If 'most of the internet' has gotten to the point where it is the telecos (ie: the phone and cable companies), msn and aol who control access to the internet (and thereby detirmine what *is* the internet), then I would beg to differ.
It's kinda the golden rule: he who has the gold [aol, the telecos] detirmines the rules [use trusted computing, or get kicked off our patch of the internet].
I can hardly imagine whatever "trusted computing" consortium allowing Open Source operating systems to have the specs to their protocols [after all, "security through obscurity" seems to be the favored method of both microsoft and the anti-virus industry].
Without those specifications, the routers will reject packets from Linux and BSD computers (because they will be seen by the routers as being infected because they cannot give the expected response) and therefore only 'approved' (read: microsoft, and perhaps -perhaps- apple) operating systems will have access to the internet.
And now, with the access to the hardware cut off by "trusted computing"'s subsitution for the bios; open source operating systems won't even be able to write to the computer hardware itself.
(my ex-gf pointed out that someone can crack that the way the xbox was cracked, but that is not taking the DMCA into account, which would prevent any 'respectable' projects from being able to use any code generated illegally).
To top things off, the final piece of the puzzle may be the fact that europe is on the verge of adopting 'software patents', which gives Microsoft the foot in the door to sue anyone who designs a half-way decent GUI into obscurity...and this will be coming soon to a formerly free democratic republic near you.
In short, Open Source computing is a concept whose day has come and now has gone, and it's time to either get back to chasing 'warez' or give up on computers entirely.
Unless there's something I'm missing here. But after reading slashdot for the last three or four years, I really doubt that there is.
Judging by the fact they still use OpenBSD's installer (with its' fucked up lack of proper partitioning tools like cfdisk), I think the answer to that question is a resounding "Fuck No!".
Not only do they "prevent more important issues from being dealt with.", but as a result of the back-lash that they generate, they actually undo a lot of the progress on these issues that has already been made. Look at all of the damage done since the rise of the 'angry white male' movement, most of it simply because people want to say the n word which has two g's.:~(
This is the year that Open Source will FINALLY
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
be made illegal for all intents and purposes. NO ONE in thier right mind can believe that the republicans in power would let the 3rd world get away with becoming independent of american interests [trans: "get away with not putting money in american pockets."]
With the DMCA, etc in place, and the current state of soft-ware patents in europe, I think it's safe to say that in 2005, the only ones who'll be left using GNU software will be outlaws.
Actually, you should optimize it IE, for one simple reason. Standards reflect what are being used, and as the leading browser out there, IE sets the standards of the future. So even if opera (or whatever) doesn't load your page today, there's a good chance that it will catch up to the De-Facto standard eventually.
Because, really, it's the de-facto standards that count, and for the internet, that means IE
Thanks to Asscroft, most citizens can be accused of commiting crimes ["terrorism"] at any arbitary point in time.
Does this mean we're only supposed to use the internet for the purposes of communicating with those corporations with whom we're engaging in commerce with?
And you know what is really really interesting. Do a Google Search on "Unix Hater Handbook" "who we are" and look at the results (one of two is reproduced below).
Who We Are
We are academics, hackers, and professionals. None of us were born in the computing analog of Ken Pier's East Africa. We have all experienced much more advanced, usable, and elegant systems than Unix ever was, or ever can be. Some of these systems have increasingly forgotten names, such as TOPS-20, ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System), Multics, Apollo Domain, the Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, and the Dorado. Some of us even use Macs and Windows boxes. Many of us are highly proficient programmers who have served our time trying to practice our craft upon Unix systems. It's tempting to write us off as envious malcontents, romantic keepers of memories of systems put to pasture by the commercial success of Unix, but it would be an error to do so: our judgments are keen, our sense of the possible pure, and our outrage authentic. We seek progress, not the reestablishment of ancient relics.
Our story started when the economics of computing began marching us, one by one, into the Unix Gulag. We started passing notes to each other. At first, they spoke of cultural isolation, of primitive rites and rituals that we thought belonged only to myth and fantasy, of depravation and humiliations. As time passed, the notes served as morale boosters, frequently using black humor based upon our observations. Finally, just as prisoners who plot their escape must understand the structure of the prison better than their captors do, we poked and prodded into every crevice. To our horror, we discovered that our prison had no coherent design. Because it had no strong points, no rational basis, it was invulnerable to planned attack. Our rationality could not upset its chaos, and our messages became defeatist, documenting the chaos and lossage.
This book is about people who are in abusive relationships with Unix, woven around the threads in the UNIX-HATERS mailing list. These notes are not always pretty to read. Some are inspired, some are vulgar, some depressing. Few are hopeful. If you want the other side of the story, go read a Unix how-to book or some sales brochures.
This book won't improve your Unix skills. If you are lucky, maybe you will just stop using Unix entirel
In short, they're proffessionals, some of whom work with windows and macs. Linux 'proffessionals' *coff coff* are conspicuous by thier absence.
] This is Chapter 7 of the UNIX-HATERS Handbook. The X-Windows Disaster chapter was written by Don Hopkins. [
How to make a 50-MIPS Workstation Run Like a 4.77MHz IBM PC
If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.
- Marus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corporation
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions. Divisive dependencies, distributed deadlocks, and partisan protocols have tightened gridlocks, aggravated race conditions, and promulgated double standards.
X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats -- like Sun's Open Look clock tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn't have enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 "xclock" utility consumed 656K to run. And X's memory usage is increasing.
X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster X-Windows started out as one man's project in an office on the fifth floor of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. A wizardly hacker, who was familiar with W, a window system written at Stanford University as part of the V project, decided to write a distributed graphical display server. The idea was to allow a program, called a client, to run on one computer and allow it to display on another computer that was running a special program called a window server. The two computers might be VAXes or Suns, or one of each, as long as the computers were networked together and each implemented the X protocol.
[Footnote: We have tried to avoid paragraph-length footnotes in this book, but X has defeated us by switching the meaning of client and server. In all other client/server relationships, the server is the remote machine that runs the application (i.e., the server provides services, such as database service or computational service). For some perverse reason that's better left to the imagination, X insists on calling the program running on the remote machine "the client." This program displays its windows on the "window server." We're going to follow X terminology when discussing graphical client/servers. So when you see "client" think "the remote machine where the application is running," and when you see "Server" think "the local machine that displays output and accepts user input."]
The Nongraphical GUI X was designed to run three programs: xterm, xload, and xclock. (The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.) For the first few years of its development at MIT, these were, in fact, the only programs that ran under the window system. Notice that none of these program have any semblance of a graphical user interface (except xclock), only one of these programs implements anything in the way of cut-and-paste (and then, only a single data type is supported), and none of them requires a particularly sophisticated approach to color management. Is it any wonder, then, that these are all areas in which modern X falls down?
Ten years later, most computers running X run just four programs: xterm, xload, xclock, and a window manager. And most xterm windows run Emacs! X has to be the most expensive way ever of popping up an Emacs window. It sure would have been much cheaper and easier to put terminal handling in the kernel where it belongs, rather than forcing people to purchase expensive bitmapped terminals to run character-based applications. On the other hand, then users wouldn't get all of those ugly fonts. It's a trade-off.
The Motif Self-Abuse Kit X gave Unix vendors something they had professed to want
Anyone who's gone to frat parties or sci-fi parties (at least in the early 90's, maybe shit's changed) can talk about 'free beer'. Usually, raiding the frat's/yuppie's beer stash while drunkenly talking shit to them was the only reason to go to the afore-mentioned parties.;-)
So, yes, normally you have to pay for beer, but given party crashing, it's not unheard of to get 'free beer'. Its' certainly common enough to justify the phrase.
Individuality is far, far too important to be lost working to death in someone else's sugar mines.
"But don't forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor." -John Dickinson
Slashdot Mirror
If 'most of the internet' has gotten to the point where it is the telecos (ie: the phone and cable companies), msn and aol who control access to the internet (and thereby detirmine what *is* the internet), then I would beg to differ.
It's kinda the golden rule: he who has the gold [aol, the telecos] detirmines the rules [use trusted computing, or get kicked off our patch of the internet].
I can hardly imagine whatever "trusted computing" consortium allowing Open Source operating systems to have the specs to their protocols [after all, "security through obscurity" seems to be the favored method of both microsoft and the anti-virus industry].
Without those specifications, the routers will reject packets from Linux and BSD computers (because they will be seen by the routers as being infected because they cannot give the expected response) and therefore only 'approved' (read: microsoft, and perhaps -perhaps- apple) operating systems will have access to the internet.
And now, with the access to the hardware cut off by "trusted computing"'s subsitution for the bios; open source operating systems won't even be able to write to the computer hardware itself.
(my ex-gf pointed out that someone can crack that the way the xbox was cracked, but that is not taking the DMCA into account, which would prevent any 'respectable' projects from being able to use any code generated illegally).
To top things off, the final piece of the puzzle may be the fact that europe is on the verge of adopting 'software patents', which gives Microsoft the foot in the door to sue anyone who designs a half-way decent GUI into obscurity...and this will be coming soon to a formerly free democratic republic near you.
In short, Open Source computing is a concept whose day has come and now has gone, and it's time to either get back to chasing 'warez' or give up on computers entirely.
Unless there's something I'm missing here. But after reading slashdot for the last three or four years, I really doubt that there is.
could become flame-wars instead. I KNEW that all that time I wasted on usenet and irc would eventually pay off!
switching to Macintosh?
Judging by the fact they still use OpenBSD's installer (with its' fucked up lack of proper partitioning tools like cfdisk), I think the answer to that question is a resounding "Fuck No!".
"So all I need to know is why should ekkoBSD exist?"
Perhaps to shut up all the people asking for free OpenBSD iso images?
I always thought it was XFCE that gave the final death-blow to CDE.
Only slashdots' target audience of tinkerers and unix users. If you're not a geek, maybe you should ask yourself why you're here.
Not only do they "prevent more important issues from being dealt with.", but as a result of the back-lash that they generate, they actually undo a lot of the progress on these issues that has already been made. Look at all of the damage done since the rise of the 'angry white male' movement, most of it simply because people want to say the n word which has two g's. :~(
be made illegal for all intents and purposes. NO ONE in thier right mind can believe that the republicans in power would let the 3rd world get away with becoming independent of american interests [trans: "get away with not putting money in american pockets."]
With the DMCA, etc in place, and the current state of soft-ware patents in europe, I think it's safe to say that in 2005, the only ones who'll be left using GNU software will be outlaws.
Actually, you should optimize it IE, for one simple reason. Standards reflect what are being used, and as the leading browser out there, IE sets the standards of the future. So even if opera (or whatever) doesn't load your page today, there's a good chance that it will catch up to the De-Facto standard eventually.
Because, really, it's the de-facto standards that count, and for the internet, that means IE
All your rights are belong to Ashcroft
"Go directly to goatse.cx" that is...
Thanks to Asscroft, most citizens can be accused of commiting crimes ["terrorism"] at any arbitary point in time.
Does this mean we're only supposed to use the internet for the purposes of communicating with those corporations with whom we're engaging in commerce with?
In short, they're proffessionals, some of whom work with windows and macs. Linux 'proffessionals' *coff coff* are conspicuous by thier absence.
] This is Chapter 7 of the UNIX-HATERS Handbook. The X-Windows Disaster chapter was written by Don Hopkins. [
How to make a 50-MIPS Workstation Run Like a 4.77MHz IBM PC
If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.
- Marus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corporation
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions. Divisive dependencies, distributed deadlocks, and partisan protocols have tightened gridlocks, aggravated race conditions, and promulgated double standards.
X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats -- like Sun's Open Look clock tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn't have enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 "xclock" utility consumed 656K to run. And X's memory usage is increasing.
X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster
X-Windows started out as one man's project in an office on the fifth floor of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. A wizardly hacker, who was familiar with W, a window system written at Stanford University as part of the V project, decided to write a distributed graphical display server. The idea was to allow a program, called a client, to run on one computer and allow it to display on another computer that was running a special program called a window server. The two computers might be VAXes or Suns, or one of each, as long as the computers were networked together and each implemented the X protocol.
[Footnote: We have tried to avoid paragraph-length footnotes in this book, but X has defeated us by switching the meaning of client and server. In all other client/server relationships, the server is the remote machine that runs the application (i.e., the server provides services, such as database service or computational service). For some perverse reason that's better left to the imagination, X insists on calling the program running on the remote machine "the client." This program displays its windows on the "window server." We're going to follow X terminology when discussing graphical client/servers. So when you see "client" think "the remote machine where the application is running," and when you see "Server" think "the local machine that displays output and accepts user input."]
The Nongraphical GUI
X was designed to run three programs: xterm, xload, and xclock. (The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.) For the first few years of its development at MIT, these were, in fact, the only programs that ran under the window system. Notice that none of these program have any semblance of a graphical user interface (except xclock), only one of these programs implements anything in the way of cut-and-paste (and then, only a single data type is supported), and none of them requires a particularly sophisticated approach to color management. Is it any wonder, then, that these are all areas in which modern X falls down?
Ten years later, most computers running X run just four programs: xterm, xload, xclock, and a window manager. And most xterm windows run Emacs! X has to be the most expensive way ever of popping up an Emacs window. It sure would have been much cheaper and easier to put terminal handling in the kernel where it belongs, rather than forcing people to purchase expensive bitmapped terminals to run character-based applications. On the other hand, then users wouldn't get all of those ugly fonts. It's a trade-off.
The Motif Self-Abuse Kit
X gave Unix vendors something they had professed to want
Go outside, spend time with family, flirt with women [and get turned down. :-/]
Notice that none of these involve resorting to AOL...
Anyone who's gone to frat parties or sci-fi parties (at least in the early 90's, maybe shit's changed) can talk about 'free beer'. Usually, raiding the frat's/yuppie's beer stash while drunkenly talking shit to them was the only reason to go to the afore-mentioned parties. ;-)
So, yes, normally you have to pay for beer, but given party crashing, it's not unheard of to get 'free beer'. Its' certainly common enough to justify the phrase.
see subject for content.
see signature for my opinion.
This is further proof that Rob "Imma Asshat" Malda has given slashdot over to the trolls.
Speaking of trolls and asshats, when is the last anyone has seen of Mikey Sims? Has he gone the way of John Catz?
um...'fable'...'parable'...'metaphor'...?
;-)
Just a few suggestions off the top of my more-civilised-than-thou head.
I could be a coward. :-p ^_^
which is ok, since I'm an agnostic. ^_^
only to the person making it.
FP for JESUS!!!
to tolerate capitalism.
Individuality is far, far too important to be lost working to death in someone else's sugar mines.
"But don't forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor." -John Dickinson