When people see my Mac sitting on my desk they never ask me how fast it is, how big of a hard drive I have, or if I use high-speed or dial-up; they compliment me on a fine looking machine.
Translation: "Their eyes glaze over, and they say 'ooooh, shiny!'"
I remember when VA Linux started running small display ads in Linux Journal. Back when any color display ad at all that had the word 'Linux' in it was exciting.
Well, obviously, you have your secretary print out the ASCII representation of the attachment. She puts it the printed sheets in an interoffice envelope and it goes to the typing pool, where it's retyped and then re-entered on punched cards by the keypunch operator. The card deck goes to the computer operator who loads the deck and runs the job to convert it and print it out. In the end, a greenbar representation of whatever the attachment in question was is brought to your office by clerks using a skid jack to move the pallet.
I just run fvwm2. And ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc is open right over there in emacs.
If I wanted bloat I would run Windows.
The Tab Window Manager often suffices, too. The question is: what are you wanting to use your system for? Answer that before you start frontloading a lot of croft between you and the machine.
There are some interesting 'privledge escalation' things that can happen on machines 'owned' by the user on a big network, though.
The one I experienced firsthand was a Windows NT machine that was my desktop that I ('naturally') had full admin access to. This was a machine on a large corporate network that was very diverse (there were Solaris, OS/2 Warp, Netware, and Windows NT servers on the network). I discovered, quite by accident actually, that if I ran the POSIX Interix (now SFU) shell on my NT workstation (something the company had bought for me, and I had installed myself,) that I could create any account I wanted on my local machine, and it would allow me, using that account name, to access shares on the network, doing whatever I wanted to files my username 'owned'. I am talking about the network that a company that makes implantable medical devices kept their work on. I suspect the 'defect' had something to do with NIS and 'travelling profiles' in Solaris, and the security system not being equipped to deal with other Unix-like hosts on the network that weren't secured. Incidentally, I didn't discover the problem by 'poking around where I wasn't supposed to be,' I simply noticed I was suddenly able to do things to files I normally had access to without entering my UNIX password as required in the past. Something clicked in my head, so I created a local account on the NT box that matched an important person's UID on the Unix system... yep, I had all his permissions.
Delete test account. Never touch again. Too scared to mention it to anybody. It's been enough years now that I can even mention it in public. I hope they've secured things a bit better now, because these days there are unsecured Unixy systems all over the place.
Re:Just like "Pentium" was supposd to be 586 only.
on
'Intel Inside' No More
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· Score: 1
they called the 686, 786 (P3), and 886 (P4) Pentium's also.
Oh, comeon. Acknowlede the PentiumPro, too, if you're going to mention '686'. It was a fine processor, and a brave step forward by Intel. (the PPro was the first Intel processor to be 'slightly less x86 compatible' than the Pentium before it- Intel's first step away from the awful old CISC architecture. People lambasted it rigorously because 'it won't run MS-DOS programs as fast.')
My PentiumPro machine here has four of 'em in it. With the 1M cache.
They haven't updated the slashcode in that long (they just gave Malda a copy of FrontPage for what amounts to the recent 'improvements.'), so why should the hardware need updating. This site runs on VA Linux hardware and they're proud of it.
And I used to work for a company that produces implantable cardiac devices. The external 'programmer' that talks to the implanted device ran Windows NT.
Yes, but you have the 'fair use' right to use a handheld camcorder to shoot a video of the screen of your computer running Windows and playing the movie.
You can also quote excerpts from the film, or make limited use of still photos from it.
Yes, maybe 1 out of the 25 John Does wanted to share new Debian CD-images,
Or maybe they were sharing CD images of a new Operating System derived from the Debian source code, but without providing, in fact refusing to provide, the source code.
People should be careful about setting up legal precedents where anything-goes distribution is the norm.
Fair use 'rights' mean you can get away with it legally if you know how. It does NOT mean that a product vendor has to facilitate your copying activity.
Otherwise, where the heck is the little lever on all my hardback books that splits the pages out so I can scan them all, then slip the pages back in the binding?
Publishers can make it as hard as they wish for you to 'exercize your fair use rights.' The 'right' implied is that they can't come after you legally if you figure out a way to exercize said right in a legal fashion.
like we all forgot the iMac one they pulled just three short years ago?
There's no way some of us will EVER forget anything as funny as the 'My iMac swallowed the disk' disaster. The egg was NOT on Sony's face about that one. (scurry down to the repair counter at the Apple Store, now, and flash some plastic! heh.)
Funny as hell when a piece of hardware is that poorly designed.
(above said in tone of voice of kid who just had a spoonfull of brussel sprouts plopped on his plate)
Why couldn't the settlement be a prepaid 3 month DSL account and two cakeboxes of blank DVD-R media?
Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago
on
NetBSD v3.0 Released
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· Score: 1
There are people using NetBSD on the listed architectures. The fact that you aren't or can't is not anybody elses' problem.
For some reason I feel this is either a troll or a pissing match I am responding to.
Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago
on
NetBSD v3.0 Released
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· Score: 1
On older VAX systems (and on my Mac SE/30) cross-compiling is essential. It's likely that a full kernel and userland build, plus a reasonable set of the packages, on an SE/30 would take long enough that the build wouldn't be done before the next release. The SE/30 is Processor-clock, IO, and Memory bound to be a small system in today's world. My MicroVAX 3100 is even smaller and slower in some regards.
Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago
on
NetBSD v3.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Lots of people seem to have come to the belief that obscurity cannot provide anything positive at all.
Your comment points out another good aspect of the cross-platformness of NetBSD. You can run the same codebase on an obscure arch or on i386. It's the same codebase so the 'many eyes' aspect argued for by the 'security through obscurity baaaaad' jihad applies, but you can run that same code on an obscure arch, which renders your binaries a further layer impenetrable, even while running on the same codebase.
Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago
on
NetBSD v3.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
It cross-compiles and the binaries run on the VAX architecture. It is tested on VAX.
It cross-compiles and runs on my Macintosh SE/30. That doesn't mean that I want to build a full userland, or a full set of the packages I want to run, on the Macintosh SE/30 itself. That would be insanity. I built GNU Emacs once on the SE/30. It took a LONG time.
NetBSD supports the VAX architecture. Binaries are built and distributed, and run on VAX systems. Historically, Microsoft built the MS-DOS binaries on PDP-10 systems. It would have been INSANE for someone to complain that they weren't fully supporting the 8088 processor because it was more realistic to use a PDP-10 minicomputer to build the MS-DOS binaries. Similarly, NetBSD will run on some of the otherwise WinCE-bound Pocket PCs. Do people claim because the kernel isn't natively compiled on a Pocket PC that it isn't a supported architecture?
'Compile the kernel' is a worthy pursuit some of the time. Other times it's a bellygazing exercise.
For me, a part of the reason I find it valuable is that I am into all sorts of old classic UNIX hardware, and want a modern OS to run on all of it. I have the following systems and can/have run NetBSD on:
Intel Boxes (regular PIII boxes, a Quad Pentium Pro Server, 486 laptops, Pentium Laptops...)
My Macintosh SE/30 and my Quadra 650
My Beige G3 Macintosh.
My Sun Sparcstation IPC, IPX, Classic, 5, 10, 20.
My Sun UltraSparc 1, 2, and 5 systems.
My SGI 02 systems.
My IBM RS/6000 (prep architecture)
My PPC Mac clone (prep architecture)
My Microvax 3100
I can run NetBSD, built from the same source tree on ALL these systems. That isn't at all the same as saying that I can run odd distros of Linux on some of them. I have a fairly uptodate mirroring of the pkgsrc collection so I can locally build uptodate packages on all archs too.
The key is that it's all version controlled together in one CVS tree.
And no, I do not run all these archs 24/7 or regularly. The value of NetBSD is that I can use NetBSD as a common platform and use it to feel out and test a wide selection of hardware. It's often more appropriate to run the native Unix on many classic workstations. I can't, for example, get glorious dual 24-bit graphics in Xinerama mode running anything but Solaris on my SparcStation 10sx.
I have dithered and experimented with other kinda-acceptable freenix solutions for my main desktop system. I've tested recent releases of Slackware and OpenBSD on my Pentium III desktop system, and they just don't give me the power and flexibility that I have with NetBSD. So I've come back and just this past week brough up 3.0 (previously was running 2.1) and am typing this in Mozilla that I built from source on this box about a half a week ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The 'Math Bug' was in the original pre-socket 5 Pentium.
Mao was using waterboards, truncheons and various other bric-a-brac.
You're just mad because there's no place to plug in your ADB mouse.
When people see my Mac sitting on my desk they never ask me how fast it is, how big of a hard drive I have, or if I use high-speed or dial-up; they compliment me on a fine looking machine.
Translation: "Their eyes glaze over, and they say 'ooooh, shiny!'"
You're not making sense. You're not stuck with what a single vendor offers unless you go with a Mac.
You're more constrained with Windows than a Freenix (i.e. NetBSD or one of the Linux-based OS) but you're even MORE constrained with a Mac.
Get a fanless Xterminal and put your main CPU in a separate room.
I remember when VA Linux started running small display ads in Linux Journal. Back when any color display ad at all that had the word 'Linux' in it was exciting.
Oh, whatever...
True, but I thought we were all supposed to switch to a GNU operating system.
Well, obviously, you have your secretary print out the ASCII representation of the attachment. She puts it the printed sheets in an interoffice envelope and it goes to the typing pool, where it's retyped and then re-entered on punched cards by the keypunch operator. The card deck goes to the computer operator who loads the deck and runs the job to convert it and print it out. In the end, a greenbar representation of whatever the attachment in question was is brought to your office by clerks using a skid jack to move the pallet.
...'the server ate my email' to any queries about critical email messages.
Like the Clinton team did.
I just run fvwm2. And ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc is open right over there in emacs.
If I wanted bloat I would run Windows.
The Tab Window Manager often suffices, too. The question is: what are you wanting to use your system for? Answer that before you start frontloading a lot of croft between you and the machine.
There are some interesting 'privledge escalation' things that can happen on machines 'owned' by the user on a big network, though.
The one I experienced firsthand was a Windows NT machine that was my desktop that I ('naturally') had full admin access to. This was a machine on a large corporate network that was very diverse (there were Solaris, OS/2 Warp, Netware, and Windows NT servers on the network). I discovered, quite by accident actually, that if I ran the POSIX Interix (now SFU) shell on my NT workstation (something the company had bought for me, and I had installed myself,) that I could create any account I wanted on my local machine, and it would allow me, using that account name, to access shares on the network, doing whatever I wanted to files my username 'owned'. I am talking about the network that a company that makes implantable medical devices kept their work on. I suspect the 'defect' had something to do with NIS and 'travelling profiles' in Solaris, and the security system not being equipped to deal with other Unix-like hosts on the network that weren't secured. Incidentally, I didn't discover the problem by 'poking around where I wasn't supposed to be,' I simply noticed I was suddenly able to do things to files I normally had access to without entering my UNIX password as required in the past. Something clicked in my head, so I created a local account on the NT box that matched an important person's UID on the Unix system... yep, I had all his permissions.
Delete test account. Never touch again. Too scared to mention it to anybody. It's been enough years now that I can even mention it in public. I hope they've secured things a bit better now, because these days there are unsecured Unixy systems all over the place.
they called the 686, 786 (P3), and 886 (P4) Pentium's also.
Oh, comeon. Acknowlede the PentiumPro, too, if you're going to mention '686'. It was a fine processor, and a brave step forward by Intel. (the PPro was the first Intel processor to be 'slightly less x86 compatible' than the Pentium before it- Intel's first step away from the awful old CISC architecture. People lambasted it rigorously because 'it won't run MS-DOS programs as fast.')
My PentiumPro machine here has four of 'em in it. With the 1M cache.
They haven't updated the slashcode in that long (they just gave Malda a copy of FrontPage for what amounts to the recent 'improvements.'), so why should the hardware need updating. This site runs on VA Linux hardware and they're proud of it.
but almost nobody is thinking about their processor or having to fiddle with it.
True, but there's a whole subculture of people who can think about nothing else.
And I used to work for a company that produces implantable cardiac devices. The external 'programmer' that talks to the implanted device ran Windows NT.
I think 'Cairo' is the one to be watching for.
Yes, but you have the 'fair use' right to use a handheld camcorder to shoot a video of the screen of your computer running Windows and playing the movie.
You can also quote excerpts from the film, or make limited use of still photos from it.
Yes, maybe 1 out of the 25 John Does wanted to share new Debian CD-images,
Or maybe they were sharing CD images of a new Operating System derived from the Debian source code, but without providing, in fact refusing to provide, the source code.
People should be careful about setting up legal precedents where anything-goes distribution is the norm.
Fair use 'rights' mean you can get away with it legally if you know how. It does NOT mean that a product vendor has to facilitate your copying activity.
Otherwise, where the heck is the little lever on all my hardback books that splits the pages out so I can scan them all, then slip the pages back in the binding?
Publishers can make it as hard as they wish for you to 'exercize your fair use rights.' The 'right' implied is that they can't come after you legally if you figure out a way to exercize said right in a legal fashion.
Get used to it.
like we all forgot the iMac one they pulled just three short years ago?
There's no way some of us will EVER forget anything as funny as the 'My iMac swallowed the disk' disaster. The egg was NOT on Sony's face about that one. (scurry down to the repair counter at the Apple Store, now, and flash some plastic! heh.)
Funny as hell when a piece of hardware is that poorly designed.
(above said in tone of voice of kid who just had a spoonfull of brussel sprouts plopped on his plate)
Why couldn't the settlement be a prepaid 3 month DSL account and two cakeboxes of blank DVD-R media?
There are people using NetBSD on the listed architectures. The fact that you aren't or can't is not anybody elses' problem.
For some reason I feel this is either a troll or a pissing match I am responding to.
On older VAX systems (and on my Mac SE/30) cross-compiling is essential. It's likely that a full kernel and userland build, plus a reasonable set of the packages, on an SE/30 would take long enough that the build wouldn't be done before the next release. The SE/30 is Processor-clock, IO, and Memory bound to be a small system in today's world. My MicroVAX 3100 is even smaller and slower in some regards.
Lots of people seem to have come to the belief that obscurity cannot provide anything positive at all.
Your comment points out another good aspect of the cross-platformness of NetBSD. You can run the same codebase on an obscure arch or on i386. It's the same codebase so the 'many eyes' aspect argued for by the 'security through obscurity baaaaad' jihad applies, but you can run that same code on an obscure arch, which renders your binaries a further layer impenetrable, even while running on the same codebase.
It cross-compiles and the binaries run on the VAX architecture. It is tested on VAX.
It cross-compiles and runs on my Macintosh SE/30. That doesn't mean that I want to build a full userland, or a full set of the packages I want to run, on the Macintosh SE/30 itself. That would be insanity. I built GNU Emacs once on the SE/30. It took a LONG time.
NetBSD supports the VAX architecture. Binaries are built and distributed, and run on VAX systems. Historically, Microsoft built the MS-DOS binaries on PDP-10 systems. It would have been INSANE for someone to complain that they weren't fully supporting the 8088 processor because it was more realistic to use a PDP-10 minicomputer to build the MS-DOS binaries. Similarly, NetBSD will run on some of the otherwise WinCE-bound Pocket PCs. Do people claim because the kernel isn't natively compiled on a Pocket PC that it isn't a supported architecture?
'Compile the kernel' is a worthy pursuit some of the time. Other times it's a bellygazing exercise.
For me, a part of the reason I find it valuable is that I am into all sorts of old classic UNIX hardware, and want a modern OS to run on all of it. I have the following systems and can/have run NetBSD on:
Intel Boxes (regular PIII boxes, a Quad Pentium Pro Server, 486 laptops, Pentium Laptops...)
My Macintosh SE/30 and my Quadra 650
My Beige G3 Macintosh.
My Sun Sparcstation IPC, IPX, Classic, 5, 10, 20.
My Sun UltraSparc 1, 2, and 5 systems.
My SGI 02 systems.
My IBM RS/6000 (prep architecture)
My PPC Mac clone (prep architecture)
My Microvax 3100
I can run NetBSD, built from the same source tree on ALL these systems. That isn't at all the same as saying that I can run odd distros of Linux on some of them. I have a fairly uptodate mirroring of the pkgsrc collection so I can locally build uptodate packages on all archs too.
The key is that it's all version controlled together in one CVS tree.
And no, I do not run all these archs 24/7 or regularly. The value of NetBSD is that I can use NetBSD as a common platform and use it to feel out and test a wide selection of hardware. It's often more appropriate to run the native Unix on many classic workstations. I can't, for example, get glorious dual 24-bit graphics in Xinerama mode running anything but Solaris on my SparcStation 10sx.
I have dithered and experimented with other kinda-acceptable freenix solutions for my main desktop system. I've tested recent releases of Slackware and OpenBSD on my Pentium III desktop system, and they just don't give me the power and flexibility that I have with NetBSD. So I've come back and just this past week brough up 3.0 (previously was running 2.1) and am typing this in Mozilla that I built from source on this box about a half a week ago.