It uses Python as the language, has a powerful template language and comes packaged with a web server, ftp server and database. You can develop on it remotely via a web browser, and has an excellent security model that is fully tweakable.
You can also use external web servers and databases if you need to (for scalability). You can load a module to get perl scripting capability, as well, if you need it.
Python is more effective for building large applications than perl - and I use both languages, depending on what I am doing.
Most projects are going web enabled now (who loads executables other than plugins anymore?) - and Zope makes it easy.
The article "Linux's Hitmen" is utter garbage. How you keep such an obvious hack on your payroll is beyond me.
What Mr. Lyons fails to mention in his article is the other side of the coin: Microsoft and other heavy hitters using their unlimited legal resources to enforce their own lisenses.
The GPL is clear on the issue of use and the requirement to make the source code available. If a company goes into a project and expects to sidestep the lisense - I see no difference between that and someone not following Microsoft's lisensing.
Why is there a double standard? Why should GPL software developers be any less worthy of respect than a company? Why should companies get the benefit of GPL'd software without meeting their obligations - that they agreed upon by using the code?
Hypocricy is still hypocricy, anyway you cut it.
I would urge everyone here to reply to this article to drive our point home.
I did RTFA - and it didn't specify how it was supposed to work, other than 'parallax' - which could mean two pictures side by side on the monitor, or some other scheme (turns out to be some other scheme - sort of)
However, I just followed one of comments that had a link to a company that patented a process for doing the parallax thing via a special LCD monitor. By his own admission, the area of the parallax effect is small (you would have to keep your head in one place infront of the monitor - kind of like the old LCD monitors) - and the developers got headaches after using it for more than a few hours.
Who would find this really useful - enough to spend thousands of dollars for it? How much of a market will there be for games made specifically for it?
I turn that automatic shutoff crap off - because invariably I will be scanning a large document, or I will get up to get my favorite programming fluid, and the damn system will turn off.
Only I know when I am ready to turn the monitor off. The crude intelligence (timer) behind these systems doesn't fit the bill for me.
The oldest application I am running is actually a little 'fortune cookie' program I wrote in college and compiled in Turbo Pascal for Windows/DOS. This runs on my laptop for my amusement - and I share it with others I find deserving.
I have thought about rewriting it in C++ or Python, but haven't gotten around to doing it.
I yanked the memory out of my old Packard Bell Pentium 100, and stuffed it into my Gateway P120 - for a whopping 73 megabytes of ram. The hard drive that was also in the Packard Bell is still running in the Gateway as well (1.4 Gig drive). That system is running Redhat 8 - and serves files from another 20 Gb drive partition as well as running Seti@home 24/7.
I may actually resurrect the Packard Bell case and motherboard as a firewall - we shall see (I have a tentative offer of a free AMD 400 mhz motherboard, with CPU and 128 meg of ram that I will jam into another case I have - at which point the P120 will take over as the firewall, at which point the Packard Bell may be left to die - or I might just turn it into a test box for testing assembly language applications - thinking of doing some OS and filesystem hacking - and/or as a controller for some other hardware I have lying around). While I would love to have really fast machines for all kinds of activities, money limits what I can do - and so I make do with lesser machines as needed.
The really old stuff I have had is long on the scrap heap -a PC XT, a 286, a 486, a TI 99a, and an Atari 800XL are all gone along with their peripheral devices (20 Mb hard drive, cassette recorder, EISA 6 Mb Memory module, various 5 1/4" floppy drives etc...)
The neatest old machine I ever had was a Toshiba laptop XT clone, that had 1mb of ram, and had DOS in a ROM chip - so it would boot up to DOS without having to insert a floppy disk. The disk drive was a, then new, 3 1/2" DD floppy drive - there was no hard drive. It also had the first back-lit supertwist LCD monitor and was very easy on the eyes - 4 shade monochrome CGA. You could also set up a semi-non-volatile ramdisk - which would stay active as long as you had battery power to the machine - regardless of if it was off or on - a nice touch so you could keep handy tools, like Norton Commander at your fingertips. I traded the thing in for my 286.
I had two machines from that era: A TI 99a, and an Atari 800XL. I loved both of those machines - and cut my teeth on basic and assembler instructions on them. The next machine I programmed to such a level was assembler on the Sparc (although I did dabble in assembler on the IBM XT - I never delved into it as much, or found it as interesting on the PC). In school I learned Basic and Fortran on an Apple and an NEC respectively.
Now I do most of my work in Perl and Python (Zope). It is truely amazing how far we have come from a virtual standpoint. With all the different types of hardware and operating systems out there, you don't have the time to program 15 different versions of the same application - you use open libraries, like openGL instead of writing directly to video memory locations. Program memory management is not as big of an issue with 512 Mbytes of ram and OSs that page swap vast amounts of memory to disk. Alot of the work now is geared toward creating web based applications that make loading software on client machines a thing of the past.
While there is a certain nostalgia for the past, I must say that I keep myself in the game in the present by hacking on my Slackware Linux box. The Slackware distribution comes closest, in my mind, to the ideal of a machine that you can really learn, inside and out. There are no frills and GUIs for your configurations - you manage it with your trusty editor by hand - kind of reminiscent of all the gyrations you had to go through to download a program from a cassette player back in the day.
While I may never write another line of assembly again - I have the benefit of knowing what goes on underneath the abstraction of a high level language that alot of you young whipper-snappers will never fathom. I would urge anyone new to computer science and programming in general, to take the time to play with some of the excellent simulators out there - to get an understanding of what is happening beneath your C++, VB, Perl, Python, etc. program.
...but for a desktop OS that in 99.9999% of cases does not run for more a day (let alone a month)...
- ummm - my Linux box has an uptime of 45 days atm. Its not good to turn your machine off and on (heating and cooling, and reheating your motherboard and peripherals).
The only part of the machine I turn off is the monitor - to preserve the backlight (I have an LCD) - which also helps preserve regular CRTs, as well (there was a report in the 80s from IBM that proved that the life of a monitor could be doubled by turning off the power - this basically had to do with the electron gun burning out - but would also apply for LCD backlighting).
I still own all of the hard drives I have had since 1985 - the only ones I have retired were too small (20 megabyte). The only 'drive' failure I ever had was the result of an IDE controller failure on an AMD motherboard (all of my other machines are Intel - though I intend on buying an AMD for my next machine). Disk drives are incredibly efficient - and if you don't have a failure in the first 100 hours, you probably won't have one until it finally gives up the ghost many years down the road.
Interestingly, after I put both of my telephone numbers on the 'Do Not Call' list, I started getting telemarketers calling my secondary line, that up until that time had only received the random modem whalesong. Additionally, the calls increased on the mainline (have always had cold calls on that line anyway).
I never use the secondary line for anything - nor do I reference it when applying for credit or whatnot.
Could it be the Federal Government duped us all into giving up our numbers to the telemarketing cosortium?
While I am not ready to put on my tinfoil hat just yet, I can't help but wonder...
Have you looked at Open Office? There are also other tools like Gnumeric and KOffice that can do the job - and they are all free.
Why does pricey software always equate to quality to niave users? The quality is on par if not better than commercial offerings - and is free! How can you walk away from something like that?
It seems to me as if the government is using the internet as a way to undermine all of the judicial precedence (not to mention the Constitution and the Bill of Rights) that have been hard fought for over the past two centuries.
I can't understand how anyone who has sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States can in any way perceive freedom of the press and the protection of sources to not apply in the case of the internet. All of the young soldiers who died for our freedom are spinning in their graves with every nail this administration puts into the coffin of the Constitution and the Internet.
This is a dark day for freedom - in a year of dark days.
I feel like Alice, having dropped down the rabbit hole; everything I understood to be right and wrong is turned on its head - and no one seems to give a damn.
To me the most important issue is response time. I replaced the standard EXT3 with ReiserFS and have seen a marked improvement when accessing files on disk. I have alot of small files on my workstation - so reiser really works for me.
Now, if I had a few large database files, then I might think of changing to something else - but I don't have that situation on my workstation, and probably never will. To echo what Spy Hunter said, I am willing to trade some CPU cycles for more efficient data retrieval - my cpu is 90% idle most times anyway (when I am not playing video games) so I have cycles to spare.
On my server, on the other hand, I am running Zope, initially using Berkely DB for the database. It is currently running redhat with EXT3 - and this will be the box where I will really need to think about performance in terms of large files as my application grows. I am also running Seti@home on this box, so CPU cycles are at a premium here.
On another note, the report itself was difficult to understand because there was no key that explained the colors or the fields. While it may be 'human readable', it is not 'human decipherable'.
For email, I have set up Mozilla Thunderbird on my wife's Windows XP box - and she loves it.
It has a very smart spam stopping feature, its easy for her to use (non technical person), and it doesn't have all of the virus problems associated with Outlook.
She used to complain about Outlook all of the time on her old system. Since I put Thunderbird on there, I haven't heard a peep out of her; that is testimony enough in my book...
Why not change the default shell entry in the/etc/passwd file?
Instead of/bin/bash, use/bin/csh or whatever...
If you need another shell, for whatever reason after that, you can either invoke it to run a script, such as bash script.sh, or invoke the shell over your existing, such as bash, or exec another shell to replace the default, like exec bash.
Hmmm -- if I were in 6th grade again, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't care what OS they are going to load on it. I would just wipe the disk and load linux and Open Office and be done with it.
Back when I was in 6th grade, in 1976, I think we might have had portable manual typewriters as the bleeding edge technology. I didn't see a computer, outside of video games, until 1980.
Back then life was simple - you just had to remember stuff and use your brain - and you actually went to the library if you wanted to find out about something - or for entertainment in the form of Fiction. The librarian would be there as a guide to help you with difficult searches - and the card catalog would suffice in most cases. As a result, there was this built-in filter (as a result of having limited access at a measured pace) that allowed you to focus on what was important.
Now there is terabytes of crap we have to sort through to get to the kernel of truth on the net. The counterpart of the knowledgeable librarian are few and far between, and information has to be taken with more than a grain of salt.
While I applaud providing computing resources to children - I think it is more important to now start looking at ways of taking those resources to the next level beyond simple hierarchies of filesystems - to a real collector and recorder of critical knowledge for everyone, tailored to their specific neural wiring. I think that will be the next great leap in computing - and now that we have machines capable of making it a reality, we will see it happen.
Information is not static - lets build applications that take that idea to its fruition.
The critical time to kill a patent is during the discovery process. This means being involved and on the PSTO mailing list (if they have one) that publicizes new patent applications is a must.
Then, if you identify prior art, you can send the pertinent information to the patent office before they make a decision.
Once a patent is granted, only the courts can then nullify it.
Additionally, I also understand that the patent office is a revenue generator for the Federal government - so there is little incentive not to grant a patent or spend a great deal of time searching for prior art. I get the feeling that alot of these large companies are not only using patents as a business tool, but also a tool to influence the Federal government vie the thousands of dollars they pay for patent applications each year.
However, if I apply the pipe function at the command prompt like this:
C:\Una\Lesbian Porn>DIR | more
. . . then the display will show me one screen of files at a time, with a "More" at the bottom.
That is a pretty weak explanation of what is actually happening. First, the pipe symbol is not a 'function', it is really a form of output redirection. The standard out from the 'dir' command is redirected to the standard input of the 'more' command. 'more' is the function, whereas the pipe is just that - a pipeline between the two applications.
This is the true power of a well thought out command line shell - the ability to take various small applications and cobble them together to create new functionality, to filter and manipulate data.
In the *nix world there is also the 'tee' command which takes the output of the pipe and 'T's it off to two different applications; for example, you could redirect the raw output stream of a command to a file before it gets filtered.
This is why GUIs are evil - they don't allow you to be creative, unless you can dedicate a bunch of time and energy into learning the GUI APIs to build the same application that you can create in a matter of seconds on the command line using output redirection and the plethora of existing utilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent points.
I was not aware there were any alternatives to XF86. Can someone name them? I would be interested in looking into it.
LoL!
Karma has a way of coming back around and stinging you in the ass, doesn't it?
Here is another option: Zope
It uses Python as the language, has a powerful template language and comes packaged with a web server, ftp server and database. You can develop on it remotely via a web browser, and has an excellent security model that is fully tweakable.
You can also use external web servers and databases if you need to (for scalability). You can load a module to get perl scripting capability, as well, if you need it.
Python is more effective for building large applications than perl - and I use both languages, depending on what I am doing.
Most projects are going web enabled now (who loads executables other than plugins anymore?) - and Zope makes it easy.
Did I mention that Zope is open source?
This is what I wrote in the submit comment area:
The article "Linux's Hitmen" is utter garbage. How you keep such an obvious hack on your payroll is beyond me.
What Mr. Lyons fails to mention in his article is the other side of the coin: Microsoft and other heavy hitters using their unlimited legal resources to enforce their own lisenses.
The GPL is clear on the issue of use and the requirement to make the source code available. If a company goes into a project and expects to sidestep the lisense - I see no difference between that and someone not following Microsoft's lisensing.
Why is there a double standard? Why should GPL software developers be any less worthy of respect than a company? Why should companies get the benefit of GPL'd software without meeting their obligations - that they agreed upon by using the code?
Hypocricy is still hypocricy, anyway you cut it.
I would urge everyone here to reply to this article to drive our point home.
I did RTFA - and it didn't specify how it was supposed to work, other than 'parallax' - which could mean two pictures side by side on the monitor, or some other scheme (turns out to be some other scheme - sort of)
However, I just followed one of comments that had a link to a company that patented a process for doing the parallax thing via a special LCD monitor. By his own admission, the area of the parallax effect is small (you would have to keep your head in one place infront of the monitor - kind of like the old LCD monitors) - and the developers got headaches after using it for more than a few hours.
Who would find this really useful - enough to spend thousands of dollars for it? How much of a market will there be for games made specifically for it?
Probably not many and not much.
I turn that automatic shutoff crap off - because invariably I will be scanning a large document, or I will get up to get my favorite programming fluid, and the damn system will turn off.
Only I know when I am ready to turn the monitor off. The crude intelligence (timer) behind these systems doesn't fit the bill for me.
The oldest application I am running is actually a little 'fortune cookie' program I wrote in college and compiled in Turbo Pascal for Windows/DOS. This runs on my laptop for my amusement - and I share it with others I find deserving.
I have thought about rewriting it in C++ or Python, but haven't gotten around to doing it.
I yanked the memory out of my old Packard Bell Pentium 100, and stuffed it into my Gateway P120 - for a whopping 73 megabytes of ram. The hard drive that was also in the Packard Bell is still running in the Gateway as well (1.4 Gig drive). That system is running Redhat 8 - and serves files from another 20 Gb drive partition as well as running Seti@home 24/7.
I may actually resurrect the Packard Bell case and motherboard as a firewall - we shall see (I have a tentative offer of a free AMD 400 mhz motherboard, with CPU and 128 meg of ram that I will jam into another case I have - at which point the P120 will take over as the firewall, at which point the Packard Bell may be left to die - or I might just turn it into a test box for testing assembly language applications - thinking of doing some OS and filesystem hacking - and/or as a controller for some other hardware I have lying around). While I would love to have really fast machines for all kinds of activities, money limits what I can do - and so I make do with lesser machines as needed.
The really old stuff I have had is long on the scrap heap -a PC XT, a 286, a 486, a TI 99a, and an Atari 800XL are all gone along with their peripheral devices (20 Mb hard drive, cassette recorder, EISA 6 Mb Memory module, various 5 1/4" floppy drives etc...)
The neatest old machine I ever had was a Toshiba laptop XT clone, that had 1mb of ram, and had DOS in a ROM chip - so it would boot up to DOS without having to insert a floppy disk. The disk drive was a, then new, 3 1/2" DD floppy drive - there was no hard drive. It also had the first back-lit supertwist LCD monitor and was very easy on the eyes - 4 shade monochrome CGA. You could also set up a semi-non-volatile ramdisk - which would stay active as long as you had battery power to the machine - regardless of if it was off or on - a nice touch so you could keep handy tools, like Norton Commander at your fingertips. I traded the thing in for my 286.
I had two machines from that era:
A TI 99a, and an Atari 800XL. I loved both of those machines - and cut my teeth on basic and assembler instructions on them. The next machine I programmed to such a level was assembler on the Sparc (although I did dabble in assembler on the IBM XT - I never delved into it as much, or found it as interesting on the PC). In school I learned Basic and Fortran on an Apple and an NEC respectively.
Now I do most of my work in Perl and Python (Zope). It is truely amazing how far we have come from a virtual standpoint. With all the different types of hardware and operating systems out there, you don't have the time to program 15 different versions of the same application - you use open libraries, like openGL instead of writing directly to video memory locations. Program memory management is not as big of an issue with 512 Mbytes of ram and OSs that page swap vast amounts of memory to disk. Alot of the work now is geared toward creating web based applications that make loading software on client machines a thing of the past.
While there is a certain nostalgia for the past, I must say that I keep myself in the game in the present by hacking on my Slackware Linux box. The Slackware distribution comes closest, in my mind, to the ideal of a machine that you can really learn, inside and out. There are no frills and GUIs for your configurations - you manage it with your trusty editor by hand - kind of reminiscent of all the gyrations you had to go through to download a program from a cassette player back in the day.
While I may never write another line of assembly again - I have the benefit of knowing what goes on underneath the abstraction of a high level language that alot of you young whipper-snappers will never fathom. I would urge anyone new to computer science and programming in general, to take the time to play with some of the excellent simulators out there - to get an understanding of what is happening beneath your C++, VB, Perl, Python, etc. program.
eye popping 3d
Yeah,right...If it is a two dimensional surface - how is that any different than my current video games that map 3d objects to a 2d pixilated surface?
I will believe it when I see it.
...but for a desktop OS that in 99.9999% of cases does not run for more a day (let alone a month)...
- ummm - my Linux box has an uptime of 45 days atm. Its not good to turn your machine off and on (heating and cooling, and reheating your motherboard and peripherals).
The only part of the machine I turn off is the monitor - to preserve the backlight (I have an LCD) - which also helps preserve regular CRTs, as well (there was a report in the 80s from IBM that proved that the life of a monitor could be doubled by turning off the power - this basically had to do with the electron gun burning out - but would also apply for LCD backlighting).
I still own all of the hard drives I have had since 1985 - the only ones I have retired were too small (20 megabyte). The only 'drive' failure I ever had was the result of an IDE controller failure on an AMD motherboard (all of my other machines are Intel - though I intend on buying an AMD for my next machine). Disk drives are incredibly efficient - and if you don't have a failure in the first 100 hours, you probably won't have one until it finally gives up the ghost many years down the road.
Interestingly, after I put both of my telephone numbers on the 'Do Not Call' list, I started getting telemarketers calling my secondary line, that up until that time had only received the random modem whalesong. Additionally, the calls increased on the mainline (have always had cold calls on that line anyway).
I never use the secondary line for anything - nor do I reference it when applying for credit or whatnot.
Could it be the Federal Government duped us all into giving up our numbers to the telemarketing cosortium?
While I am not ready to put on my tinfoil hat just yet, I can't help but wonder...
Could it be that M$ put some pressure on them, either directly or indirectly, through their government/business contacts?
Any time Balmer screams 'uncle' it makes me want to turn the screws tighter - not let off...
Have you looked at Open Office? There are also other tools like Gnumeric and KOffice that can do the job - and they are all free.
Why does pricey software always equate to quality to niave users? The quality is on par if not better than commercial offerings - and is free! How can you walk away from something like that?
This must be a BSD-ism - similar to shadow password database under system V?
Even under the shadow system, the entries for users are also in the passwd file - for backwards compatability with certain applications.
This is not so under BSD?
(I learn something new every frikin' day - and I'm sick of it...So stop it!)
Then the aliens wait while the work gets done...
:(
Your post was mostly indecipherable - and I have difficulty understanding the logic of the above sentence...
?
It seems to me as if the government is using the internet as a way to undermine all of the judicial precedence (not to mention the Constitution and the Bill of Rights) that have been hard fought for over the past two centuries.
I can't understand how anyone who has sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States can in any way perceive freedom of the press and the protection of sources to not apply in the case of the internet. All of the young soldiers who died for our freedom are spinning in their graves with every nail this administration puts into the coffin of the Constitution and the Internet.
This is a dark day for freedom - in a year of dark days.
I feel like Alice, having dropped down the rabbit hole; everything I understood to be right and wrong is turned on its head - and no one seems to give a damn.
To me the most important issue is response time. I replaced the standard EXT3 with ReiserFS and have seen a marked improvement when accessing files on disk. I have alot of small files on my workstation - so reiser really works for me.
Now, if I had a few large database files, then I might think of changing to something else - but I don't have that situation on my workstation, and probably never will. To echo what Spy Hunter said, I am willing to trade some CPU cycles for more efficient data retrieval - my cpu is 90% idle most times anyway (when I am not playing video games) so I have cycles to spare.
On my server, on the other hand, I am running Zope, initially using Berkely DB for the database. It is currently running redhat with EXT3 - and this will be the box where I will really need to think about performance in terms of large files as my application grows. I am also running Seti@home on this box, so CPU cycles are at a premium here.
On another note, the report itself was difficult to understand because there was no key that explained the colors or the fields. While it may be 'human readable', it is not 'human decipherable'.
P.S. The Thunderbird client will also work under Linux - so you can have the same interface regardless of which kernel you boot up.
For email, I have set up Mozilla Thunderbird on my wife's Windows XP box - and she loves it.
It has a very smart spam stopping feature, its easy for her to use (non technical person), and it doesn't have all of the virus problems associated with Outlook.
She used to complain about Outlook all of the time on her old system. Since I put Thunderbird on there, I haven't heard a peep out of her; that is testimony enough in my book...
Why not change the default shell entry in the /etc/passwd file?
/bin/bash, use /bin/csh or whatever...
Instead of
If you need another shell, for whatever reason after that, you can either invoke it to run a script, such as bash script.sh, or invoke the shell over your existing, such as bash, or exec another shell to replace the default, like exec bash.
In *nix there is more than one way to skin a cat.
Hmmm -- if I were in 6th grade again, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't care what OS they are going to load on it. I would just wipe the disk and load linux and Open Office and be done with it.
Back when I was in 6th grade, in 1976, I think we might have had portable manual typewriters as the bleeding edge technology. I didn't see a computer, outside of video games, until 1980.
Back then life was simple - you just had to remember stuff and use your brain - and you actually went to the library if you wanted to find out about something - or for entertainment in the form of Fiction. The librarian would be there as a guide to help you with difficult searches - and the card catalog would suffice in most cases. As a result, there was this built-in filter (as a result of having limited access at a measured pace) that allowed you to focus on what was important.
Now there is terabytes of crap we have to sort through to get to the kernel of truth on the net. The counterpart of the knowledgeable librarian are few and far between, and information has to be taken with more than a grain of salt.
While I applaud providing computing resources to children - I think it is more important to now start looking at ways of taking those resources to the next level beyond simple hierarchies of filesystems - to a real collector and recorder of critical knowledge for everyone, tailored to their specific neural wiring. I think that will be the next great leap in computing - and now that we have machines capable of making it a reality, we will see it happen.
Information is not static - lets build applications that take that idea to its fruition.
The critical time to kill a patent is during the discovery process. This means being involved and on the PSTO mailing list (if they have one) that publicizes new patent applications is a must.
Then, if you identify prior art, you can send the pertinent information to the patent office before they make a decision.
Once a patent is granted, only the courts can then nullify it.
Additionally, I also understand that the patent office is a revenue generator for the Federal government - so there is little incentive not to grant a patent or spend a great deal of time searching for prior art. I get the feeling that alot of these large companies are not only using patents as a business tool, but also a tool to influence the Federal government vie the thousands of dollars they pay for patent applications each year.
Ouch!
I seem to have pushed someone's 'hot' button...
You should really see a mental health professional about that misplaced anger.
However, if I apply the pipe function at the command prompt like this:
C:\Una\Lesbian Porn>DIR | more
. . . then the display will show me one screen of files at a time, with a "More" at the bottom.
That is a pretty weak explanation of what is actually happening. First, the pipe symbol is not a 'function', it is really a form of output redirection. The standard out from the 'dir' command is redirected to the standard input of the 'more' command. 'more' is the function, whereas the pipe is just that - a pipeline between the two applications.
This is the true power of a well thought out command line shell - the ability to take various small applications and cobble them together to create new functionality, to filter and manipulate data.
In the *nix world there is also the 'tee' command which takes the output of the pipe and 'T's it off to two different applications; for example, you could redirect the raw output stream of a command to a file before it gets filtered.
This is why GUIs are evil - they don't allow you to be creative, unless you can dedicate a bunch of time and energy into learning the GUI APIs to build the same application that you can create in a matter of seconds on the command line using output redirection and the plethora of existing utilities.