They don't have a public cvs just to be nice you know. They earn a lot of code-contribution from it. I guess they want the best of both worlds.
<sarcasm>
I'm sick of these bastards that make huge contributions to open source software and then don't want to pay hosting costs for thousands of kiddies to download source at install time!
This annoys me, not because it's not a reasonable thing to say, but because it's the ONLY thing people say when they see this idea.
Reasons it's not the only way to go:
SFA is essentially a military college. You're not dealing with high-schoolers
SFA is a military college where the students are going to be the smartest and most ambitious folks that the Federation has to offer.
Think Harry Potter + James Bond + Star Trek. You have the "wide eyed innocents arriving for thier first year" (Potter), all the tech gadgets they're getting access to for the first time (Bond) and the races and cultures of Star Trek. That's some fertile story-telling ground, certainly not on-par with 90210.
Who says the main characters HAVE to be the students?
Most of the obvious flaws with the idea go away if you set it long after the events we're familiar with (or before, perhaps between Enterprise and TOS, maybe just after Kirk graduates and before he's given the Enterprise, so the students/teachers have to deal with the aftermath of the TOS crew's exploits).
There's no rule that says there has to only be one campus... you could set it on a remote campus where students go to study the dynamics of the frontier.
The show doesn't have to focus on particularly noble motivations (e.g. Ender's Game)
A Star Trek: Star Fleet Academy show or movie is only a bad idea if it's done in an obvious or under-developed way. Put these kids through hell and show us that the instructors have a clue and demonstrate the sort of institution that could produce a James Kirk or Jean Luc Picard, and it will be fun and exciting.
What are you disagreeing with in my posting? Whatever it is, I'm pretty sure it's not something I actually wrote.
Straczynski has done a bunch of stuff, but I could name 20 people in the comics industry who have done more. Ellis has done more. Gaiman. Wolfman. Perez. Byrne. Moore. etc, etc, etc.
Having read the posting, I would not hold my breath for this. I did find some of the other comments interesting:
* He was asked to EP Enterprise, but turned it down * He is accepting an EP role on *something* * He's going to be in the UK for a while * It's not Dr. Who
Those last 3 are all of a set. My theory is that JMS doesn't get this excited about anything from the UK more than Prisoner and Blake's 7... if it's not something new, it just has to be one of those.
Personally, I just want more Supreme Power, Rising Stars and Amazing Spider Man out of him. Those have been amazingly good (though Spider Man slipped into a sort of slow patch for a bit in the middle). I don't need the big screen or tee-vee, in fact I think JMS does better in comics.
JMS once talked about his doing a trek series. It was back in the hieght of B5 and someone asked him what he would do if Paramount handed him a Trek series. He said something along the lines of (can't find it on Google Groups right now): I'd start by getting away from the federation. Kill off a few people so the fans know that this is not going to be the same-old and then start to tell some interesting stories.
It was funny because he said that before Voyager and Andromeda (which was originally a Trek series about the fall of the Federation as Rodenbury had pitched it) came out, and the good points of BOTH of those series were exactly that: getting away from the Federation and establishing their own stories. Woefully Voyager just entrenched itself in its own static mythos and Andromeda as plagued by execs that couldn't stand how dark it was.
Personally I don't see JMS being able to play ball with Paramount. I think he'd last 3-6 months tops before he blew up at them and walked. He's just not enough of a political animial (his detractors would say he's too much of one) to be able to put up with it.
they are shallow characters that could easily have been a midget and a butler
I think that summs up the problem with your viewpoint. You seem to think that a midget and a butler would not be interesting characters, but as I look back on the development of what started as an obvious nod to Laurel and Hardy, and have since become not just likable characters, but characters with enough depth to continue to be interesting 6 movies later... well, I don't care if they're a Bavarian sword-juggler and a bar-hopper. They're still good characters.
Watching 3P0 try to appear disinterested in human machinations and then demand that Chewbaca turn him around so he can see what's going on, for example. R2's plaintive whistle when Luke is lost (the single most emotion-packed whistle I've ever heard in a movie). And as you get to know them, you realize that the bickering between these two droids is much like the sorts of arguments that a married couple have after decades together... not bitter or cruel, just reflections of their personalities.
Man, if you didn't get a chance to enjoy these two characters, I really feel for you. They're some of the best character development in that series!
R2D2 and C3P0 are not shallow characters at all. They're the only characters in the movies that we get any real sense have feelings about the events surrounding them that go deeper than the waistline. R2, clearly in control of more events than he lets on, is constantly thinking ahead and taking giant causes on his shoulders in order to protect the ones he cares about. He evolves, but slightly, though the course of the chronology of the series. His actions in the first three movies, like Yoda's, show a certain age. No more flying around metal-shops, he's instead carrying plans, but he's still playfull... knowing full well who Yoda is, he has fun poking at the old master in Empire. R2 enjoys his role as much as he considers it important.
What I find fascinating about R2 is that he manages to convey his character deeply and meaningfully without every uttering a word.
3P0 on the other hand puts up a fastideous and shallow front, but time and again we see him chip away at that front and expose the compasionnate friend that he can be. He complains about everything, but when R2 or Luke need him, he's always there and always charging into danger along-side his human counterparts.
This pair is going to play a huge role in the third movie, and I suspect people's opinions of them and droids in general will change after that movie.
Did you think Lucas had just accidentally wrote the Obi Wan line about how different everything would be if droids could act on their own initiative (when we clearly know that they can)? Did you think that it was just a shallow plot device that no one living on the planet-sized computer of Corsucant knew how you could possibly DELETE any information (and yet it happened)?
To mis-quote Lynch... the droids are not what they seem....
Office software, if it wants to be the next MS Office needs one thing to even have the slightest chance of doing this. Complete compatability with MS Office
And if you consider being the "next MS Office" to be a useless and ignorable goal?
What if your goal is to build a very small base of dedicated users for whom your software meets their needs? That's what MS did. The number of small businesses that had the means and technical know-how to buy a PC back when MS first came out with Word was very limited, and they were literally competing with typewriters (the single most entrenched piece of office equipment outside of desks and chairs)!
You don't revolutionize a market by doing what everyone else is.
By the low standards that we have set today, old versions of Word are very nice.
Time for some band of grad students to start putting together the next generation tool that takes the bad new features out of word processing, makes the good new features more smoothly integrated with the rest and more efficient and finally that re-learns from modern users what a word-processor is for.
That last is HARD. Word processors use to be used strictly to produce documents which would be printed. Today the primary use is for producing text documents that will be sent to others electronically that may or may not contain complex objects like images, graphs, etc.
These are different problem domains, but separating out the one from the other and re-solving the problem correctly is never easy.
To be more specific, Perl 1.0 had heavy influences from C. The most obvious influecnes were in the operator precedence, ternary operator and behavior of parens.
In 5.0, the influence of C++ was felt strongly on the establishment of Perl 5's non-object-model object model (AKA the object model construction kit) and from LISP can the idea of closures.
Come Perl6, of course, it's a different language which borrows most of all from Perl 5, but also heavily from the other languages listed. Adding LISP currying, Ruby mix-ins, a Java and/or C#-like VM, python-like exceptions and a number of features from C++ including templated proto-classes and iterators as well as dozens of unique features. But, ultimately I think the most world-view altering change will be the SNOBOL-like inline grammar construction.
I have vivid memories of typing rm -rf * in the wrong directory
One of the reasons I love NetApp. Not that the person who asked is able to afford one for home use, but man I love those things for never losing data.
For those who've never used one, they have an atomic, instantaneous backup system that works by having copy-on-write semantics on EVERY BLOCK AND EVERY FILE on the filesystem. You just have a cron job (or use the internal configuration) to create one of these "snapshots" every 5 minutes or every hour or whatever and then expire them on whatever timetable you want.
If you ever want access to the data you just deleted, you just "mv.snapshot/five_minute_01/file_I_need file_I_need" And you have it back, but things you don't change don't get backed up until you DO change them (and that's on the block-level, not the whole file).
I tried it out, and sure enough there IS a file-browser.... I have to admit, I've been using Gnome for a long time and I had no idea. Heh, nifty. Ok, back to my command line to do real work now.
I get what you're saying, and you're correct as far as that goes, but I was not concerned that you failed to wipe the CC list.
I was refering to sending your credit card number to someone via electronic mail. Even if I was sure that TLS would occur between my MTA and theirs (ignoring the chance that a third-party secondary MX would get involved) and that they and I were using SSL-enabled IMAP to fetch our mail... I would still hesitate long enough to make it worth my while to just find their phone number and phone in the CC#.
That you claim to be a security expert and yet seemingly advocate against looking for exploits AND send your credit card number out via email... well, I worry is all.
Did I read that correctly? You just stated that: The notoriously bad US laws should be extended to plaque the whole world
No, I most certainly did not!
I said that the US should not become signatories to a treaty until such time as the text of the treaty is a subset of US law. That could mean that there was a pre-existing law (in which case the rest of the world should apply the same kind of scrutiny before signing on) or that could mean that the executive has to get the legislative branch to make it a law first.
Congressional oversight of treaties exists, but it is a poor substitute for the actual lawmaking process.
So, you're not so much replying to the text that you linked to, as to a Slashdot discussion ABOUT the text that you linked to.
Slashdot wigs out over any discussion that a public project has about future goals. There's always the "fix the bugs/performance/features-I-care-about/etc. in the current release first!" yahoos, even when it's clear that future development is just that, and maintenance of the current release progresses unhindered.
But, in this case you've refered specifically to something that isn't even planned for the next upcoming release, but as a possible target for a realease AFTER THAT. Work has not even started on it, and as far as I can tell, it's just 2 buzzwords in a future roadmap right now.
Saying that Gnome should drop this kind of thing in favor of current work is just not productive. THERE IS NOTHING TO DROP.
I'm confused about this guy. He claims to be a security consultant, but to quote his blog,
"I replied to the mail and didn't check the recipients lines and my mailer helpfully sent a copy of my credit card # to everyone who had gotten the original message. Outstanding."
Really. I didn't make that up, check the link! Who is this guy, and why is he giving me software security advice?!
The goal of searching out vulnerabilities is to find them before the people with black-hats do. This is why most clearinghouses of such reports don't release the information until there is a fix (or until such time passes that vendors have demonstrated a lack of interest in producing a fix): the people who would exploit the bugs need to mount their OWN efforts to discover them.
Ignoring actual bugs, there are many other kinds of security vulnerability. We know that software will always have side-effects that we don't intend. In fact, we desire this (e.g. providing a user with the flexibility to use the product in ways not envisioned by the creator). Sometimes those side-effects have security implications (e.g giving someone an environement variable to control a program's behavior lets a good user do something you might not have thought of, but it turns out a malicious user can abuse this in order to raise their security status).
This means that, as long as software is not static, security bugs will continue to be introduced. Discovering them as fast as possible is the only correct course of action... you KNOW the black-hats will be.
* Metadata framework
- Possible implementations include Novell's Simias, GNOME
Storage
So your concern is that in the "Long Term" section (which refers to some release target post-2.8) the idea is being handed around that P2P and blogging features would become part of the desktop? And you're bringing this up in the context of current desktop offerings?
I think it makes fine sense to investigate the addition of such functionality as a long-term goal. That has no bearing on what work goes on in the current or next release of Gnome in terms of performance.
We're not giving up anything now. We gave up our freedoms when we decided that it was not treason of the highest order, and certainly worthy of kicking someone out of office next election, to make law in the US via treaty. The abysmal treaties that have constrained patents, trade, and any number of other activities and rights are not subject to any judicial review, and they are written, primarily, by members of the executive branch, thus curtailing the powers of the legislature.
Treaties should be constrained to only adopt existing US laws in a global context. If the executive wants a treaty saying that US citizens will walk around naked, then they should have to pursue a law in the US first. This would slow the processes and make it much less convinient to make law via treaty.
Won't work, because for averaging to work, the video needs to be otherwise IDENTICAL, for the most part. Especially in terms of framing - if one camrip is perfectly squared off, and another one is rotated 2 degrees clockwise, then averaging would be useless.
The techniques for correcting that sort of problem are trivial.
You should be able, on a frame-by-frame basis to line up the two images exactly. I would not average though... Seems like there should be better techniques available, like using a larger pixel grid (say 2x the pixel resolution of the originals) and using each image to fill in portions of the final. This should allow you to start to approximate the original quality of the screen without having to have a good source image. It also much more effectively eliminates frequency manipulation used in some of the more advanced watermarking techniques.
Those are the two most widly used. Then there's the Windows DNS and many special-purpose servers (usually caching only, though I'm pretty sure there are one or two other full implementations).
Some people find DJB difficult to get on with and/or were turned off by the whole problem around (non) distribution of modified versions of qmail, and so avoid DJB's other offerings
I have to say that this is the largest and most insurmountable reason for me against using either his DNS server or his mail server.
I was a big fan of his back in the days of UUCP, but his unwillingness to let distributions of BSD, Linux, etc. modify and distribute his software (without some kind of source-based patching hack sans binaries) was a snub to all of us who have contributed to open source software over the years, and a clear indication of a lack of concern over the larger needs of his audience.
Let me be clear: he's WELL WITHIN HIS RIGHTS, and he's even going out of his way to distribute his stuff, which is great. But to say "I'm going to play ball with you, but only if you use my ball, and in the following ways" doesn't fly for me. There are many good alternatives to his code, and they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Thanks for playing, though.
Slashdot Mirror
This annoys me, not because it's not a reasonable thing to say, but because it's the ONLY thing people say when they see this idea.
Reasons it's not the only way to go:
A Star Trek: Star Fleet Academy show or movie is only a bad idea if it's done in an obvious or under-developed way. Put these kids through hell and show us that the instructors have a clue and demonstrate the sort of institution that could produce a James Kirk or Jean Luc Picard, and it will be fun and exciting.
What are you disagreeing with in my posting? Whatever it is, I'm pretty sure it's not something I actually wrote.
Straczynski has done a bunch of stuff, but I could name 20 people in the comics industry who have done more. Ellis has done more. Gaiman. Wolfman. Perez. Byrne. Moore. etc, etc, etc.
What was your point?
He and Joss Whedon will finally produce the Giles-centered Buffy spinoff Ripper!
;-)
Oh man, that would be amazing! Get Aaron Sorkin to write a few episodes about machinations in the EU, and you're done!
Having read the posting, I would not hold my breath for this. I did find some of the other comments interesting:
* He was asked to EP Enterprise, but turned it down
* He is accepting an EP role on *something*
* He's going to be in the UK for a while
* It's not Dr. Who
Those last 3 are all of a set. My theory is that JMS doesn't get this excited about anything from the UK more than Prisoner and Blake's 7... if it's not something new, it just has to be one of those.
Personally, I just want more Supreme Power, Rising Stars and Amazing Spider Man out of him. Those have been amazingly good (though Spider Man slipped into a sort of slow patch for a bit in the middle). I don't need the big screen or tee-vee, in fact I think JMS does better in comics.
JMS once talked about his doing a trek series. It was back in the hieght of B5 and someone asked him what he would do if Paramount handed him a Trek series. He said something along the lines of (can't find it on Google Groups right now): I'd start by getting away from the federation. Kill off a few people so the fans know that this is not going to be the same-old and then start to tell some interesting stories.
It was funny because he said that before Voyager and Andromeda (which was originally a Trek series about the fall of the Federation as Rodenbury had pitched it) came out, and the good points of BOTH of those series were exactly that: getting away from the Federation and establishing their own stories. Woefully Voyager just entrenched itself in its own static mythos and Andromeda as plagued by execs that couldn't stand how dark it was.
Personally I don't see JMS being able to play ball with Paramount. I think he'd last 3-6 months tops before he blew up at them and walked. He's just not enough of a political animial (his detractors would say he's too much of one) to be able to put up with it.
they are shallow characters that could easily have been a midget and a butler
I think that summs up the problem with your viewpoint. You seem to think that a midget and a butler would not be interesting characters, but as I look back on the development of what started as an obvious nod to Laurel and Hardy, and have since become not just likable characters, but characters with enough depth to continue to be interesting 6 movies later... well, I don't care if they're a Bavarian sword-juggler and a bar-hopper. They're still good characters.
Watching 3P0 try to appear disinterested in human machinations and then demand that Chewbaca turn him around so he can see what's going on, for example. R2's plaintive whistle when Luke is lost (the single most emotion-packed whistle I've ever heard in a movie). And as you get to know them, you realize that the bickering between these two droids is much like the sorts of arguments that a married couple have after decades together... not bitter or cruel, just reflections of their personalities.
Man, if you didn't get a chance to enjoy these two characters, I really feel for you. They're some of the best character development in that series!
R2D2 and C3P0 are not shallow characters at all. They're the only characters in the movies that we get any real sense have feelings about the events surrounding them that go deeper than the waistline. R2, clearly in control of more events than he lets on, is constantly thinking ahead and taking giant causes on his shoulders in order to protect the ones he cares about. He evolves, but slightly, though the course of the chronology of the series. His actions in the first three movies, like Yoda's, show a certain age. No more flying around metal-shops, he's instead carrying plans, but he's still playfull... knowing full well who Yoda is, he has fun poking at the old master in Empire. R2 enjoys his role as much as he considers it important.
What I find fascinating about R2 is that he manages to convey his character deeply and meaningfully without every uttering a word.
3P0 on the other hand puts up a fastideous and shallow front, but time and again we see him chip away at that front and expose the compasionnate friend that he can be. He complains about everything, but when R2 or Luke need him, he's always there and always charging into danger along-side his human counterparts.
This pair is going to play a huge role in the third movie, and I suspect people's opinions of them and droids in general will change after that movie.
Did you think Lucas had just accidentally wrote the Obi Wan line about how different everything would be if droids could act on their own initiative (when we clearly know that they can)? Did you think that it was just a shallow plot device that no one living on the planet-sized computer of Corsucant knew how you could possibly DELETE any information (and yet it happened)?
To mis-quote Lynch... the droids are not what they seem....
Office software, if it wants to be the next MS Office needs one thing to even have the slightest chance of doing this. Complete compatability with MS Office
And if you consider being the "next MS Office" to be a useless and ignorable goal?
What if your goal is to build a very small base of dedicated users for whom your software meets their needs? That's what MS did. The number of small businesses that had the means and technical know-how to buy a PC back when MS first came out with Word was very limited, and they were literally competing with typewriters (the single most entrenched piece of office equipment outside of desks and chairs)!
You don't revolutionize a market by doing what everyone else is.
By the low standards that we have set today, old versions of Word are very nice.
Time for some band of grad students to start putting together the next generation tool that takes the bad new features out of word processing, makes the good new features more smoothly integrated with the rest and more efficient and finally that re-learns from modern users what a word-processor is for.
That last is HARD. Word processors use to be used strictly to produce documents which would be printed. Today the primary use is for producing text documents that will be sent to others electronically that may or may not contain complex objects like images, graphs, etc.
These are different problem domains, but separating out the one from the other and re-solving the problem correctly is never easy.
Perl's history starts with nawk and sh at version 1.0 and there are no further influences listed. At least that's what's in the picture.
A more accurate history would be:
Perl 1.0: awk, sh, C, BASIC
Perl 5.0: C++, LISP
Listed as a seperate line:
Perl6 A1-12: Perl 5.0, LISP, C#, C++, Ruby, Java, Python, SNOBOL
To be more specific, Perl 1.0 had heavy influences from C. The most obvious influecnes were in the operator precedence, ternary operator and behavior of parens.
In 5.0, the influence of C++ was felt strongly on the establishment of Perl 5's non-object-model object model (AKA the object model construction kit) and from LISP can the idea of closures.
Come Perl6, of course, it's a different language which borrows most of all from Perl 5, but also heavily from the other languages listed. Adding LISP currying, Ruby mix-ins, a Java and/or C#-like VM, python-like exceptions and a number of features from C++ including templated proto-classes and iterators as well as dozens of unique features. But, ultimately I think the most world-view altering change will be the SNOBOL-like inline grammar construction.
I have vivid memories of typing rm -rf * in the wrong directory
.snapshot/five_minute_01/file_I_need file_I_need" And you have it back, but things you don't change don't get backed up until you DO change them (and that's on the block-level, not the whole file).
One of the reasons I love NetApp. Not that the person who asked is able to afford one for home use, but man I love those things for never losing data.
For those who've never used one, they have an atomic, instantaneous backup system that works by having copy-on-write semantics on EVERY BLOCK AND EVERY FILE on the filesystem. You just have a cron job (or use the internal configuration) to create one of these "snapshots" every 5 minutes or every hour or whatever and then expire them on whatever timetable you want.
If you ever want access to the data you just deleted, you just "mv
Wonderful devices.
I tried it out, and sure enough there IS a file-browser.... I have to admit, I've been using Gnome for a long time and I had no idea. Heh, nifty. Ok, back to my command line to do real work now.
Actually, I think that reinforces my point.
I get what you're saying, and you're correct as far as that goes, but I was not concerned that you failed to wipe the CC list.
I was refering to sending your credit card number to someone via electronic mail. Even if I was sure that TLS would occur between my MTA and theirs (ignoring the chance that a third-party secondary MX would get involved) and that they and I were using SSL-enabled IMAP to fetch our mail... I would still hesitate long enough to make it worth my while to just find their phone number and phone in the CC#.
That you claim to be a security expert and yet seemingly advocate against looking for exploits AND send your credit card number out via email... well, I worry is all.
Did I read that correctly? You just stated that:
The notoriously bad US laws should be extended to plaque the whole world
No, I most certainly did not!
I said that the US should not become signatories to a treaty until such time as the text of the treaty is a subset of US law. That could mean that there was a pre-existing law (in which case the rest of the world should apply the same kind of scrutiny before signing on) or that could mean that the executive has to get the legislative branch to make it a law first.
Congressional oversight of treaties exists, but it is a poor substitute for the actual lawmaking process.
So, you're not so much replying to the text that you linked to, as to a Slashdot discussion ABOUT the text that you linked to.
Slashdot wigs out over any discussion that a public project has about future goals. There's always the "fix the bugs/performance/features-I-care-about/etc. in the current release first!" yahoos, even when it's clear that future development is just that, and maintenance of the current release progresses unhindered.
But, in this case you've refered specifically to something that isn't even planned for the next upcoming release, but as a possible target for a realease AFTER THAT. Work has not even started on it, and as far as I can tell, it's just 2 buzzwords in a future roadmap right now.
Saying that Gnome should drop this kind of thing in favor of current work is just not productive. THERE IS NOTHING TO DROP.
Really. I didn't make that up, check the link! Who is this guy, and why is he giving me software security advice?!
The goal of searching out vulnerabilities is to find them before the people with black-hats do. This is why most clearinghouses of such reports don't release the information until there is a fix (or until such time passes that vendors have demonstrated a lack of interest in producing a fix): the people who would exploit the bugs need to mount their OWN efforts to discover them.
Ignoring actual bugs, there are many other kinds of security vulnerability. We know that software will always have side-effects that we don't intend. In fact, we desire this (e.g. providing a user with the flexibility to use the product in ways not envisioned by the creator). Sometimes those side-effects have security implications (e.g giving someone an environement variable to control a program's behavior lets a good user do something you might not have thought of, but it turns out a malicious user can abuse this in order to raise their security status).
This means that, as long as software is not static, security bugs will continue to be introduced. Discovering them as fast as possible is the only correct course of action... you KNOW the black-hats will be.
I think it makes fine sense to investigate the addition of such functionality as a long-term goal. That has no bearing on what work goes on in the current or next release of Gnome in terms of performance.
The freedom you give up now
We're not giving up anything now. We gave up our freedoms when we decided that it was not treason of the highest order, and certainly worthy of kicking someone out of office next election, to make law in the US via treaty. The abysmal treaties that have constrained patents, trade, and any number of other activities and rights are not subject to any judicial review, and they are written, primarily, by members of the executive branch, thus curtailing the powers of the legislature.
Treaties should be constrained to only adopt existing US laws in a global context. If the executive wants a treaty saying that US citizens will walk around naked, then they should have to pursue a law in the US first. This would slow the processes and make it much less convinient to make law via treaty.
Won't work, because for averaging to work, the video needs to be otherwise IDENTICAL, for the most part. Especially in terms of framing - if one camrip is perfectly squared off, and another one is rotated 2 degrees clockwise, then averaging would be useless.
The techniques for correcting that sort of problem are trivial.
You should be able, on a frame-by-frame basis to line up the two images exactly. I would not average though... Seems like there should be better techniques available, like using a larger pixel grid (say 2x the pixel resolution of the originals) and using each image to fill in portions of the final. This should allow you to start to approximate the original quality of the screen without having to have a good source image. It also much more effectively eliminates frequency manipulation used in some of the more advanced watermarking techniques.
I use bind, yes. I would probably not poke a stick at the MS server, much less use it in production.
Those are the two most widly used. Then there's the Windows DNS and many special-purpose servers (usually caching only, though I'm pretty sure there are one or two other full implementations).
Some people find DJB difficult to get on with and/or were turned off by the whole problem around (non) distribution of modified versions of qmail, and so avoid DJB's other offerings
I have to say that this is the largest and most insurmountable reason for me against using either his DNS server or his mail server.
I was a big fan of his back in the days of UUCP, but his unwillingness to let distributions of BSD, Linux, etc. modify and distribute his software (without some kind of source-based patching hack sans binaries) was a snub to all of us who have contributed to open source software over the years, and a clear indication of a lack of concern over the larger needs of his audience.
Let me be clear: he's WELL WITHIN HIS RIGHTS, and he's even going out of his way to distribute his stuff, which is great. But to say "I'm going to play ball with you, but only if you use my ball, and in the following ways" doesn't fly for me. There are many good alternatives to his code, and they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Thanks for playing, though.