Why not use Automake and Autoconf ? Wouldn't that take care of some of the cross system problems ?
Automake and autoconf can, as you imply, improve portability. Unfortunately, they can also completely destroy build reproducibility: add something to a PATH or install an additional library, and watch as your software gets built with completely different requirements than the previous build.
I'd stay away from autoXXXX for software that's not distributed as source.
BIND 8/9 will eventually make it into a future release. 99% of us do not need it, however, and so having
a well-known and secure BIND 4 implementation has more value for the rest of us.
And a few of us don't care what version of BIND ships with the operating system, because we immediatly chuck it and use djbdns instead, which generally suffers only from D.J. Bernstein's infamous Spartanism rather than from the incredibly baroque design flaws of BIND.
Couldn't you have been just a little more creative in coming up with a name? Geez. Now we get:
---So how do i do this Red Carpet update thing again?
---rc channels to list the available channels.
[pause]
---It says channels: No such file or directory
---Huh? That's weird...
It was the packaging, not the worms, that were the problem. I just thought I'd clear that up for anyone who didn't
read the full WP article.
Also from the article:
But tests conducted this spring by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Anne Arundel County found that
the worms and their packing material contained three species of the bacterium vibrio. One of them attacks oysters and
can cause serious illness in people, [...]. [italics mine]
Thought i'd clear that up for those who didn't read the article closely.:)
"That is"? I think you meant exemplum gratia, "for (the sake of) example". (Impressive, however, that you actually knew what i.e. expands to).
This illustrates another problem with automated language translation: languages change over time. New words appear, old ones change their meaning, and really old ones are sometimes forgotten completely.
Even "dude" used to mean something quite different (male who tends cattle from horseback) from it's current use today as pal, chum (as a term of address, e.g., "Phreak, dude-dude-dude-dude-dude, i gotta---" --"Get ahold of yourself Joey! One more 'dude' and i'm gonna have to slap the shit outta you!") or male of at least the age of puberty (in the third person, e.g., "She's buff... ballsy." --"Let's keep her... waste the dude").
Note how i prove my sophistication by demonstrating proper use of the abbreviation e.g..;)
Remember, the suit doesn't allege that monitoring is improper. [...] The lawsuit alleges
consumers weren't properly notified.
According to the article:
In at least four lawsuits involving seven other consumer plaintiffs, Consolidated
Enterprises Inc., which does business in Arizona as Budget Rent-A-Car and Budget
Car & Truck Rental of Tucson, is accused of defrauding customers by
failing to
disclose the tracking systems and potential penalty fees, as well as invasion of
privacy. [italics mine]
The lawsuits (plural) allege invasion of privacy as well as failure to disclose the monitoring.
The biggest problem i see is that the monitoring technology puts the customer at a heightened disadvantage: The rental company can "tell" whether you have violated their contract by using the technology, but the very same technology gives the customer no such warning at all. The customer doesn't find out until s/he returns the vehicle, thus building up huge "fines". If the customer had the same warning the company had, the customer could either (a) turn the vehicle around and avoid a huge fine, or (b) dispute the alleged violation by showing that the vehicle is not, in fact, where it claims to be.
Granted, right now i can perform some of the same monitoring using my own GPS receiver---but that costs me extra money, and it doesn't level the playing field sufficiently, because not everyone who rents a car necessarily has a GPS receiver or can even afford one.
Disclosure of the monitoring at the outset is also important in levelling the playing field between the company and the customer: If i see that the mid-size sedan i've been issued has a monitoring system, i have the potential to request either another vehicle without a monitoring system (otherwise i'll go next door to Avis or Hertz and rent one there).
In sum, it's not the monitoring that's bad, it's the shift in the balance of power too far toward the company that's bad.
If the monitoring system were not incomplete and allowed the customer to know when the system believes it detects a violation, then the customer has the power to react appropriately---otherwise it's just a scam to squeeze more money from customers. And if the monitoring system were disclosed, then the customer can make an informed decision about whether to accept the rental vehicle (i.e., whether to agree to the contract offered by the rental company).
Or like alumin[i]um? "Hey, now we can pour metal into a mold and cast it! This new technology is great!" Newsflash: Humans have been casting metal---in molds---for thousands of years.
Oh, you mean it doesn't have to be machined after it's cast? Oh, well that's totally different... that is something new.
[...] and sharpened like glass.
Hey, that's great! Glass is really easy to sharpen. So all you have to do is throw this metal on the ground and watch it shatter, right?
What's that? Oh, you mean it can become as sharp as glass? Hey, that makes a lot more sense.
Was Hemos smoking something before he posted?
Re:Or, if you need something even better than NTP.
on
Do You Have The Time?
·
· Score: 1
Much better than starting up another project and having people to switch
over to a new system of doing things...
Want httpd installed? "make install" in the ports directory.
Actually, it's more like: Want httpd installed? *DING!* It already is. Just check the config file, and then apachectl start. Want SSL support in your webserver? *DING!* It's already there. Just apachectl startssl instead.
But here's the real key i've found: The upgrade from OpenBSD 3.0 to 3.1 is the easiest upgrade i've ever done. Ever. Choose "upgrade" from the CD, reboot, unpack the new/etc files somewhere, and run mergemaster. *DING!* No more looking around for *.rpmsave or *.rpmnew files.
There is actually some value to not controlling misrepresentation of your words.... The value lies in the fact that the public
benefits from 'bad' derivative works (e.g.: how to tell the relative merits of a good/accurate movie review without a
bad one?) just as much as from good ones.
What do "good" or "bad" movie reviews have to do with whether someone has misrepresented what you said? A misquote is a misquote, and a purposefully misleading representation is a lie.
If i tell a reporter "I do not support that bill", and the reporter quotes me as saying "I... support that bill", that's misrepresentation of what i said. The public doesn't benefit from that at all... how does the public know what i said without the reporter?
As far as misrepresenting your words in a non-derivative work (i.e.:
just copying it poorly--implying the spelling mistakes are your errors), there is value in that too--a new/different
work has been created. The public (though probably not you) has benefitted.
What kind of crack are you smoking? There is no value to the public if mistakes enter a work due to errors in distribution. That's not a "new work", it's an erroneous one. What if one of the mistakes is to add or leave out the word "not"? Or to mistakenly replace a question mark with an exclamation point? Those mistakes could significantly change the meaning of the work, but---and here's the key---the public has no way of identifying that they are mistakes. The public believes that the work is correct as it stands, because, after all, it has been distributed. It's like that game of "telephone", where each person whispers to the next person the message they think they heard from the prior person---the resulting message is garbled and unrecognizable as the initial message.
Remember, copyight is not about the authors only. Copyright tries to bridge the gap between the free rider problem
of public goods and authorial incentives.
Your spiel about the public benefitting from erroneous works and misrepresentations is a load of tripe. The public benefits from derivative works, not non-obvious mistakes.
And if mistakes affect an author's meaning, that affects the author's reputation. As digital media create explosive possibilities for the number of new authors, reputation becomes more important in order for the public to judge the relevance and quality of an author's work. If reputations are sullied by misquotes and stupid errors, the public does not benefit, it gets harmed.
I am entirely for replacing traditional storage devices. Hard drives contain moving parts, and that usually lends
itself to failure more often than solid state devices.
If you had read the article, you would know that these new nano-punchcards also need moving parts in order to work. Heat the "phonograph arm" to 400C, it bends enough to write the plastic. Heat to to 300C, it bends only enough to read resistance differences. Imagine the thermal stress involved....
Any Red Hat Linux since release 5.0 (1997, five years ago) has/sbin/chkconfig. And any Red-Hat-derived distribution has it as well. And if you have something else and prefer to use chkconfig, look for it on Freshmeat.
Window Maker does virtually (pun not intended) all of the things you describe above:
allowed you to _persistently_ associate an application with a particular "screen"
Your screens are called "workspaces" in Window Maker. You can set an application's "initial workspace" (based on the application's name, class, or both) using a simple panel.
The automatic creation/destruction of screens on an as-needed basis
You can tell Window Maker to create a new workspace as soon as you move there.
and the ability to name each screen
Also easy, from the menu of workspaces, or from the Clip (see below).
You flicked between screens by clicking the top-right hand corner of the screen,
Window Maker has a sort of "button" on the desktop called the "Clip". Among other things, the Clip allows you to switch among workspaces. You can move the Clip to the upper righthand corner of the desktop if you want it there.
and you could drag them up and down to partially expose screens behind
That's the only thing Window Maker doesn't do; each workspace is disjoint and occupies the whole display. (You can drag windows to other workspaces, however).
And in addition, Window Maker owes much to another underground computer maker with fiercely loyal fans: NeXT. Should make you feel right at home.:)
I never even have to touch the config files by hand anymore, the WPrefs tool
works fine. And coming from a die-hard Slackware control-freak like me, that's saying something.
And if you're even more of a control freak than that (like i sometimes am), you can use the wdwrite utility to store selected preferences, and then use the WPrefs tool and whatnot to handle the rest.
I think the development team should just declare it to be version 1.0. Windowmaker is stable and
full-featured enough for it.:)
Close, but not quite. Alfredo's working on support for the _NET_WM spec (or whatever the devil that Grand Unified Post-ICCCCCM Extension is called nowadays), to support next-generation KDE and GNOME and whatnot. Once that's there, together with up-to-date documentation, then i would agree with the v1.0 thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Automake and autoconf can, as you imply, improve portability. Unfortunately, they can also completely destroy build reproducibility: add something to a PATH or install an additional library, and watch as your software gets built with completely different requirements than the previous build.
I'd stay away from autoXXXX for software that's not distributed as source.
And a few of us don't care what version of BIND ships with the operating system, because we immediatly chuck it and use djbdns instead, which generally suffers only from D.J. Bernstein's infamous Spartanism rather than from the incredibly baroque design flaws of BIND.
Couldn't you have been just a little more creative in coming up with a name? Geez. Now we get:
Hurrah for Xidiot.Also from the article:
Thought i'd clear that up for those who didn't read the article closely. :)
"That is"? I think you meant exemplum gratia, "for (the sake of) example". (Impressive, however, that you actually knew what i.e. expands to).
This illustrates another problem with automated language translation: languages change over time. New words appear, old ones change their meaning, and really old ones are sometimes forgotten completely.
Even "dude" used to mean something quite different (male who tends cattle from horseback) from it's current use today as pal, chum (as a term of address, e.g., "Phreak, dude-dude-dude-dude-dude, i gotta---" --"Get ahold of yourself Joey! One more 'dude' and i'm gonna have to slap the shit outta you!") or male of at least the age of puberty (in the third person, e.g., "She's buff ... ballsy." --"Let's keep her ... waste the dude").
Note how i prove my sophistication by demonstrating proper use of the abbreviation e.g.. ;)
I sure hope not. Wouldn't want to see everything on the surface of the planet suddenly fly off into space....
According to the article:
The lawsuits (plural) allege invasion of privacy as well as failure to disclose the monitoring.The biggest problem i see is that the monitoring technology puts the customer at a heightened disadvantage: The rental company can "tell" whether you have violated their contract by using the technology, but the very same technology gives the customer no such warning at all. The customer doesn't find out until s/he returns the vehicle, thus building up huge "fines". If the customer had the same warning the company had, the customer could either (a) turn the vehicle around and avoid a huge fine, or (b) dispute the alleged violation by showing that the vehicle is not, in fact, where it claims to be.
Granted, right now i can perform some of the same monitoring using my own GPS receiver---but that costs me extra money, and it doesn't level the playing field sufficiently, because not everyone who rents a car necessarily has a GPS receiver or can even afford one.
Disclosure of the monitoring at the outset is also important in levelling the playing field between the company and the customer: If i see that the mid-size sedan i've been issued has a monitoring system, i have the potential to request either another vehicle without a monitoring system (otherwise i'll go next door to Avis or Hertz and rent one there).
In sum, it's not the monitoring that's bad, it's the shift in the balance of power too far toward the company that's bad. If the monitoring system were not incomplete and allowed the customer to know when the system believes it detects a violation, then the customer has the power to react appropriately---otherwise it's just a scam to squeeze more money from customers. And if the monitoring system were disclosed, then the customer can make an informed decision about whether to accept the rental vehicle (i.e., whether to agree to the contract offered by the rental company).
Or like alumin[i]um? "Hey, now we can pour metal into a mold and cast it! This new technology is great!" Newsflash: Humans have been casting metal---in molds---for thousands of years.
Oh, you mean it doesn't have to be machined after it's cast? Oh, well that's totally different ... that is something new.
[...] and sharpened like glass.
Hey, that's great! Glass is really easy to sharpen. So all you have to do is throw this metal on the ground and watch it shatter, right?
What's that? Oh, you mean it can become as sharp as glass? Hey, that makes a lot more sense.
Was Hemos smoking something before he posted?
Well, for one thing, NTP has the year 2036 problem. Additionally, unless it's been fixed in the meantime, NTP has trouble with leap seconds. Until those two things are fixed, why bother using NTP? DJB's TAICLOCK protocol and clockspeed and taiclockd daemons seem to be a better choice.
Actually, it's more like: Want httpd installed? *DING!* It already is. Just check the config file, and then apachectl start. Want SSL support in your webserver? *DING!* It's already there. Just apachectl startssl instead.
But here's the real key i've found: The upgrade from OpenBSD 3.0 to 3.1 is the easiest upgrade i've ever done. Ever. Choose "upgrade" from the CD, reboot, unpack the new /etc files somewhere, and run mergemaster. *DING!* No more looking around for *.rpmsave or *.rpmnew files.
What do "good" or "bad" movie reviews have to do with whether someone has misrepresented what you said? A misquote is a misquote, and a purposefully misleading representation is a lie. If i tell a reporter "I do not support that bill", and the reporter quotes me as saying "I ... support that bill", that's misrepresentation of what i said. The public doesn't benefit from that at all ... how does the public know what i said without the reporter?
As far as misrepresenting your words in a non-derivative work (i.e.: just copying it poorly--implying the spelling mistakes are your errors), there is value in that too--a new/different work has been created. The public (though probably not you) has benefitted.
What kind of crack are you smoking? There is no value to the public if mistakes enter a work due to errors in distribution. That's not a "new work", it's an erroneous one. What if one of the mistakes is to add or leave out the word "not"? Or to mistakenly replace a question mark with an exclamation point? Those mistakes could significantly change the meaning of the work, but---and here's the key---the public has no way of identifying that they are mistakes. The public believes that the work is correct as it stands, because, after all, it has been distributed. It's like that game of "telephone", where each person whispers to the next person the message they think they heard from the prior person---the resulting message is garbled and unrecognizable as the initial message.
Remember, copyight is not about the authors only. Copyright tries to bridge the gap between the free rider problem of public goods and authorial incentives.
Your spiel about the public benefitting from erroneous works and misrepresentations is a load of tripe. The public benefits from derivative works, not non-obvious mistakes. And if mistakes affect an author's meaning, that affects the author's reputation. As digital media create explosive possibilities for the number of new authors, reputation becomes more important in order for the public to judge the relevance and quality of an author's work. If reputations are sullied by misquotes and stupid errors, the public does not benefit, it gets harmed.
Every time a new storage technology makes it to market, some bubble memory gets its wings.
If you had read the article, you would know that these new nano-punchcards also need moving parts in order to work. Heat the "phonograph arm" to 400C, it bends enough to write the plastic. Heat to to 300C, it bends only enough to read resistance differences. Imagine the thermal stress involved....
[root@pootle rc3.d]# mv S14nfslock K86nfslock_S14
[root@pootle rc3.d]# mv S13portmap K87portmap_S13
[root@pootle rc3.d]#
[root@pootle rc3.d]#
You (and all those who come after you) would find it significantly easier if you simply did:
Any Red Hat Linux since release 5.0 (1997, five years ago) has /sbin/chkconfig. And any Red-Hat-derived distribution has it as well. And if you have something else and prefer to use chkconfig, look for it on Freshmeat.
Geez, folks, it doesn't have to be that complex.
Nope; foreach is not Bourne shell, but C shell. Bourne shell syntax is:
Don't know why Larry chose foreach. Oh well.No. ptrdiff_t is a signed type. cp is a pointer, and hence an unsigned type. size_t is the correct type to use for the typecast.
The proper technical term is "flavor", i.e., "There are six flavors of quark: up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top".
You mean "vanilla", "chocolate", and "strawberry"? Or the new old names?
Hmmm ...
Linuxcare: Still Up And Swinging
By Steven J.Vaughan-Nichols
June 20, 2000
Weird. He had a working time machine over a year and a half ago....
Isn't that the, ehm, point of the executable flag?
Your screens are called "workspaces" in Window Maker. You can set an application's "initial workspace" (based on the application's name, class, or both) using a simple panel.
You can tell Window Maker to create a new workspace as soon as you move there.
Also easy, from the menu of workspaces, or from the Clip (see below).
Window Maker has a sort of "button" on the desktop called the "Clip". Among other things, the Clip allows you to switch among workspaces. You can move the Clip to the upper righthand corner of the desktop if you want it there.
That's the only thing Window Maker doesn't do; each workspace is disjoint and occupies the whole display. (You can drag windows to other workspaces, however).
And in addition, Window Maker owes much to another underground computer maker with fiercely loyal fans: NeXT. Should make you feel right at home. :)
And if you're even more of a control freak than that (like i sometimes am), you can use the wdwrite utility to store selected preferences, and then use the WPrefs tool and whatnot to handle the rest.
I think the development team should just declare it to be version 1.0. Windowmaker is stable and full-featured enough for it. :)
Close, but not quite. Alfredo's working on support for the _NET_WM spec (or whatever the devil that Grand Unified Post-ICCCCCM Extension is called nowadays), to support next-generation KDE and GNOME and whatnot. Once that's there, together with up-to-date documentation, then i would agree with the v1.0 thing.
Yes. That was the whole problem, you may recall.
(If everyone used spell checkers, there wouldn't be any serendipitous irony...).
Not to be confused with the United Nations Special Interest Group for Networking Educational Districts [unsigned.int].
(You may now groan).
Hey, wait a minute there....