I fully agree that Linux needs a good configuration system. I haven't used SuSE and YaST, so I can't comment on them, but I will comment on the newbie-orientated distro that I did have the misfortune to use for a short while, before I flattened it and installed Debian:
<rant relevance="marginal">
Mandrake Linux 8.0 has a pretty install program, a 'control panel' and the latest versions of all those must-have apps, and none of it works properly: the install program claims to support insalling from ISOs on a hard disk, but actually requires some tweaking in a spare VT to do that. The configuation tools within the system are hopelessly narrowly focussed, do not always achieve what they claim to, and are unstable. The 'latest' applications are development releases and are also often unstable.
I will concede that the Madrake install tools did set me up a basic graphical system with all my hardware supported much more quickly than with RedHat, and in not much longer than it took simply to get a booting text based system with the kernel version I wanted, etc. under Debian. But after all that, I end up with an unstable system that I'm going to have to fiddle with to get it to work the way I want it. No Linux newbie (yet) is so new to computers that they don't feel the need to play with the configuration options. So our newbie is left with a choice between learning to use BASH and Emacs or accepting system that is simply not going to be a comfortable to use as Windows.
But as a more experienced user, I should be able to fix the faults and get a stable, functional system, right?
Well of course, and the Linux From Scratch site would be very helpful. This is not a matter of the kernel, or of the configuration file for any given program. This is a problem with the way the distribution fits together, with the spaghetti/etc tree inherited from RedHat and then tangled further, and with a network of low-quality software linked by dependencies. Low-quality because it is the latest, and that's what the newbie (and, I confess, me, before I learned better) wants to hear.
</rant>
Now, the point:
Linux is open, so ultimately anyone can of course do what they want with it, but there comes a point where is ceases to be practical to do so. Add a few configuration tools and this point can be reached entirely too quickly.
Again, this is not a problem with the configuation tool that comes with a single program, for example Samba's SWAT. The problem comes when tools have to perform much more varied tasks, such as RedHat's Networking and Dialup tools. Some of the files these tools needed to work were on originaly simple shell scripts. Other system components expect them to be shell scripts. But a configuration tool cannot easily work on those, so the/etc/sysconfig directory was born, and the scripts had to be written to detect all the possible setups a system might have, rather than just catering for the setup actually present.
In cases like this, a sensible 'power' configuration method and a sensible 'newbie' configuration method can be mutually exclusive! The situation could certainly be alleviated somewhat by 'normalising' the configuration mechanisms of the programs/libraries involved, but this is likely to lead to a loss of expressiveness and an increase in binary components in the configuration process.
Ultimately, I see no alternatives to a large-scale overhaul of the user space tools and libraries that make up the core of a linux system. Manual and tool-based configuration cannot coexist peacefully until a configuration method can be found that is as powerful as shell scripts, but comprehensible to a tool. Probably something involving inheritance and overriding...
Umm.. anyone remember the BBC Micro? More specifically that plastic strip at the top of the keyboard that you could slide a card under to indicate the meanings of the function keys?
I've also seen devices almost identical to this one but again using a piece of cardboard in front of the buttons rather than an LCD.
So, does having a program to change the display rather than sliding in a different bit of card justify a $300 price tag?
I think not.
Do you guys think VA keep CowboyNeal locked in a basement typing out all those slashboxes?
The MSN site is just the same: they have a script that pulls all the articles off the WSJ front page.
I'm sure most people realise this, but it irratates me when some posters suggest that MS have some 'hidden agenda' behind allowing MS-critical articles on MSN.
As for the BSD thing: Yes, it's old news. Yes, it's good that it is appearing in a business-directed publication. No, MS are not using BSD for their main hotmail servers, just for advertising and DNS servers.
Has it occurred to you that all those fans are actually for cooling your computer? If you then go and shut it away in a nearly airtight cupboard, it'll take a little longer to heat the extra space up, but it will happen unless you open the cupboard regularly. I suppose it depends on your usage habits, and how hot your system runs anyway, but personally I think I'd rather keep some airflow.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted
provided that this notice is preserved and due credit is given
to the original author and the contributors.
This is an implication that one could distribute modified versions of the package, since otherwise one could not possibly fail to preserve the notice. I don't suppose it would stand up in court though.
This article does not appear to be about child porn, but rather access to porn by children. There is a very big difference.
Nevertheless, I will respond to your extremely poor analogy:
By taking drugs, a man harms himself. No-one is harmed in the production of drugs. An addict may commit crimes to pay his way, and dealers may fight amongst themselves, but those are not direct results of the use of drugs and must be treated separately.
By buying child porn, a pervert is creating a demand, which will be met by a supply, which will cause a child to be harmed. Therefore the pervert should be held criminally responsible, even if he has not actually taken a photograph himself.
Conduit is good. We run plastic water pipes under the floors. Dirt cheap and easier than burying stuff in walls. You keep a pullthrough string in each section, and then you can bend the pipes about however you like and still be able to add wires without opening anything up.
There was brief spate of Windows programs that did gestures with no mouse buttons a while ago. They called them `glicks'. They were crap though, because they would go off by accident. Much better to use a button. I find Emacs strokes very natural.
When I have a really critical piece of code, I write it in both C and assembler, then look at the compiler output and mix and match.
I generally come up with a more efficient overall representation of the algorithm, and can do other optimisations based on extra knowledge, and the compiler comes up with a better way to use registers, etc.
The combined code is usually about 15% faster than either of the originals.
A few people have suggested Star Trek style replicators, and have been rebutted the effect that the objects could only exist at 0K. Why?
Why can an object not be created at 0K and then allowed to heat up? I can see that that process would destroy biological matter, and would possibly cause problems with any sort of molecular bonding, but surely once you arrange the atoms of e.g. a metal some way, it will stay like that.
Maybe once the kinks are worked out:
To heat your meal:
From chilled: 3mins
From frozen: 12mins
From suspended animation: 7hrs
I think there's a good reason why there are no PosgreSQL binaries available for Win32 - because no-one with any sense uses them. After searching for binaries for some time, I gave up and downloaded the source, Cygwin, etc. It compiled, but crashed every five minutes when I actually tried to use it. I don't think PostgeSQL will be viable for Windows until someone does a proper port. I doubt that will happen.
Long live Linux! Ahem... Of course, for that system I ended up with SQL Server, because it needed to be Windows. Maybe one day...
Naturally, if I'm wrong and someone does have some stable binaries, I'd be most interested.
I have a 486 laptop with a Li-ion battery. It's sat plugged into the mains pretty much constantly for the last 4 years. It gets used heavily as a second desktop and the battery gets discharged to below 50% about twice a week. Uptime is still about two hours, which is about as good as it ever was.
I have NiMH batteries for my MP3 player, which I charged in a supposedly 'smart' NiMH charger. They get discharged below half most days and recharged overnight. In about 5 months, the play-time has gone down from over 8 hours to under 2 hours.
As a experiment, I put them in a 'really smart' charger capable of recharging standard alkalines and also NiCds. It was made well before NiMH batteries appeared in the shops. The play-time has gone back up to over 6 hours.
Hmm... say we scroll a page of graphics in a maximised window. That means almost all of a, say, 1024x768x32bit screen is changing. That's 3MB per screenful. Lets say we have a 10Mbit network. That means that we get a screen update about every 2 seconds if we saturate the network. Maybe 2 frames/second with good compression (lots of CPU time).
A bit impractical?
I disagree. Linux was never going to win in terms of its applications. It currently has about one widely-used program (Apache) that is really better than anything windows can offer (aside for all the eye-candy stuff like Enlightenment). The reason people use Linux is because it is better as an operating system. It is faster, more secure, etc.
Win4Lin will not change that. On the contrary, it allows more people to use Linux, so that application developers are able to write for Linux and still have a large user base.
Windows doesn't manange windowing like X. Explorer is not a window manager, it's just a menu system (etc.). Windows are magaged directly by Windows. WindowsBlinds does what it does through a whole load of fancy hooks, which work only with standard window classes. Normal graphics data cannot be translated like this, e.g. WindowBlinds has no knowledge of the 'canvas' of a draw program, or the 'page' of a word processor or browser. This stuff is rendered fairly directly by GDI calls.
In order to get this stuff sent somewhere else, large parts of user32 and gdi32 would need to be rewritten.
Replace 'Linux' with 'Apache', etc. to taste:
The danger is that the Windows code is basically closed source. The hacker has access to back doors/bugs that we don't know about and can't fix, and if he changed it, we can't know about that either. Microsoft may not have the resources to audit their entire code, but I would guess that every line of Linux source gets scrutinised by someone somewhere every few weeks or so at least.
Linux has no back doors and bugs are fixed as they are discovered, because everyone can alter it. As for malicious alterations, code is checked by the maintainers as it goes in, and even if someone hacked linux.kernel.org and we all got bad code for a few days, someone would notice quickly, because we can all read it, and the problem would be corrected.
Slashdot Mirror
<rant relevance="marginal"> /etc tree inherited from RedHat and then tangled further, and with a network of low-quality software linked by dependencies. Low-quality because it is the latest, and that's what the newbie (and, I confess, me, before I learned better) wants to hear.
Mandrake Linux 8.0 has a pretty install program, a 'control panel' and the latest versions of all those must-have apps, and none of it works properly: the install program claims to support insalling from ISOs on a hard disk, but actually requires some tweaking in a spare VT to do that. The configuation tools within the system are hopelessly narrowly focussed, do not always achieve what they claim to, and are unstable. The 'latest' applications are development releases and are also often unstable.
I will concede that the Madrake install tools did set me up a basic graphical system with all my hardware supported much more quickly than with RedHat, and in not much longer than it took simply to get a booting text based system with the kernel version I wanted, etc. under Debian. But after all that, I end up with an unstable system that I'm going to have to fiddle with to get it to work the way I want it. No Linux newbie (yet) is so new to computers that they don't feel the need to play with the configuration options. So our newbie is left with a choice between learning to use BASH and Emacs or accepting system that is simply not going to be a comfortable to use as Windows.
But as a more experienced user, I should be able to fix the faults and get a stable, functional system, right?
Well of course, and the Linux From Scratch site would be very helpful. This is not a matter of the kernel, or of the configuration file for any given program. This is a problem with the way the distribution fits together, with the spaghetti
</rant>
Now, the point: /etc/sysconfig directory was born, and the scripts had to be written to detect all the possible setups a system might have, rather than just catering for the setup actually present.
Linux is open, so ultimately anyone can of course do what they want with it, but there comes a point where is ceases to be practical to do so. Add a few configuration tools and this point can be reached entirely too quickly.
Again, this is not a problem with the configuation tool that comes with a single program, for example Samba's SWAT. The problem comes when tools have to perform much more varied tasks, such as RedHat's Networking and Dialup tools. Some of the files these tools needed to work were on originaly simple shell scripts. Other system components expect them to be shell scripts. But a configuration tool cannot easily work on those, so the
In cases like this, a sensible 'power' configuration method and a sensible 'newbie' configuration method can be mutually exclusive! The situation could certainly be alleviated somewhat by 'normalising' the configuration mechanisms of the programs/libraries involved, but this is likely to lead to a loss of expressiveness and an increase in binary components in the configuration process.
Ultimately, I see no alternatives to a large-scale overhaul of the user space tools and libraries that make up the core of a linux system. Manual and tool-based configuration cannot coexist peacefully until a configuration method can be found that is as powerful as shell scripts, but comprehensible to a tool. Probably something involving inheritance and overriding...
I've also seen devices almost identical to this one but again using a piece of cardboard in front of the buttons rather than an LCD.
So, does having a program to change the display rather than sliding in a different bit of card justify a $300 price tag?
I think not.
Besides, we all know CLIs are the best, right?
The MSN site is just the same: they have a script that pulls all the articles off the WSJ front page.
I'm sure most people realise this, but it irratates me when some posters suggest that MS have some 'hidden agenda' behind allowing MS-critical articles on MSN.
As for the BSD thing: Yes, it's old news. Yes, it's good that it is appearing in a business-directed publication. No, MS are not using BSD for their main hotmail servers, just for advertising and DNS servers.
Try to consider facts people.
Has it occurred to you that all those fans are actually for cooling your computer?
If you then go and shut it away in a nearly airtight cupboard, it'll take a little longer to heat the extra space up, but it will happen unless you open the cupboard regularly. I suppose it depends on your usage habits, and how hot your system runs anyway, but personally I think I'd rather keep some airflow.
This is an implication that one could distribute modified versions of the package, since otherwise one could not possibly fail to preserve the notice. I don't suppose it would stand up in court though.
Nevertheless, I will respond to your extremely poor analogy:
By taking drugs, a man harms himself. No-one is harmed in the production of drugs. An addict may commit crimes to pay his way, and dealers may fight amongst themselves, but those are not direct results of the use of drugs and must be treated separately.
By buying child porn, a pervert is creating a demand, which will be met by a supply, which will cause a child to be harmed. Therefore the pervert should be held criminally responsible, even if he has not actually taken a photograph himself.
Conduit is good. We run plastic water pipes under the floors. Dirt cheap and easier than burying stuff in walls. You keep a pullthrough string in each section, and then you can bend the pipes about however you like and still be able to add wires without opening anything up.
There was brief spate of Windows programs that did gestures with no mouse buttons a while ago. They called them `glicks'. They were crap though, because they would go off by accident. Much better to use a button. I find Emacs strokes very natural.
I generally come up with a more efficient overall representation of the algorithm, and can do other optimisations based on extra knowledge, and the compiler comes up with a better way to use registers, etc.
The combined code is usually about 15% faster than either of the originals.
Why can an object not be created at 0K and then allowed to heat up? I can see that that process would destroy biological matter, and would possibly cause problems with any sort of molecular bonding, but surely once you arrange the atoms of e.g. a metal some way, it will stay like that.
Maybe once the kinks are worked out:
To heat your meal:
From chilled: 3mins
From frozen: 12mins
From suspended animation: 7hrs
-- Jamie Webb
Long live Linux! Ahem... Of course, for that system I ended up with SQL Server, because it needed to be Windows. Maybe one day...
Naturally, if I'm wrong and someone does have some stable binaries, I'd be most interested.
- I have a 486 laptop with a Li-ion battery. It's sat plugged into the mains pretty much constantly for the last 4 years. It gets used heavily as a second desktop and the battery gets discharged to below 50% about twice a week. Uptime is still about two hours, which is about as good as it ever was.
- I have NiMH batteries for my MP3 player, which I charged in a supposedly 'smart' NiMH charger. They get discharged below half most days and recharged overnight. In about 5 months, the play-time has gone down from over 8 hours to under 2 hours.
Make what you will of that.As a experiment, I put them in a 'really smart' charger capable of recharging standard alkalines and also NiCds. It was made well before NiMH batteries appeared in the shops. The play-time has gone back up to over 6 hours.
Hmm... say we scroll a page of graphics in a maximised window. That means almost all of a, say, 1024x768x32bit screen is changing. That's 3MB per screenful. Lets say we have a 10Mbit network. That means that we get a screen update about every 2 seconds if we saturate the network. Maybe 2 frames/second with good compression (lots of CPU time).
A bit impractical?
Win4Lin will not change that. On the contrary, it allows more people to use Linux, so that application developers are able to write for Linux and still have a large user base.
Windows doesn't manange windowing like X. Explorer is not a window manager, it's just a menu system (etc.). Windows are magaged directly by Windows. WindowsBlinds does what it does through a whole load of fancy hooks, which work only with standard window classes. Normal graphics data cannot be translated like this, e.g. WindowBlinds has no knowledge of the 'canvas' of a draw program, or the 'page' of a word processor or browser. This stuff is rendered fairly directly by GDI calls.
In order to get this stuff sent somewhere else, large parts of user32 and gdi32 would need to be rewritten.
Replace 'Linux' with 'Apache', etc. to taste:
The danger is that the Windows code is basically closed source. The hacker has access to back doors/bugs that we don't know about and can't fix, and if he changed it, we can't know about that either. Microsoft may not have the resources to audit their entire code, but I would guess that every line of Linux source gets scrutinised by someone somewhere every few weeks or so at least.
Linux has no back doors and bugs are fixed as they are discovered, because everyone can alter it. As for malicious alterations, code is checked by the maintainers as it goes in, and even if someone hacked linux.kernel.org and we all got bad code for a few days, someone would notice quickly, because we can all read it, and the problem would be corrected.