It's more of a DDoS really. I'm not sure, I don't know enough about the relevant laws. I think it's a great idea to turn the scales on them, and pure numbers is a good way to overwhelm them imo.
I really couldn't disagree more. If you want a purely x86 focussed distro there are plenty of them to choose from. Debian is alone among Linux distributions in having a rigorous structure and development process so much of the work of maintaining multi-architecture support (and indeed many of the challenges of assembling a distro) is automated. I personally have Debian running on two x86 boxes, a Sun IPX and my iPAQ. I run a variety of stable and unstable packages on them, so I am at least somewhat aware of the supposed hinderances. Writing an installer would have taken a long time just for x86, and it would kill exotic systems if they had to write their own installers from scratch (I know, I did some work on a hacky Debian installer for the IPAQ). Supporting all platforms is not absolutely necessary - if people stop using a port then of course it should be retired after a given stable release, but the non-x86 ports are pretty active and of great use to a lot of people. Hell, Bruce Perens is trying to organise a solid Enterprise release of Debian - that will be able to unify servers for corporations across x86, sparc, alpha, mips, whatever legacy machines they have we can present as a unified platform. Not many people can say that, so not many people can offer that kind of flexibility.
I think it would be a great shame if Debian were to throw away one of it's most distinguishing features just to get faster releases of pretty mouse pointers out. A very great shame.
All the users of non-exotic archs could very well sick with the version they already have. You can't say that is any less true than your argument, but it is just as silly.
A source distribution is unlikely to be better, especially for non-mainstream stuff. I'd really rather not have my little Sun IPX churning away for weeks trying to build a base image when I can download one in a couple of hours. I have challenged a number of FreeBSD and Gentoo users to give me one *good* reason why source distros are better than binary ones. I instantly discount "because it's cool" and "because optimisations make it faster" because the former is not a *good* reason and the latter is still very much up for debate;) I have yet to be given a good answer and I believe I never will, unless CPUs suddenly get a lot faster and compile time is no longer more "expensive" than a bit of downloading.
I like that Debian is exactly the same on my IPX as it is on my desktop x86 box, forking the architectures would only serve to fuck that up. If the tradeoff for that is I have to wait a bit longer for XFree 4.3, so be it, the only interesting new feature for me is coloured/animated mouse pointers, which isn't even that exciting.
Your mileage will indeed vary considerably depending on your hardware. I have made a specific point of buying well supported hardware where possible, so things like my network and scsi cards work with almost any kernel version (and both have vendor supported drivers in 2.4 and above - adaptec's aic7xxx driver and intel's e100 driver). If you are running strange newfangled onboard chipsets for things you might find it won't even boot;) I've been running test8 for a couple of days now and it has been pretty much exactly like 2.4.21 so far - nothing feels particularly improved or regressed. I'm sure I'll get into the new 2.6 stuff at some point (the crypto stuff especially), but right now I'm just running it to see if I can shake out any last minute bugs to report to the kernel dudes:)
"Terrorism: A response to the perceived threat of a capitalist society."
No it's not. Why do so many people assume that terrorism is some new entity that only just sprung up to object to the US' foreign policy of the last half-century? Please get a dictionary, and a history book or two, even if your post is in jest;)
Nobody is forced to use a desktop they don't want and a newbie user probably won't be choosing the desktop they do use. Why not? Because generally the distro they install will make a default choice for them. Give a Linux newcomer a copy of RH9 and they won't even dream that KDE exists, but they will be able to run KDE applications if they want. Ok they won't integrate completely, yet (yay freedesktop.org), but virtually no Windows applications integrate cleanly with other ones (beyond standard clipboard type operations, which will work fine betwixt GTK and Qt) and most new software I see on Windows these days seems to be abandoning the standard UI tools and introducing application specific, custom, pretty, artist made GUIs, which is even worse than providing a choice between two polished, standardised interfaces imo. Hell, if you use RedHat's BlueCurve, your Qt and GTK applications will even have the same look. All of the above is without even mentioning that for any given Gnome or KDE application, there is almost certainly a counterpart for the other desktop, making the choice even less relevant. Both KDE and Gnome have a purpose, those purposes are different and the only result of having both projects continue to run is that both will be enriched by the fruits of the other, or at least will be able to better the mistakes of the other.
...thanks to David Blunkett's excruciatingly stupid efforts to help the US wage their War on Freedom^WTerror, we can now be extradited to the US with absolutely no due process, simply on the basis that a US law enforcement agency suspects us of having commited a crime that would carry a US legal system jail sentence of >1 year. So remember kids, don't piss the Feds off, or they'll have you rotting in Guantanamo before you can say "I want my phone call".
I guess it's time for the p2p guys to kick things up a notch and deliver a truly serverless, truly anonymous, securely encrypted network who's UI looks just like Notepad;)
I just hooked up an nforce2 motherboard into my main desktop PC yesterday, I grabbed the gart patch, applied it, reinstalled the nvidia drivers for my geforce3 and rebooted. Everything came up fine, the agpgart stuff seemed to work fine and glxgears was faster than with my previous motherboard, but then everything completely locked up after the machine had been up for a few hours (I was playing tuxracer at the time). DAMMIT! I have had agp disabled on this PC for a couple of years now because every damn fricken time I enable it and set X drivers to use it, my PC starts suffering random crashes. That really pisses me off. So I disabled the agpgart module and I'm now trying things out with the nVidia XFree86 driver's internal nforce gart support.
Also, I'm having some serious doubts about the performance of the system, changing workspaces takes so much longer than before (gnome2), yet my CPU is about 600mhz faster than the one I was running yesterday, the RAM is faster, ok the gfx card is still the same gf3ti500, but it should be more snappy, not much less snappy! If anyone has a similar setup (XP2600, EPoX 8RDA nforce2 mobo, pc3200 memory, geforce 3 ti500), please post some Quake 3 benchmarks or something...I got about 180 when I ran demo001 on the default "High Quality" settings (so 800x600), 150 when I ran it at 1024x768 and about 100 at 1600x1200, which seems fairly respectable to me, but then I was only getting just under 3000fps from glxgears, whereas some people on nvnews.net's forums seemed to think 5000-10000 would be more normal. Anyway, here's hoping for stability and speed!
but to demonstrate it really is from their code they are going to need to exhibit considerably more code in court than they will be doing to the NDA'd analysts, equally IBM could possibly subpoena other development information they would argue is covered by patents/copyrights and since it's an IP case they could justifiably ask for that specific evidence to be sealed. IANAL of course:)
I manage a few linux boxes at work and we have various versions of RH installed on them, and none of them have any kind of additional service contracts and stuff, they are all installed from ISOs downloaded from a local redhat mirror. I don't need the service contracts because I get all of our package updates from a local redhat mirror and not through the under-bandwidthed RHN.
It's really not that hard. I don't blame RH in the slightest for wanting people to pay for RHN, it's a useful service, but it's not vital (therefore "the services cannot be separated from the software" is extremely bogus).
I'm actually looking at using Ximian's Red-Carpet 2 for managing the updates from now on, it will happily handle RH boxen and there is a mirror on mirror.ac.uk, which is stupendously fast from any decent UK net connection, plus RC is free. Having said that, if we needed proper support and so on, I would be perfectly happy to give RH money, I don't expect to get everything for free, unlike some people!;)
From my reading of the Sun employees vs everyone else threads about this on xfree86's forum mailing list, it seems to me that STSF is about offloading as much of the font layout/hinting as possible to a server, so that thin clients can run in less CPU/RAM. That seems like a sensible goal on the surface. Except that CPU and RAM are so goddam cheap these days, this simply can't be worth the effort. By the time STSF is finished and the vast amount of work has been completed to integrate it in place of fontconfig and Xft, CPU and RAM will be even cheaper and even faster, so why on earth don't Sun slap 256MB of RAM and a >1ghz CPU in their thin client machines? Surely that solves the problem without a huge engineering challenge and without returning to the insane paradigm of remote font servers (even though STSF can render locally, thus removing any point it existed for).
I would think that making fontconfig/Xft more efficient at caching and pre-rendering/hinting data would be a better path to improving performance here, or maybe using a gtk theme that has no pixmaps would reduce the memory usage sufficiently. Offloading stuff for the sake of it seems crazy to me.
Use the fonts Microsoft provides for Windows (Arial, Tahoma, Verdana are all pretty nice). They're available freely from a sourceforge site (can't quite remember the URL offhand). As for screen resolution changing, you can kinda do this already, but it doesn't resize the viewport. The RandR extension that might be finished for XFree86 5 allows for rotating and resizing the viewport, so you will be able to do a windows-style resolution change (which is what I think you mean).
This little corner of slashdot is of the opinion that WTO rules don't allow import duties on products that are produced cheaper overseas. That is part of the free market economy we have created for ourselves with globalisation. Don't like it? Tough, shouldn't have been so rampantly greedy in exploiting sweatshops and creating the WTO to make doing so cheaper (ok, you lot aren't directly responsible for it, but many of you are voters in countries that support the WTO, so you have a share of responsibility at least;)
I guess it would halt execution of the binary and highlight the failed function in some way so you could pull in to it and examine it to find out what went wrong. Having said that, I'm not sure that 3d debugging is necessarily a good idea;)
Could something like this be rewritten to display in real-time in GL and then hooked into a kernel level debugger? That would let you watch a kernel visualisation in realtime, get to see data pulsing between sections, etc. Perhaps not the most useful debugging tool in the world, but it sure would look cool;)
No one died and gave me anything, it's not like I can forcibly beat the stupidity out of people;)
The original post's clear intention was not to accept the offer for the purpose it is intended, but to deliberately overburden a small company. If people legitimately want to examine the source, or are interested in it, they should of course ask for a copy, but to do so simply to abuse a small company before anyone with any actual authority has even ruled them guilty, seems childish and stupid. Maybe that kind of thing is acceptable behaviour for you, I don't know.
You wrote: "There is more to it than just a dispute between Castle and the copyright owners"
I say: Let's keep an open mind and wait until a definitive conclusion can be reached.
I'm not sure what you mean about the concept of good will. If they have infringed, they can either fix it (ie buy a licence from the appropriate kernel developers (unlikely, obviously), free their code, remove the infringing code, etc.) or (do nothing and) hope they don't get sued (which they probably would). I don't see how that's anything other than a description of reality here. Getting a few angry requests for floppy disks is hardly going to suddenly make them go "hey, these guys are right, let's do X", is it.
(I have ignored your totally irrelevant traffic offence analogy)
Don't be a bozo, that's a spiteful and stupid thing to do. Why not do what you should be doing, shut the fuck up and leave this to the people who's Copyright is alleged to have been infringed. Spamming the crap out of some poor little company is pathetic. If they have infringed, they can either fix it or hope the copyright owners don't sue them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's more of a DDoS really. I'm not sure, I don't know enough about the relevant laws. I think it's a great idea to turn the scales on them, and pure numbers is a good way to overwhelm them imo.
mmm, that's a very neat idea. You could fill forms with random junk and submit them if you had the filter set on "properly evil" ;)
I do wonder if it might be straying into legal definitions of DoS and the like?
This will be around for a couple of days.
http://www.tenshu.net/gaterix/index.html
Cheers,
That's interesting, and I might add they are by far the best answers I've had so far, thank you :)
;)
I am now happier that people do have a good reason at least, but I still don't think it's worth lots of recompiling
I really couldn't disagree more. If you want a purely x86 focussed distro there are plenty of them to choose from. Debian is alone among Linux distributions in having a rigorous structure and development process so much of the work of maintaining multi-architecture support (and indeed many of the challenges of assembling a distro) is automated.
I personally have Debian running on two x86 boxes, a Sun IPX and my iPAQ. I run a variety of stable and unstable packages on them, so I am at least somewhat aware of the supposed hinderances. Writing an installer would have taken a long time just for x86, and it would kill exotic systems if they had to write their own installers from scratch (I know, I did some work on a hacky Debian installer for the IPAQ).
Supporting all platforms is not absolutely necessary - if people stop using a port then of course it should be retired after a given stable release, but the non-x86 ports are pretty active and of great use to a lot of people. Hell, Bruce Perens is trying to organise a solid Enterprise release of Debian - that will be able to unify servers for corporations across x86, sparc, alpha, mips, whatever legacy machines they have we can present as a unified platform. Not many people can say that, so not many people can offer that kind of flexibility.
I think it would be a great shame if Debian were to throw away one of it's most distinguishing features just to get faster releases of pretty mouse pointers out. A very great shame.
All the users of non-exotic archs could very well sick with the version they already have. You can't say that is any less true than your argument, but it is just as silly.
;)
A source distribution is unlikely to be better, especially for non-mainstream stuff. I'd really rather not have my little Sun IPX churning away for weeks trying to build a base image when I can download one in a couple of hours. I have challenged a number of FreeBSD and Gentoo users to give me one *good* reason why source distros are better than binary ones. I instantly discount "because it's cool" and "because optimisations make it faster" because the former is not a *good* reason and the latter is still very much up for debate
I have yet to be given a good answer and I believe I never will, unless CPUs suddenly get a lot faster and compile time is no longer more "expensive" than a bit of downloading.
I like that Debian is exactly the same on my IPX as it is on my desktop x86 box, forking the architectures would only serve to fuck that up. If the tradeoff for that is I have to wait a bit longer for XFree 4.3, so be it, the only interesting new feature for me is coloured/animated mouse pointers, which isn't even that exciting.
Cheers,
No security fixes for older versions of OS X, no support for killed older iPods.....Apple really sounds like a great vendor :/
Your mileage will indeed vary considerably depending on your hardware. ;) :)
I have made a specific point of buying well supported hardware where possible, so things like my network and scsi cards work with almost any kernel version (and both have vendor supported drivers in 2.4 and above - adaptec's aic7xxx driver and intel's e100 driver). If you are running strange newfangled onboard chipsets for things you might find it won't even boot
I've been running test8 for a couple of days now and it has been pretty much exactly like 2.4.21 so far - nothing feels particularly improved or regressed. I'm sure I'll get into the new 2.6 stuff at some point (the crypto stuff especially), but right now I'm just running it to see if I can shake out any last minute bugs to report to the kernel dudes
Cheers,
"Terrorism: A response to the perceived threat of a capitalist society."
;)
No it's not. Why do so many people assume that terrorism is some new entity that only just sprung up to object to the US' foreign policy of the last half-century?
Please get a dictionary, and a history book or two, even if your post is in jest
Cheers,
Nobody is forced to use a desktop they don't want and a newbie user probably won't be choosing the desktop they do use. Why not? Because generally the distro they install will make a default choice for them.
Give a Linux newcomer a copy of RH9 and they won't even dream that KDE exists, but they will be able to run KDE applications if they want. Ok they won't integrate completely, yet (yay freedesktop.org), but virtually no Windows applications integrate cleanly with other ones (beyond standard clipboard type operations, which will work fine betwixt GTK and Qt) and most new software I see on Windows these days seems to be abandoning the standard UI tools and introducing application specific, custom, pretty, artist made GUIs, which is even worse than providing a choice between two polished, standardised interfaces imo.
Hell, if you use RedHat's BlueCurve, your Qt and GTK applications will even have the same look.
All of the above is without even mentioning that for any given Gnome or KDE application, there is almost certainly a counterpart for the other desktop, making the choice even less relevant.
Both KDE and Gnome have a purpose, those purposes are different and the only result of having both projects continue to run is that both will be enriched by the fruits of the other, or at least will be able to better the mistakes of the other.
...thanks to David Blunkett's excruciatingly stupid efforts to help the US wage their War on Freedom^WTerror, we can now be extradited to the US with absolutely no due process, simply on the basis that a US law enforcement agency suspects us of having commited a crime that would carry a US legal system jail sentence of >1 year.
;)
So remember kids, don't piss the Feds off, or they'll have you rotting in Guantanamo before you can say "I want my phone call".
I guess it's time for the p2p guys to kick things up a notch and deliver a truly serverless, truly anonymous, securely encrypted network who's UI looks just like Notepad
I just hooked up an nforce2 motherboard into my main desktop PC yesterday, I grabbed the gart patch, applied it, reinstalled the nvidia drivers for my geforce3 and rebooted. Everything came up fine, the agpgart stuff seemed to work fine and glxgears was faster than with my previous motherboard, but then everything completely locked up after the machine had been up for a few hours (I was playing tuxracer at the time).
DAMMIT!
I have had agp disabled on this PC for a couple of years now because every damn fricken time I enable it and set X drivers to use it, my PC starts suffering random crashes. That really pisses me off.
So I disabled the agpgart module and I'm now trying things out with the nVidia XFree86 driver's internal nforce gart support.
Also, I'm having some serious doubts about the performance of the system, changing workspaces takes so much longer than before (gnome2), yet my CPU is about 600mhz faster than the one I was running yesterday, the RAM is faster, ok the gfx card is still the same gf3ti500, but it should be more snappy, not much less snappy!
If anyone has a similar setup (XP2600, EPoX 8RDA nforce2 mobo, pc3200 memory, geforce 3 ti500), please post some Quake 3 benchmarks or something...I got about 180 when I ran demo001 on the default "High Quality" settings (so 800x600), 150 when I ran it at 1024x768 and about 100 at 1600x1200, which seems fairly respectable to me, but then I was only getting just under 3000fps from glxgears, whereas some people on nvnews.net's forums seemed to think 5000-10000 would be more normal.
Anyway, here's hoping for stability and speed!
but to demonstrate it really is from their code they are going to need to exhibit considerably more code in court than they will be doing to the NDA'd analysts, equally IBM could possibly subpoena other development information they would argue is covered by patents/copyrights and since it's an IP case they could justifiably ask for that specific evidence to be sealed. :)
IANAL of course
I doubt much would make it into the open, SCO will file probably a motion asking for their exhibits to be sealed.
Very bizarre argument.
;)
I manage a few linux boxes at work and we have various versions of RH installed on them, and none of them have any kind of additional service contracts and stuff, they are all installed from ISOs downloaded from a local redhat mirror.
I don't need the service contracts because I get all of our package updates from a local redhat mirror and not through the under-bandwidthed RHN.
It's really not that hard. I don't blame RH in the slightest for wanting people to pay for RHN, it's a useful service, but it's not vital (therefore "the services cannot be separated from the software" is extremely bogus).
I'm actually looking at using Ximian's Red-Carpet 2 for managing the updates from now on, it will happily handle RH boxen and there is a mirror on mirror.ac.uk, which is stupendously fast from any decent UK net connection, plus RC is free.
Having said that, if we needed proper support and so on, I would be perfectly happy to give RH money, I don't expect to get everything for free, unlike some people!
At least now I know I am protected against ever being tricked into playing a santana cd ;)
From my reading of the Sun employees vs everyone else threads about this on xfree86's forum mailing list, it seems to me that STSF is about offloading as much of the font layout/hinting as possible to a server, so that thin clients can run in less CPU/RAM. That seems like a sensible goal on the surface.
Except that CPU and RAM are so goddam cheap these days, this simply can't be worth the effort. By the time STSF is finished and the vast amount of work has been completed to integrate it in place of fontconfig and Xft, CPU and RAM will be even cheaper and even faster, so why on earth don't Sun slap 256MB of RAM and a >1ghz CPU in their thin client machines?
Surely that solves the problem without a huge engineering challenge and without returning to the insane paradigm of remote font servers (even though STSF can render locally, thus removing any point it existed for).
I would think that making fontconfig/Xft more efficient at caching and pre-rendering/hinting data would be a better path to improving performance here, or maybe using a gtk theme that has no pixmaps would reduce the memory usage sufficiently. Offloading stuff for the sake of it seems crazy to me.
Use the fonts Microsoft provides for Windows (Arial, Tahoma, Verdana are all pretty nice). They're available freely from a sourceforge site (can't quite remember the URL offhand).
As for screen resolution changing, you can kinda do this already, but it doesn't resize the viewport. The RandR extension that might be finished for XFree86 5 allows for rotating and resizing the viewport, so you will be able to do a windows-style resolution change (which is what I think you mean).
This little corner of slashdot is of the opinion that WTO rules don't allow import duties on products that are produced cheaper overseas. That is part of the free market economy we have created for ourselves with globalisation. ;)
Don't like it? Tough, shouldn't have been so rampantly greedy in exploiting sweatshops and creating the WTO to make doing so cheaper (ok, you lot aren't directly responsible for it, but many of you are voters in countries that support the WTO, so you have a share of responsibility at least
So it's definitely waterproof? ;)
I guess it would halt execution of the binary and highlight the failed function in some way so you could pull in to it and examine it to find out what went wrong. ;)
Having said that, I'm not sure that 3d debugging is necessarily a good idea
Damn, that's pretty sweet. Does it highlight the nodes in some way as they are called?
Could something like this be rewritten to display in real-time in GL and then hooked into a kernel level debugger? That would let you watch a kernel visualisation in realtime, get to see data pulsing between sections, etc. ;)
Perhaps not the most useful debugging tool in the world, but it sure would look cool
No one died and gave me anything, it's not like I can forcibly beat the stupidity out of people ;)
The original post's clear intention was not to accept the offer for the purpose it is intended, but to deliberately overburden a small company. If people legitimately want to examine the source, or are interested in it, they should of course ask for a copy, but to do so simply to abuse a small company before anyone with any actual authority has even ruled them guilty, seems childish and stupid. Maybe that kind of thing is acceptable behaviour for you, I don't know.
You wrote: "There is more to it than just a dispute between Castle and the copyright owners"
I say: Let's keep an open mind and wait until a definitive conclusion can be reached.
I'm not sure what you mean about the concept of good will. If they have infringed, they can either fix it (ie buy a licence from the appropriate kernel developers (unlikely, obviously), free their code, remove the infringing code, etc.) or (do nothing and) hope they don't get sued (which they probably would). I don't see how that's anything other than a description of reality here. Getting a few angry requests for floppy disks is hardly going to suddenly make them go "hey, these guys are right, let's do X", is it.
(I have ignored your totally irrelevant traffic offence analogy)
Don't be a bozo, that's a spiteful and stupid thing to do. Why not do what you should be doing, shut the fuck up and leave this to the people who's Copyright is alleged to have been infringed. Spamming the crap out of some poor little company is pathetic.
If they have infringed, they can either fix it or hope the copyright owners don't sue them.