Pardon the complete noob-iness here, but, you said this license was on distributed binaries. So, would it not be restrictive if you just sent the source out in your distro...and compiled it on the box?
Sure, but one of the (main) things that Mandrake uses to advertise itself as a Quality Product(TM) is a nice, easy, fast install. While I don't use it, I must give them credit, their installer is top-notch.
If all of a sudden, XFree86 had to be compiled at the end of the Mandrake installation process, depending on the speed of the machine, it would increase the install time by *hours*. Totally unacceptable.
I really think the XFree86 guys are shooting themselves in the foot here, if not in the head.
If Mandrake has already decided they're not going to use it because of license issues, well... take a look at a couple other major distributions and how seriously they take legal issues: Debian has it's own legal mailing list, and are viewed by many as being far more restrictive or perhaps anal about licensing issues than others; Redhat... do they include mp3 support yet? I don't think so.
I think most distributions will stick with 4.3 for now, until an alternative is available and ready for use (i.e. freedesktop.org or whatever). When that happens, the majority of XFree86's userbase will drop them like a hot potato.
You can see a working gentoo today at:
gentoo.poorfolks.org or www.poorfolks.org...click on gentoo to go to Enterprise Edition.
Um, I *have* a working gentoo, today. Or do you mean a working gentoo using NPTL? If that's the case, then yeah, your apache test page appears to be working very well.
...talked up the new GUI configuration interface as if it was the best thing ever since sliced bread.
Am I the only one who finds these things clunky? Both the QT and GTK ones. Maybe I just haven't given them a fair shake, but make menuconfig seems WAY more useable.
Red Hat's had NPTL since RH9 - so a bit more than LFS and perhaps Gentooers.
Hmm, I dunno about Gentoo, actually. It is available, but most developers will advise against using it I think. I just did a little search for NPTL on bugs.gentoo.org, it looks like there are still a few outstanding issues. Some appear to be show-stopping. If someone has successfully got it working though, I'd be interested to hear it.
Heh. Funny how if Google screws up a little (which, honestly, they are working out bugs) they don't get trashed.
Microsoft does it -- well, damn. Watch hell break loose.
Look around. It seems fairly obvious that Google is in fact NOT behind this, just a google employee.
What's more, it doesn't seem like that much of a screw-up to me. The site is still in beta, they took it down[1] for a few days to fix things... what's the screw-up?
And to further add to the irony of your post, google IS getting trashed for it.
[1] The site's still up, I'm guessing you can't join or login right now. I wasn't 'invited', so I don't know.
It also wouldn't take very long for the virus writers to create viruses that vary the file size on every reproduction.
Although I can't think of any better examples, here is an excerpt from Cert's Nimda advisory:
The email message delivering the Nimda worm appears to also have the following characteristics:
The text in the subject line of the mail message appears to be variable.
There appear to be many slight variations in the attached binary file, causing the MD5 checksum to be different when one compares different attachments from different email messages. However, the file length of the attachment appears to consistently be 57344 bytes.
The attachment doesn't change size, but it does change MD5sums, which is really the only way that ISPs could filter these things without false positives. It seems to me that filtering based on message/attachment size would almost certainly result in false positives.
Besides, I'll bet that ISPs could be held liable for filtering customers' email in the first place.
I'm not sure why there are so many posts bashing the law that prohibits nudity in public. There are many, many people that you absolutely do NOT want to see naked. You'd be crying for the law to be reinstated within minutes.
Where I live, it is legal for women to go topless in the summer (and winter, I presume). The argument was that if men should be able to do it on really hot days, then women should as well. There were even topless protests at the time they were trying to get the law approved or whatever.
What's funny is, since then (years ago, at least 5), I have yet to see a topless woman walking down the street on a hot summer day, nor have I heard of anyone else seeing that.
Think there are going to be lots of retail consumer Linux apps showing up on the shelves of Compusa?
This is precisely my point. There certainly *won't* be if someone doesn't make an effort to distributed OEM'd PCs and laptops (which are even more of a problem in my view). Like I said, it's a chicken/egg problem, or the other poster who said it's a catch 22. Adobe *might* make a version of Photoshop for Linux, the chances of that happening increase if people start buying these Java desktops, or the Lindows/Mandrake PCs, or whatever Novell/Ximian may or may not come out with. So yeah, for more widespread acceptance, we need to have those commercial apps that people are used to in Windows, and also to have supported OEM PCs that can be bought at Compusa/Walmart/Futureshop/Wherever.
If Sun is trying to pull off the latter, then good for them I say. 1/2 is better than 0/2. Sure, Walmart salespeople don't knoq squat about Linux, but how much do they know about Windows? Probably a bit more, but not much. Walmart sells those Micron PCs on the web anyways, there is no salesperson interaction. I would hope that Walmart would train their people to do some elementary tasks with a Linux desktop if they were to sell them in the store (haha, it is to laugh).
...but when it comes to Windows most things do "just work". So your perception about Windows is a bit warped.
My perception of Windows comes from helping friends and family. Which is why the grandparent post really struck a note. Sure, things do "just work", but often enough, they "just work" because someone had to call me over to get it to "just work" for them.
The idea of Wal Mart selling PCs with an OS to compete with Windows appeals to me. But it can, conceivably, open up a whole host of other problems.
So... what then?
It's a chicken/egg problem isn't it?
Those applications are never going to show up on the shelves without companies putting the OS there first. Sure it's a risk, but it's got to be done. I give Sun credit for this, it's a ballsy move, and it benefits the rest of us.
Suddenly, things don't work like they're supposed to, and auntie and uncle get upset and call in their nephew to fix things.
This isn't all that different from the way things are now with Windows though, is it?
It can be embedded within other GTK+ applications (Galeon, Epiphany...)
Galeon and Epiphany just use mozilla's rendering engine, the fact that they are both GTK+ apps is irrelevant. One could write a web browser in QT (didn't konqueror do this at one point?) using mozilla's rendering engine, if one so desired...
No, it's Gtk. Not that you can see much of it - XUL provides most of the visible stuff - but the underlying system for displaying windows and stuff is Gtk.
Yep. But considering it doesn't follow user-defined GTK+ themes, and so look "integrated" with the rest of a user's GTK+ apps or Gnome desktop, I don't consider it GTK+.
Before you answer porn consider how much money this array cost and how much money it would cost to actually *pay* for the xxx dvd's.
Eh? Who said anything about porn? Maybe this guy wants to mirror linux/BSD isos or other software, docs, other websites, etc. You can never have too many mirrors, after all. Or maybe it's just a fun project. It would be nice if not everyone jumped to the conclusion that this guy is setting this all up for some grand warez site or what have you. At least I hope so, anyway.
Let's get this one out of the way
on
MicroBSD Is No More
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Except for those Linux systems which don't use sysvinit, I guess you mean. I think Gentoo, for instance, uses something other than sysvinit. There's no real reason other distributions couldn't as well. sysvinit isn't part of the linux kernel, it is just a piece of software; you can put anything you want in/sbin/init.
That's right. For instance Slackware uses BSD-style init. If that is what all the excitement is about, who knows?
So Sun is calling this venture "Beonix" [beonix.com]?
Did you even bother to look at that link? How about the other stories? It seems fairly obvious that Beonix is a small tech company, not a "venture" so dubbed by Sun.
This isn't really a question for the interviewee, but, it seems to me that those of us who have been using Linux/BSD/whatever for long enough will likely have no problem getting around this stuff. Those who will be affected (and this would ultimately affect us all, if growth were to drop off), are new users who are just getting to the point where they can install Redhat, Mandrake, or one of the other desktop oriented distros without too much trouble. It seems likely that if TCPA or Palladium enabled BIOSes become widespread, there will be a hack to get around it. It might not be a hack, it might just be something as simple as disabling some setting in the BIOS - regardless, it will be another frustrating roadblock for a new Linux user to overcome. I fear to see the day when multitudes of people appear on usenet or IRC asking for help getting around their BIOS to install linux. (or the many more who will say "oh forget it" and go back to windows)
Out of curiosity, what benefit do we as customers (both windows and linux users) receive from buying a system with a TCPA-enabled BIOS? What benefit does AMI receive for selling them? Considering the fact that I can't think of even *one* good reason why any PC user can benefit from this, it sounds suspicious to say the least.
To see how rapidly GNU's alternative to the Linux kernel is moving along, look at the Initial [gnu.org] GNU HURD announcent in 1991 and the last [gnu.org] announcement. Note the following phrase in the last announcement:"Popular PC devices are generally supported." What a fantastic 12 years it has been for GNU!
Hehe..."prep.ai.mit.edu is 18.159.42, for the nameserver-impaired"
But what about the ipv4 impaired? BTW, prep.ai.mit.edu resolves to something not even remotely similar to that "address".
Hi, I would just like to say that I think [blankety-blank-blank] they are doing. I am using their amazing [blank blank], and nobody will ever be able to [blank] my posts!
I sincerely hope that [blankblankblank, and blank] for [blanky blank blanks] and [blank^2] is forced to [#define _BLANK_ 1]. So there!
Ps My bet is on that spiky fish eventhough that little red bastard with the fork might be nasty. I mean, how hard can it be to beat a geek from redmond or a penguin? Hmm, could be a whole army of penguins of course, well that might get tricky.
ITYM: spiky [blow]fish vs cute cartoon devil with fork vs [army of] penguin[s] vs a butterfly vs an apple:)
Slashdot Mirror
Look again, it really *is* a music search, Britney Spears aside.
I am appalled that no one has mentioned how these LASERs would somehow be "frickin'".
Not to mention, this is obviously a precursor to Dr^H^HPres. Ev^H^HBush's MOON BASE.
*curls pinky to lip*
Did I miss anything?
Sure, but one of the (main) things that Mandrake uses to advertise itself as a Quality Product(TM) is a nice, easy, fast install. While I don't use it, I must give them credit, their installer is top-notch.
If all of a sudden, XFree86 had to be compiled at the end of the Mandrake installation process, depending on the speed of the machine, it would increase the install time by *hours*. Totally unacceptable.I really think the XFree86 guys are shooting themselves in the foot here, if not in the head.
If Mandrake has already decided they're not going to use it because of license issues, well... take a look at a couple other major distributions and how seriously they take legal issues: Debian has it's own legal mailing list, and are viewed by many as being far more restrictive or perhaps anal about licensing issues than others; Redhat... do they include mp3 support yet? I don't think so.I think most distributions will stick with 4.3 for now, until an alternative is available and ready for use (i.e. freedesktop.org or whatever). When that happens, the majority of XFree86's userbase will drop them like a hot potato.
Um, I *have* a working gentoo, today. Or do you mean a working gentoo using NPTL? If that's the case, then yeah, your apache test page appears to be working very well.
Am I the only one who finds these things clunky? Both the QT and GTK ones. Maybe I just haven't given them a fair shake, but make menuconfig seems WAY more useable.
Hmm, I dunno about Gentoo, actually. It is available, but most developers will advise against using it I think. I just did a little search for NPTL on bugs.gentoo.org, it looks like there are still a few outstanding issues. Some appear to be show-stopping. If someone has successfully got it working though, I'd be interested to hear it.
Anybody out there who can type at 128 kbps?
Yes, but not without a good deal of ...buffering... going on.
Everytime a Real story shows up on slashdot, I'm tempted to post this. Looks like I couldn't resist!Heh. Funny how if Google screws up a little (which, honestly, they are working out bugs) they don't get trashed.
Microsoft does it -- well, damn. Watch hell break loose.Look around. It seems fairly obvious that Google is in fact NOT behind this, just a google employee.
What's more, it doesn't seem like that much of a screw-up to me. The site is still in beta, they took it down[1] for a few days to fix things... what's the screw-up? And to further add to the irony of your post, google IS getting trashed for it.
[1] The site's still up, I'm guessing you can't join or login right now. I wasn't 'invited', so I don't know.Although I can't think of any better examples, here is an excerpt from Cert's Nimda advisory:
The attachment doesn't change size, but it does change MD5sums, which is really the only way that ISPs could filter these things without false positives. It seems to me that filtering based on message/attachment size would almost certainly result in false positives.Besides, I'll bet that ISPs could be held liable for filtering customers' email in the first place.
Where I live, it is legal for women to go topless in the summer (and winter, I presume). The argument was that if men should be able to do it on really hot days, then women should as well. There were even topless protests at the time they were trying to get the law approved or whatever.
What's funny is, since then (years ago, at least 5), I have yet to see a topless woman walking down the street on a hot summer day, nor have I heard of anyone else seeing that.
This is in southern Ontario, BTW.
This is precisely my point. There certainly *won't* be if someone doesn't make an effort to distributed OEM'd PCs and laptops (which are even more of a problem in my view). Like I said, it's a chicken/egg problem, or the other poster who said it's a catch 22. Adobe *might* make a version of Photoshop for Linux, the chances of that happening increase if people start buying these Java desktops, or the Lindows/Mandrake PCs, or whatever Novell/Ximian may or may not come out with. So yeah, for more widespread acceptance, we need to have those commercial apps that people are used to in Windows, and also to have supported OEM PCs that can be bought at Compusa/Walmart/Futureshop/Wherever.
If Sun is trying to pull off the latter, then good for them I say. 1/2 is better than 0/2. Sure, Walmart salespeople don't knoq squat about Linux, but how much do they know about Windows? Probably a bit more, but not much. Walmart sells those Micron PCs on the web anyways, there is no salesperson interaction. I would hope that Walmart would train their people to do some elementary tasks with a Linux desktop if they were to sell them in the store (haha, it is to laugh).
My perception of Windows comes from helping friends and family. Which is why the grandparent post really struck a note. Sure, things do "just work", but often enough, they "just work" because someone had to call me over to get it to "just work" for them.
The idea of Wal Mart selling PCs with an OS to compete with Windows appeals to me. But it can, conceivably, open up a whole host of other problems.
So... what then?It's a chicken/egg problem isn't it?
Those applications are never going to show up on the shelves without companies putting the OS there first. Sure it's a risk, but it's got to be done. I give Sun credit for this, it's a ballsy move, and it benefits the rest of us.
Suddenly, things don't work like they're supposed to, and auntie and uncle get upset and call in their nephew to fix things.
This isn't all that different from the way things are now with Windows though, is it?
That's just silly
Took the words right out of my mouth...
David Ehi is a good read too.
See other thread.
It can be embedded within other GTK+ applications (Galeon, Epiphany...)Galeon and Epiphany just use mozilla's rendering engine, the fact that they are both GTK+ apps is irrelevant. One could write a web browser in QT (didn't konqueror do this at one point?) using mozilla's rendering engine, if one so desired...
Yep. But considering it doesn't follow user-defined GTK+ themes, and so look "integrated" with the rest of a user's GTK+ apps or Gnome desktop, I don't consider it GTK+.
Actually, it's XUL.
Before you answer porn consider how much money this array cost and how much money it would cost to actually *pay* for the xxx dvd's.
Eh? Who said anything about porn? Maybe this guy wants to mirror linux/BSD isos or other software, docs, other websites, etc. You can never have too many mirrors, after all. Or maybe it's just a fun project. It would be nice if not everyone jumped to the conclusion that this guy is setting this all up for some grand warez site or what have you. At least I hope so, anyway.
[Mm]i[^([^c])r[1,1]oBSD is dying^Wdead!
Bringing you meaningless regex's for 22 years.
Except for those Linux systems which don't use sysvinit, I guess you mean. I think Gentoo, for instance, uses something other than sysvinit. There's no real reason other distributions couldn't as well. sysvinit isn't part of the linux kernel, it is just a piece of software; you can put anything you want in /sbin/init.
That's right. For instance Slackware uses BSD-style init. If that is what all the excitement is about, who knows?
Did you even bother to look at that link? How about the other stories? It seems fairly obvious that Beonix is a small tech company, not a "venture" so dubbed by Sun.
This isn't really a question for the interviewee, but, it seems to me that those of us who have been using Linux/BSD/whatever for long enough will likely have no problem getting around this stuff. Those who will be affected (and this would ultimately affect us all, if growth were to drop off), are new users who are just getting to the point where they can install Redhat, Mandrake, or one of the other desktop oriented distros without too much trouble. It seems likely that if TCPA or Palladium enabled BIOSes become widespread, there will be a hack to get around it. It might not be a hack, it might just be something as simple as disabling some setting in the BIOS - regardless, it will be another frustrating roadblock for a new Linux user to overcome. I fear to see the day when multitudes of people appear on usenet or IRC asking for help getting around their BIOS to install linux. (or the many more who will say "oh forget it" and go back to windows)
Out of curiosity, what benefit do we as customers (both windows and linux users) receive from buying a system with a TCPA-enabled BIOS? What benefit does AMI receive for selling them? Considering the fact that I can't think of even *one* good reason why any PC user can benefit from this, it sounds suspicious to say the least.
To see how rapidly GNU's alternative to the Linux kernel is moving along, look at the Initial [gnu.org] GNU HURD announcent in 1991 and the last [gnu.org] announcement. Note the following phrase in the last announcement:"Popular PC devices are generally supported." What a fantastic 12 years it has been for GNU!
Hehe..."prep.ai.mit.edu is 18.159.42, for the nameserver-impaired"
But what about the ipv4 impaired? BTW, prep.ai.mit.edu resolves to something not even remotely similar to that "address".
Hi, I would just like to say that I think [blankety-blank-blank] they are doing. I am using their amazing [blank blank], and nobody will ever be able to [blank] my posts!
I sincerely hope that [blankblankblank, and blank] for [blanky blank blanks] and [blank^2] is forced to [#define _BLANK_ 1]. So there!
Ps My bet is on that spiky fish eventhough that little red bastard with the fork might be nasty. I mean, how hard can it be to beat a geek from redmond or a penguin? Hmm, could be a whole army of penguins of course, well that might get tricky.
:)
ITYM: spiky [blow]fish vs cute cartoon devil with fork vs [army of] penguin[s] vs a butterfly vs an apple