PPCs are bi-endian. Purely as a matter of personal preference, I prefer little-endian architectures. (Though I'd take a big-endian PPC over an x86 any day..)
- so, is this reference design IBM has come out with little- or big- endian, or both?
As far as I know, all the current linux/PPC stuff is big-endian, designed, of course, to run on big-endian PPC Macs or PPC Amigas.
It seems to me that a little-endian PPC architecture would give you all the advantages of the PPC over the x86, but with 90% of the user-space application porting hassle taken out (it always seems to be dodgy endianess assumptions that stopped things compiling on my Linux/APUS box)
>Therefore, this is the US's way of trying to not say OOPS 20 years from now.
Except that they're trying to shut the field gate when the horse has already bolted...
Strong crypto is easy to get hold of here in Ireland (and the rest of the EU) They may wish it were otherwise, but the cat's out of the bag, and it isn't going back in...
The chinese and arab nations also, of course, already have strong crypto, and are not stupid enough not to develop it further ( notwithstanding certain idiot fundamentalist muslims (the majority of muslims are very nice, enlightened, reasonable people -more so than most cristians - but I'm an atheist anyway...) breeding out intelligence from their races by encouraging stupid, subservient women, who will of course bear them stupider children - intelligence is partly genetic, but not much sex-linked...
Just on the off-chance anyone cares, and for comparison purposes, a lot of people in Ireland, when speaking "Irish-Dialect" English, use "yez" or "youse" as the 2nd person plural. Y'all is sometimes heard too.
No, but you raise an important issue - they might well propose some totally ridiculous, draconian scheme in the knowledge that they won't get it, but then offer to "compromise" with a slightly less horrible, but still pretty awful scheme, which the public will then perceive as an improvement. Smart people don't fall for this, but there's lots of stupid people in the world.
Personally, I'm making sure to distribute strong encryption software as much as possible, but I'm not in the US anyway...
Linux is GPL'd. Code release required. The BeOS kernel is closed-source (although large chunks of the system are open i.e. the BeOS GeekGadgets, like the Amiga GeekGadgets from ninemoons before them, are just recompiles of all the GNU tools)
Could be interesting, although more likely is just "a single-user mode linux kernel configured to boot a somewhat BeOS-like GUI"
You're free to do a code fork under the GPL if you want, and produce eg. "bortux". Of course, that'd be pretty pointless, since, also due to the GPL, if you actually did do anything good in your code fork, it could be merged back into linux.
There are situations where such forks are cool - eg. RTLinux (Linux goes hard realtime) and mu-clinux ( linux for MMU-less microcontrollers used in embedded systems + PDAs)
If your brother happens to have an ALi 15xx chipset, the support's in 2.3.x, and there are patches for 2.2.x. (Probably in Alan Cox's 2.2.x patch tree, before they were moved out and into 2.3.x). Obviously, 2.3.x is the development branch, and the support is labelled as being in development, but they seem to work pretty well by now, and the Mandrake 6.0 distro includes a 2.2.9 Kernel RPM with the ALi 15xx support patch backfolded in.
Mice are pretty horrible for 3D, granted, but I kinda like my logitech trackman marble+ trackball...
It's got the trackball for 2 axes, and the mouse wheel for the third. Any intellimouse, of course, has the same wheel , but the marble+ "feels" pretty good compared to the mouse(this is entirely subjective) X calls the mouse wheel the z-axis - as in ZAxisMapping 4 5 in XF86Config to get the mouse wheel working in the first place.
Does the Psion Series 5 have any market presense to speak of in the US? It's got a nice OS (EPOC32), and a full keyboard. It's only got a B/W screen though.
Um... I used DeluxePaint IV + PersonalPaint 7 on the Amiga for years (HAM mode was really wierd, wasn't it?). I really like GIMP, and I use it for retouching/compositing raytraces, photos, and the like, but for pixel-painting, I miss the DPaint-style interface. The GIMP (and Photoshop) though undeniably more powerful really, feel much more "clunky" (IMHO) for pixel work onto a blank bitmap, like (euro)demo pics... Also, the DPaint IV animation stuff was really good.
So what's my point?
Ideally, I'd like to have an alternate UI for the GIMP engine. Seems to me an implementation of the dpaint interface, interfaced through script-fu, that worked on a single layer, or even a UI that "felt" like DPaint, but had support for GIMPy features, would be possible. I was just wondering if a) one exists and I've missed it or b) if there would be any demand beyond myself for such an alternate interface?
>With Slashdot in its normal (with all the tables and colors) display, both IE 4.01SP2 and Netscape 4.6 LOCK SOLID on me under Win98 when I scroll the pages
This happens to me too. Interestingly, a similar freeze effect happened to X Windows (NOT the whole OS) when I was using an early version of Daryll Strauss' X Server for Voodoo Banshee - he later fixed the bug, but windows (YES the whole OS) still crashes. And only on slashdot. I can't tell whether it's the windows banshee drivers suffering from the same bug, or whether it's something nastier (see below). Either way, improper HTML and/or buggy userland gfx should NEVER be able to bring the whole OS to a halt. Windows really is a crap system.
Alternatively, it could be Microsoft putting in their usual "break websites we don't like at TCP stack level" code. Have you ever tried to ftp to netscape with the command-prompt ftp client included in an early Win95 release? I have encountered "interesting" intermittent failures.
Of course, that ftp client is just a recompilation of the BSD client, copyright acknowledgement and all. That's why we use the GPL, folks - MS can legally take BSD-style licensed source and corrupt it to their own ends, and release it, binary only, with whatever little extra "features" they see fit.
The joys of amiga SetFunction() *grin* See, no memory protection whatsoever is good for some things...
My old amiga box had a ridiculous amount of SetFunction()'ed patches by the time it finished s:user-startup...
Of course, I had to use Patchcontrol ( a SetFunction() patch that patches SetFunction() to be multitasking-safe) to keep everything working together...
Well, there's Woodward's work. Basically, as a result of Mach's principle, it predicts a transient mass fluctuation in an LRC circuit. It could be the "impulse engine" of ST fame, or the hover cars off the Jetsons...
(Just maybe, it could also provide a large enough mass fluctuation for more exotic uses, like temporary wormhole stabilisation...)
NB. IANAP (I am not a Physicist (...and boy, does it show...))
Woodward carried out a test, which seemed to confirm the theory. However, an unforseen non-linear response in some of the experimental equipment casts doubt on the first results. Even if the fluctuations were a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than observed, it would still be a major breakthrough. NASA seems to think so too, and are, AFAIK, quietly working on a repeat test in their breakthrough propulsion labs...
Well, Carl Sassenrath developed the "classic" AmigaOS - which was a 32-bit, preemptive multitasking, message-passing OS, running on 68k series chips (N.B. even the 68000, though it had a 16-bit data bus, had 32-bit registers (16 of 'em, not 4...), so the OS was always written (well, 1.3 and above) to be 32-bit) -but it lacked true memory protection (it came fairly close with pervasive semaphore locking in software, and a few other tricks. My amiga without true memory protection was always more stable than W95's so-called memory protection...) - CPUs with MMUs wre prohibitively expensive at design time of the original amiga.
The Amiga OS had lots of good features, though, some of which linux is only catching up to now. A lot of its more esoteric and underused functions were actually quite cool, for the time. e.g. The Envoy networking software, in conjunction with ARexx, had "gateways" that could be used for message passing, scripting, etc, between clusters of Amigas - basically anything that a local arexx program could do, could also be sent through the gateways to other amigas. I also liked the dynamically resizing ramdisk - it was always handy. The support for multiple resolutions and colour depths on different screens simultaneously was also very useful. This was possible due to the custom hardware, though, which really made the amiga what is was.
It's also really easy to program for in C or macro assembler, and its system include files work very well, and were very well written (on average) - I liked taglists for function parameters, exec lists were really useful, etc. etc.
A lot of Linux people are ex-amiga people. Rasterman springs to mind. Imlib's kinda like datatypes, and enlightenment on X obviously borrows from the amiga workbench on intuition.
Amiga OS 5.0 is a different kettle of fish. It's built upon QNX, which is a very good RTOS. It has relatively little to do with Amiga OSes 0 to 3, other than the name, and the fact that some of the original amiga people are designing it "in the spirit of the original amiga" - whatever that's supposed to mean.
Rebol is a pretty easy language to learn, and very easy to read. However, I'd expect the Amiga NG people to include several scriptiing languages- they'll probably include the GNU tools, for a start, at least in the developer release of the OS.
Maybe you could get some hints as to how VMWare works by watching what MS changes in their next OS release in order to break it, if they can...:-)
Using Netscape + fetchmail + procmail
on
Netscape 4.6
·
· Score: 3
Here's the way I get my mail. Note that fetchmail supports IMAP as well, AFAIK. This isn't any use with the remote message storage features of IMAP, though. However, it may be useful to some people, so i'll post it one more time.
By a little constructive work, you can get netscape's "MoveMail external program" option to use procmail. First, I set up fetchmail to check my mail every few minutes, by calling it in.bash_profile, and putting this in my home dir:
> more ~/.fetchmailrc
set postmaster "myusername" set bouncemail set properties "" set daemon 600 poll my.pop3.server with proto POP3 user "mypop3username" there with password "my password" is myusername here
fetchmail loops mail from my pop server into my linux box's internal mail system (sendmail) Sendmail is set up to use procmail on my RH6.0 box, anyway, so I didn't need to use the.forward mechanism to use procmail.
Procmail can accept a list of rules for what to do with your incoming mail, _in addition_ to the system wide rules. These are stored in.procmailrc
I added this rule ("recipe") to my ~/.procmailrc
:0c: $HOME/nsmail/.netscape.mail-recovery
This tells procmail to move a _copy_ of all my system mail (including the external mail looped in by fetchmail) to a file in the netscape mail directory called.netscape.mail-recovery This happens automatically whenever mail comes in.
Then, within Netscape, I went to Edit/Preferences Mail&Newsgroups/Mail servers.
I changed the server to (Using MoveMail), and changed the movemail preference to "using external application"
Now's the tricky bit - netscape calls the external movemail program with a few parameters, which are supposed to tell it to get the mail from/var/spool/mail/myusername, and put it in the (undocumented, AFAICT) file ~/nsmail/.netscape.mail-recovery
However - procmail's already done that bit! So, we don't need to do it again. I changed the "external movemail program" to "echo" with no parameters, as a sort of dummy command - netscape returns an error if no command at all is present.
So now, when I click on "get mail", netscape goes off and finds a copy of all my mail.
This is dead handy. note that a backup of all the mail could be kept by the procmail recipe (eg.):
:0c: $HOME/mail.backup
This rather convoluted sounding approach is the one I've found to be by far the most flexible. It allows me to use any combination of mail readers, by distributing copies of all messages between them, and allows me to use procmail's advanced filtering functions. It also neatly gets round netscape's "only one pop3 host" limitation, since fetchmail can poll as many as you like, and allows me to read all my system internal mail in the comfort of Netscape Messenger.
Note also that, for security, the.fetchmailrc and.procmailrc must have restricted permissions set as documented in the fetchmail+procmail manuals.
It seems, subjectively, to be working better than 4.51 for me. (N.B. I'm using the glibc2 version)
Slashdot seems to render faster, as do other sites, and it hasn't hung yet - though 4.51 hadn't hung in a while since I setup squid as a local proxy for my machine. (most of the hangs I used to get appeared to be blocking dns lookups and the like, so by using squid locally, squid deals with the dns lookups + data download, and always gives netscape something to chew on - even if it's a page of html saying "not found").
Using the computer as its own proxy server may seem like overkill, but it's definitely upped the responsiveness of my machine. Squid is pretty good at downloading stuff:-)
This FUD is designed to focus the community into a producing small group to answer all their challenges.
DON'T fall for it. DON'T answer their challenge too directly. DON'T provide a focus for their attacks. If MS has a single target for their attack, then they can set the rules for the fight.
Keep diffuse. Attack from everywhere at once.
Let them swipe at a swarm of bees with a sword, until they get too tired to fight.
If big businesses are interested in Linux, they should come on our terms. Don't bow to pressure to soften the open source stance. We'll be here regardless of what they do, if they want to join up and help, well and good. If they want to fight, eventually they'll lose.
Slashdot Mirror
PPCs are bi-endian. Purely as a matter of personal preference, I prefer little-endian architectures.
(Though I'd take a big-endian PPC over an x86 any day..)
- so, is this reference design IBM has come out with little- or big- endian, or both?
As far as I know, all the current linux/PPC stuff is big-endian, designed, of course, to run on big-endian PPC Macs or PPC Amigas.
It seems to me that a little-endian PPC architecture would give you all the advantages of the PPC over the x86, but with 90% of the user-space application porting hassle taken out (it always seems to be dodgy endianess assumptions that stopped things compiling on my Linux/APUS box)
>Therefore, this is the US's way of trying to not say OOPS 20 years from now.
Except that they're trying to shut the
field gate when the horse has already bolted...
Strong crypto is easy to get hold of here in Ireland (and the rest of the EU) They may wish it were otherwise, but the cat's out of the bag, and it isn't going back in...
The chinese and arab nations also, of course, already have strong crypto, and are not stupid enough not to develop it further ( notwithstanding certain idiot fundamentalist muslims (the majority of muslims are very nice, enlightened, reasonable people -more so than most cristians - but I'm an atheist anyway...) breeding out intelligence from their races by encouraging stupid, subservient women, who will of course bear them stupider children - intelligence is partly genetic, but not much sex-linked...
Just on the off-chance anyone cares,
and for comparison purposes,
a lot of people in Ireland,
when speaking "Irish-Dialect" English,
use "yez" or "youse" as the 2nd person plural.
Y'all is sometimes heard too.
No, but you raise an important issue - they might well propose some totally ridiculous, draconian scheme in the knowledge that they won't get it, but then offer to "compromise" with a slightly less horrible, but still pretty awful scheme, which the public will then perceive as an improvement. Smart people don't fall for this, but there's lots of stupid people in the world.
Personally, I'm making sure to distribute strong encryption software as much as possible, but I'm not in the US anyway...
Linux is GPL'd. Code release required. The BeOS kernel is closed-source (although large chunks of the system are open i.e. the BeOS GeekGadgets, like the Amiga GeekGadgets from ninemoons before them, are just recompiles of all the GNU tools)
Could be interesting, although more likely is just "a single-user mode linux kernel configured to boot a somewhat BeOS-like GUI"
Y == Berlin ?
You're free to do a code fork under the GPL if you want, and produce eg. "bortux". Of course, that'd be pretty pointless, since, also due to the GPL, if you actually did do anything good in your code fork, it could be merged back into linux.
There are situations where such forks are cool - eg. RTLinux (Linux goes hard realtime) and
mu-clinux ( linux for MMU-less microcontrollers used in embedded systems + PDAs)
If your brother happens to have an ALi 15xx chipset, the support's in 2.3.x, and there are patches for 2.2.x. (Probably in Alan Cox's 2.2.x patch tree, before they were moved out and into 2.3.x). Obviously, 2.3.x is the development branch, and the support is labelled as being in development, but they seem to work pretty well by now, and the Mandrake 6.0 distro includes a 2.2.9 Kernel RPM with the ALi 15xx support patch backfolded in.
Mice are pretty horrible for 3D, granted, but I kinda like my logitech trackman marble+ trackball...
It's got the trackball for 2 axes, and the mouse wheel for the third. Any intellimouse, of course, has the same wheel , but the marble+ "feels" pretty good compared to the mouse(this is entirely subjective) X calls the mouse wheel the z-axis - as in ZAxisMapping 4 5 in XF86Config to get the mouse wheel working in the first place.
Does the Psion Series 5 have any market presense to speak of in the US? It's got a nice OS (EPOC32), and a full keyboard. It's only got a B/W screen though.
code crusader's pretty nice..
www.cco.caltech.edu/~jafl/jcc/
Um... I used DeluxePaint IV + PersonalPaint 7 on the Amiga for years (HAM mode was really wierd, wasn't it?). I really like GIMP, and I use it for retouching/compositing raytraces, photos, and the like, but for pixel-painting, I miss the DPaint-style interface. The GIMP (and Photoshop) though undeniably more powerful really, feel much more "clunky" (IMHO) for pixel work onto a blank bitmap, like (euro)demo pics... Also, the DPaint IV animation stuff was really good.
So what's my point?
Ideally, I'd like to have an alternate UI for the GIMP engine. Seems to me an implementation of the dpaint interface, interfaced through script-fu, that worked on a single layer, or even a UI that "felt" like DPaint, but had support for GIMPy features, would be possible. I was just wondering if a) one exists and I've missed it or b) if there would be any demand beyond myself for such an alternate interface?
Amiga (i) + Amiga NG - :-)
Red + White chequered beach ball
Hey, it was cool when it bounced + spun.
Amiga (ii) - "Rainbow Tick"
I liked the rainbow tick.
CBM - ChickenHead !!!
I mean the X Window System, of course ... :-( )
(Doh! so tired... 11 3rd Yr end-of-semester exams
>With Slashdot in its normal (with all the tables and colors) display, both IE 4.01SP2 and Netscape 4.6 LOCK SOLID on me under Win98 when I scroll the pages
This happens to me too. Interestingly, a similar freeze effect happened to X Windows (NOT the whole OS) when I was using an early version of Daryll Strauss' X Server for Voodoo Banshee - he later fixed the bug, but windows (YES the whole OS) still crashes. And only on slashdot. I can't tell whether it's the windows banshee drivers suffering from the same bug, or whether it's something nastier (see below). Either way, improper HTML and/or buggy userland gfx should NEVER be able to bring the whole OS to a halt. Windows really is a crap system.
Alternatively, it could be Microsoft putting in their usual "break websites we don't like at TCP stack level" code. Have you ever tried to ftp to netscape with the command-prompt ftp client included in an early Win95 release? I have encountered "interesting" intermittent failures.
Of course, that ftp client is just a recompilation of the BSD client, copyright acknowledgement and all. That's why we use the GPL, folks - MS can legally take BSD-style licensed source and corrupt it to their own ends, and release it, binary only, with whatever little extra "features" they see fit.
ttmkfdir -o fonts.scale -p
like the next post. It works better.
you don't need to install any new rpms
if you've installed RH6.0
do this as root:
/mnt/c/windows/fonts/ in my case...
/usr/local/share/fonts/ttf/
/usr/local/share/fonts/ttf/
/usr/local/share/fonts/ttf
get the fonts from wherever.
cp *.ttf
(or wherever - make sure to create the directory, if it doesn't exist)
cd
(go to the directory)
ttmkfdir -o fonts.dir
(make the font index file)
chkfontpath --add
(add the directory to the font path)
/etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs restart
(restart the font server)
There. All done. Use chkfontpath --list to see your current fontpath, chkfontpath --remove to remove entries. Try chkfontpath --help for a summary
It's on its way....
Display ghostscript
The joys of amiga SetFunction() *grin*
See, no memory protection whatsoever is good for some things...
My old amiga box had a ridiculous amount of SetFunction()'ed patches by the time it finished s:user-startup...
Of course, I had to use Patchcontrol ( a SetFunction() patch that patches SetFunction() to be multitasking-safe) to keep everything working together...
Well, there's Woodward's work. Basically, as a result of Mach's principle, it predicts a transient mass fluctuation in an LRC circuit.
It could be the "impulse engine" of ST fame, or the hover cars off the Jetsons...
(Just maybe, it could also provide a large enough mass fluctuation for more exotic uses, like temporary wormhole stabilisation...)
NB. IANAP (I am not a Physicist (...and boy, does it show...))
Woodward carried out a test, which seemed to confirm the theory. However, an unforseen non-linear response in some of the experimental equipment casts doubt on the first results. Even if the fluctuations were a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than observed, it would still be a major breakthrough. NASA seems to think so too, and are, AFAIK, quietly working on a repeat test in their breakthrough propulsion labs...
Anyway, the theory makes interesting reading.
Here's the relevant links:
chaos.fullerton.edu/Woodward.html
www.inetarena.com/~noetic/pls/wo odward.html
Well, Carl Sassenrath developed the "classic" AmigaOS - which was a 32-bit, preemptive multitasking, message-passing OS, running on 68k series chips (N.B. even the 68000, though it had a 16-bit data bus, had 32-bit registers (16 of 'em, not 4...), so the OS was always written (well, 1.3 and above) to be 32-bit) -but it lacked true memory protection (it came fairly close with pervasive semaphore locking in software, and a few other tricks. My amiga without true memory protection was always more stable than W95's so-called memory protection...) - CPUs with MMUs wre prohibitively expensive at design time of the original amiga.
The Amiga OS had lots of good features, though, some of which linux is only catching up to now. A lot of its more esoteric and underused functions were actually quite cool, for the time. e.g. The Envoy networking software, in conjunction with ARexx, had "gateways" that could be used for message passing, scripting, etc, between clusters of Amigas - basically anything that a local arexx program could do, could also be sent through the gateways to other amigas. I also liked the dynamically resizing ramdisk - it was always handy. The support for multiple resolutions and colour depths on different screens simultaneously was also very useful. This was possible due to the custom hardware, though, which really made the amiga what is was.
It's also really easy to program for in C or macro assembler, and its system include files work very well, and were very well written (on average) - I liked taglists for function parameters, exec lists were really useful, etc. etc.
A lot of Linux people are ex-amiga people. Rasterman springs to mind. Imlib's kinda like datatypes, and enlightenment on X obviously borrows from the amiga workbench on intuition.
Amiga OS 5.0 is a different kettle of fish. It's built upon QNX, which is a very good RTOS. It has relatively little to do with Amiga OSes 0 to 3, other than the name, and the fact that some of the original amiga people are designing it "in the spirit of the original amiga" - whatever that's supposed to mean.
Rebol is a pretty easy language to learn, and very easy to read. However, I'd expect the Amiga NG people to include several scriptiing languages- they'll probably include the GNU tools, for a start, at least in the developer release of the OS.
Maybe you could get some hints as to :-)
how VMWare works by watching what MS
changes in their next OS release in
order to break it, if they can...
Here's the way I get my mail. Note that fetchmail supports IMAP as well, AFAIK. This isn't any use with the remote message storage features of IMAP, though. However, it may be useful to some people, so i'll post it one more time.
.bash_profile, and putting this in my home dir:
.forward mechanism to use procmail.
.procmailrc
:0c:
.netscape.mail-recovery This happens automatically whenever mail comes in.
/var/spool/mail/myusername, and put it in the (undocumented, AFAICT) file ~/nsmail/.netscape.mail-recovery
:0c:
.fetchmailrc and .procmailrc must have restricted permissions set as documented in the fetchmail+procmail manuals.
By a little constructive work, you can get netscape's "MoveMail external program" option to use procmail.
First, I set up fetchmail to check my mail every few minutes, by calling it in
> more ~/.fetchmailrc
set postmaster "myusername"
set bouncemail
set properties ""
set daemon 600
poll my.pop3.server with proto POP3
user "mypop3username" there with password "my password" is myusername here
fetchmail loops mail from my pop server into my linux box's internal mail system (sendmail) Sendmail is set up to use procmail on my RH6.0 box, anyway, so I didn't need to use the
Procmail can accept a list of rules for what to do with your incoming mail, _in addition_ to the system wide rules. These are stored in
I added this rule ("recipe") to my ~/.procmailrc
$HOME/nsmail/.netscape.mail-recovery
This tells procmail to move a _copy_ of all my system mail (including the external mail looped in by fetchmail) to a file in the netscape mail directory called
Then, within Netscape, I went to Edit/Preferences Mail&Newsgroups/Mail servers.
I changed the server to (Using MoveMail), and changed the movemail preference to "using external application"
Now's the tricky bit - netscape calls the external movemail program with a few parameters, which are supposed to tell it to get the mail from
However - procmail's already done that bit! So, we don't need to do it again. I changed the "external movemail program" to "echo" with no parameters, as a sort of dummy command - netscape returns an error if no command at all is present.
So now, when I click on "get mail", netscape goes off and finds a copy of all my mail.
This is dead handy. note that a backup of all the mail could be kept by the procmail recipe (eg.):
$HOME/mail.backup
This rather convoluted sounding approach is the one I've found to be by far the most flexible. It allows me to use any combination of mail readers, by distributing copies of all messages between them, and allows me to use procmail's advanced filtering functions. It also neatly gets round netscape's "only one pop3 host" limitation, since fetchmail can poll as many as you like, and allows me to read all my system internal mail in the comfort of Netscape Messenger.
Note also that, for security, the
There - that wasn't so hard now....
It seems, subjectively, to be working better than 4.51 for me. (N.B. I'm using the glibc2 version)
:-)
Slashdot seems to render faster, as do other sites, and it hasn't hung yet - though 4.51 hadn't hung in a while since I setup squid as a local proxy for my machine. (most of the hangs I used to get appeared to be blocking dns lookups and the like, so by using squid locally, squid deals with the dns lookups + data download, and always gives netscape something to chew on - even if it's a page of html saying "not found").
Using the computer as its own proxy server may seem like overkill, but it's definitely upped the responsiveness of my machine. Squid is pretty good at downloading stuff
This FUD is designed to focus the community into a producing small group to answer all their challenges.
DON'T fall for it. DON'T answer their challenge too directly. DON'T provide a focus for their attacks. If MS has a single target for their attack, then they can set the rules for the fight.
Keep diffuse. Attack from everywhere at once.
Let them swipe at a swarm of bees with a sword, until they get too tired to fight.
If big businesses are interested in Linux, they should come on our terms. Don't bow to pressure to soften the open source stance. We'll be here regardless of what they do, if they want to join up and help, well and good. If they want to fight, eventually they'll lose.