from what i've heard english is considered by many to be the hardest to learn as a foreign language
Teehee...
Hardest? Whatever. Of all the languages I've had to learn English is the simplest. Go try French and come back to tell me the results of your efforts. Pay particular attention to the overcomplicated-for-no-reason-at-all conjugation system, and the myriad of agreements all over the fscking place, and don't forget to take into account those dear exceptions. For the record neither of those two is my native tongue. People who think English is hard should go have a whirl around the world's languages. Their minds will likely be warped beyond repair, those poor fucks...
Alan Cox posted this link to LKML a few months ago. It contains the early LKML posts, dating back to 1993. This prompted a post from tytso, who gave out this link to even earlier posts.
Stow's, er, nift is indeed great, but it doesn't provide you with the other benefits of a good package management system. Things like what rpm -qi package_name would provide and other niceties like dependency checking, querying of the package database to know what programs provide a certain capability or what capability a certain program provides, package-integrity verification, easy package relocation, what packages a certain package might be dependant on, and such.
But it's also true, I think, that these package management systems are more complex and thus more failure prone than compiling from source. But it's great when they do work.
Microsoft's "secure" PPTP protocol is inherently insecure, and hence no implementation of it can be secure.
Daaaaah. Trying to match MS at FUD or what?
The protocol itself is okay, according to people who have a much better understanding of security matters than me (like Bruce Schneier). It's just that Microsoft's implementation of PPTP is brain-damaged. To quote from Counterpane's FAQ about the matter(emphasis mine):
1. What did Bruce Schneier and Mudge actually do? They found security flaws in Microsoft PPTP that allow attacks to sniff passwords across the network, break the encryption scheme and read confidential data, and mount denial of service attacks against PPTP servers. They did not find flaws in PPTP, only in Microsoft's implementation of it.
Look at the composition of the "KDE Free Qt Foundation": two Troll Tech employees and "two members of the KDE project". Even if the "two members of the KDE project" were completely independent, that would at best produce a tie.
Go read the KDE Free Qt Foundation document. It explicitly states that in case of a tie one of the KDE representatives will have a double vote.
I do not feel competent to comment on the rest of your post because I don't know enough of these matters. Your above inaccurate statement does not reassure me as to the validity or truthfulness of the rest of your post. I hope you'll follow my example in the future if faced with the same situation.
But what about the opposite, if it was Qt which was "left in the dark" instead of GTK? Many people/developers don't like the GPL.
GTK+ is under the LGPL,not the GPL, which basically means that you can't run off with it and make a proprietary version, or extend and distribute the library itself while keeping the source closed. In no way does it harm your ability to release closed-source apps based on GTK+.
Let's say I install something, like LessTif. The LessTif rpm doesn't modify my ld.so.conf so I have to put the path to libXm in there myself. Where did the RPM put it? Can't use locate because I haven't yet run updatedb.
For this particular case, it's better to query the RPM database or the RPM package itself to find out, because find will take far longer. Do "rpm -ql lesstif" and get a listing of all files that were installed. Pipe through "grep -i libxm" to find out the exact path.
but it says nothing about the source YOU generate.
Says nothing? How's that? By "generate", I assume that you mean the source code that you've produced out of your own creativity. But my reading of this is that "programs" comprises both source code and compiled binary, and their license only allows you to redistribute the binary portion of the program. Notice the following:
You may reproduce and distribute, in executable form only, programs which you create using the Software
This shows that they consider a program to have more than one form, and they've limited redistribution rights to the binary portion of the program.
The term "Free Software" is also inappropriate. It makes people think of freeware, not GPL, freedom, or "free as in speech". Both terms are inadequate, but IMHO "Open Source" is less so.
2. tcsh 'autolist' functionality: possibilities are listed after an ambiguous completion on tab (bash requires two tab's), eg: % ls/usr/l[tab] lib/ libexec/ local/
This can be set via readline. In/etc/inputrc or ~/.inputrc, put "set show-all-if-ambiguous on". This'll cause bash (which uses readline) to list all possibilities after a single tab. Check the readline man page for other nifty stuff, including the reverse-search-history (default Control-R)
>what if your system's borked and you can only > boot it with a rescue disk?
Bootable disks are getting larger. Sooner or later, the venerable 1.44 Mb floppy is going to be bumped off into computing history, and larger capacity disks will become truly standard. Even today, there are 250Mb Zip disks and floppy-compatible 120 Mb Superdisks. I assume you can boot off these. 120 Mb should be enough to fit everything one needs for an X-based sytem.
'Make oldconfig' will reuse your previous.config file, only asking questions for new options, so you don't have to re-enter the same stuff again. Never heard of that one? I'm surprised.
'Make xconfig' (X-based proggy) has the option of importing any.config file you may have. I assume 'make menuconfig' (ncurses-based) has the same option.
If you really want to edit text files by hand so much, edit your.config and do a 'make dep' straight away, no need for doing 'make {x,old,menu}config' beforehand. Where do you get the docs to be able to edit.config? You've got the source to the whole damn thing, so read it. Don't stare at me like that, you wanted it the hard way:)
Since you're using a 386 for a dedicated purpose, you shouldn't have any need for the newer features, so 'make oldconfig' should suit you fine.
I have recompiled the FreeBSD kernel once, and for a first time user, it's definitely much harder than the equivalent process under Linux. No question about that. Under Linux, you can do it any way you like, from mega-macho-text-file-fundamentalist to super-point-n-click-weenie. Under FreeBSD you simply don't.
>While this may seem insignificant and dismissed >as simple syntax shuffling, it becomes profound >when you realize that we all think in language
I don't agree. I've observed my thinking process and I've come to believe that language is sort of like an API that maps imperfectly over the capabilities of the brain. It's not possible for me to express _all_ thoughts that go through my brain in a conventional, spoken language. To do that, I'd have to invent my own language and terminology. I would think that it's true of all human beings, even if it never comes to their attention.
More evidence : I am trilingual, and when thinking I usually borrow both words and structure from all the languages that I know and mix them all freely, together with 'unspoken' thoughts, with the result that if I thought out loud, it would make little sense to anybody else. In addition, I'm not as fluent in speech as I would like. So recently I've taken to thinking in only one language at a time (plus the unspoken mental 'language', no way to get rid of that one), because that's the way we usually speak in society. The result is that I'm slower at thinking out stuff, but I gain some fluency in the process.
Then again, the fact that I started studying the non-native languages (French and English) at an early age might account for all of the above.
Hmmm. Quicktime begam life around 90/91 purely as an audiovisual format, AFAICR. Later on, Apple bolted on VR.
As for QuickDraw, the only thing it has in common with Quicktime are the first five letters. It was around way before Quicktime, and concerns itself only with 2-dimensional representation. QuickDraw 3D came into being much later, around 1995/6, IIRC.
Quicktime is definitely not "a complete multimedia architecture". You are confusing two separate technologies built into the MacOS (QuickDraw and Quicktime).
Quicktime can hardly be called the inspiration behind the idea of DirectX. DirectX was conceived as a way to bring games to the Win 95 platform. Microsoft wanted to move everybody over to their wonderful, revolutionary, 32 bit, multitasking, mutithreaded, stable, wah, wah, wah new OS. They had to get rid of Win 3.1 and especially DOS, still the favorite of gamers (and an absolute bitch to program for, what with the individual support that had to be built for each peripheral, from joysticks to sound and video cards). DirectX was nothing short of a necessity for Microsoft. A standard set of APIs to adress in one go the whole PC spectrum? It was a PC game programmer's dream come true. Now, how good a game programming API DirextX is, that's another matter altogether.
In addition to that, remember Apple's 'Game Sprockets' set of APIs (How did they manage to come up with such a name?). They came on the scene (or were announced) about a year later than DirectX , were supposed to be cross-platform (Windows versions were also planned, presumably to encourage the use of said APIs and the release of more games for Macs). BTW, Quickdraw 3D was the 3D API for the Game Sprockets. I would say that Apple got the idea for Game Sprockets from DirectX, rather than M$ being inspired by that "complete multimedia architecture" called Quicktime.
Personally, as far as ZDNet selling out to Microsoft, I think if it's being done (and I am of the opinion that it _is_ being done), it's not a company-wide policy, but rather a few so-called journalists doing whatever the Redmond PR department tells them to. I've seen some positive press for Linux from some people at ZDNet, notably the SmartReseller bunch. Generalising to such an extent is, I think, not fair towards them. It's the same as calling everybody who posts on Slashdot brainless flamers because some of the people who visit Slashdot like to indulge in this.
Regarding Dvorak, nobody should take notice of the man. He isn't worth it. He is only useful to ZDNet because of the controversy he's always stirring up. More controversy equals more page served equals more banner ads equals more dollars. That's probably the sole reasoning behind his columns. The trouble is this drains away all credibility one might have really really fast. If talking crap could kill, Dvorak would have been buried long, long ago.
>When the linux market matures, you'll see the >same sort of bs coming from Red Hat and SUSE as >they fight over a saturated user base. It's just >business as usual.
I really doubt we'll ever see long-standing Linux companies like Red Hat and Suse spreading any kind of FUD about each other. FUD tactics are not well looked upon by the open source community. These companies have been around long enough to know that these tactics will very likely backfire big time. Furthermore, Linux companies are populated with free-software hackers who very much dislike any sort of FUD. The danger probably comes from marketroids still saddled with traditional marketing mindset. Linux companies had better make sure that their marketing people are aware of the specifities of the open source market. Or better yet, try to hire honest marketing people, which I'll admit is as close to impossible as possible.:)
It was in Mauritius. Never heard of it eh? It's in the Indian Ocean, and if you want to locate it on a map, get hold of a magnifier, it's so damn tiny.I quit school less than four years ago.
Ah, another thing. Find out what Mark Twain (allegedly) said about Mauritius: it might explain a lot of things.
Nope. It wasn't in the UK. Although born in the UK, I lived nearly all my life in Mauritius, tiny tropical island in the Indian Ocean.
Incidentally, I'm currently studying at a university in Britain, and I can tell you it's not a place I would like to spend my whole life in. Discounting the dreadful weather (compared to sunny Mauritius) and awful stacked-aginst-one-another houses (in London), it's the whole rotten culture that gets to me. The media is (in general) invasive, hard-nosed, downright unethical in some cases, and worst of all, omnipresent. You can't escape it. They basically promote a mentality of agression and intolerance, especially between men and women. This is especially obvious in the adverts. From what I've seen and heard, all tends to indicate that it's much worse in the States.
Well, I'm surprised to hear that high school (around here:secondary education), appears to be _such_ a torture for so many people in the US. I enjoyed high school, and it's the same for the vast majority of people I know. The targeted and persistent physical abuse that many students seem to be victim of is pretty much absent in this country. I was wondering why it's like this in America. My guess is it's due to movies, TV, and -generally everything fiction- making violence and what is normally considered bad behaviour appear acceptable and even desirable. Yes?
So which Unix has the fastest TCP/IP stack? I too have read at various places that the Linux TCP/IP stack is the fastest monoprocessor implementation (among Unices, presumably). Whether this still holds true (or has ever held true), I don't have the foggiest. Anyway, why are you screaming so much about something while providing no concrete information. Anything you are afraid of? Eh?
>Their NT workstations are nice, but they aren't >anything you couldn't build with the proper >knowledge in hardware, and a good cheap supplier
Yeah, yeah, just try to build me a graphics subsystem with 3.2 Gb/sec bandwidth throughout. 512 MB/s is as good as you'll get currently (1 GB/s soon with AGP 4X).
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from what i've heard english is considered by many to be the hardest to learn as a foreign language
Teehee... Hardest? Whatever. Of all the languages I've had to learn English is the simplest. Go try French and come back to tell me the results of your efforts. Pay particular attention to the overcomplicated-for-no-reason-at-all conjugation system, and the myriad of agreements all over the fscking place, and don't forget to take into account those dear exceptions. For the record neither of those two is my native tongue. People who think English is hard should go have a whirl around the world's languages. Their minds will likely be warped beyond repair, those poor fucks...
Might not be what you're looking for, however...
Alan Cox posted this link to LKML a few months ago. It contains the early LKML posts, dating back to 1993. This prompted a post from tytso, who gave out this link to even earlier posts.
Stow's, er, nift is indeed great, but it doesn't provide you with the other benefits of a good package management system. Things like what rpm -qi package_name would provide and other niceties like dependency checking, querying of the package database to know what programs provide a certain capability or what capability a certain program provides, package-integrity verification, easy package relocation, what packages a certain package might be dependant on, and such.
But it's also true, I think, that these package management systems are more complex and thus more failure prone than compiling from source. But it's great when they do work.
- Microsoft's "secure" PPTP protocol is inherently insecure, and hence no implementation of it can be secure.
Daaaaah. Trying to match MS at FUD or what?The protocol itself is okay, according to people who have a much better understanding of security matters than me (like Bruce Schneier). It's just that Microsoft's implementation of PPTP is brain-damaged. To quote from Counterpane's FAQ about the matter(emphasis mine):
- 1. What did Bruce Schneier and Mudge actually do? They found security flaws in Microsoft PPTP that allow attacks to sniff passwords across the network, break the encryption scheme and read confidential data, and mount denial of service attacks against PPTP servers. They did not find flaws in PPTP, only in Microsoft's implementation of it.
Read the whole thing hereLook at the composition of the "KDE Free Qt Foundation": two Troll Tech employees and "two members of the KDE project". Even if the "two members of the KDE project" were completely independent, that would at best produce a tie.
Go read the KDE Free Qt Foundation document. It explicitly states that in case of a tie one of the KDE representatives will have a double vote.
I do not feel competent to comment on the rest of your post because I don't know enough of these matters. Your above inaccurate statement does not reassure me as to the validity or truthfulness of the rest of your post. I hope you'll follow my example in the future if faced with the same situation.
But what about the opposite, if it was Qt which was "left in the dark" instead of GTK? Many people/developers don't like the GPL.
, not the GPL, which basically means that you can't run off with it and make a proprietary version, or extend and distribute the library itself while keeping the source closed. In no way does it harm your ability to release closed-source apps based on GTK+.
GTK+ is under the LGPL
Let's say I install something, like LessTif. The LessTif rpm doesn't modify my ld.so.conf so I have to put the path to libXm in there myself. Where did the RPM put it? Can't use locate because I haven't yet run updatedb.
For this particular case, it's better to query the RPM database or the RPM package itself to find out, because find will take far longer. Do "rpm -ql lesstif" and get a listing of all files that were installed. Pipe through "grep -i libxm" to find out the exact path.
but it says nothing about the source YOU generate.
Says nothing? How's that? By "generate", I assume that you mean the source code that you've produced out of your own creativity. But my reading of this is that "programs" comprises both source code and compiled binary, and their license only allows you to redistribute the binary portion of the program. Notice the following:
You may reproduce and distribute, in executable form only, programs which you create using the Software
This shows that they consider a program to have more than one form, and they've limited redistribution rights to the binary portion of the program.
The term "Free Software" is also inappropriate. It makes people think of freeware, not GPL, freedom, or "free as in speech". Both terms are inadequate, but IMHO "Open Source" is less so.
>what if your system's borked and you can only
> boot it with a rescue disk?
Bootable disks are getting larger. Sooner or later, the venerable 1.44 Mb floppy is going to be bumped off into computing history, and larger capacity disks will become truly standard. Even today, there are 250Mb Zip disks and floppy-compatible 120 Mb Superdisks. I assume you can boot off these. 120 Mb should be enough to fit everything one needs for an X-based sytem.
Another option is to burn a rescue CD.
'Make oldconfig' will reuse your previous .config file, only asking questions for new options, so you don't have to re-enter the same stuff again. Never heard of that one? I'm surprised.
.config file you may have. I assume 'make menuconfig' (ncurses-based) has the same option.
.config and do a 'make dep' straight away, no need for doing 'make {x,old,menu}config' beforehand. Where do you get the docs to be able to edit .config? You've got the source to the whole damn thing, so read it. Don't stare at me like that, you wanted it the hard way :)
'Make xconfig' (X-based proggy) has the option of importing any
If you really want to edit text files by hand so much, edit your
Since you're using a 386 for a dedicated purpose, you shouldn't have any need for the newer features, so 'make oldconfig' should suit you fine.
I have recompiled the FreeBSD kernel once, and for a first time user, it's definitely much harder than the equivalent process under Linux. No question about that. Under Linux, you can do it any way you like, from mega-macho-text-file-fundamentalist to super-point-n-click-weenie. Under FreeBSD you simply don't.
>While this may seem insignificant and dismissed
>as simple syntax shuffling, it becomes profound
>when you realize that we all think in language
I don't agree. I've observed my thinking process and I've come to believe that language is sort of like an API that maps imperfectly over the capabilities of the brain. It's not possible for me to express _all_ thoughts that go through my brain in a conventional, spoken language. To do that, I'd have to invent my own language and terminology. I would think that it's true of all human beings, even if it never comes to their attention.
More evidence : I am trilingual, and when thinking I usually borrow both words and structure from all the languages that I know and mix them all freely, together with 'unspoken' thoughts, with the result that if I thought out loud, it would make little sense to anybody else. In addition, I'm not as fluent in speech as I would like. So recently I've taken to thinking in only one language at a time (plus the unspoken mental 'language', no way to get rid of that one), because that's the way we usually speak in society. The result is that I'm slower at thinking out stuff, but I gain some fluency in the process.
Then again, the fact that I started studying the non-native languages (French and English) at an early age might account for all of the above.
>NeoMagic: completely closed, installed on all our
> laptops, a thorn in our side.
Neomagic are not closed. See this (It's a press release by Redhat about the opensourcing of an XFree driver for Neomagic chips)
Hmmm. Quicktime begam life around 90/91 purely as an audiovisual format, AFAICR. Later on, Apple bolted on VR.
As for QuickDraw, the only thing it has in common with Quicktime are the first five letters. It was around way before Quicktime, and concerns itself only with 2-dimensional representation. QuickDraw 3D came into being much later, around 1995/6, IIRC.
Quicktime is definitely not "a complete multimedia architecture". You are confusing two separate technologies built into the MacOS (QuickDraw and Quicktime).
Quicktime can hardly be called the inspiration behind the idea of DirectX. DirectX was conceived as a way to bring games to the Win 95 platform. Microsoft wanted to move everybody over to their wonderful, revolutionary, 32 bit, multitasking, mutithreaded, stable, wah, wah, wah new OS. They had to get rid of Win 3.1 and especially DOS, still the favorite of gamers (and an absolute bitch to program for, what with the individual support that had to be built for each peripheral, from joysticks to sound and video cards). DirectX was nothing short of a necessity for Microsoft. A standard set of APIs to adress in one go the whole PC spectrum? It was a PC game programmer's dream come true. Now, how good a game programming API DirextX is, that's another matter altogether.
In addition to that, remember Apple's 'Game Sprockets' set of APIs (How did they manage to come up with such a name?). They came on the scene (or were announced) about a year later than DirectX , were supposed to be cross-platform (Windows versions were also planned, presumably to encourage the use of said APIs and the release of more games for Macs). BTW, Quickdraw 3D was the 3D API for the Game Sprockets. I would say that Apple got the idea for Game Sprockets from DirectX, rather than M$ being inspired by that "complete multimedia architecture" called Quicktime.
Personally, as far as ZDNet selling out to Microsoft, I think if it's being done (and I am of the opinion that it _is_ being done), it's not a company-wide policy, but rather a few so-called journalists doing whatever the Redmond PR department tells them to. I've seen some positive press for Linux from some people at ZDNet, notably the SmartReseller bunch. Generalising to such an extent is, I think, not fair towards them. It's the same as calling everybody who posts on Slashdot brainless flamers because some of the people who visit Slashdot like to indulge in this.
Regarding Dvorak, nobody should take notice of the man. He isn't worth it. He is only useful to ZDNet because of the controversy he's always stirring up. More controversy equals more page served equals more banner ads equals more dollars. That's probably the sole reasoning behind his columns. The trouble is this drains away all credibility one might have really really fast. If talking crap could kill, Dvorak would have been buried long, long ago.
>When the linux market matures, you'll see the
:)
>same sort of bs coming from Red Hat and SUSE as
>they fight over a saturated user base. It's just
>business as usual.
I really doubt we'll ever see long-standing Linux companies like Red Hat and Suse spreading any kind of FUD about each other. FUD tactics are not well looked upon by the open source community. These companies have been around long enough to know that these tactics will very likely backfire big time. Furthermore, Linux companies are populated with free-software hackers who very much dislike any sort of FUD. The danger probably comes from marketroids still saddled with traditional marketing mindset. Linux companies had better make sure that their marketing people are aware of the specifities of the open source market. Or better yet, try to hire honest marketing people, which I'll admit is as close to impossible as possible.
It was in Mauritius. Never heard of it eh? It's in the Indian Ocean, and if you want to locate it on a map, get hold of a magnifier, it's so damn tiny.I quit school less than four years ago.
Ah, another thing. Find out what Mark Twain (allegedly) said about Mauritius: it might explain a lot of things.
Nope. It wasn't in the UK. Although born in the UK, I lived nearly all my life in Mauritius, tiny tropical island in the Indian Ocean.
Incidentally, I'm currently studying at a university in Britain, and I can tell you it's not a place I would like to spend my whole life in. Discounting the dreadful weather (compared to sunny Mauritius) and awful stacked-aginst-one-another houses (in London), it's the whole rotten culture that gets to me. The media is (in general) invasive, hard-nosed, downright unethical in some cases, and worst of all, omnipresent. You can't escape it. They basically promote a mentality of agression and intolerance, especially between men and women. This is especially obvious in the adverts. From what I've seen and heard, all tends to indicate that it's much worse in the States.
Well, I'm surprised to hear that high school (around here :secondary education), appears to be _such_ a torture for so many people in the US. I enjoyed high school, and it's the same for the vast majority of people I know. The targeted and persistent physical abuse that many students seem to be victim of is pretty much absent in this country. I was wondering why it's like this in America. My guess is it's due to movies, TV, and -generally everything fiction- making violence and what is normally considered bad behaviour appear acceptable and even desirable. Yes?
So which Unix has the fastest TCP/IP stack? I too have read at various places that the Linux TCP/IP stack is the fastest monoprocessor implementation (among Unices, presumably). Whether this still holds true (or has ever held true), I don't have the foggiest. Anyway, why are you screaming so much about something while providing no concrete information. Anything you are afraid of? Eh?
All languages are weird. Fact.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/07/13/18502 26&cid=80
>Their NT workstations are nice, but they aren't >anything you couldn't build with the proper >knowledge in hardware, and a good cheap supplier
Yeah, yeah, just try to build me a graphics subsystem with 3.2 Gb/sec bandwidth throughout. 512 MB/s is as good as you'll get currently (1 GB/s soon with AGP 4X).