You can *easily* fit all drivers to boot almost any given system in 8MB. In fact, you can almost certainly do it in one meg. What you can't do is have all the drivers in existence availabe -- but who needs that?
I'm impressed that you were able to write that long paragraph in the three minutes since the article was posted, let alone read the message linked-to. But, I think that in your hurry, you missed a few key things, so I thought I'd quote them here for your benefit and the benefit of anyone else in too much of a rush:
I wrote up a short piece that I hope to flesh out a bit more later
on why Red Hat chose to include ext3 in this release, why you want
to use it, and what we did to make it robust.
It's not an anti-any-other-filesystem tirade at all. Don't take
any part of it as meant to put down any other filesystem, even
ones we have not chosen to ship yet. No hidden agenda involving
alien abductions...:-)
Red Hat is just telling you what they think works -- not taking away any of your choices. They even ship the reiserfs tools. Perhaps you've fallen to the whole "Red Hat is too popular to be cool" thing?
Ok, first, the linux system of actually lookin' in a file to see what file type it is seems pretty un-idiotic to me.
But more importantly, I strongly disagree with your point about ACLs. Different priviledge levels might be useful (as opposed to simple user-or-root), but I don't see a good reason to apply this to a filesystem. As it is, it's very easy to see quickly exactly who has what rights to what area -- with complicated ACLs, everything can get confusing and you might not notice a security problem. Sometimes simple is good.
The private groups notion is far from an "ugly hack" -- in fact, there's no "hack" involved at all: it's just *using* the group and umask functionality in a nice elegant way.
Have you seen their financials? They're going to be out of money by the end of the year unless something really exciting happens. Their stock isn't trading for pennies without good reason. (As nice as their hardware is....)
Locks up hard for me with kernel 2.4.6 and XFree86 4.1.... haven't tried it with a newer kernel.... if you have more info on this, I'd really appreciate it.
1. chkconfig is IRIX-like. linuxconf is depricated (and is from someone else anyway. rpm is very powerful and good despite its few flaws.
2. The 6.2 installer needed some work -- it was newly re-written in python. The 6.0 installer was a terrible ugly chunk of C code which needed to be rewritten, but which was very solid. If you use 7.1 or the 7.2 beta, you'll find the installer is much more stable. I've never seen netconfig segfault, but I probably haven't seen the situation you're referring to.
3. See http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html for some good information on the GCC issue. Red Hat is a part of the Linux Standard Base project, and makes a very strong effort to be FHS-compliant. Library differences are a fact of Unix -- you can't expect to move binaries between *any* two distributions without some glitches. I'm pretty sure that POSIX doesn't specify init scripts, so I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about there -- care to clarify? And in general, can you point to some evidence of this "deliberate"ness?
4. Red Hat's tools aren't proprietary. The installer, anaconda, is GPL'd. So are chkconfig and RPM, and linuxconf is too, although as I said it doesn't really have anything to do with Red Hat per se. netconfig is part of pump, which is released under the MIT license. Your route gripe might be valid, but as far as I know, that's not Red Hat specific.
5. The ps that ships with Red Hat (GPL'd, by the way) will accept either BSD options or SysV flags. So you can do either "ps ax" or "ps -ef".
I've heard this analogy quite often, but it's not fair. (And I think we all know that even if you didn't mean it negatively, in these circles, being compared to MS isn't exactly an endorsement.)
Red Hat might have the best selling and/or most popular distribution, but they're not Microsoft-like an any meaningful way. In fact, they're one of the most -- if not the #1 -- Free Software-friendly commercial distributions. All of the software they write is released under the GPL, and with the sole exception of Netscape 4.7x, the distro includes no closed software. (They've said that Netscape will go away when Mozilla is a completely viable replacement, which shouldn't be too long now.) And, they've shown repeatedly that they're not interested in becoming a monopoly (of Linux or in general) -- they're interested in increasing the Linux "pie" completely. (A great example of this is the Mandrake distribution, which basically started as a branch from RH Linux.)
In fact, take this as a challenge to people in general: point out one way in which Red Hat's behavior is like Microsoft's. From what I can tell, it's pretty much all "they're-too-popular-to-be cool" syndrome.
(As a side note: I'd say Caldera, with Ransom Love's anti-GPL rhetoric, is more like Microsoft -- or at least, they'd like to be.)
Well, you can't buy an apple notebook with a two/three-button integrated mouse -- you've got to deal with an add-on thing, which is a pain to carry around.
Of course, that only applies to registered trademarks. That is, ®. There's lots of perfectly valid unregistered trademarks -- TM.
More importantly, someone *could* actually trademark "movie" -- it wouldn't be a good trademark for motion pictures since it's already a generic term in that since, but might be a perfectly legitimate trademark for cosmetics. In fact, it is.:)
However, I also don't agree with sideline punditry, which has reached epidemic proportions amongst the editorial crew of Slashdot.
Hey, guess what? Slashdot is and always has been an exercise in sideline punditry. That's what it's for.
That said:
1. Copyright has nothing to do with it. The issues relate to trademarks.
2. The people "out there" aren't finding a better way. They're not interested in that. They're trying to find a way that makes big-money corporate interests happy. That the proposed "solutions" are failing at that is sort of amusing.
1. I just posted elsewhere on this.... basically, as michael says, any TLD could be *added*, but that doesn't mean any one group could *have* that TLD. (Anyone could create second-level domains within any TLD.)
2. On the contrary -- it would spread the load more evenly. Each TLD would get its own set of servers. It's a hierarchical system and this is exactly the kind of scaling that would be no problem.
1. *Any* gTLD can be created.
2. Anyone can register any second-level domain in
any TLD, excepting the existing ones with
special limitations, and perhaps with a few
new ones with restrictions (.kids, maybe).
3. Trademark disputes can't be based on the name
alone but must take into consideration what is
being done with that name -- trademarks are
only relevant to *trade*, after all, and within
that are bound by trademark classes (type of
product/service) and by geography.
Note on point 3: My phone number could be 555-LEGO, and The Lego Company wouldn't have any grounds or even incentive to sue me unless I were using it to sell toy building bricks, or using it in a way that disparages them or might somehow confuse consumers. Same should apply online.
I'd actually like to see the DNS redone as a hierarchy similar to that used for Usenet, which would make it clear from the name itself exactly how the term is being used. But that ain't gonna happen, so the only sensible approach to trademarks and domain names is the "look at the content" concept.
I think I'm pretty safe in saying that not a single person has used a keyboard for a hundred years.:) It doesn't matter how old the technology is -- it's something we all have to learn.
It may be slightly less confusing to have only one button, but that's a small thing compared to learning to use a mouse at all, and more importantly, a small thing compared to the added functionality of multiple buttons.
I'd be curious to see studies done on children -- my guess is that picking up how to use a two-button mouse is trivial compared to learning how to type.
The main problem I see people having with two-button mice is remembering which button does what things. Good UI design goes a long way here, and, as I said, it might be a good idea to somehow label the different buttons -- maybe with an icon or a standard color code, or both.
Ahh. So you're saying that in order for Ottawa to make itself more appealing to High-Tech Workers, it should become New York City, and also convince your friends to move there? I see how that's helpful.
1-button keyboards
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Taking that to the logical conclusion: I'm confused by all of these buttons on my keyboard. The right choice is obviously to reduce them. I want just one big key. (It could say "Duh".)
Seriously, though: might a better approach be to label the two (or better, three) mouse buttons, just like keyboard keys?
It's not a matter of security. A lot of stuff you don't want indexed because it's temporary or maybe just too variable (dynamically generated). robots.txt is mostly for the search engines' own good, and if they're ignoring that, they'll eventually be full of junk.
pair.net would have the same problem. The issues isn't that they don't provide a mail relay -- it's that they don't provide a mail relay that can be used directly by Verizon customers. This completely reasonable -- otherwise (without an authentication scheme) any Verizon customer could relay spam through their server.
Obviously, there are authentication schemes that can work around this (as suggested elsewhere in this message), but they're nonstandard and a pain for both the ISP and for the customers.
For all of their flaws, ICANN is in fact a non-profit organization. They may be in the pockets of corporations, but it seems to be largely because they don't know any better, not because they're personally profiting directly. And I don't see how they're going to get any money for.us "hosts" under this scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure which day you're remembering, but it must have been in an alternate universe. Slashdot has always been this way.
:) Actually, you can link to books.
(This bit here is to get around the stupid "postercomment compression filter" yet still post my insightful comment....)
You can *easily* fit all drivers to boot almost any given system in 8MB. In fact, you can almost certainly do it in one meg. What you can't do is have all the drivers in existence availabe -- but who needs that?
I'm impressed that you were able to write that long paragraph in the three minutes since the article was posted, let alone read the message linked-to. But, I think that in your hurry, you missed a few key things, so I thought I'd quote them here for your benefit and the benefit of anyone else in too much of a rush:
Red Hat is just telling you what they think works -- not taking away any of your choices. They even ship the reiserfs tools. Perhaps you've fallen to the whole "Red Hat is too popular to be cool" thing?
Ok, first, the linux system of actually lookin' in a file to see what file type it is seems pretty un-idiotic to me.
But more importantly, I strongly disagree with your point about ACLs. Different priviledge levels might be useful (as opposed to simple user-or-root), but I don't see a good reason to apply this to a filesystem. As it is, it's very easy to see quickly exactly who has what rights to what area -- with complicated ACLs, everything can get confusing and you might not notice a security problem. Sometimes simple is good.
The private groups notion is far from an "ugly hack" -- in fact, there's no "hack" involved at all: it's just *using* the group and umask functionality in a nice elegant way.
Have you seen their financials? They're going to be out of money by the end of the year unless something really exciting happens. Their stock isn't trading for pennies without good reason. (As nice as their hardware is....)
Locks up hard for me with kernel 2.4.6 and XFree86 4.1.... haven't tried it with a newer kernel.... if you have more info on this, I'd really appreciate it.
Not just via motherboards -- unfortunately, anything with an AMD760 chipset too. :(
1. chkconfig is IRIX-like. linuxconf is depricated (and is from someone else anyway. rpm is very powerful and good despite its few flaws.
2. The 6.2 installer needed some work -- it was newly re-written in python. The 6.0 installer was a terrible ugly chunk of C code which needed to be rewritten, but which was very solid. If you use 7.1 or the 7.2 beta, you'll find the installer is much more stable. I've never seen netconfig segfault, but I probably haven't seen the situation you're referring to.
3. See http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html for some good information on the GCC issue. Red Hat is a part of the Linux Standard Base project, and makes a very strong effort to be FHS-compliant. Library differences are a fact of Unix -- you can't expect to move binaries between *any* two distributions without some glitches. I'm pretty sure that POSIX doesn't specify init scripts, so I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about there -- care to clarify? And in general, can you point to some evidence of this "deliberate"ness?
4. Red Hat's tools aren't proprietary. The installer, anaconda, is GPL'd. So are chkconfig and RPM, and linuxconf is too, although as I said it doesn't really have anything to do with Red Hat per se. netconfig is part of pump, which is released under the MIT license. Your route gripe might be valid, but as far as I know, that's not Red Hat specific.
5. The ps that ships with Red Hat (GPL'd, by the way) will accept either BSD options or SysV flags. So you can do either "ps ax" or "ps -ef".
I've heard this analogy quite often, but it's not fair. (And I think we all know that even if you didn't mean it negatively, in these circles, being compared to MS isn't exactly an endorsement.)
Red Hat might have the best selling and/or most popular distribution, but they're not Microsoft-like an any meaningful way. In fact, they're one of the most -- if not the #1 -- Free Software-friendly commercial distributions. All of the software they write is released under the GPL, and with the sole exception of Netscape 4.7x, the distro includes no closed software. (They've said that Netscape will go away when Mozilla is a completely viable replacement, which shouldn't be too long now.) And, they've shown repeatedly that they're not interested in becoming a monopoly (of Linux or in general) -- they're interested in increasing the Linux "pie" completely. (A great example of this is the Mandrake distribution, which basically started as a branch from RH Linux.)
In fact, take this as a challenge to people in general: point out one way in which Red Hat's behavior is like Microsoft's. From what I can tell, it's pretty much all "they're-too-popular-to-be cool" syndrome.
(As a side note: I'd say Caldera, with Ransom Love's anti-GPL rhetoric, is more like Microsoft -- or at least, they'd like to be.)
Well, you can't buy an apple notebook with a two/three-button integrated mouse -- you've got to deal with an add-on thing, which is a pain to carry around.
(And by "since", I mean "sense". *sigh* -- it's been a long day....)
Of course, that only applies to registered trademarks. That is, ®. There's lots of perfectly valid unregistered trademarks -- TM.
:)
More importantly, someone *could* actually trademark "movie" -- it wouldn't be a good trademark for motion pictures since it's already a generic term in that since, but might be a perfectly legitimate trademark for cosmetics. In fact, it is.
However, I also don't agree with sideline punditry, which has reached epidemic proportions amongst the editorial crew of Slashdot.
Hey, guess what? Slashdot is and always has been an exercise in sideline punditry. That's what it's for.
That said:
1. Copyright has nothing to do with it. The issues relate to trademarks.
2. The people "out there" aren't finding a better way. They're not interested in that. They're trying to find a way that makes big-money corporate interests happy. That the proposed "solutions" are failing at that is sort of amusing.
1. I just posted elsewhere on this.... basically, as michael says, any TLD could be *added*, but that doesn't mean any one group could *have* that TLD. (Anyone could create second-level domains within any TLD.)
2. On the contrary -- it would spread the load more evenly. Each TLD would get its own set of servers. It's a hierarchical system and this is exactly the kind of scaling that would be no problem.
The rules for gTLDs would have to be:
1. *Any* gTLD can be created.
2. Anyone can register any second-level domain in
any TLD, excepting the existing ones with
special limitations, and perhaps with a few
new ones with restrictions (.kids, maybe).
3. Trademark disputes can't be based on the name
alone but must take into consideration what is
being done with that name -- trademarks are
only relevant to *trade*, after all, and within
that are bound by trademark classes (type of
product/service) and by geography.
Note on point 3: My phone number could be 555-LEGO, and The Lego Company wouldn't have any grounds or even incentive to sue me unless I were using it to sell toy building bricks, or using it in a way that disparages them or might somehow confuse consumers. Same should apply online.
I'd actually like to see the DNS redone as a hierarchy similar to that used for Usenet, which would make it clear from the name itself exactly how the term is being used. But that ain't gonna happen, so the only sensible approach to trademarks and domain names is the "look at the content" concept.
I think I'm pretty safe in saying that not a single person has used a keyboard for a hundred years. :) It doesn't matter how old the technology is -- it's something we all have to learn.
It may be slightly less confusing to have only one button, but that's a small thing compared to learning to use a mouse at all, and more importantly, a small thing compared to the added functionality of multiple buttons.
I'd be curious to see studies done on children -- my guess is that picking up how to use a two-button mouse is trivial compared to learning how to type.
The main problem I see people having with two-button mice is remembering which button does what things. Good UI design goes a long way here, and, as I said, it might be a good idea to somehow label the different buttons -- maybe with an icon or a standard color code, or both.
Ahh. So you're saying that in order for Ottawa to make itself more appealing to High-Tech Workers, it should become New York City, and also convince your friends to move there? I see how that's helpful.
Taking that to the logical conclusion: I'm confused by all of these buttons on my keyboard. The right choice is obviously to reduce them. I want just one big key. (It could say "Duh".)
Seriously, though: might a better approach be to label the two (or better, three) mouse buttons, just like keyboard keys?
You know that the FSF has never had this business plan? They sell stuff for thousands of dollars.
Well sure, if pair.net wants to set up their system to be an open relay, that'd be nice for the Verizon customers -- and all the spammers.
Like I said, there are authentication schemes that can work around it, but that's a pain for both the users and the ISP.
(What's with the "you obviously don't know what you're talking about"? Got a chip on your shoulder?)
It's not a matter of security. A lot of stuff you don't want indexed because it's temporary or maybe just too variable (dynamically generated). robots.txt is mostly for the search engines' own good, and if they're ignoring that, they'll eventually be full of junk.
pair.net would have the same problem. The issues isn't that they don't provide a mail relay -- it's that they don't provide a mail relay that can be used directly by Verizon customers. This completely reasonable -- otherwise (without an authentication scheme) any Verizon customer could relay spam through their server.
Obviously, there are authentication schemes that can work around this (as suggested elsewhere in this message), but they're nonstandard and a pain for both the ISP and for the customers.
I'm not sure "shell" would mean any more than "terminal emulator"....
For all of their flaws, ICANN is in fact a non-profit organization. They may be in the pockets of corporations, but it seems to be largely because they don't know any better, not because they're personally profiting directly. And I don't see how they're going to get any money for .us "hosts" under this scheme.