How much oil and gas do people consume getting to and from work? Wireless networks will further allow people to telecommute, reducing dependancy on oil. Sure, right now, most people are a few meters away from the access point, but creative people are building long-range networks using these things, within the boundaries of the current laws, using well-engineered antennas and low-power transmitters.
Look at those super-efficient flourescent bulbs that have been available for years. People just don't use them, probably because they cost more than the super-cheap incandescants that most people are used to.
On a personal level, I've spent a couple hundred dollars building my wireless network at home. Am I supposed to just toss that equipment into a landfill because my neighbor wants to save a few cents and feel that he is being 'green'?
What about the regulations that the FCC has on RF noise-emitting devices - don't they apply, even though the spectrum is free?
This stuff is ancient history really, if you look at things like internet protocols and RFCs, the documents that suggest exactly how to solve this sort of problem.
The problems happen when a vendor or group of vendors try to cram standards down the throats of the users.
Anyone else here remember when your typical office email package didn't speak RFC822 and you couldn't mail anyone outside your network?
Eventually, real standards always develop. Doing it early just saves everyone a lot of money and bother.
All I'd want is a decent folding wireless dumb terminal with SSH and a reliable free 64K wireless net connection. Maybe a couple of MB of local text storage.
...unless you memorize the fingerprint, ssh doesn't protect against man-in-the-middle attacks...
Get in the habit of remembering just the first few bits of the fingerprint for frequently-accessed sites - it just takes a second or two and *greatly* increases your security. (I have a little mnemonic I use for my home server, the IP of which frequently changes...)
But then again, I'm paranoid and only use SSH to connect two machines, both of which are on my desk...)
Cheers, Jim in Tokyo
My *own* favourite OpenSSH feature
on
SSH, The Secure Shell
·
· Score: 3, Informative
From work, SSH home - then open X Window or GTK, KDE programs that exist only on your home machine (gtk_gnutella, mozilla outside your corporate firewall, nmapfe, you name it...)
X connections over ssh are braindead easy, secure and quite simply kick ass.
Radio is crap - we all know that. So what do we do? We download. We seek out old and different things to hear - sometimes it's an old Tom Waits song, or perhaps something from "Grease" that was playing the summer you first fell in love in junior high school - maybe it's something new from Moby that you have no idea if you really like or not. I would guess, though, that if they really took a look at what people were downloading, filtered out the 14-20 year olds, they could find a really half-decent radio playlist in the works. OK, but then, you have the obvious 'segments' of the market - you find twenty people downloading old Gold Band cajun recordings and 300 downloading 1967 SanFran psychedelica - no need to lump them together, just create two streams and inject your advertising every fifth song or so. If I were a record label, I would *welcome* people downloading old stuff from my catalog that I didn't happen to be pushing at the time - you get one person donloading an old song, he's just a sick - but imagine you get fifty people (fifty people!) a day downloading an old song. "And friends they may think it's a movement..." (Or at least a meme...) (Sorry, Arlo.)
Using one of the p2p apps, did you ever use the option to "See what else this guy has"? I mean, if I find someone who has a great old Django tune that I've never heard, I want to see what else he's got laying around. Often times, I see a song in their list that I may have on CD but haven't popped in for a while - guess what? I'll probably pop it in and give it a listen. There is a tremendous amount of information on listening habits out there that is not being used. Imagine a programmable radio station wher you could select the type of music you want to hear based upon what people download - imagine it in some form of pseudo-sql: Select (*.mp3 > 160Kbps) from alldownloads where user has downloaded "Gavin Bryars" and "Portishead", exclude $porn, exclude $top40...
Bad example, but it could be a lot of fun...
Once I found a guy using giFT (FastTrack) who had such an incredibly good selection (and a kickass connection) that I wrote a shell script to check his new downloads everyday - his kind of unbiased good taste is something is something that I would *pay* for. (Though I would never pay for a *corporate* selection in a million years..)
OK - it's late here and I've had too much wine... Cheers, Jim in Tokyo
I think making special-purpose distros are a good idea. If I can borrow a disk from a fiend, install it on a box and have everything I need to start creating music, this is a tremendously hassle-free to put their hardware to good use.
One of my friends is a composer and a musician - he's also a programmer, but he has *no* Linux/Unix experience at all - could a distro like this help him get started? Sure. How about a music teacher at a highschool? Don't count on him/her having much computer experience at all - given teacher salaries and the typical equipment in schools, he or she would probably welcome something like this.
I just don't see how focusing an effort on specializing a distro has any bad effect on other, more general distros. It takes nothing away, just adds...
Look at the demand for Firewall distros like IPCop. (My personal favorite!) With that, I can dl a 20mb iso and have a working firewall in 20 minutes - I don't have to go in and disable a lot of services the way I would if I had started with any of the standard distros.
I watched a pirated copy of Episode 1 subtitled in Thai on a VCD from Bangkok well before the official version was in the theaters here in Tokyo, so I guess your second assumption might be more true. (The titling was pretty crappy, too.)
The studios can't very well release a badly-subtitled movie, or release in English-only first, followed by the subtitled version later.
Plus, before the internet, it didn't matter - the movies (and all of the hype) just followed a few months behind.
Living here for a few years, I really have little idea about what movies are playing in the US - when they finally show up at my video store is usually when hear of them - since I'm usually disappointed with the movies, I don't feel particularly deprived.
Of course, the big movies you do hear about - AOTC, LOTR, Spider-man, but they get pushed through the dubbing/titling process faster, so the lag time is less.
But it still fits - About 15 years ago, I heard that Iran had contacted the US govt and demanded that they hand over Madonna and Michael Jackson so that they could be put to death on obscenity charges. (For some reason, the US chose not to...) Yet, the US feels free to nab Skylaroff and that kid in Norway for doing stuff legal where they live. Here in Japan, it seems to be legal to publish photos and videos of young teenagers that would get you put away for years in the US, yet pornography that is legal in the US is quite illegal here. They even go as far as to sandpaper away the "naughty bits" from every copy of Playboy and Penthouse imported into Japan. Who's right?
Maybe the best thing is to have the equivalent of that little "Kosher" mark on websites like they have on food, then let the viewer filter as they like. Then limit access to the internet to adults.
But then again, the US will probably just force its standards upon the rest of the world like they always do.
Anyone have any experience with the database components?
(This is the first I've heard of the database part...)
That part, if it's done well, would be worth the money to me - my office has people using Access databases that I would love to convert over to to StarOffice (connected to MySQL or Postgres) if I could.
Also, if I 'upgrade' people to StarOffice, how tough/legal is it to sell off the MS Office licenses? Assuming we have a bunch of individually-purchased copies...)
RHCE is one of the better programs out there - LPI, I'm not so familiar with. (But I've heard good things about it.)
What I was saying is that the MCSE program has way better brand recognition than anything Linux has to offer. Everybody's heard of it and frankly, outside of slashdot, it's rarely something to be ridiculed for.
My point was, there's a lot of people out there who are really qualified in Linux who are not certified in any manner. (Are RMS, Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox certified?)
Plus, making MCSEs into dogfood would be cruel. No dog deserves that...
"But if this Linux thing is so good, then why is it FREE? Can you answer me that?? Thought not. Microsoft must be better because it costs more."
Of course I'm being sarcastic, but how far is that from some people's thinking?
Government managers pride themselves on how much they spend and how many people they command, not on how much they save. Keep in mind that they cannot turn a profit or even show a savings - that's suicide - much more so than having your project fail spectacularly.
Bureaucracies often need to be able to quantify their logic (to avoid actual thought?) - so perhaps Linux should just cost more up front? That would make it a lot easier to go over budget later...
Of course it doesn't help that there is no recognized equivalent to the MCSE program - how do you then justify who you hire? Slashdot karma? I know there is the Red Hat program, but does that really carry much weight in government hiring?
The thing is, Valenti's rantings aside, they have a killer business model - no matter how nazi-ish their percieved business practices are, people still flock to the theatre to see whatever crap they decide to spoon down our throats.
(think Matrix, LOTR, Crouching Tiger et alia, Star Wars, and so on...)
I mean, COME ON!?!? This is perhaps the one place on earth where people actually are aware of what is happening with this industry and yet every other story lately seems to be about how we should all flock to the next MPAA/Time-Warner-AOL-Disney-CocaCola/Scientology/R IAA/DVD-Association-endorsed reel of advertisement-laden "entertainment".
If you don't support what they are doing, Don't Go: Don't go to the theater. Don't rent the DVD. Don't buy the Harry Potter Happy Meal. Don't buy the T-Shirt...
If you can't do that much, then you are showing that this tiny minority has absolutely no hope of making the slightest impact on how Hollywood operates.
Why don't we all just officially give up on this topic?
We're the only ones who claim to care and we don't seem to care enough to change our habits.
The article said that these things would only have a structure for supporting cargo, which, I'm guessing would be hanging about where a blimp's gondola is, so I guess the original assumption about the marshmallow might be true. (I have no idea why the author of he article kept referring to them as dirigibles...)
I'm pretty sure that if you plowed any sort of non-rigid blimp into any sort of skyscraper, the blimp would do a minimum of damage before being punctured - though if it managed to break some windows first, the occupants of the building might be running around talking in squeaky voices from inhaling al that helium, which would make for some very confused 911 operators I'm sure...
I think the local target audience is Tokyo commuters who will use it while standing on a crowded train. Believe me, doing that, you get good at typing with your thumbs - touch typing isn't really an option unless you manage to get a seat - in which case you are more likely to try and catch a bit of sleep.
The small footprint will also appeal to people who have no extra desk space but want to peek at their personal mail at work or carry their MP3s with them.
Things get crowded here - more than you'd imagine if you've never commuted to and worked in a Japanese office, so I guess that's why it's been introduced here and not in the US...
Except you'd keep getting hacked by people from countries with border disputes -
Seriously, though, I once saw a spherical jigsaw puzzle globe from a company that would send you updated pieces when borders changed.
You've motivated me to go and see what the latest Xearth programs are like - RedHat used to include it years ago and it was a cool program - lots of configurable options beyond the defaults. I wonder if it's been updated with those great satellite images I saw here a month or so ago...
I haven't had any users complain about *wanted* attachments not getting through, either...
I also silently strip out any IFRAMES: :0fW |sed 's/IFRAME//gI' :0 Afhw
| formail -I "X-iframe: iframes stripped " (I have that as my own ~/.procmailrc )
Please note that the sed option 'I' makes it case-insensitive, but is a Gnu extension, so it may not work with all versions.
I just wish procmail syntax was a bit less, um, *impossible to understand*...
I think the "Barriers to Acceptance" are even smaller: 3 years ago, Joe User had never heard of even an MP3. Then some friend of his showed him Napster. "So how do I play one of these here MP3s?" "Go get WinAmp." So now Joe User is skilled in MP3..
Skip ahead to 2002. "So I got $DownloaderOfTheWeek and searched for my songs, but all I got was these Ogg files - how do I hear them?" "Go get the Winamp Plugin..." I was never particularly interested in Ogg. I thought it was a stupid name for an unneeded format. (I never understood their logo, either - it looks like Jesus beating the hell out of a snake...) But then I put Mandrake on my ThinkPad and ripped a CD using Grip - It used to be with Grip, you got the program, then went out and downloaded BladeEnc or Lame to actually do the ripping, but this version comes with an Ogg ripper.So I tried it out and DAMN, but they sound good. As long as I can get all of my players to play them, I'm in business. Probably, a lot of other people will come to accept Ogg this way, too - MP3s are not so old to most people that they have some sort of strong loyalty - if the stuff they want to hear is in Ogg - they wil download the plugin for their player and go about their downloading. As for ripping and distribution, if Ogg is free and people are somewhat familiar with it, rippers will use it by default - they may even install the WinAmp plugin for you at the same time... Just my 2 yen... Jim in Tokyo
That's exactly the sort of answer I was looking for when I posed the question. When I asked it, it was not "What works well under Linux" or even "Who makes drivers available" but "Who really stands out in their support of the Linux community."
At this point, I've pretty much got all the hardware I need, most of it working under Linux, now it's down to where should I go to upgrade and who do I recommend to friends?
I've had great luck with Adaptec - they make great stuff and I never had to give the drivers a thought - I just never knew that Adaptec was throwing so much support behind their product.
What's that? Oh, *right* - that thing I voided with a screwdriver that first day...
Actually, I've never needed to use the warranty on my vaios - I have 2 of them. Damn solid little machines. They've literally been all over the world, usually rattling around in a backpack without any special padding or protection. The older one is held together with tape in places, but it performs like a dream.
Slashdot Mirror
How much oil and gas do people consume getting to and from work?
Wireless networks will further allow people to telecommute, reducing dependancy on oil. Sure, right now, most people are a few meters away from the access point, but creative people are building long-range networks using these things, within the boundaries of the current laws, using well-engineered antennas and low-power transmitters.
Look at those super-efficient flourescent bulbs that have been available for years. People just don't use them, probably because they cost more than the super-cheap incandescants that most people are used to.
On a personal level, I've spent a couple hundred dollars building my wireless network at home. Am I supposed to just toss that equipment into a landfill because my neighbor wants to save a few cents and feel that he is being 'green'?
What about the regulations that the FCC has on RF noise-emitting devices - don't they apply, even though the spectrum is free?
This stuff is ancient history really, if you look at things like internet protocols and RFCs, the documents that suggest exactly how to solve this sort of problem.
The problems happen when a vendor or group of vendors try to cram standards down the throats of the users.
Anyone else here remember when your typical office email package didn't speak RFC822 and you couldn't mail anyone outside your network?
Eventually, real standards always develop. Doing it early just saves everyone a lot of money and bother.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
All I'd want is a decent folding wireless dumb terminal with SSH and a reliable free 64K wireless net connection. Maybe a couple of MB of local text storage.
Yup, that would just about do it for me...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
A snail for my O'Reilly zoo!...or maybe he'll get eaten.
Damn Mandrake users!
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
...unless you memorize the fingerprint, ssh doesn't protect against man-in-the-middle attacks...
Get in the habit of remembering just the first few bits of the fingerprint for frequently-accessed sites - it just takes a second or two and *greatly* increases your security. (I have a little mnemonic I use for my home server, the IP of which frequently changes...)
But then again, I'm paranoid and only use SSH to connect two machines, both of which are on my desk...)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
From work, SSH home - then open X Window or GTK, KDE programs that exist only on your home machine (gtk_gnutella, mozilla outside your corporate firewall, nmapfe, you name it...)
X connections over ssh are braindead easy, secure and quite simply kick ass.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Radio is crap - we all know that.
So what do we do? We download. We seek out old and different things to hear - sometimes it's an old Tom Waits song, or perhaps something from "Grease" that was playing the summer you first fell in love in junior high school - maybe it's something new from Moby that you have no idea if you really like or not. I would guess, though, that if they really took a look at what people were downloading, filtered out the 14-20 year olds, they could find a really half-decent radio playlist in the works.
OK, but then, you have the obvious 'segments' of the market - you find twenty people downloading old Gold Band cajun recordings and 300 downloading 1967 SanFran psychedelica - no need to lump them together, just create two streams and inject your advertising every fifth song or so.
If I were a record label, I would *welcome* people downloading old stuff from my catalog that I didn't happen to be pushing at the time - you get one person donloading an old song, he's just a sick - but imagine you get fifty people (fifty people!) a day downloading an old song. "And friends they may think it's a movement..." (Or at least a meme...) (Sorry, Arlo.)
Using one of the p2p apps, did you ever use the option to "See what else this guy has"? I mean, if I find someone who has a great old Django tune that I've never heard, I want to see what else he's got laying around. Often times, I see a song in their list that I may have on CD but haven't popped in for a while - guess what? I'll probably pop it in and give it a listen.
There is a tremendous amount of information on listening habits out there that is not being used.
Imagine a programmable radio station wher you could select the type of music you want to hear based upon what people download - imagine it in some form of pseudo-sql:
Select (*.mp3 > 160Kbps) from alldownloads where user has downloaded "Gavin Bryars" and "Portishead", exclude $porn, exclude $top40...
Bad example, but it could be a lot of fun...
Once I found a guy using giFT (FastTrack) who had such an incredibly good selection (and a kickass connection) that I wrote a shell script to check his new downloads everyday - his kind of unbiased good taste is something is something that I would *pay* for. (Though I would never pay for a *corporate* selection in a million years..)
OK - it's late here and I've had too much wine...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
I think making special-purpose distros are a good idea. If I can borrow a disk from a fiend, install it on a box and have everything I need to start creating music, this is a tremendously hassle-free to put their hardware to good use.
One of my friends is a composer and a musician - he's also a programmer, but he has *no* Linux/Unix experience at all - could a distro like this help him get started? Sure.
How about a music teacher at a highschool? Don't count on him/her having much computer experience at all - given teacher salaries and the typical equipment in schools, he or she would probably welcome something like this.
I just don't see how focusing an effort on specializing a distro has any bad effect on other, more general distros. It takes nothing away, just adds...
Look at the demand for Firewall distros like IPCop. (My personal favorite!) With that, I can dl a 20mb iso and have a working firewall in 20 minutes - I don't have to go in and disable a lot of services the way I would if I had started with any of the standard distros.
Just my opinion...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
I watched a pirated copy of Episode 1 subtitled in Thai on a VCD from Bangkok well before the official version was in the theaters here in Tokyo, so I guess your second assumption might be more true. (The titling was pretty crappy, too.)
The studios can't very well release a badly-subtitled movie, or release in English-only first, followed by the subtitled version later.
Plus, before the internet, it didn't matter - the movies (and all of the hype) just followed a few months behind.
Living here for a few years, I really have little idea about what movies are playing in the US - when they finally show up at my video store is usually when hear of them - since I'm usually disappointed with the movies, I don't feel particularly deprived.
Of course, the big movies you do hear about - AOTC, LOTR, Spider-man, but they get pushed through the dubbing/titling process faster, so the lag time is less.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Subtitling takes time.
(Not everyone in the world speaks English...)
Cheers -
Jim
But it still fits -
About 15 years ago, I heard that Iran had contacted the US govt and demanded that they hand over Madonna and Michael Jackson so that they could be put to death on obscenity charges.
(For some reason, the US chose not to...)
Yet, the US feels free to nab Skylaroff and that kid in Norway for doing stuff legal where they live.
Here in Japan, it seems to be legal to publish photos and videos of young teenagers that would get you put away for years in the US, yet pornography that is legal in the US is quite illegal here. They even go as far as to sandpaper away the "naughty bits" from every copy of Playboy and Penthouse imported into Japan. Who's right?
Maybe the best thing is to have the equivalent of that little "Kosher" mark on websites like they have on food, then let the viewer filter as they like. Then limit access to the internet to adults.
But then again, the US will probably just force its standards upon the rest of the world like they always do.
Anyone have any experience with the database components?
(This is the first I've heard of the database part...)
That part, if it's done well, would be worth the money to me - my office has people using Access databases that I would love to convert over to to StarOffice (connected to MySQL or Postgres) if I could.
Also, if I 'upgrade' people to StarOffice, how tough/legal is it to sell off the MS Office licenses? Assuming we have a bunch of individually-purchased copies...)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Now a beowulf cluster of these would certainly be a party.
Or would it be a Gnu Hurd?
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
RHCE is one of the better programs out there - LPI, I'm not so familiar with. (But I've heard good things about it.)
What I was saying is that the MCSE program has way better brand recognition than anything Linux has to offer. Everybody's heard of it and frankly, outside of slashdot, it's rarely something to be ridiculed for.
My point was, there's a lot of people out there who are really qualified in Linux who are not certified in any manner. (Are RMS, Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox certified?)
Plus, making MCSEs into dogfood would be cruel. No dog deserves that...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
"But if this Linux thing is so good, then why is it FREE? Can you answer me that?? Thought not. Microsoft must be better because it costs more."
Of course I'm being sarcastic, but how far is that from some people's thinking?
Government managers pride themselves on how much they spend and how many people they command, not on how much they save. Keep in mind that they cannot turn a profit or even show a savings - that's suicide - much more so than having your project fail spectacularly.
Bureaucracies often need to be able to quantify their logic (to avoid actual thought?) - so perhaps Linux should just cost more up front? That would make it a lot easier to go over budget later...
Of course it doesn't help that there is no recognized equivalent to the MCSE program - how do you then justify who you hire? Slashdot karma? I know there is the Red Hat program, but does that really carry much weight in government hiring?
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Hollywood is doing just fine the way they are.
R IAA/DVD-Association-endorsed reel of advertisement-laden "entertainment".
The thing is, Valenti's rantings aside, they have a killer business model - no matter how nazi-ish their percieved business practices are, people still flock to the theatre to see whatever crap they decide to spoon down our throats.
(think Matrix, LOTR, Crouching Tiger et alia, Star Wars, and so on...)
I mean, COME ON!?!? This is perhaps the one place on earth where people actually are aware of what is happening with this industry and yet every other story lately seems to be about how we should all flock to the next MPAA/Time-Warner-AOL-Disney-CocaCola/Scientology/
If you don't support what they are doing, Don't Go:
Don't go to the theater. Don't rent the DVD. Don't buy the Harry Potter Happy Meal. Don't buy the T-Shirt...
If you can't do that much, then you are showing that this tiny minority has absolutely no hope of making the slightest impact on how Hollywood operates.
Why don't we all just officially give up on this topic?
We're the only ones who claim to care and we don't seem to care enough to change our habits.
Whatever...
Jim in Tokyo
The article said that these things would only have a structure for supporting cargo, which, I'm guessing would be hanging about where a blimp's gondola is, so I guess the original assumption about the marshmallow might be true. (I have no idea why the author of he article kept referring to them as dirigibles...)
I'm pretty sure that if you plowed any sort of non-rigid blimp into any sort of skyscraper, the blimp would do a minimum of damage before being punctured - though if it managed to break some windows first, the occupants of the building might be running around talking in squeaky voices from inhaling al that helium, which would make for some very confused 911 operators I'm sure...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
I think the local target audience is Tokyo commuters who will use it while standing on a crowded train.
Believe me, doing that, you get good at typing with your thumbs - touch typing isn't really an option unless you manage to get a seat - in which case you are more likely to try and catch a bit of sleep.
The small footprint will also appeal to people who have no extra desk space but want to peek at their personal mail at work or carry their MP3s with them.
Things get crowded here - more than you'd imagine if you've never commuted to and worked in a Japanese office, so I guess that's why it's been introduced here and not in the US...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Except you'd keep getting hacked by people from countries with border disputes -
Seriously, though, I once saw a spherical jigsaw puzzle globe from a company that would send you updated pieces when borders changed.
You've motivated me to go and see what the latest Xearth programs are like - RedHat used to include it years ago and it was a cool program - lots of configurable options beyond the defaults. I wonder if it's been updated with those great satellite images I saw here a month or so ago...
Off to google...
Jim in Tokyo
That's been a great script for me - I've been using it for months. I added a few types to the list of blocked files as well...
\
:0 Afhw
*name=".*\.(vbs|wsf|vbe|wsh|hta|scr|pif|com|exe
|bak|rar|bat|lnk|url|dll|hlp|shs|ocx|js|nws)"
I haven't had any users complain about *wanted* attachments not getting through, either...
I also silently strip out any IFRAMES:
:0fW
|sed 's/IFRAME//gI'
| formail -I "X-iframe: iframes stripped "
(I have that as my own ~/.procmailrc )
Please note that the sed option 'I' makes it case-insensitive, but is a Gnu extension, so it may not work with all versions.
I just wish procmail syntax was a bit less, um, *impossible to understand*...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
I think the "Barriers to Acceptance" are even smaller:
3 years ago, Joe User had never heard of even an MP3. Then some friend of his showed him Napster. "So how do I play one of these here MP3s?"
"Go get WinAmp."
So now Joe User is skilled in MP3..
Skip ahead to 2002. "So I got $DownloaderOfTheWeek and searched for my songs, but all I got was these Ogg files - how do I hear them?"
"Go get the Winamp Plugin..."
I was never particularly interested in Ogg. I thought it was a stupid name for an unneeded format. (I never understood their logo, either - it looks like Jesus beating the hell out of a snake...)
But then I put Mandrake on my ThinkPad and ripped a CD using Grip - It used to be with Grip, you got the program, then went out and downloaded BladeEnc or Lame to actually do the ripping, but this version comes with an Ogg ripper.So I tried it out and DAMN, but they sound good. As long as I can get all of my players to play them, I'm in business. Probably, a lot of other people will come to accept Ogg this way, too - MP3s are not so old to most people that they have some sort of strong loyalty - if the stuff they want to hear is in Ogg - they wil download the plugin for their player and go about their downloading. As for ripping and distribution, if Ogg is free and people are somewhat familiar with it, rippers will use it by default - they may even install the WinAmp plugin for you at the same time...
Just my 2 yen...
Jim in Tokyo
I *Really* want one of these -
(but can't justify buying one because I detest television...)
Cheers,
Jim
That's exactly the sort of answer I was looking for when I posed the question.
When I asked it, it was not "What works well under Linux" or even "Who makes drivers available" but "Who really stands out in their support of the Linux community."
At this point, I've pretty much got all the hardware I need, most of it working under Linux, now it's down to where should I go to upgrade and who do I recommend to friends?
I've had great luck with Adaptec - they make great stuff and I never had to give the drivers a thought - I just never knew that Adaptec was throwing so much support behind their product.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Plugging it again here on SlashDot can't hurt...
Oh, wait a minute...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
What's that?
Oh, *right* - that thing I voided with a screwdriver that first day...
Actually, I've never needed to use the warranty on my vaios - I have 2 of them. Damn solid little machines. They've literally been all over the world, usually rattling around in a backpack without any special padding or protection. The older one is held together with tape in places, but it performs like a dream.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo