There's no functional difference between this "paging file" and the usual swap partition except that yours is file based while the latter if partition-based.
>You can make a fstab entry to mount this file at boot up as a swap partition.
How is this different from a swap partition? (Or, in other words, why bother?)
> Even the BSD license requires that I not say the code was written by me.
Are you talking about this? ------- Neither the name of the nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. ------- Source; http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php
If yes, then what you say is untrue - you can talk about it but not use your name or organization to **endorse** the products **without permission**. That is to say, you can't hawk a BSD appliance shouting (for example) "Come on folks, only $999, here's a router appliance with AT&T routing programs!" unless you've got a permission.
>The intention of the GPL is to open up the code to any type of freedom imagineable.
Riiight. I want to sell a mail server appliance based on a modified Postfix MTA and keep those Postfix modifications to myself. Pray tell, how can I excercise such freedom?
The only truly free license would not have any duties, obligations or restrictions whatsoever. GPL and suchlike licenses are full of rules and restrictions, for Christ's sake.
>*forcing* source distribution even to those that have no access to binaries
Heh, heh - of course, aparently GPL "hawks" didn't like the fact that thousands of companies run modified code without distributing it (and therefore without having to distribute the modified source).
xSPs, service providers and others will be scared shitless. I wonder if Google's MTAs are modified GPL or commercial.. They'd have to disclose that fact so that people can ask (or not) for access to source code such as Gmail's MTA and perhaps even more than that.
>A general belief that benefit to others is good even when you don't directly benefit, perhaps?
That's all great - but if you want to be that kind of person, go ahead, be that thing. That's why there are humanitarian organizations, sourceforge.net, etc. We already pay too much in taxes to the government and they are wasters and bad bosses - there's no question about that.
If I had to pay I'd prefer to be forced to invest a small part of my income in investment fund focusing on open source enterprises in poor countries. Dollar for dollar, you can get more bang for the buck if you spend it there rather than here. Still, as I said, I just don't like the idea.
> Why should Google cease what seems to be fair use of published material?
Aparently because they feel they might lose the case. "Fair use" is your term - it doesn't mean it's really fair use just because you call it that name.
>A news agency could block this by requiring their customers to use the Robots Exclusion Protocol.
I don't think that's the case - no matter if the content guys used it or not - a copyright notice on their site or home page should suffice. It's Google's responsibility to make sure of copyrights before they copy something.
>That's surely the agency's problem, not Google's.
Why would I, as a taxpayer, support give-away projects to help countries with lower R&D investments and lower taxes compete against my company and my country?
>I spent nights translating some packages to be on schedule for the 10.2 release. I was quite disappointed (snip)
Oh, the so-called OSS syndrome (Open Source Slave syndrome).. Hopefully that'll teach him that it's safer to pick a non-commercial distro (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) to contribute to in the future!
>I could be mistaken, but wouldn't that announcement qualify as an announcement to the community?
I guess he meant the announcement wasn't about the v10.2 per se but rather about the combining of packages in the future (which turned out to include his midnight contributions).
It's funny how the market can support only a handful of commercial distributions. Even RH and Novell/SuSE are having hard time (Novell even has published a RH to SLES9 migration how-to). I believe there should be a similar doc for Win-to-Lin migration, but, WTF? I thought the idea was that Linux distros don't need to compete among themselves because the non-Linux market was actually a big one.
Alright, I'm just kidding here based on distroWatch.com definition;-) " (i.e haven't released a new version in over 2 years and their web sites don't give indication of work in progress)." http://distrowatch.com/stats.php Onc e upon a time Debian was the most respected and popular Linux distro. I still love it but its popularity has dwindled under the onslaught of new distributions. Who would have thought...
By the way, the popularity stats are very informative: http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?sec tion=popularit y Fedora is going down - despite Red Hat's reanimation procedures, Debian too, while Ubuntu and CentOS are going up...
> With Ubuntu, everything is free, and they've made a commitment to always remain free.
The same is with CentOS - http://www.centos.org/ - stable, free, even binary-compatible with a Linux vendor's enterprise edition releases.
>it's developed by a community and has a central package repository.
CentOS is built from "North American enterprise Linux vendor's SRPMs" so in that respect it's less open to experimenting with and it follows the upstream vendor's releases, but for those who like stability, that's a good thing. Of course, it's RPM based but who cares - it comes with YUM pre-installed so you don't really have to think about it - you update and install similarly to the way you'd do it using apt-get.
If I had time to spend on fooling around with unstable packages and such, I guess I'd try Gentoo... For regular sysadmin folks who don't dislike Red Hat, CentOS is a godsend.
> You were personally put out by the Xorg fork? How? I find this difficult to believe.
Yes I was put out, that's why the comment got me going:-)
Before I was able to run X-Windows on my hardware and recently when I tried to upgrade to kernel 2.6 (with Xorg X-Windows), both SuSE and Red Hat detected my h/w properly during setup but "startx" crashes no matter what I do.
All I wanted was 800 x 600 to be able to get on the Web using Firefox. Not exactly rocket science. That's why I said that as far as I'm concerned, X.org isn't an improvement. I spent 2 nights on troubleshooting, recompiling and general fucking around before I gave up.
>Fragmentation... Like DOS->WinNT? Like WinNT->WinXP? Etc.?
That's not fragmentation, that's end-of-lifeing. Different generations of OS... If you run a current sytem, that'd be Win2K3 on server and WinXP on client. For server apps all you need is to test them on Win2K3. With Linux I would think that for most apps you need to QA on each distro if you want to be sure.
>in the case of http you explicitly grant caching since every implementation of a graphical web browser does that.
As discussed by several posts here, what Google does isn't caching as it changes content. They take out images, change formatting and sometimes provide out-of-date cached pages (which obviously are different from current pages). If they did an extra step and "improved" the content with mouse-over keyword ads and links to competitors of the copyright owner, I assume that'd be OK too?
>Google cache and Internet Archive have helped me out immensely.
Nice to hear that, but why would anyone care about your convenience.
As there's cache of the images, anyone with a Web server could run this as their homepage at http://127.0.0.1/
Another thought: the icons could be recycled and used for ObjectDock (http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/) if only the goddamned thing wouldn't crash Explorer.exe so much...
No it wouldn't. It would be if it was released together with GPL code as a derivative work. If he takes his code out and re-writes the missing (formerly GPL) part, he can release the complete work as a non-derivative work.
>The DMCA specifically allows caching, so it's more in a gray area than blatent (sic!).
It allows cashing if the content is unchanged as in proxy server cache, not as in Google's permanent and modified cache. See: http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/hr2281_dm ca_law_1998102 0_pl105-304.html
" the material described in paragraph (1) is transmitted to the subsequent users described in paragraph (1)(C) without modification to its content from the manner in which the material was transmitted from the person described in paragraph (1)(A);"
>Naturally EDS has financial interests in saying such things
So Red Hat are scum as well - if for no other reason, then for the fact that they don't give away their software and services.
>They're a company that makes millions off of companies by pushing proprietary software.
That's actually totally irrelevant - you obviously have no clue about government (and enterprise) purchasing. If they suddenly were able to get the OS for free, they'd sell more other non-OS software (or services) to their customers. Needs are always bigger than budgets - you get some extra dollars, you spend some dollars so the money saved on OS would just go someplace else.
> If I remember, forking XFree86 into X.org was the best thing that couuld have happened to X development.
Why? It's the same shit, people just have to waste time to re-learn new tricks about configuration and troubleshooting. Before I ran XFree86 because that was the only way to use Firefox, now I run X.org for the same reason. I don't feel I'm better off in any way. It goes on my nerves, if anything.
>everywhere I've ever worked uses a fork of unix..
That's the whole point of their complaint - fragmentation. Instead of developing one version (as for Windows 2003 for example), vendors have to develop and support a myriad of UNIX flavors). Features of individual OS aside, which *approach* is more scalable, supportable and cheaper? Of course Microsoft's approach helps lower the costs and provide a better development platform.
On Linux, even when you don't have to modify source code for different distros, you still must test and QA for each build which all contributes to higher expenses, lower supportability, etc.
>I still feel that people need free alternatives to try out Linux. Maybe having an Open Circulation Edition a lá Xandros would be a good idea
What makes you think they need free alternatives?
Most PowerPC customers are big and medium enterprises and they don't want to try out stuff - once the server gets bought it'd better go online as soon as possible (unless it's a test machine - even then, it's usually tested using the same OS as their main production PPC machine(s)). Because of that, most PPC customers don't give a shit about choices, tryouts and such. They want to go online and forget about the OS (including any problems such as compatibility with Oracle, backup tools, SAN and other details). That means that even if they want to try it out first (those are very few), they won't want to use a free distro and certainly not beta (!) version of a free (!) distro such as Fedora. Even if it worked fine - what would you do - buy a PPC server and run it on Fedora? Of course not - you'd want to buy a stable and supported distro that will live more than six months.
SuSe offers a free trial of their PPC version: http://download.novell.com/Download?buil did=fOx0vY fWu6g~
Slashdot Mirror
> Yes, Linux can make use of a paging file.
There's no functional difference between this "paging file" and the usual swap partition except that yours is file based while the latter if partition-based.
>You can make a fstab entry to mount this file at boot up as a swap partition.
How is this different from a swap partition? (Or, in other words, why bother?)
>There is no incentive to keep derivatives open, and thus the code quickly becomes less free.
Who cares if the code is free?
Freedom of people is the first thing to worry about, and BSDL gives more freedom.
http://www.afp.fr/english/links/?pid=copyright
©AFP 2005 . All rights reserved. Users may download and print extracts of contents from this website for personal and non-commercial use only, provided they do not remove any copyright, trademarks or other proprietary notices. Except as provided above, users may not reproduce, publish, sell, distribute or in any way commercially exploit contents from this website without the prior written consent of AFP. AFP and its logo are registered trademarks.
> Even the BSD license requires that I not say the code was written by me.
p
Are you talking about this?
-------
Neither the name of the nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
-------
Source; http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.ph
If yes, then what you say is untrue - you can talk about it but not use your name or organization to **endorse** the products **without permission**.
That is to say, you can't hawk a BSD appliance shouting (for example) "Come on folks, only $999, here's a router appliance with AT&T routing programs!" unless you've got a permission.
>The intention of the GPL is to open up the code to any type of freedom imagineable.
Riiight.
I want to sell a mail server appliance based on a modified Postfix MTA and keep those Postfix modifications to myself.
Pray tell, how can I excercise such freedom?
The only truly free license would not have any duties, obligations or restrictions whatsoever.
GPL and suchlike licenses are full of rules and restrictions, for Christ's sake.
>*forcing* source distribution even to those that have no access to binaries
Heh, heh - of course, aparently GPL "hawks" didn't like the fact that thousands of companies run modified code without distributing it (and therefore without having to distribute the modified source).
xSPs, service providers and others will be scared shitless. I wonder if Google's MTAs are modified GPL or commercial.. They'd have to disclose that fact so that people can ask (or not) for access to source code such as Gmail's MTA and perhaps even more than that.
Woo hoo! Great times for Solaris and xBSD...
>A general belief that benefit to others is good even when you don't directly benefit, perhaps?
That's all great - but if you want to be that kind of person, go ahead, be that thing.
That's why there are humanitarian organizations, sourceforge.net, etc.
We already pay too much in taxes to the government and they are wasters and bad bosses - there's no question about that.
If I had to pay I'd prefer to be forced to invest a small part of my income in investment fund focusing on open source enterprises in poor countries.
Dollar for dollar, you can get more bang for the buck if you spend it there rather than here. Still, as I said, I just don't like the idea.
> Why should Google cease what seems to be fair use of published material?
Aparently because they feel they might lose the case.
"Fair use" is your term - it doesn't mean it's really fair use just because you call it that name.
>A news agency could block this by requiring their customers to use the Robots Exclusion Protocol.
I don't think that's the case - no matter if the content guys used it or not - a copyright notice on their site or home page should suffice. It's Google's responsibility to make sure of copyrights before they copy something.
>That's surely the agency's problem, not Google's.
We'll see about that.
> Google has the records,
:-)
Indeed, that should make it easy for someone to prosecute Google (for unauthorized caching like the French did earlier this week)
That makes sense.
Why would I, as a taxpayer, support give-away projects to help countries with lower R&D investments and lower taxes compete against my company and my country?
>I spent nights translating some packages to be on schedule for the 10.2 release. I was quite disappointed (snip)
Oh, the so-called OSS syndrome (Open Source Slave syndrome)..
Hopefully that'll teach him that it's safer to pick a non-commercial distro (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) to contribute to in the future!
>I could be mistaken, but wouldn't that announcement qualify as an announcement to the community?
I guess he meant the announcement wasn't about the v10.2 per se but rather about the combining of packages in the future (which turned out to include his midnight contributions).
It's funny how the market can support only a handful of commercial distributions. Even RH and Novell/SuSE are having hard time (Novell even has published a RH to SLES9 migration how-to). I believe there should be a similar doc for Win-to-Lin migration, but, WTF? I thought the idea was that Linux distros don't need to compete among themselves because the non-Linux market was actually a big one.
> where they can track life's fundamental processes, such as DNA repair, for hours on end.
But, does it work with MRTG?
RTFA.
They show AFP's freaking photos, how is that "only linking"?
Last time I checked it was called "image theft", leaching and such.
Alright, I'm just kidding here based on distroWatch.com definition ;-)c e upon a time Debian was the most respected and popular Linux distro. I still love it but its popularity has dwindled under the onslaught of new distributions. Who would have thought...
c tion=popularit y
" (i.e haven't released a new version in over 2 years and their web sites don't give indication of work in progress)."
http://distrowatch.com/stats.php
On
By the way, the popularity stats are very informative:
http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?se
Fedora is going down - despite Red Hat's reanimation procedures, Debian too, while Ubuntu and CentOS are going up...
> With Ubuntu, everything is free, and they've made a commitment to always remain free.
The same is with CentOS - http://www.centos.org/ - stable, free, even binary-compatible with a Linux vendor's enterprise edition releases.
>it's developed by a community and has a central package repository.
CentOS is built from "North American enterprise Linux vendor's SRPMs" so in that respect it's less open to experimenting with and it follows the upstream vendor's releases, but for those who like stability, that's a good thing.
Of course, it's RPM based but who cares - it comes with YUM pre-installed so you don't really have to think about it - you update and install similarly to the way you'd do it using apt-get.
If I had time to spend on fooling around with unstable packages and such, I guess I'd try Gentoo... For regular sysadmin folks who don't dislike Red Hat, CentOS is a godsend.
> You were personally put out by the Xorg fork? How? I find this difficult to believe.
:-)
Yes I was put out, that's why the comment got me going
Before I was able to run X-Windows on my hardware and recently when I tried to upgrade to kernel 2.6 (with Xorg X-Windows), both SuSE and Red Hat detected my h/w properly during setup but "startx" crashes no matter what I do.
All I wanted was 800 x 600 to be able to get on the Web using Firefox. Not exactly rocket science. That's why I said that as far as I'm concerned, X.org isn't an improvement.
I spent 2 nights on troubleshooting, recompiling and general fucking around before I gave up.
>Fragmentation... Like DOS->WinNT? Like WinNT->WinXP? Etc.?
That's not fragmentation, that's end-of-lifeing. Different generations of OS...
If you run a current sytem, that'd be Win2K3 on server and WinXP on client. For server apps all you need is to test them on Win2K3.
With Linux I would think that for most apps you need to QA on each distro if you want to be sure.
>in the case of http you explicitly grant caching since every implementation of a graphical web browser does that.
As discussed by several posts here, what Google does isn't caching as it changes content.
They take out images, change formatting and sometimes provide out-of-date cached pages (which obviously are different from current pages).
If they did an extra step and "improved" the content with mouse-over keyword ads and links to competitors of the copyright owner, I assume that'd be OK too?
>Google cache and Internet Archive have helped me out immensely.
Nice to hear that, but why would anyone care about your convenience.
As there's cache of the images, anyone with a Web server could run this as their homepage at http://127.0.0.1/
Another thought: the icons could be recycled and used for ObjectDock (http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/) if only the goddamned thing wouldn't crash Explorer.exe so much...
No it wouldn't.
It would be if it was released together with GPL code as a derivative work.
If he takes his code out and re-writes the missing (formerly GPL) part, he can release the complete work as a non-derivative work.
>The DMCA specifically allows caching, so it's more in a gray area than blatent (sic!).
m ca_law_1998102 0_pl105-304.html
It allows cashing if the content is unchanged as in proxy server cache, not as in Google's permanent and modified cache.
See:
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/hr2281_d
" the material described in paragraph (1) is transmitted to the subsequent users described in paragraph (1)(C) without modification to its content from the manner in which the material was transmitted from the person described in paragraph (1)(A);"
>Naturally EDS has financial interests in saying such things
So Red Hat are scum as well - if for no other reason, then for the fact that they don't give away their software and services.
>They're a company that makes millions off of companies by pushing proprietary software.
That's actually totally irrelevant - you obviously have no clue about government (and enterprise) purchasing.
If they suddenly were able to get the OS for free, they'd sell more other non-OS software (or services) to their customers.
Needs are always bigger than budgets - you get some extra dollars, you spend some dollars so the money saved on OS would just go someplace else.
> If I remember, forking XFree86 into X.org was the best thing that couuld have happened to X development.
Why? It's the same shit, people just have to waste time to re-learn new tricks about configuration and troubleshooting.
Before I ran XFree86 because that was the only way to use Firefox, now I run X.org for the same reason. I don't feel I'm better off in any way. It goes on my nerves, if anything.
>everywhere I've ever worked uses a fork of unix..
That's the whole point of their complaint - fragmentation.
Instead of developing one version (as for Windows 2003 for example), vendors have to develop and support a myriad of UNIX flavors). Features of individual OS aside, which *approach* is more scalable, supportable and cheaper? Of course Microsoft's approach helps lower the costs and provide a better development platform.
On Linux, even when you don't have to modify source code for different distros, you still must test and QA for each build which all contributes to higher expenses, lower supportability, etc.
>I still feel that people need free alternatives to try out Linux. Maybe having an Open Circulation Edition a lá Xandros would be a good idea
l did=fOx0vY fWu6g~
What makes you think they need free alternatives?
Most PowerPC customers are big and medium enterprises and they don't want to try out stuff - once the server gets bought it'd better go online as soon as possible (unless it's a test machine - even then, it's usually tested using the same OS as their main production PPC machine(s)).
Because of that, most PPC customers don't give a shit about choices, tryouts and such.
They want to go online and forget about the OS (including any problems such as compatibility with Oracle, backup tools, SAN and other details). That means that even if they want to try it out first (those are very few), they won't want to use a free distro and certainly not beta (!) version of a free (!) distro such as Fedora.
Even if it worked fine - what would you do - buy a PPC server and run it on Fedora? Of course not - you'd want to buy a stable and supported distro that will live more than six months.
SuSe offers a free trial of their PPC version:
http://download.novell.com/Download?bui
Of course, you are right about the tremors.
Illiterate fucks.
>When I mess up, I just cuss at the computer, it's less than $100, but I suppose I could make an expensive mistake...
Perhaps using console mode (for things that it works, like browsing the web) would help?
It's a big hassle...
Guess what happened to these punks?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/11/29/45
My guess is nothing.
>Also, where's Groklaw when you need it?
Hah, that's a good question! I guess they're only interested in high profile high PR cases and not this menial, dirty work.
Once I asked GNU.org about the process for dealing with GPL violators and it was quite cumbersome and non-exciting.