Could someone explain to me *why* it takes longer to get the source up there than the binaries? Isn't the former pretty much a prerequisite for building the latter?
Kidding aside, I'd really like to know. The only thing I can think of is that they want to add some packaging niceties, like maybe changes to the configure script.
Anyone?
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
This is from Triumph of the Nerds, and I may be mutilating some of the details, but anyways:
In the early days of Apple, Jobs needed someone to fill a management position and knew exactly whom he wanted: John Sculley, then head of sales at Pepsi-Cola. So they meet.
Sculley is initially not thrilled about the idea. Give up a great position at a rock-solid, multinational company for some shaky startup? What is this guy, nuts? So Jobs looks him in the eye, and says:
"Do you want to go on selling sugar water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
And he had him!
Of course, Sculley ultimately kicked Jobs out of Apple, but that's another story...
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Re:that's a pile of australian legislature
on
The Onion on Robots
·
· Score: 1
You're absolutely right, of course. The comparison that paints other animals as "superior" is bogus, but the description of the effect is nonetheless accurate. I heard a researcher being interviewed the other day (I think it was David Suzuki, but I can't remember for sure) saying "If humandkind were to become extinct -- how can I put this without sounding callous? -- the rest of life on this planet would benefit tremendously.
p.s. *love* the subject header.:^>
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develop an equilibrium with the surrounding environment. You humans do not. You move into an area and
multiply. You multiply until that area's natural resources are consumed, and then you spread to a new area. There is one other lifeform on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Humans beings are disease. A cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are the cure.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
I'm intrigued by this sandbox idea, I hadn't heard of it before. I'm thinking about how this could be done on Unix:
Postulate a bogus user 'sandbox', with no login password. You can run an untrusted exe safely as follows:
su - sandbox -c untrusted_exe
It can't touch your files, and it most certainly can't take down your system. On the downside, I don't see a way of letting it open windows in X without compromising security.
Any ideas?
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Software piracy has slowed the adoption of free software.
It's true, really -- if all the people currently using illegal software were somehow prevented from it, can you imagine the massive flux towards Linux et al.? Because say what you like, the fact is that not everyone using pirated software would want to pay for it at any price, let alone the monstrous figures the industry forces upon us.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Will the TT server be integrated instead of separate xfstt or xfsft?
Do you mean officially? Because you can patch the source and build XFree86 with integrated TT fonts right now... I know; I've done it. See the xfsft link from freetype.org for details. They provide precompiled binaries as well.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
I can certainly relate, but if that's the market they're aiming for, they had better beat Mozilla to the punch. I for one would be nothing short of astonished if they managed to make a better product.
Speaking of which, M6 was scheduled for release on Saturday... Shouldn't be long now...
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Erm, that really isn't the usual situation, you realize. I upgraded to glibc2 almost the instant it came out (I'm funny that way), making it the default C library. It was a bit of work to do it by hand (mainly because of incompatibilities in the crt*.o objects) but it worked out fine. There aren't very many source-level incompatibilities, either, I remember sys_errlist being the most annoying. To fix stuff that relied on that, I wrote a "retrocc" script that passed gcc all the necessary flags to use libc5, which I'd relegated to/usr/linux-libc5 (or something alike).
So, er, ahem, I'm not saying you're dumb, but most people haven't had the problems you're describing...
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
The actual Palm ads might've easily been considered sexist, but this one is satire. It's making fun of the original, which you could logically conclude to be a good thing if you didn't like the original.
That being said, Red Hat certainly has the right to decide how its image is used, and if it thinks the humourless masses will take it the wrong way (evidently quite possible), that's their call to make.
TurboLinux has no such excuse for using spokesmodels, on the other hand, so bad karma in their general direction.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
The fonts are unreadable. Totally. Well... I agree the ones they give away for free are next to useless, but that's just a hook to get you to buy the CD. Sucks, but hey, they are a for-profit company.
No driver for my Canon BJC 4000 [...] if it would print using the print system I ALREADY HAVE! You can get it to print vanilla postscript by using the Apple LaserWriter driver. That's what we did at my office because the HP LaserJet 5M driver was icky...
Word import sucks. It mangles anything more complex than simple paragraphs, and the fonts all go to hell. Well, yeah, that's because you only have a dozen fonts or so. See the first point.
The interface was clearly designed by aliens. It's even more counterintuitive than Word for christ's sake. Really? I didn't think it was that bad. Matter of opinion I suppose.
Given that I have a 32M machine at home, this thing blows StarOffice right out of the water. I won't be buying the CD, as I really have almost no need for a WP anyways (LaTeX will do fine in a pinch), but WP seems very nice to me. Mind you, I haven't tried Applix.
And all of this may become academic when KOffice matures. I've used some of the prereleases. They're crashy (as of 2 months ago, anyways) but they look mighty fine... KOffice, along with Mozilla, is the app I'm most looking forward to maturing. I think it'll do a lot for Open Source software.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Not only are the free speech issues rather iffy here, but what can he possibly hope to accomplish? There is no possible way he can prevent someone from coming up with an original derogatory domain name (bushbites.com, bush-is-a-loser.com, bush-can-suck-my-big-hairy-ass.com, etc. etc.), so he's only really intercepting people who actually think to type the name straight into their browser, rather than following a link... How many can that be?
As for wanting the publicity, boff... I'm not sure I agree that "any press is good press". Are people really going to be more likely to vote for him, having read this?
Incidentally, I have nothing against the man myself. I don't live in the US and have no idea of his policies, anyways. Just pointing out that this was a dumb idea.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
I could spend all day discussing the claims which are merely misleading or questionable, so I'll stick to those which are outright lies, besides the four already mentioned.
"Administrators are required to re-link and reload kernel to add features to OS". Hello? Modules? And the "reloading" statement is especially galling in light of Windoze's frequent need to reboot after installing a bloody application!
Historically, in order to perform optimally, applications need to be recompiled when the OS is upgraded Utter crap. Can you imagine recompiling everything each time the patch level is incremented? And are you telling me that Windows 3.1 applications perform "optimally" under 95 or NT, when they actually work at all?
Ah, and under the NT column, I think the following bullet nicely illustrates MS' overall "commitment to quality"...
"Why don't we address the int'l and accessibility point?"
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
You have done nothing to refute them, you just quoted them. Sadly that was enough to get you the highest possible score on the moderation scale.
The reason being that the people doing the moderation are savvy enough to see that the claims are blatant lies, and actually going to the trouble to refute them is almost overkill.
Still, I suppose it would've been better for the non-techies...
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
One one-thousandth actually (one one-millionth is "micro")... So his computer was an 8 MHz machine. Nothing to get excited about, but it sure beats an 8 kHz clock...
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
The facial close-up of that girl is absolutely gorgeous. Hard to believe it's actually CGI.
What pinched me most, though, was the scene at the end of the second movie -- "Crash leading a bunch of penguins over a snow drift", as it's described. I can't help but wonder -- do you suppose it's a nod to Linux? It was reported not long ago that Sony is using Linux as their development platform for this project...
Ciao... . SNF .
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
In short, mozilla.org is failing to follow one of free software's most powerful and effective maxims: release early; release often. Just get the browser out there.
No, they haven't. I refer you to ftp.mozilla.org, on which you may find daily builds of Mozilla for many platforms, as well as a daily sourcedump.
Ah ah -- there's a nuance you're missing there. The key word is release. That means a working, useful build of the product. Daily source dumps do not constitute a release. I've downloaded sources on three separate occasions, including the "official" 12/03 "release," and in all cases I couldn't even get the thing to build, and not for lack of trying either.
M3 is close (I was actually shocked when it compiled succesfully, although I still can't get it actually working) but it's taken a year to get this far!
Can someone in the know tell me why a minimal working browser was not released quickly, and features added in gradually, without breaking the source base for extended periods of time? Is it because, as JWZ noted, the actual released source was such a crawling horror?
I'd like to know. . SNF .
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Slashdot Mirror
Kidding aside, I'd really like to know. The only thing I can think of is that they want to add some packaging niceties, like maybe changes to the configure script.
Anyone?
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
This is from Triumph of the Nerds, and I may be mutilating some of the details, but anyways:
In the early days of Apple, Jobs needed someone to fill a management position and knew exactly whom he wanted: John Sculley, then head of sales at Pepsi-Cola. So they meet.
Sculley is initially not thrilled about the idea. Give up a great position at a rock-solid, multinational company for some shaky startup? What is this guy, nuts? So Jobs looks him in the eye, and says:
"Do you want to go on selling sugar water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
And he had him!
Of course, Sculley ultimately kicked Jobs out of Apple, but that's another story...
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
p.s. *love* the subject header. :^>
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Postulate a bogus user 'sandbox', with no login password. You can run an untrusted exe safely as follows:
su - sandbox -c untrusted_exe
It can't touch your files, and it most certainly can't take down your system. On the downside, I don't see a way of letting it open windows in X without compromising security.
Any ideas?
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
It's true, really -- if all the people currently using illegal software were somehow prevented from it, can you imagine the massive flux towards Linux et al.? Because say what you like, the fact is that not everyone using pirated software would want to pay for it at any price, let alone the monstrous figures the industry forces upon us.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Do you mean officially? Because you can patch the source and build XFree86 with integrated TT fonts right now... I know; I've done it. See the xfsft link from freetype.org for details. They provide precompiled binaries as well.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Correct, but if one had to be picked, I'd put my vote in for A portrait of J. Random Hacker from the Jargon File.
Like reading my own biography...
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Speaking of which, M6 was scheduled for release on Saturday... Shouldn't be long now...
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
So, er, ahem, I'm not saying you're dumb, but most people haven't had the problems you're describing...
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
*Star Trek: The Next Generation*
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
That being said, Red Hat certainly has the right to decide how its image is used, and if it thinks the humourless masses will take it the wrong way (evidently quite possible), that's their call to make.
TurboLinux has no such excuse for using spokesmodels, on the other hand, so bad karma in their general direction.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Well... I agree the ones they give away for free are next to useless, but that's just a hook to get you to buy the CD. Sucks, but hey, they are a for-profit company.
No driver for my Canon BJC 4000 [...] if it would print using the print system I ALREADY HAVE!
You can get it to print vanilla postscript by using the Apple LaserWriter driver. That's what we did at my office because the HP LaserJet 5M driver was icky...
Word import sucks. It mangles anything more complex than simple paragraphs, and the fonts all go to hell.
Well, yeah, that's because you only have a dozen fonts or so. See the first point.
The interface was clearly designed by aliens. It's even more counterintuitive than Word for christ's sake.
Really? I didn't think it was that bad. Matter of opinion I suppose.
Given that I have a 32M machine at home, this thing blows StarOffice right out of the water. I won't be buying the CD, as I really have almost no need for a WP anyways (LaTeX will do fine in a pinch), but WP seems very nice to me. Mind you, I haven't tried Applix.
And all of this may become academic when KOffice matures. I've used some of the prereleases. They're crashy (as of 2 months ago, anyways) but they look mighty fine... KOffice, along with Mozilla, is the app I'm most looking forward to maturing. I think it'll do a lot for Open Source software.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
As for wanting the publicity, boff... I'm not sure I agree that "any press is good press". Are people really going to be more likely to vote for him, having read this?
Incidentally, I have nothing against the man myself. I don't live in the US and have no idea of his policies, anyways. Just pointing out that this was a dumb idea.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
- "Administrators are required to re-link and reload kernel to add features to OS".
- Historically, in order to perform optimally, applications need to be recompiled when the OS is upgraded
Ah, and under the NT column, I think the following bullet nicely illustrates MS' overall "commitment to quality"...Hello? Modules? And the "reloading" statement is especially galling in light of Windoze's frequent need to reboot after installing a bloody application!
Utter crap. Can you imagine recompiling everything each time the patch level is incremented? And are you telling me that Windows 3.1 applications perform "optimally" under 95 or NT, when they actually work at all?
"Why don't we address the int'l and accessibility point?"
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
The reason being that the people doing the moderation are savvy enough to see that the claims are blatant lies, and actually going to the trouble to refute them is almost overkill.
Still, I suppose it would've been better for the non-techies...
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
What pinched me most, though, was the scene at the end of the second movie -- "Crash leading a bunch of penguins over a snow drift", as it's described. I can't help but wonder -- do you suppose it's a nod to Linux? It was reported not long ago that Sony is using Linux as their development platform for this project...
Ciao... . SNF .
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
No, they haven't. I refer you to ftp.mozilla.org, on which you may find daily builds of Mozilla for many platforms, as well as a daily sourcedump.
Ah ah -- there's a nuance you're missing there. The key word is release. That means a working, useful build of the product. Daily source dumps do not constitute a release. I've downloaded sources on three separate occasions, including the "official" 12/03 "release," and in all cases I couldn't even get the thing to build, and not for lack of trying either.
M3 is close (I was actually shocked when it compiled succesfully, although I still can't get it actually working) but it's taken a year to get this far!
Can someone in the know tell me why a minimal working browser was not released quickly, and features added in gradually, without breaking the source base for extended periods of time? Is it because, as JWZ noted, the actual released source was such a crawling horror?
I'd like to know. . SNF .
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty