If you really wanted to, you _could_ run diskless X terminals. That would make system administration really easy. And, those who really do need their own computer (not sure why), could have one, and just run an X server on it. If your requirements allow it, it is an excellent choice. See
One more thing, remember to disable any unnecessary services that are being run, or find a dist that doesn't run them by default. This will not only improve security (it is actually a MUST for security) but will drastically improve performance. And, in conclusion, DONT RUN SENDMAIL ON DESKTOP MACHINES. This is a bad idea that always leads to trouble. Just use SMTP. A lot of people/dists (esp RH) try to put a lot of servers on desktop installs. WHY????? Isn't that what server machines are for?
64MB is plenty for anything I've done. I'd use sawfish (formerly sawmill) as a WM. It's really easy on the resources, easy to config, etc. etc. As for distribution, it depends on your needs. What kind of upgrade path do you want to follow? As far as short-term, it doesn't really matter. The problems will occur in the long term. Considering this, you will want to use a distribution that is entirely free like RH/Debian/Slack, because 5 years down the road, if you get a vendor-specific distribution, you will be a slave to that vendor. I've never used Applix, but WP is very nice.
One thing you should really consider when choosing a dist is to make sure that _everything_ you install works properly. This is RH's big difficulty. All of the GUI tools and sysadmin tools work "half-way". If you look at them wrong, they break. For desktop users, this is unacceptable. Users can usually deal with strange environments surprisingly well, as long as the tools actually work. They get really frustrated when some buttons don't work, some right-click menus don't work, or a certain sequence of clicks crash a program. If you don't know what I'm talking about, try using the RedHat GNOME RPM manager in RH 6.1 (haven't really looked at 6.2). RH is nice on the server (without Linuxconf), because it has everything you need, and everything is integrated with PAM, and organized in a sane way. But on the desktop, it has too many half-done tools. So, either find a dist that doesn't have half-done tools, or don't install anything that doesn't work 99.99% right. I'd be happy to supply you with more advice (advice does come cheaply), but I'd have to know more about your requirements.
Corel defeats one of the primary benefits of Linux - vendor independence. Because of its closed nature, the only method of support/upgrades you will get for Corel Linux is Corel.
I have never successfully gotten kickstart to work. I spent about a week trying with RH6.1. They may have gotten it fixed in 6.2, but 6.1 is absolutely unusable. Also, they need a validator, so you can check your kickstart syntax errors on the fly.
Actually, people in the commercial world DO choose Linux for freedom. Where I work we use it because we have very wierd requirements (which are constantly changing), so we have to be able to fully customize anything. The benefits of freedom are not purely philosophical. It gives lower costs because of vendor independance, and gives an organization flexibility as far as deployment is concerned. For example, you don't have to keep track of licensing requirements (just keeping track - not including paying the costs - is a major overhead for an organization). Our company uses Linux for freedom, because freedom is very practical.
Everyone is looking at this the wrong way. Why is everyone so concerned about speed? Are you aware that speed is not the only issue on computers? Gosh, the fact that Microsoft may have done something right somewhere is not that hard to believe. Why does everyone look at speed so much? Things like this make people forget why they chose Linux in the first place. That reason is freedom. That's the advantage over other systems. Having this freedom _usually_ produces better code, but it doesn't always. So what? With our freedom, we don't have to worry if RedHat puts out a better/worse system than Microsoft. If RedHat/Linux sucks, we can hire someone to modify it so it doesn't suck so much. And, if those modifications are worthwhile enough, we can sell them ourselves. The reasons most people choose Linux are freedom, openness, freedom from being vendor-bound, and customizability. Because of these things, we usually have scalability, performance, and security as well. But those are not the important issues. The fact is, you have the freedom to do things with Linux that you could _never_ dream of doing with Windows simply for legal reasons. This benchmark may be skewed. It may not. It may even be skewed in favor of Linux. But the fact is, I have my freedom, they do not. And my freedom is not something I deal lightly with.
If you read the interviews from the gnome guys, they admit to copying what's good about other people's designs. They say that first we need to get a good free software base that is consistent with the current market, and then we can start to innovate from that. So the current GNOME efforts have been just that - copying from others to get a good free software system to innovate from.
I agree. Kids adapt amazingly well. They will learn whatever you expect them to learn. I would put them on a Linux box. Don't start them out with "hello world", start them out programming GNOME applets. Give them a short applet, tell them how it works, how to compile and link it, and they will learn faster than you can imagine. I did basic when I was 6, and Apple assembly language when I was 10 or 12. If you have faith in them to learn it, there is no limit. Just make sure its interesting (that's why I suggest starting with GNOME). Also, be sure to do Linux, because then they have the whole system to mess with.
If you think evolution is stupid, what do you think natural selection does? Since you made a point of differentiating them, I assume you had a reason.
Natural selection is simply a drift of the gene pool within its current bounds, or maybe with a few genetic mutations, nothing major. Evolution drastically increases this to include the addition and removal of entire chromosomes. Basically, anyone (human or otherwise) who has been born with an extra pair of chromosomes cannot have children. There have certainly been no documented cases of such a thing happening with even a possible survival enhancement under any circumstances. Minor genetic shifts _cannot_ account for the theory of evolution. In fact, most of the noted physical changes in Animals throughout history are actually better explained by diet and environment than by genetics, except for small shifts in the quantity of a gene in a gene pool (not in the genes themselves). Basically, the idea of slow evolution has been discredited because of fossil evidence, and the evidence which supports a "fast" evolution theory is better supported by diet and environment than genetics.
Science is very limited it what it can do. First of all, science is only applicable for testable circumstances. Most of life does not fall into this category. Almost every circumstance I encounter every day is not something I can test to determine the best or correct solution, and sometimes, it would not even be possible. In addition, science can _never_ tell you what you should do. It can only tell how things work. In order to find out what you should do, you'll have to find something besides science. Science can tell you that if you cut off my head, I will die, but it will give no insight as to whether or not that would be a good or bad thing. I remember reading in Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" that the difference between a physicist and a metaphysicist is not a matter of intelligence, but rather that the metaphysicist has no lab to determine if he is really correct or not. He cannot experiment to determine if his results are correct. The same is true for those who study pre-historic times. There is mounds of evidence, but no labs to test theories. Evolution (not natural selection, evolution) is not as provable as the rest of science, simply because we have not had the time to test the theory. In a few million years, we will hopefully have gathered enough data to make that determination, but until then, pre-historians are still working without a lab.
There is an evangelist of Darwin's day (I forgot who) who said that Darwin recanted on his death bed. However, Darwin's sister (I think) vehemently denied it, and there's no evidence that shows that the evangelist even talked to Darwin in the period before his death. Therefore, I am very skeptical of the evangelist's claim. As stupid as I think the concept of evolution is(_evolution_, not natural selection, mind you), I think that the evangelist in question, whomever he may be, was probably lying. Moderators, please forgive me for being offtopic.
I think that the GUI has all the potential (or at least most) of the command-line. However, it is just in its early stages of development. In the future, especially through the use of componentized software, we may be able to do the equivalent(or better) of command line filtering by dragging several GUI components together and clicking on options. One major advantage of GUI over command-line is that you don't have to worry about special characters (like in regexps), you simply have a symbol for them that is clicked rather than having to escape (or double-escape) everything you type.
I agree in principle. However, the USPTO has been so crappy about looking for prior art that I don't think that publishing it would make any difference. I disagree with the whole notion of patents, but I do see where this guy is coming from.
Would you be pissed if someone looked at your couch and created an exact duplicate instead? The words "property" and "stealing" are not useful in this discussion, because they have a prejudice toward fixed objects. Information is a totally different ball game. If I steal your couch, you don't have it anymore. If I "steal" your software/documents, you still have them and can use them, however, I can too. With property, you are dealing with a zero-sum game, in which if I take from you, you lose and there is no net gain. However, with information, if I take from you, we both still have it, and there is a net gain. So, in effect, by "stealing" I am actually adding value to the system without taking any away.
I set up a little mini-distribution of Linux, called "Serial Terminal Linux" that allows you to use an old laptop as a serial console. A single boot floppy puts you directly into Minicom. You can get it athttp://members.wri.com/johnnyb/serialli nux/. Very useful. I configure servers at a desk that I don't want a monitor taking up space on, so I just use a little laptop. Works wonders.
The advantage, though, is that you remove a whole gamut of complexity. I know how XML works, and therefore, reading configuration files, even though they are for different DTDs, I still know how it works, in general. Also, having a DTD gives a standard way for a user to find out what options are available in a configuration file. With current config files, I can't even tell if my configuration file is valid. This also enables better GUI tools, because they only have to have one parser.
ldd./find_ddos reveals: not a dynamic executable Hmmmm.... I'm guessing they linked with glibc, which, since they didn't release source code, means they violated the LGPL. For those who are unaware, the LGPL allows anyone to dynamically link for any reason, but forbids static linking (which is what they did).
I'm not sure I understand this... If A opened the file, wouldn't B inherit A's permissions, and thus not be able to write the file? Or is there something I'm missing?
Steve, I'm looking into getting into hardware design, and I was wondering what books give a good introduction to the subject? Is it possible to learn to design motherboards and such without having a degree in electrical engineering? How would you suggest a person learn digital electronics?
Why doesn't anyone use the ScriptAlias directive? It does the same thing as query strings, but makes it look nicer, like the rest of the web. You can "say" your looking at a directory or a.html file, but in reality you are viewing a singe script. For an example go to http://store.wolfram.com/. There are no directories on the server side, it's all served off of one script. Yet, to the user, it appears as a hierarchical directory structure, complete with.html files. The only query string is your session id, which is appended to the URL in case your browser doesn't support cookies (however, these are not there if a robot views the site). Anyway, a simple directive like ScriptAlias can save everyone a lot of trouble. If anyone has questions about its usage, send me an email.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really wanted to, you _could_ run diskless X terminals. That would make system administration really easy. And, those who really do need their own computer (not sure why), could have one, and just run an X server on it. If your requirements allow it, it is an excellent choice. See
http://www.ltsp.org/
http://www.solucorp.qc.ca/xterminals/
for more details.
One more thing, remember to disable any unnecessary services that are being run, or find a dist that doesn't run them by default. This will not only improve security (it is actually a MUST for security) but will drastically improve performance. And, in conclusion, DONT RUN SENDMAIL ON DESKTOP MACHINES. This is a bad idea that always leads to trouble. Just use SMTP. A lot of people/dists (esp RH) try to put a lot of servers on desktop installs. WHY????? Isn't that what server machines are for?
64MB is plenty for anything I've done. I'd use sawfish (formerly sawmill) as a WM. It's really easy on the resources, easy to config, etc. etc. As for distribution, it depends on your needs. What kind of upgrade path do you want to follow? As far as short-term, it doesn't really matter. The problems will occur in the long term. Considering this, you will want to use a distribution that is entirely free like RH/Debian/Slack, because 5 years down the road, if you get a vendor-specific distribution, you will be a slave to that vendor. I've never used Applix, but WP is very nice.
One thing you should really consider when choosing a dist is to make sure that _everything_ you install works properly. This is RH's big difficulty. All of the GUI tools and sysadmin tools work "half-way". If you look at them wrong, they break. For desktop users, this is unacceptable. Users can usually deal with strange environments surprisingly well, as long as the tools actually work. They get really frustrated when some buttons don't work, some right-click menus don't work, or a certain sequence of clicks crash a program. If you don't know what I'm talking about, try using the RedHat GNOME RPM manager in RH 6.1 (haven't really looked at 6.2). RH is nice on the server (without Linuxconf), because it has everything you need, and everything is integrated with PAM, and organized in a sane way. But on the desktop, it has too many half-done tools. So, either find a dist that doesn't have half-done tools, or don't install anything that doesn't work 99.99% right. I'd be happy to supply you with more advice (advice does come cheaply), but I'd have to know more about your requirements.
Corel defeats one of the primary benefits of Linux - vendor independence. Because of its closed nature, the only method of support/upgrades you will get for Corel Linux is Corel.
I have never successfully gotten kickstart to work. I spent about a week trying with RH6.1. They may have gotten it fixed in 6.2, but 6.1 is absolutely unusable. Also, they need a validator, so you can check your kickstart syntax errors on the fly.
Actually, people in the commercial world DO choose Linux for freedom. Where I work we use it because we have very wierd requirements (which are constantly changing), so we have to be able to fully customize anything. The benefits of freedom are not purely philosophical. It gives lower costs because of vendor independance, and gives an organization flexibility as far as deployment is concerned. For example, you don't have to keep track of licensing requirements (just keeping track - not including paying the costs - is a major overhead for an organization). Our company uses Linux for freedom, because freedom is very practical.
Ahhhhh!!!!!!!!
Everyone is looking at this the wrong way. Why is everyone so concerned about speed? Are you aware that speed is not the only issue on computers? Gosh, the fact that Microsoft may have done something right somewhere is not that hard to believe. Why does everyone look at speed so much? Things like this make people forget why they chose Linux in the first place. That reason is freedom. That's the advantage over other systems. Having this freedom _usually_ produces better code, but it doesn't always. So what? With our freedom, we don't have to worry if RedHat puts out a better/worse system than Microsoft. If RedHat/Linux sucks, we can hire someone to modify it so it doesn't suck so much. And, if those modifications are worthwhile enough, we can sell them ourselves. The reasons most people choose Linux are freedom, openness, freedom from being vendor-bound, and customizability. Because of these things, we usually have scalability, performance, and security as well. But those are not the important issues. The fact is, you have the freedom to do things with Linux that you could _never_ dream of doing with Windows simply for legal reasons. This benchmark may be skewed. It may not. It may even be skewed in favor of Linux. But the fact is, I have my freedom, they do not. And my freedom is not something I deal lightly with.
This doesn't help hash access.
$foo{bar} is just as valid as $foo{baar}. Also,
once we spent months chasing down a
$foo{query} which was supposed to be a $foo{$query} (no, we don't actually use foo in
variable names)
If you read the interviews from the gnome guys, they admit to copying what's good about other people's designs. They say that first we need to get a good free software base that is consistent with the current market, and then we can start to innovate from that. So the current GNOME efforts have been just that - copying from others to get a good free software system to innovate from.
I agree. Kids adapt amazingly well. They will learn whatever you expect them to learn. I would put them on a Linux box. Don't start them out with "hello world", start them out programming GNOME applets. Give them a short applet, tell them how it works, how to compile and link it, and they will learn faster than you can imagine. I did basic when I was 6, and Apple assembly language when I was 10 or 12. If you have faith in them to learn it, there is no limit. Just make sure its interesting (that's why I suggest starting with GNOME). Also, be sure to do Linux, because then they have the whole system to mess with.
you made a point of differentiating them, I assume you had a reason.
Natural selection is simply a drift of the gene pool within its current bounds, or maybe with a few genetic mutations, nothing major. Evolution drastically increases this to include the addition and removal of entire chromosomes. Basically, anyone (human or otherwise) who has been born with an extra pair of chromosomes cannot have children. There have certainly been no documented cases of such a thing happening with even a possible survival enhancement under any circumstances. Minor genetic shifts _cannot_ account for the theory of evolution. In fact, most of the noted physical changes in Animals throughout history are actually better explained by diet and environment than by genetics, except for small shifts in the quantity of a gene in a gene pool (not in the genes themselves). Basically, the idea of slow evolution has been discredited because of fossil evidence, and the evidence which supports a "fast" evolution theory is better supported by diet and environment than genetics.
Science is very limited it what it can do. First of all, science is only applicable for testable circumstances. Most of life does not fall into this category. Almost every circumstance I encounter every day is not something I can test to determine the best or correct solution, and sometimes, it would not even be possible. In addition, science can _never_ tell you what you should do. It can only tell how things work. In order to find out what you should do, you'll have to find something besides science. Science can tell you that if you cut off my head, I will die, but it will give no insight as to whether or not that would be a good or bad thing. I remember reading in Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" that the difference between a physicist and a metaphysicist is not a matter of intelligence, but rather that the metaphysicist has no lab to determine if he is really correct or not. He cannot experiment to determine if his results are correct. The same is true for those who study pre-historic times. There is mounds of evidence, but no labs to test theories. Evolution (not natural selection, evolution) is not as provable as the rest of science, simply because we have not had the time to test the theory. In a few million years, we will hopefully have gathered enough data to make that determination, but until then, pre-historians are still working without a lab.
There is an evangelist of Darwin's day (I forgot who) who said that Darwin recanted on his death bed. However, Darwin's sister (I think) vehemently denied it, and there's no evidence that shows that the evangelist even talked to Darwin in the period before his death. Therefore, I am very skeptical of the evangelist's claim. As stupid as I think the concept of evolution is(_evolution_, not natural selection, mind you), I think that the evangelist in question, whomever he may be, was probably lying. Moderators, please forgive me for being offtopic.
I think that the GUI has all the potential (or at least most) of the command-line. However, it is just in its early stages of development. In the future, especially through the use of componentized software, we may be able to do the equivalent(or better) of command line filtering by dragging several GUI components together and clicking on options. One major advantage of GUI over command-line is that you don't have to worry about special characters (like in regexps), you simply have a symbol for them that is clicked rather than having to escape (or double-escape) everything you type.
I agree in principle. However, the USPTO has been so crappy about looking for prior art that I don't think that publishing it would make any difference. I disagree with the whole notion of patents, but I do see where this guy is coming from.
Would you be pissed if someone looked at your couch and created an exact duplicate instead? The words "property" and "stealing" are not useful in this discussion, because they have a prejudice toward fixed objects. Information is a totally different ball game. If I steal your couch, you don't have it anymore. If I "steal" your software/documents, you still have them and can use them, however, I can too. With property, you are dealing with a zero-sum game, in which if I take from you, you lose and there is no net gain. However, with information, if I take from you, we both still have it, and there is a net gain. So, in effect, by "stealing" I am actually adding value to the system without taking any away.
I'm not sure about the JDBC driver specifically, but you have to be within a BEGIN WORK/COMMIT block in order to use large objects.
Jon
I set up a little mini-distribution of Linux, called "Serial Terminal Linux" that allows you to use an old laptop as a serial console. A single boot floppy puts you directly into Minicom. You can get it athttp://members.wri.com/johnnyb/serialli nux/. Very useful. I configure servers at a desk that I don't want a monitor taking up space on, so I just use a little laptop. Works wonders.
The advantage, though, is that you remove a whole gamut of complexity. I know how XML works, and therefore, reading configuration files, even though they are for different DTDs, I still know how it works, in general. Also, having a DTD gives a standard way for a user to find out what options are available in a configuration file. With current config files, I can't even tell if my configuration file is valid. This also enables better GUI tools, because they only have to have one parser.
I feel very sheepish..... The .src.rpms are only for building RPMs, not containing source. Very sorry.
Jon
RPMs of Netscape built with GCC-2.95 with i686 optimizations available at
http://members.wri.com/johnnyb/netscape/
ldd ./find_ddos reveals: not a dynamic executable Hmmmm.... I'm guessing they linked with glibc, which, since they didn't release source code, means they violated the LGPL. For those who are unaware, the LGPL allows anyone to dynamically link for any reason, but forbids static linking (which is what they did).
I'm not sure I understand this... If A opened the file, wouldn't B inherit A's permissions, and thus not be able to write the file? Or is there something I'm missing?
Steve, I'm looking into getting into hardware design, and I was wondering what books give a good introduction to the subject? Is it possible to learn to design motherboards and such without having a degree in electrical engineering? How would you suggest a person learn digital electronics?
Jon
Why doesn't anyone use the ScriptAlias directive? It does the same thing as query strings, but makes it look nicer, like the rest of the web. You can "say" your looking at a directory or a .html file, but in reality you are viewing a singe script. For an example go to http://store.wolfram.com/. There are no directories on the server side, it's all served off of one script. Yet, to the user, it appears as a hierarchical directory structure, complete with .html files. The only query string is your session id, which is appended to the URL in case your browser doesn't support cookies (however, these are not there if a robot views the site). Anyway, a simple directive like ScriptAlias can save everyone a lot of trouble. If anyone has questions about its usage, send me an email.
Jon