NetBSD has a substancial cross-platform 'packages' library of source code and a robust build system. Most packages, when they appear ready for one architecture, are ready and buildable on any other architecture. If you're not going to be running MacOS stuff in that 'Macintosh' API layer(s), you're FAR BETTER OFF running NetBSD/macPPC than you are running Darwin alone on your Apple hardware. Furthermore, if you run multiple architectures, with NetBSD you'll be able to admin the same exact/etc structure on your i386, sparc, sparc64, macPPC, prep, m68k, etc. boxes.
I threw Darwin on my beige G3 machine last week, from the ISO downloadable from the OpenDarwin project. It installed fine and booted properly (I had specifically told it what drive to install itself on and it instead installed on a different drive, wiping out my MacOS 9 partition, but I don't hold a grudge about that)
I looked at the Unix command prompt, said 'gee whiz, it works, but there's no packages to run' and took it off. I noted while reading the howtos at opendarwin.org that the binary packages they have built require you to use the MacOS X installer to put them on your system.
I do not own a copy of MacOS X. It was a no-starter proposition for me. Nor am I about to buy OS X for a Beige G3 just to install 'free' software packages on it.
Is it possible you only deal well with your own personal parodies of your opponents? Does it frighten you to think that there are people who think differently than you who are not nutcases?
One of the easiest ways of isolating yourself and marginalizing your impact on other people is to live in a dream world where your opponents are you own spun-up fantasies.
Both the extreme left and the extreme right engage in this particular adventure.
Actually, the right to free association entitles people to use site-blocking software. If I choose not to associate with a particular sort of people, I am allowed to block them from my private associations. I am entitled to choose who and what I am exposed to in the privacy of my own domain.
However, 'freedom of association' tends to get soft-pedaled these days by a lot of political idealogues, because in-your-face sexual radicals and other sorts view it as a threat, and interpret people's personal tastes as phobias.
And while you're at it, make Linux and OS X versions
You really think they can succeed by getting mired in not one, but TWO additional GUI development environments? You think they should fragment their developer and support staff that way??
I once got a paper cut from my printed level maps in Wolfenstein 3D.
Aaah, the old days. A VGA display and a '286 with 4 megs of RAM....
Re:What he/she really meant is...
on
OpenBSD 3.4 Released
·
· Score: 1, Informative
There are easy ways of 'signing' the ISO and keeping the 'signature', i.e. an MD5 sum, on a secured website and/or just widely distributing it.
OpenBSD is selling a product, it's that simple, and it's acceptable for them to do so. However, the way that they do so detracts and even diminishes the security a little (widely distributing a way to 'validate' a downloaded version would enhance security)
It is in our interest to have the government flawed when it comes to secrecy.
Really? It is? It's acceptable, and even a good thing, when the identities of people about to testify before a grand jury about organized crime activies are revealed?
I only lock the doors of my car once a week, when I go into the 'big city' to the place where they hold a weekly auction where I buy stuff to sell on eBay. Other than that, it's parked out in the driveway in our house in the country. I don't leave a key in the ignition, but my neighbors on both sides of me are good guys and almost nobody else ever happens by to make any trouble.
A point to remember with regard to security is that the MIT Hackers, including Richard Stallman, adamantly refused to put passwords on their UNIX accounts back when MIT's computing staff first became 'security concious.' They considered it reprehensible to lock their fellow hackers out of the system that way.
I just pulled up an xterm out of curiousity and ran an nmap against my little ol' Macintosh. (I keep it in the living room and use it for 'fun' to play Diablo II and browse the web and stuff. It's running MacOS 9.2.1 without any particular frills or features enabled. It's just an old beige G3 box I paid almost nothing for.)
Zero ports of any kind opened.
An nmap of my Windows 2000 box reveals that it still has port 1025 open. I am certainly NOT running NFS or IIS on it. WTF?
Anyhow, all the boxes on MY subnet are two layers removed from the Internet because my DSL provider supplied a DSL 'modem' that has a NAT server that's hardwire 'crippled' in firmware to only share out one DHCP port, so I stuck one of those $50 Linksys hardware NAT/Router boxes inline with it that talks to everything in here.
I certainly am not running any services at all available to the public Internet. Hell, the DSL 'modem' uses PPOE and I am never sure what my 'real' IP address is in the first place.
I'll co-locate if I ever want a box on the net that I own. It's been almost a decade now since I owned any 'real estate' in cyberspace; my WWIV 3.21 sysop days are probably over forever. It was cool back then having a second phone line and a 1200 baud modem on it. I put stickers up all around town with the phone number and got a REAL assortment of callers to my BBS. But I'm drifting off topic...
Maybe Bill Gates is thinking of moving in on the hardware firewall/router market.
TeX is an example of a software project that has a completely frozen specification. It's one hell of a fine program, but there hasn't been a feature or a change to the functioning of it for longer than a decade. It's what could be called a 'convergent' code project: one where all it will do in the future is get ever so slightly better (if any more bugs in the code are ever found) at doing exactly what it does today.
Maybe more software projects should be like that. But few are. I certainly wouldn't want Windows, or Linux, or many other software projects out there in the wild, to have complete 'feature freezes' at this point in time. They're far too complex and general-purpose for that to be a productive project goal.
Slackware 3.6 didn't assign a root password 'by default' and assigning a root password wasn't part of the installation script, either. It wasn't until 4.0 that they added that.
I have first hand experience 'breaking into' a friend's Linux box because of that design oversight by the Slackware folks. A friend of mine ran her Linux box as a dialup system on the Internet for several weeks before I took it upon myself to read a just-arrived mail header from her and telnet into that IP address. She'd already given me a password-protected user account on the system. On a lark I typed 'root' instead. Default behavior on her Slackware 3.6 system was to put me at the # prompt without even prompting me for a password.
She got kinda paranoid after I pointed out what I'd done.
I'm sure Microsoft wouldn't mind at all if a robust 'appliance type' firware product ran an embedded BSD variant, or some hand-rolled alternative. It seems like an excellent idea, and also seems like a perfect 'niche' application for that sort of operating system.
I don't think Microsoft has their ego wrapped around their existing code base to anything close to the degree that a lot of anti-Microsoft people assume.
Interesting use of the word 'noble' you made there.
I'm not at ALL a VMS expert, but my impression of VMS is that it's rock solid, a very stable design, and unchanging. Like a machine tool that's good at performing specific tasks, but not very flexible or useful for new tasks as they come up. Probably, as you say, a hell of a good front-end for something bigger.
To swing back to the term 'noble', VMS is like a noble gas. Relatively inert.
It seems their public statements can be at odds with reality; certainly it was the case in the context that particular "firewall" policy.
Umm.. look again at what the parent commenter said.
The Microsoft Office team is cited as adding 'operating system' functionality to Office. That implies that there is indeed a chinese wall, and that since there was 'operating system' level functionality missing that they needed, they rolled their own.
That's not significantly different from a novice programmer (I have been guilty of this in the past) writing up his own routines to perform certain functions, when it would be more efficient use of time to use library functions that already exist.
The fact that the Office development team 'rolled their own' functionality actually validates the notion that there's a Chinese Wall in place.
However, your version is more useful for bashing Microsoft, so maybe I'm out of place here in making my comments.
Knuth considers his TeX project to be convergent. That's why with each 'new version' he just tacks on another digit to the version number, which is the value 'e' if I'm not mistaken. The specification for what TeX is designed to accomplish was written, and the code is steadily improved to meet that specification.
It's a refreshing way to look at a software project.
I had great hopes that the Linux kernal was going to be a convergent OS project, or at least much more convergent that it's turned out to be. Instead, it's bought into the whole 'creeping featurism' thing, as everything imaginable is added to the kernal. Everybody wants to be the 'inventor' of something, though, so it's not surprising that people are more inclined to want something new in the kernal source tree with their name on it.
The fact that Clinton had to lie about his sexual practices just shows what a petty person he really is. He would have a lot more credibility with a lot of us if he'd said 'Yes! She gave me blow jobs. Hillary and I have an open marriage.'
But, spineless opportunist that he is, he couldn't do that. I am sure there are a lot of free love advocates and people who are into exploratory/alternative sexuality who wish he hadn't been such a coward. He could have blown the lid off a whole mess of sexual prudery with a few well-chosen comments.
But really, he's just a petty opportunist. The Polling Data said that people wouldn't like him getting blow jobs in the White House from a woman young enough to be his daughter, so he lied.
People with doctorates tend to be people who don't want to leave the warm security blanket of academia until they've used up all possible means of staying on campus. People who graduate with a two, four, or six year degree, then go out and find a job, are less prone to exist in a fantasy world of ideology.
That's a generalization, of course, but this whole slashdot topic is supposed to be a rant fest, isn't it??
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that isn't the case at all.
/etc structure on your i386, sparc, sparc64, macPPC, prep, m68k, etc. boxes.
NetBSD has a substancial cross-platform 'packages' library of source code and a robust build system. Most packages, when they appear ready for one architecture, are ready and buildable on any other architecture. If you're not going to be running MacOS stuff in that 'Macintosh' API layer(s), you're FAR BETTER OFF running NetBSD/macPPC than you are running Darwin alone on your Apple hardware. Furthermore, if you run multiple architectures, with NetBSD you'll be able to admin the same exact
I threw Darwin on my beige G3 machine last week, from the ISO downloadable from the OpenDarwin project. It installed fine and booted properly (I had specifically told it what drive to install itself on and it instead installed on a different drive, wiping out my MacOS 9 partition, but I don't hold a grudge about that)
I looked at the Unix command prompt, said 'gee whiz, it works, but there's no packages to run' and took it off. I noted while reading the howtos at opendarwin.org that the binary packages they have built require you to use the MacOS X installer to put them on your system.
I do not own a copy of MacOS X. It was a no-starter proposition for me. Nor am I about to buy OS X for a Beige G3 just to install 'free' software packages on it.
whacked-out hallucinatory right-propaganda
What's with all the colorful name calling?
Is it possible you only deal well with your own personal parodies of your opponents? Does it frighten you to think that there are people who think differently than you who are not nutcases?
One of the easiest ways of isolating yourself and marginalizing your impact on other people is to live in a dream world where your opponents are you own spun-up fantasies.
Both the extreme left and the extreme right engage in this particular adventure.
Actually, the right to free association entitles people to use site-blocking software. If I choose not to associate with a particular sort of people, I am allowed to block them from my private associations. I am entitled to choose who and what I am exposed to in the privacy of my own domain.
However, 'freedom of association' tends to get soft-pedaled these days by a lot of political idealogues, because in-your-face sexual radicals and other sorts view it as a threat, and interpret people's personal tastes as phobias.
And you seem to consider 'fisting' and 'animal' porn to be 'making love.' You're so weird.
When governmental agencies use the Symantec product (i.e. public libraries) it's entirely plausible a first amendment challange can be mounted.
Why would Windows advocates care about anything Linus Torvalds says?
That would be a little like George W Bush caring about something the president of Guatamala says.
Probably it's not an important enough question that anybody cares to ask??
And while you're at it, make Linux and OS X versions
You really think they can succeed by getting mired in not one, but TWO additional GUI development environments? You think they should fragment their developer and support staff that way??
it's an apples to oranges thing
Which is a difficult comparison to make on modern hardware, as Apple ran Orange Computer out of business with legal harassment.
I once got a paper cut from my printed level maps in Wolfenstein 3D.
Aaah, the old days. A VGA display and a '286 with 4 megs of RAM....
There are easy ways of 'signing' the ISO and keeping the 'signature', i.e. an MD5 sum, on a secured website and/or just widely distributing it.
OpenBSD is selling a product, it's that simple, and it's acceptable for them to do so. However, the way that they do so detracts and even diminishes the security a little (widely distributing a way to 'validate' a downloaded version would enhance security)
Or they could just put it on Freenet.
*rim shot*
It is in our interest to have the government flawed when it comes to secrecy.
Really? It is? It's acceptable, and even a good thing, when the identities of people about to testify before a grand jury about organized crime activies are revealed?
I guess it is if you're a mobster...
Funny how Microsoft says the same thing about Windows XP isos....
'I am a dj. I am what I play.'
(a somewhat non-complmentary reference from David Bowie's 'Lodger' album.)
I only lock the doors of my car once a week, when I go into the 'big city' to the place where they hold a weekly auction where I buy stuff to sell on eBay. Other than that, it's parked out in the driveway in our house in the country. I don't leave a key in the ignition, but my neighbors on both sides of me are good guys and almost nobody else ever happens by to make any trouble.
A point to remember with regard to security is that the MIT Hackers, including Richard Stallman, adamantly refused to put passwords on their UNIX accounts back when MIT's computing staff first became 'security concious.' They considered it reprehensible to lock their fellow hackers out of the system that way.
I just pulled up an xterm out of curiousity and ran an nmap against my little ol' Macintosh. (I keep it in the living room and use it for 'fun' to play Diablo II and browse the web and stuff. It's running MacOS 9.2.1 without any particular frills or features enabled. It's just an old beige G3 box I paid almost nothing for.)
Zero ports of any kind opened.
An nmap of my Windows 2000 box reveals that it still has port 1025 open. I am certainly NOT running NFS or IIS on it. WTF?
Anyhow, all the boxes on MY subnet are two layers removed from the Internet because my DSL provider supplied a DSL 'modem' that has a NAT server that's hardwire 'crippled' in firmware to only share out one DHCP port, so I stuck one of those $50 Linksys hardware NAT/Router boxes inline with it that talks to everything in here.
I certainly am not running any services at all available to the public Internet. Hell, the DSL 'modem' uses PPOE and I am never sure what my 'real' IP address is in the first place.
I'll co-locate if I ever want a box on the net that I own. It's been almost a decade now since I owned any 'real estate' in cyberspace; my WWIV 3.21 sysop days are probably over forever. It was cool back then having a second phone line and a 1200 baud modem on it. I put stickers up all around town with the phone number and got a REAL assortment of callers to my BBS. But I'm drifting off topic...
Maybe Bill Gates is thinking of moving in on the hardware firewall/router market.
TeX is an example of a software project that has a completely frozen specification. It's one hell of a fine program, but there hasn't been a feature or a change to the functioning of it for longer than a decade. It's what could be called a 'convergent' code project: one where all it will do in the future is get ever so slightly better (if any more bugs in the code are ever found) at doing exactly what it does today.
Maybe more software projects should be like that. But few are. I certainly wouldn't want Windows, or Linux, or many other software projects out there in the wild, to have complete 'feature freezes' at this point in time. They're far too complex and general-purpose for that to be a productive project goal.
Slackware 3.6 didn't assign a root password 'by default' and assigning a root password wasn't part of the installation script, either. It wasn't until 4.0 that they added that.
I have first hand experience 'breaking into' a friend's Linux box because of that design oversight by the Slackware folks. A friend of mine ran her Linux box as a dialup system on the Internet for several weeks before I took it upon myself to read a just-arrived mail header from her and telnet into that IP address. She'd already given me a password-protected user account on the system. On a lark I typed 'root' instead. Default behavior on her Slackware 3.6 system was to put me at the # prompt without even prompting me for a password.
She got kinda paranoid after I pointed out what I'd done.
I'm sure Microsoft wouldn't mind at all if a robust 'appliance type' firware product ran an embedded BSD variant, or some hand-rolled alternative. It seems like an excellent idea, and also seems like a perfect 'niche' application for that sort of operating system.
I don't think Microsoft has their ego wrapped around their existing code base to anything close to the degree that a lot of anti-Microsoft people assume.
Interesting use of the word 'noble' you made there.
I'm not at ALL a VMS expert, but my impression of VMS is that it's rock solid, a very stable design, and unchanging. Like a machine tool that's good at performing specific tasks, but not very flexible or useful for new tasks as they come up. Probably, as you say, a hell of a good front-end for something bigger.
To swing back to the term 'noble', VMS is like a noble gas. Relatively inert.
It seems their public statements can be at odds with reality; certainly it was the case in the context that particular "firewall" policy.
Umm.. look again at what the parent commenter said.
The Microsoft Office team is cited as adding 'operating system' functionality to Office. That implies that there is indeed a chinese wall, and that since there was 'operating system' level functionality missing that they needed, they rolled their own.
That's not significantly different from a novice programmer (I have been guilty of this in the past) writing up his own routines to perform certain functions, when it would be more efficient use of time to use library functions that already exist.
The fact that the Office development team 'rolled their own' functionality actually validates the notion that there's a Chinese Wall in place.
However, your version is more useful for bashing Microsoft, so maybe I'm out of place here in making my comments.
Knuth considers his TeX project to be convergent. That's why with each 'new version' he just tacks on another digit to the version number, which is the value 'e' if I'm not mistaken. The specification for what TeX is designed to accomplish was written, and the code is steadily improved to meet that specification.
It's a refreshing way to look at a software project.
I had great hopes that the Linux kernal was going to be a convergent OS project, or at least much more convergent that it's turned out to be. Instead, it's bought into the whole 'creeping featurism' thing, as everything imaginable is added to the kernal. Everybody wants to be the 'inventor' of something, though, so it's not surprising that people are more inclined to want something new in the kernal source tree with their name on it.
The fact that Clinton had to lie about his sexual practices just shows what a petty person he really is. He would have a lot more credibility with a lot of us if he'd said 'Yes! She gave me blow jobs. Hillary and I have an open marriage.'
But, spineless opportunist that he is, he couldn't do that. I am sure there are a lot of free love advocates and people who are into exploratory/alternative sexuality who wish he hadn't been such a coward. He could have blown the lid off a whole mess of sexual prudery with a few well-chosen comments.
But really, he's just a petty opportunist. The Polling Data said that people wouldn't like him getting blow jobs in the White House from a woman young enough to be his daughter, so he lied.
People with doctorates tend to be people who don't want to leave the warm security blanket of academia until they've used up all possible means of staying on campus. People who graduate with a two, four, or six year degree, then go out and find a job, are less prone to exist in a fantasy world of ideology.
That's a generalization, of course, but this whole slashdot topic is supposed to be a rant fest, isn't it??