That ideas alone can be used to increase growth in the idea by fostering not just growth in the idea itself, but growth in the population that has the idea in the first place is interesting. So you would expect a Mormon that has 6 wives, that has a taboo against birth control, where it is unthinkable to have any sex other than vaginal sex, that goes to church at least once a week to enforce these ideas, that sends his children to teach the gospel and thinks celebacy is ludicrous and instills all of his beliefs into his children to eventually have a larger group of decendants to that, of say, a part-time christian that had 2 children and stopped there and doesn't really attend church that much.
It's amazing that someone would actually advance this hypothesis. We're all driven to reproduce, and some of our (um, I mean mainstream modern Western cultural) social conventions, such as monogamy, don't necessarily maximize our ability to spread our genes. If you do the math, and want to maximize your chances of propagating your genes, then men should mate with as many partners as they can. This isn't because of some silly idea virus garbage, this is simple biology.
Apes, cats, bats, rats, and rabbits all do the same thing. They don't communicate ideas, and yet they managed to figure it out.
Other cultural taboos also originate from the drive to increase the survival rate of the species. Take pork, for example. The prohibition on eating pork in certain religions no doubt comes from the fact that eating undercooked pork can lead to trichinosis, which is a fatal disease. (Pigs carry Trichinella Spiralis, which causes trichinosis). Someone probably observed that lots of people who ate pork caught this and died, while those who didn't, didn't. So, unaware of the parasite living in their swine, they decided that it must be God punishing them for eating the "filthy animal" and issued an appropriate edict.
That's it. Cause and effect coupled with instinct and the ability to communicate. Not some crapola mental virus.
Dennis Hopper said it best: "Just because it happened to you, doesn't mean it's interesting". Come on, does it really surprise anyone that ideas spread in a Darwinistic way? The problem is, the meme concept doesn't really explain why ideas spread, it just takes the fact that it does happen and runs with it in unlikely directions.
We talk to one another not just to selflessly impart information, but to receive the gratification of an elicited response. You tell someone about something because, when that person finds the idea interesting, they find *you* interesting. Likewise, the news media wants to tell you about things you'll find interesting -- then you'll find *them* interesting, and you'll watch, and they'll make money from commercials.
Conversely, of course, you won't bother repeating information to someone if you don't think it's going to interest them.
And this is how ideas live and die. The idea of "memes" takes the process out of context and really fails to get at the real issues behind why ideas spread -- it conveniently factors out human nature. Nebulous concepts like ideas surviving on their own and propagating due to their value to a culture are interesting fodder for late-night freshman year dormitory discussions but fail to take important things like human nature into account. And therefore they're not very interesting.
BTW the bug is this: If you start a x session at tty1 you're x display will go to tty7. Whenever you try to start a command line tool in the Run applet it will prompt you for stuff on tty1. I started a "ssh -l my_name My_Host" in the run applet. On tty1 a command line prompt was started asking me for a password. To my stunning suprise the password *was* echoed on the screen. I did file report.
Ummm... That's not a bug, that's the way X always works. If you run a command line program, it will appear on the current controlling terminal. You were on tty1, so WM's controlling terminal is tty1, and since these things are inherited so is the run applet's, and therefore so is ssh's. There's not a whole lot you could do about it; you'd have to modify the Run applet to be smart enough to know whether what it's being asked to run is an X app in order to get around this, and to start the app in an xterm if it's not. That's not the kind of stuff that the Run app is supposed to do.
The real solution is to type "xterm -e ssh -l my_name my_host" in the Run... box.
A proprietary driver under the HURD would be pretty funny.
Yep, kind of ironic. But the decision to only have open-source drivers is GNU's, and if that decision limits the number of devices the OS can support then that's something they have to live with.
We can rail all we want against vendors that decide to release binary-only applications, drivers, etc. But at least in the near term, they will continue to do just that because, right or wrong, they see it in their best interest. It's better for us to welcome what they do release and try to convince them to release more, than to angrily turn them away because what they release isn't "free enough". Linux's market share increases because it supports more hardware, and the vendor's market share increases because its hardware works in more places. In time they'll see that releasing source only increases the amount of hardware they can sell; until then it benefits everyone to support and encourage them to at least be compatible.
The example you use about BIOS'es not having accompanied source is a pretty stupid remark. There is more to it than just HAVING the source of a driver. You'd suggest that in order to have 3dfx support in say The Hurd, people should write a linux-driver emulator on top of an ix86 emulator and then run the binary driver from there? Why didn't you use THAT example to state that binary drivers are only good for money, money, money and money ? Grow up, there is more to this life than just the dollar sign.
If you're so smart, why don't you do like Darryll is doing, and sign an NDA with 3dfx and port Glide to the Hurd yourself? 3dfx isn't charging anyone for the Linux version of Glide, they just don't want to publicly release the source code. If someone were seriously interested in porting Glide to some other OS or platform, they should get in touch with 3dfx and do it, not sit back and bitch because they don't get their way.
The entire point of school should be academics. We send our children there to get an education, to learn how to deal with one another in a social setting and to learn about the world around them, to get a background in our history and culture and to learn the fundamental skills required to function in the world.
If that's the case, then why do we select the biggest and strongest male students, get them to don body armor and run onto a field to smash one another around, whilst the most attractive female students jump around in skimpy outfits and wave pom-poms around? Why is it that every Friday, we glorify this violent exercise with several minutes of footage on the evening news?
We send students a conflicting message. We tell them to succeed academically and conform. But at the same time we create a special class of people, the jocks, who have everything given to them, are allowed to amuse themselves at the expense of other students with little or no repercussions. The greatest academic achievements of most of the students get little or no mention, but the quarterback will always see his name in the paper.
Look at the kids in the Trenchcoat Mafia, the kids who have committed the other well-publicized acts of school violence recently, and the kids who are now being persecuted as a result of these acts. What do they all have in common? Most of them are very intelligent, and all of them feel worthless and rejected by the system. Is it any wonder? The school system doesn't make any effort to accommodate them, to challenge them, to make them feel involved and interested. Instead it promotes a culture in which physical strength and attractiveness are valued above all else.
The fix is simple. Get rid of the hero class, stop shining the spotlight on a group whose achievements, at least in the context of what is supposed to be an institute of learning, are completely irrelevant. Don't do away with all athletic programs, but stop elevating them to the point where they overshadow all else. The jocks will do fine without it, the smart kids will do better than they're doing now, and perhaps if more time is devoted to academics the freaks and the geeks will find something worthwhile in the system.
Yes. A DVD drive can read CD-Roms, CD-Rs, CD-RW's, etc. (first generation DVD drives couldn't read CD-R's, but the newer ones can). I have a second-generation DVD drive that I use in linux as a CD-ROM drive. Unfortunately, I still have to boot Windows to play DVD movies as there isn't support for those yet in Linux. Hopefully that's coming.
However, only a DivX player can read DivX discs, and there are no DivX drives for PCs.
But my real problem with the article was how it exagerrated the problems. If you sell your player, you call them up and they transfer it. No big deal.
Um, yes, but if I sell my DVD player, I don't have to call anyone at all.
If you want to watch your movie somewhere else, i'm sure you can just call them up or push a few buttons on your remote, and it'll work at your friend's house.
"I'm sure". No indeed, if you want to watch a movie at your friend's house, they'll get charged for the next viewing. If you have upgraded the movie to "Silver" then you have to call Divx up and change the ownership of the movie to your friend. Then I guess you have to change it back later.
And complaining that "Not a lot of movies are out for Divx" is like complaining that Linux doesn't have any applications.
Actually it's almost entirely unlike complaining that Linux doesn't have any applications, mainly because that statement about Linux isn't true, while it is true about Divx.
The entire divx concept is pure crap. I can rent DVDs at any of several Hollywood video and Blockbuster outlets in my town, as well as one of the local smaller chains, and I can buy them at any number of places, even including Wal-Mart if I so choose! I could only get DivX at... Circuit City. I pay less for a 3-day rental of a DVD than I would for a first viewing of a DivX film. If I buy a DVD, it's mine and I can watch it wherever and whenever I want -- and the cost of most DVD movies is no greater than the cost of buying a DivX and upgrading it to silver. I don't have to call anyone in Virginia to transfer title of the thing if I watch it at a friend's house -- and if I rent a DVD and decide it's so cool I have to take it to my friends' house the next day and watch it there, I don't have to pay anyone a second time. No one in Virginia gets to send me spam or know my viewing habits.
Finally, I have two DVD players -- one a standalone DVD player in my living room, the other a PC with a DVD-ROM drive whose output is hooked up to a TV in my bedroom. Can't watch DivX on the PC, can I? And if I owned two DivX players, one for upstairs and one for down, I'd have to pay twice to see my own movies.
Well put. I've been using Linux since the SLS days, so I'm one of the "grey-haired old timers" you talk about. I encourage people to use Linux, and I back that up by helping out newbies as much as possible. I help out friends and coworkers, spend a moderate amount of time on #LinuxHelp, and I post to the comp.os.linux.* hierarchy frequently. Last night, for example, I spent about 45 minutes in a/msg window with a guy helping him get X running on his video card, then got his mouse working, then KDE up and running. All that to say that I have a good deal of patience helping newbies get their feet under them.
On the other hand, I also understand where the author here is coming from. I'm not sure clueless is really the word I'd use to describe them, but there are plenty of newbies out there who just refuse to read any documentation at all, and just expect things to magically work. Then they come to you for "help" and get really angry when you point them to something they could take five minutes to read and would solve all their problems. I agree that telling people "bugger off and RTFM" is worse than no answer at all, but at the same time it's very frustrating when you point someone to exactly the resource they need in order to help themselves with a minimum of work and they still complain.
Right now, the thing that I don't quite grasp is that of IPP not specifying the document format that the printer supports (i.e., PostScript, PCL, etc.). This would surely conflict with the claim that IPP would eliminate drivers (that is, you would at least have the IPP driver). Suppose that someone creates a new PostScript killer for some new device: wouldn't you need a different driver to print to that printer?
Having implemented a commercial IPP solution, I can tell you that IPP does indeed support document formats via the "document-format" job attribute. Document formats are basically MIME types, for example application/postscript, application/text-plain, application/vnd.hp-pcl, or for those printers that can autosense emulations or for driver data, application/octet-stream.
Using old kernel config. file with new kernel?
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Linux 2.2.4
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My 2.2.3 kernel configuration is saved in a file called/root/kernelconfig. If I upgrade the source to 2.2.4, can I load my 2.2.3 config in "make menuconfig", or do I have to go thru and set everything all over again? How are new/updated options handled?
In general it's a good idea to browse the make xconfig menu and make sure all your options are still the way you want them. Basically, any options in your.config that are no longer supported are ignored, whilst new options that you don't specify use the default value. Still, the only time I've had to modify my old config when moving from 2.2.x to 2.2.(x+1) was to disable an option that broke between releases.
The short answer for 2.2.3->2.2.4 is yes, you can use the 2.2.3 config file, as long as you first patch kernel/acct.c if you enabled BSD process accounting (if you don't enable BSD process accounting you don't need the patch). I had no problems whatsoever doing that.
Let's start with the title: ``Printers to get their own Web addresses'' Umm, does that mean there will be a URL scheme to go with IPP?
That's exactly what it means. IPP Printers are referred to either as http:// for IPP v1.0, or ipp:// for IPP v1.1. In case you're interested, the TCP port pointed at by the ipp: scheme is 631.
How about ``A system administrator could manage his printers from a hotel room.'' Haven't these guys heard of lpq(8)/telnet(1)? Geesh.
Do you really want to expose those services over the public internet? Maybe if your printer supports ssh this will work, but with IPP you get management capabilities through a nice GUI (or text or however it's implemented) interface over a secure, authenticated connection.
Don't let this bit of CNN reporting dissuade you from IPP, however, because it looks like it will fix some of my pet peeves with Berkeley lpd(8)--namely, no decent authentication, no queue management in the protocol beyond deleting jobs, and no thought given to the actual format of the transported data (you've got to either use Postscript queues or raw text queues or use specific printer drivers on all clients).
IPP will support several authentication schemes, depending upon the client and server platforms.
IPP lets you specify the document-format attribute in the print job; it can be PostScript, pcl, text, printer driver output (e.g "octet-stream" type), or whatever other MIME types the printer supports. The printer will intelligently reject unsupported document formats sent to it, and you can query the printer ahead of time as to what it supports.
It should be noted that most expensive printers with network connections already support LPR and many support a strange feature where you can `print' HTML files (it's called ``Web printing'').
That's still supported in IPP (via the print-URI operation). Unfortunately not every OS supports lpr, and as you've pointed out there are big flaws in lpr that make it difficult to use over public networks.
It's not Kubrick's 2001 - it's Arthur C. Clarke's. Kubrick just did the movie.
Second, none of these predictions are new, and they're not particularly original. Ever read the cyberpunk authors, like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, or Walter Jon Williams? They all predicted these things in the early '80s (or even before). I'm sort of underwhelmed by someone who came along nearly 10 years later and "predicted" these very same things, when in fact we were well on our way to fulfilling them and the "trends" weren't very hard to see at all.
The term Neo-Luddite is lifted from William Gibson, by the way. (but then, so is the term Cyberspace, so that's probably OK).
"The Age of Spiritual machines" surpasses most futuristic predictions of sci-fi writers and technologists.
Wrong. It apes them, and not very well from the sound of things. Sounds like John Katz needs to do a bit more reading before extolling the virtues of this kind of literature. It raises some interesting points, yes, so it's fodder for good discussions, but at the same time it's not original and doesn't seem to bring anything new to the table.
Banks are just plain evil. You pay *them* money for the privilege of letting *them* borrow your money in a checking account. You pay them twice if you use an ATM. You pay the opportunity cost of a better return interest rate if you put money in a savings account -- they invest at a much higher rate, so by accepting the trivial interest they pay you, in effect you're paying them again.
Thank goodness Congress actually did something sensible for once and prevented the banks from limiting the memberships and services of credit unions last year. And I'm even more thankful that I'm a member for life at mine.....
Excellent points! And some ramblings of my own...
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Feature:The Two Towers
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Wow. This has to be the most coherent, non-through-rosy-glasses article on Open Source in general and Linux in particular, that I've seen yet. Excellent work.
The cautionary nature of this article is a point well taken. The Open Source community must remain focused on developing outstanding, truly free software. Simply bringing down Microsoft is a narrow-minded, unworthy aim. However, alongside the dislike for Microsoft, there is also too much fear of a successful commercial entity using Linux to its advantage.
The hypothetical ascendancy of Red Hat as "The" commercial linux vendor is just fine. The great thing about linux is that it can't ever be owned by anyone, yet at the same time anyone is free to try and make money with it. Red Hat can't own the OS as such, but they can sell it with things that they do own, and they can sell support for it. So much the better. Better software is a good thing for everyone, however they get it and regardless of who profits monetarily from it. If Red Hat gets out of hand, the Open Source community will still be there and will still be an alternative - all the more so, since the difference between Red Hat Linux and everyone else's linux will be far less than the difference between Windows and Linux is now.
Microsoft became a juggernaut because they not only created a new environment for software development with Windows, but they fought to become the only developer in that environment. They have succeeded, and have now stifled competition and innovation in the Windows world to the extent that no one wants to develop there any longer - the only choices are failure or assimilation.
On the other hand, a commercial-grade Linux (TM), however much the thought of that grates on some of us, is good for everyone. A well-known distributor with established support channels is absolutely necessary for serious commercial development on Linux to take place - that point is eloquently made by Jeremy. The common fear is that this would turn Red Hat into the next Microsoft. But there's no guarantee of that. Even if Red Hat is the biggest Linux vendor, it isn't the 1000-lb gorilla that Microsoft constitutes. Just because RH produces the most successful distribution of the OS, doesn't mean that it will dominate application development for the Linux platform. Indeed, because the OS is open, it doesn't even give them a particular advantage. They sell the OS, and the applications get a level playing field on which to compete - which is as it should be.
I read Jesse Berst's spin of this story on ZDNet's AnchorDesk page, and I'm glad to see less-biased coverage of it. Berst dismissingly calls Pancerzewski "not the most credible accuser" and leaves it at that. It must have taken some guts to report those kinds of findings in a company where dozens of millionaires made their fortunes purely by virtue of its stock price.
Then again, I'm not surprised to see this kind of allegation come out against Microsoft, and I'm even less surprised to see ZDNet jump to their defense.
Current kernel version is 2.2.0-pre4 Applying patch 2.2.1 (bz2) done
(You have to rename the patch file as the patch-kernel script doesn't recognize the -pre5 extension. Obviously this has no actual effect on the patch itself).
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That ideas alone can be used to increase growth in the idea by fostering not just growth in the idea itself, but growth in the population that has the idea in the first place is interesting. So you would expect a Mormon that has 6 wives, that has a taboo against birth control, where it is unthinkable to have any sex other than vaginal sex, that goes to church at least once a week to enforce these ideas, that sends his children to teach the gospel and thinks celebacy is ludicrous and instills all of his beliefs into his children to eventually have a larger group of decendants to that, of say, a part-time christian that had 2 children and stopped there and doesn't really attend church that much.
It's amazing that someone would actually advance this hypothesis. We're all driven to reproduce, and some of our (um, I mean mainstream modern Western cultural) social conventions, such as monogamy, don't necessarily maximize our ability to spread our genes. If you do the math, and want to maximize your chances of propagating your genes, then men should mate with as many partners as they can. This isn't because of some silly idea virus garbage, this is simple biology.
Apes, cats, bats, rats, and rabbits all do the same thing. They don't communicate ideas, and yet they managed to figure it out.
Other cultural taboos also originate from the drive to increase the survival rate of the species. Take pork, for example. The prohibition on eating pork in certain religions no doubt comes from the fact that eating undercooked pork can lead to trichinosis, which is a fatal disease. (Pigs carry Trichinella Spiralis, which causes trichinosis). Someone probably observed that lots of people who ate pork caught this and died, while those who didn't, didn't. So, unaware of the parasite living in their swine, they decided that it must be God punishing them for eating the "filthy animal" and issued an appropriate edict.
That's it. Cause and effect coupled with instinct and the ability to communicate. Not some crapola mental virus.
Dennis Hopper said it best: "Just because it happened to you, doesn't mean it's interesting". Come on, does it really surprise anyone that ideas spread in a Darwinistic way? The problem is, the meme concept doesn't really explain why ideas spread, it just takes the fact that it does happen and runs with it in unlikely directions.
We talk to one another not just to selflessly impart information, but to receive the gratification of an elicited response. You tell someone about something because, when that person finds the idea interesting, they find *you* interesting. Likewise, the news media wants to tell you about things you'll find interesting -- then you'll find *them* interesting, and you'll watch, and they'll make money from commercials.
Conversely, of course, you won't bother repeating information to someone if you don't think it's going to interest them.
And this is how ideas live and die. The idea of "memes" takes the process out of context and really fails to get at the real issues behind why ideas spread -- it conveniently factors out human nature. Nebulous concepts like ideas surviving on their own and propagating due to their value to a culture are interesting fodder for late-night freshman year dormitory discussions but fail to take important things like human nature into account. And therefore they're not very interesting.
BTW the bug is this:
If you start a x session at tty1 you're x display will go to tty7. Whenever you try to start a command line tool in the Run applet it will prompt you for stuff on tty1. I started a "ssh -l my_name
My_Host" in the run applet. On tty1 a command line
prompt was started asking me for a password. To my stunning suprise the password *was* echoed on the screen. I did file report.
Ummm... That's not a bug, that's the way X always works. If you run a command line program, it will appear on the current controlling terminal. You were on tty1, so WM's controlling terminal is tty1, and since these things are inherited so is the run applet's, and therefore so is ssh's. There's not a whole lot you could do about it; you'd have to modify the Run applet to be smart enough to know whether what it's being asked to run is an X app in order to get around this, and to start the app in an xterm if it's not. That's not the kind of stuff that the Run app is supposed to do.
The real solution is to type "xterm -e ssh -l my_name my_host" in the Run... box.
A proprietary driver under the HURD would be pretty funny.
Yep, kind of ironic. But the decision to only have open-source drivers is GNU's, and if that decision limits the number of devices the OS can support then that's something they have to live with.
We can rail all we want against vendors that decide to release binary-only applications, drivers, etc. But at least in the near term, they will continue to do just that because, right or wrong, they see it in their best interest. It's better for us to welcome what they do release and try to convince them to release more, than to angrily turn them away because what they release isn't "free enough". Linux's market share increases because it supports more hardware, and the vendor's market share increases because its hardware works in more places. In time they'll see that releasing source only increases the amount of hardware they can sell; until then it benefits everyone to support and encourage them to at least be compatible.
The example you use about BIOS'es not having accompanied source is a pretty stupid remark. There is more to it than just HAVING the source of a driver. You'd suggest that in order to have 3dfx support in say The Hurd, people should write a linux-driver emulator on top of an ix86 emulator and then run the binary driver from there? Why didn't you use THAT example to state that binary drivers are only good for money, money, money and money ? Grow up, there is more to this life than just the dollar sign.
If you're so smart, why don't you do like Darryll is doing, and sign an NDA with 3dfx and port Glide to the Hurd yourself? 3dfx isn't charging anyone for the Linux version of Glide, they just don't want to publicly release the source code. If someone were seriously interested in porting Glide to some other OS or platform, they should get in touch with 3dfx and do it, not sit back and bitch because they don't get their way.
The entire point of school should be academics. We send our children there to get an education, to learn how to deal with one another in a social setting and to learn about the world around them, to get a background in our history and culture and to learn the fundamental skills required to function in the world.
If that's the case, then why do we select the biggest and strongest male students, get them to don body armor and run onto a field to smash one another around, whilst the most attractive female students jump around in skimpy outfits and wave pom-poms around? Why is it that every Friday, we glorify this violent exercise with several minutes of footage on the evening news?
We send students a conflicting message. We tell them to succeed academically and conform. But at the same time we create a special class of people, the jocks, who have everything given to them, are allowed to amuse themselves at the expense of other students with little or no repercussions. The greatest academic achievements of most of the students get little or no mention, but the quarterback will always see his name in the paper.
Look at the kids in the Trenchcoat Mafia, the kids who have committed the other well-publicized acts of school violence recently, and the kids who are now being persecuted as a result of these acts. What do they all have in common? Most of them are very intelligent, and all of them feel worthless and rejected by the system. Is it any wonder? The school system doesn't make any effort to accommodate them, to challenge them, to make them feel involved and interested. Instead it promotes a culture in which physical strength and attractiveness are valued above all else.
The fix is simple. Get rid of the hero class, stop shining the spotlight on a group whose achievements, at least in the context of what is supposed to be an institute of learning, are completely irrelevant. Don't do away with all athletic programs, but stop elevating them to the point where they overshadow all else. The jocks will do fine without it, the smart kids will do better than they're doing now, and perhaps if more time is devoted to academics the freaks and the geeks will find something worthwhile in the system.
Yes. A DVD drive can read CD-Roms, CD-Rs, CD-RW's, etc. (first generation DVD drives couldn't read CD-R's, but the newer ones can). I have a second-generation DVD drive that I use in linux as a CD-ROM drive. Unfortunately, I still have to boot Windows to play DVD movies as there isn't support for those yet in Linux. Hopefully that's coming.
However, only a DivX player can read DivX discs, and there are no DivX drives for PCs.
But my real problem with the article was how it exagerrated the problems. If you sell your player, you call them up and they transfer it. No big deal.
Um, yes, but if I sell my DVD player, I don't have to call anyone at all.
If you want to watch your movie somewhere else, i'm sure you can just call them up or push a few buttons on your remote, and it'll work at your friend's house.
"I'm sure". No indeed, if you want to watch a movie at your friend's house, they'll get charged for the next viewing. If you have upgraded the movie to "Silver" then you have to call Divx up and change the ownership of the movie to your friend. Then I guess you have to change it back later.
And complaining that "Not a lot of movies are out for Divx" is like complaining that Linux doesn't have any applications.
Actually it's almost entirely unlike complaining that Linux doesn't have any applications, mainly because that statement about Linux isn't true, while it is true about Divx.
The entire divx concept is pure crap. I can rent DVDs at any of several Hollywood video and Blockbuster outlets in my town, as well as one of the local smaller chains, and I can buy them at any number of places, even including Wal-Mart if I so choose! I could only get DivX at... Circuit City. I pay less for a 3-day rental of a DVD than I would for a first viewing of a DivX film. If I buy a DVD, it's mine and I can watch it wherever and whenever I want -- and the cost of most DVD movies is no greater than the cost of buying a DivX and upgrading it to silver. I don't have to call anyone in Virginia to transfer title of the thing if I watch it at a friend's house -- and if I rent a DVD and decide it's so cool I have to take it to my friends' house the next day and watch it there, I don't have to pay anyone a second time. No one in Virginia gets to send me spam or know my viewing habits.
Finally, I have two DVD players -- one a standalone DVD player in my living room, the other a PC with a DVD-ROM drive whose output is hooked up to a TV in my bedroom. Can't watch DivX on the PC, can I? And if I owned two DivX players, one for upstairs and one for down, I'd have to pay twice to see my own movies.
No thanks.
Well put. I've been using Linux since the SLS days, so I'm one of the "grey-haired old timers" you talk about. I encourage people to use Linux, and I back that up by helping out newbies as much as possible. I help out friends and coworkers, spend a moderate amount of time on #LinuxHelp, and I post to the comp.os.linux.* hierarchy frequently. Last night, for example, I spent about 45 minutes in a /msg window with a guy helping him get X running on his video card, then got his mouse working, then KDE up and running. All that to say that I have a good deal of patience helping newbies get their feet under them.
On the other hand, I also understand where the author here is coming from. I'm not sure clueless is really the word I'd use to describe them, but there are plenty of newbies out there who just refuse to read any documentation at all, and just expect things to magically work. Then they come to you for "help" and get really angry when you point them to something they could take five minutes to read and would solve all their problems. I agree that telling people "bugger off and RTFM" is worse than no answer at all, but at the same time it's very frustrating when you point someone to exactly the resource they need in order to help themselves with a minimum of work and they still complain.
Right now, the thing that I don't quite grasp is that of IPP not specifying the document format that the printer supports (i.e., PostScript, PCL, etc.). This would surely conflict with the claim that IPP would eliminate drivers (that is, you would at least have the IPP driver). Suppose that someone creates a new PostScript killer for some new device: wouldn't you need a different driver to print to that printer?
Having implemented a commercial IPP solution, I can tell you that IPP does indeed support document formats via the "document-format" job attribute. Document formats are basically MIME types, for example application/postscript, application/text-plain, application/vnd.hp-pcl, or for those printers that can autosense emulations or for driver data, application/octet-stream.
My 2.2.3 kernel configuration is saved in a file called /root/kernelconfig. If I upgrade the source to 2.2.4, can I load my 2.2.3 config in "make menuconfig", or do I have to go thru and set everything all over again? How are new/updated options handled?
.config that are no longer supported are ignored, whilst new options that you don't specify use the default value. Still, the only time I've had to modify my old config when moving from 2.2.x to 2.2.(x+1) was to disable an option that broke between releases.
In general it's a good idea to browse the make xconfig menu and make sure all your options are still the way you want them. Basically, any options in your
The short answer for 2.2.3->2.2.4 is yes, you can use the 2.2.3 config file, as long as you first patch kernel/acct.c if you enabled BSD process accounting (if you don't enable BSD process accounting you don't need the patch). I had no problems whatsoever doing that.
Let's start with the title: ``Printers to get their own Web addresses'' Umm, does that mean there will be a URL scheme to go with IPP?
That's exactly what it means. IPP Printers are referred to either as http:// for IPP v1.0, or ipp:// for IPP v1.1. In case you're interested, the TCP port pointed at by the ipp: scheme is 631.
How about ``A system administrator could manage his printers from a hotel room.'' Haven't these guys heard of lpq(8)/telnet(1)? Geesh.
Do you really want to expose those services over the public internet? Maybe if your printer supports ssh this will work, but with IPP you get management capabilities through a nice GUI (or text or however it's implemented) interface over a secure, authenticated connection.
Don't let this bit of CNN reporting dissuade you from IPP, however, because it looks like it will fix some of my pet peeves with Berkeley lpd(8)--namely, no decent authentication, no queue management in the protocol beyond deleting jobs, and no thought given to the actual format of the transported data (you've got to either use Postscript queues or raw text queues or use specific printer drivers on all clients).
IPP will support several authentication schemes, depending upon the client and server platforms.
IPP lets you specify the document-format attribute in the print job; it can be PostScript, pcl, text, printer driver output (e.g "octet-stream" type), or whatever other MIME types the printer supports. The printer will intelligently reject unsupported document formats sent to it, and you can query the printer ahead of time as to what it supports.
It should be noted that most expensive printers with network connections already support LPR and many support a strange feature where you can `print' HTML files (it's called ``Web printing'').
That's still supported in IPP (via the print-URI operation). Unfortunately not every OS supports lpr, and as you've pointed out there are big flaws in lpr that make it difficult to use over public networks.
First, a couple of facts:
It's not Kubrick's 2001 - it's Arthur C. Clarke's. Kubrick just did the movie.
Second, none of these predictions are new, and they're not particularly original. Ever read the cyberpunk authors, like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, or Walter Jon Williams? They all predicted these things in the early '80s (or even before). I'm sort of underwhelmed by someone who came along nearly 10 years later and "predicted" these very same things, when in fact we were well on our way to fulfilling them and the "trends" weren't very hard to see at all.
The term Neo-Luddite is lifted from William Gibson, by the way. (but then, so is the term Cyberspace, so that's probably OK).
"The Age of Spiritual machines" surpasses most futuristic predictions of sci-fi writers and technologists.
Wrong. It apes them, and not very well from the sound of things. Sounds like John Katz needs to do a bit more reading before extolling the virtues of this kind of literature. It raises some interesting points, yes, so it's fodder for good discussions, but at the same time it's not original and doesn't seem to bring anything new to the table.
I'll check out a used copy sometime.
Banks are just plain evil. You pay *them* money for the privilege of letting *them* borrow your money in a checking account. You pay them twice if you use an ATM. You pay the opportunity cost of a better return interest rate if you put money in a savings account -- they invest at a much higher rate, so by accepting the trivial interest they pay you, in effect you're paying them again.
Thank goodness Congress actually did something sensible for once and prevented the banks from limiting the memberships and services of credit unions last year. And I'm even more thankful that I'm a member for life at mine.....
Wow. This has to be the most coherent, non-through-rosy-glasses article on Open Source in general and Linux in particular, that I've seen yet. Excellent work.
The cautionary nature of this article is a point well taken. The Open Source community must remain focused on developing outstanding, truly free software. Simply bringing down Microsoft is a narrow-minded, unworthy aim. However, alongside the dislike for Microsoft, there is also too much fear of a successful commercial entity using Linux to its advantage.
The hypothetical ascendancy of Red Hat as "The" commercial linux vendor is just fine. The great thing about linux is that it can't ever be owned by anyone, yet at the same time anyone is free to try and make money with it. Red Hat can't own the OS as such, but they can sell it with things that they do own, and they can sell support for it. So much the better. Better software is a good thing for everyone, however they get it and regardless of who profits monetarily from it. If Red Hat gets out of hand, the Open Source community will still be there and will still be an alternative - all the more so, since the difference between Red Hat Linux and everyone else's linux will be far less than the difference between Windows and Linux is now.
Microsoft became a juggernaut because they not only created a new environment for software development with Windows, but they fought to become the only developer in that environment. They have succeeded, and have now stifled competition and innovation in the Windows world to the extent that no one wants to develop there any longer - the only choices are failure or assimilation.
On the other hand, a commercial-grade Linux (TM), however much the thought of that grates on some of us, is good for everyone. A well-known distributor with established support channels is absolutely necessary for serious commercial development on Linux to take place - that point is eloquently made by Jeremy. The common fear is that this would turn Red Hat into the next Microsoft. But there's no guarantee of that. Even if Red Hat is the biggest Linux vendor, it isn't the 1000-lb gorilla that Microsoft constitutes. Just because RH produces the most successful distribution of the OS, doesn't mean that it will dominate application development for the Linux platform. Indeed, because the OS is open, it doesn't even give them a particular advantage. They sell the OS, and the applications get a level playing field on which to compete - which is as it should be.
I read Jesse Berst's spin of this story on ZDNet's AnchorDesk page, and I'm glad to see less-biased coverage of it. Berst dismissingly calls Pancerzewski "not the most credible accuser" and leaves it at that. It must have taken some guts to report those kinds of findings in a company where dozens of millionaires made their fortunes purely by virtue of its stock price.
Then again, I'm not surprised to see this kind of allegation come out against Microsoft, and I'm even less surprised to see ZDNet jump to their defense.
An amusing trick that is quicker than uncompressing and running patch manually:
/usr/src/linux ./scripts/patch-kernel
# cd
# cp patch-2.2.0-pre5.bz2 patch-2.2.1.bz2
#
Current kernel version is 2.2.0-pre4
Applying patch 2.2.1 (bz2)
done
(You have to rename the patch file as the patch-kernel script doesn't recognize the -pre5 extension. Obviously this has no actual effect on the patch itself).