Perhaps the fact that it generates assembler output (a.out) rather than the later and now more widely used Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) binaries?
Thank you. I had been wondering how to get DNS to Just Work [TM] over an autoconfigured v6 interface for a while. I had been falling back to using the dhclient-enter-hooks file to stop a rewrite of resolv.conf on v4 lease acceptance and manually applying my nameservers' v6 addresses. This is the problem with any "new" technology that replaces something ubiquitous; the accepted ways of doing things sometimes no longer apply. It doesn't help that OpenBSD's dhclient dropped support for many options that I successfully used with the old ISC client in dhclient.conf. Like you, I will be glad to see the back of DHCP.
I'll be trying it on FreeBSD and, according to the Wiki and a few other links the search "FreeBSD mDNS" returned, it looks like it is going to work. This is the final piece of the puzzle for me, apart from a suspected bug that fragments UDP NFS packets [1] when used over v6 - which is nothing to do with the v6 specification at all, just FBSD's implementation of it in either KAME or NFS.
[1] Lots of "kernel: ipfw: pullup failed" messages on the server after a while [2] of working fine. The client hangs dead once this starts (NFS mounted/home). It might even be a problem with ipfw2. More testing needed before I start pointing fingers in a PR just in case I've screwed my configuration up in some brain-dead manner.
[2] FSVO "a while".
Joking aside, this is something I have been toying with for the past few months. I have a couple of polycrystaline panels on the roof of the workshop and a small LV controller/wet battery arrangement. Getting LV PSUs for standard PC hardware is a pain, though. They are available, and the beauty of them is that you don't have to faff about with DC-AC inverters, but they're more than double the price of a high-end AC PSU.
There are also those small PSU modules for the likes of Via's EPIA mini-ITX boards that will supply the other voltages from a single 12V feed. The main problem with these is that they supply the board with 12V directly from the source. With Lead-acid and solar, you can bet that this will vary with load, time of day, weather and other factors. The best solution for off-grid solar is a 24V system with a real 24V DC-DC PSU that will regulate the 12V rails. As soon as I am comfortable remortgaging the house I may get one...
I am now convinced that BSD zealots are *much* worse than linux zealots, or even apple zealots. I doubt I will ever use anything BSD. The community seems bloody insane.
You could be right. However, please read my post in context. What I was trying to point out is that Microsoft is 100% in compliance with the terms of the BSD licence because they have kept the copyright intact. I certainly wasn't trying to say that Microsoft have committed any wrongdoing whatsoever.
The bitching about the ar5k/OpenHAL is, indeed, insane. I think you'll find a lot of BSD users tend to treat much of Theo's ranting as amusing but irrelevant. See my other post on this here and please accept my apologies for not making the other post clearer.
Actually, you're all bleedin' wrong, as was I last week. Reyk Floeter's code is under the ISC licence, not the BSD and certainly not the GPL. If you need proof, hop over to the "discussion" that happened over the bcw driver nearly six months ago where Reyk nailed his colours to the mast quite firmly.
Don't worry, I made the same mistake myself. As soon as I heard "Atheros" I immediately thought "Sam Leffler" who does dual license his code specifically to allow Linux people to use it. This, however, is not the case with ar5k/OpenHAL. It's Reyk's code and it has only the equivalent of a two clause BSD licence (the ISC licence).
Of course, the fact that some people decided to be knobs (whereas Marcus, who was actually the one who made the mistake of committing GPL code was trying to be conciliatory) in that same discussion meant I probably closed the thing before I had read Reyk's comments, which are near the end of the thread, as I guess a lot of you did.
That episode was wrong, but two wrongs do not make a right. By that I mean Michael posted publicly instead of a quiet e-mail to Marcus first, which sent Theo up into the air in a self-righteous, um, flurry of e-mails (also in public). Now the shoe is on the other foot? I'll leave you to be the judge of that. Hurrah for cooperation in free software.
Not quite. The text of the copyright can be had if you know where to look (this is on Windows XP SP2):
ftp.exe, 04/08/2004 13:00, 41.5kB, command "strings ftp.exe | grep Regents" yields "@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California."
nslookup.exe, 04/08/2004 13:00, 75.0kB, command "strings nslookup.exe | grep Regents" yields "@(#) Copyright (c) 1985,1989 Regents of the University of California."
You actually need much more than a OS+tools package.
Quite. Whilst I stand by my original assertion that the tools I have selected are primarily a practical choice, there is much to what you say.
The preservation and defense of the political conditions needed for the use of your tools is as imporant as the tools themselves.
Agreed. I am most interested in where the system came from, why and under what conditions it came to be, where it is going and what could threaten it in the future. That is one of the reasons I read and post here on Slashdot.
The illusion that the usage of tools is independent of the historical and political context is just an illusion. People tend to see the word `political' and basically turn away, building a ficticious separation between what they are interested in (a solid OS + tools, say) and the political, historical and social conditions needed for them; that's how we got where we are...
Actually, I probably erred when I wrote "political". However, it helps when one's "party" is singing from the same hymnsheet, so to speak, not inadvertently wrenching it apart from the inside. The BSD community, by and large, has this. I won't go on into the realms of flamebait with a comparison. Others may point towards certain vociferous members of other BSD projects. Those people would also have a valid point.
I could point to Bourdieu's 'Practical Reasons' for a rather detailed and extensive analysis of this---last time I checked, though, it was not available in English.
Since you made a very good, cogent point, I took the liberty of searching for some references.
"Of all the oppositions that artificially divide social science, the most fundamental, and the most ruinous, is the one that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism."
Replace social science with free software and you have my feelings exactly. I have simply found an environment where the subjective and the objective remain in harmony most of the time. So perhaps, as you say, the political conditions are more important than I realised.
With portables on the up, are we going to get specifications for the Radeon IGP chipsets? These seem to be causing the reverse engineering folks a huge headache and I've seen no mention of the Radeon Xpress 200M RS480 (yes, I have one, so I suppose I had better declare self-interest) or the Xpress 1100 so far. OK, we have 2D with the radeon(4x) driver in Xorg 7.2. 3D would be nice, though.
The whole point of the GPL is that it's subversive, and destroys traditional economic value by creating plenty and subverting efforts to legislate scarcity and ownership.
That's why I like it, that's why I take the time to teach myself about software released in this fashion, that's why I support it.
FreeBSD isn't going to deliver that to me.
You're quite right, it isn't because it doesn't enforce the creation of plentiful supply on downstream recipients, the licence's biggest failing in the eyes of the FSF. You obviously have more political concerns than I, which probably looks to some like I'm either lazy or naïve, but all I need is a solid OS with the tools to get things done. I can do without the inevitable clashes of personality that go with it. We BSD users haven't totally escaped, of course; Theo is still about somewhere;-)
By the way, on the subject of Solaris, you can grab a media kit for x86 (Express Developer Edition 5/07) here. I think it's free for the DVD. At least, it was when I got one to try.
Why is this marked as a troll? It's a serious question.
Not sure myself. I think a greater proportion of Linus worshipping sheeple got mod points today. You have to remember that Stallman himself created "St IGNUcius" and highlighted "The Church of EMACS" as a parody of this sort of blind faith; followers of names and personalities instead of ideals. I'd just shrug it off, were I you. "Troll" seems to be a handy word for "I disagree and I think a lot of slashdotters would also disagree" for many mods.
Warning: Advocacy ahead. May contain personal preferences and things that won't work for you. If you want an alternative where the personalities are less important than the functionality and freedom, you could do worse than look at FreeBSD (especially the mailing lists; compare with the LKML and I think you'll understand where I'm coming from). It has its own set of problems and you may find it not to your liking, but that's what works for me for very much the same reasons as you highlight in your original post. Except "Unix shit," of course, which I tend to disagree with because the Unix philosophy works well and logically in FreeBSD, but that in no way makes your post a troll. It might make it flamebait, but that is more a reflection on the thin-skinned individuals on here not being able to accept an opposing point of view than you being modded -1.
Yes, I think it did first appear in 5.x according to the CVSweb entry for its Makefile. I vaguely unforget an old Proliant running 4.7-R that didn't have/rescue and needed lot of mounting of filesystems and messing about to add the missing " to rc.conf that stopped the whole system going multi-user. Getting it to recognise all the memory on that not-quite-a-BIOS equipped box was fun, too (MAXMEM=xxx and recompiling a kernel on a system that could only "see" 16MB of memory, if you can call that "fun"). Amusing times. Thank goodness for all the little improvements we never see until we do something daft.
You're right. It's about the open hardware abstraction layer code, which replaces the ath_hal still used in FreeBSD. Hmm, seems I was wrong. Reyk's code isn't dual licensed, which makes for a completely different story. Apologies to Theo.
Please mod parent up. This seems to be the definitive answer to all of this. Sam has the final say and he's saying that what was done is fine. He (and Atsushi Onoe in the case of the onoe rate control algorithm) hold the copyright to the code and specifically released it dual licence to allow this sort of co-operation.
So, yes, Theo had better shut up. He's damaging the BSD relationship with Linux developers, from whom we get a lot of useful code (think ports).
Ever upgraded kernels? With the binary drivers, that's always a blast.
Indeed.
BSDBox/usr/src # make installkernel && portupgrade -f nvidia-driver && fastboot
Most annoying. It sometimes takes me a whole ten seconds to type all that out, with a further two minutes for the kernel to install, the port to rebuild and the machine to reboot (this stage is optional and only required if the kernel is being updated because of a vulnerability or you are running an X session that won't let go of the nvidia kernel module). Yeah, ease of use, CLI, Joe Sixpack, yada yada.
General purpose computers are complicated. It's what makes them so powerful. Hiding this fact is deluding the user, restraining flexibility and limiting the ability to learn, not to mention being diametrically opposite to the Unix philosophy (Linux Is Not UniX, yes, I know).
Matt Fuller (who is not me, I hasten to add) dissects the arguments here. For my own part, whenever I hear of such-and-such being made "easier," I wonder just what is being compromised to get there. Sure, make things easier if you must, but leave my CLI alone. I do not want to spend twenty minutes clicking pretty boxes in GUIs to do what takes me thirty seconds as su root, which is one reason I chose BSD.
Raises another question, though: What's your market?
Names like Fluke, Megger, HP (OK, not a good example), Tektronix, Marconi Instruments, Bruel and Kjaer (CBA to launch KCharSelect), Ono Sokki, Racal et al might mean something to the/. crowd, but to your average non-techie? Sod all. Those companies have flourished on the knowledge of technically savvy people making a conscious choice about things like reliability, quality and accuracy. What they were called mattered not a bit.
Operating systems are more complicated because they straddle markets. We use things like Ubuntu Feisty, Fedora Core, The GIMP and such because we know the software, not because of the name. "What the hell is the GIMP anyway? BDSM pr0n?" would be a more likely question from a non techie user seeing the package name for the first time.
Who was it said letting the developers of flagship OSS projects name the applications is akin to letting marketing write them? Personally, I wouldn't care if they suddenly started calling FreeBSD "*nix for BaStarDs 7.0" [1] as long as it still adhered to POLA. Others, however, may have a different view, especially if they are thinking of switching from some proprietary UNIX OS in a datacentre, where a lot of decisions are made by beancounter PHBs who have little tech background. I can't see Joe Sixpack using "Professional GNU/Linux 2.6.22 SMP datacentre high load optimised" either.
True, you can't judge a book by its cover, but people still do. It's very hard for the distro people to strike a balance. Ubuntu is aimed at desktop users primarily, so they're trying to make it sound friendly. On that score, they're doing quite well. I'm looking forward to "Ubuntu Killer Koala" after Linus' references to dropbears in an earlier interview...
[1] Could have been tailor made for me, that name, but I really can't see Yahoo! or any of the big hosting providers using it.
Call yourselves BOsFH? I find it hard to believe that anyone has yet to mention LARTs/millifortnight as the standard unit of sysadmin productivity. There's also [notches|dings]/clue-by-four and deletions/phonecall (what was your username again?). I shouldn't have to mention that the blackmails_ongoing/boss metric should be kept strictly between you and your PFY as it's only good for working out the junkets/week figure and the correct work:pub_break ratio to adopt.
Now, I'm not saying that you should use these figures. They're intended as self-improvement figures for internal ops use. A real BOFH would find something else to occupy said boss such as, oh, I don't know, say not drinking his own urine when stuck in the lift (with the broken telephone) over the weekend?
Yes, I have used Scroogle in the past. The thing I liked about BlackBox is that it retains the Google look and feel when providing results. Here is a screenshot of the first page of results for "compiz-fusion". It should simply act like Google's search results, but the issue with the subsequent pages of results remains.
Anyway, thanks for the link. There is a search plugin available for Scroogle Scraper on Mycroft, too.
I can't replicate this. I have NoScript and ABP and I also tried setting network.http.sendRefererHeader (about:config) to 0, thinking that BB has some sort of referrer filtering going on, but it still works. However, I have noticed that the Google search has a little (OK, huge) bug: It displays the first page of results fine, but as soon as you try to advance to the next set of results, BB's server barfs with a 404. Sorry for the misinformation. It always worked for me before, but it looks like at least the Google portion is coming apart at the seams right now.
I find myself wondering if you're the type to distrust anything corporate for no real reason other than it's corporate?
Not really. I trust some corporates who have never attempted to do anything but provide a product or service in return for the appropriate fee. When corporations start taking it upon themselves to profile, catalogue, report and categorise people who have no wish to be so treated I find that leaves a bad taste. For just this reason I refuse to use store loyalty cards. Perhaps I am too protective of my privacy but, in my experience, if you don't protect something you value, you lose it.
I'm not claiming that most companies are trustworthy, but over the last 8 or 9 years, Google has pretty consistantly done exactly what they said they'd do. At this point, I'm inclined to trust that they will continue to do so.
Good point. They do seem to have a good track record so far, despite the data mining operation. As I said up-thread, they are the best search engine bar none. They also support OSS through their "Summer of Code" events, amongst other things, which makes me feel they deserve at least some slack. However, privacy is a number one concern, especially here in the UK where it's getting close to the point where we have none left.
Please note, I'm not talking about searches on immoral topics here. Most of my search history would show my amateur radio interests, my hardware hacking and my FreeBSD searches. However, just imagine the potential mine of information for governments looking for problems to apply their solutions to. Almost any set of data can be manipulated to prove almost anything and, as we saw with ThePirateBay, anything held can be the subject of a subpoena. "There, you see? Bomb making has x number of hits! This Interweb pipes thing is a danger to our very civilisation!"
I suppose you could say it's not Google that is the problem. It's the thought of what others (governments, primarily) could force Google to become. A little aforethought could avoid this eventuality.
Thanks for a nice, well thought out response. You haven't exactly made me change my mind, but you certainly made me look critically at what I wrote. I accept that perhaps I am being a little hard on Google right now, but only because I can see a potential threat to something wonderful. The Internet has given humanity something we've never had before: Unfettered access to information. Some good, some bad (yep, that's freedom), but all of it outside the control of those who would burn our digital books.
Perhaps I'm a pessimist, but there are always those who will try to subdue anything that removes control from them (ironic that I'm talking about Google removing control from individuals, but I'm sure you can read between the lines on this and accept my limitations when trying to articulate my stand on this issue). Sorry if this sounds a little too dramatic, but Google is both the primary enabler and the possible downfall of this at the moment, which I think means we all have something at stake when they decide which way to go. It also gives them a huge responsibility. Are they up to it? I hope so. I think this justifies a certain amount of critical examination, don't you?
Thanks for the correction, Phil, although I notice that they do say "in the coming months" and, since the blog post was made in July, there's no indication of when the policy kicks in. They also fail to mention what happens to users who already have the long expiry cookie on their system.
Don't get me wrong, Google is the best engine out there, period. Tinfoil aside, I simply think that people may have misconstrued the motto; "Do no evil" and the unwritten subtext "because we are watching you" extrapolated from their actions seems to be an admonition rather than a corporate statement of ethics.
No, SM, not big, just cookies that don't expire until 2038 and profiling users might be just a little naughty. An anonymising proxy based search plugin may well be the answer for Firefox users. Those without Firefox can still make use of Blackboxsearch - at least until something a little more ethical (than BlackBox or Google) appears.
FWIW, BlackBox is also slightly naughty. It's using Google's search technology without giving anything back. The disparity between getting a few links and giving up your right not to be profiled makes it the lesser of two evils, though.
Dammit, nailed me. It's Saturday, I have a boat that needs a top coat of paint going on (prep's done) and it's raining. I wouldn't be bitching about frivolities like what's on Slashdot if I could actually get some damned work done;-)
OK, getting really tired of seeing these iBleedingPhone articles now [1]. Since the overpriced hunk o' junk came out, it's been iPhone this and iPhone that ad nauseum. It's expensive, locks you into a single provider, proprietary, expensive to maintainclunky and only superficially superior (ooooh, shiny!). In short, all the things that/.ers usually rally against. Am I missing some point, or is Apple just darling du jour?
Odd disparity of interest there, Slashdot. I'm trying to understand, I really am, but I really can't see any moral or technical advantages of owning one of these things.
[1] Yes, I can ignore them. Nobody has a gun to my head. I wonder if AdBlock Plus can filter on "shiny gimmick for tossers with more money than sense" or will I then be branded a "thief" for not reading them? It's akin to The Goog being everyone's darling even though they have more information on folks than the NSA. The world's gone mad, I tell you!
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the fact that it generates assembler output (a.out) rather than the later and now more widely used Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) binaries?
Thank you. I had been wondering how to get DNS to Just Work [TM] over an autoconfigured v6 interface for a while. I had been falling back to using the dhclient-enter-hooks file to stop a rewrite of resolv.conf on v4 lease acceptance and manually applying my nameservers' v6 addresses. This is the problem with any "new" technology that replaces something ubiquitous; the accepted ways of doing things sometimes no longer apply. It doesn't help that OpenBSD's dhclient dropped support for many options that I successfully used with the old ISC client in dhclient.conf. Like you, I will be glad to see the back of DHCP.
/home). It might even be a problem with ipfw2. More testing needed before I start pointing fingers in a PR just in case I've screwed my configuration up in some brain-dead manner.
I'll be trying it on FreeBSD and, according to the Wiki and a few other links the search "FreeBSD mDNS" returned, it looks like it is going to work. This is the final piece of the puzzle for me, apart from a suspected bug that fragments UDP NFS packets [1] when used over v6 - which is nothing to do with the v6 specification at all, just FBSD's implementation of it in either KAME or NFS.
[1] Lots of "kernel: ipfw: pullup failed" messages on the server after a while [2] of working fine. The client hangs dead once this starts (NFS mounted
[2] FSVO "a while".
...will it run Solaris?
Joking aside, this is something I have been toying with for the past few months. I have a couple of polycrystaline panels on the roof of the workshop and a small LV controller/wet battery arrangement. Getting LV PSUs for standard PC hardware is a pain, though. They are available, and the beauty of them is that you don't have to faff about with DC-AC inverters, but they're more than double the price of a high-end AC PSU.
There are also those small PSU modules for the likes of Via's EPIA mini-ITX boards that will supply the other voltages from a single 12V feed. The main problem with these is that they supply the board with 12V directly from the source. With Lead-acid and solar, you can bet that this will vary with load, time of day, weather and other factors. The best solution for off-grid solar is a 24V system with a real 24V DC-DC PSU that will regulate the 12V rails. As soon as I am comfortable remortgaging the house I may get one...
The bitching about the ar5k/OpenHAL is, indeed, insane. I think you'll find a lot of BSD users tend to treat much of Theo's ranting as amusing but irrelevant. See my other post on this here and please accept my apologies for not making the other post clearer.
Actually, you're all bleedin' wrong, as was I last week. Reyk Floeter's code is under the ISC licence, not the BSD and certainly not the GPL. If you need proof, hop over to the "discussion" that happened over the bcw driver nearly six months ago where Reyk nailed his colours to the mast quite firmly.
Don't worry, I made the same mistake myself. As soon as I heard "Atheros" I immediately thought "Sam Leffler" who does dual license his code specifically to allow Linux people to use it. This, however, is not the case with ar5k/OpenHAL. It's Reyk's code and it has only the equivalent of a two clause BSD licence (the ISC licence).
Of course, the fact that some people decided to be knobs (whereas Marcus, who was actually the one who made the mistake of committing GPL code was trying to be conciliatory) in that same discussion meant I probably closed the thing before I had read Reyk's comments, which are near the end of the thread, as I guess a lot of you did.
That episode was wrong, but two wrongs do not make a right. By that I mean Michael posted publicly instead of a quiet e-mail to Marcus first, which sent Theo up into the air in a self-righteous, um, flurry of e-mails (also in public). Now the shoe is on the other foot? I'll leave you to be the judge of that. Hurrah for cooperation in free software.
Not quite. The text of the copyright can be had if you know where to look (this is on Windows XP SP2):
ftp.exe, 04/08/2004 13:00, 41.5kB, command "strings ftp.exe | grep Regents" yields "@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California."
nslookup.exe, 04/08/2004 13:00, 75.0kB, command "strings nslookup.exe | grep Regents" yields "@(#) Copyright (c) 1985,1989 Regents of the University of California."
"Of all the oppositions that artificially divide social science, the most fundamental, and the most ruinous, is the one that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism."
Replace social science with free software and you have my feelings exactly. I have simply found an environment where the subjective and the objective remain in harmony most of the time. So perhaps, as you say, the political conditions are more important than I realised.
Much food for thought. Thank you.
With portables on the up, are we going to get specifications for the Radeon IGP chipsets? These seem to be causing the reverse engineering folks a huge headache and I've seen no mention of the Radeon Xpress 200M RS480 (yes, I have one, so I suppose I had better declare self-interest) or the Xpress 1100 so far. OK, we have 2D with the radeon(4x) driver in Xorg 7.2. 3D would be nice, though.
By the way, on the subject of Solaris, you can grab a media kit for x86 (Express Developer Edition 5/07) here. I think it's free for the DVD. At least, it was when I got one to try.
Warning: Advocacy ahead. May contain personal preferences and things that won't work for you. If you want an alternative where the personalities are less important than the functionality and freedom, you could do worse than look at FreeBSD (especially the mailing lists; compare with the LKML and I think you'll understand where I'm coming from). It has its own set of problems and you may find it not to your liking, but that's what works for me for very much the same reasons as you highlight in your original post. Except "Unix shit," of course, which I tend to disagree with because the Unix philosophy works well and logically in FreeBSD, but that in no way makes your post a troll. It might make it flamebait, but that is more a reflection on the thin-skinned individuals on here not being able to accept an opposing point of view than you being modded -1.
Yes, I think it did first appear in 5.x according to the CVSweb entry for its Makefile. I vaguely unforget an old Proliant running 4.7-R that didn't have /rescue and needed lot of mounting of filesystems and messing about to add the missing " to rc.conf that stopped the whole system going multi-user. Getting it to recognise all the memory on that not-quite-a-BIOS equipped box was fun, too (MAXMEM=xxx and recompiling a kernel on a system that could only "see" 16MB of memory, if you can call that "fun"). Amusing times. Thank goodness for all the little improvements we never see until we do something daft.
That's what /rescue/vi is for, Hawk. All the stuff in there is statically linked and needs nothing but /.
You're right. It's about the open hardware abstraction layer code, which replaces the ath_hal still used in FreeBSD. Hmm, seems I was wrong. Reyk's code isn't dual licensed, which makes for a completely different story. Apologies to Theo.
Please mod parent up. This seems to be the definitive answer to all of this. Sam has the final say and he's saying that what was done is fine. He (and Atsushi Onoe in the case of the onoe rate control algorithm) hold the copyright to the code and specifically released it dual licence to allow this sort of co-operation.
So, yes, Theo had better shut up. He's damaging the BSD relationship with Linux developers, from whom we get a lot of useful code (think ports).
General purpose computers are complicated. It's what makes them so powerful. Hiding this fact is deluding the user, restraining flexibility and limiting the ability to learn, not to mention being diametrically opposite to the Unix philosophy (Linux Is Not UniX, yes, I know).
Matt Fuller (who is not me, I hasten to add) dissects the arguments here. For my own part, whenever I hear of such-and-such being made "easier," I wonder just what is being compromised to get there. Sure, make things easier if you must, but leave my CLI alone. I do not want to spend twenty minutes clicking pretty boxes in GUIs to do what takes me thirty seconds as su root, which is one reason I chose BSD.
Raises another question, though: What's your market?
/. crowd, but to your average non-techie? Sod all. Those companies have flourished on the knowledge of technically savvy people making a conscious choice about things like reliability, quality and accuracy. What they were called mattered not a bit.
Names like Fluke, Megger, HP (OK, not a good example), Tektronix, Marconi Instruments, Bruel and Kjaer (CBA to launch KCharSelect), Ono Sokki, Racal et al might mean something to the
Operating systems are more complicated because they straddle markets. We use things like Ubuntu Feisty, Fedora Core, The GIMP and such because we know the software, not because of the name. "What the hell is the GIMP anyway? BDSM pr0n?" would be a more likely question from a non techie user seeing the package name for the first time.
Who was it said letting the developers of flagship OSS projects name the applications is akin to letting marketing write them? Personally, I wouldn't care if they suddenly started calling FreeBSD "*nix for BaStarDs 7.0" [1] as long as it still adhered to POLA. Others, however, may have a different view, especially if they are thinking of switching from some proprietary UNIX OS in a datacentre, where a lot of decisions are made by beancounter PHBs who have little tech background. I can't see Joe Sixpack using "Professional GNU/Linux 2.6.22 SMP datacentre high load optimised" either.
True, you can't judge a book by its cover, but people still do. It's very hard for the distro people to strike a balance. Ubuntu is aimed at desktop users primarily, so they're trying to make it sound friendly. On that score, they're doing quite well. I'm looking forward to "Ubuntu Killer Koala" after Linus' references to dropbears in an earlier interview...
[1] Could have been tailor made for me, that name, but I really can't see Yahoo! or any of the big hosting providers using it.
Call yourselves BOsFH? I find it hard to believe that anyone has yet to mention LARTs/millifortnight as the standard unit of sysadmin productivity. There's also [notches|dings]/clue-by-four and deletions/phonecall (what was your username again?). I shouldn't have to mention that the blackmails_ongoing/boss metric should be kept strictly between you and your PFY as it's only good for working out the junkets/week figure and the correct work:pub_break ratio to adopt.
Now, I'm not saying that you should use these figures. They're intended as self-improvement figures for internal ops use. A real BOFH would find something else to occupy said boss such as, oh, I don't know, say not drinking his own urine when stuck in the lift (with the broken telephone) over the weekend?
Yes, I have used Scroogle in the past. The thing I liked about BlackBox is that it retains the Google look and feel when providing results. Here is a screenshot of the first page of results for "compiz-fusion". It should simply act like Google's search results, but the issue with the subsequent pages of results remains.
Anyway, thanks for the link. There is a search plugin available for Scroogle Scraper on Mycroft, too.
I can't replicate this. I have NoScript and ABP and I also tried setting network.http.sendRefererHeader (about:config) to 0, thinking that BB has some sort of referrer filtering going on, but it still works. However, I have noticed that the Google search has a little (OK, huge) bug: It displays the first page of results fine, but as soon as you try to advance to the next set of results, BB's server barfs with a 404. Sorry for the misinformation. It always worked for me before, but it looks like at least the Google portion is coming apart at the seams right now.
Good point. They do seem to have a good track record so far, despite the data mining operation. As I said up-thread, they are the best search engine bar none. They also support OSS through their "Summer of Code" events, amongst other things, which makes me feel they deserve at least some slack. However, privacy is a number one concern, especially here in the UK where it's getting close to the point where we have none left.
Please note, I'm not talking about searches on immoral topics here. Most of my search history would show my amateur radio interests, my hardware hacking and my FreeBSD searches. However, just imagine the potential mine of information for governments looking for problems to apply their solutions to. Almost any set of data can be manipulated to prove almost anything and, as we saw with ThePirateBay, anything held can be the subject of a subpoena. "There, you see? Bomb making has x number of hits! This Interweb pipes thing is a danger to our very civilisation!"
I suppose you could say it's not Google that is the problem. It's the thought of what others (governments, primarily) could force Google to become. A little aforethought could avoid this eventuality.
Thanks for a nice, well thought out response. You haven't exactly made me change my mind, but you certainly made me look critically at what I wrote. I accept that perhaps I am being a little hard on Google right now, but only because I can see a potential threat to something wonderful. The Internet has given humanity something we've never had before: Unfettered access to information. Some good, some bad (yep, that's freedom), but all of it outside the control of those who would burn our digital books.
Perhaps I'm a pessimist, but there are always those who will try to subdue anything that removes control from them (ironic that I'm talking about Google removing control from individuals, but I'm sure you can read between the lines on this and accept my limitations when trying to articulate my stand on this issue). Sorry if this sounds a little too dramatic, but Google is both the primary enabler and the possible downfall of this at the moment, which I think means we all have something at stake when they decide which way to go. It also gives them a huge responsibility. Are they up to it? I hope so. I think this justifies a certain amount of critical examination, don't you?
Thanks for the correction, Phil, although I notice that they do say "in the coming months" and, since the blog post was made in July, there's no indication of when the policy kicks in. They also fail to mention what happens to users who already have the long expiry cookie on their system.
Don't get me wrong, Google is the best engine out there, period. Tinfoil aside, I simply think that people may have misconstrued the motto; "Do no evil" and the unwritten subtext "because we are watching you" extrapolated from their actions seems to be an admonition rather than a corporate statement of ethics.
No, SM, not big, just cookies that don't expire until 2038 and profiling users might be just a little naughty. An anonymising proxy based search plugin may well be the answer for Firefox users. Those without Firefox can still make use of Blackboxsearch - at least until something a little more ethical (than BlackBox or Google) appears.
FWIW, BlackBox is also slightly naughty. It's using Google's search technology without giving anything back. The disparity between getting a few links and giving up your right not to be profiled makes it the lesser of two evils, though.
OK, getting really tired of seeing these iBleedingPhone articles now [1]. Since the overpriced hunk o' junk came out, it's been iPhone this and iPhone that ad nauseum. It's expensive, locks you into a single provider, proprietary, expensive to maintain clunky and only superficially superior (ooooh, shiny!). In short, all the things that /.ers usually rally against. Am I missing some point, or is Apple just darling du jour?
Odd disparity of interest there, Slashdot. I'm trying to understand, I really am, but I really can't see any moral or technical advantages of owning one of these things.
[1] Yes, I can ignore them. Nobody has a gun to my head. I wonder if AdBlock Plus can filter on "shiny gimmick for tossers with more money than sense" or will I then be branded a "thief" for not reading them? It's akin to The Goog being everyone's darling even though they have more information on folks than the NSA. The world's gone mad, I tell you!