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GNU believers (NewsForge)
NewsForge
examines the increasing use of Linux and open-source software by
religious institutions.
"GNU's roots lie squarely with an atheist named Richard M. Stallman. Yet, GNU -- meaning GNU's Not Unix -- was born out of the Golden Rule -- a biblical precept that strikes home with pretty much every Christian. While Stallman's Kantian ethics would clash at various points with Christian theology, the Golden Rule is common to both. In fact, in personal correspondence, Stallman told me he believes the Christian Church should be one of the major advocates of free software."
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GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 27, 2004 23:26 UTC (Fri) by jamesm (guest, #2273) [Link] I wonder if they are using Jesux.
That should be ...
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 2:30 UTC (Sat) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] I wonder if they are using Jesux.I don't know how it is now, but when I worked for Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (2001-2003) we used Debian.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 4:27 UTC (Sat) by sandy_pond (guest, #9734) [Link] I wonder if they'll provide a patch like:
s/daemons/angels/
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 5:06 UTC (Sat) by sandy_pond (guest, #9734) [Link] I want to apologize if I irritated anyone. It was unintentional.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 6:57 UTC (Sat) by yohahn (subscriber, #4107) [Link] As a Christian, Free Software, kinda guy, I wouldn't worry about it.
(
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 14:26 UTC (Sat) by havoc (guest, #2261) [Link] I thought it was funny.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 14:27 UTC (Sat) by havoc (guest, #2261) [Link] ... but it was nice that you care enough preemptively to apologize.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 15:06 UTC (Sat) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] s/daemons/angels/This is the sort of thing that I have to skate around when promoting Linux in Christian organizations. People either don't care, or they freak out. I once had a guy freak out when he found out that '666' was commonly used to change file permissions! :-) If Unix had been written by Christians we might have angels instead of daemons. The only significance of '666' in relation to chmod is that it is preceeded by '555' and followed by '777'. It is fortunate that most people never grep the Linux source...
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 16:47 UTC (Sat) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link] It is unfortunate, that there exists people that thinks common numbers like "6" has some deep, sinister "meaning". 6 is the number between 5 and 7, that's it. You can attach any meaning you like to it, but then to get paranoid and assume your freely choosen meaning applies wherever you come across the number in question is just stupid.<p>
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 18:15 UTC (Sat) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] Here in the US many tall buildings don't have a floor numbered 13; they go straight from 12 to 14. I've wondered if this is strictly a US thing, or if this numbering scheme is practiced in other parts of the world.I've also noticed that a lot of computer users have an adversion to the number 1.0. ;-)
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 18:16 UTC (Sat) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] whoops, s/adv/av/
Be nice to have a 20 minute edit frame for us bad spellers...
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 18:26 UTC (Sat) by The_Pirate (guest, #21740) [Link] I think it's something that goes around in the U.S. - i noticed when i was over there some years ago.
Here in Europe people dont seem to mind 13th floor, room 13, Friday the 13th and so on.
The 1.0 thing, on the other hand.... Bohohooo !
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 23:06 UTC (Sat) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] I believe from memory that the buildings with no 13th public floor usuallyhave an engineering section at that level (air conditioning, plumbing, etc.) to take advantage of the superstition to place some noisy machinery away from offices, etc. The floor exists; it's just not marked on the public elevators. :-) And also, when it comes to free software, I have no problem with 1.0; it's 0.0.1 I try to stay away from. By 1.0 things generally work just fine. With proprietary software however (and even more so depending on the glitz level of the 'product launch'), I agree... stay far away.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 29, 2004 8:57 UTC (Sun) by mbp (subscriber, #2737) [Link] Because engineers tend to be less superstitious?
(I'm not sure if that's true, but we have well-founded superstitions. :-)
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 29, 2004 22:48 UTC (Sun) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link] Robert Heinlein - "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag" - 13th floor - initiation rituals - CHICAGO!
...
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 30, 2004 15:52 UTC (Mon) by crankysysadmin (guest, #19449) [Link] The "14th" floor is the 13th floor, folks. Climb the stairs some time. A floor by any other name...
OT: Not just the 13th floor... Posted Aug 29, 2004 13:46 UTC (Sun) by jvotaw (subscriber, #3678) [Link] I read a while back that many new skyscrapers skip floor numbers rather freely, so as to make the building seem more impressive. So you might have a building with a 100th floor, but only 80 floors.
-Joel
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 30, 2004 8:31 UTC (Mon) by vidileo (subscriber, #7891) [Link] > Here in the US many tall buildings don't have a floor numbered 13;> they go straight from 12 to 14. I've wondered if this is strictly > a US thing, or if this numbering scheme is practiced in other > parts of the world.
I took this picture in the french side of the Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg Airport. Notice something strange? :-)
http://omnibus.uni-freiburg.de/~s8vidile/BMF13.jpg
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 21:36 UTC (Sat) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link] >If Unix had been written by Christians we might have angels instead of daemons.
It's all Maxwell's fault!
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 28, 2004 23:16 UTC (Sat) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] If I suspected people would have a problem with it I would just instructthem to use the symbolic forms ('chmod a=rw') instead. The more verbose form is easier to understand anyway... maybe not as flexible or fast, but oh well. If they never know about the number form, it can't hurt 'em, right? ;-)
chmod Posted Aug 29, 2004 0:18 UTC (Sun) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] I have always wondered why so many beginners introductions to command line tools keep introducing chmod with the octal mode notation. It is definitely a "power user" feature that is rarely necessary to use, and presenting it as the primary way to set file protections just unnecessarily reinforces the perception that the Linux command line is hard to use.
chmod Posted Aug 29, 2004 9:16 UTC (Sun) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link] How so? The most common modes I use are 755, 644, 775, and 664. Those are all pretty unwieldy in the symbolic notation.
chmod Posted Aug 29, 2004 12:42 UTC (Sun) by droundy (subscriber, #4559) [Link] But most people only want to change some of the permissions (not all). The two commands
chmod +x
are sufficient for most uses. In other cases
chmod o-r
isn't hard either. A power user may want or need to change all the permissions at once, but I get
non-mnemonic command syntax Posted Sep 3, 2004 17:46 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] It's the same reason they use one-character options when mnemonic alternatives are available. I suppose it's partly because the author's brain works in such a way that 666 actually is no harder to conceive than a=rw and partly because for historical reasons he uses 666 himself and is too lazy to look up the more understandable version.I myself am an avid and quite old Linux user, and my brain still doesn't work that way. I wouldn't be caught dead typing chmod 666 and when I see "tar -cvxrf" or whatever in an example, I just skip it because I don't have time to decode all those letters, even if I didn't have to look each one up in a manual.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 29, 2004 2:58 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] > I once had a guy freak out when he> found out that '666' was commonly > used to change file permissions! :-)
'chmod 666' is indeed a sin (though not as bad as chmod 777). A necessary sin, sometimes, but a sin nevertheless.
> s/daemons/angels/
Personally, I can't figure why those folks would be so alarmed with Disk And Execution MONitor processes. But then again, anybody aware of Free/NetBSD used by some religious institute?
> it is unfortunate that most people
vmlinux (not vmlinuz) still has some of it left.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 29, 2004 9:44 UTC (Sun) by dvrabel (subscriber, #9500) [Link] Disk And Execution MONitor isn't the original origin of the term daemon.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 30, 2004 6:46 UTC (Mon) by roskegg (subscriber, #105) [Link] No, you got it wrong. Most Christians do. In the original Greek, the sign of the beast is 616, not 666. 666 is perfectly innocuous and safe. Beware the ides of 616!
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 30, 2004 12:31 UTC (Mon) by AAP (guest, #721) [Link] >Personally, I can't figure why those folks would be so alarmed with Disk>And Execution MONitor processes. But then again, anybody aware of >Free/NetBSD used by some religious institute?
No, but I often hear comments about FreeBSD's mascot. I'm sure many of them are just joking, but some are actually serious.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 30, 2004 19:49 UTC (Mon) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] No, but I often hear comments about FreeBSD's mascot. I'm sure many of them are just joking, but some are actually serious.Actually, I would never try to promote FreeBSD within a Christian organization for this very reason. The battle isn't worth fighting. The mascot is too visible, and the best I could do is break even -- there's no way I could win. If FreeBSD held some significant advantage over Linux maybe it would be different.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 31, 2004 22:53 UTC (Tue) by roskegg (subscriber, #105) [Link] That is why I like OpenBSD; the fugu fish mascot doesn't have any of the problems that the NetBSD and FreeBSD demon mascots have. Makes OpenBSD an easy sell in Christian organizations.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 29, 2004 12:13 UTC (Sun) by mbp (subscriber, #2737) [Link] Tell him
chmod a=rw foo.txt
and don't hurt his brain.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 30, 2004 0:16 UTC (Mon) by darthmdh (guest, #8032) [Link] The only significance of "666" in Christian theology is that it is the number of a certain man (Revelation 13:18, AMP). People who go all stupid about it and won't, for example, "chmod 666 [somefile]" are idiots. No, really. Perhaps marginally more stupid than the people who think s/daemons/angels/ is plausible. As a Spirit-filled Pentecostal Christian I can assure you I certainly wouldn't be advocating that, because it's Just Plain Dumb (tm). Kinda like that feminist thing about "that girl's name is Peopledy, not Mandy!".
Like most non-profit organisations, churches don't have the kind of dosh just sitting idly by to go spend on site-licenses for, eg, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office and Microsoft blahblahblah, particularly when there's ample free (beer) software that can at least adequately perform the job. And like most people with brains, they would tend toward free (speech) software also so it can be customised if need be for their exact needs. The freedom free software brings also fits in well with ministries involving charity work, where software can be given away as-is or modified and given away to those who need it.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Sep 1, 2004 22:10 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link] > The only significance of "666" in Christian theology is that it is the number of a certain man (Revelation 13:18, AMP).
And, as Heinlein points out in... _Job_? -- It may not be that it was actually six hundred sixty six that was the number being discussed; translation is a pesky thing. No, it was _Beast_.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 30, 2004 12:41 UTC (Mon) by fjf33 (subscriber, #5768) [Link] I think the 6 comes from using the binary representation as a flag 111 (7), 110 (6), 101 (5), etc. Well you get the idea.
If people don't like 6 they can alway switch to binary numbers. That would be a nice patch. Not very usable and would touch a lot of code but it would completely remove 6 from the interface. (BTW all OSs use this concept of flags one way or another) Maybe we can simplify and go to base 4. It would make the transition easier, and break all numbers into duets.
Well gotta go to work.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 30, 2004 21:50 UTC (Mon) by s_cargo (guest, #10473) [Link] s/daemons/angels/For those that might not know, daemon is a real English word (pronounced the same as "demon") and refers to a subordinate diety or attendant spirit. Considering that daemon processes are privileged processes that handle specific tasks, calling them subordinate dieties makes perfect sense.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 29, 2004 17:08 UTC (Sun) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link] On a *serious* front, this seems like a good time to point out once again the Rivendell radio broadcast automation system, produced -- and GPL'd -- by the DP folks at the Salem Radio christian network.They have just put out 0.9.0, including SuSE 9 RPM's, and are calling it feature-complete. If you need something like that; worth taking a look at.
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 30, 2004 12:17 UTC (Mon) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] Minor nitpick: The golden rule is older, and can already be found inConfucianism (and he formulates it more concise than Jesus. The actual formulation we use today is the one of Confucious, not the one of Jesus - but we don't use his one-word form: "Mutuality"). The fact that other religions have also found that concept worthwile does not mean it's something unique, or, as presented here, a major achievement of Christianity (except to catch up with older philosophies). As it is a rule that does not require any supreme authority (it's a peer to peer rule), and can be understood without any metaphysics (it's pretty obvious), it is a rule no atheist has any problems to follow. Actually, this golden rule (as part of the Sermon on the Mount) is a pretty unique thing within Christianity. Usually, Christianity is a dualistic religion, there's we and 'em (David vs. Goliath), there's good and bad, there's God and Devil, Heaven and Hell; forces fighting against each others. Blue pill vs. red pill (ups, other movie, but you get the idea). There's no such thing as the golden mean (which is an important part of Confucianism, and a direct consequence of the golden rule applied).
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 30, 2004 14:32 UTC (Mon) by Lou57 (guest, #12083) [Link] The biggest problem that I see within Christian organization with respect to technology is training. Since 90% of what is done by MOST Christian organizations is done by volunteers, the decision makers often have very limited choices. And often when deciding, they want to feel comfortable about the project, so the go with what they know. This often leaves *nix out of consideration. It's getting better, but Windows normally gets the nod. Lack of training screams here too -- ugly frontpage sites. But that's what THAT volunteer could do.
We have been streaming audio and video live using Windows and Real for years. It's not by choice, but because we have a volunteer who knows how to do it with these tools and was willing to put out the effort to do this every week. But our archive is linux based, and streams those same sermons and classes, again using Real and Helix servers. Again, a volunteer that works at a local ISP and who knows how to get it done with these tools.
FreeBSD? My local congregation uses FreeBSD -- via Pair.net!
GNU believers (NewsForge) Posted Aug 30, 2004 17:38 UTC (Mon) by Signal-9 (guest, #24380) [Link] I think religion belongs in ---> /dev/null
But jesux 1.0 would be kewl... i just wonder if it will run the 2.6.6.6 client ?
lol just playing around...
now seriously, what was this guy thinking?
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