That's a good place to start, thank you! I'd seen the bug tracking system before, and it's also good.
I guess what I was looking for is a place that says something like "Package X could use someone with Perl knowledge to write an installer script" or "Package Y could use a C graphics guru to optimize and prettify these functions." It's a lot of details to keep track of, I know, but it may save a lot of work later.
I mean, "Yes, we should be doing something." But also, "No, we should not react to feeling singled out by further withdrawing from the mainstream."
I have enough interests and hobbies and activities that don't involve sitting in a darkened room in front of my computer that I actually know and get along quite well with people who aren't geeks. Some of these people will never understand the strange allure of Perl programming, and many cannot see the awful beauty of a quick and dirty hack. But we get along anyway.
Now if I'm misunderstanding you, I apologize. I just think more kids than just budding geeks need people in their lives to spend time with them and to tell them that they're worth being around -- and that other people, even the ones that seem different and weird, are also valuable. Seems too important to limit it to just 'our own kind.'
What's the best way to get involved with the Debian project? Do you have a list of tasks that need to be done along with the required skills?
I ask because that seems to be one barrier keeping more people from helping out various free software projects -- they don't know where to start. If we could point to a list and say "The boot disks need testing; we expect these error messages:" or "The foo package has these ugly functions that need to be rewritten:" it would give us more concrete goals to reach.
My Opinion: The person who submitted the story rushed things. Hemos posted it too quickly. (Sorry, buddy.)
Really, is the desire to get a scoop so intense that people are willing to run to the submit script every time someone says something controversial? I for one do not read Slashdot because it has the fastest news. Does anyone?
As for Roblimo's story, I'm a little saddened. It seems like he's shifting responsibility for this little ruckus onto Bruce. Okay, so maybe he sent that message prematurely, but he *didn't* send it to a million people like Slashdot did. Yes, it's hard to be in the spotlight, but it doesn't help when your friends are following you around with a 50,000 cp handheld deer-blinder.
There's a big difference. Suppose there's a nice little flameware on the kernel developer's list, or suppose Tom Christiansen lets someone have it on the Perl Porter's list -- does that really warrant a story that Linux or Perl is doomed? I'm willing to wait a day or two for confirmation of details before panicking. If I ran Slashdot, that would be the rule.
I don't, and it's just a suggestion. But I do hope Rob and Robin and Jeff and Justin and the rest sit down and decide if speed in reporting is more important than accuracy and insight, and then stick to that decision.
Tom, are you thinking of such things as graphical representation of pipes and redirecting input and output? For example, if I wanted to print my manuscript from LyX to my printer doing 2-up duplexing, I could drag the LyX document icon to a pipeline workspace, add a dvi2ps filter and the specific print filter to do the 2-up and duplexing and connect it to the appropriate printer -- all graphically.
That could be very nice. Imagine a desktop that worked like one of those nice Java Beans IDEs. While KDE is componentized and Python-scriptable, I'm thinking of something that end-users would be able to use *without* scripting.
Unix has a lot more power underneath a nice GUI than Windows does (especially with DOS). It would be nice to have a GUI or a Desktop Environment that gives people access to this power.
I'd like to second the idea that this book is an introduction to Mindstorms. It does have a lot of useful references, and serves as an overview of What You Can Do with Your Mindstorms. There's not a lot of time spent on any one topic.
It would be nice to have another couple of chapters on more advanced topics ("Common Traps and How To Avoid Them", "Cool Hacks You'd Never Think Of", "a Beowulf Cluster of Mindstorms"). It's a good introduction, but don't expect a LEGO Camel.
You can't expect someone to live only off the Internet. That's not how life was meant to be.
That's also not how the Internet was meant to be. You might as well ask someone to live only off of the telephone or the radio or the newspaper. Perhaps next month, the author will lock himself in a library and write about how it is hard to live there for a week.
It's not technology failing, it's people who fail to understand that technology is merely a tool who are failing.
What do you think will be the most important legacy from the KDE project? A desktop environment? A framework for applications? KOffice? A bunch of little applications that make life easier (kppp comes to mind)?
Even if Judge Jackson took a cat nap or two, he still had access to the court transcripts and all of the exhibits presented. Just think of it as reviewing someone else's notes before the big final.
I'm pleased with the performance. Even though the NVIDIA SVGA server only supports hardware acceleration with 16 bpp right now, q3test looks good and is very playable at 800x600.
Now I haven't seen the Windows version at all, let alone with a similar setup, and I haven't cared enough to measure framerates, but the only problems I've had with the demo are my rather poor ping times and my mediocre fragging abilities. (But I'm still better than Hemos.)
Grab the modified SVGA server from NVIDIA and run the little installation script.
Quake 2 looks good (in a window) and q3test looks great (full screen) with my TNT2 and XFree86 3.3.5. You'll probably also want to update your Mesa library. (I think I had to make a symbolic link to a slightly-modified libMesa, too.)
Looking At It In Different Ways
on
Using Samba
·
· Score: 2
I didn't think about it that way... My line of reasoning was that Samba allows you to replace a Windows server with a Unix box in an existing network.
If you have an existing network set up, your Windows clients are probably already configured. The assumption there is that anyone setting up Samba has already configured the clients for one server or another, and the configuration method is the same no matter what type of server they use. Of course, you can also set up a network from scratch, with absolutely no Windows servers, which renders that assumption invalid.
Thanks for the comment. Now I understand why that chapter was there!
If you don't want the governement stepping in when Linux or BSD or whatever OS makes it's way to the top, then I highly suggest you support Microsoft in this struggle to free themselves from Government regulation.
I think not. Let me rephrase that and you'll see what I mean:
If you like companies breaking the law to increase their profits, stifle competition, and give consumers sub-optimal products, support Microsoft in this struggle to be free from Government regulation. That's the same kind of government regulation that says your car company can't make airbags that shoot metal spikes into your skull instead of nice, fluffy pillows.
Yeah, government sucks sometimes. However, that doesn't mean that it's not right once in a while. Anarchy ain't fun for long.
It's worse than that. Consider the MIS degree. It used to be that companies wanted technical people. Now they want people to manage technical people. Instead of hiring a good sysadmin, they'd rather hire someone to rent a sysadmin.
I suppose I shouldn't complain -- I wouldn't have my job if it weren't for A Big Company deciding that it is too expensive to hire people with technical skills. (Instead, it started a program with two additional layers of management and various contract negotiations and secretaries and the like.)
I wonder, though, if the desire to save quick cash is going to bite some of these companies on the backside when something goes wrong and no one has the foggiest clue how to fix it. Sucks to fire all of the network guys, eh? Sucks to pay me $2000 to show up, type in three commands, and spend the rest of the day at home, wondering how many people you could have hired at $25 an hour to catch these things before they happen.
The moral of the story? If you're renting brains to tell your company how to run its business, your company is in a heap of trouble. I'd short it.
From a legal standpoint, can Microsoft point to such developments as the Sun/AOL/Netscape deal and the mainstream attention devoted to Linux and the BSDs and say, "Things move too fast and we're struggling to catch up" and avoid or beg down punishment?
Contrariwise, is the case focused only on what Microsoft has done in the past? Even if the company has broken the law, if it falls apart tomorrow, will it still be held responsible for its actions?
There is a difference between hardware and software. Transmeta's patents all seem to cover hardware devices. I don't see a dilemma there (barring the question of the legitimacy of 'Intellectual Property').
Everybody who bought Microsoft products (from OEMs and partners to end users) did so by their own choice. If no one wanted microsoft products, no one is forced to buy them.
Missed Windows Refund Day, did you?
How about the story in my essay about the future of business software? One particular company with which I have a passing acquaintance had to purchase Office 2000 just to get one bug fix which prevented them from communicating with their business partners. (I supposed they weren't *forced* to do so, but the company did feel a need to stay in business. If you don't build anything to sell, you'll run out of money pretty quickly.)
Let's try an analogy -- 'everybody' bought petroleum distillates from 'Standard Oil' not because they all thought that it was the best deal, but because that is the only choice they could see. Sure, some people may have been able to drill in their backyards and set up a gasoline still, but did that work for most people?
No, Microsoft isn't in the business of saying 'buy this software or your dog gets it', but the company does behave in such a way to suggest, 'Nice company, pity if you can't read documents from anyone else.'
But does Microsoft have a monopoly on any software it gives away? The closest thing that comes to mind is special student pricing on Visual Studio products or the Office suite.
I suppose you could put educational donations on that short list... but that's not how Microsoft achieved the monopoly. In fact, reading the FoF, it appears that growing the user base of Internet Explorer required some quick and dirty deals with AOL.
Sorry, Jon, but Microsoft didn't become a monopoly by giving software away. It became a monopoly by making shrewd deals with computer manufacturers -- the same ones the Judge discussed as being rather unethical.
Unless you're talking about becoming a monopoly in the web browsing market (not the case), the web server market (not the case), the music software playing market (not the case), you're wrong. Microsoft has a monopoly in approximately none of the markets in which it has given away software. (Not that it hasn't tried....) Perhaps if Microsoft were truly innovative, things would be different.
Remember Windows refund day? There's the monopoly product.
Remember when www.windows2000test.com first went public? How long did it take to come back up after the router got "hit by lightning"? Wasn't it almost three days?
Now how do I attach that Monty Python foot to this post...?
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good place to start, thank you! I'd seen the bug tracking system before, and it's also good.
I guess what I was looking for is a place that says something like "Package X could use someone with Perl knowledge to write an installer script" or "Package Y could use a C graphics guru to optimize and prettify these functions." It's a lot of details to keep track of, I know, but it may save a lot of work later.
--
I mean, "Yes, we should be doing something." But also, "No, we should not react to feeling singled out by further withdrawing from the mainstream."
I have enough interests and hobbies and activities that don't involve sitting in a darkened room in front of my computer that I actually know and get along quite well with people who aren't geeks. Some of these people will never understand the strange allure of Perl programming, and many cannot see the awful beauty of a quick and dirty hack. But we get along anyway.
Now if I'm misunderstanding you, I apologize. I just think more kids than just budding geeks need people in their lives to spend time with them and to tell them that they're worth being around -- and that other people, even the ones that seem different and weird, are also valuable. Seems too important to limit it to just 'our own kind.'
--
What's the best way to get involved with the Debian project? Do you have a list of tasks that need to be done along with the required skills?
I ask because that seems to be one barrier keeping more people from helping out various free software projects -- they don't know where to start. If we could point to a list and say "The boot disks need testing; we expect these error messages:" or "The foo package has these ugly functions that need to be rewritten:" it would give us more concrete goals to reach.
--
My Opinion:
The person who submitted the story rushed things. Hemos posted it too quickly. (Sorry, buddy.)
Really, is the desire to get a scoop so intense that people are willing to run to the submit script every time someone says something controversial? I for one do not read Slashdot because it has the fastest news. Does anyone?
As for Roblimo's story, I'm a little saddened. It seems like he's shifting responsibility for this little ruckus onto Bruce. Okay, so maybe he sent that message prematurely, but he *didn't* send it to a million people like Slashdot did. Yes, it's hard to be in the spotlight, but it doesn't help when your friends are following you around with a 50,000 cp handheld deer-blinder.
There's a big difference. Suppose there's a nice little flameware on the kernel developer's list, or suppose Tom Christiansen lets someone have it on the Perl Porter's list -- does that really warrant a story that Linux or Perl is doomed? I'm willing to wait a day or two for confirmation of details before panicking. If I ran Slashdot, that would be the rule.
I don't, and it's just a suggestion. But I do hope Rob and Robin and Jeff and Justin and the rest sit down and decide if speed in reporting is more important than accuracy and insight, and then stick to that decision.
--
Tom, are you thinking of such things as graphical representation of pipes and redirecting input and output? For example, if I wanted to print my manuscript from LyX to my printer doing 2-up duplexing, I could drag the LyX document icon to a pipeline workspace, add a dvi2ps filter and the specific print filter to do the 2-up and duplexing and connect it to the appropriate printer -- all graphically.
That could be very nice. Imagine a desktop that worked like one of those nice Java Beans IDEs. While KDE is componentized and Python-scriptable, I'm thinking of something that end-users would be able to use *without* scripting.
Unix has a lot more power underneath a nice GUI than Windows does (especially with DOS). It would be nice to have a GUI or a Desktop Environment that gives people access to this power.
--
I'd like to second the idea that this book is an introduction to Mindstorms. It does have a lot of useful references, and serves as an overview of What You Can Do with Your Mindstorms. There's not a lot of time spent on any one topic.
It would be nice to have another couple of chapters on more advanced topics ("Common Traps and How To Avoid Them", "Cool Hacks You'd Never Think Of", "a Beowulf Cluster of Mindstorms"). It's a good introduction, but don't expect a LEGO Camel.
--
You can't expect someone to live only off the Internet. That's not how life was meant to be.
That's also not how the Internet was meant to be. You might as well ask someone to live only off of the telephone or the radio or the newspaper. Perhaps next month, the author will lock himself in a library and write about how it is hard to live there for a week.
It's not technology failing, it's people who fail to understand that technology is merely a tool who are failing.
--
QDMerge 0.4!
It was ESR's second essay in Open Sources, and you can read it here.
--
QDMerge 0.4!
What do you think will be the most important legacy from the KDE project? A desktop environment? A framework for applications? KOffice? A bunch of little applications that make life easier (kppp comes to mind)?
--
QDMerge 0.4!
Even if Judge Jackson took a cat nap or two, he still had access to the court transcripts and all of the exhibits presented. Just think of it as reviewing someone else's notes before the big final.
--
QDMerge 0.4!
I'm pleased with the performance. Even though the NVIDIA SVGA server only supports hardware acceleration with 16 bpp right now, q3test looks good and is very playable at 800x600.
Now I haven't seen the Windows version at all, let alone with a similar setup, and I haven't cared enough to measure framerates, but the only problems I've had with the demo are my rather poor ping times and my mediocre fragging abilities. (But I'm still better than Hemos.)
--
QDMerge 0.4!
Grab the modified SVGA server from NVIDIA and run the little installation script.
Quake 2 looks good (in a window) and q3test looks great (full screen) with my TNT2 and XFree86 3.3.5. You'll probably also want to update your Mesa library. (I think I had to make a symbolic link to a slightly-modified libMesa, too.)
--
QDMerge 0.4!
I didn't think about it that way... My line of reasoning was that Samba allows you to replace a Windows server with a Unix box in an existing network.
If you have an existing network set up, your Windows clients are probably already configured. The assumption there is that anyone setting up Samba has already configured the clients for one server or another, and the configuration method is the same no matter what type of server they use. Of course, you can also set up a network from scratch, with absolutely no Windows servers, which renders that assumption invalid.
Thanks for the comment. Now I understand why that chapter was there!
--
QDMerge 0.4!
If you don't want the governement stepping in when Linux or BSD or whatever OS makes it's way to the top, then I highly suggest you support Microsoft in this struggle to free themselves from Government regulation.
I think not. Let me rephrase that and you'll see what I mean:
If you like companies breaking the law to increase their profits, stifle competition, and give consumers sub-optimal products, support Microsoft in this struggle to be free from Government regulation. That's the same kind of government regulation that says your car company can't make airbags that shoot metal spikes into your skull instead of nice, fluffy pillows.
Yeah, government sucks sometimes. However, that doesn't mean that it's not right once in a while. Anarchy ain't fun for long.
--
QDMerge 0.4!
It's worse than that. Consider the MIS degree. It used to be that companies wanted technical people. Now they want people to manage technical people. Instead of hiring a good sysadmin, they'd rather hire someone to rent a sysadmin.
I suppose I shouldn't complain -- I wouldn't have my job if it weren't for A Big Company deciding that it is too expensive to hire people with technical skills. (Instead, it started a program with two additional layers of management and various contract negotiations and secretaries and the like.)
I wonder, though, if the desire to save quick cash is going to bite some of these companies on the backside when something goes wrong and no one has the foggiest clue how to fix it. Sucks to fire all of the network guys, eh? Sucks to pay me $2000 to show up, type in three commands, and spend the rest of the day at home, wondering how many people you could have hired at $25 an hour to catch these things before they happen.
The moral of the story? If you're renting brains to tell your company how to run its business, your company is in a heap of trouble. I'd short it.
--
QDMerge 0.4!
From a legal standpoint, can Microsoft point to such developments as the Sun/AOL/Netscape deal and the mainstream attention devoted to Linux and the BSDs and say, "Things move too fast and we're struggling to catch up" and avoid or beg down punishment?
Contrariwise, is the case focused only on what Microsoft has done in the past? Even if the company has broken the law, if it falls apart tomorrow, will it still be held responsible for its actions?
--
QDMerge 0.4!
There is a difference between hardware and software. Transmeta's patents all seem to cover hardware devices. I don't see a dilemma there (barring the question of the legitimacy of 'Intellectual Property').
--
QDMerge 0.4!
Everybody who bought Microsoft products (from OEMs and partners to end users) did so by their own choice. If no one wanted microsoft products, no one is forced to buy them.
Missed Windows Refund Day, did you?
How about the story in my essay about the future of business software? One particular company with which I have a passing acquaintance had to purchase Office 2000 just to get one bug fix which prevented them from communicating with their business partners. (I supposed they weren't *forced* to do so, but the company did feel a need to stay in business. If you don't build anything to sell, you'll run out of money pretty quickly.)
Let's try an analogy -- 'everybody' bought petroleum distillates from 'Standard Oil' not because they all thought that it was the best deal, but because that is the only choice they could see. Sure, some people may have been able to drill in their backyards and set up a gasoline still, but did that work for most people?
No, Microsoft isn't in the business of saying 'buy this software or your dog gets it', but the company does behave in such a way to suggest, 'Nice company, pity if you can't read documents from anyone else.'
--
QDMerge 0.4!
But does Microsoft have a monopoly on any software it gives away? The closest thing that comes to mind is special student pricing on Visual Studio products or the Office suite.
I suppose you could put educational donations on that short list... but that's not how Microsoft achieved the monopoly. In fact, reading the FoF, it appears that growing the user base of Internet Explorer required some quick and dirty deals with AOL.
--
QDMerge 0.4!
Sorry, Jon, but Microsoft didn't become a monopoly by giving software away. It became a monopoly by making shrewd deals with computer manufacturers -- the same ones the Judge discussed as being rather unethical.
Unless you're talking about becoming a monopoly in the web browsing market (not the case), the web server market (not the case), the music software playing market (not the case), you're wrong. Microsoft has a monopoly in approximately none of the markets in which it has given away software. (Not that it hasn't tried....) Perhaps if Microsoft were truly innovative, things would be different.
Remember Windows refund day? There's the monopoly product.
--
QDMerge 0.4!
It's a fake rumor that never made it into the Quickies here... too obscure, I guess!
--
QDMerge 0.4!
Don't be too hasty. I can barely achieve 16/7 uptime with the original wetware. Let's not talk about reliability, either.
insert smiley here
--
QDMerge 0.4!
You might say, he'd pretty much mastered that world.
The fake world, but not the real one. The rest of the story is how Neo (et al) do the same thing again where they don't have solipsistic abilities.
Besides that, I heard a rumor that Carrie-Ann Moss will not be playing Trinity.
--
QDMerge 0.4!
If you could add or change three things about Linux to make your job easier or more enjoyable, what would they be?
--
QDMerge 0.4!
Remember when www.windows2000test.com first went public? How long did it take to come back up after the router got "hit by lightning"? Wasn't it almost three days?
Now how do I attach that Monty Python foot to this post...?
--
QDMerge 0.4!