The argument, of course, is that it requires advanced knowledge, or that it's simply too hard.
It's taken me about a week to get FreeBSD set up reasonably close to the way I want it, but that was mostly just because I was still learning. I've never really understood why people find anything other than Windows so difficult. Maybe I'm weird, but for me, FreeBSD has probably been the single easiest operating system I've ever used, as odd as that might sound.
The single main reason why I like it is because even though sometimes it will take time to get things going initially, once something is set up to work the first time, it keeps working. It's not like Ubuntu where I had ALSA crashing whenever it felt like it. I can have Enlightenment, Claws-Mail, Firefox, the epic 5 IRC client, the cplay mp3 player, and htop running with screen though in under 100 Mb of RAM. Ubuntu uses 300 Mb of RAM, by contrast, with just GNOME running and no other applications.
I don't understand why people find problem solving intimidating, either. I've never been intimidated by UNIX. (whether Linux or FreeBSD) I had some problems playing a DVD for the first time the other night, but I found that whenever I had a problem, I could usually just look for it on Google, or maybe go to the #FreeBSD irc channel, and someone else would have run into it and solved it themselves; so I was able to get past all of them. The Dark Knight was running very smoothly in xine, even while having Firefox and about six tabs going as well.
If anything, I actually have found Windows genuinely scary because prior versions at least behaved in illogical. I don't like systems where the level of complexity is so high that if something crashes, it can be caused by the interaction of any two (or more) of a million different processes, and I can't hope to identify what they are, in order to fix the problem.
I just hope there are enough of us CLI users left that these applications at least get maintained, going forward.
...when we as a species will have to choose between whether we want to allow any and all life on this planet to survive, or whether we want to allow the corporation to survive.
The survival of Man and the corporation are mutually exclusive. In order for one to survive, the other must eventually die.
Once I got it I found out that the host development platform was MSwindows only.
To quote Dr. Emmett Brown, "You're just not thinking fourth dimensionally."
It's an ARM processor. Take a surf on over to our friends at NetBSD.org, and see if it's one of the ARM processors they know about. If it is, then with possibly a certain amount of extra hackery to get the disk formatted, you're in business.
If it isn't one of their identified processors, then fire off an email to them and tell them about it. They pride themselves on their system being able to run on every processor in the known universe, and so if you've got one that NetBSD doesn't run on, they're likely going to want to know about it.
Also, seeing as it is known as an ARM processor, chances are good that even on the offchance that NetBSD doesn't support that exact one, because it does support a good number of ARM processors, they might well be able to lash together something that will run on that one with fairly minimal effort; they might even just have to change a couple of minor things here and there, and have a workable port for it.
If you're someone who absolutely needs Linux, then there's not much I can say; although maybe the Linux portability people could possibly do something as well. Them I don't really know about.
So I've had the idea for a while now, of trying to find a console MP3 player. Even though I haven't ascended to LAN SSH jockey status yet, I have long been disgusted by the bloated abominations that are GNOME and KDE, (I'm a little less averse to KDE, truth be told, but it is even more bloated than GNOME) and thus have been looking for a better way.
Yesterday I found this wonderful gem of a blog post, which told me about a lot of applications which I can use from the CLI, as well as a series of blog posts from this guy, which give you a lot more ideas in terms of applications and how to set them up.
The end result is a realisation that just about any old junk you've got lying around, north of 400 Mhz, can be used for doing pretty much anything you want. Servers of all kinds, jukebox appliances, even incremental render/compiling nodes if you've got distcc or blender.
Even people who've got 3Ghz+ machines should take a serious look at these CLI apps, IMHO. Cplay as a media player for example works great, and because it is only a front end rather than the app itself, as well as a media player, I can also plug something like mikmod into it to listen to my old mod files as well, which is awesome.
Then of course there are the possibilities for a ram stick you can carry around in your pocket, as well. The command line is the single best thing about a UNIX system; if you don't use it, you're basically missing the entire point of it as a unique operating system. Ubuntu users and GUI junkies, take note!;)
Offtopic? I've had some blatantly corrupt down-mods from the cult before, but this takes the cake.
You're stretching here, guys. I suppose you could, at a real stretch, claim that my extension of the GP's analogy was Offtopic; but it is a major stretch.
A hint, though; abusing the moderation system in order to exact revenge against me for writing things you don't like, is not really a legitimate use of said system.;)
It seems to me that the freedom nerds have ended up creating incompatible freedom licenses and have thus shackled themselves in such a way as to prevent them from sucking each other off.
That's a fairly accurate interpretation, yes. However, the point is that the CC licenses allow for mutual fellatio among a greater and more inclusive cross-section of nerds, while also involving less legal restrictions.
Some of us tend to view this as an extremely positive and beneficial thing, because after all, when we're talking about mutual oral sex between nerds, what's not to love?
The core motivations for this proposed change are as follows:
* We cannot currently share text (in either direction) with projects that use the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike Licenses. The Creative Commons licenses are used by hundreds of thousands of authors world-wide (see statistics), having quickly become the most widely used legal tool to release rights on works other than software. This interoperability barrier with other non-profit organizations and online communities who share knowledge freely is therefore counter to Wikimedia's mission.
* The GFDL includes some potentially onerous provisions, such as the requirement to include the full license text with each copy. These requirements impede re-use of both text and multimedia (spoken or printed versions of articles, prints of images, etc.). Wikimedia is committed to the widest possible dissemination of free knowledge. While our terms of use have always allowed for lower barriers to re-use, their inconsistency with the license text leads to fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what is legal and what is not. It advantages those re-users who can afford legal advice and research over those who cannot. This is counter to Wikimedia's mission.
The bold passage was one I found particularly relevant. Gotta love that freedom, eh Richard?
Concerning my own personal message to the FSF regarding this decision, I think the great Duke Nukem said it best.
a) In a good year now, I'll go to the cinema twice. Three times, tops. That isn't because I don't like the cinema "experience," either; I still love it. I don't, however, enjoy watching crap, and it is exceptionally rare for Hollywood to make good films these days.
The suits have taken over in Hollywood, and their thinking is actually what is going to possibly destroy the industry, even though for some inexplicable reason, everyone still listens when they insist their doctrine of making sequels and prequels and retreads over and over and over again is good business sense.
It isn't. When was the last time you saw a cinematic remake of a 60s TV show (other than Star Trek, of course; said for the sake of the legions of idiots who would respond with that, while thinking they were hilariously funny and ingeniously clever. Yes, I know you well, Slashdot) which made hundreds of millions of dollars? It doesn't happen. It's either the reasonably new or relatively innovative/risky movies that are the really big earners. The Lord of the Rings, The Dark Knight. If Hollywood wants to survive, the suits have to go, and the industry needs to learn that creativity is what really gets major money from audiences; not canned business as usual. We don't want repetitive garbage; we want to be surprised and emotionally impacted and made to think.
Please, film industry; start making good movies on a regular basis. I very much *want* to go to the cinema more, and if you make good films, you will get my money. I just refuse to pay to watch rubbish. Give me more films with the same level of quality as the Matrix (the first one, and to a lesser extent the second) and The Dark Knight, and I will go and see two of them a month if you make them that often. Most of the rest of us probably would too, I'm guessing.
b) The economic factor. For the full experience, I will spend $20 AUD at the cinema now; $12 approximately for my ticket, and the rest on popcorn and Coke. (Which is horribly expensive, but given that I do it so rarely I justify it on that basis. In previous years when there were good movies on more often, if I still wanted food, I'd get some shopping bags or a backpack and load that up with stuff from the supermarket; so the cinema still got the money for my ticket. I only pirate movies as an advance screening if it's something I *really* want to see, like The Dark Knight, and I still go and see them afterwards anyway, partly because I like cinema trips, and partly because cam quality is always bad)
The point though is that for maybe twice that, ($40 or so) if I've already got a console, I can buy a game which I can then play whenever I want. A cinema trip is a one off; it's fun, but you spend the $20 and then it's gone. $20 will also buy me a month's worth of playtime in World of Warcraft and a lot of other MMORPGs as well.
If you've got the money, a trip to the cinema every so often is one of the most fun things I know of to do; I've always loved it. If you don't have so much money, however, it doesn't make much sense to pay for a one-off experience, when the same amount of money could keep you entertained for a month (or longer) if you spent it a different way. Games thus tend to be more cost effective.
c) The immersion/interaction factor. I love a good movie. However, the unfortunate reality is that, no matter how good your movie is, it's never going to have the same amount of emotional impact for me that a game will, simply because with a game, I'm in control of the character on the screen, so it feels as though I'm actually inside it that much more. With a movie, I'm watching something. With a game, I'm doing something. The T4 movie means I'm watching Christian Bale shoot T800s. A T4 game means I'm shooting T800s. Which one do you think I'm going to want more?
There are reasons why games are going to be a more compelling medium, which Hollywood can't do much about. However, there is one thing Hollywood can do, and needs to do if it wants to survive; it needs to start making truly good movies on a regular basis again. One truly standout movie every 2-4 years isn't cutting it; there need to be at least that many in one year.
Playing DVD's and video files either flat out doesn't work, or is very choppy. This is with VLC and mplayer. Unacceptable.
That's because Ubuntu's GNOME implementation is a bloated, steaming pile, and so the system generally won't have enough ram or cpu time left from it to be able to play mp3s; and that includes on contemporary systems. Granted, I also tend to consider GNOME garbage regardless of the underlying distro, to be honest; but I digress.;)
Get FreeBSD, and install Enlightenment DR16.999. E's core takes up around 26 Mb on my system, and it's absolutely beautiful. Yes, you might have to learn a few things about how to use a computer along the way, but that won't hurt you. The handbook at freebsd.org will make things a lot easier.
Use ports during installation to get XMMS, which AFAIK isn't reliant on QT's bloatedness, as VLC is. Playback will be as smooth as silk.;)
...killed it. A relationship based, talky, meditative series that was deliberately constructed it seems NOT to be attractive to male psychology. The latest Star Trek movie is a success because it appeals to male motivational and psychological structures. Let the male hero be the hero, not an angst-filled, reluctant non-hero dominated by females. No female magic/future-reading/esp crap.
I disliked Buffy myself in the end precisely because the estrogen quotient became unbearably high there in the end, but in this case, (yes, as a male) I actually think it was appropriate.
The whole point was that while John was a hero, (and yes, in the movies, he's allowed to be) in this specific case, his heroism was largely irrelevant. He was a hero primarily because Sarah made him one; it was her influence, and she was actually a much tougher personality than he was.
The other thing which I've always considered to actually be somewhat subtle and clever about their relationship, is the fact that the above is never made overt. John is the big hero; he's the guy who everyone sees, as the great man and the leader of the Resistance.
He, however, is the only one of the characters who really knows the truth; that he himself wasn't really all that great at all. In actuality, it was all Sarah. She raised him, she moulded him, and she turned him from a frightened child into a man who could not only fight machines, but who could also lead others; and all of this was hidden. John himself was the only one who knew that he was nothing other than what she made him to be.
John was Sarah's instrument, and her creation. In that sense, it was actually she who fought Skynet, and she who defeated it.
If the franchise is intractably tied to Arnold, it shouldn't be.
There were some other equally memorable performances in the movies as well. (Robert Patrick's, Linda Hamilton's)
More to the point, some of us also find Skynet and the stuff related to the robots etc to be very interesting, as well.
Schwarzenegger did put in some great performances, yes, so I'm not trying to detract from that at all; but if anyone out there feels as though he's the only good thing about the entire Terminator series, then IMHO, they're not looking hard enough.
The show didn't really fit with the continuity of the movies. Sarah is supposed to die of leukemia some years after the events of T2, (at least according to the "new" continuity; in the T2 book she is alive until just before Skynet is taken offline) and so if they were going to keep things consistent, the show couldn't have run for more than a few seasons anywayz.
I hope they actually do an episode where she dies, and if they do, I will definitely watch it. I saw the pilot, and liked it.
Lena Headey was perfect for the role; the only way they could have cast it better would have been with Linda Hamilton herself. Her appearance is very similar, she channels Ma Durga 100% as well as Linda Hamilton did, and the initials of both actresses are the same, in a particularly nice touch of consistency. Headey isn't in the series purely due to being low-budget, either; she played Leonidas' wife in 300 as well.
Anyone who's interested might actually want to check out the stories of Durga's fights against Mahishasura and (particularly) Raktabija from the Devi Mahatmaya; there are some very interesting connections between her stories and Sarah Connor/Skynet.
I've done Linux Distro Development so I know a thing or two about build a install from the ground up and I run a native stage 1 gentoo install:-) What about you
My first exposure to UNIX was in 1995; first exposure to Linux was Slackware, two years later. I've compiled the Linux From Scratch project, and BLFS; also written an automation system for LFS which was modelled on ports/pkgsrc and uses Berkeley make.
I've compiled X from source and configured it multiple times, and most of those were before X.org, when doing so meant that you had to do some actual work. I've also installed and configured servers for just about every net protocol in existence, usually also from source.
I also obtained a certificate in Web Design from the Australian Academy of Design in 2000, (http://www.designacademy.edu.au/) which, while that in itself isn't anything so great, the results of my final exam (particularly in relation to my knowledge of Internet history) were retained as reference material for future students.
I'm currently using FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE, as although I am perfectly capable of running an LFS, I consider FreeBSD's overall design to be much simpler and more elegant than that of Linux, and considerably more relaxing.
As I've said before, people use the GPL in order to try and maintain favour/good PR with Stallmanite fanatics, when in practical terms, another license would be a better choice.
The BSD license makes no stipulations as to whether parts of a given program license it or not. Cisco could have licensed 3-5 files of their entire project BSD if they wanted, while still closing the rest completely, and if they then wanted to, they could relicense and close the rest later on, in order to create a product.
The BSD (or similar, such as the MIT) license gives people options, which is part of the non-Stallmanite/loaded language (read: legitimate) definition of the word freedom.
No, we aren't. It's on record that cults generally don't outlive their founder, and he's getting on in years.
The only thing that those of us who dislike the FSF really need to do is wait, at this point. The group is primarily Stallman's cult of personality, and as I've already said, now that they're not producing code any more, they don't have any hugely compelling reason to exist.
Once Stallman dies, the group will collapse. It might take a couple of years, perhaps; but a look at the historical pattern with cults strongly suggests that it will happen.
Other free software licenses have no similarly forgiving language
That's because other (read: legitimate) free software licenses generally don't need them.
I'm tired of hearing people claim that the FSF is anything other than a disease, to be honest. Maybe back when they were still actually developing or maintaining software, you might have been able to claim that they were doing something useful; but these days they don't really do anything other than rabble rouse and occasionally legally harass people.
I know, I know...you're going to say that the only reason why the FSF goes after people in court is because they violate the GPL. If the GPL wasn't blatantly anticommercial, however, it wouldn't be an issue; if Cisco had simply used something BSD licensed, they could have done what they liked and the court case never would have happened.
Of course, we know the reason why people who have no intention of complying with the GPL use it; it's because they want to curry favour with the freaks who've drunk sufficient amounts of Stallman's Kool Aid that they actually think it's a genuinely worthwhile license.
The GPL 2 I can tolerate, but the GPL 3, no. The license aside, however, one thing that has always been true is that the FSF are a textbook destructive cult, and Stallman himself is the proverbial aspirant cult leader; he's the computing world's answer to Lefayette Ronald Hubbard.
Development of the GNU project has been primarily handed over to Red Hat at this point, and as I've already said, I consider the GPL 3 a bad and overly restrictive license, even if v2 wasn't. Given those two points, the FSF have been reduced to not much more than a group of low budget terrorists, and the organisation should thus be abolished at this point. If it has ceased maintaining software or generating real code, it has outlived its' usefulness.
Really? I'm trying to do that for work, and I'm having a hell of a time. Our product is based on RHEL4/5 (depending on version) and I wanted iptables -m random or -m statistic, so I could do some network failure testing... Cue decent into hell.
I can't speak for the rest of the kernel's current state, but Linux's module framework in particular is an unmitigated disaster.
If you want to test that assertion, download FreeBSD sometime, and compile a custom kernel for that with the handbook close at hand. There's no horrid mess like make menuconfig at all; the kernel config file there is an absolute joy. Comment in or out your particular hardware, set some overrides on what gets installed as modules if you want, and recompile.
The other wonderful thing is that the FreeBSD developers had the good sense not to include the system's firewall or routed in the kernel; with FreeBSD, both of those things are seperate packages, which is of course exactly as it should be. Linus should have been birched for accepting an httpd into the Linux kernel as well, although I don't know whether or not it is still there. If it is, I would advocate the birching to occur on a daily basis until the httpd is removed.;)
Thank Kali for Slackware. It was the first Linux distribution I ever used, and also has the distinction of being the Linux distro that bears the most resemblance to BSD.
I pray that Slack is able to survive for a long time to come, yet; it is the sole Linux distribution in existence that I consider genuinely well designed. The single main thing which bothers me so much about Debian in particular is not simply the fact that Debian is so horrible, but that its' developers and fanboys are also so adamant in their insistence that it is actually something wonderful.
Although I do not know the man personally, I vicariously consider Mr. Volkerding a second father. In terms of his distribution, at least, he has done more for me than my real father has for many years, now.
Inability to play a damned MP3 on the included jukebox app with extraordinarily common commodity hardware? What fucking year is this?
Install VLC. Problem solved. It was the very first thing I did on installing Ubuntu. I know well enough to not even bother messing around with Rhythmbox.
Believe me when I say that most of, "Linux's," problems, are actually 100% Gnome's problems.
If you're not using it now, you probably never will.
There is a valid point here. Linux's window of opportunity for gaining mainstream acceptance closed in late 2006. (2007 if you really want to be generous)
Ubuntu as a single distro might hit the big time, yes; but other distros won't. My money says that Ubuntu is going to become truly mainstream, to a degree that not even Red Hat really managed. Ubuntu is a single distro, though.
Debian in particular is going to stay well and truly in the basement, and that is exactly where it belongs. The only reason why Debian devs are so anxious to remind everyone that Ubuntu is Debian based, is because they well know that Ubuntu is the only reason why they aren't completely irrelevant.
"Standardize on GTK+ or Qt but don't have both." "There should be one vendor, so many distributions add confusion." "Everything should be open to the GUI."
Yes! There must be only one of anything! We cannot have choice! Choice means responsibility! *Begins crying frantically at the thought of responsibility* Make it go away!
The only freedom we demand is freedom from having to think! We demand Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer!
Slashdot Mirror
The argument, of course, is that it requires advanced knowledge, or that it's simply too hard.
It's taken me about a week to get FreeBSD set up reasonably close to the way I want it, but that was mostly just because I was still learning. I've never really understood why people find anything other than Windows so difficult. Maybe I'm weird, but for me, FreeBSD has probably been the single easiest operating system I've ever used, as odd as that might sound.
The single main reason why I like it is because even though sometimes it will take time to get things going initially, once something is set up to work the first time, it keeps working. It's not like Ubuntu where I had ALSA crashing whenever it felt like it. I can have Enlightenment, Claws-Mail, Firefox, the epic 5 IRC client, the cplay mp3 player, and htop running with screen though in under 100 Mb of RAM. Ubuntu uses 300 Mb of RAM, by contrast, with just GNOME running and no other applications.
I don't understand why people find problem solving intimidating, either. I've never been intimidated by UNIX. (whether Linux or FreeBSD) I had some problems playing a DVD for the first time the other night, but I found that whenever I had a problem, I could usually just look for it on Google, or maybe go to the #FreeBSD irc channel, and someone else would have run into it and solved it themselves; so I was able to get past all of them. The Dark Knight was running very smoothly in xine, even while having Firefox and about six tabs going as well.
If anything, I actually have found Windows genuinely scary because prior versions at least behaved in illogical. I don't like systems where the level of complexity is so high that if something crashes, it can be caused by the interaction of any two (or more) of a million different processes, and I can't hope to identify what they are, in order to fix the problem.
I just hope there are enough of us CLI users left that these applications at least get maintained, going forward.
...when we as a species will have to choose between whether we want to allow any and all life on this planet to survive, or whether we want to allow the corporation to survive.
The survival of Man and the corporation are mutually exclusive. In order for one to survive, the other must eventually die.
Once I got it I found out that the host development platform was MSwindows only.
To quote Dr. Emmett Brown, "You're just not thinking fourth dimensionally."
It's an ARM processor. Take a surf on over to our friends at NetBSD.org, and see if it's one of the ARM processors they know about. If it is, then with possibly a certain amount of extra hackery to get the disk formatted, you're in business.
If it isn't one of their identified processors, then fire off an email to them and tell them about it. They pride themselves on their system being able to run on every processor in the known universe, and so if you've got one that NetBSD doesn't run on, they're likely going to want to know about it.
Also, seeing as it is known as an ARM processor, chances are good that even on the offchance that NetBSD doesn't support that exact one, because it does support a good number of ARM processors, they might well be able to lash together something that will run on that one with fairly minimal effort; they might even just have to change a couple of minor things here and there, and have a workable port for it.
If you're someone who absolutely needs Linux, then there's not much I can say; although maybe the Linux portability people could possibly do something as well. Them I don't really know about.
So I've had the idea for a while now, of trying to find a console MP3 player. Even though I haven't ascended to LAN SSH jockey status yet, I have long been disgusted by the bloated abominations that are GNOME and KDE, (I'm a little less averse to KDE, truth be told, but it is even more bloated than GNOME) and thus have been looking for a better way.
Yesterday I found this wonderful gem of a blog post, which told me about a lot of applications which I can use from the CLI, as well as a series of blog posts from this guy, which give you a lot more ideas in terms of applications and how to set them up.
The end result is a realisation that just about any old junk you've got lying around, north of 400 Mhz, can be used for doing pretty much anything you want. Servers of all kinds, jukebox appliances, even incremental render/compiling nodes if you've got distcc or blender.
Even people who've got 3Ghz+ machines should take a serious look at these CLI apps, IMHO. Cplay as a media player for example works great, and because it is only a front end rather than the app itself, as well as a media player, I can also plug something like mikmod into it to listen to my old mod files as well, which is awesome.
Then of course there are the possibilities for a ram stick you can carry around in your pocket, as well. The command line is the single best thing about a UNIX system; if you don't use it, you're basically missing the entire point of it as a unique operating system. Ubuntu users and GUI junkies, take note! ;)
Offtopic? I've had some blatantly corrupt down-mods from the cult before, but this takes the cake.
You're stretching here, guys. I suppose you could, at a real stretch, claim that my extension of the GP's analogy was Offtopic; but it is a major stretch.
A hint, though; abusing the moderation system in order to exact revenge against me for writing things you don't like, is not really a legitimate use of said system. ;)
It seems to me that the freedom nerds have ended up creating incompatible freedom licenses and have thus shackled themselves in such a way as to prevent them from sucking each other off.
That's a fairly accurate interpretation, yes. However, the point is that the CC licenses allow for mutual fellatio among a greater and more inclusive cross-section of nerds, while also involving less legal restrictions.
Some of us tend to view this as an extremely positive and beneficial thing, because after all, when we're talking about mutual oral sex between nerds, what's not to love?
From the Licensing Update page http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update (Emphasis mine):-
Motivation
The core motivations for this proposed change are as follows:
* We cannot currently share text (in either direction) with projects that use the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike Licenses. The Creative Commons licenses are used by hundreds of thousands of authors world-wide (see statistics), having quickly become the most widely used legal tool to release rights on works other than software. This interoperability barrier with other non-profit organizations and online communities who share knowledge freely is therefore counter to Wikimedia's mission.
* The GFDL includes some potentially onerous provisions, such as the requirement to include the full license text with each copy. These requirements impede re-use of both text and multimedia (spoken or printed versions of articles, prints of images, etc.). Wikimedia is committed to the widest possible dissemination of free knowledge. While our terms of use have always allowed for lower barriers to re-use, their inconsistency with the license text leads to fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what is legal and what is not. It advantages those re-users who can afford legal advice and research over those who cannot. This is counter to Wikimedia's mission.
The bold passage was one I found particularly relevant. Gotta love that freedom, eh Richard?
Concerning my own personal message to the FSF regarding this decision, I think the great Duke Nukem said it best.
"Eat shit and die." ;)
a) In a good year now, I'll go to the cinema twice. Three times, tops. That isn't because I don't like the cinema "experience," either; I still love it. I don't, however, enjoy watching crap, and it is exceptionally rare for Hollywood to make good films these days.
The suits have taken over in Hollywood, and their thinking is actually what is going to possibly destroy the industry, even though for some inexplicable reason, everyone still listens when they insist their doctrine of making sequels and prequels and retreads over and over and over again is good business sense.
It isn't. When was the last time you saw a cinematic remake of a 60s TV show (other than Star Trek, of course; said for the sake of the legions of idiots who would respond with that, while thinking they were hilariously funny and ingeniously clever. Yes, I know you well, Slashdot) which made hundreds of millions of dollars? It doesn't happen. It's either the reasonably new or relatively innovative/risky movies that are the really big earners. The Lord of the Rings, The Dark Knight. If Hollywood wants to survive, the suits have to go, and the industry needs to learn that creativity is what really gets major money from audiences; not canned business as usual. We don't want repetitive garbage; we want to be surprised and emotionally impacted and made to think.
Please, film industry; start making good movies on a regular basis. I very much *want* to go to the cinema more, and if you make good films, you will get my money. I just refuse to pay to watch rubbish. Give me more films with the same level of quality as the Matrix (the first one, and to a lesser extent the second) and The Dark Knight, and I will go and see two of them a month if you make them that often. Most of the rest of us probably would too, I'm guessing.
b) The economic factor. For the full experience, I will spend $20 AUD at the cinema now; $12 approximately for my ticket, and the rest on popcorn and Coke. (Which is horribly expensive, but given that I do it so rarely I justify it on that basis. In previous years when there were good movies on more often, if I still wanted food, I'd get some shopping bags or a backpack and load that up with stuff from the supermarket; so the cinema still got the money for my ticket. I only pirate movies as an advance screening if it's something I *really* want to see, like The Dark Knight, and I still go and see them afterwards anyway, partly because I like cinema trips, and partly because cam quality is always bad)
The point though is that for maybe twice that, ($40 or so) if I've already got a console, I can buy a game which I can then play whenever I want. A cinema trip is a one off; it's fun, but you spend the $20 and then it's gone. $20 will also buy me a month's worth of playtime in World of Warcraft and a lot of other MMORPGs as well.
If you've got the money, a trip to the cinema every so often is one of the most fun things I know of to do; I've always loved it. If you don't have so much money, however, it doesn't make much sense to pay for a one-off experience, when the same amount of money could keep you entertained for a month (or longer) if you spent it a different way. Games thus tend to be more cost effective.
c) The immersion/interaction factor. I love a good movie. However, the unfortunate reality is that, no matter how good your movie is, it's never going to have the same amount of emotional impact for me that a game will, simply because with a game, I'm in control of the character on the screen, so it feels as though I'm actually inside it that much more. With a movie, I'm watching something. With a game, I'm doing something. The T4 movie means I'm watching Christian Bale shoot T800s. A T4 game means I'm shooting T800s. Which one do you think I'm going to want more?
There are reasons why games are going to be a more compelling medium, which Hollywood can't do much about. However, there is one thing Hollywood can do, and needs to do if it wants to survive; it needs to start making truly good movies on a regular basis again. One truly standout movie every 2-4 years isn't cutting it; there need to be at least that many in one year.
Playing DVD's and video files either flat out doesn't work, or is very choppy. This is with VLC and mplayer. Unacceptable.
That's because Ubuntu's GNOME implementation is a bloated, steaming pile, and so the system generally won't have enough ram or cpu time left from it to be able to play mp3s; and that includes on contemporary systems. Granted, I also tend to consider GNOME garbage regardless of the underlying distro, to be honest; but I digress. ;)
Get FreeBSD, and install Enlightenment DR16.999. E's core takes up around 26 Mb on my system, and it's absolutely beautiful. Yes, you might have to learn a few things about how to use a computer along the way, but that won't hurt you. The handbook at freebsd.org will make things a lot easier.
Use ports during installation to get XMMS, which AFAIK isn't reliant on QT's bloatedness, as VLC is. Playback will be as smooth as silk. ;)
...killed it. A relationship based, talky, meditative series that was deliberately constructed it seems NOT to be attractive to male psychology. The latest Star Trek movie is a success because it appeals to male motivational and psychological structures. Let the male hero be the hero, not an angst-filled, reluctant non-hero dominated by females. No female magic/future-reading/esp crap.
I disliked Buffy myself in the end precisely because the estrogen quotient became unbearably high there in the end, but in this case, (yes, as a male) I actually think it was appropriate.
The whole point was that while John was a hero, (and yes, in the movies, he's allowed to be) in this specific case, his heroism was largely irrelevant. He was a hero primarily because Sarah made him one; it was her influence, and she was actually a much tougher personality than he was.
The other thing which I've always considered to actually be somewhat subtle and clever about their relationship, is the fact that the above is never made overt. John is the big hero; he's the guy who everyone sees, as the great man and the leader of the Resistance.
He, however, is the only one of the characters who really knows the truth; that he himself wasn't really all that great at all. In actuality, it was all Sarah. She raised him, she moulded him, and she turned him from a frightened child into a man who could not only fight machines, but who could also lead others; and all of this was hidden. John himself was the only one who knew that he was nothing other than what she made him to be.
John was Sarah's instrument, and her creation. In that sense, it was actually she who fought Skynet, and she who defeated it.
If the franchise is intractably tied to Arnold, it shouldn't be.
There were some other equally memorable performances in the movies as well. (Robert Patrick's, Linda Hamilton's)
More to the point, some of us also find Skynet and the stuff related to the robots etc to be very interesting, as well.
Schwarzenegger did put in some great performances, yes, so I'm not trying to detract from that at all; but if anyone out there feels as though he's the only good thing about the entire Terminator series, then IMHO, they're not looking hard enough.
The show didn't really fit with the continuity of the movies. Sarah is supposed to die of leukemia some years after the events of T2, (at least according to the "new" continuity; in the T2 book she is alive until just before Skynet is taken offline) and so if they were going to keep things consistent, the show couldn't have run for more than a few seasons anywayz.
I hope they actually do an episode where she dies, and if they do, I will definitely watch it. I saw the pilot, and liked it.
Lena Headey was perfect for the role; the only way they could have cast it better would have been with Linda Hamilton herself. Her appearance is very similar, she channels Ma Durga 100% as well as Linda Hamilton did, and the initials of both actresses are the same, in a particularly nice touch of consistency. Headey isn't in the series purely due to being low-budget, either; she played Leonidas' wife in 300 as well.
Anyone who's interested might actually want to check out the stories of Durga's fights against Mahishasura and (particularly) Raktabija from the Devi Mahatmaya; there are some very interesting connections between her stories and Sarah Connor/Skynet.
I've done Linux Distro Development so I know a thing or two about build a install from the ground up and I run a native stage 1 gentoo install :-) What about you
My first exposure to UNIX was in 1995; first exposure to Linux was Slackware, two years later. I've compiled the Linux From Scratch project, and BLFS; also written an automation system for LFS which was modelled on ports/pkgsrc and uses Berkeley make.
I've compiled X from source and configured it multiple times, and most of those were before X.org, when doing so meant that you had to do some actual work. I've also installed and configured servers for just about every net protocol in existence, usually also from source.
I also obtained a certificate in Web Design from the Australian Academy of Design in 2000, (http://www.designacademy.edu.au/) which, while that in itself isn't anything so great, the results of my final exam (particularly in relation to my knowledge of Internet history) were retained as reference material for future students.
I'm currently using FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE, as although I am perfectly capable of running an LFS, I consider FreeBSD's overall design to be much simpler and more elegant than that of Linux, and considerably more relaxing.
As I've said before, people use the GPL in order to try and maintain favour/good PR with Stallmanite fanatics, when in practical terms, another license would be a better choice.
The BSD license makes no stipulations as to whether parts of a given program license it or not. Cisco could have licensed 3-5 files of their entire project BSD if they wanted, while still closing the rest completely, and if they then wanted to, they could relicense and close the rest later on, in order to create a product.
The BSD (or similar, such as the MIT) license gives people options, which is part of the non-Stallmanite/loaded language (read: legitimate) definition of the word freedom.
I can only assume that this was modded Insightful by your fellow cultists.
I suppose in a way, it's something to be admired. Loyalty in really any form is rare, these days.
No, we aren't. It's on record that cults generally don't outlive their founder, and he's getting on in years.
The only thing that those of us who dislike the FSF really need to do is wait, at this point. The group is primarily Stallman's cult of personality, and as I've already said, now that they're not producing code any more, they don't have any hugely compelling reason to exist.
Once Stallman dies, the group will collapse. It might take a couple of years, perhaps; but a look at the historical pattern with cults strongly suggests that it will happen.
Other free software licenses have no similarly forgiving language
That's because other (read: legitimate) free software licenses generally don't need them.
I'm tired of hearing people claim that the FSF is anything other than a disease, to be honest. Maybe back when they were still actually developing or maintaining software, you might have been able to claim that they were doing something useful; but these days they don't really do anything other than rabble rouse and occasionally legally harass people.
I know, I know...you're going to say that the only reason why the FSF goes after people in court is because they violate the GPL. If the GPL wasn't blatantly anticommercial, however, it wouldn't be an issue; if Cisco had simply used something BSD licensed, they could have done what they liked and the court case never would have happened.
Of course, we know the reason why people who have no intention of complying with the GPL use it; it's because they want to curry favour with the freaks who've drunk sufficient amounts of Stallman's Kool Aid that they actually think it's a genuinely worthwhile license.
The GPL 2 I can tolerate, but the GPL 3, no. The license aside, however, one thing that has always been true is that the FSF are a textbook destructive cult, and Stallman himself is the proverbial aspirant cult leader; he's the computing world's answer to Lefayette Ronald Hubbard.
Development of the GNU project has been primarily handed over to Red Hat at this point, and as I've already said, I consider the GPL 3 a bad and overly restrictive license, even if v2 wasn't. Given those two points, the FSF have been reduced to not much more than a group of low budget terrorists, and the organisation should thus be abolished at this point. If it has ceased maintaining software or generating real code, it has outlived its' usefulness.
But eventually I went to Debian, and now I'm a Debian and Ubuntu user, and now I make my own debs, and I am much much happier this way thank you.
Ordinarily I cannot abide Debian users, but because you have mentioned compiling your own packages, you will be allowed to live. ;)
I guess some folk like to stick with the first version of anything they ever try... kinda like the Amiga crowd?
Is there any real need to troll like this?
Not all of us like Ubuntu. Some of us care about stability and security...and some of us also have brains in our heads.
Really? I'm trying to do that for work, and I'm having a hell of a time. Our product is based on RHEL4/5 (depending on version) and I wanted iptables -m random or -m statistic, so I could do some network failure testing... Cue decent into hell.
I can't speak for the rest of the kernel's current state, but Linux's module framework in particular is an unmitigated disaster.
If you want to test that assertion, download FreeBSD sometime, and compile a custom kernel for that with the handbook close at hand. There's no horrid mess like make menuconfig at all; the kernel config file there is an absolute joy. Comment in or out your particular hardware, set some overrides on what gets installed as modules if you want, and recompile.
The other wonderful thing is that the FreeBSD developers had the good sense not to include the system's firewall or routed in the kernel; with FreeBSD, both of those things are seperate packages, which is of course exactly as it should be. Linus should have been birched for accepting an httpd into the Linux kernel as well, although I don't know whether or not it is still there. If it is, I would advocate the birching to occur on a daily basis until the httpd is removed. ;)
Thank Kali for Slackware. It was the first Linux distribution I ever used, and also has the distinction of being the Linux distro that bears the most resemblance to BSD.
I pray that Slack is able to survive for a long time to come, yet; it is the sole Linux distribution in existence that I consider genuinely well designed. The single main thing which bothers me so much about Debian in particular is not simply the fact that Debian is so horrible, but that its' developers and fanboys are also so adamant in their insistence that it is actually something wonderful.
Although I do not know the man personally, I vicariously consider Mr. Volkerding a second father. In terms of his distribution, at least, he has done more for me than my real father has for many years, now.
Inability to play a damned MP3 on the included jukebox app with extraordinarily common commodity hardware? What fucking year is this?
Install VLC. Problem solved. It was the very first thing I did on installing Ubuntu. I know well enough to not even bother messing around with Rhythmbox.
Believe me when I say that most of, "Linux's," problems, are actually 100% Gnome's problems.
Linux's ship has sailed.
If you're not using it now, you probably never will.
There is a valid point here. Linux's window of opportunity for gaining mainstream acceptance closed in late 2006. (2007 if you really want to be generous)
Ubuntu as a single distro might hit the big time, yes; but other distros won't. My money says that Ubuntu is going to become truly mainstream, to a degree that not even Red Hat really managed. Ubuntu is a single distro, though.
Debian in particular is going to stay well and truly in the basement, and that is exactly where it belongs. The only reason why Debian devs are so anxious to remind everyone that Ubuntu is Debian based, is because they well know that Ubuntu is the only reason why they aren't completely irrelevant.
Parent should be modded +5 Insightful.
I'm serious.
"Standardize on GTK+ or Qt but don't have both."
"There should be one vendor, so many distributions add confusion."
"Everything should be open to the GUI."
Yes! There must be only one of anything! We cannot have choice! Choice means responsibility! *Begins crying frantically at the thought of responsibility* Make it go away!
The only freedom we demand is freedom from having to think! We demand Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer!