"If a Linux Distro is really open, should the user not have the freedom"
Ah true freedom. Sounds like you are wishing you ran an OS with BSD license...
Why don't all you guys whining about the slightly insane GNU license come on over the BSD land... where everyone is happy and free (especially NetBSD and FreeBSD... OpenBSD, while nice, has a propensity towards ideological fascism, like the GNU people---but at least they set their cool toys truly free for the rest of us). If enough of you come over ATI might share the pain of their Linux driver with us. Until then, of course, there's NVidia.
Holy ignorant crap, and missing-the-point comparisons. Holy ignorant crap that ironically contains a complete refutation of itself within itself:
"We've seen time and again that messing with the environment can have devastating repurcussions."
Yes. That it has. Carry on. (And while carrying on, do check out the site the parent's parent's parent suggested (Real Climate)... rather than spouting off more ignorant crap. There may be differences of opinion as to the exact causes in some respects, but there's virtual unanimity that the situation is not good... there's overwhelming evidence in so many areas... I'm just wondering what is the exact ratio required of evidence-to-idiots before the idiots notice the evidence? Just curious... don't worry, not expecting an answer from you.)
Wow, I had to dig down to score:1 to find a reference to Tellico. It always amazes me how few people have heard of this great software. It's been around for quite some time. It's very flexible. Maybe it's because it doesn't have "library" in its name?
It started out as book cataloguing software, but it will catalogue just about anything now, all within in a quite comfortable, and customizable, interface.
Couple of potential problems with this point of view.
Charismatic manipulators (of marginal intelligence can sometimes use various means of manipulating large numbers of morons in ways that most more thoughtful persons would not stoop to. (This is leaving even more complex issues of proportional representation, and other weirdness elements of elections aside.)
"using the history page" requires the target being defamed to know that they have a wikipedia entry. Anyone can go and add an entry about you and you may not know for some time. Someone may cunningly edit your entry, and you may not know for some time.
most viewers won't use the history page, even if they did realise its purpose, because it's an extra click. Kind of like microsoft knowing almost everyone is going to use IE even though it sucks ass, just because it's what's in front of them.
This being said, I love Wikipedia, and use it several times a week. It's a great resource. But it does have some pretty big inherent problems due to its nature. No use in glossing over that fact.
Yes, like most things MySQL, it's simple to get going and hooked on, but half assed, and will bite your ass later if you ever grow beyond a certain point... or in certain directions.
But of course anyone who is is willing to tolerate MyISAM tables (which mysql's full text indexes still seem to require) already has pretty low standards for their data. (I don't mean "low standards" in a derogatory way.)
As a programmer of a search engine built on postgresql's tsearch2 I can confirm that it is a pain in the ass in a few ways. Installation isn't one of them. And in fact setup, while certainly more involved than MySQL, isn't very difficult either... if you can be satisfied with the defaults (just run the bundled sql setup script).
The main problem with the defaults for me is the crude "snowball stemmer" (does MySQL have any stemming support? I did a quick google search but couldn't seem to find any info... though i note some plugins that seem to offer it). Once you get tsearch2's dictionary based stemmer working, things become much more wonderful very quickly.
On the other hand for anyone who cares about full text search tsearch2, in it's complex design, offers a vast amount of configurability and power. It's indexes are pretty fast. There are multiple ranking algorithms, a "headline" function for pulling highlighted extracts from found text, (limited) field weighting, replaceable tokenizer, multiple languages and encodings, and on and on.
Unfortunately I don't think it comes close to something like lucene. But that's another kettle of fish.
Regarding MySQL's full-text search I came across this nice quote (from Kate of Wikipedia):
We already support MySQL's fulltext search. Its uselessness is mainly what inspired me to write the Lucene support:)
Of course the parent poster says up front that they have "pretty simple requirements" so all of my comments above probably make no impression at all. But anyhow, just something to think about.
I'd personally love to see an application that detected your memory and other settings and came out with sane settings, at least with such an option you'd have a place to start.
There is this old (and seemingly abandoned) project (pg_autotune). I haven't got around to trying it for the last 3 years, but have always intended to...
It's somewhat amusing (or perhaps disturbing?) that the top scoring comments on this thread are mostly people saying: don't drink that crap, do/drink something healthy!
Well, let me join them. I've been doing some contract work at a place that happens to have a Whole Foods conveniently nearby. I sometimes stop by there and check out their juice. So far I've found that Arthur's 'Green Energy' smoothie works best for me. (I'm not sure how widespread this brand is; it may or may not be fairly local.)
So, yeah, you may want to look for a healthfood store rather than a 7/11.
With all due respect to the noble voilin, it's still just the violin... no matter how perfected, and excellent the players. Einstein introduced us to a new sort of violin, which many have been working to perfect, destroy or surpass. But it's still a violin.
One wonders however if it wasn't being GPL for all those years being one thing (besides being a decent system, and filling a niche) that enabled Nessus to gain as much mindshare as it did, which now enables it to close its source and continue on as successfully as they no doubt will.
This is not meant as a criticism at all. Just musing aloud.
It'll be interesting to see if the GPL fork goes anywhere also. All of those evil companies that ripped off Nessus should be getting behind the GPL version now, right? <-;
The problem isn't the messenger or the message, per se. The problem is the failure of supposed "real science" to be convincing and meaningful to a frightening percentage of the United States population first of all; and second of all the problem is a fighteningly large percentage of the United States population. As has been noted by others, this seems to be largely an American problem.
If ID is so flimsey and ridiculous as so many here seem to say, what does the fact that we have these ID posts every few weeks say about the strength of "real science" which is supposedly so pure and clear?
As the Jesus says, if you'll forgive my referring to that messenger, maybe you should think about removing the log in your own eye before worrying so much about the splinters in the eyes of others.
The BSD ports system (with a definite nod of the head also to pkgsrc) does indeed rock.
That being said, it also could learn a bunch of things from other systems (though i don't hold my breath on this happening any time soon).
Particularly it could learn a few things from its famous progeny: portage.
I love the idea of portage whereby absolutely everything in Gentoo is a package (i'm typing this on my Gentoo powered laptop). However, I don't find it nearly as stable as my FreeBSD ports-based box. (This may be partly just the nature of Linux where bits and pieces of the core system get swapped and upgraded so much, and not entirely Gentoo).
Things that I'd love to see from portage (and other places) brought to FreeBSD:
ability to have more than one version of a port maintained at the same time.
ports system ported to a more manageable and extendable language than just shell scripts.
ability to have ports that maintain and build from SVN/CVS, or whatever, version control.
pkg-plists auto-generated by the install process (which helps make the last point manageable---and ports easier to maintain).
some extremely useful elements of the great (the only reason I have ruby installed on my box) portupgrade script (i won't bother to itemize which ones) brought into the base ports system (not to mention porteasy and a few other scripts that have popped up to ease some of the ports awkwardness).
"These days, most types of games need good production values as well as a good concept."
Spiderweb Software (a mom and pop operation) seems to be doing alright for itself for many years now... using an extremely archaic game engine with shockingly limited production values. Of course they are never going to get a mainstream market (at least until Geneforge: The Movie comes out!), but that's not the point.
"To add to that, games are getting more complex in the way of graphics engines, physics engines, and AI as well."
Not a very complex game, nor a highly original concept, but the wonderful and addictive Breakquest took an open source physics engine (not to mention SDL based graphics) and applied it a "breakout" style game, with a style of its own, and beautiful results.
These two examples somewhat contradict some of the assumptions above. It seems to me creativity and visions are the two main things needed... and a competent developer still may be able to find a niche big enough to support himself, at least... it's a matter of scale.
Supreme Court of Canada made a ruling nearly 3 years ago that genes of higher life forms can not be patented here (ie. Canada, where I am). The higher life form at the center of this case was a mouse.
Yet another reason why freedom loving people love Canada. (-:
And they are pro-actively helping the P2P community by giving them incentive to design and implement better, more secure, less easily polluted P2P networks, protocols and tools. Bravo, HBO!
So let me get this straight... your advocating the next Quake engine licence to go to the Children's Television Network? Some sort of a game where you run around trying to give an incredibly textured Big Bird a hug?
Sounds great, i'm all for it.
Re:I haven't read the book, but...
on
Pornified
·
· Score: 1
All of the examples you list are things a person decides to do to/for themselves and does not largely involve the involvement/exploitation of other people (with, of course, perhaps the exception of video game programmers at Activision -; ). The porn industry is potentially different in several ways. For one thing, the alleged psychological effect on the people used to make the entertainment, and that the entertained are viewing real people in certain contexts. I'm not saying whether this is the case or not, but just pointing out that there may be a fundamental difference there. I haven't read the book either. It would be interesting to actually find out about these studies the author cites, before forming any further conclusion.
Here we go again. I admin at a small ISP. Unfortunately I have to set up a lot of users with mysql because they ask for it. There is something nice to be said for all of the access control being within db tables.
However...
1. What mysql gives in more convenient access control setup, it completely takes away in a horrific security record. I may be able to set up users the way I want easier, but I'm constantly having to upgrade and apply security patches... which disrupts everyone.
2. Most of the awkwardness in our Postgresql setup is due to legacy support. If i was setting up postgresql fresh on an ISP now, it'd be done much differently than our ISPs current method. There's a few different approaches. One interesting one is using postgresql's "namespace" support. See the "db_user_namespace" setting in postgresql.conf (it's turned off by default). It automatically segregates users who log in to the server to their own namespace...
If PDF is your ultimate target (and it is a good choice for this sort of thing), then why not generate PDF directly?
Check out a PDF generator such as ReportLab. It's pretty easy to use, with minimal python coding to glue/generate your elements. It handles/automates all the tedious stuff like flowing text, etc.
Actually Zope solved this (at least that's where I came across the trick). Or sort of solved it. It sort of works. If simply return a unauthorized status header most browsers will drop credentials and re-prompt for login/password. It's ugly, ugly, ugly... but mostly works.
And the ones that have salt generally are pandering to people who no longer are capable of appreciating the perfect beautify of simply ground peanuts.
But then the culture that gave us Skippy and the like is the culture who through much of recent times ranked "white bread" as its population's single greatest source of calories. But the Americans have been learning, slowly, that their diet is killing them.
But to stick to this metaphor, perhaps salted peanut butter is like Linux. Pretty good. But the salt is not necessary, and often used just to mask inferiority of product, or to make it more palatable to those corrupted by the fat/sugar stuff. BSD is purer unsalted goodness. (-:
Indeed, both are decent. I run FreeBSD on my AMD64 desktop; but Gentoo on my laptop (originally due to proprietary drivers only available for linux). Both get a lot of use. Both build and update a lot of software frequently.
Gentoo's portage system has a lot to recommend it. The various BSD port build systems feel pretty clunky in some ways in comparison. On the other hand there are some third party utils for FreeBSD (porteasy, portupgrade, etc) that make things a lot more convenient.
Also, I've found gentoo in the end to be a lot more fragile than FreeBSD. True, I do run Gentoo with mostly ~x86, I try to do it fairly carefully (though no ~x86 for gcc, and a few other base ports... tried it... big mistake...!). I find the ~x86 necessary to keep many software packages I use daily on FreeBSD as current on my laptop... waiting for "stable" blessing on Gentoo can take a long time, it seems.
Even so, my Gentoo laptop is often developing weird quirks, which seem to be due to dependency problems. On linux I find it necessary to update the kernel, and tweak kernel flags much more than on BSD. And BSD's solid base packages which rarely change between releases of the OS as a whole I think are what keeps it much more stable than my experience with Gentoo.
Still, I'm glad Gentoo exists... i can't think of another Linux distro i'd like to run. It's a pretty good system, which I hope improves. It has learned a lot from BSD, and improved some things, however its relative immaturity is still pretty glaring (or at least so it seems to me).
Slashdot Mirror
"If a Linux Distro is really open, should the user not have the freedom"
Ah true freedom. Sounds like you are wishing you ran an OS with BSD license...
Why don't all you guys whining about the slightly insane GNU license come on over the BSD land... where everyone is happy and free (especially NetBSD and FreeBSD... OpenBSD, while nice, has a propensity towards ideological fascism, like the GNU people---but at least they set their cool toys truly free for the rest of us). If enough of you come over ATI might share the pain of their Linux driver with us. Until then, of course, there's NVidia.
You might want to go and edit the Wikipedia entry on Censorship to agree with your definition.
Holy ignorant crap, and missing-the-point comparisons. Holy ignorant crap that ironically contains a complete refutation of itself within itself:
"We've seen time and again that messing with the environment can have devastating repurcussions."
Yes. That it has. Carry on. (And while carrying on, do check out the site the parent's parent's parent suggested (Real Climate)... rather than spouting off more ignorant crap. There may be differences of opinion as to the exact causes in some respects, but there's virtual unanimity that the situation is not good... there's overwhelming evidence in so many areas... I'm just wondering what is the exact ratio required of evidence-to-idiots before the idiots notice the evidence? Just curious... don't worry, not expecting an answer from you.)
"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."
"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of."
-- Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C.S. Lewis)
Wow, I had to dig down to score:1 to find a reference to Tellico. It always amazes me how few people have heard of this great software. It's been around for quite some time. It's very flexible. Maybe it's because it doesn't have "library" in its name?
It started out as book cataloguing software, but it will catalogue just about anything now, all within in a quite comfortable, and customizable, interface.
Maybe Sun, Oracle, or Novell will graciously save us all by swooping in a "buying" the OpenBSD/OpenSSH project(s)?
- Charismatic manipulators (of marginal intelligence can sometimes use various means of manipulating large numbers of morons in ways that most more thoughtful persons would not stoop to. (This is leaving even more complex issues of proportional representation, and other weirdness elements of elections aside.)
- "using the history page" requires the target being defamed to know that they have a wikipedia entry. Anyone can go and add an entry about you and you may not know for some time. Someone may cunningly edit your entry, and you may not know for some time.
- most viewers won't use the history page, even if they did realise its purpose, because it's an extra click. Kind of like microsoft knowing almost everyone is going to use IE even though it sucks ass, just because it's what's in front of them.
This being said, I love Wikipedia, and use it several times a week. It's a great resource. But it does have some pretty big inherent problems due to its nature. No use in glossing over that fact.Now combine that with coding/testing Zope 3 from a command line... and you've got some serious grue.
But of course anyone who is is willing to tolerate MyISAM tables (which mysql's full text indexes still seem to require) already has pretty low standards for their data. (I don't mean "low standards" in a derogatory way.)
As a programmer of a search engine built on postgresql's tsearch2 I can confirm that it is a pain in the ass in a few ways. Installation isn't one of them. And in fact setup, while certainly more involved than MySQL, isn't very difficult either... if you can be satisfied with the defaults (just run the bundled sql setup script).
The main problem with the defaults for me is the crude "snowball stemmer" (does MySQL have any stemming support? I did a quick google search but couldn't seem to find any info... though i note some plugins that seem to offer it). Once you get tsearch2's dictionary based stemmer working, things become much more wonderful very quickly.
On the other hand for anyone who cares about full text search tsearch2, in it's complex design, offers a vast amount of configurability and power. It's indexes are pretty fast. There are multiple ranking algorithms, a "headline" function for pulling highlighted extracts from found text, (limited) field weighting, replaceable tokenizer, multiple languages and encodings, and on and on.
Unfortunately I don't think it comes close to something like lucene. But that's another kettle of fish.
Regarding MySQL's full-text search I came across this nice quote (from Kate of Wikipedia):
Of course the parent poster says up front that they have "pretty simple requirements" so all of my comments above probably make no impression at all. But anyhow, just something to think about.
It's somewhat amusing (or perhaps disturbing?) that the top scoring comments on this thread are mostly people saying: don't drink that crap, do/drink something healthy!
Well, let me join them. I've been doing some contract work at a place that happens to have a Whole Foods conveniently nearby. I sometimes stop by there and check out their juice. So far I've found that Arthur's 'Green Energy' smoothie works best for me. (I'm not sure how widespread this brand is; it may or may not be fairly local.)
So, yeah, you may want to look for a healthfood store rather than a 7/11.
With all due respect to the noble voilin, it's still just the violin... no matter how perfected, and excellent the players. Einstein introduced us to a new sort of violin, which many have been working to perfect, destroy or surpass. But it's still a violin.
One wonders however if it wasn't being GPL for all those years being one thing (besides being a decent system, and filling a niche) that enabled Nessus to gain as much mindshare as it did, which now enables it to close its source and continue on as successfully as they no doubt will.
This is not meant as a criticism at all. Just musing aloud.
It'll be interesting to see if the GPL fork goes anywhere also. All of those evil companies that ripped off Nessus should be getting behind the GPL version now, right? <-;
The problem isn't the messenger or the message, per se. The problem is the failure of supposed "real science" to be convincing and meaningful to a frightening percentage of the United States population first of all; and second of all the problem is a fighteningly large percentage of the United States population. As has been noted by others, this seems to be largely an American problem.
If ID is so flimsey and ridiculous as so many here seem to say, what does the fact that we have these ID posts every few weeks say about the strength of "real science" which is supposedly so pure and clear?
As the Jesus says, if you'll forgive my referring to that messenger, maybe you should think about removing the log in your own eye before worrying so much about the splinters in the eyes of others.
That being said, it also could learn a bunch of things from other systems (though i don't hold my breath on this happening any time soon).
Particularly it could learn a few things from its famous progeny: portage.
I love the idea of portage whereby absolutely everything in Gentoo is a package (i'm typing this on my Gentoo powered laptop). However, I don't find it nearly as stable as my FreeBSD ports-based box. (This may be partly just the nature of Linux where bits and pieces of the core system get swapped and upgraded so much, and not entirely Gentoo).
Things that I'd love to see from portage (and other places) brought to FreeBSD:
Ah sigh. This is all off topic anyhow...
Spiderweb Software (a mom and pop operation) seems to be doing alright for itself for many years now... using an extremely archaic game engine with shockingly limited production values. Of course they are never going to get a mainstream market (at least until Geneforge: The Movie comes out!), but that's not the point.
"To add to that, games are getting more complex in the way of graphics engines, physics engines, and AI as well."
Not a very complex game, nor a highly original concept, but the wonderful and addictive Breakquest took an open source physics engine (not to mention SDL based graphics) and applied it a "breakout" style game, with a style of its own, and beautiful results.
These two examples somewhat contradict some of the assumptions above. It seems to me creativity and visions are the two main things needed... and a competent developer still may be able to find a niche big enough to support himself, at least... it's a matter of scale.
Yet another reason why freedom loving people love Canada. (-:
And they are pro-actively helping the P2P community by giving them incentive to design and implement better, more secure, less easily polluted P2P networks, protocols and tools. Bravo, HBO!
So let me get this straight... your advocating the next Quake engine licence to go to the Children's Television Network? Some sort of a game where you run around trying to give an incredibly textured Big Bird a hug?
Sounds great, i'm all for it.
All of the examples you list are things a person decides to do to/for themselves and does not largely involve the involvement/exploitation of other people (with, of course, perhaps the exception of video game programmers at Activision -; ). The porn industry is potentially different in several ways. For one thing, the alleged psychological effect on the people used to make the entertainment, and that the entertained are viewing real people in certain contexts. I'm not saying whether this is the case or not, but just pointing out that there may be a fundamental difference there. I haven't read the book either. It would be interesting to actually find out about these studies the author cites, before forming any further conclusion.
Here we go again. I admin at a small ISP. Unfortunately I have to set up a lot of users with mysql because they ask for it. There is something nice to be said for all of the access control being within db tables.
However...
1. What mysql gives in more convenient access control setup, it completely takes away in a horrific security record. I may be able to set up users the way I want easier, but I'm constantly having to upgrade and apply security patches... which disrupts everyone.
2. Most of the awkwardness in our Postgresql setup is due to legacy support. If i was setting up postgresql fresh on an ISP now, it'd be done much differently than our ISPs current method. There's a few different approaches. One interesting one is using postgresql's "namespace" support. See the "db_user_namespace" setting in postgresql.conf (it's turned off by default). It automatically segregates users who log in to the server to their own namespace...
Check out a PDF generator such as ReportLab. It's pretty easy to use, with minimal python coding to glue/generate your elements. It handles/automates all the tedious stuff like flowing text, etc.
Actually Zope solved this (at least that's where I came across the trick). Or sort of solved it. It sort of works. If simply return a unauthorized status header most browsers will drop credentials and re-prompt for login/password. It's ugly, ugly, ugly... but mostly works.
But then the culture that gave us Skippy and the like is the culture who through much of recent times ranked "white bread" as its population's single greatest source of calories. But the Americans have been learning, slowly, that their diet is killing them.
But to stick to this metaphor, perhaps salted peanut butter is like Linux. Pretty good. But the salt is not necessary, and often used just to mask inferiority of product, or to make it more palatable to those corrupted by the fat/sugar stuff. BSD is purer unsalted goodness. (-:
Gentoo's portage system has a lot to recommend it. The various BSD port build systems feel pretty clunky in some ways in comparison. On the other hand there are some third party utils for FreeBSD (porteasy, portupgrade, etc) that make things a lot more convenient.
Also, I've found gentoo in the end to be a lot more fragile than FreeBSD. True, I do run Gentoo with mostly ~x86, I try to do it fairly carefully (though no ~x86 for gcc, and a few other base ports... tried it... big mistake...!). I find the ~x86 necessary to keep many software packages I use daily on FreeBSD as current on my laptop... waiting for "stable" blessing on Gentoo can take a long time, it seems.
Even so, my Gentoo laptop is often developing weird quirks, which seem to be due to dependency problems. On linux I find it necessary to update the kernel, and tweak kernel flags much more than on BSD. And BSD's solid base packages which rarely change between releases of the OS as a whole I think are what keeps it much more stable than my experience with Gentoo.
Still, I'm glad Gentoo exists... i can't think of another Linux distro i'd like to run. It's a pretty good system, which I hope improves. It has learned a lot from BSD, and improved some things, however its relative immaturity is still pretty glaring (or at least so it seems to me).