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Poll

Do you agree with me that libertarians should choose Copyfree software over Copyleft whenever possible?

Yes.
- 4 (80%)
No.
- 1 (20%)

Total Members Voted: 5


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Author Topic: Copyfree Software  (Read 17532 times)

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blackie

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #30 on: March 15, 2011, 07:03:45 PM »

Once again, if you have enough CPU power you don't really need GPU.
Some of the games my kids play require a specific GPU. I've got a system that has  8 cores running at 2.9GHz, with 24GB of RAM, and it's running windows so they can play those games on it.
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Fred

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #31 on: March 15, 2011, 07:04:46 PM »

24 fucking gigs of ram?!~~~~~~~~~~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Alex Libman

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #32 on: March 15, 2011, 08:50:23 PM »

[...]  and it's running windows so they can play those games on it.

I agree that Windows is the rational choice for you, and I would be running it myself if it had a bit more to offer me.  The only thing I need Windows for is AJAX compatibility testing, which I need maybe for one hour every two weeks, so virtualization (or remote access to a Windows instance in the cloud) is good enough.

I almost never ever play games (unless I get some 1990s nostalgia like once a year, but emulating those games on OpenBSD requires very little).  The pointy clicky GUI's are great for minimizing the learning curve, but I'm more productive editing configuration files directly.  I never even use (Open)Office apps, because I do everything through scripting and the Internet.  Who needs a word processor when it's faster to type things in forum / wiki syntax to post on the Internet?  I most definitely don't need an HTML authoring app - I remember all the syntax by heart, or I write Web content in my own syntax and then use a generator script to produce HTML files and mass-upload them to multiple mirrors.  I even find it more productive to use text data files (or rarely SQL) and scripting instead of spreadsheets.  Visual Studio is a temptation, especially with the new Python component, but not tempting enough.


24 fucking gigs of ram?!~~~~~~~~~~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dude, go to amazon.freetalklive.com and search for "24gb ram" - prices start at just $240!

My routine coding setup of OpenBSD + X + wmii + xterms + console apps like vim uses ~256MB RAM, and another 512MB is more than enough for all the GUI apps I ever run: browsers and mplayer.  Another half a gig to virtualize Windows XP, or a gig to visualize Windows 7 (without any desktop GUI effects, just enough to run IE9).  But you do need lots and lots of RAM for good high-end database and Web-server performance - and you get special performance benefits if you use a DMA NIC that can serve static pages from RAM, bypassing the OS and the CPU completely!

Investing in good connectivity and hardware infrastructure is very important.  Most people spend 10x more on their car than their computers - I'd rather walk but have high-end local hardware, fast Internet connectivity with fallback redundancies, a super-powerful neighborhood wifi hotspot, lots of foreign Web site mirrors, etc, etc, etc.  The Internet is our most powerful weapon in the fight for freedom, and good weapons don't come cheap.
« Last Edit: March 15, 2011, 09:01:17 PM by /sbin/libmand »
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Fred

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #33 on: March 15, 2011, 08:53:23 PM »

but 24 gigs?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! what do you need that for?
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blackie

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #34 on: March 15, 2011, 09:56:29 PM »

Lots of RAM for virtual machines. Each vm gets it's own memory. I want to be able to run 10 2GB virtual machines at the same time.

Some day I am going to build a private cloud. The system won't be running windows then.
« Last Edit: March 15, 2011, 10:09:40 PM by blackie »
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Zhwazi

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #35 on: March 15, 2011, 11:26:53 PM »

Does OpenBSD have KDE 4 yet?
Can I use more than 4 GB of RAM on amd64 yet?
Does it have anything similar to jails yet?
MAC? ZFS?

OpenBSD may be less vulnerable (the base system at least, no telling about the third-party stuff or admin misconfiguration), but FreeBSD's jails provide a level of fault isolation that OpenBSD doesn't have an equivalent for. I have an atom box running FreeBSD with 16 jails on it running DHCP, DNS, apache, mpd, postgresql, SMTP and IMAP and tons of other stuff. If something in a jail gets compromised the only way to access the rest of the system is effectively through network sockets. The host runs nothing but sshd. mpd is by far the largest user of CPU, when it isn't playing the CPU is >99% idle. To get the same kind of fault isolation on OpenBSD I'd have to either run a dozen instances of qemu (soooo slooow, and I don't wanna store tons of stuff on a virtual hard drive image just so I can have a file share) or buy a dozen servers that will each be constantly at <1% utilization. And I still won't get the same level of seamlessness as I get with FreeBSD jails or Solaris zones.

Jails are kind of a big deal. Not just chroots, but full OS-level virtualization.
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Alex Libman

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #36 on: March 16, 2011, 03:24:59 AM »

Does OpenBSD have KDE 4 yet?

Yuck, using KDE4 on OpenBSD?  Um, why?!  KDE sucks in general, KDE4 sucks even more, and most desktop OpenBSD setups are already polluted with GTK or Swing - why add the completely unnecessary Qt GNUshit as well?!  To me it doesn't even feel like OpenBSD unless it's running a minimalist Copyfree tiling window manager like dwm or wmii.  (The one included by default, FVWM, is the biggest OpenBSD brainfart of them all.)

But, yes, the porting work has been done even three years ago.


Can I use more than 4 GB of RAM on amd64 yet?

Yes, again, three years ago.


Does it have anything similar to jails yet?

There was a sysjail project for OpenBSD, but it was abandoned because it's generally a flawed idea.  If BSD auth + chroot + systrace aren't enough, you might as well use kqemu.  The only advantage of jails over full virtualization is CPU efficiency (if you use the very same OS as the host), and there are plenty of disadvantages.  So get more / bigger CPU's (and bigger solar panels or whatever to power them).  Another alternative is use dedicated routers and cheap plug computers to separate out the security-critical tasks.  Good server infrastructure does cost money.


MAC?  ZFS?

OpenBSD's approach to security is primarily focused on writing quality code, with the aim being to eliminate bugs and related vulnerabilities, while keeping things as minimalist and simple as possible.  They don't add more bells and whistles unless there is a darn good reason to do it, and for some reason the security gurus at OpenBSD weren't all that impressed with MAC, RBAC, ACL, Veriexec, and other new security technologies.  I'm not going to go into all the details of this discussion, but this is definitely a good opportunity for someone to port the remainder of TrustedBSD to OpenBSD, finish sysjail, etc - and then release it as proprietary software, or better yet TLHS (Time-Limited Hybrid Source)...  ;)

And ZFS is a licensing issue, obviously.  I'm sure they'll import HAMMER once there's a sufficiently good reason to do so.  But relying on filesystem features is a poor way to do things, as it reduces the portability of your solution, especially for the possibility of deploying it on cheap / shared hosts.
« Last Edit: March 16, 2011, 04:05:20 AM by /sbin/libmand »
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Zhwazi

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #37 on: March 17, 2011, 01:13:24 AM »

I happen to like KDE more than all the other DE's available. I've long hated GNOME and xfce is too minimalist for my liking. Non-DE WM's have their place but I don't have a place for them. KDE 4 started sucking a lot less after 4.2, and and the latest releases are getting better and better as KDE 4 matures.

Glad to hear those improvements have been made, that's two of my major sticking points down. You've already said the giant kernel lock is still in place and that does have a big impact on performance and scalability.

How is jail a flawed idea? What are the disadvantages you speak of? I love jails and ZFS because they are conceptually simple in a way that using chroot and systrace aren't. It leaves me time to learn how to do other things so I don't have to worry much about them, and lets me efficiently use the resources I have, so I can cheap out on hardware and get more done with less.

Does OpenBSD have anything that offers a level of compartmentalization equivalent to FreeBSD's Jails? Not just sandboxing of services and stopping them from doing things they shouldn't be, but binding each one to a single IP address to let your configurations be simpler and more portable. If you give somebody a chrooted OpenBSD system and they try to run apache on it, it'll be using the system's port 80. You could configure it with multiple IP's and tell the person with control of the chroot to listen on a specific address, but they can create an issue more complex to troubleshoot than needed by missing that directive. Most services will listen on the only interface on the system by default, in a jail I can just leave that unspecified and it'll listen on the only address it has, and won't conflict with anything else.

This makes the configuration more portable. The way I have things set up, none of my jails depends on the jail infrastructure. If I wanted to move to a single userland for everything, I'd basically have to concatenate the jail-specific rc.conf variables to the host's, change a couple of mountpoints (by removing a /jails/$(jailname)-root prefix), and install the packages on the host instead of in the jails.

Nothing I'm doing depends on ZFS. I can move the files over to UFS and lose the extent of my snapshotting abilities and start having to worry about what size I should make /var, /usr, and /tmp, but why bother? It doesn't reduce portability, it only enhances manageability if it's there. zfs send | zfs recv is an excellent and well-integrated way to make robust transactional incremental backups and while I'd hate to have to switch to using some other backup tool, most other backup tools don't rely on the underlying filesystem much.

ZFS may be copyleft, but it's not viral copyleft like the GPL.
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TimeLady Victorious

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Re: Copyfree Software
« Reply #38 on: March 17, 2011, 01:26:48 PM »

Pff. Superior Fluxbox master race.
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ENGAGE RIDLEY MOTHER FUCKER
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