At least in Germany the Cartoon Network Channel is encrypted most times (or something is wrong with my satellite dish). And *now* they actually start broadcasting cool things instead of the 1001st rerun of [insert your least favourite series here]. Hmm..., maybe if I put a TV card in my PC and download this nifty little - huh, where did that ferret come from? "Stay good, Wolfram, stay good!" *Poink* *Poink*
When I first read "Neuromancer" by W. Gibson I thought "that sounds *so* real. that's how the internet is going to be". Then I picked up "idoru"... In idoru the internet is some virtual reality place that everybody can acces with a nintendo-style vr-set. However, it has been commercialized and is under control of the government. The only place where there is still some good ole internet anarchy is a hidden part of the net that only hacker know about and where 'normal' users don't have access to ("walled city").
With governments nowadays telling the people what they may put on their pages and what the must not, with content-rating systems openly supported by many countries and with companies making incompatible plugins and proprietary extensions to standard-protocols (and thus blurring the open nature of the web step by step) i think it is quite possible that the net may turn out the way gibson describes it in ~8 years. Fortunately, prognoses about the future development of the computer industry have never beent accurate a lot. I hope *we* won't hide in some secret places but openly defend the freedom of our net before it is too late.
(As my statement is quite general, it may be a little off-topic, but here we go...)
What seemed most important to me in this article was not the question FreeBSD vs. OpenBSD but: "Don't view OS's as a religion, because they are only tools. Nothing more. Use the best one for a given job and let it stay at that. [...]"
Whereas hardly any Windows-user really identifies with his OS, many U*IX-users tend to do so. (Hell, I also often do so...;-)
This does not only increase the os-for-computer-nerds image, it may also make some gurus blind for problems of their OS where another OS already offers a good solution (that might be integrated easily).
So I was quite happy to read in this article that O'Gorman used a very conservative approach to choose the os that best meets his needs. If he had also considered Linux he would have made my day...;-)
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At least in Germany the Cartoon Network Channel is encrypted most times (or something is wrong with my satellite dish).
And *now* they actually start broadcasting cool things instead of the 1001st rerun of [insert your least favourite series here].
Hmm..., maybe if I put a TV card in my PC and download this nifty little - huh, where did that ferret come from?
"Stay good, Wolfram, stay good!" *Poink* *Poink*
In idoru the internet is some virtual reality place that everybody can acces with a nintendo-style vr-set. However, it has been commercialized and is under control of the government. The only place where there is still some good ole internet anarchy is a hidden part of the net that only hacker know about and where 'normal' users don't have access to ("walled city").
With governments nowadays telling the people what they may put on their pages and what the must not, with content-rating systems openly supported by many countries and with companies making incompatible plugins and proprietary extensions to standard-protocols (and thus blurring the open nature of the web step by step) i think it is quite possible that the net may turn out the way gibson describes it in ~8 years.
Fortunately, prognoses about the future development of the computer industry have never beent accurate a lot. I hope *we* won't hide in some secret places but openly defend the freedom of our net before it is too late.
What seemed most important to me in this article was not the question FreeBSD vs. OpenBSD but: "Don't view OS's as a religion, because they are only tools. Nothing more. Use the best one for a given job and let it stay at that. [...]"
Whereas hardly any Windows-user really identifies with his OS, many U*IX-users tend to do so. (Hell, I also often do so... ;-)
This does not only increase the os-for-computer-nerds image, it may also make some gurus blind for problems of their OS where another OS already offers a good solution (that might be integrated easily).
So I was quite happy to read in this article that O'Gorman used a very conservative approach to choose the os that best meets his needs. If he had also considered Linux he would have made my day... ;-)