Probably not, I suspect if you searched for "root" you'd just get a billion porn sites. They probably just looked it up in their "Computer Journalism for Dummies" glossary...
hey now, careful... wouldn't want slashdot getting sued 'n stuff cuz you mentioned "... for dummies" in a post...
A couple months ago a friend mailed me a question... programs were starting to segfault with alarming frequency, and he noticed some obscure message in his kern.log (forget what it was) and he had no idea what was wrong... so I go into/usr/src/linux, do a recursive grep (grep is the best tool ever!) on the error message, read the appropriate code surrounding the message to figure out what's going on, and mail the guy back with some suggestions on how to fix the problem. That is why open source rules, and that is why I love Linux.
Perhaps - although even better might have been a knowledge base (think HOWTO, if the term "knowledge base" sets off anti-Microsoft antibodies:-)) so that one wouldn't have to search the kernel source to find out what that message was saying, whether what it's saying could explain the problems one is seeing, and how to fix the problem.
I won't argue with you here. This is definitely true. But writing documentation isn't nearly as fun as writing code, so I think documentation is always gonna be behind... of course, the LDP has become quite a nice resource, but there's still lots that needs to be covered.
It's nice that you can open the hood/bonnet and check the engine - sometimes the answer might not be in a knowledge base, and sometimes the answer in the knowledge base might not be the right answer for the particular problem you're seeing, and it's also nice that you can take a look and see what software is doing, see how it's doing it, and see why it's doing it, and it's nice that you can make it do something different - but it's not necessarily nice if you have to do that.
You are absolutely right, of course. But there have been plenty of times where I have been using closed-source software and I have encountered error messages and such that are entirely cryptic and for which I could find no documentation. And this is where the advantage of open source really comes in. Not everyone is going to want to look at the source to figure out what the error means, but for those of us who are willing to look at the source, having the source makes a huge difference in the quality of the software... or at least it does in my humblest of opinions...
Well, as many people have pointed out, there would not be Linux if it were not open-source. I mean, granted, Linus released a working OS to the net, but it was far from being a usable OS (other than use as a toy...)
But people saw potential, and since they had the source were able to help expand linux into what it is today.
So after having repeated what everyone else already said (you're welcome.) i'll had some more worthless stuff:
I was vaguely familiar with the concept of open source when I started using Linux. My OS of choice was Solaris when I set up my first Linux box, and came to appreciate the GNU utilities that the admins had kindly installed. For one thing I liked some of the options that some of the GNU versions offered (tar xvfz is much better than gunzip -c foo.tgz | tar xvf -) and as I became more curious about learning what made the box work I spent more and more time reading the source code of these utilities and learning what made them work.
another great advantage to open source was that if i downloaded a program and it didn't work quite as I wanted to... if I had the source, I could fix it! What a great concept! It made my life so much less frustrating.
After a couple years on Solaris I finally got together enough money to buy a cheap PC so that I could use a puter in my room instead of going to the uni computer labs, and I gave the whole Linux thing a try. (windoze has never infested my hard drive, i'm so proud!) I definitely love Linux. So here's my final anecdote:
A couple months ago a friend mailed me a question... programs were starting to segfault with alarming frequency, and he noticed some obscure message in his kern.log (forget what it was) and he had no idea what was wrong... so I go into/usr/src/linux, do a recursive grep (grep is the best tool ever!) on the error message, read the appropriate code surrounding the message to figure out what's going on, and mail the guy back with some suggestions on how to fix the problem. That is why open source rules, and that is why I love Linux. And I'm sure many other people love Linux and Open source for the same reasons...
So to get to some sort of point: If Linux had not been open source, it would not have appealed to people like me. If it had not appealed to people like me, it would probably never have spread far... and Linux for a long time only spread among the hacker type... not until it had a large hackerish following did other people start playing with it. So if Linux had not been open source, I don't think it would exist.
As far as the open source movement, I think it would've done ok without Linux. It might have taken longer, but if there had been no Linux for people to focus their energy on, these people would have probably focused their energy one of the free BSD variants, or maybe even on the Hurd. Some open-source OS would've taken a similar position to the one of Linux. I think open source was destined to get big one way or another... it just might have taken longer...
I hope I haven't bored anyone, and I hope my rantings haven't been too redundant... peace out.
It reminds me of the deals Coke gets with fast food chains and university cafeterias to only distribute Coke (and thus the university gets some kind of kick-back from Coke). Disgusting.
Isn't it Pepsi that generally does this? I know it was Pepsi at my university (Humboldt State Univ.).
For what it's worth, Notre Dame is pretty much coke-only. At least in the cafeterias and such. There are pepsi vending machines and such around campus, tho, which is a Good Thing, since I need my mountain dew fix.
I think some high muckity-muck who works/worked for Coke recently donated a dorm to ND. But I paid little attention to the new dorms they put up, since I never go to that part of campus anyway..
Anyway, my guess is that both Pepsi and Coke do this. It wouldn't make sense for one of them to do it and for the other one not to and to just sit back instead and let the competition corner the lucrative college cafeteria market...
A few weeks ago, I helped set up a mirror for the LAM pages (http://www.mpi.nd.edu/lam/) and while one of the mirrors was spidering our site, downloading everything, we noticed another machine that was on our campus doing the same thing. We found this slightly odd and sent a Big Brother sorta mail (we're watching you spider our site... why?) to the people doing this... got a response about them doing some study about how the web is laid out. They thought they could predict it using some physical or mathematical model.
I also administer the NDLUG (http://www.ndlug.nd.edu/) web server, and noticed massive spidering from the same machine on campus.
Now I read this article and see this quote:
"The Web doesn't look anything like we expected it to be," said Notre Dame physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who along with two colleagues studied the Web's topology.
so, i guess i don't have much of a point, but it's kinda cool to see that something actually came of some people in the college of science abusing our poor 486 webserver...
except that if you post to a discussion thread on which you moderated posts, the moderation you did to any posts on that discussion is removed... so this post had 2 points or so removed from it and it had already been moderated downwards by other moderators, so it is now at a score of -2. nifty, you broke slashdot. since the selecty box thingums only allow you to chose a threshold of -1, you have to go into the url and change...&threshold=-1... to...&threshold=-10... (well, it only needs be -2, but best be safe, right?) in order to even see the post...
actually, if you register a domain with register.com, you need to do
whois -h whois.register.com cooldomain.org
(and obviously replace cooldomain.org with whatever you're looking up)
So, i guess in order to get domain contact info, you would need to write a script of sorts that checks each whois host (nsi's and register.com's at the moment -- more to come in the future, i'm sure) until it finds the domain you're looking for...
well, i don't smoke normal pipes... i smoke huge real-man pipes, and i use a huge, real-man editor -- emacs. so quit your huffing and puffing and go smoke your vi in tiny pipe.
The software for this thing is compatible with Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. Not that I blame them or anything, but I imagine that until a Linux version is available, this hardware will have little practical use to some people here. At least, to me it's not worth the six dollars...
Don't give them a reason to watch you, and they won't.
Or, better yet, give them a reason to watch you, so that their efforts cannot be intensified on a few single people as easily.
I'm thinking of pgp-encrypting all my email and giving it subject lines from that emacs function... don't remember it's name right now... spook or something... just so that the government can focus on me and have less manpower to focus elsewhere...
yar, agreed. i hate people who design webpages that aren't lynx-friendly... i forces me to bloat up my system with netscape... i think it actually requires more effort to make a page that is incompatible with most browsers than it does to make a simple page that everyone can see. that's probably the problem with the web. it's easy to make stuff look pretty. hell, just steal someone else's javascript. what is difficult is coming up with original content that doesn't need to look spiffy in order for people to look at it...
if i want fancy graphics, i'll play quake, thanks very much.
i definitely agree that Netscape's rendering blows. But even with lynx (the bestest web browser ever) i see no site at all. lynx downloads all the html fine and prints out the title " NEC Z1 - The Evolution of the Computer Ends with Z" but is unable to render anything else... not a very friendly website, methinks...
i let netscape try to load it for rather a long while and finally decided screw it. when i hit stop, i just got a grey page saying transfer interrupted. so being curious, i go to "view page source" and the page's html had loaded in its entirety. now call me old-fashioned, but i think if netscape was able to load all of the page source, it should be able to draw the page, maybe with a few graphix missing...
but nope, netscape was unable to draw even a small semblance of a page. grrr... and i'm on ethernet connected to a T3...
think he'd come speak to NDLUG? =)
on
Linus @BALUG
·
· Score: 1
We might actually get more than 10 people to show up to a meeting if he did...
I took a break from my busy summer star wars viewing schedule to see this one. I guess it was worth it (Heather Graham definitely was fun to watch, but she's no Natalie Portman:P)
But anyway, I think that has been the only non-star wars movie i'll have seen this summer. because star wars ruled! I recommend you all go see it again. Those of you who hated it..... I was really unimpressed with it my first time. But the second time was better. And now that i've seen it six times, I want to see it more and more and more... besides, we can't let titanic win!
do your moral duty. see austin powers once, it's worth it. but see star wars many, many times... it's worth it even more...
I've gotta agree. Star Trek IV is by far my favorite. I think it was probably because as a youngster, my parents wouldn't let me watch the more violent Star Trek movies that had come before it, but this one was alright. I've impressed several friends by being able to say every line in the movie as it comes (well, impress or annoy... same thing)
"Admiral! There be whales here!" "You planning to go for a bit of a swim?" - "Off the deep end Mr. Scott" "Humpbacked? People?" - "Whales, Mr. Scott" "Angels and ministers of grace defend us" - "Hamlet, Act One, scene four" - "No doubts about your memory, Spock" "Excuse me, can you tell us where they keep the nuclear vessels?" (in thick russian accent) "You mean I have to die before I can discuss death with you?" (another great McCoy line... *sigh*)
anyway, the one line i've never figured out is in the beginning... maybe somebody can help me... the klingon ambassador is demanding kirk's release, sarek comes along, the president denies the klingon request, klingon: "Star fleet regulations, that's outrageous! remember this well... there shall be no peace, as long as kirk lives" and then the crowd gets into a frenzy of sorts, and some voice yells something in the background... i've rewound that scene many, many times, trying to figure out what the voice says, but i can't figure it out... it's probably not even english or something, but i shan't give up my quest till i know that for sure.
> My cat lost its mittens. (Rare: a possessive without an apostrophe).
but not in any way an exception:
he - his she - her it - its
it's only confusing because there does exist an (it's) with an apostrophe, not because it's some sort of exception to a rule or trend. i don't think any of the possessive pronouns use apostrophes.
heheheheheheheheh... of course, i'm not an english major, nor have i had much in the way of formal education in english.
I mean, obviously all the *bsd variants... and some commercial unices are bsd based. but i've heard rumors that some m$ code is bsd based too. do they belong to the family?
in other news, i'm jealous. rich got to go to usenix, and i had to stay in indiana. and it's really humid here these days... ugh.
yeah, i first saw this last (sunday) night, and now it has suddenly appeared as the most recently posted article on monday morning...
i think something suspicious is afoot.
if it wasn't for the fact that i'm on ethernet, i'd do that silly "no carrier" thing in an attempt to make you all think i'd disappeared because of my suspicions... but that wouldn't make sense anyway, because how does one hit the submit button without a carrier? hmmm?
rc5 rocks. i'm keeping my (well, not really *my* but close enough) little cluster of ancient AIX boxes doing rc5. As cool as the possibility of alien life is, it's not gonna have any short term effects on my life. encryption is an issue that needs much more short term attention... but i encourage everyone else doing rc5 to switch to seti so i can rise up the ranks... nah, on second thought, let's kill rc5. =)
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not, I suspect if you searched for "root" you'd just get a billion porn sites. They probably just looked it up in their "Computer Journalism for Dummies" glossary...
hey now, careful... wouldn't want slashdot getting sued 'n stuff cuz you mentioned "... for dummies" in a post...
doh! now i did it myself!
- A couple months ago a friend mailed me a question... programs were starting to segfault with alarming frequency, and he noticed some obscure message in his kern.log (forget what it was) and he had no idea what was wrong... so I go into
/usr/src/linux, do a recursive grep (grep is the best tool ever!) on the error message, read the appropriate code surrounding the message to figure out what's going on, and mail the guy back with some suggestions on how to fix the problem. That is why open source rules, and that is why I love Linux.
:-)) so that one wouldn't have to search the kernel source to find out what that message was saying, whether what it's saying could explain the problems one is seeing, and how to fix the problem.
I won't argue with you here. This is definitely true. But writing documentation isn't nearly as fun as writing code, so I think documentation is always gonna be behind... of course, the LDP has become quite a nice resource, but there's still lots that needs to be covered.Perhaps - although even better might have been a knowledge base (think HOWTO, if the term "knowledge base" sets off anti-Microsoft antibodies
- It's nice that you can open the hood/bonnet and check the engine - sometimes the answer might not be in a knowledge base, and sometimes the answer in the knowledge base might not be the right answer for the particular problem you're seeing, and it's also nice that you can take a look and see what software is doing, see how it's doing it, and see why it's doing it, and it's nice that you can make it do something different - but it's not necessarily nice if you have to do that.
You are absolutely right, of course. But there have been plenty of times where I have been using closed-source software and I have encountered error messages and such that are entirely cryptic and for which I could find no documentation. And this is where the advantage of open source really comes in. Not everyone is going to want to look at the source to figure out what the error means, but for those of us who are willing to look at the source, having the source makes a huge difference in the quality of the software... or at least it does in my humblest of opinions...Well, as many people have pointed out, there would not be Linux if it were not open-source. I mean, granted, Linus released a working OS to the net, but it was far from being a usable OS (other than use as a toy...)
/usr/src/linux, do a recursive grep (grep is the best tool ever!) on the error message, read the appropriate code surrounding the message to figure out what's going on, and mail the guy back with some suggestions on how to fix the problem. That is why open source rules, and that is why I love Linux. And I'm sure many other people love Linux and Open source for the same reasons...
But people saw potential, and since they had the source were able to help expand linux into what it is today.
So after having repeated what everyone else already said (you're welcome.) i'll had some more worthless stuff:
I was vaguely familiar with the concept of open source when I started using Linux. My OS of choice was Solaris when I set up my first Linux box, and came to appreciate the GNU utilities that the admins had kindly installed. For one thing I liked some of the options that some of the GNU versions offered (tar xvfz is much better than gunzip -c foo.tgz | tar xvf -) and as I became more curious about learning what made the box work I spent more and more time reading the source code of these utilities and learning what made them work.
another great advantage to open source was that if i downloaded a program and it didn't work quite as I wanted to... if I had the source, I could fix it! What a great concept! It made my life so much less frustrating.
After a couple years on Solaris I finally got together enough money to buy a cheap PC so that I could use a puter in my room instead of going to the uni computer labs, and I gave the whole Linux thing a try. (windoze has never infested my hard drive, i'm so proud!) I definitely love Linux. So here's my final anecdote:
A couple months ago a friend mailed me a question... programs were starting to segfault with alarming frequency, and he noticed some obscure message in his kern.log (forget what it was) and he had no idea what was wrong... so I go into
So to get to some sort of point: If Linux had not been open source, it would not have appealed to people like me. If it had not appealed to people like me, it would probably never have spread far... and Linux for a long time only spread among the hacker type... not until it had a large hackerish following did other people start playing with it. So if Linux had not been open source, I don't think it would exist.
As far as the open source movement, I think it would've done ok without Linux. It might have taken longer, but if there had been no Linux for people to focus their energy on, these people would have probably focused their energy one of the free BSD variants, or maybe even on the Hurd. Some open-source OS would've taken a similar position to the one of Linux. I think open source was destined to get big one way or another... it just might have taken longer...
I hope I haven't bored anyone, and I hope my rantings haven't been too redundant... peace out.
I don't know what happened to the article, but I know it is still visible at http://slashdot.org/articles/99/1 0/19/1230228.shtml...
/. articles disappear... but it does seem to happen on a regular basis... sunspots, maybe?
i dunno why
- It reminds me of the deals Coke gets with fast food chains and university cafeterias to only distribute Coke (and thus the university gets some kind of kick-back from Coke). Disgusting.
Isn't it Pepsi that generally does this? I know it was Pepsi at my university (Humboldt State Univ.).For what it's worth, Notre Dame is pretty much coke-only. At least in the cafeterias and such. There are pepsi vending machines and such around campus, tho, which is a Good Thing, since I need my mountain dew fix.
I think some high muckity-muck who works/worked for Coke recently donated a dorm to ND. But I paid little attention to the new dorms they put up, since I never go to that part of campus anyway..
Anyway, my guess is that both Pepsi and Coke do this. It wouldn't make sense for one of them to do it and for the other one not to and to just sit back instead and let the competition corner the lucrative college cafeteria market...
A few weeks ago, I helped set up a mirror for the LAM pages (http://www.mpi.nd.edu/lam/) and while one of the mirrors was spidering our site, downloading everything, we noticed another machine that was on our campus doing the same thing. We found this slightly odd and sent a Big Brother sorta mail (we're watching you spider our site... why?) to the people doing this... got a response about them doing some study about how the web is laid out. They thought they could predict it using some physical or mathematical model.
I also administer the NDLUG (http://www.ndlug.nd.edu/) web server, and noticed massive spidering from the same machine on campus.
Now I read this article and see this quote:
"The Web doesn't look anything like we expected it to be," said Notre Dame physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who along with two colleagues studied the Web's topology.
so, i guess i don't have much of a point, but it's kinda cool to see that something actually came of some people in the college of science abusing our poor 486 webserver...
shredding the instructions to the shredder...
except that if you post to a discussion thread on which you moderated posts, the moderation you did to any posts on that discussion is removed... so this post had 2 points or so removed from it and it had already been moderated downwards by other moderators, so it is now at a score of -2. nifty, you broke slashdot. since the selecty box thingums only allow you to chose a threshold of -1, you have to go into the url and change ...&threshold=-1... to ...&threshold=-10... (well, it only needs be -2, but best be safe, right?) in order to even see the post...
quite entertaining, methinks...
actually, if you register a domain with register.com, you need to do
whois -h whois.register.com cooldomain.org
(and obviously replace cooldomain.org with whatever you're looking up)
So, i guess in order to get domain contact info, you would need to write a script of sorts that checks each whois host (nsi's and register.com's at the moment -- more to come in the future, i'm sure) until it finds the domain you're looking for...
well, i don't smoke normal pipes... i smoke huge real-man pipes, and i use a huge, real-man editor -- emacs. so quit your huffing and puffing and go smoke your vi in tiny pipe.
oh well, Go Irish!
The software for this thing is compatible with Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. Not that I blame them or anything, but I imagine that until a Linux version is available, this hardware will have little practical use to some people here. At least, to me it's not worth the six dollars...
Don't give them a reason to watch you, and they won't.
Or, better yet, give them a reason to watch you, so that their efforts cannot be intensified on a few single people as easily.
I'm thinking of pgp-encrypting all my email and giving it subject lines from that emacs function... don't remember it's name right now... spook or something... just so that the government can focus on me and have less manpower to focus elsewhere...
heh heh heh
yar, agreed. i hate people who design webpages that aren't lynx-friendly... i forces me to bloat up my system with netscape... i think it actually requires more effort to make a page that is incompatible with most browsers than it does to make a simple page that everyone can see. that's probably the problem with the web. it's easy to make stuff look pretty. hell, just steal someone else's javascript. what is difficult is coming up with original content that doesn't need to look spiffy in order for people to look at it...
if i want fancy graphics, i'll play quake, thanks very much.
*sigh*
i definitely agree that Netscape's rendering blows. But even with lynx (the bestest web browser ever) i see no site at all. lynx downloads all the html fine and prints out the title " NEC Z1 - The Evolution of the Computer Ends with Z" but is unable to render anything else... not a very friendly website, methinks...
i let netscape try to load it for rather a long while and finally decided screw it. when i hit stop, i just got a grey page saying transfer interrupted. so being curious, i go to "view page source" and the page's html had loaded in its entirety. now call me old-fashioned, but i think if netscape was able to load all of the page source, it should be able to draw the page, maybe with a few graphix missing...
but nope, netscape was unable to draw even a small semblance of a page. grrr... and i'm on ethernet connected to a T3...
We might actually get more than 10 people to show up to a meeting if he did...
maybe if we ask real nicely-like...
quit using them bigish words, dude. they confuse me.
and maybe i won't last long against your attacks, but i shall certainly at least die knowing i was defending the honor of my school...
go irish!!
(ha, take that! two exclamation points!)
go irish!
I took a break from my busy summer star wars viewing schedule to see this one. I guess it was worth it (Heather Graham definitely was fun to watch, but she's no Natalie Portman :P)
But anyway, I think that has been the only non-star wars movie i'll have seen this summer. because star wars ruled! I recommend you all go see it again. Those of you who hated it..... I was really unimpressed with it my first time. But the second time was better. And now that i've seen it six times, I want to see it more and more and more... besides, we can't let titanic win!
do your moral duty. see austin powers once, it's worth it. but see star wars many, many times... it's worth it even more...
I've gotta agree. Star Trek IV is by far my favorite. I think it was probably because as a youngster, my parents wouldn't let me watch the more violent Star Trek movies that had come before it, but this one was alright. I've impressed several friends by being able to say every line in the movie as it comes (well, impress or annoy... same thing)
"Admiral! There be whales here!"
"You planning to go for a bit of a swim?" - "Off the deep end Mr. Scott"
"Humpbacked? People?" - "Whales, Mr. Scott"
"Angels and ministers of grace defend us" - "Hamlet, Act One, scene four" - "No doubts about your memory, Spock"
"Excuse me, can you tell us where they keep the nuclear vessels?" (in thick russian accent)
"You mean I have to die before I can discuss death with you?" (another great McCoy line... *sigh*)
anyway, the one line i've never figured out is in the beginning... maybe somebody can help me... the klingon ambassador is demanding kirk's release, sarek comes along, the president denies the klingon request, klingon: "Star fleet regulations, that's outrageous! remember this well... there shall be no peace, as long as kirk lives"
and then the crowd gets into a frenzy of sorts, and some voice yells something in the background... i've rewound that scene many, many times, trying to figure out what the voice says, but i can't figure it out... it's probably not even english or something, but i shan't give up my quest till i know that for sure.
ah well... RIP bones... i miss you already...
for anyone not subscribed to bugtraq, there was an interesting post that included a bit more info than the news articles seem to have:
m l
http://www.geek-girl.com/bugtraq/1999_2/0710.ht
> My cat lost its mittens. (Rare: a possessive without an apostrophe).
but not in any way an exception:
he - his
she - her
it - its
it's only confusing because there does exist an (it's) with an apostrophe, not because it's some sort of exception to a rule or trend. i don't think any of the possessive pronouns use apostrophes.
heheheheheheheheh... of course, i'm not an english major, nor have i had much in the way of formal education in english.
I mean, obviously all the *bsd variants... and some commercial unices are bsd based. but i've heard rumors that some m$ code is bsd based too. do they belong to the family?
in other news, i'm jealous. rich got to go to usenix, and i had to stay in indiana. and it's really humid here these days... ugh.
yeah, i first saw this last (sunday) night, and now it has suddenly appeared as the most recently posted article on monday morning...
i think something suspicious is afoot.
if it wasn't for the fact that i'm on ethernet, i'd do that silly "no carrier" thing in an attempt to make you all think i'd disappeared because of my suspicions... but that wouldn't make sense anyway, because how does one hit the submit button without a carrier? hmmm?
and why do stories keep migrating?
rc5 rocks. i'm keeping my (well, not really *my* but close enough) little cluster of ancient AIX boxes doing rc5. As cool as the possibility of alien life is, it's not gonna have any short term effects on my life. encryption is an issue that needs much more short term attention... but i encourage everyone else doing rc5 to switch to seti so i can rise up the ranks... nah, on second thought, let's kill rc5. =)
nugget is my hero!