Hold up there Jim... this is Slashdot and you're not only admitting you expressed yourself poorly, you're apologizing. This can't happen on Slashdot, please make sure you go back and flame this guy's perfectly sensible and reasoned (also accurate) response and if you can, put a personal attack in.
It starts here, and before you know it civil conversation will erupt, then it's all over!:)
I love our guild hunters, they're all quite skilled and manage to top meters without getting themselves killed. But I've seen the other side of the fence in PUG runs... bad hunters who are level 70 who don't know how to ice trap. It's all relative to experience I guess.
Hmm, seems fishy that the article is this bad. Maybe it's actually written by a MS shill to evoke this kind of reaction from both the microsoft and linux community.
ColorZilla is great for web developers. It's like a dropper tool you can use anywhere on the page. Has a ton of other features too, but I only use the dropper.
So the question you need to ask is: Why is Paul Graham trying to educate us about PR firms? Maybe he's coming out with a book about the cattle-like treatment the populace gets.
Probably the United States. It'll be poorly tested by big drug company X in hopes they are the first to get it to market, fast tracked to the general public by corrupt senators who get kickbacks from said company and brought into the media in a branding fenzy as yet unseen by our brand-burned retinas. It will pushed as the dividing line between a sucessful child and a failure in society.
After all: "Won't somebody please think of the children".
Appologies. This is my first, and only "I for one..." joke. I agree with you entirely I get bored of the rehashed jokes, especially when they're well beyond their time.
But this time I thought it actually made sense. The Emergents were overlords in every sense of the word, and any Ziphead slave ("refocused" individuals who have their lives turned into a human computing service... much like we are with Technology) did welcome them with open arms. To those who read the book, it might have been a bit more funny.
I downloaded a copy of FF today for my XP desktop at work. Sorry, I think I screwed up the download stats. Now the Moz foundation will never know for sure how well the ad worked because of my thoughtless mistake:)
You didn't buy a brace of rabbits. You donated X amount of dollars to the general Heifer fund. They decided where your money went. Yet another reason to not trust these people. There is a decent critique of the organization here.
As for grass grazing of cattle: If the grass grows so could grains. There are hundreds of grains humans can live off of, that don't promote soil erosion like overgrazing livestock.
Agreed. To further that, what type of system is the grandparent using that sucks down 35W/hr? Any modern Athlon system or P4 with the hard drives spinning will be closer to 110-120W/hr. Yes folks, your PC is over the 100W light bulb range. I'm sure you don't keep those on all night.
Modern PC's use more power than the CRT's we've connected to them.
Being vegan, I have a few problems with Heifer. Sending livestock to people in 3rd world countries is really dumb. You need to grow a significant amount of grains to feed livestock, which can be just as easily used for human consumption. Livestock is just not ideal for these kinds of economies.
This has to be, one of the most interesting things I've seen posted to slashdot in a long while. If true, it paints a very grim picture of corporate greed making inroads to even the strongest bastions of free thought. As much as this community is accused of having herd mentality, I find that there are a lot of herds to listen too, and one is bound to be more correct;)
Keep up the good work. As long as you're looking in the right places for the truth behind things, it's ok to sound a little tinfoilish.
That's a good point. I like to test my PHP and Python scripts out on older, slower machines so I know that I'm not introducing anything horribly inefficent.
My work life is spent helping people code ASP.NET pages for a municipality, and I have to say that any organization with money seems more inclined to throw bigger hardware at a performance issue rather than spend any amount of time profiling the applications. We have monster boxes running bad web applications that could be served from really tiny boxes if the original author wouldn't have had a P4 3.0HT, 2gig ram desktop to develop on.
There is no message in the native mozilla package dir, and the one in the linux mozilla just tells me to have COMPAT_LINUX in my kernel... duh. Mozilla core dumps on me after a few days of use. It gets slower and slower until it dies, it's not a core dump on execute.
I understand the upgrade procedure, the problem is the source breaks quite consistently. I would say that 7 times out of 10 updating my source tree will induce some breakage that is only fixed by whacking the entire tree and re-downloading. Also, the procedure you outline is only for 2.0 systems not 1.6.x systems, which I'm still using. I fully understand why the 2.0 tree was breaking in the past, it's the 1.6 tree breakage that causes me the most grief.
I installed pkg_chk on my sparc, and it seems to be quite useful. I don't have any packages out of date yet so I can't test the update functionality, but it does have the features I'm looking for. Thanks:)
I've used both NetBSD and FreeBSD systems as desktops for over a year, and I can say from the standpoint of initial setup they're pretty equal. But I can say the same thing for most Linux systems as well. You can get X, KDE, GAIM, Moz, X-Chat, etc working pretty easily on both systems after an initial install.
However, where they differ is the maintainability. FreeBSD has portupgrade, which doesn't seem to exist in the NetBSD ports world. Portupgrade, although not a perfect port management tool, is damn near close to perfect:)
Having a ports tree is nice, all the BSD's have that, but having a tool that can intelligently upgrade your existing packages without having to remove and recompile 1/2 your installed packages (try a "make update" sometime on NetBSD, you'll see), is a must.
As well, updating NetBSD from source has always been an exercise in frustration for me. Most of the time, after updating, I can no longer rebuild the userland. It's always some small problem or other, but it's still a far stretch from FreeBSD-STABLE which has broken maybe 3-4 times in the 5 years I've worked with it.
Stability of desktop apps seems to be a bit of an issue for me as well. Mozilla in particular (Linux emulated, and native) core dumps on me on a weekly basis. This was with the pre-RC 2.0 beta's though, so they might have worked that issue out. I imagine it can't be threading related, because KDE seemed very solid, and never gave me grief.
After all this, I still trust NetBSD as a firewall which it has performed perfectly for me for years now. It's also the only OS that I find works well on non i386 hardware. Everything in the Linux world I've tried for Sparc (not Sparc64) has been crap compared to NetBSD in terms of stability. As well, 68k support (Older macs, and older HP workstations) on NetBSD is top notch, and very usable. I actually had a Quadra 610 mac (33Mhz, 24 meg ram, 250 meg SCSI-2 hdd) running apache, php, postgresql and bind 8, and it was still surprisingly fast, and even more amazingly fit well within that tiny hard drive.
NetBSD can give your older oddball hardware new life. The scalability factor that they push is not only impressive upwardly, but downwardly as well. Can you imagine any Linux distro working well on 25Mhz machines with 250 meg drives? Me neither. When they finally come out with a tool for netbsd like portupgrade, and 2.0 gets a minor revision number, I'll be there with my desktop systems.
You could try to load up the first install disc, or even better the miniinst disc if you don't want to waste bandwidth, and see during the boot messages if all the hardware in your box is probed.
Don't worry if it can't find your sound card though, install kernels don't have multimedia features.
However, as a hard core BSD user, I would say if you're looking for a desktop replacement, you may not find the joy here. First, getting BSD up and running as a desktop requires a bit of work and a certain comfort level working with the command line.
Being Bi-OS-ual (I swing Linux and BSD where necessary;), I would recommend either Knoppix 2.6 or Fedora Core 2 as a better starter unix. With these, you won't be dropped to a prompt after a fairly mimimalist install to fend for yourself. You'll also get a chance to run a ton of pre-configured desktop applications, so when you finally do attempt the BSD desktop, you'll know what you want to install beforehand.
If however you're wanting to setup your first server environment, I would recommend FreeBSD over everything else. You will learn unix the proper way, which is at the command line and manually configuring your service config files. (Yes I've used Debian and Gentoo for this in the past, and I still think FreeBSD is better suited).
I think they said in the release that it had to do with stability issues with some optional kernel settings.
Dunno about the rest of you guys, but I find the 4BSD scheduler smoother on my single CPU boxes. Then again I have crappy hardware, so who knows why that would be:)
I guess it depends on your environment. I have a 68k macintosh (040-25mhz) with 24 megs of ram running NetBSD 1.6.2, with ssh, apache, php4, postgresql as services running a Windowmaker desktop on X. The machine runs decently (smoother than you'd expect for a machine made in 1992).
If you're concerned that your ram is always showing as fully allocated in a *nix setup, no worries it's supposed to do that. It's not that you're out of memory, it's that the memory is allocated to various caching buffers and can be flushed for program usage at any time. I'm happy when I see my "Free" sitting less than 100k.
Upgrading from 5.2.1 to 5.3-BETA1 a little bumpy
on
FreeBSD 5.3 Beta1
·
· Score: 5, Informative
For those of you running 5.2.1 and planning on doing a source upgrade, make sure you check the/usr/src/etc/group and/usr/src/etc/master.passwd files and add the new groups and users into your own, otherwise your buildworld will fail about half way through.
As well, you can't build a new kernel until the userland is upgraded, the "config" program and kernel options have been upgraded.
Otherwise, the upgrade went well, and it does seem faster than the previous releases.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure the entire reason I got into the OSS movement was this site. Thanks for 14 years of interesting stuff.
You and Hemos did a great job.
/ignore
fuggin gold farmers... sheesh.
Alright I was wrong, I'm sorry.
Hold up there Jim... this is Slashdot and you're not only admitting you expressed yourself poorly, you're apologizing. This can't happen on Slashdot, please make sure you go back and flame this guy's perfectly sensible and reasoned (also accurate) response and if you can, put a personal attack in.
It starts here, and before you know it civil conversation will erupt, then it's all over! :)
I love our guild hunters, they're all quite skilled and manage to top meters without getting themselves killed. But I've seen the other side of the fence in PUG runs... bad hunters who are level 70 who don't know how to ice trap. It's all relative to experience I guess.
Yeah!
:)
NetBSD 3.0 on a Vax with 13Mhz SMP... the slowest SMP you can get
Ok, I never had one of those in my arch farm, but I did run a 25Mhz Sparc 1+, and it did print spooling admirably.
Hmm, seems fishy that the article is this bad. Maybe it's actually written by a MS shill to evoke this kind of reaction from both the microsoft and linux community.
ColorZilla is great for web developers. It's like a dropper tool you can use anywhere on the page. Has a ton of other features too, but I only use the dropper.
So the question you need to ask is: Why is Paul Graham trying to educate us about PR firms? Maybe he's coming out with a book about the cattle-like treatment the populace gets.
Probably the United States. It'll be poorly tested by big drug company X in hopes they are the first to get it to market, fast tracked to the general public by corrupt senators who get kickbacks from said company and brought into the media in a branding fenzy as yet unseen by our brand-burned retinas. It will pushed as the dividing line between a sucessful child and a failure in society.
After all: "Won't somebody please think of the children".
Appologies. This is my first, and only "I for one..." joke. I agree with you entirely I get bored of the rehashed jokes, especially when they're well beyond their time.
But this time I thought it actually made sense. The Emergents were overlords in every sense of the word, and any Ziphead slave ("refocused" individuals who have their lives turned into a human computing service... much like we are with Technology) did welcome them with open arms. To those who read the book, it might have been a bit more funny.
I for one welcome our new Emergent overlords!
:)
Sorry a bit obscure
I downloaded a copy of FF today for my XP desktop at work. Sorry, I think I screwed up the download stats. Now the Moz foundation will never know for sure how well the ad worked because of my thoughtless mistake :)
You didn't buy a brace of rabbits. You donated X amount of dollars to the general Heifer fund. They decided where your money went. Yet another reason to not trust these people. There is a decent critique of the organization here.
As for grass grazing of cattle: If the grass grows so could grains. There are hundreds of grains humans can live off of, that don't promote soil erosion like overgrazing livestock.
Agreed. To further that, what type of system is the grandparent using that sucks down 35W/hr? Any modern Athlon system or P4 with the hard drives spinning will be closer to 110-120W/hr. Yes folks, your PC is over the 100W light bulb range. I'm sure you don't keep those on all night.
Modern PC's use more power than the CRT's we've connected to them.
Being vegan, I have a few problems with Heifer. Sending livestock to people in 3rd world countries is really dumb. You need to grow a significant amount of grains to feed livestock, which can be just as easily used for human consumption. Livestock is just not ideal for these kinds of economies.
This has to be, one of the most interesting things I've seen posted to slashdot in a long while. If true, it paints a very grim picture of corporate greed making inroads to even the strongest bastions of free thought. As much as this community is accused of having herd mentality, I find that there are a lot of herds to listen too, and one is bound to be more correct ;)
Keep up the good work. As long as you're looking in the right places for the truth behind things, it's ok to sound a little tinfoilish.
I've had similar problems with the regular BitTorrent client without specifying an upload cap. I'd recommend you look into m0n0wall, it's a great firewall that you boot from a CD that can do traffic shaping. No more worries about badly designed programs spanking your network, the shaper is your friend :)
You can also get traffic shaping from the Linksys WRT54G when you add a 3rd party ROM image. I haven't tried it myself, but I assume it's the same concept.
That's a good point. I like to test my PHP and Python scripts out on older, slower machines so I know that I'm not introducing anything horribly inefficent.
My work life is spent helping people code ASP.NET pages for a municipality, and I have to say that any organization with money seems more inclined to throw bigger hardware at a performance issue rather than spend any amount of time profiling the applications. We have monster boxes running bad web applications that could be served from really tiny boxes if the original author wouldn't have had a P4 3.0HT, 2gig ram desktop to develop on.
There is no message in the native mozilla package dir, and the one in the linux mozilla just tells me to have COMPAT_LINUX in my kernel... duh. Mozilla core dumps on me after a few days of use. It gets slower and slower until it dies, it's not a core dump on execute.
:)
I understand the upgrade procedure, the problem is the source breaks quite consistently. I would say that 7 times out of 10 updating my source tree will induce some breakage that is only fixed by whacking the entire tree and re-downloading. Also, the procedure you outline is only for 2.0 systems not 1.6.x systems, which I'm still using. I fully understand why the 2.0 tree was breaking in the past, it's the 1.6 tree breakage that causes me the most grief.
I installed pkg_chk on my sparc, and it seems to be quite useful. I don't have any packages out of date yet so I can't test the update functionality, but it does have the features I'm looking for. Thanks
I've used both NetBSD and FreeBSD systems as desktops for over a year, and I can say from the standpoint of initial setup they're pretty equal. But I can say the same thing for most Linux systems as well. You can get X, KDE, GAIM, Moz, X-Chat, etc working pretty easily on both systems after an initial install.
:)
However, where they differ is the maintainability. FreeBSD has portupgrade, which doesn't seem to exist in the NetBSD ports world. Portupgrade, although not a perfect port management tool, is damn near close to perfect
Having a ports tree is nice, all the BSD's have that, but having a tool that can intelligently upgrade your existing packages without having to remove and recompile 1/2 your installed packages (try a "make update" sometime on NetBSD, you'll see), is a must.
As well, updating NetBSD from source has always been an exercise in frustration for me. Most of the time, after updating, I can no longer rebuild the userland. It's always some small problem or other, but it's still a far stretch from FreeBSD-STABLE which has broken maybe 3-4 times in the 5 years I've worked with it.
Stability of desktop apps seems to be a bit of an issue for me as well. Mozilla in particular (Linux emulated, and native) core dumps on me on a weekly basis. This was with the pre-RC 2.0 beta's though, so they might have worked that issue out. I imagine it can't be threading related, because KDE seemed very solid, and never gave me grief.
After all this, I still trust NetBSD as a firewall which it has performed perfectly for me for years now. It's also the only OS that I find works well on non i386 hardware. Everything in the Linux world I've tried for Sparc (not Sparc64) has been crap compared to NetBSD in terms of stability. As well, 68k support (Older macs, and older HP workstations) on NetBSD is top notch, and very usable. I actually had a Quadra 610 mac (33Mhz, 24 meg ram, 250 meg SCSI-2 hdd) running apache, php, postgresql and bind 8, and it was still surprisingly fast, and even more amazingly fit well within that tiny hard drive.
NetBSD can give your older oddball hardware new life. The scalability factor that they push is not only impressive upwardly, but downwardly as well. Can you imagine any Linux distro working well on 25Mhz machines with 250 meg drives? Me neither. When they finally come out with a tool for netbsd like portupgrade, and 2.0 gets a minor revision number, I'll be there with my desktop systems.
Yes, I decided to take a zero on the idiot test today :)
2.6 is a kernel version, 3.6 is the Knoppix version.
You could try to load up the first install disc, or even better the miniinst disc if you don't want to waste bandwidth, and see during the boot messages if all the hardware in your box is probed.
;), I would recommend either Knoppix 2.6 or Fedora Core 2 as a better starter unix. With these, you won't be dropped to a prompt after a fairly mimimalist install to fend for yourself. You'll also get a chance to run a ton of pre-configured desktop applications, so when you finally do attempt the BSD desktop, you'll know what you want to install beforehand.
Don't worry if it can't find your sound card though, install kernels don't have multimedia features.
However, as a hard core BSD user, I would say if you're looking for a desktop replacement, you may not find the joy here. First, getting BSD up and running as a desktop requires a bit of work and a certain comfort level working with the command line.
Being Bi-OS-ual (I swing Linux and BSD where necessary
If however you're wanting to setup your first server environment, I would recommend FreeBSD over everything else. You will learn unix the proper way, which is at the command line and manually configuring your service config files. (Yes I've used Debian and Gentoo for this in the past, and I still think FreeBSD is better suited).
I think they said in the release that it had to do with stability issues with some optional kernel settings.
:)
Dunno about the rest of you guys, but I find the 4BSD scheduler smoother on my single CPU boxes. Then again I have crappy hardware, so who knows why that would be
I guess it depends on your environment. I have a 68k macintosh (040-25mhz) with 24 megs of ram running NetBSD 1.6.2, with ssh, apache, php4, postgresql as services running a Windowmaker desktop on X. The machine runs decently (smoother than you'd expect for a machine made in 1992).
If you're concerned that your ram is always showing as fully allocated in a *nix setup, no worries it's supposed to do that. It's not that you're out of memory, it's that the memory is allocated to various caching buffers and can be flushed for program usage at any time. I'm happy when I see my "Free" sitting less than 100k.
For those of you running 5.2.1 and planning on doing a source upgrade, make sure you check the /usr/src/etc/group and /usr/src/etc/master.passwd files and add the new groups and users into your own, otherwise your buildworld will fail about half way through.
As well, you can't build a new kernel until the userland is upgraded, the "config" program and kernel options have been upgraded.
Otherwise, the upgrade went well, and it does seem faster than the previous releases.