My goodness, what about xfm? It predates KDE and GNOME -- it probably predates TK, for cryin' out loud. It wasn't pretty, but it never required one to type a filename.
And th ere are quite a few more. (Sorry to insist on the cached copy, but the original site is a trifle slow to respond from my location.)
The references article is not the worst piece of Linux journalism I have seen, but it's not very impressive either. A little research would have made it a much better article...but a much less effective piece of hype.
If we want to encourage Microsoft to behave as well as the Linux community does and acknowledge its bugs, we can't jump on bug totals like this. Yes, I know Microsoft did not intentionally release the figure, but it's not going to encourage them to do so in future if we treat any such admission as some sort of weakness.
Besides, what does it mean to have 28,000 known serious bugs? How many does BSD have? How about Linux?
If we don't want Microsoft to behave better but would rather that they die in poverty and are eaten by dogs, then that's fine...but let's be clear on our goals.
Some of the responses on this thread have disparaged the book under review as meandering and unfocused. They may be right. I don't know. The problem is that the review was itself so meandering and unfocused that I didn't feel the slightest inclination to look into the book.
What, exactly, does the author of the book do? Miss Erin makes a tantalizing reference to stimulating "communications revolutions", but what, if anything, does that mean? If the book is autobiographical, and I gather that it is, then what is so fascinating about the author's life and pursuits that should compel me to look into it?
The trouble is that the reviewer does not appear to have the slightest idea how to review a book. She has forgotten that the readers of the review have not all read the book, and she produces a rather aimless summary that practically requires us to have read the thing in the first place in order to understand a word of it.
If Slashdot is going to publish reviews, let it at least publish good ones.
Heimdal is very good. It would, of course, have been illegal for the MIT Kerberos team to have given them any source, but there's nothing wrong with seeing whether two packages will talk to one another...and the folks at MIT spent considerable time doing such testing with the Heimdal team.
Incidentally, don't bother with single-DES Kerberos; it can be cracked in real time. 3DES is good. It may implement other encryption as well -- I'm not sure.
The point of a parody is that it resembles its target in some key fashion. There was nothing parodic in your summary of my position -- it was a heavy-handed lie. Learn the difference between parody and mere sarcasm, and do it quickly.
If you want to posit a systematic conspiracy against women everywhere but in our schools, that's your privilege. It is up to the intelligent reader to decide which environment is likelier to be bias-prone -- the world of the standardized test, the great wide world of events, or the cloistered, female-dominated world of school. While you're at it, you can hypothesize about black helicopters and New World Orders. Thinking adults are unlikely to join you in your fantasies.
I find it amusing that you seek to compare the status of blacks with the status of women. As Warren Farrell points out in The Myth of Male Power, it is men who die early, get less education, and work in dangerous jobs, not women. If we are to make a racial analogy based on the facts, you are very likely to lose.
You claim that your workplace conspiracy against women is "amply documented", but tellingly you fail to include such documentation. Perhaps you hope to rely on popular misapprehensions -- what "everyone knows". I think you should make an effort to educate yourself about the myth of the glass ceiling, the myth of the wage gap, and other lies you've been told -- and been telling.
Your translation is a crude attempt to lie about what I said. Read for meaning or get lost.
You simultaneously slam me for not going along with the claim that women are at a disadvantage in education (while declining to say why I should believe you) and ignore the fact that men are provably at such a disadvantage (and if you're ignorant of that, take a look at the anti-male sex disparity in college enrollment). Your objections are self-contradictory if you're not a sexist, and at variance with the facts either way.
If you can show where I said women were stupid...well, who am I kidding? If you could show it, you could quote it. In fact, I explicitly mentioned that women are making technical contributions. They're not sitting around whining about how tough they have it -- they're out there being tough. Go and do thou likewise.
Many women are making such useful content. Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't do either become sexist bigots, like the feminists whose works are cited in the article.
I suspect that the reason women do better in academia while men do better at standardized tests and in real-world jobs is that it's easier to rig the academic system to favor a preferred sex. We can dole out special favors to girls on report cards, but businesses can't afford to do that and objective tests can't practice such discrimination.
The point of the great majority of feminist activism is that rights are for women, responsibilities are for men. Then they complain when more men take on responsibilities in the computing industry.
As an employee of one of citifi.com's impending competitors, I should probably be happy that you are giving this advice. Our services don't require the use of a particular browser, and we try not to make browser-specific decisions in our designs and implementations.
However, I cannot resist pointing out that you are full of shit. There may be people who want to use citifi.com's services, for whatever reason, and they have every right to give CitiBank an opportunity to explain themselves before going to someone else. Since when is polite protest not legitimate? If you are too passive to do anything about a problem, that is your problem; keep it to yourself. The rest of us reserve the right to try and improve things.
-newbies is a discussion group for people new to FreeBSD, it's not intended for technical questions. Likewise, -questions is for technical questions, and not for discussions by new people. You WILL see a lot of "RTFM" on that list, and deservedly so...
So where do newbies go when they have technical questions?
Clearly, Time meant to give the nod to Larry Wall, without whose efforts Amazon would still be working on their first C++ prototype. Not that Amazon has given a thing back to the Perl community...
I have informed them of their accidental error; I'm sure they'll correct it shortly.:)
If we are outraged over things like this, what assumptions are we making?
That everyone has the same God-given rights? If so, then God has been regrettably selective in granting them; very few people worldwide have strong civil liberties. The truth is that the only rights you have are the ones you're willing to fight for. Everything else is a privilege, to be taken away at the convenience of the grantor.
That a basic assumption of the British system of government is the value of the individual? If you think that's true, look up the difference between the definitions of "citizen" and "subject". I'm not claiming that the current American government makes such an assumption, but it was sufficiently emphasized in the founding principles of our nation that even the most repressive agencies and politicians are occasionally inconvenienced by it, despite our current unwillingness to fight for our rights (see first point). We may not appreciate what they're doing, but we must concede its consistency with their founding assumptions.
That the British system is sufficiently similar to America's that American standards apply? I'm sorry, but this is Britain -- the same country that places absurd bans on pornography, firearms, and books which express opinions unpopular to the government. There is some historical connection between the two countries, but that doesn't mean much.
Bottom line: Until the British make the same decision as the early Americans that they are no longer willing to be subjects, it's pointless to argue on their behalf.
I'm surprised this is even an issue. Linux isn't NetBSD, with tight oversight and cathedral-like concentration on purity. Thisis Linux -- people are supposed to be able to contribute freely.
This isn't to say that all submitted diffs should be merged immediately, but why give up one of Linux's great strengths -- the ease of contribution.
This is mostly false. No matter how many jagoffs commit a solecism, it's still recognized as a solecism by people who actually know something about the language.
I just wanted to post before someone else bitched about it.
This isn't substantially different from a "First Post!" type of ambition.
This reminds me of the Slashdot thread about a programmer's code of ethics. I remarked at the time that such a code wouldn't mean much, since the programmers rarely run the company -- it's the managers who need to sign on to such a code. We can either persuade them by sweet reason (ha!) or we can organize.
The union label used to be a quality guarantee; we can make it so again. Unless we organize, we won't have the necessary leverage to push through massive quality changes.
I know programmers don't generally care to form unions, but what choice do we have, if we want better software?
What is it with people insisting that there be only one window manager for Linux? I can understand the need for a default window manager for a given distribution, and most distributions support this (maybe tomsrtbt doesn't;), but why must all distros pick the same thing, or disallow the use of alternate WM's at the user's request.
Explain this to me, please! If you're just asserting this because Windows and MacOS mandate the use of a particular window manager, then that's fine -- it's just a failure of imagination on your part. If you have a real reason for saying this, however, let's hear it.
I work at an Internet banking company with a technically strong and extremely clueful development team. We use open source software in as many roles as possible, and mandate its use in any security-critical role unless no suitable open source product is available.
The reason's not hard to guess: We must assure ourselves that anything we use, we can examine from source to determine security risks. We've been known to submit bugfixes to Perl, NetBSD, etc.
To hell with crackpot theories of avoiding liability -- we're trying to avoid getting hacked in the first place.
Garfinkel discussed several issues in his article. On the niggling technical points he's correct, or at least not provably incorrect. Some things are simply a matter of taste.
However, he failed to mention at least two Big Things in his article, even though he was touching on the periphery of one of them.
Garfinkel characterizes the difference between the philosophies of *BSD and Linux as one of "correctness". The snottiness of this distinction aside, he's not quite accurate. The distinction is between old-fashioned release engineering as represented by *BSD, and a strange model of free contribution used by the GNU project and, more recently, Linux. While BSD's release engineering might make some system architects happier, it's not necessarily better, any more than tight government control of the economy is necessarily going to result in a stronger economy. The free-software approach may have flaws, but Garfinkel can't plausibly state which approach is more "correct".
The other, bigger problem he entirely avoids: The general suckiness of Un*x. I firmly believe that Un*x is the best thing going, but IT STILL SUCKS. There is no system-wide abstraction, and a lot less conformance to standards than most people think. NeXT was an interesting attempt to remove some of the suckiness from Un*x, and it may yet prevail under Apple's aegis, but I'll be more impressed when I see it win.
Given that there is no really good OS out there, dwelling on the differences between two fairly similar flavors of Un*x seems stupid and pointless. Let's work instead on making something that doesn't suck so much. That might derive from BSD (as Mac OS X does), or from Linux, or from any other damn thing -- it really doesn't matter that much. Just make sure it doesn't suck!
Aristoi is a fine book, and contains a much better treatment of cyberspace, biological engineering and nanotechnology than many other science fiction novels.
(There -- now the relevance to Slashdot and to this thread is re-established.;)
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Linux and the PC Assumption
on
Linux Lite?
·
· Score: 1
The trouble with the LinuxLite suggestion is that it violates the architectural intent of Un*x, which is meant to be a networking, multi-user OS and is designed on those assumptions.
People have already noted all of the problems with lacking a root password, etc. These are reflective of an underlying problem -- we are asking Un*x to do something it was never designed to do. Microsoft tried to take a 16-bit, single-user, single-tasking system and make it into a 32-bit, multi-user, multi-tasking OS -- and wasn't the result just grand?
If you want a solid, nice-looking, single-user OS with GNU tools and good security, try MacOS or BeOS. I run Linux by preference, but I use Be and recommend it to inexperienced users who won't abandon their old x86 hardware:). Each system has its place.
I have long opined that citizens of the industrialized nations spend too much time complaining about trivial problems, since most of their big ones are solved, or nearly so. My proposed remedy was an infestation of Giant Flying Tigers (TM). That would get us focused on the things that really matter.
"You want to impose gun control? Screw that, gella. I need my gun for protection against Giant Flying Tigers(TM)!"
"I don't care if he sexually harassed you, Jim. The fact is, he's a fine hand in a pinch. Remember what he did when Giant Flying Tigers (TM) took over the building?"
"Leave the abortion clinic alone, Elsie. The news says there's a swarm of Giant Flying Tigers (TM) headed our way. First things first, dammit!"
But these aren't real tigers, and they don't fly, and they don't plan to release them in our cities. So what's the use?
RPG's are no longer a large portion of the gaming market. Even AD&D is slim pickings compared to WotC's card games.
It's a sign of the graying of the hobby. This happened to the wargamers and it's happening to us. While this has probably improved the quality of the average campaign (no more eighth-graders grabbing loot and inventing the Helm of Many Fists to wear all of their rings:), it's going to hurt the industry. I think it'll return to the hands of the small companies and the hobbyists within a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
My goodness, what about xfm? It predates KDE and GNOME -- it probably predates TK, for cryin' out loud. It wasn't pretty, but it never required one to type a filename.
And th ere are quite a few more. (Sorry to insist on the cached copy, but the original site is a trifle slow to respond from my location.)
The references article is not the worst piece of Linux journalism I have seen, but it's not very impressive either. A little research would have made it a much better article...but a much less effective piece of hype.
--
If we want to encourage Microsoft to behave as well as the Linux community does and acknowledge its bugs, we can't jump on bug totals like this. Yes, I know Microsoft did not intentionally release the figure, but it's not going to encourage them to do so in future if we treat any such admission as some sort of weakness.
Besides, what does it mean to have 28,000 known serious bugs? How many does BSD have? How about Linux?
If we don't want Microsoft to behave better but would rather that they die in poverty and are eaten by dogs, then that's fine...but let's be clear on our goals.
--
Some of the responses on this thread have disparaged the book under review as meandering and unfocused. They may be right. I don't know. The problem is that the review was itself so meandering and unfocused that I didn't feel the slightest inclination to look into the book.
What, exactly, does the author of the book do? Miss Erin makes a tantalizing reference to stimulating "communications revolutions", but what, if anything, does that mean? If the book is autobiographical, and I gather that it is, then what is so fascinating about the author's life and pursuits that should compel me to look into it?
The trouble is that the reviewer does not appear to have the slightest idea how to review a book. She has forgotten that the readers of the review have not all read the book, and she produces a rather aimless summary that practically requires us to have read the thing in the first place in order to understand a word of it.
If Slashdot is going to publish reviews, let it at least publish good ones.
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Joey Skaggs already did this even better, fellas.
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Heimdal is very good. It would, of course, have been illegal for the MIT Kerberos team to have given them any source, but there's nothing wrong with seeing whether two packages will talk to one another...and the folks at MIT spent considerable time doing such testing with the Heimdal team.
Incidentally, don't bother with single-DES Kerberos; it can be cracked in real time. 3DES is good. It may implement other encryption as well -- I'm not sure.
--
The point of a parody is that it resembles its target in some key fashion. There was nothing parodic in your summary of my position -- it was a heavy-handed lie. Learn the difference between parody and mere sarcasm, and do it quickly.
If you want to posit a systematic conspiracy against women everywhere but in our schools, that's your privilege. It is up to the intelligent reader to decide which environment is likelier to be bias-prone -- the world of the standardized test, the great wide world of events, or the cloistered, female-dominated world of school. While you're at it, you can hypothesize about black helicopters and New World Orders. Thinking adults are unlikely to join you in your fantasies.
I find it amusing that you seek to compare the status of blacks with the status of women. As Warren Farrell points out in The Myth of Male Power, it is men who die early, get less education, and work in dangerous jobs, not women. If we are to make a racial analogy based on the facts, you are very likely to lose.
You claim that your workplace conspiracy against women is "amply documented", but tellingly you fail to include such documentation. Perhaps you hope to rely on popular misapprehensions -- what "everyone knows". I think you should make an effort to educate yourself about the myth of the glass ceiling, the myth of the wage gap, and other lies you've been told -- and been telling.
--
Your translation is a crude attempt to lie about what I said. Read for meaning or get lost.
You simultaneously slam me for not going along with the claim that women are at a disadvantage in education (while declining to say why I should believe you) and ignore the fact that men are provably at such a disadvantage (and if you're ignorant of that, take a look at the anti-male sex disparity in college enrollment). Your objections are self-contradictory if you're not a sexist, and at variance with the facts either way.
If you can show where I said women were stupid...well, who am I kidding? If you could show it, you could quote it. In fact, I explicitly mentioned that women are making technical contributions. They're not sitting around whining about how tough they have it -- they're out there being tough. Go and do thou likewise.
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Many women are making such useful content. Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't do either become sexist bigots, like the feminists whose works are cited in the article.
I suspect that the reason women do better in academia while men do better at standardized tests and in real-world jobs is that it's easier to rig the academic system to favor a preferred sex. We can dole out special favors to girls on report cards, but businesses can't afford to do that and objective tests can't practice such discrimination.
The point of the great majority of feminist activism is that rights are for women, responsibilities are for men. Then they complain when more men take on responsibilities in the computing industry.
To hell with the sexists.
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I wrote with imprecision. I should have said that there is no feature they are offering which justifies the restriction on non-Windows access.
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As an employee of one of citifi.com's impending competitors, I should probably be happy that you are giving this advice. Our services don't require the use of a particular browser, and we try not to make browser-specific decisions in our designs and implementations.
However, I cannot resist pointing out that you are full of shit. There may be people who want to use citifi.com's services, for whatever reason, and they have every right to give CitiBank an opportunity to explain themselves before going to someone else. Since when is polite protest not legitimate? If you are too passive to do anything about a problem, that is your problem; keep it to yourself. The rest of us reserve the right to try and improve things.
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Rubbish. There's nothing they're doing that requires Windows specificity.
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So where do newbies go when they have technical questions?
It does happen, you know.
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Clearly, Time meant to give the nod to Larry Wall, without whose efforts Amazon would still be working on their first C++ prototype. Not that Amazon has given a thing back to the Perl community...
I have informed them of their accidental error; I'm sure they'll correct it shortly. :)
--
If we are outraged over things like this, what assumptions are we making?
Bottom line: Until the British make the same decision as the early Americans that they are no longer willing to be subjects, it's pointless to argue on their behalf.
--
I'm surprised this is even an issue. Linux isn't NetBSD, with tight oversight and cathedral-like concentration on purity. Thisis Linux -- people are supposed to be able to contribute freely.
This isn't to say that all submitted diffs should be merged immediately, but why give up one of Linux's great strengths -- the ease of contribution.
--
This is mostly false. No matter how many jagoffs commit a solecism, it's still recognized as a solecism by people who actually know something about the language.
This isn't substantially different from a "First Post!" type of ambition.
--
This reminds me of the Slashdot thread about a programmer's code of ethics. I remarked at the time that such a code wouldn't mean much, since the programmers rarely run the company -- it's the managers who need to sign on to such a code. We can either persuade them by sweet reason (ha!) or we can organize.
The union label used to be a quality guarantee; we can make it so again. Unless we organize, we won't have the necessary leverage to push through massive quality changes.
I know programmers don't generally care to form unions, but what choice do we have, if we want better software?
--
What is it with people insisting that there be only one window manager for Linux? I can understand the need for a default window manager for a given distribution, and most distributions support this (maybe tomsrtbt doesn't ;), but why must all distros pick the same thing, or disallow the use of alternate WM's at the user's request.
Explain this to me, please! If you're just asserting this because Windows and MacOS mandate the use of a particular window manager, then that's fine -- it's just a failure of imagination on your part. If you have a real reason for saying this, however, let's hear it.
--
I work at an Internet banking company with a technically strong and extremely clueful development team. We use open source software in as many roles as possible, and mandate its use in any security-critical role unless no suitable open source product is available.
The reason's not hard to guess: We must assure ourselves that anything we use, we can examine from source to determine security risks. We've been known to submit bugfixes to Perl, NetBSD, etc.
To hell with crackpot theories of avoiding liability -- we're trying to avoid getting hacked in the first place.
--
Garfinkel discussed several issues in his article. On the niggling technical points he's correct, or at least not provably incorrect. Some things are simply a matter of taste.
However, he failed to mention at least two Big Things in his article, even though he was touching on the periphery of one of them.
Garfinkel characterizes the difference between the philosophies of *BSD and Linux as one of "correctness". The snottiness of this distinction aside, he's not quite accurate. The distinction is between old-fashioned release engineering as represented by *BSD, and a strange model of free contribution used by the GNU project and, more recently, Linux. While BSD's release engineering might make some system architects happier, it's not necessarily better, any more than tight government control of the economy is necessarily going to result in a stronger economy. The free-software approach may have flaws, but Garfinkel can't plausibly state which approach is more "correct".
The other, bigger problem he entirely avoids: The general suckiness of Un*x. I firmly believe that Un*x is the best thing going, but IT STILL SUCKS. There is no system-wide abstraction, and a lot less conformance to standards than most people think. NeXT was an interesting attempt to remove some of the suckiness from Un*x, and it may yet prevail under Apple's aegis, but I'll be more impressed when I see it win.
Given that there is no really good OS out there, dwelling on the differences between two fairly similar flavors of Un*x seems stupid and pointless. Let's work instead on making something that doesn't suck so much. That might derive from BSD (as Mac OS X does), or from Linux, or from any other damn thing -- it really doesn't matter that much. Just make sure it doesn't suck!
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Points to you, anonymous sir. Yes, it is.
Aristoi is a fine book, and contains a much better treatment of cyberspace, biological engineering and nanotechnology than many other science fiction novels.
(There -- now the relevance to Slashdot and to this thread is re-established. ;)
--
The trouble with the LinuxLite suggestion is that it violates the architectural intent of Un*x, which is meant to be a networking, multi-user OS and is designed on those assumptions.
People have already noted all of the problems with lacking a root password, etc. These are reflective of an underlying problem -- we are asking Un*x to do something it was never designed to do. Microsoft tried to take a 16-bit, single-user, single-tasking system and make it into a 32-bit, multi-user, multi-tasking OS -- and wasn't the result just grand?
If you want a solid, nice-looking, single-user OS with GNU tools and good security, try MacOS or BeOS. I run Linux by preference, but I use Be and recommend it to inexperienced users who won't abandon their old x86 hardware :). Each system has its place.
--
I have long opined that citizens of the industrialized nations spend too much time complaining about trivial problems, since most of their big ones are solved, or nearly so. My proposed remedy was an infestation of Giant Flying Tigers (TM). That would get us focused on the things that really matter.
"You want to impose gun control? Screw that, gella. I need my gun for protection against Giant Flying Tigers(TM)!"
"I don't care if he sexually harassed you, Jim. The fact is, he's a fine hand in a pinch. Remember what he did when Giant Flying Tigers (TM) took over the building?"
"Leave the abortion clinic alone, Elsie. The news says there's a swarm of Giant Flying Tigers (TM) headed our way. First things first, dammit!"
But these aren't real tigers, and they don't fly, and they don't plan to release them in our cities. So what's the use?
--
Where's General Jack D. Ripper when you need him?
Let's protect our precious bodily fluids on December 31. There's nothing like revenge long after the fight is over!
Are you with me, Slashdotters!
--
RPG's are no longer a large portion of the gaming market. Even AD&D is slim pickings compared to WotC's card games.
It's a sign of the graying of the hobby. This happened to the wargamers and it's happening to us. While this has probably improved the quality of the average campaign (no more eighth-graders grabbing loot and inventing the Helm of Many Fists to wear all of their rings :), it's going to hurt the industry. I think it'll return to the hands of the small companies and the hobbyists within a decade.
--