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Re: [News] Towards a Few Main Linux Distributions?

__/ [ Mark Kent ] on Wednesday 28 June 2006 10:31 \__

> begin  oe_protect.scr
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> __/ [ Mark Kent ] on Wednesday 28 June 2006 09:01 \__
>> 
>>> begin  oe_protect.scr
>>> B Gruff <bbgruff@xxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>>> On Wednesday 28 June 2006 00:07 Mark Kent wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> begin  oe_protect.scr
>>>>> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>>>>> A GPL requirement could have a chilling effect on derivative distros
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>>>>>| Many derivative distributions, then, seem to be on their own in a
>>>>>>| difficult situation where good intentions and creativity count for
>>>>>>| nothing beside the letter of the law.
>>>>>> `----
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/06/23/1728205&from=rss
>>>>> 
>>>>> The FSF are quite correct about their position here, the licence is
>>>>> clear, and source code must be made available.  If this provision is
>>>>> not upheld, the GPL would begin to look like the BSD licence, enabling
>>>>> those who wish to take code without returning their work to the pool to
>>>>> spread this limitation of others' freedom to GPLed works, which is
>>>>> clearly not acceptable (noting that at least one regular here doesn't
>>>>> seem to understand this, if not two or three).
>>>> 
>>>> I agree of course, Mark, but I reckon it's even worse that that.  This
>>>> is
>>>> likely also a Configuration Control/Management issue.  They are (I
>>>> think) taking the source from a "parent" distro (e.g. Debian), but not
>>>> re-distributing it, and possibly therefore not archiving it.  If, after
>>>> they have taken that code, and put out their distro, Debian were to make
>>>> a change..... do you see what I mean?
>>>> I don't think it's a case of worrying that they are "holding something
>>>> back", but rather that by not archiving and distributing, they are in
>>>> danger of a configuration cock-up!
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> Hmmm, quite right...  one wonders if there isn't a case for a shared
>>> respository for source-code?  A bit like sourceforge, but wouldn't need
>>> to have all the bells & whistles, just lots and lots of storage,
>>> mirrored across the planet.
>> 
>> 
>> This kind of reminds me of ibiblio.
> 
> Yes, used to be sunsite, didn't it?  I was a regular at sunsite for many
> years, lots of excellent software, including huge amounts of freeware
> and shareware, as well as a growing body of GPLed code, even for DOS.
> The walnut creek CPM stuff was good too, but that's a looonggg time ago.
> 
> I took a snapshot of one of the CPM archives shortly before it
> disappeared, and have contemplated putting it up on the web as it was,
> but I'm not sure how much interest there is in cpm now.  I still have a
> couple of machines which can boot it, including an Athlon 2200 machine
> :-) (cpm86, naturally).
> 
>> 
>> 
>>> In all honesty, one of the greatest crimes of all time is the number of
>>> chip & software designs which have just been "lost".  Worse than that,
>>> this behaviour is actually /encouraged/ by most information retention
>>> policies in most companies, which tend to prefer their staff to not
>>> archive things - for generally good reason, I would add, which is to
>>> save embarassing information surfacing which shouldn't - but the result
>>> is that lots of info is lost.
>>> 
>>> This is exacerbated by the reliance lots of organisations have had on
>>> proprietary tools over the years - how many documents have been lost
>>> because they're stored in a binary format which can no longer be read,
>>> or no longer be /easily/ read (which means they get junked - too much
>>> effort to do anything else...).
>> 
>> 
>> I still have some data, which I believe has lost its value. It's utterly
>> inaccessible, which makes it a ball of binary goo. It is unfortunate and
>> vexing to me, to say the last (Palm are among the culprits, by the way).
>> Much as in Pigrim's words, I want to keep my trail of data open and
>> accessible in the long run. I often need to refer back to old information,
>> which I sometimes keep indexed. But without some shallow standards, how do
>> you index in the first place? How do you impose hierarchy (levels) and
>> structure, for instance?
> 
> Yeah - the "everything drawer" problem, as I mentioned elsewhere.  Even
> reading a floppy is getting quite hard now, particularly if it's a 5"
> one or a 3" one.
> 
> Over the years in email, I've moved over to storing mainly by date
> (monthly) and avoiding doing too much more sorting for work items, as
> the subjects and structures change so fast that it creates more work to
> attempt to file emails into a fine structure than it is just to search
> the month directories (or folders or whatever they're called in
> outlook).
> 
> For my home stuff, I use a procmail recipe to store by month, but also
> to sort into a set of categories, as they don't change all that often
> for home stuff.


I personally file by month, but I have a tiered structure that's composed of
about 20 E-mail addresses, each corresponding to different type of mail.
This makes message sortable by header or box to which they are delivered (if
downloaded rather than managed on the server). Movement of messages is done
manually roughly every 3 months. This means that I maintain one large inbox,
but visible items are only "One day old" OR "Unread" OR "Labelled important"
OR "Status is new". Pressing "1" (for important) ensure that undealt-with
item remain visible rather than drop to oblivion. This seems to work well
and I can actually afford to have a new mail notifier without getting
distracted. Different accounts are polled for at different intervals,
depending on importance.

Links of relevance, FWIW (sliced by criteria in the MySQL database,
chronologically listed): 

http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/01/06/solution-to-junk-mail/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/01/15/mail-checker/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/02/21/managing-large-e-mail-quantities/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/03/22/life-without-e-mail/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/04/15/web-based-local/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/04/29/managing-e-mail-on-personal-domains/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/06/01/e-mail-address-disclosure/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/06/06/public_mail/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/07/16/urgent-mail-account/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/07/28/inbox-management/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/08/24/autoresponder-trick/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/09/26/mail-survey/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/10/13/e-mail-count/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2006/01/10/signatures-spam/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2006/02/23/spam-spoof/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2006/03/05/collaborative-filter/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2006/04/28/thunderbird-notify/
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2006/06/21/better-email/


>>> The fantastic work which emulator writers have done over the years to
>>> keep the capability to run older binaries on new systems is amazing, but
>>> as chip designs are ever more bespoke, this kind of emulation will
>>> become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, so it could be that
>>> future generations of emulators will, in reality, rely on having source
>>> available.
>>> 
>>> Hmm, wonder if I should start blogging my diamonds of wisdom :-))
>> 
>> 
>> I urge you too, as I already said before. It should take just minutes to
>> get started and you will have at least one reader.
>> 
> 
> Is it better to do it one one's home site, or use an externally hosted
> service?  There are some gems I'd like to pick up back out of cola and
> work them a little further...


Not that I /necessarily/ recommend this, but: you could go through your
outgoing mail box(es) and seek messages which you think would be suitable as
articles (with some further work, potentially). You can start with a
/friendly/ (i.e. not egocentric) third-party service like WordPress.com and
at some stage export and import into a personal domain (hoested by self or a
third party) running WordPress.org.

Best wishes,

Roy

-- 
Roy S. Schestowitz      |    Bring home the world cup, England!
http://Schestowitz.com  | Free as in Free Beer ¦  PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
Cpu(s):  20.3% user,   3.6% system,  17.6% nice,  58.5% idle
      http://iuron.com - semantic engine to gather information

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