Hard cases are good, but be sure to put a belt around it. I can still remember hard cases when they were popular last, and think I still have a Samsonite in the closet. One wrong drop and they sprung open unless they were locked and locks were not 100% effective. You can't lock anything anymore and a belt will hold it closed when the catches fail. Just wrap a good belt around the middle through handle and make sure nothing is loose and can catch.
Good luck. I'm hoping I don't have to fly for the next six months or so. Reading about all the stupid things inspectors will do is all the "stark reminder" I want.
If you did, you would find it that it is on a closed-circuit "cable" channel called Comedy Central, and is carried only over cable TV or point-to-point satellite transmission. Thus "The Colbert Report" does not take up any space on the precious and limited broadband spectrum.
Cable is a broadcast medium that's just as regulated as the EM spectrum. Position on that medium is a scarce and regulated commodity.
I'm not sure about OBL, but the spammers and assholes have already won. Not that applying the patch of the month will really help. After all, the spammers have known for years the problems being fixed this month and next month and so on ad nausea. The OS itself is just junk. That's why Windoze has a half life of 12 minutes, 80% of spam is coming from broken windoze boxes, the vast majority of email is spam and people with botnets can screw anything anyone wants to do online. With new problems found every month and none of the same problems on any other OS, you can't blame the users. North Korea is already taking advantage of the situation to spy. Directing people to constantly apply a stream of patches instead of abandoning Windoze is nothing but a waste of time.
I don't know about or care what this clown has said or done beside the current problem. He might be really funny, that's great and why he's one of the few granted a chunk of the country's precious and government limited broadcast spectrum. None of it make what he's doing right. In fact, his abuse of his privileged position makes it worse.
Yes, you can screw online polls and sources of information. If jerking people around is your thing, you might think it's funny. Most people don't enjoy being jerked around and most people outgrow the urge to do it. We can be sure that everyone but economic competitors will get over messing with Wikipedia. It's not really much more fun than screwing with books down at the local library. When the novelty of having such a resource wears off, vandalizing it will just look the waste of time and effort that it is.
Getting a little closer to home, Taco, how would you like it if the clown made fun of Slashdot next and advised his audience that they should join this small group of losers ? Yeah, that's what I thought. Fuck the haters.
I don't want to waste time with *any* unsolicited messages from anyone not a contact. Why bother filtering on content, when I care only from whom the message comes?
That's called whitelisting and it has a lot of problems if you are a business or do anything with the public, like maintain or help with free software.
A lot of my spam has contained crap about Hezbolla. In the past it's contained lots of O'Reily text about free software. It's as if someone wants filters to flag and trash these subjects.
This is why I don't like my ISP filtering my mail for me. They no longer give me a choice, so I'm screwed if they are fooled.
That of course is why mirror operators, packagers and developers of Xine, Mplayer and libdvdcss are all in jail.
Yes, they have tried twice and are still trying to put DVD Jon in jail.
I'm not sure why I'm talking to a stalker, but most of the above is common knowledge and not nearly as important as Jon's case which proves the intent and methods. Everyone knows WMP is a piece of shit and it's because of DRM, everyone but M$ and the MPAA that is and that's why we don't have medai PCs. It's not because people don't want them.
Please point me to a specific clause in the Windows EULA that proves that this isn't a complete fabrication. Please. Prove me wrong.
It's easier for me to cite other people's opinions than it is to dig through M$'s obnoxious EULAs.
Here's one 2003 study which validates practices others have found looking at tools like fastfind even further back. M$'s EULA fun has been going on for a while. They usually pretend they are looking for copyright violations in their snooping. Here's more:
No, the sheer mental cost of remembering how the offscreen information is organized is more than most people can handle. Either you have to memorize the positions and contents of Y layered windows on X different desktops, or you have to train yourself to follow some kind of 'this information goes on this desktop' work scheme, or you have to play 'hunt like hell' for that one window you were using five tasks ago, which has the information you want.... It takes skill to use virtual desktops... Most casual computer users lack those skills...
The ease with which I organize my tasks in Enlightenment 16 makes you wrong or me a genius. I'm not a genius. Like the Wiki says, being able to run the different instances of the same common tools on each desktop makes division of work easy. Yes, I make myself put "this kind of work" on one desktop at a time, which is not hard at all because I only have three or four tasks at any given time. Three desktops with nine screens each are more than I need to lay everything out for easy work. It's like having a separate physical desk for those tasks but it's easier to move things from one to the other when required. E16's excellent pagers give me thumbnails and popups so that it's easy to find what I was working on. They can be as big or small as I like and brought to the top with a single click. If pagers fail me because a program got covered up, a middle click on the drag bar gives me a listing of every program I'm running. Some very common programs, like shells to start new programs get put into an icon box. While it sounds complicated, it's really just as easy and intuitive as the three separate desktops I mentioned.
KDE and Gnome and others have similar features, but I've gotten used to E16 and the more I use it, the more I like it. Yes, edge flipping can be a little confusing at first and it's occasionally annoying. Not being able to move things out of the way is worse.
The Redmond way of doing things, 'hunt like hell' on a single screen is unbearable for complex tasks. It was using W2K as a systems engineer that taught me the value of virtual desktops along with the pain of non free software. I was expected to bring together information from many sources and put it back together in others. It was not bad for a single task, but there was always more than one task and they would always go on for days. It only took four five icons to make the text on the start bar go away. Two tasks typically required ten icons. From there, it was a game of find the gofer in one of three identical icons. The oversized things had to be printed out I ended up using it for organization and place keeping because had to boot your machine and start fresh every day. The work got done, but it was wasteful and painful. Virtual desktops and system stability are a must for anyone with any real "information worker". When you segregate your work properly, it's easy to recognize the immediate task by visiting the browser in the center screen of your desktop. With system stability, your virtual desktop acts like a real one and placekeeping is possible, your computer file system takes over from your paper one and you are much closer to a paperless office than M$ every will be.
For the average user, a few virtual screens is nice. One for email/PIM, another for that ebay auction browser and related stuff, one for the music player and mixer. My wife does absolutely everything through a single tabbed browser, but "everything" is webmail and social sites. Having space for games neither taxes nor bothers her. Indeed, saying basic organization skills and the ability to remember two things is beyond most people is crazy. With a proper pager, the extra space is never invisible and people don't even have to remember that much. There's nothing very special about me, except that I've had to use a computer for more than one task at a time. Now that I've done it, I understand that the virtual desktop makes it easier. The average user, given proper guidance, will come to thing the same way you and I do.
... what I do is make each frame and save it as a bmp and use JavaScript to load each frame by frame, It saves a load on bandwidth! Vs. Piggy Flash
That's the safe bet if you can't use regular mpeg. If you put the wrong kind of compression between your bitmap and transmission, you might be sued for violating someone's lame software patent.
Even proprietary software can be packaged coherently and ignore the rest of the distribution. Witness Star Office, which came as a big tarball that installed as easily on Debian as it did on RH, Solaris or Windoze. There are lots of other examples that prove it can be done easier than you can develop for the DLL and version hell of Windoze. Stuff on *nix works.
This is one of the fundamental things that Linux advocates rarely get.
We can take it that you are not one? That's too bad.
From a user perspective, there are about as many differences between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE as there are between FreeBSD and OpenBSD, or Solaris and some other SysV variant.
That sounds right, but it's dead wrong. Most people like having a choice up front and then many choices after install. The differences between the free and non free worlds are, as usual, huge and mostly in favor of the free world. People in the free software world get to try out and chose the interface they like. Once they have chosen they are only forced to upgrade by compelling new features and the overall experience is much more consistent.
Free software, once a distro choice has been made, is much more consistent than Windoze from a user stand point, and I'll even say that there's as much or more consistency between distros than elsewhere. The differences between RHE and SuSE are not all that awful because both pull from the same upstream sources. Konqueror on RHE does about the same thing as Konqueror under Debian and so on and so forth. The main difference is in administration styles, which the average corporate user could care less about. It's much less annoying than the pointless differences between Win2k and XP or XP and Vista, ad nausea. One "version" of Suse is much like the one before it, which is something the user appreciates much more than having transparency or some other useless toy. I don't even want to talk about the differences between non free GUIs like Apple, Solaris and Windows. Each has it's own version of window manager and users of one are clueless on the others. With free software you can at least have the same window manager and the window managers can share tricks. Non free GUI makers get smashed for "photocopy" when they try that.
Saying you support 'Linux' is silly. It's like saying you support 'UNIX.' Saying you support RHEL makes sense.
Well, that makes sense. Everyone has their specialty, except that poor guy at the help desk who's supposed to know every version of every free and non free thing ever written. I'm not going to tell people I can help them out with their Windows box. I'm most comfortable with Debian desktops and a few of their derivatives. Between Google and that, I can operate and stumble through other distros.
If people actually wanted Viiv-like products, there'd be a lot more do-it-yourself versions while we're waiting for Intel. If the problem were a lack of software, there'd be plenty of open-source projects by impatient hackersthat's how we got Napster and BitTorrent. But the geeks seem uninterested. Where are the obsessive bloggers? The forum feuds? The amateur meetups? Show me any truly hot technology, and I'll show you 100,000 guys who can't wait to tell you about it. Has anyone bored you to death talking about their Media Center PC lately?
This is a joke, right?
People are talking, but you can't do it with free software. Just telling people how will get you tossed in jail, thanks to the DMCA and greedy big media. Rather than buy a big screen TV, I'd love to have a projector and stereo hooked up to computer. I've already got my music collection digitized. The access and convenience of Amarok are awesome. It would be great to do the same thing with movies. The cost of a projector is about the same as a big TV, but it's much more portable and gives better quality. The problem is CSS. I can't watch or archive DVD movies with my software. It's against the law to distribute software that would let me in the US or even tell people what sites in countries with sane laws have it.
Did they name the article "Myth" for kicks or what? So many people talk about Mythtv, it's hard to believe a Slate Editor has not heard of it. It even made it into the EFF's "Corruptables" video.
You can do it with non free software, sort of. The author mentions the miserable death of ViiV. Paul Boutin did not receive his promissed test model and wonders why. He must have missed this Washington Post review where the damn thing did not work at all because of all the DRM nonsense. You might be able to watch current DVDs if you fall all the way back to Windoze 98SE and have a stash of the now illegal Xcopy and other software required. The network and file system restrictions of such a computer would make most people cry, but it's the easiest route for honest people. People unafraid of the law have been swapping movies almost forever, but the effort and risks are way to great for "normal" people who will just rent a video. Yes, you can even find software that works with your free software, it's just a huge pain all around and you will again be stuck with a static system because upgrades will break it. Contraband is not free, it's not convenient and it's hard to trust.
Big Media is the root cause. They do not want their media on computers they don't have complete control over. They want it to act like a cable box, to shove adds down your throat, tell you what you can watch and when and how much you will pay for it all. Given that most media buffs already have a cable box and all the gear, the computer version that does not work looks really lame and big media is happy. There will be no video Napster, they think.The customer is not happy, too bad.
This represents a tremendous opportunity for independent media and it's why Net Neutrality is such a big deal. Already, artists can get great viewings on youtube, google video and other sites. These are just the beginning because they rely on flash and other crappy software. The quality sucks and you can't save them without a lot of effort that's liable to lace your computer with malware. The potential of the media are better seen with stuff like Star Wreck, a free, full length movie. It's a big file and independent productions are going to stay that way due to patents on video streaming and more advanced compression routines. "So what", you might ask, "I've got broadband." That's where Net Neutrality comes in and independent media gets the shaft. Warner Brothers, which so badly mangled AOL and squandered their c
Eh, the states in favor of strong states rights thought the same thing in 1861. I guess 11 isn't "enough".
That was a case of property rights which violated other more basic rights and, worse, economically threatened all of the other more populous and numerous states. This case is not that much different if you consider the economic risk everyone is under when their communications company treats them like slaves. The risk of economic espionage that comes from this violation of your privacy puts much more weight on side of those who oppose it. There will be more than 11 states and a vast majority of the population opposing this. The advocacy of a few large and rich companies will not carry this one. Your right to security in your personal effects and papers will make a nice poster child for all companies who are not ATT as they demolish NSA snooping. The rest of us can be outraged for the issues as they stand, without regard to economic interest.
... when IE7 rolls out, we start seeing a new round of sites that work *only* in IE7, and when you complain the response will be words to the effect of "get a real browser like everyone else uses".
That reads like a M$ fantasy and it's unlikely to happen. Very few commercial sites are now IE only and most of the best are now sanely written to standards instead of browsers. M$ has yet to finish pushing their last browser onto a majority of their users, so you'd be insane to code anything a specific version and expect it to work for even half of your customers. When those customers complain to anyone other than M$, the answer is:
[internal thought] oh shit, there goes our sale.
[out loud] We'll be happy to take your order by phone, do you have a credit card with you?
[on paper] Fix that fucking site, it's costing us money!"
If they were to get the "get a real browser" answer from anyone, they would probably join the hoards of people defying M$'s lock in by downloading Firefox or installing a whole free OS. As Mozilla and free software adoption pass 20%, IE sites and even IIS served sites will sink like lead turds.
Nothing much has changed, has it? Just yesterday, they were still going to flunk the Acid test. That's the core of this article. If much had changed, I'd expect this guy to have updated the page. M$'s excuse, "we can't change cause that would break compatibility," is as inflexible as it is dishonest. Killing simple protocols has been a stated goal since the 1998 Halloween Papers were acknowledged. They did it wrong, justified that wrongness and have continued along with it.
Qt does not play nice with C++. If all I want to write is a GUI, Qt is great. If I want to write a program with a GUI and other functionality that requires other C++ libraries, I'm stuck with a huge impedance mismatch.
Are you telling me that I can't pass values between Qt classes and those written by others? Can you give me some examples? I was thinking that Qt's double buffering and OpenGL support would be a nice way for me to put an interface onto some tomography code I'd written. The code is all straight C, and I thought wrapping it up in a class might be nice. Would it be harder for me to call my functions though a class than it would the straight C versions? How do the KDE programmers get around these issues?
Is AOL really the worst? It's good they publically screwed up but others have been doing the same thing behind your back for years. Most spyware, like Microsoft Windows, comes with an EULA that grants the supplier complete ability to monitor what you do and sell the results to the highest bidder. All of the ISPs, by law, must keep your web activity and email on file so that the feds can come and look through it. Do you trust them to not mine and sell it? Before 9/11 justified all sorts of invasive behavior, US courts had bent over backwards to allow ISPs to read your email with such ridiculous criteria as they could read it if it was "in storage" instead of "in transit". Can you even trust the jokers to keep it to themselves? My ISP might be bright enough to be using Solaris and Apache for web services, but I'm sure they are accessing the information with some crummy Windoze client. If a clerk does not sell them out, it's surely running out over the network multiple times a day. AOL's little "mistake" is just the tip of the iceburg. Abuse over this and "support" issues can be cast far and wide, though one is much more important than the other.
There need to be more of these kinds of scandals because companies should not be keeping this kind of information in the first place. Most don't even want to because it's expensive and prone to abuse. Back when the Feds required Carnivore type logging, all the ISPs objected that it would cost too much. The net result of all of this is places like ChoicePoint. Having a secure OS won't help you when those serving you betray your trust.
I'm a little worried about how quickly the current line will become legacy machines since it is pretty certain that Apple won't be shipping 32bit Intel machines in a year and has only been shipping 32bit Intel machines for a little while.
The faster it drops the price of powerpc notebooks the happier I'll be. My 1.2 GHz PIII M is burning a hole through pocket faster than my money does. I might try playing around with underclocking but it would be nice to have a higher efficiency chip to begin with. It's not worth that much too me, so I'll wait. Both run Debian.
Good features *should* be copied from operating system to operating system - that way everyone gets the best of what is available! Who cares who invented it first, as long as people are implementing the slickest ideas and improving on them where possible.
Apple and M$ deserve criticism for doing the non free hype thing and claiming more than they deliver. It's odd that the least featured interfaces are hyped up as the most productive, isn't it? Interfaces that lack basic features like virtual desktops are routinely drooled over in the tech press as "must buy improvements" to stuff that's even less useful. As a user of free software, the lack of virtual desktops on Mac is a real jaw dropper. Because M$'s interface is ubiquitous, I know it's even further behind. Listening to the hype, a gullible user would think that Apple has the best GUI available, M$ is not far behind and everything else is difficult. That's not the way the world and those who present things that way deserve should be put straight.
install 6000 radios on "water towers, buildings, light poles and other structures". In New York City, operators have to pay to get access to such valuable real estate.
Most people consider NY an example of how not to tax people, but obviously they have their fans. Reasonable places allow use of the public servitude. If the deployment of radio boxes can be done without interference to other infrastructure and without government cost but with great benefit to the people of the county, it would be silly to charge for deployment. The only reason you would tax something like that is to fund something unrelated.
It's also possible that you are wrong. Every one of those structures could be private.
I think you underestimate the reality-resistance of the People's Republic of Ann Arbor.
A private company that takes advantage of technology to offer a cheap service is called communist. It's main competitor is a state protected monopoly, labled "reality". Something is very screwed up here.
they could have been the major player in Linux for business. They just had really bad, shortsighted leadership.
Their leaders are in Redmond, but don't worry they are on the same ride. The SCO you are talking about did hitch onto free software. M$ crushed them, just like they did Corel.
They won't be able to do that much longer. The performance and cost difference between free and non free software is so extreme that the money is moving. Those that don't move will dry up and die. $6,200,000,000 in advertising won't change reality.
Most noise laws would not ban a mosquito device. I've seen people defeated with noise meters on the front porch of their house next to a frat party going full blast. While annoying to any normal person, it was not illegally loud.
Your best chances are to be a little less paranoid and irritable yourself. Did he tell you he was out to get you or did you imagine that? He might really just be out to get the bugs? Offer to buy him a better model bug zapper. How could he refuse an offer like that? Of course, you could be right and he hates you for no good reason and you will have to learn to live with it. He can buy as many zappers as you break and get you arrested besides. In that case, drink another beer and turn the music up another notch.
The general rule is that being friendly in the first place is cheap, confrontation is expensive, and ignoring the problem makes it go away.
Slashdot Mirror
Hard cases are good, but be sure to put a belt around it. I can still remember hard cases when they were popular last, and think I still have a Samsonite in the closet. One wrong drop and they sprung open unless they were locked and locks were not 100% effective. You can't lock anything anymore and a belt will hold it closed when the catches fail. Just wrap a good belt around the middle through handle and make sure nothing is loose and can catch.
Good luck. I'm hoping I don't have to fly for the next six months or so. Reading about all the stupid things inspectors will do is all the "stark reminder" I want.
When you get down to it, cable channels are no more "scare" than web sites are on the Internet.
Explain Youtube.
If you did, you would find it that it is on a closed-circuit "cable" channel called Comedy Central, and is carried only over cable TV or point-to-point satellite transmission. Thus "The Colbert Report" does not take up any space on the precious and limited broadband spectrum.
Cable is a broadcast medium that's just as regulated as the EM spectrum. Position on that medium is a scarce and regulated commodity.
If you don't patch Windows, the terrorists win!
I'm not sure about OBL, but the spammers and assholes have already won. Not that applying the patch of the month will really help. After all, the spammers have known for years the problems being fixed this month and next month and so on ad nausea. The OS itself is just junk. That's why Windoze has a half life of 12 minutes, 80% of spam is coming from broken windoze boxes, the vast majority of email is spam and people with botnets can screw anything anyone wants to do online. With new problems found every month and none of the same problems on any other OS, you can't blame the users. North Korea is already taking advantage of the situation to spy. Directing people to constantly apply a stream of patches instead of abandoning Windoze is nothing but a waste of time.
I don't know about or care what this clown has said or done beside the current problem. He might be really funny, that's great and why he's one of the few granted a chunk of the country's precious and government limited broadcast spectrum. None of it make what he's doing right. In fact, his abuse of his privileged position makes it worse.
Yes, you can screw online polls and sources of information. If jerking people around is your thing, you might think it's funny. Most people don't enjoy being jerked around and most people outgrow the urge to do it. We can be sure that everyone but economic competitors will get over messing with Wikipedia. It's not really much more fun than screwing with books down at the local library. When the novelty of having such a resource wears off, vandalizing it will just look the waste of time and effort that it is.
Getting a little closer to home, Taco, how would you like it if the clown made fun of Slashdot next and advised his audience that they should join this small group of losers ? Yeah, that's what I thought. Fuck the haters.
I don't want to waste time with *any* unsolicited messages from anyone not a contact. Why bother filtering on content, when I care only from whom the message comes?
That's called whitelisting and it has a lot of problems if you are a business or do anything with the public, like maintain or help with free software.
A lot of my spam has contained crap about Hezbolla. In the past it's contained lots of O'Reily text about free software. It's as if someone wants filters to flag and trash these subjects.
This is why I don't like my ISP filtering my mail for me. They no longer give me a choice, so I'm screwed if they are fooled.
That of course is why mirror operators, packagers and developers of Xine, Mplayer and libdvdcss are all in jail.
Yes, they have tried twice and are still trying to put DVD Jon in jail.
I'm not sure why I'm talking to a stalker, but most of the above is common knowledge and not nearly as important as Jon's case which proves the intent and methods. Everyone knows WMP is a piece of shit and it's because of DRM, everyone but M$ and the MPAA that is and that's why we don't have medai PCs. It's not because people don't want them.
Please point me to a specific clause in the Windows EULA that proves that this isn't a complete fabrication. Please. Prove me wrong.
It's easier for me to cite other people's opinions than it is to dig through M$'s obnoxious EULAs.
Here's one 2003 study which validates practices others have found looking at tools like fastfind even further back. M$'s EULA fun has been going on for a while. They usually pretend they are looking for copyright violations in their snooping. Here's more:
It could be true that non free software requires such invasive practices to maintain itself in the world. That's just one more reason to avoid it.
No, the sheer mental cost of remembering how the offscreen information is organized is more than most people can handle. Either you have to memorize the positions and contents of Y layered windows on X different desktops, or you have to train yourself to follow some kind of 'this information goes on this desktop' work scheme, or you have to play 'hunt like hell' for that one window you were using five tasks ago, which has the information you want. ... It takes skill to use virtual desktops ... Most casual computer users lack those skills...
The ease with which I organize my tasks in Enlightenment 16 makes you wrong or me a genius. I'm not a genius. Like the Wiki says, being able to run the different instances of the same common tools on each desktop makes division of work easy. Yes, I make myself put "this kind of work" on one desktop at a time, which is not hard at all because I only have three or four tasks at any given time. Three desktops with nine screens each are more than I need to lay everything out for easy work. It's like having a separate physical desk for those tasks but it's easier to move things from one to the other when required. E16's excellent pagers give me thumbnails and popups so that it's easy to find what I was working on. They can be as big or small as I like and brought to the top with a single click. If pagers fail me because a program got covered up, a middle click on the drag bar gives me a listing of every program I'm running. Some very common programs, like shells to start new programs get put into an icon box. While it sounds complicated, it's really just as easy and intuitive as the three separate desktops I mentioned.
KDE and Gnome and others have similar features, but I've gotten used to E16 and the more I use it, the more I like it. Yes, edge flipping can be a little confusing at first and it's occasionally annoying. Not being able to move things out of the way is worse.
The Redmond way of doing things, 'hunt like hell' on a single screen is unbearable for complex tasks. It was using W2K as a systems engineer that taught me the value of virtual desktops along with the pain of non free software. I was expected to bring together information from many sources and put it back together in others. It was not bad for a single task, but there was always more than one task and they would always go on for days. It only took four five icons to make the text on the start bar go away. Two tasks typically required ten icons. From there, it was a game of find the gofer in one of three identical icons. The oversized things had to be printed out I ended up using it for organization and place keeping because had to boot your machine and start fresh every day. The work got done, but it was wasteful and painful. Virtual desktops and system stability are a must for anyone with any real "information worker". When you segregate your work properly, it's easy to recognize the immediate task by visiting the browser in the center screen of your desktop. With system stability, your virtual desktop acts like a real one and placekeeping is possible, your computer file system takes over from your paper one and you are much closer to a paperless office than M$ every will be.
For the average user, a few virtual screens is nice. One for email/PIM, another for that ebay auction browser and related stuff, one for the music player and mixer. My wife does absolutely everything through a single tabbed browser, but "everything" is webmail and social sites. Having space for games neither taxes nor bothers her. Indeed, saying basic organization skills and the ability to remember two things is beyond most people is crazy. With a proper pager, the extra space is never invisible and people don't even have to remember that much. There's nothing very special about me, except that I've had to use a computer for more than one task at a time. Now that I've done it, I understand that the virtual desktop makes it easier. The average user, given proper guidance, will come to thing the same way you and I do.
That's the safe bet if you can't use regular mpeg. If you put the wrong kind of compression between your bitmap and transmission, you might be sued for violating someone's lame software patent.
This is one of the fundamental things that Linux advocates rarely get.
We can take it that you are not one? That's too bad.
From a user perspective, there are about as many differences between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE as there are between FreeBSD and OpenBSD, or Solaris and some other SysV variant.
That sounds right, but it's dead wrong. Most people like having a choice up front and then many choices after install. The differences between the free and non free worlds are, as usual, huge and mostly in favor of the free world. People in the free software world get to try out and chose the interface they like. Once they have chosen they are only forced to upgrade by compelling new features and the overall experience is much more consistent.
Free software, once a distro choice has been made, is much more consistent than Windoze from a user stand point, and I'll even say that there's as much or more consistency between distros than elsewhere. The differences between RHE and SuSE are not all that awful because both pull from the same upstream sources. Konqueror on RHE does about the same thing as Konqueror under Debian and so on and so forth. The main difference is in administration styles, which the average corporate user could care less about. It's much less annoying than the pointless differences between Win2k and XP or XP and Vista, ad nausea. One "version" of Suse is much like the one before it, which is something the user appreciates much more than having transparency or some other useless toy. I don't even want to talk about the differences between non free GUIs like Apple, Solaris and Windows. Each has it's own version of window manager and users of one are clueless on the others. With free software you can at least have the same window manager and the window managers can share tricks. Non free GUI makers get smashed for "photocopy" when they try that.
Saying you support 'Linux' is silly. It's like saying you support 'UNIX.' Saying you support RHEL makes sense.
Well, that makes sense. Everyone has their specialty, except that poor guy at the help desk who's supposed to know every version of every free and non free thing ever written. I'm not going to tell people I can help them out with their Windows box. I'm most comfortable with Debian desktops and a few of their derivatives. Between Google and that, I can operate and stumble through other distros.
If people actually wanted Viiv-like products, there'd be a lot more do-it-yourself versions while we're waiting for Intel. If the problem were a lack of software, there'd be plenty of open-source projects by impatient hackersthat's how we got Napster and BitTorrent. But the geeks seem uninterested. Where are the obsessive bloggers? The forum feuds? The amateur meetups? Show me any truly hot technology, and I'll show you 100,000 guys who can't wait to tell you about it. Has anyone bored you to death talking about their Media Center PC lately?
This is a joke, right?
People are talking, but you can't do it with free software. Just telling people how will get you tossed in jail, thanks to the DMCA and greedy big media. Rather than buy a big screen TV, I'd love to have a projector and stereo hooked up to computer. I've already got my music collection digitized. The access and convenience of Amarok are awesome. It would be great to do the same thing with movies. The cost of a projector is about the same as a big TV, but it's much more portable and gives better quality. The problem is CSS. I can't watch or archive DVD movies with my software. It's against the law to distribute software that would let me in the US or even tell people what sites in countries with sane laws have it.
Did they name the article "Myth" for kicks or what? So many people talk about Mythtv, it's hard to believe a Slate Editor has not heard of it. It even made it into the EFF's "Corruptables" video.
You can do it with non free software, sort of. The author mentions the miserable death of ViiV. Paul Boutin did not receive his promissed test model and wonders why. He must have missed this Washington Post review where the damn thing did not work at all because of all the DRM nonsense. You might be able to watch current DVDs if you fall all the way back to Windoze 98SE and have a stash of the now illegal Xcopy and other software required. The network and file system restrictions of such a computer would make most people cry, but it's the easiest route for honest people. People unafraid of the law have been swapping movies almost forever, but the effort and risks are way to great for "normal" people who will just rent a video. Yes, you can even find software that works with your free software, it's just a huge pain all around and you will again be stuck with a static system because upgrades will break it. Contraband is not free, it's not convenient and it's hard to trust.
Big Media is the root cause. They do not want their media on computers they don't have complete control over. They want it to act like a cable box, to shove adds down your throat, tell you what you can watch and when and how much you will pay for it all. Given that most media buffs already have a cable box and all the gear, the computer version that does not work looks really lame and big media is happy. There will be no video Napster, they think.The customer is not happy, too bad.
This represents a tremendous opportunity for independent media and it's why Net Neutrality is such a big deal. Already, artists can get great viewings on youtube, google video and other sites. These are just the beginning because they rely on flash and other crappy software. The quality sucks and you can't save them without a lot of effort that's liable to lace your computer with malware. The potential of the media are better seen with stuff like Star Wreck, a free, full length movie. It's a big file and independent productions are going to stay that way due to patents on video streaming and more advanced compression routines. "So what", you might ask, "I've got broadband." That's where Net Neutrality comes in and independent media gets the shaft. Warner Brothers, which so badly mangled AOL and squandered their c
Eh, the states in favor of strong states rights thought the same thing in 1861. I guess 11 isn't "enough".
That was a case of property rights which violated other more basic rights and, worse, economically threatened all of the other more populous and numerous states. This case is not that much different if you consider the economic risk everyone is under when their communications company treats them like slaves. The risk of economic espionage that comes from this violation of your privacy puts much more weight on side of those who oppose it. There will be more than 11 states and a vast majority of the population opposing this. The advocacy of a few large and rich companies will not carry this one. Your right to security in your personal effects and papers will make a nice poster child for all companies who are not ATT as they demolish NSA snooping. The rest of us can be outraged for the issues as they stand, without regard to economic interest.
That reads like a M$ fantasy and it's unlikely to happen. Very few commercial sites are now IE only and most of the best are now sanely written to standards instead of browsers. M$ has yet to finish pushing their last browser onto a majority of their users, so you'd be insane to code anything a specific version and expect it to work for even half of your customers. When those customers complain to anyone other than M$, the answer is :
If they were to get the "get a real browser" answer from anyone, they would probably join the hoards of people defying M$'s lock in by downloading Firefox or installing a whole free OS. As Mozilla and free software adoption pass 20%, IE sites and even IIS served sites will sink like lead turds.
Nothing much has changed, has it? Just yesterday, they were still going to flunk the Acid test. That's the core of this article. If much had changed, I'd expect this guy to have updated the page. M$'s excuse, "we can't change cause that would break compatibility," is as inflexible as it is dishonest. Killing simple protocols has been a stated goal since the 1998 Halloween Papers were acknowledged. They did it wrong, justified that wrongness and have continued along with it.
Performance is not the goal, domination is.
Qt does not play nice with C++. If all I want to write is a GUI, Qt is great. If I want to write a program with a GUI and other functionality that requires other C++ libraries, I'm stuck with a huge impedance mismatch.
Are you telling me that I can't pass values between Qt classes and those written by others? Can you give me some examples? I was thinking that Qt's double buffering and OpenGL support would be a nice way for me to put an interface onto some tomography code I'd written. The code is all straight C, and I thought wrapping it up in a class might be nice. Would it be harder for me to call my functions though a class than it would the straight C versions? How do the KDE programmers get around these issues?
There need to be more of these kinds of scandals because companies should not be keeping this kind of information in the first place. Most don't even want to because it's expensive and prone to abuse. Back when the Feds required Carnivore type logging, all the ISPs objected that it would cost too much. The net result of all of this is places like ChoicePoint. Having a secure OS won't help you when those serving you betray your trust.
I'm a little worried about how quickly the current line will become legacy machines since it is pretty certain that Apple won't be shipping 32bit Intel machines in a year and has only been shipping 32bit Intel machines for a little while.
The faster it drops the price of powerpc notebooks the happier I'll be. My 1.2 GHz PIII M is burning a hole through pocket faster than my money does. I might try playing around with underclocking but it would be nice to have a higher efficiency chip to begin with. It's not worth that much too me, so I'll wait. Both run Debian.
Good features *should* be copied from operating system to operating system - that way everyone gets the best of what is available! Who cares who invented it first, as long as people are implementing the slickest ideas and improving on them where possible.
Apple and M$ deserve criticism for doing the non free hype thing and claiming more than they deliver. It's odd that the least featured interfaces are hyped up as the most productive, isn't it? Interfaces that lack basic features like virtual desktops are routinely drooled over in the tech press as "must buy improvements" to stuff that's even less useful. As a user of free software, the lack of virtual desktops on Mac is a real jaw dropper. Because M$'s interface is ubiquitous, I know it's even further behind. Listening to the hype, a gullible user would think that Apple has the best GUI available, M$ is not far behind and everything else is difficult. That's not the way the world and those who present things that way deserve should be put straight.
install 6000 radios on "water towers, buildings, light poles and other structures". In New York City, operators have to pay to get access to such valuable real estate.
Most people consider NY an example of how not to tax people, but obviously they have their fans. Reasonable places allow use of the public servitude. If the deployment of radio boxes can be done without interference to other infrastructure and without government cost but with great benefit to the people of the county, it would be silly to charge for deployment. The only reason you would tax something like that is to fund something unrelated.
It's also possible that you are wrong. Every one of those structures could be private.
I think you underestimate the reality-resistance of the People's Republic of Ann Arbor.
A private company that takes advantage of technology to offer a cheap service is called communist. It's main competitor is a state protected monopoly, labled "reality". Something is very screwed up here.
they could have been the major player in Linux for business. They just had really bad, shortsighted leadership.
Their leaders are in Redmond, but don't worry they are on the same ride. The SCO you are talking about did hitch onto free software. M$ crushed them, just like they did Corel.
They won't be able to do that much longer. The performance and cost difference between free and non free software is so extreme that the money is moving. Those that don't move will dry up and die. $6,200,000,000 in advertising won't change reality.
Your best chances are to be a little less paranoid and irritable yourself. Did he tell you he was out to get you or did you imagine that? He might really just be out to get the bugs? Offer to buy him a better model bug zapper. How could he refuse an offer like that? Of course, you could be right and he hates you for no good reason and you will have to learn to live with it. He can buy as many zappers as you break and get you arrested besides. In that case, drink another beer and turn the music up another notch.
The general rule is that being friendly in the first place is cheap, confrontation is expensive, and ignoring the problem makes it go away.