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pax (Unix) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
pax is an archiving utility created by POSIX and defined by the POSIX.1-2001[1] standard. By default, it creates archives in ustar format, also defined by the POSIX standard. Rather than sort out the incompatible options that have crept up between tar and cpio, along with their implementations across various versions of UNIX, the IEEE designed a new archive utility. The name "pax" is an acronym for portable archive exchange. Furthermore, "pax" means "peace" in Latin, so name implies it shall create peace between the tar and cpio format supporters. The command invocation and command structure, is somewhat a unification of both, tar and cpio.
The interesting bit is at the bottom: it's required by the LSB,but only 6.36% of Debian systems have it installed. However, it comes by default on OSX, where it's used internally in the .pkg format.
There's a push to distribute Python in pax format, and supposedly Red Hat and others plan to move to it. Shaving even 10% off an enormous bandwidth bill would make sense. (Although of course, it seems unlikely the old formats are going to go away any time soon.)
Free Software Needs Free Tools :: Benjamin Mako Hill
Over the last decade, free software developers have been repeatedly tempted by development tools that offer the ability to build free software more efficiently or powerfully.
The only cost, we are told, is that the tools themselves are nonfree or run as network services with code we cannot see, copy, or run ourselves. In their decisions to use these tools and services -- services such as BitKeeper, SourceForge, Google Code and GitHub -- free software developers have made "ends-justify-the-means" decisions that trade away the freedom of both their developer communities and their users. These decisions to embrace nonfree and private development tools undermine our credibility in advocating for software freedom and compromise our freedom, and that of our users, in ways that we should reject.
This is a good point, and one that I think deserves some scrutiny. The open source KForge project provides an opportunity to escape hosts like SourceForge, Google Code, GitHub and Bitbucket, but it is relatively difficult to deploy on commodity hosting. (This week I had the opportunity to talk to someone who had deployed it.) I'm guilty of storing many of my scientific projects on Google Code and Bitbucket, but one of my main projects is hosted privately on a server I pay for, using only Free Software.
One of the issues I see with scientific programming endeavors is that often the self-hosting option presents some red tape, whereas the hosted option is much simpler and easier -- particularly if the project itself is cross-institutional. This is one of the reasons I pushed for our primary simulation platform to be hosted at Google Code, rather than on a local, university-hosted server.
The Kansas City standard — Trevor’s Bike Shed
It was thus a catalyst in the rise of the personal computer, offering home users inexpensive data storage at a time when floppy disk drives cost around $1000.
Hit the original article for what "It" was. I used this for Scott Adams-brand (no, not that Scott Adams, the other one) adventure games.
FOSS Patents: Western civilization runs on the mainframe
There are estimates that 80% of the world's data are processed by mainframes. Banks, insurance companies and governmental departments still use them for their most mission-critical purposes. If you enter a bank transfer, chances are that your bank and the recipient's bank will process the transaction on their respective mainframes. If you get a social security statement anywhere in the industrialized world, the data will almost certainly come from a mainframe.
A few weeks ago I had the occasion to chat with someone who founded and is still head of a company that produces a piece of software for mainframe computers. He told me that he wants to retire, wants to close down the company, wants to stop working on that software: but his clients have too high a demand for it.
