OK, that's better worded and I understand your point now. You're going for the "outside shock" theory of neoclassical economics -- and is a very valid point.
Let's say that the Justice Department splits up MS tomorrow and all has to be implemented by Friday -- that would cause a massive shock with a big down-swing. Companies would be confused with uncertainty, re-training would have to be done, new vendors would have to be evaluated, etc. Same with massive and quick switch to say, "Lindows". . .
Shocks work in a positive way, too. That's the.com boom. A "shock" of new technology caused a large up-swing which was followed by a down-swing stabilization.
You got it right on the nose. "If, over time, people just switch to Lindows, we're all good." Like you said, the key is the rate of change, not a change in itself (to avoid a shock).
I agree. One of the large problems that is overlooked is that State's Rights to handle driver's licenses was just F*cked over by this one.
More and more the US is becoming a 100% federal entity. Things work best when you have choices and people are allowed to rule their town, county, state and country the way they want to. If you don't like what your state does just move to another one. That's what the entire Civil War was about.
What makes this really suck is that the US federal government is not only sucking away state's rights, but sucking away the rights of the world by using "economic sanctions" to get other countries to conform to our laws adn using the WTO as the big stick as we walk softly.
It won't be too long until if you don't like a law the only way to protest it or get away from it is to leave the planet. I've been considering leaving the US after I finish up a few obligations because their foreign policy pisses me off too much, but US law is creeping into every country. Once we have a homogenized world law system and a world culture, the land of Huxley's "Brave New World" is not too far off.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Massachusetts keep driver's license photos digitally on record making it even worse.
Every time I renew my license I have them digitally recycle my picture from 6 years ago when I had long hair and a beard. It looks nothing like me (but I look like a 'terrorist'). . .
I just bought a pack of butts here at a Massachusetts CVS (drung store). They asked me for ID. I pulled out my drivers licence. She asked me to take it out of it's case so that she could scan it.
I put my license away and handed her my miltary ID out of its case. It caused mass confusion, a "scene" and a stern talking to a manager but I wouldn't let those bastards "scan" my driver's license to buy a pack of butts.
Point is that they can "scan" IDs now in Massachusetts. No way in hell I'm letting CVS or any other store "scan" my ID. It's WAY too easy for them to store that info and turn it into a marketing tool as well as a means [now] for the federal government to track my purchases.
Man, that's rough. .."the US economy needs MS". That's the most ignorant comment I've seen thus far. Go take a few macroeconomics courses -- I'm not even going to try to fully debunk this one but I'll mention a few things:
1) Did the US economy NEED the Standard Oil Company, Carnegie Steel or ATT&T?
2) Was the US economy hurt when there were multiple [American] MS competitors such as Netscape, Lotus and WordPerfect?
I won't doubt it. ..afterall MS started that very young with the creed, "MSDOS 2.0 is not complete until Lotus 1-2-3 is broken". ..and DOS 2.0 broke 1-2-3, but people did not switch to thier product, "MultiPlan". . . .
Years later MS owns every desktop app debunking biggies such as Lotus and WordPerfect. ..I don't doubt that they'll do the same to hold their office status.
I think it's too bad that Judge Jackson limited the number of witnesses in the MS case. ..if the scope hadn't been narrowed I think the Justice Department could have dug up some nasty stuff from long ago that would have amused us all. ..afterall the only positive thing the anti-trust case seems to have done is kill popular opionion of MS and more of that wouldn't have hurt. Lord knows that nothing has happened legally yet. . .
If I remeber it correctly the previos version was "W" for "Window" (no plural) and the next version was called "X" for the alpahbetic pun.
The naming confusion that started after that caused a lot of chattering and I think they finally said that calling it "X Window" was OK as LONG as you use the singular "window" and not the plural "windows".
I may be wrong though as I an't find any references to jog my memory. . .
So, yes, we have one application with "window" in its name. The question is whether MS is going to sue Anderson for selling windows.:).
When transgaming, codeweavers and lindows all fail and [hopefully] contribute their code back to wine, that's when we'll finally have a stable wine that runs everything. I don't see it any time before.
Wine's under an X11 license, and from the wine mailing list:
"We switched from the BSD license to the X11 license on 2000/4/24 to enable commercial companies to be able to include WINE into their products."
commercial company in this case is probably lindows. The only thing I hope is that when lindows fails they contribute thier 'proprietary' code back to the wine guys. . .
I by no means an expert in this area at all, but after hearing the death of the Alpha in favor of the Itanium and the fact that people buy P4s purely because "they have more megahertz" I bang my head on the desk asking why why why did I waste my life away taking Logic Design, Computer Architecture, Mircoprocessor Operations, etc in college.
I should haev taken a few marketing courses instead. They would have been more applicable to today's processor market and I could have gone to parties, drunk beer and relaxed instead of filling entire notebooks with K-maps:(.
Frankly I've had 95, 98, NT, Linux, Solaris, SCO, and Tru64 all crash at some point for differnet reasons. Some are stupid and are my fault like an improperly lined kernel . . . others are plain uncceptable.
The thing that pisses me off more then anything alse about Windows is that fact that YOU CANT TELL WHY IT CRASHED and you can't fix it!
It could be a slightly incompatible library. ..it could be a buggy driver. ..but you'll never know and you don't have the ability to ever find out. All UNIXes that I've used let you at least figure out what happened easily and fix it.
To fix windows it's either trial and error or a format and re-install. No other option.
Frankly I really don't care if XP is about as stable as Linux. They'll both crash at some point for somthing stupid. What I really care about is that I can fix the reason why it crashed.
. ..or they blame their techie friend [you] that tried to help them and the thing crashed a month later. . .
friend: "it was working fine two months ago before you touched it". .."can you fix it".
you: "there are no logs, I can't figure out what the 'blue screen' is trying to tell me". .."you'll probably have to format and re-install"
friend: "Well all my friends computers don't crash like this and THEY run Windows".."[think] you must not know what your doing and you broke it".
No computer ignorant person that I've ever helped ever blames windows. They either blame hardware or me and get pissed of when I tell them to format and re-install as if it is complete blastphemy like telling them to overhaul their engine because their car battery died. "It can't be a Windows problem because Bill Gates is a visionary and a genius like they said on 20/20. He said that my computer is faster and more reliable with Windows 98 -- you're not a genuis like Bill Gates so you must now know what you're doing."
I don't help ANYONE who runs windows EVER anymore PERIOD. No matter how much they beg. Not even my parents. I'm sick of getting blamed by ignortant people.
C'mon, I'm in the mood to here some serious ranting. Please tell about idiot stories where your non-tachnical friends blamed you for their future Windows problems after you helped them. . .
> IBM, Toshiba, and Sony wouldn't work together anyway
It's definately in IBM's interest:
[from the article]:
> TVs with the OS installed will be much
> smaller as they will not need a tuner, the
> sources said.
How are they to battle the monopoly-leverage that the MS HomeStation will have? Built it into the TV -- and they need the big TV makers Sony and Toshiba to pull it off.
Sony and Toshiba probably like it because they will get cheap chips and ASICs from IBM. If I remeber correctly there are a few IBM chips in the PS2. . .
This atricle is vaporware and hype, however the partnership is actually very logical and this does seem plausible. . .
A few years ago I wuld have never guessed these bed partners, though. . .
Use SCO Open Server some time. They do this. All packages are installed in a "per directory" manner and then sym linked to the "/bin,/lib,/etc" heierarchy.
I thought it ws an interesting idea until I had to admin about 50 of these things. . . I can't even begin to explain why it is a bad idea. ..let me hit a few quick points. ..if you're very interested I could write a large paper about why it is a bad idea. . .
It's a complete mess not to mention the massive performance hit from derefencing every symlink (afterall you're not going to have your PATH contain hundreds of variables to EVERY package's sub-directory so you'll still be referncing the current heierarchy after which you file system will have to dereferance every single stinkling sym link).
If you *REALLY* want every single file for a program in the same directory you can easily do it with the RPM database. ..this simple script will symlink every file into a "package heierarchy" [untested]:
#/bin/bash
mkdir/Program-Files
for F in `rpm -q -a`; do
mkdir/Program-Files/$F
for G in `rpm -q -l $F`; do
ln -s $G/Program-Files/$F/$G
done
done
Have Fun!
BTW having files in the/bin/lib/etc format is an EXTREME advantage. You can optimize mount points based on file types (ro,rw in NFS rsize, wsize, etc) and most of all with NFS you can remote mount filesystems off of a large server that are not likely to change (such as the/usr/local directory but unlike the/etc diretory) and thus have a central install base that only requires ugrading *ONE* server.
Having a central install base is a *BITCH* in Winblows and a lot of it has to do with the filesystem heierarchy.
Lastly the RPM database is the answer to your dilemma. It keeps a record of where every file is for every program. If you want to get rid of every file to a program you simply do a "rpm -e". That's it! Rather then doing "make install" with your builds simply write a.spec file and use rpm to build them. That way they'll be in the database and you can easily un-install them later.
The advantages to the current heierarchy is massive and frankly if you don't like it learn how to use the RPM database or get the SRMS to everything, do a little editing on the install scripts and create your own custom distro.
I hope that most people will agree with me that the current heierarchy has many many high-level administrative benefits (that you only realize after you've managed a few hundred UNIX boxen at a time). ..I think that's why most people won't even bother attempting to reply to this. . .
As a note SCO OpenServer used to be known as XENIX, a Microsoft product. . .
If I remeber it correctly ARPA paid BBN Corporation in Cambridge, MA to put and IP stack on BSD, which in turn it gave back to Berkley so that it could become "public domain". After that Berkley re-wrote the IP stack and added a plethora of tools (I think Bill Joy tries to take all the credit for the IP-stack re-write. ..another history re-write).
I'm pretty sure my history is correct. In that case how the hell this retard, Bill Hoskins, at Berkley ever expected Berkley to "license" it lord only knows.
I absolutely love how technology-related companies and universities re-write history to show that they were on top. I wrote a 20-page paper about MS re-writing history a few months ago that I'll perhaps post here some day when I have more bandwidth. . .
So a University spends time educating its students so that they can produce code which in turn the University can sell at a profit. . .
"It's a good incentive for a University to educate it's students", you say. "Universities are poor and the students can't afford the tuition so anything they sell to help that is cool with me.", you say.
What is now the difference between a University and a company that hires a newbie and trains him/her OJT? NOTHING other then the students now pays the 'corporate' university $30k to work for them rather then the company paying the newbie $30k to learn OJT.
Too many people put WAY WAY too much stock in a 'university education' and forget good old OJT. I say let the Universities that can not afford to exist go down in flames before they sell code and let all those "poor newbies" that "lost out on an education because of it" go learn OJT at a company. Otherwise there will be no distinction between a University and a Company other then having to pay a fuedal labor obligation to the University for "accepting" your money.
As people mentioned here before, licensing code is 100% against te goal of Universities to contribute to the sciences. Hell, a PHD candidate has to PROVE that they contributed to the relm of human knowledge in thier scisnce -- how the hell can they do that if their ideas are licensed?
If a University can not be a University then cut it's funding, discredit it and let it try to survive in the realm of megacorps. "Licensing" ideas stops a university from being a university and makes it a corporation.
But yet I'll probably still see it in the theatres. ..it's like seeing a train wreck. ..you don't want to see it because you'll know you'll be repulsed but at the same time your curious about it. ...
Worse comes to worse I think the new James Bond film will be out at about the same time. ..the only James Bond film to EVER disappoint me was "License to Kill". . . .
I agree. ..I've been using linux [and only linux] on the desktop for about the same time and I didn't know about XWC -- frankly it rocks!
I had been looking for a good GUI file manager for a long long time (yes, I love CLI but the mouse is faster when moving around 10,000 files). ..I had tried everything:
* gmc -- decent, slight bloat
* konqueror -- best file mamager but WAY too slow and bloated -- just like the rest of KDE -- I tried EVERYTHING to speed it up -- 686 compilation, objprelink even static linking -- ALWAYS slow!
* Nautilus -- don't even get me started.
* System G -- lacked features
I started to think that it was impossible to have a decent graphical file manager under linux that was fast -- and then this article came up. Nice. The only thing I have to figure out now is how to configure it to use the wheel mouse. . .
It was the same with web browsers until I found Opera:
* konqueror -- decent but slow
* Nautilus -- bloated to hell
* Mozilla -- I've given up with the hope that mozilla will ever be fast.
* galeon -- nice and quick front end, but the [mozilla] rendering still feels like I'm browsing drunk.
* Netscape 4 -- excellent, but crashes or locks up every 10th web page. I had to run gkrellm just to see when netscape was sucking up 100% CPU.
Same, too with office apps. ..abiword and gnumeric seem to be the speed winners here.
* StarOffice -- You need a cray supercomputer and the patience of a monk to run it.
* KOffice -- just like the rest of KDE, good but slow.
* Applixware -- I've yet to 'purchase' it.
. ..and e-mail clients. . .
* evolution -- the clear winner in functionality, but I just want a GUI mail reader, not somthing that opens 30 processes to manage my life.
* kmail -- slow and doesn't even uderstand IMAP _subscribed_ folders.
* Netscape 4 mail -- excellent, but crashes.
* Mozilla Mail -- just like the rest of mozilla, bloated to hell.
It was nice to see this article on a non-bloated desktop! Hopefully with these comments, this article and some more trial-and-error I'll find more apps to replace my bloated ones.
man mplayer.
You can choose many many different video outputs:
bash-2.05$/usr/local/bin/mplayer -vo help
Available video output drivers:
xv X11/Xv
x11 X11 ( XImage/Shm )
gl X11 (OpenGL)
gl2 X11 (OpenGL) - multiple textures version
dga DGA ( Direct Graphic Access V2.0 )
sdl SDL YUV/RGB/BGR renderer (SDL v1.1.7+ only!)
aa AAlib
png PNG file
null Null video output
pgm PGM file
md5 MD5 sum
mpegpes Mpeg-PES file
vesa VESA VBE 2.0 video output
directfb Direct Framebuffer Device
My personal favorites is the aa (ascii art) one -- you get to watch your favirote movie in 100% ASCII -- including on a VT220 terminal if you don't mind slow frames and have the patience to set up aalib and directfb -- which plays directly to the console through the framebuffer device (no X!).
I don't know what all the bitching about documentation has been. I read the documentation, compiled the source in 20 minutes and had it running, voila! The only thing you have to do is have all the headers installed for all the supporting libraries for it to compile the support.
The one question I do have is what is the licensing issues with using Windows codecs? Obviosly RedHat or Mandrake could never package this with their shipments because of fear of getting slapped by MS and one couldn't install it in a business deployment without paying MS. ..so frankly this player seriuosly rocks and I love it, but it and avifile don't help linux on the desktop at all. ..or does it?
Yeah, like putting a band-aid on a skin cancer sore.
The DOJ needs to solve the root of the problem, not patch the surface. Dicth the settlement and carry the case through -- all the provisions in the settlements are band-aids.
1) Use resierfs -- it'd stable now and recovers better then ext2 in small "incidents"
2) RAID 5 array
3) Run a nightly script that hard links all the files into a . (hidden) directory -- protects against rm -rf''s
4) Run mirror in every directory from cron-- if you lose or mangle one file you cna recontruct it from the contents of the mirror and the other files (works a lot like XOR in raid 5 arrays -- aka a RAID for files).
5) DDS3 incremental back-up; complete backup at regular intervals -- one set of tapes stored off site.
This protects you from multiple levels of failures -- with the catastrophic redundancy being the tapes. You don't always want to rely 100% on the tapes for all your redundancy.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, that's better worded and I understand your point now. You're going for the "outside shock" theory of neoclassical economics -- and is a very valid point.
.com boom. A "shock" of new technology caused a large up-swing which was followed by a down-swing stabilization.
Let's say that the Justice Department splits up MS tomorrow and all has to be implemented by Friday -- that would cause a massive shock with a big down-swing. Companies would be confused with uncertainty, re-training would have to be done, new vendors would have to be evaluated, etc. Same with massive and quick switch to say, "Lindows". . .
Shocks work in a positive way, too. That's the
You got it right on the nose. "If, over time, people just switch to Lindows, we're all good." Like you said, the key is the rate of change, not a change in itself (to avoid a shock).
I agree. One of the large problems that is overlooked is that State's Rights to handle driver's licenses was just F*cked over by this one.
More and more the US is becoming a 100% federal entity. Things work best when you have choices and people are allowed to rule their town, county, state and country the way they want to. If you don't like what your state does just move to another one. That's what the entire Civil War was about.
What makes this really suck is that the US federal government is not only sucking away state's rights, but sucking away the rights of the world by using "economic sanctions" to get other countries to conform to our laws adn using the WTO as the big stick as we walk softly.
It won't be too long until if you don't like a law the only way to protest it or get away from it is to leave the planet. I've been considering leaving the US after I finish up a few obligations because their foreign policy pisses me off too much, but US law is creeping into every country. Once we have a homogenized world law system and a world culture, the land of Huxley's "Brave New World" is not too far off.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Massachusetts keep driver's license photos digitally on record making it even worse.
Every time I renew my license I have them digitally recycle my picture from 6 years ago when I had long hair and a beard. It looks nothing like me (but I look like a 'terrorist'). . .
I just bought a pack of butts here at a Massachusetts CVS (drung store). They asked me for ID. I pulled out my drivers licence. She asked me to take it out of it's case so that she could scan it.
I put my license away and handed her my miltary ID out of its case. It caused mass confusion, a "scene" and a stern talking to a manager but I wouldn't let those bastards "scan" my driver's license to buy a pack of butts.
Point is that they can "scan" IDs now in Massachusetts. No way in hell I'm letting CVS or any other store "scan" my ID. It's WAY too easy for them to store that info and turn it into a marketing tool as well as a means [now] for the federal government to track my purchases.
Big Brother is watching you.
"I shall call him Brian"
Man, that's rough. . ."the US economy needs MS". That's the most ignorant comment I've seen thus far. Go take a few macroeconomics courses -- I'm not even going to try to fully debunk this one but I'll mention a few things:
1) Did the US economy NEED the Standard Oil Company, Carnegie Steel or ATT&T?
2) Was the US economy hurt when there were multiple [American] MS competitors such as Netscape, Lotus and WordPerfect?
3) Isn't Lindows an American company?
I won't doubt it. . .afterall MS started that very young with the creed, "MSDOS 2.0 is not complete until Lotus 1-2-3 is broken". . .and DOS 2.0 broke 1-2-3, but people did not switch to thier product, "MultiPlan". . . .
.I don't doubt that they'll do the same to hold their office status.
.if the scope hadn't been narrowed I think the Justice Department could have dug up some nasty stuff from long ago that would have amused us all. . .afterall the only positive thing the anti-trust case seems to have done is kill popular opionion of MS and more of that wouldn't have hurt. Lord knows that nothing has happened legally yet. . .
Years later MS owns every desktop app debunking biggies such as Lotus and WordPerfect. .
I think it's too bad that Judge Jackson limited the number of witnesses in the MS case. .
If I remeber it correctly the previos version was "W" for "Window" (no plural) and the next version was called "X" for the alpahbetic pun.
:).
The naming confusion that started after that caused a lot of chattering and I think they finally said that calling it "X Window" was OK as LONG as you use the singular "window" and not the plural "windows".
I may be wrong though as I an't find any references to jog my memory. . .
So, yes, we have one application with "window" in its name. The question is whether MS is going to sue Anderson for selling windows.
When transgaming, codeweavers and lindows all fail and [hopefully] contribute their code back to wine, that's when we'll finally have a stable wine that runs everything. I don't see it any time before.
They probably use WINE ans just tweaked it.
Wine's under an X11 license, and from the wine mailing list:
"We switched from the BSD license to the X11 license on 2000/4/24 to enable commercial companies to be able to include WINE into their products."
commercial company in this case is probably lindows. The only thing I hope is that when lindows fails they contribute thier 'proprietary' code back to the wine guys. . .
I by no means an expert in this area at all, but after hearing the death of the Alpha in favor of the Itanium and the fact that people buy P4s purely because "they have more megahertz" I bang my head on the desk asking why why why did I waste my life away taking Logic Design, Computer Architecture, Mircoprocessor Operations, etc in college.
:(.
I should haev taken a few marketing courses instead. They would have been more applicable to today's processor market and I could have gone to parties, drunk beer and relaxed instead of filling entire notebooks with K-maps
Frankly I've had 95, 98, NT, Linux, Solaris, SCO, and Tru64 all crash at some point for differnet reasons. Some are stupid and are my fault like an improperly lined kernel . . . others are plain uncceptable.
.it could be a buggy driver. . .but you'll never know and you don't have the ability to ever find out. All UNIXes that I've used let you at least figure out what happened easily and fix it.
The thing that pisses me off more then anything alse about Windows is that fact that YOU CANT TELL WHY IT CRASHED and you can't fix it!
It could be a slightly incompatible library. .
To fix windows it's either trial and error or a format and re-install. No other option.
Frankly I really don't care if XP is about as stable as Linux. They'll both crash at some point for somthing stupid. What I really care about is that I can fix the reason why it crashed.
. . .or they blame their techie friend [you] that tried to help them and the thing crashed a month later. . .
."can you fix it".
."you'll probably have to format and re-install"
."[think] you must not know what your doing and you broke it".
friend: "it was working fine two months ago before you touched it". .
you: "there are no logs, I can't figure out what the 'blue screen' is trying to tell me". .
friend: "Well all my friends computers don't crash like this and THEY run Windows".
No computer ignorant person that I've ever helped ever blames windows. They either blame hardware or me and get pissed of when I tell them to format and re-install as if it is complete blastphemy like telling them to overhaul their engine because their car battery died. "It can't be a Windows problem because Bill Gates is a visionary and a genius like they said on 20/20. He said that my computer is faster and more reliable with Windows 98 -- you're not a genuis like Bill Gates so you must now know what you're doing."
I don't help ANYONE who runs windows EVER anymore PERIOD. No matter how much they beg. Not even my parents. I'm sick of getting blamed by ignortant people.
C'mon, I'm in the mood to here some serious ranting. Please tell about idiot stories where your non-tachnical friends blamed you for their future Windows problems after you helped them. . .
> IBM, Toshiba, and Sony wouldn't work together anyway
It's definately in IBM's interest:
[from the article]:
> TVs with the OS installed will be much
> smaller as they will not need a tuner, the
> sources said.
How are they to battle the monopoly-leverage that the MS HomeStation will have? Built it into the TV -- and they need the big TV makers Sony and Toshiba to pull it off.
Sony and Toshiba probably like it because they will get cheap chips and ASICs from IBM. If I remeber correctly there are a few IBM chips in the PS2. . .
This atricle is vaporware and hype, however the partnership is actually very logical and this does seem plausible. . .
A few years ago I wuld have never guessed these bed partners, though. . .
Hmm. .
Use SCO Open Server some time. They do this. All packages are installed in a "per directory" manner and then sym linked to the "/bin, /lib, /etc" heierarchy.
.let me hit a few quick points. . .if you're very interested I could write a large paper about why it is a bad idea. . .
.this simple script will symlink every file into a "package heierarchy" [untested]:
/Program-Files
/Program-Files/$F
/Program-Files/$F/$G
/bin /lib /etc format is an EXTREME advantage. You can optimize mount points based on file types (ro,rw in NFS rsize, wsize, etc) and most of all with NFS you can remote mount filesystems off of a large server that are not likely to change (such as the /usr/local directory but unlike the /etc diretory) and thus have a central install base that only requires ugrading *ONE* server.
.spec file and use rpm to build them. That way they'll be in the database and you can easily un-install them later.
.I think that's why most people won't even bother attempting to reply to this. . .
I thought it ws an interesting idea until I had to admin about 50 of these things. . . I can't even begin to explain why it is a bad idea. .
It's a complete mess not to mention the massive performance hit from derefencing every symlink (afterall you're not going to have your PATH contain hundreds of variables to EVERY package's sub-directory so you'll still be referncing the current heierarchy after which you file system will have to dereferance every single stinkling sym link).
If you *REALLY* want every single file for a program in the same directory you can easily do it with the RPM database. .
#/bin/bash
mkdir
for F in `rpm -q -a`; do
mkdir
for G in `rpm -q -l $F`; do
ln -s $G
done
done
Have Fun!
BTW having files in the
Having a central install base is a *BITCH* in Winblows and a lot of it has to do with the filesystem heierarchy.
Lastly the RPM database is the answer to your dilemma. It keeps a record of where every file is for every program. If you want to get rid of every file to a program you simply do a "rpm -e". That's it! Rather then doing "make install" with your builds simply write a
The advantages to the current heierarchy is massive and frankly if you don't like it learn how to use the RPM database or get the SRMS to everything, do a little editing on the install scripts and create your own custom distro.
I hope that most people will agree with me that the current heierarchy has many many high-level administrative benefits (that you only realize after you've managed a few hundred UNIX boxen at a time). .
As a note SCO OpenServer used to be known as XENIX, a Microsoft product. . .
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. . .
.another history re-write).
If I remeber it correctly ARPA paid BBN Corporation in Cambridge, MA to put and IP stack on BSD, which in turn it gave back to Berkley so that it could become "public domain". After that Berkley re-wrote the IP stack and added a plethora of tools (I think Bill Joy tries to take all the credit for the IP-stack re-write. .
I'm pretty sure my history is correct. In that case how the hell this retard, Bill Hoskins, at Berkley ever expected Berkley to "license" it lord only knows.
I absolutely love how technology-related companies and universities re-write history to show that they were on top. I wrote a 20-page paper about MS re-writing history a few months ago that I'll perhaps post here some day when I have more bandwidth. . .
Universties selling code for profit. . ..
So a University spends time educating its students so that they can produce code which in turn the University can sell at a profit. . .
"It's a good incentive for a University to educate it's students", you say. "Universities are poor and the students can't afford the tuition so anything they sell to help that is cool with me.", you say.
What is now the difference between a University and a company that hires a newbie and trains him/her OJT? NOTHING other then the students now pays the 'corporate' university $30k to work for them rather then the company paying the newbie $30k to learn OJT.
Too many people put WAY WAY too much stock in a 'university education' and forget good old OJT. I say let the Universities that can not afford to exist go down in flames before they sell code and let all those "poor newbies" that "lost out on an education because of it" go learn OJT at a company. Otherwise there will be no distinction between a University and a Company other then having to pay a fuedal labor obligation to the University for "accepting" your money.
As people mentioned here before, licensing code is 100% against te goal of Universities to contribute to the sciences. Hell, a PHD candidate has to PROVE that they contributed to the relm of human knowledge in thier scisnce -- how the hell can they do that if their ideas are licensed?
If a University can not be a University then cut it's funding, discredit it and let it try to survive in the realm of megacorps. "Licensing" ideas stops a university from being a university and makes it a corporation.
But yet I'll probably still see it in the theatres. . .it's like seeing a train wreck. . .you don't want to see it because you'll know you'll be repulsed but at the same time your curious about it. . ..
.the only James Bond film to EVER disappoint me was "License to Kill". . . .
Worse comes to worse I think the new James Bond film will be out at about the same time. .
I agree. . .I've been using linux [and only linux] on the desktop for about the same time and I didn't know about XWC -- frankly it rocks!
.I had tried everything:
.abiword and gnumeric seem to be the speed winners here.
.and e-mail clients. . .
I had been looking for a good GUI file manager for a long long time (yes, I love CLI but the mouse is faster when moving around 10,000 files). .
* gmc -- decent, slight bloat
* konqueror -- best file mamager but WAY too slow and bloated -- just like the rest of KDE -- I tried EVERYTHING to speed it up -- 686 compilation, objprelink even static linking -- ALWAYS slow!
* Nautilus -- don't even get me started.
* System G -- lacked features
I started to think that it was impossible to have a decent graphical file manager under linux that was fast -- and then this article came up. Nice. The only thing I have to figure out now is how to configure it to use the wheel mouse. . .
It was the same with web browsers until I found Opera:
* konqueror -- decent but slow
* Nautilus -- bloated to hell
* Mozilla -- I've given up with the hope that mozilla will ever be fast.
* galeon -- nice and quick front end, but the [mozilla] rendering still feels like I'm browsing drunk.
* Netscape 4 -- excellent, but crashes or locks up every 10th web page. I had to run gkrellm just to see when netscape was sucking up 100% CPU.
Same, too with office apps. .
* StarOffice -- You need a cray supercomputer and the patience of a monk to run it.
* KOffice -- just like the rest of KDE, good but slow.
* Applixware -- I've yet to 'purchase' it.
. .
* evolution -- the clear winner in functionality, but I just want a GUI mail reader, not somthing that opens 30 processes to manage my life.
* kmail -- slow and doesn't even uderstand IMAP _subscribed_ folders.
* Netscape 4 mail -- excellent, but crashes.
* Mozilla Mail -- just like the rest of mozilla, bloated to hell.
It was nice to see this article on a non-bloated desktop! Hopefully with these comments, this article and some more trial-and-error I'll find more apps to replace my bloated ones.
man mplayer. You can choose many many different video outputs: bash-2.05$ /usr/local/bin/mplayer -vo help
Available video output drivers:
xv X11/Xv
x11 X11 ( XImage/Shm )
gl X11 (OpenGL)
gl2 X11 (OpenGL) - multiple textures version
dga DGA ( Direct Graphic Access V2.0 )
sdl SDL YUV/RGB/BGR renderer (SDL v1.1.7+ only!)
aa AAlib
png PNG file
null Null video output
pgm PGM file
md5 MD5 sum
mpegpes Mpeg-PES file
vesa VESA VBE 2.0 video output
directfb Direct Framebuffer Device
My personal favorites is the aa (ascii art) one -- you get to watch your favirote movie in 100% ASCII -- including on a VT220 terminal if you don't mind slow frames and have the patience to set up aalib and directfb -- which plays directly to the console through the framebuffer device (no X!).
I don't know what all the bitching about documentation has been. I read the documentation, compiled the source in 20 minutes and had it running, voila! The only thing you have to do is have all the headers installed for all the supporting libraries for it to compile the support.
The one question I do have is what is the licensing issues with using Windows codecs? Obviosly RedHat or Mandrake could never package this with their shipments because of fear of getting slapped by MS and one couldn't install it in a business deployment without paying MS. . .so frankly this player seriuosly rocks and I love it, but it and avifile don't help linux on the desktop at all. . .or does it?
Yeah, like putting a band-aid on a skin cancer sore.
The DOJ needs to solve the root of the problem, not patch the surface. Dicth the settlement and carry the case through -- all the provisions in the settlements are band-aids.
Others agree:
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2001/12/passport.htm
That's why I love the game Risk so much. It's a direct reflection of war and business.
This is what I do (man levels of redundancy):
1) Use resierfs -- it'd stable now and recovers better then ext2 in small "incidents"
2) RAID 5 array
3) Run a nightly script that hard links all the files into a . (hidden) directory -- protects against rm -rf''s
4) Run mirror in every directory from cron-- if you lose or mangle one file you cna recontruct it from the contents of the mirror and the other files (works a lot like XOR in raid 5 arrays -- aka a RAID for files).
5) DDS3 incremental back-up; complete backup at regular intervals -- one set of tapes stored off site.
This protects you from multiple levels of failures -- with the catastrophic redundancy being the tapes. You don't always want to rely 100% on the tapes for all your redundancy.