E's screenshots look cool, and I installed and played with an old version about a year ago, but I always end up going back to my standard window manager: olvwm
See, I was imprinted when I worked for a couple of years on a Sparcstation 2 (that was about 10 years ago) and I am comfortable with the background and menu configuration, etc.. I was overjoyed when I discovered that it had been opened up and came with my Linux distribution - no need to learn somthing strange (like WindowMaker - ick!). I judge my current machine to be just as powerful as the Sparcstation was, at a fraction of the price.:)
If I ever do change WM's it will probably be to convert to E, but it never seems the right time - I guess I'm just a stick-in-the-mud. Maybe when E 1.0 comes out? --
A lot of the open-source contributions (fixes, enhancements, ports, drivers, adaptations, etc.) probably come as a byproduct of other in-house development projects - which is the thing the developers actually get paid for. --
The issue is that currently, high-speed, always-on connections are not the norm - and so we have to use ISP and other dedicated hosting sites to provide our content. True freedom of speech will only be possible when high-speed connection providers (who are not responsible for the contents of sites they don't host, even if they are the common carrier for the packets to/from that site), connect your personal site box (sitting on your property) to the net.
The other issue then would be the disturbing practice of police to some and confiscate all of of someones computer equipment, backups, etc. on some phoney-balony charge (several stories come to mind) - thereby silencing that person. --
Emacs is not a do-all program - it is a general purpose editing platform + high power extension language (elisp) + a popular and comprehensive set of customizations. You are comparing apples and oranges - you should be comparing Emacs modes with "typical" unix programs. (It would be better to refer to them as unix toolbox programs.)
It would be possible to create a version of emacs (Emacs lite?) with a much smaller set of distributed/preloaded elisp packages, with everything but the basics taken out, and get something that loads faster, has a smaller installed footprint, etc. But despite the open-source availablity of all the C and elisp sources, such a special version variant has never been created - so I guess there is no real interest in it. (Despite it being used as convient target to attack by people who don't care for Emacs or are already attached to other editors anyway.) --
The ancestor organization to the KGB (I forget the name) was set up under Lenin - and the Gulag started then too. "Enemies of the People" (i.e. anybody the Party didn't like) were tried, and sent to the Gulag or shot right from the beginning of the Soviet state - and this patteren has been seen for all other examples of Communist rule. Stalin, who was far more paranoid, just did a lot more in this area; looking for and removing potential rivals to his power - in the Party, the Army, etc., in addition to terrorizing the general populace. But it started right from the beginning - don't be a "useful idiot" and sugarcoat what Lenin did. --
Yes we know that the *BSD's have some special strengths. And it a damm shame that they don't get more attention from the press. But there's no need to get so nasty.
I guess this just goes to prove the article's point about competition, just in a larger context. --
I hear what you are saying - it doesn't work well enough for you. I would interpret that to mean that the current state of linux and it's available packages is not strong enough for the tasks you need to get done. Fair enough - though you weren't very specific about your needs, I will have to guess.
My personal situation is different... I have set up a dual-boot machine with Windows98 and Debian 2.1 Linux. I use Windows98 for games and occasional other items that only run there, and I use Linux for all my serious work (and a few games that run there, like FreeCiv). I am a programmer/developer by profession, so Linux fits my work needs well. I have a hand-assembled machine: AMD K6-2 380MMX, 256MB PC-100, 19" CompUSA monitor (documented as capable of 1600x1280, I use it in 1280x1024 - it was enough), SoundBlaster AWE 32. Configuring hardware does require some work in Debian (and Slackware, the only other distruibution I have worked extensively worked with), and XFree86 setup can be a little furstrating the first time, but it does appeal to my hands-on personal preferences (and yes, I like stick-shift transmissions also). By contrast, I have had problems in Windows with double-registered devices, things that can never be completely uninstalled, etc. - and I find wizard-based admin annoying and limiting.
Anyway, what to I spend most of my time doing in this machine?
Editing in emacs.
Using the shell in Xterm.
Reading email/Surfing the web in Netscape 4.5
Using other utilities I have written myself in perl/Tk.
Telnet, ftp, etc..
Using the Citrix linux client to log on to Citrix/NT Winframe servers that my employer uses.
Occasionally I will play a CD or otherwise use the sound card.
But mostly I program, and the Linux I get from the Debian CD is all I need - no need to dip my toe in the murky waters of downloading binary packages from Freshmeat or simlar sites (I prefer to custom-build sources, if I branch out). I have heard enough complaints about RPM's to prefer DEB's, despite the current funky dselect front-end. I upgraded from Debian 2.0 to 2.1 without rebooting and barely a hitch - I have heard that is impossible for other distributions.
So Linux fits my work needs like a glove, I am very happy with it. So what are you doing that makes using Linux difficult? Why do you need to download bleeding-edge RPM's for shared libraries and otherwise muck with the internals of your distribution? For that matter, I don't know what RedHat does in/etc, but the Debian/etc layout is pretty logical and easy to administer (Maybe you should consider using another distribution? After all RedHat != Linux).
Note, I am not saying that radically changing things is wrong, is just carries a higher level of risk. Distributions exist to provide assembled, stable snapshots of Linux. Debian is quite conservative in this respect - annoyingly so in some cases (Perl revs come to mind). But the payoff is stability.
You do seem to have a strong need to run Windows apps, this could be an issue - Wine is still under development, the few times I have tried it it usually didn't work so well (except for FreeCell, my favorite worktime deversion!), and I never had enough interest or need to put any real effort into it. Since filesystem access is usually all I need (i.e. mount/mtools/smbclient), or an occasional Citrix session, this is not likely to change. --
And you are making a fundemental mistake of thinking in only a single political demension. To wit: if OSS is not compatible with the traditional capitalistic approach to software (propriatary IP), and it involves people working together for a common good, instead of fighting each other (in dog-eat-dog competition); then it must be "communism".
First, expand your thinking about politics. Communism, in practice, involves using state power to enforce utopian ideas about how people should work together for a supposed common good - ignoring actual conditions - and has been a miserable failure. OSS, on the other hand, has appeared and grown despite the common practice of the establishment and the state. This is because, as ESR points out, it is functions well in the free market - it's just that it uses a different set of business models. And there is nothing wrong with the service industry: while janitors and burger flippers are the low end, true; there is also the high end of doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers. Programmers and consultants have always tended twoards the high end, and will continue to do so, IMHO. So that first quoted paragragh is just fear-mongering.
The second paragraph is even worse, containing baseless accusations about the character of the OSS community. If you have something of real value to contribute, then do so! If it requires a radical new approach, then lets see it! If you have to fork an existing code tree to accomplish your grand vision, then go for it! But it just sounds like some lamer whining to me.
As far as I am concerned, the orignal post deserved it's flamebait moderation. --
What BS, Mr. AC! That's character assasination based on bogus issues irrelevant to ESR's argument (including "credentials"). Do you have anything of substance to say about his argument? Hmmm? --
Encryption products are general-purpose and content-neutral. PGP can be used to encrypt business plans and negoitations, love sonnets, nuclear weapons designs, harmless gossip, discussions among illegal drug dealers, political campaign plans, kiddie porn - i.e. anything that can be stored in a disk file (a stream of bits). That provision is just for pandering to computer-illiterate "middle america" - but it seriously weakens the value of the proposed law. --
The effect of Open Source is just one aspect of the effect of the 'net as a whole on closed corporations. The Third Wave is coming, either surf it or wipe out.
The article is talking about DNA spread around on surfaces on the outside of cells... but the idea in many SF plots is to incorporate messages into inheritable DNA - I vaguely remember a storyline where introns ("junk" segments) in Human DNA are found to contain coded messages from the beginning of evolutionary history, put there by aliens etc. etc.
Or get this, for a way to pass a message undetected: Incorporate a secret message into the DNA of a highly contagious (but non-fatal) flu virus, infect yourself. Spread the disease around by copughing in the subway, etc.. Disease spreads around the world, and is picked up by destination lab, sequenced, decoded and message is delivered. It's a tradeoff; slow delivery time vs. a untraceable delivery path (i.e. no radio or message handoff).
I recently did a perl/Tk script where I was moving the current version daily between my Windows NT 4.0 workstation at work and my Linux box at home (I work at home several days a week). The most noticeable differences were:
Tk::FileSelect (or it's front-end top methods getOpenFile() and getSaveFile()). The response to various configuration paramaters varied greatly - '-initialdir' and '-defaultextension' is ignored and '-initialfile' was buggy on the NT Windows platform; on the other hand, the '-filetypes' command was supported on Windows and not in the X version. I eventually ended up wrapping it to hide the differences.
The tear-off menu items are nonfunctional in Windows, but can't be removed.
Other than this, there were some minor font sizing descrepancies, and the usual expected differences stemming from the basic nature of the underlying OS - file names, etc.
Having a portable windowing toolkit is a good thing... Even if you don't actually run a particular app on more than one platform, you need learn only one toolkit for both - MS must hate that. And of course, Perl is just about the best thing since sliced bread.
I found the following paragraph inserted in the middle of the otherwise pure-science press release amusing:
Noting that four members of the discovery team are German citizens, U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, whose department funded this work said, "
This stunning discovery which opens the door to further insights into the structure of the atomic nucleus also underscores the value of foreign visitors and what the country would lose if there were a moratorium on foreign visitors at our national labs. Scientific excellence doesn't recognize national boundaries, and we will damage our ability to perform world-class science if we cut off our laboratories from the rest of the world."
#soapbox mode on
All I can say to this BS is:
Visitors are fine - spies are not. And there is no excuse for your criminal failure to act on the information given to you about a major breach in national security,
Mr. Richardson.
IANAL, but a crime, by definition, is whatever the applicable Goverment jurisdiction/law says it is. (Even if the government is a bad one, with bad laws.) So, unfortunately, you are wrong.
Nevertheless, if a law is immoral, as IP law is increasingly shown to be, then it is justifiable in some higher sense to break the law in the name of morality: this is called civil disobedience, and it has a long and honorable tradition. Just don't be suprised at your punishment if you are caught.
Personally, I prefer RMS's solution to this problem - avoid legal entanglements by creating/using free software/OSS. Looked at in this light, not only creating by also using free software is a radical, subversive act - a rejection of the whole piracy/sharing debate, shrinkwrap licences, legal mumbo-jumbo and all the other BS that the "Establishment" wishes to impose on one:
Free software says: We don't need your steenkin' licences - or your software either!
Usually, I have a pretty good relationship with my direct manager - they need stuff done, I get it done - and after a while, they let me do it my way. It's the guys in higher positions that cause the trouble. For example: recently, after getting permission from my direct manager, I installed Linux on my desktop machine at work. So that I could be more productive. Then a higher manager caught wind of it (via. the whining of the local system support person, not that I needed his support), and demanded that I put NT back on my desktop (in the name of "complying with corporate standards" - what bogosity). Needless to say, I do most of my productive work at home now (in Linux). And my job satisfaction has sunk very low. But none of this is my direct manager's fault - in some ways I feel we both suffered together on this. (Having such a decision reversed must have been embarrasing, to say the least).
Yes, Unix/Linux has had support for spaces in file names for some time; amd they can be handled with quoting, careful shell scripting and things like 'find . -print0'. But embedded spaces is not conventional usage in Unix-land; the only place you would normally see it is various alien filesystem views, like mounted VFAT volumes or samba-provided trees.
Embedded spaces are hostile to casual CLI interaction, and are present in inverse proportion to the quality of the CLI. Consider the following data points:
In the Mac, with no (native) CLI, spaces are used in file names with abandon.
In Windows 95+ interface, with a retarded CLI (command/cmd), embedded spaces in file names have been encouraged (like the obnoxious 'Program Files' and common usage for Word documents) but are not nearly as common (in my experience, YMMV). It is interesting to note that the presence of the embedded spaces 'feature' in Windows seems to be a part of a blind effort on MS's part to "be like a Mac" (even when it doesn't make sense).
Finally, in the Unix/Linux world, with several quality CLI's, embedded spaces is vanishingly rare.
Personally, whenever co-workers send or reference files in our NT network that contain embedded spaces, I ask them (as politely as I can manage), to change the spaces to underscores. It takes no more time to write the name that way, and eliminates one more source of bugs in scripts (we use MKS Korn Shell for NT extensively, it is light years ahead of the native CLI - making the problem with spaces more acute), typed commands, etc.
Embedded spaces in filenames are just a bad idea, people should get out of the habit of using them, no matter if the OS allows it or not.
First of all, the article seems to be a rumor, as the sites are back up.
But the issue brought up is a different thing. No matter that a "war" is on.(Or is it a "police action"?) There are rules, even in war - Geneva convention, etc - and for good reasons (they are to everyone's long-term benefit). For political leaders to deny connectivity to individuals, groups or nations on any pretext is a slippery slope leading to lack of freedom for everybody. Even scum should have their day in court (including and always, the court of public opinion).
And claiming that removal of 'net connectivity will affect military communications is absurd.
Yeah, whenever I am signing a check, I feel like I am trying to "forge my own signature" - since my signature is the only thing I ever write in script anyway. Capital-caps (big and small capital letters) for anything else, and not much of that either.
But I don't own a PDA. I'll wait till they accept voice (or telepathic) input.
Slashdot Mirror
See, I was imprinted when I worked for a couple of years on a Sparcstation 2 (that was about 10 years ago) and I am comfortable with the background and menu configuration, etc.. I was overjoyed when I discovered that it had been opened up and came with my Linux distribution - no need to learn somthing strange (like WindowMaker - ick!). I judge my current machine to be just as powerful as the Sparcstation was, at a fraction of the price. :)
If I ever do change WM's it will probably be to convert to E, but it never seems the right time - I guess I'm just a stick-in-the-mud. Maybe when E 1.0 comes out?
--
A lot of the open-source contributions (fixes, enhancements, ports, drivers, adaptations, etc.) probably come as a byproduct of other in-house development projects - which is the thing the developers actually get paid for.
--
"If it's not source, It's not software". .sig
I think I'll make that my
--
The other issue then would be the disturbing practice of police to some and confiscate all of of someones computer equipment, backups, etc. on some phoney-balony charge (several stories come to mind) - thereby silencing that person.
--
It would be possible to create a version of emacs (Emacs lite?) with a much smaller set of distributed/preloaded elisp packages, with everything but the basics taken out, and get something that loads faster, has a smaller installed footprint, etc. But despite the open-source availablity of all the C and elisp sources, such a special version variant has never been created - so I guess there is no real interest in it. (Despite it being used as convient target to attack by people who don't care for Emacs or are already attached to other editors anyway.)
--
The ancestor organization to the KGB (I forget the name) was set up under Lenin - and the Gulag started then too. "Enemies of the People" (i.e. anybody the Party didn't like) were tried, and sent to the Gulag or shot right from the beginning of the Soviet state - and this patteren has been seen for all other examples of Communist rule.
Stalin, who was far more paranoid, just did a lot more in this area; looking for and removing potential rivals to his power - in the Party, the Army, etc., in addition to terrorizing the general populace.
But it started right from the beginning - don't be a "useful idiot" and sugarcoat what Lenin did.
--
I guess this just goes to prove the article's point about competition, just in a larger context.
--
My personal situation is different... I have set up a dual-boot machine with Windows98 and Debian 2.1 Linux. I use Windows98 for games and occasional other items that only run there, and I use Linux for all my serious work (and a few games that run there, like FreeCiv). I am a programmer/developer by profession, so Linux fits my work needs well. I have a hand-assembled machine: AMD K6-2 380MMX, 256MB PC-100, 19" CompUSA monitor (documented as capable of 1600x1280, I use it in 1280x1024 - it was enough), SoundBlaster AWE 32. Configuring hardware does require some work in Debian (and Slackware, the only other distruibution I have worked extensively worked with), and XFree86 setup can be a little furstrating the first time, but it does appeal to my hands-on personal preferences (and yes, I like stick-shift transmissions also). By contrast, I have had problems in Windows with double-registered devices, things that can never be completely uninstalled, etc. - and I find wizard-based admin annoying and limiting.
Anyway, what to I spend most of my time doing in this machine?
- Editing in emacs.
- Using the shell in Xterm.
- Reading email/Surfing the web in Netscape 4.5
- Using other utilities I have written myself in perl/Tk.
- Telnet, ftp, etc..
- Using the Citrix linux client to log on to Citrix/NT Winframe servers that my employer uses.
- Occasionally I will play a CD or otherwise use the sound card.
But mostly I program, and the Linux I get from the Debian CD is all I need - no need to dip my toe in the murky waters of downloading binary packages from Freshmeat or simlar sites (I prefer to custom-build sources, if I branch out). I have heard enough complaints about RPM's to prefer DEB's, despite the current funky dselect front-end. I upgraded from Debian 2.0 to 2.1 without rebooting and barely a hitch - I have heard that is impossible for other distributions.So Linux fits my work needs like a glove, I am very happy with it. So what are you doing that makes using Linux difficult? Why do you need to download bleeding-edge RPM's for shared libraries and otherwise muck with the internals of your distribution? For that matter, I don't know what RedHat does in /etc, but the Debian /etc layout is pretty logical and easy to administer (Maybe you should consider using another distribution? After all RedHat != Linux).
Note, I am not saying that radically changing things is wrong, is just carries a higher level of risk. Distributions exist to provide assembled, stable snapshots of Linux. Debian is quite conservative in this respect - annoyingly so in some cases (Perl revs come to mind). But the payoff is stability.
You do seem to have a strong need to run Windows apps, this could be an issue - Wine is still under development, the few times I have tried it it usually didn't work so well (except for FreeCell, my favorite worktime deversion!), and I never had enough interest or need to put any real effort into it. Since filesystem access is usually all I need (i.e. mount/mtools/smbclient), or an occasional Citrix session, this is not likely to change.
--
First, expand your thinking about politics. Communism, in practice, involves using state power to enforce utopian ideas about how people should work together for a supposed common good - ignoring actual conditions - and has been a miserable failure. OSS, on the other hand, has appeared and grown despite the common practice of the establishment and the state. This is because, as ESR points out, it is functions well in the free market - it's just that it uses a different set of business models. And there is nothing wrong with the service industry: while janitors and burger flippers are the low end, true; there is also the high end of doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers. Programmers and consultants have always tended twoards the high end, and will continue to do so, IMHO. So that first quoted paragragh is just fear-mongering.
The second paragraph is even worse, containing baseless accusations about the character of the OSS community. If you have something of real value to contribute, then do so! If it requires a radical new approach, then lets see it! If you have to fork an existing code tree to accomplish your grand vision, then go for it! But it just sounds like some lamer whining to me.
As far as I am concerned, the orignal post deserved it's flamebait moderation.
--
What BS, Mr. AC! That's character assasination based on bogus issues irrelevant to ESR's argument (including "credentials"). Do you have anything of substance to say about his argument? Hmmm?
--
But that was a very long time ago, when MS had only a few employees.
--
Encryption products are general-purpose and content-neutral. PGP can be used to encrypt business plans and negoitations, love sonnets, nuclear weapons designs, harmless gossip, discussions among illegal drug dealers, political campaign plans, kiddie porn - i.e. anything that can be stored in a disk file (a stream of bits). That provision is just for pandering to computer-illiterate "middle america" - but it seriously weakens the value of the proposed law.
--
The effect of Open Source is just one aspect of the effect of the 'net as a whole on closed corporations.
The Third Wave is coming, either surf it or wipe out.
Or get this, for a way to pass a message undetected:
Incorporate a secret message into the DNA of a highly contagious (but non-fatal) flu virus, infect yourself. Spread the disease around by copughing in the subway, etc.. Disease spreads around the world, and is picked up by destination lab, sequenced, decoded and message is delivered. It's a tradeoff; slow delivery time vs. a untraceable delivery path (i.e. no radio or message handoff).
- Tk::FileSelect (or it's front-end top methods getOpenFile() and getSaveFile()). The response to various configuration paramaters varied greatly - '-initialdir' and '-defaultextension' is ignored and '-initialfile' was buggy on the NT Windows platform; on the other hand, the '-filetypes' command was supported on Windows and not in the X version. I eventually ended up wrapping it to hide the differences.
- The tear-off menu items are nonfunctional in Windows, but can't be removed.
Other than this, there were some minor font sizing descrepancies, and the usual expected differences stemming from the basic nature of the underlying OS - file names, etc.Having a portable windowing toolkit is a good thing... Even if you don't actually run a particular app on more than one platform, you need learn only one toolkit for both - MS must hate that. And of course, Perl is just about the best thing since sliced bread.
Is anyone going to moderate this spam/flamage? The response is way out of proportion to the original post.
All I can say to this BS is:
#soapbox mode offNevertheless, if a law is immoral, as IP law is increasingly shown to be, then it is justifiable in some higher sense to break the law in the name of morality: this is called civil disobedience, and it has a long and honorable tradition. Just don't be suprised at your punishment if you are caught.
Personally, I prefer RMS's solution to this problem - avoid legal entanglements by creating/using free software/OSS. Looked at in this light, not only creating by also using free software is a radical, subversive act - a rejection of the whole piracy/sharing debate, shrinkwrap licences, legal mumbo-jumbo and all the other BS that the "Establishment" wishes to impose on one:
Usually, I have a pretty good relationship with my direct manager - they need stuff done, I get it done - and after a while, they let me do it my way. It's the guys in higher positions that cause the trouble.
For example: recently, after getting permission from my direct manager, I installed Linux on my desktop machine at work. So that I could be more productive. Then a higher manager caught wind of it (via. the whining of the local system support person, not that I needed his support), and demanded that I put NT back on my desktop (in the name of "complying with corporate standards" - what bogosity). Needless to say, I do most of my productive work at home now (in Linux). And my job satisfaction has sunk very low.
But none of this is my direct manager's fault - in some ways I feel we both suffered together on this. (Having such a decision reversed must have been embarrasing, to say the least).
Some things just have to be moderated down.
Then all responsible moderators should "take the pledge" to only moderate up, never down.
Embedded spaces are hostile to casual CLI interaction, and are present in inverse proportion to the quality of the CLI. Consider the following data points:
In the Mac, with no (native) CLI, spaces are used in file names with abandon.
In Windows 95+ interface, with a retarded CLI (command/cmd), embedded spaces in file names have been encouraged (like the obnoxious 'Program Files' and common usage for Word documents) but are not nearly as common (in my experience, YMMV).
It is interesting to note that the presence of the embedded spaces 'feature' in Windows seems to be a part of a blind effort on MS's part to "be like a Mac" (even when it doesn't make sense).
Finally, in the Unix/Linux world, with several quality CLI's, embedded spaces is vanishingly rare.
Personally, whenever co-workers send or reference files in our NT network that contain embedded spaces, I ask them (as politely as I can manage), to change the spaces to underscores. It takes no more time to write the name that way, and eliminates one more source of bugs in scripts (we use MKS Korn Shell for NT extensively, it is light years ahead of the native CLI - making the problem with spaces more acute), typed commands, etc.
Embedded spaces in filenames are just a bad idea, people should get out of the habit of using them, no matter if the OS allows it or not.
Except for those of us who have wives and post - but I can't complain.
But the issue brought up is a different thing. No matter that a "war" is on.(Or is it a "police action"?) There are rules, even in war - Geneva convention, etc - and for good reasons (they are to everyone's long-term benefit). For political leaders to deny connectivity to individuals, groups or nations on any pretext is a slippery slope leading to lack of freedom for everybody. Even scum should have their day in court (including and always, the court of public opinion).
And claiming that removal of 'net connectivity will affect military communications is absurd.
But I don't own a PDA. I'll wait till they accept voice (or telepathic) input.