It's all right. It's extremely slow (~28.8), but I like being able to just leave the connection up. In fact, my primary use of my home PC these days is via telnet, from work.
I had a problem getting it to work, due to some incompatibility between the Linux and Solaris ppp daemons. I fixed it by using the "novj" pppd option.
Technically speaking, if I can convince a jury that you took your "i++" out of a GPL'd program rather than writing it from scratch yourself, then you've broken the law. (Of course, in an example as ludicrous as this, nobody would buy it, nobody would care. But you see my point.)
It's really an issue of where the code actually came from, rather than what it looks like.
Yeah, but supporting yet another UNIX is a significant cost for a software company, in terms of internal infrastructure and processes and all that junk. The porting may be easy, but the support and distribution and all that are not.
I've used Applix, and find it to be full-featured, easy, and very fast. I like it. Still, I've now converted to the One True Way, which is, of course, abiword, at www.abisource.com. (Still under development, unfortunately. But already good enough for me to scrape by with.)
And what about those kernel packages in the updates directory? Oops! (The redhat errate webpages specifically tell you *not* to use "-U" to update them.)
A lot of people think that point patches are a pain, compared to a VENDOR-SUPPORTED method of bringing your system up to date with one simple procedure.
Why do so many Linux fanatics have such a hard time hearing this?
If a user does "mget *" and then "rpm --freshen *" they're going to get into trouble with the kernel updates.
Sure, Linux is more secure than NT. But you're wearing blinders if you think that updating a Linux box is easy enough and shouldn't be improved.
It's easy for me, a Linux geek, to keep my single home PC up to date. But I don't typically bother with the Linux PCs at work, because it's too much trouble. I see this as a problem, and I'm not the only one.
Well, you can deny it if you want, but the latest released Linux (2.2) still doesn't scale as well as the latest released NT when it comes to adding processors and network cards. (And as far as the real world is concerned, 2.3 doesn't count, because nobody in their right mind would put a development kernel on a production system.)
I'm not complaining about Linux, mind you, because I know that for most purposes it outperforms the competition. (Which isn't really why I use it; I use it because it's/free/. But it's nice to know that it's also technically superior.)
Again, I do think Linux is the best. But your statement just struck me as being so pro-Linux that you almost seem to be denying facts, and I think that's dangerous.
> For example, heroin. It takes two shots to get addicted.
Not exactly true, really, as anyone who's been on a morphine drip in the hospital can tell you. No, I'm not advocating heroin use. It's a very addictive drug, and you can overdose on it if you're not careful. But let's stick to the facts.
> Being able to sit at the bus stop getting high with friends whilst an old granny is queing for her bus is just wrong.
Being able to sit at a bus stop drinking a beer with friends whilst an old granny is queing for her bus is just wrong, too. Which is why it's illegal to do so.
Now, I don't think marijuana is healthy. But our laws are a waste of money and only make the problem worse. People are getting really hurt, here, for minor lapses in judgement. It's just not working.
The "protecting us from ourselves" explanation is just an excuse, for the most part. I can't speak for etrade.com, but I know that the real reason that the US in general tries to discourage inexperienced traders from making high-risk investments (yes, an IPO is very high risk!) is that if this sort of thing becomes too widespread it can make for a highly unstable economy. It isn't just good luck that's prevented us from having another Great Depression.
The salon article worried me a little. Yes, I would have let him invest a small amount of money, a very small amount, but no, I don't think he knows what he's doing. He seems to think that this IPO is free money, and he's essentially investing on credit. It's very bad news if lots of people do this sort of thing with large amounts of money. (But if a few friends of companies lose a few thousand dollars once in a while on a one-time thing, I don't think it's too bad.)
My biggest problem with the etrade.com eligibility requirements is that I really don't think they accomplish what they are supposed to be trying to accomplish. As has been pointed out, they ask about our assets without looking at our debts, and they don't take into account the actual quantity of money we're looking to invest. The actual amount we stand to lose is very very relevant in this case!
If you have little or no debts, a steady income, and a small net worth, it shouldn't be a problem if you risk a portion of your savings on something risky.
Also, the whole concept of companies offering stock like this to employees and friends is a little different, anyway. The same basic economic sanity checks should still apply, of course, but bearing in mind the fact that it is a limited amount of stock and a one-time thing. Normally, you can't say "Oh, it's OK if somebody spends only $1000 dollars investing with borrowed money" because it's an open market, and they could potentially be doing the same thing everywhere else, you can't know. But in cases like this, it's not an open market, and you do know.
I want to own a small piece of RedHat, but I don't want to tell a lie to do it. Come on, etrade, let me in!
Apparently etrade has the list of email addresses from Redhat. If the email address listed in your etrade account doesn't match, you're denied.
Initially, mine didn't match. (I signed up with an address that was different from the one RedHat used.) So, I couldn't get to the page. I went and changed my preferences to make the email addresses match, and now I can get to the page, only to be told that I don't qualify.
I can afford to lose this money, it's my money. I am not thrilled about etrade deciding what is and is not appropriate for me to do with it. Assuming that this situation doesn't get resolved, I'm getting my money back from etrade and taking it elsewhere. This is annoying.
> Why should it cost to mail a letter across town as it does to mail to Alaska or Hawaii or even just to the other coast?
Not that I don't really know what I'm talking about here; I'm just making wild-ass guesses.:)
Anyhow, my guess is that most of the cost is with the local delivery to the individual mailboxes and the overhead of all those POs. Shipping the letters from central office to central office (the extra cost incurred for long-distance mail) is probably much smaller than this, so a long-distance mail shouldn't cost a lot more. So if the costs are similar, why not just make them the same, and save on complexity and processing?
> What airline would sell flat-rate tickets to anywhere?
Ugh. Airlines. A whole other can of worms. What's with airline rates, anyway? Their prices *really* don't reflect how far you're going. From California, you can usually get to Bangkok cheaper than you can get to New York.
Maybe, but I don't really have any complaints with the USPS.
Firstly, the USPS pays for itself. That is, it is fully funded by the stamps we buy, not by taxes.
Secondly, I don't think it's all that expensive for what you're getting. I don't feel it's unreasonable to ask $0.33 to carry something to the other side of the country.
Compared to the horrible service, sleasy marketing, and ludicrous prices of my phone company, the USPS looks pretty good. It could be a lot worse.:)
> As someone who would not be here had they been standing a few yards closer to an IRA bomb, I'd rather not hear this claptrap about British invasions > of Ireland, Scotland, Wales. Get a fricken' clue. Try reading a book before spouting an opinion.
I sympathise with the fact that you were a victim of IRA violence. As I'm sure you sympathise with all the victims of Orangemen violence. (2 times the number of murders as the IRA throughout the conflict.)
And yes, the US has many dark pages in its history too, which would in no way be an excuse for terrorist attacks on the US populace.
But what are you saying? Are you saying that because there are violent extremists on both sides, all people of a certain ethnicity (Irish, in this case) have to foregoe their civil rights? Doesn't sound like a recipe for lasting peace to me...
At work, they switched over to using Postfix on our mail hub, and the server load dropped dramatically. It's a large company, so the server is handling a lot of traffic; it's been very reliable.
Perhaps more importantly, I have a lot of faith in Wietse Venema's skill at writing secure code.
This is a real win for the free software community. (I hope IBM benefits from it, too.)
I have had that problem, to some extent, where I use the wrong word if I've been studying a foreign language too much. (I mix up french and spanish.) Calling this a neurological disorder would be a little excessive, though.
I imagine that if I used a palm pilot I might accidentally write one letter on top of the other or something like that, too.
I guess it's the slight amount of truth to this article that makes it so funny. This was really well done.
But I don't understand "Who cares?" posts like this. If you don't care about the news, why comment on it? Other people (such as myself) do care about the news. Love it or hate it, KDE is an important piece of software in the free software world, and a new release of it is news.
I agree, which is why I run Linux when and where I can.:)
The only point I'm trying to make is that rabid Linux enthusiasm shouldn't cause us to say unrealistic things about it. People who claim that Linux is fine for the high-end are people who have never worked with high-end systems.
Whether or not high-end systems matter much is a totally separate issue, as you've pointed out.
Yes, I think Linux is headed in this direction. (No, I'm not too excited about Monterey.)
My point is only that claiming Linux is a realistic high-end system today or in the short-term future is dishonest.
The fact that Linux has once booted on a system with 14 cpus doesn't mean it can actually process a lot of IO on a big system (32+ cpus?), and 2 gigs of RAM is small where I work.
Like you, I was excited when I saw this, bacause I'd like to see free software on big iron.
Obviously, this business model makes no sense for OS vendors such as Microsoft. But for companies which make their money selling boxes (that is to say, hardware vendors) this makes a great deal of sense, to me at least.
It's not about a meaningless number on a piece of paper. It's about real workloads.
I'm talking about doing online data wharehousing of terabyte-sized databases. Big I/O, and high availability. You can tell me "well, Linux could have terrabytes of disks hooked up to it" but that doesn't mean it's actually gonna handle that kind of workload. It won't.
Do you think I'm picking on your favorite OS? I'm not, and it's my favorite OS, too.
Linux is great. But enough dogma; it's not a high-end OS, and it won't be for quite some time.
The fact that it's the best OS for your PC today does NOT mean it's the best OS for an enterprise server today. Open source will eventually move into that space, I'm sure, but it isn't in there yet. (And no, a quad xeon isn't even close to high-end.)
Saying "why not Linux?" when it's perfectly obvious why not only serves to make Linux, a great OS, look like little more than a bunch of hype.
Slashdot Mirror
> You don't have a right to any software of any kind.
True, but you *do* have a right to *write* the software yourself.
Yes, thank you! This has been worrying me, too.
I want Microsoft's over-valued stock price to go down, but I want it to happen very very very slowly.
It's all right. It's extremely slow (~28.8), but I like being able to just leave the connection up. In fact, my primary use of my home PC these days is via telnet, from work.
I had a problem getting it to work, due to some incompatibility between the Linux and Solaris ppp daemons. I fixed it by using the "novj" pppd option.
Not only the compilers and the JVM, but a working copy of netscape, too.
Technically speaking, if I can convince a jury that you took your "i++" out of a GPL'd program rather than writing it from scratch yourself, then you've broken the law. (Of course, in an example as ludicrous as this, nobody would buy it, nobody would care. But you see my point.)
It's really an issue of where the code actually came from, rather than what it looks like.
Yeah, but supporting yet another UNIX is a significant cost for a software company, in terms of internal infrastructure and processes and all that junk. The porting may be easy, but the support and distribution and all that are not.
I've used Applix, and find it to be full-featured, easy, and very fast. I like it. Still, I've now converted to the One True Way, which is, of course, abiword, at www.abisource.com. (Still under development, unfortunately. But already good enough for me to scrape by with.)
And what about those kernel packages in the updates directory? Oops! (The redhat errate webpages specifically tell you *not* to use "-U" to update them.)
A lot of people think that point patches are a pain, compared to a VENDOR-SUPPORTED method of bringing your system up to date with one simple procedure.
Why do so many Linux fanatics have such a hard time hearing this?
If a user does "mget *" and then "rpm --freshen *" they're going to get into trouble with the kernel updates.
Sure, Linux is more secure than NT. But you're wearing blinders if you think that updating a Linux box is easy enough and shouldn't be improved.
It's easy for me, a Linux geek, to keep my single home PC up to date. But I don't typically bother with the Linux PCs at work, because it's too much trouble. I see this as a problem, and I'm not the only one.
Well, you can deny it if you want, but the latest released Linux (2.2) still doesn't scale as well as the latest released NT when it comes to adding processors and network cards. (And as far as the real world is concerned, 2.3 doesn't count, because nobody in their right mind would put a development kernel on a production system.)
I'm not complaining about Linux, mind you, because I know that for most purposes it outperforms the competition. (Which isn't really why I use it; I use it because it's
Again, I do think Linux is the best. But your statement just struck me as being so pro-Linux that you almost seem to be denying facts, and I think that's dangerous.
> For example, heroin. It takes two shots to get addicted.
Not exactly true, really, as anyone who's been on a morphine drip in the hospital can tell you. No, I'm not advocating heroin use. It's a very addictive drug, and you can overdose on it if you're not careful. But let's stick to the facts.
> Being able to sit at the bus stop getting high with friends whilst an old granny is queing for her bus is just wrong.
Being able to sit at a bus stop drinking a beer with friends whilst an old granny is queing for her bus is just wrong, too. Which is why it's illegal to do so.
Now, I don't think marijuana is healthy. But our laws are a waste of money and only make the problem worse. People are getting really hurt, here, for minor lapses in judgement. It's just not working.
> Look in countries like Ireland where they have legalized it - it's a non-issue.
:)
You're confusing European nations; pot is illegal in Ireland. Other than that, I agree with your posting entirely.
The "protecting us from ourselves" explanation is just an excuse, for the most part. I can't speak for etrade.com, but I know that the real reason that the US in general tries to discourage inexperienced traders from making high-risk investments (yes, an IPO is very high risk!) is that if this sort of thing becomes too widespread it can make for a highly unstable economy. It isn't just good luck that's prevented us from having another Great Depression.
The salon article worried me a little. Yes, I would have let him invest a small amount of money, a very small amount, but no, I don't think he knows what he's doing. He seems to think that this IPO is free money, and he's essentially investing on credit. It's very bad news if lots of people do this sort of thing with large amounts of money. (But if a few friends of companies lose a few thousand dollars once in a while on a one-time thing, I don't think it's too bad.)
My biggest problem with the etrade.com eligibility requirements is that I really don't think they accomplish what they are supposed to be trying to accomplish. As has been pointed out, they ask about our assets without looking at our debts, and they don't take into account the actual quantity of money we're looking to invest. The actual amount we stand to lose is very very relevant in this case!
If you have little or no debts, a steady income, and a small net worth, it shouldn't be a problem if you risk a portion of your savings on something risky.
Also, the whole concept of companies offering stock like this to employees and friends is a little different, anyway. The same basic economic sanity checks should still apply, of course, but bearing in mind the fact that it is a limited amount of stock and a one-time thing. Normally, you can't say "Oh, it's OK if somebody spends only $1000 dollars investing with borrowed money" because it's an open market, and they could potentially be doing the same thing everywhere else, you can't know. But in cases like this, it's not an open market, and you do know.
I want to own a small piece of RedHat, but I don't want to tell a lie to do it. Come on, etrade, let me in!
Apparently etrade has the list of email addresses from Redhat. If the email address listed in your etrade account doesn't match, you're denied.
Initially, mine didn't match. (I signed up with an address that was different from the one RedHat used.) So, I couldn't get to the page. I went and changed my preferences to make the email addresses match, and now I can get to the page, only to be told that I don't qualify.
I can afford to lose this money, it's my money. I am not thrilled about etrade deciding what is and is not appropriate for me to do with it. Assuming that this situation doesn't get resolved, I'm getting my money back from etrade and taking it elsewhere. This is annoying.
> Why should it cost to mail a letter across town as it does to mail to Alaska or Hawaii or even just to the other coast?
:)
Not that I don't really know what I'm talking about here; I'm just making wild-ass guesses.
Anyhow, my guess is that most of the cost is with the local delivery to the individual mailboxes and the overhead of all those POs. Shipping the letters from central office to central office (the extra cost incurred for long-distance mail) is probably much smaller than this, so a long-distance mail shouldn't cost a lot more. So if the costs are similar, why not just make them the same, and save on complexity and processing?
> What airline would sell flat-rate tickets to anywhere?
Ugh. Airlines. A whole other can of worms. What's with airline rates, anyway? Their prices *really* don't reflect how far you're going. From California, you can usually get to Bangkok cheaper than you can get to New York.
Maybe, but I don't really have any complaints with the USPS.
Firstly, the USPS pays for itself. That is, it is fully funded by the stamps we buy, not by taxes.
Secondly, I don't think it's all that expensive for what you're getting. I don't feel it's unreasonable to ask $0.33 to carry something to the other side of the country.
Compared to the horrible service, sleasy marketing, and ludicrous prices of my phone company, the USPS looks pretty good. It could be a lot worse.
> As someone who would not be here had they been standing a few yards closer to an IRA bomb, I'd rather not hear this claptrap about British invasions
> of Ireland, Scotland, Wales. Get a fricken' clue. Try reading a book before spouting an opinion.
I sympathise with the fact that you were a victim of IRA violence. As I'm sure you sympathise with all the victims of Orangemen violence. (2 times the number of murders as the IRA throughout the conflict.)
And yes, the US has many dark pages in its history too, which would in no way be an excuse for terrorist attacks on the US populace.
But what are you saying? Are you saying that because there are violent extremists on both sides, all people of a certain ethnicity (Irish, in this case) have to foregoe their civil rights? Doesn't sound like a recipe for lasting peace to me...
At work, they switched over to using Postfix on our mail hub, and the server load dropped dramatically. It's a large company, so the server is handling a lot of traffic; it's been very reliable.
Perhaps more importantly, I have a lot of faith in Wietse Venema's skill at writing secure code.
This is a real win for the free software community. (I hope IBM benefits from it, too.)
I have had that problem, to some extent, where I use the wrong word if I've been studying a foreign language too much. (I mix up french and spanish.) Calling this a neurological disorder would be a little excessive, though.
I imagine that if I used a palm pilot I might accidentally write one letter on top of the other or something like that, too.
I guess it's the slight amount of truth to this article that makes it so funny. This was really well done.
I agree; WindowMaker is neat.
But I don't understand "Who cares?" posts like this. If you don't care about the news, why comment on it? Other people (such as myself) do care about the news. Love it or hate it, KDE is an important piece of software in the free software world, and a new release of it is news.
Exactly. I have very little confidence in the
results of this survey.
When I run queso it almost always misidentifies
HP-UX boxes. Sometimes it calls them BSD,
sometimes it calls them Cisco routers.
On the other hand, "nmap -O" always seems to
get it right, even when I point it at weird
devices like X terminals.
I agree, which is why I run Linux when and where I can.
The only point I'm trying to make is that rabid Linux enthusiasm shouldn't cause us to say unrealistic things about it. People who claim that Linux is fine for the high-end are people who have never worked with high-end systems.
Whether or not high-end systems matter much is a totally separate issue, as you've pointed out.
Yes, I think Linux is headed in this direction. (No, I'm not too excited about Monterey.)
My point is only that claiming Linux is a realistic high-end system today or in the short-term future is dishonest.
The fact that Linux has once booted on a system with 14 cpus doesn't mean it can actually process a lot of IO on a big system (32+ cpus?), and 2 gigs of RAM is small where I work.
Like you, I was excited when I saw this, bacause I'd like to see free software on big iron.
Obviously, this business model makes no sense for OS vendors such as Microsoft. But for companies which make their money selling boxes (that is to say, hardware vendors) this makes a great deal of sense, to me at least.
It's not about a meaningless number on a piece of paper. It's about real workloads.
I'm talking about doing online data wharehousing of terabyte-sized databases. Big I/O, and high availability.
You can tell me "well, Linux could have terrabytes of disks hooked up to it" but that doesn't mean it's actually gonna handle that kind of workload. It won't.
Do you think I'm picking on your favorite OS? I'm not, and it's my favorite OS, too.
Linux is great. But enough dogma; it's not a high-end OS, and it won't be for quite some time.
The fact that it's the best OS for your PC today does NOT mean it's the best OS for an enterprise server today. Open source will eventually move into that space, I'm sure, but it isn't in there yet. (And no, a quad xeon isn't even close to high-end.)
Saying "why not Linux?" when it's perfectly obvious why not only serves to make Linux, a great OS, look like little more than a bunch of hype.