My very (very) aging 486-50 laptop with 28MB of RAM still works quite well as a portable system with NetBSD on it. Not the fastest thing in the world, but with FVWM it's a nice snappy little machine.
Re:A couple of points, mildly off-topic
on
Open Source Art?
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· Score: 1
Where I work, we distribute all code for our main application to unix boxes in the field, so we can customize it on-site.
Yikes! That means that five years from now you'll have 1,500 different forks of the code, all implementing kinda-sorta the same updates and functions, but all just different enough that your whole crew will always be insured of job security.
Thanks for linking to that Word Document. It's got an opinion expressed in it that should be added to this discussion:
To the Editor:
Re Hal Plotkin's Aug. 29 article (Perens Article) it's nice to see that Bruce Perens, the "free software guru," is abandoning his scorched-earth opposition to commercial software. Just two weeks ago, after all, Mr. Perens joined the LinuxWorld march on San Francisco's City Hall, demanding passage of the Digital Security Software Act, which would require the use of open-source software by the State of California. Indeed, in his new role as purveyor of compromise and sweet reason, Perens offers us Sincere Choice, whose name is a gentle play on words to the hard-core capitalist CompTIA trade association's Software Choice campaign.
Alas, compromise and sweet reason are in the eye of the beholder. From where I view it, Sincere Choice looks like another route to requiring the use of open-source software, freshly camouflaged in terms like "competition by merit."
Sincere Choice, we learn from its Web site (www.sincerechoice.com), stands for "choice through interoperability": "no user should be required to use a product because others do." Or as Mr. Plotkin puts it, "no companies would be able to lock the state in as a customer by building technical roadblocks that keep competitors out."
In the real world, commercial software makers constantly face tradeoffs. On the one hand, they want to sell more products while optimizing performance and protecting their intellectual property from cloners. On the other, they must please their customers by maximizing users' flexibility: large customers typically must live with multiple generations of software from different sources and are deeply skeptical about efforts to lock them in.
Free markets determine the way for-profit enterprises cope with these tensions, and different purveyors of software offer different solutions. Thus IBM and Sun have embraced open-source Linux as part of broader strategies to sell hardware--but they (like Oracle and Microsoft) also sell proprietary applications software and also provide other services. And in making decisions about what sort of software to use, big organizations like the State of California are free to weigh factors ranging from cost to performance to product compatibility.
I think I know what Mr. Perens wants in advocating new rules for state software procurement: a world in which the path of least resistance is one in which everybody uses open-source software. If Mr. Plotkin's point is indeed different -- that the IT professionals working for State of California have goofed in the past and now need legislation to make software decisions for them-- one has to wonder where the problem really lies. Does the State of California need new rules, or does it need better IT decision makers?
Jack MacCrisken Chicago Partners Jack MacCrisken is an Initiative for Software Choice consultant
Sybian, as far as I can tell, just uses various electric motors, and plain speed controls to function. What is the 'java' going to be used for? Are we about to see fancy new Sybian units that can be modulated to music or something? Please, let's hope nobody is working on an AI engine for Sybian.
If there's an anti-trust violation, roll the tanks in and start the battle.
Otherwise, keep your 'looking into' crap away from legitimate business practices.
If artists can make it on their own, then they don't need to sign contracts. They can't sign the papers, take the bucks and then turn around a few years later and go 'wah! wah!' and have any credibility.
Generally, 'very sensitive data' doesn't transit on 'the net.' Anybody who thinks highly critical data gets shuttled around on the public Internet has a lot to learn.
What would be nice is if they could reverse the law that lets the Big-5 keep the copyrights forever.
Pass new laws that retroactively reverse a contract that was signed in the past? Wow. Bring in the People's Committee. I think we have a rebbelution on our hands.
This is where Janis Ian's suggestion of letting artist re-release their out-of-print stuff would really be of use.
Suggest away. Then get that worded into the contract. Otherwise, deal with the contract that you signed. Or were you proposing the gummint come in and nullify the contracts somehow?
Usernames and passwords to web sites can be embedded into the URL, and encrypted. This still allows anybody who grabs the URL to get onto a 'secured' page on said website. The BDSM Web Site alt.com uses such a mechanism, and is full of people with all sorts of kinky interests, including 'vulnerable' sexual submissives. The alt.com chatroom uses URL-based 'passwords.' For whatever reason they prefer that to a cookie-based security scheme.
I have a stronger feeling that apple.slashdot.org is because there's a sizable anything-but-Microsoft crowd out there in the Mac community, and any ABM people possible are courted to this website.
An alternative reason would be that VA is courting to be purchased by Apple Computer. But I really know almost nothing about the Macintosh side of this site as months ago I blocked all the Apple/Macintosh articles and topics. I haven't seen ol' 'Pudge' in ages.
When something is supported in NetBSD, it generally means it's part of the one big source tree that all of NetBSD runs on (almost always). Since Linux is just a kernal, and people toss in whatever userland, etc. that they want, every 'distribution' of Linux is really a separate fork. Everybody runs the same userland on all those different hardware architectures of NetBSD. That means everybody on the NetBSD team is working on essentially the same project.
There is One 'distribution' of NetBSD, and the base install is built out of the same set of source for all architectures. Many people view that as a good thing. I don't run it on old Macintoshes any longer, just Intel and Sparc, but the seamless way configs can move from machine to machine all running the same userland code (and building packages from the same/user/pkgsrc tree) is really nice.
The whole concept of 'root' is dangerous and a major security flaw. There should be ACL restrictions on any modern secure operating system. Security should be segmented. There's no reason for an antiquated 'god account' concept on a modern server.
Sadly, many people are still bogged down in the concepts of 70's era Time Sharing systems.
I guess there goes the notion that people should run httpd on their home boxes and the hype of the 'voices of millions of servers sharing content on the web' is officially declared dead.
If you want to run a home web server, you need to put it on a seperate standalone machine. Yep. You heard it here, folks.
If GCC isn't installed you can't quickly download the source for the fix, or, *better yet* patch it and recompile yourself.
Yeah, yeah. You can build it on a seperate machine and then drag over the binary.
I guess this means nobody should run apache as one of the daemons on their main system anymore. Websites should become Geocities directories, and people should stop running services on their machine unless it's a locked down server.
I remember reading a few years back in a tech journal column about a guy who had installed a 'gravel cannon' in the trunk of his car. All it would do is spill out a little bit of gravel under driver control when someone was tailgating him. I've often thought such a feature would be a good thing, if done in such a way that it could seem like regular gravel off the road spraying upward. Just a rock or two. Voila. We'd all know who the obnoxious tailgaters were by their chipped windshield.
An alternative would be a brake fluid squirter. It would just spray out little droplets of brake fluid once in awhile. Hey, brake fluid is an ordinary hazard of the road (also, it dissolves paint on cars) and if tailgaiters end up having the shittiest paint job on the road, that's their problem. Various other ordinary automotive fluids could be dispersed as well. Key is for it to be something that's ordinarily in the car. Acetone wouldn't seem innocent enough.
You're forgetting that with cardboard voting forms the votes would take a while longer to count. The media wouldn't be able to whoop up the frenzy they do following (halfway through) all elections.
Given that both Linux and Darwin are open-source, shouldn't the headline be something like "Open-Source Desktops Gain on Proprietary, Non-Customizable Desktops"?
What, pray tell, about the Apple OS X desktop is Open Source?
Sorry, Apple can only use the marketing point of Darwin being Open Source when they're talking about the core of the system.
It's really disappointing when people trim out little bits of Jefferson and paste them into their own contexts.
Jefferson said nothing about people outright copying recordings of other people performing music, because they didn't have recorded music at the time. The context of his quoted comment above is that of ideas, as expressed in words, not discrete recordings of musical performances.
You say that like there's something wrong with it.
Could it be that this country is big enough that you don't have to cross over a national border to go on vacation and have a nice time of it?
Probably about the same percentage of Americans go on the same sort of holiday as the Europeans do: go sit their fat asses on a beach somewhere or go 'camping' in some dirt. The only difference is, in the United States you don't have to leave the country to do so.
But, far be it for me to continue interfering in your superiority complex. Keep on with all the whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
My very (very) aging 486-50 laptop with 28MB of RAM still works quite well as a portable system with NetBSD on it. Not the fastest thing in the world, but with FVWM it's a nice snappy little machine.
Where I work, we distribute all code for our main application to unix boxes in the field, so we can customize it on-site.
Yikes! That means that five years from now you'll have 1,500 different forks of the code, all implementing kinda-sorta the same updates and functions, but all just different enough that your whole crew will always be insured of job security.
Oh.... wait....
Thanks for linking to that Word Document. It's got an opinion expressed in it that should be added to this discussion:
To the Editor:
Re Hal Plotkin's Aug. 29 article (Perens Article) it's nice to see that Bruce Perens, the "free software guru," is abandoning his scorched-earth opposition to commercial software. Just two weeks ago, after all, Mr. Perens joined the LinuxWorld march on San Francisco's City Hall, demanding passage of the Digital Security Software Act, which would require the use of open-source software by the State of California. Indeed, in his new role as purveyor of compromise and sweet reason, Perens offers us Sincere Choice, whose name is a gentle play on words to the hard-core capitalist CompTIA trade association's Software Choice campaign.
Alas, compromise and sweet reason are in the eye of the beholder. From where I view it, Sincere Choice looks like another route to requiring the use of open-source software, freshly camouflaged in terms like "competition by merit."
Sincere Choice, we learn from its Web site (www.sincerechoice.com), stands for "choice through interoperability": "no user should be required to use a product because others do." Or as Mr. Plotkin puts it, "no companies would be able to lock the state in as a customer by building technical roadblocks that keep competitors out."
In the real world, commercial software makers constantly face tradeoffs. On the one hand, they want to sell more products while optimizing performance and protecting their intellectual property from cloners. On the other, they must please their customers by maximizing users' flexibility: large customers typically must live with multiple generations of software from different sources and are deeply skeptical about efforts to lock them in.
Free markets determine the way for-profit enterprises cope with these tensions, and different purveyors of software offer different solutions. Thus IBM and Sun have embraced open-source Linux as part of broader strategies to sell hardware--but they (like Oracle and Microsoft) also sell proprietary applications software and also provide other services. And in making decisions about what sort of software to use, big organizations like the State of California are free to weigh factors ranging from cost to performance to product compatibility.
I think I know what Mr. Perens wants in advocating new rules for state software procurement: a world in which the path of least resistance is one in which everybody uses open-source software. If Mr. Plotkin's point is indeed different -- that the IT professionals working for State of California have goofed in the past and now need legislation to make software decisions for them-- one has to wonder where the problem really lies. Does the State of California need new rules, or does it need better IT decision makers?
Jack MacCrisken
Chicago Partners
Jack MacCrisken is an Initiative for Software Choice consultant
Sybian, as far as I can tell, just uses various electric motors, and plain speed controls to function. What is the 'java' going to be used for? Are we about to see fancy new Sybian units that can be modulated to music or something? Please, let's hope nobody is working on an AI engine for Sybian.
needs some serious looking into.
If there's an anti-trust violation, roll the tanks in and start the battle.
Otherwise, keep your 'looking into' crap away from legitimate business practices.
If artists can make it on their own, then they don't need to sign contracts. They can't sign the papers, take the bucks and then turn around a few years later and go 'wah! wah!' and have any credibility.
Generally, 'very sensitive data' doesn't transit on 'the net.' Anybody who thinks highly critical data gets shuttled around on the public Internet has a lot to learn.
What would be nice is if they could reverse the law that lets the Big-5 keep the copyrights forever.
Pass new laws that retroactively reverse a contract that was signed in the past? Wow. Bring in the People's Committee. I think we have a rebbelution on our hands.
This is where Janis Ian's suggestion of letting artist re-release their out-of-print stuff would really be of use.
Suggest away. Then get that worded into the contract. Otherwise, deal with the contract that you signed. Or were you proposing the gummint come in and nullify the contracts somehow?
You can't get laid listening to cd's anyway.
You can get syphilis from the skanks who hang out at rawk concerts, though.
I used to use my teeth to strip wire.
A good wire stripper is a lot better, and more replacable, than your teeth. Get one of the Paladin strippers. You'll not regret it.
Usernames and passwords to web sites can be embedded into the URL, and encrypted. This still allows anybody who grabs the URL to get onto a 'secured' page on said website. The BDSM Web Site alt.com uses such a mechanism, and is full of people with all sorts of kinky interests, including 'vulnerable' sexual submissives. The alt.com chatroom uses URL-based 'passwords.' For whatever reason they prefer that to a cookie-based security scheme.
I have a stronger feeling that apple.slashdot.org is because there's a sizable anything-but-Microsoft crowd out there in the Mac community, and any ABM people possible are courted to this website.
An alternative reason would be that VA is courting to be purchased by Apple Computer. But I really know almost nothing about the Macintosh side of this site as months ago I blocked all the Apple/Macintosh articles and topics. I haven't seen ol' 'Pudge' in ages.
When something is supported in NetBSD, it generally means it's part of the one big source tree that all of NetBSD runs on (almost always). Since Linux is just a kernal, and people toss in whatever userland, etc. that they want, every 'distribution' of Linux is really a separate fork. Everybody runs the same userland on all those different hardware architectures of NetBSD. That means everybody on the NetBSD team is working on essentially the same project.
/user/pkgsrc tree) is really nice.
There is One 'distribution' of NetBSD, and the base install is built out of the same set of source for all architectures. Many people view that as a good thing. I don't run it on old Macintoshes any longer, just Intel and Sparc, but the seamless way configs can move from machine to machine all running the same userland code (and building packages from the same
but for the average user, having someone else "0wn" their machine is probably, ultimately, a necessity.
Red Hat is betting a whole wad of cash on it becoming a necessity.
The whole concept of 'root' is dangerous and a major security flaw. There should be ACL restrictions on any modern secure operating system. Security should be segmented. There's no reason for an antiquated 'god account' concept on a modern server.
Sadly, many people are still bogged down in the concepts of 70's era Time Sharing systems.
I guess there goes the notion that people should run httpd on their home boxes and the hype of the 'voices of millions of servers sharing content on the web' is officially declared dead.
If you want to run a home web server, you need to put it on a seperate standalone machine. Yep. You heard it here, folks.
And as long as they make sure their Red Hat releases have the proper number of bugs in them, they're guaranteed a revenue stream.
If GCC isn't installed you can't quickly download the source for the fix, or, *better yet* patch it and recompile yourself.
Yeah, yeah. You can build it on a seperate machine and then drag over the binary.
I guess this means nobody should run apache as one of the daemons on their main system anymore. Websites should become Geocities directories, and people should stop running services on their machine unless it's a locked down server.
I remember reading a few years back in a tech journal column about a guy who had installed a 'gravel cannon' in the trunk of his car. All it would do is spill out a little bit of gravel under driver control when someone was tailgating him. I've often thought such a feature would be a good thing, if done in such a way that it could seem like regular gravel off the road spraying upward. Just a rock or two. Voila. We'd all know who the obnoxious tailgaters were by their chipped windshield.
An alternative would be a brake fluid squirter. It would just spray out little droplets of brake fluid once in awhile. Hey, brake fluid is an ordinary hazard of the road (also, it dissolves paint on cars) and if tailgaiters end up having the shittiest paint job on the road, that's their problem. Various other ordinary automotive fluids could be dispersed as well. Key is for it to be something that's ordinarily in the car. Acetone wouldn't seem innocent enough.
You're forgetting that with cardboard voting forms the votes would take a while longer to count. The media wouldn't be able to whoop up the frenzy they do following (halfway through) all elections.
What, pray tell, about the Apple OS X desktop is Open Source?
Sorry, Apple can only use the marketing point of Darwin being Open Source when they're talking about the core of the system.
I hate to admit it, but I am looking forward to the first major Linux trojan that comes along and is tuned to delete home directories.
A stripped, feature-poor Mac system can be bought for $800.
Funny how nobody who speaks up in a geek forum has that kind of low end disaster machine. That Mac is equivalent to the $400 WalMart special.
Be honest, if you're going to be a Macintosh advocate, and admit you spent more for the 'Mac experience.'
It's really disappointing when people trim out little bits of Jefferson and paste them into their own contexts.
Jefferson said nothing about people outright copying recordings of other people performing music, because they didn't have recorded music at the time. The context of his quoted comment above is that of ideas, as expressed in words, not discrete recordings of musical performances.
You say that like there's something wrong with it.
Could it be that this country is big enough that you don't have to cross over a national border to go on vacation and have a nice time of it?
Probably about the same percentage of Americans go on the same sort of holiday as the Europeans do: go sit their fat asses on a beach somewhere or go 'camping' in some dirt. The only difference is, in the United States you don't have to leave the country to do so.
But, far be it for me to continue interfering in your superiority complex. Keep on with all the whatever.