This gets brought up so many times it should probably be in the FAQ. Maybe it is by now. Slashdot does not link to the google cache because they don't have any arrangement with google, and there is no such deal because they do not want sites that depend on banner impressions (amazingly some folks think banner ads still make money) naming them as a party in a lawsuit that claims they conspired to redirect traffic away from their site. It wouldn't matter if the suit had merit, all it takes is one dot-bomb that decides lawsuit shakedowns are its new revenue stream to make life hell for a lot of people at OSDN.
'course maybe someone will sue slashdot for linking to them in the first place...
Intuition suggests that the most efficient thing to do is to "get rid" of the VM by compiling everything to native code before you distribute your app. But that doesn't get rid of the VM -- it just converts it to a different form. There are some VM features you can't compile away, such as garbage collection.
Where did you pull this assertion out? It's rubbish. Eiffel and Ada are garbage collected out of the box. C and C++ can be by just linking code to a different library. The 'V' in VM stands for Virtual. There is no virtual machine being used, it is using the real machine. Real registers, real opcodes. In fact, gcj compiles down to what amounts to C++ (the object layout is the same)
Some experts claim (not me, I get dizzy when I even read benchmarks) that "pure" nativeness is illusory and not that efficient. Plus you lose a lot of the features of the Java platform when you run the program that way.
Partly true on both counts. A VM has some known constraints that lends utsekf to optimization. Pointers in C and C++ for example create potential aliasing problems that just don't exist in Java. However, a good native compiler (not a merely adequate one like gcc) can do instruction ordering that a VM cannot. Bytecode has advantages like portability, and with clever classloaders, you can do all kinds of wizardry to objects by rewriting the bytecode. Not every app needs these features however, and so native compilation is also a compelling option. Native compilation also gains you the capability of using more native features efficiently. Case in point, JNI is slow -- Macromedia Generator is largely a Java scaffold around C++ components, so it uses JNI extensively. Turns out to be slower than an alternative written in pure java.
Can I run all apps/libs (or equivalents of the same quality) I use regularly now on FreeBSD? That would be KDE2.2, XMMS, OpenGL on GeForce2, MSN client, \LaTeX{}, Java1.2 a.o. Would It really bring me some extra performance/stability?
Yes, yes, no, yes, yes, sorta. Most apps for linux compile for freebsd out of the box, and if they don't, you just type 'linux bash' at a shell and install a redhat rpm. nVidia is never going to release a driver for freebsd, closed or otherwise (don't start with OSX, it's not even close to the same thing at that level), or sufficient specs to write one. There's native Java now, but I doubt they'll port a retrograde version -- it should be backward compatible anyway.
The whole FreeBSD approach does appeal to me, so I'm definitely interested in trying, but only if it has a real chance becoming my primary LILO partion;-)
We may yet see the death of LILO and it won't be too soon. FreeBSD's bootloader is comparable to GRUB and then some. It'll load Linux just fine as well.
Not that CVS isn't still a steaming pile of excrement, but couldn't approval be done with tags in cvs? Just make it a rule that only a reviewer could add such a tag (it's not a secret military project, you can do it with just policy and not access control), and have the build sandbox check out only reviewed tags.
I'm not all that well-read on CVS, so I don't know if a tag automatically causes a branch or if there can be only one tag or what... I was just thinking of ways that real VC and workflow features could be simulated for those stuck with CVS.
Any new leader that simply does the courtesy of replying to patch submitters with "got your patch, first glance doesn't look like i'm going to take it, so hash it out on k-t to discuss it and i'll jump in when i have time and point out my objections" or just plain "got your patch, don't have time to look at it yet" would be doing a far better job at patch management than Linus is currently doing. Linus's behavior toward developers he has any personal friction with is nothing short of passive-agressive.
Pickling is really trivial. Hell, I've worked on a pickler for C++. Perl has a plethora of picklers (say that 10 times fast), including Data::Dumper, FreezeThaw, and Storable. Then there's Java's Serializable. It's really not a terribly interesting problem, orthogonal persistence is. Orthogonal persistence where you have an interpreter or other such runtime environent that can be started and stopped and moved around in the meantime, possibly with multiple processes attached to the runtime simultaneously. The "orthogonal" means that you don't do anything special (like pickling) to persist objects and retrieve them from the persistent store, they're just there when you want them, and their lifecycle is indefinite when you create them.
Any programmable MUD is an example of such orthogonal persistence. Squeak and Self would be others. Personally I wouldn't mind such an environment for Python, but I'm not holding my breath.
> I think the better solution is to write a new signal called "SIGFREEZE"
Which is not only how Solaris does it, it's what Solaris calls it. The counterpart signal is SIGTHAW. The signals are advisory though, the process isn't required to implement all the freeze/thaw logic in userspace.
Yunno, some people hit the 50 cap long ago. Some never cared. I thought this whinging over so-called "karma whoring" had died long ago (I was thinking of changing my sig), but I guess there are some people still left who are socially stunted enough that they cannot conceive of others partaking in conversation for the fun or edification instead of pleas for attention. I thought I was kind of messed up, but I can't say that I feel particularly validated or not based on some score I have on slashdot.
> In short, people who don't like WikiStyleLinks usually don't like them because they haven't given them an honest try
Ah, the cry of the novice advocate: "if you don't agree, you don't understand". I've seen this argument used on everything from python to political theories. This argument also has about as much merit: those who advocate WikiWords or indentation for syntax or redistribution of wealth believe in the self-evident merit of the idea so much that anyone else must be deluded. Believe it or don't, it's just based on as much actual insight as the first assertion.
It really just doesn't take a lot of training to get people to use brackets. People can stick brackets around phrases in existing text.
With a little more intelligence, it can be done with a javascript browser interface and no syntax at all: hilight the words, click on a "make link" button, if there's no link then do a fuzzy match (think spellchecker) on existing links, suggest them. No cumbersome textarea needed. A bit slow for my tastes (too much aiming with the mouse), but great for one-off editing.
Thankfully most wikis worth using do support free link syntax, because in keeping with the wiki philosophy, freedom is good. As for the javascript trick, I've a similar thing done with in a helpdesk app, though it wasn't browser-based (it easily could be).
The database example is apples and oranges -- the database with an index is using an O(1) algorithm instead of O(n). This usually isn't the case with bloaty apps though. Perl for example, love it to death, but the damn thing just doesn't free many structures like anonymous subs, thinking it'll be able to reuse the activation later. Or apps with string copies all over the place when it never uses the original copy again.
Certainly for quick one-off apps it's better to waste memory and cpu cycles than time. I'm not suggesting a return to micromanaged handcrafting of code, I am saying that the tradeoff for convenience is still a tradeoff and in the big picture can't be handwaved away with price quotes on RAM.
Jeepers, it's the "memory is cheap" nonsense again. I got news for ya: L1 cache still isn't cheap. Page sizes are still 8k. Think of how much more responsive your apps are going to be when they're not constantly paging and blowing away cache. RAM might be cheap, bloat still costs not only the app, but everything else that has to share a CPU with it.
> How is this any more convenient than apt-get which is also available for RPM based systems?
Because ports does not require packages. Example, if I want to install a KDE app, it does not require that I have the qt package installed. It searches for libqt.so. If it's a gtk package, it runs gtk-config, if it's apache, it runs apxs, and so forth. Now debian's a little better than RPM, which ends up making you force-install just about everything (defeating dependency checking) because you installed something from source, but you still have to intervene when a dependent package isn't present. Ports assumes you know what you're doing, and if the lib is there, it's there, it doesn't need a package manifest to tell you. It does check for the package first, and ports does build a package, so you get a package-based system that degrades gracefully when you don't religiously use the package system.
THAT is why I use ports. Because no sysadmin I know of takes the builds out of the box, they keep their source trees around to tweak and recompile as needed. Oh, and ports lets me do that doo, I just "make get" the port, cd work/packagename, and there's the source tree as if I'd untarred it myself. I can configure && make install it from there, or cd../..; make install from there and it builds as a package.
my thoughts on a distribution
on
Debian NetBSD
·
· Score: 2
I once thought of making a Linux distro -- yeah, everyone has -- but short story shorter, I don't have that itch to scratch anymore, since I have sitting in front of me a box that's running just Win2k. I got cygwin, liked it for a while, and have grown to hate it. Slow, buggy, and now unreliable in config -- make stopped working, some weird interaction with shell quoting. Make is kinda important yunno. The DLL that every last damn cygwin program needs is also GPL'd, which ironically might violate the LGPL for a lot of binutils. Discouraging commercial apps from using cygwin might be A Good Thing anyway, since it's not a paragon of security (it uses a shm segment to keep state like fd's). So I'm switching to MinGW, which is much nicer in many ways, but it has an even worse system of distribution than cygwin's rather unimpressive kludgy installer (which for starters is impossible to use without a mouse)
So I am wondering, what about porting something like BSD ports or Gentoo's portage or Debian's apt to MinGW? They're all ostensibly architecture-neutral, right? Personally I am leaning toward ports, because it uses the right language for dependency checking (make), it doesn't require packages (great for embryonic distros that don't have everything in packages). Portage OTOH looks like it has transactional features ports does not. I don't want to get mired in trying to design The Package System To End All Package Systems... I would like to know if anyone else is working on such a thing for cygwin and/or mingw though.
How long did it take them to: (a) Kill Netscape with MSIE, (b) maim RealAudio with Windows Media, (c) shutdown 3rd-party Windows webservers with IIS, etc.? Not long.
Netscape and Real Networks self-destructed. Real is still trudging along, making their player more and more obtrusive, obnoxious, buggy, and resource-consuming, but at that rate they'll deservedly become a footnote. Netscape was the only one that managed to market a decent webserver for windows, but well, see above.
So MS integrates what was once third-party software into the OS. Some even cry to the DOJ about their disappearing "market" (the idea that there was a "web browser market" was dubious at best). I have about as much sympathy for companies that attempt to ride on shinier versions of the Same Old Software they sold ten years ago as I do for Trumpet (makers of a TCP/IP stack) and the makers of buggy whips. No one has a god given right to keep selling the same product to the same market forever. If MS raises the bar, I'm happy to be left with companies that can jump it.
Developer differences. First there was 386/BSD, which contained much that was architecture-specific, and this was seen as baleful and abhorrent to some developers, who founded NetBSD, which probably has a port to the abacus -- it's so portable it makes linux look about as portable as Win95. FreeBSD decided that performance and features were more useful than architectural purity, so they stuck with being architecture specific. OpenBSD spun off of NetBSD when its founder was drummed out of the group for being somewhat less cuddly than your average poisonous sea urchin. It tends to track more closely with FreeBSD these days.
To this day, they still retain these focuses. If you want to learn OS design with neat theoretical underpinnings, you want NetBSD. If you want something fast and featureful, FreeBSD is for you, and if you want something that's been audited by some freakishly security-attentive reviewers, then the choice is OpenBSD.
Personally I find three forks better than 233252635265246 various distributions
Question: cannot I counter-subpoena, requesting the name of the individual(s) that asserted I have pirated software, for the purposes of filing a "defamation of character" or "bearing false witness" suit?
You can try. They will counter by claiming various confidentiality contracts, claim the tip was anonymous, claim they didn't need the tip, then change the venue to 3 am in a disused lavatory in Kandahar with a sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard". In short, they will make sure you pay tens of thousands of clams in legal bills. Then they'll drop their investigation of you and ask for summary dismissal of your complaints because of that, you get to file your own brand new complaint, lather, rinse, repeat, and spend spend spend.
How about for windows? (Yeah, I imagine it's there too, it's a rhetorical question) How about pictures that one can actually view on this newfangled web thing? I can't imagine those pics have a resource fork they need to preserve in order to have to be binhexed.
Interestingly, I just learned how to create multiply forked files on win2k.. ironically it's only cygwin that can do it easily. Now if only I knew how to browse the forks in a file. Wonder what other nifty features windows is hiding for lack of a decent shell. Well, back to the topic...
There are rumors that moving the IIS document root directory is quite complicated. Do you really have to change registry entries, without support from the GUI?
Find the server in "my network places", right-click, select "manage", expand "internet information services", right-click "default website", select "home directory", change it in "local path".
Too much clicking on different widgets and popups and waiting for my tastes... I tried editing this in the registry (seems to be under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W3SVC\Param eters\Virtual Roots) but it didn't seem to take when I checked the value in mmc.
Cobalt's approach is nice, they use mod_perl to read in a config file written by their configurator app and generate the appropriate config info. It's too bad the interface absolutely *sucks* for managing more than a couple dozen virtual sites on one box (we had one cobalt box serving up 200 sites. not fun, since the group-based security model starts to lock out the admin user after only 28 sites)
> Really, who does not feel like a veneralbe cripple on the M$ box they have to use at work?
At work, sure, it's usually locked down so I can run my apps and not tweak it. At home? I have an office suite I can program in a half dozen different languages, a development environment without equal for C++, perl, python, haskell, ocaml. I use bash as my shell with all the unix utilities I want, including X11 ones. I run mysql, postgresql, and MSSQL for my databases, I run Java apps with blazing speed. I have my choice of IIS and apache for servers -- and run both at once, IE, Opera, and Mozilla for clients. I get remote access to my desktop with VNC, to my individual apps with MTS.
Frankly I don't see where I'm stuck here. I suppose if I needed to put up a cheap firewall I'm out of luck on my platform, but that's all I can think of offhand. Yes it costs -- I willingly paid for these features.
Slashdot Mirror
So buy Red Hat database. That's what its for. You get the benefits of free software, and it is fully-supported by Red Hat.
Redhat, one of the most trusted and experienced names in the database industry...
This gets brought up so many times it should probably be in the FAQ. Maybe it is by now. Slashdot does not link to the google cache because they don't have any arrangement with google, and there is no such deal because they do not want sites that depend on banner impressions (amazingly some folks think banner ads still make money) naming them as a party in a lawsuit that claims they conspired to redirect traffic away from their site. It wouldn't matter if the suit had merit, all it takes is one dot-bomb that decides lawsuit shakedowns are its new revenue stream to make life hell for a lot of people at OSDN.
'course maybe someone will sue slashdot for linking to them in the first place...
Intuition suggests that the most efficient thing to do is to "get rid" of the VM by compiling everything to native code before you distribute your app. But that doesn't get rid of the VM -- it just converts it to a different form. There are some VM features you can't compile away, such as garbage collection.
Where did you pull this assertion out? It's rubbish. Eiffel and Ada are garbage collected out of the box. C and C++ can be by just linking code to a different library. The 'V' in VM stands for Virtual. There is no virtual machine being used, it is using the real machine. Real registers, real opcodes. In fact, gcj compiles down to what amounts to C++ (the object layout is the same)
Some experts claim (not me, I get dizzy when I even read benchmarks) that "pure" nativeness is illusory and not that efficient. Plus you lose a lot of the features of the Java platform when you run the program that way.
Partly true on both counts. A VM has some known constraints that lends utsekf to optimization. Pointers in C and C++ for example create potential aliasing problems that just don't exist in Java. However, a good native compiler (not a merely adequate one like gcc) can do instruction ordering that a VM cannot. Bytecode has advantages like portability, and with clever classloaders, you can do all kinds of wizardry to objects by rewriting the bytecode. Not every app needs these features however, and so native compilation is also a compelling option. Native compilation also gains you the capability of using more native features efficiently. Case in point, JNI is slow -- Macromedia Generator is largely a Java scaffold around C++ components, so it uses JNI extensively. Turns out to be slower than an alternative written in pure java.
Can I run all apps/libs (or equivalents of the same quality) I use regularly now on FreeBSD? That would be KDE2.2, XMMS, OpenGL on GeForce2, MSN client, \LaTeX{}, Java1.2 a.o. Would It really bring me some extra performance/stability?
;-)
Yes, yes, no, yes, yes, sorta. Most apps for linux compile for freebsd out of the box, and if they don't, you just type 'linux bash' at a shell and install a redhat rpm. nVidia is never going to release a driver for freebsd, closed or otherwise (don't start with OSX, it's not even close to the same thing at that level), or sufficient specs to write one. There's native Java now, but I doubt they'll port a retrograde version -- it should be backward compatible anyway.
The whole FreeBSD approach does appeal to me, so I'm definitely interested in trying, but only if it has a real chance becoming my primary LILO partion
We may yet see the death of LILO and it won't be too soon. FreeBSD's bootloader is comparable to GRUB and then some. It'll load Linux just fine as well.
> How long before the Linux kernel is forked by someone that actually does version management with CVS?
I believe LinuxPPC uses CVS. Still has to deal with tracking Linux itself though, which varies in quality with the quality of Linus's moods.
They are. Try this for size. Still in development, but it's now self-hosting (subversion uses subversion as their VC now).
Not that CVS isn't still a steaming pile of excrement, but couldn't approval be done with tags in cvs? Just make it a rule that only a reviewer could add such a tag (it's not a secret military project, you can do it with just policy and not access control), and have the build sandbox check out only reviewed tags.
... I was just thinking of ways that real VC and workflow features could be simulated for those stuck with CVS.
I'm not all that well-read on CVS, so I don't know if a tag automatically causes a branch or if there can be only one tag or what
Any new leader that simply does the courtesy of replying to patch submitters with "got your patch, first glance doesn't look like i'm going to take it, so hash it out on k-t to discuss it and i'll jump in when i have time and point out my objections" or just plain "got your patch, don't have time to look at it yet" would be doing a far better job at patch management than Linus is currently doing. Linus's behavior toward developers he has any personal friction with is nothing short of passive-agressive.
Pickling is really trivial. Hell, I've worked on a pickler for C++. Perl has a plethora of picklers (say that 10 times fast), including Data::Dumper, FreezeThaw, and Storable. Then there's Java's Serializable. It's really not a terribly interesting problem, orthogonal persistence is. Orthogonal persistence where you have an interpreter or other such runtime environent that can be started and stopped and moved around in the meantime, possibly with multiple processes attached to the runtime simultaneously. The "orthogonal" means that you don't do anything special (like pickling) to persist objects and retrieve them from the persistent store, they're just there when you want them, and their lifecycle is indefinite when you create them.
Any programmable MUD is an example of such orthogonal persistence. Squeak and Self would be others. Personally I wouldn't mind such an environment for Python, but I'm not holding my breath.
> I think the better solution is to write a new signal called "SIGFREEZE"
Which is not only how Solaris does it, it's what Solaris calls it. The counterpart signal is SIGTHAW. The signals are advisory though, the process isn't required to implement all the freeze/thaw logic in userspace.
Insightful my ass.
Yunno, some people hit the 50 cap long ago. Some never cared. I thought this whinging over so-called "karma whoring" had died long ago (I was thinking of changing my sig), but I guess there are some people still left who are socially stunted enough that they cannot conceive of others partaking in conversation for the fun or edification instead of pleas for attention. I thought I was kind of messed up, but I can't say that I feel particularly validated or not based on some score I have on slashdot.
> In short, people who don't like WikiStyleLinks usually don't like them because they haven't given them an honest try
Ah, the cry of the novice advocate: "if you don't agree, you don't understand". I've seen this argument used on everything from python to political theories. This argument also has about as much merit: those who advocate WikiWords or indentation for syntax or redistribution of wealth believe in the self-evident merit of the idea so much that anyone else must be deluded. Believe it or don't, it's just based on as much actual insight as the first assertion.
It really just doesn't take a lot of training to get people to use brackets. People can stick brackets around phrases in existing text.
With a little more intelligence, it can be done with a javascript browser interface and no syntax at all: hilight the words, click on a "make link" button, if there's no link then do a fuzzy match (think spellchecker) on existing links, suggest them. No cumbersome textarea needed. A bit slow for my tastes (too much aiming with the mouse), but great for one-off editing.
Thankfully most wikis worth using do support free link syntax, because in keeping with the wiki philosophy, freedom is good. As for the javascript trick, I've a similar thing done with in a helpdesk app, though it wasn't browser-based (it easily could be).
The database example is apples and oranges -- the database with an index is using an O(1) algorithm instead of O(n). This usually isn't the case with bloaty apps though. Perl for example, love it to death, but the damn thing just doesn't free many structures like anonymous subs, thinking it'll be able to reuse the activation later. Or apps with string copies all over the place when it never uses the original copy again.
Certainly for quick one-off apps it's better to waste memory and cpu cycles than time. I'm not suggesting a return to micromanaged handcrafting of code, I am saying that the tradeoff for convenience is still a tradeoff and in the big picture can't be handwaved away with price quotes on RAM.
Jeepers, it's the "memory is cheap" nonsense again. I got news for ya: L1 cache still isn't cheap. Page sizes are still 8k. Think of how much more responsive your apps are going to be when they're not constantly paging and blowing away cache. RAM might be cheap, bloat still costs not only the app, but everything else that has to share a CPU with it.
> Ages ago I planned on doing some small application that would make my desktop 'alive'.
Microsoft did this and slashdot screamed for their heads.
Anyway... Web developer friend of mine has a flash desktop, has very subtle animations going on in the background. It's tres cool.
Yah, but RMS won't shut up til ya build it all with lcc :^)
> How is this any more convenient than apt-get which is also available for RPM based systems?
../..; make install from there and it builds as a package.
Because ports does not require packages. Example, if I want to install a KDE app, it does not require that I have the qt package installed. It searches for libqt.so. If it's a gtk package, it runs gtk-config, if it's apache, it runs apxs, and so forth. Now debian's a little better than RPM, which ends up making you force-install just about everything (defeating dependency checking) because you installed something from source, but you still have to intervene when a dependent package isn't present. Ports assumes you know what you're doing, and if the lib is there, it's there, it doesn't need a package manifest to tell you. It does check for the package first, and ports does build a package, so you get a package-based system that degrades gracefully when you don't religiously use the package system.
THAT is why I use ports. Because no sysadmin I know of takes the builds out of the box, they keep their source trees around to tweak and recompile as needed. Oh, and ports lets me do that doo, I just "make get" the port, cd work/packagename, and there's the source tree as if I'd untarred it myself. I can configure && make install it from there, or cd
I once thought of making a Linux distro -- yeah, everyone has -- but short story shorter, I don't have that itch to scratch anymore, since I have sitting in front of me a box that's running just Win2k. I got cygwin, liked it for a while, and have grown to hate it. Slow, buggy, and now unreliable in config -- make stopped working, some weird interaction with shell quoting. Make is kinda important yunno. The DLL that every last damn cygwin program needs is also GPL'd, which ironically might violate the LGPL for a lot of binutils. Discouraging commercial apps from using cygwin might be A Good Thing anyway, since it's not a paragon of security (it uses a shm segment to keep state like fd's). So I'm switching to MinGW, which is much nicer in many ways, but it has an even worse system of distribution than cygwin's rather unimpressive kludgy installer (which for starters is impossible to use without a mouse)
... I would like to know if anyone else is working on such a thing for cygwin and/or mingw though.
So I am wondering, what about porting something like BSD ports or Gentoo's portage or Debian's apt to MinGW? They're all ostensibly architecture-neutral, right? Personally I am leaning toward ports, because it uses the right language for dependency checking (make), it doesn't require packages (great for embryonic distros that don't have everything in packages). Portage OTOH looks like it has transactional features ports does not. I don't want to get mired in trying to design The Package System To End All Package Systems
How long did it take them to: (a) Kill Netscape with MSIE, (b) maim RealAudio with Windows Media, (c) shutdown 3rd-party Windows webservers with IIS, etc.? Not long.
Netscape and Real Networks self-destructed. Real is still trudging along, making their player more and more obtrusive, obnoxious, buggy, and resource-consuming, but at that rate they'll deservedly become a footnote. Netscape was the only one that managed to market a decent webserver for windows, but well, see above.
So MS integrates what was once third-party software into the OS. Some even cry to the DOJ about their disappearing "market" (the idea that there was a "web browser market" was dubious at best). I have about as much sympathy for companies that attempt to ride on shinier versions of the Same Old Software they sold ten years ago as I do for Trumpet (makers of a TCP/IP stack) and the makers of buggy whips. No one has a god given right to keep selling the same product to the same market forever. If MS raises the bar, I'm happy to be left with companies that can jump it.
> Why are there still three BSDs?
Developer differences. First there was 386/BSD, which contained much that was architecture-specific, and this was seen as baleful and abhorrent to some developers, who founded NetBSD, which probably has a port to the abacus -- it's so portable it makes linux look about as portable as Win95. FreeBSD decided that performance and features were more useful than architectural purity, so they stuck with being architecture specific. OpenBSD spun off of NetBSD when its founder was drummed out of the group for being somewhat less cuddly than your average poisonous sea urchin. It tends to track more closely with FreeBSD these days.
To this day, they still retain these focuses. If you want to learn OS design with neat theoretical underpinnings, you want NetBSD. If you want something fast and featureful, FreeBSD is for you, and if you want something that's been audited by some freakishly security-attentive reviewers, then the choice is OpenBSD.
Personally I find three forks better than 233252635265246 various distributions
Question: cannot I counter-subpoena, requesting the name of the individual(s) that asserted I have pirated software, for the purposes of filing a "defamation of character" or "bearing false witness" suit?
You can try. They will counter by claiming various confidentiality contracts, claim the tip was anonymous, claim they didn't need the tip, then change the venue to 3 am in a disused lavatory in Kandahar with a sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard". In short, they will make sure you pay tens of thousands of clams in legal bills. Then they'll drop their investigation of you and ask for summary dismissal of your complaints because of that, you get to file your own brand new complaint, lather, rinse, repeat, and spend spend spend.
How about for windows? (Yeah, I imagine it's there too, it's a rhetorical question) How about pictures that one can actually view on this newfangled web thing? I can't imagine those pics have a resource fork they need to preserve in order to have to be binhexed.
.. ironically it's only cygwin that can do it easily. Now if only I knew how to browse the forks in a file. Wonder what other nifty features windows is hiding for lack of a decent shell. Well, back to the topic...
Interestingly, I just learned how to create multiply forked files on win2k
For those of us not in the choir, are those pictures available in non-binhexed format anywhere?
There are rumors that moving the IIS document root directory is quite complicated. Do you really have to change registry entries, without support from the GUI?
m eters\Virtual Roots) but it didn't seem to take when I checked the value in mmc.
Find the server in "my network places", right-click, select "manage", expand "internet information services", right-click "default website", select "home directory", change it in "local path".
Too much clicking on different widgets and popups and waiting for my tastes... I tried editing this in the registry (seems to be under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W3SVC\Para
Cobalt's approach is nice, they use mod_perl to read in a config file written by their configurator app and generate the appropriate config info. It's too bad the interface absolutely *sucks* for managing more than a couple dozen virtual sites on one box (we had one cobalt box serving up 200 sites. not fun, since the group-based security model starts to lock out the admin user after only 28 sites)
> Really, who does not feel like a veneralbe cripple on the M$ box they have to use at work?
At work, sure, it's usually locked down so I can run my apps and not tweak it. At home? I have an office suite I can program in a half dozen different languages, a development environment without equal for C++, perl, python, haskell, ocaml. I use bash as my shell with all the unix utilities I want, including X11 ones. I run mysql, postgresql, and MSSQL for my databases, I run Java apps with blazing speed. I have my choice of IIS and apache for servers -- and run both at once, IE, Opera, and Mozilla for clients. I get remote access to my desktop with VNC, to my individual apps with MTS.
Frankly I don't see where I'm stuck here. I suppose if I needed to put up a cheap firewall I'm out of luck on my platform, but that's all I can think of offhand. Yes it costs -- I willingly paid for these features.