Um, since the acronym GNU contains the word "Unix", I should think is a fairly significant tip of the hat in the direction of the existing versions of Unix. Additionally, most of the GNU tools out there that bear a resemblence to an existing Unix tool, share something of the name, so again, this is recognition of the source for the idea. It's not like the FSF is trying to whitewash history here. In fact, one is reminded of the old adage "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery".
I guess I will look a little more carefully for stylesheets using FO to get to PDF-- since that was my only real sticking point. I like TeX, but long-term it doesn't seem like the ideal solution to this problem.
I had not used either tool at all before I did my investigation. What I found after extensive searching (which included both of your links) was that the tools out there for making PDFs from DocBook rely on LaTeX anyway (and to top it off, I was unable to decipher the proper usage thereof, whereas the tools to go straight from LaTeX were quite easy to find/use). It would be trivial to build a latex2docbook convertor should there eventually be compelling reason to switch. FWIW, I don't think your characterizations of LaTeX are accurate. In actual practice, an author need know nothing aobut layout and style to produce useful LaTeX documents, and LaTeX documents are easily machine parsed for things like which sections have titles containing the word "apple".
The quotes are an artifact of LaTeX, which I'm sure could be easily removed by tweaking the latex2html script (it may even be an option)... however, as you see them, they are being strictly translated from the correct inputs to get left/right quotes in TeX, which then ensures they look right in printed copy. I'll have to look into it. While it doesn't bother me much, obviously it bugs someone.:)
And yes, there is an option to have the resulting.html files have better names, but latex2html does not have any provision to prevent name collision-- so I opted out of it in this case (not that I needed to worry about that, so your point is valid and I will change that). LaTeX (like DocBook) has a facility for both regular names for chapters/sections/whatevers and a place to put abbreviated names (for use in places like tables of contents, references, and headers). The filenaming in latex2html does not use this, but rather a set number of words from the title (IIRC).
In a perfect world, I'd like to see a system that combined the best of Wiki, TeX, and DocBook (I have nothing against XML, I just don't know if I'm in love with DB's DTD yet), so that you could have the pages be fairly interactive for online references (especially useful in a corporate setting), but still generate standalone documents from the entire work. All with complete revision control, of course.
I settled on what seemed to be the best compromise available so that I could have a single set of source files produce both printed matter and a website. Ultimately the possibilities with XML seem greater (via stylesheets and xsltproc and custom document parsers written in languages like Perl or Ruby), but getting from XML to PostScript or PDF is the part I had problems with. I like to think if I had problems with it, so would others. But then I limited myself to Free Software, whereas someone willing to use non-Free software might easily find an off-the-shelf package to get around the PS/PDF hurdle.
I was recently looking heavily at DocBook/XML and comparing it to (La)TeX. I found all the tools for docbook completely lacking, and the XML format to be completely unfriendly to actually writing. LaTeX on the other hand, seems to kick ass for writing, since the markup is short, sweet and easy to learn/use. Not to mention that the algorithms used to perform the layout were designed by a damn genius instead of mere mortals. I've now used LaTeX in conjunction with pdflatex and latex2html to use a single set of source docs to generate both a web site and a PDF file (not to mention that you could also crank out postscript or just about anything you might need to do with documentation... TeX was designed so Knuth could write computer books after all).
DocBook, on the other hand, has a lot of complicated markup-- I mean who enjoys using the PARA tag to open and close each and every paragraph? It would drive me insane. Then, after you finally find an editor that suits your needs, you still have to monkey around trying to convert the documents. I was able to get a DB file into HTML without too much pain, but PDF? Never managed it. I spent too many hours on what essentially would have translated the DB XML into TeX source anyway! Why not just write in TeX and be done with it.
Finally, there is LyX for LaTeX which looks to be a WYSIaboutWYG editor, although I find it very convenient to just use emacs. I think the only problem I've had so far is getting figures to lay out on within text how I want, whereas TeX is pretty happy shoving them later, so that the body of the text can remain as fluid as possible. You can see the results on my site (where I suppose I ought to include a tarball of the actual LaTeX source files and the simple shell script that drives all the processing).
Re:I dont understand how they could have missed th
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, well, just because they paid in doesn't mean that I owe them, does it?
You don't. The social security administration, however, does. And because social security money was not simply invested (in itself an odd idea since it would have likely been invested in bonds anyway), but spent on other government projects, this means that the money has to come from somewhere. Again, the variances in population, cost of living, etc, are what affect this financial model the most.
I agree that we have a right to be angry if we reach the age where we should receive social security benefits and there are none to be had. Of course, we will-- at that point-- have only our own generation to blame, since previous generations will be long gone by then and we would have had every opportunity to repair the damage... we are going to need to get creative, though... simply being upset about something that might happen in the future isn't going to solve our problems.
So what is your plan to make sure that the streets are not filled with homeless old folks who can't afford medicine, a home, new clothes, or a comfortable old age?
Re:I dont understand how they could have missed th
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 1
Except that saying "you will not see" social security is speculation on future events. Now maybe if you know where I can get a crystal ball as functional as yours, I can dabble in the market and not have to worry about social security in the future?
Your analysis fails to support the assertion that those who are receiving social security now have not made payments into the system in the past. Without such an assertion, your argument is merely pessimism-- although a little bit of mathematical modeling can go a long way in describing the effects of the COLA changes that happened in the 50's, and how the changes in population affect the fund's liquidity, since social security money is not just sitting in a vault somewhere).
If you read a little of the history of social security, you'll find that the program has been withholding income from wage-earners since 1935, so it is unlikely that you'll find someone receiving a payment who did not make a payment (especially since the system is predicated on giving you back money based on those payments). So if there's a problem, it's that our parents didn't have enough children (revenues may not meet expenses for SS), and if we want to correct this, we'll have to have a lot more children (I say this as a 30-something). How you get from this to "rig[ging] the political system" is beyond me.
Um. BZZZT! Different parts of Indiana are in different time zones and some of those parts do observe DST. (reference). In fact, of all the states, Indiana is probably the worst in this respect. If you have trouble dealing with clocks, the place to be is Arizona.
But isn't the part about getting DRM content about like getting content in proprietary binary formats is now? A social issue? If people are sending unreadable documents/content/whatever isn't it going to be up to us to ask them to flip that bit off before sending it to us so we can read it?
I'm still curious, how will the CPU prevent GNU/Linux from reading one of these documents if the OS contains no hooks for it? Will the documents be somehow encrypted?
Please excuse my ignorance, but why does it matter to me if my CPU is TCPA compliant? Doesn't my choice of operating system have a larger influence over my life than this? Or will it somehow become impossible to even boot GNU/Linux on one of these chips? And keep in mind I won't be buying or attempting to work with any DRM-infested/broken content.
Re:Alternatives to Binary distro's
on
Red Hat 8.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
BS! Binary distros save everyone a lot of CPU time and make for more stable systems, since the packages are usually well-tested, etc. The average user is not going to notice the performance gains from custom compiles. They would probably be better off just buying a faster computer or more RAM first.
And comparing a binary distro to Windows is just insulting to the intelligence of your readers. Let me know when Microsoft starts offering source via FTP on a 2nd CD in the boxed set, ok? In fact, Gentoo protects your freedom less than Debian GNU/Linux does by facilitating a lot of binary-installer packages (the default Java VM being the main one). However, they obviously "get it" and this is not meant to be a slam.
Finally, on older hardware, recompiling all the software is a big time sink... and probably a wasted effort. But I have to say I'm proud to have installed Gentoo as the only OS to ever run on my new homebrew Athlon XP-based desktop. Something very satisfying about putting a system together from parts and then compiling the whole system from source code. But it's probably not for everyone.
Congratulations to Red Hat on another milestone release.
They want to make money on everything they can and don't want competition from someone else using public domain works that Disney created. (ie Disney doesn't want to compete with a new Mickey Mouse movie based off the Steam Boat Willy (sp?) cartoons.)
Which is pathetic on their part because they have been plundering the public domain for source material for, oh, 75 years now. From the music they've used in their movies, to the characters and the plots, there are quite a few Disney movies that owe a great debt to the creative efforts of past artists.
* not that you don't understand this, I just enjoy pointing it out.:)
*Nix users will say ANYTHING to put down the "Evil Empire" even if they have no idea what they are talking about.
Hey troll, who said anything about Linux or Unix so far? No one. In fact, the poster you were replying to cited personal experience using Windows as his/her backup for the statements. If he or she is wrong I think you can explain this without mentioning Linux or Unix in an ad hominem attack.
If they do any amateur web development they might be doing FTP, in which case it would be better for them to have scp as option via ssh... assuming the hosting server can handle it.
Thank you! I don't know if I buy bero's complaint that this is somehow crippleware... I find that term unnecessarily inflammatory when discussing Free Software (you've got the damn source code and the freedom to use it, how can that possibly be considered "crippled"?).
Meanwhile, RedHat seems to be taking an approach normally called "middle-of-the-road". They appear to believe that Mozilla is the leading browser for the Free Software set, so they make that the default no matter which desktop you set up. Let's just be glad they decided to dump the unfree Netscape. They are making their distribution more and more Free by the day. This is a good thing, imo.
Having a choice of desktop environment is not something the average user wants much of, I believe. And businesses can't truly be excited about trying to support two completely separate work environments. Imagine the support calls: before you can ever start solving the user's problem you have to do a whole "animals" style question-answer game to find out what their system looks like? Forget it.
So if KDE and its default apps are all that popular wouldn't there be a market for a completely separate distribution centered on that instead? Perhaps bero will go to work for that company, or form his own company... and maybe they will crush RH in the marketplace. But that's all speculation. In the meantime, one has to assume that RedHat has done the consumer research and talked to its larger clients and prospective clients about this and made their decision based on what will drive revenue. Anything is a disservice to their customers, their employees, and their shareholders.
Um, I am fairly familiar with the concept of a buffer overrun-- in fact, you don't need to check the buffer, you probably want to check your input... the buffer isn't going to overrun all by itself. What I am not so familiar with is how you got from my comment to yours. Perhaps you are not so familiar with the concept of unit testing?
If you are trying to say that taking a known exploit and turning it into a unit test is a bad idea, then please say that. But it's stupid to throw away a perfectly useful unit test just because you say you've fixed the bug. What if someone swaps out your repaired routine entirely and rewrites it-- accidentally rewriting the buffer overflow you repaired? Having the exploit as a unit test will catch this. Your approach won't.
As long as Mozilla is truly Free Software, then good for Netscape. Thank you Netscape and AOL-- Mozilla and its derivatives are great browsers and I will gladly contribute money to further their development (especially a gtk2/Gnome2 version). But I have no intention of giving up my freedom for the sake of convenience or to show my gratitude, that would defeat the whole purpose of being excited about Mozilla in the first place.
No one said anything about Windows in this thread, troll.
What I find amusing is the thought that because of the availability of source code for both the vulnerable and fixed versions of this application, that even an unclever hacker could run a diff to see what was changed, then know exactly how to write code that would crack the server.
Not like I'm complaining, a good exploit is actually needed whenever there is a vulnerability. The exploit becomes a vital unit test to ensure that that particular vulnerability stays repaired in future versions.
Actually there was a recent story (in the last month?) here on Slashdot about how the patent owners for mp3 were going to start charging all kinds of royalties, even on the decoders... but note that there is a fee for distributing an mp3 encoder... so the default to Ogg Vorbis isn't that surprising once you get over your initial surprise.;)
Good thing they're using GNU/Linux then. Ext3 with journaling turned on will help a lot under those circumstances.;)
Re:As long as they are not X.10...
on
LAN Camera Review
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· Score: 1
You mean I can start buying lame CDs, watching bad movies in the theater, spending $20 on new VHS or $30 on new DVDs, and using Intel chips, Adobe software, and Microsoft Windows again? Damn. I took that stuff serious. And I have been super-mega-bored trying to boycott so much stuff. At least boycotting Amazon.com was easy, since there's always bn.com, but the rest of that stuff-- whew! I had taken up reading books and going for bike rides. Thank god that's over.
Complaining that a DBMS that has the word "SQL" in its name does not implement a standard feature of SQL is not a cheap shot, but valid criticism if you ask me. If nothing else, the database could do-- behind the scenes-- what users are forced to do to mimick this: create a temporary table for the duration of the query. Mind you, probably many queries can be rewritten to work without a subquery.
As to the benchmarks you cite: yes. I know. That is where MySQL was designed to be used. And yes, right tool for the job is a great motto... and as long as the job doesn't change to include a need for things like transactions or stored procedures MySQL is perfect. Either way, it's certainly hard to beat the price.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Um, since the acronym GNU contains the word "Unix", I should think is a fairly significant tip of the hat in the direction of the existing versions of Unix. Additionally, most of the GNU tools out there that bear a resemblence to an existing Unix tool, share something of the name, so again, this is recognition of the source for the idea. It's not like the FSF is trying to whitewash history here. In fact, one is reminded of the old adage "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery".
Bwahahahaahahahah! Thank you for the best laugh I've had this morning.
I guess I will look a little more carefully for stylesheets using FO to get to PDF-- since that was my only real sticking point. I like TeX, but long-term it doesn't seem like the ideal solution to this problem.
I had not used either tool at all before I did my investigation. What I found after extensive searching (which included both of your links) was that the tools out there for making PDFs from DocBook rely on LaTeX anyway (and to top it off, I was unable to decipher the proper usage thereof, whereas the tools to go straight from LaTeX were quite easy to find/use). It would be trivial to build a latex2docbook convertor should there eventually be compelling reason to switch. FWIW, I don't think your characterizations of LaTeX are accurate. In actual practice, an author need know nothing aobut layout and style to produce useful LaTeX documents, and LaTeX documents are easily machine parsed for things like which sections have titles containing the word "apple".
The quotes are an artifact of LaTeX, which I'm sure could be easily removed by tweaking the latex2html script (it may even be an option)... however, as you see them, they are being strictly translated from the correct inputs to get left/right quotes in TeX, which then ensures they look right in printed copy. I'll have to look into it. While it doesn't bother me much, obviously it bugs someone. :)
.html files have better names, but latex2html does not have any provision to prevent name collision-- so I opted out of it in this case (not that I needed to worry about that, so your point is valid and I will change that). LaTeX (like DocBook) has a facility for both regular names for chapters/sections/whatevers and a place to put abbreviated names (for use in places like tables of contents, references, and headers). The filenaming in latex2html does not use this, but rather a set number of words from the title (IIRC).
And yes, there is an option to have the resulting
In a perfect world, I'd like to see a system that combined the best of Wiki, TeX, and DocBook (I have nothing against XML, I just don't know if I'm in love with DB's DTD yet), so that you could have the pages be fairly interactive for online references (especially useful in a corporate setting), but still generate standalone documents from the entire work. All with complete revision control, of course.
I settled on what seemed to be the best compromise available so that I could have a single set of source files produce both printed matter and a website. Ultimately the possibilities with XML seem greater (via stylesheets and xsltproc and custom document parsers written in languages like Perl or Ruby), but getting from XML to PostScript or PDF is the part I had problems with. I like to think if I had problems with it, so would others. But then I limited myself to Free Software, whereas someone willing to use non-Free software might easily find an off-the-shelf package to get around the PS/PDF hurdle.
I was recently looking heavily at DocBook/XML and comparing it to (La)TeX. I found all the tools for docbook completely lacking, and the XML format to be completely unfriendly to actually writing. LaTeX on the other hand, seems to kick ass for writing, since the markup is short, sweet and easy to learn/use. Not to mention that the algorithms used to perform the layout were designed by a damn genius instead of mere mortals. I've now used LaTeX in conjunction with pdflatex and latex2html to use a single set of source docs to generate both a web site and a PDF file (not to mention that you could also crank out postscript or just about anything you might need to do with documentation... TeX was designed so Knuth could write computer books after all).
DocBook, on the other hand, has a lot of complicated markup-- I mean who enjoys using the PARA tag to open and close each and every paragraph? It would drive me insane. Then, after you finally find an editor that suits your needs, you still have to monkey around trying to convert the documents. I was able to get a DB file into HTML without too much pain, but PDF? Never managed it. I spent too many hours on what essentially would have translated the DB XML into TeX source anyway! Why not just write in TeX and be done with it.
Finally, there is LyX for LaTeX which looks to be a WYSIaboutWYG editor, although I find it very convenient to just use emacs. I think the only problem I've had so far is getting figures to lay out on within text how I want, whereas TeX is pretty happy shoving them later, so that the body of the text can remain as fluid as possible. You can see the results on my site (where I suppose I ought to include a tarball of the actual LaTeX source files and the simple shell script that drives all the processing).
Yeah, well, just because they paid in doesn't mean that I owe them, does it?
You don't. The social security administration, however, does. And because social security money was not simply invested (in itself an odd idea since it would have likely been invested in bonds anyway), but spent on other government projects, this means that the money has to come from somewhere. Again, the variances in population, cost of living, etc, are what affect this financial model the most.
I agree that we have a right to be angry if we reach the age where we should receive social security benefits and there are none to be had. Of course, we will-- at that point-- have only our own generation to blame, since previous generations will be long gone by then and we would have had every opportunity to repair the damage... we are going to need to get creative, though... simply being upset about something that might happen in the future isn't going to solve our problems.
So what is your plan to make sure that the streets are not filled with homeless old folks who can't afford medicine, a home, new clothes, or a comfortable old age?
Except that saying "you will not see" social security is speculation on future events. Now maybe if you know where I can get a crystal ball as functional as yours, I can dabble in the market and not have to worry about social security in the future?
Your analysis fails to support the assertion that those who are receiving social security now have not made payments into the system in the past. Without such an assertion, your argument is merely pessimism-- although a little bit of mathematical modeling can go a long way in describing the effects of the COLA changes that happened in the 50's, and how the changes in population affect the fund's liquidity, since social security money is not just sitting in a vault somewhere).
If you read a little of the history of social security, you'll find that the program has been withholding income from wage-earners since 1935, so it is unlikely that you'll find someone receiving a payment who did not make a payment (especially since the system is predicated on giving you back money based on those payments). So if there's a problem, it's that our parents didn't have enough children (revenues may not meet expenses for SS), and if we want to correct this, we'll have to have a lot more children (I say this as a 30-something). How you get from this to "rig[ging] the political system" is beyond me.
Um. BZZZT! Different parts of Indiana are in different time zones and some of those parts do observe DST. (reference). In fact, of all the states, Indiana is probably the worst in this respect. If you have trouble dealing with clocks, the place to be is Arizona.
"tax and spend" Gore? As opposed to President Bush, who prefers "borrow and spend"? Tweedle-dee, tweedle-dum.
I'm still curious, how will the CPU prevent GNU/Linux from reading one of these documents if the OS contains no hooks for it? Will the documents be somehow encrypted?
Please excuse my ignorance, but why does it matter to me if my CPU is TCPA compliant? Doesn't my choice of operating system have a larger influence over my life than this? Or will it somehow become impossible to even boot GNU/Linux on one of these chips? And keep in mind I won't be buying or attempting to work with any DRM-infested/broken content.
And comparing a binary distro to Windows is just insulting to the intelligence of your readers. Let me know when Microsoft starts offering source via FTP on a 2nd CD in the boxed set, ok? In fact, Gentoo protects your freedom less than Debian GNU/Linux does by facilitating a lot of binary-installer packages (the default Java VM being the main one). However, they obviously "get it" and this is not meant to be a slam.
Finally, on older hardware, recompiling all the software is a big time sink... and probably a wasted effort. But I have to say I'm proud to have installed Gentoo as the only OS to ever run on my new homebrew Athlon XP-based desktop. Something very satisfying about putting a system together from parts and then compiling the whole system from source code. But it's probably not for everyone.
Congratulations to Red Hat on another milestone release.
Which is pathetic on their part because they have been plundering the public domain for source material for, oh, 75 years now. From the music they've used in their movies, to the characters and the plots, there are quite a few Disney movies that owe a great debt to the creative efforts of past artists.
* not that you don't understand this, I just enjoy pointing it out. :)
Hey troll, who said anything about Linux or Unix so far? No one. In fact, the poster you were replying to cited personal experience using Windows as his/her backup for the statements. If he or she is wrong I think you can explain this without mentioning Linux or Unix in an ad hominem attack.
If they do any amateur web development they might be doing FTP, in which case it would be better for them to have scp as option via ssh... assuming the hosting server can handle it.
Meanwhile, RedHat seems to be taking an approach normally called "middle-of-the-road". They appear to believe that Mozilla is the leading browser for the Free Software set, so they make that the default no matter which desktop you set up. Let's just be glad they decided to dump the unfree Netscape. They are making their distribution more and more Free by the day. This is a good thing, imo.
Having a choice of desktop environment is not something the average user wants much of, I believe. And businesses can't truly be excited about trying to support two completely separate work environments. Imagine the support calls: before you can ever start solving the user's problem you have to do a whole "animals" style question-answer game to find out what their system looks like? Forget it.
So if KDE and its default apps are all that popular wouldn't there be a market for a completely separate distribution centered on that instead? Perhaps bero will go to work for that company, or form his own company... and maybe they will crush RH in the marketplace. But that's all speculation. In the meantime, one has to assume that RedHat has done the consumer research and talked to its larger clients and prospective clients about this and made their decision based on what will drive revenue. Anything is a disservice to their customers, their employees, and their shareholders.
If you are trying to say that taking a known exploit and turning it into a unit test is a bad idea, then please say that. But it's stupid to throw away a perfectly useful unit test just because you say you've fixed the bug. What if someone swaps out your repaired routine entirely and rewrites it-- accidentally rewriting the buffer overflow you repaired? Having the exploit as a unit test will catch this. Your approach won't.
As long as Mozilla is truly Free Software, then good for Netscape. Thank you Netscape and AOL-- Mozilla and its derivatives are great browsers and I will gladly contribute money to further their development (especially a gtk2/Gnome2 version). But I have no intention of giving up my freedom for the sake of convenience or to show my gratitude, that would defeat the whole purpose of being excited about Mozilla in the first place.
What I find amusing is the thought that because of the availability of source code for both the vulnerable and fixed versions of this application, that even an unclever hacker could run a diff to see what was changed, then know exactly how to write code that would crack the server.
Not like I'm complaining, a good exploit is actually needed whenever there is a vulnerability. The exploit becomes a vital unit test to ensure that that particular vulnerability stays repaired in future versions.
Actually there was a recent story (in the last month?) here on Slashdot about how the patent owners for mp3 were going to start charging all kinds of royalties, even on the decoders... but note that there is a fee for distributing an mp3 encoder... so the default to Ogg Vorbis isn't that surprising once you get over your initial surprise. ;)
Yeah, because GRIP was such a pain in the butt to use.
Good thing they're using GNU/Linux then. Ext3 with journaling turned on will help a lot under those circumstances. ;)
You mean I can start buying lame CDs, watching bad movies in the theater, spending $20 on new VHS or $30 on new DVDs, and using Intel chips, Adobe software, and Microsoft Windows again? Damn. I took that stuff serious. And I have been super-mega-bored trying to boycott so much stuff. At least boycotting Amazon.com was easy, since there's always bn.com, but the rest of that stuff-- whew! I had taken up reading books and going for bike rides. Thank god that's over.
As to the benchmarks you cite: yes. I know. That is where MySQL was designed to be used. And yes, right tool for the job is a great motto... and as long as the job doesn't change to include a need for things like transactions or stored procedures MySQL is perfect. Either way, it's certainly hard to beat the price. ;)