Send me your snail mail to arandir@usermode.org and I'll send off a copy to you. Also check out freebsd.kde.org, which is an effort to improve KDE on the FreeBSD side.
My intention was not to bitch at KDE or Gnome, and I hope you didn't take it that way. But being the minority OS user, we sometimes have to shout to get recognition.
What the hell are you talking about? One of the goals of FreeBSD-5.0 is "to implement all requirements of the ISO 9899:1999 (C99) and IEEE 1003.1-2001 (POSIX) standards." I don't have time to do a POSIX audit right now, but my -4.5 system has a man page for POSIX.1e, every random man 3 page I've tried yet states compliance for C89, C99, POSIX.1 or SUSv2 under the STANDARDS section. Having done a bit of pthread programming, I know from first hand experience that FreeBSD us *much* more compliant with the standards than Linux.
Is FreeBSD fully compliant? No. No free unix implementation is. But FreeBSD (and I assume the other *BSDs as well) is a lot more compliant than some commercial unices I've used.
I'm not an expert in networks, especially WANs. But I'm not expecting the relay owners to charge the spammers directly. Instead, the relay owner charges the server or node that is using the bandwidth. This will eventually be filtered back to the spammer.
Please note that I am fully aware that many spammers are very creative in hiding their true identity. But unless they are actually hacking upstream servers, the charges will eventually find them.
Nothing in life is perfect (get used to it), but charging for bandwidth is a much better solution than to falsely assume that the internet is a commons that anyone can use free of charge. In real life, commons only exist in economic texts. Sure, spammers may learn more creative cracking skills to get around the bandwidth charges, but then they become criminals and then their costs of doing business become potentially exhorbitant. Certain asian countries might not care what bandwidth their citizens steal, but a few well placed liens on asian ISPs would do wonders.
We just need to get the Gnome and KDE developers to realize this as well. Most of Gnome and KDE run just fine under my FreeBSD boxen, but there's always an occasional linuxism so that something doesn't work or works oddly. There's this big huge standard out there called "POSIX", and another one called "X11R6". It's a shame there is still the occasional developer who doesn't know about them.
Yep, you hit the problem squarely on the head. Economics. Snail mail spam costs money, so what you get is limited and targeted to you or the region. But email spam is free.
The economics are screwed up somewhere. And I know where it's screwed up. Internet users do not pay for internet usage. They do pay for hookup, maintenance and service, but they don't pay for use. Someone who sends out one email a day pays exactly the same as someone who spams out ten thousand a day.
Bandwidth isn't free. But no one is charging for bandwidth. So here's my very radical solution: start charging for bandwidth. Your ISP charges you according to the bandwidth you use. And the ISPs in turn pay for the use of resources owned by other providers, services and institutions. Forget about information wanting to be free, because I'm not talking about information. I'm talking about routers, servers, cables and lines. Someone owns that router two hops away that has to route ten million pieces of spam a day. The owner of that router needs to start charging for its use. That owner may not know the ultimate origin of a peice of spam, but they do know which in which direction it came from.
Then to top it all off, start suing spammers for where appropriate. Sue them for hacking your server. Sue them for spoofing your address. Sue them if your penis doesn't grow four inches after smoking temple kiff. It may be difficult now to sue them for much of this stuff, but when bandwidth actually costs money, you're able to walk into court with a detailed list of monetary damages.
This won't stop spam. Nothing will. But it will do wonders for reducing it. Just start treating the internet as owned property instead of some mythical village commons.
you voted on it? I sure didn't - that's corporate fascism. (Look it up.)
I did look it up. Your dictionary is grossly erroneous. Find a real dictionary and look up "representative democracy". You votes for representatives and they in turn voted to extend copyright. The corporations may have encouraged these bills, but they certainly did not impose them or vote for them or take away your right to bitch at your representative.
You're making some very wrong assumptions in your pseudo calculations. First, you assume that the potential cost of doing nothing is infinite. Second, you ignore the probabilities.
Let's say the actual cost global environmental damage is 10 billion, not infinite. Then let's assume that the actual benefit for doing nothing is ten. If those are the only variables, then of course we have to shoot SUV owners and abolish democracy in case people might not vote green! But it's not a balanced equation. If the probability of global environmental damage is 1 in ten billion, then the odds say to do nothing.
Look at it another way. You could be hit and killed by a car on the way to work tomorrow. Cost to you is extremely high. The benefit to you is whatever pay you receive from work. Is it worth risking total destruction just to get $10 an hour? Of course not! But you ride to work anyway. Ponder it a bit and you'll realize that the cost of you dying is not infinite, but less than your wages times the probability of being hit and killed by a car.
Another replier made the very important point that local environmental damage is a different thing than global environmental damage. If you fart you destroy the environment in your pants and possibly that in the room, but you don't destroy the environment of the whole town.
it shows that those who claim that human activities do nothing to affect the environment are clearly out to lunch.
Nobody is claiming this. All life as an effect on the environment. But that's no excuse to jump to the conclusion that the sky is falling.
I would pay $19.95 for the chance to throw baseballs at a dunktank filled with wet Cowboy Neal gummies and Jon Katz sitting on the plank. Hell, I'd pay $49.95 for that opportunity.
Thanks for clarifying. I was seriously confused for a bit:-)
I've tried to try to use portage, but I never could get Gentoo installed. I've built LFS before, but my problems stemmed from unstable code and my lack of willingness to go in and fix the scripts and stuff so it would build the way it was supposed to. This was rc6 I believe. I'm going to wait until the final release and try it again then.
In the meantime, reading over the portage information, I can see where it may be a bit more beneficial than ports for the packager, but I still can't see where it's advantageous to the end user. The "profile" sounds nice, but is it that much different from editing the excellently commented make.conf? The basic official ports system doesn't do upgrades well, but using the portupgrade package, it's a snap. I expect it to become an official tool in FreeBSD 5.0.
Subpackages and package variations are two major things missing from all the candidate systems. I mean, Windows can manage to do this, why can't we? Why can Windows users select "custom" during install but we have to take whatever the packager decides to give us?
One example: Dia. Under FreeBSD the port and package requires Gnome. But Dia will build just fine without the Gnome libraries. Everytime I want to install or upgrade Dia I have to go in and edit the Makefile.
Proposal 1A: All meaningful configuration options should be easily available to the user of ports and any successor to ports. All major configuration options should be easily available for packages. Let me choose "custom->without-gnome" when I install Dia.
Another example: KDE. This already exists as a meta package in FreeBSD, but a metapackage is not the same as a set of subpackages. Uninstall KDE and nothing actually gets uninstalled, as all the dependencies are still there. At an even finer grain of detail, maybe I don't want to install everything in kdegames. Maybe I just want shisen-sho and patience. Allow me a way to install just what I want out of a package. The Debian way of splitting packages into smaller packages (instead of subpackages) is not an optimal solution.
Proposal 1B: A port or package that contains optional or secondary components should allow the user to choose what components they want installed.
The defaults should remain for obvious reasons. But the package manager should allow -full, minimal, and -custom installs. For a CLI installer, these could be switches (with -full being the default), and for GUI installers they should be selectable options. For some packages it won't make sense to have more than one option, but for most it will.
These proposals may mean the replacement of metapackages with superpackages. It will mean more work for the package developers, but that's outweighed by the benefits to the user.
Portage is basically a pythonized BSD ports system. To the end user there is no advantage in one over the other. To the package developer it comes down to make/sh versus python.
my understanding is that an MS rep asked what it would take to get them to switch to a Microsoft cluster.
You've got a golden opportunity here! Microsoft does it your way or they don't get the sale.
Let them know the nature of a cluster in a research project. Nodes will be swapped in and out. New ones will be added. Different OSs will be used. So tell them you want a copy of Windows for each potential node, licensed to the University and not to any individual node. Tell them you need full rights to install, reinstall, and uninstall any particular copy on any particular node. Tell them you will not accept any terms restricting the cluster to Windows only.
If you really want to play hardball, tell them you don't even want licenses, but bonafide user-owned copies of Windows subject only to the provisions of copyright. In other words, you don't want to be subject to any EULA. Then you'll discover how much Microsoft wants your cluster to be a Windows cluster.
I think one major difference between managers at tech companies and those elsewhere is that at the tech companies they don't understand their domain. You can be an effective manager at Ford or Chrysler without knowing any automotive engineering, but same does not hold for a software company. The reason for this is that software is a new and evolving field. It needs to settle out before the managers can get a grasp on it, but in the meantime the domain keeps changing on a yearly basis.
The stereotypical software manager will want to use Windows, because that's all he knows. For some applications that's an appropriate choice, but for a great many is certainly is not. Where we work we build embedded realtime invasive medical diagnostic equipment. Management made the braindead decision to base all of our new products on a piece of medical workstation software developed at another division.
Another problem, whose source I haven't discovered, is the strange idea that you can create a quality software product in one or two years. Go look at any other industry and you'll see that it takes around five years to get a product from initial idea to the sales floor. Everyone in the automotive industry knows that new designs don't magically appear, but I've seen too many managers in software that think I can magically pull a feature out of my ass on a moment's notice.
These problems will go away, but I don't expect them to for another ten years at least. But there are companies that are on the ball. Some listen to their engineers. Some send their managers to software engineering classes. Some are in niches where the industry has settled down somewhat.
With comparitively minimal funds, about 10 years of work could be rolled into a commercial product that never gives a line of code back.
My questions of the day: If I take 10 years worth of your work and roll it up into a commercial product, just what exactly do you want back? You keep telling me this is free but keep demanding that I pay for it by giving something back. As near as I can tell, I have taken nothing from you. Go check and you will find that your 10 years worth of work is still there sitting in your cvs tree. You're starting to sound an awful lot like those proprietary developers who have this strange notion that software wants to be regulated by its author.
Okay... one last time. There are binaries available at the KDE ftp sites. They are not links to locations elsewhere, but actual, god fearing, bonafide binaries.
All you guys saying we have to call a certain operating system by the name "GNU/Linux" just because major portions of it come from GNU, are now saying MacOSX is not BSD.
Well screw that! MacOSX has more BSD code than Redhat has GNU code. Make up your minds how you're going to name on OS. You can't have it both ways.
That's not the point. The point is that a thousand people are posting here at the top of their lungs that KDE doesn't provide binaries at all. But it turns out that they DO provide binaries for a few distros.
You know, if someone said "the sun is green", and I point out that it is not, it's quite strange to get a reply to the effect "if you don't like the color why don't you go repaint it yourself?"
I realize it's a hell of a lot of work making KDE packages. An awful lot of work. I certainly don't expect every distro to have packages ready five minutes after a KDE release.
But maybe I again misphrased the question. I'm not blaming anyone, certainly not KDE, Debian or other distros. All I'm wondering is why KDE chooses to offer binaries for some distros and not for others. Maybe it's just a rhetorical question without an answer.
Geez, everyone and their grandma is yelling at the top of their lungs that KDE only provides source code. I'm stunned. Frankly I'm flabbergasted. Have I been operating under a false assumption all these years? It woulnd't have been the first time.
Let me check...
...hmmmmm....
Oh, look here! ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/2.2.2/ provides binaries for SEVEN different operating systems and distros! These aren't links to those respective systems, but bonafide binaries on the actual genuine KDE site!
I understand that KDE does not actually create and build the binaries that are on their site, but they are still on their site. According to my dictionary, that is one definition of "produce", as in "he produced a binary from within the nether regions of the ftp site."
So let me rephrase the orginal question: "Why does KDE offer binaries for a few selected Linux distros, but not for other distros or other operating systems?"
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Send me your snail mail to arandir@usermode.org and I'll send off a copy to you. Also check out freebsd.kde.org, which is an effort to improve KDE on the FreeBSD side.
My intention was not to bitch at KDE or Gnome, and I hope you didn't take it that way. But being the minority OS user, we sometimes have to shout to get recognition.
What the hell are you talking about? One of the goals of FreeBSD-5.0 is "to implement all requirements of the ISO 9899:1999 (C99) and IEEE 1003.1-2001 (POSIX) standards." I don't have time to do a POSIX audit right now, but my -4.5 system has a man page for POSIX.1e, every random man 3 page I've tried yet states compliance for C89, C99, POSIX.1 or SUSv2 under the STANDARDS section. Having done a bit of pthread programming, I know from first hand experience that FreeBSD us *much* more compliant with the standards than Linux.
Is FreeBSD fully compliant? No. No free unix implementation is. But FreeBSD (and I assume the other *BSDs as well) is a lot more compliant than some commercial unices I've used.
I'm not an expert in networks, especially WANs. But I'm not expecting the relay owners to charge the spammers directly. Instead, the relay owner charges the server or node that is using the bandwidth. This will eventually be filtered back to the spammer.
Please note that I am fully aware that many spammers are very creative in hiding their true identity. But unless they are actually hacking upstream servers, the charges will eventually find them.
Nothing in life is perfect (get used to it), but charging for bandwidth is a much better solution than to falsely assume that the internet is a commons that anyone can use free of charge. In real life, commons only exist in economic texts. Sure, spammers may learn more creative cracking skills to get around the bandwidth charges, but then they become criminals and then their costs of doing business become potentially exhorbitant. Certain asian countries might not care what bandwidth their citizens steal, but a few well placed liens on asian ISPs would do wonders.
We just need to get the Gnome and KDE developers to realize this as well. Most of Gnome and KDE run just fine under my FreeBSD boxen, but there's always an occasional linuxism so that something doesn't work or works oddly. There's this big huge standard out there called "POSIX", and another one called "X11R6". It's a shame there is still the occasional developer who doesn't know about them.
Yep, you hit the problem squarely on the head. Economics. Snail mail spam costs money, so what you get is limited and targeted to you or the region. But email spam is free.
The economics are screwed up somewhere. And I know where it's screwed up. Internet users do not pay for internet usage. They do pay for hookup, maintenance and service, but they don't pay for use. Someone who sends out one email a day pays exactly the same as someone who spams out ten thousand a day.
Bandwidth isn't free. But no one is charging for bandwidth. So here's my very radical solution: start charging for bandwidth. Your ISP charges you according to the bandwidth you use. And the ISPs in turn pay for the use of resources owned by other providers, services and institutions. Forget about information wanting to be free, because I'm not talking about information. I'm talking about routers, servers, cables and lines. Someone owns that router two hops away that has to route ten million pieces of spam a day. The owner of that router needs to start charging for its use. That owner may not know the ultimate origin of a peice of spam, but they do know which in which direction it came from.
Then to top it all off, start suing spammers for where appropriate. Sue them for hacking your server. Sue them for spoofing your address. Sue them if your penis doesn't grow four inches after smoking temple kiff. It may be difficult now to sue them for much of this stuff, but when bandwidth actually costs money, you're able to walk into court with a detailed list of monetary damages.
This won't stop spam. Nothing will. But it will do wonders for reducing it. Just start treating the internet as owned property instead of some mythical village commons.
you voted on it? I sure didn't - that's corporate fascism. (Look it up.)
I did look it up. Your dictionary is grossly erroneous. Find a real dictionary and look up "representative democracy". You votes for representatives and they in turn voted to extend copyright. The corporations may have encouraged these bills, but they certainly did not impose them or vote for them or take away your right to bitch at your representative.
Yeah, god forbid anyone should ever say anything negative about Linux, even if it happens to be true. My OS, right or wrong, everything else is Evil.
You're making some very wrong assumptions in your pseudo calculations. First, you assume that the potential cost of doing nothing is infinite. Second, you ignore the probabilities.
Let's say the actual cost global environmental damage is 10 billion, not infinite. Then let's assume that the actual benefit for doing nothing is ten. If those are the only variables, then of course we have to shoot SUV owners and abolish democracy in case people might not vote green! But it's not a balanced equation. If the probability of global environmental damage is 1 in ten billion, then the odds say to do nothing.
Look at it another way. You could be hit and killed by a car on the way to work tomorrow. Cost to you is extremely high. The benefit to you is whatever pay you receive from work. Is it worth risking total destruction just to get $10 an hour? Of course not! But you ride to work anyway. Ponder it a bit and you'll realize that the cost of you dying is not infinite, but less than your wages times the probability of being hit and killed by a car.
Another replier made the very important point that local environmental damage is a different thing than global environmental damage. If you fart you destroy the environment in your pants and possibly that in the room, but you don't destroy the environment of the whole town.
it shows that those who claim that human activities do nothing to affect the environment are clearly out to lunch.
Nobody is claiming this. All life as an effect on the environment. But that's no excuse to jump to the conclusion that the sky is falling.
I would pay $19.95 for the chance to throw baseballs at a dunktank filled with wet Cowboy Neal gummies and Jon Katz sitting on the plank. Hell, I'd pay $49.95 for that opportunity.
Thanks for clarifying. I was seriously confused for a bit :-)
I've tried to try to use portage, but I never could get Gentoo installed. I've built LFS before, but my problems stemmed from unstable code and my lack of willingness to go in and fix the scripts and stuff so it would build the way it was supposed to. This was rc6 I believe. I'm going to wait until the final release and try it again then.
In the meantime, reading over the portage information, I can see where it may be a bit more beneficial than ports for the packager, but I still can't see where it's advantageous to the end user. The "profile" sounds nice, but is it that much different from editing the excellently commented make.conf? The basic official ports system doesn't do upgrades well, but using the portupgrade package, it's a snap. I expect it to become an official tool in FreeBSD 5.0.
I second the motion!
Subpackages and package variations are two major things missing from all the candidate systems. I mean, Windows can manage to do this, why can't we? Why can Windows users select "custom" during install but we have to take whatever the packager decides to give us?
One example: Dia. Under FreeBSD the port and package requires Gnome. But Dia will build just fine without the Gnome libraries. Everytime I want to install or upgrade Dia I have to go in and edit the Makefile.
Proposal 1A: All meaningful configuration options should be easily available to the user of ports and any successor to ports. All major configuration options should be easily available for packages. Let me choose "custom->without-gnome" when I install Dia.
Another example: KDE. This already exists as a meta package in FreeBSD, but a metapackage is not the same as a set of subpackages. Uninstall KDE and nothing actually gets uninstalled, as all the dependencies are still there. At an even finer grain of detail, maybe I don't want to install everything in kdegames. Maybe I just want shisen-sho and patience. Allow me a way to install just what I want out of a package. The Debian way of splitting packages into smaller packages (instead of subpackages) is not an optimal solution.
Proposal 1B: A port or package that contains optional or secondary components should allow the user to choose what components they want installed.
The defaults should remain for obvious reasons. But the package manager should allow -full, minimal, and -custom installs. For a CLI installer, these could be switches (with -full being the default), and for GUI installers they should be selectable options. For some packages it won't make sense to have more than one option, but for most it will.
These proposals may mean the replacement of metapackages with superpackages. It will mean more work for the package developers, but that's outweighed by the benefits to the user.
Portage is basically a pythonized BSD ports system. To the end user there is no advantage in one over the other. To the package developer it comes down to make/sh versus python.
my understanding is that an MS rep asked what it would take to get them to switch to a Microsoft cluster.
You've got a golden opportunity here! Microsoft does it your way or they don't get the sale.
Let them know the nature of a cluster in a research project. Nodes will be swapped in and out. New ones will be added. Different OSs will be used. So tell them you want a copy of Windows for each potential node, licensed to the University and not to any individual node. Tell them you need full rights to install, reinstall, and uninstall any particular copy on any particular node. Tell them you will not accept any terms restricting the cluster to Windows only.
If you really want to play hardball, tell them you don't even want licenses, but bonafide user-owned copies of Windows subject only to the provisions of copyright. In other words, you don't want to be subject to any EULA. Then you'll discover how much Microsoft wants your cluster to be a Windows cluster.
So is that a valid reason for ignoring the design, engineering and quality that would normally go into a material product? I don't think so.
I think one major difference between managers at tech companies and those elsewhere is that at the tech companies they don't understand their domain. You can be an effective manager at Ford or Chrysler without knowing any automotive engineering, but same does not hold for a software company. The reason for this is that software is a new and evolving field. It needs to settle out before the managers can get a grasp on it, but in the meantime the domain keeps changing on a yearly basis.
The stereotypical software manager will want to use Windows, because that's all he knows. For some applications that's an appropriate choice, but for a great many is certainly is not. Where we work we build embedded realtime invasive medical diagnostic equipment. Management made the braindead decision to base all of our new products on a piece of medical workstation software developed at another division.
Another problem, whose source I haven't discovered, is the strange idea that you can create a quality software product in one or two years. Go look at any other industry and you'll see that it takes around five years to get a product from initial idea to the sales floor. Everyone in the automotive industry knows that new designs don't magically appear, but I've seen too many managers in software that think I can magically pull a feature out of my ass on a moment's notice.
These problems will go away, but I don't expect them to for another ten years at least. But there are companies that are on the ball. Some listen to their engineers. Some send their managers to software engineering classes. Some are in niches where the industry has settled down somewhat.
See, they're admitting that they make "these packages available from the KDE web site."
With comparitively minimal funds, about 10 years of work could be rolled into a commercial product that never gives a line of code back.
My questions of the day: If I take 10 years worth of your work and roll it up into a commercial product, just what exactly do you want back? You keep telling me this is free but keep demanding that I pay for it by giving something back. As near as I can tell, I have taken nothing from you. Go check and you will find that your 10 years worth of work is still there sitting in your cvs tree. You're starting to sound an awful lot like those proprietary developers who have this strange notion that software wants to be regulated by its author.
Okay... one last time. There are binaries available at the KDE ftp sites. They are not links to locations elsewhere, but actual, god fearing, bonafide binaries.
All you guys saying we have to call a certain operating system by the name "GNU/Linux" just because major portions of it come from GNU, are now saying MacOSX is not BSD.
Well screw that! MacOSX has more BSD code than Redhat has GNU code. Make up your minds how you're going to name on OS. You can't have it both ways.
Hmm, does that mean Linux 2.4 sucks now? Glad you cleared that one up. Ever since 2.0 everyone's been telling "just wait until..."
That's not the point. The point is that a thousand people are posting here at the top of their lungs that KDE doesn't provide binaries at all. But it turns out that they DO provide binaries for a few distros.
You know, if someone said "the sun is green", and I point out that it is not, it's quite strange to get a reply to the effect "if you don't like the color why don't you go repaint it yourself?"
I realize it's a hell of a lot of work making KDE packages. An awful lot of work. I certainly don't expect every distro to have packages ready five minutes after a KDE release.
But maybe I again misphrased the question. I'm not blaming anyone, certainly not KDE, Debian or other distros. All I'm wondering is why KDE chooses to offer binaries for some distros and not for others. Maybe it's just a rhetorical question without an answer.
Geez, everyone and their grandma is yelling at the top of their lungs that KDE only provides source code. I'm stunned. Frankly I'm flabbergasted. Have I been operating under a false assumption all these years? It woulnd't have been the first time.
Let me check...
...hmmmmm....
Oh, look here! ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/2.2.2/ provides binaries for SEVEN different operating systems and distros! These aren't links to those respective systems, but bonafide binaries on the actual genuine KDE site!
I understand that KDE does not actually create and build the binaries that are on their site, but they are still on their site. According to my dictionary, that is one definition of "produce", as in "he produced a binary from within the nether regions of the ftp site."
So let me rephrase the orginal question: "Why does KDE offer binaries for a few selected Linux distros, but not for other distros or other operating systems?"