I suspect that you've seen different things than I have, but certainly there are massive problems out there that we're not dealing with.
For one, I think we need to get new terms. People say "drugs" to mean everything from marajuanna to cocaine to LSD to asprin. Then we say things like "drugs are addictive" (which they aren't as a whole, only some). This is a dangerous trap. I prefer the simple classifications of effects. Stimulants, psychadellics, narcotics, depressents and deleriants are a convinient set, though they too have ambiguity problems. At the very least, the narcotics and stimulants tend to be addictive, the depressents are a mixed bag, and psychadellics are not.
As for de-criminalization, I agree. Taxation would help, but much more so, applying the free market to psychoactives would eliminate a huge section of the black market (so much so that it might actually hurt our economy for a short time), and this would elliminate several sources of violence.
As to the law, I think Slashdotters tend to be the sort who will argue for A LAW, but not THE LAW. I feel that the ADA and electronic privacy act are important laws that need to be upheld, but I cheer challenges to the DMCA or descendants of the CDA. It's a matter of not being absolutist.
Hackers tend to use two categories of drugs: stimulants and what I call relaxers. Stimulants are obvious: caffeine, crystal meth, dexadrine, etc. Fairly obvious why - their use tends be be tied usually to their favorite activity (hacking).
Yes, I've seen a lot of stimulant abuse (and boy howdy do I mean abuse) in the techie crowd. There's a clearly lowered defense against stimulant use (and for the addictive ones, this usually ends up leading to abuse) among hackers due to odd-schedules and that drive to create that many hacker/coders have. I've been doing more and more coffee since my job moved to 1+1/2 hours from my home, and I'm starting to notice a bit of withdrawral over the weekends....
The relaxers - alcohol, pot, maybe some low-level psycho-tromatics like 'shrooms - tend to be used exactly for that reason: as a break/vacation from hacking, or as a social thing to do with friends over for the evening.
I've seen a lot of psychadellic use over the last 12 years of being in the hacker community. The drugs of choice seem to be psilocybe mushrooms ('shrooms) and LSD (acid). X (as in extacy, not X11) was never a very popular hacker drug on the east coast as far as I can tell. Many hackers come to psychadellics via simple experimentation, as they tend to be empirically minded and "Just say no" doesn't work very well against that mindset. After a short time, though, most hackers who do psychadellics get caught up in the "how does my brain work" game. Oddly enough I've never seen this have as much negative impact on one's life as a minor addiction to alcohol. Makes one wonder about the relative legallities, doesn't it?
One common thread among all of the hackers I know. None of them do the hard stimulants (e.g. cocaine et al.) or narcotics (e.g. opiates such as opium or morphine). I think this is because intelligent people of any sort tend to do a little research before taking any drug, and the side-effects of these drugs coupled with their massively addictive qualities makes bungie-jumping look like a nice safe passtime.
I feel like this post is an endorsement of drug use, and I want to be very clear: it's NOT. You have to live with your body and brain for the rest of your life, don't get stupid with it. "Just say no" isn't a terrible rule, but if you feel you need to live by another one, take all due caution. Do research. Say no the FIRST time, so you can think it over with a clear head and give it the same priority you would give any major life decision. And, most importantly: peer pressure to do anything you're not comfortable with indicates you have the wrong peers. Talk to them about it, or just find new friends.
If you're still confused, concerned or just want someone to talk to, send me some email, maybe some of what I've seen or been through can help, or maybe I can just help by listening.
Of course, these are all my thoughts and opinions, and my employer would probably be happier if I didn't state them, so there's little chance they agree.
Imminent demise of USENET predicted
on
Is Usenet Dying?
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· Score: 2
Ok, so USENET has been "just about to die" for 12 years now (when I started reading). But, I'll tell you what will kill it:
Some hotshot Open Source programmer is going to get it in his head to write a USENET-like system that brings Slashdot-like, user-moderated discussion forums to the Web in a USENETish decentralized way. When this happens, USENET's only use will be as a mirror for this service.
Why? Well, imagine if any web site that wanted to could plug in "the global discussion forum" for their pet topic and actually get more than the handful of posts that most sites get to their talkback areas.... This would lead to sites everywhere hooking up, and probably dozens of Deja-like services for indexing it all.
All you need is:
A distribution protocol. Preferably one that is encapsulated in HTTP.
A control protocol (perhaps a subset of the distribution protocol) that gives absolute control to no one, but arranges for a "primary host" for each topic forum, which is the host responsible for maintianing stats like moderation information for that forum.
A way to keep a distributed user login directory that allows for annonymity, psuedonimity and some sort of cryptographic signatures when you actually want/need to be known.
A database-back-end for each site to run.
A web-based front-end much like Slash, but a little more static and focused on persistant forums.
When this exists, the last reasons to use USENET will evaporate.
You missed the point. Intel is timing this ANNOUNCEMENT to chip away at some of the glow around Transmeta. Yes, they likely have had this in the pipeline forever, but they also almost certainly rushed the announcement out the door after the Transmeta pess conference.
Intel needs to be scared by Transmeta. If they're not, they are doing their shareholders a disservice.
(3) point out some of the craziness behind the recent "dot-com mania" (or whatever the media is calling it this week).
Isn't that dot-net maina? After all Andover.net is proving that even the stigma of being a non-dot-com with non-dot-com sites (e.g. slashdot dot... wait for it... ORG!) can be overcome. These companies can band together into pitiful little groups and stand up for the rights of the dot-com-challenged!
Heck, I see a movie in it. The heart-warming tale of a DNS-dissadvantaged company that managed to strike it big against the odds. Excuse me while I go write the screenplay.;-)
ob-on-topic-comment: So, is it possible that LinuxOne, while a PR nightmare is doing the right thing? If I wanted to build a Linux business right now, I could do worse than to IPO with 1/3-2/3 of my shares, use that to hire a herd of slick, young geeks and start building a company that gains some sales, stock price goes higher, then follow-on with another 1/3.... Oh wait! That's what Red Hat did!;-) Remember that Red Hat only made 80ish million on their IPO. They'll be makeing 380ish million on their (much smaller) follow-on.
I found this Upside article on the VA/Andover purchase, and was suprised by how much of it made sense. It touches on some good points that ESR made, and doesn't fall into the trap of "introducing" Linux and Open Source.
At first this discussion ammused me. The first mentions of the legal action on Slashdot struck me as silly. How could the industry claim that decrypting data in-place, that was easy to copy in the first place equated to copyright violation? Isn't the copyright violation the distribution of encrypted or unencrypted coppies?
Then I started to get mad. People are taking these crackpots seriously, and trying to enshrine their dirty tricks as a reasonable business model.
Now I'm just confused. The more I think about it the less sense it makes. We're practically begging to be allowed to spend money. If they simply give in an produce source code for a Linux kernel module that decrypts DVDs, they'd see a short-term spike in sales and then it'd be business as usual. What are they afraid of?
I have about 20 DVDs. If I could view them under Linux I'd probably have about 60. I don't want pirated movies, and let's face it, the people who do, aren't their customers. Sure, I know people who would take a pirated copy of Shakes the Clown for free if someone handed it to them, but that doesn't mean that the industry just lost a Shakes sale. I also know dozens of people who pre-ordered The Matrix DVD, knowing full well that they could have gotten it "through channels" from Asia for less money. I want the real deal. I want to be able to return it if the "White Rabbit scenes" are broken. I want my A/V fix. Don't they realize they've won? All they can do now is alienate customers.
Perhaps someone should write the compliment of DeCSS. We should come up with DVD content authoring tools that allow artists to cut their own DVDs. Isn't this what the opposition wants? Don't they want to protect the interests of these poor artists? That's what they keep claiming in court, and we know they wouldn't lie.
How's this for commercialization: Hot off the business wire: VA/Linux is buying Andover.net for 0.425 shares of VA per share of Andover. This is good news for me, being that I like VA enough to own them and already bought into Andover at 37....
I don't recall XtAddInput ever being broken, which means that whatever code you saw was wrong. [...] The things that bother me most are that timer and file-descriptor events aren't first-class events the way events are...
Uh... Jamie, how can you make both of these statements?! As I recall, this is exaclty the kind of brokenness that people were working around.
GTK is under active development, which means it can be fixed. GTK could easily be made to use the X Resource Manager as its basis for reading and storing preferences information. This could be done without breaking any existing apps: it could be a binary-compatible change.
First, Gtk+ is well on it's way toward it's third stable release cycle (1.4, I think would be the version number). This certainly is not the time to be re-working major gobs of the internals without a darn good reason.
Second, I still disagree that the X resource manager is a good solution. Gtk+/GNOME's model works well. I guess you liked the X resource manager. Ok, cool. I didn't, and what's more, I thought that it held X back in a lot of ways. But, maybe I'm wrong. Time will tell.
But even if I'm wrong, and doing so would require incompatible changes, so what? They've done it before (there was a year when everyone had to have two versions of GTK installed because Gimp didn't work with the version of GTK that almost all other apps were written for.) They've had flag days before and they will have flag days again.
If I'm remembering correctly that was when 1.2 was on it's way or had just arrived, and significant functionality was being added that modern widget sets required. Specifically, these were features that projects like GNOME, gnumeric and even the Gimp itself could not be written without.
Now that there are several dozens of popular proof-of-concept programs that work quite well with Gtk+ as it stands, it would be much harder to convince anyone that incompatible changes in Gtk+ were required.
Dismissing my criticisms of GTK's design because ``the decision has been made'' or ``that's living in the past'' is ridiculous. If a design mistake was made, even if that mistake is fully entrenched (like most of Unix), that mistake should be acknowleged so that people don't make similar mistakes in the future.
Here's the fundamental disagreement between you and I. I don't think a mistake was made. Gtk+ used standard X conventions where they made sense and dumped them like a hot rock where they hobbled development. Clearly, given the way the market is going, they made the right choices. Their model for configuration has spawned efforts like themes.org. Please note that there is no xdefaults.org (I tried). Also note the number of high-quality end-user applications being written in the last year for Gtk+, and the number that are currently under development (find that sort of info and more at gnome.org).
What I'm saying is not that you should nto be living in the past because that's bad. Instead you should not be living in the past if the present can suit your needs. You don't "need".Xdefaults. You "need" a configurable desktop and applications.
Oh, on the contrary, the C++ port for Gtk+ (called Gtk--) is tracking the current development of Gtk+ quite nicely. Take a look at the most recent release.
The Python support tends to lag a little, but not much. There are some pretty serious applications that use python (including the gnumeric spreadsheet).
You definitely want to impliment the digital-audio portion of your digital-audio application in C or C++, but why can't the UI be in Python or Perl or Guile?
Jamie, look. Clearly you and I disagree fundamentally on how flexible and dynamic the Xt libraries can be. Fine. Bottom line is that the current contenders for X GUI toolkit are Gtk and Qt. Motif is an unsupported (as in development stopped two years ago) product of a company that's slowly drifting down the tubes.
I just don't see how one can continue to live in the past on this point. Gtk+ might have made some descisions that you don't like, but overall, these descisions have been accepted by enough programmers that these toolkits are taking over the development space that Motif used to occupy.
As for your points:
X resources make it very hard to store information reasonably when one application class needs to remember the same state for several different instances at the same time. You can naming-convention your way around this, but it gets very hairy.
The binary data that you might want to store accross invocations could include encrypted passwords; complex data strcutures or even small images (you say you'd want to store these by reference, but what if they're downloaded? Why have each application creating it's own directories for downloaded image files?)
One point that I did not bring up earlier was that the emphasis in X resources is in configuring widgets. In Gtk+ and GNOME it's on configuring user interfaces and applications. As an example, look at theming. You can use theming to change the foreground color of buttons, but that's not what it's all about. It's about changing the look of ui elements for all of your applications at once.
I seem to remember that XtAddInput does not work. I don't know why off the top of my head (Xt being something that I stopped using back in '92 or so), but every Xt or Motif program that I've seen that needs this functionality does exactly what I describe. Perhaps they're all wrong, in which case it's just that Xt is widely misunderstood.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, Gtk+/GNOME had to dump X resources because they simply could not do what what needed. For one there's no reasonable way to shoe-horn in a WRITABLE X resource mechanism. For another, the heirechical nature of Gtk+/GNOME's resources are just a little bit more flexible than anything that X resources can muster.
This all, not to mention the ability to replace the plain-text nature of the Gtk+ configuration file mechansim and replace it with a real, binary-capable database without a change to the API.
As an example, here's a piece of code that stores a user preference to a resource file for later use:
gnome_config_set_string("features","lots");
There's a line to open the config database / associate the program with a root path, and there's one to close it, and that's it.
But... but... Python is an option in Gtk+. It's even a well supported option! Perl, Python, C, C++, guile, Objective C and ADA appear to be the best supported languages for Gtk+.
Qt on the other hand as some poorly maintained bindings for Perl and Python (last I looked I couldn't actually find a non-broken link to them from the Qt pages) and then C++ is the default. As far as I can tell there are no interfaces to other languages. C being the notable exception. I can understand wanting a C++ binding, but no C binding? For UNIX systems?
Please explain what the GTK event model can do that the Xt event model cannot. I think they are the same.
In Gtk+, I can tell my application to respond to an event (signal in Gtk+ terminology) that is triggered by, say a button press. So far this is the same as Xt. But let's say I'm writing a Web browser. Ok, now I want to open a socket and handle events on that too. The usual Xt/Motif way to do this is to pull out the X display socket file descriptor from Xt (Xlib really) and then add that into your select call. When select returns, you see which descriptor triggers, and then jump into Xt's event handling if X triggered the select.
In Gtk+ you simply tell it about your socket and request events from it with the same callback strucutre as the rest of your code! This makes Gtk+ code a lot easier to develop and maintain (big emphasis on maintain).
I do not believe that GTK's object model is fundamentally saner than Xt's.
GTK's objects are fundamentally saner than Motif's objects, but that's the implementation of the widgets, not the object model itself.
No, I meant what I said. Gtk+ provides features like virtual destructors and a well defined line between class definition and implimentation. These features of Gtk+'s C-based OO do not exist in Xt.
In many ways Xt was a grand experiment, but I've spoken to one or two of the original Xt creators, and even they admit that if they had it to do over, it would be done very differently. I agree, and I think that Gtk+ makes great strides in that direction.
I can't comment on what it's like using Xt from C++, because C++ is an abomination
I used to feel this way, but it was basically because I did not understand C++. Now, I understand it better and I think it's the wrong choice for much of what it is applied to, but when used carefully and selectively, C++ has some excellent applications. I'm glad to see that the Gtk-- folks have staballized their interface to Gtk+, as C++ access to Gtk+ is quite important. However, I am pleased that most coding for GNOME and Gtk+ continues to be in C. C is more portable, more debuggable and generally a better choice for most of these projects.
Qt on the other hand suffers from being a C++ implimentation. I've seen a lot of developers simply discount it out of hand because they don't use or want to use C++.
1) GTK apps don't parse Xt command line arguments. so you can't do something like "gtkapp -geometry +400+20", or even worse, you can't do "gtkapp -display remotehost". How annoying!
The Gtk+ libraries obey the POSIX command-line specification. Namely, they do not use multi-character arguments following a single dash. X was the longest holdout against POSIX compliance in this respect. As an alternative, Gtk+ uses the GNU coding conventions, which allow for a "--" to precede multi-character arguments. Thus you wanted "--display", which works just fine in all Gtk+ apps (that's built into the libraries just like it is with Xt). "--help" is also supported if you can't remember the dozen or so standard Gtk+ flags.
What's more, GNOME provides additional standard command-line parameters for things like session management.
2) GTK doesn't support the editres protocol for querying and customizing widgets.
Thank all the little gods! What a terrible way to do it. On the other hand, it does support dynamic theming and run-time loadable UIs. This gives you all of the advantages of editres and a whole lot more.
3) GTK doesn't accept X resources from.Xdefaults like any X application should. Try setting a default geometry from.Xdefaults.
This was a hard decision, as I understand it (I wasn't involved at that time). The basic problem was that X provided a very restrictive way of communitcating such defaults. Gtk+ and GNOME instead provide a much more sophisticated mechanism which allows for dynamic information (e.g. application preferences); global and semi-global values in a well-defined namespace and a number of other useful features. It's also a lot more flexible in terms of replacing the underlying mechanism with more complex systems. As I understand it, there is work to replace the text-only database now used with something that can handle arbitrary binary data.
Yes the loss of X resources (of which.Xdefaults was just an instance) was a loss. No arguing that point, but what was gained was worth it, IMHO.
GTK suffers a bit from not-invented-here syndrome, and ignores existing standards
I disagree. The descisions were all either to stay with and/or extend existing standards (e.g. the X session management protocol) or to ignore them because they were fundamentally crippling or themselves non-standards compliant (e.g. Xt argument parsing).
Finally, what's the status of i18n for GTK? Does it exist?
Oh BOY. Yes, I guess is the best answer.
Your application is not GNOME compliant unless it allows for internationalization (see the GNOME coding standard for more info). There are currently something like 9 dedicated language teams for GNOME. That means there are 9 projects that do nothing but translate GNOME into their own languages. There are a lot more volunteer translations for individual applications and libraries (I think the gnome-core package ships in 26 languages), but you can basically count on those 9 being under constant development across the GNOME and Gtk+ code base.
Gtk+ and glib support the i18n features (of which I know little enough to be dangerous). There is also an effort for the next generation of Gtk+ and GNOME to start supporting fonts and character sets that require right-to-left rendering (I think that the only thing left there is some of the data-entry handling, but I don't know for sure) and cases where certain 3-character combinations are represented with a single glyph. There's acutally a lot that i18n does not cover, but GNOME is working on filling the gaps.
Basically, all of your points are good ideas for things to look out for in developing an X-based toolkit and desktop, but these are already things that the Gtk+ and GNOME folks have thought of.
Some people have pointed out that Gtk+'s table handling is a tad shy of Motif's, but that's about it. If you compare CDE+Motif to GNOME+Gtk+, you get:
GNOME has a component object model
GNOME has an anti-aliased canvas which can handle rotation and scaling
GNOME handles unified printing very nicely.
Gtk+ has a much more covinient event model which can incorporate arbitrary I/O and event loops.
Gtk+ has a fundamentally saner object model which actually works well in C and C++.
glib (the non-graphics portability layer that's part of the Gtk+ distribution) reduces the number of pointer-related bugs in your code by providing higher level abstractions of many simple data types (from strings to hashes), includes portable threading and has many ease-of-debugging features.
These are just some examples, and only for Gtk+/GNOME. Qt/KDE has it's own set of features, and obsoletes Motif in several unique ways.
What I'd really like to see is a GNOME/KDE abstraction library that makes it easy for apps like Word Perfect or EMACS to be re-written to use either at compile-time.
Why do these guys want to paint a big red bull's eye on themselevs? They must not realize that they are going to draw fire from every 16-year-old with a computer and a malicious streak. I guess they'll find out the expensive way...
You must be joking.... That would suit their purposes perfectly. The last thing that the DeCSS folks need in court is to have the DVD folks pointing out that the response from the evil pirates was to crack their systems. That would do more to sway the judge than any 100 wacko Slashdot postings....
Of course, if I were they, I'd just buy a copy of Windows NT and "forget" to install the service packs. Gee, these evil hackers broke in in no time flat; clearly they cannot be dealt with rationally. Sigh.
In case this does get read in court:
Your honor: we, the technical professionals who use Slashdot as a way to stay in touch with out fellow "geeks" and to keep abreast on issues too technical for the mainstream media, wish to thank you in advance for not writing off the entire high-tech (specifically, Open Source) community for the mallicious acts of a few individuals who do not represent our collective attitudes, ethics or motivations (as evidenced by Slashdot's moderation system). The attempt to create software to access our own media is in no way an attempt to redeem, justify or condone the acts of piracy that the DVD consortiae so often try to label us with.
No, if the records are sealed, it's not legal to distribute the info. That's why they're having the hearing. The judge will likely seal the records as a matter of course.
It seems like part of the strategy here is to keep the community off-balance by scheduling everything too fast for us to keep up. Why does our legal system allow for this?
If there truely is a law against this kind of tracking in the EU, then the authorities should be the ones pressing charges.
Re:What are the Differences?
on
Free Solaris 8
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· Score: 2
Unless you are in the "web business", none of Apache, mod_perl or PHP are necessary tools.
How many non-web businesses do you think use Suns for Intranets? I think it's a very large number. And why should it not be there?
So, which Linux vendor supports Perl, Python, Apache, GIMP, whatever?
Red Hat, SuSE, Corel, TurboLinux... need I go on?
What you are mistaking is the difference between providing commercial support for a product and managing the development schedule of a product. Red Hat provides support for all of the products that they include in their distribution. They will work to help you with probelms and, if necessary, fix the software. If they patch the software in order to provide support, it goes into their updates (after Q/A), and also back to the maintainer.
Sometime unpack a few Red Hat SRPMS (source RPMs) and check out what comes with one. Usually, it's the base package plus one or two Red Hat specific patches (e.g. to make it work with RPM or with PAM or some other porting issue or bug fix that hasn't made it into the core distribution yet). You can type "rpm --rebuild package.srpm" to merge the patches in and create an RPM, so you don't notice Red Hat's contribution unless you look for it, but it's significant, and it's there.
Red Hat or Debian ain't going around "oh, there's a new release of Perl, quick, we need to make a new release too".
Check out ftp://updates.redhat.com/6.1/SRPMS/. Yes, that's exactly what they do. And they do it the same way Sun releases new sendmail versions. They provide a patch after having done their own Q/A, and then they include it in the next major update.
Saying that Linux is better than Solaris because of the existance of vendors that gather the freeware for you, and put it on a CD doesn't make much sense.
I agree, but that wasn't what I was saying. Vendors like the ones you describe (e.g. Slackware) are interesting to me, but not for business use. Vendors like Red Hat that integrate all of those products well, create their own infrastructure around them and support the whole RESULTING PRODUCT are very interesting to me, and I consider them more business worthy than Sun for those very reasons.
Now, to be fair, I hear that a lot of the software that I have mentioned (but not all) actually *is* in the next Solaris release. I guess I'll wait and see. But, for right now, the choice is clear for those who want a low TCO.
Ok, I like Linux, and I would like to see articles like this tout its speed and power. However, if this article had been well-written, I would have accepted their put-downs.
This article is not well-written as it turns out. They tout numbers, but you would think that a benchmark result would be presented in a tabular format.... Nope, that would encourage people to use quantitative comparison, and that would not show favorably on W2K. Also, they peg Linux as a sort of "almost as good as Netware" OS, but in every actual feature comparioson it comes out ahead (except for performance).
Basically, things that Linux does and none of the commercial products do are "extras". Things that W2K does and no one else does are "missing features" in the other OSes.
Someone please start doing real feature-to-feature comparisons; real benchmarks; real TCO comparisons; etc. I'm getting sick of this kind of "I think W2K is a good product because we have advertisers who want to hear us say that" crap.
Slashdot Mirror
I know where you're coming from.
I suspect that you've seen different things than I have, but certainly there are massive problems out there that we're not dealing with.
For one, I think we need to get new terms. People say "drugs" to mean everything from marajuanna to cocaine to LSD to asprin. Then we say things like "drugs are addictive" (which they aren't as a whole, only some). This is a dangerous trap. I prefer the simple classifications of effects. Stimulants, psychadellics, narcotics, depressents and deleriants are a convinient set, though they too have ambiguity problems. At the very least, the narcotics and stimulants tend to be addictive, the depressents are a mixed bag, and psychadellics are not.
As for de-criminalization, I agree. Taxation would help, but much more so, applying the free market to psychoactives would eliminate a huge section of the black market (so much so that it might actually hurt our economy for a short time), and this would elliminate several sources of violence.
As to the law, I think Slashdotters tend to be the sort who will argue for A LAW, but not THE LAW. I feel that the ADA and electronic privacy act are important laws that need to be upheld, but I cheer challenges to the DMCA or descendants of the CDA. It's a matter of not being absolutist.
I speek for me... only.
Yes, I've seen a lot of stimulant abuse (and boy howdy do I mean abuse) in the techie crowd. There's a clearly lowered defense against stimulant use (and for the addictive ones, this usually ends up leading to abuse) among hackers due to odd-schedules and that drive to create that many hacker/coders have. I've been doing more and more coffee since my job moved to 1+1/2 hours from my home, and I'm starting to notice a bit of withdrawral over the weekends....
I've seen a lot of psychadellic use over the last 12 years of being in the hacker community. The drugs of choice seem to be psilocybe mushrooms ('shrooms) and LSD (acid). X (as in extacy, not X11) was never a very popular hacker drug on the east coast as far as I can tell. Many hackers come to psychadellics via simple experimentation, as they tend to be empirically minded and "Just say no" doesn't work very well against that mindset. After a short time, though, most hackers who do psychadellics get caught up in the "how does my brain work" game. Oddly enough I've never seen this have as much negative impact on one's life as a minor addiction to alcohol. Makes one wonder about the relative legallities, doesn't it?
One common thread among all of the hackers I know. None of them do the hard stimulants (e.g. cocaine et al.) or narcotics (e.g. opiates such as opium or morphine). I think this is because intelligent people of any sort tend to do a little research before taking any drug, and the side-effects of these drugs coupled with their massively addictive qualities makes bungie-jumping look like a nice safe passtime.
I feel like this post is an endorsement of drug use, and I want to be very clear: it's NOT. You have to live with your body and brain for the rest of your life, don't get stupid with it. "Just say no" isn't a terrible rule, but if you feel you need to live by another one, take all due caution. Do research. Say no the FIRST time, so you can think it over with a clear head and give it the same priority you would give any major life decision. And, most importantly: peer pressure to do anything you're not comfortable with indicates you have the wrong peers. Talk to them about it, or just find new friends.
If you're still confused, concerned or just want someone to talk to, send me some email, maybe some of what I've seen or been through can help, or maybe I can just help by listening.
Of course, these are all my thoughts and opinions, and my employer would probably be happier if I didn't state them, so there's little chance they agree.
Some hotshot Open Source programmer is going to get it in his head to write a USENET-like system that brings Slashdot-like, user-moderated discussion forums to the Web in a USENETish decentralized way. When this happens, USENET's only use will be as a mirror for this service.
Why? Well, imagine if any web site that wanted to could plug in "the global discussion forum" for their pet topic and actually get more than the handful of posts that most sites get to their talkback areas.... This would lead to sites everywhere hooking up, and probably dozens of Deja-like services for indexing it all.
All you need is:
When this exists, the last reasons to use USENET will evaporate.
You missed the point. Intel is timing this ANNOUNCEMENT to chip away at some of the glow around Transmeta. Yes, they likely have had this in the pipeline forever, but they also almost certainly rushed the announcement out the door after the Transmeta pess conference.
Intel needs to be scared by Transmeta. If they're not, they are doing their shareholders a disservice.
Isn't that dot-net maina? After all Andover.net is proving that even the stigma of being a non-dot-com with non-dot-com sites (e.g. slashdot dot
Heck, I see a movie in it. The heart-warming tale of a DNS-dissadvantaged company that managed to strike it big against the odds. Excuse me while I go write the screenplay.
ob-on-topic-comment: So, is it possible that LinuxOne, while a PR nightmare is doing the right thing? If I wanted to build a Linux business right now, I could do worse than to IPO with 1/3-2/3 of my shares, use that to hire a herd of slick, young geeks and start building a company that gains some sales, stock price goes higher, then follow-on with another 1/3.... Oh wait! That's what Red Hat did!
I found this Upside article on the VA/Andover purchase, and was suprised by how much of it made sense. It touches on some good points that ESR made, and doesn't fall into the trap of "introducing" Linux and Open Source.
At first this discussion ammused me. The first mentions of the legal action on Slashdot struck me as silly. How could the industry claim that decrypting data in-place, that was easy to copy in the first place equated to copyright violation? Isn't the copyright violation the distribution of encrypted or unencrypted coppies?
Then I started to get mad. People are taking these crackpots seriously, and trying to enshrine their dirty tricks as a reasonable business model.
Now I'm just confused. The more I think about it the less sense it makes. We're practically begging to be allowed to spend money. If they simply give in an produce source code for a Linux kernel module that decrypts DVDs, they'd see a short-term spike in sales and then it'd be business as usual. What are they afraid of?
I have about 20 DVDs. If I could view them under Linux I'd probably have about 60. I don't want pirated movies, and let's face it, the people who do, aren't their customers. Sure, I know people who would take a pirated copy of Shakes the Clown for free if someone handed it to them, but that doesn't mean that the industry just lost a Shakes sale. I also know dozens of people who pre-ordered The Matrix DVD, knowing full well that they could have gotten it "through channels" from Asia for less money. I want the real deal. I want to be able to return it if the "White Rabbit scenes" are broken. I want my A/V fix. Don't they realize they've won? All they can do now is alienate customers.
Perhaps someone should write the compliment of DeCSS. We should come up with DVD content authoring tools that allow artists to cut their own DVDs. Isn't this what the opposition wants? Don't they want to protect the interests of these poor artists? That's what they keep claiming in court, and we know they wouldn't lie.
How's this for commercialization: Hot off the business wire: VA/Linux is buying Andover.net for 0.425 shares of VA per share of Andover. This is good news for me, being that I like VA enough to own them and already bought into Andover at 37....
Uh... Jamie, how can you make both of these statements?! As I recall, this is exaclty the kind of brokenness that people were working around.
First, Gtk+ is well on it's way toward it's third stable release cycle (1.4, I think would be the version number). This certainly is not the time to be re-working major gobs of the internals without a darn good reason.
Second, I still disagree that the X resource manager is a good solution. Gtk+/GNOME's model works well. I guess you liked the X resource manager. Ok, cool. I didn't, and what's more, I thought that it held X back in a lot of ways. But, maybe I'm wrong. Time will tell.
If I'm remembering correctly that was when 1.2 was on it's way or had just arrived, and significant functionality was being added that modern widget sets required. Specifically, these were features that projects like GNOME, gnumeric and even the Gimp itself could not be written without.
Now that there are several dozens of popular proof-of-concept programs that work quite well with Gtk+ as it stands, it would be much harder to convince anyone that incompatible changes in Gtk+ were required.
Here's the fundamental disagreement between you and I. I don't think a mistake was made. Gtk+ used standard X conventions where they made sense and dumped them like a hot rock where they hobbled development. Clearly, given the way the market is going, they made the right choices. Their model for configuration has spawned efforts like themes.org. Please note that there is no xdefaults.org (I tried). Also note the number of high-quality end-user applications being written in the last year for Gtk+, and the number that are currently under development (find that sort of info and more at gnome.org).
What I'm saying is not that you should nto be living in the past because that's bad. Instead you should not be living in the past if the present can suit your needs. You don't "need"
Oh, on the contrary, the C++ port for Gtk+ (called Gtk--) is tracking the current development of Gtk+ quite nicely. Take a look at the most recent release.
The Python support tends to lag a little, but not much. There are some pretty serious applications that use python (including the gnumeric spreadsheet).
You definitely want to impliment the digital-audio portion of your digital-audio application in C or C++, but why can't the UI be in Python or Perl or Guile?
I just don't see how one can continue to live in the past on this point. Gtk+ might have made some descisions that you don't like, but overall, these descisions have been accepted by enough programmers that these toolkits are taking over the development space that Motif used to occupy.
As for your points:
One point that I did not bring up earlier was that the emphasis in X resources is in configuring widgets. In Gtk+ and GNOME it's on configuring user interfaces and applications. As an example, look at theming. You can use theming to change the foreground color of buttons, but that's not what it's all about. It's about changing the look of ui elements for all of your applications at once.
I seem to remember that XtAddInput does not work. I don't know why off the top of my head (Xt being something that I stopped using back in '92 or so), but every Xt or Motif program that I've seen that needs this functionality does exactly what I describe. Perhaps they're all wrong, in which case it's just that Xt is widely misunderstood.
This all, not to mention the ability to replace the plain-text nature of the Gtk+ configuration file mechansim and replace it with a real, binary-capable database without a change to the API.
As an example, here's a piece of code that stores a user preference to a resource file for later use:
There's a line to open the config database / associate the program with a root path, and there's one to close it, and that's it.
But... but... Python is an option in Gtk+. It's even a well supported option! Perl, Python, C, C++, guile, Objective C and ADA appear to be the best supported languages for Gtk+.
Qt on the other hand as some poorly maintained bindings for Perl and Python (last I looked I couldn't actually find a non-broken link to them from the Qt pages) and then C++ is the default. As far as I can tell there are no interfaces to other languages. C being the notable exception. I can understand wanting a C++ binding, but no C binding? For UNIX systems?
In Gtk+, I can tell my application to respond to an event (signal in Gtk+ terminology) that is triggered by, say a button press. So far this is the same as Xt. But let's say I'm writing a Web browser. Ok, now I want to open a socket and handle events on that too. The usual Xt/Motif way to do this is to pull out the X display socket file descriptor from Xt (Xlib really) and then add that into your select call. When select returns, you see which descriptor triggers, and then jump into Xt's event handling if X triggered the select.
In Gtk+ you simply tell it about your socket and request events from it with the same callback strucutre as the rest of your code! This makes Gtk+ code a lot easier to develop and maintain (big emphasis on maintain).
No, I meant what I said. Gtk+ provides features like virtual destructors and a well defined line between class definition and implimentation. These features of Gtk+'s C-based OO do not exist in Xt.
In many ways Xt was a grand experiment, but I've spoken to one or two of the original Xt creators, and even they admit that if they had it to do over, it would be done very differently. I agree, and I think that Gtk+ makes great strides in that direction.
I used to feel this way, but it was basically because I did not understand C++. Now, I understand it better and I think it's the wrong choice for much of what it is applied to, but when used carefully and selectively, C++ has some excellent applications. I'm glad to see that the Gtk-- folks have staballized their interface to Gtk+, as C++ access to Gtk+ is quite important. However, I am pleased that most coding for GNOME and Gtk+ continues to be in C. C is more portable, more debuggable and generally a better choice for most of these projects.
Qt on the other hand suffers from being a C++ implimentation. I've seen a lot of developers simply discount it out of hand because they don't use or want to use C++.
The Gtk+ libraries obey the POSIX command-line specification. Namely, they do not use multi-character arguments following a single dash. X was the longest holdout against POSIX compliance in this respect. As an alternative, Gtk+ uses the GNU coding conventions, which allow for a "--" to precede multi-character arguments. Thus you wanted "--display", which works just fine in all Gtk+ apps (that's built into the libraries just like it is with Xt). "--help" is also supported if you can't remember the dozen or so standard Gtk+ flags.
What's more, GNOME provides additional standard command-line parameters for things like session management.
Thank all the little gods! What a terrible way to do it. On the other hand, it does support dynamic theming and run-time loadable UIs. This gives you all of the advantages of editres and a whole lot more.
This was a hard decision, as I understand it (I wasn't involved at that time). The basic problem was that X provided a very restrictive way of communitcating such defaults. Gtk+ and GNOME instead provide a much more sophisticated mechanism which allows for dynamic information (e.g. application preferences); global and semi-global values in a well-defined namespace and a number of other useful features. It's also a lot more flexible in terms of replacing the underlying mechanism with more complex systems. As I understand it, there is work to replace the text-only database now used with something that can handle arbitrary binary data.
Yes the loss of X resources (of which
I disagree. The descisions were all either to stay with and/or extend existing standards (e.g. the X session management protocol) or to ignore them because they were fundamentally crippling or themselves non-standards compliant (e.g. Xt argument parsing).
Oh BOY. Yes, I guess is the best answer.
Your application is not GNOME compliant unless it allows for internationalization (see the GNOME coding standard for more info). There are currently something like 9 dedicated language teams for GNOME. That means there are 9 projects that do nothing but translate GNOME into their own languages. There are a lot more volunteer translations for individual applications and libraries (I think the gnome-core package ships in 26 languages), but you can basically count on those 9 being under constant development across the GNOME and Gtk+ code base.
Gtk+ and glib support the i18n features (of which I know little enough to be dangerous). There is also an effort for the next generation of Gtk+ and GNOME to start supporting fonts and character sets that require right-to-left rendering (I think that the only thing left there is some of the data-entry handling, but I don't know for sure) and cases where certain 3-character combinations are represented with a single glyph. There's acutally a lot that i18n does not cover, but GNOME is working on filling the gaps.
Basically, all of your points are good ideas for things to look out for in developing an X-based toolkit and desktop, but these are already things that the Gtk+ and GNOME folks have thought of.
These are just some examples, and only for Gtk+/GNOME. Qt/KDE has it's own set of features, and obsoletes Motif in several unique ways.
What I'd really like to see is a GNOME/KDE abstraction library that makes it easy for apps like Word Perfect or EMACS to be re-written to use either at compile-time.
One off-the-wall: nethack -- will someone please write a decent configure/build/install process for it, and then distribute an SRPM?!
And several serious:
Why do these guys want to paint a big red bull's eye on themselevs? They must not realize that they are going to draw fire from every 16-year-old with a computer and a malicious streak. I guess they'll find out the expensive way...
You must be joking.... That would suit their purposes perfectly. The last thing that the DeCSS folks need in court is to have the DVD folks pointing out that the response from the evil pirates was to crack their systems. That would do more to sway the judge than any 100 wacko Slashdot postings....
Of course, if I were they, I'd just buy a copy of Windows NT and "forget" to install the service packs. Gee, these evil hackers broke in in no time flat; clearly they cannot be dealt with rationally. Sigh.
In case this does get read in court:
Your honor: we, the technical professionals who use Slashdot as a way to stay in touch with out fellow "geeks" and to keep abreast on issues too technical for the mainstream media, wish to thank you in advance for not writing off the entire high-tech (specifically, Open Source) community for the mallicious acts of a few individuals who do not represent our collective attitudes, ethics or motivations (as evidenced by Slashdot's moderation system). The attempt to create software to access our own media is in no way an attempt to redeem, justify or condone the acts of piracy that the DVD consortiae so often try to label us with.
No, if the records are sealed, it's not legal to distribute the info. That's why they're having the hearing. The judge will likely seal the records as a matter of course.
It seems like part of the strategy here is to keep the community off-balance by scheduling everything too fast for us to keep up. Why does our legal system allow for this?
If there truely is a law against this kind of tracking in the EU, then the authorities should be the ones pressing charges.
Unless you are in the "web business", none of Apache, mod_perl or PHP are necessary tools.
How many non-web businesses do you think use Suns for Intranets? I think it's a very large number. And why should it not be there?
So, which Linux vendor supports Perl, Python, Apache, GIMP, whatever?
Red Hat, SuSE, Corel, TurboLinux... need I go on?
What you are mistaking is the difference between providing commercial support for a product and managing the development schedule of a product. Red Hat provides support for all of the products that they include in their distribution. They will work to help you with probelms and, if necessary, fix the software. If they patch the software in order to provide support, it goes into their updates (after Q/A), and also back to the maintainer.
Sometime unpack a few Red Hat SRPMS (source RPMs) and check out what comes with one. Usually, it's the base package plus one or two Red Hat specific patches (e.g. to make it work with RPM or with PAM or some other porting issue or bug fix that hasn't made it into the core distribution yet). You can type "rpm --rebuild package.srpm" to merge the patches in and create an RPM, so you don't notice Red Hat's contribution unless you look for it, but it's significant, and it's there.
Red Hat or Debian ain't going around "oh, there's a new release of Perl, quick, we need to make a new release too".
Check out ftp://updates.redhat.com/6.1/SRPMS/. Yes, that's exactly what they do. And they do it the same way Sun releases new sendmail versions. They provide a patch after having done their own Q/A, and then they include it in the next major update.
Saying that Linux is better than Solaris because of the existance of vendors that gather the freeware for you, and put it on a CD doesn't make much sense.
I agree, but that wasn't what I was saying. Vendors like the ones you describe (e.g. Slackware) are interesting to me, but not for business use. Vendors like Red Hat that integrate all of those products well, create their own infrastructure around them and support the whole RESULTING PRODUCT are very interesting to me, and I consider them more business worthy than Sun for those very reasons.
Now, to be fair, I hear that a lot of the software that I have mentioned (but not all) actually *is* in the next Solaris release. I guess I'll wait and see. But, for right now, the choice is clear for those who want a low TCO.
Ok, I like Linux, and I would like to see articles like this tout its speed and power. However, if this article had been well-written, I would have accepted their put-downs.
This article is not well-written as it turns out. They tout numbers, but you would think that a benchmark result would be presented in a tabular format.... Nope, that would encourage people to use quantitative comparison, and that would not show favorably on W2K. Also, they peg Linux as a sort of "almost as good as Netware" OS, but in every actual feature comparioson it comes out ahead (except for performance).
Basically, things that Linux does and none of the commercial products do are "extras". Things that W2K does and no one else does are "missing features" in the other OSes.
Someone please start doing real feature-to-feature comparisons; real benchmarks; real TCO comparisons; etc. I'm getting sick of this kind of "I think W2K is a good product because we have advertisers who want to hear us say that" crap.