Shady NSA-type: "Here are the logs of encrypted material we can't decrypt (lawfully). We hope you British intelligence types can benefit from our wiretapping."
Shady British Intelligence-type: "Why, thank you! For no connected reason, here is a copy of our wiretapping data. If you find anything, let us know, k?"
Shady NSA-type: "No problem. Friends are as friends do. Aww, you look like you need a good back scratch turn around.. When I'm done, scratch my back."
Shady British Intelligence-type: "Sure. I love these Echelon backscratchers."
All the governments of the world are starting to work together to stop real privacy.. Sigh
And boycott watching the superbowl. For someone like me, this will not be a problem, as I don't care about sports (;-)), but for some of you this may be hard.
I suggest you also write a letter or email to one of the people invovled, and mention why you won't be watching the super bowl. Considering the "Golden Goose" status that the super bowl has achieved in advertisers' eyes, you might just be able to shock them into realising how downright mean (and quasi-legal, if you squint at it just right and ignore Canada's sovereignty from the US) way they shut down an innocent company, a company that let people like me watch some TV when they wouldn't have otherwise.
Then again, their hearts might just be blackened and their minds recognising only money, kinda like the MPAA ilk who had a minor unfairly arrested (can you say Kevin Mitnick '00?). Shadowrun's future is starting to seem optimistic. ---
"...that Canada's laws give it the right to retransmit broadcast television signals, in the same way that cable companies and satellite companies do. As long as the company doesn't cut or insert its own commercials into the programming, and ultimately pays copyright holders for their work, iCraveTV's action is completely legal..."
Interesting you should quote that. The local cable monoply shows advertisements for local services over top of, for example, whatever advertisements were on A&E this afternoon, among other things. All the US channels they carry, they edit at some point. Would it be possible to prosecute them? iCraveTV.com is even more in compliance than they are, and I agree that nothing should happen to them.. There's no other way I can watch Voyager currenly:-) ---
"In considering the matter, Judge Pfaelzer said that it was "clever" of Mitnick to have encrypted the files in such a way that the government could not use them"
Yeah, it's clever I keep important data encrypted, just like it's clever I send letters in envelopes, and it's clever I don't go handing out my credit card number to every doofus who can run a packet sniffer.
"For all we know, it could be plans to take down a computer system."
Forgetting that any computer that needs to be secure would 1) not mix executables and data (like Microsoft's DocBomb (tm) technology), and 2) would likely also not have an internet (or other network) connection period, which would render it safe from simple overflow attacks.
This level of technological imcompotence coupled with the luddite level of gut reaction stupidity makes me glad I don't live in the United States of America.
Maybe Linux won't be the OS of choice, as such, but he has a good point about Linux first.
Once games are developed on Linux, they will be easier to port (think John Carmack). Once they are easier to port, you can go and port it to where ever the money is, and be proud that you will likely have fewer support issues eating at the money because of the cleaner core produced under Linux.
So you have less support costs, and can easily port your game. Now what? Think digital. Copies cost nothing to make, it's only a little porting work for each target. If you can easily port the game, you can easily make money on other hardware with other target audiences your main target will not even see. You can hit the Win32 audience, hit the Mac (l)users, hit the Linux gamers, hit the console market (at least the Dreamcast and PSX2, the N64 could be a contender if Nintendo ever puts ouf a fscking CDROM drive), and be laughing all the way to the bank.
So it's not really a matter of "Linux getting it first," which you point out won't happen until we have the lion's share of the OS market, but "development being done under Linux" -- which is certainly feasible, as it will cost less to develop under a free (beer, libre) OS with free (beer, libre) tools -- and will lead to Linux being one of the first ports (think Quake 3):-) ---
It's true. Writing the core of the game, like John C. did, portably is better because you have less end-user support to deal with (as there are less bugs). This is one of the reasons John did it.
Another reason is that 1000 * 50 is 50,000. That's 50 thousand extra dollars for making your portable core run on another system. That could feed & clothe another programmer, or even an executive PHB who just wastes company money. Out of the 20 million Linux users, that's a fairly small percentage -- which means it's likely that they will see that kind of return, or even better.
So buy Quake 3 Arena, and show your support for Linux -- the others will follow:) ---
At the risk of the bandwidth of my box, here's my true type font tarball. It contains the MS readme.txt and EULA.txt as per their licence agreement. I've lower-cased all the names of fonts. It's free to distribute, AFAIK:
If you're going to download it, and you run a website or FTP site, please mirror it and help others get good looking usage from their browsers under Linux:-)
Note: you have to change Netscape 4.x's prefs in Appearance -> Fonts so that Variable font is Times New Roman [ttf] and Fixed width is Courier New [ttf].
M13 seems to not need any modification out of the box:)
xfstt works by listening on a Unix domain socket (or TCP socket), just add it to your font path as per the instructions in the tarball from ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/slackw are-7.0/contrib (also get the xfstt.txt file). ---
Veranda is a free font. All you have to do is head to MS's FTP site, or get it from another place, and unzip or untar it. Heck, I have a big bundle of true type fonts I have archived in a tarball so that I can get at them when I install Linux on a machine. Then you just install a TrueType font server for X (like xfstt in the Slackware contrib dir on ftp.cdrom.com).. Freshmeat has a bunch of them, too..
The page looks great in M13 and Netscape thanks to it.. ---
From the C|net article: "Court papers are generally considered public documents, available to anyone for the asking."
Isn't the LiViD code under the GPL? Doesn't this make it qualify as a public document, as anyone who asks can get the source? I just don't understand the crazy US legal system:-) ---
If you look at it that way..
on
Free Solaris 8
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· Score: 1
You could also say there's no reason to install OpenBSD, because you can just go and audit your server afterwards and fix any problems..
But this doesn't scale if you have to manage more than a few boxen. What you include at install time (and can be scripted to install) is pretty much it for most of my fire & forget jobs, like small firewalls that protect a SOHO or small business network. But then, Sun doesn't target that market, and there's no way they could afford the pricing that they used -- and now that it's free (beer), the quality is the dubious aspect. The "Solaris version" sounds like non-audited, eyeballed by the community code to me.
"Authorities are anxious not to smother the Internet, keenly aware that new information technology is key to China's economic future. Yet they fear an information free-flow which could threaten communist control."
Long live the revolution, eh?
Why is it that a corrupt, foul government is overthrown by smart citizens... then the new one designed to smooth the flow of goods to everyone goes and decides that it will be the forever government, instead of a transitional one? So what does it do to cement its power? Why, the very things the original government was over thrown for!
I really with that the people had forced Mao and the rest on the hundred day march to properly get some sort of "we have rights" document signed, ala the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or the US Constitution. Actions like this fly in the face of what Karl Marx wrote about. They also remind me of the actions of the MPAA and RIAA, so who am I to judge? ---
I'm amazed at the numbers of just-out-of-journalism-school 20-somethings who end up getting hired by C|Net or ZDNet (especially the Sm@rt reseller people) who just don't get it.. They put in glaring (even to people I know who aren't Linux zealots;-) things like this, and say "oh, good point" when told about it.. You'd think they'd have more of a feedback loop, what with peer review and the official editors.
Ahh well, it's fun to poke them and make them fix things:-)
PS: Does anyone else think "sm@rt" reads as "sm at rt" ? ---
I would be interested in getting a detailed version history of RedHat.. Just head over to RedHat's website, and find the info for me, then post a reply:-) I'm trying to develop a "family tree" of distributions, ala the Unix family tree you might've seen.
But RedHat still went up from 0.1 to 4.0 in a period of two years or so, which seems weird. ---
Re:What are the Differences?
on
Free Solaris 8
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· Score: 1
"Shells: tcsh and bash"
Just for reference, Slackware comes with tcsh, ash, bash2, bash1, and zsh:-)
The point, though, is that whereas Solaris is very much uni-choice, uni-company, Linux is very much multi-choice, multi-solutions.. Kinda like perl.. ---
Re:RHAT did version jumps!!
on
Free Solaris 8
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· Score: 2
Here's a slightly more detailed history, for the anal retentives like myself:-)
Slackware: 1994 1.0 -> SLS based v1.0 kernel 1995 2.x -> Slackware has install scripts that are ncurses fueled. Runs 1.2 kernel ELF beta introduced. Slackware 2.3 was out when Red Hat "Mother's Day" +0.1 was out. libc 4, AFAIK 1996 Slackware 96 -> Linux 2.0.0 kernel. ELF clean 1997 - 1998 3.x -> 2.0.x kernel with libc5 3.9 --- A real release. Basically Slack4 with the 2.0 kernel. 1999 4.0 --- Linux 2.2.0 (basically Slackware 3.9 with a 2.0 kernel). KDE also included:-) Install scripts slightly tweaked. 7.0 --- glibc 2.1 (important!). GUI side, includes both a newer KDE and October Gnome officially, and a completely new ncurses library. Install scripts have been revamped a bit more a slicker install that allowed for DHCP out of the box, "upgradepkg" script, and included RPM in an unsupported fashion. (So, yes, 7 is a big jump, but there are a lot of important changes)
RedHat: 1995 "Mother's Day" +0.1 (First collection of packages) 4.0 -> First "Real" release. Kernel 1.2.x 4.1 -> Tweaks to fix bugs regularly became.1 and.2 1996 4.2 5.0 -> Kernel 2.0.x 1997 5.1 -> Glibc 2.0 (**development library, WHY! **) 1998 5.2 1999 6.0 -> Linux kernel 2.2.x 6.1 -- Graphical installer, glibc 2.1. KDE as an option (might've been in 6.0).
I'm a Slackware clan member, so I couldn't give as much info as Slackware, but this should give you an idea on how much of a jump Red Hat had. Especially considering Slackware 4.0 was the 2.2.x kernel, whereas Red Hat 4.0 was the 1.2.x kernel.. Slackware has also "done" more with their releases, especially if you consider that Slackware is basically Patrick and a few volunteers (maybe 5 people tops), compared to Red Hat (which recently ate Cygnus, among other things).
"Windows is not DOS, Windows does not run 'on top' of DOS."
True. But just like Linux, Windows needs a bootloader, ergo: Without DOS, there is no Windows.
All they did was alter MSDOS 7.0 so you couldn't use an alternative DOS (well, they tried to). Win95 and Win98 don't need a specific MS DOS any more than Win 3.1 did, which is one of the reasons why Caldera is suing them. They locked them out of the DOS business by partially melding it into Win9x.
As for your "slow" loading -- remember, DOS is a very simple OS. You need to load a cache like Norton Cache or one of the MSDOS cache programs, like smartdrive (MSDOS 6.0 and up included a lot of external Norton Utilities functionality, like defrag and scandisk -- they were sued over this too, as they ripped off stacker's doublespace technology). ---
AFAIK, the only major changes between DOS 6.22 and DOS 7.0 (MS flavours) would be the altering of IO.SYS (the kernel and semi-bootstrap code) to parse msdos.sys as a text file (rather than the separate machine code half it was before, ala ibmbio.sys and ibmio.sys), and force the loading of a few extra.sys files from the windows dir.. Not to mention the "lovely" new boot logo..
Windows "milennium" claims to do away with it, but I think they just tuned io.sys a bit more to not allow a command.com any more. Otherwise, Windows 95 (all revs) and Windows 98 (all revs) would work just fine on any recent DOS kernel (FreeDOS, PCDOS, etc) that supported whatever features the.sys files needed before win.com swapped the machine to protected mode, and loaded the various Windows components. ---
But trying to make sure your enemies don't have strong encryption by just not telling them about it doesn't work. As many people know, intelligencia around the world tend to get onto the same ideas at the same time, and develop them in parrallel (if not in communication).
In the end, it comes down to trust and fear. Using a balance of terror, and not trusting people (ie: by making sure it's easy to read their email, etc) leads to more trouble than it is worth.. ---
" You have to have MSIE because the banner software uses MSIE's libraries"
Ahh, so it will be vulnerable to whatever proxy you set IE to use, ne? The problem with these programs that use the IE API for web stuff, is that the API doesn't expose the proxy setup to the program... A very trivial man in the middle attack is very easy to setup in this situation. The thing is, do you want to show your own little ads, or do you want to simply return a blank, transparent gif?
I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader:) ---
"Interesting. Makes me wonder why I haven't seen http://www.freedsl.com/ on Slashdot yet.:)"
Noveltly.
The Simpsons (r) branded free ISP is a novel thing. FreeDSL is not novel, just interesting. However, judging by the website, this is more targetted at the marketters and advertisers with wonderful statements like: "our service will offer direct access to a large high-speed Internet audience supporting general network advertising, content affinity, and demographic targeting."
Translation: "We will monitor the browsing habits of the people, so you'll know if they're into those 'special interest' items. And thanks to content affinity and the broadband, you'll be able to push large, streaming media of your 'special interest' items in action in order to entice them to buy.."
Yeah, I love being a captive audience.. Considering reliable broadband is available for 40$ Cdn (28$ US) in the form of Cable Modem access through a local @Home monopoly, I don't think it's really worth it.. Linux can easily provide protection from the @Home portscanning via ipchains:) ---
"How many people do you think are unaware of the existence of Coca-Cola? If they were to cut their advertising budget in half, would there be a significant drop in their brand recognition? I doubt it."
Which is why I said: "What they don't seem to understand is that advertisements don't work, and never really did. Now adays, it's easy for a person who recognises a need to go out and find information on products. "
The Coke adds do not serve to inform the potential customer. The market has been saturated for years, and no one is going to leave their favourite brands because of that silly lady who sips an obviously marked cup of a certain fizzy beverage, and then expresses pleasure through cooing (gack, I want to retch just thinking of it). They merely serve to reinforce the belief by existing users that their choice was right. Another example of the same is that a survey found that people who had bought brand X of automobile felt a lot better watching advertisements about it (especially the overly positive ones). Advertisements no longer teach or inform, they merely reinforce consumerism. "Gee, it sure was great I bought that thing. I'm such a smart, sexy person for doing it. Look at the other smart, sexy people enjoying these same products. I think I'll go buy more, I feel soo good."
"In his book Democracy In America, Alexis De Toqueville commented on how pervasive he found commercial advertising to be in the US. He was writing in first part of the 19th century. Advertising has been with us since long before the 1950s."
I agree. However, back in the early 20th, advertisments were less instrusive (compared to now). Gee, was that an X automobile being driven by that handsome movie star in that movie? Wow, Neo sure does like X brand of cola. Hmm, what brand of cellphone was that again? Let's all go to the lobby, and buy more popcorn. The subliminal advertisements tell me to. Wow, time to reduce the amount of time spent on the episode -- more good commercials are comming along. (Speaking of commercials, have you noticed how US TV averages between 2.4 and 2.9 minutes vs 1.7 to 2.2 minutes of advertisement time on Canadian TV?)
When some store (can't remember which) wanted to spread their name around the small city of New York, they purchased branded umbrellas and gave them to street vendors. This helped the vendors, who now had protection from the weather, and helped the consumers, who became aware of a new store that could serve their needs. Cities like New York couldn't have grown without ideas like that. Now, however, it's increasingly easy for the customer to evaluate their own needs, and select the appropriate solution with little effort. Without advertisements. If I go to a website to buy something, I don't need to see unrelated advertisements that waste my bandwidth and CPU time. A related products link could be tasteful, though.
I'm hopeful that a nice device to screen out TV advertisements will be available soon. Look at the Tivo, it's certainly possible to do it for prerecorded programs. I'd certainly pay to not see commercials. Heck, I might even watch more TV... then again, it's increasingly banal bullshit (especially stuff like "Who wants to be a millionaire?"). Oh well, at least I can still watch the Simpsons. ---
He mentions negative margins a lot.. And he's right.. You do run Internet Junkbuster, don't you?
"Typical click-through rates have fallen to under 0.5%, and are continuing to fall. Advertising networks are shifting to pay-per-click systems, from pay-per-impression ones."
Which is much worse, as it forces users to load things without them really wanting to (in most cases).. Kinda like those popup windows you find on "shadier" sites, like Netscape.com. Portals? Basically repackaged push that doesn't require a special client.
"The reason so many sites advertise is because it's free and easy to do so, and if it brings in some cash, great! "
This is why things like Cybergold or AllAdvantage are starting up. Paying a person for advertising impressions.. They are trivially defeated, of course, as you can't ever trust a client on a nonsecure machine:^)
What they don't seem to understand is that advertisements don't work, and never really did. Now adays, it's easy for a person who recognises a need to go out and find information on products. Need some way of turning off lights remotely, and don't like "the clapper" ? Simply go and find a site about.X10. No need to advertise, as most people will find the information themselves through a convienient search engine. So, if not to inform, what purpose do adds serv? They serv only to create want and need, and unless you're the mental age of a 10-year-old, they won't work on you.. Only the momentum of the "consumerism" of the 1950s through 1980s keeps people advertising in this day and age. I can't wait for it to die. ---
I looked at the site, and didn't see any "Used with permission from 20th Century Fox" or similar boilerplate. Their little "bar" has a Fox link, but again, no licence information.
Is this ISP using the media and characters without permission? 1stup.com doesn't sound like a Fox affiliate, and could be in a bit of trouble if they've not worked out the proper deals.
Anyways, it looks to be a standard "watch adds, receive free dialup" service.. And, like Altavista's service, it looks to be easily spoofed (just dialup, and have a little daemon pulling certain content:-)).
Not that I condone that kind of activity.. I'm on a cable modem, after all:) ---
"I mean, you people hate companies, you only want GPL and free beer."
If it's under the GPL, you have the code...
If you have the code, you can port it to other OSes..
The BSDs seem to work fine with GPL stuff, SCO has the skunkware CD.. It's not our fault that Be or QNX don't port the GPL software over and submit their changes back to the tree.. If you want more apps, help port over the libs and such. GNX and BeOS both are Unixy enough to allow easy porting (compared to Win32) of libs and apps.
And just because the code is GPLed, doesn't mean the software is free (like Quake -- GPLed code, pay for the pack file).. ---
Slashdot Mirror
How can they do this?
Shady NSA-type: "Here are the logs of encrypted material we can't decrypt (lawfully). We hope you British intelligence types can benefit from our wiretapping."
Shady British Intelligence-type: "Why, thank you! For no connected reason, here is a copy of our wiretapping data. If you find anything, let us know, k?"
Shady NSA-type: "No problem. Friends are as friends do. Aww, you look like you need a good back scratch turn around.. When I'm done, scratch my back."
Shady British Intelligence-type: "Sure. I love these Echelon backscratchers."
All the governments of the world are starting to work together to stop real privacy.. Sigh
---
And boycott watching the superbowl. For someone like me, this will not be a problem, as I don't care about sports (;-)), but for some of you this may be hard.
I suggest you also write a letter or email to one of the people invovled, and mention why you won't be watching the super bowl. Considering the "Golden Goose" status that the super bowl has achieved in advertisers' eyes, you might just be able to shock them into realising how downright mean (and quasi-legal, if you squint at it just right and ignore Canada's sovereignty from the US) way they shut down an innocent company, a company that let people like me watch some TV when they wouldn't have otherwise.
Then again, their hearts might just be blackened and their minds recognising only money, kinda like the MPAA ilk who had a minor unfairly arrested (can you say Kevin Mitnick '00?). Shadowrun's future is starting to seem optimistic.
---
"...that Canada's laws give it the right to retransmit broadcast television signals, in the same way that cable companies and satellite companies do. As long as the company doesn't cut or insert its own commercials into the programming, and ultimately pays copyright holders for their work, iCraveTV's action is completely legal..."
:-)
Interesting you should quote that. The local cable monoply shows advertisements for local services over top of, for example, whatever advertisements were on A&E this afternoon, among other things. All the US channels they carry, they edit at some point. Would it be possible to prosecute them? iCraveTV.com is even more in compliance than they are, and I agree that nothing should happen to them.. There's no other way I can watch Voyager currenly
---
"In considering the matter, Judge Pfaelzer said that it was "clever" of Mitnick to have encrypted the files in such a way that the government could not use them"
Yeah, it's clever I keep important data encrypted, just like it's clever I send letters in envelopes, and it's clever I don't go handing out my credit card number to every doofus who can run a packet sniffer.
"For all we know, it could be plans to take down a computer system."
Forgetting that any computer that needs to be secure would 1) not mix executables and data (like Microsoft's DocBomb (tm) technology), and 2) would likely also not have an internet (or other network) connection period, which would render it safe from simple overflow attacks.
This level of technological imcompotence coupled with the luddite level of gut reaction stupidity makes me glad I don't live in the United States of America.
Freedom? What freedom?
---
Maybe Linux won't be the OS of choice, as such, but he has a good point about Linux first.
:-)
Once games are developed on Linux, they will be easier to port (think John Carmack). Once they are easier to port, you can go and port it to where ever the money is, and be proud that you will likely have fewer support issues eating at the money because of the cleaner core produced under Linux.
So you have less support costs, and can easily port your game. Now what? Think digital. Copies cost nothing to make, it's only a little porting work for each target. If you can easily port the game, you can easily make money on other hardware with other target audiences your main target will not even see. You can hit the Win32 audience, hit the Mac (l)users, hit the Linux gamers, hit the console market (at least the Dreamcast and PSX2, the N64 could be a contender if Nintendo ever puts ouf a fscking CDROM drive), and be laughing all the way to the bank.
So it's not really a matter of "Linux getting it first," which you point out won't happen until we have the lion's share of the OS market, but "development being done under Linux" -- which is certainly feasible, as it will cost less to develop under a free (beer, libre) OS with free (beer, libre) tools -- and will lead to Linux being one of the first ports (think Quake 3)
---
It's true. Writing the core of the game, like John C. did, portably is better because you have less end-user support to deal with (as there are less bugs). This is one of the reasons John did it.
:)
Another reason is that 1000 * 50 is 50,000. That's 50 thousand extra dollars for making your portable core run on another system. That could feed & clothe another programmer, or even an executive PHB who just wastes company money. Out of the 20 million Linux users, that's a fairly small percentage -- which means it's likely that they will see that kind of return, or even better.
So buy Quake 3 Arena, and show your support for Linux -- the others will follow
---
At the risk of the bandwidth of my box, here's my true type font tarball. It contains the MS readme.txt and EULA.txt as per their licence agreement. I've lower-cased all the names of fonts. It's free to distribute, AFAIK:
:-)
:)
True Type Fonts
If you're going to download it, and you run a website or FTP site, please mirror it and help others get good looking usage from their browsers under Linux
Note: you have to change Netscape 4.x's prefs in Appearance -> Fonts so that Variable font is Times New Roman [ttf] and Fixed width is Courier New [ttf].
M13 seems to not need any modification out of the box
xfstt works by listening on a Unix domain socket (or TCP socket), just add it to your font path as per the instructions in the tarball from ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/slackw are-7.0/contrib (also get the xfstt.txt file).
---
needed to hear this.
Veranda is a free font. All you have to do is head to MS's FTP site, or get it from another place, and unzip or untar it. Heck, I have a big bundle of true type fonts I have archived in a tarball so that I can get at them when I install Linux on a machine. Then you just install a TrueType font server for X (like xfstt in the Slackware contrib dir on ftp.cdrom.com).. Freshmeat has a bunch of them, too..
The page looks great in M13 and Netscape thanks to it..
---
But I have to say this..
:-)
From the C|net article:
"Court papers are generally considered public documents, available to anyone for the asking."
Isn't the LiViD code under the GPL? Doesn't this make it qualify as a public document, as anyone who asks can get the source? I just don't understand the crazy US legal system
---
You could also say there's no reason to install OpenBSD, because you can just go and audit your server afterwards and fix any problems..
:-)
But this doesn't scale if you have to manage more than a few boxen. What you include at install time (and can be scripted to install) is pretty much it for most of my fire & forget jobs, like small firewalls that protect a SOHO or small business network. But then, Sun doesn't target that market, and there's no way they could afford the pricing that they used -- and now that it's free (beer), the quality is the dubious aspect. The "Solaris version" sounds like non-audited, eyeballed by the community code to me.
No thanks
---
"Authorities are anxious not to smother the Internet, keenly aware that new information technology is key to China's economic future. Yet they fear an information free-flow which could threaten communist control."
Long live the revolution, eh?
Why is it that a corrupt, foul government is overthrown by smart citizens... then the new one designed to smooth the flow of goods to everyone goes and decides that it will be the forever government, instead of a transitional one? So what does it do to cement its power? Why, the very things the original government was over thrown for!
I really with that the people had forced Mao and the rest on the hundred day march to properly get some sort of "we have rights" document signed, ala the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or the US Constitution. Actions like this fly in the face of what Karl Marx wrote about. They also remind me of the actions of the MPAA and RIAA, so who am I to judge?
---
I'm amazed at the numbers of just-out-of-journalism-school 20-somethings who end up getting hired by C|Net or ZDNet (especially the Sm@rt reseller people) who just don't get it.. They put in glaring (even to people I know who aren't Linux zealots ;-) things like this, and say "oh, good point" when told about it.. You'd think they'd have more of a feedback loop, what with peer review and the official editors.
:-)
Ahh well, it's fun to poke them and make them fix things
PS: Does anyone else think "sm@rt" reads as "sm at rt" ?
---
I would be interested in getting a detailed version history of RedHat.. Just head over to RedHat's website, and find the info for me, then post a reply :-) I'm trying to develop a "family tree" of distributions, ala the Unix family tree you might've seen.
But RedHat still went up from 0.1 to 4.0 in a period of two years or so, which seems weird.
---
"Shells: tcsh and bash"
:-)
Just for reference, Slackware comes with tcsh, ash, bash2, bash1, and zsh
The point, though, is that whereas Solaris is very much uni-choice, uni-company, Linux is very much multi-choice, multi-solutions.. Kinda like perl..
---
Here's a slightly more detailed history, for the anal retentives like myself :-)
:-) Install scripts slightly tweaked.
.1 and .2
Slackware:
1994
1.0 -> SLS based v1.0 kernel
1995
2.x -> Slackware has install scripts that are ncurses fueled. Runs 1.2 kernel ELF beta introduced. Slackware 2.3 was out when Red Hat "Mother's Day" +0.1 was out. libc 4, AFAIK
1996
Slackware 96 -> Linux 2.0.0 kernel. ELF clean
1997 - 1998
3.x -> 2.0.x kernel with libc5
3.9 --- A real release. Basically Slack4 with the 2.0 kernel.
1999
4.0 --- Linux 2.2.0 (basically Slackware 3.9 with a 2.0 kernel). KDE also included
7.0 --- glibc 2.1 (important!). GUI side, includes both a newer KDE and October Gnome officially, and a completely new ncurses library. Install scripts have been revamped a bit more a slicker install that allowed for DHCP out of the box, "upgradepkg" script, and included RPM in an unsupported fashion. (So, yes, 7 is a big jump, but there are a lot of important changes)
RedHat:
1995
"Mother's Day" +0.1 (First collection of packages)
4.0 -> First "Real" release. Kernel 1.2.x
4.1 -> Tweaks to fix bugs regularly became
1996
4.2
5.0 -> Kernel 2.0.x
1997
5.1 -> Glibc 2.0 (**development library, WHY! **)
1998
5.2
1999
6.0 -> Linux kernel 2.2.x
6.1 -- Graphical installer, glibc 2.1. KDE as an option (might've been in 6.0).
I'm a Slackware clan member, so I couldn't give as much info as Slackware, but this should give you an idea on how much of a jump Red Hat had. Especially considering Slackware 4.0 was the 2.2.x kernel, whereas Red Hat 4.0 was the 1.2.x kernel.. Slackware has also "done" more with their releases, especially if you consider that Slackware is basically Patrick and a few volunteers (maybe 5 people tops), compared to Red Hat (which recently ate Cygnus, among other things).
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"Windows is not DOS, Windows does not run 'on top' of DOS."
True. But just like Linux, Windows needs a bootloader, ergo: Without DOS, there is no Windows.
All they did was alter MSDOS 7.0 so you couldn't use an alternative DOS (well, they tried to). Win95 and Win98 don't need a specific MS DOS any more than Win 3.1 did, which is one of the reasons why Caldera is suing them. They locked them out of the DOS business by partially melding it into Win9x.
As for your "slow" loading -- remember, DOS is a very simple OS. You need to load a cache like Norton Cache or one of the MSDOS cache programs, like smartdrive (MSDOS 6.0 and up included a lot of external Norton Utilities functionality, like defrag and scandisk -- they were sued over this too, as they ripped off stacker's doublespace technology).
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AFAIK, the only major changes between DOS 6.22 and DOS 7.0 (MS flavours) would be the altering of IO.SYS (the kernel and semi-bootstrap code) to parse msdos.sys as a text file (rather than the separate machine code half it was before, ala ibmbio.sys and ibmio.sys), and force the loading of a few extra .sys files from the windows dir.. Not to mention the "lovely" new boot logo..
.sys files needed before win.com swapped the machine to protected mode, and loaded the various Windows components.
Windows "milennium" claims to do away with it, but I think they just tuned io.sys a bit more to not allow a command.com any more. Otherwise, Windows 95 (all revs) and Windows 98 (all revs) would work just fine on any recent DOS kernel (FreeDOS, PCDOS, etc) that supported whatever features the
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Now you'll be able to get ultra fast data transfers over them. How many accidents will be caused because the driver was surfing while driving to work?
"I'm sorry, Officer, but this porn site just popped up, and my eyes left the road.."
I mean, people already read (while driving) to work..
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But trying to make sure your enemies don't have strong encryption by just not telling them about it doesn't work. As many people know, intelligencia around the world tend to get onto the same ideas at the same time, and develop them in parrallel (if not in communication).
In the end, it comes down to trust and fear. Using a balance of terror, and not trusting people (ie: by making sure it's easy to read their email, etc) leads to more trouble than it is worth..
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" You have to have MSIE because the banner software uses MSIE's libraries"
:)
Ahh, so it will be vulnerable to whatever proxy you set IE to use, ne? The problem with these programs that use the IE API for web stuff, is that the API doesn't expose the proxy setup to the program... A very trivial man in the middle attack is very easy to setup in this situation. The thing is, do you want to show your own little ads, or do you want to simply return a blank, transparent gif?
I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader
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"Interesting. Makes me wonder why I haven't seen http://www.freedsl.com/ on Slashdot yet. :)"
:)
Noveltly.
The Simpsons (r) branded free ISP is a novel thing. FreeDSL is not novel, just interesting. However, judging by the website, this is more targetted at the marketters and advertisers with wonderful statements like:
"our service will offer direct access to a large high-speed Internet audience supporting general network advertising, content affinity, and demographic targeting."
Translation:
"We will monitor the browsing habits of the people, so you'll know if they're into those 'special interest' items. And thanks to content affinity and the broadband, you'll be able to push large, streaming media of your 'special interest' items in action in order to entice them to buy.."
Yeah, I love being a captive audience.. Considering reliable broadband is available for 40$ Cdn (28$ US) in the form of Cable Modem access through a local @Home monopoly, I don't think it's really worth it..
Linux can easily provide protection from the @Home portscanning via ipchains
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"How many people do you think are unaware of the existence of Coca-Cola? If they were to cut their advertising budget in half, would there be a significant drop in their brand recognition? I doubt it."
Which is why I said:
"What they don't seem to understand is that advertisements don't work, and never really did. Now adays, it's easy for a person who recognises a need to go out and find information on products. "
The Coke adds do not serve to inform the potential customer. The market has been saturated for years, and no one is going to leave their favourite brands because of that silly lady who sips an obviously marked cup of a certain fizzy beverage, and then expresses pleasure through cooing (gack, I want to retch just thinking of it). They merely serve to reinforce the belief by existing users that their choice was right. Another example of the same is that a survey found that people who had bought brand X of automobile felt a lot better watching advertisements about it (especially the overly positive ones). Advertisements no longer teach or inform, they merely reinforce consumerism. "Gee, it sure was great I bought that thing. I'm such a smart, sexy person for doing it. Look at the other smart, sexy people enjoying these same products. I think I'll go buy more, I feel soo good."
"In his book Democracy In America, Alexis De Toqueville commented on how pervasive he found commercial advertising to be in the US. He was writing in first part of the 19th century. Advertising has been with us since long before the 1950s."
I agree. However, back in the early 20th, advertisments were less instrusive (compared to now). Gee, was that an X automobile being driven by that handsome movie star in that movie? Wow, Neo sure does like X brand of cola. Hmm, what brand of cellphone was that again? Let's all go to the lobby, and buy more popcorn. The subliminal advertisements tell me to. Wow, time to reduce the amount of time spent on the episode -- more good commercials are comming along. (Speaking of commercials, have you noticed how US TV averages between 2.4 and 2.9 minutes vs 1.7 to 2.2 minutes of advertisement time on Canadian TV?)
When some store (can't remember which) wanted to spread their name around the small city of New York, they purchased branded umbrellas and gave them to street vendors. This helped the vendors, who now had protection from the weather, and helped the consumers, who became aware of a new store that could serve their needs. Cities like New York couldn't have grown without ideas like that. Now, however, it's increasingly easy for the customer to evaluate their own needs, and select the appropriate solution with little effort. Without advertisements. If I go to a website to buy something, I don't need to see unrelated advertisements that waste my bandwidth and CPU time. A related products link could be tasteful, though.
I'm hopeful that a nice device to screen out TV advertisements will be available soon. Look at the Tivo, it's certainly possible to do it for prerecorded programs. I'd certainly pay to not see commercials. Heck, I might even watch more TV... then again, it's increasingly banal bullshit (especially stuff like "Who wants to be a millionaire?"). Oh well, at least I can still watch the Simpsons.
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He mentions negative margins a lot.. And he's right.. You do run Internet Junkbuster, don't you?
:^)
.X10. No need to advertise, as most people will find the information themselves through a convienient search engine. So, if not to inform, what purpose do adds serv? They serv only to create want and need, and unless you're the mental age of a 10-year-old, they won't work on you.. Only the momentum of the "consumerism" of the 1950s through 1980s keeps people advertising in this day and age. I can't wait for it to die.
"Typical click-through rates have fallen to under 0.5%, and are continuing to fall. Advertising networks are shifting to pay-per-click systems, from pay-per-impression ones."
Which is much worse, as it forces users to load things without them really wanting to (in most cases).. Kinda like those popup windows you find on "shadier" sites, like Netscape.com. Portals? Basically repackaged push that doesn't require a special client.
"The reason so many sites advertise is because it's free and easy to do so, and if it brings in some cash, great! "
This is why things like Cybergold or AllAdvantage are starting up. Paying a person for advertising impressions.. They are trivially defeated, of course, as you can't ever trust a client on a nonsecure machine
What they don't seem to understand is that advertisements don't work, and never really did. Now adays, it's easy for a person who recognises a need to go out and find information on products. Need some way of turning off lights remotely, and don't like "the clapper" ? Simply go and find a site about
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I looked at the site, and didn't see any "Used with permission from 20th Century Fox" or similar boilerplate. Their little "bar" has a Fox link, but again, no licence information.
:-)).
:)
Is this ISP using the media and characters without permission? 1stup.com doesn't sound like a Fox affiliate, and could be in a bit of trouble if they've not worked out the proper deals.
Anyways, it looks to be a standard "watch adds, receive free dialup" service.. And, like Altavista's service, it looks to be easily spoofed (just dialup, and have a little daemon pulling certain content
Not that I condone that kind of activity.. I'm on a cable modem, after all
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"I mean, you people hate companies, you only want GPL and free beer."
If it's under the GPL, you have the code...
If you have the code, you can port it to other OSes..
The BSDs seem to work fine with GPL stuff, SCO has the skunkware CD.. It's not our fault that Be or QNX don't port the GPL software over and submit their changes back to the tree.. If you want more apps, help port over the libs and such. GNX and BeOS both are Unixy enough to allow easy porting (compared to Win32) of libs and apps.
And just because the code is GPLed, doesn't mean the software is free (like Quake -- GPLed code, pay for the pack file)..
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