T-Rex's web page declares Open Source Firewall, but their FAQ says:
Q: Where is the source code for version2?
A: Contractual obligations prohibit us from releasing the source code at this time. However, we did not want to delay the release of Version2 any longer.
All this breakage - continual splitting or overlaying of existing area codes - is due to the much talked about "local number portability", something that doesn't exist and maybe won't ever happen. And it sucks.
"Local number portability" is the blue sky hope that one day you will be able to take your phone number with you when you move... to almost anywhere.
For that eventual, possibily unattainable goal, people everywhere under the NANP (North American Number Plan - http://www.nanpa.org/) are continually being subjected to having their local area codes made obscure!
Here in Eastern MA, we've already had 2 major splits and are due for an overlay in April 2001:
In 1988, 617 -> 617, 508
In 1998, 617 -> 617, 781 and 508 -> 508, 978
In 2001, 617/857, 781/339, 508/774, 978/351
That's now 8 area codes in a relatively small area. How much fun it will be to figure out if a phone number is in the next town or across the state! Not to mention all those people who had to change their area codes 3 years ago.
Of course, "local number portability" makes it impossible to take the easy approach to solving the apparent "running out of phone numbers" problem, which would involve changing local numbers from 7 to 8 digits. Under that scheme, every area code grows 10x (almost) in size. That's actually numbers than we'll have here in eastern MA after the April overlay.
In other words, we could have all had the pain of changing from 7 to 8 digits a dozen years ago, and never have had to worry about area codes since then.
But, instead, we'll just continue with the breakage. After all, the projection for eastern MA is that the 8 area codes will only be sufficient until 2006.
John
(it is also erroneous to say we are "running out of phone numbers"; the problem is that allocations of phone numbers to local carriers is done in units of 10000, so local carrier competition is artificially consuming phone numbers that aren't actually being used!)
> Then, one day, someone realised that - hey! If > you throw away the assumption that baud == bps, > you can actually drive up speeds to 56Kb/s!
Excellent comment; too bad it is wrong.
Baud has not been the same as bps since the debut of 1200 bps modems in the early 80s. For instance, the good ol' Bell 212A standard for 1200 bps modems uses 300 baud with 4 bits per baud.
Looking at the site, it appears to only be a way to harvest email and snailmail addresses. In fact, they'd just appear to prefer you sign up for a "Next Card" credit card.
Come up with a cool (but irrational) sounding scheme ("open source satellite network" WTF?) and get it published on/. then harvest addresses and collect credit card referrals. Ah, why work for a living.
Just for kicks, on my 4.7 Communicator I enabled JavaScript, Java, and "Smart Update". I then selected Help->"Software Updates" to go to their "SmartUpdate" pages. Selecting step 1 shows me:
Communicator Update Your current version is Communicator 4.7 - 128 bit encryption.
Congratulations, you already have the latest Netscape browser software
Smart? Nope, more like useless. Why is this bloatware included in Communicator anyway?
But these examples were all found through trial and error; today is the first day that the entire list of URL's has been made public. And to determine the 68% figure, it was necessary to have a copy of the entire list, so that the first 50 blocked sites could be used as a random sample.
Given that the entire list has been decoded, you could have really produced a valid statistic by taking an actual random sample of 50 working.edu sites from the whole list. Merely using the first 50 is not a random sample.
the auto-proxy config would also toss out all URLS with "ads" in them; but that isn't focused enough for my tastes. Anyway, I don't use something like JunkBuster itself for the reason given in the comments at my no-ads page:
Why is this better than a ad-removing proxy? If you use a ad-removing proxy, then (by definition), all of your content must go through the proxy filter. This can slow down loading of pages, or cause other problems. This mechanism avoids this by avoiding the proxy altogether for the content you actually care about!
I can't go to the "opt out" page because I've told my browser to never load any URL that comes from doubleclick. 8-} It's easy and works on UNIX, Windows, and Macs with IE5 or NS2-5.
http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/
(I also blackhole a slew of other "ad banner" servers; mostly those that serve cookies or animated images)
While it is a nice (and possibly true) story, one needn't go back 363 years for a relevant example of the downside.
Today's "Internet" stocks are rather similar to the the hot stocks of the late 80s. Just 10 years ago biotechnology stocks were all the rage, giving outrageous gains of 50% (or more!) per year. Just 7 years ago they all tumbled rather badly, and most have not fully recovered.
It appears that the obvious conclusion of this thread is that "slash" is following the Cathedral method of development -- it isn't being a successful "open source" project. That being so, it's time to stop asking them for further source releases and just move on.
The good news is that the released source has already forked, and several viable alternatives have already been developed that are feature compatible with "slash". So, rather than asking for a new "slash" release, simply pick one of those actively and openly developed systems to use and contribute back to. This _is_ the whole point of open source. Vote with your use.
The "slash"-similar systems mentioned in this thread were:
You first have to go back to the roots of the X Consortium to understand how things worked. The important standard for X was the protocol, not the particular implementations of the client or server.
Before the (then independent) X Consortium ran out of money (and sold the remains of itself to The Open Group), it had prepared plans to change the license for the reference implementation to add a commercial redistribution fee. This was to give the Consortium an additional income stream, which until that time had mostly been funded by sponsor dollars and contract dollars. Interestingly enough, those contract dollars mostly came from the Open Software Foundation, which outsourced the development of CDE 1.0 (after having ceased all in-house development of Motif, along with DCE and OSF/1). In fact, many engineers from the Motif group ended up at the X Consortium working on the CDE/Motif contract).
But, the X Consortium ran out of money and sold it self. Most of the engineers left and a few folks hung on at as part of the X Project Team at TOG. Since TOG had emerged from the OSF and X/Open merger, this meant that some of those engineers now had the chance of being layed off from the same building a second time. Some were (but I get ahead of myself).
The XPT ran on at TOG with sponsor dollars, but, near the end, still needed more funding.
The planned change in the X license was resurrected.
However, to the core developers of X, this was NOT A PROBLEM because the licensing only affected the "reference implementation". As long as clients and servers all followed the same X11 protocol, then the world would be served well by the elimination of a monoculture in the implementation.
In fact, if you go back to the earlier vendor releases of X (by HP, DEC, IBM and later Sun), you'll see that each had their 'proprietary' additions to the clients and servers, but all interoperated by working against one standard protocol.
X is intended to be a standard of communication, but a single implementation. Even with the license change, the X protocol would continue to be an open standard. An "open standard" doesn't mean that source is free, but rather the definition of the standard (and implementations of that standard) are unencumbered. OSF was founded on the principal of defining an operating system (OSF/1) as an open standard -- OSF/1 was defined by a book (called the AES) that dictated the interfaces. OSF also provided a reference implementation that was used by others (like DEC) to creatte their own operating system.
But, I digress.
At the time the X11R6.4 license change went into effect, several things were cooking. First, a freely distributable source distribution of Motif2.0 was planned. It, too, would have commercial redistribution restrictions.
However, TOG was in serious money troubles itself. Barely weeks after R6.4 hit the streets, it was announced that the OSF portion of TOG was being shut down. Within two months, almost every engineer in the building was gone. The final move to revert the license was made because at the time, it looked like X.Org was dead.
(and the Motif release never happened because the people - engineers and management - responsible for X were gone).
The group that is "X.org" today is composed of the former sponsors of the X Project Team. None of the engineers remain there. Any ongoing work is done by sponsor organizations. If anything, XFree86 is 'the' hotbed of X server development these days.
To think there is some ulterior motive at TOG in regard to X licensing or X.Org is silly -- the remaining folks at TOG are just the X/Open folks in the UK, and they are just doing what X/Open ALWAYS did ("nothing"?).
The "they" in "not only did they reverse that decision" just doesn't exist.
The truth is that the part of The Open Group that was responsible for X (and Motif, and OSF/1, and DCE) is gone and buried.
Dummynet is useful, but also available for FreeBSD is the AltQ package. This adds several additional QOS-style packet queuing disciplines, such as WFQ (weighted fair queuing) and CBQ (class-based queuing), that are bettm er to use to implement a BW/traffic shaping device.
See http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/kjc/software.html
Yes, a nonprofit can go public. An interesting side-effect is that to accomplish this, a (sometimes new) comercial entity has to purchase the assests of the nonprofit. The comercial entity raises capital and buys out the nonprofit. The money paid to the nonprofit has to be disbursed in a fashion appropriate for a nonprofit; it cannot be turned over to the comercial entity.
This is how UUNET was started oh-so-long-ago. The money paid to the nonprofit UUNET by the for-profit UUNET was used to fund various free/open software efforts a 8-10 years ago (such as "nvi").
Sheesh. Anyone thinking TOG is getting special treatment WRT x.org is just dating themselves as "Internet newbies". x.org belonged to the X Consortium right from when it spun out from MIT. That's nearly 10 years by now. The 1997 date reported by whois is only the time the record was created as belonging to TOG.
And, long before "The Slashdot Effect", the Internet trembled at whims of "The X Effect", which took place whenever a new release of X was made. It generally caused no end of routing havoc as links were saturated with X tar balls for days on end.
Slashdot Mirror
All this breakage - continual splitting or overlaying of existing area codes - is due to the much talked about "local number portability", something that doesn't exist and maybe won't ever happen. And it sucks.
... to almost anywhere.
"Local number portability" is the blue sky hope that one day you will be able to take your phone number with you when you move
For that eventual, possibily unattainable goal, people everywhere under the NANP (North American Number Plan - http://www.nanpa.org/) are continually being subjected to having their local area codes made obscure!
Here in Eastern MA, we've already had 2 major splits and are due for an overlay in April 2001:
In 1988, 617 -> 617, 508
In 1998, 617 -> 617, 781 and 508 -> 508, 978
In 2001, 617/857, 781/339, 508/774, 978/351
That's now 8 area codes in a relatively small area. How much fun it will be to figure out if a phone number is in the next town or across the state! Not to mention all those people who had to change their area codes 3 years ago.
Of course, "local number portability" makes it impossible to take the easy approach to solving the apparent "running out of phone numbers" problem, which would involve changing local numbers from 7 to 8 digits. Under that scheme, every area code grows 10x (almost) in size. That's actually numbers than we'll have here in eastern MA after the April overlay.
In other words, we could have all had the pain of changing from 7 to 8 digits a dozen years ago, and never have had to worry about area codes since then.
But, instead, we'll just continue with the breakage. After all, the projection for eastern MA is that the 8 area codes will only be sufficient until 2006.
John
(it is also erroneous to say we are "running out of phone numbers"; the problem is that allocations of phone numbers to local carriers is done in units of 10000, so local carrier competition is artificially consuming phone numbers that aren't actually being used!)
Actually, the full DMTF spec calls for 16 tones, using a 4x4 keypad with A B C and D keys (A to the right of 3, B to the right of 6, etc).
It's rather hard to dial # or * without touch tone. (And that doesn't just mean on rotary dial phones).
> Then, one day, someone realised that - hey! If
> you throw away the assumption that baud == bps,
> you can actually drive up speeds to 56Kb/s!
Excellent comment; too bad it is wrong.
Baud has not been the same as bps since the debut of 1200 bps modems in the early 80s. For instance, the good ol' Bell 212A standard for 1200 bps modems uses 300 baud with 4 bits per baud.
John
The image appears gone now (and the directory is no longer browsable). I think you hit a nerve.
Looking at the site, it appears to only be a way to harvest email and snailmail addresses. In fact, they'd just appear to prefer you sign up for a "Next Card" credit card.
/. then harvest addresses and collect credit card referrals. Ah, why work for a living.
Come up with a cool (but irrational) sounding scheme ("open source satellite network" WTF?) and get it published on
I don't know where you got your information, as WC is still at cdrom.com (in addition to wccdrom.com and freesoftware.com)
- || shExpMatch(url, "*ads*")
the auto-proxy config would also toss out all URLS with "ads" in them; but that isn't focused enough for my tastes. Anyway, I don't use something like JunkBuster itself for the reason given in the comments at my no-ads page:You don't even need to hack the browser: it already supports this! And it's easier than adding routes or /etc/host entries. See my post above.
I can't go to the "opt out" page because I've told my browser to never load any URL that comes from doubleclick. 8-} It's easy and works on UNIX, Windows, and Macs with IE5 or NS2-5.
http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/
(I also blackhole a slew of other "ad banner" servers; mostly those that serve cookies or animated images)
While it is a nice (and possibly true) story, one needn't go back 363 years for a relevant example of the downside.
Today's "Internet" stocks are rather similar to the the hot stocks of the late 80s. Just 10 years ago biotechnology stocks were all the rage, giving outrageous gains of 50% (or more!) per year. Just 7 years ago they all tumbled rather badly, and most have not fully recovered.
The good news is that the released source has already forked, and several viable alternatives have already been developed that are feature compatible with "slash". So, rather than asking for a new "slash" release, simply pick one of those actively and openly developed systems to use and contribute back to. This _is_ the whole point of open source. Vote with your use.
The "slash"-similar systems mentioned in this thread were:
- PHPSlash
Looks like they all have either open CVS servers or frequent snapshots.DOINS
SquishDot
Motif was not partially funded by Microsoft!
This comment is WRONG.
You first have to go back to the roots of the X Consortium to understand how things worked. The important standard for X was the protocol, not the particular implementations of the client or server.
Before the (then independent) X Consortium ran out of money (and sold the remains of itself to The Open Group), it had prepared plans to change the license for the reference implementation to add a commercial redistribution fee. This was to give the Consortium an additional income stream, which until that time had mostly been funded by sponsor dollars and contract dollars. Interestingly enough, those contract dollars mostly came from the Open Software Foundation, which outsourced the development of CDE 1.0 (after having ceased all in-house development of Motif, along with DCE and OSF/1). In fact, many engineers from the Motif group ended up at the X Consortium working on the CDE/Motif contract).
But, the X Consortium ran out of money and sold it self. Most of the engineers left and a few folks hung on at as part of the X Project Team at TOG. Since TOG had emerged from the OSF and X/Open merger, this meant that some of those engineers now had the chance of being layed off from the same building a second time. Some were (but I get ahead of myself).
The XPT ran on at TOG with sponsor dollars, but, near the end, still needed more funding.
The planned change in the X license was resurrected.
However, to the core developers of X, this was NOT A PROBLEM because the licensing only affected the "reference implementation". As long as clients and servers all followed the same X11 protocol, then the world would be served well by the elimination of a monoculture in the implementation.
In fact, if you go back to the earlier vendor releases of X (by HP, DEC, IBM and later Sun), you'll see that each had their 'proprietary' additions to the clients and servers, but all interoperated by working against one standard protocol.
X is intended to be a standard of communication, but a single implementation. Even with the license change, the X protocol would continue to be an open standard. An "open standard" doesn't mean that source is free, but rather the definition of the standard (and implementations of that standard) are unencumbered. OSF was founded on the principal of defining an operating system (OSF/1) as an open standard -- OSF/1 was defined by a book (called the AES) that dictated the interfaces. OSF also provided a reference implementation that was used by others (like DEC) to creatte their own operating system.
But, I digress.
At the time the X11R6.4 license change went into effect, several things were cooking. First, a freely distributable source distribution of Motif2.0 was planned. It, too, would have commercial redistribution restrictions.
However, TOG was in serious money troubles itself. Barely weeks after R6.4 hit the streets, it was announced that the OSF portion of TOG was being shut down. Within two months, almost every engineer in the building was gone. The final move to revert the license was made because at the time, it looked like X.Org was dead.
(and the Motif release never happened because the people - engineers and management - responsible for X were gone).
The group that is "X.org" today is composed of the former sponsors of the X Project Team. None of the engineers remain there. Any ongoing work is done by sponsor organizations. If anything, XFree86 is 'the' hotbed of X server development these days.
To think there is some ulterior motive at TOG in regard to X licensing or X.Org is silly -- the remaining folks at TOG are just the X/Open folks in the UK, and they are just doing what X/Open ALWAYS did ("nothing"?).
The "they" in "not only did they reverse that decision" just doesn't exist.
The truth is that the part of The Open Group that was responsible for X (and Motif, and OSF/1, and DCE) is gone and buried.
I just black hole all doubleclick ads (and many others) without using a proxy for the rest of my browsing. See my "how to" at
http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/
> afterall, Bill Joy makes money from his code.
That's wrong, of course, once you go back and consider vi, csh, 3BSD, etc.
Of course, the same system, sans the Apple Cinema Display is $2499, making the display itself just a mere $3999!
Does anyone know of a port of the "flight" [simulator] program to use X on non-SGI hardware? That would be cool.
Dummynet is useful, but also available for FreeBSD is the AltQ package. This adds several additional QOS-style packet queuing disciplines, such as WFQ (weighted fair queuing) and CBQ (class-based queuing), that are bettm er to use to implement a BW/traffic shaping device.
l
See http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/kjc/software.htm
Yes, a nonprofit can go public. An interesting side-effect is that to accomplish this, a (sometimes new) comercial entity has to purchase the assests of the nonprofit. The comercial entity raises capital and buys out the nonprofit. The money paid to the nonprofit has to be disbursed in a fashion appropriate for a nonprofit; it cannot be turned over to the comercial entity.
This is how UUNET was started oh-so-long-ago. The money paid to the nonprofit UUNET by the for-profit UUNET was used to fund various free/open software efforts a 8-10 years ago (such as "nvi").
Sheesh. Anyone thinking TOG is getting special treatment WRT x.org is just dating themselves as "Internet newbies". x.org belonged to the X Consortium right from when it spun out from MIT. That's nearly 10 years by now. The 1997 date reported by whois is only the time the record was created as belonging to TOG.
And, long before "The Slashdot Effect", the Internet trembled at whims of "The X Effect", which took place whenever a new release of X was made. It generally caused no end of routing havoc as links were saturated with X tar balls for days on end.