But it will be entertaining to watch you prove that absolutely nobody will take money providing any degree of support for WordPress.
I have no intention of doing that, because it's completely and utterly irrelevant. The original argument was that it didn't have support. That's still true despite any longwinded sermons by Richard Stallman you manage to dig up.
That page you linked to doesn't have paid support, it only has hosting services. You're playing games with semantics. While they "support" WordPress in the sense that they let you run it on their servers, there's no evidence that they will help you install it, help you configure it, or fix it if it breaks.
Since when did using software that allows the direct transfer and query of data become illegal?
If you own a bar, club, etc., that becomes a haven for criminals, the cops can close you down. If you don't want your server taken down, keep the riff-raff out!
The relationship is true, because support is not available! That fact that the GPL isn't getting in the way of setting up such support is beside the point, because the real point is that there isn't any!
If you step back a few feet you can see how silly your argument is:
No one is talking about seizing control of the root servers. They are talking about creating new ones under different control.
Then just go do so! Frankly, I can't understand why each nation doesn't set up their own. No need to for conferences in Tunisia, just go do it!
Really, that's my whole point. This would be a non issue but for the fact that several nations are making very big stinks about it. This makes me very suspicious about their motives.
And without this assurance, ICANN's nationality matters, because it essentially ties control of the root servers to US law.
No, it only ties control of US root servers to US law. There's nothing in US law stopping the EU (for example) from setting up its own root name server. I would have thought that obvious.
I was bored with the Gamist nature of D20 before either term existed, so I feel your pain.
In my current (non-d20) game, a player submitted three pages of background story, not including two pages of contacts. While he is the exception and does live out on the end of the bell curve, you're lucky if your average d20 player even bothers to think up a surname for his character.
I suspect that most gamists consider their character to be nothing more than a collection of abilities and items.
Why can't they just set up a root name server in China? Put a couple in Tunisia and Saudi Arabia too for redundancy. Then everyone who doesn't like the gross mismanagement of the Internet by the US can simply point their resolvers there. Those of us who happen to prefer the inherent corruption in a capitalistic Internet can keep our resolvers as they are. Everyone is happy. Problem solved!
The US doesn't own your Linux box. So feel free to disconnect it from any and all US networks. Problem solved.
You see, it's all a matter of ownership. The US root name servers are not your property, so you don't have the authority to impose rules upon them. If you don't want to use the US root name servers, just don't use them.
This whole brouhaha can be settled if they simply build a UN root name server in Tunisia or China. Then you can resolve there and everyone lives happily ever after.
the current administration doesn't believe in international law
Sure it does! It just doesn't believe that international law supercedes national law. Despite rumours to the contrary, there is no world government. The UN is a diplomatic organization and cooperative arrangement between nations, not a government. The US is not beholden to the whims of the UN, because the UN has no legitimate authority over the US.
Those people should not be subject to the whims of a US corporation when it comes to managing their local slice of communication infrastructure.
There's nothing stopping you from managing your own local slice of communication infrastructure. The US government has a hands-off policy, which leads me to think that your real gripe is that you want someone to have an intrusive hands-on policy instead.
The Internet under US control works and it works well. There is no current problem (or feasible future problem) with the Internet that UN government is the solution for, becase no current problem (or feasible future problem) is the fault of the US's hands-off policy.
When the world's biggest free speech violators are behind the push to bring the Internet under UN control, I get very suspicious of their motives. Especially since the the system they want to replace is the US's hands-off policy. Do you really want to give China hands-on control of the Internet?
You're correct, I won't buy a game at a mainstream bookstore. If you go check, all the games at the big chain bookstores are WotC d20 games. Usually it's a quarter shelf of D&D rules, followed by three shelves of fluff supplements.
There are three styles of gaming, known as the G.N.S. model. Basic d20 is heavily Gamist, can be somewhat adapted to Narrativist if you bang on the rules hard enough, but is very unsuited to Simulationist. But Gamist gamers tend to be the younger crowd. By the time they graduate from college, most gamers have "progressed" to narrativist or simulationist styles where D&D and d20 are weak.
I don't eat McDonald's hamburgers because they're tasteless. I don't drink Budweiser because I prefer beer. I don't run Windows because it insults my intelligence. And I don't play d20 because it's geared towards an audience thirty years younger than I am.
In other news, this is also a good year for hamburgers, as both McDonalds and Burger King have introduced new products!
To me, the introduction of new WotC products is as about as exciting as new hamburgers at McDonalds. In other words, "yawn." To me, much more exciting news would have been the release of the new "Tekumel". Or those juicy rumours in the RQ world. And surely there must be news from the Steve Jackson corner of the market?
Frankly, if I can buy the game at a mainstream bookstore, I'm not interested. If the game had a booth larger than 200 square feet at GenCon, I'm not interested. If it says d20, WotC or Hasbro anywhere on the cover, I'm not interested. And for the same reasons I'm not interested in McDonald's hamburgers, Budweiser beer, or Microsoft Windows.
I've got no problem learning the "how", but I really need to know the "why" before I will spend the valuable time re-learning my way around an OS.
Wow! You're a born Unix person. Really. Windows was made for people who don't care how it works, Unix was made for people who do. You're a perfect fit.
Unfortunately, the current crop of Unix advocates are too busy trying to shield the potential newbie from the "why" to realize how important it really is. If the "why" scares the newbie, then they're not a good fit for Unix, so we shouldn't be trying to fit them into an OS that they won't like.
Does anyone know any books that address the "how it all works together" part?
Someone else mentioned "Design and Implementation of *BSD", but that's too hardcore for your needs (unless you're a developer and are keenly interested in the inner workings of kernel data structures). I'm going to point you in other directions instead.
Comparing Unix to nuklar powerplants and navigating oil tankers is unfair. Unix is far simpler by several orders of magnitudes. First of all, if you make a mistake, you're not irradiating the countryside or dumping oil all over the coastline.
The basics of Unix is quite easy for someone willing to learn. Where people get stuck is in assuming that you have to know EVERYTHING about it before you begin. That's not true. Most of the stuff that makes Unix "hard" is stuff you'll never need to know. Such as troff. You don't need to know troff. Neither do you need to know how to configure a firewall or which fields of crontab are which.
To put it another way, there are eight year olds that can navigate Unix with ease, but there are no eight year olds that can navigate an oil tanker through the inland passage.
You didn't read my post, did you? Nowhere did I claim immunity against lawsuits, or guarantees against accusations. All I said was that I was "pretty safe". Not perfectly safe, just "pretty safe". I still hold to that.
p.s. I'll stop laughing when your summons arrives.
You can't test before you build, because there isn't anything to test! You can of course design your tests before you build, but that's part of design.
Otherwise I agree with you. If you had read my original post, you would have known that. The fatal flaw in the waterfall model is it's slowness. Period. Everything else about it works, and works well. If developers didn't cave in to customer demands and deliver shoddy products quickly, then maybe customers would start to realize that good software takes just as long to build as a good bridge.
Using an iterative waterfall model is the best method, but it still won't get a two year project out in two weeks. Someday the customer base is going to stop accepting slapdash bugfest prototypes, and then the Agile/Scrum/SilverBullet hype will end.
The great thing about the US is freedom. Capitalism is a side effect of freedom. Every country with freedom has capitalism. Even those Scandanavian nations who proudly proclaim their socialism-ness have scads of capitalism.
An SUV can hold your entire family of six, plus soccer equipment, plus five bags of groceries. The typical hybrid can hold you and three other cramped people, a baseball and half a bat, and McDonald's happy meal.
People don't buy SUVs because they are evil people who want to destroy the environment, they buy SUVs because they need the room. Back in the fifties and sixties, such people bought large station wagons. In the seventies and eighties they bought large vans. Now they're buying SUVs. In many cases they actually save gas over hybrids as they only need to make one trip instead of three.
A single person driving a Hummer is a pretty flagrant display of consumption. But that's the exception. Much more common is the family of four driving a Honda CR-V. Oddly enough, the same people who hate SUVs also hate Martha Stewart and Wal-Mart. Thus, I suspect the hatred over SUVs relates more to a disdain of the middle class burgeois than it does to love of the environment.
Slashdot Mirror
But it will be entertaining to watch you prove that absolutely nobody will take money providing any degree of support for WordPress.
I have no intention of doing that, because it's completely and utterly irrelevant. The original argument was that it didn't have support. That's still true despite any longwinded sermons by Richard Stallman you manage to dig up.
That page you linked to doesn't have paid support, it only has hosting services. You're playing games with semantics. While they "support" WordPress in the sense that they let you run it on their servers, there's no evidence that they will help you install it, help you configure it, or fix it if it breaks.
Since when did using software that allows the direct transfer and query of data become illegal?
If you own a bar, club, etc., that becomes a haven for criminals, the cops can close you down. If you don't want your server taken down, keep the riff-raff out!
Is there any markup language with the functionality to make the average webpage worth reading?
The relationship is true, because support is not available! That fact that the GPL isn't getting in the way of setting up such support is beside the point, because the real point is that there isn't any!
If you step back a few feet you can see how silly your argument is:
"Support is not available."
"But it could be!"
"But it's not."
"But it could be!"
No one is talking about seizing control of the root servers. They are talking about creating new ones under different control.
Then just go do so! Frankly, I can't understand why each nation doesn't set up their own. No need to for conferences in Tunisia, just go do it!
Really, that's my whole point. This would be a non issue but for the fact that several nations are making very big stinks about it. This makes me very suspicious about their motives.
And without this assurance, ICANN's nationality matters, because it essentially ties control of the root servers to US law.
No, it only ties control of US root servers to US law. There's nothing in US law stopping the EU (for example) from setting up its own root name server. I would have thought that obvious.
I was bored with the Gamist nature of D20 before either term existed, so I feel your pain.
In my current (non-d20) game, a player submitted three pages of background story, not including two pages of contacts. While he is the exception and does live out on the end of the bell curve, you're lucky if your average d20 player even bothers to think up a surname for his character.
I suspect that most gamists consider their character to be nothing more than a collection of abilities and items.
Why can't they just set up a root name server in China? Put a couple in Tunisia and Saudi Arabia too for redundancy. Then everyone who doesn't like the gross mismanagement of the Internet by the US can simply point their resolvers there. Those of us who happen to prefer the inherent corruption in a capitalistic Internet can keep our resolvers as they are. Everyone is happy. Problem solved!
The US doesn't own your Linux box. So feel free to disconnect it from any and all US networks. Problem solved.
You see, it's all a matter of ownership. The US root name servers are not your property, so you don't have the authority to impose rules upon them. If you don't want to use the US root name servers, just don't use them.
This whole brouhaha can be settled if they simply build a UN root name server in Tunisia or China. Then you can resolve there and everyone lives happily ever after.
the current administration doesn't believe in international law
Sure it does! It just doesn't believe that international law supercedes national law. Despite rumours to the contrary, there is no world government. The UN is a diplomatic organization and cooperative arrangement between nations, not a government. The US is not beholden to the whims of the UN, because the UN has no legitimate authority over the US.
Those people should not be subject to the whims of a US corporation when it comes to managing their local slice of communication infrastructure.
There's nothing stopping you from managing your own local slice of communication infrastructure. The US government has a hands-off policy, which leads me to think that your real gripe is that you want someone to have an intrusive hands-on policy instead.
The Internet under US control works and it works well. There is no current problem (or feasible future problem) with the Internet that UN government is the solution for, becase no current problem (or feasible future problem) is the fault of the US's hands-off policy.
When the world's biggest free speech violators are behind the push to bring the Internet under UN control, I get very suspicious of their motives. Especially since the the system they want to replace is the US's hands-off policy. Do you really want to give China hands-on control of the Internet?
You're correct, I won't buy a game at a mainstream bookstore. If you go check, all the games at the big chain bookstores are WotC d20 games. Usually it's a quarter shelf of D&D rules, followed by three shelves of fluff supplements.
There are three styles of gaming, known as the G.N.S. model. Basic d20 is heavily Gamist, can be somewhat adapted to Narrativist if you bang on the rules hard enough, but is very unsuited to Simulationist. But Gamist gamers tend to be the younger crowd. By the time they graduate from college, most gamers have "progressed" to narrativist or simulationist styles where D&D and d20 are weak.
Er... because you're too cool for them or what?
I don't eat McDonald's hamburgers because they're tasteless. I don't drink Budweiser because I prefer beer. I don't run Windows because it insults my intelligence. And I don't play d20 because it's geared towards an audience thirty years younger than I am.
'iwlist scan' ?
We were talking about Unix, not Linux. That command isn't on my Unix system. I use ifconfig to configure my wifi...
Dogs in the Vineyard
I've played that game. It's not my cup of tea, but it was very interesting, very well done.
In other news, this is also a good year for hamburgers, as both McDonalds and Burger King have introduced new products!
To me, the introduction of new WotC products is as about as exciting as new hamburgers at McDonalds. In other words, "yawn." To me, much more exciting news would have been the release of the new "Tekumel". Or those juicy rumours in the RQ world. And surely there must be news from the Steve Jackson corner of the market?
Frankly, if I can buy the game at a mainstream bookstore, I'm not interested. If the game had a booth larger than 200 square feet at GenCon, I'm not interested. If it says d20, WotC or Hasbro anywhere on the cover, I'm not interested. And for the same reasons I'm not interested in McDonald's hamburgers, Budweiser beer, or Microsoft Windows.
I've got no problem learning the "how", but I really need to know the "why" before I will spend the valuable time re-learning my way around an OS.
a rch-handbook/index.html. Finally, "Learning the Unix Operating System", http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lunix5/, is a very good introduction to Unix that doesn't hide away the "why" nearly as much as other introductory books do.
Wow! You're a born Unix person. Really. Windows was made for people who don't care how it works, Unix was made for people who do. You're a perfect fit.
Unfortunately, the current crop of Unix advocates are too busy trying to shield the potential newbie from the "why" to realize how important it really is. If the "why" scares the newbie, then they're not a good fit for Unix, so we shouldn't be trying to fit them into an OS that they won't like.
Does anyone know any books that address the "how it all works together" part?
Someone else mentioned "Design and Implementation of *BSD", but that's too hardcore for your needs (unless you're a developer and are keenly interested in the inner workings of kernel data structures). I'm going to point you in other directions instead.
First, check out the set of newbie documents for FreeBSD, http://www.freebsd.org/projects/newbies.html. More technical, but much less so than the Design book, is the FreeBSD Architecture Handbook, http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/
The commands to configure WiFi are the same commands used to configure any network on a Unix system. Duh.
But, wouldn't you say that doing is an important part of learning?
Of course it is. But it isn't the only part of learning!
Comparing Unix to nuklar powerplants and navigating oil tankers is unfair. Unix is far simpler by several orders of magnitudes. First of all, if you make a mistake, you're not irradiating the countryside or dumping oil all over the coastline.
The basics of Unix is quite easy for someone willing to learn. Where people get stuck is in assuming that you have to know EVERYTHING about it before you begin. That's not true. Most of the stuff that makes Unix "hard" is stuff you'll never need to know. Such as troff. You don't need to know troff. Neither do you need to know how to configure a firewall or which fields of crontab are which.
To put it another way, there are eight year olds that can navigate Unix with ease, but there are no eight year olds that can navigate an oil tanker through the inland passage.
You didn't read my post, did you? Nowhere did I claim immunity against lawsuits, or guarantees against accusations. All I said was that I was "pretty safe". Not perfectly safe, just "pretty safe". I still hold to that.
p.s. I'll stop laughing when your summons arrives.
You can't test before you build, because there isn't anything to test! You can of course design your tests before you build, but that's part of design.
Otherwise I agree with you. If you had read my original post, you would have known that. The fatal flaw in the waterfall model is it's slowness. Period. Everything else about it works, and works well. If developers didn't cave in to customer demands and deliver shoddy products quickly, then maybe customers would start to realize that good software takes just as long to build as a good bridge.
Using an iterative waterfall model is the best method, but it still won't get a two year project out in two weeks. Someday the customer base is going to stop accepting slapdash bugfest prototypes, and then the Agile/Scrum/SilverBullet hype will end.
The great thing about the US is freedom. Capitalism is a side effect of freedom. Every country with freedom has capitalism. Even those Scandanavian nations who proudly proclaim their socialism-ness have scads of capitalism.
One problem though...
An SUV can hold your entire family of six, plus soccer equipment, plus five bags of groceries. The typical hybrid can hold you and three other cramped people, a baseball and half a bat, and McDonald's happy meal.
People don't buy SUVs because they are evil people who want to destroy the environment, they buy SUVs because they need the room. Back in the fifties and sixties, such people bought large station wagons. In the seventies and eighties they bought large vans. Now they're buying SUVs. In many cases they actually save gas over hybrids as they only need to make one trip instead of three.
A single person driving a Hummer is a pretty flagrant display of consumption. But that's the exception. Much more common is the family of four driving a Honda CR-V. Oddly enough, the same people who hate SUVs also hate Martha Stewart and Wal-Mart. Thus, I suspect the hatred over SUVs relates more to a disdain of the middle class burgeois than it does to love of the environment.