I feel like the only person on the planet who actually liked the themes.org that was born post-crack. Sure, it had lots of images on the site but that's why browser cache (or better still, caching proxy servers) exist! It takes two or three pages and then the site is quite snappy and looked good. Sure, there were still problems but those problems were never going to be fixed esp. considering the extreme lack of communication from OSDN with the staff, so long as the rumours of them being usurped still floated. What I found the biggest problem with that site was, was it was updated very slowly and I think because it took so long before it came back, the people creating the themes had given up and found other sites like deviantart.com, skinz.org, customize.org, and so forth. So there was little content, rarely being posted, and people wonder why it sucked?
The new freshmeat version bugs me more than any previous incarnation of themes.org. Themes appear on the main freshmeat page and clog up the already over-clogged apps site. If you look at a screenshot, you get a tiny 3"x3" picture that's only marginally more viewable than the thumbnail, AND if you hit the close button - BOOM goodbye Mozilla - regardless of how many other pages you have open in other tabs. On the bright side its nice they were able to reuse the freshmeat code for this purpose, its a testament to the good design and work Scoop has put in over these many years.
This is the Redhat Linux Standard Base, as witnessed by the complete stacking of board members in favour of Redhat, hence Debian and other non-rpm-based distributions can completely ignore this so-called "standard" and continue to distribute their technically superior distributions in peace while Redhat make the Redhat Linux Standard Base their next marketing tool. "Hey, we're compliant with our own standards, aren't we cool!". Hmm, sounds very familiar *cough*Microsoft*cough*
I don't know the exact details, but assuming since Andrea Arcangeli worked on it it's his VM alternative, yes it definately is more stable and to me has noticeably more response under a) interactive feel and b) load than Rik's VM. It's also neater code and there's nowhere near as much special-casing, plus its excellent for applications that stream data.
Ruling aside the obvious objections (changing major subsystems in a so-called "stable" kernel, NIH syndrome) I can only assume Alan's objection is that it was yet another really neat thing developed (or sponsored) by rival Linux company SuSE (like reiserfs, which he also objected to)
The sooner Redhat stop leveraging its collection of kernel hackers to drive Linux kernel development the better for the rest of us that don't care for their crappy distribution.
This was one of my gripes with Marko of IceWM fame - he had a really cool editor called FTE that had console and x11 versions, did syntax highlighting, folding, was pretty fast and easy to use. Then he gave up working on that to work on IceWM instead, which was/is a lame Win9x UI ripoff.
kinda funny how when a US law affects someone from a foreign country, nothing much happens; yet the lamericans get all up in arms when they discover a foreign law affects one of them.
Also, if it is just a bug in SELECT statements, no data is actually being lost - its just not showing up where it should be.
This might be a cultural thing, but where I'm from, if something doesn't show up where it should be, we describe it as being "lost" (until it is "found")
The so-called "standard" decided on RPM because the LSB committee is stacked with Redhat employees or sympathists. The LSB is nothing more than an excuse for Redhat to say "we are the standard", reaffirming their stance as Microsoft Linux.
Also, packaging is not a trivial issue. Sure, you can simply repackage some program you built, but if it was built on a Redhat 6.2 system it's going to have diffrerent library dependencies than a Mandrake 7 system which has different library dependencies to a Debian 2.2 system which has different library dependencies to a Slackware 8 system which has different library dependencies to...
Also, both rpm and deb usually require recompilation as part of the package building process.
You're missing some other critical points as well.
Not only is the read latency a heck of a lot less on the NT box due to the extra two spindles in the RAID array, it is configured with logging disabled and updating atime disabled.
Since it has less writes to the disk than the Linux box, it has more time to serve up content.
Oh, almost forgot, the NT box has 6 fewer client systems flogging the crap out of it.
These are just the obvious things from the results page, I'm sure there's more differences that don't get mentioned.
"screw you guys, I'm going home"
"oh my God, you killed kenny, you bastards!"
"suck on my chocolate salty balls..."
"...stick 'em in your mouth and suck 'em"
"kick the baby!"
or my personal favourite
"this is a song, la la la la, Dukey's song"
(followed by fscking huge explosion)
Hell, all army guys sing, and drop their pants when "Eagle Rock" plays;-)
You register a.id.au for individual use.
There's also.conf.au for conferences (like the recent linux.conf.au) and a few other 2LD's, all noted at www.aunic.net.
.co was the uk/european naming convention,.com was the US one. It's been one of the big debating points of Australian internet access why the hell they went with the US naming convention rather than the UK one, but it probably had something to do with MCI bending Telstra over a barrel which is why we have to subsidise lamerican's practically free internet access.
The real issue is that people signed a contract which left the terms and conditions open to change at any time without notice, and now they have a whinge when the other party does just that.
Even the ACCC recognise that and try to explain that it's not Telstra screwing people over above and beyond their usual, its the people who signed dud contracts that have screwed themselves over.
The cost of bandwidth is high because the infrastructure and support is expensive, and MCI or whatever they're called this week have Telstra bent over a bigger barrel than Telstra have us, charging both ways for traffic crossing the pacific. Telstra are forced to pass this cost on, obviously with an added extra to make a bit of profit off it. You can't blame them for that, that's why people go into business - to make money. I'd honestly thought that the typical lamerican slashdotter would understand this coming from a capitalist country.
It irritates me that people have a problem with paying for a service. It's not a God-given right that everyone gets super high bandwidth, completely free Internet access. You want the service, you should pay. You sign a contract that legally binds you to that, with various loopholes that can bite you on the bum later, that's your fault for signing it. Don't blame the other side for simply exercising their rights.
This is one of the primary tenants of Extreme Programming. I find it strange how Slashdot can embrace that philosophy on one hand, and blast companies that practice it on the other.
At least Apple has the guts to admit their software isn't perfect and are doing something positive about it. Many other companies should learn from this.
$4.50 to call and tell her, plus you interrupt the meeting you're in and the boss tells you not to bother coming back and you can't afford your mobile phone because you have no job to pay the overpriced bills.
I'm speaking as someone in Canberra involved in this. It started as a fun hack hobby of people in the Canberra Linux Users Group but the mailing list has people from other states involved as well. Obviously there's no interstate connection since the cards don't transmit with enough power to stretch the 400+ Km to our friends in Sydney or 800+ km to our friends in Melbourne, and further.
Anyway, there's not even 250 people in the CLUG, let alone doing the WaveLAN thing, so this limit isn't as silly as it sounds. We're not worried about scalability since there's currently more than enough and if the limit is hit, then shock horror we can vi a file and use the 10.0.0.0 network instead. That's enough IP's for every man, woman, child, dog and refrigerator in the territory with room to spare (heck, 256^3 is almost enough for the population of the country).
The galaxy antennas have worked mostly well though some people have been having more luck with custom helicals (which is also good since the galaxy ones are rare, anyway it's more fun to build your own)
One big problem we have at the moment is between the north and south side is a fair bit of non-residential area (read: parks, public land, parliament house, etc) a wideish lake, and a mountain - which is making a north-south link impossible due to the short range of the cards.
The guys north-side (the main instigators) have been having more luck as the terrain south-side messes with LOS more.
Anyway its a lot of fun and I encourage other people who like hacking and get bored with ethernet networks to get involved in something similar in your area. We've already got a splinter group iirc which are using a different card which has a longer range and more bandwidth, and works with modern hardware (the main problem with the wavelan cards imho - full-length 8-bit ISA)
--
Matt
I recently bought one of these for my workstation, along with a Promise 20267 controller. Sure, I'd prefer SCSI, but I'd also prefer an IBM S/390 to my PC! I still managed to get an IBM..;)
It's a very very nice drive. I got the 32.7Gb model, made a ~22Gb partiton and stuck on reiserfs because there was no way in hell I'll be waiting for fsck on something that big. ~8Gb I kept as ext2 for another purpose and the remainder is some extra swap I have striped with another drive on the onboard controller.
There's nothing I can really add to the article except to affirm that it is a sweet disk and I'd recommend it to anyone. IBM are coming out with some top-notch stuff and coupled with their support for open-source software (Linux JDK 1.3, Apache, etc) it feels good to be able to give back to a company that is giving to me. --
Matt
There was nothing wrong with the original MySQL license. It was open source, free software. The only restriction was if you wanted to make money directly from it (by selling it) you had to pay a small license fee. What's wrong with that? NOT paying the license fee is morally wrong, because you are ripping off the good people who wrote the software for you. Why should you make profit from their work and they don't?
Being under the GPL now means that the applications one can use MySQL for are restricted. Yet again another decent software package falls victim to the virus license.
Or, my personal favourite, the Linux "user" is actually the network administrator who now has to run around like a headless chicken installing antivirus software updates and doing crazy things like adding content filtering to the (linux-based) mail servers. Oh, and also having to put up with the plethora of email and news stories about it.
It's my opinion that Linux users are MORE affected by the virus than Windows users, since thanks to the Linux users, most Windows users will never come across the virus.
Bzzzzt. It's debian unstable (2.3). The frozen distribution (2.2) is named "potato".
Funnily enough, woody is being updated less frequently than potato atm while they whack off a bit and otherwise procrastinate about renaming the directory "stable". -- Matt
I'd happily pay cash for any piece of decent software. Programmers have to eat, pay rent, wear clothes, etc. just like any other people.
The big question is, will it become open source? You pay the $1,000 (or whatever it happens to be) and you get the source code along with it (with some appropriate license agreement like SCSL)
That's what matters most.
Oh, BTW, although it does ASP, it doesn't do ActiveX which is the big hurdle. ASP is easy, it can be parsed through a perl filter to turn it into PHP. ActiveX is the problem - some things need those COM objects!
Note you're naming mostly Blizzard games - Blizzard have bought the Microsoft line in return for early access to API's etc. and have stated they have no intention of porting to any other platform, and will definately never port to Linux or assist anyone else to port to Linux.
I recommend that nobody buy titles from Blizzard until their backwards attitude changes. It's not too difficult to write portable software. I do it for a living. But of course the difficulty isn't the point - it's the M$ deal.
I heard on good authority that a certain manager at Redhat Advanced Development Labs thinks that Microsoft is the best thing ever, their interface is wonderful and GNOME (and hence the Redhat default interface) should look and behave exactly like it.
This is probably why Redhat ship with modified kernel sources - so the OS can crash like Microsoft OS's too;-)
Seriously though, this person may like to read Thomas McCarthy's intro to NeXTStep which has some very good information on interface design.
For example, you do not put three tiny weenie buttons on a titlebar, each performing a different operation, such that a 1-2 pixel mis-click is all the difference between maximising the application, and losing the past hours work by closing it.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel like the only person on the planet who actually liked the themes.org that was born post-crack. Sure, it had lots of images on the site but that's why browser cache (or better still, caching proxy servers) exist! It takes two or three pages and then the site is quite snappy and looked good.
Sure, there were still problems but those problems were never going to be fixed esp. considering the extreme lack of communication from OSDN with the staff, so long as the rumours of them being usurped still floated.
What I found the biggest problem with that site was, was it was updated very slowly and I think because it took so long before it came back, the people creating the themes had given up and found other sites like deviantart.com, skinz.org, customize.org, and so forth. So there was little content, rarely being posted, and people wonder why it sucked?
The new freshmeat version bugs me more than any previous incarnation of themes.org. Themes appear on the main freshmeat page and clog up the already over-clogged apps site. If you look at a screenshot, you get a tiny 3"x3" picture that's only marginally more viewable than the thumbnail, AND if you hit the close button - BOOM goodbye Mozilla - regardless of how many other pages you have open in other tabs.
On the bright side its nice they were able to reuse the freshmeat code for this purpose, its a testament to the good design and work Scoop has put in over these many years.
It won't affect Debian at all.
This is the Redhat Linux Standard Base, as witnessed by the complete stacking of board members in favour of Redhat, hence Debian and other non-rpm-based distributions can completely ignore this so-called "standard" and continue to distribute their technically superior distributions in peace while Redhat make the Redhat Linux Standard Base their next marketing tool. "Hey, we're compliant with our own standards, aren't we cool!". Hmm, sounds very familiar *cough*Microsoft*cough*
I don't know the exact details, but assuming since Andrea Arcangeli worked on it it's his VM alternative, yes it definately is more stable and to me has noticeably more response under a) interactive feel and b) load than Rik's VM. It's also neater code and there's nowhere near as much special-casing, plus its excellent for applications that stream data.
Ruling aside the obvious objections (changing major subsystems in a so-called "stable" kernel, NIH syndrome) I can only assume Alan's objection is that it was yet another really neat thing developed (or sponsored) by rival Linux company SuSE (like reiserfs, which he also objected to)
The sooner Redhat stop leveraging its collection of kernel hackers to drive Linux kernel development the better for the rest of us that don't care for their crappy distribution.
This was one of my gripes with Marko of IceWM fame - he had a really cool editor called FTE that had console and x11 versions, did syntax highlighting, folding, was pretty fast and easy to use. Then he gave up working on that to work on IceWM instead, which was/is a lame Win9x UI ripoff.
kinda funny how when a US law affects someone from a foreign country, nothing much happens; yet the lamericans get all up in arms when they discover a foreign law affects one of them.
I'll spell it out
G
E
T
A
C
L
U
E
Also, if it is just a bug in SELECT statements, no data is actually being lost - its just not showing up where it should be.
This might be a cultural thing, but where I'm from, if something doesn't show up where it should be, we describe it as being "lost" (until it is "found")
--
Matt
The so-called "standard" decided on RPM because the LSB committee is stacked with Redhat employees or sympathists. The LSB is nothing more than an excuse for Redhat to say "we are the standard", reaffirming their stance as Microsoft Linux.
...
Also, packaging is not a trivial issue. Sure, you can simply repackage some program you built, but if it was built on a Redhat 6.2 system it's going to have diffrerent library dependencies than a Mandrake 7 system which has different library dependencies to a Debian 2.2 system which has different library dependencies to a Slackware 8 system which has different library dependencies to
Also, both rpm and deb usually require recompilation as part of the package building process.
--
Matt
You're missing some other critical points as well.
Not only is the read latency a heck of a lot less on the NT box due to the extra two spindles in the RAID array, it is configured with logging disabled and updating atime disabled.
Since it has less writes to the disk than the Linux box, it has more time to serve up content.
Oh, almost forgot, the NT box has 6 fewer client systems flogging the crap out of it.
These are just the obvious things from the results page, I'm sure there's more differences that don't get mentioned.
--
Matt
"screw you guys, I'm going home"
;-)
"oh my God, you killed kenny, you bastards!"
"suck on my chocolate salty balls..."
"...stick 'em in your mouth and suck 'em"
"kick the baby!"
or my personal favourite
"this is a song, la la la la, Dukey's song"
(followed by fscking huge explosion)
Hell, all army guys sing, and drop their pants when "Eagle Rock" plays
--
Matt
You register a .id.au for individual use.
.conf.au for conferences (like the recent linux.conf.au) and a few other 2LD's, all noted at www.aunic.net.
.com was the US one. It's been one of the big debating points of Australian internet access why the hell they went with the US naming convention rather than the UK one, but it probably had something to do with MCI bending Telstra over a barrel which is why we have to subsidise lamerican's practically free internet access.
There's also
.co was the uk/european naming convention,
--
Matt
The real issue is that people signed a contract which left the terms and conditions open to change at any time without notice, and now they have a whinge when the other party does just that.
Even the ACCC recognise that and try to explain that it's not Telstra screwing people over above and beyond their usual, its the people who signed dud contracts that have screwed themselves over.
The cost of bandwidth is high because the infrastructure and support is expensive, and MCI or whatever they're called this week have Telstra bent over a bigger barrel than Telstra have us, charging both ways for traffic crossing the pacific. Telstra are forced to pass this cost on, obviously with an added extra to make a bit of profit off it. You can't blame them for that, that's why people go into business - to make money. I'd honestly thought that the typical lamerican slashdotter would understand this coming from a capitalist country.
It irritates me that people have a problem with paying for a service. It's not a God-given right that everyone gets super high bandwidth, completely free Internet access. You want the service, you should pay. You sign a contract that legally binds you to that, with various loopholes that can bite you on the bum later, that's your fault for signing it. Don't blame the other side for simply exercising their rights.
--
Matt
This is one of the primary tenants of Extreme Programming. I find it strange how Slashdot can embrace that philosophy on one hand, and blast companies that practice it on the other.
At least Apple has the guts to admit their software isn't perfect and are doing something positive about it. Many other companies should learn from this.
--
Matt
... surely this heading refers to every computer ever made?
--
Matt
Hmm, lets see.
15c to send a text message "Will be home late"
$4.50 to call and tell her, plus you interrupt the meeting you're in and the boss tells you not to bother coming back and you can't afford your mobile phone because you have no job to pay the overpriced bills.
Real difficult choice there...
--
Matt
Anyway, there's not even 250 people in the CLUG, let alone doing the WaveLAN thing, so this limit isn't as silly as it sounds. We're not worried about scalability since there's currently more than enough and if the limit is hit, then shock horror we can vi a file and use the 10.0.0.0 network instead. That's enough IP's for every man, woman, child, dog and refrigerator in the territory with room to spare (heck, 256^3 is almost enough for the population of the country).
The galaxy antennas have worked mostly well though some people have been having more luck with custom helicals (which is also good since the galaxy ones are rare, anyway it's more fun to build your own)
One big problem we have at the moment is between the north and south side is a fair bit of non-residential area (read: parks, public land, parliament house, etc) a wideish lake, and a mountain - which is making a north-south link impossible due to the short range of the cards. The guys north-side (the main instigators) have been having more luck as the terrain south-side messes with LOS more.
Anyway its a lot of fun and I encourage other people who like hacking and get bored with ethernet networks to get involved in something similar in your area. We've already got a splinter group iirc which are using a different card which has a longer range and more bandwidth, and works with modern hardware (the main problem with the wavelan cards imho - full-length 8-bit ISA)
--
Matt
I recently bought one of these for my workstation, along with a Promise 20267 controller. Sure, I'd prefer SCSI, but I'd also prefer an IBM S/390 to my PC! I still managed to get an IBM.. ;)
It's a very very nice drive. I got the 32.7Gb model, made a ~22Gb partiton and stuck on reiserfs because there was no way in hell I'll be waiting for fsck on something that big. ~8Gb I kept as ext2 for another purpose and the remainder is some extra swap I have striped with another drive on the onboard controller.
There's nothing I can really add to the article except to affirm that it is a sweet disk and I'd recommend it to anyone. IBM are coming out with some top-notch stuff and coupled with their support for open-source software (Linux JDK 1.3, Apache, etc) it feels good to be able to give back to a company that is giving to me.
--
Matt
There was nothing wrong with the original MySQL license. It was open source, free software.
The only restriction was if you wanted to make money directly from it (by selling it) you had to pay a small license fee.
What's wrong with that? NOT paying the license fee is morally wrong, because you are ripping off the good people who wrote the software for you. Why should you make profit from their work and they don't?
Being under the GPL now means that the applications one can use MySQL for are restricted.
Yet again another decent software package falls victim to the virus license.
--
Matt
Or, my personal favourite, the Linux "user" is actually the network administrator who now has to run around like a headless chicken installing antivirus software updates and doing crazy things like adding content filtering to the (linux-based) mail servers. Oh, and also having to put up with the plethora of email and news stories about it.
It's my opinion that Linux users are MORE affected by the virus than Windows users, since thanks to the Linux users, most Windows users will never come across the virus.
--
Matt
Read and understand this before talking about user interfaces.
Tom McCarthy's Intro to NEXTSTEP.--
Matt
Funnily enough, woody is being updated less frequently than potato atm while they whack off a bit and otherwise procrastinate about renaming the directory "stable".
--
Matt
You're thinking free as in beer, which is wrong.
I'd happily pay cash for any piece of decent software. Programmers have to eat, pay rent, wear clothes, etc. just like any other people.
The big question is, will it become open source?
You pay the $1,000 (or whatever it happens to be) and you get the source code along with it (with some appropriate license agreement like SCSL)
That's what matters most.
Oh, BTW, although it does ASP, it doesn't do ActiveX which is the big hurdle. ASP is easy, it can be parsed through a perl filter to turn it into PHP. ActiveX is the problem - some things need those COM objects!
Note you're naming mostly Blizzard games - Blizzard have bought the Microsoft line in return for early access to API's etc. and have stated they have no intention of porting to any other platform, and will definately never port to Linux or assist anyone else to port to Linux.
I recommend that nobody buy titles from Blizzard until their backwards attitude changes. It's not too difficult to write portable software. I do it for a living. But of course the difficulty isn't the point - it's the M$ deal.
I heard on good authority that a certain manager at Redhat Advanced Development Labs thinks that Microsoft is the best thing ever, their interface is wonderful and GNOME (and hence the Redhat default interface) should look and behave exactly like it.
This is probably why Redhat ship with modified kernel sources - so the OS can crash like Microsoft OS's too ;-)
Seriously though, this person may like to read Thomas McCarthy's intro to NeXTStep which has some very good information on interface design.
For example, you do not put three tiny weenie buttons on a titlebar, each performing a different operation, such that a 1-2 pixel mis-click is all the difference between maximising the application, and losing the past hours work by closing it.
Dude, www.cdrom.com and ftp.cdrom.com are two different beasts.
BTW, wcarchive runs FleaBSD for historical reasons, not technical ones. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Try using a Debian distribution not >12 months old.
These drivers work fine with my potato-based system and a TNT2 Ultra
About 10fps faster in Q3A than the old ones...
(still patiently awaiting XFree86 4.0)