My comment had nothing to do with proportions of the code that are or are not written by US citizens. It pointed out that regardless of that, the Linux trademark is owned by a Finnish citizen. Many major packages outside of the FSF assigned code also have questionable legal status. MySQL for example.
The attempts by the US government to limit dissemination of intellectual property (vis. software source code) are remarkably similar to Soviet control of all intellectual property. Have a look on the web for information about Samizdat, the Novy Mir journal, Socialist-Realism and authors like Solzhenitsyn. Although I doubt that software embargos will have the power to bring down a government...
Not to deflate your ego, but over half of all US citizens do not have Anglo Saxon names
Yeah, but having watched US TV for the last three weeks, it seems the ones with Anglo-Saxon names are more inclined to be part of the lunatic fringe or ill-informed isolationists.
The short length of US history, and the strong sense of cultural affinity that many US citizens share with their or their ancestors homeland is at odds with American jingoism. I will never understand how such a racially diverse and affluent country can be so ill-informed and hypocritical.
I find many faults with my homeland, not least the lack of full egalitarianism, and the existence of a state funded monarchy, but find it infinitely preferable to the US.
I think you'd have a hard time proving how much GNU code is American. And given that the list of GNU maintainers has a vast number of non-Anglo Saxon names on it, I think you could be wrong.
Don't get all flustered that some 'terrorist' state is getting it's hands on Uncle Sams crown jewels. You seem to forget the decidedly iffy way that the Carter administration tried to infringe Iranian sovereignty. They also gave asylum to the Shah of Iran, who was undoubtedly guilty of mismanagement of the Iranian economy.
Having watched US TV for the last three weeks while on a business trip, I can see that US jingoism is alive and kicking...
Chris Wareham
How to de-RPM your kernel tree
on
Linux 2.2.8
·
· Score: 1
First off, simply install the bin86 package to get round your second error. For a quick and painless kernel build:
make mrproper make menuconfig (fiddle with those options) make dep make clean make bzImage cp arch/architecture/boot/bzImage/boot/vmlinuz-new cp System.map/boot/System.map-new vi/etc/lilo.conf (add stanza for new kernel) /sbin/lilo reboot
Once everything is running Ok, then you can remove the RedHat kernel RPM's (kernel, kernel-pcmcia-cs, kernel-headers, etc) using --nodeps if necessary. Edit Do make clean in your Linux source directory to recover some space, and wait in anticipation for the next kernel patch...
Chris Wareham
FreeBSD & Linux have different development mod
on
Linux 2.3.0
·
· Score: 2
I use FreeBSD and Linux at work, Linux at home. For a server OS where upgrades can break existing code, then FreeBSD makes sense. Linux as a workstation OS is nirvana - utter perfection for the technically competent. However, the upgrade path for FreeBSD is *far* rockier than Linux. With Linux, I only ever had problems going from libc5 to libc6 (aka glibc2). I was lucky enough to miss out on the a.out to ELF fun. But going from FreeBSD 2.1.x to 2.2.x or even worse, 3.x... no thanks. Most sysadmins who *know* what they're talking about (and aren't just FreeBSD bigots), will agree that FreeBSD has more than its share of upgrade nightmares. Chris Wareham
Generally written in a rush just to get the job done. Yeah, a fucking great way of learning a language. Having had to learn way too many badly written systems from the code (``we don't have any documentation here, man'') I can honestly say thank god for books like Stevens `Advanced Programming...' and its ilk.
Anyways, I bet you had a college education in computer science. Try being self-taught sometime, and then you'll know the pain of learning from limited sources.
In the past year about %80 of my spam mail has been redirected from US mailservers. More importantly, the US admins seem less inclined to close holes in their servers than those in the EU.
Please feel free to killfile European sourced mail, as I detect a distinct smell of xenophobia in your ill considered post.
Maybe that's his point. KT's comments don't hold up to analysis. In fact one wonders if he really has tried Linux, or if he has just heard some bad gossip.
I thought Plan 9 had disappeared down the back of the sofa ages ago, and maybe it's resentment at this which produced such a bizarre comment. Chris Wareham
RedHat may sell their distribution, but it's still downloadable for free.
And of course, at this stage of the game, they can't make enough money from support alone to justify distributing Linux at replication cost only.
Anyway, not that selling Linux at any price is against the GNU philosophy - as long as the source code is there, and the option exists to get it for free.
So SCO's whining sounds like sour-grapes from a company who are losing market share hand over fist. SCO Unix / Xenix was always a dog anyway.
Not sure about the involvement of Intel with the Gygnus/egcs team, but I can comment on the Pentium optimisations in pgcc. The differences between pgcc and egcs are gradually fading, as more of the optimisations are folded into the latter.
Chris Wareham
So can linux 2.2 compile with egcs now?
on
egcs to become gcc
·
· Score: 1
I've been compiling my kernels with egcs and pgcc since the 2.1.* series. I haven't come across any problems, although officially the pgcc maintainer doesn't advocate the use of pgcc to compile Linux.
There is also some bad blood between the compiler and kernel crowd over who is resposible for the quirks that plague egcs/kernel 2.0.* builds.
I don't know enough about the egcs/pgcc code or compiler code to comment on who is right in all this, but I wish they'd work together on this.
Apparently Linus said some inflammatory remarks about possible bugs in the compiler code, while the compiler people maintain that it's down to bad kernel code.
Despite the official pgcc position (as espoused on the mainling list), I will continue to build my kernels with pgcc on Intel boxes and egcs on my Sparc.
This is very encouraging - it goes against the common criticism of open-source software which states that such projects often fragment. Once the remaining features from PGCC are folded into egcs/gcc we'll have one superb compiler.
Chris Wareham
More flamebait - but warrants a reply
on
Learning Perl/Tk
·
· Score: 1
Perl and Tcl may be lame if you're after speed and compactness, but for rapid solutions to everyday problems they're fantastic. After all, that's what VB is used for in the Windows world - quick apps that may be a little kludgy and slow, but that get the job done without taking an age to program.
They're tools for a certain job (or jobs), don't knock them.
I've found the tutorial to be almost as good as a reference. For the more detailed points I currently turn to the mailing lists, which have some very knowledgable posters.
Yeah, the rest of the GTK+ docs are a little sparse at the moment. For low level stuff, volume one of the O'Reilly X Programming series is good, the one on Xlib. The GDK in particular maps quite closely onto the functionality of Xlib - but with a much, much nicer API.
Tcl has always struck me as a little less anarchic than Perl. The KDE to Perl's Gnome if you're into weird analogies.
With version 8, Tcl/Tk really came of age, and I have actually found myself questioning my otherwise firm devotion to Perl. Especially when I encountered oodles of memory leaks in the Perl Tk module.
Since 3Com bought USR, they've stopped shipping manuals with their modems. Now you just get the irritating 'Insert the driver disk and type A:\SETUP.EXE' instructions.
Kissinger, during his face saving exercise, insisted that US arm supplies to Indonesia should be cut shortly after the East Timor occuaption.
When it became clear that UN condemnation of Indonesian aggression had been forestalled by US delegates, the arms supplies DOUBLED.
Recently released US government documents (including transcripts of Kissinger's briefings), corroborate this. In fact the US connived to the extent that they informed the Indonesians not to invade East Timor until *after* the US Presidential visit to Indonesia. It began shortly after the President's aircraft left Jakarta airport.
Weapon supplies from US and Britain
on
First Virtual War
·
· Score: 1
Britain supplied (amongst a vast arsenal of stuff) a number of Hawk 'trainers'. These jets are high performance, and against people with small arms (the East Timor rebels) or civilians, make great close support aircraft. They are even sold on the understanding that they can rapidly be converted into fighter bombers.
This prompted a big scandal in the UK. When asked recently whether this use of British hardware worried him, former minister Alan Clark replied that it didn't. Asked if this was a little contradictory from an avowed vegetarian, he again replied in the negative.
Slashdot Mirror
My comment had nothing to do with proportions of the code that are or are not written by US citizens. It pointed out that regardless of that, the Linux trademark is owned by a Finnish citizen. Many major packages outside of the FSF assigned code also have questionable legal status. MySQL for example.
The attempts by the US government to limit dissemination of intellectual property (vis. software source code) are remarkably similar to Soviet control of all intellectual property. Have a look on the web for information about Samizdat, the Novy Mir journal, Socialist-Realism and authors like Solzhenitsyn. Although I doubt that software embargos will have the power to bring down a government ...
Chris Wareham
Not to deflate your ego, but over half of all US citizens do not have Anglo Saxon names
Yeah, but having watched US TV for the last three weeks, it seems the ones with Anglo-Saxon names are more inclined to be part of the lunatic fringe or ill-informed isolationists.
The short length of US history, and the strong sense of cultural affinity that many US citizens share with their or their ancestors homeland is at odds with American jingoism. I will never understand how such a racially diverse and affluent country can be so ill-informed and hypocritical.
I find many faults with my homeland, not least the lack of full egalitarianism, and the existence of a state funded monarchy, but find it infinitely preferable to the US.
Chris Wareham
I think you'd have a hard time proving how much GNU code is American. And given that the list of GNU maintainers has a vast number of non-Anglo Saxon names on it, I think you could be wrong.
...
Don't get all flustered that some 'terrorist' state is getting it's hands on Uncle Sams crown jewels. You seem to forget the decidedly iffy way that the Carter administration tried to infringe Iranian sovereignty. They also gave asylum to the Shah of Iran, who was undoubtedly guilty of mismanagement of the Iranian economy.
Having watched US TV for the last three weeks while on a business trip, I can see that US jingoism is alive and kicking
Chris Wareham
First off, simply install the bin86 package to get round your second error. For a quick and painless kernel build:
/boot/vmlinuz-new /boot/System.map-new /etc/lilo.conf
make mrproper
make menuconfig
(fiddle with those options)
make dep
make clean
make bzImage
cp arch/architecture/boot/bzImage
cp System.map
vi
(add stanza for new kernel)
/sbin/lilo
reboot
Once everything is running Ok, then you can remove the RedHat kernel RPM's (kernel, kernel-pcmcia-cs, kernel-headers, etc) using --nodeps if necessary. Edit Do make clean in your Linux source directory to recover some space, and wait in anticipation for the next kernel patch ...
Chris Wareham
I use FreeBSD and Linux at work, Linux at home. For a server OS where upgrades can break existing code, then FreeBSD makes sense. Linux as a workstation OS is nirvana - utter perfection for the technically competent. However, the upgrade path for FreeBSD is *far* rockier than Linux. With Linux, I only ever had problems going from libc5 to libc6 (aka glibc2). I was lucky enough to miss out on the a.out to ELF fun. But going from FreeBSD 2.1.x to 2.2.x or even worse, 3.x ... no thanks. Most sysadmins who *know* what they're talking about (and aren't just FreeBSD bigots), will agree that FreeBSD has more than its share of upgrade nightmares.
Chris Wareham
``Just look through some example code ...''
...' and its ilk.
Generally written in a rush just to get the job done. Yeah, a fucking great way of learning a language. Having had to learn way too many badly written systems from the code (``we don't have any documentation here, man'') I can honestly say thank god for books like Stevens `Advanced Programming
Anyways, I bet you had a college education in computer science. Try being self-taught sometime, and then you'll know the pain of learning from limited sources.
Chris Wareham
In the past year about %80 of my spam mail has
been redirected from US mailservers. More
importantly, the US admins seem less inclined to
close holes in their servers than those in the EU.
Please feel free to killfile European sourced
mail, as I detect a distinct smell of xenophobia
in your ill considered post.
Chris Wareham
I'm sure the old 'cypherpunk' trick will work soon enough
Chris Wareham
"I don't see any articles bearing this ..."
Maybe that's his point. KT's comments don't hold up to analysis. In fact one wonders if he really has tried Linux, or if he has just heard some bad gossip.
I thought Plan 9 had disappeared down the back of the sofa ages ago, and maybe it's resentment at this which produced such a bizarre comment.
Chris Wareham
RedHat may sell their distribution, but it's still downloadable for free.
And of course, at this stage of the game, they can't make enough money from support alone to justify distributing Linux at replication cost only.
Anyway, not that selling Linux at any price is against the GNU philosophy - as long as the source code is there, and the option exists to get it for free.
So SCO's whining sounds like sour-grapes from a company who are losing market share hand over fist. SCO Unix / Xenix was always a dog anyway.
Chris Wareham
Not sure about the involvement of Intel with the Gygnus/egcs team, but I can comment on the Pentium optimisations in pgcc. The differences between pgcc and egcs are gradually fading, as more of the optimisations are folded into the latter.
Chris Wareham
I've been compiling my kernels with egcs and pgcc since the 2.1.* series. I haven't come across any problems, although officially the pgcc maintainer doesn't advocate the use of pgcc to compile Linux.
There is also some bad blood between the compiler and kernel crowd over who is resposible for the quirks that plague egcs/kernel 2.0.* builds.
I don't know enough about the egcs/pgcc code or compiler code to comment on who is right in all this, but I wish they'd work together on this.
Apparently Linus said some inflammatory remarks about possible bugs in the compiler code, while the compiler people maintain that it's down to bad kernel code.
Despite the official pgcc position (as espoused on the mainling list), I will continue to build my kernels with pgcc on Intel boxes and egcs on my Sparc.
Chris Wareham
This is very encouraging - it goes against the common criticism of open-source software which states that such projects often fragment. Once the remaining features from PGCC are folded into egcs/gcc we'll have one superb compiler.
Chris Wareham
Perl and Tcl may be lame if you're after speed and compactness, but for rapid solutions to everyday
problems they're fantastic. After all, that's
what VB is used for in the Windows world - quick
apps that may be a little kludgy and slow, but
that get the job done without taking an age to
program.
They're tools for a certain job (or jobs), don't
knock them.
Chris Wareham
(see subject line)
Chris Wareham
I've found the tutorial to be almost as good
as a reference. For the more detailed points I
currently turn to the mailing lists, which have
some very knowledgable posters.
Yeah, the rest of the GTK+ docs are a little
sparse at the moment. For low level stuff, volume
one of the O'Reilly X Programming series is good,
the one on Xlib. The GDK in particular maps quite
closely onto the functionality of Xlib - but with
a much, much nicer API.
Chris Wareham
Tcl has always struck me as a little less anarchic
than Perl. The KDE to Perl's Gnome if you're
into weird analogies.
With version 8, Tcl/Tk really came of age, and I
have actually found myself questioning my
otherwise firm devotion to Perl. Especially when
I encountered oodles of memory leaks in the Perl
Tk module.
Chris Wareham
There is a Grid widget, but it's a little flaky.
Check out the FAQ (I can't remember the URL, but
it's worth poking around the CPAN directory on
CPAN, it's in a module listing included there).
The Tk module's worth the masses of disk space it
uses up just for the TkPod addon.
Chris Wareham
Bye, bye worthless parasites
Chris Wareham
Or simply delete ~/.gimp-1.1/gtkrc
It works fine without it, either using the default theme or picking up the theme fom ~/.gtkrc
Chris Wareham
Shame they couldn't Gzip the files though.
Since 3Com bought USR, they've stopped shipping manuals with their modems. Now you just get the irritating 'Insert the driver disk and type A:\SETUP.EXE' instructions.
A worthy addition to the two truly *essential* Perl books, namely:
...
Programming Perl
Advanced Perl Programming
Accept no substitute
Kissinger, during his face saving exercise, insisted that US arm supplies to Indonesia should be cut shortly after the East Timor occuaption.
When it became clear that UN condemnation of Indonesian aggression had been forestalled by US delegates, the arms supplies DOUBLED.
Recently released US government documents (including transcripts of Kissinger's briefings), corroborate this. In fact the US connived to the extent that they informed the Indonesians not to invade East Timor until *after* the US Presidential visit to Indonesia. It began shortly after the President's aircraft left Jakarta airport.
Britain supplied (amongst a vast arsenal of stuff) a number of Hawk 'trainers'. These jets are high performance, and against people with small arms (the East Timor rebels) or civilians, make great close support aircraft. They are even sold on the understanding that they can rapidly be converted into fighter bombers.
This prompted a big scandal in the UK. When asked recently whether this use of British hardware worried him, former minister Alan Clark replied that it didn't. Asked if this was a little contradictory from an avowed vegetarian, he again replied in the negative.