"Unfortunately most recipes are written for people that already know how to cook."
A good resource to deal with this is to keep a copy of "The Joy of Cooking" handy. I think the recipes in there are just okay, but it's the Rosetta Stone for cooking recipes.
Unfortunately, his statement is true of a lot of computer "recipes" as well. I always try to identify a "Rosetta Stone" book for every technology I dive into. For example, I was lost in the Linux Documentation Project until after I read Mark Sobell's A Practical Guide to Linux.
Of course, the Tivo gives you a little bit of that hacking goodness. You can use the "Hinsdale How-To" to add an additional hard-drive. I added a 120G drive to my 30 hour unit and now have ~180 hours of capacity. That's more than I'll likely ever need, but it gives me the flexibility to rarely-if-ever have to erase something I haven't watched yet in order to make room for something else.
"clever users will also note that you can tunnel this over just about any port you want. Make this an encrypted tunnel and no filter in the world will detect it. If your school/network allows even a single TCP port out to the Internet you can do this. "
Even without an open TCP port, you can do this over HTTP if you have a proxy server. Just tunnel everything over HTTP. Of course, then you're tunneling http over ssh over http , which gets a little complicated, but it works.
"I understand what you're trying to say, and neither does my analogy work (you can't compare competition to violation of copyright), but in fact it's all part of the system. "
Agreed -all the analogies break down. There was a great quote from one of the last episodes of Sports Night that I really like. It went something like:
"It's not black and white. The world is a much more interesting place than that."
"Stealing software for your own use does not in any way affect the vendor of the software . .."
I agree that the car theft analogy doesn't work, but stealing software does affect the vendor by distorting the market.
A contractor that I worked with made a vary astute observation once: the difference between a $200/hour consultant and a $50/hour consultant is the ability not to work. If you can afford to turn down work when someone isn't willing to pay your price, you set the market. In this case, the pirate is certainly affecting the value of the software by making it available for free.
Reasonable people can disagree about how much effect, but it's ludicrous to deny that the effect exists.
I didn't read anyone advocating government intervention here. I read people saying that Wal*Mart engages in repressive sales policies which impact on what types of content people can easily access, and that those policies justified avoiding Wal*Mart and supporting alternative outlets. So I don't quite see the reason for the knee-jerk anti-government response.
Fair enough - I don't really disagree with you here. The proper response is to take your business elsewhere and encourage others to do so.
My "anti-government" response came out because the original posting was made in terms of "rights", and in the U.S. discussions of rights generally lead to discussions of laws to enforce those rights.
Allowing Walmart to choose what not to carry is the necessary consequence of not allowing the government to tell you what you can and can't carry.
And how do you intend to enforce a "right to be free of undue pressures to self-censor"?
Do you want a law that requires Walmart to carry magazines/books/etc of which it disapproves? Then who gets to decide?
Turn it around. Let's assume that you run your own bookstore. Do you want the government telling you that you have to promote ideas with which you disagree?
Note: I'm not disagreeing with you that Walmart's dominance has negative consequences - I'm just not sure that any likely solution wouldn't have worse consequences.
If WalMart starts using Linux desktops for their own business, that will have a much bigger impact. For example, if WalMart were to tell all of its vendors and suppliers that they have to submit their documents using open file formats instead of MS proprietary formats, that would create a ripple effect across corporate America.
Technology review had an interesting article on this very topic a few months ago.
The reason is simple. Wal-Mart is by far the commercial world's most influential purchaser and implementer of software and systems. It is the 800-pound gorilla in a retail jungle of bonobos and howler monkeys. Microsoft and Cisco may set technical standards; Wal-Mart sets business process standards. When Wal-Mart--which is bigger than Sears, Kmart and J. C. Penney combined--wants global suppliers like Procter and Gamble or GE or Pfizer to comply with its inventory software and data networks, they do so or else. "Everyday low prices" don't come cheap.
*-snip-*
This power of procurement facilitates the procurement of power. Suppose Wal-Mart decided that it would be economically advantaged by abandoning proprietary software formats in favor of "open source" to manage its supplier interactions. Imagine the ripple--or rather, tsunami--effect on the future of systems design and development in the retail, wholesale and consumer goods sectors. What happens to a Microsoft or Oracle in that environment?
Hopefully, selling Linux PCs is just the first step. When WalMart starts using Linux-based PCs internally, then the game will really change.
Hard disks have a high MTBF when compared to existing media
Who cares? Tivo's aren't generally used for long-term storage anyway. They are a time-shifting device more than anything else.
If you want long-term storage, you can always use the Tivo's "Backup to Tape" option (I can't remember off the top of my head exactly what the menu option is called, but it basically plays the recorded show and prompts you to start your VCR - not real high-tech, but it works and it's easy)
Because it's based on Linux, the Tivo is eminently hackable. Following some pretty straightforward directions, I was able to add a second hard-drive to my Tivo, turning my 30 hour Tivo into a 180 hour Tivo. Cost of upgrade: ~$200. Try finding a 180 hour Tivo at the store:-)
Adding that much capacity really changes how you use Tivo. I can go weeks without watching TV without worrying about shows being deleted before I get a chance to watch them. With the 30 hour version, you have to manage your capacity a bit. With 180 hours, you can really just forget about it for weeks at a time.
Granted, the article here doesn't go into that aspect, but the fact that the Tivo is based on Linux is definitely relevant to this audience.
"I'd rather have that than specs and a driver development effort that can't keep up."
While I agree that we shouldn't "dis" NVIDIA for supporting us in a less than optimial way, we should still politely encourage companies to embrace open source, not just Linux, for practical reasons.
Ask anybody who tries to use older hardware, especially from companies that don't exist anymore. Think Aureal soundcards, for example. The folks at aureal.sourceforge.net make a valiant effort to support hardware from a bankrupt company, but are constantly hampered by insufficient information.
Ideally, hardware vendors would supply both specs and their own Linux drivers.
The company then gets to benefit from the developer community.
The "common folk" benefit from knowing that if the company chooses not to continue supporting a particular piece of hardware that they won't be left out in the cold.
Thanks to the folks who decided to use the GPL for VNC.
They deserve a lot of credit for ensuring that their software would continue to be freely available to the world.
preaching to the choir . . .
on
Revolution OS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Sundance channel showed this a few times (thank god for Tivo).
I thought that it was okay overall, but that it suffered a bit from the "preaching to the choir" syndrome. The best example: when they read Bill Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists" and they have the reader read increasingly fast and in a high pitched voice.
Open Source has good enough answers to the issues raised in the "Open Letter to Hobbyists" that it really wasn't necessary to "fix the fight" by making Bill Gates sound like a hyperactive chipmunk.
Eric Raymond's "I'm your worst nightmare" anecdote about encountering Bill Mundie in the elevator also hit a sour note. I've heard Eric speak, and he is a very thoughtful speaker. But the way this anecdote was presented out of context made him sound pretty childish. Fortunately, he gets some good air time later in the movie.
" Looks quite a bit like Tribes 2, which has been out since ~May of last year."
That was my first thought as well. I wonder if an indoor shot or a closer view of one of the other players would have given a better sense of the new graphics engine. The snow effects look nice, though.
Another really good choice is Sobell's A Practical Guide to Linux. (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201895498 ). It doesn't worry about installation, but provides a great introduction to how to use Linux. After reading this a few years ago, all the man pages finally started to make sense.
I would still like to see a review from a technical magazine/journal/website that I trust.
A valid point, but don't forget that reviews from the "clueless" have value. When you're too close to the technology, it can be very easy to underestimate how difficult something to use can be. I find the command "ps auxw|grep galeon" to be very intuitive now, but I doubt that my mother-in-law would agree:-) On the other hand, when she visited a couple of weeks ago she had no trouble using Galeon to do her normal web-based tasks.
To get a good sense of the success of Sharp at designing and implementing the Taurus, I think you really need to get feedback from both technical and non-technical folks.
"I was not being strictly serious, and I never once said that because they were doing business on the internet, they should have blanket immunity from national laws. "
Fair enough. However, some people really do seem to take the view that the Internet shouldn't be regulated at all.
You do make a valid point - the issue of jurisdiction does seem to get bent completely out of shape at times. The best example is probably the way the commerce clause gets used to make almost everything a federal case.
" A US court would claim jurisdiction over someone who at one time had breathed air that might possibly have passed over US soil, so that jurisdiction was asserted is not a surprise."
Have you ever done business internationally? I have, and it is not at all surprising that a court in any country would claim jurisdiction over commerce in that country. You make this sound like some kind of evil power grab, when in fact it's just a rational way to do things. Somebody has to have jurisdiction. When I do business in China, I have to deal with Chinese law. When I do business in Britain, I have to deal with British law. Even if I never step foot in those countries.
If you sell something directly to our citizens, you should expect to comply with our laws. If you don't want to accept that, then don't do business with the United States (or any other country that has laws you don't like). The Internet complicates things in some interesting ways by making it easier to conduct international business, but it doesn't eliminate all other rules. If you want to do business with U.S. citizens while violating U.S. law, don't:
use U.S. banks
own U.S. assets
operate from a country with reciprocal treaty obligations with the U.S.
travel to the U.S.
etc.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I believe that holding an individual employee of a foreign company criminally libel for his company's allegedly illegal acts is a bad idea. (legally questionable and sets a bad precedent for the treatment of U.S. business people overseas)
I hope that the DMCA gets overturned on other grounds. I think it's both bad public policy and bad law.
But the argument that "because you use the Internet no nation's laws apply" doesn't fly.
I have to admit that sometimes I really want to sit down with a red pen and a paper draft. When I have to send my comments to somebody else electronically, however, I'd rather work on the computer than have to retype all my scribbled comments.
There are tools for this, but they just aren't that commonly used. The best one I've found is the full version of adobe acrobat. You can print just about anything to a PDF, and then use Acrobat to draw on it (circle things, draw arrows, highlight, etc) and include comments on anything you draw. There is even an option to create a second document with all of your comments that makes a great checklist for the next revision. PDFs are also common enough that I can send these marked up documents to just about anybody and expect them to be able to see and read my comments.
Again, I don't think we'll get to the paperless office in my lifetime, but we could get a lot closer using the tools that are available.
Another good option, using entire free (both as in speech and as in beer) software, is VNC, tunneled through SSH, tunneled through GNU HTTP tunnel.
Although I've used straigh X forwarding, I generally prefer VNC because of the ability to kill the connection (either intentionally or not) and reconnect later to the same session.
My favorite expression for these kind of top-down decisions, that essentially come down to "because I said so!", is: "are we discussing this, or are we going to Tahiti."
I picked up the expression from this John Soat column where he told a story about the GAP and their decision to replace Lotus Notes with Exchange.
Gap is migrating its messaging infrastructure from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange , a decision implemented by CIO Ken Harris shortly after he arrived at the company several months ago, according to a source close to the situation. Changing messaging infrastructure isn't easy, and the IT people at the Gap were hoping for some kind of explanation or justification. Instead, according to the source, Harris told the staff that when the captain of a ship tells the crew that they're going to Tahiti, the crew doesn't question the order-they simply steer the ship to Tahiti. "Going to Tahiti" has apparently become an oft-used phrase in Gap IT circles-i.e., when talking over strategy, people now ask, "Are we discussing this, or are we going to Tahiti?"
Okay, please excuse my ignorance, but what do you lose by not having g++ exceptions? Do some programs not run? Do they run slower? I have no problem compiling programs from source, but if you get much beyond compile, make, make install, I'm lost. I have no idea what a g++ exception is, and a google search didn't help clear it up for me much.
For VNC, blackbox is another good option.
Just install blackbox and change your ~/.vnc/xstartup file.
#!/bin/sh
xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
xterm -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
blackbox &
Slashdot Mirror
"Unfortunately most recipes are written for people that already know how to cook."
A good resource to deal with this is to keep a copy of "The Joy of Cooking" handy. I think the recipes in there are just okay, but it's the Rosetta Stone for cooking recipes.
Unfortunately, his statement is true of a lot of computer "recipes" as well. I always try to identify a "Rosetta Stone" book for every technology I dive into. For example, I was lost in the Linux Documentation Project until after I read Mark Sobell's A Practical Guide to Linux.
Of course, the Tivo gives you a little bit of that hacking goodness. You can use the "Hinsdale How-To" to add an additional hard-drive. I added a 120G drive to my 30 hour unit and now have ~180 hours of capacity. That's more than I'll likely ever need, but it gives me the flexibility to rarely-if-ever have to erase something I haven't watched yet in order to make room for something else.
"clever users will also note that you can tunnel this over just about any port you want. Make this an encrypted tunnel and no filter in the world will detect it. If your school/network allows even a single TCP port out to the Internet you can do this. "
Even without an open TCP port, you can do this over HTTP if you have a proxy server. Just tunnel everything over HTTP. Of course, then you're tunneling http over ssh over http , which gets a little complicated, but it works.
See the GNU HTTPtunnel home page for more details.
"I understand what you're trying to say, and neither does my analogy work (you can't compare competition to violation of copyright), but in fact it's all part of the system. "
Agreed -all the analogies break down. There was a great quote from one of the last episodes of Sports Night that I really like. It went something like:
"It's not black and white. The world is a much more interesting place than that."
"Stealing software for your own use does not in any way affect the vendor of the software . . ."
I agree that the car theft analogy doesn't work, but stealing software does affect the vendor by distorting the market.
A contractor that I worked with made a vary astute observation once: the difference between a $200/hour consultant and a $50/hour consultant is the ability not to work. If you can afford to turn down work when someone isn't willing to pay your price, you set the market. In this case, the pirate is certainly affecting the value of the software by making it available for free.
Reasonable people can disagree about how much effect, but it's ludicrous to deny that the effect exists.
I didn't read anyone advocating government intervention here. I read people saying that Wal*Mart engages in repressive sales policies which impact on what types of content people can easily access, and that those policies justified avoiding Wal*Mart and supporting alternative outlets. So I don't quite see the reason for the knee-jerk anti-government response.
Fair enough - I don't really disagree with you here. The proper response is to take your business elsewhere and encourage others to do so.
My "anti-government" response came out because the original posting was made in terms of "rights", and in the U.S. discussions of rights generally lead to discussions of laws to enforce those rights.
Walmart is censoring your culture.
Allowing Walmart to choose what not to carry is the necessary consequence of not allowing the government to tell you what you can and can't carry.
And how do you intend to enforce a "right to be free of undue pressures to self-censor"?
Do you want a law that requires Walmart to carry magazines/books/etc of which it disapproves? Then who gets to decide?
Turn it around. Let's assume that you run your own bookstore. Do you want the government telling you that you have to promote ideas with which you disagree?
Note: I'm not disagreeing with you that Walmart's dominance has negative consequences - I'm just not sure that any likely solution wouldn't have worse consequences.
If WalMart starts using Linux desktops for their own business, that will have a much bigger impact. For example, if WalMart were to tell all of its vendors and suppliers that they have to submit their documents using open file formats instead of MS proprietary formats, that would create a ripple effect across corporate America.
Technology review had an interesting article on this very topic a few months ago.
The reason is simple. Wal-Mart is by far the commercial world's most influential purchaser and implementer of software and systems. It is the 800-pound gorilla in a retail jungle of bonobos and howler monkeys. Microsoft and Cisco may set technical standards; Wal-Mart sets business process standards. When Wal-Mart--which is bigger than Sears, Kmart and J. C. Penney combined--wants global suppliers like Procter and Gamble or GE or Pfizer to comply with its inventory software and data networks, they do so or else. "Everyday low prices" don't come cheap.
*-snip-*
This power of procurement facilitates the procurement of power. Suppose Wal-Mart decided that it would be economically advantaged by abandoning proprietary software formats in favor of "open source" to manage its supplier interactions. Imagine the ripple--or rather, tsunami--effect on the future of systems design and development in the retail, wholesale and consumer goods sectors. What happens to a Microsoft or Oracle in that environment?
Hopefully, selling Linux PCs is just the first step. When WalMart starts using Linux-based PCs internally, then the game will really change.
Hard disks have a high MTBF when compared to existing media
Who cares? Tivo's aren't generally used for long-term storage anyway. They are a time-shifting device more than anything else.
If you want long-term storage, you can always use the Tivo's "Backup to Tape" option (I can't remember off the top of my head exactly what the menu option is called, but it basically plays the recorded show and prompts you to start your VCR - not real high-tech, but it works and it's easy)
"it's football, not soccer dammnit!"
Soccer is an abbreviated form of "Association Football"
by eliminating the accounting necessary for Microsoft licencing?
Because it's based on Linux, the Tivo is eminently hackable. Following some pretty straightforward directions, I was able to add a second hard-drive to my Tivo, turning my 30 hour Tivo into a 180 hour Tivo. Cost of upgrade: ~$200. Try finding a 180 hour Tivo at the store :-)
Adding that much capacity really changes how you use Tivo. I can go weeks without watching TV without worrying about shows being deleted before I get a chance to watch them. With the 30 hour version, you have to manage your capacity a bit. With 180 hours, you can really just forget about it for weeks at a time.
Granted, the article here doesn't go into that aspect, but the fact that the Tivo is based on Linux is definitely relevant to this audience.
See http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/ for more info.
While I agree that we shouldn't "dis" NVIDIA for supporting us in a less than optimial way, we should still politely encourage companies to embrace open source, not just Linux, for practical reasons.
Ask anybody who tries to use older hardware, especially from companies that don't exist anymore. Think Aureal soundcards, for example. The folks at aureal.sourceforge.net make a valiant effort to support hardware from a bankrupt company, but are constantly hampered by insufficient information.
Ideally, hardware vendors would supply both specs and their own Linux drivers.
Thanks to the folks who decided to use the GPL for VNC.
They deserve a lot of credit for ensuring that their software would continue to be freely available to the world.
Sundance channel showed this a few times (thank god for Tivo).
I thought that it was okay overall, but that it suffered a bit from the "preaching to the choir" syndrome. The best example: when they read Bill Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists" and they have the reader read increasingly fast and in a high pitched voice.
Open Source has good enough answers to the issues raised in the "Open Letter to Hobbyists" that it really wasn't necessary to "fix the fight" by making Bill Gates sound like a hyperactive chipmunk.
Eric Raymond's "I'm your worst nightmare" anecdote about encountering Bill Mundie in the elevator also hit a sour note. I've heard Eric speak, and he is a very thoughtful speaker. But the way this anecdote was presented out of context made him sound pretty childish. Fortunately, he gets some good air time later in the movie.
" Looks quite a bit like Tribes 2, which has been out since ~May of last year."
That was my first thought as well. I wonder if an indoor shot or a closer view of one of the other players would have given a better sense of the new graphics engine. The snow effects look nice, though.
Another really good choice is Sobell's A Practical Guide to Linux. (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201895498 ). It doesn't worry about installation, but provides a great introduction to how to use Linux. After reading this a few years ago, all the man pages finally started to make sense.
I would still like to see a review from a technical magazine/journal/website that I trust.
:-) On the other hand, when she visited a couple of weeks ago she had no trouble using Galeon to do her normal web-based tasks.
A valid point, but don't forget that reviews from the "clueless" have value. When you're too close to the technology, it can be very easy to underestimate how difficult something to use can be. I find the command "ps auxw|grep galeon" to be very intuitive now, but I doubt that my mother-in-law would agree
To get a good sense of the success of Sharp at designing and implementing the Taurus, I think you really need to get feedback from both technical and non-technical folks.
"I was not being strictly serious, and I never once said that because they were doing business on the internet, they should have blanket immunity from national laws. "
Fair enough. However, some people really do seem to take the view that the Internet shouldn't be regulated at all.
You do make a valid point - the issue of jurisdiction does seem to get bent completely out of shape at times. The best example is probably the way the commerce clause gets used to make almost everything a federal case.
Have you ever done business internationally? I have, and it is not at all surprising that a court in any country would claim jurisdiction over commerce in that country. You make this sound like some kind of evil power grab, when in fact it's just a rational way to do things. Somebody has to have jurisdiction. When I do business in China, I have to deal with Chinese law. When I do business in Britain, I have to deal with British law. Even if I never step foot in those countries.
If you sell something directly to our citizens, you should expect to comply with our laws. If you don't want to accept that, then don't do business with the United States (or any other country that has laws you don't like). The Internet complicates things in some interesting ways by making it easier to conduct international business, but it doesn't eliminate all other rules. If you want to do business with U.S. citizens while violating U.S. law, don't:
Now, don't get me wrong.
I believe that holding an individual employee of a foreign company criminally libel for his company's allegedly illegal acts is a bad idea. (legally questionable and sets a bad precedent for the treatment of U.S. business people overseas)
I hope that the DMCA gets overturned on other grounds. I think it's both bad public policy and bad law.
But the argument that "because you use the Internet no nation's laws apply" doesn't fly.
I have to admit that sometimes I really want to sit down with a red pen and a paper draft. When I have to send my comments to somebody else electronically, however, I'd rather work on the computer than have to retype all my scribbled comments.
There are tools for this, but they just aren't that commonly used. The best one I've found is the full version of adobe acrobat. You can print just about anything to a PDF, and then use Acrobat to draw on it (circle things, draw arrows, highlight, etc) and include comments on anything you draw. There is even an option to create a second document with all of your comments that makes a great checklist for the next revision. PDFs are also common enough that I can send these marked up documents to just about anybody and expect them to be able to see and read my comments.
Again, I don't think we'll get to the paperless office in my lifetime, but we could get a lot closer using the tools that are available.
Another good option, using entire free (both as in speech and as in beer) software, is VNC, tunneled through SSH, tunneled through GNU HTTP tunnel.
Although I've used straigh X forwarding, I generally prefer VNC because of the ability to kill the connection (either intentionally or not) and reconnect later to the same session.
My favorite expression for these kind of top-down decisions, that essentially come down to "because I said so!", is:
"are we discussing this, or are we going to Tahiti."
I picked up the expression from this John Soat column where he told a story about the GAP and their decision to replace Lotus Notes with Exchange.
Okay, please excuse my ignorance, but what do you lose by not having g++ exceptions? Do some programs not run? Do they run slower? I have no problem compiling programs from source, but if you get much beyond compile, make, make install, I'm lost. I have no idea what a g++ exception is, and a google search didn't help clear it up for me much.
For VNC, blackbox is another good option. Just install blackbox and change your ~/.vnc/xstartup file. #!/bin/sh xrdb $HOME/.Xresources xsetroot -solid grey xterm -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" & blackbox &