Our faculty of the university at which I work has decided on a new layout for their web pages. This was done and delivered to us by a PR agency. I feared that it might be bad, but that fear didn't even come close to what I had to witness.
Imagine having to tell our users (many of which are using GNU/Linux or Macintosh) that our web site only works reliably in Windows with Internet Explorer 6.0 and above. Just because a PR agency can't develop web pages. It's impossible. I had to do something about it.
So when I implemented the layout for our department (scheduled to go live later this month), I scrapped everything they had done. I took a printout of their page (as it looked in Internet Explorer) and marked up what colors and fonts they had used.
Then I set down and wrote the same thing using XHTML/1.0 Strict and CSS1. This was about two days work, but the finished result now validates using w3c's validate tools, and it works reliably in all browsers I've managed to try, all the way back to Mosaic and Netscape 3, with or without images (yes, Lynx, Links, w3 and other text browsers work very well indeed too).
Not only did I get the pages to validate. By using CSS, I was able to get rid of several images they had been using with their design. The overall size of a page, including graphics and CSS, now weighs in at about 35 kbytes. This is compared to around 120 kbytes with the proposed code.
And even better, most things can be cached by the browser (CSS code and images). The only thing that needs reloading when you hit subsequent pages is the dynamic XHTML code, which weighs in at around 5 kbytes, compares to 40 kbytes in the proposed code.
Now, I think our students will like us. This result is even better than the pages that we have today. They render quickly and effortlessly even on old equipment or on extremely slow links.
I havn't been able to convince the faculty to make my code the "default" yet, but they might get the idea once people start noticing that our pages load much more quickly than the rest of the faculty pages.
So, using standards isn't always about making things render nicely in all browsers. It gives you a while heap of nice side effects that isn't worth sneezing at.
Not only was Time Bandits a better movie, but do you remember the Randall character, played by David Rappaport? He also played in "The Wizard". No, not the movie. The 1980's series where he did loads more to influence my life than anyone in the movie.
Yes, the word is indeed "loosly". I don't remember the exact dates, but work on RPM version 1 was started in 1996 I believe. Before that, there was other package managers, like Debian's dpkg. Debian certainly had package management in -94 and by -95 it was fully functional and used extensively in Debian (remember that Red Hat wasn't founded until -95).
I hope I've gotten the dates right; my memory is a little muddy from so long ago, but they should be more or less right. Of course, during the last years, both dpkg and rpm has borrowed ideas from each other even if they've developed independently.
PLWM is the "Pointless Window Manager". Written by Peter Liljenberg and others, one if its basic ideas is that "the mouse should be banished, and everything should be possible to do without moving your hands from the keyboard."
That's the pointless bit of PLWM. The window manager is built using a number of Python classes and another idea is that you should be able to configure it exactly as you want it by writing Python-snippets that use the PLWM library to construct your window manager.
While not actually related, John Byers, Michael Luby and Michael Mitzenmacher wrote a paper on using Tornado codes to speed up downloads. Basically, what they propose is clients accessing a file from more than one mirror in parallel and using erasure codes to make the system feedback-free. The abstract:
Mirror sites enable client requests to be serviced by any of a number of servers, reducing load at individual servers and dispersing network load. Typicall, a client requests service from a single mirror site. We consider enabling a client to access a file from multiple mirror sites in parallel to speed up the download. To eliminate complex client-server negotiations that a straightforward implementation of this approach would require, we develop a feedback-free protocol based on erasure codes. We demonstrate that a protocol using fast Tornado codes can deliver dramatic speedups at the expense of transmitting a moderate number of additional packets into the network. Our scalable solution extends naturally to allow multiple clients to access data from multiple mirror sites imultaneously. Our approach applies naturally to wireless networks and satellite networks as well.
I don't have the paper in a computer format, but the number is TR-98-021 and John and Michael were both at Berkeley at the time (1998), so it should be fairly easy to find if someone is interested. Doubtlessly, a number of other reports on the subject should also exist that deals with the same problem but with different solutions.
As anyone who has cared to look at the website can tell, this is so far only a Declaration of Intent. Greve, Bernhard, Werner, Peter and others are currently very busy with organisating a Free Software Foundation Europe. There will also be local chapters of this FSF Europe. If I have anything to say about this, and I think I do, Sweden will be one of those countries having a local chapter. This is interesting times indeed.
RMS is, unfortunately(!), one of very few people who complains about proprietary software. The world could be significantly better if more people was fighting proprietary software with the same dedication.
You should ask that question from ESR; we're not members of the open source community, we're members of the free software community. Please see this page for an explanation.
The relationship between BSD and GNU has always interested me. I think part of the problem is indeed the incompatibilities between the GPL and the BSD. The BSD is not incompatible with the GPL license, but the GPL is incompatible with the BSD. Let me explain this; BSD people work very hard to eliminate GPL code from their systems because they don't want the GPL to "infect" their systems. But GNU people freely uses BSD code because it doesn't "infect" our GPLed programs. This obviously causes some friction because some BSD developers (certainly not all) think that GNU is "stealing" code from them. Surprisingly, when you think about it, they advocate the BSD license for just this very reason; so that people -can- take the code and do whatever they wish with it.
If I remember correctly (this was some time back now -- maybe it's time to give the Amazon story it's own subdirectory on the GNU webserver? It seems to become a lengthy debate), RMS did post an authors comment to one or more of the GNU books urging people to boycott Amazon, but those were silently dropped by Amazon.
To correct a minor point; no, the X developers has never agreed to make X a part of the GNU system, and GNU has never agreed that X should be a GNU project. But yes, we like to use X because it serves the purpose well enough that there is no need to write a replacement.
RMS just wrote in to say that there has been a few minor last-minute corrections to the license. I'm sorry that I do not have any more details at the moment, but please do not use this license just yet.
Yes, I (or someone else) intends to implement on-line ordering for the FSF. If you can convince my employer that it's in their self-interest to let me go to Boston and do this for a few months, we could have it soon:-)
Well, actually he's right. The purpose of the GNU project is to create a wholly-free operating system; all GNU software is supposed to run on the GNU system. Making it run on other systems is secondary. Developers might accept changes from people on other operating systems and insert them into the code, but they shouldn't go out of their way to make the software run on, for example, Solaris.
I'm donating $100 to them. Apparently, the address to send checks to is
Phillip Island Penguin Parade
att: Penguin Hospital Support Fund
P.O. Box 97
Cowes
Phillip Island. Victoria. 3922. AUSTRALIA.
But it would also be interesting to make sure that this doesn't continue to happen -- for any animals! What organisations exist that help prevent that these polluters get away?
1MB/s is relatively slow. I constantly get 4-5MB/s when I transfer data between schools in Sweden (SUNET). So if this Internet2 doesn't handle more than 1MB/s, I'm not very impressed at all.
I personally don't think much can be done at all, and not much should be done. Slashdot is not a medium suitable for discussions, there are more apropriate forums for that, such as News and mailing lists.
Slashdot Mirror
Our faculty of the university at which I work has decided on a new layout for their web pages. This was done and delivered to us by a PR agency. I feared that it might be bad, but that fear didn't even come close to what I had to witness.
Imagine having to tell our users (many of which are using GNU/Linux or Macintosh) that our web site only works reliably in Windows with Internet Explorer 6.0 and above. Just because a PR agency can't develop web pages. It's impossible. I had to do something about it.
So when I implemented the layout for our department (scheduled to go live later this month), I scrapped everything they had done. I took a printout of their page (as it looked in Internet Explorer) and marked up what colors and fonts they had used.
Then I set down and wrote the same thing using XHTML/1.0 Strict and CSS1. This was about two days work, but the finished result now validates using w3c's validate tools, and it works reliably in all browsers I've managed to try, all the way back to Mosaic and Netscape 3, with or without images (yes, Lynx, Links, w3 and other text browsers work very well indeed too).
Not only did I get the pages to validate. By using CSS, I was able to get rid of several images they had been using with their design. The overall size of a page, including graphics and CSS, now weighs in at about 35 kbytes. This is compared to around 120 kbytes with the proposed code.
And even better, most things can be cached by the browser (CSS code and images). The only thing that needs reloading when you hit subsequent pages is the dynamic XHTML code, which weighs in at around 5 kbytes, compares to 40 kbytes in the proposed code.
Now, I think our students will like us. This result is even better than the pages that we have today. They render quickly and effortlessly even on old equipment or on extremely slow links.
I havn't been able to convince the faculty to make my code the "default" yet, but they might get the idea once people start noticing that our pages load much more quickly than the rest of the faculty pages.
So, using standards isn't always about making things render nicely in all browsers. It gives you a while heap of nice side effects that isn't worth sneezing at.
Not only was Time Bandits a better movie, but do you remember the Randall character, played by David Rappaport? He also played in "The Wizard". No, not the movie. The 1980's series where he did loads more to influence my life than anyone in the movie.
Debian 1.0 wasn't the first Debian release though :-)
I hope I've gotten the dates right; my memory is a little muddy from so long ago, but they should be more or less right. Of course, during the last years, both dpkg and rpm has borrowed ideas from each other even if they've developed independently.
everything should be possible to do without moving your hands from the keyboard."
That's the pointless bit of PLWM. The window manager is built using a number of Python classes and another idea is that you should be able to configure it exactly as you want it by writing Python-snippets that use the PLWM library to construct your window manager.
I don't have the paper in a computer format, but the number is TR-98-021 and John and Michael were both at Berkeley at the time (1998), so it should be fairly easy to find if someone is interested. Doubtlessly, a number of other reports on the subject should also exist that deals with the same problem but with different solutions.
As anyone who has cared to look at the website can tell, this is so far only a Declaration of Intent. Greve, Bernhard, Werner, Peter and others are currently very busy with organisating a Free Software Foundation Europe. There will also be local chapters of this FSF Europe. If I have anything to say about this, and I think I do, Sweden will be one of those countries having a local chapter. This is interesting times indeed.
RMS is, unfortunately(!), one of very few people who complains about proprietary software. The world could be significantly better if more people was fighting proprietary software with the same dedication.
You should ask that question from ESR; we're not members of the open source community, we're members of the free software community. Please see this page for an explanation.
The relationship between BSD and GNU has always interested me. I think part of the problem is indeed the incompatibilities between the GPL and the BSD. The BSD is not incompatible with the GPL license, but the GPL is incompatible with the BSD. Let me explain this; BSD people work very hard to eliminate GPL code from their systems because they don't want the GPL to "infect" their systems. But GNU people freely uses BSD code because it doesn't "infect" our GPLed programs.
This obviously causes some friction because some BSD developers (certainly not all) think that GNU is "stealing" code from them. Surprisingly, when you think about it, they advocate the BSD license for just this very reason; so that people -can- take the code and do whatever they wish with it.
If I remember correctly (this was some time back now -- maybe it's time to give the Amazon story it's own subdirectory on the GNU webserver? It seems to become a lengthy debate), RMS did post an authors comment to one or more of the GNU books urging people to boycott Amazon, but those were silently dropped by Amazon.
To correct a minor point; no, the X developers has never agreed to make X a part of the GNU system, and GNU has never agreed that X should be a GNU project. But yes, we like to use X because it serves the purpose well enough that there is no need to write a replacement.
From: Richard Stallman
Subject: doc license
To: webmasters
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2000 02:17:51 -0700 (MST)
Please do not put up the doc license yet.
A few last minute details have come up.
RMS just wrote in to say that there has been a few minor last-minute corrections to the license. I'm sorry that I do not have any more details at the moment, but please do not use this license just yet.
Yes, I (or someone else) intends to implement on-line ordering for the FSF. If you can convince my employer that it's in their self-interest to let me go to Boston and do this for a few months, we could have it soon :-)
I would recommend that you use Heimdal. It's a Kerberos V implementation made primarily in Sweden.
I suppose that might be true; they might be like XFree in the regard that they measure success in how many people use their software.
Well, actually he's right. The purpose of the GNU project is to create a wholly-free operating system; all GNU software is supposed to run on the GNU system. Making it run on other systems is secondary. Developers might accept changes from people on other operating systems and insert them into the code, but they shouldn't go out of their way to make the software run on, for example, Solaris.
I think part of the problem is that the penguins have a lot of natural oils on their bodies to protect them.
Phillip Island Penguin Parade
att: Penguin Hospital Support Fund
P.O. Box 97
Cowes
Phillip Island. Victoria. 3922. AUSTRALIA.
But it would also be interesting to make sure that this
doesn't continue to happen -- for any animals! What
organisations exist that help prevent that these polluters
get away?
1MB/s is relatively slow. I constantly get 4-5MB/s when I transfer data between schools in Sweden (SUNET). So if this Internet2 doesn't handle more than 1MB/s, I'm not very impressed at all.
If you made this into a wholly-open news service thing, then it wouldn't be Slashdot any more.
I personally don't think much can be done at all, and not much should be done. Slashdot is not a medium suitable for discussions, there are more apropriate forums for that, such as News and mailing lists.
In the interest of being on the right side of Rob, Jeff, et al., I will nominate Geeks in Space ;-)
I would nominate CmdrTaco for the Hemos award. Who cares if he's elegible or not? :)