Assuming that by "defendent" you mean "defendant", you are wrong. A defendant is right by default, no matter where you try the case -- civil or criminal court. It's always the duty of the accuser to prove the defendant wrong.
In Canadian court, and, I expect, in US courts as well, civil suits are measured on a 'balance of probabilities'. If you can convince the judge/jury that you were probably pirating software, then you lose. This would be easy to do. 'X-Company is a small, low-budget operation that cannot afford to spend any more money than it needs to. They have twelve computers running Windows 2000, yet can only show four licenses for them. Where are the licenses kept? Would any manager really buy a $500 operating system and then throw out the license?'
This is the internet remember? You can find anything if you know what to look for. GDP, average incomes, tax rates, tax brackets, population densities, urban plans, street maps, bandwidth prices...
But have you ever tried to find an ISP or cable company in a country you've never lived in? Keyword searches don't work too well, since most companies assume you know where they are and who they service.
By finding out from customers (such a diverse array of customers as this) you can find out that (maybe) Americans are paying more than Canadians and Germans, but maybe Germans are paying more than Canadians. Then you can compare that against economies and get a good idea of what's what.
Add on to that the fact that a lot of broadband providers don't even quote exact speeds that you're rate-limited to, let alone that you're likely to get.
There have been some sincerely stupid Ask Slashdot questions in the past, but this isn't really one of them.
Seriously, I see in ads all the time, Windows XP lets you e-mail movies to family, my Quickcam software does likewise, but does anyone actually -DO- this?
My stepfather tried to e-mail me a (not too large) PDF the other day, and it was bounced because it was too large. @Home (what was @Home) also had a transfer limit. I expect most ISPs do. Who on earth actually e-mails 350-meg files?
Try supporting a large java app, with folks who may have to install JRE's, open up security settings in their browser sometimes talking to an admin before being permitted to do so, who will find ENDLESS incompatabilities between various versions, and will discover that that java does NOT look "like what they are accustomed too" and you have yourself a gargantuan support, installation and education headache the like of which you probably have only had nightmares about.
If you need a JRE, include one with the game installer.
If you do not know how to change security settings in the browser, then use the regular version. If you have an 'admin', you should probably not be playing a game (at work? at school?).
If you include a version of the Sun JRE that your product works with, then your product will work.
I do not see how java can be 'what they are accustomed to' or not. 99.99% of games have a custom UI anyway. Java apps can be double-clicked on. What is the issue here?
You will be taking a performance hit going to java. Most of a game's speed depends on the video card. It is hard to max out a modern CPU. With a JIT compiler (or a native compiler, if you so desire), you can eliminate most of the speed hit.
C# appears to be an honest open standard created by a company that has historically proven that they have no interest in keeping interoperability any longer than it takes to lock in developers. They will undoubtedly come up with 'extensions' that will make life, if not impossible, then at least difficult for any non-MS users/developers.
I would go with Sun's stupidity over MS's malice any day of the week. At least I know Sun isn't -trying- to screw me over.
And a big 'screw you' to lynx, for pasting all that whitespace, and slashcode, for actually changing it all to non-breaking spaces for the first time I've ever seen.
--Dan
PS: I wasn't an admin. I wasn't getting paid, it wasn't my box, and they would have had to pay me a lot of money to fix that mess.
See above. If upgrading via RPM is too dependency-ridden, compile from
source. You're an admin. Be an admin, not somebody who insists on
having everything prepackaged in a format a deaf-blind rhesus monkey
with a drinking problem could use.
In fact, I did this, but considering that the last sysadmin had the box so fucked over (there was various crap - files, dirs, installation, sourcecode, etc. in/), I wasn't looking forward to assuming where everything was.
Turns out I had to anyway. *shrug*
As for the RPM version thing, as you can tell from the anecode, I didn't pay too much attention to the state of affairs of RPM, and I am wel aware that I don't know what version were out. Bump everything down by enough version numbers to make things make sense, and there you go.
It depends, really. The current 'stable' distro ships only with the latest 2.2.x kernel (which works great, really, for most users).
The 'testing' branch uses software that was in the 'unstable' branch for two weeks without having any bug reports (not including feature requests) filed against it. This is the best way to go if you're not a masochist.
The 'unstable' branch is the 'god only knows' branch. Going with unstable can mean that after a dist-upgrade, five core packages change in some unforseeable (by you) way, and 90% of your programs break (this has happened). Their philosophy is 'it's unstable. If you don't like it, don't use it, 'cause we don't know what'll happen any more than you do.'
In that sense, it's better than other distros, in giving you three options. You can stick with what's worked for a while, you can go with the cutting-edge but tested software, or you can go with bleeding edge and hope you can find a bandage before you pass out.
Well, the first thing people notice is the package format. Debian, way back in the olden days of yore, when men were real men, and so forth, decided to invent a format for binary packages on Linux. Wtihout getting into technical detail, they were doing very well and their ideas were very well thought out.
RedHat wanted to use said package format, but the Debian folks did not want to go with a half-baked product. (This paragraph is heresay)
RedHat invented its own package format, RPM, which was apparantly designed to suck. It does this very well. It is buggy, often incompatible, and goes through version changes quite often, which makes each distro incompatible with the last, and each new package incompatible with the previous distros.
(One time, I was attempting to install OpenSSH on a RH box I was adminning. to put on OpenSSH, I needed OpenSSL. To install OpenSSL, I needed to get RPM v.5 (4 was installed). To install RPM V.5, I needed to replace half my packages. Another time, I tried to install a package on a RH box, and it said that it required '/usr/bin/perl'. I did an 'ls/usr/bin/perl' and there it was. From that moment on, I have never touched an RPM.)
Debian's package format, combined with the apt suite of tools, allows it to download new (to you) or updated software from a server on the internet, from a LAN, from a CD-ROM, or from a local drive, over HTTP, FTP, or mounted filesystems (the CD-ROM voodoo is pretty neat). If you try to install a package (for example, the xchat IRC client) and you do not have the libraries needed to run it (libgdk, libgtk+1.2, etc.) it will automatically add these to the list of packages to be installed, and will then prompt you to continue.
All software packaged for Debian and included on the official Debian mirrors follows rather stricy guidelines about where things go - important binaries in/bin,/lib, etc., everything else in/usr/bin,/usr/lib, etc. Various files in/var, logs in/var/log, and so on. Everything has a place, and it all makes sense.
Also, it feels very modular, thanks to brilliantly executed install scripts and lots of testing time. For example, if you do not have logrotate installed, your logs are in/var/log and get rather large. As soon as you install logrotate, however, all your/var/log logs are automatically rotated, and after two rotations the logfiles are gzipped. It's all automatic. You don't have to compile logrotate and install it, you don't have to edit example scripts and put them in, and you don't have to edit cron scripts to make it work, and then wonder why your logs get deleted every 5 hours because you missed a semicolon. Debian is the distro for people who install Linux to use it, instead of admin it.
My last comment for the day, Debian is Free in every sense of the word. They do not charge you. They do not hold anything back from you. In fact, it was, until recently, rather impossible to buy anything from Debian, as Debian is not even an official organization. Lately, there have been boxed versions of Debian (of which I have everything but the CD), which included a cool-ass bumper sticker and a 360+ page special-edition book on learning Debian from O'Reilly Press. I don't know if they still sell these. I hope so.
If you wish to give money, you can give to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), if you wish to buy a CD you can buy them from someone online. If you wish to sell a CD, just make sure you're using the official ISOs (there is more information about this at Debian's cd image website) and go nuts.
Oh, one more thing - software. Last time I ran Debian, I had a pretty tricked-out list of software sources from around the internet, totalling something like 9600 packages. Yes, nine thousand, six hundred individual pieces of software. You want choice, you got it.
There are hundreds more reasons to choose Debian, and there are dozens of reasons not to use RedHat. I'm going to avoid RedHat bashing though, because I think Debian's merits speak well enough without hilighting RedHat's faults.
Visit their webpage, read the social contract, and the free software guidelines. It's very interesting, even from a philosophical point of view.
Because Debian is 'the distro your mother would use, if it were ten times easier'.
Libranet makes it ten times easier. Finally the best, most advanced, most convenient, best thought-out, most 'Free', and more widely accepted distro out there is usable by end users.
Sure, this post is incredibly subjective, but there are a LOT of people out there who agree - Debian is the epitome of what Linux should be. It's free, it's a community effort, making no money and giving everything they do away for Free.
Libranet is a chance to support that very effort, and indeed, an attempt (and, apparantly, success) at improving upon it.
This is why I think you should. There are likely other, more technical reasons, but I'm very emotionally invested in Debian's philosophy. Maybe someone else will tell you why it's objectively better, but not I, not today anyway.
I hope you donate to Debian too, or the Open Source Initiative at any rate. They do what you -actually- use, but no one gets paid for using it.
I just hope Libranet donates part of their profits to the OSI - it would only be fair. Debian makes the packages, the software, the formats, gets the servers, the maintainers, the bugfixes, the scripts and so on, and Libranet sells them. This is, of course, legal, but I think Libranet has a moral obligation to give some of their profits (even just a few bucks per copy sold) to make sure that this free ride stays free for everyone.
It will run easily on a P90 or P75. People use 486 machines to do what you want. A P133 will do this easily (unlses you get slashdotted).
The issue is ram. I don't know about 24 megs, but I know that on 16 megs of ram, dselect is slooooow (I left it for an hour and it still didn't even show me the package list), and don't even bother with X (which is probably what Libra's admin tools run under).
I would say try and scrounge up some more ram to at least get yourself to 32, to give yourself a nice margin. Apache takes up a fair chunk of mem even idling, and you don't want to spend hours just adding packages. Unpacking/installing from the command-line was almost as bad as dselect, because it was so heavy into swap, and my drive doesn't get on well with that kind of use.
You could use aptitude or console-apt, but I don't know how well those would've ran because I gave up and threw another 32 megs of ram in the box.
Anyway, if you learn the apt command-line tools, I can't forsee you having -too- much trouble, but pick up some extra ram if you can. You'll be glad you did.
I've actually considered this before (though my position may not so indicate). My philosophy is so:
Microsoft ripped of FreeBSD's TCP stack. What does this mean? It means that WIndows 2000 and Windows XP are better products today. They're not great, but still, MS probably spent more effort on porting the BSD TCP stack than they would have spent fixing the older one they had.
I understand the monopoly point of view, but my counterargument is that MS software is going to be omnipresent for a while, and then will collapse like Big Blue. At least in the meantime, the software no one gets fired for buying will have a good TCP stack.
When people start ignoring his email (message->block sender), maybe then he'll get the idea: being a jackass to other people might be funny for roughly two seconds, but no longer than that.
The irony here is that Outlook is doing that automatically, and that's what you're all complaining about.
If you're this uptight about everything, he doesn't WANT you to read his e-mail, and doesn't CARE if you killfile him, block sender, or insult his mother on alt.binaries.goatsex. He just doesn't care, and neither do I. If you don't want to listen to me, don't listen.
IE6 has great support for standards, but let's face it, a lot of stuff is entirely nonstandard, and MS promotes these 'added features' like nobody's business.
Prime example, VBScript. The only thing VBScript 'adds' is the ability for VB programmers to write code without learning anything requiring a modicum of skill. Oh, and a total lack of interoperability, I forgot about that.
MS supports features, yes, but that's not the issue. The issue is their 'embrace and extend' philosophy. Add features that only IE has, and then pages will break on non-IE, and then people will think IE is better becase (as you just said) it's more standards compliant.
No, it's not. That is the exact opposite of the problem. Thanks for playing though. Have some rice-a-roni.
I hate to be contrary (heh, yeah right), but I have Quicktime installed and it -doesn't- render PNGs for me. IE6's PNG support still sucks ass.
Sorry, try again next time.
--Dan
PS, if you're wondering how I'm certain... The quicktime plugin on my computer takes about three minutes to load (before it starts downloading content), and locks up my computer while doing it. I would know if it was QT.
Windows users aren't the ones excluded. Outlook-for-Windows users are the ones excluded. Mac users aren't excluded because their mail clients don't suck ass (even Outlook/OE on Mac is quite a rulesome mail client, but it's no Eudora).
If efficiency were a concern, email gateways wouldn't be limited to 7-bit character sets, so don't even try to get on that high horse.
They're not. All modern MTAs and MUAs support 8-bit quoted printable. 7-bit is for backwards compatibility for anyone whose network/server admins still live in 1982.
8-bit quoted printable works fine, and if your recipient ever gets garbled mail, then mail the administrator of the server that garbled it and tell them to upgrade, because they're holding the internet back.
If they want to read the mail, they should get some software that is standards compliant and can claim to properly read mail. If your mail client misinterprets properly formatted mail, then too bad, so sad. I have no qualms about setting the bar at a mark that MS is too lazy to reach, but could if they cared.
When iloveyou came out? When any of a dozen other e-mail viruses came out? When Microsoft not only produces buggy software, they refuse to allow you to disable HTML mail/scripting in their e-mail clients, even though these things have been happening for years?
Let's face it, he is generating perfectly valid e-mail, as is his right. It's your (read: the users') stupid, poorly-written e-mail client that is choking. He is not outputting garbled messages, he is outputting perfectly normal messages that people with crap mail user agents can't read.
I have seen elitism, and this is not it. This is setting a reasonable bar, and watching Microsoft's software screw it up because of their incompetance. If it were a broken message format, I may agree that it is elitism, but as it stands, I do not.
Nick seems to think he's being terribly clever, by putting this "begin " in his attribution, so that his every mail is deliberately disruptive to public mailing lists.
Why is it that everyone seems to think that anything on the internet is 'public'? His personal mailing list hosted at his personal domain on a private server is not public. It is his mailing list. He can do whatever the hell he wants. He can kick you off, he can insult your mother, he can require that everyone subscribed post from a TI-83 calculator with Minix running OSX under WINE, and if you don't like it, get lost.
As for your argument that this is like hacking someone's box or sending HTML mail - it's not. The bug is that Outlook assumes that ANY line that consists of 'begin[space][space][anything]' is a UUEncoded file. It does not check to see if [anything] is in the format '### filename', it does not check for an 'end' tag to the uuencoded document. This is not sending HTML mail (which is at least a standard), this is sending regular, normal, perfectly valid e-mail which Outlook express is too stupid to handle. This breaks no standards, as a lot of broken HTML mail does. It does not cause damage or lost time, as hacking someone's box does.
Also, if you read his post, he specifically says that this has nothing to do with open source, linux, or anything else. What he want is for people to use standards, that's all.
I mean, get real, I type in 8 characters at the start of a line on my mailing list, and your mail client garbles the whole rest of the e-mail automatically, and it's my fault?
If you don't want to read his mail, don't read his mail. If you do, get a MUA that doesn't choke on plaintext mail. Either way, quit whining.
He doesn't want to subjugate others' behavior, except by using software in the way he thinks is right. He wants to be ethical and respect people's rights, except where he feels he has the right to impose on others how they release technologies or extensions that rely in small part on his code.
The 'Free Software' community seems to believe that subjugating people under their ideas of how things should be is better than letting Microsoft subjugate people under their (MS's) ideas. While the FSF's ideas may be better (at least I can fix the code myself), it's still subjugation.
This is why I prefer the Artistic License or the BSD licenses. They don't create stipulations, or only create stipulations on the original code. Code released under these licenses will always be available for everyone regardless of their creed.
I agree with you here. My philosophy is, here is my code, if it helps you, use it. I have already written the code, and I don't code for profit (nor would I if given the chance), so why would I mind if other people use it? Hell, if you need MY code to help you, you have bigger problems than licenses anyway.
However, GCC is universal. It runs everthing, targets anything and costs nothing. Nothing in terms of both Beer and Speech.
And sucks on all platforms.
Which is fine, because that's what it's for. Intel's compiler does one thing great - x86 C/C++/Fortran compilation. GCC does many things in mediocrity - Java, C, C++, Fortran, Objective C, on PPC, Alpha, MIPS, PaRISC, x86, blah blah.
GCC is omnipresent and will continue to be so, but people who want the big power will pay the big bucks.
Was Loki compiling with GCC? If so, how much faster would their games have been with this compiler? Hell, Myth II was actually playable on my Cyrix 133 in software mode, if they could get this kind of optimization, it could prove that, in a lot of cases, Linux is great for things that people think it isn't so good for.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming that by "defendent" you mean "defendant", you are wrong. A defendant is right by default, no matter where you try the case -- civil or criminal court. It's always the duty of the accuser to prove the defendant wrong.
In Canadian court, and, I expect, in US courts as well, civil suits are measured on a 'balance of probabilities'. If you can convince the judge/jury that you were probably pirating software, then you lose. This would be easy to do. 'X-Company is a small, low-budget operation that cannot afford to spend any more money than it needs to. They have twelve computers running Windows 2000, yet can only show four licenses for them. Where are the licenses kept? Would any manager really buy a $500 operating system and then throw out the license?'
Bam, guilty.
--Dan
God, just shut up.
This is the internet remember? You can find anything if you know what to look for. GDP, average incomes, tax rates, tax brackets, population densities, urban plans, street maps, bandwidth prices...
But have you ever tried to find an ISP or cable company in a country you've never lived in? Keyword searches don't work too well, since most companies assume you know where they are and who they service.
By finding out from customers (such a diverse array of customers as this) you can find out that (maybe) Americans are paying more than Canadians and Germans, but maybe Germans are paying more than Canadians. Then you can compare that against economies and get a good idea of what's what.
Add on to that the fact that a lot of broadband providers don't even quote exact speeds that you're rate-limited to, let alone that you're likely to get.
There have been some sincerely stupid Ask Slashdot questions in the past, but this isn't really one of them.
--Dan
Check out DSLReports.com for a lot of ISPs and reviews thereof in multiple countries (US, Canada, UK, and one other afaik).
Also, I use Shaw, as does another slashdot user. I get what s/he gets.
Also, a friend of mine in Washington state gets wireless internet for free. Not legally, but...
--Dan
Seriously, I see in ads all the time, Windows XP lets you e-mail movies to family, my Quickcam software does likewise, but does anyone actually -DO- this?
My stepfather tried to e-mail me a (not too large) PDF the other day, and it was bounced because it was too large. @Home (what was @Home) also had a transfer limit. I expect most ISPs do. Who on earth actually e-mails 350-meg files?
--Dan
A few comments about your post...
Try supporting a large java app, with folks who may have to install JRE's, open up security settings in their browser sometimes talking to an admin before being permitted to do so, who will find ENDLESS incompatabilities between various versions, and will discover that that java does NOT look "like what they are accustomed too" and you have yourself a gargantuan support, installation and education headache the like of which you probably have only had nightmares about.
If you need a JRE, include one with the game installer.
If you do not know how to change security settings in the browser, then use the regular version. If you have an 'admin', you should probably not be playing a game (at work? at school?).
If you include a version of the Sun JRE that your product works with, then your product will work.
I do not see how java can be 'what they are accustomed to' or not. 99.99% of games have a custom UI anyway. Java apps can be double-clicked on. What is the issue here?
You will be taking a performance hit going to java. Most of a game's speed depends on the video card. It is hard to max out a modern CPU. With a JIT compiler (or a native compiler, if you so desire), you can eliminate most of the speed hit.
C# appears to be an honest open standard created by a company that has historically proven that they have no interest in keeping interoperability any longer than it takes to lock in developers. They will undoubtedly come up with 'extensions' that will make life, if not impossible, then at least difficult for any non-MS users/developers.
I would go with Sun's stupidity over MS's malice any day of the week. At least I know Sun isn't -trying- to screw me over.
--Dan
And a big 'screw you' to lynx, for pasting all that whitespace, and slashcode, for actually changing it all to non-breaking spaces for the first time I've ever seen.
--Dan
PS: I wasn't an admin. I wasn't getting paid, it wasn't my box, and they would have had to pay me a lot of money to fix that mess.
See above. If upgrading via RPM is too dependency-ridden, compile from
/), I wasn't looking forward to assuming where everything was.
source. You're an admin. Be an admin, not somebody who insists on
having everything prepackaged in a format a deaf-blind rhesus monkey
with a drinking problem could use.
In fact, I did this, but considering that the last sysadmin had the box so fucked over (there was various crap - files, dirs, installation, sourcecode, etc. in
Turns out I had to anyway. *shrug*
As for the RPM version thing, as you can tell from the anecode, I didn't pay too much attention to the state of affairs of RPM, and I am wel aware that I don't know what version were out. Bump everything down by enough version numbers to make things make sense, and there you go.
--Dan
It depends, really. The current 'stable' distro ships only with the latest 2.2.x kernel (which works great, really, for most users).
The 'testing' branch uses software that was in the 'unstable' branch for two weeks without having any bug reports (not including feature requests) filed against it. This is the best way to go if you're not a masochist.
The 'unstable' branch is the 'god only knows' branch. Going with unstable can mean that after a dist-upgrade, five core packages change in some unforseeable (by you) way, and 90% of your programs break (this has happened). Their philosophy is 'it's unstable. If you don't like it, don't use it, 'cause we don't know what'll happen any more than you do.'
In that sense, it's better than other distros, in giving you three options. You can stick with what's worked for a while, you can go with the cutting-edge but tested software, or you can go with bleeding edge and hope you can find a bandage before you pass out.
--Dan
Well, the first thing people notice is the package format. Debian, way back in the olden days of yore, when men were real men, and so forth, decided to invent a format for binary packages on Linux. Wtihout getting into technical detail, they were doing very well and their ideas were very well thought out.
/usr/bin/perl' and there it was. From that moment on, I have never touched an RPM.)
/bin, /lib, etc., everything else in /usr/bin, /usr/lib, etc. Various files in /var, logs in /var/log, and so on. Everything has a place, and it all makes sense.
/var/log and get rather large. As soon as you install logrotate, however, all your /var/log logs are automatically rotated, and after two rotations the logfiles are gzipped. It's all automatic. You don't have to compile logrotate and install it, you don't have to edit example scripts and put them in, and you don't have to edit cron scripts to make it work, and then wonder why your logs get deleted every 5 hours because you missed a semicolon. Debian is the distro for people who install Linux to use it, instead of admin it.
RedHat wanted to use said package format, but the Debian folks did not want to go with a half-baked product. (This paragraph is heresay)
RedHat invented its own package format, RPM, which was apparantly designed to suck. It does this very well. It is buggy, often incompatible, and goes through version changes quite often, which makes each distro incompatible with the last, and each new package incompatible with the previous distros.
(One time, I was attempting to install OpenSSH on a RH box I was adminning. to put on OpenSSH, I needed OpenSSL. To install OpenSSL, I needed to get RPM v.5 (4 was installed). To install RPM V.5, I needed to replace half my packages. Another time, I tried to install a package on a RH box, and it said that it required '/usr/bin/perl'. I did an 'ls
Debian's package format, combined with the apt suite of tools, allows it to download new (to you) or updated software from a server on the internet, from a LAN, from a CD-ROM, or from a local drive, over HTTP, FTP, or mounted filesystems (the CD-ROM voodoo is pretty neat). If you try to install a package (for example, the xchat IRC client) and you do not have the libraries needed to run it (libgdk, libgtk+1.2, etc.) it will automatically add these to the list of packages to be installed, and will then prompt you to continue.
All software packaged for Debian and included on the official Debian mirrors follows rather stricy guidelines about where things go - important binaries in
Also, it feels very modular, thanks to brilliantly executed install scripts and lots of testing time. For example, if you do not have logrotate installed, your logs are in
My last comment for the day, Debian is Free in every sense of the word. They do not charge you. They do not hold anything back from you. In fact, it was, until recently, rather impossible to buy anything from Debian, as Debian is not even an official organization. Lately, there have been boxed versions of Debian (of which I have everything but the CD), which included a cool-ass bumper sticker and a 360+ page special-edition book on learning Debian from O'Reilly Press. I don't know if they still sell these. I hope so.
If you wish to give money, you can give to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), if you wish to buy a CD you can buy them from someone online. If you wish to sell a CD, just make sure you're using the official ISOs (there is more information about this at Debian's cd image website) and go nuts.
Oh, one more thing - software. Last time I ran Debian, I had a pretty tricked-out list of software sources from around the internet, totalling something like 9600 packages. Yes, nine thousand, six hundred individual pieces of software. You want choice, you got it.
There are hundreds more reasons to choose Debian, and there are dozens of reasons not to use RedHat. I'm going to avoid RedHat bashing though, because I think Debian's merits speak well enough without hilighting RedHat's faults.
Visit their webpage, read the social contract, and the free software guidelines. It's very interesting, even from a philosophical point of view.
--Dan
Because Debian is 'the distro your mother would use, if it were ten times easier'.
Libranet makes it ten times easier. Finally the best, most advanced, most convenient, best thought-out, most 'Free', and more widely accepted distro out there is usable by end users.
Sure, this post is incredibly subjective, but there are a LOT of people out there who agree - Debian is the epitome of what Linux should be. It's free, it's a community effort, making no money and giving everything they do away for Free.
Libranet is a chance to support that very effort, and indeed, an attempt (and, apparantly, success) at improving upon it.
This is why I think you should. There are likely other, more technical reasons, but I'm very emotionally invested in Debian's philosophy. Maybe someone else will tell you why it's objectively better, but not I, not today anyway.
--Dan
I hope you donate to Debian too, or the Open Source Initiative at any rate. They do what you -actually- use, but no one gets paid for using it.
I just hope Libranet donates part of their profits to the OSI - it would only be fair. Debian makes the packages, the software, the formats, gets the servers, the maintainers, the bugfixes, the scripts and so on, and Libranet sells them. This is, of course, legal, but I think Libranet has a moral obligation to give some of their profits (even just a few bucks per copy sold) to make sure that this free ride stays free for everyone.
--Dan
It will run easily on a P90 or P75. People use 486 machines to do what you want. A P133 will do this easily (unlses you get slashdotted).
The issue is ram. I don't know about 24 megs, but I know that on 16 megs of ram, dselect is slooooow (I left it for an hour and it still didn't even show me the package list), and don't even bother with X (which is probably what Libra's admin tools run under).
I would say try and scrounge up some more ram to at least get yourself to 32, to give yourself a nice margin. Apache takes up a fair chunk of mem even idling, and you don't want to spend hours just adding packages. Unpacking/installing from the command-line was almost as bad as dselect, because it was so heavy into swap, and my drive doesn't get on well with that kind of use.
You could use aptitude or console-apt, but I don't know how well those would've ran because I gave up and threw another 32 megs of ram in the box.
Anyway, if you learn the apt command-line tools, I can't forsee you having -too- much trouble, but pick up some extra ram if you can. You'll be glad you did.
--Dan
I've actually considered this before (though my position may not so indicate). My philosophy is so:
Microsoft ripped of FreeBSD's TCP stack. What does this mean? It means that WIndows 2000 and Windows XP are better products today. They're not great, but still, MS probably spent more effort on porting the BSD TCP stack than they would have spent fixing the older one they had.
I understand the monopoly point of view, but my counterargument is that MS software is going to be omnipresent for a while, and then will collapse like Big Blue. At least in the meantime, the software no one gets fired for buying will have a good TCP stack.
--Dan
When people start ignoring his email (message->block sender), maybe then he'll get the idea: being a jackass to other people might be funny for roughly two seconds, but no longer than that.
The irony here is that Outlook is doing that automatically, and that's what you're all complaining about.
If you're this uptight about everything, he doesn't WANT you to read his e-mail, and doesn't CARE if you killfile him, block sender, or insult his mother on alt.binaries.goatsex. He just doesn't care, and neither do I. If you don't want to listen to me, don't listen.
Seriously, stop being so uptight.
--Dan
IE6 has great support for standards, but let's face it, a lot of stuff is entirely nonstandard, and MS promotes these 'added features' like nobody's business.
Prime example, VBScript. The only thing VBScript 'adds' is the ability for VB programmers to write code without learning anything requiring a modicum of skill. Oh, and a total lack of interoperability, I forgot about that.
MS supports features, yes, but that's not the issue. The issue is their 'embrace and extend' philosophy. Add features that only IE has, and then pages will break on non-IE, and then people will think IE is better becase (as you just said) it's more standards compliant.
No, it's not. That is the exact opposite of the problem. Thanks for playing though. Have some rice-a-roni.
--Dan
I hate to be contrary (heh, yeah right), but I have Quicktime installed and it -doesn't- render PNGs for me. IE6's PNG support still sucks ass.
Sorry, try again next time.
--Dan
PS, if you're wondering how I'm certain... The quicktime plugin on my computer takes about three minutes to load (before it starts downloading content), and locks up my computer while doing it. I would know if it was QT.
Windows users aren't the ones excluded. Outlook-for-Windows users are the ones excluded. Mac users aren't excluded because their mail clients don't suck ass (even Outlook/OE on Mac is quite a rulesome mail client, but it's no Eudora).
--Dan
The trick is to have 'begin', two spaces, and then something else after the two spaces. Maybe this will work.
--Dan
If efficiency were a concern, email gateways wouldn't be limited to 7-bit character sets, so don't even try to get on that high horse.
They're not. All modern MTAs and MUAs support 8-bit quoted printable. 7-bit is for backwards compatibility for anyone whose network/server admins still live in 1982.
8-bit quoted printable works fine, and if your recipient ever gets garbled mail, then mail the administrator of the server that garbled it and tell them to upgrade, because they're holding the internet back.
--Dan
If they want to read the mail, they should get some software that is standards compliant and can claim to properly read mail. If your mail client misinterprets properly formatted mail, then too bad, so sad. I have no qualms about setting the bar at a mark that MS is too lazy to reach, but could if they cared.
--Dan
When did we become such elitists?
When iloveyou came out? When any of a dozen other e-mail viruses came out? When Microsoft not only produces buggy software, they refuse to allow you to disable HTML mail/scripting in their e-mail clients, even though these things have been happening for years?
Let's face it, he is generating perfectly valid e-mail, as is his right. It's your (read: the users') stupid, poorly-written e-mail client that is choking. He is not outputting garbled messages, he is outputting perfectly normal messages that people with crap mail user agents can't read.
I have seen elitism, and this is not it. This is setting a reasonable bar, and watching Microsoft's software screw it up because of their incompetance. If it were a broken message format, I may agree that it is elitism, but as it stands, I do not.
--Dan
Nick seems to think he's being terribly clever, by putting this "begin " in his attribution, so that his every mail is deliberately disruptive to public mailing lists.
Why is it that everyone seems to think that anything on the internet is 'public'? His personal mailing list hosted at his personal domain on a private server is not public. It is his mailing list. He can do whatever the hell he wants. He can kick you off, he can insult your mother, he can require that everyone subscribed post from a TI-83 calculator with Minix running OSX under WINE, and if you don't like it, get lost.
As for your argument that this is like hacking someone's box or sending HTML mail - it's not. The bug is that Outlook assumes that ANY line that consists of 'begin[space][space][anything]' is a UUEncoded file. It does not check to see if [anything] is in the format '### filename', it does not check for an 'end' tag to the uuencoded document. This is not sending HTML mail (which is at least a standard), this is sending regular, normal, perfectly valid e-mail which Outlook express is too stupid to handle. This breaks no standards, as a lot of broken HTML mail does. It does not cause damage or lost time, as hacking someone's box does.
Also, if you read his post, he specifically says that this has nothing to do with open source, linux, or anything else. What he want is for people to use standards, that's all.
I mean, get real, I type in 8 characters at the start of a line on my mailing list, and your mail client garbles the whole rest of the e-mail automatically, and it's my fault?
If you don't want to read his mail, don't read his mail. If you do, get a MUA that doesn't choke on plaintext mail. Either way, quit whining.
--Dan
He doesn't want to subjugate others' behavior, except by using software in the way he thinks is right. He wants to be ethical and respect people's rights, except where he feels he has the right to impose on others how they release technologies or extensions that rely in small part on his code.
The 'Free Software' community seems to believe that subjugating people under their ideas of how things should be is better than letting Microsoft subjugate people under their (MS's) ideas. While the FSF's ideas may be better (at least I can fix the code myself), it's still subjugation.
This is why I prefer the Artistic License or the BSD licenses. They don't create stipulations, or only create stipulations on the original code. Code released under these licenses will always be available for everyone regardless of their creed.
I agree with you here. My philosophy is, here is my code, if it helps you, use it. I have already written the code, and I don't code for profit (nor would I if given the chance), so why would I mind if other people use it? Hell, if you need MY code to help you, you have bigger problems than licenses anyway.
Freedom through freedom.
--Dan
However, GCC is universal. It runs everthing, targets anything and costs nothing. Nothing in terms of both Beer and Speech.
And sucks on all platforms.
Which is fine, because that's what it's for. Intel's compiler does one thing great - x86 C/C++/Fortran compilation. GCC does many things in mediocrity - Java, C, C++, Fortran, Objective C, on PPC, Alpha, MIPS, PaRISC, x86, blah blah.
GCC is omnipresent and will continue to be so, but people who want the big power will pay the big bucks.
Was Loki compiling with GCC? If so, how much faster would their games have been with this compiler? Hell, Myth II was actually playable on my Cyrix 133 in software mode, if they could get this kind of optimization, it could prove that, in a lot of cases, Linux is great for things that people think it isn't so good for.
--Dan
If you're going to get rid of your flag, send it to me. Dan Udey, General Delivery, Mission, BC, V2V 3L2
You can hate your country and prattle on about whatever you please, but don't waste a perfectly good wall hanging.
--Dan