... mirror of the MicroBSD files/iso images, but after some of the antics performed by the MicroBSD "team", I removed it.
I liked some of the goals that MicroBSD had, but there were too many things I was uncomfortable with. There were "Anonymous" comments in various forums, giving praise and support to MicroBSD -- when in fact those comments were written by Outback Dingo. Failure to credit OpenBSD in any way when basically mirroring their source and customizing it (perhaps they've since added credit, but it was not originally so). The fact that the MicroBSD site was originally hosted on a "virtualhost" type server, provided by a volunteer, instead of being independently hosted.. not a big deal, but it still struck me as unprofessional.
In the end, although I liked the premise of MicroBSD, I just didn't feel comfortable with the way it turned out, and ended up removing the mirror.
Microsoft has already invented an extremely convenient keyboard, with every required and useful key on it!
They're a little hard to find these days, but I think more and more people will start buying them for the convenience!
If they don't manage, this will be the first gTLD to go bankrupt.
Good. Most people on the net have gotten used to the 3 letter (or less) TLD scheme, due to using.com/net/org for quite some time. Longer TLDs are counterintuitive. On top of that, because the.name TLD is not popular, it perpetuates the issue. Nobody has to repeat ".com" when explaining where their website is - the.com domain is universally understood and remembered. On the other hand,.name is not. You'll probably end up repeating yourself a couple times if you give out a.name address, and chances are your customer will probably try.com to reach your site, when they can't remember.name...
The majority would also probably prefer to type less when surfing the net, not more. Most people type "ford.com" instead of "fordmotorcompany.com".
Also, the TLD itself limits the usefulness. "name" classifies the site;.com/net/org have been diluted to the point where they are generally accepted as "generic". The three extensions (except for perhaps.org in some situations) do not really differentiate themselves anymore, regardless of their original intention.
A TLD that wants to succeed will market a shorter, more generic TLD at a decent price.
For Gods sake, why would someone choose BSD over linux????
First, let me congratulate you for your enthusiastic use of the ? key. Second, if you'd actually used FreeBSD/OpenBSD in any real capacity, you'd realize that the structure and design of BSD makes it attractive for many people who try it.
First, remember that there is no magic bullet. There are always tradeoffs with anything. Linux has definate strong points (new hardware support usually hits linux first; there are more developers for linux). FreeBSD has fewer developers, and doesn't support the newest hardware as quickly - but the (FreeBSD) network stack is extremely solid, and the system design is very clean.
So, you have to evaluate your goals in these kinds of situations. Are you out to get the newest hardware and features, or are you looking for a clean design and good performance.
There is a reason many sites (like Yahoo, imdb, cr.yp.to) use Open/FreeBSD to run their servers.
If that's not one of your priorities, but you're still curious: I'd still take a look at FreeBSD; the overall design is quite pleasant to work with.
Also, many of the exploits produced are usually done on Linux, at least initially. This could buy you a little extra lead-time when something malicious is released. It's not security by obscurity, but it is a fringe benefit.
As always, if you're truly curious as to which OS would suit you best, you should put a little effort into it, and dosomeresearch yourself. I'm not saying you shouldn't use Linux, and I'm not saying you should use FreeBSD. FreeBSD is not for everyone. Linux is not for everyone. Do the research, decide for yourself, and next time - when you feel the urge to ask "why use *BSD?" -- you'll be able to at least discuss what you do or don't like about either. Otherwise, you end up contributing nothing to the discussion.
Sun are perfectly willing to provide documentation to anyone willing to meet them halfway and sign an NDA, which is fair enough, since they need to protect their opportunity to earn a return on their investment.
If they are so willing, as you say, why has an offer not been made? The fact remains: he has not been offered the documentation for something that is supposedly "open" and availble (whether under an NDA or not).
This is not a flame or a troll, but the OpenBSD people's position is "we want you to respect our terms, but we aren't willing to respect yours".
No, you have that wrong. The OpenBSD position is "What ARE the terms?" -- they haven't been offered anything at all.
I think they have been ignoring his requests because they realize Theo is not going to be happy with an NDA, and is going to call the bluff. On one hand, Sun says it's an open architecture, but on the other hand - they're telling people they need to sign an NDA to get the data. I believe Sun would have offered him the NDA a long time ago if they thought he would sign it -- just like they've done with other (Linux) developers - but they probably realize it's not going to work like that with him. I don't think Theo is as concerned about the actual documentation; I think his driving motivation here is to get Sun to "practice what they preach."
Theo is of the opinion that if you're going to say something is a certain way, it better be. Sun will need to either ignore him indefinately, thus avoiding the whole NDA paradox -- or they will change the policy and truly offer the documention in an open manner, as they claim.
What I find interesting is the comment near the end of the article that basically says Theo thinks they have everyone sign an NDA to avoid public discussions of architecture bugs in the US3. Am I the only one that remembers Sun having customers sign NDA's so they could get their faulty UltraSparc chips replaced with bad cache? I can't find a link to past discussions about this, but...
On second thought, perhaps "package" isn't the best choice of words.. but anyway -
SpamAssassin uses Perl, which adds a couple megs of overhead to the connection. Most spammers slam a server with a billion connections, so Theo's package would be more efficient - it's very small and has low overhead.
I've heard various horror stories about SPEWS though -- mostly about them being indiscriminate when blacklisting whole subnets.. so although I won't be using this tool myself, I'm sure some people will find it useful.
I thought a lot of ATM's used OS/2. I wonder what OS they'll eventually migrate those to -- QNX perhaps?
It's sad to see OS/2 die - I had hopes that BeOS was going to be "everything OS/2 could have been, but wasn't." Too bad it died too:(
It's interesting to just sit back and wonder what the computing world would be like now (and what type of operating system we'd be running today) if IBM would have actually marketed OS/2 effectively.
Liquid Audio's days are numbered [...] The board
voted unanimously in favor of a $57 million
stockholder cash payout. They would rather sell
the company, but if there is no buyer then they
would probably have to liquidate the company.
Interestingly enough, I was reading this month's issue of CPUmag , and they said Liquid Audio had already sold the majority of the patents they hold - to Microsoft. MS is letting them (indefinately?) use the technologies and patents Liquid Audio came up with, but Microsoft owns the patents now. Yes, really. Now that I see today's story, I wonder what company they had in mind to "make a $57 million stockholder payout"..:)
I'm sure there's at least a few patents MS will find useful enough to include in Windows Media Player 9.x. Did anyone else notice that Windows Media Player 9 is not uninstallable? Welcome to step one of forced Digital Rights Management. Step two, coming soon: The "do not enable DRM" checkbox in WMP will accidentally disappear in future versions. Step three: Welcome to Palladium.
Fun times.:)
In short, the potential recipient of a message/call advertises the potential cost of contacting him uninvited. If the sender agrees to pay that cost, it acquires a token that it includes in the message/call and the message/call is accepted. The recipient decides to collect the fee or not[...]
An important question to ask is, who would manage this system? I would presume the telcos would immediately step in and volunteer to handle the fees for you, plus a small "shipping and handling" fee, of course. They're so helpful. After they were helpful for a while, they'd no-doubt raise their prices for being helpful. That $1 fee you charge telemarketers to call you may shrink to $0.10 after they take their cut.. who knows?
Phone companies sell your name and number to telemarketers; then they sell you devices to block those same people, profiting from both sides of the loop. Aren't they likely to play both sides with anything else they're offered? Just my thoughts..
I don't understand why companies don't include such things on new PCs as an option. Just include the.EXE file for Folding@Home (or one of the lesser projects:), a link on the desktop and an explanation of what the user can do with his/her idle CPU time. The number crunching power of millions upon millions of PCs wouldn't go to waste.
It's a good idea, but which ones do you choose? SETI? Folding@Home? Mersenne? There are tons of distributed computing projects - who do you include, and who do you leave out?
I would imagine that AOL, Earthlink, and others have paid a set amount to put their icons on the desktop of new PCs. Giving away "desktop real-estate" on their new PC's might reduce the price they can command from other customers.:)
[sales] And here we have our 300 series machine [cust ] Neat! (opens IE) [cust ] It seems a little slow opening up a browser; I thought you said it was fast? [sales] It is! It just appears slow because we're maxing out the processor. [cust ] Why would you do that on a display machine that's supposed to be showing off the machine's strengths? [sales] We make $0.03/hour crunching numbers in the background. [cust ] (on cellphone) Honey.. sell the Gateway stock. They're obviously in trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
Wear sunscreen.
... mirror of the MicroBSD files/iso images, but after some of the antics performed by the MicroBSD "team", I removed it.
I liked some of the goals that MicroBSD had, but there were too many things I was uncomfortable with. There were "Anonymous" comments in various forums, giving praise and support to MicroBSD -- when in fact those comments were written by Outback Dingo. Failure to credit OpenBSD in any way when basically mirroring their source and customizing it (perhaps they've since added credit, but it was not originally so). The fact that the MicroBSD site was originally hosted on a "virtualhost" type server, provided by a volunteer, instead of being independently hosted.. not a big deal, but it still struck me as unprofessional.
In the end, although I liked the premise of MicroBSD, I just didn't feel comfortable with the way it turned out, and ended up removing the mirror.
Microsoft has already invented an extremely convenient keyboard, with every required and useful key on it! They're a little hard to find these days, but I think more and more people will start buying them for the convenience!
The majority would also probably prefer to type less when surfing the net, not more. Most people type "ford.com" instead of "fordmotorcompany.com".
Also, the TLD itself limits the usefulness. "name" classifies the site;
A TLD that wants to succeed will market a shorter, more generic TLD at a decent price.
First, remember that there is no magic bullet. There are always tradeoffs with anything. Linux has definate strong points (new hardware support usually hits linux first; there are more developers for linux). FreeBSD has fewer developers, and doesn't support the newest hardware as quickly - but the (FreeBSD) network stack is extremely solid, and the system design is very clean.
So, you have to evaluate your goals in these kinds of situations. Are you out to get the newest hardware and features, or are you looking for a clean design and good performance.
There is a reason many sites (like Yahoo, imdb, cr.yp.to) use Open/FreeBSD to run their servers.
If that's not one of your priorities, but you're still curious: I'd still take a look at FreeBSD; the overall design is quite pleasant to work with.
Also, many of the exploits produced are usually done on Linux, at least initially. This could buy you a little extra lead-time when something malicious is released. It's not security by obscurity, but it is a fringe benefit.
As always, if you're truly curious as to which OS would suit you best, you should put a little effort into it, and do some research yourself. I'm not saying you shouldn't use Linux, and I'm not saying you should use FreeBSD. FreeBSD is not for everyone. Linux is not for everyone. Do the research, decide for yourself, and next time - when you feel the urge to ask "why use *BSD?" -- you'll be able to at least discuss what you do or don't like about either. Otherwise, you end up contributing nothing to the discussion.
No, you have that wrong. The OpenBSD position is "What ARE the terms?" -- they haven't been offered anything at all.
I think they have been ignoring his requests because they realize Theo is not going to be happy with an NDA, and is going to call the bluff. On one hand, Sun says it's an open architecture, but on the other hand - they're telling people they need to sign an NDA to get the data. I believe Sun would have offered him the NDA a long time ago if they thought he would sign it -- just like they've done with other (Linux) developers - but they probably realize it's not going to work like that with him. I don't think Theo is as concerned about the actual documentation; I think his driving motivation here is to get Sun to "practice what they preach."
Theo is of the opinion that if you're going to say something is a certain way, it better be. Sun will need to either ignore him indefinately, thus avoiding the whole NDA paradox -- or they will change the policy and truly offer the documention in an open manner, as they claim.
What I find interesting is the comment near the end of the article that basically says Theo thinks they have everyone sign an NDA to avoid public discussions of architecture bugs in the US3. Am I the only one that remembers Sun having customers sign NDA's so they could get their faulty UltraSparc chips replaced with bad cache? I can't find a link to past discussions about this, but...
On second thought, perhaps "package" isn't the best choice of words.. but anyway -
SpamAssassin uses Perl, which adds a couple megs of overhead to the connection. Most spammers slam a server with a billion connections, so Theo's package would be more efficient - it's very small and has low overhead.
I've heard various horror stories about SPEWS though -- mostly about them being indiscriminate when blacklisting whole subnets.. so although I won't be using this tool myself, I'm sure some people will find it useful.
I thought a lot of ATM's used OS/2. I wonder what OS they'll eventually migrate those to -- QNX perhaps?
:(
It's interesting to just sit back and wonder what the computing world would be like now (and what type of operating system we'd be running today) if IBM would have actually marketed OS/2 effectively.
It's sad to see OS/2 die - I had hopes that BeOS was going to be "everything OS/2 could have been, but wasn't." Too bad it died too
[sales] And here we have our 300 series machine
[cust ] Neat! (opens IE)
[cust ] It seems a little slow opening up a browser; I thought you said it was fast?
[sales] It is! It just appears slow because we're maxing out the processor.
[cust ] Why would you do that on a display machine that's supposed to be showing off the machine's strengths?
[sales] We make $0.03/hour crunching numbers in the background.
[cust ] (on cellphone) Honey.. sell the Gateway stock. They're obviously in trouble.