The changes to UCITA are all very well-reasoned and good responses to the criticism that has dogged it since it was first proposed.
However, it does not remove the worst offense of UCITA, which is the imposition of the shrink-wrap license on the unsuspecting purchasers of software. Nowhere in the existing NCCUSL is there any support for this outrageous abuse of power by the so-called "intellectual property" industry. The imposition of a shrink-wrap license is just too much. They did see fit to throw in the fact that UCITA now gives consumers a clear way to opt-out and get their money back if they feel the restrictions are too heinous, but the fact remains that this is still an attempt to impose a contract on someone who never signed up for the terms.
Most large companies have required training goals that everyone in the company must meet. At Motorola, for example, when I worked there 5 years ago, the company had a policy of requiring 40 hours of on-the-job training per employee per year. They spent a lot of time tracking and reporting this statistic and managers were rated on how well their employees did on the training scale. It was often a struggle to get the local average up to 40 hours per employee because everyone did not participate.
Of course, this was just the usual seminar training stuff. Motorola (as most other large businesses) also has a tuition reimbursement program for off-the-job training. I think that any employer who is interested in quality work will have both types of training programs. Require a minimum of 40 hours on-the-job training per employee per year and offer tuition reimbursement for off-the-job training (college degree, etc.)
Also, just because the minimum was 40 hours did not mean that they wouldn't spring for more. More is always better, because it pumps up the average for people who did not manage the minimum. I usually managed to get them to spring for Usenix in addition to the usual company seminars.
Nowadays, I work for a consulting services company. They will pay for off-the-clock training, but are reluctant to pay for on-the-clock training, since their business is entirely selling consultant services. Occaisionally, you get to work for a client who will pay for on-the-job training, basically you just tag along when the client schedules training for their own employees on a particular subject. Or maybe you get to work for a client that has extensive CBT materials that you can use as part of your job. It is a lot harder to get on-the-job training when you are a consultant. You generally have to budget at least the time on your own, if not both time and money.
Is it just coincidence that Gracenote received two patent grants on May 8, 2001? The more important one, 6,230,192 concerns using a remote computer to deliver content based on ids derived from CD's, DVD's and MP3's. Specifically, claim 10 of that patent is exactly what freedb does.
10. A method for associating a recording with output of data on a local computer connected to a network, comprising:
determining an identifier from information associated with the recording;
comparing the identifier with records in a database maintained on a remote computer coupled to the local computer via the network; and
outputting remote data obtained from the network upon verification of access to the recording by the local computer, the remote data obtained via the network from at least one storage location dynamically determined based on the identifier.
However, this patent is an egregious example of an over-broad patent covering compeltely obvious technology. For instance, one claim involves detecting CD insertion and automatically starting a program!
13. A method as recited in claim 12, further comprising:
detecting insertion of the compact disc in the compact disc player; and
automatically starting a client program within the computer to cause the computer to access the network when the compact disc is inserted in the compact disc player.
Also, there are 79 claims in this patent! Most of the claims are extremely trivial variations on a theme of delivering a variety of content (pictures, videos, tickets, ads, etc.) based on the ids derived from the inserted media.
If you are in the U.S., federal law states that hourly employees must be compensated for all time worked. Depending on the interpretation of the law (which is very dense and hard to read), being on call counts as work time and must be compensated, although not necessarily at the same rate as real work.
Depending on which state you live in, state law may or may not trump federal law. Check out the department of labor web site for starting places to explore. If this really is a Fortune 100 company, then they must have the plans in place to deal with this situation. If they don't, they are wide open for a lawsuit. Probably you management either doesn't know the rules or they are trying to get away with it. Go to HR and find out.
Back in the day when we installed the ARPAnet node in Seattle (a BBN C30), the network was redundant by design. We had to lease two 56k(!) lines from AT&T in order to guarantee two physical connections from each IMP to all of the others. One connection went to Minnesota, one to Berkeley. AT&T guaranteed to use separate facilities to route the signals leaving Seattle. That provided the redundancy, but we still had the SPOF within Seattle, because we relied on AT&T/US West to get the signal from the campus t the central switching center downtown.
As the Internet has grown, people have attempted to keep the backbone structure true to the initial premise of having two or more separate physical connections between each major backbone node. With the introduction of the MAE centers, the commercialization of the net, the proliferation of private backbones interacting with each other through policy-driven exchange agreements and the internationalization of the network (how to you have physically redundant connections on a single trans-oceanic fiber?), the goal of physical redundancy has been more or less abandoned, except for military purposes (.mil linkage).
It is nearly impossible for anyone to request and guarantee separate physical connections between backbone nodes, because even the telecom providers do not always know in advance where signals will be routed on their own ATM/SONET/etc. networks. Backhoe outages and DDoS are only the tip of the iceberg--we will see more routing troubles due to the complex, policy-driven exchange agreements are implemented using BGP mechanisms with varying degrees of effectivenes. If your ISP uses the Sprint backbone and Sprint is in an argument with PSInet, you may not be able to reach anyone on PSInet until the political argument is settled.
Bottom line, the Internet backbone is no longer a single network with built-in redundancy. Each separate, private backbone may (or may not) have internal physical redundancy, depending on the carriers network design. The existence of private networks interacting at MAE's pretty much guarantees regular partitioning of the Internet as backhoe outages disrupt the exchange of traffic between private carriers. The increasing use of DWDM fiber as backbone also pretty much eliminates physical redundancy in network paths. It is an open question whether or not redundancy is important or desirable in the modern Internet.
I posted this suggestion during the/. poll on new advertising tech, and I think it is really the only way to go.
Basically, look at the magazine model of advertising. For really popular mags, you get nearly 75% ad to content ratio (Byte, any "womens" mag, GQ, etc.) You have to skip over all of those ads to reach any content, but it is (relatively) easy to do the skipping. If, during your skipping, you see an interesting ad flash by, you can make a mental note and come back to it later for more info.
Why can't advertisers treat web advertising the same way? Just give us the ads but also give us a way to find the interesting ads again once we have digested the content and want to check out the interesting ad. The current "banner server" technology makes it difficult to find the same ad by reloading the page, since you never know which ad will present itself. Better to have a thumbnail index somewhere that you can browse for the ad and be able to click through to the company.
Another annoying thing is to be able to determine the ultimate destination of the click through before you actually click on it to avoid sites you really do not want to visit.
Who in their right mind would listen to commercial radio on the Internet? You want to listen to streamed commercials?
Go out and point your browser to KEXP and listen to real radio. If you are lucky enough to be on Internet2, you can get an uncompressed 1.4mbps feed! The best radio station in the world!
Like many of ICANN's critics, and like most of the so-called content at ICANN Watch, the referenced editorial is nearly content-free. It goes on at tedious length and actually presents absolutely no factual evidence, only hysterical claims. This simply perpetuates the same ranting that most ICANN critica engage in. A lot of smoke and steam, but where is the fire?
Rant all you want about world government, etc., but please back up your rants with facts. The puff piece makes no citations, only vague allegations. If you are going to complain about something, the least you can do in offer constructive suggestions about how to do it better. He complains about the lack of transparency in ICANN board meetings. I could make the same complaint about VeriSign or NSI board meetings. He complains about WIPO without acknowledging the horrendous mess that NSI made of the entire trademark issue by arbitrarily granting domains to anyone who claimed trademark ownership without even checking whether or not they were lying through their teeth.
Bottom line, when NSI had their nice cozy, private contract with DoC, they were much more abusive about the operation of the DNS than ICANN has ever been. I certainly do not want to see a return to the days of NSI abuse of power, thank you very much. I certainly do not believe the protestations of one of the people most central to the NSI abuse of DNS when he complains about someone else. Go cry in someone else's beer.
Having the keyring, of course, is not quite all there is to it. Keyrings are protected by passphrases, as well. But passphrases are not as secure as encryption keys themselves are - they are chosen by the user, and most will fall to dictionary attacks very quickly.
The whole point of a passphrase is to use a phrase. That means more than one word! I compose a nonsense sentence with misspellings and other substitutions that make it virtually impossible to guess. Go with the suggestion of nonsense obscenity--mix in a variety of misspellings and obscenities into a usually inocuous phrase. Mix in numerics as any 31337 hax0r would (only don't stick to the 31337 rules) and you have something unguessable. There is no need to write it down, since it is memorable to you. If you need to, write yourself a hint that leads obliquely to the phrase. Someone will still have to spend a lot of time to recover a 50-60 character sentence to decode your keyring.
I cannot help but be worried about the Wind River purchase. At least, when BSDI purchased Walnut Creek, there was the feeling that they at least had some connection to the Open Source community through the shared BSD heiritage. Now, Wind River has absolutely no committment to Open Source, since the entire premise of the company is selling proprietary software. Also, they have a very bad track record with previous acquisitionns (rememer pSOS and ISI?) Even though they have Hubbard and Karels and McKusick as talking heads saying good things, exactly how long will the good feelings last? According to the article on Yahoo!, the reason WRS did this was to try to force more people to use their proprietary tools, not to promote openness.
This whole ORSC, Name.space, yet-another-NIC, etc. is really just a bunch of whiney people who are mad at the world because it refuses to roll over and make them millionaires like they saw all of those dotcom'ers and other fat cats. They can't stand the fact that their internet land-grab was rejected by people with cooler heads and an interest in making sure that the Internet continued to function during the process in introducing a major change.
I have been reading the mailing lists for this whole discussion from the beginning and these people have never said anything new. They just keep complaining about how unfair everyone is treating them and because everyone is so unfair to them, they are just going to go over into this corner and play by themselves.
Well, fine. Let them play by themselves. They refuse to compromise with anyone, especially if it threatens the windfall profits they are sure that the world owes them for their own great idea of charging through the nose for the wonderful domain "john-palmer.owns.the.earth". Others see that everything has to be compromised and approached carefully. Sure, there is still the whole IP constituency and the UDRP mess, but it is being worked out. No thanks to anyone in ORSC or name.space.
Well, duk, of course SunOS is BSD based. Bill Joy is one of the founders of Sun! Through SunOS 4.1...., SunOS was BSD by definition, basically Joy taking the latest releases across the bay to Sun when it suited him. As of SunOS 5.x (Solaris 2.x, 7, 8) Sun entered into an agreement with AT&T to merge SunOS and SVR4. They were originally going to rewrite the OS completely in C++ (the famous "Spring" kernel), but that never happened. What did happen is that Solaris 2.x contains mostly SVR4 base with BSD add-ons in terms of the file system and VM system. The userland utilities are almost all SVR4. Sun's major contribution was originally a userland select(3) implementation, but around 2.5 they re-implemented it inside the kernel bcause poll(2) is just too clumsy and that whole TLI library inheirited from AT&T is just too wierd for words.
AIX, as far as I remember, was always System III/V based with significant inheiritance from BSD, just as all major UNIX vendors tried to import in a mix and match fashion the best of BSD and System III/V. IBM, similarly to HP, had very few qualms about making willy-nilly changes just because they could do it. They ennded up with that horrendous SMIT and they also trampled all over select(2), adding a horrible extension to allow waiting on both sockets and msgq's.
Don't get me started on the abominations perpetrated on UNIX by HP-UX--the history of that is just too convoluted to bear. Suffice to say that HP-UX 11 is the closest to a standards-compliant UNIX that HP has ever produced. You can almost port applications from other versions of UNIX without change!
At least the editor did the work to actually read about the issue in depth and report on it, no matter what bias shows up in the report. That is much more than can be said of the usual/. editor pseduo-work (exemplified by the completely clueless intro to the XP book review).
You obviously did not even bother to read the referenced article. The non-WEP attacks are so trivial as to not require any programming to accomplish (snoop from the parking lot and change the MAC address of your interface being the most trivial attack). Only the WEP attacks require computation, and even those are so trivial as to be not worth coding up except to fuel the script kiddies.
It would really help if people would actually read the links before posting.
Hah! Don't make me laugh! Maybe 10 years ago most routers were based on 68k's, but nowadays, the routers that we are talking about have either completely custom CPU's or else high-end RISC cpu's with significant ASIC support for searching tables. Please read some recent articles in EETimes (say, anything written in the last 10 years!) before you display your lack of knowledge again. And, the core routers were never 68k's. Even 10 years ago, the CORE routers were RS/6000's.
Yahoo! reports that AOL has just released AIM 4.5 Beta for Mac OS X. Someone needs to analyze this and see if it has windoze aim.exe built-in to handle the handshake business.
I am very happy with my Covad SDSL, even though it took more than 6 months to install it two years ago. GTE had such a bad deal for ISP's back then that my ISP just refused to play with them and jumped in with Covad right at the start. The only problem I have ever had was the scheduling of the initial installation, and that was as much GTE's fault as it was Covad's. At least I have an SDSL, always-on, no PPPOE or any crap like that.
I think that the current "deals" that Covad has are somewhat more expensive. I don't think they offer the router option anymore, but you can always use a spare picoBSD to do that.
The correct quote is "Great googly moogly".
Watch out where the huskies go
And don't you eat that yellow snow!
The purpose is research into wearable computing
on
IBM Linux Watch v2.0
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· Score: 1
You need something powerful like Linux on a wristwatch because the future is in multifunction wearable devices. The future versions of this "watch" will actually be more like the Dick Tracy "two-way wrist tv" than a watch. Too many people are distracted by the word "watch" which should really have been "wearable computer".
"[P]ublically revealed" facts do not invalidate copyrights. Facts are not copyrightable--the words and method of expressing those facts are still copyrightable and protectable as free speech. Thus, code protected by GPL may contain facts, but the particular expression of those facts is still copyrightable and still licenseable. You are free to reformulate the facts into a different expression once the facts are released into the public domain, a concept different from copyright of expression.
The argument is about free speech being able to disseminte truthful facts. The use of the term "public domain" is in reference to facts, not copyright.
Neutrinos have very little mass (if at all), therefore, they are hard to detect. Low energy neutrinos are easier to detect, since they are slower and easier to stop. High energy particles interact less with the matter they pass through, therefore they are harder to detect.
Do you get it now?
Re:Hey, would FreeBSD make a good DSL web server?
on
Bringing xMach To Life
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· Score: 2
It depends.
What do you feel comfortable with? FreeBSD is my personal preference, but you have to be very aware of the huge cultural difference between Linux and FreeBSD communities. Within the FreeBSD community, it is extermely necessary to RTFM completely before you step forward and ask a presumably stupid (all newbies are presumed stupid until proven smart) question on the mailing list. Clueless lusers are not very welcome. (I'm just stating what I see as the attitude on the various FreeBSD mailing lists.)
That said, the technical qualities of FreeBSD make it outperform Linux in all cases. Linux suffers from the disease of the least common denominator--i.e., they let anyone hack away and contribute poor quality software to the effort. With FreeBSD, there is a lot of attention to doing things the right way, where the right way is defined by the people on the committers list.
So, if you think that you can install and start up the system on your own, go for FreeBSD. If you need help from the get-go, better stick with Linux. After you get the system up and running, and you have thoroughly R'd TFM, and you have spent at least 2 weeks reading freebsd-stable mailing list, then ask for help.
I think that Salon has some of the most literate content on the net. They have had some brilliant writers featured on their site, and there is always at least one or two articles per day that I read in their entirety.
Other posters have said that they do not find banner ads intrusive. Even on a fast connection, it often takes a significant amount of time for the overloaded banner server to cough up the ad. This delays the page significantly, especially with the stupid animated banners. I have set my Mozilla image settings to animation "none" and that makes the pages appear even faster. If I could do away with the banners completely without constantly updating my Junkbuster config, I would be happy.
Of course, if all sites went to pay per view, then I would have to really make a choice which sites were worth the premium. The only magazines I pay for are Consumers Reports and Rolling Stone (other than professional society memberships and, of course, free technical rags like EETimes). I think I would pay for Salon, but probably would not pay for/. (unless they included actually interesting original content, and, no, Jon Katz does not qualify as interesting or original.)
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The changes to UCITA are all very well-reasoned and good responses to the criticism that has dogged it since it was first proposed.
However, it does not remove the worst offense of UCITA, which is the imposition of the shrink-wrap license on the unsuspecting purchasers of software. Nowhere in the existing NCCUSL is there any support for this outrageous abuse of power by the so-called "intellectual property" industry. The imposition of a shrink-wrap license is just too much. They did see fit to throw in the fact that UCITA now gives consumers a clear way to opt-out and get their money back if they feel the restrictions are too heinous, but the fact remains that this is still an attempt to impose a contract on someone who never signed up for the terms.
Of course, this was just the usual seminar training stuff. Motorola (as most other large businesses) also has a tuition reimbursement program for off-the-job training. I think that any employer who is interested in quality work will have both types of training programs. Require a minimum of 40 hours on-the-job training per employee per year and offer tuition reimbursement for off-the-job training (college degree, etc.)
Also, just because the minimum was 40 hours did not mean that they wouldn't spring for more. More is always better, because it pumps up the average for people who did not manage the minimum. I usually managed to get them to spring for Usenix in addition to the usual company seminars.
Nowadays, I work for a consulting services company. They will pay for off-the-clock training, but are reluctant to pay for on-the-clock training, since their business is entirely selling consultant services. Occaisionally, you get to work for a client who will pay for on-the-job training, basically you just tag along when the client schedules training for their own employees on a particular subject. Or maybe you get to work for a client that has extensive CBT materials that you can use as part of your job. It is a lot harder to get on-the-job training when you are a consultant. You generally have to budget at least the time on your own, if not both time and money.
Depending on which state you live in, state law may or may not trump federal law. Check out the department of labor web site for starting places to explore. If this really is a Fortune 100 company, then they must have the plans in place to deal with this situation. If they don't, they are wide open for a lawsuit. Probably you management either doesn't know the rules or they are trying to get away with it. Go to HR and find out.
As the Internet has grown, people have attempted to keep the backbone structure true to the initial premise of having two or more separate physical connections between each major backbone node. With the introduction of the MAE centers, the commercialization of the net, the proliferation of private backbones interacting with each other through policy-driven exchange agreements and the internationalization of the network (how to you have physically redundant connections on a single trans-oceanic fiber?), the goal of physical redundancy has been more or less abandoned, except for military purposes (.mil linkage).
It is nearly impossible for anyone to request and guarantee separate physical connections between backbone nodes, because even the telecom providers do not always know in advance where signals will be routed on their own ATM/SONET/etc. networks. Backhoe outages and DDoS are only the tip of the iceberg--we will see more routing troubles due to the complex, policy-driven exchange agreements are implemented using BGP mechanisms with varying degrees of effectivenes. If your ISP uses the Sprint backbone and Sprint is in an argument with PSInet, you may not be able to reach anyone on PSInet until the political argument is settled.
Bottom line, the Internet backbone is no longer a single network with built-in redundancy. Each separate, private backbone may (or may not) have internal physical redundancy, depending on the carriers network design. The existence of private networks interacting at MAE's pretty much guarantees regular partitioning of the Internet as backhoe outages disrupt the exchange of traffic between private carriers. The increasing use of DWDM fiber as backbone also pretty much eliminates physical redundancy in network paths. It is an open question whether or not redundancy is important or desirable in the modern Internet.
Basically, look at the magazine model of advertising. For really popular mags, you get nearly 75% ad to content ratio (Byte, any "womens" mag, GQ, etc.) You have to skip over all of those ads to reach any content, but it is (relatively) easy to do the skipping. If, during your skipping, you see an interesting ad flash by, you can make a mental note and come back to it later for more info.
Why can't advertisers treat web advertising the same way? Just give us the ads but also give us a way to find the interesting ads again once we have digested the content and want to check out the interesting ad. The current "banner server" technology makes it difficult to find the same ad by reloading the page, since you never know which ad will present itself. Better to have a thumbnail index somewhere that you can browse for the ad and be able to click through to the company.
Another annoying thing is to be able to determine the ultimate destination of the click through before you actually click on it to avoid sites you really do not want to visit.
Go out and point your browser to KEXP and listen to real radio. If you are lucky enough to be on Internet2, you can get an uncompressed 1.4mbps feed! The best radio station in the world!
Rant all you want about world government, etc., but please back up your rants with facts. The puff piece makes no citations, only vague allegations. If you are going to complain about something, the least you can do in offer constructive suggestions about how to do it better. He complains about the lack of transparency in ICANN board meetings. I could make the same complaint about VeriSign or NSI board meetings. He complains about WIPO without acknowledging the horrendous mess that NSI made of the entire trademark issue by arbitrarily granting domains to anyone who claimed trademark ownership without even checking whether or not they were lying through their teeth.
Bottom line, when NSI had their nice cozy, private contract with DoC, they were much more abusive about the operation of the DNS than ICANN has ever been. I certainly do not want to see a return to the days of NSI abuse of power, thank you very much. I certainly do not believe the protestations of one of the people most central to the NSI abuse of DNS when he complains about someone else. Go cry in someone else's beer.
The whole point of a passphrase is to use a phrase. That means more than one word! I compose a nonsense sentence with misspellings and other substitutions that make it virtually impossible to guess. Go with the suggestion of nonsense obscenity--mix in a variety of misspellings and obscenities into a usually inocuous phrase. Mix in numerics as any 31337 hax0r would (only don't stick to the 31337 rules) and you have something unguessable. There is no need to write it down, since it is memorable to you. If you need to, write yourself a hint that leads obliquely to the phrase. Someone will still have to spend a lot of time to recover a 50-60 character sentence to decode your keyring.
I cannot help but be worried about the Wind River purchase. At least, when BSDI purchased Walnut Creek, there was the feeling that they at least had some connection to the Open Source community through the shared BSD heiritage. Now, Wind River has absolutely no committment to Open Source, since the entire premise of the company is selling proprietary software. Also, they have a very bad track record with previous acquisitionns (rememer pSOS and ISI?) Even though they have Hubbard and Karels and McKusick as talking heads saying good things, exactly how long will the good feelings last? According to the article on Yahoo!, the reason WRS did this was to try to force more people to use their proprietary tools, not to promote openness.
I have been reading the mailing lists for this whole discussion from the beginning and these people have never said anything new. They just keep complaining about how unfair everyone is treating them and because everyone is so unfair to them, they are just going to go over into this corner and play by themselves.
Well, fine. Let them play by themselves. They refuse to compromise with anyone, especially if it threatens the windfall profits they are sure that the world owes them for their own great idea of charging through the nose for the wonderful domain "john-palmer.owns.the.earth". Others see that everything has to be compromised and approached carefully. Sure, there is still the whole IP constituency and the UDRP mess, but it is being worked out. No thanks to anyone in ORSC or name.space.
I do.
AIX, as far as I remember, was always System III/V based with significant inheiritance from BSD, just as all major UNIX vendors tried to import in a mix and match fashion the best of BSD and System III/V. IBM, similarly to HP, had very few qualms about making willy-nilly changes just because they could do it. They ennded up with that horrendous SMIT and they also trampled all over select(2), adding a horrible extension to allow waiting on both sockets and msgq's.
Don't get me started on the abominations perpetrated on UNIX by HP-UX--the history of that is just too convoluted to bear. Suffice to say that HP-UX 11 is the closest to a standards-compliant UNIX that HP has ever produced. You can almost port applications from other versions of UNIX without change!
I say, good work michael!
It would really help if people would actually read the links before posting.
Hah! Don't make me laugh! Maybe 10 years ago most routers were based on 68k's, but nowadays, the routers that we are talking about have either completely custom CPU's or else high-end RISC cpu's with significant ASIC support for searching tables. Please read some recent articles in EETimes (say, anything written in the last 10 years!) before you display your lack of knowledge again. And, the core routers were never 68k's. Even 10 years ago, the CORE routers were RS/6000's.
Yahoo! reports that AOL has just released AIM 4.5 Beta for Mac OS X. Someone needs to analyze this and see if it has windoze aim.exe built-in to handle the handshake business.
I think that the current "deals" that Covad has are somewhat more expensive. I don't think they offer the router option anymore, but you can always use a spare picoBSD to do that.
The correct quote is "Great googly moogly". Watch out where the huskies go And don't you eat that yellow snow!
You need something powerful like Linux on a wristwatch because the future is in multifunction wearable devices. The future versions of this "watch" will actually be more like the Dick Tracy "two-way wrist tv" than a watch. Too many people are distracted by the word "watch" which should really have been "wearable computer".
The argument is about free speech being able to disseminte truthful facts. The use of the term "public domain" is in reference to facts, not copyright.
Do you get it now?
What do you feel comfortable with? FreeBSD is my personal preference, but you have to be very aware of the huge cultural difference between Linux and FreeBSD communities. Within the FreeBSD community, it is extermely necessary to RTFM completely before you step forward and ask a presumably stupid (all newbies are presumed stupid until proven smart) question on the mailing list. Clueless lusers are not very welcome. (I'm just stating what I see as the attitude on the various FreeBSD mailing lists.)
That said, the technical qualities of FreeBSD make it outperform Linux in all cases. Linux suffers from the disease of the least common denominator--i.e., they let anyone hack away and contribute poor quality software to the effort. With FreeBSD, there is a lot of attention to doing things the right way, where the right way is defined by the people on the committers list.
So, if you think that you can install and start up the system on your own, go for FreeBSD. If you need help from the get-go, better stick with Linux. After you get the system up and running, and you have thoroughly R'd TFM, and you have spent at least 2 weeks reading freebsd-stable mailing list, then ask for help.
They are proposing $30 per year, not $30 per month! $30/year is a reasonable magazine subscription price.
Other posters have said that they do not find banner ads intrusive. Even on a fast connection, it often takes a significant amount of time for the overloaded banner server to cough up the ad. This delays the page significantly, especially with the stupid animated banners. I have set my Mozilla image settings to animation "none" and that makes the pages appear even faster. If I could do away with the banners completely without constantly updating my Junkbuster config, I would be happy.
Of course, if all sites went to pay per view, then I would have to really make a choice which sites were worth the premium. The only magazines I pay for are Consumers Reports and Rolling Stone (other than professional society memberships and, of course, free technical rags like EETimes). I think I would pay for Salon, but probably would not pay for /. (unless they included actually interesting original content, and, no, Jon Katz does not qualify as interesting or original.)