Just like Debian... without all the pesky precompiled applications. I tried Ubuntu once. I found that in order to get anything useful, I had to pull packages from Debian APT sources. After a while it just seemed like I would be better off running Debian. Half of my packages were from there anyway. And here I am. Debian -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Debian. Yeah, so I am not bleeding edge. Sue me!
My home is colder than 70F as well. I also kept the fermenter in the bathroom next to a radiator. Seems to have worked well. My next beer is a nice dark Porter. Although I suspect that I will have a much smaller audience for that one.
To satisfy some basic definitions of capitalism, open source software satisfies the most basic requirement: free entry into and exit from the market. I can write a program and put it out there and sell support services with very little money or capital. I can just as easily stop supporting my program without any financial repercussions.
Profitting from software support is not the same as profitting from the software itself. The "spirit" of the OSS movement does not include or even imply profit at all beyond the sheer satisfaction of doing what you love. And, hence, has nothing to do with capitalism. The spirit of OSS is to make software just for the sake of making software. If you chose to profit from OSS support, that is outside of the "spirit" of the OSS movement. This isn't to say that capitalizing on OSS is opposed to the spirit of the OSS movement. It just isn't included in it.
Open source is anything BUT communism. It is free market capitalism at its very best.
OSS isn't communism, but they do share the ideal that the people own all intellectual "property." Or rather, that there is no such thing as personal or corporate property at all. Say what you want about communism in the real world, but this is one redeeming quality that it has in theory.
Neat. I just tasted the first of my 5 gallons of brown ale. Fortunately, temperature controls are not necessary when brewing an ale. Room temperature will suffice. Good luck with your brew. Looks good!
Energy costs? I just brewed 5 gallons of ale and it didn't take more energy than it takes to run a gas burner for 60 minutes. All the fermenting and aging was done at room temperature.
Maybe it takes a lot of energy to brew a lager, but not an ale. I like ales better anyway...
Just because they are making the GPU work harder doesn't mean your CPU is going to have more freetime. As a matter of fact, the CPU requirement are going up as well. They are just adding eyecandy for chrissakes, not starting a revolution in OS design. They didn't find some amazing way to make the GPU handle basic window management tasks. The CPU still has to do the stuff it did before.
For this to be valid, you'd have to keep the amount of eyecandy the same and just offload it to the GPU. In this case, you are creating MORE graphics. Even if the GPU is going to do much of the rendering, the data has to get there somehow. The textures and whatnot are not going to move themselves, you know! In this regard, they are adding to the CPU load. All I can say is that there better be a way to turn that crap off. Eyecandy like what they are talking about is fun for, like, 2 days. Then it gets old and you just want something that gets the job done.
What mail server even allows mail from unknown/unregistered domains? Isn't that, like, one of the most basic anti-UCE checks? I hope spammers employ this tactic because I know my mail gateways will drop all of the spam.
Yeah, it blew up just like an truck carrying gasoline would. Are you seriously trying to argue that hydrogen is not a good alternative fuel supply because a long time ago people decided to fill a huge balloon with it that had an extremely flammable outer skin while there was lighting shooting down from the sky?
That is the least of the reasons why hydrogen isn't a good alternative fuel supply. The main reason being that it isn't a fuel supply at all. It is a storage medium... and not a very good one at that. But I guess if you are swimming in geothermal energy like Iceland is, it makes more sense to waste some of the energy using hydrogen than it does to import oil. For the rest of us, oil is extremely convenient form of energy. All you need to do is pump it out of the ground and process it a little... and maybe go to war from time to time.
If this country (USA) wants to get off its coal, natural gas, and petroleum dependency, it has to build new nuclear power plants to power homes and use that to generate hydrogen to power vehicles. No new nuclear power plant has been built since the Three Mile Island incident, which similar to Chernobyl, was a combination of untrained workers and poor design.
Sorry, the "too cheap to meter" dream died a long time ago. Get with the times, man. There are more reasons than fear that keep us from moving all power to nuclear. Fossil fuels are just too damn convenient and still plentiful enough.
No, the rich sell to the poor. And the poor, since they're in a capitalist country, are buying. There is nothing keeping the poor from selling something that people want to other poor people--it's just that, by and large, poor people aren't smart enough or hard-working enough to bother. Which is why they're poor, at least in this country.
I'm sorry, but I do not believe for one second that there is room in a capitalist society for everyone to be rich (or even secure financially) no matter how "smart" or "hardworkign" everyone is. Capitalism depends on the existence of exploiters and exploitees. Any *individual* can, perhaps, improve his or her socio-economic class, but on the whole a poor class must exist for the greedy to be successful. Sure, there are people who are lazy and dumb. But there are also people who are just not motivated by greed. How does a system fueled by greed protect these people?
All systems are fucked up. Some are fucked up worse than others. The perfect system does not exist and will never exist. Capitalism, or at least the Jesus-laden, love-thy-neighbor version we have in America, is better than most.
And eventually this system will collapse like the rest. It is already straining under the load of globalization. What's next?
If you are in a position where you want to sunlight o keep you warm, you are most likely wearing a fair amount of warm clothing. With the insulation, the IR energy shouldn't be reaching your body anyway. Same goes for your house. If it is cold enough outside to require heating and if your insulation is doing its job, you shouldn't be using IR energy to heat your house. Any warmth you get from the sun in your house would come through the windows. So as long as you don't paint the windows, you should be fine.;-)
Communism, and I am talking about the idealized Marxist communism here, not the even worse real-world examples, is about the poor stealing from the rich, simply because the poor outnumber the rich. This is not voluntary on the part of the rich, but rather their property is taken against their will, and this robbery is justified by the greed of the poor.
As opposed to capitalism where the rich steal from the poor (and then "trickle" it back down) simply because the rich have more political and social influence? This is not voluntary on the part of the poor, but rather their labor is exploited because the poor can't survive at all without their job(s).
Sorry, but both systems are pretty fucked up if you really take a good look at them. Capitalism works well only when the gap between the rich and the poor is relatively small. Eventually it gets larger and it becomes more and more difficult, on average, for the poor to improve their situation no matter how hard they try. Small companies find it more and more difficult to compete with the near monopolies. It gets even worse with globalization where the gap between the rich and the poor becomes enormous. Whole countries are relegated to the bottom rungs with almost no hope of ever improving their situation.
Anyway, i thought thought I'd like to pay devil's advocate for a minute...
First of all, let me point out that you are a moron (or just a troll)
If it's a gamer, they will learn what games DON'T run on a Mac, versus what does.
Common knowledge. Nothing new here. Move along.
If it's a song swapper, they will learn what P2P DOESN'T run on the Mac.
REAL song swappers use Usenet. You should see the song swapping, application pirating, news client my wife uses on her Mac. Best of all, she is under the radar as far as the RIAA is concerned. But if you are too clueless to figure out how to use Usenet, there are still P2P clients for the Mac.
Granted, they can shell out more money for the emulation software.
Unnecessary.
I have yet to get a Mac, and the only reason why I want one is for web development testing, to make sure it works for that 3-5% market share of Safari users using a browser that might still have bugs or features not yet implemented.
One word: Firefox
The main thing stopping me from getting a Mac... Price.
Go to your local Mac store and check out the iBooks.
One thing that the PC world has that apple really needs to do something about is inexpensive machines. Sure, you can get a Dell for 700$ with overall impressive specs and performance,
First of all, Apple can't compete on price because they don't have the volume. Second, they don't need to. Their niche is delivering quality products for people who like their computers. Third, at some point enough is enough as far as specs and performance go... for most people. Sure, your hardcore gamers are going to get the cheapest, fastest hardware they can, but I think, more and more, we are going to see people giving up on the MHz rat race and settle for a computer that is simple and easy to use and will last them for a while. Apple is on the right track, IMO.
Generally, I suggest getting a PC (a 1200$ Dell, in fact) to most people when they ask me what computer to get. Sure, you can get a 1ghz G4 eMac from apple for like 800$, but it's a piece of shit compared to a Dell that you could get for the same price.
Or $1000 for an iBook which isn't a piece of shit compared to a Dell of the same price. I think you may be doing people a diservice by recommending computers based on price/performance alone.
I say this as I'm typing into safari on my 800mhz, custom built G4 with 1.25GB RAM and it's struggling to keep up... but I'm downloading 6 torrents and have a 400mb photoshop file and a multi-page inDesign document open, not to mention countless other apps. I've considered many times getting a 2000$ Dell workstation, but it wouldn't fit my needs enough, and I can't stomach the idea of using windows at home. I feel 1000x more comfortable in OSX.
What makes you think all these people asking you what computer they should buy want to stomach using Windows at home?
Is this type of post obligatory or what? How many times do we have to hear this age old argument about Macs being more expensive? Really, the price difference isn't that great considering that this is a relatively long term purchase and that you will presumably be using it a lot. How long are you going to keep your computer? 2, maybe 3 years at least? Does a few extra hundred dolars really make that much difference? Also, consider the resale value. PCs aren't worth shit in the used market. They are practically disposable.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a PC user myself. But that has a lot more to do with the fact that I run Linux and don't really care about having slick, easy to use gear. I also tend to upgrade my way to the latest CPU rather than purchase whole systems. My wife, on the other hand, just bought a new iBook for $1000 and couldn't be happier. Her old Mac lasted her nearly 6 years.
Perhaps the iPod serves as an introduction to Apple products where many PC users have never even seen an Apple product. They might say, "hey, this iPod is really slick. I wonder if their computers are this cool...." I can see it happening.
So it was downloaded. So what? How many of those people are just going to try it and say, "This sucks, I'm going back to *BSD/Linux/Windows." How many of them were users of previous versions and just wanted an update? No, the number of downloads doesn't count in my book. I've downloaded plenty of software that I didn't end up using... INCLUDING Solaris x86!
How many more drivers does Linux have? It can't be that big, and even if it's 8 or 9M (I doubt it), that's nothing on a modern system.
My newly installed Debian system (kernel 2.6.8) shipped with 38MB in/lib/modules/2.6.8-1-386/kernel. But I don't know what that would amount to when statically linked into a kernel. Certainly more than 9M. More than enough to make building them all into a single kernel impractical... even if you could free up most of that later.
I guess it depends on which "Linux" you are talking about. Each distribution has its own hardware detection (if it has any at all) and kernel build. I haven't had any problems with the latest Debian installer. X autodetect has been pretty reliable for some time in most Linux distributions. I don't know what hardware you are using or when the last time you used Linux was. If all your devices are PCI, I can't imagine why autodetection would ever fail besides an incomplete list of device -> driver mappings.
Problem is that Linux (2.6) has so many drivers that it just doesn't make sense to include them all in one huge kernel. Although I do wish Linux distros would include all the storage and filesystem drivers in the kernel. initrd is a pointless bit of added complexity to the boot process.
Also, you still have to detect video when configuring X.
...why someone would even run Solaris x86. Solaris loses all of its appeal when not running on Sun hardware. IMO, Solaris x86 will remain as obscure as SCO. They just can't compete with *BSD and Linux.
A paper trail is enough. Nobody is suggesting that the same machine that counted your electronic vote would also (re)count the paper reciepts. The paper could be counted by hand, if necessary... completely independant of the machines. Why is this not good enough? Are you worry about the black box implementing a post printing mechanism to change the piece of paper that you verified with your own eyes?
Slashdot Mirror
Just like Debian... without all the pesky precompiled applications. I tried Ubuntu once. I found that in order to get anything useful, I had to pull packages from Debian APT sources. After a while it just seemed like I would be better off running Debian. Half of my packages were from there anyway. And here I am. Debian -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Debian. Yeah, so I am not bleeding edge. Sue me!
-matthew
Heh, I have the same "Ale Pail" ;-)
My home is colder than 70F as well. I also kept the fermenter in the bathroom next to a radiator. Seems to have worked well. My next beer is a nice dark Porter. Although I suspect that I will have a much smaller audience for that one.
-matthew
Profitting from software support is not the same as profitting from the software itself. The "spirit" of the OSS movement does not include or even imply profit at all beyond the sheer satisfaction of doing what you love. And, hence, has nothing to do with capitalism. The spirit of OSS is to make software just for the sake of making software. If you chose to profit from OSS support, that is outside of the "spirit" of the OSS movement. This isn't to say that capitalizing on OSS is opposed to the spirit of the OSS movement. It just isn't included in it.
Open source is anything BUT communism. It is free market capitalism at its very best.
OSS isn't communism, but they do share the ideal that the people own all intellectual "property." Or rather, that there is no such thing as personal or corporate property at all. Say what you want about communism in the real world, but this is one redeeming quality that it has in theory.
-matthew
Neat. I just tasted the first of my 5 gallons of brown ale. Fortunately, temperature controls are not necessary when brewing an ale. Room temperature will suffice. Good luck with your brew. Looks good!
-matthew
Energy costs? I just brewed 5 gallons of ale and it didn't take more energy than it takes to run a gas burner for 60 minutes. All the fermenting and aging was done at room temperature.
Maybe it takes a lot of energy to brew a lager, but not an ale. I like ales better anyway...
-matthew
Just because they are making the GPU work harder doesn't mean your CPU is going to have more freetime. As a matter of fact, the CPU requirement are going up as well. They are just adding eyecandy for chrissakes, not starting a revolution in OS design. They didn't find some amazing way to make the GPU handle basic window management tasks. The CPU still has to do the stuff it did before.
-matthew
For this to be valid, you'd have to keep the amount of eyecandy the same and just offload it to the GPU. In this case, you are creating MORE graphics. Even if the GPU is going to do much of the rendering, the data has to get there somehow. The textures and whatnot are not going to move themselves, you know! In this regard, they are adding to the CPU load. All I can say is that there better be a way to turn that crap off. Eyecandy like what they are talking about is fun for, like, 2 days. Then it gets old and you just want something that gets the job done.
-matthew
What mail server even allows mail from unknown/unregistered domains? Isn't that, like, one of the most basic anti-UCE checks? I hope spammers employ this tactic because I know my mail gateways will drop all of the spam.
-matthew
That is the least of the reasons why hydrogen isn't a good alternative fuel supply. The main reason being that it isn't a fuel supply at all. It is a storage medium... and not a very good one at that. But I guess if you are swimming in geothermal energy like Iceland is, it makes more sense to waste some of the energy using hydrogen than it does to import oil. For the rest of us, oil is extremely convenient form of energy. All you need to do is pump it out of the ground and process it a little... and maybe go to war from time to time.
If this country (USA) wants to get off its coal, natural gas, and petroleum dependency, it has to build new nuclear power plants to power homes and use that to generate hydrogen to power vehicles. No new nuclear power plant has been built since the Three Mile Island incident, which similar to Chernobyl, was a combination of untrained workers and poor design.
Sorry, the "too cheap to meter" dream died a long time ago. Get with the times, man. There are more reasons than fear that keep us from moving all power to nuclear. Fossil fuels are just too damn convenient and still plentiful enough.
-matthew
I'm sorry, but I do not believe for one second that there is room in a capitalist society for everyone to be rich (or even secure financially) no matter how "smart" or "hardworkign" everyone is. Capitalism depends on the existence of exploiters and exploitees. Any *individual* can, perhaps, improve his or her socio-economic class, but on the whole a poor class must exist for the greedy to be successful. Sure, there are people who are lazy and dumb. But there are also people who are just not motivated by greed. How does a system fueled by greed protect these people?
All systems are fucked up. Some are fucked up worse than others. The perfect system does not exist and will never exist. Capitalism, or at least the Jesus-laden, love-thy-neighbor version we have in America, is better than most.
And eventually this system will collapse like the rest. It is already straining under the load of globalization. What's next?
-matthew
If you are in a position where you want to sunlight o keep you warm, you are most likely wearing a fair amount of warm clothing. With the insulation, the IR energy shouldn't be reaching your body anyway. Same goes for your house. If it is cold enough outside to require heating and if your insulation is doing its job, you shouldn't be using IR energy to heat your house. Any warmth you get from the sun in your house would come through the windows. So as long as you don't paint the windows, you should be fine. ;-)
-matthew
As opposed to capitalism where the rich steal from the poor (and then "trickle" it back down) simply because the rich have more political and social influence? This is not voluntary on the part of the poor, but rather their labor is exploited because the poor can't survive at all without their job(s).
Sorry, but both systems are pretty fucked up if you really take a good look at them. Capitalism works well only when the gap between the rich and the poor is relatively small. Eventually it gets larger and it becomes more and more difficult, on average, for the poor to improve their situation no matter how hard they try. Small companies find it more and more difficult to compete with the near monopolies. It gets even worse with globalization where the gap between the rich and the poor becomes enormous. Whole countries are relegated to the bottom rungs with almost no hope of ever improving their situation.
Anyway, i thought thought I'd like to pay devil's advocate for a minute...
-matthew
It sucks AND blows.
If it's a gamer, they will learn what games DON'T run on a Mac, versus what does.
Common knowledge. Nothing new here. Move along.
If it's a song swapper, they will learn what P2P DOESN'T run on the Mac.
REAL song swappers use Usenet. You should see the song swapping, application pirating, news client my wife uses on her Mac. Best of all, she is under the radar as far as the RIAA is concerned. But if you are too clueless to figure out how to use Usenet, there are still P2P clients for the Mac.
Granted, they can shell out more money for the emulation software.
Unnecessary.
I have yet to get a Mac, and the only reason why I want one is for web development testing, to make sure it works for that 3-5% market share of Safari users using a browser that might still have bugs or features not yet implemented.
One word: Firefox
The main thing stopping me from getting a Mac... Price.
Go to your local Mac store and check out the iBooks.
-matthew
First of all, Apple can't compete on price because they don't have the volume. Second, they don't need to. Their niche is delivering quality products for people who like their computers. Third, at some point enough is enough as far as specs and performance go... for most people. Sure, your hardcore gamers are going to get the cheapest, fastest hardware they can, but I think, more and more, we are going to see people giving up on the MHz rat race and settle for a computer that is simple and easy to use and will last them for a while. Apple is on the right track, IMO.
Generally, I suggest getting a PC (a 1200$ Dell, in fact) to most people when they ask me what computer to get. Sure, you can get a 1ghz G4 eMac from apple for like 800$, but it's a piece of shit compared to a Dell that you could get for the same price.
Or $1000 for an iBook which isn't a piece of shit compared to a Dell of the same price. I think you may be doing people a diservice by recommending computers based on price/performance alone.
I say this as I'm typing into safari on my 800mhz, custom built G4 with 1.25GB RAM and it's struggling to keep up... but I'm downloading 6 torrents and have a 400mb photoshop file and a multi-page inDesign document open, not to mention countless other apps. I've considered many times getting a 2000$ Dell workstation, but it wouldn't fit my needs enough, and I can't stomach the idea of using windows at home. I feel 1000x more comfortable in OSX.
What makes you think all these people asking you what computer they should buy want to stomach using Windows at home?
-matthew
Is this type of post obligatory or what? How many times do we have to hear this age old argument about Macs being more expensive? Really, the price difference isn't that great considering that this is a relatively long term purchase and that you will presumably be using it a lot. How long are you going to keep your computer? 2, maybe 3 years at least? Does a few extra hundred dolars really make that much difference? Also, consider the resale value. PCs aren't worth shit in the used market. They are practically disposable.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a PC user myself. But that has a lot more to do with the fact that I run Linux and don't really care about having slick, easy to use gear. I also tend to upgrade my way to the latest CPU rather than purchase whole systems. My wife, on the other hand, just bought a new iBook for $1000 and couldn't be happier. Her old Mac lasted her nearly 6 years.
-matthew
Sure, but what if you weren't already familiar with Apple products and thought the iPod was cool enough to investigate further?
-matthew
Perhaps the iPod serves as an introduction to Apple products where many PC users have never even seen an Apple product. They might say, "hey, this iPod is really slick. I wonder if their computers are this cool...." I can see it happening.
-matthew
So it was downloaded. So what? How many of those people are just going to try it and say, "This sucks, I'm going back to *BSD/Linux/Windows." How many of them were users of previous versions and just wanted an update? No, the number of downloads doesn't count in my book. I've downloaded plenty of software that I didn't end up using... INCLUDING Solaris x86!
-matthew
My newly installed Debian system (kernel 2.6.8) shipped with 38MB in /lib/modules/2.6.8-1-386/kernel. But I don't know what that would amount to when statically linked into a kernel. Certainly more than 9M. More than enough to make building them all into a single kernel impractical... even if you could free up most of that later.
-matthew
I guess it depends on which "Linux" you are talking about. Each distribution has its own hardware detection (if it has any at all) and kernel build. I haven't had any problems with the latest Debian installer. X autodetect has been pretty reliable for some time in most Linux distributions. I don't know what hardware you are using or when the last time you used Linux was. If all your devices are PCI, I can't imagine why autodetection would ever fail besides an incomplete list of device -> driver mappings.
-matthew
Problem is that Linux (2.6) has so many drivers that it just doesn't make sense to include them all in one huge kernel. Although I do wish Linux distros would include all the storage and filesystem drivers in the kernel. initrd is a pointless bit of added complexity to the boot process.
Also, you still have to detect video when configuring X.
-matthew
I guess it depends on the license the use. Open_source != GPL (or BSD for that matter).
-matthew
...why someone would even run Solaris x86. Solaris loses all of its appeal when not running on Sun hardware. IMO, Solaris x86 will remain as obscure as SCO. They just can't compete with *BSD and Linux.
-matthew
A paper trail is enough. Nobody is suggesting that the same machine that counted your electronic vote would also (re)count the paper reciepts. The paper could be counted by hand, if necessary... completely independant of the machines. Why is this not good enough? Are you worry about the black box implementing a post printing mechanism to change the piece of paper that you verified with your own eyes?
-matthew