Nonsense. You obviously haven't read much libertarian philosophy. It has little to do with the political party, but shares the same basic point of view.
There are purely philosphical works like Narveson's, and lots of hybrid material like Hospers' and Machan's (all highly recommended reading for those who would like to *really* know what libertarianism is about). None advocate any degree of socialist control, under the guise of "anarchism."
The meaning of libertarian is pretty clear, and has been since at least the 1960s.
The aversion to the use of the term "Frisco" is a yuppie/upper class thing (Remember Herb Caen's book?). "Frisco" is A-OK among the blue collar/"Regular Guy" crowd.
My only gripe about ext2 is its tendency to fragment. It's nearly as bad as NTFS in this regard. ufs and HPFS do a much better job at resisting fragmentation.
So, does anyone know if XFS is better at resisting fragmentation than ext2?
Joe User isn't going to switch to Linux on his own accord; he won't have to. He doesn't really choose Windows now, and when his machine is preloaded with Linux, it won't matter a whole lot to him, as long as the software he wants to run is there.
It's only a matter of time before Linux does to Windows what the PC did to the Mac. The Mac, in the late 80s/early 90s was a quite obviously superior piece of hardware to your run-of-the-mill PC. But it cost a lot more. The mass market went for the cheaper alternative, because the case for the Mac was not sufficiently compelling to make up for the higher cost.
The same thing is about to happen to Windows.
As soon as hardware vendors think they can get away with it (read: as soon as Linux will allow people to deal with Word documents and play some games), they will bundle Linux instead of Windows, to try to get that extra edge on the competition. It will save them $40-80 per unit, a not-inconsiderable sum in the razor-thin-margin PC market.
Think about the following trends:
KDE moving to version 2.0 and including an office suite
The beginnings of mainstream gaming support
Corel's end-user Linux distribution
Very-low-end clone vendors beginning to ship Linux as their default OS
and you can see that Windows' days as the ubiquitous desktop OS are indeed numbered.
The preloads are coming; it's just a matter of time.
Who said it was? Jesse Berst? You're supposed to ignore him, anyhow. People love to rant and rave about things the "Linux community" is supposedly doing. 9 times out of 10, though, the "Linux community" is doing no such thing.
Linus has said he is interested in improving Linux's scalablity; he certainly hasn't said that Linux can be used on massive machines now. He also has said repeatedly that his core interest is the desktop.
Linux will be eventually scale up pretty far, but, yes, for the time being, Solaris is the way to go for relatively high-end stuff.
Of course, the Sun machines I work with run what would be more accrately described as GNU/Solaris...:-)
I'm wondering how this will do now that it will be competing for a part of the same audience that is now involved in MMRPGs like UO and EQ. I love the concept in both games, but there are times that both have frustrated the hell out of me.
I think you and I are not the only ones who have become frustrated by the shortcomings of MMRPGs. MMRPGs are far from ideal because:
Anonymity encourages (or at least does not discourage) disruptive behavior. I'm part of a pen-and-paper AD&D group. If someone were disruptive to the group, we'd ask them to leave. There is no such incentive when people pay you to be on their server. Even putting aside the PKing (which is a real problem, especially on UO), UO and EQ seem to be largely devoid of role-playing, and are more like irc with pictures.
Server lag seems to be an inevitable part of MMRPG-ing. I have friends who took a liking to Everquest. They felt that the massive scale of EQ would prevent the kind of lag seen in Ultima Online. Still, they play sometimes at 2 AM to avoid server lag.
Campaigns/plots do not really exist in MMRPGs, because there is not a DM available to run such a campaign. When you pay to spend 4 hours/day fishing, I'd say there's a plot problem.
Monthly fees, even if they're low, is still a drag.
I've stayed away from UO and EQ, for the most part, because they don't run under Linux. It's not so much of a religious OS thing, as a practicality thing. I just don't feel like wasting the space on a Windows installation, and I keep my box up 24/7 and run services on it. These would be interrupted if I was dual-booting to Windows.
This will allow me to play AD&D with gaming friends who have moved away. For this reason alone, I am anxiously awaiting this game. I hope they announce a ship date soon.
OS/2 1.x was developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft. It was to be the "next big thing" back in the late 80s/early 90s, and could preemptively multitask. Microsoft contributed things like HPFS, a not-half-bad filesystem that resists fragmentation pretty well, and has a MacOS-like implementation of custom resources in the filesystem ("Extended Attributes").
Unfortunately for IBM, what they didn't know was that Microsoft was working *heavily* on Windows in the meantime, and was using OS/2 as a decoy, to throw everyone off, so that they could use their preload power to dominate the OS *and* applications markets.
Some more OS/2 info (subject to the limitations of my memory): OS/2 1.0 was CLI-only, and was released in 1987. OS/2 1.x, released in 1989(?), introduced the Presentation Manager GUI, which was similar to the Windows 3.x interface. Early versions of OS/2 had a 16-bit architecture, and were released in two versions: one specifically for PS/2-based machines, and one for standard PC-compatibles.
OS/2 2.0, introduced in 1992, was partially 32-bit, and was the first IBM-only release of OS/2. It introduced the Workplace Shell, the object-oriented GUI you often hear old OS/2 users (like me) rave about. It also introduced the Win-OS/2 subsystem, which allowed the use of 16-bit Windows programs under OS/2.
Re:Libertarians are "cool" Republicans.
on
New Cyberlaws
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· Score: 2
Oh, knock off the trolling. Republicans have practically nothing in common with Libertarians, as their philosophy is completely different. As for the handful of Libertarians who have run as Republicans, well, there are about as many who have run as Democrats.
The voters have spoken, and they're wrong
on
New Cyberlaws
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· Score: 2
CAUTION: Political advocacy below. (Sorry, but the constant attacks on our freedoms are just getting too out of hand to stay silent)
By repeatedly voting for Republicans and Democrats, the American people have advocated this kind of war on the Constitution. And everyone here that has continued to vote for members of these two parties is a co-conspirator.
The *only* way you're going to stop this rush towards fascism is to stop voting for these fools, and to start voting Libertarian, and to get your friends to do the same. Even if you don't support every Libertarian position, you will at least begin to counter-balance the always-pro-regulation fascists who infest our governments.
As one prominent Libertarian likes to say:
If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got.
Insanity is defined as expecting different results from the same actions. Currently, the voting public is displaying insanity.
Stop it now. Start the change.
Thank you for this opportunity to advocate. Now back to your regular/. discussion
People used to know how to do this; now, they enter the freeway ~20-30 mph below the flow of traffic, causing a chain reaction slowdown.
Another big problem, especially here in Portland, Oregon, has to do both with driver skill/courtesy and street/highway design. There are a lot of places where a right lane begins for no apparent reason, and then ends abruptly, usually on the far side of a signaled intersection. A certain percentage of rather discourteous people will attempt to drive in this lane as far as they physically can, and then swerve into traffic at the last second, causing everyone else to hit their brakes.
Most cases of this could be eliminated by only terminating right lanes into right turn only lanes, preferably with a cement barrier to prevent people from illegally going straight through the intersection.
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And that ain't the half of it...
on
Some KDE news
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· Score: 2
It was sort of hinted at by the mention of Konqueror's capabilities, but possibly the most important improvement in KDE 2.0 will be the inclusion of KOffice. Apart from the spreadsheet which is somewhat low-key, the tools ( word processor/DTP, presentation, vector graphics, formula editor, etc.) look to be, if not directly feature competitive, at least in the same ball park as the big guys. And KOffice uses KOM/OpenParts for embeddablity (is that a word?).
Not to take away anything from any of the other free software projects...but these guys truly amaze me; they are taking on Microsoft, not with words, but with deeds.
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Re:I'm looking forward to the day they ditch X
on
Some KDE news
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· Score: 2
Use ssh. It will take care of your cookie handling and can encrypt your X traffic.
If this tax cut goes through, then God help us that this Internet tax is imposed lest our teachers be forced to work for free.
Teachers are employees of the school district in which they work, not the federal government. They are funded by the local school district, which is funded either by local levies, or by the state. Teachers are not paid by the federal government, so a federal tax cut will not affect their wages.
And, just FYI, the average wage for teachers at the high school I attended is over $55,000 per year, for 9 months' work.
1) The free (as in unimpeded, not as in gratis) flow of information is crucial to today's society in a world where knowledge is rapidly becoming more valuable than gold. This has implications for encryption, education, and the media (particularly censorship). Free-speech issues are also included here. 2) Personal privacy is a vital aspect of personal freedom. This one also has implications for encryption. 3) Free will is the vehicle which drives humanity forward and keeps us together even through the toughest times. Note, however, that the right to free will does not include the right to infringe upon the free will or other rights of anyone else. This has implications on censorship as well as other issues. Note that, of course, free will includes free speech.
I dunno, but that sounds not all that far from the Libertarian position. Some people don't like the LP's position on a particular issue, where they feel the gov't should have more control. But if you think about the kind of system of goverment we have in the U.S., you realize that there will always be compromise, so unless the LP had 100% control of the gov't, and all of the office-holders were rabid platform-thumpers, it's not likely that the LP platform would be enacted unmodified.
If you look at it realistically, if the LP started gaining support, and became a serious force in the gov't, it would make it *much* harder for anti-freedom legislation of all types to pass. That's what I want, so I vote mostly a straight LP ticket.
I figure the authoritarians won't be going away anytime soon, so why not try to keep them in check?
I'm afraid you're correct. According to his web site:
That means easing export controls on computers and encryption products that can already be purchased on the open market.
But then he follows that up with:
At the same time, as the use of encryption programs increases, American law enforcement must always have the resources to stay ahead of the criminal use of that technology.
He just don't get it, folks. The only way to "stay ahead of the criminal use of that technology," even partially, is some kind of key escrow. And that will only work with law-abiding criminals who use legal encryption software. Ultimately, that is not the answer for people who live in a (nominally) free country.
I'm sticking with the Libertarian Party. They may not be perfect, but I agree with them a heck of a lot more often than I agree with any other party.
If this passes all the state legislatures largely untouched (unlikely), and isn't gutted by the courts (also unlikely), you'd have to be completely insane to buy and/or use proprietary software under such conditions.
I'm not rooting for this, because it's very bad law, but, if it does pass, it will likely cause a stampede to free software. As well it should.
Is qmail used primarily for security benefits, or for some particular feature?
I'm just wondering, because I'm somewhat surprised Bruce isn't using the GPLd Exim for his MTA. I've found it to be quite good, and it scales up well to at least several thousand users. Easy to configure, too. It doesn't support some of the more exotic transports like BITNET or FidoNet, though, I think.
I'm guessing security, since I seem to recall a quasi-flamefest on Bugtraq between qmail and Secure Mailer over that issue.
Y'know, after looking at the Apple Lisa screenshots (linked off of the GUI history page), I started to think: in 1975, the Altair had a UI that consisted of blinky lights. Eight years later, the Lisa brought us the GUI of today. But in the ensuing sixteen years up until today, very little has changed.
What do you think, folks? Is the still-largely application-centric WIMP interface the absolute pinnacle of user interface innovation? Is the web browser really the ultimate means of interacting with a computer?
I just have to believe there can be something more.
(still waiting for the day when I will have a animated, rotating 3-D Max von Sydow (as Brewmaster Smith, of course) head on my screen that I can speak commands to...or is it the other way around?:-/ )
Big companies don't know how to cooperate; they could have asked him nicely to link to the main page, or perhaps compromised, and had him link to some internal index page. When you get letters from lawyers, though, some people are naturally going to get their back up, and be *less* cooperative. But I imagine that these large companies don't know how to do anything without using lawyers.
Yes, it would be nice if people could just cooperate. That was, after all, the model the web was designed with. Unfortunately, many people don't seem to know how or want to do that.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of idiocy that is inevitable, due to the commercialization of the Internet. I'm all for free markets, but when you get the mega-corporations involved, you can say goodbye to free markets, fairness or cooperation.
So, they will subvert the whole point of the world wide web, and we will eventually build something new for them to "discover."
Sorry, I'm crabby today. If you don't want people to link to your stuff, DON'T PUT IT ON THE WEB!
If the ISP knew that legit sites were being blocked and chose not to tell their customers (*Business* customers), then why is it not their fault.
Because what sites are blocked by whatever censoring software is not their concern, and is totally out of their hands.
If Joe Crackpot writes in a letter to a TV station and tells them that he will never watch their station again because he saw a show where someone said "monkey ass," must the TV station disclose that to every potential advertiser? Of course not.
They have an obligation to deliver the goods.
They have an obligation to make your site available via TCP/IP. Whether others choose to visit or blacklist your site has nothing to do with them.
Slashdot Mirror
There are purely philosphical works like Narveson's, and lots of hybrid material like Hospers' and Machan's (all highly recommended reading for those who would like to *really* know what libertarianism is about). None advocate any degree of socialist control, under the guise of "anarchism."
The meaning of libertarian is pretty clear, and has been since at least the 1960s.
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The aversion to the use of the term "Frisco" is a yuppie/upper class thing (Remember Herb Caen's book?). "Frisco" is A-OK among the blue collar/"Regular Guy" crowd.
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Like Netscape? (possibly the biggest memory-sieve I've ever experienced)
Get lost, troll.
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Also, I recently bought Civ:CTP, and there's a patch on Loki's web site that includes a PPC binary.
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So, does anyone know if XFS is better at resisting fragmentation than ext2?
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It's only a matter of time before Linux does to Windows what the PC did to the Mac. The Mac, in the late 80s/early 90s was a quite obviously superior piece of hardware to your run-of-the-mill PC. But it cost a lot more. The mass market went for the cheaper alternative, because the case for the Mac was not sufficiently compelling to make up for the higher cost.
The same thing is about to happen to Windows.
As soon as hardware vendors think they can get away with it (read: as soon as Linux will allow people to deal with Word documents and play some games), they will bundle Linux instead of Windows, to try to get that extra edge on the competition. It will save them $40-80 per unit, a not-inconsiderable sum in the razor-thin-margin PC market.
Think about the following trends:
- KDE moving to version 2.0 and including an office suite
- The beginnings of mainstream gaming support
- Corel's end-user Linux distribution
- Very-low-end clone vendors beginning to ship Linux as their default OS
and you can see that Windows' days as the ubiquitous desktop OS are indeed numbered.The preloads are coming; it's just a matter of time.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
Who said it was? Jesse Berst? You're supposed to ignore him, anyhow. People love to rant and rave about things the "Linux community" is supposedly doing. 9 times out of 10, though, the "Linux community" is doing no such thing.
Linus has said he is interested in improving Linux's scalablity; he certainly hasn't said that Linux can be used on massive machines now. He also has said repeatedly that his core interest is the desktop.
Linux will be eventually scale up pretty far, but, yes, for the time being, Solaris is the way to go for relatively high-end stuff.
Of course, the Sun machines I work with run what would be more accrately described as GNU/Solaris... :-)
--
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I think you and I are not the only ones who have become frustrated by the shortcomings of MMRPGs. MMRPGs are far from ideal because:
- Anonymity encourages (or at least does not discourage) disruptive behavior. I'm part of a pen-and-paper AD&D group. If someone were disruptive to the group, we'd ask them to leave. There is no such incentive when people pay you to be on their server. Even putting aside the PKing (which is a real problem, especially on UO), UO and EQ seem to be largely devoid of role-playing, and are more like irc with pictures.
- Server lag seems to be an inevitable part of MMRPG-ing. I have friends who took a liking to Everquest. They felt that the massive scale of EQ would prevent the kind of lag seen in Ultima Online. Still, they play sometimes at 2 AM to avoid server lag.
- Campaigns/plots do not really exist in MMRPGs, because there is not a DM available to run such a campaign. When you pay to spend 4 hours/day fishing, I'd say there's a plot problem.
- Monthly fees, even if they're low, is still a drag.
I've stayed away from UO and EQ, for the most part, because they don't run under Linux. It's not so much of a religious OS thing, as a practicality thing. I just don't feel like wasting the space on a Windows installation, and I keep my box up 24/7 and run services on it. These would be interrupted if I was dual-booting to Windows.This will allow me to play AD&D with gaming friends who have moved away. For this reason alone, I am anxiously awaiting this game. I hope they announce a ship date soon.
--
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Unfortunately for IBM, what they didn't know was that Microsoft was working *heavily* on Windows in the meantime, and was using OS/2 as a decoy, to throw everyone off, so that they could use their preload power to dominate the OS *and* applications markets.
Some more OS/2 info (subject to the limitations of my memory): OS/2 1.0 was CLI-only, and was released in 1987. OS/2 1.x, released in 1989(?), introduced the Presentation Manager GUI, which was similar to the Windows 3.x interface. Early versions of OS/2 had a 16-bit architecture, and were released in two versions: one specifically for PS/2-based machines, and one for standard PC-compatibles.
OS/2 2.0, introduced in 1992, was partially 32-bit, and was the first IBM-only release of OS/2. It introduced the Workplace Shell, the object-oriented GUI you often hear old OS/2 users (like me) rave about. It also introduced the Win-OS/2 subsystem, which allowed the use of 16-bit Windows programs under OS/2.
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I've been waiting for a game like this for a long, long time. Particularly one that lets you run your own server and DM your own campaign.
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Oh, knock off the trolling. Republicans have practically nothing in common with Libertarians, as their philosophy is completely different. As for the handful of Libertarians who have run as Republicans, well, there are about as many who have run as Democrats.
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By repeatedly voting for Republicans and Democrats, the American people have advocated this kind of war on the Constitution. And everyone here that has continued to vote for members of these two parties is a co-conspirator.
The *only* way you're going to stop this rush towards fascism is to stop voting for these fools, and to start voting Libertarian, and to get your friends to do the same. Even if you don't support every Libertarian position, you will at least begin to counter-balance the always-pro-regulation fascists who infest our governments.
As one prominent Libertarian likes to say:
If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got.
Insanity is defined as expecting different results from the same actions. Currently, the voting public is displaying insanity.
Stop it now. Start the change.
Thank you for this opportunity to advocate. Now back to your regular /. discussion
--
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Another big problem, especially here in Portland, Oregon, has to do both with driver skill/courtesy and street/highway design. There are a lot of places where a right lane begins for no apparent reason, and then ends abruptly, usually on the far side of a signaled intersection. A certain percentage of rather discourteous people will attempt to drive in this lane as far as they physically can, and then swerve into traffic at the last second, causing everyone else to hit their brakes.
Most cases of this could be eliminated by only terminating right lanes into right turn only lanes, preferably with a cement barrier to prevent people from illegally going straight through the intersection.
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Not to take away anything from any of the other free software projects...but these guys truly amaze me; they are taking on Microsoft, not with words, but with deeds.
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Use ssh. It will take care of your cookie handling and can encrypt your X traffic.
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Teachers are employees of the school district in which they work, not the federal government. They are funded by the local school district, which is funded either by local levies, or by the state. Teachers are not paid by the federal government, so a federal tax cut will not affect their wages.
And, just FYI, the average wage for teachers at the high school I attended is over $55,000 per year, for 9 months' work.
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2) Personal privacy is a vital aspect of personal freedom. This one also has implications for encryption.
3) Free will is the vehicle which drives humanity forward and keeps us together even through the toughest times. Note, however, that the right to free will does not include the right to infringe upon the free will or other rights of anyone else. This has implications on censorship as well as other issues. Note that, of course, free will includes free speech.
I dunno, but that sounds not all that far from the Libertarian position. Some people don't like the LP's position on a particular issue, where they feel the gov't should have more control. But if you think about the kind of system of goverment we have in the U.S., you realize that there will always be compromise, so unless the LP had 100% control of the gov't, and all of the office-holders were rabid platform-thumpers, it's not likely that the LP platform would be enacted unmodified.
If you look at it realistically, if the LP started gaining support, and became a serious force in the gov't, it would make it *much* harder for anti-freedom legislation of all types to pass. That's what I want, so I vote mostly a straight LP ticket.
I figure the authoritarians won't be going away anytime soon, so why not try to keep them in check?
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That means easing export controls on computers and encryption products that can already be purchased on the open market.
But then he follows that up with:
At the same time, as the use of encryption programs increases, American law enforcement must always have the resources to stay ahead of the criminal use of that technology.
He just don't get it, folks. The only way to "stay ahead of the criminal use of that technology," even partially, is some kind of key escrow. And that will only work with law-abiding criminals who use legal encryption software. Ultimately, that is not the answer for people who live in a (nominally) free country.
I'm sticking with the Libertarian Party. They may not be perfect, but I agree with them a heck of a lot more often than I agree with any other party.
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I'm not rooting for this, because it's very bad law, but, if it does pass, it will likely cause a stampede to free software. As well it should.
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We have more users, so we're more popular. (At least that's what I'm able to parse)
You're certainly right; it is a bit verbose.
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I'm just wondering, because I'm somewhat surprised Bruce isn't using the GPLd Exim for his MTA. I've found it to be quite good, and it scales up well to at least several thousand users. Easy to configure, too. It doesn't support some of the more exotic transports like BITNET or FidoNet, though, I think.
I'm guessing security, since I seem to recall a quasi-flamefest on Bugtraq between qmail and Secure Mailer over that issue.
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What do you think, folks? Is the still-largely application-centric WIMP interface the absolute pinnacle of user interface innovation? Is the web browser really the ultimate means of interacting with a computer?
I just have to believe there can be something more.
(still waiting for the day when I will have a animated, rotating 3-D Max von Sydow (as Brewmaster Smith, of course) head on my screen that I can speak commands to...or is it the other way around? :-/ )
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Big companies don't know how to cooperate; they could have asked him nicely to link to the main page, or perhaps compromised, and had him link to some internal index page. When you get letters from lawyers, though, some people are naturally going to get their back up, and be *less* cooperative. But I imagine that these large companies don't know how to do anything without using lawyers.
Yes, it would be nice if people could just cooperate. That was, after all, the model the web was designed with. Unfortunately, many people don't seem to know how or want to do that.
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So, they will subvert the whole point of the world wide web, and we will eventually build something new for them to "discover."
Sorry, I'm crabby today. If you don't want people to link to your stuff, DON'T PUT IT ON THE WEB!
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Because what sites are blocked by whatever censoring software is not their concern, and is totally out of their hands.
If Joe Crackpot writes in a letter to a TV station and tells them that he will never watch their station again because he saw a show where someone said "monkey ass," must the TV station disclose that to every potential advertiser? Of course not.
They have an obligation to deliver the goods.
They have an obligation to make your site available via TCP/IP. Whether others choose to visit or blacklist your site has nothing to do with them.
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