Oh ho HO! International chat certainly is a problem in the Linux community, owing to many factors; not the least of which being that the developers of the major IM forces out there seem to largely be from ISO-8859-1 locales. Thus ISO-8859-1 works pretty well, and other, more ASCII-deviant (CJK) locales work with virtually no success.
The good news is that an answer is here! I've been on a crusade to make Gaim the penguin-pimpin'est international chat machine available, and it's really paying off! For the stable series of gaim (0.59.x, currently at 0.59.4 with 0.59.5 to be released possibly as I type this) (I just looked and 0.59.5 is out), if your locale is set correctly you should be able to chat in whatever language your little heart desires... (I have personally successfully used it with English and Japanese) as long as you aren't chatting over the AOL Instant Messenger service or the ICQ service, both of which use the Oscar protocol. However, MSN and Jabber, for instance, should be substantially correct.
The fabulous news is that the development version of gaim coming at us right now has first class i18n support on the whole gamut of protocols! With a timely move to Gtk+ 2.0 and the Pango text formatting system, Gaim now has international text formatting second to none in the OSS community and hardly rivalled in the commercial world. Images like this shot of gaim displaying Japanese, Russian, and English simultaneously display what I'm talking about very nicely. Not only can we do non-English text, thanks to UTF-8 we can do all of the modern languages of the world simultaneously. In addition, support for internationalization on the troublesome Oscar (AIM and ICQ) protocol has been added and is coming along very nicely.
In short, look for the next major release of gaim to clear up these issues in a big way. For those hardy souls wanting to test the code that's currently in CVS, please note that it is NOT currently complete, and isses that you have are most likely transient.
Also, please be aware that your locale MUST be set correctly for internationalized programs to work the way you expect. Programs that only deal with your system can be more forgiving, but programs that communicate over the network absolutely must know more about your locale, including your character set. If the output of your 'locale' command lists LC_CTYPE as, for instance, "C", it's no wonder i18n isn't working! Set your LANG or LC_CTYPE correctly for your language (en_US for English with ISO-8859-1, es_ES or es_MX for Spanish, pt_PT or pt_BR for Portuguese, ja_JP for Japanese, zh_CN for Chinese, etc.) and you might see general i18n support improving dramatically.
I'm curious as to why "one would assume that this is based on 802.11b"... ? Their page clearly says that your PC must already be Ethernet-capable; if it were based on 802.11b, I would think they would use one of the widely available 802.11 adapters and an external antenna.
The fact of the matter is that this is not what 802.11 is intended for. It is intended for local LAN access. While many organizations are trying to (and having some success) move it into the long distance market, that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense for an ISP. There are plenty of other ways to push bits over the airwaves, guys.
After all that talk about how scalable and powerful the system is compared to Linux, they say that a script that came with the system "locked up" the system and "forced them to reinstall"... That doesn't sound very scalable and powerful to me. I would be interested in hearing more details about the incident. Were they "forced" to reinstall because they didn't know how to fix it, or because it couldn't be fixed?
Well, it's a little late to be announcing the IETF meeting if anyone is actually interested (although I doubt the percentage of Slashdot readership that is actually interested (versus the percentage that thinks they might be) is too terribly high...), but fortunately the good multicast event hasn't been missed.
If you're at all interested in the goings-on of the IETF and would like to get a feel for the overall issues considered "important", watch the Plenary session tonight (I think it's at 1830 UTC). It is generally interesting, and guaranteed to have at least a little bit of bickering.;-)
Copyrights don't expire like patents... A copyright held by the FSF will stand as long as the FSF is around and cares to let it.
IIRC, a copyright is good for some N years after the original author's death, where N is very large (90?). In the case where the copyright is held by a corporation or organization, that becomes the lifetime of the organization + N years.
I could be wrong, but this is the way I understand it.
Not to say I think the GPL is a problem in most cases; if you can't use the GPL'd code, write an independent implementation. Generally GPL'd algorithms aren't patented, which can be a problem.
I guess my statement was too wide-reaching.;-) I meant that you can't execute commands/change environment variables/etc. i.e. you can't do damage in a parent shell from a child su nobody'd shell. Sure you can kill it, but you can't 'rm -rf/'.
I just bought a new iBook as well, for the same reasons on the referenced page. I couldn't find a comparable x86 laptop in the same price range, and being a poor college student price was critical.
Since this is my first PPC machine, I chose to take the easy path and install a PPC-only distribution... I chose Yellow Dog 2.0, and I had an easier time installing than Mr. Moffitt indicates. Everything worked "out of the box" for me (pardoning sound, which as he mentions is still forthcoming) except for suspend, which locked up the laptop on resume. A little bit of web research revealed that resuming the new ATI Mobility chipsets was more difficult than some other chipsets, but the problem had been solved in 2.4.x; I snarfed one of BenH's fabulous kernel trees and built 2.4.6. Suspend was fixed, just like that.
Yellow Dog isn't as up-to-date as the distros I'm used to using on x86, but with a little legwork I'm getting it pulled into mid-2001.;-) The Ximian LinuxPPC 2000 RPMs work fine (although the installer and Red Carpet do not), and a quick rebuild of the jed RPMs got me up and running with a good editor.
I haven't found any documentation on how to turn off the AirPort card when it is not in use (I'm not sure about these 802.11 cards, but I know that regular 802.11 cards suck battery power like its their job; turning the slot off when they're not in use is a big bonus), but the battery life still seems to be 4 hours or so of light usage, less under heavy load.
I don't have the latch problems Mr. Moffitt mentions, either... The magnetic latch thing is SUPER cool in my opinion. It's cool just to mostly close the lid and watch the hook jump out.;-)
All in all I'm very pleased. Time will tell if my pleasure is well-placed, I guess.
Uhh, the exit would exit the command shell and it would cease to be harmful at that point.:-)
You can't affect a parent shell from a subshell in any way that I am aware of.
Re:Abusing /. to get tech-support
on
XFree 4.1.0 Out
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· Score: 1
The S3 Virge drivers have had pixel corruption on some cards for as long as I can remember (since the inception of the Virge, basically). I don't know of a fix.
Just out of curiosity, what makes you say it is less impressive than Qt/embedded? I don't ask that to start a flame war, but it seems to me they are shooting at (and apparently accomplishing) approximately the same goals. Why do you like Qt/embedded better? (Disclaimer: I have not used GTK+fb or Qt/embedded either one, but I have used both toolkits; I like the fact that Gtk+fb will not require application code to change at all, but I don't know where Qt/embedded stands on this issue)
Speed. The default Gtk+ look is very simple, which we often now associate with primitive; however, it is also very fast and very light. If you want a prettier (but heftier) theme, they are available.
Postscript is a spectacular presentation language for the final product, but it isn't much for editing. This guy wants something for "living" documents that people are going to have to edit...
what is CORBA anyway? I haven't been able to figure it out.
CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is a method of decoupling "objects" (read: chunks of code) from their physical location, programming language, and implementation details. What this means is that I can have a CORBA object implementing a particular "interface" that is running on an iMac in London, England and use it just the same as if it were local to my box in Ohio, USA. Obviously there would be network latencies, but the functionality would be identical...
What's more, the module on the iMac can be written in Eiffel while my program (the one using it) is written in Smalltalk; CORBA doesn't care as long as both computers have a compatible ORB.
What this is supposed to enable is interchangeable software "parts". For instance, I have an email application that requires and "address book" CORBA object; I would query the local ORB and say "hey, I need an 'address book'". The local ORB would hand me whatever address book was available; it might not be the same address book you use, but if it exports the same interface neither of us has to care. The details are handled within the ORB.
All of this is very cool, but I'm not sure how much I like CORBA or not.:-)
The higher your resolution gets, the more pretty anti-aliasing gets... At very low resolutions it can make unreadable text readable, but it does look blurry. At middling resolutions it doesn't really improve the readability much and it certainly makes the text look blurry. At high resolutions (where even the heavily anti-aliased portions of a line have a solid center) it looks FINE.
I'm waiting very impatiently for some decent anti-aliasing.:-)
One thing to keep in mind is that (at least IMHO) the anti-aliasing in Windows, MacOS, etc. SUCKS. Please don't base your opinion of anti-aliasing off these... Grab a FreeType library and play with the included demos, or check out the anti-aliasing in BeOS or QNX if you want to see some pretty anti-aliasing. The quality of the implementation can obviously make a big difference...
The majority of the readers that are not interested (excepting at least one...) are smart enough to just not read the article rather than childishly complaining.
Yes, you and I read lkml, and I'm sure (I hope) some of the/. staff... But do you really expect every reader of/. who clicked through on that story to read lkml? I don't think so...
The slashdot crowd as a whole isn't as technical as it once was... I have some complaints about the recent quality of slashdot postings just like the next guy, but I solve it by reading the ones I like and ignoring the ones I don't - somebody likes the ones I don't, and I don't begrudge them their stories.
Yes, especially considering that we are widely believed to be in the recession of an ice age... It just might make sense that ice melts during the recession of an ice age, only to freeze when the age comes back in full force.
This is funniest because 20-30 years ago the big stir was all that we were headed back into the ice age and the world was going to freeze over. There was "real(1)" fear that latitudes as far south as Maine would be locked in polar ice caps.
But that's not convenient now, global warming is convenient now.
I have as much respect for the environment as the next guy, but at some point you have to sit back and say "hmm, maybe the global weather trends that have been going on for eons are still going on". I think it is supremely arrogant of mankind to believe that he can change what nature built in a billion years in just fifty.
Then again, maybe I'm wrong... But I certainly think this needs taken with a grain of salt.
(1) Which is to say that the same people who are afraid now were afraid then... They must have short memories
I'm pretty sure there was a bug in one of the Helix packages a while back that caused ORBit to listen on a TCP socket by default... This caused any gnome app exporting a CORBA interface to have an open socket. (gnome-terminal, panel, gpilot-applet, etc. - any applet and many apps)
At any rate, Helix fixed this in one of their updates, and the recent ORBit RPMs have this feature disabled by default. A simple upgrade should fix your troubles.
Mmm, yes, I don't know about WINS servers and time servers... But nameservers etc. are supposed to be solved by "anycast" addresses. An anycast address goes to the "closest" host performing a certain function, such as name serving. I will not be surprised if some of these other services get an anycast address, as well.
DHCP does more than hand out dynamic IPs...the server tells the client about who the DNS servers are on its network, what the subnet mask is, etc. What you're really asking is "will dynamic IP addresses die". DHCP is potentially very useful even if you're not using dynamic addressing. Nitpicking, perhaps, but I see this misconception about the purpose of DHCP far too often. It is actually quite underutilized IMO.
All of this is taken care of for you in IPv6 as well, albeit in a different sort of way. The subnet mask is handled by "Router Advertisements", DNS is handled by an "All DNS Servers" multicast (if I remember correctly, I could be wrong - this may be an advertisement as well), etc. IPv6 is truly a next generation protocol in *many* ways. There is a DHCPv6 spec, but I doubt that many (if any) installations will have to use it as all of the functionality in DHCPv4 is automatic in IPv6 via its 'stateless autoconfiguration'.
But unfortunately, Linux is not an OS. Having IPv6 in the kernel is fine, but it is a *major* PITA to get even the basics (ping, traceroute) recompiled, etc. FreeBSD is way ahead of the game in this case.
Actually, the newest iputils packages have ping6, traceroute6, etc. and many other packages (e.g. OpenSSH) can be compiled with ipv6 support with relative ease. (Note that I realize OpenSSH is originally from a *BSD and I recognize and respect their support for IPv6 - but Linux *does* also have it)
As I'm sure countless others have pointed out, there is excellent information on transitioning (borrowed word from a friend of mine at school... I'm not sure it's a real word, but hey...) to ipv6 at the ipv6.org site, as well as a Linux HOWTO with some easy-to-follow instructions.
At this point, I recommend checking out some RFCs if you're wanting to set up an IPv6 box... It has all kinds of nuances IPv4 didn't have that you need to know at this point. Once it is widely deployed, IPv6 has fabulous autoconfiguration methods; however, if (like most of us) you will have to be tunneling through IPv4 to get to the nearest IPv6 host, you'll hafta set a lot of that stuff up yourself.
That said, you know that as soon as I can get a working IPv6 tunnel at school I'll have it in a heartbeat.;-)
Ethan
Re:It's D&D Jim, but not as we know it
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 1
That casting sequence is my favorite part of the entire Slayers series... I dunno why, but that billowing cape and the eerie light are just awesome.
Darkness beyond twilight, crimson beyond blood that flows, buried in the flow of time... In Thy great name I pledge myself to darkness. Let all the fools who stand in our way be destroyed by the power that you and I posess. DRAGON SLAVE!
Slashdot Mirror
Oh ho HO! International chat certainly is a problem in the Linux community, owing to many factors; not the least of which being that the developers of the major IM forces out there seem to largely be from ISO-8859-1 locales. Thus ISO-8859-1 works pretty well, and other, more ASCII-deviant (CJK) locales work with virtually no success.
The good news is that an answer is here! I've been on a crusade to make Gaim the penguin-pimpin'est international chat machine available, and it's really paying off! For the stable series of gaim (0.59.x, currently at 0.59.4 with 0.59.5 to be released possibly as I type this) (I just looked and 0.59.5 is out), if your locale is set correctly you should be able to chat in whatever language your little heart desires... (I have personally successfully used it with English and Japanese) as long as you aren't chatting over the AOL Instant Messenger service or the ICQ service, both of which use the Oscar protocol. However, MSN and Jabber, for instance, should be substantially correct.
The fabulous news is that the development version of gaim coming at us right now has first class i18n support on the whole gamut of protocols! With a timely move to Gtk+ 2.0 and the Pango text formatting system, Gaim now has international text formatting second to none in the OSS community and hardly rivalled in the commercial world. Images like this shot of gaim displaying Japanese, Russian, and English simultaneously display what I'm talking about very nicely. Not only can we do non-English text, thanks to UTF-8 we can do all of the modern languages of the world simultaneously. In addition, support for internationalization on the troublesome Oscar (AIM and ICQ) protocol has been added and is coming along very nicely.
In short, look for the next major release of gaim to clear up these issues in a big way. For those hardy souls wanting to test the code that's currently in CVS, please note that it is NOT currently complete, and isses that you have are most likely transient.
Also, please be aware that your locale MUST be set correctly for internationalized programs to work the way you expect. Programs that only deal with your system can be more forgiving, but programs that communicate over the network absolutely must know more about your locale, including your character set. If the output of your 'locale' command lists LC_CTYPE as, for instance, "C", it's no wonder i18n isn't working! Set your LANG or LC_CTYPE correctly for your language (en_US for English with ISO-8859-1, es_ES or es_MX for Spanish, pt_PT or pt_BR for Portuguese, ja_JP for Japanese, zh_CN for Chinese, etc.) and you might see general i18n support improving dramatically.
Telnet disables the Nagle algorithm.
It's a moot point with SSH anyway, because SSH transmits the password in one chunk as far as I know...
Of course, this article also asked if replacing SSL with TLS would fix SSH. Par for the course, I guess.
I'm curious as to why "one would assume that this is based on 802.11b" ... ? Their page clearly says that your PC must already be Ethernet-capable; if it were based on 802.11b, I would think they would use one of the widely available 802.11 adapters and an external antenna.
The fact of the matter is that this is not what 802.11 is intended for. It is intended for local LAN access. While many organizations are trying to (and having some success) move it into the long distance market, that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense for an ISP. There are plenty of other ways to push bits over the airwaves, guys.
EthanAfter all that talk about how scalable and powerful the system is compared to Linux, they say that a script that came with the system "locked up" the system and "forced them to reinstall"... That doesn't sound very scalable and powerful to me. I would be interested in hearing more details about the incident. Were they "forced" to reinstall because they didn't know how to fix it, or because it couldn't be fixed?
Ethan
Well, it's a little late to be announcing the IETF meeting if anyone is actually interested (although I doubt the percentage of Slashdot readership that is actually interested (versus the percentage that thinks they might be) is too terribly high...), but fortunately the good multicast event hasn't been missed.
If you're at all interested in the goings-on of the IETF and would like to get a feel for the overall issues considered "important", watch the Plenary session tonight (I think it's at 1830 UTC). It is generally interesting, and guaranteed to have at least a little bit of bickering. ;-)
... Dragon?
IIRC, a copyright is good for some N years after the original author's death, where N is very large (90?). In the case where the copyright is held by a corporation or organization, that becomes the lifetime of the organization + N years.
I could be wrong, but this is the way I understand it.
Not to say I think the GPL is a problem in most cases; if you can't use the GPL'd code, write an independent implementation. Generally GPL'd algorithms aren't patented, which can be a problem.
I guess my statement was too wide-reaching. ;-) I meant that you can't execute commands/change environment variables/etc. i.e. you can't do damage in a parent shell from a child su nobody'd shell. Sure you can kill it, but you can't 'rm -rf /'.
Since this is my first PPC machine, I chose to take the easy path and install a PPC-only distribution... I chose Yellow Dog 2.0, and I had an easier time installing than Mr. Moffitt indicates. Everything worked "out of the box" for me (pardoning sound, which as he mentions is still forthcoming) except for suspend, which locked up the laptop on resume. A little bit of web research revealed that resuming the new ATI Mobility chipsets was more difficult than some other chipsets, but the problem had been solved in 2.4.x; I snarfed one of BenH's fabulous kernel trees and built 2.4.6. Suspend was fixed, just like that.
Yellow Dog isn't as up-to-date as the distros I'm used to using on x86, but with a little legwork I'm getting it pulled into mid-2001.
I haven't found any documentation on how to turn off the AirPort card when it is not in use (I'm not sure about these 802.11 cards, but I know that regular 802.11 cards suck battery power like its their job; turning the slot off when they're not in use is a big bonus), but the battery life still seems to be 4 hours or so of light usage, less under heavy load.
I don't have the latch problems Mr. Moffitt mentions, either... The magnetic latch thing is SUPER cool in my opinion. It's cool just to mostly close the lid and watch the hook jump out.
All in all I'm very pleased. Time will tell if my pleasure is well-placed, I guess.
Ethan
You can't affect a parent shell from a subshell in any way that I am aware of.
The S3 Virge drivers have had pixel corruption on some cards for as long as I can remember (since the inception of the Virge, basically). I don't know of a fix.
Three button USB mice work fine... The issue is that the built-in pointer only has one button. It would be nice to not *require* an external mouse.
;-) And I don't even like Macs!
That said, I'm dreaming of the day I can buy one of these.
Just out of curiosity, what makes you say it is less impressive than Qt/embedded? I don't ask that to start a flame war, but it seems to me they are shooting at (and apparently accomplishing) approximately the same goals. Why do you like Qt/embedded better? (Disclaimer: I have not used GTK+fb or Qt/embedded either one, but I have used both toolkits; I like the fact that Gtk+fb will not require application code to change at all, but I don't know where Qt/embedded stands on this issue)
Speed. The default Gtk+ look is very simple, which we often now associate with primitive; however, it is also very fast and very light. If you want a prettier (but heftier) theme, they are available.
Postscript is a spectacular presentation language for the final product, but it isn't much for editing. This guy wants something for "living" documents that people are going to have to edit...
what is CORBA anyway? I haven't been able to figure it out.
CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is a method of decoupling "objects" (read: chunks of code) from their physical location, programming language, and implementation details. What this means is that I can have a CORBA object implementing a particular "interface" that is running on an iMac in London, England and use it just the same as if it were local to my box in Ohio, USA. Obviously there would be network latencies, but the functionality would be identical...
What's more, the module on the iMac can be written in Eiffel while my program (the one using it) is written in Smalltalk; CORBA doesn't care as long as both computers have a compatible ORB.
What this is supposed to enable is interchangeable software "parts". For instance, I have an email application that requires and "address book" CORBA object; I would query the local ORB and say "hey, I need an 'address book'". The local ORB would hand me whatever address book was available; it might not be the same address book you use, but if it exports the same interface neither of us has to care. The details are handled within the ORB.
All of this is very cool, but I'm not sure how much I like CORBA or not. :-)
The higher your resolution gets, the more pretty anti-aliasing gets... At very low resolutions it can make unreadable text readable, but it does look blurry. At middling resolutions it doesn't really improve the readability much and it certainly makes the text look blurry. At high resolutions (where even the heavily anti-aliased portions of a line have a solid center) it looks FINE.
I'm waiting very impatiently for some decent anti-aliasing.
One thing to keep in mind is that (at least IMHO) the anti-aliasing in Windows, MacOS, etc. SUCKS. Please don't base your opinion of anti-aliasing off these... Grab a FreeType library and play with the included demos, or check out the anti-aliasing in BeOS or QNX if you want to see some pretty anti-aliasing. The quality of the implementation can obviously make a big difference...
Ethan
Because:
-
CmdrTaco lives in the US
-
Thousands of other
/. readers live in the US
-
CmdrTaco is interested in Anime
-
(quantifier) other people are interested in Anime
And perhaps most importantly...Yes, you and I read lkml, and I'm sure (I hope) some of the
The slashdot crowd as a whole isn't as technical as it once was... I have some complaints about the recent quality of slashdot postings just like the next guy, but I solve it by reading the ones I like and ignoring the ones I don't - somebody likes the ones I don't, and I don't begrudge them their stories.
Yes, especially considering that we are widely believed to be in the recession of an ice age... It just might make sense that ice melts during the recession of an ice age, only to freeze when the age comes back in full force.
This is funniest because 20-30 years ago the big stir was all that we were headed back into the ice age and the world was going to freeze over. There was "real(1)" fear that latitudes as far south as Maine would be locked in polar ice caps.
But that's not convenient now, global warming is convenient now.
I have as much respect for the environment as the next guy, but at some point you have to sit back and say "hmm, maybe the global weather trends that have been going on for eons are still going on". I think it is supremely arrogant of mankind to believe that he can change what nature built in a billion years in just fifty.
Then again, maybe I'm wrong... But I certainly think this needs taken with a grain of salt.
I'm pretty sure there was a bug in one of the Helix packages a while back that caused ORBit to listen on a TCP socket by default... This caused any gnome app exporting a CORBA interface to have an open socket. (gnome-terminal, panel, gpilot-applet, etc. - any applet and many apps)
At any rate, Helix fixed this in one of their updates, and the recent ORBit RPMs have this feature disabled by default. A simple upgrade should fix your troubles.
Mmm, yes, I don't know about WINS servers and time servers... But nameservers etc. are supposed to be solved by "anycast" addresses. An anycast address goes to the "closest" host performing a certain function, such as name serving. I will not be surprised if some of these other services get an anycast address, as well.
Ethan
All of this is taken care of for you in IPv6 as well, albeit in a different sort of way. The subnet mask is handled by "Router Advertisements", DNS is handled by an "All DNS Servers" multicast (if I remember correctly, I could be wrong - this may be an advertisement as well), etc. IPv6 is truly a next generation protocol in *many* ways. There is a DHCPv6 spec, but I doubt that many (if any) installations will have to use it as all of the functionality in DHCPv4 is automatic in IPv6 via its 'stateless autoconfiguration'.
For more information, see:
Every IPv6 RFC I've read (that I can remember) has been a good read, so check 'em out. :-)
EthanActually, the newest iputils packages have ping6, traceroute6, etc. and many other packages (e.g. OpenSSH) can be compiled with ipv6 support with relative ease. (Note that I realize OpenSSH is originally from a *BSD and I recognize and respect their support for IPv6 - but Linux *does* also have it)
As I'm sure countless others have pointed out, there is excellent information on transitioning (borrowed word from a friend of mine at school... I'm not sure it's a real word, but hey...) to ipv6 at the ipv6.org site, as well as a Linux HOWTO with some easy-to-follow instructions.
At this point, I recommend checking out some RFCs if you're wanting to set up an IPv6 box... It has all kinds of nuances IPv4 didn't have that you need to know at this point. Once it is widely deployed, IPv6 has fabulous autoconfiguration methods; however, if (like most of us) you will have to be tunneling through IPv4 to get to the nearest IPv6 host, you'll hafta set a lot of that stuff up yourself.
That said, you know that as soon as I can get a working IPv6 tunnel at school I'll have it in a heartbeat. ;-)
EthanThat casting sequence is my favorite part of the entire Slayers series... I dunno why, but that billowing cape and the eerie light are just awesome.
Or something like that. ;-)