I'd love to just filter all executables, but my mail clients often send each other zips and.exe's and.scr's *on purpose*. Weirdos.
I'm currently using something like this:
(reformatted due to the posting filter not liking my real recipe)
I've been using the ext3 stuff from
http://www.uow.edu.au/~andrewm/linux/ext3/
for quite some time now. Seems to work quite well, for me. Remember to upgrade the other stuff, e2fsprogs and utl-linux. It's not too hard. Mostly untar,./configure, make install kind of stuff.
The only trouble I've had is with different behaiviour of e2fsck, it now checks if the fs is mounted before an auto-clean, but it's wrong if you crashed... So now I don't run fsck at all at bootup.:)
It has always seemed to me that the best open source software was stuff where
the authors wrote it because they wanted it for themselves, and then they gave
it away because, well, why not?
Freeware is free as in freedom, but there is a cost. But instead of exchanging
money for the software, users pay for free software by contributing fixes and
enhancements back to the maintainers (and thus the users), by writing
how-tos and documentation, and by answering questions and giving advice to
fellow users on message boards and newsgroups. Free software is paid for in
human energy. Why do we give software away for free? We don't. We give it
away for freedom, and are repaid in human energy.
As the userbase of free software grows, we get to an area where only a small
percentage of the users are actively participating in this exchange of software
for ideas and energy. But that's ok... What's one percent of a million users?
Ten thousand people modifying, patching, discussing, improving, advising,
flaming, and promoting the use of your software really doesn't suck, even
if there's nine-hundred and ninety thousand people who just use and (hopefully)
be happy. The active users, in effect, pay for the software with their
activity on behalf of everybody... But in doing so, it doesn't actually cost
them more.
They'll feel better if you let them pay the $30/seat. I've actually done this, a few times. The guys buying the software feel good about it, and the Slackware or redhat guys get some money... Everybody's happy.
Re:The Neverending wave of criticism of slackware.
on
Slackware 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
That would be really cool, especially if the *user* gets to make the choice.
I wouldn't be suprised if there is a way to do that (optional dependencies) as it seems like an obviously good extension. But what does the user do if the package maintainer doesn't use it?
It would be cool if the *user* could permanently mark a dependancy as "optional", and that would survive package updates.
If I could say, at package install or update time, "libfoo-1.08 is every bit as good as libfoo-1.09" and forevermore libfoo-1.08==libfoo-1.09 as far as the package manager is concerned, why that would just rule...
Re:The Neverending wave of criticism of slackware.
on
Slackware 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
>> For example, both Ximian Gnome and the Red Hat Netscape RPM's provide a Netscape Icon, thus producing a conflict and breaking up2date.
>The problem there is mixing packages from two independent, non-cooperating vendors, not packaging per se.
Exactly the point. Two different maintainers. One or the other got the dependencies wrong. And the user is screwed for it. Not all RPM's come from Red-Hat.
The problem is a packaging system that enforces the maintainers idea of dependencies. Yes, the maintainer may have built his RPM on a system with libfoo-1.1, but I have libfoo-1.0.8, because I've found libfoo-1.0.9 to be broken for me. And after I rip open the RPM and hand install the thing, I find it works perfectly fine with libfoo-1.0.8...
You are right, this is not a problem with packaging per se. It's a problem with a package maintainer trying to enforce his idea of how a computer is set up on you.
And this problem is not limited to packaging or software installation. How many times have you gone to a web page with a perfectly modern browser, only to be greeted with a "this site requires a modern browser" message, just because you were not on Win/MacOS? Shockwave.com will break in in the middle of a perfectly playing flash movie to tell me I can't watch flash with my browser!
A package maintainer cannot foresee all things. Yes, it's true, if I install a binary package with different libs, etc, than the maintainer intended, it may not work. But then, maybe it will. The maintainer has no way of knowing if his package will work on my computer, so he says (through the facilities of the package manager) "Do No Try." I say, "Go Ahead, try it... maybe it will work!"
(Blah blah supporting my users blah support nightmare. There are many valid places for a homogenised computer. My desktop is not one of them.)
>YOUR SYSTEM, THOUGH LACKING A PACKAGE MANAGER, STILL HAS DEPENDENCIES!!!
Yes, and Real World Dependencies != package manager dependencies, unfortunately.
Re:The Neverending wave of criticism of slackware.
on
Slackware 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
> > Dependencies should be up to the administrator, not up to the maintainers, because the maintainers will eventually get something wrong.
> Eh? This makes no sense at all.
This makes *perfect* sense. The maintainers *do* get it wrong. For example, both Ximian Gnome and the Red Hat Netscape RPM's provide a Netscape Icon, thus producing a conflict and breaking up2date. Why can't *I* choose which icon I wanna use? Do I look like some kind of windows user who can't figure out for myself what kind of Icon I want?
The underlying problem with Windows (and MacOS) is that it is condecending to the user. "There there, poor, stupid user, don't worry, we'll just install this crap and you don't have to think..." One of the major goodneses of Free software and Linux is that it does not condecend. The user has the right to be responsible for their own computer!
My friends with Red Hat call me saying they updated an RPM and now the config's different and they can't find the config file and the dependancies won't resolve and so on... It's the same calls they made to me years ago about Windows.
USE THE SOURCE, People! This is not a black box... It's good to know and care what's happening on your hard drive.
>Some please tell me what is music advertising? I hear no advertising; I see no advertising...
That would be the Payola. And "Teen Beat" magazine, too...
One of the big changes after the Indy promoter scandal of the '80's is that much of the money now comes from the artists "tour support" package, which is a recoupable expense. What that means is, Independant promoters are still getting money, but the money comes out of the band's royalties. So now it's more like 1% materials, 0% artist pay, 0% publishing fee (if the band wrote the song, it's subject to recoupment) etc...
$19.95 list, about $10-12 to the retailer, so $14US is a common discount price. In the Vinyl days, the "standard" royalty was 10% of suggested retail, less holdbacks (10% for breakage, etc.) record club stock (the artist doesn't get payed for sales through "record clubs") promotional copies, etc. The standard royalty for CD's is 5%. Britney, of course, gets a higher percentage.
The IRS (of all people) has a good quicky overview of the money side here in evil pdf format
> Some big corporation has an arrangement to manage those racks.
In the record industry those guys are called "Rack Jobbers". They would lease rack space in stores, and fill them with product. Of course, a label or distributer could pay the rack jobber to make sure his product got some of the (probably limited) shelf space. Or, more likely, he could pay to make sure someone else's product did *not* get shelf space.
Once apon a time, this was the way a large percentage of records were sold, at least here in the US, especially in rural America. Over time, smaller "mom-and-pop" retail outfits gave way to large chain stores, and the chain stores now run their own racks, and have the power to make a CD available to large segments of the population overnight. Think about Wal-Mart. Wal-mart is perhaps the largest record retailer in the United States. In rural America, your local Wal-Mart might be the ONLY record retailer available. And if they only carry what you see on MTV and VH1 and TNN, well, then that's the only music that exists (as far as the consumer knows!)
> And the recording industry wonders why sites like Napster sprung up?
That's a point that has been totally ignored in the Napster/file sharing debate. Why would a hundred-odd-million people *want* to steal so much intellectual property, as the lables claim? Are we a nation of thieves, seperated from total lawlessness and anarchy only by locks and fences? I don't think so.
I believe that Napster could not have happened were it not for industry abuses of the consumer. Remember when vinyl records were $10US? And than CD's came out, and the price was $20US, with the excuse being that it was so much more expensive to make a CD... But the truth is that digital reduced the cost of every step of album production, manufacturing, and distribution. It costs less to record on digital, mastering is cheaper and easier, pressing is cheaper (vinyl was close to $1US/copy back in the '70s, CD's are far below that today.) CD's cost less to warehouse and ship, and you can fit more per square foot of shop space at retail. Yet CD's still list for $20US, and the labels still pay only half the royalty rate to the artists! (And yes, most recording contracts still only pay for 90% of the records, allowing 10% for damages because, you know, lacquer records are fragile!)
One can argue all day about the right and the wrong of file sharing (and I'm purposely NOT addressing the right and wrong, whether it's theft or not, blah blah blah) but I cannot imagine much more that the Majors could have done to prepare the market for the emergence of technologies such as Napster.
The telling line is this:
"Fitzpatrick also says no such problems with abuse of the service have been noted stateside."
Pundants and other blue-noses like to claim that exposure to things distasteful leads to desensitization and tolerance. I'm beginning to think that they have something there... But the trouble is that NON-exposure leads to over-sensitivity and intolerance. Canadians just need to expose themselves more.
Can we have some specifics? This has a touch of the friend-of-a-friend urban legend to it. I would like to verify that this actually happened before I get all in a twist about it.
H.R. stands for "House of Reprehensible" er, "House of Representatives." The bill got through the House, but never made it through the Senate, and was never signed into law by the President, so it means nothing.
Breaking MS up is not enough, or at least not the correct thing... An independant OS division would still have enough mindshare to kill competitors with vaporware announcements, and could still make use of many if not most of the unfair practices that are listed in the finding of fact.
MS probably needs to be regulated like a utility until such time as the market is able to assert normal control over it. Something like what a "Public Utilities Commision" does with phone and power companies.
It's not uncommon for the Police and prosecutors to heap charges apon a defendant in a high-profile case, only to drop many (even most) of them before trial. Gives them stuff to trade away in the plea-bargan stage.
according to: http://www.calderasystems.com/company/, Caldera Systems, Inc. is a registered trademark of Caldera, Inc. I'm guessing that Caldera, Inc owns Caldera Systems?
Domain names (and system names, for that matter) were invented as a convenience, nothing more.
As time goes on, I think we're seeing that people get to a site through search engines, portals, links on related sites, whatever. The significance of a "good" domain name has waned, and will continue to become less important as time goes on.
From http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/makechange s/mc-decision (the page you go to after you enter the domain name you wish to modify):
NEW! Priority Registrant Name Change Service For $199 per domain name change, we will process your Registrant Transfer and Legal Name Change in two business days after receiving complete and correct information *. Our standard processing time is 3 to 6 weeks.
(so, like, sorry you got screwed, but next time pay $200 extra and we'll do it right...)
Notice that the five day wait was because he bought the extra cost "registration plus"? One thing I have noticed with bureaucracies, whether it's Netsol or UPS or the Gov, is that they tend to do O.K.when they are doing the same old same-old, but the slightest deviation from that path (like buying an "extra", or asking UPS to hold a package at the counter) causes them to self destruct. The robots collecting the paychecks aren't programmed for it.
Although it is quite inexpensive to employ seat-warming automatons, it can't do much for customer satisfaction, and can be used effectivly only where either (a) the customer doesn't care (or doesn't know enough to care) or (b) the customer has no where else to go.
Now that NetSol's customers have some place else to go, will that leave Netsol with only the Dumb and Non-Caring as customers? And will Netsol dumb-down their services even more to meet the desires of their new, streamlined customer base?
Slashdot Mirror
The only trouble I've had is with different behaiviour of e2fsck, it now checks if the fs is mounted before an auto-clean, but it's wrong if you crashed... So now I don't run fsck at all at bootup. :)
I've installed... No servers yet? I've got a Linux box colo'd at an ISP, if there was a dedicated Linux server available... Damn, I wanna play!
Freeware is free as in freedom, but there is a cost. But instead of exchanging money for the software, users pay for free software by contributing fixes and enhancements back to the maintainers (and thus the users), by writing how-tos and documentation, and by answering questions and giving advice to fellow users on message boards and newsgroups. Free software is paid for in human energy. Why do we give software away for free? We don't. We give it away for freedom, and are repaid in human energy.
As the userbase of free software grows, we get to an area where only a small percentage of the users are actively participating in this exchange of software for ideas and energy. But that's ok... What's one percent of a million users? Ten thousand people modifying, patching, discussing, improving, advising, flaming, and promoting the use of your software really doesn't suck, even if there's nine-hundred and ninety thousand people who just use and (hopefully) be happy. The active users, in effect, pay for the software with their activity on behalf of everybody... But in doing so, it doesn't actually cost them more.
I need a static IP for my 128 upstream... I run a nameserver!
They'll feel better if you let them pay the $30/seat. I've actually done this, a few times. The guys buying the software feel good about it, and the Slackware or redhat guys get some money... Everybody's happy.
That would be really cool, especially if the *user* gets to make the choice.
I wouldn't be suprised if there is a way to do that (optional dependencies) as it seems like an obviously good extension. But what does the user do if the package maintainer doesn't use it?
It would be cool if the *user* could permanently mark a dependancy as "optional", and that would survive package updates.
If I could say, at package install or update time, "libfoo-1.08 is every bit as good as libfoo-1.09" and forevermore libfoo-1.08==libfoo-1.09 as far as the package manager is concerned, why that would just rule...
>> For example, both Ximian Gnome and the Red Hat Netscape RPM's provide a Netscape Icon, thus producing a conflict and breaking up2date.
>The problem there is mixing packages from two independent, non-cooperating vendors, not packaging per se.
Exactly the point. Two different maintainers. One or the other got the dependencies wrong. And the user is screwed for it. Not all RPM's come from Red-Hat.
The problem is a packaging system that enforces the maintainers idea of dependencies. Yes, the maintainer may have built his RPM on a system with libfoo-1.1, but I have libfoo-1.0.8, because I've found libfoo-1.0.9 to be broken for me. And after I rip open the RPM and hand install the thing, I find it works perfectly fine with libfoo-1.0.8...
You are right, this is not a problem with packaging per se. It's a problem with a package maintainer trying to enforce his idea of how a computer is set up on you.
And this problem is not limited to packaging or software installation. How many times have you gone to a web page with a perfectly modern browser, only to be greeted with a "this site requires a modern browser" message, just because you were not on Win/MacOS? Shockwave.com will break in in the middle of a perfectly playing flash movie to tell me I can't watch flash with my browser!
A package maintainer cannot foresee all things. Yes, it's true, if I install a binary package with different libs, etc, than the maintainer intended, it may not work. But then, maybe it will. The maintainer has no way of knowing if his package will work on my computer, so he says (through the facilities of the package manager) "Do No Try." I say, "Go Ahead, try it... maybe it will work!"
(Blah blah supporting my users blah support nightmare. There are many valid places for a homogenised computer. My desktop is not one of them.)
>YOUR SYSTEM, THOUGH LACKING A PACKAGE MANAGER, STILL HAS DEPENDENCIES!!!
Yes, and Real World Dependencies != package manager dependencies, unfortunately.
> > Dependencies should be up to the administrator, not up to the maintainers, because the maintainers will eventually get something wrong.
> Eh? This makes no sense at all.
This makes *perfect* sense. The maintainers *do* get it wrong. For example, both Ximian Gnome and the Red Hat Netscape RPM's provide a Netscape Icon, thus producing a conflict and breaking up2date. Why can't *I* choose which icon I wanna use? Do I look like some kind of windows user who can't figure out for myself what kind of Icon I want?
The underlying problem with Windows (and MacOS) is that it is condecending to the user. "There there, poor, stupid user, don't worry, we'll just install this crap and you don't have to think..." One of the major goodneses of Free software and Linux is that it does not condecend. The user has the right to be responsible for their own computer!
My friends with Red Hat call me saying they updated an RPM and now the config's different and they can't find the config file and the dependancies won't resolve and so on... It's the same calls they made to me years ago about Windows.
USE THE SOURCE, People! This is not a black box... It's good to know and care what's happening on your hard drive.
>Some please tell me what is music advertising? I hear no advertising; I see no advertising...
That would be the Payola. And "Teen Beat" magazine, too...
One of the big changes after the Indy promoter scandal of the '80's is that much of the money now comes from the artists "tour support" package, which is a recoupable expense. What that means is, Independant promoters are still getting money, but the money comes out of the band's royalties. So now it's more like 1% materials, 0% artist pay, 0% publishing fee (if the band wrote the song, it's subject to recoupment) etc...
$19.95 list, about $10-12 to the retailer, so $14US is a common discount price. In the Vinyl days, the "standard" royalty was 10% of suggested retail, less holdbacks (10% for breakage, etc.) record club stock (the artist doesn't get payed for sales through "record clubs") promotional copies, etc. The standard royalty for CD's is 5%. Britney, of course, gets a higher percentage. The IRS (of all people) has a good quicky overview of the money side here in evil pdf format
> Some big corporation has an arrangement to manage those racks.
In the record industry those guys are called "Rack Jobbers". They would lease rack space in stores, and fill them with product. Of course, a label or distributer could pay the rack jobber to make sure his product got some of the (probably limited) shelf space. Or, more likely, he could pay to make sure someone else's product did *not* get shelf space.
Once apon a time, this was the way a large percentage of records were sold, at least here in the US, especially in rural America. Over time, smaller "mom-and-pop" retail outfits gave way to large chain stores, and the chain stores now run their own racks, and have the power to make a CD available to large segments of the population overnight. Think about Wal-Mart. Wal-mart is perhaps the largest record retailer in the United States. In rural America, your local Wal-Mart might be the ONLY record retailer available. And if they only carry what you see on MTV and VH1 and TNN, well, then that's the only music that exists (as far as the consumer knows!)
> And the recording industry wonders why sites like Napster sprung up?
That's a point that has been totally ignored in the Napster/file sharing debate. Why would a hundred-odd-million people *want* to steal so much intellectual property, as the lables claim? Are we a nation of thieves, seperated from total lawlessness and anarchy only by locks and fences? I don't think so.
I believe that Napster could not have happened were it not for industry abuses of the consumer. Remember when vinyl records were $10US? And than CD's came out, and the price was $20US, with the excuse being that it was so much more expensive to make a CD... But the truth is that digital reduced the cost of every step of album production, manufacturing, and distribution. It costs less to record on digital, mastering is cheaper and easier, pressing is cheaper (vinyl was close to $1US/copy back in the '70s, CD's are far below that today.) CD's cost less to warehouse and ship, and you can fit more per square foot of shop space at retail. Yet CD's still list for $20US, and the labels still pay only half the royalty rate to the artists! (And yes, most recording contracts still only pay for 90% of the records, allowing 10% for damages because, you know, lacquer records are fragile!)
One can argue all day about the right and the wrong of file sharing (and I'm purposely NOT addressing the right and wrong, whether it's theft or not, blah blah blah) but I cannot imagine much more that the Majors could have done to prepare the market for the emergence of technologies such as Napster.
There's a nifty page about Technicolor's three-strip process at http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicol or6.htm
Voicestream and cingular just traded some bandwidth, Cingular got 10Mhz in NY, St. Louis and Detroit in exchange for 10Mhz in SF and LA.
The telling line is this:
"Fitzpatrick also says no such problems with abuse of the service have been noted stateside."
Pundants and other blue-noses like to claim that exposure to things distasteful leads to desensitization and tolerance. I'm beginning to think that they have something there... But the trouble is that NON-exposure leads to over-sensitivity and intolerance. Canadians just need to expose themselves more.
Can we have some specifics? This has a touch of the friend-of-a-friend urban legend to it. I would like to verify that this actually happened before I get all in a twist about it.
H.R. stands for "House of Reprehensible" er, "House of Representatives." The bill got through the House, but never made it through the Senate, and was never signed into law by the President, so it means nothing.
Breaking MS up is not enough, or at least not the correct thing... An independant OS division would still have enough mindshare to kill competitors with vaporware announcements, and could still make use of many if not most of the unfair practices that are listed in the finding of fact.
MS probably needs to be regulated like a utility until such time as the market is able to assert normal control over it. Something like what a "Public Utilities Commision" does with phone and power companies.
It's not uncommon for the Police and prosecutors to heap charges apon a defendant in a high-profile case, only to drop many (even most) of them before trial. Gives them stuff to trade away in the plea-bargan stage.
Still, though, I recommend encrypting your disks.
according to: http://www.calderasystems.com/company/, Caldera Systems, Inc. is a registered trademark of Caldera, Inc. I'm guessing that Caldera, Inc owns Caldera Systems?
Domain names (and system names, for that matter) were invented as a convenience, nothing more.
As time goes on, I think we're seeing that people get to a site through search engines, portals, links on related sites, whatever. The significance of a "good" domain name has waned, and will continue to become less important as time goes on.
From http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/makechange s/mc-decision (the page you go to after you enter the domain name you wish to modify):
NEW! Priority Registrant Name Change Service For $199 per domain name change, we will process your Registrant Transfer and Legal Name Change in two business days after receiving complete and correct information *. Our standard processing time is 3 to 6 weeks.
(so, like, sorry you got screwed, but next time pay $200 extra and we'll do it right...)
Notice that the five day wait was because he bought the extra cost "registration plus"? One thing I have noticed with bureaucracies, whether it's Netsol or UPS or the Gov, is that they tend to do O.K.when they are doing the same old same-old, but the slightest deviation from that path (like buying an "extra", or asking UPS to hold a package at the counter) causes them to self destruct. The robots collecting the paychecks aren't programmed for it.
Although it is quite inexpensive to employ seat-warming automatons, it can't do much for customer satisfaction, and can be used effectivly only where either (a) the customer doesn't care (or doesn't know enough to care) or (b) the customer has no where else to go.
Now that NetSol's customers have some place else to go, will that leave Netsol with only the Dumb and Non-Caring as customers? And will Netsol dumb-down their services even more to meet the desires of their new, streamlined customer base?