>...using said product on any sort of trial basis...
I think it's being used way more than on a trial basis. It's being used for production purposes. Somebody's making money off of that software. It's only right that a slice of that is passed on to BK.
Well, a lot of people didn't care if Eazel made money either.
> I do care if Linux development is hampered by their stupid > license. Time to dump BK.
Their stupid license isn't what's the problem. The problem is people who refuse to consider paying for their software. Not even an option to consider? Nobody on this whole topic has even brought up the actual number of dollars - no need to, because spending money is out of the question. You're willing to hamper your project because you're not willing to even consider paying money.
Several times the cost of this software has been burned up by me and you and all the other programmers reading and arguing on this thread. Take your yearly salary, divide by 2000 hours (ok maybe 1850 for our european friends), that's your hourly rate. RedHat's pulling in $40M per year, ask them for some bucks.
Somebody's paying for it, one way or another. Go begging for some VC and tell them it's a "Linux" project and watch the doors slam and the money dry up. That's you, paying for someone else's refusal to pay money, for software like Eazel.
What goes around comes around. You want Linux to succeed, well, the money's got to come from somewhere.
> You can, but non-free software can't be the best tool for the job.
something tells me that BK is in use because it is the "best", or someone thought it was the best at one time.
Their site is uncomfortably cagey about the $price. That probably means, some suit dickers with your boss, feeling out "what the market will bear". IE the most money they can get.
The only number I came up with is "roughly 1% of the cost of an engineer" (cost of ownership page). OK so how does that compare with the cost of the lawyers meant to fight this whole thing?
How awful is it if you actually PAID MONEY for the software? Face it, if your boss doesn't have bucks, you don't have a job. Somebody's paying for the Linux kernel to be developed - if it costs 1% more, is that a big deal?
> Building trust is an issue between the website and their > potential customer. If the customer trusts the site, they're > going to buy regardless of who signed the cert.
Makes a lot of sense to me. How often do you get ripped off by an impostor site with a bogus certificate? Like, never. How often do you get ripped off by a real company (all certs in order) selling a mediocre or broken product? Much more often.
> How can they be reasonably certain the remote server is > actually who it says it is if the cert is self signed?
They can't. And they may never be able to. Browsers are always putting up bogus marginal security warnings; people have learned to click OK and get on with it.
Security people are really bad at user interface.
Almost any solution will be in the form of "do this and that mumbo jumbo with your browser, go here, do that, trust me". Any imposter site can do the same. The computer is a big ocean of inscrutible complexity. What's a human to do?
I'm not trying to be a troll here; I'm just trying to point out some of the problems. Most people do not understand the Certificate Authority panel, or any other security panel, in their browser, well enough to be able to tell if they're doing the right thing.
Hmmm... this browser I'm on doesn't even have one. OK, internet exploiter - that has one. 85 certificate authorities in the list, as shipped, and it's a security breach if ONE of those CA certs is bogus.
OK, quiz question, here's some of the certs that came built in with Internet Exploder:
SecureNet CA Root au EUnet Internatioinal Root CA EUnet International RSA CyberTrust Root RSA Corporation US Netlock Uzleti (Class B) Tanusitvanykiado Tanusitvanykiadok NetLock
Which one of these did I make up? And, more importantly, how did you decide that it was bogus?
Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
on
Undelete In Linux
·
· Score: 1
>If I am not sure if they can be deleted, then I will just mv > them to a temp. location or not delete them.
so, see, this guy has been using Unix for quite a while - stuff like this gets embeedded in your work habits. Probably early on, he mistakenly deleted a few things, and a trash can would have helped him out during those early times. But such was not available. Short term pain, long term power (perhaps).
For newbies, they are ALWAYS in short term mode. That's why this Trash concept is so popular. zero attention span.
It's like back when I programmed in Fortran, I'd be extra careful to spell variable names correctly, otherwise it's auto-declared as a whole other variable; a hard bug to find. One learns the hard way to cover your butt. Since converting to C I've gotten sloppy cuz the compiler almost always catches the error. I don't think we would have it any other way - the mistakes are expensive.
Similarly, recovering a lost file is time wasted, and time is expensive. Hard disk space is like a penny a megabyte these days (whoops, this one here's 1/4 cent per megabyte). OK so if it takes you 1 hour to recreate a file, that costs as much as several gigabytes of hard disk space. Assuming your time is worth money, and if it isn't, you aren't reading this.
Personally, I just buy so many gigabytes that I never have to worry about actually deleting files to make room. If it saves me ONE mistake every two years, it's worth it.
>...if Apple wanted to completely be out of making hardware, > because they'd be aiming OSX at commodity hardware, and that's > just too hideous to imagine,...
Part of their whole approach is to dominate the hardware to make sure stuff works. Not a big issue for Linux install people, who actually know what a disk controller is, and have the courage and time and skill to mess with it until it works. Apple's trying to make appliances that work the first time. WIth a market full of peripherals that also work the first time. You have to narrow the hardware spectrum for that.
correct, wrong word. I see this all the time, it's like affect vs effect, drives me crazy.
I once saw a book that used flaunt throughout where it should have used flout. They kind of have opposite meanings. Pretty painful reading. I didn't buy the book for that reason.
> Lots of work being done on Python between 2.0 and 2.2 . ..
then they ought to call it Python 3, so everybody gets a clue that it's a big change. Scoping is a big change.
Don't make the mistake that the sun/java people are doing - after two api-doubling releases and lots of cleanup releases, it's up to what, 1.4 I think. It's the marketing people who called it Java 2 cuz they couldn't stand it.
a non-GUI solution that works
on
GUIs for Everyone
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
>...Where you put >the buttons for the windows and what color the window borders >are isn't what's important - it's how... the GUI...communicates >... in a way that doesn't provoke anxiety, is unambiguous, and >fun.
Yeah. In particular, if you follow the directions and it doesn't work, that provokes anxiety. The typical Unix/Linux user instead sees a fun challenge. In other words, a non-GUI solution that works, first time - every time, is better than a GUI solution that doesn't.
> the people who have a complete blank slate about > computers.... There are no such things.
Yes there are. You obviously don't run into many, but if you visited a rural area of a third world country, you'd meet a few. Maybe they call you "Michael Jackson" because that's the only American they've ever heard of. Maybe they don't know the names of the countries that border their country - why would they need to know? Granted, by the time any of these people actually get their hands on a computer, there will have been some learning.
BUT, to give you an idea of real live computer users who are clueless, my Mom couldn't cope when I changed my email address. I got no emails for months, and I still don't even after my sister fixed it. She didn't know how to go to this window or that to change the nickname, she understands three different windows: an incoming mail, an outgoing mail, and a mailbox list of emails. She doesn't know how to type in a raw email to a random person, she can only do what she's been told to do.
My dad drags the installer, from the CD, onto the disk, and he thinks the software has been "installed". He reboots and his current problem is fixed, that confirms it. It took years for him to understand the difference between Ram and Disk - he calls it "memories". I set up a web page for him, and he forgot he had it, and didn't know how to get to it.
so what - these people will check the brand of their video card and Ethernet chipset for a Linux install? don't make me laugh.
yeah, I think the solution(s) will involve stuff like this:
1) everybody has incoming email filters 2) Stuff from people you know gets modded up, spammers can't really fake this. 3) Suspicion points mod an email down. Suspicion points such as the word "penis" in the subject. 4) As time permits, you can scan some of the maybe-spam. 5) Email from your long lost Kindergarten playmates, pfft, sorry, they get tossed.
I like the idea of requiring anybody on the non-approved list to reply again to verify that they are human. Spammers have blood of reptile just beneath their skin.
Let's try this out BEFORE implementing a widespread PKI thing.
I'm a developer and I jump between Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and Darwin. Lemme tell you it's a pain in the ass. [Yeah, FreeBSD and Linux are both open source, but are no closer to each other than the other two.]
And, yes, I do a tiny bit of sysadmin; just keeping these systems networked together. Not real sysadmin.
Which shell to use? Well, in the Solaris world, ya got yer sh, yer ksh and csh. And tcsh. Write scripts to ksh.
Linux doesn't have sh or ksh, it's got substitute symlinks to bash, which is sortof upward compatible. But that means that you get a script running on Linux and often something breaks when you move to Solaris. There's no sh manpage on Linux so it's hard to tell. (I got this book on scripting sh; I use that.)
bash has echo -n; sh doesn't.
In Linux, you can say
ls *.c -l On Solaris you must say
ls -l *.c otherwise it'll complain there's no file named -l.
In Linux you can say
date +%s to get the date as a big honkin integer. Not on solaris. BUT if you've installed the "software supplement" = gnu tools, you can instead say:
gdate +%s but of course this won't work on Linux. (Unless you wire up symlinks. every time you reinstall linux.)
In Linux you can say
ls -S to get it sorted by size. Not on solaris.
On all four platforms, the ps and df commands are so way different, I can't even memorize a common denominator form - I just try different things until I give up and do "man ps" or something.
Linux and FreeBSD have/etc/fstab. In Solaris it's/etc/vfstab. In Darwin, it's in NetInfo.
Linux has the best/proc directory (most fun). Solaris and BSD also have/proc directories - but the details are all different. Darwin - still trying to find that one.
In Solaris,/usr/bin and/bin are the same directory - symlinked together. !!!
Solaris calls a windows partition "pcfs". Linux calls it "vfat" and has a few other variations. On Darwin and FreeBSD I think it's called "msdos". And ALL of these work better than trying to cross-mount partitions: solaris UFS and freebsd UFS refuse to acknowlege each other's existence. Linux can mount both kinds of UFS but read only. Linux on PowerPC can't even mount an HFS+ volume, which is native for Darwin. None of the others can mount Linux's ext2.
Solaris breaks a disk into "partitions" that are subdivided into ufs "slices". BSD breaks a disk into "slices" that are subdivided into ufs "partitions". Linux follows Microsoft's lead and has "physical partitions" that are divided into "logical partitions". Mac machines have their own, simpler partition system. All 4 of these are incompatible with each other.
Certainly learning one unix will prepare you for the others - much easier than going, eg, between unix and windows. But if you think these hassles are cost free, I don't want you making decisions in my company.
> It gives an accurate picture of physics, > but not...relationships, love, peace, etc.
> Sure it does, in fact logical and mathematical modeling > of relationships between groups and even between individuals > is widely used and has been for sometime.
in theory.
If this were true, then mathematicians/physicists/engineers would be better than the average person at: - romance (aka getting laid) - salesmanship - politics
And I think there's ample evidence that they are in fact worse at these.
I think what's going on is more like this: mathematicians are especially bad at empirical testing, and at taking empiracle evidence seriously, therefore they more easily delude themselves into believing that they understand it all. (And this guy Wolfram, professor 'really complicated shit', is leading the pack.)
It's for the wealthy who really really want it cuz it's cool. Sure it breaks soon. It'll be way overpriced. They got a patent, otherwise it would be a commodity in 2 years and the company goes belly up.
They rake in the big bucks from the PHB's who say "where can i download it". Money comes in. After a few years it becomes affordable. After they've paid off their R&D and the VCs who risked the capital.
Actually the economy is at a bad time to release a toy, but I wish them well.
I got a z505r laptop 2 years ago. All the LinuxLaptop sites had lots of trip reports about how this linux and that linux work ok, yada yada.
It was a nightmare. The basics worked except you couldn't turn off the tapping on the touchpad, so typing anything longer than one line was frustrating as hell. The cursor would jump to a different place, right in the middle of a word, and your fingers wouldn't stop till a few words later. So you spend 15 seconds cutting and pasting to fix it. Every two minutes.
Finally a hack was found that fixed it (thanks bruce kall) (see tactileint.com/linux/vaiolinux.html if you care). But it's not ideal. EG it reverts to tapping after most sleep modes. FreeBSD isn't fixed, nor the 2.4 kernel. Kindof stuck.
Their tech support website scans for "linux" - any question that includes it, gets a form letter reply, "we don't support".
I wish THIS thread, or a Summary, was available somewhere, to basically tell people who are shopping for laptops for linux, "get IBM and DELL, not SONY, yada yada". Instead of just pretending that they all work OK because somebody got something to work somewhere once.
>Does FreeBSD or any other OS already have background > defragmenting that does not cause danger to the files on > disk with regard to crashes?
Here's these freebsd guys, they work hard and produce yet another amazing trick. Then you go and ask for something completely different.
On the other hand, yeah, you're right. Unconscious defrags, that would be ultra cool. DEAR FILESYSTEM PEOPLE: WE WANT IT ALL. ALL AT THE SAME TIME, without THINKING.
Personally, I want my laptop to be able to crash, in the middle of building software, and it's no big deal. Recently I had the battery run out while building, and the root partition wouldn't fsck anymore. Wasted!! (suse 7.1 running 2.2.18; build partition was ReiserFS, root partition was ext2. I'm sure other linux's are ==ly suspect.) I cleaned thoroughly and reinstalled (root is now ReiserFS).
Not what you would call consumer friendly.
Extra credit: after rebooting, resume the make, from where it left off. :-)
> While OpenOffice is preferrable for most things, > there are a couple of people who need StarOffice until > there are free replacements for the missing parts.
This seems to be a common mentality - if it ain't free, don't use it. Let the "corporate pinheads who have $$$ to burn" pay for "support". Or whatever, just so that I don't have to pay any money. Hey, I do it myself - if it's not mission critical, I don't want to pay for it.
You know, at some point, people have to start paying for this stuff. If you hear muffled screams from Mandrake and Caldera and VA Linux and Eazel and others, it's cuz they have mouths to feed. Hobbyists hacking in their spare time, off from their "day jobs", that's not enough. Linux needs to be people's day job, and for that you need money coming in. Linux has to have money flowing through it, just like a shark needs water flowing through it, otherwise it'll suffocate.
Shit, Mandrake starts demanding a few bucks, in between gasps for air, and everybody gets pissed at them. You want to know who's keeping Microsoft on top of the market, look in a fucking mirror.
>"The problem with general public license advocates is that they >don't understand that people need the opportunity to >commercialize software," Mundie said, attacking the notion of >open-source software.
Translation: God dammit, the BSD people let us rip off their VM code so we could rightfully make billions off of it, but this GPL stuff, we can't do anything with it! Who are these assholes!?!?!? Why won't they let us rip off their code?
>"If there is not commercialization there, a company can only >exist based on ancillary manufacturing or services. "
He's trying to get back to reality... to a certain extent what he says is true: often OSS does not provide a revenue stream, so an alternative revenue stream is needed. (All liars need to touch back to reality to shore up their credibility.)
>"If >commercialization was cut down, investors would not support >research and development in the IT sector,...
If there was no revenue stream from software development (directly or indirectly), investors would not support R&D. He's already tossed out the "ancillary manufacturing or services".
side note: ms doesn't do r&d, they do slash and burn.
>...less projects would >be developed, less taxes paid and the government would have less >money to run universities, and all the other things that >governments do," said Mundie.
Translation: if you don't do it our way, communist pinko fag islamic terrorists would take over Mom and Apple Pie. (OOPS don't say apple!! aaak!!)
In reality, OSS brings cheaper, better products to the greater market. Everybody wins except microsoft. That's what he's pissed at.
Slashdot Mirror
> ...using said product on any sort of trial basis...
I think it's being used way more than on a trial basis. It's being used for production purposes. Somebody's making money off of that software. It's only right that a slice of that is passed on to BK.
> I don't care if BitKeeper makes money.
Well, a lot of people didn't care if Eazel made money either.
> I do care if Linux development is hampered by their stupid
> license. Time to dump BK.
Their stupid license isn't what's the problem. The problem is people who refuse to consider paying for their software. Not even an option to consider? Nobody on this whole topic has even brought up the actual number of dollars - no need to, because spending money is out of the question. You're willing to hamper your project because you're not willing to even consider paying money.
Several times the cost of this software has been burned up by me and you and all the other programmers reading and arguing on this thread. Take your yearly salary, divide by 2000 hours (ok maybe 1850 for our european friends), that's your hourly rate. RedHat's pulling in $40M per year, ask them for some bucks.
Somebody's paying for it, one way or another. Go begging for some VC and tell them it's a "Linux" project and watch the doors slam and the money dry up. That's you, paying for someone else's refusal to pay money, for software like Eazel.
What goes around comes around. You want Linux to succeed, well, the money's got to come from somewhere.
> You can, but non-free software can't be the best tool for the job.
something tells me that BK is in use because it is the "best", or someone thought it was the best at one time.
Their site is uncomfortably cagey about the $price. That probably means, some suit dickers with your boss, feeling out "what the market will bear". IE the most money they can get.
The only number I came up with is "roughly 1% of the cost of an engineer" (cost of ownership page). OK so how does that compare with the cost of the lawyers meant to fight this whole thing?
How awful is it if you actually PAID MONEY for the software? Face it, if your boss doesn't have bucks, you don't have a job. Somebody's paying for the Linux kernel to be developed - if it costs 1% more, is that a big deal?
> They can still *purchase* a commercial license and develop
> whatever they want with it.
heaven forbid someone should actually PAY MONEY for software.
who is Larry McVoy? What does he have to do with this whole thing?
> Building trust is an issue between the website and their
> potential customer. If the customer trusts the site, they're
> going to buy regardless of who signed the cert.
Makes a lot of sense to me. How often do you get ripped off by an impostor site with a bogus certificate? Like, never. How often do you get ripped off by a real company (all certs in order) selling a mediocre or broken product? Much more often.
> How can they be reasonably certain the remote server is
> actually who it says it is if the cert is self signed?
They can't. And they may never be able to. Browsers are always putting up bogus marginal security warnings; people have learned to click OK and get on with it.
Security people are really bad at user interface.
Almost any solution will be in the form of "do this and that mumbo jumbo with your browser, go here, do that, trust me". Any imposter site can do the same. The computer is a big ocean of inscrutible complexity. What's a human to do?
I'm not trying to be a troll here; I'm just trying to point out some of the problems. Most people do not understand the Certificate Authority panel, or any other security panel, in their browser, well enough to be able to tell if they're doing the right thing.
Hmmm... this browser I'm on doesn't even have one. OK, internet exploiter - that has one. 85 certificate authorities in the list, as shipped, and it's a security breach if ONE of those CA certs is bogus.
OK, quiz question, here's some of the certs that came built in with Internet Exploder:
SecureNet CA Root au
EUnet Internatioinal Root CA EUnet International
RSA CyberTrust Root RSA Corporation US
Netlock Uzleti (Class B) Tanusitvanykiado Tanusitvanykiadok NetLock
Which one of these did I make up? And, more importantly, how did you decide that it was bogus?
>If I am not sure if they can be deleted, then I will just mv
> them to a temp. location or not delete them.
so, see, this guy has been using Unix for quite a while - stuff like this gets embeedded in your work habits. Probably early on, he mistakenly deleted a few things, and a trash can would have helped him out during those early times. But such was not available. Short term pain, long term power (perhaps).
For newbies, they are ALWAYS in short term mode. That's why this Trash concept is so popular. zero attention span.
It's like back when I programmed in Fortran, I'd be extra careful to spell variable names correctly, otherwise it's auto-declared as a whole other variable; a hard bug to find. One learns the hard way to cover your butt. Since converting to C I've gotten sloppy cuz the compiler almost always catches the error. I don't think we would have it any other way - the mistakes are expensive.
Similarly, recovering a lost file is time wasted, and time is expensive. Hard disk space is like a penny a megabyte these days (whoops, this one here's 1/4 cent per megabyte). OK so if it takes you 1 hour to recreate a file, that costs as much as several gigabytes of hard disk space. Assuming your time is worth money, and if it isn't, you aren't reading this.
Personally, I just buy so many gigabytes that I never have to worry about actually deleting files to make room. If it saves me ONE mistake every two years, it's worth it.
>...if Apple wanted to completely be out of making hardware, ...
> because they'd be aiming OSX at commodity hardware, and that's
> just too hideous to imagine,
Part of their whole approach is to dominate the hardware to make sure stuff works. Not a big issue for Linux install people, who actually know what a disk controller is, and have the courage and time and skill to mess with it until it works. Apple's trying to make appliances that work the first time. WIth a market full of peripherals that also work the first time. You have to narrow the hardware spectrum for that.
correct, wrong word. I see this all the time, it's like affect vs effect, drives me crazy.
I once saw a book that used flaunt throughout where it should have used flout. They kind of have opposite meanings. Pretty painful reading. I didn't buy the book for that reason.
> At least they got rid of the @#$% Hollerith-punch card column layout...
oh god and remember those "hollerith constants"? Something like this - to make a sortof quoted string you did this:
12HHello, World
I would have put a ! at the end but we didn't have exclaimation points in our character set.
> If optimising fortran is so easy, why's gnu f77 such a pile of crap?
my guess, it gets much less use than the C stuff. How much of the average Linux distro is in Fortran? probly 1%. They don't even fix all the C bugs.
> Lots of work being done on Python between 2.0 and 2.2 . . .
then they ought to call it Python 3, so everybody gets a clue that it's a big change. Scoping is a big change.
Don't make the mistake that the sun/java people are doing - after two api-doubling releases and lots of cleanup releases, it's up to what, 1.4 I think. It's the marketing people who called it Java 2 cuz they couldn't stand it.
>...Where you put ... the GUI ...communicates
>the buttons for the windows and what color the window borders
>are isn't what's important - it's how
>... in a way that doesn't provoke anxiety, is unambiguous, and
>fun.
Yeah. In particular, if you follow the directions and it doesn't work, that provokes anxiety. The typical Unix/Linux user instead sees a fun challenge. In other words, a non-GUI solution that works, first time - every time, is better than a GUI solution that doesn't.
> the people who have a complete blank slate about
> computers.... There are no such things.
Yes there are. You obviously don't run into many, but if you visited a rural area of a third world country, you'd meet a few. Maybe they call you "Michael Jackson" because that's the only American they've ever heard of. Maybe they don't know the names of the countries that border their country - why would they need to know? Granted, by the time any of these people actually get their hands on a computer, there will have been some learning.
BUT, to give you an idea of real live computer users who are clueless, my Mom couldn't cope when I changed my email address. I got no emails for months, and I still don't even after my sister fixed it. She didn't know how to go to this window or that to change the nickname, she understands three different windows: an incoming mail, an outgoing mail, and a mailbox list of emails. She doesn't know how to type in a raw email to a random person, she can only do what she's been told to do.
My dad drags the installer, from the CD, onto the disk, and he thinks the software has been "installed". He reboots and his current problem is fixed, that confirms it. It took years for him to understand the difference between Ram and Disk - he calls it "memories". I set up a web page for him, and he forgot he had it, and didn't know how to get to it.
so what - these people will check the brand of their video card and Ethernet chipset for a Linux install? don't make me laugh.
yeah, I think the solution(s) will involve stuff like this:
1) everybody has incoming email filters
2) Stuff from people you know gets modded up, spammers can't really fake this.
3) Suspicion points mod an email down. Suspicion points such as the word "penis" in the subject.
4) As time permits, you can scan some of the maybe-spam.
5) Email from your long lost Kindergarten playmates, pfft, sorry, they get tossed.
I like the idea of requiring anybody on the non-approved list to reply again to verify that they are human. Spammers have blood of reptile just beneath their skin.
Let's try this out BEFORE implementing a widespread PKI thing.
I'm a developer and I jump between Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and Darwin. Lemme tell you it's a pain in the ass. [Yeah, FreeBSD and Linux are both open source, but are no closer to each other than the other two.]
/etc/fstab. In Solaris it's /etc/vfstab. In Darwin, it's in NetInfo.
/proc directory (most fun). Solaris and BSD also have /proc directories - but the details are all different. Darwin - still trying to find that one.
/usr/bin and /bin are the same directory - symlinked together. !!!
And, yes, I do a tiny bit of sysadmin; just keeping these systems networked together. Not real sysadmin.
Which shell to use? Well, in the Solaris world, ya got yer sh, yer ksh and csh. And tcsh. Write scripts to ksh.
Linux doesn't have sh or ksh, it's got substitute symlinks to bash, which is sortof upward compatible. But that means that you get a script running on Linux and often something breaks when you move to Solaris. There's no sh manpage on Linux so it's hard to tell. (I got this book on scripting sh; I use that.)
bash has echo -n; sh doesn't.
In Linux, you can say
ls *.c -l
On Solaris you must say
ls -l *.c
otherwise it'll complain there's no file named -l.
In Linux you can say
date +%s
to get the date as a big honkin integer. Not on solaris. BUT if you've installed the "software supplement" = gnu tools, you can instead say:
gdate +%s
but of course this won't work on Linux. (Unless you wire up symlinks. every time you reinstall linux.)
In Linux you can say
ls -S
to get it sorted by size. Not on solaris.
On all four platforms, the ps and df commands are so way different, I can't even memorize a common denominator form - I just try different things until I give up and do "man ps" or something.
Linux and FreeBSD have
Linux has the best
In Solaris,
Solaris calls a windows partition "pcfs". Linux calls it "vfat" and has a few other variations. On Darwin and FreeBSD I think it's called "msdos". And ALL of these work better than trying to cross-mount partitions: solaris UFS and freebsd UFS refuse to acknowlege each other's existence. Linux can mount both kinds of UFS but read only. Linux on PowerPC can't even mount an HFS+ volume, which is native for Darwin. None of the others can mount Linux's ext2.
Solaris breaks a disk into "partitions" that are subdivided into ufs "slices". BSD breaks a disk into "slices" that are subdivided into ufs "partitions". Linux follows Microsoft's lead and has "physical partitions" that are divided into "logical partitions". Mac machines have their own, simpler partition system. All 4 of these are incompatible with each other.
Certainly learning one unix will prepare you for the others - much easier than going, eg, between unix and windows. But if you think these hassles are cost free, I don't want you making decisions in my company.
> It gives an accurate picture of physics, ...relationships, love, peace, etc.
> but not
> Sure it does, in fact logical and mathematical modeling
> of relationships between groups and even between individuals
> is widely used and has been for sometime.
in theory.
If this were true, then mathematicians/physicists/engineers would be better than the average person at:
- romance (aka getting laid)
- salesmanship
- politics
And I think there's ample evidence that they are in fact worse at these.
I think what's going on is more like this: mathematicians are especially bad at empirical testing, and at taking empiracle evidence seriously, therefore they more easily delude themselves into believing that they understand it all. (And this guy Wolfram, professor 'really complicated shit', is leading the pack.)
> Why not put them in a different room and use SSH and ... :)
> remote-management-by-serial-console?
> I'd prefer it.
that would be like going to a Hunan restaurant and ordering a hamburger.
It's for the wealthy who really really want it cuz it's cool. Sure it breaks soon. It'll be way overpriced. They got a patent, otherwise it would be a commodity in 2 years and the company goes belly up.
They rake in the big bucks from the PHB's who say "where can i download it". Money comes in. After a few years it becomes affordable. After they've paid off their R&D and the VCs who risked the capital.
Actually the economy is at a bad time to release a toy, but I wish them well.
Therefore we have "good" technology
"ok" tech support
"shitty" teachers
and "hideous" management
sound about right?
hmmm... I knew someone who managed tech support, he was actually pretty good. But I digress.
I got a z505r laptop 2 years ago. All the LinuxLaptop sites had lots of trip reports about how this linux and that linux work ok, yada yada.
It was a nightmare. The basics worked except you couldn't turn off the tapping on the touchpad, so typing anything longer than one line was frustrating as hell. The cursor would jump to a different place, right in the middle of a word, and your fingers wouldn't stop till a few words later. So you spend 15 seconds cutting and pasting to fix it. Every two minutes.
Finally a hack was found that fixed it (thanks bruce kall) (see tactileint.com/linux/vaiolinux.html if you care). But it's not ideal. EG it reverts to tapping after most sleep modes. FreeBSD isn't fixed, nor the 2.4 kernel. Kindof stuck.
Their tech support website scans for "linux" - any question that includes it, gets a form letter reply, "we don't support".
I wish THIS thread, or a Summary, was available somewhere, to basically tell people who are shopping for laptops for linux, "get IBM and DELL, not SONY, yada yada". Instead of just pretending that they all work OK because somebody got something to work somewhere once.
>Does FreeBSD or any other OS already have background
> defragmenting that does not cause danger to the files on
> disk with regard to crashes?
Here's these freebsd guys, they work hard and produce yet another amazing trick. Then you go and ask for something completely different.
On the other hand, yeah, you're right. Unconscious defrags, that would be ultra cool. DEAR FILESYSTEM PEOPLE: WE WANT IT ALL. ALL AT THE SAME TIME, without THINKING.
Personally, I want my laptop to be able to crash, in the middle of building software, and it's no big deal. Recently I had the battery run out while building, and the root partition wouldn't fsck anymore. Wasted!! (suse 7.1 running 2.2.18; build partition was ReiserFS, root partition was ext2. I'm sure other linux's are ==ly suspect.) I cleaned thoroughly and reinstalled (root is now ReiserFS).
Not what you would call consumer friendly.
Extra credit: after rebooting, resume the make, from where it left off.
:-)
> While OpenOffice is preferrable for most things,
> there are a couple of people who need StarOffice until
> there are free replacements for the missing parts.
This seems to be a common mentality - if it ain't free, don't use it. Let the "corporate pinheads who have $$$ to burn" pay for "support". Or whatever, just so that I don't have to pay any money. Hey, I do it myself - if it's not mission critical, I don't want to pay for it.
You know, at some point, people have to start paying for this stuff. If you hear muffled screams from Mandrake and Caldera and VA Linux and Eazel and others, it's cuz they have mouths to feed. Hobbyists hacking in their spare time, off from their "day jobs", that's not enough. Linux needs to be people's day job, and for that you need money coming in. Linux has to have money flowing through it, just like a shark needs water flowing through it, otherwise it'll suffocate.
Shit, Mandrake starts demanding a few bucks, in between gasps for air, and everybody gets pissed at them. You want to know who's keeping Microsoft on top of the market, look in a fucking mirror.
>"The problem with general public license advocates is that they
...
>don't understand that people need the opportunity to
>commercialize software," Mundie said, attacking the notion of
>open-source software.
Translation: God dammit, the BSD people let us rip off their VM code so we could rightfully make billions off of it, but this GPL stuff, we can't do anything with it! Who are these assholes!?!?!? Why won't they let us rip off their code?
>"If there is not commercialization there, a company can only
>exist based on ancillary manufacturing or services. "
He's trying to get back to reality... to a certain extent what he says is true: often OSS does not provide a revenue stream, so an alternative revenue stream is needed. (All liars need to touch back to reality to shore up their credibility.)
>"If
>commercialization was cut down, investors would not support
>research and development in the IT sector,
If there was no revenue stream from software development (directly or indirectly), investors would not support R&D. He's already tossed out the "ancillary manufacturing or services".
side note: ms doesn't do r&d, they do slash and burn.
>...less projects would
>be developed, less taxes paid and the government would have less
>money to run universities, and all the other things that
>governments do," said Mundie.
Translation: if you don't do it our way, communist pinko fag islamic terrorists would take over Mom and Apple Pie. (OOPS don't say apple!! aaak!!)
In reality, OSS brings cheaper, better products to the greater market. Everybody wins except microsoft. That's what he's pissed at.
> I dont know a single person who reads a fresh cut of ..."
> Microsoft FUD and says "My god - they are so right
i do. They're out there. They don't show up on this list, but they're out there spending their corporate bucks. sucks.