I find the Internet very useful in planning social events, something which increases socializing time. I'm hardly less social because of it.
Hey, don't forget all that quality time spent fixing people's broken Windoze! That's plenty of social time wasted for sure. Your friends might even be so insulting as to watch TV in another room while you do the job for them. Nice!
The only computer fix up I did this Christmas was one job with Linux and OSX. None of the software had a problem, the cable company (Cox) turned them off when they tried to use a laptop via DHCP, so all I had to do was to reset their cable modem. A hub, a second network card, guidedog and 15 minutes of softare install would have fixed the problem, but they did not think it was worth the effort. No winblows fun for me, yeah!
That must be much better than the TV I have, which makes for something that I don't even like to watch, much less have as "background noise". On broadcast, everything but PBS is about 50% advertising of the lowest, most obnoxious sort. They use "compressed" (essentially maxed out) audio, flashing lights and other distracting tricks to try to MAKE YOU WATCH and REMEMBER their message to buy their crap. Most of the crap would be rejected as the lowest sort of spam if it came by email. There's nothing I hate more than visiting a house where CNN is on 24/7 and it's hard to have a conversation over it.
Gee, you would not want anyone firing laser beams at airplanes in any of the 6,000 miles of US border space. To keep that from happening, I suppose you could empty the two million or so US prisoners onto the border and tell them to watch out for suspicious people with freaking lasers. They would each get about 12 feet of border to patrol, but would feel much less crowded than they were in jail. To keep them from raping each other, you could hire all those boys coming back from Iraq to watch them. Illegal aliens and their employers could also be pressed into service and the rest of us could sleep easy, knowing that we'd always have a job feeding the border patrol. Safe at last, safe at last, thank God Almighty, I'm safe and Socially Secure at last.
Which of those six things were missing from his letter to his ISP? He gave them his contact information, what was coppied and sold on their servers, where it was located and sold, his good faith belief that his code and images were used without his authorization for profit and I'm sure he signed it. The act was so blatant that the ISP should have known, regardless of what was actually provided by the victim. He could have gone through the slight effort of generating MD5 sums, without proving anything further. Still, the ISP did nothing, even after they had been Slashdotted.
I think he needs to be signed up for some snail mail spam and get a few loads of dog shit dumped onto his front door. Got info on where the scum lives and breeds?
Remember that DMCA thing we bitch about? Time to write a takedown notice [wikipedia.org] to the hosting company citing the infringing material in question. In addition, once you have collected that information, take a few extra minutes tracking down the legitimate owners of the other software on the site, explain what you did, and share that information.
Thanks, this is a good example of how little guys get crushed by well meaning laws with onerous enforcement. He did write a take down notice, but the host did not follow through. As can be seen above, the no good is still selling, so Provision 512 has not helped at all. The case has been very different when the requester represents some big dumb company with an army of lawyers. The differential result shows that the system is broken. Who you are should not matter but they do when you are dealing with copyright.
This inherent inequity is one of the biggest dangers of exclusive franchises. An exclusive franchise is created and must be enforced by Government by restricting the natural actions and rights of others. This is unlike most other criminal and civil law, where violations are unnatural, obvious and easy to demonstrate. Even in such a clear cut case, justice in exclusive franchises is more a matter of who you are and what kind of resources you have than anything else. The complaint people have about the DMCA is that it makes some people more equal than others by it's vagueness.
The DMCA is a huge, steaming shit pile that shows how broken "IP" laws are. Ordinary copyright law should have been able to handle the bad guy. In return for not being able to help our hero, the DMCA makes it so we can't tell people how to work their toys. Somehow, the "compromise" worked out by the dummies who passed the DMCA looks like a clear win for big publishers and a clear loss for the rest of us.
why wouldn't they use a set of rotating mirrors to sequentially distribute the light to the different sensors from a single entry point ?
The big ugly array looks like the best solution, but I'd love to see it done your way. I'd use a set of beam splitter, you know, glass set at 45 degrees, but this has some of the same problems the array does, and you would need lots and lots of light to get a decent image. Early high speed cameras at Los Alamos used film rolled on barrels, each frame with it's own lens, that could be rotated at high speeds. That's where you get your first bomb movies. CCDs might be light enough for this now, but you won't be able to use a rolling shutter camera. Mirrors won't really overcome the change of apparent position of the viewer and also limit the number of cameras you can set up and would be a bitch to synchronize. Also, you won't be able to use a rolling shutter. Let us know when you get it done. The Stanford people have given you a great start.
The more I look at this, the more I think they are making life difficult for themselves, and the resultant image quality shows.
Yeah, they mention Photron in their paper. As nice as that camera is, it can only store a few seconds at 800x600. The system you are looking at will run till you run out of space. The paper is a well written 320kB pdf and more worth your download time than the movies themselves.
Now, here are a few thoughts of my own. Some of the image quality problems you notice might be a side effect of reducing the movie to something that can be downloaded and played by the average web surfer. Higher quality image capture devices will become cheaper and this method will improve with that. More importantly, this system seems to not take any non free software to use. A wizzbang camera soon becomes a big pain in the ass if it's tied to special drivers that tie you to a specific operating system on a specific computer.
it may be more trouble than its worth, and may well be wise to buy a camera from the professionals.
What you use is up to you and your needs, but these people are NOT making their life difficult in a pointless exercise. They have met their needs in a real way and could have kept it to themselves. I'm happy they decided to share and realize that much of the difficult work is now simply done. The authors, by the way, are members of the EE and CS departments of Stanford University. That makes them pros to me, and I'm about as well off reading their manual as I am reading one from a camera maker.
Their biggest misunderstanding is nicely illustrated by their attack on companies that have embraced free software. Specifically, they claim that IBM, CA and others are embracing free software only where they have an inferior program of their own:
... when really, when you take a look at it, they're embracing Linux as a platform to show value to customers through their global services business, through their hardware business and through their proprietary software offerings.... they see a benefit for some open-source products when they don't have a strong platform or product in that space.
As if AIX or OS/2 were somehow weak. If we follow this logic, Windoze would be GPL because it needs a lot of help to avoid being part of a bot net.
What they don't get is that they have already lost. The entire technical community is fed up with M$ and their BS. One of components that is being offered by others is a cheaper and technically superior replacement for Windoze. No Microsoft publication will change that fact. The closed source development model is hoplessly obsolete.
The most broken part of "Unix" is that it's non free. Everyone has their own way of fixing things and does not share any of it, so we have the current fragmented landscape of Sun, HP, AIX, OSX, etc. The obvious solution is to use free software which ports the best features of each and costs nothing but time and thought to implement. What could be easier than that? The details are not as important as the root cause and the solution.
Nuclear is only cheap if you don't factor in the problem of disposing of the waste...
Reprocessing is a little more expensive than the one shot fuel cycle being used, but it makes the fuel we have on hand essentially limitless. In any case, fuel disposal costs are most part of the cost of nuclear power and no one is hiding anything. The only hidden part of costs are those imposed by infinite research, such as goes on at Yucca mountian, and continuously changing requirements for storage of "waste".
...and the entire plant after it's rather limited life
Every plant has a decommission fund that you have paid for. Beware those who would spend it on anything else, especially those who pretend such funds do not exist and call for government programs like superfund. The problem there is that you will get to pay for it again and again.
The "waste" problem is not technical, it's political.
OK, I've RTFA. Hype!... the problem [is] supplying the energy in a form that burns clean and is clean to produce in the first place.
TFA redundantly refutes the idea that this is not an improvement over existing internal combustion:
External combustion engines - like steam ones - hold several advantages over internal ones. They have the potential to produce fewer harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) than conventional cars which use internal combustion engines. Although steam engines still need to burn hydrocarbon-based fuels like petrol and diesel, which in turn release carbon dioxide, external combustion engines can control the release and the production of CO2 more efficiently.
The real problems with this vehicle are size and practicality. The link to the designer's site is informative and should be followed if you are interested in steam powered vehicles. The heat exchangers are each bigger than large internal combustion engines and the care requires two of them. Also, the system has no condenser so you have to fill up water as well as fuel. Most of us won't have to go 200 MPH, so the size consideration can be reduced, but that improvement will be offset for by the inclusion of a condenser. If we could linearly reduce the 2MW thermal (from which we might get 1,000 HP!) to a far more reasonable 100 HP model, we would get a steam engine 1/10th the size of this one. I imagine that material restraints will not allow this. A hybrid vehicle would be nice, but it would have to be huge with current steam technology. This effort goes a long way to show why steam is an abandoned locomotion technology and why it would be better to separate power generation from consumption.
Nuclear power plants and electric cars are a current, viable alternative to internal combustion. Nuclear, despite disastrous exclusive franchises and government regulation, is still the cheapest and cleanest electricity available. Recent improvements to batteries makes high performance electric cars possible. Self contained nuclear plants have been designed that could be distributed like gas stations and will put an end to both much regulatory monkey business, if we demand reasonable laws.
This advert for a new software engineer, dated Decamber 10th does not mention AIX, but does mention lots of Windozy stuff. Let me quote it:
Advanced knowledge of one or more of the following: C, C++, Java, Cobol, Unix, Windows operating system. Intermediate knowledge of Oracle, SQL and/or Sybase required
While AIX, "Ain't unIX", might be described as Unix and the advert looks like HR drool, I'd still wager that some thing M$ failed something Sybase and that the AIX rumor is someone blowing smoke up your ass. Comparing reputations, AIX vrs. M$, the choice is clear.
You really HAVE to give it anyone that can pull this off, especially to/.ers.
Give him whatever you want, I'm keeping mine.
Did I really think this guy had blinking lights that other people could control? Sure, why not? Other people have done it without complaining so much about the "Slashdot effect". Did I ever care? No. Do I like it when people lie to me? No. What's left to give him? A raspberry.
It's not the OS, it's the people behind who's to blame. Yes, stupidity and MSW often go together but in a few years one will probably occasionally see a massive linux outage due to... similarly stupid people.
It's interesting how you dissmiss an OS with a track record of failure in order to blame anyone other programmer. This assumes Microsoft has better programmers than anyone else, an assumption Microsoft marketing loves you for but is unsupported by any objective review of of performance. The same "stupid people" have been and still are writing applications for Linux, Unix and Mac right now but they have better tools and make fewer mistakes there than they have with M$'s crappy SDK's and pathetic OS.
Two examples of software that just works are Apache and Sendmail. People write all sorts of applications for both of them without this kind of meltdown and both dominate their "markets". Microsoft's efforts at both, IIS and exchange have been a total dissaster.
Wanna bet what crappy OS is behind this? Blaming you developers is sorry stuff.
At least he's being proactive about it studying and analyzing it to try to figure out ways to prevent it in the future,
The proactive people said not to use M$ crap. Studying the mess afterwards is the very definition of reactive. The lesson was obvious before it happened, and the rest of us are entitled to a happy, "I told you so".
we have blanket assumptions... in your flamebait post.
Microsoft sucks, yeah, yeah, yeah. All your apologies are worthless.
I am only trying to make sense out of the above comment from the official statement above.
My wife says things just snowballed.
Crew assignment is a hard problem...
Records keeping, very tricky. You would not want to try that with any old database, no sir, it might pop a window. Just thinking about how every other airline has managed this tricky problem since before computers makes my head hurt.
We may never know what really happened but this would be a nice example for my classes:-)
Yeah, it's a real class act for those 30,000 people sitting around in airports for Christmas, employees doing the same and those who have to recover from this disaster. Management is going to be happy about the publicity they just earned while their huge capital investment in AIRPLANES sits idle during a time of year that's supposed to be their most profitable because their far to expensive M$ "soloution" "melted". A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link. Employees, I'm sure, are also stranded for Christmas. For the New Year they get to ponder layoffs. What a happy company for you to dissect at your leisure next semester. Season's Best!
Here's what I'll bet you might learn: WHEN SOMETHING MELTS, YOU LOSE YOUR ASS IF YOU DEPEND ON IT. MICROSOFT MELTS AND HAS POOR OR NO FAIL OVER CAPABILITY, SO YOU BETTER NOT DEPEND ON IT.
It's not the OS, it's the people behind who's to blame. Yes, stupidity and MSW often go together but in a few years one will probably occasionally see a massive linux outage due to... similarly stupid people.
What you are saying is that it was NOT Microsoft's fault. You might want to reserve that judgement before till you know.
The record is not tilted in your favor. Such problems did not happen before people switched out to M$ junk. They still don't happen on systems that have nothing to do with M$ and I can predict they won't happen on Linux with the regular frequency of M$ based "solutions". One of these things is not like the other, can you tell me which does not belong? Microsoft "Dogfood" is legendary for not being able to take load. Just look up the history of their conversion of Hotmail. You can't hide from the fact that the same kinds of people program for other platforms without the same kinds of problems.
And there's your problem, the average user has NO IDEA what you are talking about, they don't know what an OGG is, they have't a clue about DRM and THEY DON'T CARE.
Ignorance is a problem, but it's not true that they don't care. Most people who own gadgets like this are already pissed about the upgrade train having made a few of them "obsolete" by not "supporting" them. What better way to educate your friends than by enjoying your devices and music with next to no problems while they struggle with non free formats and clients that don't get along? They want what I've got and it's easier than what they are dealing with.
That guy must be using Slackware 0.99 In Xandros, Fedora and several others you plug your player, it shows up as a new directory or hard disk, drag and drop what you want, and off you go.
Debian Sarge but it's true that Fedora does USB better.
At the same time anyone who can master Mac OS or read the manual to install the average Winblows hardware can deal with adding a line to their fstab. The instructions for doing such a thing would occupy less than one page, or the manufacturer could provide a little script. Mac works, Winblows sucks life, Linux rocks.
I know which one I'd rather help my friends and family keep up. Some nice distro like Simply Mepis that I can install in 20 minutes and ssh into to fix. Now that's easy.
You will be completely free of Apple's DRM unless you buy music from the iTunes Music Store. If you never buy music from the iTMS, then Apple's DRM never affects you, so it is not a valid argument against owning an iPod.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying, because what you said is no reassurance at all.
Can you put music onto your ipod without an Apple client? If I can't use free software to load and unload the thing, I don't want it. I don't want to root my machine with some kind of non free install, if such a thing is even available. If it's Windoze and Mac only, I don't even have the software to run it because I got tired of the upgrade train about five years ago.
Don't like DRM? Then rip (or, in your case I assume, pirate) all your music as MP3 or MP4 and shut up about it.
Bad assumption. I have never used a music sharing program. I've moved all of my phonographs and CDs to ogg.
DRM with your Microsoft PlaysForSureUnlessTheRIAAWon'tLetYouToPlayIt
That does bother me, though I don't intend to use any Microsoft music provider or WMA. There's still good music out there and there will be replacements for MP3.com, which was the best way of promoting new music. Mostly, I've been collecting CDs from local bands. I don't need to "pirate" anything and I don't need Microsoft or Apple telling me anything about it. So, the DRM that is there bothers me. The fact that I did not have to install a software client gives me some assurance that the RIAA won't be able to flip a bit on this device to turn off my music. At the same time, I worry that bit might just flip in a few years on it's own. DRM sucks and the less of it there is the happier I am.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, don't forget all that quality time spent fixing people's broken Windoze! That's plenty of social time wasted for sure. Your friends might even be so insulting as to watch TV in another room while you do the job for them. Nice!
The only computer fix up I did this Christmas was one job with Linux and OSX. None of the software had a problem, the cable company (Cox) turned them off when they tried to use a laptop via DHCP, so all I had to do was to reset their cable modem. A hub, a second network card, guidedog and 15 minutes of softare install would have fixed the problem, but they did not think it was worth the effort. No winblows fun for me, yeah!
That must be much better than the TV I have, which makes for something that I don't even like to watch, much less have as "background noise". On broadcast, everything but PBS is about 50% advertising of the lowest, most obnoxious sort. They use "compressed" (essentially maxed out) audio, flashing lights and other distracting tricks to try to MAKE YOU WATCH and REMEMBER their message to buy their crap. Most of the crap would be rejected as the lowest sort of spam if it came by email. There's nothing I hate more than visiting a house where CNN is on 24/7 and it's hard to have a conversation over it.
Thanks, this is a good example of how little guys get crushed by well meaning laws with onerous enforcement. He did write a take down notice, but the host did not follow through. As can be seen above, the no good is still selling, so Provision 512 has not helped at all. The case has been very different when the requester represents some big dumb company with an army of lawyers. The differential result shows that the system is broken. Who you are should not matter but they do when you are dealing with copyright.
This inherent inequity is one of the biggest dangers of exclusive franchises. An exclusive franchise is created and must be enforced by Government by restricting the natural actions and rights of others. This is unlike most other criminal and civil law, where violations are unnatural, obvious and easy to demonstrate. Even in such a clear cut case, justice in exclusive franchises is more a matter of who you are and what kind of resources you have than anything else. The complaint people have about the DMCA is that it makes some people more equal than others by it's vagueness.
The DMCA is a huge, steaming shit pile that shows how broken "IP" laws are. Ordinary copyright law should have been able to handle the bad guy. In return for not being able to help our hero, the DMCA makes it so we can't tell people how to work their toys. Somehow, the "compromise" worked out by the dummies who passed the DMCA looks like a clear win for big publishers and a clear loss for the rest of us.
The big ugly array looks like the best solution, but I'd love to see it done your way. I'd use a set of beam splitter, you know, glass set at 45 degrees, but this has some of the same problems the array does, and you would need lots and lots of light to get a decent image. Early high speed cameras at Los Alamos used film rolled on barrels, each frame with it's own lens, that could be rotated at high speeds. That's where you get your first bomb movies. CCDs might be light enough for this now, but you won't be able to use a rolling shutter camera. Mirrors won't really overcome the change of apparent position of the viewer and also limit the number of cameras you can set up and would be a bitch to synchronize. Also, you won't be able to use a rolling shutter. Let us know when you get it done. The Stanford people have given you a great start.
Yeah, they mention Photron in their paper. As nice as that camera is, it can only store a few seconds at 800x600. The system you are looking at will run till you run out of space. The paper is a well written 320kB pdf and more worth your download time than the movies themselves.
Now, here are a few thoughts of my own. Some of the image quality problems you notice might be a side effect of reducing the movie to something that can be downloaded and played by the average web surfer. Higher quality image capture devices will become cheaper and this method will improve with that. More importantly, this system seems to not take any non free software to use. A wizzbang camera soon becomes a big pain in the ass if it's tied to special drivers that tie you to a specific operating system on a specific computer. it may be more trouble than its worth, and may well be wise to buy a camera from the professionals.
What you use is up to you and your needs, but these people are NOT making their life difficult in a pointless exercise. They have met their needs in a real way and could have kept it to themselves. I'm happy they decided to share and realize that much of the difficult work is now simply done. The authors, by the way, are members of the EE and CS departments of Stanford University. That makes them pros to me, and I'm about as well off reading their manual as I am reading one from a camera maker.
As if AIX or OS/2 were somehow weak. If we follow this logic, Windoze would be GPL because it needs a lot of help to avoid being part of a bot net.
What they don't get is that they have already lost. The entire technical community is fed up with M$ and their BS. One of components that is being offered by others is a cheaper and technically superior replacement for Windoze. No Microsoft publication will change that fact. The closed source development model is hoplessly obsolete.
Reprocessing is a little more expensive than the one shot fuel cycle being used, but it makes the fuel we have on hand essentially limitless. In any case, fuel disposal costs are most part of the cost of nuclear power and no one is hiding anything. The only hidden part of costs are those imposed by infinite research, such as goes on at Yucca mountian, and continuously changing requirements for storage of "waste".
Every plant has a decommission fund that you have paid for. Beware those who would spend it on anything else, especially those who pretend such funds do not exist and call for government programs like superfund. The problem there is that you will get to pay for it again and again.
The "waste" problem is not technical, it's political.
TFA redundantly refutes the idea that this is not an improvement over existing internal combustion:
External combustion engines - like steam ones - hold several advantages over internal ones. They have the potential to produce fewer harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) than conventional cars which use internal combustion engines. Although steam engines still need to burn hydrocarbon-based fuels like petrol and diesel, which in turn release carbon dioxide, external combustion engines can control the release and the production of CO2 more efficiently.
The real problems with this vehicle are size and practicality. The link to the designer's site is informative and should be followed if you are interested in steam powered vehicles. The heat exchangers are each bigger than large internal combustion engines and the care requires two of them. Also, the system has no condenser so you have to fill up water as well as fuel. Most of us won't have to go 200 MPH, so the size consideration can be reduced, but that improvement will be offset for by the inclusion of a condenser. If we could linearly reduce the 2MW thermal (from which we might get 1,000 HP!) to a far more reasonable 100 HP model, we would get a steam engine 1/10th the size of this one. I imagine that material restraints will not allow this. A hybrid vehicle would be nice, but it would have to be huge with current steam technology. This effort goes a long way to show why steam is an abandoned locomotion technology and why it would be better to separate power generation from consumption.
Nuclear power plants and electric cars are a current, viable alternative to internal combustion. Nuclear, despite disastrous exclusive franchises and government regulation, is still the cheapest and cleanest electricity available. Recent improvements to batteries makes high performance electric cars possible. Self contained nuclear plants have been designed that could be distributed like gas stations and will put an end to both much regulatory monkey business, if we demand reasonable laws.
Advanced knowledge of one or more of the following: C, C++, Java, Cobol, Unix, Windows operating system. Intermediate knowledge of Oracle, SQL and/or Sybase required
While AIX, "Ain't unIX", might be described as Unix and the advert looks like HR drool, I'd still wager that some thing M$ failed something Sybase and that the AIX rumor is someone blowing smoke up your ass. Comparing reputations, AIX vrs. M$, the choice is clear.
Give him whatever you want, I'm keeping mine.
Did I really think this guy had blinking lights that other people could control? Sure, why not? Other people have done it without complaining so much about the "Slashdot effect". Did I ever care? No. Do I like it when people lie to me? No. What's left to give him? A raspberry.
Oh yeah, I can be an order of magnitude more "productive" than other people and prove it. Right, I'll just be a "shock worker".
No, I don't feel hurt by some highly moderated anonymous "inside information" that clearly contradicts
It's interesting how you dissmiss an OS with a track record of failure in order to blame anyone other programmer. This assumes Microsoft has better programmers than anyone else, an assumption Microsoft marketing loves you for but is unsupported by any objective review of of performance. The same "stupid people" have been and still are writing applications for Linux, Unix and Mac right now but they have better tools and make fewer mistakes there than they have with M$'s crappy SDK's and pathetic OS.
Two examples of software that just works are Apache and Sendmail. People write all sorts of applications for both of them without this kind of meltdown and both dominate their "markets". Microsoft's efforts at both, IIS and exchange have been a total dissaster.
Wanna bet what crappy OS is behind this? Blaming you developers is sorry stuff.
The proactive people said not to use M$ crap. Studying the mess afterwards is the very definition of reactive. The lesson was obvious before it happened, and the rest of us are entitled to a happy, "I told you so".
we have blanket assumptions... in your flamebait post.
Microsoft sucks, yeah, yeah, yeah. All your apologies are worthless.
My wife says things just snowballed.
Crew assignment is a hard problem...
Records keeping, very tricky. You would not want to try that with any old database, no sir, it might pop a window. Just thinking about how every other airline has managed this tricky problem since before computers makes my head hurt.
We may never know what really happened but this would be a nice example for my classes :-)
Yeah, it's a real class act for those 30,000 people sitting around in airports for Christmas, employees doing the same and those who have to recover from this disaster. Management is going to be happy about the publicity they just earned while their huge capital investment in AIRPLANES sits idle during a time of year that's supposed to be their most profitable because their far to expensive M$ "soloution" "melted". A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link. Employees, I'm sure, are also stranded for Christmas. For the New Year they get to ponder layoffs. What a happy company for you to dissect at your leisure next semester. Season's Best!
Here's what I'll bet you might learn: WHEN SOMETHING MELTS, YOU LOSE YOUR ASS IF YOU DEPEND ON IT. MICROSOFT MELTS AND HAS POOR OR NO FAIL OVER CAPABILITY, SO YOU BETTER NOT DEPEND ON IT.
What you are saying is that it was NOT Microsoft's fault. You might want to reserve that judgement before till you know.
The record is not tilted in your favor. Such problems did not happen before people switched out to M$ junk. They still don't happen on systems that have nothing to do with M$ and I can predict they won't happen on Linux with the regular frequency of M$ based "solutions". One of these things is not like the other, can you tell me which does not belong? Microsoft "Dogfood" is legendary for not being able to take load. Just look up the history of their conversion of Hotmail. You can't hide from the fact that the same kinds of people program for other platforms without the same kinds of problems.
Quick answers to that question:
Any more questions?
Ignorance is a problem, but it's not true that they don't care. Most people who own gadgets like this are already pissed about the upgrade train having made a few of them "obsolete" by not "supporting" them. What better way to educate your friends than by enjoying your devices and music with next to no problems while they struggle with non free formats and clients that don't get along? They want what I've got and it's easier than what they are dealing with.
Debian Sarge but it's true that Fedora does USB better.
At the same time anyone who can master Mac OS or read the manual to install the average Winblows hardware can deal with adding a line to their fstab. The instructions for doing such a thing would occupy less than one page, or the manufacturer could provide a little script. Mac works, Winblows sucks life, Linux rocks.
I know which one I'd rather help my friends and family keep up. Some nice distro like Simply Mepis that I can install in 20 minutes and ssh into to fix. Now that's easy.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying, because what you said is no reassurance at all.
Can you put music onto your ipod without an Apple client? If I can't use free software to load and unload the thing, I don't want it. I don't want to root my machine with some kind of non free install, if such a thing is even available. If it's Windoze and Mac only, I don't even have the software to run it because I got tired of the upgrade train about five years ago.
Bad assumption. I have never used a music sharing program. I've moved all of my phonographs and CDs to ogg.
DRM with your Microsoft PlaysForSureUnlessTheRIAAWon'tLetYouToPlayIt
That does bother me, though I don't intend to use any Microsoft music provider or WMA. There's still good music out there and there will be replacements for MP3.com, which was the best way of promoting new music. Mostly, I've been collecting CDs from local bands. I don't need to "pirate" anything and I don't need Microsoft or Apple telling me anything about it. So, the DRM that is there bothers me. The fact that I did not have to install a software client gives me some assurance that the RIAA won't be able to flip a bit on this device to turn off my music. At the same time, I worry that bit might just flip in a few years on it's own. DRM sucks and the less of it there is the happier I am.