This is the best site I've seen on the subject. If there's software that's not available or listed there, then please, please, please email the maintainer -- he's actively maintaining the site.
thanks for your comments. I am glad to hear a non-WC core member's take on the situation.
As far as "the best connectivity in the world", may I speculate (no, I don't have any knowledge) that this might have something to do with a large corporate supporter of FreeBSD?
that is because they moved all of the software to ftp.freesoftware.com (aka ftp.wccdrom.com aka ftp.freebsd.org). Don't worry, they did it to everyone, from FreeBSD itself to Info-ZIP to Slackware...
I figure that most of the obvious, and technical, stuff is going to be easy to sort out.
But, the more difficult question is going to be, what about the developers?
While I don't think anyone will have a problem with giving Mike Karels any commit privs he wants, what about Joe Random Developer inside BSDi? Will he/she have to go through the same things that FreeBSD developers have historically gone through?
Clearly, this isn't something where there are only a few developers, and I expect that most people wouldn't even be able to tell if FreeBSD added a few dozen committers (FreeBSD has a boatload already), but inside the community, this is of some importance.
When they blurb talks about large news servers, they mean it. Recently, Joe posted an email to freebsd-hackers because he tried, and failed, to newfs a 1.9 terabyte filesystem. Since it failed, he went back to allocating it as a bunch of different filesystems, but it was interesting to try...
But, wouldn't choice of language affect time and price of projects?
E.g. would you accept, say $1000 as a fair price on your time for a simple web server in C?
How about as a price for a web server written in assembly?
What about a program that took a text file, found all of the instances of an arbitrary regular expression, and printed those lines? How much time would that take you?
If you were to implement that in assembly, C, perl, or if you could call grep or a function out the POSIX regex code, that would influence your time estimate, right?
I think the point that Tim was really trying to make is more pragmatic than "there are unthinkable things in assembly language, or C, or C++", but more of "certain things may be impractical, time-consuming, or error prone in this or that language, so I will attempt to restructure the requirements to avoid that problem", or conversely, "certain things may be so simple or easy to do that I will do them this way, and this will have these other nice side effects".
For example, if it were to take you 6 years to write a game in such and so a way, I suspect many game companies would either cancel or cut the project, because economically they wouldn't be able to support 6 years of development without a product, and by the time they had gotten 3 years in, the industry may have made another radical turn.
So if there was some language development which were to give them an order of magnitude of improvement in production speed (not that I believe that the next language development will do that, but think about the transition from digital logic to assembly, which probably did), then 6 years -> 3/5th year -> 7-8 months, which probably is within the realm of a "conceivable" (economically feasable) development cycle.
So, in the practical, economic/time POV, there remains the hope that a language will give you more leverage, and that will bring things that were outside of the realm of practicality (not possibility) into range.
I realize that your beef is mostly with Sapir-Whorf, but I think that this is more of what the author was trying to get at.
I think you are operating under the mistaken impression that BSDI is based on FreeBSD's kernel -- it is not. It is based on its own kernel, which is based on the 4.4BSDLite2 kernel.
There are actually 4 main distros for *BSD -- but only 1 per kernel.
BSDI, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD all have a complete userland -- the "distro" part that distinguishes Redhat from Debian from SuSE from TurboLinux from Slackware from Caldera.
However, unlike the above, they all have separate kernels, as well, instead of being based on Linux.
There are still variant "distros" -- they just are not very large or general-purpose.
As an example, there is PicoBSD, a router-floppy "distro" for FreeBSD. However, unlike many other "distros" for linux, PicoBSD is not a standalone "distro" but is part of FreeBSD.
I hope this clears things up.
The license doesn't matter, I don't think. Remember that a number of distros are commercial ones (e.g. Caldera's) even in Linux-world.
The reason for a lack of alternative distros in the FreeBSD space is because the kernel comes bundled with a perfectly good distro.
Imagine, for a moment, that since the earliest reaches of time, Linus had distributed the "LDistro" distro of Linux.
Would there be Redhat, Caldera, SuSE, et.al, if Linus had distributed his own full OS of Linux? I doubt it. People would have declared his whole distribution, not just his kernel, "good enough" and wouldn't have forked it, as it is the natural tendency not to fork code unless you MUST.
Since there was no official distro for Linux, the community HAD to fork to produce one.
Vadem (http://www.vadem.com/) has made a WinCE machine called the Clio. They are about 3.5 pounds and have a design which includes both a keyboard AND handwriting recognition, and the form factors for both in a single unit.
They run between $700-$1000 (if you're not afraid of a refurb, they're $600).
They can boot both NetBSD and Linux, but doing so renders the slate form factor useless since there's no handwriting recognition software for Linux.
I have one that I use for taking notes and the like.
They aren't ruggedized so they're not great from that perspective, but they *are* cheap so depending on application you may be able to just replace brokens.
Since they have a PCMCIA slot, you could have people write out to a compact flash card to preserve data even if the unit fails.
Anyway, I've been pretty happy with the unit so far. Getting it to sync to BSD/Linux is evil evil evil with the built in apps but if you're writing your own app it should be fine as long as you go Ethernet or PCMCIA. Syncing via the built in sync requires Windows...:(
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
Anyway, the idea espoused here (and later in the US Bill of Rights) is that these rights are not things granted by governments, but that the rights are natural and that Governments are just gangs of humans getting together to make sure that everyone gets a fair shake.
This is amplified by the next sentence:
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Anyway, he was just saying that corporatations, while looking similar to individuals in some legal senses, only look like that because governments say so. Corporations cannot vote, they do not pay personal income tax, and can't apply for welfare (at least not the sort that people can).
Slashdot Mirror
http://linas.org/linux/pm.html
This is the best site I've seen on the subject. If there's software that's not available or listed there, then please, please, please email the maintainer -- he's actively maintaining the site.
phk,
thanks for your comments. I am glad to hear a non-WC core member's take on the situation.
As far as "the best connectivity in the world", may I speculate (no, I don't have any knowledge) that this might have something to do with a large corporate supporter of FreeBSD?
that is because they moved all of the software to ftp.freesoftware.com (aka ftp.wccdrom.com aka ftp.freebsd.org). Don't worry, they did it to everyone, from FreeBSD itself to Info-ZIP to Slackware...
I figure that most of the obvious, and technical, stuff is going to be easy to sort out.
But, the more difficult question is going to be, what about the developers?
While I don't think anyone will have a problem with giving Mike Karels any commit privs he wants, what about Joe Random Developer inside BSDi? Will he/she have to go through the same things that FreeBSD developers have historically gone through?
Clearly, this isn't something where there are only a few developers, and I expect that most people wouldn't even be able to tell if FreeBSD added a few dozen committers (FreeBSD has a boatload already), but inside the community, this is of some importance.
article on geocrawler
Actually, netbsd imported support for these cards about a week ago:
http://www.netbsd.org/Changes/changes-1.5.html
(scroll on down to January 2000, section pcmcia)
But, wouldn't choice of language affect time and price of projects?
E.g. would you accept, say $1000 as a fair price on your time for a simple web server in C?
How about as a price for a web server written in assembly?
What about a program that took a text file, found all of the instances of an arbitrary regular expression, and printed those lines? How much time would that take you?
If you were to implement that in assembly, C, perl, or if you could call grep or a function out the POSIX regex code, that would influence your time estimate, right?
I think the point that Tim was really trying to make is more pragmatic than "there are unthinkable things in assembly language, or C, or C++", but more of "certain things may be impractical, time-consuming, or error prone in this or that language, so I will attempt to restructure the requirements to avoid that problem", or conversely, "certain things may be so simple or easy to do that I will do them this way, and this will have these other nice side effects".
For example, if it were to take you 6 years to write a game in such and so a way, I suspect many game companies would either cancel or cut the project, because economically they wouldn't be able to support 6 years of development without a product, and by the time they had gotten 3 years in, the industry may have made another radical turn.
So if there was some language development which were to give them an order of magnitude of improvement in production speed (not that I believe that the next language development will do that, but think about the transition from digital logic to assembly, which probably did), then 6 years -> 3/5th year -> 7-8 months, which probably is within the realm of a "conceivable" (economically feasable) development cycle.
So, in the practical, economic/time POV, there remains the hope that a language will give you more leverage, and that will bring things that were outside of the realm of practicality (not possibility) into range.
I realize that your beef is mostly with Sapir-Whorf, but I think that this is more of what the author was trying to get at.
I think you are operating under the mistaken impression that BSDI is based on FreeBSD's kernel -- it is not. It is based on its own kernel, which is based on the 4.4BSDLite2 kernel.
There are actually 4 main distros for *BSD -- but only 1 per kernel.
BSDI, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD all have a complete userland -- the "distro" part that distinguishes Redhat from Debian from SuSE from TurboLinux from Slackware from Caldera.
However, unlike the above, they all have separate kernels, as well, instead of being based on Linux.
There are still variant "distros" -- they just are not very large or general-purpose.
As an example, there is PicoBSD, a router-floppy "distro" for FreeBSD. However, unlike many other "distros" for linux, PicoBSD is not a standalone "distro" but is part of FreeBSD.
I hope this clears things up.
The license doesn't matter, I don't think. Remember that a number of distros are commercial ones (e.g. Caldera's) even in Linux-world.
The reason for a lack of alternative distros in the FreeBSD space is because the kernel comes bundled with a perfectly good distro.
Imagine, for a moment, that since the earliest reaches of time, Linus had distributed the "LDistro" distro of Linux.
Would there be Redhat, Caldera, SuSE, et.al, if Linus had distributed his own full OS of Linux? I doubt it. People would have declared his whole distribution, not just his kernel, "good enough" and wouldn't have forked it, as it is the natural tendency not to fork code unless you MUST.
Since there was no official distro for Linux, the community HAD to fork to produce one.
Vadem (http://www.vadem.com/) has made a WinCE machine called the Clio. They are about 3.5 pounds and have a design which includes both a keyboard AND handwriting recognition, and the form factors for both in a single unit.
:(
They run between $700-$1000 (if you're not afraid of a refurb, they're $600).
They can boot both NetBSD and Linux, but doing so renders the slate form factor useless since there's no handwriting recognition software for Linux.
I have one that I use for taking notes and the like.
They aren't ruggedized so they're not great from that perspective, but they *are* cheap so depending on application you may be able to just replace brokens.
Since they have a PCMCIA slot, you could have people write out to a compact flash card to preserve data even if the unit fails.
Anyway, I've been pretty happy with the unit so far. Getting it to sync to BSD/Linux is evil evil evil with the built in apps but if you're writing your own app it should be fine as long as you go Ethernet or PCMCIA. Syncing via the built in sync requires Windows...
The language quotes from the Declaration of Independence.
The second paragraph reads like this:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
Anyway, the idea espoused here (and later in the US Bill of Rights) is that these rights are not things granted by governments, but that the rights are natural and that Governments are just gangs of humans getting together to make sure that everyone gets a fair shake.
This is amplified by the next sentence:
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Anyway, he was just saying that corporatations, while looking similar to individuals in some legal senses, only look like that because governments say so. Corporations cannot vote, they do not pay personal income tax, and can't apply for welfare (at least not the sort that people can).