``On a side note, 2.2.7 is as BSDish as you can get.''
Maybe. Except lots of the BSD API is deprecated - perhaps this is part of a move towards POSIX / XPG conformance? You have to link in compatability libraries for things like BSD C regexps, which brings back bad memories of programming on Solaris after the switch from BSD based SunOS...
``Steeper learning curve? I doubt it, unless the you're comparing redhat to them. Debian and slack can be equally daunting to a user.''
There just isn't the same amount of material avaliable for the free BSD's as there is for Linux. This is a shame as I loved NetBSD, but in the end I switched to SparcLinux simply because it performs better. (There are good reasons why Linux outperforms NetBSD - the NetBSD guys chose to code for easy portability not blistering performance on any one platform).
I can't say that I enjoyed FreeBSD though, as the version I used (2.2.7) seemed to be in some kind of limbo between BSD and System V from a programmers point of view.
As for Linux distros differing in terms of user-friendliness, I can only comment on SuSE and RedHat. RedHat is a doddle to use, but takes a lot of trimming to get rid of extraneous cruft, while SuSE reminded me of NetBSD for some reason.
What more do you want from a couple of hundred words written by someone installing OpenBSD for the first time. Remember that this article is published on a Linux-centric site, and that most people use Linux as a desktop OS. As the author correctly points out, OpenBSD's raison d'etre is as a potentially secure server OS. Note that I say it is *potentially* secure - it's still up to the end user to configure it correctly. OpenBSD simply gives you an audited set of software that gives you a fighting chance of setting up an almost uncrackable server.
So don't knock this review without noting its context. I feel that he highlights the real differences between Linux and the free BSD flavours - the latters constency, economy of features and steeper learning curve.
Reading this guys experience of installing OpenBSD reminded me of the first time I installed NetBSD. The bewildering lack of documentation, and the archaic partitioning scheme that comes up as the default. Once installed though, I felt the same as this guy in that it was a bare bones Unix, with no cruft.
My only criticism of NetBSD (and I assume this applies to OpenBSD as well), is that the kernel co nfiguration is horrible. *BSD snobs always poke fun at the user friendly kernel configuration tools that come with the Linux source, but this is really unjustified. I never got round to compiling my own NetBSD kernel because of the paucity of documentation and the crap configuration file.
I did recompile my FreeBSD kernel on numerous occcasions, but always had that ``did I do it properly'' feeling that I've never encountered with Linux.
So all in all this OpenBSD review is accurate and fair.
I was able to resist the urge to buy a Palm on the basis that I'd soon get bored of writing with the stylus. Now that excuse has gone I'm going to *have* to buy one. What a sad existence I lead when I can't overcome the urge to buy gadgets for the sake of it.
Many people found it through the excellent Broadway production
As opposed to the excruciatingly embarassing film. But seriously, The Who parted with many of their early fans over what was seen as a pretentious folly when Tommy came out. It also didn't endear them to a generation of punks (myself included), despite the fact that `Live in Leeds' can be seen as a seminal influence on both punk and heavy metal.
I love a lot of The Who's output, but the rock operas like Tommy and Townshend's solo stuff leaves a lot to be desired. Definitely something for the hardcore fans only.
And for the guy who reckons Weller is better songwriter than Townhend - well your wrong. They're both insanely good songwriters. (And that's coming from a Goth...).
A boring way of naming serverfs, but an effective one, is to name them after geographical features. Here at Elsevier (my current employer) servers are named after mountains, workstations after smaller features. My two machines are named after small rivers...
Enlightenment began as a rewrite of fvwm, and although they are supposed to no longer share any code, there could be similarities. These similarities (possibly in the way they handle X events) could be the cause of your Netscape crashes under fvwm2 and mine under E. I suggest giving Blackbox a whirl (http://blackbox.alug.org/), and seeing if this solves your problem. If it does, then a bug report to the fvwm2 maintainer is in order.
Just for the record, the Communicator crashes didn't seem to occur under E 0.16, but I have upgraded from Communicator 4.51 to 4.7 since I last ran E 0.15.
One thing I have noticed is that Communicator crashed regularily under Enlightenment 0.15. This was a fairly common event when closing a window when several browser windows were open. I first put this down to Communicator bugs, but when I switched window manager to Blackbox, the crashes were markedly decreased. From suffering a crash roughly three or four times a day, now I'm down to one or two crashes a week.
Communicator is definitely crash prone, but I put this down to the difficulty in maintaining the 'classic' version. In fact, the convoluted nature of the classic code is what prompted the drastic rewrite of Mozilla (and the consequent ignorance about why Mozilla deadlines slipped).
As for Network Computers, they are simply a repackaged version of things like X Terminals - and could even be seen as anextension of the old dumb terminals connected to a mainframe.
Whether we really need dedicated NC's is questionable. A friend who works runs a medium sized PC and network installation asked me just this weekend about how viable stripped down PC's running Linux would be. As recently reported on Slashdot, a UK based financial firm did just this, so now my friend wants to try it as well.
How the heck KDE is going to affect load on X caused be other apps ?
Other KDE apps you twit.
And as someone who has been programming X applications since the bad old days of OpenLook and then Motif, I have a feeling I know what I'm talking about.
> >...it's a Windows killer. The usability is much better, and the optimised build much smoother. > Um, exactly how often to you tend to (re)build Windows, then? Perhaps you meant "... smoother than on previous versions" on that last part, and I'm just being picky?;^) I meant that KDE 2.0 built with optimisation is much smoother than Windows - no annoying lock ups while apps load or do something mildly heavyweight. Chris Wareham
As the article states, CORBA itself doesn't provide a machanism for embedding in X applications, it simple allows the process to be initiated. The actual embedding is still relies on X and KDE library calls, so CORBA was just adding complexity to this.
As far as I understand it (and I'm an user of KDE, not one of the programmers), the new embedding technology is as simple an API as possible. Presumably a wrapper around CORBA is out of the question, because a wrapper around what is essentially a wrapper already is daft. Perhaps if the OMG's CORBA specification hadn't been designed by a band of muppets things would be different.
Having recently compiled a snapshot of KDE 2.0, I can say with some conviction that it's a Windows killer. The usability is much better, and the optimised build much smoother. Having had to do some testing of Unix apps running under the Windows Reflections X server, I'm suprised at just how poorly NT performs when more than one application is open. (I mean Windows apps like Outlook and Explorer, not the Unix apps).
The loss of Mico as a dependency for KDE 2.0 is also a good thing. Mico is just too large for it to form the basis of a component model, the only place it really shines is truly network transparent CORBA apps.
The junkbuster is a proxy that filters banner ads, cookies, etc based on simple regular expression like syntax. The default blocklist filters out pretty much all the crud out there, making for faster downloads.
Chris Wareham
Yup, I like very little from the SF genre
on
Pasquale's Angel
·
· Score: 2
I remember visiting the local library as a child, and being amused by the garish covers of science fiction paperbacks. Maybe it's just because I'm a cynic, whose parents are cynics and lives in a nation of cynics - but those books looked intensely sad.
Years later I actually tried reading a few SF books. For a genre that should be based on wild flights of imagination, it read like swords and sorcery tales with lasers. Turgid was an understatement.
As with any genre, there are a few roses growing on the dungheap of Science Fiction (to paraphrase Nietzsche), but it's one enormous mound of shit with very few roses.
I have very little interest in SF writing usually, but this book is very much an exception. I came across it by way of a media student living in my house years ago. He got sent the book as a review copy when it came out and recomended it to me - and the old line about not being able to put it down is certainly true in Snow Crash's case.
I've yet to read any of his more recent works, but this one gets a definite ten out of ten.
The Speed 12 is a monstrous V12 - hence the name. The Griffith and Chimera have the Buick based Rover V8, although to say it's been slightly modified is an understatement.
Sinn Fein is the Republican political party, and lots of shady links between the SF leadership and the IRA have been suggested. None of them have been proved beyond a doubt, although many Unionists believe Gerry Adams sits on IRA committees.
Regardless of the truth, both Adams and Trimble (the Unionist leader and Orange order member) walk a fine line in appeasing the publics need for peace and the terrorists fear of `defeat'.
Finland doesn't have it's own monarchy, although they toyed with the idea of adopting a German aristocrat as their sovereign. The idea was mooted during the transition to independence from Russia, but fell through when Germany capitulated at the end of the Great War.
Prior to that, Finland had been a Duchy of Tsarist Russia and a province of Sweden. The Swedish link is why so many Finns speak Swedish as a first language and Finnish as a second (in some cases not at all). During the Tsarist era it was briefly illegal to use Finnish - an attempt at crushing national identity that was later used by Stalin in the Baltic States and elsewhere.
Very impressed that he owns the same car as me (an MGB). It's just a shame I haven't got a Ferrari or two - although if I had that sort of money it would have to be a TVR Speed 12. Ferraris are just too flimsy...
Slashdot Mirror
``The Cheapbytes CD comes with a very clear, step by step guide ...''
;-)
Not much help if you're a total cheapskate and just downloaded NetBSD like I did
Chris Wareham
``On a side note, 2.2.7 is as BSDish as you can get.''
...
Maybe. Except lots of the BSD API is deprecated - perhaps this is part of a move towards POSIX / XPG conformance? You have to link in compatability libraries for things like BSD C regexps, which brings back bad memories of programming on Solaris after the switch from BSD based SunOS
Chris Wareham
``Steeper learning curve? I doubt it, unless the you're comparing redhat to them. Debian and slack can be equally daunting to a user.''
There just isn't the same amount of material avaliable for the free BSD's as there is for Linux. This is a shame as I loved NetBSD, but in the end I switched to SparcLinux simply because it performs better. (There are good reasons why Linux outperforms NetBSD - the NetBSD guys chose to code for easy portability not blistering performance on any one platform).
I can't say that I enjoyed FreeBSD though, as the version I used (2.2.7) seemed to be in some kind of limbo between BSD and System V from a programmers point of view.
As for Linux distros differing in terms of user-friendliness, I can only comment on SuSE and RedHat. RedHat is a doddle to use, but takes a lot of trimming to get rid of extraneous cruft, while SuSE reminded me of NetBSD for some reason.
Chris Wareham
What more do you want from a couple of hundred words written by someone installing OpenBSD for the first time. Remember that this article is published on a Linux-centric site, and that most people use Linux as a desktop OS. As the author correctly points out, OpenBSD's raison d'etre is as a potentially secure server OS. Note that I say it is *potentially* secure - it's still up to the end user to configure it correctly. OpenBSD simply gives you an audited set of software that gives you a fighting chance of setting up an almost uncrackable server.
So don't knock this review without noting its context. I feel that he highlights the real differences between Linux and the free BSD flavours - the latters constency, economy of features and steeper learning curve.
Chris Wareham
Reading this guys experience of installing OpenBSD reminded me of the first time I installed NetBSD. The bewildering lack of documentation, and the archaic partitioning scheme that comes up as the default. Once installed though, I felt the same as this guy in that it was a bare bones Unix, with no cruft.
My only criticism of NetBSD (and I assume this applies to OpenBSD as well), is that the kernel co nfiguration is horrible. *BSD snobs always poke fun at the user friendly kernel configuration tools that come with the Linux source, but this is really unjustified. I never got round to compiling my own NetBSD kernel because of the paucity of documentation and the crap configuration file.
I did recompile my FreeBSD kernel on numerous occcasions, but always had that ``did I do it properly'' feeling that I've never encountered with Linux.
So all in all this OpenBSD review is accurate and fair.
Chris Wareham
I was able to resist the urge to buy a Palm on the basis that I'd soon get bored of writing with the stylus. Now that excuse has gone I'm going to *have* to buy one. What a sad existence I lead when I can't overcome the urge to buy gadgets for the sake of it.
Chris Wareham
Many people found it through the excellent Broadway production
As opposed to the excruciatingly embarassing film. But seriously, The Who parted with many of their early fans over what was seen as a pretentious folly when Tommy came out. It also didn't endear them to a generation of punks (myself included), despite the fact that `Live in Leeds' can be seen as a seminal influence on both punk and heavy metal.
Chris Wareham
Quadrophenia is perhaps one of the finest works to come out of The Who
... Although it's a soundtrack album more than a rock opera.
Including the tracks not written or performed by them
Chris Wareham
I love a lot of The Who's output, but the rock operas like Tommy and Townshend's solo stuff leaves a lot to be desired. Definitely something for the hardcore fans only.
...).
And for the guy who reckons Weller is better songwriter than Townhend - well your wrong. They're both insanely good songwriters. (And that's coming from a Goth
Chris Wareham
Sun hardware often has wacky codenames - my favourites being the `Happy Meal' and `Big Mac' ethernet cards.
Chris Wareham
A boring way of naming serverfs, but an effective one, is to name them after geographical features. Here at Elsevier (my current employer) servers are named after mountains, workstations after smaller features. My two machines are named after small rivers ...
Chris Wareham
Enlightenment began as a rewrite of fvwm, and although they are supposed to no longer share any code, there could be similarities. These similarities (possibly in the way they handle X events) could be the cause of your Netscape crashes under fvwm2 and mine under E. I suggest giving Blackbox a whirl (http://blackbox.alug.org/), and seeing if this solves your problem. If it does, then a bug report to the fvwm2 maintainer is in order.
Just for the record, the Communicator crashes didn't seem to occur under E 0.16, but I have upgraded from Communicator 4.51 to 4.7 since I last ran E 0.15.
Chris Wareham
One thing I have noticed is that Communicator crashed regularily under Enlightenment 0.15. This was a fairly common event when closing a window when several browser windows were open. I first put this down to Communicator bugs, but when I switched window manager to Blackbox, the crashes were markedly decreased. From suffering a crash roughly three or four times a day, now I'm down to one or two crashes a week.
Communicator is definitely crash prone, but I put this down to the difficulty in maintaining the 'classic' version. In fact, the convoluted nature of the classic code is what prompted the drastic rewrite of Mozilla (and the consequent ignorance about why Mozilla deadlines slipped).
As for Network Computers, they are simply a repackaged version of things like X Terminals - and could even be seen as anextension of the old dumb terminals connected to a mainframe.
Whether we really need dedicated NC's is questionable. A friend who works runs a medium sized PC and network installation asked me just this weekend about how viable stripped down PC's running Linux would be. As recently reported on Slashdot, a UK based financial firm did just this, so now my friend wants to try it as well.
Chris Wareham
You'll need an 'other' entry as well, as I don't see Objective C in your list, and I'm sure there are many others out there ...
Chris Wareham
How the heck KDE is going to affect load on X caused be other apps ?
Other KDE apps you twit.
And as someone who has been programming X applications since the bad old days of OpenLook and then Motif, I have a feeling I know what I'm talking about.
Chris Wareham
> > ...it's a Windows killer. The usability is much better, and the optimised build much smoother. > Um, exactly how often to you tend to (re)build Windows, then? Perhaps you meant "... smoother than on previous versions" on that last part, and I'm just being picky? ;^) I meant that KDE 2.0 built with optimisation is much smoother than Windows - no annoying lock ups while apps load or do something mildly heavyweight.
Chris Wareham
As the article states, CORBA itself doesn't provide a machanism for embedding in X applications, it simple allows the process to be initiated. The actual embedding is still relies on X and KDE library calls, so CORBA was just adding complexity to this.
As far as I understand it (and I'm an user of KDE, not one of the programmers), the new embedding technology is as simple an API as possible. Presumably a wrapper around CORBA is out of the question, because a wrapper around what is essentially a wrapper already is daft. Perhaps if the OMG's CORBA specification hadn't been designed by a band of muppets things would be different.
Chris Wareham
Having recently compiled a snapshot of KDE 2.0, I can say with some conviction that it's a Windows killer. The usability is much better, and the optimised build much smoother. Having had to do some testing of Unix apps running under the Windows Reflections X server, I'm suprised at just how poorly NT performs when more than one application is open. (I mean Windows apps like Outlook and Explorer, not the Unix apps).
The loss of Mico as a dependency for KDE 2.0 is also a good thing. Mico is just too large for it to form the basis of a component model, the only place it really shines is truly network transparent CORBA apps.
Chris Wareham
The junkbuster is a proxy that filters banner ads, cookies, etc based on simple regular expression like syntax. The default blocklist filters out pretty much all the crud out there, making for faster downloads.
Chris Wareham
I remember visiting the local library as a child, and being amused by the garish covers of science fiction paperbacks. Maybe it's just because I'm a cynic, whose parents are cynics and lives in a nation of cynics - but those books looked intensely sad.
Years later I actually tried reading a few SF books. For a genre that should be based on wild flights of imagination, it read like swords and sorcery tales with lasers. Turgid was an understatement.
As with any genre, there are a few roses growing on the dungheap of Science Fiction (to paraphrase Nietzsche), but it's one enormous mound of shit with very few roses.
Chris Wareham
I have very little interest in SF writing usually, but this book is very much an exception. I came across it by way of a media student living in my house years ago. He got sent the book as a review copy when it came out and recomended it to me - and the old line about not being able to put it down is certainly true in Snow Crash's case.
I've yet to read any of his more recent works, but this one gets a definite ten out of ten.
Chris Wareham
The Speed 12 is a monstrous V12 - hence the name. The Griffith and Chimera have the Buick based Rover V8, although to say it's been slightly modified is an understatement.
Chris Wareham
Sinn Fein is the Republican political party, and lots of shady links between the SF leadership and the IRA have been suggested. None of them have been proved beyond a doubt, although many Unionists believe Gerry Adams sits on IRA committees.
Regardless of the truth, both Adams and Trimble (the Unionist leader and Orange order member) walk a fine line in appeasing the publics need for peace and the terrorists fear of `defeat'.
Chris Wareham
Finland doesn't have it's own monarchy, although they toyed with the idea of adopting a German aristocrat as their sovereign. The idea was mooted during the transition to independence from Russia, but fell through when Germany capitulated at the end of the Great War.
Prior to that, Finland had been a Duchy of Tsarist Russia and a province of Sweden. The Swedish link is why so many Finns speak Swedish as a first language and Finnish as a second (in some cases not at all). During the Tsarist era it was briefly illegal to use Finnish - an attempt at crushing national identity that was later used by Stalin in the Baltic States and elsewhere.
Chris Wareham
Very impressed that he owns the same car as me (an MGB). It's just a shame I haven't got a Ferrari or two - although if I had that sort of money it would have to be a TVR Speed 12. Ferraris are just too flimsy ...
Chris Wareham