It's occurred to me that there's a batch of DeCSS mirrors out there, but no way to locate them besides the random/. post. In an effort to change this, i've stuck up a list page so that people with mirrors can mail their urls to me (see my address above or use the mailto on the page) at http://decss.linux0wnsyou.com
-dk
Re:Sick of "We Don't Want Personal Stuff Here."
on
Geeks in Suits
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· Score: 3
instead of a long winded counter-counter-counter-argument, i'll just refer you back to the last counter-argument...if you just want straight news, why not read the other weblogs that do basically the same stuff?
there are those of us in the community who love seeing this stuff (btw, congrats chris:) even if it isn't strictly technological news, it's definitely _community news_ and for some of us here, it's most definitely stuff that matters.
afaik,/. has never had the motto "news for nerds: purely technological stuff that bugzilla wants to see"
An example is RedHat 6.1 compared to 6.0, to make it more "easy" to install and less chance of going wrong, users are prevented from running fdisk during installation. (RH are you listening? Put it back...)
last i looked there was a "Use fdisk" button in the install...as well as the old X staple, ctrl-alt-f2 -dk
"And, I'm sorry, but/. shouldn't be interviewing convicted felons."
I disagree.../. should be interviewing whomever/.ers want interviewed (who will agree to submit to it, of course) If the majority of people on/. want hitler interviewed, there should be made at least a token gesture in that direction.
and lastly, invoking an ancient usenet law concerning the introduction of hitler into any particular discussion, i now declare this thread dead.
we should institute a street-fighter style of naming convention.... imagine the press releases...
RedHat today announced the release of the next version of their linux operating system, RedHat Linux 7.3 Alpha Turbo Hyper-Fighting Championship Edition 2, Revenge of the Bride of M. Bison...
at the very least it'd be more fun than just numerics;P
ok, i just spent a half hour writing up a post and realized i suck at marketing
my opinion about pegasus is slightly biased since i'm the head linux goon there, so i won't give you a load of marketing bull...but i will dole out some blatant self-promotion:)
we're mainly a unix operation, our main machines are sun enterprise-class ultrasparc boxen running solaris
our network is connected to the world via 14 ds3 lines
we're _all_ geeks, even the poor NT guys (yes, we support NT and no, we don't particularly like it) and we're anal about uptime, security, and network speed.
for some sites that we host, check out www.ecards.org www.technimentals.com and, of course, our page at www.pwebtech.com
on a more personal note, i've never worked for a better company than this...it's the kind of company where the owner, our boss, wigs out and buys himself and the entire tech department voodoo3 cards so we can kick the crap out of each other playing Unreal Tournament after hours (the new cards were a necessity since we all, even the company owner, run linux on our office workstations, the linux UT binaries are 3dfx-only, and we weren't about to insult perfectly good linux boxen by installing windows on them)
if anyone wants more info on our hosting or our systems give me a hollar at unixtech@pwebtech.com for our main unix tech email or dave@pwebtech.com for my personal mailbox:)
i'd have to say that while most people hope that the changeover goes through without a hitch, yet EVERYONE seems intent on the fact that the world's gonna end, i'd have to say in reality it's probably somewhere mildly in between the two.
no, planes probably won't fall out of the sky and no, the electrical cord on your toaster won't try to strangle you without provocation.
most probably, you'll see a few hours of power outages in random places depending on the readiness of your local power company. isp's probably will have a little trouble (at least the lazy ones who refuse to upgrade their software;P) and a myriad of other little things may go wrong but nothing really catastrophic, in the states at least.
the only major fear that i'd express is the thought that some countries (mostly russia) that have nuclear capabilities, but may not have the funding necessary to get everything cleared up by jan. 1st and as such could possibly experience some scary situations. but at the last i really cannot say how worried we should be about something like this since i, for one, have absolutely no idea what the state of readiness is in these countries.
but like i said, for the most part, lots of little things should go wrong...just annoying stuff that we don't have the time nor the temperment to fix yet, there's the possibility for a massive disaster of apocolyptic scale, but i, for one, will assume that it's a slim possibility...mostly because there's not a damn thing i can do about it and it'll help me sleep better in the later days of december if i'm not worried about russia's government computer systems accidentally blanketing the states with nukes on jan. 1st...not to mention, i'm also assuming that this is one of those "high priority" items that they probably got started on fairly early:)
one thing that nobody has brought up yet is the _size_ of dvd movies as it relates to piracy.
think about it... 9 gigs of data? even if you're on a ds3 that'd still be an ugly download. imagine trying to download that on a modem connection! granted, the iso scene is thriving due to cable and adsl, along with all the college kids with Tx lines on campus, but even within the iso scene the hideously large ones don't see much traffic. think about baldur's gate (5 cds). it made its way around the iso scene for about a month and then disappeared because people, in general, wanted to free up space on their systems and the vast majority of pirates really just didn't feel like sitting and downloading about 3gb of data, especially on a modem connection. and that's only about 1/3 of what we're talking about for dvd movies. someone on a 56k connection wouldn't even entertain the notion of downloading 9 gigs of data, for ANY reason. until we all have ds3 lines to our houses, dvd piracy on the net will be virtually nonexistent, and the realware piracy (people physically trading and copying dvd's) isn't going to be enough of an issue to make anyone even the slightest bit nervous about lost revenues.
i think that most people will find that this whole shebang is nothing more than your standard industry reaction to the evil computer geeks lancing their illusory security bubble and once the movie industry's wide-eyed, white-knuckled fear of the evil techiepeople subsides we can all go back to doing what we were all doing before. the industries can keep making it tougher to crack their security and some 14 year old l33t d00d |-|aXx0r out in rural idaho will keep cracking it with ease. and meanwhile all us happy little geeks can go do what we wanted to do in the first place...buy and/or rent dvd movies and watch them on our tv's and in little windows on our desktops:)
although something deep inside me shudders at the thought of all these uber-newbie dists, it seems as though they are indeed helping people slowly along the road to linux.
i know a bunch of people who, after hearing me scream religiously about linux for months on end, want to try linux, but fear it a little and don't want to mess up their nice shiny windows machines. i can think of about a dozen people offhand that i know who are using the winlinux-ish thinghies as a "safe" method of testing the waters of linux without going through a full blown install/partition/mess-up/reinstall/etc.:P
i'm still not entirely sure if this is a Good Thing (tm) or not, but i don't think it'll be too harmful as long as we keep assuring those we know that it's not quite the real thing and not nearly as exciting as doing a "real" install;)
well said. all the points you raise are exactly the types of points i was talking about when i praised discussions of this type.
when i use the terms trivial and importance, i mean them in a _strictly philosophical sense_ in fact, you can say i mean them even more strictly in an existentialist, pseudo-postmodernist sense. a very Nietzschean, Ortegan type of sense in which we have to make the distinction between the claim that Shakespeare was the greatest playwright of all time because he wrote the best plays and the claim that Shakespeare was the greatest playwrite of all time because he COULD HAVE written the best plays.
In the above example, the first bit is non-trivial since it talks about actually extant things/situations...the second bit is trivial because (i know you see where i'm goin here...) it talks about potential and/or non-extant events/things.
the reason i like discussions like this, precicely for the points to raise, is because they tend to spin off into discussions that are non-trivial...just what you're talking about, what ifs that are a little more grounded in reality than the original question "what if linux wasn't open source"...the answer to which would only be non-trivial if we could reach back in time and actually make linux closed source.
i had hoped that i had made myself clear that this was a purely philosophical stance and not in any way an attempt to speak authoritatively on the subject, nor on the potential Good or Bad that could come from the discussion thereof.
while "what if" questions are entertaining, and tend to cause enormous amounts of controversy as everyone's supremely biased opinions come flailing out, they are, in all reality, trivial.
before i lace into the collective of/.ers who are, even now, forming strong opinions and typing them out at blinding speed with all the loving care they can muster, i do fell it's necessary to disclaim it all by saying that i do approve of "what if" questions, simply because they are questions. now on to the fun.
Simply put, "what if" questions are questions dealing with fantasy and nothing more. asking "what if linux wasn't open source" carries about the same amount of importance as asking "what if gandalf's beard had been made of blue cheese"
while there are intricately complex philosophical arguments dealing with this very issue (whether or not we can talk, in a non-trivial manner, about nonexistent entities or situations) the result is usually the answer: no, we cannot. even though it makes for lively and, at times, interesting discussions...the simple truth of it is that such conversations are, by nature, moot.
even more simply: the answer to "What if linux wasn't open source?" and, indeed, every other "what if" question is, "it isn't."
linux _IS_ open source and it doesn't really make much sense to talk about it not being open source.
that having been said, i do believe that any rational discussion of ANY topic between humans is a Good Thing (tm) and that such conversations, irregardless of what they are about, are necessary for the further development of humans in general (and the humans involved, specifically) and i'm sure that no matter how trivial the question behind it all, this particular discussion will have interesting, insightful, informative, humorous (you get the point) posts.
just bear in mind, before you begin aiming your well-polished (and possibly overused) flamethrowers at each other, that the question you are arguing so vehemently over is, in a strictly philosophical sense, completely trivial and of no importance whatsoever;)
personally, i think the general problem of misportrayl of geekdom in movies, while worse than most misportrayls, is part of a general underlying problem in hollywood moviemaking
the problem, simply, is that they do not have a clue how to make a decent movie.
don't misread that. their technical knowledge is unparalelled and their ability to shoot and edit "correctly" is better than people generally can understand. my argument is with the general "feel" behind the movies they make. much like the train wreck that the latest star wars installment turned out to be, 99% of hollywood's movies are overly formulaic (sp?), dumbed-down (think jar-jar), and generally devoid of any kind of creative, emotional, or intellectual content.
a good example of this idiocy is the recent release "Stigmata". before i begin to lace into it, i'd like to state that i LOVED the idea behind the movie and i tend to enjoy the work of both patricia arquette and gabriel byrne. that having been said...there is a generic trick put into all horror movies that's fairly obligatory. you take the score, the dialogue, and all the incidental sound and slowly turn it down lower until there's barely any sound at all...and when the audience's ears have become used to the low volume make a REAL LOUD NOISE and everyone goes ACK! while this practice is, like i said, fairly obligatory...i do belive every horror movie should have at least one of these...stigmata had three of 'em and it got a little tired after the first one. a movie that had this much potential ingrained in the story and plot shouldn't have to resort to standard sophomoric moviemaking tricks to get a response from its audience.
another example, from the same movie, is the way they put together the references to st. francis. i believe he was first mentioned in the movie during the conversation in the church between gabriel byrne and the priest who had been excommunicated (i forget the character's name) then, at the end...when byrne brings patricia arquette out of the house wrapped in the blanket, they pass by a statue of st. francis which sits unobtrusively in the background (the statue of the guy with the birds, as st. francis is usually portrayed...we had a statue of him in front of the chapel of the college i went to;P) and i thought that was just absolutely PERFECT...it redeemed the entire movie for me...until she gets up and starts playing with a bird and the camera pans around to shoot her standing directly in front of the statue in the same damn pose as the statue. i very nearly threw up at that point. i don't understand hollywood's fascination with taking excellent moviemaking (that last scene up until the bit with the bird) and completely removing all the subtle emotive hints that make movies great and replacing it all with some moronic overblown in-your-face explanation of things that immediately sucks any and all life out of the movie.
this is the same general problem that geeks have, only we're the only ones who know about it because nobody else picks up on it. how many of you who saw the movie knew that the statue was st. francis? it's the same general deal with geek stuff. what percentage of the population would know a unix shell prompt from a mac gui? while this annoys me...i would rather see hackers working on old unix or vax boxen (with real damn unix or vax interfaces, none of this gui crap) it probably won't happen anytime soon. what i'm really sick over is the rest of the problem...the utter lack of imagination, talent, and creativity in the moviemaking industry.
don't take this to be a complete generalization...there are quite a few movies that are absolutely perfect, but, for me, they are generally few and far between....most of the other stuff i can put up with as long as it doesn't really attempt to be creative, i can live with it being a stale rehash of some formula. movies like "12 angry men" which takes place entirely in the jury deliberation room during a trial, or any/all movies made by stanley kubrik or alfred hichcock who both knew exactly what to do, and more importantly, what NOT to do in a movie...these movies, in their perfection, are able to get their metaphors and subject matter across to the audience without beating them over the head with it, a practice which seems to be the recourse of every halfwitted hollywood director/producer/writer/marketing agent active in the movie industry today.
any spelling errors in the above are also the fault of the moviemaking industry, i swear...;)
i'm having serious issues with this phrase... i mean, really...there's no source to open i think something like massively-paralell journalism or distributed journalism would better describe it...but then again open-source is becoming such a nifty buzzwerd that i almost expect the drooling monkies runing the media to use it in all sorts of inappropriate places
altho i don't particularly agree with the new "license" i'd rather see the whois prog ask y/n once, the first time you run it instead of each time cuz i work for a web hosting company and have to use whois at least 50 times each day...:)
most of us whine when some idiot starts hollaring about how the opensource community should do something or other to save the world from the evil monopoly boys without even knowing, as us whiners do, that it's already done...and has been for quite some time.
the most interesting thing that i've found is that in my dual-boot system, all my mp3's sound markedly better in x11amp-linux than they do in winamp-windows (whether this is due to the sound subsystem in each system or the code in the different programs, i couldn't tell you) i've noticed none of that high-end frizzly crap in x11amp...yet winamp continues to sound like someone decided to apply a flanger to all the wav files before encoding them *shrug* just one of the many little everyday reasons why i use windows for games and linux for everydamnthing else =)
an admirable point...warfare of _any_ sort is abhorrant but I still get the wierd feeling that i'd rather have my net access shut off than have a rather large chunk of bomb shrapnel sticking out of my eye.
the "ethnic cleansing" that has been occurring is horrible, the nato bombing that has been going on is horrible, and the disruption of information access that is now going on is, also, horrible. all of it is disgusting and all of it is, and should be, unnecessary. i'd have prefered a simpler, less bloody solution to the conflict (send whatever super-secret stealth assassins the gov't has after milosevic and take him out real quiet-like) but it is still better than doing nothing and allowing what has been going on to continue going on.
"...which I don't remember precisely, but the gist was that in childhood we tend to be very idealistic, pure, and good."
not entirely...it's close, but it misses the point of Nietzsche's philosophy...he disliked the word "good" (read Beyond Good and Evil) and, for him, a child is innocent...a child is the only true creator left, one who is a blank slate...one who has the ability to create for him/her-self a unique identity, untainted by the invasive efforts of other people to change us to be more like them.
Nietzsche's "Overman" (Ubermensch is _not_ translated as "superman" dammit), his idea of the final step in the evolution of man, was a child. (you can find this in "Also Sprach Zarathustra" in the aphorism about the three stages of man: camel, lion, and finally child)
"But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred 'Yes.' For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred 'Yes' is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world." --Friedrich Nietzsche
the boys in littleton were lions, they had thrown off the placid beast-of-burden attitude of the camel and found that they had the capacity to destroy so they lashed out at what had been trying to hold them down. but they never learned to create, they never quite made it to the last stage...they learned well how to say "no" but could not bring themselves to wrap their mouths around a sacred "yes" and that, for me, is the true tragedy...rarely does the camel become a lion, but more rare is the transiton from lion to child...from destroyer to creator, from anger to happiness (_not_ contentment...that is the provice of the camel).
Don't know if anyone else has brought this up, but all these stories about high school and geeks has brought to mind a text file that's been circulating the underground (and not so underground) realms of the net for a handful of years now. From what I know, it was written in jail, by The Mentor (an old old school cracker) shortly after his arrest. While it doesn't exactly fit what's going on, it comes damn close...makes some VERY good points, and is truly a beautifully written piece of literature...
Mentor's Last Words (also known as "A Hacker's Manifesto")
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"... Damn kids. They're all alike. But did you, in your three- piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world... Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me... Damn underachiever. They're all alike. I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..." Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike. I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here... Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike. And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all... Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike... You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
well, like Linus is always fond of saying in regards to his kernel updates...if you don't really need to upgrade your kernel, you probably shouldn't. If everything on their system (the 1.2.x people) is running to the best of their satisfaction well...if it ain't broke, don't fix it:)
Slashdot Mirror
It's occurred to me that there's a batch of DeCSS mirrors out there, but no way to locate them besides the random /. post. In an effort to change this, i've stuck up a list page so that people with mirrors can mail their urls to me (see my address above or use the mailto on the page) at http://decss.linux0wnsyou.com
-dk
instead of a long winded counter-counter-counter-argument, i'll just refer you back to the last counter-argument...if you just want straight news, why not read the other weblogs that do basically the same stuff?
:) even if it isn't strictly technological news, it's definitely _community news_ and for some of us here, it's most definitely stuff that matters.
/. has never had the motto "news for nerds: purely technological stuff that bugzilla wants to see"
there are those of us in the community who love seeing this stuff (btw, congrats chris
afaik,
-dk
iirc, in the text install, it should just be alt-f2 :P
;)
besides, the gui install isn't that bad...is probably a difference of about four minutes or so for me, so i don't rilly mind it
-dk
An example is RedHat 6.1 compared to 6.0, to make it more "easy" to install and less chance of going wrong, users are prevented from running fdisk during installation. (RH are you listening? Put it back...)
last i looked there was a "Use fdisk" button in the install...as well as the old X staple, ctrl-alt-f2
-dk
"We need software which is not just user-friendly, but also hacker-friendly"
"We need both."
looks a little friggin redundant to me
did you just happen to miss the word "ALSO" in the original post or what?
-dk
"And, I'm sorry, but /. shouldn't be interviewing convicted felons."
/. should be interviewing whomever /.ers want interviewed (who will agree to submit to it, of course) If the majority of people on /. want hitler interviewed, there should be made at least a token gesture in that direction.
I disagree...
and lastly, invoking an ancient usenet law concerning the introduction of hitler into any particular discussion, i now declare this thread dead.
-dk
we should institute a street-fighter style of naming convention....
;P
imagine the press releases...
RedHat today announced the release of the next version of their linux operating system, RedHat Linux 7.3 Alpha Turbo Hyper-Fighting Championship Edition 2, Revenge of the Bride of M. Bison...
at the very least it'd be more fun than just numerics
-dk
ok, i just spent a half hour writing up a post and realized i suck at marketing
:)
:)
my opinion about pegasus is slightly biased since i'm the head linux goon there, so i won't give you a load of marketing bull...but i will dole out some blatant self-promotion
we're mainly a unix operation, our main machines are sun enterprise-class ultrasparc boxen running solaris
our network is connected to the world via 14 ds3 lines
we're _all_ geeks, even the poor NT guys (yes, we support NT and no, we don't particularly like it) and we're anal about uptime, security, and network speed.
for some sites that we host, check out www.ecards.org www.technimentals.com and, of course, our page at www.pwebtech.com
on a more personal note, i've never worked for a better company than this...it's the kind of company where the owner, our boss, wigs out and buys himself and the entire tech department voodoo3 cards so we can kick the crap out of each other playing Unreal Tournament after hours (the new cards were a necessity since we all, even the company owner, run linux on our office workstations, the linux UT binaries are 3dfx-only, and we weren't about to insult perfectly good linux boxen by installing windows on them)
if anyone wants more info on our hosting or our systems give me a hollar at unixtech@pwebtech.com for our main unix tech email or dave@pwebtech.com for my personal mailbox
-dk
damn fine idea actually
:)
just get the code out to as many places as we can
after all, they can't silence ALL of us, can they?
if anyone wants to send me the source, email it to
gouki@pwebtech.com or point me at a mirror
-dk
but does rsaref qualify as a "machine?"
ok, the title's cheezy, so what :P
;P) and a myriad of other little things may go wrong but nothing really catastrophic, in the states at least.
:)
i'd have to say that while most people hope that the changeover goes through without a hitch, yet EVERYONE seems intent on the fact that the world's gonna end, i'd have to say in reality it's probably somewhere mildly in between the two.
no, planes probably won't fall out of the sky and no, the electrical cord on your toaster won't try to strangle you without provocation.
most probably, you'll see a few hours of power outages in random places depending on the readiness of your local power company. isp's probably will have a little trouble (at least the lazy ones who refuse to upgrade their software
the only major fear that i'd express is the thought that some countries (mostly russia) that have nuclear capabilities, but may not have the funding necessary to get everything cleared up by jan. 1st and as such could possibly experience some scary situations. but at the last i really cannot say how worried we should be about something like this since i, for one, have absolutely no idea what the state of readiness is in these countries.
but like i said, for the most part, lots of little things should go wrong...just annoying stuff that we don't have the time nor the temperment to fix yet, there's the possibility for a massive disaster of apocolyptic scale, but i, for one, will assume that it's a slim possibility...mostly because there's not a damn thing i can do about it and it'll help me sleep better in the later days of december if i'm not worried about russia's government computer systems accidentally blanketing the states with nukes on jan. 1st...not to mention, i'm also assuming that this is one of those "high priority" items that they probably got started on fairly early
-dk
one thing that nobody has brought up yet is the _size_ of dvd movies as it relates to piracy.
:)
think about it... 9 gigs of data? even if you're on a ds3 that'd still be an ugly download. imagine trying to download that on a modem connection! granted, the iso scene is thriving due to cable and adsl, along with all the college kids with Tx lines on campus, but even within the iso scene the hideously large ones don't see much traffic. think about baldur's gate (5 cds). it made its way around the iso scene for about a month and then disappeared because people, in general, wanted to free up space on their systems and the vast majority of pirates really just didn't feel like sitting and downloading about 3gb of data, especially on a modem connection. and that's only about 1/3 of what we're talking about for dvd movies. someone on a 56k connection wouldn't even entertain the notion of downloading 9 gigs of data, for ANY reason. until we all have ds3 lines to our houses, dvd piracy on the net will be virtually nonexistent, and the realware piracy (people physically trading and copying dvd's) isn't going to be enough of an issue to make anyone even the slightest bit nervous about lost revenues.
i think that most people will find that this whole shebang is nothing more than your standard industry reaction to the evil computer geeks lancing their illusory security bubble and once the movie industry's wide-eyed, white-knuckled fear of the evil techiepeople subsides we can all go back to doing what we were all doing before. the industries can keep making it tougher to crack their security and some 14 year old l33t d00d |-|aXx0r out in rural idaho will keep cracking it with ease. and meanwhile all us happy little geeks can go do what we wanted to do in the first place...buy and/or rent dvd movies and watch them on our tv's and in little windows on our desktops
-dk
although something deep inside me shudders at the thought of all these uber-newbie dists, it seems as though they are indeed helping people slowly along the road to linux.
:P
;)
i know a bunch of people who, after hearing me scream religiously about linux for months on end, want to try linux, but fear it a little and don't want to mess up their nice shiny windows machines. i can think of about a dozen people offhand that i know who are using the winlinux-ish thinghies as a "safe" method of testing the waters of linux without going through a full blown install/partition/mess-up/reinstall/etc.
i'm still not entirely sure if this is a Good Thing (tm) or not, but i don't think it'll be too harmful as long as we keep assuring those we know that it's not quite the real thing and not nearly as exciting as doing a "real" install
-dk
well said. all the points you raise are exactly the types of points i was talking about when i praised discussions of this type.
when i use the terms trivial and importance, i mean them in a _strictly philosophical sense_ in fact, you can say i mean them even more strictly in an existentialist, pseudo-postmodernist sense. a very Nietzschean, Ortegan type of sense in which we have to make the distinction between the claim that Shakespeare was the greatest playwright of all time because he wrote the best plays and the claim that Shakespeare was the greatest playwrite of all time because he COULD HAVE written the best plays.
In the above example, the first bit is non-trivial since it talks about actually extant things/situations...the second bit is trivial because (i know you see where i'm goin here...) it talks about potential and/or non-extant events/things.
the reason i like discussions like this, precicely for the points to raise, is because they tend to spin off into discussions that are non-trivial...just what you're talking about, what ifs that are a little more grounded in reality than the original question "what if linux wasn't open source"...the answer to which would only be non-trivial if we could reach back in time and actually make linux closed source.
i had hoped that i had made myself clear that this was a purely philosophical stance and not in any way an attempt to speak authoritatively on the subject, nor on the potential Good or Bad that could come from the discussion thereof.
-dk
while "what if" questions are entertaining, and tend to cause enormous amounts of controversy as everyone's supremely biased opinions come flailing out, they are, in all reality, trivial.
/.ers who are, even now, forming strong opinions and typing them out at blinding speed with all the loving care they can muster, i do fell it's necessary to disclaim it all by saying that i do approve of "what if" questions, simply because they are questions. now on to the fun.
;)
before i lace into the collective of
Simply put, "what if" questions are questions dealing with fantasy and nothing more. asking "what if linux wasn't open source" carries about the same amount of importance as asking "what if gandalf's beard had been made of blue cheese"
while there are intricately complex philosophical arguments dealing with this very issue (whether or not we can talk, in a non-trivial manner, about nonexistent entities or situations) the result is usually the answer: no, we cannot. even though it makes for lively and, at times, interesting discussions...the simple truth of it is that such conversations are, by nature, moot.
even more simply: the answer to "What if linux wasn't open source?" and, indeed, every other "what if" question is, "it isn't."
linux _IS_ open source and it doesn't really make much sense to talk about it not being open source.
that having been said, i do believe that any rational discussion of ANY topic between humans is a Good Thing (tm) and that such conversations, irregardless of what they are about, are necessary for the further development of humans in general (and the humans involved, specifically) and i'm sure that no matter how trivial the question behind it all, this particular discussion will have interesting, insightful, informative, humorous (you get the point) posts.
just bear in mind, before you begin aiming your well-polished (and possibly overused) flamethrowers at each other, that the question you are arguing so vehemently over is, in a strictly philosophical sense, completely trivial and of no importance whatsoever
-dk
personally, i think the general problem of misportrayl of geekdom in movies, while worse than most misportrayls, is part of a general underlying problem in hollywood moviemaking
;P) and i thought that was just absolutely PERFECT...it redeemed the entire movie for me...until she gets up and starts playing with a bird and the camera pans around to shoot her standing directly in front of the statue in the same damn pose as the statue. i very nearly threw up at that point. i don't understand hollywood's fascination with taking excellent moviemaking (that last scene up until the bit with the bird) and completely removing all the subtle emotive hints that make movies great and replacing it all with some moronic overblown in-your-face explanation of things that immediately sucks any and all life out of the movie.
;)
the problem, simply, is that they do not have a clue how to make a decent movie.
don't misread that. their technical knowledge is unparalelled and their ability to shoot and edit "correctly" is better than people generally can understand. my argument is with the general "feel" behind the movies they make. much like the train wreck that the latest star wars installment turned out to be, 99% of hollywood's movies are overly formulaic (sp?), dumbed-down (think jar-jar), and generally devoid of any kind of creative, emotional, or intellectual content.
a good example of this idiocy is the recent release "Stigmata". before i begin to lace into it, i'd like to state that i LOVED the idea behind the movie and i tend to enjoy the work of both patricia arquette and gabriel byrne. that having been said...there is a generic trick put into all horror movies that's fairly obligatory. you take the score, the dialogue, and all the incidental sound and slowly turn it down lower until there's barely any sound at all...and when the audience's ears have become used to the low volume make a REAL LOUD NOISE and everyone goes ACK! while this practice is, like i said, fairly obligatory...i do belive every horror movie should have at least one of these...stigmata had three of 'em and it got a little tired after the first one. a movie that had this much potential ingrained in the story and plot shouldn't have to resort to standard sophomoric moviemaking tricks to get a response from its audience.
another example, from the same movie, is the way they put together the references to st. francis. i believe he was first mentioned in the movie during the conversation in the church between gabriel byrne and the priest who had been excommunicated (i forget the character's name) then, at the end...when byrne brings patricia arquette out of the house wrapped in the blanket, they pass by a statue of st. francis which sits unobtrusively in the background (the statue of the guy with the birds, as st. francis is usually portrayed...we had a statue of him in front of the chapel of the college i went to
this is the same general problem that geeks have, only we're the only ones who know about it because nobody else picks up on it. how many of you who saw the movie knew that the statue was st. francis? it's the same general deal with geek stuff. what percentage of the population would know a unix shell prompt from a mac gui? while this annoys me...i would rather see hackers working on old unix or vax boxen (with real damn unix or vax interfaces, none of this gui crap) it probably won't happen anytime soon. what i'm really sick over is the rest of the problem...the utter lack of imagination, talent, and creativity in the moviemaking industry.
don't take this to be a complete generalization...there are quite a few movies that are absolutely perfect, but, for me, they are generally few and far between....most of the other stuff i can put up with as long as it doesn't really attempt to be creative, i can live with it being a stale rehash of some formula. movies like "12 angry men" which takes place entirely in the jury deliberation room during a trial, or any/all movies made by stanley kubrik or alfred hichcock who both knew exactly what to do, and more importantly, what NOT to do in a movie...these movies, in their perfection, are able to get their metaphors and subject matter across to the audience without beating them over the head with it, a practice which seems to be the recourse of every halfwitted hollywood director/producer/writer/marketing agent active in the movie industry today.
any spelling errors in the above are also the fault of the moviemaking industry, i swear...
/** Start Disgust here **/
i'm having serious issues with this phrase...
i mean, really...there's no source to open
i think something like massively-paralell journalism or distributed journalism would better describe it...but then again open-source is becoming such a nifty buzzwerd that i almost expect the drooling monkies runing the media to use it in all sorts of inappropriate places
/** End Disgust here **/
altho i don't particularly agree with :)
the new "license" i'd rather see the
whois prog ask y/n once, the first
time you run it instead of each time
cuz i work for a web hosting company
and have to use whois at least 50 times
each day...
most of us whine when some idiot starts hollaring
about how the opensource community should do
something or other to save the world from the
evil monopoly boys without even knowing, as us
whiners do, that it's already done...and has been
for quite some time.
the most interesting thing that i've found is that
in my dual-boot system, all my mp3's sound
markedly better in x11amp-linux than they do in
winamp-windows (whether this is due to the sound
subsystem in each system or the code in the
different programs, i couldn't tell you) i've
noticed none of that high-end frizzly crap in
x11amp...yet winamp continues to sound like
someone decided to apply a flanger to all the
wav files before encoding them *shrug*
just one of the many little everyday reasons
why i use windows for games and linux for
everydamnthing else =)
of course :P
0day pirates are nothing if not prompt
an admirable point...warfare of _any_
sort is abhorrant but I still get the
wierd feeling that i'd rather have my
net access shut off than have a rather
large chunk of bomb shrapnel sticking
out of my eye.
the "ethnic cleansing" that has been
occurring is horrible, the nato bombing
that has been going on is horrible,
and the disruption of information access
that is now going on is, also, horrible.
all of it is disgusting and all of it
is, and should be, unnecessary. i'd have
prefered a simpler, less bloody solution
to the conflict (send whatever super-secret
stealth assassins the gov't has after
milosevic and take him out real quiet-like)
but it is still better than doing nothing
and allowing what has been going on to
continue going on.
he's got an awful lot of good ones ;) s che/frames.html
;P)
iffin ya want more, check out
http://funrsc.fairfield.edu:80/philosophy/nietz
's a few pages i slapped together a couple years ago for a class i was in (ironically, it was a class on Nietzsche
my personal favorite is "Night has come; now all fountains speak more loudly, and my soul, too, is a fountain."
"...which I don't remember precisely, but the gist was that in childhood we tend to be very idealistic, pure, and good."
not entirely...it's close, but it misses the point of Nietzsche's philosophy...he disliked the word "good" (read Beyond Good and Evil) and, for him, a child is innocent...a child is the only true creator left, one who is a blank slate...one who has the ability to create for him/her-self a unique identity, untainted by the invasive efforts of other people to change us to be more like them.
Nietzsche's "Overman" (Ubermensch is _not_ translated as "superman" dammit), his idea of the final step in the evolution of man, was a child. (you can find this in "Also Sprach Zarathustra" in the aphorism about the three stages of man: camel, lion, and finally child)
"But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred 'Yes.' For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred 'Yes' is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world." --Friedrich Nietzsche
the boys in littleton were lions, they had thrown off the placid beast-of-burden attitude of the camel and found that they had the capacity to destroy so they lashed out at what had been trying to hold them down. but they never learned to create, they never quite made it to the last stage...they learned well how to say "no" but could not bring themselves to wrap their mouths around a sacred "yes" and that, for me, is the true tragedy...rarely does the camel become a lion, but more rare is the transiton from lion to child...from destroyer to creator, from anger to happiness (_not_ contentment...that is the provice of the camel).
Don't know if anyone else has brought this up, but all these stories about high school and geeks has brought to mind a text file that's been circulating the underground (and not so underground) realms of the net for a handful of years now. From what I know, it was written in jail, by The Mentor (an old old school cracker) shortly after his arrest. While it doesn't exactly fit what's going on, it comes damn close...makes some VERY good points, and is truly a beautifully written piece of literature...
Mentor's Last Words (also known as "A Hacker's Manifesto")
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank
Tampering"... Damn kids. They're all alike. But did you, in your three-
piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the
eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces
shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the
other kids, this crap they teach us bores me... Damn underachiever.
They're all alike. I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to
teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction.
I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in
my head..." Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by
me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be
here... Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike. And then
it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line
like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out,
a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even
if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them
again... I know you all... Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again.
They're all alike... You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been
spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of
meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless.
We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few
that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are
like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without
paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering
gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us
criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We
exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias...
and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you
murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our
own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never
forgive me for. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop
this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
+++The Mentor+++
well, like Linus is always fond of saying in regards to his kernel updates...if you don't really need to upgrade your kernel, you probably shouldn't. If everything on their system (the 1.2.x people) is running to the best of their satisfaction well...if it ain't broke, don't fix it :)