Of course, in order to partially emulate an ASR-33, you could perhaps connect an IBM selectric up to your computer while running a looped recording of gunfight and an idling 58 chevy with one blown piston. For the final touch, you could replace the room's light switch with a dimmer switch and wiggle it back and forth whenever you are printing something out.
You think that's bad? At Manchester University in the seventies they had some Olivetti terminals that were so bad that the print mechanism was surrounded by soundproofing baffles. Unfortunately the soundproofed window you were supposed to view the text in was horizontal and reflected the striplighting into your eyes, giving you the option of typing blind and squinting, or flipping up the window and wearing earplugs.
Are there resources that list projects like the one above looking for editorial assistance? If not, should there be one?
I don't know if there is, but I certainly think it would be a good idea to set one up. Contact me if you don't know where to start.
Meanwhile, I contribute my own favorite open document site: Andamooka
It's a slash site, so people can login and contribute annotations. I don't think it has any provision for copy editing yet, but I think it should have.
...that the new Indiana Jones movie will be a prequel, starring some suitably youthful, rugged actor. Someone who could credibly scale a cliff, disarm an assassin, crawl through five miles of medieval sewer. That kind of thing.
The thing about Harrison Ford is...he's very, very old.
I'm struck by the idea of having a slash-style moderation system on top of a Wiki, with comment levels so you select the degree of potentially amusing noise you are prepared to tolerate. I normally run comments at level 3 but one or two trolls are in my friends list, so I get an interesting mix of very sensible and very stupid comments and I miss a lot of the me-too stuff. That might sound like a strange idea to apply to a Wiki, but I think it could be fun finding out if it works.
We've already talked about this rumour enough to fill a Karma Canyon, now what hell are we supposed to talk about?
I say we talk about forming an orderly line to give back those ill-gotten karma points. It's not fair that we should hold onto them now that we know it was a Just A Rumor!
[Tongue, for those impervious to sarcasm, firmly in cheek]
Binaries are great for quickly getting a system up and running. But once you've got the system up and running, switch to source code.
This works well for a full time sysadmin, on a well resourced system, but on this Thinkpad I've got far better uses for the 2GB hard drive, and far better uses for my time. There's nothing to stop me doing a bit of source hacking on the bits I'm really interested in, of course.
Re:how is it GNU-based if it has a _BSD_ kernel?
on
Debian NetBSD
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I don't see how you can refer to Debian as an "operating system". I mean, they do nice work, but an OS without a kernel is just a bunch of applications and utilities.
That's perfectly correct--the Debian system is aiming to independent of the kernel, so it seems to be developing into a portable userland (not a word I had encountered before, but suddenly everybody seems to be using it!) on top of whatever kernel you like.
Incidentally I notice that there was some debate on the Debian-BSD list as to whether to use the GNU name here, since unlike HURD they don't have libc6, and it's been argued that many essential parts of Debian aren't GNU anyway. And they might want to give the sysadmin the option of building a more BSD-like system (since the BSD userland is there for that kernel). The consensus so far seems to be Debian NetBSD.
Re:I shoulda seen this one coming...
on
Debian NetBSD
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Finally, it's the GNU/BSD distribution!
Gnu's not Unix...except when it is.
Re:Mac OS X will unify the *BSDs
on
Debian NetBSD
·
· Score: 2
[MacOs X has] Powerful inexpensive yummy hardware - G4 PowerMacs trump x86 by a long margin and cost much less than underperforming but expensive SPARC, MIPS and the PeeCee user's Holy Grail of DEC Alpha, which was intended to run WinBlows from the beginning and is dying anyways.
I don't know where you get your hardware from, but it is my experience that the cheapest powerful kit around is Intel-compatible. I'd love one of these Mac boxes, but I just cannot afford one.
And as for the alpha, it was originally designed by Digital to run its VMS operating system, not Windows, which was at that time a 16-bit shell running on top of MS-DOS.
Re:how is it GNU-based if it has a _BSD_ kernel?
on
Debian NetBSD
·
· Score: 2
is it just me or is it terribly pretentious to take the work of the NetBSD team, shove some debian/gnu stuff on top of it and call it a GNU-based operating system?
The beauty of the Debian approach is that sits a GNU system on top of a kernel. Source packages developed for Debian should build and run on any Debian system. The kernel is just a way of getting to the metal.
Debian is not Linux
on
Debian NetBSD
·
· Score: 5, Informative
To me, this is promising. I like to see cooperation between the Linux world and the *BSD world.
Well I agree with you that it's promising, but do remember that the Debian project is not Linux, but a GNU operating system. There is Debian GNU Linux, and there is Debian GNU HURD, and now (apparently) Debian GNU BSD.
There's absolutely no reason that I can think of why somebody shouldn't produce a desktop like KDE or Gnome, with its own graphical protocol, that can share native apps and X apps on the same desktop. I was doing that in Windows 95 back in '97, and in OS/2 Warp two years before that. Integrating the two is not a problem.
So yes, let's see someone put a non-X desktop out there, and we'll see how it competes with X-only desktops.
What I am worried about is the perception will be when America's biggest Linux firm becomes part of that media machine.
There are plenty of distributions around that are every bit as good as Red Hat, and anything that Red Hat does to the system _still_ comes under the GPL.
AOL has a good record of treating with open source--look at the really excellent AOLServer, and Netscape, both thriving under GPL on multiple platforms with AOL Time-Warner's sponsorship.
With ipchains, you have to leave port 20 and a range of ports > 1024 wide open to connections from anywhere (to allow both active and passive ftp). With iptables, you only need to open them to folks who have already established a port 21 ftp negotiation.
Yes, with iptables I might actually think about running a ftp server. At the moment ssh serves my needs quite well, but it isn't a good solution for, say, publicly sharing source code.
I guess the following makes me unusual for a Linux user--I value stability quite highly, innovation is just a nice-to-have.
I'm happily running Debian stable (potato) with a 2.2.18pre21 kernel. I'm only vaguely aware that some 2.4 kernel features could be nice to have. The main attraction is iptables, which of course wouldn't be any use on my desktop and laptop machines.
I'm about to play around with 2.4.17 on my current firewall server using Adrian Bunk's 2.4 kernel package, for that very reason. Would it be wiser to hold off? ipchains does an adequate job under 2.2, after all, and I'm perfectly happy with 2.2 on the desktop machines until Woody (the Debian candidate in testing) is moved to stable, by which time all the major gotchas will have been ironed out.
The following is from John's GNU page at toad.com, under the heading "Things I've Said (That People Sometimes Remember)"
"The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it."
I was quoted in Time Magazine in about December, 1993 as saying something very close to this ("a defect" rather than "damage"). It's been reprinted hundreds or thousands of times since then, including the NY Times on January 15, 1996, Scientific American of October 2000, and CACM 39(7):13.
In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because if a node drops certain messages because it doesn't like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don't redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)
The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.
Yes, I can see that he regards this as censorship, and I also see that he's making a stand on what he believes in, and doing so as much on behalf of his customers as himself.
But from my point of view it just looks like he is asking Verio should cave in and give him something they don't want to do--the right to run an open relay on their service. I wouldn't do that for any customer of mine, and I cannot see why Verio should be expected to do so. He argues that anti-spammers should adopt the principle that all valid email should get through, but in my opinion that is simply not a realistic objective.
Having said that, it probably isn't such a matter of principle for Verio as for John Gilmore, so I expect he'll prevail, one way or another, simply because Verio will blink first.
And possibly some good will come of this outside the question of John Gilmore's customers, if only because Verio and others are given the opportunity to (or forced to) justify their antispam policies. I think they probably already have it about right, but I'm open to persuasion.
John Gilmore's problem is censorship, and the difference between him and Cathy C is how much of his own energy, time and money he's put into practically and legally fighting it.
So apart from that, it seems that it's just like me or you complaining that we want to continue keeping an open relay, and whining that we're being censored when nobody, much less our ISP, wants to take our traffic.
Isn't he able to shop around to find a provider who would be prepared to carry his traffic? And if so, why doesn't he do so? Why is it censorship when a company makes a commercial decision about what kinds of traffic it will carry on its network?
I've tried reading this to see if I could work out what John Gilmore's problem is. Apparently he maintained an open relay, and he thinks it's just fine and dandy to do so. His upstream disagrees and blocks the relay. Does it make any difference that he is John Gilmore rather than Cathy C? I must be missing something really important, somewhere....
It's mostly just a fear of the unknown. Things work fine now don't try to fix them... that sort of thing.
But this same attitude pretty much also dooms the notion of Linux on the desktop. If people are afraid of moving to WinXP for fear of what might no longer work, they aren't about to jump into another plane of in-compatibility with Linux.
I agree wholeheartedly on this. I've never really seen Linux as a general purpose platform for desktop productivity software. In fact it surprised me to see how far Ximian and whatnot have taken this. But the killer is interoperability. As long as Microsoft is permitted to keep its file formats secret, no competitor stands a chance because people will always need to keep a copy of a Microsoft product lying around in order to read and convert legacy files and files from third parties who have not switched.
Even if Linux were a boon to the desktop user (it isn't, it has its own foibles and it can be a pig to learn them), the inertia that pertains to use of any non-mainstream (which translates to non-MS, in most cases) software would apply.
If you're going to bash [XP], bash it on the potential Digital Rights Management that was supposed to be introduced in XP, or on the product activation, or on any other Microsoft expansionist move. Bashing it for being slow is mostly just uninformed.
Fair point. I'd also like to bash it for being rather insecure, but I suppose I'll just have to stand in line behind all the other/.ers who want to bash it for being a Microsoft product.
But what interests me about XP is that so far there's no sign that the people at our office
who use 98, NT or 2K want to upgrade. There seems to be a curious lack of keenness about this product. Perhaps it's the digital rights stuff. We developers run partly Microsoft, mostly Linux, so the people I'm talking about are the CEO, sales, marketing, legal, administrative and whatnot. They're more than happy with 9X or 2k, it seems. Or perhaps they're just scared to move in case they end up having to pay out for "upgrades" in the future.
I guess we'll get an XP machine eventually because we are an ISP and we will have to support our users, just as we run tests on Mac (9 and X). But somehow our people don't seem to see XP yet as a gotta-have, the way 95 was.
TA was one of the first games I tried on WINE way back when, and it still remains one of the best running games under it. The only thing that really seems to be missing is being able to play over the net. That said, one of the things currently being voted on for Transgaming to add to WineX is netplay support for TA, so hopefully even this problem will be soon fixed.
I'm not a gamer, and I'm not a wine user, but if it's as good as you say then that's great news. This is different from making the game GPL, though. The reason why TA game developers would like to see the source is probably so that they can support the game better by adding the most commonly used cool tricks to the engine, or so by studying the engine they can simplify the code. Having the binary run under Wine doesn't enable them to do this.
Still, it isn't an easy decision to make a game GPL. There are lawyers to feed, and the game may well depend on proprietary code or rely on non-disclosure agreements. This is the good fight, though. Keep on pushing.
The day that every motherboard's BIOS uses strong crypto to demand the master boot record be signed with a secret key known only to Microsoft is the day that Linux becomes a thing of the past.)
It would take more than this. Don't like the BIOS? Roll your own. You'd need every single peripheral to require an authorisation token, just to operate the computer. I don't think the courts would wear a law that required all peripherals to require such authorisation.
Why not just port and use dkpg, apt and associated tools? They were all created to be portable, and are indeed already used in fink./, debian-cygwin./ and the like.
Those are both very interesting projects. Since the superiority of deb format is universally acknowledged, I'm surprised that anybody would consider its dumber sister. Debian distribution is famous as the one that you can upgrade to the next version just by typing "apt-get dist-upgrade". That's very powerful package management. Add to this the huge number of software packages that have already been Debian format and are being actively maintained by Debian package maintainers who seem to be only too keen to share their knowledge of the format...
Slashdot Mirror
You think that's bad? At Manchester University in the seventies they had some Olivetti terminals that were so bad that the print mechanism was surrounded by soundproofing baffles. Unfortunately the soundproofed window you were supposed to view the text in was horizontal and reflected the striplighting into your eyes, giving you the option of typing blind and squinting, or flipping up the window and wearing earplugs.
I don't know if there is, but I certainly think it would be a good idea to set one up. Contact me if you don't know where to start.
Meanwhile, I contribute my own favorite open document site: Andamooka
It's a slash site, so people can login and contribute annotations. I don't think it has any provision for copy editing yet, but I think it should have.
The thing about Harrison Ford is...he's very, very old.
I'm struck by the idea of having a slash-style moderation system on top of a Wiki, with comment levels so you select the degree of potentially amusing noise you are prepared to tolerate. I normally run comments at level 3 but one or two trolls are in my friends list, so I get an interesting mix of very sensible and very stupid comments and I miss a lot of the me-too stuff. That might sound like a strange idea to apply to a Wiki, but I think it could be fun finding out if it works.
I say we talk about forming an orderly line to give back those ill-gotten karma points. It's not fair that we should hold onto them now that we know it was a Just A Rumor!
[Tongue, for those impervious to sarcasm, firmly in cheek]
This works well for a full time sysadmin, on a well resourced system, but on this Thinkpad I've got far better uses for the 2GB hard drive, and far better uses for my time. There's nothing to stop me doing a bit of source hacking on the bits I'm really interested in, of course.
That's perfectly correct--the Debian system is aiming to independent of the kernel, so it seems to be developing into a portable userland (not a word I had encountered before, but suddenly everybody seems to be using it!) on top of whatever kernel you like.
Incidentally I notice that there was some debate on the Debian-BSD list as to whether to use the GNU name here, since unlike HURD they don't have libc6, and it's been argued that many essential parts of Debian aren't GNU anyway. And they might want to give the sysadmin the option of building a more BSD-like system (since the BSD userland is there for that kernel). The consensus so far seems to be Debian NetBSD.
Gnu's not Unix...except when it is.
I don't know where you get your hardware from, but it is my experience that the cheapest powerful kit around is Intel-compatible. I'd love one of these Mac boxes, but I just cannot afford one.
And as for the alpha, it was originally designed by Digital to run its VMS operating system, not Windows, which was at that time a 16-bit shell running on top of MS-DOS.
The beauty of the Debian approach is that sits a GNU system on top of a kernel. Source packages developed for Debian should build and run on any Debian system. The kernel is just a way of getting to the metal.
Well I agree with you that it's promising, but do remember that the Debian project is not Linux, but a GNU operating system. There is Debian GNU Linux, and there is Debian GNU HURD, and now (apparently) Debian GNU BSD.
So yes, let's see someone put a non-X desktop out there, and we'll see how it competes with X-only desktops.
There are plenty of distributions around that are every bit as good as Red Hat, and anything that Red Hat does to the system _still_ comes under the GPL.
AOL has a good record of treating with open source--look at the really excellent AOLServer, and Netscape, both thriving under GPL on multiple platforms with AOL Time-Warner's sponsorship.
Yes, with iptables I might actually think about running a ftp server. At the moment ssh serves my needs quite well, but it isn't a good solution for, say, publicly sharing source code.
I'm happily running Debian stable (potato) with a 2.2.18pre21 kernel. I'm only vaguely aware that some 2.4 kernel features could be nice to have. The main attraction is iptables, which of course wouldn't be any use on my desktop and laptop machines.
I'm about to play around with 2.4.17 on my current firewall server using Adrian Bunk's 2.4 kernel package, for that very reason. Would it be wiser to hold off? ipchains does an adequate job under 2.2, after all, and I'm perfectly happy with 2.2 on the desktop machines until Woody (the Debian candidate in testing) is moved to stable, by which time all the major gotchas will have been ironed out.
"The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it."
I was quoted in Time Magazine in about December, 1993 as saying something very close to this ("a defect" rather than "damage"). It's been reprinted hundreds or thousands of times since then, including the NY Times on January 15, 1996, Scientific American of October 2000, and CACM 39(7):13.
In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because if a node drops certain messages because it doesn't like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don't redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)
The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.
But from my point of view it just looks like he is asking Verio should cave in and give him something they don't want to do--the right to run an open relay on their service. I wouldn't do that for any customer of mine, and I cannot see why Verio should be expected to do so. He argues that anti-spammers should adopt the principle that all valid email should get through, but in my opinion that is simply not a realistic objective.
Having said that, it probably isn't such a matter of principle for Verio as for John Gilmore, so I expect he'll prevail, one way or another, simply because Verio will blink first.
And possibly some good will come of this outside the question of John Gilmore's customers, if only because Verio and others are given the opportunity to (or forced to) justify their antispam policies. I think they probably already have it about right, but I'm open to persuasion.
So apart from that, it seems that it's just like me or you complaining that we want to continue keeping an open relay, and whining that we're being censored when nobody, much less our ISP, wants to take our traffic.
Isn't he able to shop around to find a provider who would be prepared to carry his traffic? And if so, why doesn't he do so? Why is it censorship when a company makes a commercial decision about what kinds of traffic it will carry on its network?
I've tried reading this to see if I could work out what John Gilmore's problem is. Apparently he maintained an open relay, and he thinks it's just fine and dandy to do so. His upstream disagrees and blocks the relay. Does it make any difference that he is John Gilmore rather than Cathy C? I must be missing something really important, somewhere....
But this same attitude pretty much also dooms the notion of Linux on the desktop. If people are afraid of moving to WinXP for fear of what might no longer work, they aren't about to jump into another plane of in-compatibility with Linux.
I agree wholeheartedly on this. I've never really seen Linux as a general purpose platform for desktop productivity software. In fact it surprised me to see how far Ximian and whatnot have taken this. But the killer is interoperability. As long as Microsoft is permitted to keep its file formats secret, no competitor stands a chance because people will always need to keep a copy of a Microsoft product lying around in order to read and convert legacy files and files from third parties who have not switched.
Even if Linux were a boon to the desktop user (it isn't, it has its own foibles and it can be a pig to learn them), the inertia that pertains to use of any non-mainstream (which translates to non-MS, in most cases) software would apply.
Fair point. I'd also like to bash it for being rather insecure, but I suppose I'll just have to stand in line behind all the other /.ers who want to bash it for being a Microsoft product.
But what interests me about XP is that so far there's no sign that the people at our office who use 98, NT or 2K want to upgrade. There seems to be a curious lack of keenness about this product. Perhaps it's the digital rights stuff. We developers run partly Microsoft, mostly Linux, so the people I'm talking about are the CEO, sales, marketing, legal, administrative and whatnot. They're more than happy with 9X or 2k, it seems. Or perhaps they're just scared to move in case they end up having to pay out for "upgrades" in the future.
I guess we'll get an XP machine eventually because we are an ISP and we will have to support our users, just as we run tests on Mac (9 and X). But somehow our people don't seem to see XP yet as a gotta-have, the way 95 was.
I'm not a gamer, and I'm not a wine user, but if it's as good as you say then that's great news. This is different from making the game GPL, though. The reason why TA game developers would like to see the source is probably so that they can support the game better by adding the most commonly used cool tricks to the engine, or so by studying the engine they can simplify the code. Having the binary run under Wine doesn't enable them to do this.
Still, it isn't an easy decision to make a game GPL. There are lawyers to feed, and the game may well depend on proprietary code or rely on non-disclosure agreements. This is the good fight, though. Keep on pushing.
...and Michael Tiemann says the desktop market is dead...
It would take more than this. Don't like the BIOS? Roll your own. You'd need every single peripheral to require an authorisation token, just to operate the computer. I don't think the courts would wear a law that required all peripherals to require such authorisation.
Those are both very interesting projects. Since the superiority of deb format is universally acknowledged, I'm surprised that anybody would consider its dumber sister. Debian distribution is famous as the one that you can upgrade to the next version just by typing "apt-get dist-upgrade". That's very powerful package management. Add to this the huge number of software packages that have already been Debian format and are being actively maintained by Debian package maintainers who seem to be only too keen to share their knowledge of the format...