The only downside to freedesktop.org's X server is that it will no longer run well on a 20mhz 486.
Yeah, I don't care either.:)
Actually, KDrive runs better on a 20MHz 486 than XFree86. It's much smaller, and has things like a shadow frame buffer VESA mode that make it work well with pathetic graphics HW. I've used KDrive on an 8MB 386 to good effect.
Of course, you won't want to use the fancy compositing managers on such a box, but at least you can have some kind of window system on it instead of just being stuck with console mode.
In the long run, KDrive will become the standard: it's a much better server. KDrive does share much code with XFree86, but it has major cleanups and simplifications. It will need more driver support (though this is much simpler in the KDrive architecture) as well as 3D support before it is ready to take over, though.
In the short run, the right answer is to fold the changes back into XFree86. This should be no big deal technically: there's nothing terribly KDrive-specific about them. Politically, it may be harder: the reason that Keithp was ejected from the XFree86 project was essentially for trying to change things.:-)
The XFree86 DRI project server is on freedesktop.org, and will probably have these fixes well before the XFree86 core server. This server is likely the immediate future of XFree86 anyhow.
We're finding out that the pdx.freedesktop.org webserver configuration is not slashdot-ready.:-) We're working on it, but there's only so much one can do when being/.ed against multi-MB screenshots.
Quite aside from being legally questionable and ethically bankrupt, isn't C&D-ing Shoggoth On The Roof a bit...risky? I mean, I sure wouldn't be reading the response from the Old Ones' legal team. (Does anyone doubt that the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, J.D., would be drafting counsel?)
For a taste of the horror that awaits these litigious fools, check out this 401 page from yog-sothoth.com...
If you are concerned about permanent markers soaking in and destroying your media, you can ensure that there is no data under the marker. Fill the disk only part way, and then label the disk around the outside edge. The TDK disks I own have the silkscreened label area out on the edge, presumably for this reason.
Pop quiz, hotshot. What did P.T. Barnum say about bad publicity?
I doubt Belkin did this as a reasoned plan. But I doubt it will hurt their sales any. I personally didn't even know Belkin made routers--this news thus can't decrease my chances of going out looking to buy one.
We've been having a long argument about whether to continue with Debian in our 20+ box lab with the idea of expanding it to the rest of our 50+ box Linux env. I think I just won the argument.:-)
You see, we're an academic organization, but I suspect professional orgs are going to have the same issue: what to do about their home users? We can't afford to buy RHEL licenses for these folks, but it doesn't look like Fedora is going to be as nice as Deb?
Besides, RH just lost a lot of my trust. Why should I believe that they won't just EOL RHEL in favor of something even more expensive? One of my big concerns with RH has always been that their upgrade process is expensive and fault-prone. This hasn't reassured me on that score.
As someone who once ran a small lab full of RH7 boxes, I'm pretty happy to be on Deb. I think I'll stay there.
My father was a general surgeon in a rough coastal town. He used to tell me that of the folks who got stabbed (a frequent occurrence) even severely, he could save most of them. With the folks who got shot, there was usually little chance. Not guaranteed, mind you, but statistical. I had a close friend in college whose throat had been slit ear-to-ear by a psycho years before. Had a bad scar, but survived fine. He was happy said psycho didn't have a gun.
Most gun deaths are not from people who have planned in advance to use a firearm in the commission of a crime. They are either accidental or are heat-of-passion. Most involve family members or close friends. Much of this sort of gun death would probably be prevented simply by attempting to ensure that those who have a handgun make a responsible decision to do so, and that they know how to secure it properly.
I'm all for the right to bear arms. I'm also all for the same kind of licensing for firearms that we have for the only slightly-more-dangerous automobile. I don't see a major threat to our continued freedoms, and I do see some benefit to society.
I have to disagree with the moderators who found this funny. I really didn't find this character assassination troll funny at all. And the "APRILFOOLS" at the end would have been a lot funnier around April 1---was this a repeat of some old article?
Moderators, perhaps consider modding the parent back down?
But if scientists from China discover how to manufacture Terfenol -- Etrema's Snodgrass says that three Chinese companies have already started making pirated versions -- the metal's still-fragile reputation could be harmed by the cheaper, imported version.
Heh, yeah, that's the big risk to the American manufacturer---the danger to "the metal's still-fragile reputation". Snodgrass is not at all concerned by the fact that they are about to be drastically undersold by companies with better access to the rare earth metals used, and less scruples about "intellectual property" laws. Honest.
People rallied to Ford's side against the bullies. Editorials weighed in against the industry's heavy-handed lawsuits.
Today, people rally around what the TV tells them to rally around. And all the TV stations and newspapers are owned by the same people who own the music companies. If the automakers had owned all the newspapers, the outcome might have been very different.
For Ford, it was either exit the industry or fight the Selden Patent in court. The litigation lasted from 1903 until 1911.
Or about 1/2 the lifespan of the patent at the time (17 years IIRC). This meant that Ford could drag the legal fight out until the patent expired if necessary. Unfortunately, today copyright lasts forever (thanks, Sonny!).
Unlike the automobile cartel that tried to stop Henry Ford, the recording industry's copyrights are perfectly valid.
The article tries to minimize this point, but it is important. There's no legal battle to win, here. Congress might change the law. Or they might not. If they do, it will take a long time for the constitutionality of the new law to be litigated (c.f. "do-not-call").
I could go on, but I'm tired. My point is that the US is a lot different place than it was in 1911, and the analogy, while interesting, doesn't seem too promising to me. YMMV.
What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?
Knoppix. Actually, Morphix with appropriate apps. Give the kid a self-install CD: stick it in the CD drive and boot (even the dullest 6th grader can do that) and it wipes the disk and makes the laptop "just like new". Keep user files on (or mirrored on) an NFS partition and you have a fairly friendly, robust machine. Optionally, install the distro once and set the BIOS write-protect on the hard drive, making the machine essentially haxxor-proof.
All of this is a lot of work, and might take some customization on the laptop. But you're fielding 130K of them.
Here in Oregon we can't even afford desks for all of our 6th graders. Sigh.
OK, I guess I got that---thanks. But this is different from the current situation how, exactly?
This is what I thought they were saying, but I wrote it off, since it didn't seem to actually answer the objection. In fact, the spammer is likely to avoid paying $8 for a new domain, and just register the existing victim hostname with the SFP server---I'm not seeing any possible authentication that could prevent this, but again maybe I missed something.
(From John Levine:) Or spammers can register throwaway domains of their own, since burning an $8 domain for a 10 million message spam run isn't much of a deterrent.
Throwaway domains can be listed in sender blacklists which respond in real time to automated discovery methods.
The author's final stated goal? "Improve on X, and enable extra features like widget buffering, alpha transparency, and desktop resizing."
He has improved briefly and partially. Desktop resizing (which works far better than he claims) and alpha transparency (via Render) are already there. Widget buffering (actually server-side window buffering) and alpha transparent window support for X were designed last night, and implementations should be available in a couple of months.
Well, I've only gotten as far as the critique of X at the start of Thomas' paper. This critique is a classic/. "X sucks" troll in academically semi-polished form.
Point by point:
X has too much latency: See Packard's paper in Freenix 2003: high latency is not an inherent X attribute, even over high-latency connections.
X requires a toolkit for ease of programming: Duh. As opposed to what, exactly?
X needs standardized UI semantics: This is moot. You may use X+Gnome or X+KDE if this is what you desire. Either is a fairly good and fairly complete system with standard UI semantics. The existence of two such systems is no more troublesome than the simultaneous coexistence of Windows and MacOS.
X is "an incoherent mess": When making this argument, it is always useful to confuse the protocol with the implementation. The existence of Kdrive is a nice example of how much the latter can be cleaned up. The protocol hasn't changed in 20 years except for extensions: the argument that the extensions don't work together is supremely unconvincing, supported by one lame example. freedesktop.org has made a lot of progress in a short time in refactoring and standardizing X.
X is complex: It is. Unfortunately, it is a response to complex application requirements. Again, one lame example involving perhaps the most demanding application running is cited. And again, freedesktop.org is standardizing mechanism for dealing with the cited problems.
All of this would have been easy to avoid. Just talk to an X developer before publishing the paper. Many are quite accessible, and would undoubtedly have been happy to correct the critique.
It's perfectly valid to want to write a new window system. I can think of a variety of justifications, starting with "it's nice to try something different" and "I wanted to learn some things". Trolling is hardly necessary, and hardly welcome.
When I was a young boy growing up on the Oregon coast, I personally met and chatted with one of the two guys whose hoax could be credited with starting the whole Bigfoot scare. Their "Bigfoot tracks" were the first to make the papers, and were the subject of investigation by many "qualified" anthropologists, etc., who pronounced them genuine.
They later were implicated in the hoax and confessed. Apparently, it all happened just like you'd expect. They cut giant feet out of plywood, strapped them to their shoes, and went clomping around (in the snow? don't recall), then brought their friend to see the tracks they'd "found", as a gag. When the friend got the papers to come look at the tracks, they decided they might get in trouble if they confessed, so they hid the plywood feet and kept mum. They thought the anthropologists were hilarious.
Let me reiterate. They eventually confessed. Freely. In the newspaper. To this day, some folks still believe those tracks were real.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, KDrive runs better on a 20MHz 486 than XFree86. It's much smaller, and has things like a shadow frame buffer VESA mode that make it work well with pathetic graphics HW. I've used KDrive on an 8MB 386 to good effect.
Of course, you won't want to use the fancy compositing managers on such a box, but at least you can have some kind of window system on it instead of just being stuck with console mode.
In the long run, KDrive will become the standard: it's a much better server. KDrive does share much code with XFree86, but it has major cleanups and simplifications. It will need more driver support (though this is much simpler in the KDrive architecture) as well as 3D support before it is ready to take over, though.
In the short run, the right answer is to fold the changes back into XFree86. This should be no big deal technically: there's nothing terribly KDrive-specific about them. Politically, it may be harder: the reason that Keithp was ejected from the XFree86 project was essentially for trying to change things. :-)
The XFree86 DRI project server is on freedesktop.org, and will probably have these fixes well before the XFree86 core server. This server is likely the immediate future of XFree86 anyhow.
We're finding out that the pdx.freedesktop.org webserver configuration is not slashdot-ready. :-) We're working on it, but there's only so much one can do when being /.ed against multi-MB screenshots.
Quite aside from being legally questionable and ethically bankrupt, isn't C&D-ing Shoggoth On The Roof a bit...risky? I mean, I sure wouldn't be reading the response from the Old Ones' legal team. (Does anyone doubt that the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, J.D., would be drafting counsel?)
For a taste of the horror that awaits these litigious fools, check out this 401 page from yog-sothoth.com ...
If you are concerned about permanent markers soaking in and destroying your media, you can ensure that there is no data under the marker. Fill the disk only part way, and then label the disk around the outside edge. The TDK disks I own have the silkscreened label area out on the edge, presumably for this reason.
Pop quiz, hotshot. What did P.T. Barnum say about bad publicity?
I doubt Belkin did this as a reasoned plan. But I doubt it will hurt their sales any. I personally didn't even know Belkin made routers--this news thus can't decrease my chances of going out looking to buy one.
His other series are no slouch either.
...needs more buzzwords.
So how hard is it to go the next step and actually hijack a Bluetooth phone conversation? This could be huge fun...
Oops. I somehow hopelessly garbled the first sentence---sorry. We're arguing about whether to switch to RH, or to continue with Debian...
We've been having a long argument about whether to continue with Debian in our 20+ box lab with the idea of expanding it to the rest of our 50+ box Linux env. I think I just won the argument. :-)
You see, we're an academic organization, but I suspect professional orgs are going to have the same issue: what to do about their home users? We can't afford to buy RHEL licenses for these folks, but it doesn't look like Fedora is going to be as nice as Deb?
Besides, RH just lost a lot of my trust. Why should I believe that they won't just EOL RHEL in favor of something even more expensive? One of my big concerns with RH has always been that their upgrade process is expensive and fault-prone. This hasn't reassured me on that score.
As someone who once ran a small lab full of RH7 boxes, I'm pretty happy to be on Deb. I think I'll stay there.
(Massively offtopic. Oh well)
My father was a general surgeon in a rough coastal town. He used to tell me that of the folks who got stabbed (a frequent occurrence) even severely, he could save most of them. With the folks who got shot, there was usually little chance. Not guaranteed, mind you, but statistical. I had a close friend in college whose throat had been slit ear-to-ear by a psycho years before. Had a bad scar, but survived fine. He was happy said psycho didn't have a gun.
Most gun deaths are not from people who have planned in advance to use a firearm in the commission of a crime. They are either accidental or are heat-of-passion. Most involve family members or close friends. Much of this sort of gun death would probably be prevented simply by attempting to ensure that those who have a handgun make a responsible decision to do so, and that they know how to secure it properly.
I'm all for the right to bear arms. I'm also all for the same kind of licensing for firearms that we have for the only slightly-more-dangerous automobile. I don't see a major threat to our continued freedoms, and I do see some benefit to society.
I have to disagree with the moderators who found this funny. I really didn't find this character assassination troll funny at all. And the "APRILFOOLS" at the end would have been a lot funnier around April 1---was this a repeat of some old article?
Moderators, perhaps consider modding the parent back down?
Hee hee. Check out our Ricochet Robot site. Carl did all the SVG graphics you'll find there in a text editor...
Yep. This is the difference I was pointing out between the cases. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
Other big differences:
People rallied to Ford's side against the bullies. Editorials weighed in against the industry's heavy-handed lawsuits.
Today, people rally around what the TV tells them to rally around. And all the TV stations and newspapers are owned by the same people who own the music companies. If the automakers had owned all the newspapers, the outcome might have been very different.
For Ford, it was either exit the industry or fight the Selden Patent in court. The litigation lasted from 1903 until 1911.
Or about 1/2 the lifespan of the patent at the time (17 years IIRC). This meant that Ford could drag the legal fight out until the patent expired if necessary. Unfortunately, today copyright lasts forever (thanks, Sonny!).
Unlike the automobile cartel that tried to stop Henry Ford, the recording industry's copyrights are perfectly valid.
The article tries to minimize this point, but it is important. There's no legal battle to win, here. Congress might change the law. Or they might not. If they do, it will take a long time for the constitutionality of the new law to be litigated (c.f. "do-not-call").I could go on, but I'm tired. My point is that the US is a lot different place than it was in 1911, and the analogy, while interesting, doesn't seem too promising to me. YMMV.
What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?
Knoppix. Actually, Morphix with appropriate apps. Give the kid a self-install CD: stick it in the CD drive and boot (even the dullest 6th grader can do that) and it wipes the disk and makes the laptop "just like new". Keep user files on (or mirrored on) an NFS partition and you have a fairly friendly, robust machine. Optionally, install the distro once and set the BIOS write-protect on the hard drive, making the machine essentially haxxor-proof.
All of this is a lot of work, and might take some customization on the laptop. But you're fielding 130K of them.
Here in Oregon we can't even afford desks for all of our 6th graders. Sigh.
OK, I guess I got that---thanks. But this is different from the current situation how, exactly?
This is what I thought they were saying, but I wrote it off, since it didn't seem to actually answer the objection. In fact, the spammer is likely to avoid paying $8 for a new domain, and just register the existing victim hostname with the SFP server---I'm not seeing any possible authentication that could prevent this, but again maybe I missed something.
The FAQ says...
To which I can only add:
Or is there something I'm missing here?"No, I'm not a lawyer. But I did watch an episode of Matlock at the bar last night. The sounds was off, but I think I caught the gist of it."
The author's final stated goal? "Improve on X, and enable extra features like widget buffering, alpha transparency, and desktop resizing."
He has improved briefly and partially. Desktop resizing (which works far better than he claims) and alpha transparency (via Render) are already there. Widget buffering (actually server-side window buffering) and alpha transparent window support for X were designed last night, and implementations should be available in a couple of months.
Why improve upon X? Just improve X.
Well, I've only gotten as far as the critique of X at the start of Thomas' paper. This critique is a classic /. "X sucks" troll in academically semi-polished form.
Point by point:
- X has too much latency: See Packard's paper in Freenix 2003: high latency is not an inherent X attribute, even over high-latency connections.
- X requires a toolkit for ease of programming: Duh. As opposed to what, exactly?
- X needs standardized UI semantics: This is moot. You may use X+Gnome or X+KDE if this is what you desire. Either is a fairly good and fairly complete system with standard UI semantics. The existence of two such systems is no more troublesome than the simultaneous coexistence of Windows and MacOS.
- X is "an incoherent mess": When making this argument, it is always useful to confuse the protocol with the implementation. The existence of Kdrive is a nice example of how much the latter can be cleaned up. The protocol hasn't changed in 20 years except for extensions: the argument that the extensions don't work together is supremely unconvincing, supported by one lame example. freedesktop.org has made a lot of progress in a short time in refactoring and standardizing X.
- X is complex: It is. Unfortunately, it is a response to complex application requirements. Again, one lame example involving perhaps the most demanding application running is cited. And again, freedesktop.org is standardizing mechanism for dealing with the cited problems.
All of this would have been easy to avoid. Just talk to an X developer before publishing the paper. Many are quite accessible, and would undoubtedly have been happy to correct the critique.It's perfectly valid to want to write a new window system. I can think of a variety of justifications, starting with "it's nice to try something different" and "I wanted to learn some things". Trolling is hardly necessary, and hardly welcome.
Sounds like they've reinvented PC-104. Only bigger. Wish they'd stuck with the established standard.
When I was a young boy growing up on the Oregon coast, I personally met and chatted with one of the two guys whose hoax could be credited with starting the whole Bigfoot scare. Their "Bigfoot tracks" were the first to make the papers, and were the subject of investigation by many "qualified" anthropologists, etc., who pronounced them genuine.
They later were implicated in the hoax and confessed. Apparently, it all happened just like you'd expect. They cut giant feet out of plywood, strapped them to their shoes, and went clomping around (in the snow? don't recall), then brought their friend to see the tracks they'd "found", as a gag. When the friend got the papers to come look at the tracks, they decided they might get in trouble if they confessed, so they hid the plywood feet and kept mum. They thought the anthropologists were hilarious.
Let me reiterate. They eventually confessed. Freely. In the newspaper. To this day, some folks still believe those tracks were real.