You can listen to, ahem, certain college radio stations online. Yes, this is a shameless plug, but I will say that if you can't find anything you like on WMBC, there are plenty of other stations that broadcast. But we use Linux and our custom software is open source:)
And yes, our lo-fi stream (32k mono) generally works fine with dialup.
Yes, Mac IE used to be better than Windows IE; it was even the most standards-compliant browser for a time. But that was a long while ago in software time.
You really should not use software:
1. That is no longer supported 2. written by Microsoft 3. to access the Internet.
IE on the Mac (and on Windows, for the moment) is behind on standards compliance and features, and by standing still, it's only going to get worse.
Perhaps the parent poster could have phrased things a bit differently, but I'm amazed that more people didn't post replies like this.
Debian tests "frozen" for months and months before releasing, since they don't have to keep their latest release hidden as an incentive to get "subscribers" to support their business.
If 6-month-old software just isn't l337 enough for you, even packages which go into "testing" have to sit for at least a few weeks with no critical bugs.
That, and Lucky Goldstar has always been a manufacturer of...bargain products. I paid extra for my Plextor CD-RW, but it rips flawlessly and can read CDs which choke other drives.
A real benefit of always staying one step behind bleeding edge is cost. PC components which are sold in "grades" (such as speed in mhz) have always had a point where the price jumps up for increasingly less of a performance gain. Buy just below the jump, and you'll be happier later.
[I still remember buying the K6 166 while my friend bought the 233 for a lot more money. The 233 was an anomaly that run at a much higher (and hotter) voltage. I was able to clock my 166 at 210, and it still ran cooler. Plus, with a faster bus speed (83 vs. 66) it actually beat the 233 in some cases. Of course, overclocking isn't nearly as worthwile these days, especially if you run Linux.]
Yes, it's right there in the UI: you can specify sites that are allowed to use popups. As for cookies, you can set Mozilla to prompt you each time a site tries to set a cookie, have it remember your decision, and go in and manage the cookies/cookie sites. As of 1.5, you can apply a cookie decision to all sites in a domain (foo.cnn.com, bar.cnn.com, etc.).
Also note that Mozilla disables _unrequested_ popup windows. If you request the new window (e.g. by clicking a link), it will still work fine without any special setup.
Mozilla can also be set to prevent sites from resizing existing windows, harassing you with scrolling status bar marquees, changing the focus of windows, and more.
I always thought that GNUcash was more of a "personal finances" program, and the intro on their site seems to agree. I think that Appgen was more "corporate accounting".
I'm certainly not bashing GNUcash; I use it myself, and you would sustain severe injury trying to take it from me.:) It also does seem like it would be possible for a small business to use it, as it does have AP and AR sections (which I use for roommates), though these don't seem to be tied to any sort of inventory system. But they do mention "Small Business Accounting Features" in their latest release.
Babylon 5, all flamewars aside, stands out from other series of its kind mainly because the entire 5-season storyline was written ahead of time. There were story arcs spanning multiple seasons, as well as fun little non-arc episodes. This is in contrast to most series, where the people behind it might come up with a rough overall sketch for the next season, but there's no solid framework that's been well thought out in advance, and when your ability to come up with new ideas falls behind the schedule of shows, it comes apart.
So maybe the way to keep people playing is to not keep them playing, so to speak. Come out with a game and say, "This game will be around until November 2005" (if it came out today). Have a coherent overall storyline and subplots, with contingency plans in case the users change the flow of things too far in one direction. Create an ultimate evil that needs HORDES of high-level warriors of all sorts to even meet face-to-face, let alone kill. And maybe in the end, if they don't have the strength, the players lose! Have events play out so that the big climactic battle is about a month before the game itself ends to provide a little coda and see what happens.
I think planning ahead like this will merge the best elements of offline RPGs and MMORPGs. There probably will be "heroes", or at least local badasses that everyone in town knows because they are fanatical players and have amazing powers.
This would be far cooler than, say, PSO Online: "Well, 534 teams of 4 people each have destroyed the 'ultimate evil' repeatedly, and that's just today." Better to have a definitive end, going out with a bang and all that.
This isn't AOL "recommending" that users turn off the service. If Comcast could magically go in through my cablemodem and shut down my (completely internal) instance of PostgreSQL, I'd be pretty cheesed. Would that mean they could also alter or delete any anti-Comcast documents they found hanging around? Wouldn't AOL's userbase be the type to have programs "remember" their password for, say, their online banking?
You are probably right about some EULA giving them the "right" to do this, however (assuming that EULAs are enforcable...oh wait, I live in a UCITA state). Last I checked, they still used their own TCP stack on Windows. Many/. readers would revolt at that very concept, but AOL's userbase doesn't care about it. Similarly, they will probably think "AOL turned off popups! They're so great! I've got mail!", without realizing the privacy implications.
I went to SGI's "Linux University" a few years ago (back when they were saying, "We're about to release XFS for Linux, and here's why it's the best filesystem in the known universe"), and Jeremy Allison was one of the speakers. I enjoyed the session, and even got to talk to him for a few minutes afterwards.
One of the things that stuck with me was him expressing the hope that people would eventually stop using Samba because it would no longer be required. He regards SMB as an awful protocol, and isn't much for Windows as a desktop operating system either. I'm sure most software developers realize that their code, no matter how important now, will eventually fade away, but it's interesting to think of someone happily coding away and at the same time _hoping_ for the day when their primary project is no longer useful.
So if it's possible, has anyone done it? If so, and another file sync tool exists which has superior bandwidth utilisation, why not post a link to it? Why hasn't it already become more popular than rsync?
You would really be "entitled" to bash rsync if you had come up with a superior implementation yourself, but I would hope you could at least point one out.
Then again, I believe that Novell has separate permissions for "read" and "copy" on files, so you could use that (and use it on Linux). Disclaimer: this is something I overheard from a Novell admin. They or my memory may be wrong.
Of course, I'm not sure if that prevents "Save As", and it almost certainly doesn't prevent printing the screen.
Even though it's not nearly as good a deal now as it once was, $9.99 for 40 tracks is still 25 cents per track, compared with 99. And emusic has artists I actually want to hear, like Belle and Sebastion, Apples in Stereo, The Pixies, etc. I don't care if Apple is the only one to have The Eagles, because The Eagles suck large, moss-covered rocks, and I don't love the RIAA much either.
The files only come as VBR MP3s, but that's OK with me since I have a hardware MP3 player (CD-based) that I probably won't be upgrading until it breaks.
Oh, and there's the matter of it actually working (officially!) with Linux, though I assume that's probably x86 Linux only. But still, that's much better than other sites that inanely restrict you to IE on Windows. It also says that "Other operating systems may work...", but they won't provide support for them.
Does this new rights system use encryption? Can it keep the "Administrator" user from reading documents that the higher-ups don't want him to read? I'm sure that if this were true, some companies would see this as a big feature. Right now, you have to either trust your server admin, or keep your files on your laptop and hope that it doesn't get stolen/they don't get eaten.
Otherwise, then yes, I can't see what huge benefits this has over a fileserver with proper permissions (or, say, Linux+XFS+ACLs if you need finer-grained access control).
Exactly; popups in your browser are a result of the browser engine getting an instruction to open a new window. Would you want to have to download a plugin for CSS or Javascript to work? Or JPEG images? Of course not. Mozilla simply provides a way to respond differently to a combination of window.open and onload instructions.
And yes, Mozilla does bundle several applications into one package, but note that they are moving away from this, and eventually everything will be released as separate components. I suspect that it was done this way originally to cater to Netscape users who were used to getting their "suite".
There may be a reason for this (I also find it easier to sleep with white noise, computer noise being the sort I'm likely to have around).
When I was a baby, I would often not go to sleep until my parents turned on the vacuum cleaner. This may sound strange, but apparently the sound from a vacuum cleaner is similar to the sounds we hear inside the womb, so it's comforting. I'd imagine that noise from fans gives a similar effect.
The other thing is that I can't hear those tiny noises in my walls and closet that tend to keep me awake.
Apple uses open standards which can be implemented by all, including Free software projects. Their entire desktop, aside from having BSD Unix underneath, is heavily reliant on PDF. They make it easy to interoperate with others.
Microsoft makes up their own "standards", and the market uses them because Microsoft has a monopoly. When they do release specs, the specs are wrong (ask the Samba team). When they do implement real standards, they change them in incompatible ways and make life hard for those who need interoperability with pretty much every other system.
You might argue that Apple only does this because they have to, having such a small market share. That may be true, but we don't have access to an alternate reality to find out, so we have to look at the current real-life situation.
Additionally, the Apple integration of hardware and software is the reason their computers work so well. You don't have to like it, but it seems to be catching on. And Microsoft does sell keyboards, mice, and Xboxes.
FWIW, I run Linux and can't use iTMS, but that is OK. Most CDs I buy are for $5-$10 at a show immediatly after seeing the band play for the first time (and the shows often cost less than $10 too). None of the bands I see would be arrogant enough to cripple their CDs, because they actually want people to hear their music. And if my friend, who uses iTMS, wants to put some songs from it on a CD for me, he can hand me a standard CD with no problems.
Leaving the issue of your use of the word "pirate" aside, there are many legitimate music sources which distribute things in MP3 format only, or worse, RealAudio. Want to listen to some of the new Los Amigos Invisibles tracks before the album hits the U.S.? Of course you do; who doesn't like sexually explicit Spanish disco? But they're in RealAudio format. Fortunately, Real has a player available, or you can use their codecs with MPlayer.
You should also not forget about services such as Emusic.com, or the fact that many people (like myself) have hardware MP3 players, and so have an incentive to rip everything to MP3 instead. A cheap, portable MP3 discman was worth using an encoder of dubious legal status. I'm not going to spend several hundred dollars on a less flexible player, while my old one works fine, just to be able to use Ogg.
Don't get me wrong; I also use Debian, and I use as little proprietary software as possible. But I already had an nVidia card, and they are the best supported under Linux anyway. I want to watch fan-subtitled anime sometimes (which is legally grey, but responsible fansub distribution is tolerated by copyright holders, as they understand it will generate interest in a commercial release. Plus, some anime NEVER has a commercial release).
I am generally much more happy with Free software, but sometimes you need a tiny chunk of not-entirely-Free-as-in-Holy code to make things much easier on you. The goal is to eventually make these go away.
Technically, according to RMS, Vim and djbdns are non-free, but I'm not going to stop using them.
Almost all (if not all) of freshmeat.net's pages rely on the database, as that is where all of the project content is stored. It's written in PHP. I believe there may be some sort of cache in between at least some of the public pages and the Internet, but I'm not sure. We get a few hits now and then.
This is especially true for applications like a search engine, where it's difficult to implement them without hitting the database multiple times.
...but where the hell do I buy it? A google search for "Chicony KBP9805" gives me a bunch of links in a Cyrillic language that seem to be looking for or providing drivers. When chicory.com finally finished loading, I couldn't find any "where to buy" links. Does anyone actually sell this product?
I'm still using an old IBM keyboard, but it annoys me because my model doesn't have any LEDs, so I can't tell if any of the *lock keys are on.
I still have the floppy from my first 486 SX-25, but it's in the TV machine. I have never needed a floppy for my main machine (both are Debian). I know it still works because my brother did some artwork for an album cover a while back and put it on a floppy.
My parents are using the first modem I ever got, a 33.6 with fax (no voice). Cheapest, most generic one available at the MarketPro show ($100).
How To Win Friends and Influence people is an excellent book. I recommend it to anyone. I will admit that its effect on me was a bit warped; I still have an attitude problem, but now I express it in a way that makes people laugh.:)
You're right about the academic environment, too. I know that I can't escape the politics by working here; far from it. You basically have to ask yourself if you are more comfortable with people stepping on each other for appearances or money. Personally, as long as I can pretty much keep myself out of it and work out solutions that I find acceptable, I'm OK in a university setting, and my OSS leanings are more appreciated.
In martial arts, one very large obstacle is actually training yourself to be able to move without regard for your opponent. If you sweep their leg as if it were not there, and your lines are correct, their leg will go flying. Most people, however, naturally "put on the brakes" when a part of their body approaches something else, even if they think they're hitting it as hard as possible. That's why my teacher says things like, "Don't think about sweeping a foot, think about moving your leg", and "We don't have to worry about what they do, because we follow our plan. Punch is loaded? Check the shoulder. Hand is down? Check the shoulder. Punch is on the way? Check the shoulder." It works, if you can just keep your brain from getting in the way.
It seems to me that in this aspect, robots would have the advantage.
I know a lot of happy OS X users. I was the one who made the (successful) push to replace all the Windows desktops with OS X as I was leaving the Retriever Weekly (graduating). I think that OS X is a fine desktop, but my desktop at home is still Enlightenment on Linux.
Why? The Mac doesn't offer anything over Linux that matters to me, and it has some design elements that annoy me. I'm also cheap out of necessity: I haven't bought an entire new computer, ever, and actually enjoy my Frankenstein PCs. I don't spend "hours" on them because I know what I'm doing, but just like someone who likes to work on cars, I didn't mind back when I did spend hours on them.
Installing new applications is mostly trivial. Debian almost always has an application that's right for the task that I'm trying to do, and installing graphical applications automatically puts them in the Debian X menu hierarchy. Not that I use it; I have my own small, custom, efficient menu instead. I greatly prefer a tiny menu which comes up right under my pointer, and windows that spawn there, to a "dock".
I also curse Apple for removing windowshading. Bad! In E, I often have stacks of windowshaded Mozilla windows, which are identifiable as long as the page has a reasonable title. I have a 1600 x 1200 display and multiple desktops, but I would still run short on space without windowshading. And yes, I am using tabs; most of the windows have multiple tabs open. I can ALSO minimize apps down to the pager, which shows either an icon for the app or a tiny snapshot of it.
The multiple desktop solutions I've seen for OS X have all been hacks, to the point where they had limitations which were unreasonable to me (something like not being able to have the same app, like Terminal, in more than one desktop). All of my desktops are littered with Eterms.
I know that I am not the "average" user. I prefer The GIMP to Photoshop (sorry, not publishing a printed paper here). I prefer GNUcash because I can do accounting. Eterms far outnumber the real GUI apps on my desktop. I check my email with mutt and Vim. But I just wanted to point out that OS X, wonderful though it may be, is not the super-solution for everyone. If you are "frustrated" with Linux but don't want to go back to Windows, you will probably like it. But I am not frustrated with Linux.
How do you roll back updates using SUS? From what I could tell reading the documentation Microsoft provides, it's basically a "run your own Windows Update Server" where you decide which patches to let through and hope that the Automatic Updates function on the end-users' desktops installs the updates. I didn't see anything about removing updates; maybe that's actually a function of something else you're running, like AD? We're using Novell here. Is everything in your setup free (as in beer, obviously)? We're a university department in a state with a severe deficit, so expensive licensing wouldn't go over well.
I was happy to see that Microsoft plans to add the ability to deploy Office updates with the next installment of SUS.
Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V certainly don't work at Windows XP's command prompt. You have to use the right click method. I'm not really sure why they did this; Ctrl-V, at least, does nothing at all special there (just prints "^V" to the prompt).
And yes, it's nice that Windows provides a framework which _allows_ people to build consistent applications, but that doesn't mean they always do. WinAmp is one big example, and Quicktime is a particularly horrible one. If you think this only happens with freeware, I have an expensive GPS app to sell you. Microsoft doesn't have magic bullets which kill bad design (well, I guess that was obvious).
I haven not (in recent memory) come across an application in Linux (aside from StarOffice 5.2, which had an evil UI and doesn't count anymore) where the middle-click method didn't work, and Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V is also available in all of the applications where I have needed it for replace-paste (OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc.). I believe that it may be slightly "lower-level" than Windows copy/paste, and therefore sometimes problems can supposedly happen when pasting interesting data between applications, but this has never bitten me.
To "fully update" Red Hat 9.0 only takes 300MB worth of downloads? That's pretty impressive, considering that encompasses the operating system and all of the applications, many of which are probably not installed on your system. A large distribution like Debian distributes multiple gigabytes of software, so if the total size of their updates is not far greater than the total size of updates for Windows, something is badly out of place.
Windows XP service pack 1a is 125M, which includes the OS, IE, media player, and OE. There have been a good many patches since then. On a typical system here (P-III, 128M of RAM) SP1a really does take nearly an hour, and that's pulling it from the CD.
As far as games, for a gamer like _me_, it's all about the consoles. I see very little in the Windows-only gaming world that interests me even a bit. When the latest nVidia cards can cost as much as _two_ game consoles, you have to wonder.
I've also used both Xchat (under Windows and Linux) and mIRC, as well as a few console IRC programs, and I'd have to say that I've found Xchat to be a great piece of software, while mIRC is worth two flushes. I had a similar experience with news readers; the ones people seem to like under Windows (like agent) seem like total ass in comparison with Pan.
As for the article, I'm sure it was quite tongue-in-cheek (I know Roblimo), and as others pointed out, it's very similar to the vast number of "Linux sucks because it's not the same as Windows" articles.
And sorry, but I've used 2000 and XP (current job) at work, and I still think Enlightenment is a far better desktop environment. I used to be one of the Tweak-UI, latest beta of Windows 98 just to see how cool it was crowd. I ran Litestep and Xmouse. I know about all the little options for Windows, and it's still not as good for me. I feel compelled to "admit" nothing.
As an aside, jMax is one excellent Linux application which is not available for Windows, but most people prefer to make music in...more traditional ways (it's the successor to Max, the software Aphex Twin uses on his Mac).
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You can listen to, ahem, certain college radio stations online. Yes, this is a shameless plug, but I will say that if you can't find anything you like on WMBC, there are plenty of other stations that broadcast. But we use Linux and our custom software is open source :)
And yes, our lo-fi stream (32k mono) generally works fine with dialup.
Yes, Mac IE used to be better than Windows IE; it was even the most standards-compliant browser for a time. But that was a long while ago in software time.
You really should not use software:
1. That is no longer supported
2. written by Microsoft
3. to access the Internet.
IE on the Mac (and on Windows, for the moment) is behind on standards compliance and features, and by standing still, it's only going to get worse.
Perhaps the parent poster could have phrased things a bit differently, but I'm amazed that more people didn't post replies like this.
Debian tests "frozen" for months and months before releasing, since they don't have to keep their latest release hidden as an incentive to get "subscribers" to support their business.
If 6-month-old software just isn't l337 enough for you, even packages which go into "testing" have to sit for at least a few weeks with no critical bugs.
That, and Lucky Goldstar has always been a manufacturer of...bargain products. I paid extra for my Plextor CD-RW, but it rips flawlessly and can read CDs which choke other drives.
A real benefit of always staying one step behind bleeding edge is cost. PC components which are sold in "grades" (such as speed in mhz) have always had a point where the price jumps up for increasingly less of a performance gain. Buy just below the jump, and you'll be happier later.
[I still remember buying the K6 166 while my friend bought the 233 for a lot more money. The 233 was an anomaly that run at a much higher (and hotter) voltage. I was able to clock my 166 at 210, and it still ran cooler. Plus, with a faster bus speed (83 vs. 66) it actually beat the 233 in some cases. Of course, overclocking isn't nearly as worthwile these days, especially if you run Linux.]
Yes, it's right there in the UI: you can specify sites that are allowed to use popups. As for cookies, you can set Mozilla to prompt you each time a site tries to set a cookie, have it remember your decision, and go in and manage the cookies/cookie sites. As of 1.5, you can apply a cookie decision to all sites in a domain (foo.cnn.com, bar.cnn.com, etc.).
Also note that Mozilla disables _unrequested_ popup windows. If you request the new window (e.g. by clicking a link), it will still work fine without any special setup.
Mozilla can also be set to prevent sites from resizing existing windows, harassing you with scrolling status bar marquees, changing the focus of windows, and more.
I always thought that GNUcash was more of a "personal finances" program, and the intro on their site seems to agree. I think that Appgen was more "corporate accounting".
:) It also does seem like it would be possible for a small business to use it, as it does have AP and AR sections (which I use for roommates), though these don't seem to be tied to any sort of inventory system. But they do mention "Small Business Accounting Features" in their latest release.
I'm certainly not bashing GNUcash; I use it myself, and you would sustain severe injury trying to take it from me.
Babylon 5, all flamewars aside, stands out from other series of its kind mainly because the entire 5-season storyline was written ahead of time. There were story arcs spanning multiple seasons, as well as fun little non-arc episodes. This is in contrast to most series, where the people behind it might come up with a rough overall sketch for the next season, but there's no solid framework that's been well thought out in advance, and when your ability to come up with new ideas falls behind the schedule of shows, it comes apart.
So maybe the way to keep people playing is to not keep them playing, so to speak. Come out with a game and say, "This game will be around until November 2005" (if it came out today). Have a coherent overall storyline and subplots, with contingency plans in case the users change the flow of things too far in one direction. Create an ultimate evil that needs HORDES of high-level warriors of all sorts to even meet face-to-face, let alone kill. And maybe in the end, if they don't have the strength, the players lose! Have events play out so that the big climactic battle is about a month before the game itself ends to provide a little coda and see what happens.
I think planning ahead like this will merge the best elements of offline RPGs and MMORPGs. There probably will be "heroes", or at least local badasses that everyone in town knows because they are fanatical players and have amazing powers.
This would be far cooler than, say, PSO Online: "Well, 534 teams of 4 people each have destroyed the 'ultimate evil' repeatedly, and that's just today." Better to have a definitive end, going out with a bang and all that.
This isn't AOL "recommending" that users turn off the service. If Comcast could magically go in through my cablemodem and shut down my (completely internal) instance of PostgreSQL, I'd be pretty cheesed. Would that mean they could also alter or delete any anti-Comcast documents they found hanging around? Wouldn't AOL's userbase be the type to have programs "remember" their password for, say, their online banking?
/. readers would revolt at that very concept, but AOL's userbase doesn't care about it. Similarly, they will probably think "AOL turned off popups! They're so great! I've got mail!", without realizing the privacy implications.
You are probably right about some EULA giving them the "right" to do this, however (assuming that EULAs are enforcable...oh wait, I live in a UCITA state). Last I checked, they still used their own TCP stack on Windows. Many
I went to SGI's "Linux University" a few years ago (back when they were saying, "We're about to release XFS for Linux, and here's why it's the best filesystem in the known universe"), and Jeremy Allison was one of the speakers. I enjoyed the session, and even got to talk to him for a few minutes afterwards.
One of the things that stuck with me was him expressing the hope that people would eventually stop using Samba because it would no longer be required. He regards SMB as an awful protocol, and isn't much for Windows as a desktop operating system either. I'm sure most software developers realize that their code, no matter how important now, will eventually fade away, but it's interesting to think of someone happily coding away and at the same time _hoping_ for the day when their primary project is no longer useful.
So if it's possible, has anyone done it? If so, and another file sync tool exists which has superior bandwidth utilisation, why not post a link to it? Why hasn't it already become more popular than rsync?
You would really be "entitled" to bash rsync if you had come up with a superior implementation yourself, but I would hope you could at least point one out.
Then again, I believe that Novell has separate permissions for "read" and "copy" on files, so you could use that (and use it on Linux). Disclaimer: this is something I overheard from a Novell admin. They or my memory may be wrong.
Of course, I'm not sure if that prevents "Save As", and it almost certainly doesn't prevent printing the screen.
Even though it's not nearly as good a deal now as it once was, $9.99 for 40 tracks is still 25 cents per track, compared with 99. And emusic has artists I actually want to hear, like Belle and Sebastion, Apples in Stereo, The Pixies, etc. I don't care if Apple is the only one to have The Eagles, because The Eagles suck large, moss-covered rocks, and I don't love the RIAA much either.
The files only come as VBR MP3s, but that's OK with me since I have a hardware MP3 player (CD-based) that I probably won't be upgrading until it breaks.
Oh, and there's the matter of it actually working (officially!) with Linux, though I assume that's probably x86 Linux only. But still, that's much better than other sites that inanely restrict you to IE on Windows. It also says that "Other operating systems may work...", but they won't provide support for them.
Does this new rights system use encryption? Can it keep the "Administrator" user from reading documents that the higher-ups don't want him to read? I'm sure that if this were true, some companies would see this as a big feature. Right now, you have to either trust your server admin, or keep your files on your laptop and hope that it doesn't get stolen/they don't get eaten.
Otherwise, then yes, I can't see what huge benefits this has over a fileserver with proper permissions (or, say, Linux+XFS+ACLs if you need finer-grained access control).
Exactly; popups in your browser are a result of the browser engine getting an instruction to open a new window. Would you want to have to download a plugin for CSS or Javascript to work? Or JPEG images? Of course not. Mozilla simply provides a way to respond differently to a combination of window.open and onload instructions.
And yes, Mozilla does bundle several applications into one package, but note that they are moving away from this, and eventually everything will be released as separate components. I suspect that it was done this way originally to cater to Netscape users who were used to getting their "suite".
There may be a reason for this (I also find it easier to sleep with white noise, computer noise being the sort I'm likely to have around).
When I was a baby, I would often not go to sleep until my parents turned on the vacuum cleaner. This may sound strange, but apparently the sound from a vacuum cleaner is similar to the sounds we hear inside the womb, so it's comforting. I'd imagine that noise from fans gives a similar effect.
The other thing is that I can't hear those tiny noises in my walls and closet that tend to keep me awake.
Apple uses open standards which can be implemented by all, including Free software projects. Their entire desktop, aside from having BSD Unix underneath, is heavily reliant on PDF. They make it easy to interoperate with others.
Microsoft makes up their own "standards", and the market uses them because Microsoft has a monopoly. When they do release specs, the specs are wrong (ask the Samba team). When they do implement real standards, they change them in incompatible ways and make life hard for those who need interoperability with pretty much every other system.
You might argue that Apple only does this because they have to, having such a small market share. That may be true, but we don't have access to an alternate reality to find out, so we have to look at the current real-life situation.
Additionally, the Apple integration of hardware and software is the reason their computers work so well. You don't have to like it, but it seems to be catching on. And Microsoft does sell keyboards, mice, and Xboxes.
FWIW, I run Linux and can't use iTMS, but that is OK. Most CDs I buy are for $5-$10 at a show immediatly after seeing the band play for the first time (and the shows often cost less than $10 too). None of the bands I see would be arrogant enough to cripple their CDs, because they actually want people to hear their music. And if my friend, who uses iTMS, wants to put some songs from it on a CD for me, he can hand me a standard CD with no problems.
Leaving the issue of your use of the word "pirate" aside, there are many legitimate music sources which distribute things in MP3 format only, or worse, RealAudio. Want to listen to some of the new Los Amigos Invisibles tracks before the album hits the U.S.? Of course you do; who doesn't like sexually explicit Spanish disco? But they're in RealAudio format. Fortunately, Real has a player available, or you can use their codecs with MPlayer.
You should also not forget about services such as Emusic.com, or the fact that many people (like myself) have hardware MP3 players, and so have an incentive to rip everything to MP3 instead. A cheap, portable MP3 discman was worth using an encoder of dubious legal status. I'm not going to spend several hundred dollars on a less flexible player, while my old one works fine, just to be able to use Ogg.
Don't get me wrong; I also use Debian, and I use as little proprietary software as possible. But I already had an nVidia card, and they are the best supported under Linux anyway. I want to watch fan-subtitled anime sometimes (which is legally grey, but responsible fansub distribution is tolerated by copyright holders, as they understand it will generate interest in a commercial release. Plus, some anime NEVER has a commercial release).
I am generally much more happy with Free software, but sometimes you need a tiny chunk of not-entirely-Free-as-in-Holy code to make things much easier on you. The goal is to eventually make these go away.
Technically, according to RMS, Vim and djbdns are non-free, but I'm not going to stop using them.
Almost all (if not all) of freshmeat.net's pages rely on the database, as that is where all of the project content is stored. It's written in PHP. I believe there may be some sort of cache in between at least some of the public pages and the Internet, but I'm not sure. We get a few hits now and then.
This is especially true for applications like a search engine, where it's difficult to implement them without hitting the database multiple times.
...but where the hell do I buy it? A google search for "Chicony KBP9805" gives me a bunch of links in a Cyrillic language that seem to be looking for or providing drivers. When chicory.com finally finished loading, I couldn't find any "where to buy" links. Does anyone actually sell this product?
I'm still using an old IBM keyboard, but it annoys me because my model doesn't have any LEDs, so I can't tell if any of the *lock keys are on.
I still have the floppy from my first 486 SX-25, but it's in the TV machine. I have never needed a floppy for my main machine (both are Debian). I know it still works because my brother did some artwork for an album cover a while back and put it on a floppy.
My parents are using the first modem I ever got, a 33.6 with fax (no voice). Cheapest, most generic one available at the MarketPro show ($100).
How To Win Friends and Influence people is an excellent book. I recommend it to anyone. I will admit that its effect on me was a bit warped; I still have an attitude problem, but now I express it in a way that makes people laugh. :)
You're right about the academic environment, too. I know that I can't escape the politics by working here; far from it. You basically have to ask yourself if you are more comfortable with people stepping on each other for appearances or money. Personally, as long as I can pretty much keep myself out of it and work out solutions that I find acceptable, I'm OK in a university setting, and my OSS leanings are more appreciated.
In martial arts, one very large obstacle is actually training yourself to be able to move without regard for your opponent. If you sweep their leg as if it were not there, and your lines are correct, their leg will go flying. Most people, however, naturally "put on the brakes" when a part of their body approaches something else, even if they think they're hitting it as hard as possible. That's why my teacher says things like, "Don't think about sweeping a foot, think about moving your leg", and "We don't have to worry about what they do, because we follow our plan. Punch is loaded? Check the shoulder. Hand is down? Check the shoulder. Punch is on the way? Check the shoulder." It works, if you can just keep your brain from getting in the way.
It seems to me that in this aspect, robots would have the advantage.
I know a lot of happy OS X users. I was the one who made the (successful) push to replace all the Windows desktops with OS X as I was leaving the Retriever Weekly (graduating). I think that OS X is a fine desktop, but my desktop at home is still Enlightenment on Linux.
Why? The Mac doesn't offer anything over Linux that matters to me, and it has some design elements that annoy me. I'm also cheap out of necessity: I haven't bought an entire new computer, ever, and actually enjoy my Frankenstein PCs. I don't spend "hours" on them because I know what I'm doing, but just like someone who likes to work on cars, I didn't mind back when I did spend hours on them.
Installing new applications is mostly trivial. Debian almost always has an application that's right for the task that I'm trying to do, and installing graphical applications automatically puts them in the Debian X menu hierarchy. Not that I use it; I have my own small, custom, efficient menu instead. I greatly prefer a tiny menu which comes up right under my pointer, and windows that spawn there, to a "dock".
I also curse Apple for removing windowshading. Bad! In E, I often have stacks of windowshaded Mozilla windows, which are identifiable as long as the page has a reasonable title. I have a 1600 x 1200 display and multiple desktops, but I would still run short on space without windowshading. And yes, I am using tabs; most of the windows have multiple tabs open. I can ALSO minimize apps down to the pager, which shows either an icon for the app or a tiny snapshot of it.
The multiple desktop solutions I've seen for OS X have all been hacks, to the point where they had limitations which were unreasonable to me (something like not being able to have the same app, like Terminal, in more than one desktop). All of my desktops are littered with Eterms.
I know that I am not the "average" user. I prefer The GIMP to Photoshop (sorry, not publishing a printed paper here). I prefer GNUcash because I can do accounting. Eterms far outnumber the real GUI apps on my desktop. I check my email with mutt and Vim. But I just wanted to point out that OS X, wonderful though it may be, is not the super-solution for everyone. If you are "frustrated" with Linux but don't want to go back to Windows, you will probably like it. But I am not frustrated with Linux.
How do you roll back updates using SUS? From what I could tell reading the documentation Microsoft provides, it's basically a "run your own Windows Update Server" where you decide which patches to let through and hope that the Automatic Updates function on the end-users' desktops installs the updates. I didn't see anything about removing updates; maybe that's actually a function of something else you're running, like AD? We're using Novell here. Is everything in your setup free (as in beer, obviously)? We're a university department in a state with a severe deficit, so expensive licensing wouldn't go over well.
I was happy to see that Microsoft plans to add the ability to deploy Office updates with the next installment of SUS.
Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V certainly don't work at Windows XP's command prompt. You have to use the right click method. I'm not really sure why they did this; Ctrl-V, at least, does nothing at all special there (just prints "^V" to the prompt).
And yes, it's nice that Windows provides a framework which _allows_ people to build consistent applications, but that doesn't mean they always do. WinAmp is one big example, and Quicktime is a particularly horrible one. If you think this only happens with freeware, I have an expensive GPS app to sell you. Microsoft doesn't have magic bullets which kill bad design (well, I guess that was obvious).
I haven not (in recent memory) come across an application in Linux (aside from StarOffice 5.2, which had an evil UI and doesn't count anymore) where the middle-click method didn't work, and Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V is also available in all of the applications where I have needed it for replace-paste (OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc.). I believe that it may be slightly "lower-level" than Windows copy/paste, and therefore sometimes problems can supposedly happen when pasting interesting data between applications, but this has never bitten me.
To "fully update" Red Hat 9.0 only takes 300MB worth of downloads? That's pretty impressive, considering that encompasses the operating system and all of the applications, many of which are probably not installed on your system. A large distribution like Debian distributes multiple gigabytes of software, so if the total size of their updates is not far greater than the total size of updates for Windows, something is badly out of place.
Windows XP service pack 1a is 125M, which includes the OS, IE, media player, and OE. There have been a good many patches since then. On a typical system here (P-III, 128M of RAM) SP1a really does take nearly an hour, and that's pulling it from the CD.
As far as games, for a gamer like _me_, it's all about the consoles. I see very little in the Windows-only gaming world that interests me even a bit. When the latest nVidia cards can cost as much as _two_ game consoles, you have to wonder.
I've also used both Xchat (under Windows and Linux) and mIRC, as well as a few console IRC programs, and I'd have to say that I've found Xchat to be a great piece of software, while mIRC is worth two flushes. I had a similar experience with news readers; the ones people seem to like under Windows (like agent) seem like total ass in comparison with Pan.
As for the article, I'm sure it was quite tongue-in-cheek (I know Roblimo), and as others pointed out, it's very similar to the vast number of "Linux sucks because it's not the same as Windows" articles.
And sorry, but I've used 2000 and XP (current job) at work, and I still think Enlightenment is a far better desktop environment. I used to be one of the Tweak-UI, latest beta of Windows 98 just to see how cool it was crowd. I ran Litestep and Xmouse. I know about all the little options for Windows, and it's still not as good for me. I feel compelled to "admit" nothing.
As an aside, jMax is one excellent Linux application which is not available for Windows, but most people prefer to make music in...more traditional ways (it's the successor to Max, the software Aphex Twin uses on his Mac).