Is it legal for me to decide who can post to my server? Doh! You have NO right to post on my server. If I decide to block all posts from @Home that's my choice. It's MY server. We already block all mail from Yahoo. All connections from @Home IPs. We use the RBL. Guess what if you have a problem with that I don't care. My system is secure.
I don't know to what you refer to in the collective 'we' in this sence. If you own the connection to your house and you own the machine then I probably would not want to connect to your pathetic excuse of a machine anyway. All the good stuff comes from good channels and that means companies and various corporations. Now unless you are the CEO and have direct authorative control about the content that is there then you can't really say that you can do whatever you want. Vague job descriptions do not do a job justitice in my eyes.
No. Any ISP can refuse to honor cancels, and certainly pathhost aliasing is an individual ISP's decision. In addition, the cancel messages are coded with a special "psuedo-site" in the Path: header which allows ISPs to accept normal cancels but not accept UDP cancels, or only accept certain UDP cancels (if there is more than one UDP under way simultaneously). A normal spam cancel can be aliased out by pathhost aliasing the "!cyberspam" psuedo-site. In addition, there are psuedo-sites for Make Money Fast chain letter cancels ("!mmfcancel"), UDPs ("!udpcancel"), and for each individual UDP that might be in progress (![sitename]udp"). An ISP can choose to honor or ignore any or all of these if it so desires.
So then give me an example of a news server which did or does not follow the UDP? Can you even think of or list one? It's just like the reason everyone uses windows because the next guy does it.
If I don't want to accept a telephone call from you into my house, that is legal. If everyone in the world decides to not answer when you call, that is legal.
How about the 911 system that's a call to. What about calling the government for something or maybe the IRS or someone you have a contract with, or perhaps your school or work to tell them that you are ill and cannot go in today? Those are calls too.
But, if we decide to call your # constantly, thus preventing you from using your phone we are causing harm to you.
How exactly does this prevent me from calling out? In my area of the world even if a bunch of people try to call me (not necessarily several million people) I will still be able to answer the phone and still be able to physically pick it up and then do whatever I want like make a call to Enzios pizza for a large sausage pizza with anchovies or something like that (assuming that his line isn't busy trying to call me at the same time).
Preventing you from using your own facilities is entirely different from us deciding to not listen to you on -our- facilities.
That effectively kills the whole point of doing something like networking. To play a networked game with someone you first need a network to connect it with. If I have a car and everyone everywhere won't sell me gas then that kills the function of the car preventing me from using my facilities at all (unless I own a refinery and get my own oil well).
What about a hospital. Suppose I get shot because I disagree with you about usenet accesses and interfaces. I stagger to the hospital is also in on the conspiracy to shun me so I sit (or more exactly lay face down) in the middle of the street and die. You see there are little things like laws that say that if in circumstanced like those that you were obligated to help because you could give care. Just because you don't like the look of the guy because he isn't a member of club usenet dosn't mean you have the right to do anything that prevent equal access. Would you say it would be descrimination to prevent black people from eating in the same places, drinking from the same water fountains, using the same facilities and serving in the army with you? Well people in the good ol' days did (read 1865-1964 with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) exactly that. What will eventually become a standard is that access that I pay for that is being given out to the public will happen no strings attatched and such. You say spam is a problem? Well then why don't we use all the new fangled technology and create better networks to handle trafic in a free society. I I have millions of dollars to spend I ceternally am not hurting for profit or resources.
Usenet is an open forum, not some closed, unattainable clique like you're making it out to be. (The administrative side of it, however. ..)
YES BINGO GIVE THE PERSON A CIGAR
You said it admining is where the bottleneck gets really bad. It dosn't matter that Pope John Paul III himself endorces the medium and that the people on usenet help poor needy people in Bangledish get food and pokemon cards to their doors it's still about a single person trying to play Ebeneezer Scrooge and trying to determine what goes on. Technically it should be like http and have many, many choices to choose from. For example one of the terminals has a version of MSIE 5 on it could someone tell me exactly how (considering a great deal of evil scooges may have disabled it in some way) access news from there. I think that would help out a great deal right from the start.
USENET is a cooperative entity. No site is under any obligation to carry any other site's traffic. No site carries all of USENET, Every site administrator decides independently what USENET traffic will be carried at that site. If an administrator decides not to carry certain traffic, he is answerable to his own users; he is not answerable to the originators of the traffic.
And therein lies the problem with what is actually going on in terms of access. If I want to e-mail someone I can simply type in the address and send it to anyone I want to. If I want to go to a web page I can as well. What I cannot easily do is arbitraly look at a particluar news group on any particlar site. There is not simple means yet in place that will allow me to just type in news://alt.jimmy.slashdot-comments.athome.discuss or something like that and then just find a central archive or a mirror that has *every* posting for an agreed period of time. I do *not* want my admin to be in control of what I see. Do you? Do you really want to have filtered content that isn't just decided by a filter but by say Alan Keys (Republican presidential candiate)? Would it get you a little upset if another server was run by Bill Gates himself and all linux groups were banned? When it hits too close to home then people get a little uncomfortable about it but when it dosn't affect us then it's all ok right? Really what they should have said in the draft for nntp (why did they create it anyway when we can have e-mail?) is that is was a inherently sensored medium and that it would never be totally open? Can you say that about the implimentation of SMTP? No you cannot they are way to do it but the archieture does not support it in the draft 100% like nntp does.
The UDP is a suggestion to individual site administrators, no more.
Just like the school bully who makes it a "suggestion" to give him your lunch money so that he can buy smokes or he'll brain you with a lead pipe.
It's entirely legal, and ethical as well. You have no innate right to post to USENET. Being a part of any community means that you agree to play by its rules. The Usenet Death Penalty is a last-resort measure and the disruption of innocent users is the entire point, as they may be able to get a non-responsive news admin to prevent further abuse of USENET by their users. Would you consider yourself screwed if your neighbors took legal action because your house had raw sewage spraying out into the street?
What you are implying is that anyone can at any time take away something that I pay for is that right? Why dosn't anyone have any right to post to usenet? Who says? I mean if I pay $$ to post and access usenet then that's what I am paying for. I would say that this would be descrimination same as if for some reason every time I tried to post to slashdot malda decided that no matter what nic I got every post came from a person named Xasf Qertyuiop (obviously not my real name) who lives at 12345 Elf Terrace Circle Anytown, USA was not allowed to post to slashdot. That is descrimination plain and simple. I challenge the concept that just because I am on the internet that I have to follow someone's little "code of ethics" this is not to say that I may think some of them are good and maybe necessary but if I don't want to follow them then I am still legally entitled to use the net in all it's forms. I guarantee that the first person who actually bans me from a public service that I am legall entitled to will get a lawsuit and I will fight the hell out of them in court until they "see the light" and come to their senses.
My neighbors have no legal right to mess with something that is not inherently their own (the public unownable street). They may not like it but that is a problem that the particular city/county/state combo has in mind and maybe even the feds but not the irritating 80 year old bitty who dosn't like me because she is a shut in and I actually have a happy life. For a reference to these type of people things like Dennis the Menace and almost any show where you see cynnical and irritating old people trying to break the real bread winners of the world.
Are there no web browsers or terminals in your world? You can access USENET from anything capable of browsing the web, as well as the built in news clients in programs like Opera or Netscape, to say nothing of the numerous stand-alone programs that could be run on dedicated news-stations.
Ahh maybe you should talk to the paranoid people who run the terminals where I live and tell them that I am sure they wouldn't even care. I have never even heard of a stand alone news station in my life (not that it isn't possible). Why haven't more of the freebie e-mail people operate more of a news access system? What are they affraid of? If I have an operating budget like yahoo.com or hotmail.com of over $20,000,000 a year to do what I please with my technology what is the hold up?
If I am an ISP sysadmin I do ***NOT*** own the network or even the machine that the network is attatched to. I do not even own a single byte of data that is transfered in any way shape or form. I am sorry to be this blunt but if I for example hire a person to squish grapes to make wine the grape masher does not have a word of say at all in the process of making the wine. All he has to do is smash grapes and not complain. All that he does is carry out orders from others using a set of fuzzy logic and AI that machines cannot perfect in that particular case.
What about deja.com? That's pretty much public access. Of course, you will miss out on a few posts with X-NoArchive set, but that's not usually too critical. (Ok, so you wouldn't get much from the monistary, but that's your loss . ..).
I know you cannot get every group you want there anyway. What if I want to get say a binary group or two? What about having the ability to go to exactly the group that I want. How long do they keep articles for? What exactly does X-NoArchive do? Why dosn't deja carry them? My loss? I hardly see how I should be at fault because a sysadmin wanted to keep his little discussions under his control and not allow anyone by his close friends or others who have a spare T-1 to use get a newsfeed. Is there any way to actually do an end run around the news servers and simply create my own private slow nntp server? Everyone says that hd space is so cheap now adays so why can't I get a standard 56k modem and then get all the data from some reliable server (I have no idea which one is the most reliable)? Not to nay say too much but with moves like these and closing most mail to news gateways and such I think that they are pretty damn rude. I mean take the linux-kernel mailing list. I would love to have digests of my favorite newsgroups mailed to me every let's say day or so. The news server could just in fact mail me the digest hourly or so if it was too much to do it daily. With all this magical bandwith I see no reason that someone can't do something to see this through to reality.
More accurately, you would be screwed by @home. They've been warned many times. You can't have your cake and eat it too, people. If you want to stop spam, these are the types of actions that will motivate ISPs to take action.
And tell me what kind of legal basis does anyone have for doing something like this? I mean I am sure that high ideals are nice and various forms of protest are also ok but also extremists cannot be tollerated. Basically what you people are doing is akin to being annoyed that you neighbor paints his house a certain color or decided to have a barbecue or something with some of his/her friends and they drank beer (which you may not like). Then you decide to throw a hand grenade into the house to "teach em'" I mean this move was quasi-legal at best and you know it.
Well I think that this was a rather bold and audacious move by people. Concidentally is this legal? What happens if for example I am a researcher and want to send a usenet posting to someone and I use the @home service what then? Guess I'm screwed by the "wonderful" community.
My opinion of usenet is general is bad because there are no (hint here) easy to access methods for people using what I would term "public access terminals" where you cannot easily change things and add programs and such. Telnet usually could work but would generally suck. Sorry if I was a little vague about the matter in the last article.
Why don't you try flipping the bill for the extra resources it takes to process the spam? Spam costs ISP's money. ISPs are supposed to have a direct connection to a network. This theoretically should not really cost all that much. All of the various businesses and such don't have metered access and are most likely operating on a monthly fee of some sort at the worst.
In general I think usenet is just elitist in general. Anyone who wants to post must obtain a client. You must have access to a particular server. Even then it is not 100% likely that you will be able to get that group that you want. Then it is also possible to have a varring range of messages inside each group. They mentioned in the article that @home people are operating "open proxies" I assume that this means that they are allowing public access from the outside world. Well my friend what is wrong with that? You know I have had accounts at the infameous hotmail and even then I got spam in small quantities. What people need to do is to simply delete the spam and just look at what's there. How hard is it to just delete it? Is it's presence that bad that it actually causes people to react like it was a cockroach or maybe a demon? I think if the mythical Lucifer were to appear in front of one of these people they would most likely get more irritated or enraged at the spam than their most hated enemy (for Christians).
This project does, and continues to be everything we need. With out these programmers *nix would be sitting in the dust of Microsoft. Version 4.0 is the most anticipated version yet; I know I'm salavating over the next release!
Everything? Seriously just having an X server is far from having everything. Unless the apps work on that server then it's pretty much useless. Are they actively attempting to optimize? Are they trying to get better working code for even low end cards? Personally I don't need a server for a Voodoo 3 6000 and I doubt most reasonable people do as well. Now argue with me all you want about supporting all the really "cool" hardware that "everybody" has but I just think that priorities should go to something a little more deserving.
Oooh, that is a good question. I don't actually know any of the projects budget. I would assume that it would be one of the larger projects that would have a chance of using it. Apache, FreeBSD, XFree86... but that is a shot in the dark.
The projects that you name are all basically evoloved projects that are not really in need of our help. What I would love to look is taking this money and giving it to people who are real under dogs and having them develop their app from some little thing that maybe was on freshmeat or their own personal site to something that would be in the next Red Hat or Debian. That would be totally amazing. I would vote for something that departs from the standard fare of network apps or graphical stuff. Maybe something like a new compiler or perhaps something like a good IDE or even a class of so called "boring" apps that would help business professionals.
I'm actually going to agree with you on this one: Somewhere along the line this "community" became more about competition than it did about sharing. And isn't that what it's supposed to be? Sharing code and working together together to make a better system?
I think that so called "communities" are always about sharing but that eventually we swing back the other way. Take a look a history and see for your self. The decade of the 1960's can be interpreted as being a very sharing time in terms of you thought. The 70's was a time where people became less interested in various things due to apathy and having their own ecconomic problems and then we see the 1980's where people abandoned the concept of sharing and went full bull into the capitalistic concept. This is what eventually evolves when we have an open community.
Slashdot exemplifies this competitive spirit. People post just to get more Karma (there's even a HowTo out there) and almost every thread turns into a pissing contest. It's silly, and the Anti-Microsoft attitude just makes it worse. People here hate Microsoft and literally act like this whole Open Source Movement is just about beating MS. And if they're not talking about beating NT in server sales, they're starting a flame-war about KDE/Gnome. It blows my mind that there could ever be competition in an open source community... I think some people are just plain missing the point.
Hmm.. well I think that there are some interesting points. But what we see is what most irritates people. Fundamentally people hate microsoft? Why well because for a large number of vocal people they have been shafted by MS and really think of them of as the devil. Now I ask you is this totally without merit? I even had a professor just I think 2 days ago in a university setting make the statement that no one can really get away with releasing broken low quality software except MS. I am sure that some if not most of the people who complain about MS have had to use or learn something about it against their will. You know what? I have been basically forced to use NT in various lab machines and 95 on others. The only place I actually get to use linux have been 2 places (well soon 3). One was in a HS environment a couple of years ago and the other is at home. I have never actually been able to use a really nice linux setup very easily. This dosn't make me bitter just appreciative about what I actually have.
Now you talk about the pissing contest. I cannot stress enough about the fact that many people do consider this a pissing contest. Signal 11 is one of these folks. He wanted the glory and I am not saying that I don't want glory in some form but I have even espoused various points of view that are in sharp contrast to what people want. Does listing your slashdot karma on your resume actually help you? No does it give you a warm fuzzy? yes. Actually I think there is competition for a vision in terms of what people have been exposed to. Suppose that we officially said that the dominate editor for linux distros. would be Xemacs? Now what do you think the reaction would be from most folks around here? Probablly what would happen would be anarchy in some way. There are some people who linux vi/vim/ed/ or cat >prog.c and then terminate with a ^D (I actually did this in desperation once).
Maybe some people are actually missing the point in terms of what they should do. To be fair I have not the current skills to actually write a "good" piece of GPL software unless you want a bunch of crappy specialized obfuciated C++ programs or perhaps Pascal stuff (basically not written anymore).
This whole place is getting out of hand...
Maybe so if someone actually wrote a Howto. Tell me where is this little thing I really am flabergasted that someone actually wrote one.
We all know these kind and very generous folks as the people who brought us the wonderful Debian GNU/Linux distribution. They have done quite well at creating a good distribution and are basically the only distribution that allows for 100% free distributions of Linux and they are also working on the GNU/Hurd as well. Because of all their functionality and ability I think we should nominate them.
Don't believe me? Well consider this. I got an old CD set with linux that had a bunch of old distributions on it one of them was an early beta copy of Debian (0.98 or 0.99 or something like that). Guess what? The install was pretty cool and very nice and the entire thing was probably more functional than half of the distributions that were around at the time and consequently more useful as well. We can't say that about many.
Why the hatred for LinuxOne? Because they're doing exactly what the GPL allows and reselling a version of Linux that they themselves haven't changed at all? They're really not that evil, I don't think. Just a couple guys seeing dollar signs... Give them a chance.
I think a great deal of people think that if you offer the exact same thing as someone else you are perhaps cheating by using their product. If I can get a distribution from the original company and someone else sells it then why?
Maybe everyone would have a different outlook if they were offering shares back to the community? Probably....
I for one really don't buy stock at the present time at all. Is there a way that you can say spend about 10 bucks on the stock market by yourself without getting one of those fat cat brockers to do it for you?
Oh, and maybe possibly first post.
As usual all the people who have no lives got that first anyway.
Well all the other games they ported to Linux were directX based (with the possible exception of Eric's Ultimate Solitaire) The interface for all their other ports was the same as the windows version. As for the maps, I don't know, but I don't see why not. After all, it will (probably) be the same code reading and writing the map files.
Why would anyone and I mean anyone actually care about a stupid solitaire game? Let alone for a software company to actually port that game from one OS to another?
I'd like to put in the obligatory plug for AbiWord, and Gnumeric, which are the most polished parts of the GNOME Office replacement. Remember, unlike their KDE counterparts, the GNOME tools compile, build and work with the GNOME libraries you already have for your everyday GNOME desktop.
Well I actually had experience unless it has changes significant by lightyears of progress Abiword does not have even a fraction of the features of say Word or Wordperfect has in it. A great deal of the features were simply not implimented (the menus said that if you want to add such and such a feature here is where to add it). It's not a fair comparison because it not finished afterall.
Operating systems and applications for them are two entirely different matter. Sure, Linux, AmigaOS and some other operating systems can run on pretty low-power hardware but would you really want to tell the software developers that they aren't allowed make anything else but programs that work on 386 or 68000?
I have really seen some pretty amazing stuff on low end machines like these. All you have to do is optimize, optimize, optimize, and do some work arounds and there you are.
If a certain program really can do its job on a low-power machine, it's fine and it shouldn't be 'enchanted' to need more than it really needs. But should we forbid programs like Quake3 (complex realtime 3d needs modern hardware) or applications for large scientific visualization (need pretty lot of memory and preferably CPU too) if they do not work on older machines? IMO not.
Ever seen a program called gtop? This is a GNOME version of top and it just plain is a memory hog on systems or at very least significantly contributes to generally bad system load. An ncurses program run from the console is also safer. Linux dosn't crash or hand except if you use the graphical interfaces. Then you can have windows resource type problems in terms of the mouse barely being able to move or not at all and no commands can be send to the X server at all.
About the need to keep programs within certain perameters. Is it really necessary to increase graphics by 2% and increase system resoures like ram by 250% and processor requirements by 600% and hd space by 300% come on even the most avid person would not see this as an acceptable trade off. And that's basically all we are really seeing after all even with 20/20 vision you do not see all that much difference.
AFAIK, just about any Linux system should run these. Civ CTP works fine on both my dual-400 celeron system and my friend's PII (166? | 266?) (although you can tell a noticable difference;) ). It also runs through X on any other UNIX. Just for fun I tried to run it off his computer, over his T1, through the school network and onto a Sun Ultra 5. The result was slow as molasses, with 16 colors and a nasty green tinge, but it worked.
So your telling me that a 386/16MHz with 2Mb or ram will run it whoo! hoo! Now that's progress.
Good god man, what piece of shit you trying to run it on? A '486? Quake 3 was quite play able on my old Cyrix 200 system with a Voodoo 3000 graphics card. I just spent $20 on for a 300 mhz upgrade and the system rocks.
Why does anyone really need to upgrade anything at all? Why is it constantly necessary to upgrade in a microsoft like fashion when linux was meant to allow crappy machines to shine. Frankly I find this lack of vision..disturbing.
Who cares? If they run anything like linux q3 does on my machine they'll be crap..
Don't you know? Every game is supposed to run crappy. It's just the companies forcing you to get newer stuff and run it. Never mind about the fact that you may not want to actually get a new computer at all. I have found that out the hard way many times. Hell it dosn't matter that your are poor or that you can't afford one to the level that the game needs at all; it about plain and simple profit.
Plus isn't Q3 just some network game anyway? I will never play a game where the main focus is on playing over a network that I still do not have access to or a machine that will run said software.
But eventually you will be able to. When their little computers hit that little thing like the speed of light and they cannot increase processor speed then they will have to stop creating bloatware at all. And don't say that quantum computing will even cover this. The real world is not star trek and is not ever going to even come close.
While haveing games in linux is a Good Thing, and it has a benifit for the community, it really doesn't help position linux for use as a buisiness client. What linux really needs is a commercial quality, stable(sorry wordperfect), and compatible office suite. Microsoft is not a likeley cantidate for porting office over to linux, but what about lotus, they have already released domino server, how about a complete office suite, notes client, and web browser that work and look good together. This is what linux needs to compete against the likes of NT. But, hey if I can use my system to play Simcity 3k instead of working, I'm all for it.
Wow just what I need. At the end of the day when I come home from work and everything is fine I just get back to work right? Nope. Anyone who actually enjoys working on shall we say unchallenging office apps instead of expanding his/her mind is a complete fool. I don't need an "office suite" at home. I would never need one and would not buy one. I think there are other alternatives to microsoft that also work for the office suite thing if linux dosn't have it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it legal for me to decide who can post to my server? Doh! You have NO right to post on my server. If I decide to block all posts from @Home that's my choice. It's MY server.
We already block all mail from Yahoo. All connections from @Home IPs. We use the RBL. Guess what if you have a problem with that I don't care. My system is secure.
I don't know to what you refer to in the collective 'we' in this sence. If you own the connection to your house and you own the machine then I probably would not want to connect to your pathetic excuse of a machine anyway. All the good stuff comes from good channels and that means companies and various corporations. Now unless you are the CEO and have direct authorative control about the content that is there then you can't really say that you can do whatever you want. Vague job descriptions do not do a job justitice in my eyes.
No. Any ISP can refuse to honor cancels, and certainly pathhost aliasing is an individual ISP's decision. In addition, the cancel messages are coded with a special "psuedo-site" in
the Path: header which allows ISPs to accept normal cancels but not accept UDP cancels, or only accept certain UDP cancels (if there is more than one UDP under way
simultaneously). A normal spam cancel can be aliased out by pathhost aliasing the "!cyberspam" psuedo-site. In addition, there are psuedo-sites for Make Money Fast chain letter
cancels ("!mmfcancel"), UDPs ("!udpcancel"), and for each individual UDP that might be in progress (![sitename]udp"). An ISP can choose to honor or ignore any or all of these if it
so desires.
So then give me an example of a news server which did or does not follow the UDP? Can you even think of or list one? It's just like the reason everyone uses windows because the next guy does it.
If I don't want to accept a telephone call from you into my house, that is legal. If everyone in the world decides to not answer when you call, that is legal.
How about the 911 system that's a call to. What about calling the government for something or maybe the IRS or someone you have a contract with, or perhaps your school or work to tell them that you are ill and cannot go in today? Those are calls too.
But, if we decide to call your # constantly, thus preventing you from using your phone we are causing harm to you.
How exactly does this prevent me from calling out? In my area of the world even if a bunch of people try to call me (not necessarily several million people) I will still be able to answer the phone and still be able to physically pick it up and then do whatever I want like make a call to Enzios pizza for a large sausage pizza with anchovies or something like that (assuming that his line isn't busy trying to call me at the same time).
Preventing you from using your own facilities is entirely different from us deciding to not listen to you on -our- facilities.
That effectively kills the whole point of doing something like networking. To play a networked game with someone you first need a network to connect it with. If I have a car and everyone everywhere won't sell me gas then that kills the function of the car preventing me from using my facilities at all (unless I own a refinery and get my own oil well).
What about a hospital. Suppose I get shot because I disagree with you about usenet accesses and interfaces. I stagger to the hospital is also in on the conspiracy to shun me so I sit (or more exactly lay face down) in the middle of the street and die. You see there are little things like laws that say that if in circumstanced like those that you were obligated to help because you could give care. Just because you don't like the look of the guy because he isn't a member of club usenet dosn't mean you have the right to do anything that prevent equal access. Would you say it would be descrimination to prevent black people from eating in the same places, drinking from the same water fountains, using the same facilities and serving in the army with you? Well people in the good ol' days did (read 1865-1964 with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) exactly that. What will eventually become a standard is that access that I pay for that is being given out to the public will happen no strings attatched and such. You say spam is a problem? Well then why don't we use all the new fangled technology and create better networks to handle trafic in a free society. I I have millions of dollars to spend I ceternally am not hurting for profit or resources.
Usenet is an open forum, not some closed, unattainable clique like you're making it out to be. (The administrative side of it, however. . .)
YES BINGO GIVE THE PERSON A CIGAR
You said it admining is where the bottleneck gets really bad. It dosn't matter that Pope John Paul III himself endorces the medium and that the people on usenet help poor needy people in Bangledish get food and pokemon cards to their doors it's still about a single person trying to play Ebeneezer Scrooge and trying to determine what goes on. Technically it should be like http and have many, many choices to choose from. For example one of the terminals has a version of MSIE 5 on it could someone tell me exactly how (considering a great deal of evil scooges may have disabled it in some way) access news from there. I think that would help out a great deal right from the start.
USENET is a cooperative entity. No site is under any obligation to carry any other site's traffic. No site carries all of USENET, Every site administrator decides independently what
USENET traffic will be carried at that site. If an administrator decides not to carry certain traffic, he is answerable to his own users; he is not answerable to the originators of the
traffic.
And therein lies the problem with what is actually going on in terms of access. If I want to e-mail someone I can simply type in the address and send it to anyone I want to. If I want to go to a web page I can as well. What I cannot easily do is arbitraly look at a particluar news group on any particlar site. There is not simple means yet in place that will allow me to just type in news://alt.jimmy.slashdot-comments.athome.discuss or something like that and then just find a central archive or a mirror that has *every* posting for an agreed period of time. I do *not* want my admin to be in control of what I see. Do you? Do you really want to have filtered content that isn't just decided by a filter but by say Alan Keys (Republican presidential candiate)? Would it get you a little upset if another server was run by Bill Gates himself and all linux groups were banned? When it hits too close to home then people get a little uncomfortable about it but when it dosn't affect us then it's all ok right? Really what they should have said in the draft for nntp (why did they create it anyway when we can have e-mail?) is that is was a inherently sensored medium and that it would never be totally open? Can you say that about the implimentation of SMTP? No you cannot they are way to do it but the archieture does not support it in the draft 100% like nntp does.
The UDP is a suggestion to individual site administrators, no more.
Just like the school bully who makes it a "suggestion" to give him your lunch money so that he can buy smokes or he'll brain you with a lead pipe.
It's entirely legal, and ethical as well. You have no innate right to post to USENET. Being a part of any community means that you agree to play by its rules. The Usenet Death
Penalty is a last-resort measure and the disruption of innocent users is the entire point, as they may be able to get a non-responsive news admin to prevent further abuse of USENET
by their users. Would you consider yourself screwed if your neighbors took legal action because your house had raw sewage spraying out into the street?
What you are implying is that anyone can at any time take away something that I pay for is that right? Why dosn't anyone have any right to post to usenet? Who says? I mean if I pay $$ to post and access usenet then that's what I am paying for. I would say that this would be descrimination same as if for some reason every time I tried to post to slashdot malda decided that no matter what nic I got every post came from a person named Xasf Qertyuiop (obviously not my real name) who lives at 12345 Elf Terrace Circle Anytown, USA was not allowed to post to slashdot. That is descrimination plain and simple. I challenge the concept that just because I am on the internet that I have to follow someone's little "code of ethics" this is not to say that I may think some of them are good and maybe necessary but if I don't want to follow them then I am still legally entitled to use the net in all it's forms. I guarantee that the first person who actually bans me from a public service that I am legall entitled to will get a lawsuit and I will fight the hell out of them in court until they "see the light" and come to their senses.
My neighbors have no legal right to mess with something that is not inherently their own (the public unownable street). They may not like it but that is a problem that the particular city/county/state combo has in mind and maybe even the feds but not the irritating 80 year old bitty who dosn't like me because she is a shut in and I actually have a happy life. For a reference to these type of people things like Dennis the Menace and almost any show where you see cynnical and irritating old people trying to break the real bread winners of the world.
Are there no web browsers or terminals in your world? You can access USENET from anything capable of browsing the web, as well as the built in news clients in programs like
Opera or Netscape, to say nothing of the numerous stand-alone programs that could be run on dedicated news-stations.
Ahh maybe you should talk to the paranoid people who run the terminals where I live and tell them that I am sure they wouldn't even care. I have never even heard of a stand alone news station in my life (not that it isn't possible). Why haven't more of the freebie e-mail people operate more of a news access system? What are they affraid of? If I have an operating budget like yahoo.com or hotmail.com of over $20,000,000 a year to do what I please with my technology what is the hold up?
If I am an ISP sysadmin I do ***NOT*** own the network or even the machine that the network is attatched to. I do not even own a single byte of data that is transfered in any way shape or form. I am sorry to be this blunt but if I for example hire a person to squish grapes to make wine the grape masher does not have a word of say at all in the process of making the wine. All he has to do is smash grapes and not complain. All that he does is carry out orders from others using a set of fuzzy logic and AI that machines cannot perfect in that particular case.
What about deja.com? That's pretty much public access. Of course, you will miss out on a few posts with X-NoArchive set, but that's not usually too critical. (Ok, so you .).
wouldn't get much from the monistary, but that's your loss . .
I know you cannot get every group you want there anyway. What if I want to get say a binary group or two? What about having the ability to go to exactly the group that I want. How long do they keep articles for? What exactly does X-NoArchive do? Why dosn't deja carry them? My loss? I hardly see how I should be at fault because a sysadmin wanted to keep his little discussions under his control and not allow anyone by his close friends or others who have a spare T-1 to use get a newsfeed. Is there any way to actually do an end run around the news servers and simply create my own private slow nntp server? Everyone says that hd space is so cheap now adays so why can't I get a standard 56k modem and then get all the data from some reliable server (I have no idea which one is the most reliable)? Not to nay say too much but with moves like these and closing most mail to news gateways and such I think that they are pretty damn rude. I mean take the linux-kernel mailing list. I would love to have digests of my favorite newsgroups mailed to me every let's say day or so. The news server could just in fact mail me the digest hourly or so if it was too much to do it daily. With all this magical bandwith I see no reason that someone can't do something to see this through to reality.
More accurately, you would be screwed by @home. They've been warned many times. You can't have your cake and eat it too, people. If you want to stop spam, these are the types
of actions that will motivate ISPs to take action.
And tell me what kind of legal basis does anyone have for doing something like this? I mean I am sure that high ideals are nice and various forms of protest are also ok but also extremists cannot be tollerated. Basically what you people are doing is akin to being annoyed that you neighbor paints his house a certain color or decided to have a barbecue or something with some of his/her friends and they drank beer (which you may not like). Then you decide to throw a hand grenade into the house to "teach em'" I mean this move was quasi-legal at best and you know it.
Well I think that this was a rather bold and audacious move by people. Concidentally is this legal? What happens if for example I am a researcher and want to send a usenet posting to someone and I use the @home service what then? Guess I'm screwed by the "wonderful" community.
My opinion of usenet is general is bad because there are no (hint here) easy to access methods for people using what I would term "public access terminals" where you cannot easily change things and add programs and such. Telnet usually could work but would generally suck. Sorry if I was a little vague about the matter in the last article.
Why don't you try flipping the bill for the extra resources it takes to process the spam? Spam costs ISP's money. ISPs are supposed to have a direct connection to a network. This theoretically should not really cost all that much. All of the various businesses and such don't have metered access and are most likely operating on a monthly fee of some sort at the worst.
In general I think usenet is just elitist in general. Anyone who wants to post must obtain a client. You must have access to a particular server. Even then it is not 100% likely that you will be able to get that group that you want. Then it is also possible to have a varring range of messages inside each group. They mentioned in the article that @home people are operating "open proxies" I assume that this means that they are allowing public access from the outside world. Well my friend what is wrong with that? You know I have had accounts at the infameous hotmail and even then I got spam in small quantities. What people need to do is to simply delete the spam and just look at what's there. How hard is it to just delete it? Is it's presence that bad that it actually causes people to react like it was a cockroach or maybe a demon? I think if the mythical Lucifer were to appear in front of one of these people they would most likely get more irritated or enraged at the spam than their most hated enemy (for Christians).
This project does, and continues to be everything we need. With out these programmers *nix would be sitting in the dust of Microsoft. Version 4.0 is the most anticipated version
yet; I know I'm salavating over the next release!
Everything? Seriously just having an X server is far from having everything. Unless the apps work on that server then it's pretty much useless. Are they actively attempting to optimize? Are they trying to get better working code for even low end cards? Personally I don't need a server for a Voodoo 3 6000 and I doubt most reasonable people do as well. Now argue with me all you want about supporting all the really "cool" hardware that "everybody" has but I just think that priorities should go to something a little more deserving.
Oooh, that is a good question. I don't actually know any of the projects budget. I would assume that it would be one of the larger projects that would have a chance of using it.
Apache, FreeBSD, XFree86... but that is a shot in the dark.
The projects that you name are all basically evoloved projects that are not really in need of our help. What I would love to look is taking this money and giving it to people who are real under dogs and having them develop their app from some little thing that maybe was on freshmeat or their own personal site to something that would be in the next Red Hat or Debian. That would be totally amazing. I would vote for something that departs from the standard fare of network apps or graphical stuff. Maybe something like a new compiler or perhaps something like a good IDE or even a class of so called "boring" apps that would help business professionals.
I'm actually going to agree with you on this one: Somewhere along the line this "community" became more about competition than it did about sharing. And isn't that what it's
supposed to be? Sharing code and working together together to make a better system?
I think that so called "communities" are always about sharing but that eventually we swing back the other way. Take a look a history and see for your self. The decade of the 1960's can be interpreted as being a very sharing time in terms of you thought. The 70's was a time where people became less interested in various things due to apathy and having their own ecconomic problems and then we see the 1980's where people abandoned the concept of sharing and went full bull into the capitalistic concept. This is what eventually evolves when we have an open community.
Slashdot exemplifies this competitive spirit. People post just to get more Karma (there's even a HowTo out there) and almost every thread turns into a pissing contest. It's silly,
and the Anti-Microsoft attitude just makes it worse. People here hate Microsoft and literally act like this whole Open Source Movement is just about beating MS. And if they're
not talking about beating NT in server sales, they're starting a flame-war about KDE/Gnome. It blows my mind that there could ever be competition in an open source
community... I think some people are just plain missing the point.
Hmm.. well I think that there are some interesting points. But what we see is what most irritates people. Fundamentally people hate microsoft? Why well because for a large number of vocal people they have been shafted by MS and really think of them of as the devil. Now I ask you is this totally without merit? I even had a professor just I think 2 days ago in a university setting make the statement that no one can really get away with releasing broken low quality software except MS. I am sure that some if not most of the people who complain about MS have had to use or learn something about it against their will. You know what? I have been basically forced to use NT in various lab machines and 95 on others. The only place I actually get to use linux have been 2 places (well soon 3). One was in a HS environment a couple of years ago and the other is at home. I have never actually been able to use a really nice linux setup very easily. This dosn't make me bitter just appreciative about what I actually have.
Now you talk about the pissing contest. I cannot stress enough about the fact that many people do consider this a pissing contest. Signal 11 is one of these folks. He wanted the glory and I am not saying that I don't want glory in some form but I have even espoused various points of view that are in sharp contrast to what people want. Does listing your slashdot karma on your resume actually help you? No does it give you a warm fuzzy? yes. Actually I think there is competition for a vision in terms of what people have been exposed to. Suppose that we officially said that the dominate editor for linux distros. would be Xemacs? Now what do you think the reaction would be from most folks around here? Probablly what would happen would be anarchy in some way. There are some people who linux vi/vim/ed/ or cat >prog.c and then terminate with a ^D (I actually did this in desperation once).
Maybe some people are actually missing the point in terms of what they should do. To be fair I have not the current skills to actually write a "good" piece of GPL software unless you want a bunch of crappy specialized obfuciated C++ programs or perhaps Pascal stuff (basically not written anymore).
This whole place is getting out of hand...
Maybe so if someone actually wrote a Howto. Tell me where is this little thing I really am flabergasted that someone actually wrote one.
We all know these kind and very generous folks as the people who brought us the wonderful Debian GNU/Linux distribution. They have done quite well at creating a good distribution and are basically the only distribution that allows for 100% free distributions of Linux and they are also working on the GNU/Hurd as well. Because of all their functionality and ability I think we should nominate them.
Don't believe me? Well consider this. I got an old CD set with linux that had a bunch of old distributions on it one of them was an early beta copy of Debian (0.98 or 0.99 or something like that). Guess what? The install was pretty cool and very nice and the entire thing was probably more functional than half of the distributions that were around at the time and consequently more useful as well. We can't say that about many.
Why the hatred for LinuxOne? Because they're doing exactly what the GPL allows and reselling a version of Linux that they themselves haven't changed at all? They're really not
that evil, I don't think. Just a couple guys seeing dollar signs... Give them a chance.
I think a great deal of people think that if you offer the exact same thing as someone else you are perhaps cheating by using their product. If I can get a distribution from the original company and someone else sells it then why?
Maybe everyone would have a different outlook if they were offering shares back to the community? Probably....
I for one really don't buy stock at the present time at all. Is there a way that you can say spend about 10 bucks on the stock market by yourself without getting one of those fat cat brockers to do it for you?
Oh, and maybe possibly first post.
As usual all the people who have no lives got that first anyway.
Now the day that you can walk into Wally World and buy a shrink wrapped Linux game I think we will have made it.
Never heard of that one.
Well all the other games they ported to Linux were directX based (with the possible exception of Eric's Ultimate Solitaire) The interface for all their other ports was the same as the
windows version. As for the maps, I don't know, but I don't see why not. After all, it will (probably) be the same code reading and writing the map files.
Why would anyone and I mean anyone actually care about a stupid solitaire game? Let alone for a software company to actually port that game from one OS to another?
I'd like to put in the obligatory plug for AbiWord, and Gnumeric, which are the most polished parts of the GNOME Office replacement. Remember, unlike their KDE counterparts,
the GNOME tools compile, build and work with the GNOME libraries you already have for your everyday GNOME desktop.
Well I actually had experience unless it has changes significant by lightyears of progress Abiword does not have even a fraction of the features of say Word or Wordperfect has in it. A great deal of the features were simply not implimented (the menus said that if you want to add such and such a feature here is where to add it). It's not a fair comparison because it not finished afterall.
Operating systems and applications for them are two entirely different matter. Sure, Linux, AmigaOS and some other operating systems can run on pretty low-power hardware but
would you really want to tell the software developers that they aren't allowed make anything else but programs that work on 386 or 68000?
I have really seen some pretty amazing stuff on low end machines like these. All you have to do is optimize, optimize, optimize, and do some work arounds and there you are.
If a certain program really can do its job on a low-power machine, it's fine and it shouldn't be 'enchanted' to need more than it really needs. But should we forbid programs like
Quake3 (complex realtime 3d needs modern hardware) or applications for large scientific visualization (need pretty lot of memory and preferably CPU too) if they do not work on
older machines? IMO not.
Ever seen a program called gtop? This is a GNOME version of top and it just plain is a memory hog on systems or at very least significantly contributes to generally bad system load. An ncurses program run from the console is also safer. Linux dosn't crash or hand except if you use the graphical interfaces. Then you can have windows resource type problems in terms of the mouse barely being able to move or not at all and no commands can be send to the X server at all.
About the need to keep programs within certain perameters. Is it really necessary to increase graphics by 2% and increase system resoures like ram by 250% and processor requirements by 600% and hd space by 300% come on even the most avid person would not see this as an acceptable trade off. And that's basically all we are really seeing after all even with 20/20 vision you do not see all that much difference.
AFAIK, just about any Linux system should run these. Civ CTP works fine on both my dual-400 celeron system and my friend's PII (166? | 266?) (although you can tell a ;) ). It also runs through X on any other UNIX. Just for fun I tried to run it off his computer, over his T1, through the school network and onto a Sun Ultra 5.
noticable difference
The result was slow as molasses, with 16 colors and a nasty green tinge, but it worked.
So your telling me that a 386/16MHz with 2Mb or ram will run it whoo! hoo! Now that's progress.
Good god man, what piece of shit you trying to run it on? A '486? Quake 3 was quite play able on my old Cyrix 200 system with a Voodoo 3000 graphics card. I just spent $20
on for a 300 mhz upgrade and the system rocks.
Why does anyone really need to upgrade anything at all? Why is it constantly necessary to upgrade in a microsoft like fashion when linux was meant to allow crappy machines to shine. Frankly I find this lack of vision..disturbing.
Who cares? If they run anything like linux q3 does on my machine they'll be crap..
Don't you know? Every game is supposed to run crappy. It's just the companies forcing you to get newer stuff and run it. Never mind about the fact that you may not want to actually get a new computer at all. I have found that out the hard way many times. Hell it dosn't matter that your are poor or that you can't afford one to the level that the game needs at all; it about plain and simple profit.
Plus isn't Q3 just some network game anyway? I will never play a game where the main focus is on playing over a network that I still do not have access to or a machine that will run said software.
But eventually you will be able to. When their little computers hit that little thing like the speed of light and they cannot increase processor speed then they will have to stop creating bloatware at all. And don't say that quantum computing will even cover this. The real world is not star trek and is not ever going to even come close.
While haveing games in linux is a Good Thing, and it has a benifit for the community, it really doesn't help position linux for use as a buisiness client. What linux really needs is
a commercial quality, stable(sorry wordperfect), and compatible office suite. Microsoft is not a likeley cantidate for porting office over to linux, but what about lotus, they have
already released domino server, how about a complete office suite, notes client, and web browser that work and look good together. This is what linux needs to compete against the
likes of NT. But, hey if I can use my system to play Simcity 3k instead of working, I'm all for it.
Wow just what I need. At the end of the day when I come home from work and everything is fine I just get back to work right? Nope. Anyone who actually enjoys working on shall we say unchallenging office apps instead of expanding his/her mind is a complete fool. I don't need an "office suite" at home. I would never need one and would not buy one. I think there are other alternatives to microsoft that also work for the office suite thing if linux dosn't have it anyway.