Emacs works fine for python-based web development. I don't use it myself, but there's no particular reason it wouldn't work, and AquaMacs is actually a very pleasant version of Emacs, both true to Emacs's spirit and nicely integrated with OSX. I agree that in general Emacs isn't the best tool for every job, but there is historical precedent for using it to develop a language with strong dynamic types. It's clearly not the best choice for Java-based web development (I can say that with a certain amount of experience), but that doesn't mean it's the worst choice for all web development either.
I generally agree with you about webcomics generally being pretty lame, although if you look at the comics in a newspaper in any given day, you will find roughly the same level of quality (~10%, per Sturgeon).
PBF is really good, another quasi-web comic (syndicated in alternative weeklies, I think) which is in its league is Tom the Dancing Bug.
As far as web-only comics go, though, Achewood is where it's at. (But you have to put a little time into the archives before its genius becomes clear.) And if you can tolerate jokes about punk rock, Nothing Nice to Say is usually pretty good.
I know what you mean about the ski pass, I sometimes buy a bus pass in my city because of the convenience of not having to have $1.50 around when I need to take the bus, and when I have a bus pass I take the bus more often.
Doesn't this mean that you will end up consuming just as much gas in your Prius as you would have in a Corolla, though, since you're driving more?
It actually moved out to the Black Rock desert in 1990, well before the dot-com boom. Dot-commers were very well represented during the boom, though, largely because they had scads of imaginary money to spend on supplies.
Here's a timeline. Note that they were only at around 800 people when it got too big for Baker Beach.
My favorite phrase from this year's burn: "Burning Man nostalgia isn't as cool as it used to be."
...but I'm sure this is just a coincidence. (From a Yahoo! press release, mysteriously dated August 11th, 2005.)
Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - News), a leading global Internet company, and Alibaba.com, China's largest e-commerce company, today announced a definitive agreement to form a long-term strategic partnership in China. Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will contribute its Yahoo! China business to Alibaba.com and the two companies will work together in an exclusive partnership to grow the Yahoo! brand in China. Additionally, Yahoo! is investing $1 billion in cash to purchase Alibaba.com shares from the company and other shareholders. The agreement gives Yahoo! an approximately 40 percent economic interest with 35 percent voting rights, making it the largest strategic investor in Alibaba.com.
The combination will create one of the largest Internet companies in China, and the only Internet company in China with a leading position in the key growth sectors of business-to-business e-commerce, consumer e-commerce, online payments, communications and search.
By the way, here is the original press release from Reporters Without Borders, since I didn't see it linked anywhere else.
Rootkits are essentially malware that runs at a higher level than most malware, with the intention of using API-hooking to misreport filesystem, process, and network status.
Don't you mean lower-level? In the sense of device drivers being lower-level than, say, the application layer, where spyware and similar processes would more commonly reside? (I'm not trying to nitpick here, I'm genuiney curious.)
It's not engineering in the sense of pysical engineering. As an actual mechanical engineer has pointed out here, engineering requires mathematical analysis which is extremely rare in "the wild" (ie, on the job).
I don't see it as art per se, either. God save me from getting into the "definition of art" conversation on Slashdot, but suffice it to say that I have never, even once, seen a code readout which has emotionally moved me at the level that good art can. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that such a thing can't ever exist, at least for me personally.
I do think it's a craft, sort of after RMS's quote from the article. Anyone familiar with programming will recognize that there are good and bad techniques for doing things, and there are somewhat analogous received forms (say, OOP as an analog to a still life painting or sonnet).
I think a metaphor that fits more naturally to me is automotive repair. Maybe I'm focussing too much on the profession of programming, rather than the act, but bear with me.... A large amount of the actual business of programming requires having deep knowledge of the products from a particular vendor (say, Microsoft). In both professions there's a pretty good amount of technical background required (for car repair, I don't mean physics so much as the basics of what a carburetor does and so on).
There is also a similar mindset of playing around and trying different things until something works. When a mechanic goes about diagnosing and fixing a problem, he or she doesn't sit around calculating load-bearing shear levels (at least I don't think so, maybe they have whiteboards full of equations hidden away behind thise girly calendars). Instead, they'll look at the symptoms of a problem, try to isolate the subsystem it's coming from, and then look for ways to fix the problem in that context. This seems very similar to the debugging process to me. And at the end, neither the mechanic nor the programmer has scientific proof that their solution was correct.
As a caveat, I am by no means skilled with auto repair myself, so this is just guesswork, mostly. Can someone who is comment on whether there's a difference?
Solaris (SunOS) 4.x was actually a BSD variant. When they went to SunOS 5.x (confusingly also called Solaris 2), they changed to a more classical SvsV version of Unix, and that's been the basis of Solaris since that time.
Just to be a little nitpicky, this could work fine in a movie. The people in Earthsea all have their true names which they rarely reveal to anyone else (and which give other people power over them, a trope that LeGuin popularized and Vernor Vinge later adapted into his early cyberpunk story "True Names"), but they go by monikers that other people refer to them by. For instance the main character's true name is Ged, but he goes by Sparrowhawk, so most of the dialog in the book has people calling him that.
So you wouldn't really have to sit through a whole movie with all the characters refering to "that guy who we met earlier" or "hey, you."
If you actually want to try to do some hacking on the box. They are essentially rewriting the entire user-land of the Linksys distribution, which among other things means that unlike wifibox and sveasoft they don't have this in their distributed source code:
/*
* Copyright 2003, CyberTAN Inc. All Rights Reserved *
This is UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE of CyberTAN Inc.
the contents of this file may not be disclosed to third parties,
copied or duplicated in any form without the prior written
permission of CyberTAN Inc.
This software should be used as a reference only, and it not
intended for production use!
THIS SOFTWARE IS OFFERED "AS IS", AND CYBERTAN GRANTS NO WARRANTIES OF ANY
KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, BY STATUTE, COMMUNICATION OR OTHERWISE. CYBERTAN
SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS
FOR A SPECIFIC PURPOSE OR NONINFRINGEMENT CONCERNING THIS SOFTWARE */
In brief, what sveasoft is working on is a forked version of Linksys's source code release. Linksys's release was already highly questionable in regards to GPL compliance, since it does not include source code for all of the binaries included, particularly the wl.o module. In addition Linksys included in their source distribution a great deal of source code which claims to be proprietary and non-redistributable.
This is IMHO the elephant in the room that nobody's talking about, and it affects wifibox just as much as sveasoft.
I'd urge anyone interested in wrt54g development who is concerned about these GPL issues to check out OpenWRT, which aims to be a fully GPL-compatible clean-room implementation of Linux for this hardware (they use Linksys's modified version of the kernel, but not much else).
there was a firmware modification for the Linksys WRT54G router. [...] This seems to have a reasonable development community now the code is open source.
If only it were that simple! Linksys actually did a very similar thing to RealTek in that they didn't release source to their binary drivers (although they took the more-palatble-to-Linus route of releasing the binary drivers as a kernel module, at least). They also released source code with tons of comments to the effect that this was unpublished, proprietary code which was explicitly prohibited from being reproduced - this was not kernel source but additional things needed to run the router, such as the init code and web configuration interface.
This has led to (at least in my mind) a lingering cloud of uncertainty over all of the open-source forks, which so far are all based on the result of linking binary-only modules and proprietary source code. Meanwhile one prominent developer has endured a bitter GPL flame war and has moved to a subscription-based model for his version.
Could you give us your point of view about the status of binary-only kernel modules from the standpoint of the GPL?
In a nutshell, I'm interested in the status of LinkSys's released code for their wrt54g and similar routers -- regular slashdotters may recall that they released the source code, under pressure from the FSF, last year. However, their modified Linux code is distributed with both binary-only files (in the form of compiled Broadcom wireless drivers) and a great deal of source code which claims to be unpublished, proprietary, and prohibited from redistribution.
Ideally I'd like your take on the LinkSys situation specifically, but I'd settle for some discusion of how binary-only kernel drivers and the GPL coexist. There's some excellent background on this topic in this LWN article from last October.
Re:Does AMD have anything to compete with Centrino
on
AMD Back in the Black
·
· Score: 1
I've got one of these too (an eMachines m6805). It's a great little machine, but not the most compatible with linux out of the box - at least, not if you want to run a kernel in 64-bit mode.
The main problem is with the hardware manufacturers. At least three devices in the notebook (the ATI Mobility 9600 video card, the Broadcom-based 802.11g built-in wifi, and the SmartLink internal modem) have only binary drivers available for Linux. The binaries are invariably 32-bit 1386 ones, meaning that they can't be linked into a 64-bit kernel.
This is annoying - especially the wifi - but the machine still runs a mean gentoo, as long as you're willing to run mostly the latest and greatest versions of, say, XFree86 (which currently supports 2D acceleration in the video card, but no 3D). It's my hope that as 64-bit Windows looms on the horizon, hardware vendors will realize that two sets of binary drivers no longer cover all the bases.
Alternatively, I'm told, one can run Linux in 32-bit emulation mode (this is how Windows runs on the box right now). No doubt this would net one greater binary compatibility, but it still chaps my hide that companies produce binary-only drivers for linux at all.
Anyways, short answer, the CPU itself is fairly well-supported, but the drivers for accessing devices from a 64-bit OS are not all there yet.
Absolutely. The term you're looking for is "street teaming"--most likely it would have been the woman who ran by the blogger who was the covert marketer in question.
Note especially the implication that this behavior is somehow a unique aspect of "iPod culture," when in fact one could do the same thing with a cassette player (or, more to the point, a different brand of Mp3 player).
Slashdot Mirror
Moreover he's doing Python web development - I like Python and it's perfect for web development, but it's not exactly close to the metal.
Emacs works fine for python-based web development. I don't use it myself, but there's no particular reason it wouldn't work, and AquaMacs is actually a very pleasant version of Emacs, both true to Emacs's spirit and nicely integrated with OSX. I agree that in general Emacs isn't the best tool for every job, but there is historical precedent for using it to develop a language with strong dynamic types. It's clearly not the best choice for Java-based web development (I can say that with a certain amount of experience), but that doesn't mean it's the worst choice for all web development either.
YES! There is one new reason to move to SF!
As if the famously good weather and cheap housing weren't enough...
I generally agree with you about webcomics generally being pretty lame, although if you look at the comics in a newspaper in any given day, you will find roughly the same level of quality (~10%, per Sturgeon).
PBF is really good, another quasi-web comic (syndicated in alternative weeklies, I think) which is in its league is Tom the Dancing Bug.
As far as web-only comics go, though, Achewood is where it's at. (But you have to put a little time into the archives before its genius becomes clear.) And if you can tolerate jokes about punk rock, Nothing Nice to Say is usually pretty good.
I know what you mean about the ski pass, I sometimes buy a bus pass in my city because of the convenience of not having to have $1.50 around when I need to take the bus, and when I have a bus pass I take the bus more often.
Doesn't this mean that you will end up consuming just as much gas in your Prius as you would have in a Corolla, though, since you're driving more?
This phrase is terrifying, and yet somehow not surprising.
It actually moved out to the Black Rock desert in 1990, well before the dot-com boom. Dot-commers were very well represented during the boom, though, largely because they had scads of imaginary money to spend on supplies.
Here's a timeline. Note that they were only at around 800 people when it got too big for Baker Beach.
My favorite phrase from this year's burn: "Burning Man nostalgia isn't as cool as it used to be."
...but I'm sure this is just a coincidence. (From a Yahoo! press release, mysteriously dated August 11th, 2005.)
By the way, here is the original press release from Reporters Without Borders, since I didn't see it linked anywhere else.
(It's not mine, I just found it on MetaFilter.)
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/44333#1013861
Rootkits are essentially malware that runs at a higher level than most malware, with the intention of using API-hooking to misreport filesystem, process, and network status.
Don't you mean lower-level? In the sense of device drivers being lower-level than, say, the application layer, where spyware and similar processes would more commonly reside? (I'm not trying to nitpick here, I'm genuiney curious.)
Wow, Linus was at a party! Stop the presses! The whole world must know about this development, NOW!
http://www.openwrt.org/
It's the most open of the alternativesd, last I looked. Not necessarily great for the lazy, though, since it will want some hand-configuring.
alt.cascade
Telnet access to libraries.
Gopher.
FTPMail.
UUCP.
ISDN.
Hmm, I guess these aren't really web fads, though...
The average college student listens to RIAA artists like Metallica, Britney Spears, etc.
Yeah, that's why college radio stations are so notorious for playing only the most mainstream music.
It's not engineering in the sense of pysical engineering. As an actual mechanical engineer has pointed out here, engineering requires mathematical analysis which is extremely rare in "the wild" (ie, on the job).
I don't see it as art per se, either. God save me from getting into the "definition of art" conversation on Slashdot, but suffice it to say that I have never, even once, seen a code readout which has emotionally moved me at the level that good art can. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that such a thing can't ever exist, at least for me personally.
I do think it's a craft, sort of after RMS's quote from the article. Anyone familiar with programming will recognize that there are good and bad techniques for doing things, and there are somewhat analogous received forms (say, OOP as an analog to a still life painting or sonnet).
I think a metaphor that fits more naturally to me is automotive repair. Maybe I'm focussing too much on the profession of programming, rather than the act, but bear with me.... A large amount of the actual business of programming requires having deep knowledge of the products from a particular vendor (say, Microsoft). In both professions there's a pretty good amount of technical background required (for car repair, I don't mean physics so much as the basics of what a carburetor does and so on).
There is also a similar mindset of playing around and trying different things until something works. When a mechanic goes about diagnosing and fixing a problem, he or she doesn't sit around calculating load-bearing shear levels (at least I don't think so, maybe they have whiteboards full of equations hidden away behind thise girly calendars). Instead, they'll look at the symptoms of a problem, try to isolate the subsystem it's coming from, and then look for ways to fix the problem in that context. This seems very similar to the debugging process to me. And at the end, neither the mechanic nor the programmer has scientific proof that their solution was correct.
As a caveat, I am by no means skilled with auto repair myself, so this is just guesswork, mostly. Can someone who is comment on whether there's a difference?
Solaris (SunOS) 4.x was actually a BSD variant. When they went to SunOS 5.x (confusingly also called Solaris 2), they changed to a more classical SvsV version of Unix, and that's been the basis of Solaris since that time.
Just to be a little nitpicky, this could work fine in a movie. The people in Earthsea all have their true names which they rarely reveal to anyone else (and which give other people power over them, a trope that LeGuin popularized and Vernor Vinge later adapted into his early cyberpunk story "True Names"), but they go by monikers that other people refer to them by. For instance the main character's true name is Ged, but he goes by Sparrowhawk, so most of the dialog in the book has people calling him that.
So you wouldn't really have to sit through a whole movie with all the characters refering to "that guy who we met earlier" or "hey, you."
See this post about source code comments in the Linksys source release which explicitly prohibit any redistribution, and this post regarding linksys.
In brief, what sveasoft is working on is a forked version of Linksys's source code release. Linksys's release was already highly questionable in regards to GPL compliance, since it does not include source code for all of the binaries included, particularly the wl.o module. In addition Linksys included in their source distribution a great deal of source code which claims to be proprietary and non-redistributable.
This is IMHO the elephant in the room that nobody's talking about, and it affects wifibox just as much as sveasoft.
I'd urge anyone interested in wrt54g development who is concerned about these GPL issues to check out OpenWRT, which aims to be a fully GPL-compatible clean-room implementation of Linux for this hardware (they use Linksys's modified version of the kernel, but not much else).
there was a firmware modification for the Linksys WRT54G router. [...] This seems to have a reasonable development community now the code is open source.
If only it were that simple! Linksys actually did a very similar thing to RealTek in that they didn't release source to their binary drivers (although they took the more-palatble-to-Linus route of releasing the binary drivers as a kernel module, at least). They also released source code with tons of comments to the effect that this was unpublished, proprietary code which was explicitly prohibited from being reproduced - this was not kernel source but additional things needed to run the router, such as the init code and web configuration interface.
This has led to (at least in my mind) a lingering cloud of uncertainty over all of the open-source forks, which so far are all based on the result of linking binary-only modules and proprietary source code. Meanwhile one prominent developer has endured a bitter GPL flame war and has moved to a subscription-based model for his version.
Could you give us your point of view about the status of binary-only kernel modules from the standpoint of the GPL?
In a nutshell, I'm interested in the status of LinkSys's released code for their wrt54g and similar routers -- regular slashdotters may recall that they released the source code, under pressure from the FSF, last year. However, their modified Linux code is distributed with both binary-only files (in the form of compiled Broadcom wireless drivers) and a great deal of source code which claims to be unpublished, proprietary, and prohibited from redistribution.
Ideally I'd like your take on the LinkSys situation specifically, but I'd settle for some discusion of how binary-only kernel drivers and the GPL coexist. There's some excellent background on this topic in this LWN article from last October.
I've got one of these too (an eMachines m6805). It's a great little machine, but not the most compatible with linux out of the box - at least, not if you want to run a kernel in 64-bit mode.
The main problem is with the hardware manufacturers. At least three devices in the notebook (the ATI Mobility 9600 video card, the Broadcom-based 802.11g built-in wifi, and the SmartLink internal modem) have only binary drivers available for Linux. The binaries are invariably 32-bit 1386 ones, meaning that they can't be linked into a 64-bit kernel.
This is annoying - especially the wifi - but the machine still runs a mean gentoo, as long as you're willing to run mostly the latest and greatest versions of, say, XFree86 (which currently supports 2D acceleration in the video card, but no 3D). It's my hope that as 64-bit Windows looms on the horizon, hardware vendors will realize that two sets of binary drivers no longer cover all the bases.
Alternatively, I'm told, one can run Linux in 32-bit emulation mode (this is how Windows runs on the box right now). No doubt this would net one greater binary compatibility, but it still chaps my hide that companies produce binary-only drivers for linux at all.
Anyways, short answer, the CPU itself is fairly well-supported, but the drivers for accessing devices from a 64-bit OS are not all there yet.
Not to accuse you or anything, but what an interesting suggestion.
Absolutely. The term you're looking for is "street teaming"--most likely it would have been the woman who ran by the blogger who was the covert marketer in question.
Note especially the implication that this behavior is somehow a unique aspect of "iPod culture," when in fact one could do the same thing with a cassette player (or, more to the point, a different brand of Mp3 player).