My old group at JPL actually bought the GNUPro tools a few years ago. The deal is that you get access to prerelease versions of GCC, as well as technical support. They needed the prerelease version because they were using a lot of hairy C++ features and GCC 2.7.2 just didn't cut it. Then again, neither did the GNUPro tools: they had the features but lots of bugs too (since they were beta versions).
Now that EGCS is available under a more rapid release schedule, you probably won't need GNUPro just to get your code to compile, but it might be a good deal if you want the latest PII/PIII optimizations that haven't been rolled into the public codebase yet. You also get a visual debugger and some other goodies.
Here's a press release on the PII/PIII optimized GNUPro tools that will be available next quarter.
Let's not get too carried away! Remember, Linux is about freedom, and one of the important parts of OS freedom is the freedom to throw out Linux altogether and replace it with something better when it comes along.
OpenLinux's bundling of glibc 2.1 bothers me. I just finished spending two hours downgrading my Debian 2.1 system to glibc 2.0.7 after installing the new glibc 2.1 from potato. It just broke too many things, including Java (the Blackdown JDK 1.1.7 won't start due to a runtime linker error, and JDK 1.2 only works with green threads and no JIT) and several KDE applications refused to run because of similar runtime linker errors. The ironic thing is that I only installed the new glibc in the process of installing apache-mod-jserv from potato to run Java servlets, which (through a chain of dependencies) required glibc 2.1, despite the fact that the JDK itself wasn't compatible with glibc 2.1!
I've had equally poor luck trying to upgrade RedHat systems to GLIBC 2.1 using Rawhide. It's just a mess right now, and I don't understand why the glibc maintainers didn't just bump the version number to libc7, and save us all the hassle of trying to upgrade everything all at once! This is just as bad than the a.out->ELF transition, where some apps would require a certain (older) version of libc5, while others required a different (newer) version.
I don't think Caldera has solved the problem either, since they're bundling JDK 1.0.2 with OpenLinux. If you have any interest at all in Java, you'd best sit this one out for a few months, until the folks at Blackdown have a chance to release a good JDK version that supports GLIBC 2.1, and until all of your other non-open-source application vendors have a chance to recompile everything that broke in the transition...
I know that was a typo, but it's still pretty funny... PHP's not a bad little language, but every time I talk about it, people think I'm talking about PCP.:)
If you want to see a real competitor to MP3, check out the QDesign Music Codec. It's bundled with QuickTime 3, so you'll need access to a Mac or Windows box (or VMware:) to check it out. Then go to www.qdesign.com and listen to some of the samples in the listening room. At 24kbps (small enough for real-time streaming over a 28.8 modem!), it actually delivers reasonably listenable music. I was very impressed.
On the downside, besides the lack of a Linux version, there's no provision for live encoding (as RealAudio offers for realtime encoding of radio stations, etc.) and apparently the encoder is extremely CPU intensive. Also, there aren't any feature-rich players for the format (with playlists, EQ, skins, etc.) as there are for MP3.
Even with these limitations, if you want to see the real state of the art, not MS second-rate garbage, check out QDesign.
I would agree with you, but that was before I tried Debian. I've been pretty impressed with the Debian packages system. There are some minor tradeoffs between the two implementations, but they are both very similar in terms of power.
This was all old news to me, except for one point which I found very amusing: Circuit City owns a piece of Carmax, a used car dealership. I wonder if they sponsor some sort of employee exchange program among their salespeople...
For what it's worth, Workman 1.4 (at least in Solaris) had some of these features (play with speed control from -400% to 400%, extract to a file) for at least 3 years. The problem is that 1.4 never did make it out of beta, and so most people still use 1.3, if they use workman at all (I use xmcd now, and cdda2wav to rip tracks for MP3'ing).
Playing multiple tracks at a time is a pretty cool hack though. I can't think of a single good use for it, except to show that it can be done (and isn't that reason enough?)
There's a great article in this month's Performance Computing called Sun: Savior or Siren.
It's right on the mark regarding Sun's popularity in industry, their popularity as the leader of Anyone But Microsoft, their ability to take advantage of open standards and open source, and the criticisms brought upon them by competitors who accuse them of being just as bad as Microsoft if they could get away with it.
I grabbed the Melissa virus from the original alt.sex post and wanted to take a look at it, purely for educational purposes of course. I couldn't find any UNIX tools to do so!
As you pointed out, while strings will give you some juicy tidbits, you can't extract the full macro contents that way (does MS tokenize their VB text?). Neither word2x nor mswordview do anything with macros. LAOLA includes a tool called ELSER which dumps out embedded macros, but it doesn't work with Word97 documents (which Melissa is). The mswordview site even linked to a DOS program called List Word Macros which I tried, and it doesn't support Word97 either.
I'd really like to see a dump of this virus, because I'm curious to see exactly what kind of insecurities a macro language would need to have in order to let the author both scan an address book and send email, without doing anything too suspicious in the UI. Does anyone have any better tools for looking at this file?
That's an excellent, very pragmatic, point of view to take, and one which I don't think gets aired on slashdot often enough (or at least not so concisely).
Personally, I'm glad that there have been enough revolutionaries (like RMS) to get the ball rolling and give us the rich base of GPL/LGPL/BSD software that we have today, but we can't all be RMS.
If you're "forced" to work on non-free software in your day job, you shouldn't be ashamed of that. If you have the opportunity to work on free software and still put food on the table, then that's even better. Most of us will probably end up doing some combination of the two, and that's okay too.
Your emphasis on open standards for apps also seems to be mostly forgotten these days. Remember the height of the browser wars when IE and Netscape were dueling it out? While some webmasters at the bleeding edge were upset because one or the other didn't support their favorite cool feature, most people writing basic HTML were happy because the same code worked on both.
This is even more exciting when you realize that, before the Web took off, "intranets" were written with completely proprietary tools like Lotus Notes, that only worked with their proprietary client software. Public "sites" for mass consumption were limited to regional BBS's or online services like AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, or GEnie (those last two historically being almost completely text-based), and again any content more advanced than ASCII was viewable only through proprietary viewers.
HTML changed all of this. Perhaps it's only fitting that XML, a related language, holds so much promise for providing a standard document format for exchanging data among office suites and many other types of applications.
Even though IE and Opera and StarOffice and Applixware may not be open source, as long as the protocols remain open, I don't care so much. If a closed app does a better job for me, I can use it, safe in the knowledge that I can easily switch to an open app if it becomes the better choice, or if my vendor tries to screw me over.
This is freedom of choice, in my opinion a more fundamental freedom than whether or not I get the source code. If a program works well for you, you should have the right to choose it, and if not, you should have the right to choose something else. Commercial software like MS Office is evil only to the extent that it tries to prevent you from exercising your right to choose something else (through proprietary document formats).
Hmm, it's getting late, and I almost can't believe what I've just written. Does anyone agree with this heresy?
Microsoft goes through a major reorg almost every year. Am I the only one who doesn't think this is particularly news-worthy? After all, it won't change the way they operate with regards to leveraging products from one division to help another.
Now if they were to, say, announce a Linux version of IE or Office, or otherwise show that the reorg has affected their "Windows Über Alles" strategy in the slightest, then I'd pay attention. Until then, whatever.
Hmm, in terms of being pro-meat, at least last night's Simpsons wasn't nearly as bad as some KOTH episodes I've seen. The most recent KOTH, with the photo of Hank's "beef filled colon", which mentions the (real) Texas law against "defamation of beef", was particularly disgusting.
If you're going to be politically correct, though, I'm not so sure what to make about the recent theme that Homer and Bart get to go on cool adventure while Lisa and Marge stay home and install a new doorbell. As others have noted, the episodes where Marge gets to kick ass and take names are often the funniest for me (like the recent episode where she saves Homer and family from the rhinos at the zoo in her new "F-series" Canyonero).
I know there's such a thing as "suspension of disbelief", but I just can't see how they could explain away Homer being able to drive an 18-wheeler (not to mention a train!) with no prior experience. It would have been just as bad if Fry was able to fly the spaceship perfectly with no prior experience, and notice how Groening doesn't try to do that in Futurama.
Again, for Homer to keep getting stupider in each new episode, while simultaneously gaining unexplained new skills, is a really poor effect.
PDF files seem to me to be an excellent fit for the problem they are designed to solve, and there are several independent implementations of the standard. Why do you want DjVu to replace them?
Yes, PDF files are an excellent fit for the problem they are designed to solve, which is providing a compact, portable, high resolution exchange format for documents for which you have the original (Framemaker, TeX, Word, groff, PostScript, etc.) source.
The problem is that there are far too many people trying to use PDF to solve a problem it was never designed for, namely to glom together a bunch of scanned-in JPEG or TIFF images. These PDFs tend to be huge, slow to load, and ugly.
When you're trying to put a 16th century manuscript, or a comic book, online, DjVu seems to be a far better solution than PDF, and I'm glad to see AT&T truly interested in opening this format to us.
The easiest way to export fonts from a Solaris machine (or any box running X) is to install the X Font Server (on Solaris, this is the SUNWxwfs package).
Solaris includes a utility called fsadmin which you can use to add the appropriate line to/etc/inetd.conf to start the font server when someone connects to it.
Now, to configure your Linux box to access the Solaris font server, add something like "tcp/hostname:7100" to the FontPath line in your XF86Config file.
If you'd rather not use the font server, another, more complicated, option is to duplicate the CDE font aliases on your Linux system. The reason CDE programs look strange when run on your Linux system is that they look for font names starting with "-dt-", which CDE installs as aliases to regular X fonts. Try this to see a list:
grep -- -dt-/usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/*/fonts.*
Now, make sure your Linux configuration has the fonts installed that the alias lines refer to (if not, look up the font filenames in fonts.dir and copy them to the Linux box), then add the alias lines to your fonts.alias files on the Linux side. Do an xset fp rehash and you should see the new fonts in an xlsfonts listing.
You'll need to have some knowledge of the fonts.alias and fonts.dir files in order to figure out how to implement this second approach, but I have done it before, so I know it's possible. Each line in fonts.alias maps a font alias to a real font name. Each line in fonts.dir maps a filename on disk to its font name. Solaris includes some proprietary scaled fonts in the F3 directory that XFree86 doesn't support, but there seem to be bitmap versions in the F3bitmaps directory (as of Solaris 2.6 at least), and the CDE aliases refer to those so you should be okay.
Good luck!
When Games Run on NT (Win2000)
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Gaming on Linux
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· Score: 1
I hate to be a heretic but, if the biggest problem for gamers right now is the instability of Windows (and from my friends' experiences, I don't doubt that it is), then if Micros~1 gets their act together for Windows 2000 Professional (and from what I've seen of the Beta 3 RC, it looks like they have a good chance), most Windows gamers will simply switch to Win2000. The only gamers demanding Linux game support will be those already using Linux for other reasons.
So, if we can assume that by this time next year, Microsoft will have released Windows 2000 Pro, and it runs all of the hot games with great DirectX support, and it doesn't crash, then won't most of the wind go out of the sails of the Linux game movement?
I have a confession to make regarding ego gratification and slashdot. Ever since Rob added the new moderators, the chances of getting a score of 2 or greater have increased dramatically. Since that time, I've posted maybe a half dozen messages, and I've had two achieve a score of 3. I hope it doesn't sound petty for me to confess that this is a really cool feeling!
At the same time, I also feel that the system is working because it means that someone else thought my ideas were worth reading. After all, I couldn't vote my own score higher even if I were a moderator, nor would I want to if I could. Part of being an intelligent person means being critical of one's own ideas, and being willing to admit when you've said something stupid, because it's going to happen sooner or later.
The payoff comes when you achieve the respect you deserve for writing something that is truly useful. Before the new moderators, all of my posts (good and bad) would be buried among all of everyone else's posts (good and bad). It was almost not worth bothering to post because with 250 or more posts for the more inflammatory topics, even if I felt I had something really useful to say, it would get buried in the noise. Now, I can post anyway, and if peer review deems it good, it shoots to the top, and I feel good. I also benefit when reading slashdot, because I get to see the best of what everyone else has to offer first.
To some extent, I think this is the trap ESR has fallen into: if he truly follows the beliefs that he's written, then he deserves to be called a hacker just as much as any of us, but for him to seek out the spotlight (and especially to seek out getting his name in print as some sort of Open Source guru) can only blind him to his true position in the community, whatever that may be.
Yes, it was an ego boost the first (and only) time someone asked me if I was "the" Jake Hamby, but it's not something I expect to hear any time soon, nor am I seeking that out. I hope to find myself in a position in the next few years where more people will know my name, but only through writing more (and cooler) software, not because I want to get my name out there (before you ask, no I haven't yet written any software worth mentioning).
It's a slippery slope, and to tie this to another slashdot thread, I think that in the balance between getting the recognition one deserves for doing cool stuff and indulging oneself in shameless self-promotion, people like CmdrTaco, Bruce Perens, and Linus Torvalds fall on one side, and people like ESR, RMS, and Jon Katz fall on the other.
Either way, they're not nearly as bad as this guy. Follow the link to read a Salon mag story about an author of a crummy sci-fi book who, upset because his book was being trashed in viewer comments on amazon.com, retaliated by logging in under several fictitious identities, giving himself five stars and glowing reviews to boost the average! Even more shocking, rather than hiding in shame over such a dastardly act, he turns around and writes a Salon article saying exactly what he did, without even bothering to apologize for it in any way. Unbelievable.
yes it's propaganda, but are they valid points?
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Slate Takes on Linux
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· Score: 1
I agree completely that this was the far more psychologically manipulative article of the two. The article is infused throughout with the author's personal political slant, rather than attempting to be objective.
The "Labor of Linux" article, on the other hand, perhaps because the author isn't technical, would be a much better starting point for someone attempting to improve the Linux experience for new users.
For some reason, I hadn't seen this article before, even though some of you have said it's quite a few years old. It's still a worthwhile read, and just as true now as when it was written.
While ESR spends some time posturing about "open source" vs. "free software", and writes some comments about ego gratification that, while true in general, seem to be much more true for people like ESR and RMS than, say, Linus, it's worth its weight just for the lucid analysis of the core beliefs shared by all hackers, but very few non-hackers:
The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
Nobody should ever have to solve a problem twice.
Boredom and drudgery are evil.
Freedom is good.
Attitude is no substitute for competence.
The rest of the essay's advice may find itself looking rather dated ten years down the road (Python and Linux could easily find themselves replaced by something better), but those five core beliefs will never be obsolete.
Unfortunately, my Linux box at home has crashed on me several times (with only a few days of uptime in between) since I upgraded to the 2.2.x kernels. It seems to be happening around 6:30am while running the Debian/etc/cron.daily/standard (probably in the checksecurity script, which does a find for setuid files).
I haven't seen this with RedHat, but then, RedHat doesn't have the same crontab scripts. I had some theories on the cause, but none have panned out so far. I'm hoping the 2.2.4 kernel fixes things, but if not, I'll try to find the root of the problem and post the results to the appropriate places.
Of course if anyone else has seen anything similar, I'd love to hear about it...
Well, it looks like you did get flamed for it, but I'll add my two cents anyway.
You can find several examples of sites that cost money which do have intelligent conversation. The Well is probably the best example. I just signed up for an account today, since I figured that, in the worst possible case, I'm only out $10, and in the best case, the quality of conversation will be well worth my money. Delphi and the former BIX were also good examples, although Delphi Forums are now free and BIX seems to be dead.
However, your premise that the opposite applies (charge money, and the conversation will be intelligent) most definitely doesn't hold. Simply look at AOL: most AOL users are paying $22/month and 99.9% of them I wouldn't want to talk to if they paid me!
If Rob's tweaks pan out, and I think they will (simply adding more moderators is a great start), then I'd be willing to donate a reasonable sum of money to keep the system going, if it was necessary. Perhaps/. could offer some sort of "premium" membership with extra features for members only (no, I don't know what those features might be). But, since banner ad revenues are enough to make Yahoo a billion dollar company, I don't think slashdot will need to start charging money to make ends meet any time soon.
As for anonymous access, we've already gone over the reasons why it's highly valuable. For example, employees of companies posting information "off the record". Even more important are the reasons you can't think of in advance: just today, I've seen/. moderators log in as AC to talk about the system without acknowledging their "moderator-hood" and therefore losing it.:)
If you think this is a problem, then clearly you aren't cut out for politics. As long as MS can keep "convincing" OEMs not to demo Linux without getting caught, they'll keep right on doing it, while simultaneously parading the mere existence of Linux (whether or not OEMs will ever be able to promote it without losing their valuable Windows rebates) as evidence to the DOJ that they don't have a monopoly. If you're clever enough to do so, you can often have your cake and eat it too.
Like most of MS's past faux pas, I predict that you won't see any major news source carrying anything about this, and it will have been completely forgotten in a week.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing the new video codecs need that much CPU and RAM, no matter which OS you're running.
Now that EGCS is available under a more rapid release schedule, you probably won't need GNUPro just to get your code to compile, but it might be a good deal if you want the latest PII/PIII optimizations that haven't been rolled into the public codebase yet. You also get a visual debugger and some other goodies.
Here's a press release on the PII/PIII optimized GNUPro tools that will be available next quarter.
Let's not get too carried away! Remember, Linux is about freedom, and one of the important parts of OS freedom is the freedom to throw out Linux altogether and replace it with something better when it comes along.
OpenLinux's bundling of glibc 2.1 bothers me. I just finished spending two hours downgrading my Debian 2.1 system to glibc 2.0.7 after installing the new glibc 2.1 from potato. It just broke too many things, including Java (the Blackdown JDK 1.1.7 won't start due to a runtime linker error, and JDK 1.2 only works with green threads and no JIT) and several KDE applications refused to run because of similar runtime linker errors. The ironic thing is that I only installed the new glibc in the process of installing apache-mod-jserv from potato to run Java servlets, which (through a chain of dependencies) required glibc 2.1, despite the fact that the JDK itself wasn't compatible with glibc 2.1!
I've had equally poor luck trying to upgrade RedHat systems to GLIBC 2.1 using Rawhide. It's just a mess right now, and I don't understand why the glibc maintainers didn't just bump the version number to libc7, and save us all the hassle of trying to upgrade everything all at once! This is just as bad than the a.out->ELF transition, where some apps would require a certain (older) version of libc5, while others required a different (newer) version.
I don't think Caldera has solved the problem either, since they're bundling JDK 1.0.2 with OpenLinux. If you have any interest at all in Java, you'd best sit this one out for a few months, until the folks at Blackdown have a chance to release a good JDK version that supports GLIBC 2.1, and until all of your other non-open-source application vendors have a chance to recompile everything that broke in the transition...
I know that was a typo, but it's still pretty funny... PHP's not a bad little language, but every time I talk about it, people think I'm talking about PCP. :)
On the downside, besides the lack of a Linux version, there's no provision for live encoding (as RealAudio offers for realtime encoding of radio stations, etc.) and apparently the encoder is extremely CPU intensive. Also, there aren't any feature-rich players for the format (with playlists, EQ, skins, etc.) as there are for MP3.
Even with these limitations, if you want to see the real state of the art, not MS second-rate garbage, check out QDesign.
I would agree with you, but that was before I tried Debian. I've been pretty impressed with the Debian packages system. There are some minor tradeoffs between the two implementations, but they are both very similar in terms of power.
This was all old news to me, except for one point which I found very amusing: Circuit City owns a piece of Carmax, a used car dealership. I wonder if they sponsor some sort of employee exchange program among their salespeople...
Who's going to the party?
Playing multiple tracks at a time is a pretty cool hack though. I can't think of a single good use for it, except to show that it can be done (and isn't that reason enough?)
It's right on the mark regarding Sun's popularity in industry, their popularity as the leader of Anyone But Microsoft, their ability to take advantage of open standards and open source, and the criticisms brought upon them by competitors who accuse them of being just as bad as Microsoft if they could get away with it.
As you pointed out, while strings will give you some juicy tidbits, you can't extract the full macro contents that way (does MS tokenize their VB text?). Neither word2x nor mswordview do anything with macros. LAOLA includes a tool called ELSER which dumps out embedded macros, but it doesn't work with Word97 documents (which Melissa is). The mswordview site even linked to a DOS program called List Word Macros which I tried, and it doesn't support Word97 either.
I'd really like to see a dump of this virus, because I'm curious to see exactly what kind of insecurities a macro language would need to have in order to let the author both scan an address book and send email, without doing anything too suspicious in the UI. Does anyone have any better tools for looking at this file?
That's an excellent, very pragmatic, point of view to take, and one which I don't think gets aired on slashdot often enough (or at least not so concisely).
Personally, I'm glad that there have been enough revolutionaries (like RMS) to get the ball rolling and give us the rich base of GPL/LGPL/BSD software that we have today, but we can't all be RMS.
If you're "forced" to work on non-free software in your day job, you shouldn't be ashamed of that. If you have the opportunity to work on free software and still put food on the table, then that's even better. Most of us will probably end up doing some combination of the two, and that's okay too.
Your emphasis on open standards for apps also seems to be mostly forgotten these days. Remember the height of the browser wars when IE and Netscape were dueling it out? While some webmasters at the bleeding edge were upset because one or the other didn't support their favorite cool feature, most people writing basic HTML were happy because the same code worked on both.
This is even more exciting when you realize that, before the Web took off, "intranets" were written with completely proprietary tools like Lotus Notes, that only worked with their proprietary client software. Public "sites" for mass consumption were limited to regional BBS's or online services like AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, or GEnie (those last two historically being almost completely text-based), and again any content more advanced than ASCII was viewable only through proprietary viewers.
HTML changed all of this. Perhaps it's only fitting that XML, a related language, holds so much promise for providing a standard document format for exchanging data among office suites and many other types of applications.
Even though IE and Opera and StarOffice and Applixware may not be open source, as long as the protocols remain open, I don't care so much. If a closed app does a better job for me, I can use it, safe in the knowledge that I can easily switch to an open app if it becomes the better choice, or if my vendor tries to screw me over.
This is freedom of choice, in my opinion a more fundamental freedom than whether or not I get the source code. If a program works well for you, you should have the right to choose it, and if not, you should have the right to choose something else. Commercial software like MS Office is evil only to the extent that it tries to prevent you from exercising your right to choose something else (through proprietary document formats).
Hmm, it's getting late, and I almost can't believe what I've just written. Does anyone agree with this heresy?
Now if they were to, say, announce a Linux version of IE or Office, or otherwise show that the reorg has affected their "Windows Über Alles" strategy in the slightest, then I'd pay attention. Until then, whatever.
Hmm, in terms of being pro-meat, at least last night's Simpsons wasn't nearly as bad as some KOTH episodes I've seen. The most recent KOTH, with the photo of Hank's "beef filled colon", which mentions the (real) Texas law against "defamation of beef", was particularly disgusting.
If you're going to be politically correct, though, I'm not so sure what to make about the recent theme that Homer and Bart get to go on cool adventure while Lisa and Marge stay home and install a new doorbell. As others have noted, the episodes where Marge gets to kick ass and take names are often the funniest for me (like the recent episode where she saves Homer and family from the rhinos at the zoo in her new "F-series" Canyonero).
I know there's such a thing as "suspension of disbelief", but I just can't see how they could explain away Homer being able to drive an 18-wheeler (not to mention a train!) with no prior experience. It would have been just as bad if Fry was able to fly the spaceship perfectly with no prior experience, and notice how Groening doesn't try to do that in Futurama.
Again, for Homer to keep getting stupider in each new episode, while simultaneously gaining unexplained new skills, is a really poor effect.
Yes, PDF files are an excellent fit for the problem they are designed to solve, which is providing a compact, portable, high resolution exchange format for documents for which you have the original (Framemaker, TeX, Word, groff, PostScript, etc.) source.
The problem is that there are far too many people trying to use PDF to solve a problem it was never designed for, namely to glom together a bunch of scanned-in JPEG or TIFF images. These PDFs tend to be huge, slow to load, and ugly.
When you're trying to put a 16th century manuscript, or a comic book, online, DjVu seems to be a far better solution than PDF, and I'm glad to see AT&T truly interested in opening this format to us.
Solaris includes a utility called fsadmin which you can use to add the appropriate line to /etc/inetd.conf to start the font server when someone connects to it.
Now, to configure your Linux box to access the Solaris font server, add something like "tcp/hostname:7100" to the FontPath line in your XF86Config file.
If you'd rather not use the font server, another, more complicated, option is to duplicate the CDE font aliases on your Linux system. The reason CDE programs look strange when run on your Linux system is that they look for font names starting with "-dt-", which CDE installs as aliases to regular X fonts. Try this to see a list:
grep -- -dt- /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/*/fonts.*
Now, make sure your Linux configuration has the fonts installed that the alias lines refer to (if not, look up the font filenames in fonts.dir and copy them to the Linux box), then add the alias lines to your fonts.alias files on the Linux side. Do an xset fp rehash and you should see the new fonts in an xlsfonts listing.
You'll need to have some knowledge of the fonts.alias and fonts.dir files in order to figure out how to implement this second approach, but I have done it before, so I know it's possible. Each line in fonts.alias maps a font alias to a real font name. Each line in fonts.dir maps a filename on disk to its font name. Solaris includes some proprietary scaled fonts in the F3 directory that XFree86 doesn't support, but there seem to be bitmap versions in the F3bitmaps directory (as of Solaris 2.6 at least), and the CDE aliases refer to those so you should be okay.
Good luck!
I hate to be a heretic but, if the biggest problem for gamers right now is the instability of Windows (and from my friends' experiences, I don't doubt that it is), then if Micros~1 gets their act together for Windows 2000 Professional (and from what I've seen of the Beta 3 RC, it looks like they have a good chance), most Windows gamers will simply switch to Win2000. The only gamers demanding Linux game support will be those already using Linux for other reasons.
So, if we can assume that by this time next year, Microsoft will have released Windows 2000 Pro, and it runs all of the hot games with great DirectX support, and it doesn't crash, then won't most of the wind go out of the sails of the Linux game movement?
At the same time, I also feel that the system is working because it means that someone else thought my ideas were worth reading. After all, I couldn't vote my own score higher even if I were a moderator, nor would I want to if I could. Part of being an intelligent person means being critical of one's own ideas, and being willing to admit when you've said something stupid, because it's going to happen sooner or later.
The payoff comes when you achieve the respect you deserve for writing something that is truly useful. Before the new moderators, all of my posts (good and bad) would be buried among all of everyone else's posts (good and bad). It was almost not worth bothering to post because with 250 or more posts for the more inflammatory topics, even if I felt I had something really useful to say, it would get buried in the noise. Now, I can post anyway, and if peer review deems it good, it shoots to the top, and I feel good. I also benefit when reading slashdot, because I get to see the best of what everyone else has to offer first.
To some extent, I think this is the trap ESR has fallen into: if he truly follows the beliefs that he's written, then he deserves to be called a hacker just as much as any of us, but for him to seek out the spotlight (and especially to seek out getting his name in print as some sort of Open Source guru) can only blind him to his true position in the community, whatever that may be.
Yes, it was an ego boost the first (and only) time someone asked me if I was "the" Jake Hamby, but it's not something I expect to hear any time soon, nor am I seeking that out. I hope to find myself in a position in the next few years where more people will know my name, but only through writing more (and cooler) software, not because I want to get my name out there (before you ask, no I haven't yet written any software worth mentioning).
It's a slippery slope, and to tie this to another slashdot thread, I think that in the balance between getting the recognition one deserves for doing cool stuff and indulging oneself in shameless self-promotion, people like CmdrTaco, Bruce Perens, and Linus Torvalds fall on one side, and people like ESR, RMS, and Jon Katz fall on the other.
Either way, they're not nearly as bad as this guy. Follow the link to read a Salon mag story about an author of a crummy sci-fi book who, upset because his book was being trashed in viewer comments on amazon.com, retaliated by logging in under several fictitious identities, giving himself five stars and glowing reviews to boost the average! Even more shocking, rather than hiding in shame over such a dastardly act, he turns around and writes a Salon article saying exactly what he did, without even bothering to apologize for it in any way. Unbelievable.
The "Labor of Linux" article, on the other hand, perhaps because the author isn't technical, would be a much better starting point for someone attempting to improve the Linux experience for new users.
While ESR spends some time posturing about "open source" vs. "free software", and writes some comments about ego gratification that, while true in general, seem to be much more true for people like ESR and RMS than, say, Linus, it's worth its weight just for the lucid analysis of the core beliefs shared by all hackers, but very few non-hackers:
The rest of the essay's advice may find itself looking rather dated ten years down the road (Python and Linux could easily find themselves replaced by something better), but those five core beliefs will never be obsolete.
I haven't seen this with RedHat, but then, RedHat doesn't have the same crontab scripts. I had some theories on the cause, but none have panned out so far. I'm hoping the 2.2.4 kernel fixes things, but if not, I'll try to find the root of the problem and post the results to the appropriate places.
Of course if anyone else has seen anything similar, I'd love to hear about it...
Well, it looks like you did get flamed for it, but I'll add my two cents anyway.
/. could offer some sort of "premium" membership with extra features for members only (no, I don't know what those features might be). But, since banner ad revenues are enough to make Yahoo a billion dollar company, I don't think slashdot will need to start charging money to make ends meet any time soon.
/. moderators log in as AC to talk about the system without acknowledging their "moderator-hood" and therefore losing it. :)
You can find several examples of sites that cost money which do have intelligent conversation. The Well is probably the best example. I just signed up for an account today, since I figured that, in the worst possible case, I'm only out $10, and in the best case, the quality of conversation will be well worth my money. Delphi and the former BIX were also good examples, although Delphi Forums are now free and BIX seems to be dead.
However, your premise that the opposite applies (charge money, and the conversation will be intelligent) most definitely doesn't hold. Simply look at AOL: most AOL users are paying $22/month and 99.9% of them I wouldn't want to talk to if they paid me!
If Rob's tweaks pan out, and I think they will (simply adding more moderators is a great start), then I'd be willing to donate a reasonable sum of money to keep the system going, if it was necessary. Perhaps
As for anonymous access, we've already gone over the reasons why it's highly valuable. For example, employees of companies posting information "off the record". Even more important are the reasons you can't think of in advance: just today, I've seen
-Jake
Like most of MS's past faux pas, I predict that you won't see any major news source carrying anything about this, and it will have been completely forgotten in a week.
-Jake
It's actually Solaris/Intel. The irony is that HP was the first vendor to sign on to actually build these boxes, not Sun. See, for example:
? st.ne.ni.rel
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,31691,00.html
-Jake