Part of me is against the gating off of part of the internet (which doesn't work in the long run anyway), but part of me doesn't really care if American businesses have to kick back some dough for the privelage of gaining an Indian market. India's pretty poor, and has a buttload of people in it...if taxing America's "New Economy" helps them, more power to them. The smart ones will find ways around anyway ("triangle boy"). I suppose this would probably be against "free trade" though.
"So this 'Linux on the Desktop' thing is less about Linux and more about having screen furniture. File menus, browsers, printing, etc, working in a consistent and normal way."
For a coherent GUI to work in a "consistent and normal way" it is imperative that the operating system also work in a consistent normal way which hopefully reduces the impedence mismatch between the GUI and actual operating system abstractions. AFAICT, Linux, and Unix in general, is horribly horribly inadequate to match a decent GUI. Linux/Unix has no component model and everything feels like a one off - APIs are flat, configuration files get dumped into the/etc ghetto, and applications are broken up by content (binaries go here, man pages go there, configuration goes elsewhere), instead of staying atomic wholes. This is entirely different from how a GUI presents an application, as a whole, with help and configuration integrated. Mac OS X seems to have overcome this hurdle with a workaround called "bundles". The user experience is not provided solely by "screen furniture". This is an elitist idea. The OS has to have the desktop user in the picture from the start. Unfortunately since it is "good enough" for most Linux/Unix users, who have themselves already learned to work at the command line, and have spent a lot of time (often painful)accustoming themselves to Unix, there is little impetus to "fix" anything at the OS level. I certainly do not begrudge the KDE or Gnome projects, I think they are valiant. But grafting wings to a tank does not make it a fighter jet. I never understood why the open source crowd decided to hop on the Unix horse. Proprietary Unix is no better than proprietary Windows, or proprietary Mac OS. So why do we persist in insisting that Unix should be the basis for a desktop OS? Fortunately there are projects like Atheos, Open BeOS, Cosmoe, etc., which are trying to tackle these problems. Microsoft will keep laughing to the bank if we continue forcing Unix on users without trying to meet them half way (well, ok KDE/Gnome is probably half way, but if we really want to have an open source OS on the desktop, we will certainly have to go way further than that to displace Windows). That's the end of my rant, flame on. And send some flamage to that know-nothing Miguel de Icaza for writing "Let's Make Unix Not Suck" while you're at it.
It has to do with free speech, consumer protection, and the ability of the public to be aware. You are right, it probably doesn't say anything about "the right to know stuff" in the Bill of Rights or Constitution, but then again, back then there was no technology that could *prevent* you from knowing stuff (the government couldn't just magically make newspapers unreadable, e.g.). An informed public is a precondition to democracy. So yes, I think "rights" to use legally obtained hardware and software are important. It may be more abstract than, say, somebody fighting for the right to vote, but in an age of decreasing transparency in government, increasing closed-room deals between multinational corporations, and an epidemic of cynicism in politics, the right to consume, produce, and manipulate information is critical.
It's funny how it is obvious that China's restrictions on free speech/computer usage are unethical, yet simply because we have a "free market" and nominally democratic system anything goes. The perception you are making a difference while actually not, is more dangerous than not being able to make a difference in the first place.
Yeah, I mean, great economies of scale can be achieved in colluding and consolidating to reduce competition and innovation. I mean, look at all the successfull monopolists of the past. It's just normal for capitalism to destroy itself. Nothing illegal about that. Oh wait, IT IS.
If you can stand the resource usage (and really, if you are used to Emacs, you have absolutely no excuse:p), try jEdit (www.jedit.org). It is an editor written in Java, and it is excellent. It is extensible with plugins, and is scriptable (but you don't have to use/see any of this if you don't want). It has powerful syntax highlighting, abbreviation/auto expansion, built in file browser, integration with Ant, etc.
Uh, if one OS is completely unaware of another OS's access to hardware, there IS a rather large potential for corruption. Just imagine: web server starts reading file through read-only head, internal machine modifies said file, web server continues to read said file. What happens in this case? What happens if the file is deleted without the web server being notified?
It has nothing to do with drivers. Drivers live in an island called the operating system, and if those two islands are not connected, a driver on one machine will have no clue what a driver on the other is doing - they will both think they are accessing two completely different disks. Your argument might hold against VMWare if VMWare is really juggling and managing interrupts intelligently (so the operating systems don't step on each other) - but you didn't mention anything about this, and this certainly wouldn't hold for two entirely independent machines with no shared communication mechanism (the whole point of having an insecure web server use the read-only head, while the secure internal server uses the read/write head).
"Oh, and god forbid, what about NFS and Samba? Are the machines that host the NFS/Samba shares NOT allowed to change the contents of those systems?"
I'm not sure what your point is. NFS, Samba, and virtually any other network-based sharing system uses cumbersome slow-ass large-grained locking protocols. The article was about two completely seperate machines (no shared communication mechanism like NFS/Samba/sockets/shared mem - nothing).
Well, yeah, but the article was about doing this at the *hardware* level. Anybody can turn the write bit off on a partition, or mount a remote volume as read only. Yes, it's overkill to do it at the hardware level and I'd imagine this is only for the most sensitive of applications.
"And this leads to some lovely freezes if for some reason the app decides to take its time to repaint itself."
Dude, if an app is deciding to take its time to repaint itself, does the ability to MOVE the UNPAINTED window really matter? Exactly what "functionality" are you gaining from this decoupling?
I'm not sure whether to applaud you for introducing some humanity into an otherwise sterile occupation, or whether to shoot you on the spot on principle.
As bad as it is for citizens of Nevada, I feel even worse for the Shoshone, who absolutely don't deserve having our radioactive shit stored in their sacred land. Hey, maybe we should start stashing some waste in Canada. I mean, it's not like the Canucks could do anything to us.
Amen. If you REALLY REALLY REALLY need to see a movie and your job requires you to be on call, take a day of vacation. Take a sick day. Take a family emergency day. Who cares. It is simply not our responsibility that you have to be on call. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to both be on call and watch a movie at the same time. Be an adult and make a choice.
"What I choose to run in my browser is my own business" [emphasis mine]
The operative word here is choose. The question really isn't exactly what it does (we can install any software we want to filter/replace ads), the question is, does it install itself and infest your system without your knowledge. The answer is yes. It is spyware/adware and I have no sympathy for it, even if it walks my dog and makes me breakfast.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of me is against the gating off of part of the internet (which doesn't work in the long run anyway), but part of me doesn't really care if American businesses have to kick back some dough for the privelage of gaining an Indian market. India's pretty poor, and has a buttload of people in it...if taxing America's "New Economy" helps them, more power to them. The smart ones will find ways around anyway ("triangle boy"). I suppose this would probably be against "free trade" though.
"So this 'Linux on the Desktop' thing is less about Linux and more about having screen furniture. File menus, browsers, printing, etc, working in a consistent and normal way."
/etc ghetto, and applications are broken up by content (binaries go here, man pages go there, configuration goes elsewhere), instead of staying atomic wholes. This is entirely different from how a GUI presents an application, as a whole, with help and configuration integrated. Mac OS X seems to have overcome this hurdle with a workaround called "bundles". The user experience is not provided solely by "screen furniture". This is an elitist idea. The OS has to have the desktop user in the picture from the start. Unfortunately since it is "good enough" for most Linux/Unix users, who have themselves already learned to work at the command line, and have spent a lot of time (often painful)accustoming themselves to Unix, there is little impetus to "fix" anything at the OS level. I certainly do not begrudge the KDE or Gnome projects, I think they are valiant. But grafting wings to a tank does not make it a fighter jet. I never understood why the open source crowd decided to hop on the Unix horse. Proprietary Unix is no better than proprietary Windows, or proprietary Mac OS. So why do we persist in insisting that Unix should be the basis for a desktop OS? Fortunately there are projects like Atheos, Open BeOS, Cosmoe, etc., which are trying to tackle these problems. Microsoft will keep laughing to the bank if we continue forcing Unix on users without trying to meet them half way (well, ok KDE/Gnome is probably half way, but if we really want to have an open source OS on the desktop, we will certainly have to go way further than that to displace Windows). That's the end of my rant, flame on. And send some flamage to that know-nothing Miguel de Icaza for writing "Let's Make Unix Not Suck" while you're at it.
For a coherent GUI to work in a "consistent and normal way" it is imperative that the operating system also work in a consistent normal way which hopefully reduces the impedence mismatch between the GUI and actual operating system abstractions. AFAICT, Linux, and Unix in general, is horribly horribly inadequate to match a decent GUI. Linux/Unix has no component model and everything feels like a one off - APIs are flat, configuration files get dumped into the
It has to do with free speech, consumer protection, and the ability of the public to be aware. You are right, it probably doesn't say anything about "the right to know stuff" in the Bill of Rights or Constitution, but then again, back then there was no technology that could *prevent* you from knowing stuff (the government couldn't just magically make newspapers unreadable, e.g.). An informed public is a precondition to democracy. So yes, I think "rights" to use legally obtained hardware and software are important. It may be more abstract than, say, somebody fighting for the right to vote, but in an age of decreasing transparency in government, increasing closed-room deals between multinational corporations, and an epidemic of cynicism in politics, the right to consume, produce, and manipulate information is critical.
It's funny how it is obvious that China's restrictions on free speech/computer usage are unethical, yet simply because we have a "free market" and nominally democratic system anything goes. The perception you are making a difference while actually not, is more dangerous than not being able to make a difference in the first place.
by slashdotting www.sysadminday.com
Unfortunately smart bombs are no excuse for dumb people.
Yeah, I mean, great economies of scale can be achieved in colluding and consolidating to reduce competition and innovation. I mean, look at all the successfull monopolists of the past. It's just normal for capitalism to destroy itself. Nothing illegal about that. Oh wait, IT IS.
If you can stand the resource usage (and really, if you are used to Emacs, you have absolutely no excuse :p), try jEdit (www.jedit.org). It is an editor written in Java, and it is excellent. It is extensible with plugins, and is scriptable (but you don't have to use/see any of this if you don't want). It has powerful syntax highlighting, abbreviation/auto expansion, built in file browser, integration with Ant, etc.
"If only there was an alternative to Flash to escape this."
Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL): http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/05/29/smil.html
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG):
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/
Thank you©© That© was ¥ very helpful¥©
Uh, if one OS is completely unaware of another OS's access to hardware, there IS a rather large potential for corruption. Just imagine: web server starts reading file through read-only head, internal machine modifies said file, web server continues to read said file. What happens in this case? What happens if the file is deleted without the web server being notified?
It has nothing to do with drivers. Drivers live in an island called the operating system, and if those two islands are not connected, a driver on one machine will have no clue what a driver on the other is doing - they will both think they are accessing two completely different disks. Your argument might hold against VMWare if VMWare is really juggling and managing interrupts intelligently (so the operating systems don't step on each other) - but you didn't mention anything about this, and this certainly wouldn't hold for two entirely independent machines with no shared communication mechanism (the whole point of having an insecure web server use the read-only head, while the secure internal server uses the read/write head).
"Oh, and god forbid, what about NFS and Samba? Are the machines that host the NFS/Samba shares NOT allowed to change the contents of those systems?"
I'm not sure what your point is. NFS, Samba, and virtually any other network-based sharing system uses cumbersome slow-ass large-grained locking protocols. The article was about two completely seperate machines (no shared communication mechanism like NFS/Samba/sockets/shared mem - nothing).
Well, yeah, but the article was about doing this at the *hardware* level. Anybody can turn the write bit off on a partition, or mount a remote volume as read only. Yes, it's overkill to do it at the hardware level and I'd imagine this is only for the most sensitive of applications.
No, not "funny". Slashdot needs a "sad" moderation.
*busily scratching hard drive platter* What was that you said?
"And this leads to some lovely freezes if for some reason the app decides to take its time to repaint itself."
Dude, if an app is deciding to take its time to repaint itself, does the ability to MOVE the UNPAINTED window really matter? Exactly what "functionality" are you gaining from this decoupling?
I'm not sure whether to applaud you for introducing some humanity into an otherwise sterile occupation, or whether to shoot you on the spot on principle.
Thanks you mister smartsy pants. Now us s00per h4x0rs will 0wns your site! Please to tell us where you keep your spare house key! Thanxors!
As bad as it is for citizens of Nevada, I feel even worse for the Shoshone, who absolutely don't deserve having our radioactive shit stored in their sacred land. Hey, maybe we should start stashing some waste in Canada. I mean, it's not like the Canucks could do anything to us.
http://www.indiancountry.com/?1022253815
Or:
I send you this post in order to have your advice.
So, uh, does this mean communism actually won...?
Amen. If you REALLY REALLY REALLY need to see a movie and your job requires you to be on call, take a day of vacation. Take a sick day. Take a family emergency day. Who cares. It is simply not our responsibility that you have to be on call. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to both be on call and watch a movie at the same time. Be an adult and make a choice.
"How does Lance Bass pronouce his last name? And is he being shot off anytime soon? :-)"
They'll just replace him with the constant stock of animatronic dummy replicas they have on hand.
It is probably due to a limitation in subject leng
"What I choose to run in my browser is my own business" [emphasis mine]
The operative word here is choose. The question really isn't exactly what it does (we can install any software we want to filter/replace ads), the question is, does it install itself and infest your system without your knowledge. The answer is yes. It is spyware/adware and I have no sympathy for it, even if it walks my dog and makes me breakfast.
"It's against the law. It's a crime we are going to enforce," the detective said."
You heard it here: Corporate profits are the law.