Oh good grief. You think it is too much to ask, to get authorization before permanently changing the state of your system?
Remember, if it is possible for you to install software without being prompted for a password, you run the risk that some sneaky malware can install itself without you being prompted for a password.
And it's not necessarily one password for each thing you install. Suppose you install something, then you right away decide to install something else. You don't get prompted the second time; the password system keeps track of how often it asks you for a password, so you can do a bunch of sysadmin work at one time and only have to type the password once. And you can of course customize how long it will let you go before you need to re-enter that password.
Linux distributions have worked out a nice, practical balance between security and ease of use. Try it sometime.
If I recall correctly, Jerry Pournelle estimated that the energy requirement to get mass into orbit is similar to the energy requirement to fly the mass around the world twice. But as you noted, the shuttle takes a whole lot of fuel. What's up with that?
First, let me rant for a moment. The major cost of the space shuttle is not in fact fuel, but the cost of all the man-hours of service required. A 747 can land, unload passengers and luggage, load fuel, more passengers and more luggage, and take off again. A 747 spends much more time flying than being maintained. The shuttle, on the other hand, requires a standing army of 10,000 people to service it, with months of labor-intensive work to prep for the next flight. Henry Spencer observed that it takes over a million signatures to launch a shuttle flight: as in, run down the checklist, doing the observations/maintenance/whatever, then sign that the checklist is done, times a million.
Okay, back to fuel costs. Let's compare the biggest version of the 747 and the shuttle:
Empty and unfueled, the 747-8 is 214,500 kg. It can carry somewhere around 240,000 liters of fuel (the only exact number in the article is for a passenger version of the 747). The maximum liftoff weight is 442,000 kg. The maximum zero-fuel weight is given as 291,000 kg, so the maximum cargo weight possible is 76,500 kg. If you load max cargo and fuel it up to just under maximum liftoff weight (let's say 185,000 liters of fuel) you have a payload mass fraction of 76,500 kg / (442,000 - 76,500) kg == 0.209 or 20.9 percent.
The gross liftoff weight of the shuttle is given as 2,000,000 kg (obviously a rounded-off number). The payload to orbit is 25,060 kg. The payload mass fraction is 25,060 kg / (2,000,000 - 25,060) kg == 0.0127 or 1.27 percent.
In short, the shuttle is freaking huge and freaking heavy, which is why it needs a freaking giant load of fuel to get to orbit and back. You need the fuel to carry the payload, plus the fuel to carry all the other stuff, plus the fuel to carry the fuel off the ground. (And the fuel to carry the fuel to carry the fuel... it does end up as a finite amount of fuel, but I guess you need calculus to calculate how much it would be.)
You could win big if you had a small, one-piece vehicle that could carry a small payload (say, 1,000 kg) into orbit and not need man-centuries of labor to overhaul it between flights. It's important for cheap operations that pieces not fall off during flight, needing to be replaced (or recovered and refurbished). Such a vehicle could theoretically routinely fly into orbit with fuel costs dominating, just as fuel costs dominate aircraft flights. This is the "space pickup truck" often mentioned in space discussions.
Also, for supplies like dried food that can handle horrible accelerations, theoretically you could build a super-cannon that would launch a capsule into orbit. It turns out that the capsule would need to have onboard engines that would fire and alter the trajectory, causing the capsule to stay in orbit instead of returning to the ground; there is no trajactory at which you can fire an inert payload such that it stays in orbit and doesn't return to hit the ground. But if you could make such a cannon and capsule, that ought to be the cheapest way to use fuel to put things into orbit. (I mean cheapest operationally; I'm not estimating R&D costs, or the costs of building the cannon. And if you could build a "space elevator" that should be the cheapest way to put things into orbit, short of new physics such as teleportation.)
Ok, if we want electronic musical instruments, wouldn't getting schools one or two Theremins be a lot cheaper and more reliable?
Not the same thing. A theramin is an analog synth instrument; these guys have rigged Wiimotes to control digital computers, and as a result they can operate digital synths, analog synths, sample playback, what have you.
A theramin can only make a warbling tone. With skilled hands you can coax a performance out of one. But with the Wiimotes, these guys can make bells ring or whatever sound they want.
Plus, you really have to be skilled to use a theramin; with the Wiimotes, you can do anything, right down to simply triggering prerecorded content. They might have some skilled people actually performing, and some less-skilled people just triggering stuff. If their music were nothing but pre-recorded stuff being triggered, I guess we could sneer at them for that ("Why don't you just use a sequencer?") but I don't see anything inherently wrong in having an "orchestra" where less-skilled friends can help them out.
It sounds really mindless and everyone just seems to wave their arms around in circles.
Well, I didn't need the video to focus so much on that one repetitive sound they were all making. But at the beginning of the video, one guy makes a lot of different sounds; he must be using buttons on the Wiimote to switch what the synth does.
I don't think you should be so dismissive. I've heard "minimalist" music that was less musical than what these guys were doing, and I give them bonus points for making a portable system for live performances, rather than just doing everything in studio.
I do enjoy good electronica. I hope these guys can come up with some good music. If we're really lucky, they may produce a sort of live jazz electronica: different every time, with different people taking solos and playing off against each other. But we can't really judge them based on one two-minute video of one rehearsal.
I wonder if it is possible to just make the meat grow the way you want it.
Muscle cells don't grow because they are jiggled; they grow in response to signals they receive. The signals are generated by the aftermath of exercise: muscles that work hard suffer little micro-tears, and the result of the micro-tears is that the muscle cells grow more. It's a nice negative feedback system: once the muscles are strong enough, your body doesn't need to waste resources on making them stronger. (And if you are a body builder trying for nice big muscles, you keep working your muscles harder and harder to tell them to grow.)
If meat is growing in a vat, might it be possible to duplicate the signals that tell the cells to grow? Since we are talking about cells here, I should think the "signals" are chemical in nature. You might be able to just add certain chemicals, or proteins, or whatever to the vat, and cause a continuous "grow now please" signal to the meat. Then you don't need to administer shocks or make the meat actually exercise; it will just grow.
Install Linux on your netbook. Do not trust Windows.
That's my top tip for you right there.
I also use NoScript because I don't trust Javascript. The problem with Noscript is that so many web pages require Javascript to be enabled, so you need to use the Noscript control to permit Javascript. The usual sequence is: Why is this page acting funny? Why is the search feature broken? Oh yeah, it probably requires Javascript; enable it, then wait for the page to reload. So, Noscript is really a bit of a pain. But I use it anyway because I don't trust Javascript.
On my netbook (an Acer Aspire One with a 10.1" screen, 512MB of RAM, 160GB hard drive) I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 and it works great. The only issue I have noted is that if it goes into sleep mode it doesn't wake up; I need to power it down and then up. One of the cool features of Ubuntu 9.10 is that you can have an encrypted home directory; that would be nice for your credit card numbers and other personal data. I installed with this option and I have not noticed any slowdown in using the computer.
To install Linux, get a (cheap!) 1GB USB flash drive, and use Unetbootin to make a bootable installer for your chosen Linux distro. Ideally, you should use a flash drive with a physical write-protect switch; these are not common but do exist. Then, after you have set up the netbook, pack that flash drive in your luggage; if you ever need to you can re-install Linux from scratch. Or if your laptop is lost, stolen, or destroyed, you can get a new one and set it up again with Linux. But you will know the Linux installer on that USB key is a trustable Linux, especially if you have it write-protected.
By the way, when you set up Linux, be sure to put your data files one a separate partition from everything else. In other words, have two partitions: "/" (for everything but your data files) and "/home" (for your data files). If you ever do need to re-install your whole OS (due to horrible crash, or somehow getting 0wned) it is really fast to just say "go ahead and wipe the whole / partition, but don't format/home". You can completely re-install Linux in this way, losing no data, faster than you can run the Windows installer in "recovery" mode to try to fix a broken/0wned Windows install.
As others have suggested, you might want to keep your data "in the cloud", such as by using a webmail client. The major advantage is that if your laptop is lost or stolen, your data is all still where you left it; you just need a new netbook/laptop.
I'm sure you will bring a digital camera. A 160 GB hard disk can store a whole bunch of photos, and when you are in an area with good WiFi, you can backup your photos to the cloud somewhere. In future years you will treasure those photos. Looking over your photos you will say "Oh wow, I forgot all about that day; but this photo just reminded me!" Unless you tirelessly record everything in a diary, the photos will be crucial to reminding you of your trip. (And the netbook can record your diary, either by you typing it, or by you talking to the microphone. A netbook is handy no matter how you look at it.)
If you ever use a computer in a cyber cafe, just assume that a keylogger is recording your password, credit card numbers, etc. (It doesn't even need to be a software keylogger, it could be hardware!) Bringing your own computer is a good move. Using Linux to avoid your computer being 0wned is also good move.
You could do what I do: use a compact computer with two NICs (motherboard NIC plus a PCI 3Com NIC) as the firewall. Run Devil-Linux from a read-only device. Then, the inside of your firewall can be a gigabit switch. Devil-Linux is pretty easy to configure, although perhaps not quite as easy as a consumer firewall/router with a good web-based GUI. You can boot Devil-Linux from a CD drive, with a write-protected floppy holding your settings; you can roll a custom CD with the settings burned onto it; or you can use a write-protected USB flash drive for everything. No hard drive is needed.
Pro: Fastest possible throughput and lowest latency; excellent security. Con: Will consume more electricity at idle than a consumer firewall/router box.
I read the English RtL versions of the first two Ubunchu comics. The last page of the second comic has one character showing off a "CLI-tan" she drew. Oh, wow.
There is this Japanese thing of making cute anime-style characters based on operating systems; such a character is called an OS-tan. The "-tan" part is a playful tweak on Japanese honorifics; it a small child's mispronunciation of "-chan", which is a very informal diminutive (the Japanese equivalent of "Johnnie" would be "John-chan"). An OS-tan is an example of Moe anthropomorphism.
The CLI-tan is a moe-ified picture of Akane from the comic, with gloves that leave her fingers free to type, and with her fingers extended in an action pose. I think if I could get a full-size poster of that character, I'd put it up on the wall of my office.
To do the sequence where Snake is gliding into New York and looking at a computer generated wireframe of the city; James Cameron simply cut out a bunch of boxes, painted the lines on them with phosphorescent paint, and shot it in the dark.
It wasn't phosphorescent paint and they didn't shoot it in the dark. They painted the boxes black, and used reflective tape to make the grid lines; then they lit the model brightly and panned the camera through it. With black background and super-bright glowing white lines, it must be pretty easy to find camera settings where all the film sees are the glowing white lines, and the rest is just undifferentiated black.
I have an old special-edition video tape of the movie and they showed this. It's probably in the special features on the DVD.
Another effect: when the helicopter lands toward the end of the movie, you see a ruined city in the background, with actors in the shot. The ruined city was literally a matte painting, painted on glass, with a window in the middle through which you could see the actors. A super-low-budget way to get the effect they wanted.
And if anyone is wondering: yes, James Cameron worked on special effects before he was a super-famous movie director. He didn't do the effects all by himself, of course, but he did work on Escape from New York.
I think Unix got lucky, in that it grew up in a world where computer security was much less of an issue than nowadays.
I disagree completely.
UNIX was designed as a time-sharing system, with many users sharing the same (very expensive) computer. Thus, from the first day, it had security designed in.
Where UNIX got lucky was that its initial deployments were in low-threat environments, where the security didn't really need to be bulletproof. So, people found security holes and it wasn't a huge deal; the UNIX guys just fixed them. Bored university student finds a way to gain root on the computer, hole gets patched, continue for a couple of decades. By the time of the Internet, UNIX was reasonably solid.
In comparison, Windows was initially designed to own your whole computer; remember that the earliest versions ran on top of DOS! The design was, just like DOS, that you had full privileges over everything at all times; it was your computer. And, on top of that, Microsoft added every feature they could think of. Then, with Windows NT, they started trying to retrofit multi-user security on top of Windows. By the time of the Internet, Windows was far from secure, and we have been dealing with the consequences ever since. (Remember how the "WinPopup" service used to be enabled by default and people got spam popped up in their faces? Oh, boy.) And there really isn't any good excuse for the way Windows requires you to reboot so often; my Linux systems only require rebooting when I update the kernel.
Microsoft would have done well to study UNIX and copy it's ideas from day 0. As Henry Spencer famously observed: "Those who don't understand UNIX are compelled to re-invent it, poorly."
So you don't see a lot of malware targeting Unix, because it isn't such a big target
But Linux is a big target (running lots of web servers) and you still don't see a lot of malware targeting it. It's much easier to attack Windows, and there are so many Windows machines out there, that most of the effort goes into attacking Windows. But if Linux was a soft target, crackers (or even automated worms) would be taking down web servers in much greater numbers than we are seeing.
The beauty of the Unix universe is that you can have it your way. You can have a stable system with few bugs and little maintenance, or you can have a cutting edge system with the latest features, at the cost of more bugs and time spent on maintenance.
Hmm, perhaps I could have phrased that better. My point was that the cost of offering an album for sale is approaching zero; once you have an album to sell, you can host it on a server, and any sales are "pure profit". (Or more likely, some distributor runs the server, so he can spread the costs of the server across many many albums.)
So, if we assume that the artists have somehow produced an album, that album should never go out of print; it can sit on a server, and if it sells a couple of copies a year, that's good enough to keep it on the server.
I'm not trying to assume that it costs zero to produce an album. However, I'm imagining a lot of bands trying to break into the business self-producing their first album, with GarageBand or what have you, and once they have done that, finding a very low barrier of entry into the market. On the other hand, they are not guaranteed to become as rich and famous as Styx and Van Halen.
It wouldn't surprise me if most bands could make a few hundred bucks a year off their albums, with a lucky/talented few making it big and making more. This seems better than the current system, where the labels siphon off almost all the profit, such that most bands make nothing at all, and a lucky/talented very few make it big and can fight back enough to keep some profit.
However, if you have worked in the industry, you are way ahead of me. If you think I'm mistaken about any of this, I'd be very interested to hear the details.
No offense intended but you completely misunderstood the guys point. Pressing CDs is cheap. "Throwing them in the landfill" was a metaphor for "losing the money invested" not for actually throwing away pieces of metal and plastic.
No, I don't believe I misunderstood anything. He was claiming that to sell lots of CDs, you need to make and distribute lots of CDs, and run an advertising campaign; and if you do that and the CD flops, it's expensive.
Yes, there are some costs that apply even with digital distribution: as you say, production costs. Even those need not be sky-high. There are lots of eager bands who will self-produce their first album with GarageBand or something. (And before you say anything about the self-produced albums being of inferior quality: not necessarily. With modern, affordable, digital equipment, the band can make a clean recording and do an acceptable job of mastering. Maybe even a better job than the professionals right now!)
The past of music is a whole bunch of failures and a few huge successes. I predict that the future is a whole bunch of modest successes and a few bigger successes. And you really can just take some music, put it on a server, and see if anyone buys it. Word-of-mouth publicity has never been easier to get than in the age of blogs.
My point is not that the true, proper cost to produce music is zero. My point is that in the 21st Century, it's cheaper than it ever has been to produce music, especially for digital-only distribution. The proper price of a music album isn't $0 but it isn't $18 either. The market will decide, with competition, but I'm predicting the price will fall.
Huh. So much for the internet revolutionising music. Here is an obscure DnB producer that I found through internet radio, whos website is on MySpace and.... guess what. He only uses the "legacy business model".
Sorry, but I don't really care what one "obscure DnB producer" does or doesn't do. I'm making broad sweeping predictions about future trends; of course we aren't quite there yet and of course there will be exceptions.
And I'll give you a counter-example: Magnatune. They are a small record label that does not make artists sign their whole futures away (they split the take 50/50 with the artists); they just put music on the Internet and see who buys it (and they let you listen to the whole album in medium-quality MP3 before you decide whether to buy it or not).
The future of music on the Internet is more like Magnatune and less like this.
I'm finding new music I like at a far faster rate than I was ten years ago. The biggest difference is that now, I have Rhapsody. (Just like the guy who wrote TFA mentioned that he has Spotify.)
I can find an artist I like, and there are links on the page. Hey, you like Genesis? Check out Steve Hackett, Brand X, and Mike + the Mechanics, and Alan Parsons Project and Yes; check out "Art & Progressive Rock"; check out playlists that other users made that relate to Genesis; in short there are literally dozens of links. Some of the links are tenuous and unlikely, yet I have used them to branch over to music I really like: Genesis to Peter Gabriel to Synergy (Larry Fast) to Zero 7 and Infected Mushroom.
Even if you don't sign up for a music service, you can do something similar with a large online store such as Amazon. You can only hear short samples, not the full song, but you can still navigate a web of connections.
It used to be that to even hear about obscure music, you had to subscribe to music newsletters or hang out in non-mainstream record shops or at least have a friend who did those things. Now you can click around from song to song, and if it takes you nine songs you don't like to find one you do like, you are still only out a couple of minutes. And if you are like me, and you listen to albums many times if you like them, it's totally worth spending a little time branching out. Add in a little bit of time looking bands up on Wikipedia and other sources, and you too can be as much of a music expert as someone who writes for a magazine.
The RIAA and the big labels fear this new world. They want to keep charging for music as if it were a scarce commodity. I read an interview with a guy from a studio, and he defended the high price of CDs: the price is fair because it's really hard to be a studio; you have to try to find new acts, and when you guess wrong, a whole bunch of CDs go into a landfill. Well, guess what: on the Internet, you can just provide the music, and if nobody likes it, it will just sit there; and if people do like it, you make pure profit. No CDs need be produced and then landfilled. The costs go way, way down with digital distribution. They want their costs to drop, while still charging the same inflated prices they try to justify on CDs; that won't work.
The future of music is: everything available on the Internet, at lower prices than if you buy CDs. Most artists will not bother to sign their fortunes over to big record studios; they will retain control of their music, and deal more directly with the customers. There will still be middle-men, but fewer of them, and they will make less money (which doesn't sound good if you are a middle-man but sounds pretty darn good to me). And absolutely nothing will go out of print. If an album sells two copies a year, it has paid back the costs of letting it sit on a server and it is already slightly in the black.
I remember, when I was in high school, how truly huge and popular certain bands were. Whether you liked them or hated them, you recognized Styx or Van Halen when you heard them. In the future, new bands may find it impossible to reach the same level of success and recognition, because everyone will fragment themselves into small sub-markets. It will be hard for any one act to capture everyone's full attention and hold it for more than a very short time.
So basically you are saying that the government should back out of everything and let corporations take over. Sounds pretty Republican to me.
Oversimplify much?
libertarians do want government to back out of almost everything. However, they would also cut way back on the power of corporations. In a truly libertarian country, there would be no bailouts of any companies, not even companies "too big to fail". There would be no tax money given to large companies, nor the logically-equivalent case where taxes are high for everyone but certain companies have loopholes. There would be much much lower barriers to entry into markets, so it would be much much easier for a new, small company to enter into competition with an established larger company.
And libertarians are hardcore about personal liberty, so they are all opposed to laws designed to "encourage morality". For example, if a libertarian government had any role in marriage at all, same-sex couples would have the same marriage rights as hetero couples. Your proposed equivalence of libertarians and Republicans is completely wrong.
Your post contains breathtaking examples of painting a disparate group of individuals with a single brush; the way you talk about "libertarians" as if they all were part of some Borg collective is just funny.
I will now trivially disprove your statements, as follows: 0) I am a libertarian; 1) I do not "really" want corporate feudalism, I have not been unwittingly coopted by the forces of corporate feudalism, I don't feel I'm superior to everyone else, I am a fan of free software, and in fact every single position you have attributed to all libertarians is untrue in my case.
Others, better writers than I am, have already explained libertarianism better than I can, but I'll try to hit a few important points: libertarians believe that individual freedom is terribly important, and things that oppress people are in general bad. libertarians believe that government should be small and do little, because people in general can look out for their own best interests; libertarians do agree that government has a legitimate role in protecting people from the initiation of force, and from fraud.
That sounds terrible, doesn't it? In a libertarian world, there wouldn't be any FDA to tell you which drugs you are allowed to take. By the way, we don't have a government agency to check on which appliances are safe and which aren't; instead we have Underwriter's Labs (UL), which is not part of the government, but which does a good job. People who are fans of government are probably now thinking that we need a federal agency to take over the jobs currently done by UL, but libertarians believe that an organization similar to UL could replace the FDA and we would be better off.
That's just a tiny example of the general idea: libertarians believe that a free market can solve many problems without government, and we would be better off. Some libertarians believe we don't need any government at all; I think that's a fantasy, and the best we can hope for is a smaller government that does less.
Getting back to free software, RMS and the FSF have espoused some positions that libertarians don't like. In particular, RMS at least once has proposed that all software should be required to be released as GPL software, and suggested that government could issue a tax which would be used to pay the salaries of a few officially-anointed software developers. libertarians disagree about many things, but they would all line up in solid opposition to any plan like that.
Nowhere in TFA or anywhere else have I seen anything to suggest that even a few libertarians are opposed to free software in general. What's not to like? Software developers choosing to spend their time working on cool stuff and sharing the results... Companies, rationally acting in their own best interests, cooperating in a free landscape to build cool stuff... Attempts at top-down control being routed around as if they were damage... These are dreams come true for real libertarians.
TFA started with this: "the basic argument of his paper--that the network neutrality movement has 'unwittingly bought into' the 'radical agenda' of the free software movement" This makes it clear that he was discussing a few libertarians who are worried about a "radical agenda", which is not the same thing as saying all libertarians hate all free software.
There are lots of resources on the Net and elsewhere to read about libertarianism. Here is a page full of links to FAQs: http://www.libertarianism.com/faqs.htm
Except you're not going to be any more specific here, are you? You'll call me immature, but you don't define what maturity means in that context.
I'm still not sure if you are trolling. If you are, well great, ha ha, you win, you got me to reply once more and waste more of my time. But this is my last response to you.
I called you immature because your writing is immature. Here are some specific examples, taken directly from your article.
You said, and I quote: "Things don't get adopted by Linux distributions because they're technically sound; they get adopted if, for whatever other reason, they become the fad flavour of the month." Really! Every single Linux developer cares nothing for technical merit; only for fads, and only you are wise enough to see this reality and tell it like it is. And we have to just believe you, because you have no examples to support this amazing statement. That was just your introduction; there were plenty more examples to come.
You said you had problems with Ubuntu, only you phrased it as "none of the major distributions are usable without giving me endless problems". Not only do you not even entertain the possibility that the "major distributions" might work for other people, you explicitly said "Linux in technical terms is crap, currently, and I'm fed up with the denial." I use Ubuntu, every day, on several computers, with no problems at all; why does it work for me and fail for you? I use Ubuntu because I don't have problems with it; I have worse problems with, for example, Windows. Am I in denial? Denial of what?
I wrote an article listing specific reasons why PulseAudio is the right thing for Linux right now. You did not refute any of my points, but merely stated "Stop writing propogandist garbage like this" and called me an idiot. Now seriously, is that mature behaviour?
You were abrasively dismissive of all the features of PulseAudio. Since you don't personally feel any need for those features, you declare them anti-productive and you pronounce them all "shit". Okay, here's one of those PulseAudio features that I like: when I plug in a USB audio device, it shows up in the PulseAudio list of devices; controls for it appear in the standard PulseAudio places; and with a click I can make it my default audio device. I happen to like this kind of plug-and-play functionality. I never had that before PulseAudio. Is that a "shit" feature? (It has nothing to do with "just plays audio. THAT'S ALL IT NEEDS TO DO.")
You suggested with no evident humour that GNOME should be abandoned, as if that were even possible, for no clearly-stated reason; you made a side comment about "aping Windows" which apparently you felt sufficient explanation. You made the incredibly stupid comment that GNOME needs to use dotfiles; I have news for you, it does, and you can edit them with a text editor and everything. GNOME did wrap the dotfiles in a system that is superficially similar to the Windows Registry; there is a daemon that manages settings, so that if two processes each write a settings change to the same config file, there is no race condition that could clobber one of the settings. In other words, the GNOME guys kept the one good feature of the Windows Registry, while rejecting the fragile opaque binary file format that is the Registry's Achilles's heel. Is that a bad design? Does it "bog everything down"? If so, then how does it bog everything down, and how do you know this? Have you run benchmarks?
You ranted about both Upstart and the Ubuntu module loading systems. What specific problems do they have? Why are your proposed alternatives better? Have you demonstrated that you understand why Upstart does things as it does? Here, check the Wikipedia page for Upstart. Read the Rationale. How does the classic BSD-like init system handle hotplug events better than Upstart? What is the advantage? Upstart is faster than the old SysV init system it replac
Let's see how many of the Generation Y, amateur, snot nosed brats I get making a response to this post
I predict the answer will be: none. No one really cares what you think about this stuff. I sure don't.
I see two possibilities here. Either you are just trolling, in which case shame on you for wasting our time; or else you really believe all this ranting stuff you wrote, in which case you need to gain some technical maturity. Ubuntu didn't work for you, thus it must be junk for everyone. You don't understand why PulseAudio is designed the way it is, therefore it must be the work of an idiot, and anyone who defends it must be an idiot. You propose scrapping GNOME entirely, as if that were even possible, let alone a good idea. And you don't offer any facts or even reasoned debate about any of this. You don't like the design of GNOME, ergo it is "aping Windows", ergo it must be scrapped.
Whether you were trolling or serious, I have this bit of advice for you: grow up.
The Linux world is converging on two sound solutions: JACK and PulseAudio. Both of them solve important problems.
When you want audio with absolute minimum latency, like for professional audio recording, you want JACK. You also want to be plugged in to the wall, not running on battery power, because JACK will keep your CPU busy.
If you want to run Linux on a modern laptop or netbook, you want PulseAudio. PA is designed to let your CPU sleep as much as possible, and thus save battery life.
I can hear some of you now saying "I don't want any sound daemon; I want to run my apps against the bare metal." In that case, I hope you never want to hear sounds from more than one app at a time. Modern motherboards tend to have very simple audio devices, with absolutely no hardware support for mixing audio, or even sample-rate-converting audio. You might have a single output device that accepts a single stream of samples at 24-bit 48000 Hz, full stop. "Oh, I'll just let ALSA Dmix handle it." Why is Dmix good and PulseAudio bad? Both are user-space solutions; and PulseAudio can do anything Dmix can do, plus more.
Or maybe: "I'll just run OSS4, which does sample-rate-conversion." Yeah -- in the kernel. Not the right place for it; kernel drivers are not supposed to use floating-point math. OSS4 tries to do everything in the kernel, and uses IOCTLs to set parameters in the driver. I don't want bugs in the audio stack to cause kernel panics; I want complicated audio mixing and conversion to happen in user space. (With realtime priority set, thank you very much.)
PulseAudio isn't perfect, but the basic ideas behind it are sound, which is why the whole Linux world is adopting it. We really do want a user-space daemon to do all the stuff that isn't appropriate for in-kernel drivers to do. If we wanted to throw away everything and start over from scratch, we would pretty much re-invent PulseAudio as the best solution; look at the user-space daemons used in Mac OS X and Microsoft Vista/Windows 7. Given that reality, how can we best proceed: by throwing out PulseAudio and starting over, or by fixing the remaining bugs in PulseAudio. I vote for fixing PulseAudio, and so has the rest of the Linux world, which is why PulseAudio is getting universally adopted.
The worst of the problems are over by now. To clean up the Linux audio mess, we have had to fix bugs in ALSA drivers, fix bugs in audio applications, fix bugs in PulseAudio, and get the distributions to setup PulseAudio correctly. It has been painful but we are well past the worst of it.
If you can solve your specific current needs on your specific current hardware by disabling PulseAudio, then fine, do that. But don't generalize this into thinking that PulseAudio should be removed from all systems and abandoned.
I think Lennart should release a new audio system called "Audio Daemon 7". Microsoft seems to be doing well with "Windows 7", by dropping the tainted name "Vista". At this point, the name "PulseAudio" seems pretty tainted. But PA itself is the Right Thing To Do and it's becoming the standard.
Among other things, the Geneva conventions were intended to minimize collateral damage to civilians; but they don't work unless both sides follow them.
Returning to the subject of drones, it's ironic that you raise these points in a discussion of drones. Minimized collateral damages is one of the reasons the military likes drones: they have drones look around with a video camera, they identify a target, they attack that target. This is much more precise than having a B-52 carpet-bomb the area.
Frozen Bubble Slogan: "You need this game." Not sure I can endorse the slogan, but it's hours of fun. In fact, too many hours for me... the game sucks me in, and I just keep playing "only one more level" until I beat level 100 and finally stop. I'm careful now when I let myself start playing this.
Solarwolf An updated version of an Atari 2600 game! Easy to learn, addictive, fun.
KGoldrunner A modern remake of the classic LodeRunner from the Apple ][ and other computers of that era. They urge you to use the mouse, but I find I prefer the keyboard.
Stella An Atari 2600 emulator. I have ROM images of many of the games in my collection, and I still enjoy the streamlined play of classic 2600 games. My favorite is Millipede. Stella runs nice and fast even on a very old computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh good grief. You think it is too much to ask, to get authorization before permanently changing the state of your system?
Remember, if it is possible for you to install software without being prompted for a password, you run the risk that some sneaky malware can install itself without you being prompted for a password.
And it's not necessarily one password for each thing you install. Suppose you install something, then you right away decide to install something else. You don't get prompted the second time; the password system keeps track of how often it asks you for a password, so you can do a bunch of sysadmin work at one time and only have to type the password once. And you can of course customize how long it will let you go before you need to re-enter that password.
Linux distributions have worked out a nice, practical balance between security and ease of use. Try it sometime.
steveha
If I recall correctly, Jerry Pournelle estimated that the energy requirement to get mass into orbit is similar to the energy requirement to fly the mass around the world twice. But as you noted, the shuttle takes a whole lot of fuel. What's up with that?
First, let me rant for a moment. The major cost of the space shuttle is not in fact fuel, but the cost of all the man-hours of service required. A 747 can land, unload passengers and luggage, load fuel, more passengers and more luggage, and take off again. A 747 spends much more time flying than being maintained. The shuttle, on the other hand, requires a standing army of 10,000 people to service it, with months of labor-intensive work to prep for the next flight. Henry Spencer observed that it takes over a million signatures to launch a shuttle flight: as in, run down the checklist, doing the observations/maintenance/whatever, then sign that the checklist is done, times a million.
Okay, back to fuel costs. Let's compare the biggest version of the 747 and the shuttle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle
Empty and unfueled, the 747-8 is 214,500 kg. It can carry somewhere around 240,000 liters of fuel (the only exact number in the article is for a passenger version of the 747). The maximum liftoff weight is 442,000 kg. The maximum zero-fuel weight is given as 291,000 kg, so the maximum cargo weight possible is 76,500 kg. If you load max cargo and fuel it up to just under maximum liftoff weight (let's say 185,000 liters of fuel) you have a payload mass fraction of 76,500 kg / (442,000 - 76,500) kg == 0.209 or 20.9 percent.
The gross liftoff weight of the shuttle is given as 2,000,000 kg (obviously a rounded-off number). The payload to orbit is 25,060 kg. The payload mass fraction is 25,060 kg / (2,000,000 - 25,060) kg == 0.0127 or 1.27 percent.
In short, the shuttle is freaking huge and freaking heavy, which is why it needs a freaking giant load of fuel to get to orbit and back. You need the fuel to carry the payload, plus the fuel to carry all the other stuff, plus the fuel to carry the fuel off the ground. (And the fuel to carry the fuel to carry the fuel... it does end up as a finite amount of fuel, but I guess you need calculus to calculate how much it would be.)
You could win big if you had a small, one-piece vehicle that could carry a small payload (say, 1,000 kg) into orbit and not need man-centuries of labor to overhaul it between flights. It's important for cheap operations that pieces not fall off during flight, needing to be replaced (or recovered and refurbished). Such a vehicle could theoretically routinely fly into orbit with fuel costs dominating, just as fuel costs dominate aircraft flights. This is the "space pickup truck" often mentioned in space discussions.
Also, for supplies like dried food that can handle horrible accelerations, theoretically you could build a super-cannon that would launch a capsule into orbit. It turns out that the capsule would need to have onboard engines that would fire and alter the trajectory, causing the capsule to stay in orbit instead of returning to the ground; there is no trajactory at which you can fire an inert payload such that it stays in orbit and doesn't return to hit the ground. But if you could make such a cannon and capsule, that ought to be the cheapest way to use fuel to put things into orbit. (I mean cheapest operationally; I'm not estimating R&D costs, or the costs of building the cannon. And if you could build a "space elevator" that should be the cheapest way to put things into orbit, short of new physics such as teleportation.)
http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/SSHARP.htm
And by the way, I'm not a physics expert, so double check me before you trust me; corrections gladly accepted if I screwed anything up.
steveha
Sorry, as a programming languages researcher this is a pet peeve of mine.
I feel your pain. I'm a Python fan and I'm always quick to remind people that Python is in fact strongly typed, but not statically.
However, in this case, I wonder why you picked the nit, because Javascript is in fact weakly typed.
"1234" * 1 is a legal expression, which evaluates to 1234. That's pretty weak if you ask me.
steveha
Ok, if we want electronic musical instruments, wouldn't getting schools one or two Theremins be a lot cheaper and more reliable?
Not the same thing. A theramin is an analog synth instrument; these guys have rigged Wiimotes to control digital computers, and as a result they can operate digital synths, analog synths, sample playback, what have you.
A theramin can only make a warbling tone. With skilled hands you can coax a performance out of one. But with the Wiimotes, these guys can make bells ring or whatever sound they want.
Plus, you really have to be skilled to use a theramin; with the Wiimotes, you can do anything, right down to simply triggering prerecorded content. They might have some skilled people actually performing, and some less-skilled people just triggering stuff. If their music were nothing but pre-recorded stuff being triggered, I guess we could sneer at them for that ("Why don't you just use a sequencer?") but I don't see anything inherently wrong in having an "orchestra" where less-skilled friends can help them out.
steveha
It sounds really mindless and everyone just seems to wave their arms around in circles.
Well, I didn't need the video to focus so much on that one repetitive sound they were all making. But at the beginning of the video, one guy makes a lot of different sounds; he must be using buttons on the Wiimote to switch what the synth does.
I don't think you should be so dismissive. I've heard "minimalist" music that was less musical than what these guys were doing, and I give them bonus points for making a portable system for live performances, rather than just doing everything in studio.
I do enjoy good electronica. I hope these guys can come up with some good music. If we're really lucky, they may produce a sort of live jazz electronica: different every time, with different people taking solos and playing off against each other. But we can't really judge them based on one two-minute video of one rehearsal.
steveha
I wonder if it is possible to just make the meat grow the way you want it.
Muscle cells don't grow because they are jiggled; they grow in response to signals they receive. The signals are generated by the aftermath of exercise: muscles that work hard suffer little micro-tears, and the result of the micro-tears is that the muscle cells grow more. It's a nice negative feedback system: once the muscles are strong enough, your body doesn't need to waste resources on making them stronger. (And if you are a body builder trying for nice big muscles, you keep working your muscles harder and harder to tell them to grow.)
If meat is growing in a vat, might it be possible to duplicate the signals that tell the cells to grow? Since we are talking about cells here, I should think the "signals" are chemical in nature. You might be able to just add certain chemicals, or proteins, or whatever to the vat, and cause a continuous "grow now please" signal to the meat. Then you don't need to administer shocks or make the meat actually exercise; it will just grow.
steveha
Wow! This is the first time I have been moderated to -1. I think it may actually be the first time I have been moderated "Flamebait".
And here I thought nobody would moderate this article!
So, what was the offensive part? I think it must be the word "cloud", I used that several times.
Install Linux on your netbook. Do not trust Windows.
That's my top tip for you right there.
I also use NoScript because I don't trust Javascript. The problem with Noscript is that so many web pages require Javascript to be enabled, so you need to use the Noscript control to permit Javascript. The usual sequence is: Why is this page acting funny? Why is the search feature broken? Oh yeah, it probably requires Javascript; enable it, then wait for the page to reload. So, Noscript is really a bit of a pain. But I use it anyway because I don't trust Javascript.
On my netbook (an Acer Aspire One with a 10.1" screen, 512MB of RAM, 160GB hard drive) I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 and it works great. The only issue I have noted is that if it goes into sleep mode it doesn't wake up; I need to power it down and then up. One of the cool features of Ubuntu 9.10 is that you can have an encrypted home directory; that would be nice for your credit card numbers and other personal data. I installed with this option and I have not noticed any slowdown in using the computer.
To install Linux, get a (cheap!) 1GB USB flash drive, and use Unetbootin to make a bootable installer for your chosen Linux distro. Ideally, you should use a flash drive with a physical write-protect switch; these are not common but do exist. Then, after you have set up the netbook, pack that flash drive in your luggage; if you ever need to you can re-install Linux from scratch. Or if your laptop is lost, stolen, or destroyed, you can get a new one and set it up again with Linux. But you will know the Linux installer on that USB key is a trustable Linux, especially if you have it write-protected.
By the way, when you set up Linux, be sure to put your data files one a separate partition from everything else. In other words, have two partitions: "/" (for everything but your data files) and "/home" (for your data files). If you ever do need to re-install your whole OS (due to horrible crash, or somehow getting 0wned) it is really fast to just say "go ahead and wipe the whole / partition, but don't format /home". You can completely re-install Linux in this way, losing no data, faster than you can run the Windows installer in "recovery" mode to try to fix a broken/0wned Windows install.
As others have suggested, you might want to keep your data "in the cloud", such as by using a webmail client. The major advantage is that if your laptop is lost or stolen, your data is all still where you left it; you just need a new netbook/laptop.
I'm sure you will bring a digital camera. A 160 GB hard disk can store a whole bunch of photos, and when you are in an area with good WiFi, you can backup your photos to the cloud somewhere. In future years you will treasure those photos. Looking over your photos you will say "Oh wow, I forgot all about that day; but this photo just reminded me!" Unless you tirelessly record everything in a diary, the photos will be crucial to reminding you of your trip. (And the netbook can record your diary, either by you typing it, or by you talking to the microphone. A netbook is handy no matter how you look at it.)
If you ever use a computer in a cyber cafe, just assume that a keylogger is recording your password, credit card numbers, etc. (It doesn't even need to be a software keylogger, it could be hardware!) Bringing your own computer is a good move. Using Linux to avoid your computer being 0wned is also good move.
steveha
You could do what I do: use a compact computer with two NICs (motherboard NIC plus a PCI 3Com NIC) as the firewall. Run Devil-Linux from a read-only device. Then, the inside of your firewall can be a gigabit switch. Devil-Linux is pretty easy to configure, although perhaps not quite as easy as a consumer firewall/router with a good web-based GUI. You can boot Devil-Linux from a CD drive, with a write-protected floppy holding your settings; you can roll a custom CD with the settings burned onto it; or you can use a write-protected USB flash drive for everything. No hard drive is needed.
Pro: Fastest possible throughput and lowest latency; excellent security.
Con: Will consume more electricity at idle than a consumer firewall/router box.
steveha
I read the English RtL versions of the first two Ubunchu comics. The last page of the second comic has one character showing off a "CLI-tan" she drew. Oh, wow.
There is this Japanese thing of making cute anime-style characters based on operating systems; such a character is called an OS-tan. The "-tan" part is a playful tweak on Japanese honorifics; it a small child's mispronunciation of "-chan", which is a very informal diminutive (the Japanese equivalent of "Johnnie" would be "John-chan"). An OS-tan is an example of Moe anthropomorphism.
Here is a site devoted to OS-tans, including variants such as the Linux distro-tans.
There are two Ubuntu-tans listed: first second
The CLI-tan is a moe-ified picture of Akane from the comic, with gloves that leave her fingers free to type, and with her fingers extended in an action pose. I think if I could get a full-size poster of that character, I'd put it up on the wall of my office.
steveha
To do the sequence where Snake is gliding into New York and looking at a computer generated wireframe of the city; James Cameron simply cut out a bunch of boxes, painted the lines on them with phosphorescent paint, and shot it in the dark.
It wasn't phosphorescent paint and they didn't shoot it in the dark. They painted the boxes black, and used reflective tape to make the grid lines; then they lit the model brightly and panned the camera through it. With black background and super-bright glowing white lines, it must be pretty easy to find camera settings where all the film sees are the glowing white lines, and the rest is just undifferentiated black.
I have an old special-edition video tape of the movie and they showed this. It's probably in the special features on the DVD.
Another effect: when the helicopter lands toward the end of the movie, you see a ruined city in the background, with actors in the shot. The ruined city was literally a matte painting, painted on glass, with a window in the middle through which you could see the actors. A super-low-budget way to get the effect they wanted.
And if anyone is wondering: yes, James Cameron worked on special effects before he was a super-famous movie director. He didn't do the effects all by himself, of course, but he did work on Escape from New York.
steveha
I think Unix got lucky, in that it grew up in a world where computer security was much less of an issue than nowadays.
I disagree completely.
UNIX was designed as a time-sharing system, with many users sharing the same (very expensive) computer. Thus, from the first day, it had security designed in.
Where UNIX got lucky was that its initial deployments were in low-threat environments, where the security didn't really need to be bulletproof. So, people found security holes and it wasn't a huge deal; the UNIX guys just fixed them. Bored university student finds a way to gain root on the computer, hole gets patched, continue for a couple of decades. By the time of the Internet, UNIX was reasonably solid.
In comparison, Windows was initially designed to own your whole computer; remember that the earliest versions ran on top of DOS! The design was, just like DOS, that you had full privileges over everything at all times; it was your computer. And, on top of that, Microsoft added every feature they could think of. Then, with Windows NT, they started trying to retrofit multi-user security on top of Windows. By the time of the Internet, Windows was far from secure, and we have been dealing with the consequences ever since. (Remember how the "WinPopup" service used to be enabled by default and people got spam popped up in their faces? Oh, boy.) And there really isn't any good excuse for the way Windows requires you to reboot so often; my Linux systems only require rebooting when I update the kernel.
Microsoft would have done well to study UNIX and copy it's ideas from day 0. As Henry Spencer famously observed: "Those who don't understand UNIX are compelled to re-invent it, poorly."
So you don't see a lot of malware targeting Unix, because it isn't such a big target
But Linux is a big target (running lots of web servers) and you still don't see a lot of malware targeting it. It's much easier to attack Windows, and there are so many Windows machines out there, that most of the effort goes into attacking Windows. But if Linux was a soft target, crackers (or even automated worms) would be taking down web servers in much greater numbers than we are seeing.
The beauty of the Unix universe is that you can have it your way. You can have a stable system with few bugs and little maintenance, or you can have a cutting edge system with the latest features, at the cost of more bugs and time spent on maintenance.
I agree.
steveha
OMG, somebody fire this jerk.
Don't leap to conclusions like that. If he is an old-school C programmer, "macros" may just mean "constants".
If you have C++, you can do
but in boring old C that would be
Now, if you are talking about something like these then I'm with you. Up against the wall!
Or of course he could be a LISP programmer. Because we all know that macros are what gives LISP its awesome bone-crushing power.
Unless the above should have been in [sarcasm] tags, in which case, the immortal words of Miss Emily Litella apply. (grin)
I had to look that one up. "Never mind!" So now we know.
steveha
Hmm, perhaps I could have phrased that better. My point was that the cost of offering an album for sale is approaching zero; once you have an album to sell, you can host it on a server, and any sales are "pure profit". (Or more likely, some distributor runs the server, so he can spread the costs of the server across many many albums.)
So, if we assume that the artists have somehow produced an album, that album should never go out of print; it can sit on a server, and if it sells a couple of copies a year, that's good enough to keep it on the server.
I'm not trying to assume that it costs zero to produce an album. However, I'm imagining a lot of bands trying to break into the business self-producing their first album, with GarageBand or what have you, and once they have done that, finding a very low barrier of entry into the market. On the other hand, they are not guaranteed to become as rich and famous as Styx and Van Halen.
It wouldn't surprise me if most bands could make a few hundred bucks a year off their albums, with a lucky/talented few making it big and making more. This seems better than the current system, where the labels siphon off almost all the profit, such that most bands make nothing at all, and a lucky/talented very few make it big and can fight back enough to keep some profit.
However, if you have worked in the industry, you are way ahead of me. If you think I'm mistaken about any of this, I'd be very interested to hear the details.
steveha
No offense intended but you completely misunderstood the guys point. Pressing CDs is cheap. "Throwing them in the landfill" was a metaphor for "losing the money invested" not for actually throwing away pieces of metal and plastic.
No, I don't believe I misunderstood anything. He was claiming that to sell lots of CDs, you need to make and distribute lots of CDs, and run an advertising campaign; and if you do that and the CD flops, it's expensive.
Yes, there are some costs that apply even with digital distribution: as you say, production costs. Even those need not be sky-high. There are lots of eager bands who will self-produce their first album with GarageBand or something. (And before you say anything about the self-produced albums being of inferior quality: not necessarily. With modern, affordable, digital equipment, the band can make a clean recording and do an acceptable job of mastering. Maybe even a better job than the professionals right now!)
The past of music is a whole bunch of failures and a few huge successes. I predict that the future is a whole bunch of modest successes and a few bigger successes. And you really can just take some music, put it on a server, and see if anyone buys it. Word-of-mouth publicity has never been easier to get than in the age of blogs.
My point is not that the true, proper cost to produce music is zero. My point is that in the 21st Century, it's cheaper than it ever has been to produce music, especially for digital-only distribution. The proper price of a music album isn't $0 but it isn't $18 either. The market will decide, with competition, but I'm predicting the price will fall.
Huh. So much for the internet revolutionising music. Here is an obscure DnB producer that I found through internet radio, whos website is on MySpace and .... guess what. He only uses the "legacy business model".
Sorry, but I don't really care what one "obscure DnB producer" does or doesn't do. I'm making broad sweeping predictions about future trends; of course we aren't quite there yet and of course there will be exceptions.
And I'll give you a counter-example: Magnatune. They are a small record label that does not make artists sign their whole futures away (they split the take 50/50 with the artists); they just put music on the Internet and see who buys it (and they let you listen to the whole album in medium-quality MP3 before you decide whether to buy it or not).
The future of music on the Internet is more like Magnatune and less like this.
steveha
I'm finding new music I like at a far faster rate than I was ten years ago. The biggest difference is that now, I have Rhapsody. (Just like the guy who wrote TFA mentioned that he has Spotify.)
I can find an artist I like, and there are links on the page. Hey, you like Genesis? Check out Steve Hackett, Brand X, and Mike + the Mechanics, and Alan Parsons Project and Yes; check out "Art & Progressive Rock"; check out playlists that other users made that relate to Genesis; in short there are literally dozens of links. Some of the links are tenuous and unlikely, yet I have used them to branch over to music I really like: Genesis to Peter Gabriel to Synergy (Larry Fast) to Zero 7 and Infected Mushroom.
Even if you don't sign up for a music service, you can do something similar with a large online store such as Amazon. You can only hear short samples, not the full song, but you can still navigate a web of connections.
It used to be that to even hear about obscure music, you had to subscribe to music newsletters or hang out in non-mainstream record shops or at least have a friend who did those things. Now you can click around from song to song, and if it takes you nine songs you don't like to find one you do like, you are still only out a couple of minutes. And if you are like me, and you listen to albums many times if you like them, it's totally worth spending a little time branching out. Add in a little bit of time looking bands up on Wikipedia and other sources, and you too can be as much of a music expert as someone who writes for a magazine.
The RIAA and the big labels fear this new world. They want to keep charging for music as if it were a scarce commodity. I read an interview with a guy from a studio, and he defended the high price of CDs: the price is fair because it's really hard to be a studio; you have to try to find new acts, and when you guess wrong, a whole bunch of CDs go into a landfill. Well, guess what: on the Internet, you can just provide the music, and if nobody likes it, it will just sit there; and if people do like it, you make pure profit. No CDs need be produced and then landfilled. The costs go way, way down with digital distribution. They want their costs to drop, while still charging the same inflated prices they try to justify on CDs; that won't work.
The future of music is: everything available on the Internet, at lower prices than if you buy CDs. Most artists will not bother to sign their fortunes over to big record studios; they will retain control of their music, and deal more directly with the customers. There will still be middle-men, but fewer of them, and they will make less money (which doesn't sound good if you are a middle-man but sounds pretty darn good to me). And absolutely nothing will go out of print. If an album sells two copies a year, it has paid back the costs of letting it sit on a server and it is already slightly in the black.
I remember, when I was in high school, how truly huge and popular certain bands were. Whether you liked them or hated them, you recognized Styx or Van Halen when you heard them. In the future, new bands may find it impossible to reach the same level of success and recognition, because everyone will fragment themselves into small sub-markets. It will be hard for any one act to capture everyone's full attention and hold it for more than a very short time.
steveha
I don't know if it is up to the speed you need, but the equation editor in LyX is pretty darn cool.
http://www.lyx.org/
steveha
So basically you are saying that the government should back out of everything and let corporations take over.
Sounds pretty Republican to me.
Oversimplify much?
libertarians do want government to back out of almost everything. However, they would also cut way back on the power of corporations. In a truly libertarian country, there would be no bailouts of any companies, not even companies "too big to fail". There would be no tax money given to large companies, nor the logically-equivalent case where taxes are high for everyone but certain companies have loopholes. There would be much much lower barriers to entry into markets, so it would be much much easier for a new, small company to enter into competition with an established larger company.
And libertarians are hardcore about personal liberty, so they are all opposed to laws designed to "encourage morality". For example, if a libertarian government had any role in marriage at all, same-sex couples would have the same marriage rights as hetero couples. Your proposed equivalence of libertarians and Republicans is completely wrong.
steveha
And in the end, their proposed solution for any conflict between money making and freedom will always will come down on the site of money making.
References, please. I don't even know what you think you are talking about here; maybe some examples would help.
steveha
Your post contains breathtaking examples of painting a disparate group of individuals with a single brush; the way you talk about "libertarians" as if they all were part of some Borg collective is just funny.
I will now trivially disprove your statements, as follows: 0) I am a libertarian; 1) I do not "really" want corporate feudalism, I have not been unwittingly coopted by the forces of corporate feudalism, I don't feel I'm superior to everyone else, I am a fan of free software, and in fact every single position you have attributed to all libertarians is untrue in my case.
Others, better writers than I am, have already explained libertarianism better than I can, but I'll try to hit a few important points: libertarians believe that individual freedom is terribly important, and things that oppress people are in general bad. libertarians believe that government should be small and do little, because people in general can look out for their own best interests; libertarians do agree that government has a legitimate role in protecting people from the initiation of force, and from fraud.
That sounds terrible, doesn't it? In a libertarian world, there wouldn't be any FDA to tell you which drugs you are allowed to take. By the way, we don't have a government agency to check on which appliances are safe and which aren't; instead we have Underwriter's Labs (UL), which is not part of the government, but which does a good job. People who are fans of government are probably now thinking that we need a federal agency to take over the jobs currently done by UL, but libertarians believe that an organization similar to UL could replace the FDA and we would be better off.
That's just a tiny example of the general idea: libertarians believe that a free market can solve many problems without government, and we would be better off. Some libertarians believe we don't need any government at all; I think that's a fantasy, and the best we can hope for is a smaller government that does less.
Getting back to free software, RMS and the FSF have espoused some positions that libertarians don't like. In particular, RMS at least once has proposed that all software should be required to be released as GPL software, and suggested that government could issue a tax which would be used to pay the salaries of a few officially-anointed software developers. libertarians disagree about many things, but they would all line up in solid opposition to any plan like that.
Nowhere in TFA or anywhere else have I seen anything to suggest that even a few libertarians are opposed to free software in general. What's not to like? Software developers choosing to spend their time working on cool stuff and sharing the results... Companies, rationally acting in their own best interests, cooperating in a free landscape to build cool stuff... Attempts at top-down control being routed around as if they were damage... These are dreams come true for real libertarians.
TFA started with this: "the basic argument of his paper--that the network neutrality movement has 'unwittingly bought into' the 'radical agenda' of the free software movement" This makes it clear that he was discussing a few libertarians who are worried about a "radical agenda", which is not the same thing as saying all libertarians hate all free software.
There are lots of resources on the Net and elsewhere to read about libertarianism. Here is a page full of links to FAQs: http://www.libertarianism.com/faqs.htm
steveha
Except you're not going to be any more specific here, are you? You'll call me immature, but you don't define what maturity means in that context.
I'm still not sure if you are trolling. If you are, well great, ha ha, you win, you got me to reply once more and waste more of my time. But this is my last response to you.
I called you immature because your writing is immature. Here are some specific examples, taken directly from your article.
You said, and I quote: "Things don't get adopted by Linux distributions because they're technically sound; they get adopted if, for whatever other reason, they become the fad flavour of the month." Really! Every single Linux developer cares nothing for technical merit; only for fads, and only you are wise enough to see this reality and tell it like it is. And we have to just believe you, because you have no examples to support this amazing statement. That was just your introduction; there were plenty more examples to come.
You said you had problems with Ubuntu, only you phrased it as "none of the major distributions are usable without giving me endless problems". Not only do you not even entertain the possibility that the "major distributions" might work for other people, you explicitly said "Linux in technical terms is crap, currently, and I'm fed up with the denial." I use Ubuntu, every day, on several computers, with no problems at all; why does it work for me and fail for you? I use Ubuntu because I don't have problems with it; I have worse problems with, for example, Windows. Am I in denial? Denial of what?
I wrote an article listing specific reasons why PulseAudio is the right thing for Linux right now. You did not refute any of my points, but merely stated "Stop writing propogandist garbage like this" and called me an idiot. Now seriously, is that mature behaviour?
You were abrasively dismissive of all the features of PulseAudio. Since you don't personally feel any need for those features, you declare them anti-productive and you pronounce them all "shit". Okay, here's one of those PulseAudio features that I like: when I plug in a USB audio device, it shows up in the PulseAudio list of devices; controls for it appear in the standard PulseAudio places; and with a click I can make it my default audio device. I happen to like this kind of plug-and-play functionality. I never had that before PulseAudio. Is that a "shit" feature? (It has nothing to do with "just plays audio. THAT'S ALL IT NEEDS TO DO.")
You suggested with no evident humour that GNOME should be abandoned, as if that were even possible, for no clearly-stated reason; you made a side comment about "aping Windows" which apparently you felt sufficient explanation. You made the incredibly stupid comment that GNOME needs to use dotfiles; I have news for you, it does, and you can edit them with a text editor and everything. GNOME did wrap the dotfiles in a system that is superficially similar to the Windows Registry; there is a daemon that manages settings, so that if two processes each write a settings change to the same config file, there is no race condition that could clobber one of the settings. In other words, the GNOME guys kept the one good feature of the Windows Registry, while rejecting the fragile opaque binary file format that is the Registry's Achilles's heel. Is that a bad design? Does it "bog everything down"? If so, then how does it bog everything down, and how do you know this? Have you run benchmarks?
You ranted about both Upstart and the Ubuntu module loading systems. What specific problems do they have? Why are your proposed alternatives better? Have you demonstrated that you understand why Upstart does things as it does? Here, check the Wikipedia page for Upstart. Read the Rationale. How does the classic BSD-like init system handle hotplug events better than Upstart? What is the advantage? Upstart is faster than the old SysV init system it replac
Let's see how many of the Generation Y, amateur, snot nosed brats I get making a response to this post
I predict the answer will be: none. No one really cares what you think about this stuff. I sure don't.
I see two possibilities here. Either you are just trolling, in which case shame on you for wasting our time; or else you really believe all this ranting stuff you wrote, in which case you need to gain some technical maturity. Ubuntu didn't work for you, thus it must be junk for everyone. You don't understand why PulseAudio is designed the way it is, therefore it must be the work of an idiot, and anyone who defends it must be an idiot. You propose scrapping GNOME entirely, as if that were even possible, let alone a good idea. And you don't offer any facts or even reasoned debate about any of this. You don't like the design of GNOME, ergo it is "aping Windows", ergo it must be scrapped.
Whether you were trolling or serious, I have this bit of advice for you: grow up.
steveha
Here's all you really need to know:
The Linux world is converging on two sound solutions: JACK and PulseAudio. Both of them solve important problems.
When you want audio with absolute minimum latency, like for professional audio recording, you want JACK. You also want to be plugged in to the wall, not running on battery power, because JACK will keep your CPU busy.
If you want to run Linux on a modern laptop or netbook, you want PulseAudio. PA is designed to let your CPU sleep as much as possible, and thus save battery life.
I can hear some of you now saying "I don't want any sound daemon; I want to run my apps against the bare metal." In that case, I hope you never want to hear sounds from more than one app at a time. Modern motherboards tend to have very simple audio devices, with absolutely no hardware support for mixing audio, or even sample-rate-converting audio. You might have a single output device that accepts a single stream of samples at 24-bit 48000 Hz, full stop. "Oh, I'll just let ALSA Dmix handle it." Why is Dmix good and PulseAudio bad? Both are user-space solutions; and PulseAudio can do anything Dmix can do, plus more.
Or maybe: "I'll just run OSS4, which does sample-rate-conversion." Yeah -- in the kernel. Not the right place for it; kernel drivers are not supposed to use floating-point math. OSS4 tries to do everything in the kernel, and uses IOCTLs to set parameters in the driver. I don't want bugs in the audio stack to cause kernel panics; I want complicated audio mixing and conversion to happen in user space. (With realtime priority set, thank you very much.)
PulseAudio isn't perfect, but the basic ideas behind it are sound, which is why the whole Linux world is adopting it. We really do want a user-space daemon to do all the stuff that isn't appropriate for in-kernel drivers to do. If we wanted to throw away everything and start over from scratch, we would pretty much re-invent PulseAudio as the best solution; look at the user-space daemons used in Mac OS X and Microsoft Vista/Windows 7. Given that reality, how can we best proceed: by throwing out PulseAudio and starting over, or by fixing the remaining bugs in PulseAudio. I vote for fixing PulseAudio, and so has the rest of the Linux world, which is why PulseAudio is getting universally adopted.
The worst of the problems are over by now. To clean up the Linux audio mess, we have had to fix bugs in ALSA drivers, fix bugs in audio applications, fix bugs in PulseAudio, and get the distributions to setup PulseAudio correctly. It has been painful but we are well past the worst of it.
If you can solve your specific current needs on your specific current hardware by disabling PulseAudio, then fine, do that. But don't generalize this into thinking that PulseAudio should be removed from all systems and abandoned.
I think Lennart should release a new audio system called "Audio Daemon 7". Microsoft seems to be doing well with "Windows 7", by dropping the tainted name "Vista". At this point, the name "PulseAudio" seems pretty tainted. But PA itself is the Right Thing To Do and it's becoming the standard.
steveha
The West (including Israel) have a blind spot, thinking "collateral casualties don't count".
[citation required]
Whatever else our new strategy entails, "no civilian casualties" needs to be the cornerstone, or we're never going to win.
I'm pretty sure this is impossible. I'm equally sure that it is already official doctrine to minimize civilian casualties to the extent possible.
Remember, it's not the West that sends suicide bombers to blow up little kids who are being given candy by "enemy" soldiers. http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=b63bbd28-fded-46e6-aaf1-3489fb7a5d54&k=12319 And it's not the West that fires weapons from inside mosques and apartment buildings. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=6559859
Among other things, the Geneva conventions were intended to minimize collateral damage to civilians; but they don't work unless both sides follow them.
Returning to the subject of drones, it's ironic that you raise these points in a discussion of drones. Minimized collateral damages is one of the reasons the military likes drones: they have drones look around with a video camera, they identify a target, they attack that target. This is much more precise than having a B-52 carpet-bomb the area.
steveha
Frozen Bubble Slogan: "You need this game." Not sure I can endorse the slogan, but it's hours of fun. In fact, too many hours for me... the game sucks me in, and I just keep playing "only one more level" until I beat level 100 and finally stop. I'm careful now when I let myself start playing this.
Solarwolf An updated version of an Atari 2600 game! Easy to learn, addictive, fun.
KGoldrunner A modern remake of the classic LodeRunner from the Apple ][ and other computers of that era. They urge you to use the mouse, but I find I prefer the keyboard.
Stella An Atari 2600 emulator. I have ROM images of many of the games in my collection, and I still enjoy the streamlined play of classic 2600 games. My favorite is Millipede. Stella runs nice and fast even on a very old computer.