Amen to that. My previous machine was a t-bird 900 on an above average MB. Slightly unstable until I finally threw money at the problem and bought a big-ass, high quality power supply to replace what Enlight tossed in for free with the case. Zero problems after doing that.
This time I started out with a nice heavy, well ventilated case with a beefy p/s filled with another high quality MB, name brand RAM and an Athlon64. I have been running a lot of test builds of whiteboxlinux on this puppy to stress it before building a final x86_64 release and the temp rises a bit after 20+ hours of straight compiling, but it has run rock solid.
Moral of the story, don't buy AMD to save money and expect a system as stable as a quality Intel box. Buy AMD as part of a quality system and it won't be the weak link.
> The little money it makes will be sucked out by "legal" pirates > from its very movement.
As the alleged "pirate" in question, allow me to disagree. Those who need the SUPPORT offered by RH should purchase RHEL3. Those of us who DON'T need the support shouldn't since RHEL3 is 100% Free Software. Red Hat does not sell software since that would be kinda daft, it being Free Software and all that. What they sell is support and if you are the sort of site deploying an Oracle box you will be writing them a check just like you wrote one to Sun when Oracle was sitting on an UltraSparc.
Basically, WhiteBox should be thought of a product between Fedora and RHEL, offering the longer deployment window and most of the stability of RHEL but with the community support more like that of Fedora.
And I have heard my little project from the swamps of Louisiana mantioned by several RH people, but never disparagingly. So if they don't have a problem with what I (and the cAos, tao, etc. rebuild efforts) am doing why don't you hold off on condemming me for another couple of years, until you learn a little more about how the Open Source/Free Software ecology actually works.
Because in Sun's case they did a lot of good in their day and some folks would rather see them go gracefully now, instead of die a long messy death and in their death spasms corrupt and despoil most of those good works in a vain attempt to live a year or so beyond their allotted time.
If you use fast cards (or a microdrive) it should be possible. Remember that RAW isn't that much larger than the highest quality JPEG and smaller than TIFF. Plus the camera does not have to reprocess the data before saving.
Actually, I'm increasingly of the opinion that RAW is the best format for digital photography.
The file size isn't THAT much larger than the high quality JPEG setting and half the size of a lossless TIFF file. (Just to throw out some actual numbers, on my Olympus C5050z a RAW is 7.5MB, TIFF is 14MB and JPEG at high quality usually varies between 2-4MB.)
This is due to the fact that consumer quality cams use bayer patterned CCDs and only have one sensor per pixel (half green, the other half split between red and blue) and the camera has to invent the other two color values for each pixel and then feed that trippled dataset into the JPEG or TIFF encoding process. While a RAW is simply the raw values from the CCD, often at higher than eight bit samples. (Mine appears to return 12bits/value)
> Personally I feel it's a big mistake. Linux 2.6.x is stable now, so > use it. It's also much faster.
2.6 wasn't here last summer when RHEL3 was being built. But RH wanted several of the features for the new version, since it was going to be around for five years and all that jazz.
RHEL4 is looking like it will be 2.6 based, but they are adding in SELINUX. RedHat is usually out near the bleeding edge, but just far enough back that they don't get cut up too bad.
> So you're saying that windows users are smarter than the mac people?
Actually, yes.:) Old BBS tagline says it all:
"If he's an idiot I send him to the Mac store."
But seriously, most Mac users I know aren't idiots per se, they are just not big on rational thought and common sense. Arts types. World needs em, just don't ask one to help with your tax return.
> Unix geeks like myself are switching in droves to OS X.
Then you were never a real UNIX geek anyway, just an ABMer chasing the current shiny toy. None of the REAL alpha geeks have switched. Hint: Cmdr. Taco isn't one.
> ask a 12 year old kid if she'd rather buy the latest NSync album > with or without DRM, and first she'll laugh
Of course, end users never care about technical issues. They WILL care when they realize the consequences for them, same as when Circuit City tried DIVX. When that 12yr old loses her whole collection when daddy has to reload Windows and tehy can't get the DRM keys set back "just so" and the music stops working she will care... and go back to WinMX. Those 12yr olds also swap their CDs among themselves like crazy. When she can't loan/give her bestest friend a copy of Britney's hottest new track she will care.
> However, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think > Linux 3D graphics drivers are currently all > proprietary,
Wrong. There are RADEON drivers in X.org and XFree86's tree with both 2D and 3D accellerated. The ATI driver supports the latest cards and supposedly has better acceleration. But I wouldn't know about that since Free drivers is why I tossed the NVIDIA card and now buy only hardware supported by Free drivers. The horror of keeping closed drivers working through kernel/distro upgrades wasn't worth it.
> Apple is about the only one who realized that you can't make money > by selling songs only,
Then Apple IS a bunch of mindless idiots who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Consumer electronics is a low margin/high volume game. The money is in content. Compare DVD sales figures to player sales. Now compare net profits. Or do the same with CD players vs the music industry.
There would be profits for all at $0.99/track if the RIAA would get their heads out of their butts and embrace the change.
A 909% increase over a number in the statistical noise of consumer electronics sales isn't something to crow about. And look how much cash they are burning through in advertising to get it.
The problem with iPod is that at the current unit sales it is ignorable and yet if the numbers DO become significant the established consumer electronics mfgrs will devour them with better, cheaper products. Sure Apple has some good designers..... but so does Sony, Samsung, etc. At the current price points Apple is working with iPod like devices will never become mainstream and Apple has a twenty plus year track record of not only being unable to do, but actually disdaining, the hard work of selling high volume/low margin consumer products.
This wouldn't be a problem if there were a standard and the higher quality/low volume iPods were compatible, but that isn't the case. And once WMA has conquered the field the recording studios won't even renew Apple's license to run the iTunes Store. Their 1% marketshare won't justify pissing off Billy Gates.
Of course my money is on none of the above. Consumers aren't stupid enough to buy into this DRM crapola. The Apple crowd was the perfect audience for iPod, they are generally artistic types (i.e. not overly rational) with tons of disposbale income and used to being abused in the wallet by Apple. I don't see the WinMX crowd lining up to buy crippled tracks.
The $0.99/track is a good pricepoint if it were on the same terms as CD sales, but DRM is a dealbreaker. Just too complicated and risky for me.
> When Palm did the same thing, the same thing happened.
Wrong. Palm has money coming in, they just couldn't live up to the hype from their moonshot IPO. For Palm, retaining enough market share to avoid destruction at the hands of WinCE was everything. Below a certain share they will suffer the same fate as Netscape or Apple, as most developers currently writing to PalmOS shift to the one with the unit sales.
And where would Palm be had they continued as the sole maker of hardware? Sure, their hardware is nice stuff for a general market of salesmen and midlevel executives, but it doesn't compare to what a hardware maker with serious engineering resources like Sony can do with the Clie line, or niche players like Symbol and their barcode enabled palms, etc.
And thanks to the Jobs reality distortion field, when Microsoft's music service starts kicking their asses, they will have zero friends... as usual. As of now they are #1 in a market segment that is so close to zero in dollar sales as to not even show up on a large corp's balance sheet. Will their overpriced (if well built) incompatible players stay #1 as the other players get second generation products into the channel, partnered with Microsoft's power to unlock content from studios? No. When the player market shifts, iTunes Store can't stay #1 when they are reduced to selling to the little club of yuppies with iPods.
And #2? How about in another year or two when Apple is #3 behind Linux on generic Intel hardware. Watch for em on start racking up serious points over at FuckedCompany?
Yea, I know people have been writing Apple's epitath for almost twenty years now, but this time it is going to happen. There isn't room for a #3 that is as fudged up as Apple, with Steve Jobs living in that little world of his own, unwilling to be bothered to even speak to the other children on the playground. Being #2 has kept them alive all this time, if for no other reason than to be Billy boy's designated token competition. No more.
Is this decision going to be the one that seals their doom? Hell, considering Real is a walking zombie it might have even been a good business decision, but the arrogance of the delivery is a good symptom of the underlying problem for any willing to see it.
Yes, 2D. For those of us who use Free Software everything from Nvidia is just another 2D card. Same for ATI's newest products.
At least we get good 3D support for one generation old ATI boards, which are very affordable by the time the Windows kids have ran off to chase the next shiny thing and the XFree/X.org folks have stabilized the drivers.
Grr.. Sorry bout that, lost the original post in the thread in the filter. Agree completely about those unofficial Java environments not being ready for a production environment.
Hope my post above this gets modded into oblivion so fewer people see I was an idiot. I got karma to burn anyway.
> Every distro finds a way to install Microsoft TrueType Fonts
Oh? RedHat doesn't. Debian doesn't. Mandrake might, being French and all might give legal cover. But if SUSE does now they won't anymore after being sucked into Novell.
Go read the Sun and IBM JRE EULAs. They explicitly forbid redistribution.
Depends. Linux and *BSD power a majority of the really impressive sites on the network so I'd certainly be in good company. Solaris is just too expensive for something so clusterable like web services.
Might use a big Solaris box to host the DB on the backend if the site was really major. Postgresql has made a lot of progress and I'll probably revise this remark in another year or so, but Oracle/DB2/Sybase is still what I'd want running the backend if a lot of money was riding on it just because it they have been doing replication and other such enterprise level things long enough to be trustworthy. Of course Oracle and IBM both support Linux as a tier 1 platform these days so running Linux all the way to the backend is certainly possible for all but the largest users who need the 128way Sun boxes.
And I think it goes without saying that Windows has no place in the enterprise except as legacy desktops. Period, end of story. Anyone suggesting otherwise has instantly proven themself to be incompetent and not to be trusted for advice on IT matters.
> In exactly what way does Sun "shift direction almost as often as > a political candidate"?
You must be new here. For a vivid example, familiar to most around these parts, take a look at their ever changing stances on Linux. Some years they ignore it as a 'toy' others it is an enemy, then in still others they are selling it, rinse & repeat. Currently they are talking out both sides of their ass, selling it on the desktop, sorta selling it on small servers, while passing SCO money under the table to knife it; all the while trying to cover every possible position in their public pronouncements depending on the audience. In other words, a typical corporation.
> Would you care to explain to me how it got there?
Never having run Gentoo, but knowing how it works I'd guess it has an ebuild that snarfs the package from Sun or IBM's website. But I will remember this little factoid for my next encounter with a certain other Gentoo user who was blathering on about how Gentoo builds EVERYTHING, nothing is binary. Think I'll ask him where Gentoo managed to get their grubby mitts on the source to Java without signing an NDA like the BlackDown folks had to.:)
We are supposed to "have a little faith" in a company that shifts direction almost as often as a political candidate? No thanks. Been there, done that, ain't ever trusting anything important to a product or service that is tied to any single entity. Sooner or later their goals and mine diverge and I get screwed.
Trust, but verify is a better way to go. Sun SAYS they will not screw over their Java development community but what concrete assurances do they offer to allow one to verify? Have they even made a Trolltech like promise that they will free the code if Sun pulls the plug on Java or, more likely, Sun itself is bought or broken up for spare parts?
Personally I prefer to deal with software under a DFSG compatible license since then I KNOW (as opposed to an act of faith) the software will continue to be available and so long as a few people care about it, updates will continue. I also prefer open hardware from multiple sources for the same reasons. No one corp's ever shifting plans will leave me high and dry.
Plus with Sun you get policies that are just insane. No other word really describes the behaviour. Example: It is obviously in Sun's interest to see a JVM on as many machines as possible. Their JVM is a free download. But you can't even redistribute unmodified copies of it, which is why no linux distro includes a JVM. To use Java under Linux requires a user to go search it out, download a non-trivial package and install it. Won't be holding my breath waiting for someone at Sun to drop into this thread and answer that one.
> Great, now, if we can just prove it's being used by Al Qaeda to help > the Jihad we may finally get some political support for getting rid > of spammers!
I know your post was modded funny, but it really isn't. But you aren't being paranoid enough.
Broadcasting to agents in the field is not a new idea, using UCE/SPAM is just teh latest example.
In WWII the BBC embedded messages in their newscasts. Of course in the current political environment over there they would be more likely to be embeding messages for Al Qaeda.... but that is another rant....
Anyone who has ever listened to a shortwave for any length of time has probably heard a 'numbers' station, long thought to be broadcasts to agents in the field.
Now we see crazy text embedded in spam, often in segments of the message where it would never be seen by the target Outlook drone. Hell, the presence of 'invisible text' makes identifying and filtering it easier so why is it there? Spammers normally go to a lot of trouble to evade filters, the dead givaway is telling.
I have been observing a similar phenom on Uselessnet for a year or so. Seemingly meaningless streams of words or nonsense sentences spewed out onto usenet, with or without an actual attachment for the bianry groups. The ones WITH the attachments are the most interesting. Since most readers of binary groups are mechanical, a post that contains an on topic binary post wouldn't even flag as spam.
No, I'm really paranoid. I now think most spam is coming from intelligence agencies. Think about it, they setup a spamming operation and it at least breaks even or possibly generates actual revenue they can plow back into other covert operations Sure beats operating a shortwave station at a loss. And you know the CIA will be in the game, they are always good at adopting new technology.
So I'm sure they ARE going after the Al Qaeda spam operation, but you won't see it on TV, it will be Spy vs. Spy games. Hopefully more effective than Mad Magazine.:)
> If Apple doesn't want WMA to become the standard, let Apple get its act > together with a demonstrably good implementation of the DRM idea, one > which can't be cracked.
Apple happens to be run by a geek who understands the fundamental reality of the situation. So long as we still have trusted computers, uncrackable DRM isn't possible. If the iTunes player can read the data out it can be reverse engineered to discover the method and the keys. Only if we, the purchasers of hardware, allow the trust relationship to be inverted will that change. When you hear someone speak of "trusted computing" you must always ask the question of WHO is going to be the one trusting the machine. Right now it is the owner, but certain forces would like to change that.
Dunno, sounds good enough for me. If I could do the whole transaction without booting Windows (Wine would be good enough) I might actually subscribe to iTunes. You see I have this little problem. I think.
More importantly I think thus:
I have CDs that are getting on 20 years old and they still play. By all indications, if properly cared for they can be passed on when I exit this reality. I have serious doubts about still being able to play DRMed music files. Follow me on this. Yes I can archive them to removable media. Yes I can supposedly transfer them to a new computer.... right now. But considering the pitiful sales figures that even iTunes is reporting (and they are the biggest!) I would seriously doubt they will still exist in their current form in 20 years. And even that is ASSuming they will still want to help me rekey a new machine twenty years from now to access obsolete AAC files encoded with a master key they might no longer have access to, shit happens you know. And NOBODY has broached the subject of whether iTunes licenses are inheritable property.
Now with this unlocking program I could use iTunes to buy the songs I want, in known good high quality rips and still be able to store them away on archival grade CD-R, safe in the knowledge I will be able to play them in 20 years or pass them down. This is fairly attractive.
Now if they would only offer a better selection of formats. I would really like something like flac, because quality matters to me. I don't just play music on crappy little computer speakers, I have a real stereo/home theater system in the living room. Sorry, but if I'm still going to have to go buy the CD the song is on, I'll just use gnutella for the low quality PC version. Plus I can convert a good format like flac down to mp3 for portable gadgets, computers, etc. AAC files can be played on a couple of software based players and exactly ONE brand of portable player. And reencoding a lossy format is usually not a good idea. MP3 -> ATRAC does fairly good, but then my MD is normal MD not MDLP. Haven't tried it but AAC->MP3 probably isn't very good.
> It's affected sales to me. I stopped buying cd's when napster first > came out, and haven't since.
Just the opposite with me. I don't buy many CDs, but then I don't run gtk-gnutella much either. But I have bought CDs because of it, a good example was just this weekend. You see, I live deep in flyover country where you don't hear much on the radio except what Clear Channel is pushing. So from time to time I 'graze' new stuff on P2P and Shoutcast. Had heard of Moby from time to time but except for one track I caught on VH1 once, didn't know squat. So last year I typed "Moby" into gtk-gnutella and grabbed some mp3 and even a couple of mpegs. The music kinda grew on me so while I was in a Best Buy (90 miles from home, in semi-civilization) I bought two CDs. Because while MP3 is ok, the real CD is the only thing I want to be playing on the main amp in the living room when I'm cranking it up.
Re:Other possibilities
on
Red Hat Recap
·
· Score: 1
> Someone explain to me why there are THREE separate RHEL clone > projects?
Slightly different focus.
Whitebox aims to be a pure play clone of RHEL, period. Yum was brought in to replace RHN because there wasn't a choice, being as RHN is what RH charges for. But beyond that and trademark removal it aims to track RHEL bug for bug. For example, binary kernel modules compiled against RHEL3 load into the WBEL kernel without errors or warnings and if an update broke that I'd consider it a bug.
Tao is RHEL with apt instead of yum and, I think, a few additional packages as well.
CentOS, I'm still trying to get a grip on exactly what they are about. Whatever their goals are, one thing is clear; they are thinking big and the rebuild portion of their project appears to be more like a stopgap measure on the way to forking their own distro. And hey, Mandrake started off the same way so more power to em.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen to that. My previous machine was a t-bird 900 on an above average MB. Slightly unstable until I finally threw money at the problem and bought a big-ass, high quality power supply to replace what Enlight tossed in for free with the case. Zero problems after doing that.
This time I started out with a nice heavy, well ventilated case with a beefy p/s filled with another high quality MB, name brand RAM and an Athlon64. I have been running a lot of test builds of whiteboxlinux on this puppy to stress it before building a final x86_64 release and the temp rises a bit after 20+ hours of straight compiling, but it has run rock solid.
Moral of the story, don't buy AMD to save money and expect a system as stable as a quality Intel box. Buy AMD as part of a quality system and it won't be the weak link.
> The little money it makes will be sucked out by "legal" pirates
> from its very movement.
As the alleged "pirate" in question, allow me to disagree. Those who need the SUPPORT offered by RH should purchase RHEL3. Those of us who DON'T need the support shouldn't since RHEL3 is 100% Free Software. Red Hat does not sell software since that would be kinda daft, it being Free Software and all that. What they sell is support and if you are the sort of site deploying an Oracle box you will be writing them a check just like you wrote one to Sun when Oracle was sitting on an UltraSparc.
Basically, WhiteBox should be thought of a product between Fedora and RHEL, offering the longer deployment window and most of the stability of RHEL but with the community support more like that of Fedora.
And I have heard my little project from the swamps of Louisiana mantioned by several RH people, but never disparagingly. So if they don't have a problem with what I (and the cAos, tao, etc. rebuild efforts) am doing why don't you hold off on condemming me for another couple of years, until you learn a little more about how the Open Source/Free Software ecology actually works.
Because in Sun's case they did a lot of good in their day and some folks would rather see them go gracefully now, instead of die a long messy death and in their death spasms corrupt and despoil most of those good works in a vain attempt to live a year or so beyond their allotted time.
If you use fast cards (or a microdrive) it should be possible. Remember that RAW isn't that much larger than the highest quality JPEG and smaller than TIFF. Plus the camera does not have to reprocess the data before saving.
Actually, I'm increasingly of the opinion that RAW is the best format for digital photography.
The file size isn't THAT much larger than the high quality JPEG setting and half the size of a lossless TIFF file. (Just to throw out some actual numbers, on my Olympus C5050z a RAW is 7.5MB, TIFF is 14MB and JPEG at high quality usually varies between 2-4MB.)
This is due to the fact that consumer quality cams use bayer patterned CCDs and only have one sensor per pixel (half green, the other half split between red and blue) and the camera has to invent the other two color values for each pixel and then feed that trippled dataset into the JPEG or TIFF encoding process. While a RAW is simply the raw values from the CCD, often at higher than eight bit samples. (Mine appears to return 12bits/value)
> Personally I feel it's a big mistake. Linux 2.6.x is stable now, so
> use it. It's also much faster.
2.6 wasn't here last summer when RHEL3 was being built. But RH wanted several of the features for the new version, since it was going to be around for five years and all that jazz.
RHEL4 is looking like it will be 2.6 based, but they are adding in SELINUX. RedHat is usually out near the bleeding edge, but just far enough back that they don't get cut up too bad.
> I don't see what the big deal is. You can just hold down the control
> key when you click to get the same function as a right click.
And how would you do a CTRL-B2? Or ALT-B3, or CTRL-ALT-B2, etc. Gimp uses all of that and more.
> Have you even used a Mac? Do you know what you are talking about?
Yes. OSX 10.1, but that is new enough.
> So you're saying that windows users are smarter than the mac people?
:) Old BBS tagline says it all:
Actually, yes.
"If he's an idiot I send him to the Mac store."
But seriously, most Mac users I know aren't idiots per se, they are just not big on rational thought and common sense. Arts types. World needs em, just don't ask one to help with your tax return.
> Unix geeks like myself are switching in droves to OS X.
Then you were never a real UNIX geek anyway, just an ABMer chasing the current shiny toy. None of the REAL alpha geeks have switched. Hint: Cmdr. Taco isn't one.
> ask a 12 year old kid if she'd rather buy the latest NSync album
> with or without DRM, and first she'll laugh
Of course, end users never care about technical issues. They WILL care when they realize the consequences for them, same as when Circuit City tried DIVX. When that 12yr old loses her whole collection when daddy has to reload Windows and tehy can't get the DRM keys set back "just so" and the music stops working she will care... and go back to WinMX. Those 12yr olds also swap their CDs among themselves like crazy. When she can't loan/give her bestest friend a copy of Britney's hottest new track she will care.
> However, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think
> Linux 3D graphics drivers are currently all
> proprietary,
Wrong. There are RADEON drivers in X.org and XFree86's tree with both 2D and 3D accellerated. The ATI driver supports the latest cards and supposedly has better acceleration. But I wouldn't know about that since Free drivers is why I tossed the NVIDIA card and now buy only hardware supported by Free drivers. The horror of keeping closed drivers working through kernel/distro upgrades wasn't worth it.
> Apple is about the only one who realized that you can't make money
> by selling songs only,
Then Apple IS a bunch of mindless idiots who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Consumer electronics is a low margin/high volume game. The money is in content. Compare DVD sales figures to player sales. Now compare net profits. Or do the same with CD players vs the music industry.
There would be profits for all at $0.99/track if the RIAA would get their heads out of their butts and embrace the change.
A 909% increase over a number in the statistical noise of consumer electronics sales isn't something to crow about. And look how much cash they are burning through in advertising to get it.
/low volume iPods were compatible, but that isn't the case. And once WMA has conquered the field the recording studios won't even renew Apple's license to run the iTunes Store. Their 1% marketshare won't justify pissing off Billy Gates.
The problem with iPod is that at the current unit sales it is ignorable and yet if the numbers DO become significant the established consumer electronics mfgrs will devour them with better, cheaper products. Sure Apple has some good designers..... but so does Sony, Samsung, etc. At the current price points Apple is working with iPod like devices will never become mainstream and Apple has a twenty plus year track record of not only being unable to do, but actually disdaining, the hard work of selling high volume/low margin consumer products.
This wouldn't be a problem if there were a standard and the higher quality
Of course my money is on none of the above. Consumers aren't stupid enough to buy into this DRM crapola. The Apple crowd was the perfect audience for iPod, they are generally artistic types (i.e. not overly rational) with tons of disposbale income and used to being abused in the wallet by Apple. I don't see the WinMX crowd lining up to buy crippled tracks.
The $0.99/track is a good pricepoint if it were on the same terms as CD sales, but DRM is a dealbreaker. Just too complicated and risky for me.
> When Palm did the same thing, the same thing happened.
Wrong. Palm has money coming in, they just couldn't live up to the hype from their moonshot IPO. For Palm, retaining enough market share to avoid destruction at the hands of WinCE was everything. Below a certain share they will suffer the same fate as Netscape or Apple, as most developers currently writing to PalmOS shift to the one with the unit sales.
And where would Palm be had they continued as the sole maker of hardware? Sure, their hardware is nice stuff for a general market of salesmen and midlevel executives, but it doesn't compare to what a hardware maker with serious engineering resources like Sony can do with the Clie line, or niche players like Symbol and their barcode enabled palms, etc.
And thanks to the Jobs reality distortion field, when Microsoft's music service starts kicking their asses, they will have zero friends... as usual. As of now they are #1 in a market segment that is so close to zero in dollar sales as to not even show up on a large corp's balance sheet. Will their overpriced (if well built) incompatible players stay #1 as the other players get second generation products into the channel, partnered with Microsoft's power to unlock content from studios? No. When the player market shifts, iTunes Store can't stay #1 when they are reduced to selling to the little club of yuppies with iPods.
And #2? How about in another year or two when Apple is #3 behind Linux on generic Intel hardware. Watch for em on start racking up serious points over at FuckedCompany?
Yea, I know people have been writing Apple's epitath for almost twenty years now, but this time it is going to happen. There isn't room for a #3 that is as fudged up as Apple, with Steve Jobs living in that little world of his own, unwilling to be bothered to even speak to the other children on the playground. Being #2 has kept them alive all this time, if for no other reason than to be Billy boy's designated token competition. No more.
Is this decision going to be the one that seals their doom? Hell, considering Real is a walking zombie it might have even been a good business decision, but the arrogance of the delivery is a good symptom of the underlying problem for any willing to see it.
> and only bundled as part of, and for the sole purpose of
> running, your Programs
Guess you missed that part. That means I can't add the JRE to my whiteboxlinux distribution unless I also include some java app that requires it.
Sorry, can't get worked up over another 2D card.
Yes, 2D. For those of us who use Free Software everything from Nvidia is just another 2D card. Same for ATI's newest products.
At least we get good 3D support for one generation old ATI boards, which are very affordable by the time the Windows kids have ran off to chase the next shiny thing and the XFree/X.org folks have stabilized the drivers.
Grr.. Sorry bout that, lost the original post in the thread in the filter. Agree completely about those unofficial Java environments not being ready for a production environment.
Hope my post above this gets modded into oblivion so fewer people see I was an idiot. I got karma to burn anyway.
> Every distro finds a way to install Microsoft TrueType Fonts
Oh? RedHat doesn't. Debian doesn't. Mandrake might, being French and all might give legal cover. But if SUSE does now they won't anymore after being sucked into Novell.
Go read the Sun and IBM JRE EULAs. They explicitly forbid redistribution.
> Would you trust your ecommerce site to Linux?
Depends. Linux and *BSD power a majority of the really impressive sites on the network so I'd certainly be in good company. Solaris is just too expensive for something so clusterable like web services.
Might use a big Solaris box to host the DB on the backend if the site was really major. Postgresql has made a lot of progress and I'll probably revise this remark in another year or so, but Oracle/DB2/Sybase is still what I'd want running the backend if a lot of money was riding on it just because it they have been doing replication and other such enterprise level things long enough to be trustworthy. Of course Oracle and IBM both support Linux as a tier 1 platform these days so running Linux all the way to the backend is certainly possible for all but the largest users who need the 128way Sun boxes.
And I think it goes without saying that Windows has no place in the enterprise except as legacy desktops. Period, end of story. Anyone suggesting otherwise has instantly proven themself to be incompetent and not to be trusted for advice on IT matters.
> In exactly what way does Sun "shift direction almost as often as
:)
> a political candidate"?
You must be new here. For a vivid example, familiar to most around these parts, take a look at their ever changing stances on Linux. Some years they ignore it as a 'toy' others it is an enemy, then in still others they are selling it, rinse & repeat. Currently they are talking out both sides of their ass, selling it on the desktop, sorta selling it on small servers, while passing SCO money under the table to knife it; all the while trying to cover every possible position in their public pronouncements depending on the audience. In other words, a typical corporation.
> Would you care to explain to me how it got there?
Never having run Gentoo, but knowing how it works I'd guess it has an ebuild that snarfs the package from Sun or IBM's website. But I will remember this little factoid for my next encounter with a certain other Gentoo user who was blathering on about how Gentoo builds EVERYTHING, nothing is binary. Think I'll ask him where Gentoo managed to get their grubby mitts on the source to Java without signing an NDA like the BlackDown folks had to.
We are supposed to "have a little faith" in a company that shifts direction almost as often as a political candidate? No thanks. Been there, done that, ain't ever trusting anything important to a product or service that is tied to any single entity. Sooner or later their goals and mine diverge and I get screwed.
Trust, but verify is a better way to go. Sun SAYS they will not screw over their Java development community but what concrete assurances do they offer to allow one to verify? Have they even made a Trolltech like promise that they will free the code if Sun pulls the plug on Java or, more likely, Sun itself is bought or broken up for spare parts?
Personally I prefer to deal with software under a DFSG compatible license since then I KNOW (as opposed to an act of faith) the software will continue to be available and so long as a few people care about it, updates will continue. I also prefer open hardware from multiple sources for the same reasons. No one corp's ever shifting plans will leave me high and dry.
Plus with Sun you get policies that are just insane. No other word really describes the behaviour. Example: It is obviously in Sun's interest to see a JVM on as many machines as possible. Their JVM is a free download. But you can't even redistribute unmodified copies of it, which is why no linux distro includes a JVM. To use Java under Linux requires a user to go search it out, download a non-trivial package and install it. Won't be holding my breath waiting for someone at Sun to drop into this thread and answer that one.
> Great, now, if we can just prove it's being used by Al Qaeda to help
:)
> the Jihad we may finally get some political support for getting rid
> of spammers!
I know your post was modded funny, but it really isn't. But you aren't being paranoid enough.
Broadcasting to agents in the field is not a new idea, using UCE/SPAM is just teh latest example.
In WWII the BBC embedded messages in their newscasts. Of course in the current political environment over there they would be more likely to be embeding messages for Al Qaeda.... but that is another rant....
Anyone who has ever listened to a shortwave for any length of time has probably heard a 'numbers' station, long thought to be broadcasts to agents in the field.
Now we see crazy text embedded in spam, often in segments of the message where it would never be seen by the target Outlook drone. Hell, the presence of 'invisible text' makes identifying and filtering it easier so why is it there? Spammers normally go to a lot of trouble to evade filters, the dead givaway is telling.
I have been observing a similar phenom on Uselessnet for a year or so. Seemingly meaningless streams of words or nonsense sentences spewed out onto usenet, with or without an actual attachment for the bianry groups. The ones WITH the attachments are the most interesting. Since most readers of binary groups are mechanical, a post that contains an on topic binary post wouldn't even flag as spam.
No, I'm really paranoid. I now think most spam is coming from intelligence agencies. Think about it, they setup a spamming operation and it at least breaks even or possibly generates actual revenue they can plow back into other covert operations Sure beats operating a shortwave station at a loss. And you know the CIA will be in the game, they are always good at adopting new technology.
So I'm sure they ARE going after the Al Qaeda spam operation, but you won't see it on TV, it will be Spy vs. Spy games. Hopefully more effective than Mad Magazine.
> If Apple doesn't want WMA to become the standard, let Apple get its act
> together with a demonstrably good implementation of the DRM idea, one
> which can't be cracked.
Apple happens to be run by a geek who understands the fundamental reality of the situation. So long as we still have trusted computers, uncrackable DRM isn't possible. If the iTunes player can read the data out it can be reverse engineered to discover the method and the keys. Only if we, the purchasers of hardware, allow the trust relationship to be inverted will that change. When you hear someone speak of "trusted computing" you must always ask the question of WHO is going to be the one trusting the machine. Right now it is the owner, but certain forces would like to change that.
> That's not much of a crack now, is it?
Dunno, sounds good enough for me. If I could do the whole transaction without booting Windows (Wine would be good enough) I might actually subscribe to iTunes. You see I have this little problem. I think.
More importantly I think thus:
I have CDs that are getting on 20 years old and they still play. By all indications, if properly cared for they can be passed on when I exit this reality. I have serious doubts about still being able to play DRMed music files. Follow me on this. Yes I can archive them to removable media. Yes I can supposedly transfer them to a new computer.... right now. But considering the pitiful sales figures that even iTunes is reporting (and they are the biggest!) I would seriously doubt they will still exist in their current form in 20 years. And even that is ASSuming they will still want to help me rekey a new machine twenty years from now to access obsolete AAC files encoded with a master key they might no longer have access to, shit happens you know. And NOBODY has broached the subject of whether iTunes licenses are inheritable property.
Now with this unlocking program I could use iTunes to buy the songs I want, in known good high quality rips and still be able to store them away on archival grade CD-R, safe in the knowledge I will be able to play them in 20 years or pass them down. This is fairly attractive.
Now if they would only offer a better selection of formats. I would really like something like flac, because quality matters to me. I don't just play music on crappy little computer speakers, I have a real stereo/home theater system in the living room. Sorry, but if I'm still going to have to go buy the CD the song is on, I'll just use gnutella for the low quality PC version. Plus I can convert a good format like flac down to mp3 for portable gadgets, computers, etc. AAC files can be played on a couple of software based players and exactly ONE brand of portable player. And reencoding a lossy format is usually not a good idea. MP3 -> ATRAC does fairly good, but then my MD is normal MD not MDLP. Haven't tried it but AAC->MP3 probably isn't very good.
> It's affected sales to me. I stopped buying cd's when napster first
> came out, and haven't since.
Just the opposite with me. I don't buy many CDs, but then I don't run gtk-gnutella much either. But I have bought CDs because of it, a good example was just this weekend. You see, I live deep in flyover country where you don't hear much on the radio except what Clear Channel is pushing. So from time to time I 'graze' new stuff on P2P and Shoutcast. Had heard of Moby from time to time but except for one track I caught on VH1 once, didn't know squat. So last year I typed "Moby" into gtk-gnutella and grabbed some mp3 and even a couple of mpegs. The music kinda grew on me so while I was in a Best Buy (90 miles from home, in semi-civilization) I bought two CDs. Because while MP3 is ok, the real CD is the only thing I want to be playing on the main amp in the living room when I'm cranking it up.
> Someone explain to me why there are THREE separate RHEL clone
> projects?
Slightly different focus.
Whitebox aims to be a pure play clone of RHEL, period. Yum was brought in to replace RHN because there wasn't a choice, being as RHN is what RH charges for. But beyond that and trademark removal it aims to track RHEL bug for bug. For example, binary kernel modules compiled against RHEL3 load into the WBEL kernel without errors or warnings and if an update broke that I'd consider it a bug.
Tao is RHEL with apt instead of yum and, I think, a few additional packages as well.
CentOS, I'm still trying to get a grip on exactly what they are about. Whatever their goals are, one thing is clear; they are thinking big and the rebuild portion of their project appears to be more like a stopgap measure on the way to forking their own distro. And hey, Mandrake started off the same way so more power to em.
Lineox is a commercial effort, nuff said.