I just don't understand the use of it in a home setting? I already have my cellphone with free long distance.
Free international? I doubt it. The article expressly talks about a call from Japan to NYC
I live in Italy and we have a 10 mpbs internet connection with fastweb which includes unlimited local and national calling. It's all voip without a noticable depreciation in vox quality.
Well, entire branches of the Linux kernal, and various other software projects, like Apache, are changed as a result of security exploits.
The ever-so-subtle distinction between your observation and that of the original posting is that when security holes force rethinkings and reworkings of applications and protocols in the Open Source world, there isn't an entire great big monopoly suffering, just some geeks losing sleep reworking code... as opposed to thousands and thousands of stock holders all of whom are wringing their teeth and gnashing their hands in hopeless, helpess despair as one whipper-snapper post-grad at MIT all but destroys their hopes and dreams of infinite wealth and world peace and dogs and cats loving each other... and god dammit I just can't go on for the shame...
Oxford University is setting up Linux training courses. We're assuming that those on the course have little or no experience of Linux. We're using Knoppix for the course because it comes with the basic software that a user will need to learn and become familiar with the OS and it lets them take the CD home or to their office and play with it while making no permanent changes to their precious systems.
My own project is run entirely on Open Source Software and it is my belief that spending public funds on licenses for office suites, web browsers, email clients, databases and webservers is money poorly spent. It seems that others in the university agree. A medium sized project can save thousands of (dollars, euros or pounds) by setting up staff with the basic tools for their tasks on an Open Source platform. Those thousands of pounds can often mean the project can bring in another researcher / investigator / clerical assistant.
Getting fellow academics and their students to dip their toes into the Open Source Gnu/Linux waters through a bootable CD like Knoppix is very easy to do. We'll see how these training courses go but I'm hopeful that we'll see more projects migrating at least some of their staff from Microsoft to Gnu/Linux
I posted the article precisely because I didn't think it was "holier than thou".
The article is funny. It's also imbued with a sense of sadness that a lot of people's dreams and desires were contained in those expired domains (a lot of stupidity too).
I don't think the author was trying to show that she's more clever than anyone else... just making an insightful sociological observation.
Hrmn. Well, it's not as though redcarpet is *replacing* debs or rpms. It's a GUI, nothing more, nothing less. That it's easy to use and looks sharp is a nice bonus.
You're still able to install things by building from source or via deb or rpm. It's merely giving you more choice and making it conceivable that your mum can keep her own system up to date / install software for herself.
I think one has to take into consideration that a great deal of these statistics are compiled on the basis of free and paid-for webcounters.
The news.com article refers to stats made public by OneStat (http://www.onestat.com/). OneStat provides "free" counters to end-users much like Netstat, webcounter and others. I've had a Netstat counter for yonks and keep it there mostly because many of my collaborators on the site like the pointy-clicky graphics it produces; however, I have noticed a huge discrepancy between the stats that netstat compiles and those I derive from running analysis programmes on the server logs.
OneStat, for example, installs an invisible image on the page:
Apply for Onestat Pro or Onestat Premium if you want an account with an invisible tracking icon and password protected stats and extra features.
How many of us have browsers and/or software that blocks this kind of monitoring? How many of us have browsers that lie about what they are?
While there's no doubt that the large majority of users continue to use IE, I do not for a moment believe it's anything like the 95 or 96% that's being reported.
Participants included all the usual suspects including the MPAA, RIAA, Microsoft, and Intel
Interestingly, one of the participants was Forrester Research who, in their public archives which unfortunatly only has summaries available, include several reports such as:
whose summaries with punch line conclusions like "Media companies turn into eBusiness network" alone would have been enough to curl the nose hairs of any movie / recording industry executive still stuck in the 90s (1990s that is).
A rebuttal written for that target audience is worth more to the forward progress of linux than a hundred of these "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" rebuttals that can only sound like the squabbling of an infant to an outside party.
The author makes it quite plane, both in his preface and in his methodology: he's simply providing a resource for others to use in their arguments in the "perception battle". That's why he went through the process of converting the pdfs to text and diff'ing them.
The additional comments were there to offer his own perspective and, quite rightly, they were to the intended audience: those who'd be using his research as substance for their own arguments in their own forums.
The only downside is that the router is a total blackbox for a gateway/router. Portscanning it from either side of the firewall reveals nothing and there seems no way into it to configure port-forwarding...
The gateway device Fastweb is using is here: telsey. Any ideas on how to make this thing more, erm, functional... would be appreciated.
The other terrific thing about the Fastweb service is that with our monthly tarrif, we also get 'free' national and local calls. They also gave some crazy webTV appliance (which runs linu, btw) but we don't have much use for it.
Two interesting points which jumped out at me when I was reading Billy G's Unix Expo Remarks remembering that they were from October 9, 1996 were:
One of the exciting things we're announcing today is that our commitment to the Internet and to building a state-of-the-art browser extends not only to Windows 95 and Windows NT, but also to 16-bit Windows and the Macintosh and to Unix.
Explorer for Unix!
And this:
And the reason we do that -- it's not purely a magnanimous thing on our part. (Laughter.) We're doing that to promote the Active X technology, and by having the browser be out there very, very broadly...
Who'd have thought that there would have been enough interest in the Motorola CPU that powers the Palm family to make a movie of it? Tron was pretty popular I guess...
This has been modded a Troll? It's hilarious! I've spluttered coffee all over the place. Christ, if you don't like a gag, ignore it. Don't mod the poor postee down for it!
There was no troll intended. However, I think what I was hinting at but probably should have stated is a general culture of 'hands off' that encourages the divide.
The more the mechanics of a device is put into proverbial black-boxes, the less clue there will be out there. There was a time when almost anyone could fix a car... not any longer. Indeed, attempting to do so may violate the terms of your gurantee, insurance, etc.
The reason so many forums exist today for hacking / tweaking computer gear is because it's still not criminal to do so. When it does become illegal, the tech divide will grow some more as new generations aren't raised with the ability to troubleshoot a device, but will, instead, dispose of it / send it in for a replacement and so on.
Point taken though, this has little to do with 'knowing' how to use a DVD player. It does, nevertheless, explain how the MPAA can get away with bollocks like region-coding. There's not enough clue out there amongst consumers to even know what to protest.
All the various and heinous anti-circumvention / IP protection laws also probably have something to do with it.
If you can't tinker with something, how on earth are you supposed to figure out how it works. Most tech companies and especially their lawyers and bean counters would prefer if we just clicked and drooled.
Again, this is not a problem limited to the USA. don't forget that/. has an international readership. Why frame it as an American issue? OK, that's what the stats that formed the foundation of the article pointed to, but surely the problem as a notion can be extended without too much trouble.
The stories of Hercules and Jesus are very very similar, but their perception, and their effect, are entirely different.
I took a course in Greek Mythology and am very familiar with the Christian Bible and I'd like to ask you one question: What kind of weed were you smoking when you thought that line up?
It wasn't my comment but I'm glad it was made. The stories of Jesus and Hercules are very similar. The details vary, but the structures are very, very similar. Likewise, the story of
Ogmius (the Celtic equivelant of the legend) follows the same pattern.
No one would be offended if someone compared Ogmius to Hercules. Somehow drawing a parallel with Jesus causes offence. Why? Jesus was himself very conscious of the power of myth and used it in his teachings as well as in his political power struggles.
And to bring things back to the thread, it's the theme of the self-sacrificing son which dominates the original Star Wars trilogy. Everything builds to that climax where Luke proves his love for his father in Episode VI. Yes, it's 'just a movie' but the reason it was so successful and popular is that it picked up on what all the mythographers mentioned in this thread would have termed, an "eternal" or "proto" myth.
Isn't this the Robert Graves who wrote I, Claudius ? He also translated Suetonius's work, which is not unrelated...
Yes it is. And it's what my doctoral thesis was about.;-) But well spotted. The ideas in Graves' White Goddess are not totally unrelated from his Claudius books and his 'interpretation' of Seutonius, etc.
It's not often that I get to write about my thesis on Eng Lit on/!
Campbell, Graves as well as very many other mythographers before them recognised that, in Graves' words, "There was one story, and one story only". The study of myth is often just an attempt to relocate its sources. These sources aren't only in literature. They're in all manner of unexplainable things: nature, science, psychology, dream, etc. They all fuel our imaginations and, given that we've not really changed that much over time (we're just a bit better at explaining things and hence, behaving 'rationaly').
One great appeal of the original Star Wars trilogy is that was so faithful to the pattern of proto-myths described by Campbell, Graves and others. The Phantom Menace though, seems more concerned with being faithful to the orginal trilogy than any of the more unversal mythological legends. It's probably why they feel more shallow, more commercial and less about those things that matter to all of us.
No big loss though. The eye candy is great. Most of us will enjoy it. There will be other story tellers who will captivate us with wickedly spun tales.
Especially if they're those 'anti-globalisation' protesters (whatever that means). For people supposedly fighting to ensure that 'the little guy. gets treated fairly they sure do love trashing the shops owned by small family businesses.
nice troll!
Mr and Mrs McDonald's (and their blind dog poopy) and their good friends, the Starbucks, surely appreciate you compassion.
There were upwards of 60 million Napster users when it got shut down. "Most" of them were not anything. ("Most" of them were certainly not teenagers; there are only ~12 million teenagers in the US total!) And, as there were something like 40 million unique mp3s floating around Napster, I guess "most" of them actually were listening to more than just the latest Britney album. (Otherwise that's a pretty long album...)
If you want a "most", here it is: most Americans with Internet access in early 2001 used Napster.
For christ's sake, the inderned != the usa.
It is unbelievably infuriating for the r.o.w., whatever paltry statistic we might be, to read shit like that.
Slashdot Mirror
the exploding manhole accidents...
Sounds like a theme for sadomasochistic gay pr0n to explore
Xine plays quicktime movies now.
I just don't understand the use of it in a home setting? I already have my cellphone with free long distance.
Free international? I doubt it. The article expressly talks about a call from Japan to NYC
I live in Italy and we have a 10 mpbs internet connection with fastweb which includes unlimited local and national calling. It's all voip without a noticable depreciation in vox quality.
Well, entire branches of the Linux kernal, and various other software projects, like Apache, are changed as a result of security exploits.
The ever-so-subtle distinction between your observation and that of the original posting is that when security holes force rethinkings and reworkings of applications and protocols in the Open Source world, there isn't an entire great big monopoly suffering, just some geeks losing sleep reworking code... as opposed to thousands and thousands of stock holders all of whom are wringing their teeth and gnashing their hands in hopeless, helpess despair as one whipper-snapper post-grad at MIT all but destroys their hopes and dreams of infinite wealth and world peace and dogs and cats loving each other... and god dammit I just can't go on for the shame...
Oxford University is setting up Linux training courses. We're assuming that those on the course have little or no experience of Linux. We're using Knoppix for the course because it comes with the basic software that a user will need to learn and become familiar with the OS and it lets them take the CD home or to their office and play with it while making no permanent changes to their precious systems.
My own project is run entirely on Open Source Software and it is my belief that spending public funds on licenses for office suites, web browsers, email clients, databases and webservers is money poorly spent. It seems that others in the university agree. A medium sized project can save thousands of (dollars, euros or pounds) by setting up staff with the basic tools for their tasks on an Open Source platform. Those thousands of pounds can often mean the project can bring in another researcher / investigator / clerical assistant.
Getting fellow academics and their students to dip their toes into the Open Source Gnu/Linux waters through a bootable CD like Knoppix is very easy to do. We'll see how these training courses go but I'm hopeful that we'll see more projects migrating at least some of their staff from Microsoft to Gnu/Linux
I posted the article precisely because I didn't think it was "holier than thou".
The article is funny. It's also imbued with a sense of sadness that a lot of people's dreams and desires were contained in those expired domains (a lot of stupidity too).
I don't think the author was trying to show that she's more clever than anyone else ... just making an insightful sociological observation.
To open can, simply lift the ring and pull towards you. Drink.
s/Drink/Open mouth, drink./
Hrmn. Well, it's not as though redcarpet is *replacing* debs or rpms. It's a GUI, nothing more, nothing less. That it's easy to use and looks sharp is a nice bonus.
You're still able to install things by building from source or via deb or rpm. It's merely giving you more choice and making it conceivable that your mum can keep her own system up to date / install software for herself.
I think one has to take into consideration that a great deal of these statistics are compiled on the basis of free and paid-for webcounters.
The news.com article refers to stats made public by OneStat (http://www.onestat.com/). OneStat provides "free" counters to end-users much like Netstat, webcounter and others. I've had a Netstat counter for yonks and keep it there mostly because many of my collaborators on the site like the pointy-clicky graphics it produces; however, I have noticed a huge discrepancy between the stats that netstat compiles and those I derive from running analysis programmes on the server logs.
OneStat, for example, installs an invisible image on the page:
How many of us have browsers and/or software that blocks this kind of monitoring? How many of us have browsers that lie about what they are?
While there's no doubt that the large majority of users continue to use IE, I do not for a moment believe it's anything like the 95 or 96% that's being reported.
This is not the first such workshop that has been held.
The previous was held on December 17, 2001: http://www.ta.doc.gov/PRel/MA011214.htm
Participants included all the usual suspects including the MPAA, RIAA, Microsoft, and Intel
Interestingly, one of the participants was Forrester Research who, in their public archives which unfortunatly only has summaries available, include several reports such as:
http://www.forrester.com/ER/Research/Report/Summawhose summaries with punch line conclusions like "Media companies turn into eBusiness network" alone would have been enough to curl the nose hairs of any movie / recording industry executive still stuck in the 90s (1990s that is).
The context is here:
http://www.adti.net/html_files/defense/opensourcehere:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25656.htmland here: (a very good devastation of the original paper)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25659.htmlA rebuttal written for that target audience is worth more to the forward progress of linux than a hundred of these "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" rebuttals that can only sound like the squabbling of an infant to an outside party.
The author makes it quite plane, both in his preface and in his methodology: he's simply providing a resource for others to use in their arguments in the "perception battle". That's why he went through the process of converting the pdfs to text and diff'ing them.
The additional comments were there to offer his own perspective and, quite rightly, they were to the intended audience: those who'd be using his research as substance for their own arguments in their own forums.
In addition, Sanders contended it would be too expensive for companies like AMD to "create products for multiple, inconsistent versions of Windows."
As opposed to running multiple and inconsistant versions of Linux and *BSD???
Some of us already have it.
http://www.fastweb.it
10 mbps to the home. :)
The only downside is that the router is a total blackbox for a gateway/router. Portscanning it from either side of the firewall reveals nothing and there seems no way into it to configure port-forwarding...
The gateway device Fastweb is using is here: telsey. Any ideas on how to make this thing more, erm, functional... would be appreciated.
The other terrific thing about the Fastweb service is that with our monthly tarrif, we also get 'free' national and local calls. They also gave some crazy webTV appliance (which runs linu, btw) but we don't have much use for it.
Two interesting points which jumped out at me when I was reading Billy G's Unix Expo Remarks remembering that they were from October 9, 1996 were:
One of the exciting things we're announcing today is that our commitment to the Internet and to building a state-of-the-art browser extends not only to Windows 95 and Windows NT, but also to 16-bit Windows and the Macintosh and to Unix.
Explorer for Unix!
And this:
And the reason we do that -- it's not purely a magnanimous thing on our part. (Laughter.) We're doing that to promote the Active X technology, and by having the browser be out there very, very broadly...
Clearly an early vision of .Net!
Who'd have thought that there would have been enough interest in the Motorola CPU that powers the Palm family to make a movie of it? Tron was pretty popular I guess...
This has been modded a Troll? It's hilarious! I've spluttered coffee all over the place. Christ, if you don't like a gag, ignore it. Don't mod the poor postee down for it!
I see your point.
There was no troll intended. However, I think what I was hinting at but probably should have stated is a general culture of 'hands off' that encourages the divide.
The more the mechanics of a device is put into proverbial black-boxes, the less clue there will be out there. There was a time when almost anyone could fix a car... not any longer. Indeed, attempting to do so may violate the terms of your gurantee, insurance, etc.
The reason so many forums exist today for hacking / tweaking computer gear is because it's still not criminal to do so. When it does become illegal, the tech divide will grow some more as new generations aren't raised with the ability to troubleshoot a device, but will, instead, dispose of it / send it in for a replacement and so on.
Point taken though, this has little to do with 'knowing' how to use a DVD player. It does, nevertheless, explain how the MPAA can get away with bollocks like region-coding. There's not enough clue out there amongst consumers to even know what to protest.
All the various and heinous anti-circumvention / IP protection laws also probably have something to do with it.
If you can't tinker with something, how on earth are you supposed to figure out how it works. Most tech companies and especially their lawyers and bean counters would prefer if we just clicked and drooled.
Again, this is not a problem limited to the USA. don't forget that /. has an international readership. Why frame it as an American issue? OK, that's what the stats that formed the foundation of the article pointed to, but surely the problem as a notion can be extended without too much trouble.
The stories of Hercules and Jesus are very very similar, but their perception, and their effect, are entirely different.
I took a course in Greek Mythology and am very familiar with the Christian Bible and I'd like to ask you one question: What kind of weed were you smoking when you thought that line up?
It wasn't my comment but I'm glad it was made. The stories of Jesus and Hercules are very similar. The details vary, but the structures are very, very similar. Likewise, the story of Ogmius (the Celtic equivelant of the legend) follows the same pattern.
No one would be offended if someone compared Ogmius to Hercules. Somehow drawing a parallel with Jesus causes offence. Why? Jesus was himself very conscious of the power of myth and used it in his teachings as well as in his political power struggles.
And to bring things back to the thread, it's the theme of the self-sacrificing son which dominates the original Star Wars trilogy. Everything builds to that climax where Luke proves his love for his father in Episode VI. Yes, it's 'just a movie' but the reason it was so successful and popular is that it picked up on what all the mythographers mentioned in this thread would have termed, an "eternal" or "proto" myth.
Isn't this the Robert Graves who wrote I, Claudius ? He also translated Suetonius's work, which is not unrelated...
Yes it is. And it's what my doctoral thesis was about. ;-) But well spotted. The ideas in Graves' White Goddess are not totally unrelated from his Claudius books and his 'interpretation' of Seutonius, etc.
It's not often that I get to write about my thesis on Eng Lit on /!
Of course, Campbell drew on Robert Graves, who himself drew on Sir James Frazer and W.B. Yeats and so on...
Campbell, Graves as well as very many other mythographers before them recognised that, in Graves' words, "There was one story, and one story only". The study of myth is often just an attempt to relocate its sources. These sources aren't only in literature. They're in all manner of unexplainable things: nature, science, psychology, dream, etc. They all fuel our imaginations and, given that we've not really changed that much over time (we're just a bit better at explaining things and hence, behaving 'rationaly').
One great appeal of the original Star Wars trilogy is that was so faithful to the pattern of proto-myths described by Campbell, Graves and others. The Phantom Menace though, seems more concerned with being faithful to the orginal trilogy than any of the more unversal mythological legends. It's probably why they feel more shallow, more commercial and less about those things that matter to all of us.
No big loss though. The eye candy is great. Most of us will enjoy it. There will be other story tellers who will captivate us with wickedly spun tales.
Because 6 years ago, you would have been asking, "Maybe this is a silly question.. but why would you want to compile a kernel in 3 minutes?"
Hrmn. You two are taking this "living of two lives as one thing" very seriously it appears:
CmdrTaco (editor) (kathleenfent@yahoo.com)
Especially if they're those 'anti-globalisation' protesters (whatever that means). For people supposedly fighting to ensure that 'the little guy. gets treated fairly they sure do love trashing the shops owned by small family businesses.
nice troll!
Mr and Mrs McDonald's (and their blind dog poopy) and their good friends, the Starbucks, surely appreciate you compassion.
There were upwards of 60 million Napster users when it got shut down. "Most" of them were not anything. ("Most" of them were certainly not teenagers; there are only ~12 million teenagers in the US total!) And, as there were something like 40 million unique mp3s floating around Napster, I guess "most" of them actually were listening to more than just the latest Britney album. (Otherwise that's a pretty long album...)
If you want a "most", here it is: most Americans with Internet access in early 2001 used Napster.
For christ's sake, the inderned != the usa.
It is unbelievably infuriating for the r.o.w., whatever paltry statistic we might be, to read shit like that.