The reason I'm for Google has little to do with technology. It has everything to do with advertisements and capitalism.
I'd rather support a company that uses subtle advertisements like Google does than a company that uses in your face banner ads, etc. (Then again I'm posting on Slashdot!) Also I make a point to check out the ads evey now and then on Google and visit the company's site. I may be getting hosting from an advertiser on Google soon.
If people who advertise on Google make more money than they do with banner ads, pop-ups, etc. then we'll see the idea spread. I don't like in-my-face ads, so I do what I can to tell companies that. It's called being a responsible consumer.
Plus more valid hits come up when I search for myself on Google;-).
Re:gnome, kde
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually gconf doesn't care what the back end is. The standard one is based on XML files but you could use a database or an ldap server or just about anything you want that can store its key/value pairs.
Gconf is also great because its easy as hell to work on. Either tinkering with the files by hand or from the command line or using the ever nifty gconf-editor. The schemas are available to the user to check out so no configuration variable is completely undocumented although they do not explain what exactly they are used for.
People forget the biggest problem with the registry is not the registry itself its the number of undocumented keys that take difficult to comprehend values. Microsoft makes it difficult to understand on purpose under the guise of making it so "You have to know what you're doing to mess with it" which roughly translates to "Even if you work for Microsoft you shouldn't be messing with it. Bill knows whats best for you."
The registry-like idea is a natural decision. If you have a set of programs that use a similar text based config file format and they store all their config files in the same directory, thats registry-like. If you're building a DE, you're going to build a configuration API so that people can get and set values without having to reinvent the wheel every time. Gconf just makes it easy on programmers, users and sys admins.
We shouldn't be zealots that hate all things Microsoft just because they're Microsoft. If you find yourself needing something Microsoftish that you don't like, think about why you really don't like it and see how you can not fall into the same trap they did.
It's interesting to me that, at least in the US, people talk alot about how important your vote is, but they neglect to point out that we vote every day with the money we spend. If you disagree with the company, go somewhere else with your money. Find another cable or DSL provider, or (dear god!) suffer through having to use dialup. Maybe consider getting together with your neighbors and getting a commercial solution and share it via 802.11.
As long as you support that company they'll remain and they'll continue their business practices. You have to motivate them (you could say provide an evolutionary pressure) for them to change. Sure you're only a few dollars in their pocket, but you can provide an example for other to follow, otherwise you're just part of the problem.
Next time you're having a brewski with your buds or whatever you do where you have moderately intelligent conversation, bring this up. Remind them that capitalism takes effort (I'm not speaking for or against the system, just a statement of fact).
Re:and furthermore (found sounds)...
on
lowercase music
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· Score: 1
Don't forget the classic sound of a man getting bearhugged until his ribs crack with a mic taped to his chest that they actually used in a track.
I just can't wait till R2 can project my voicemail in stunning 3D. You know, for when you have that message that says "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."
I installed the Ximian Gnome 2 snapshots on a PII 333 machine w/ 64 MB RAM. I know it sounds like suicide, but when I used metacity instead of sawfish and didn't use nautilus to draw the desktop (I don't use desktop icons anyway) it ran pretty snappy.
Well, first I killed nautilus (duh!), noted it was still a little slow, and decided to try out Metacity. I use blackbox normally on my other slow machine, but I wanted something Gnome complaint. Metacity fit the bill perfectly since it uses the same libs as everything else. I've been using the thinice theme for Gnome2 as well.
I don't know why the company would pick a name like Lindows, though. Thats like those movies that are hyped up as "If you liked X you're gonna love Y." Or "The best ___ since X." Everyone I know who reads something like that immediately moves on. Rather than selling themselves as a cheap immitation product they should try and sell themselves as a better alternative that happens to also be much cheaper.
This seems especially silly when they have to fight legal battles for the right to use a bad name. Even if they win it's going to cost them a fortune.
I'd just move on and make a big anti-Microsoft PR stunt out of Microsoft trying to pressure my compnay legally. You'd be getting articles in all the ZDnet type news sites, where it seems Lindows target audience hangs out. They'd talk first about the big MS v. Lindows and Linux in general thing plus they'd mention your new snazzy name. Then the reviews start rolling in when the reporters have nothing to talk about because they get a review and a chance to drag up old MS v. Linux garbage. I guess they get all this now, but I think the costs would be a lot less the other way.
Plus, you have to admit the only reason they are using the name is to trick people into using their product. The name basicly says "Like Windows? Try Lindows." Without MS, they'd have no reason to name their product that.
I really don't see how that email is "in your face". He urges people to not use any software that is non-free. Does anyone listen to him? No. He has every right to urge people to wear briefs over boxers. Again, will I follow his directions? No.
And the "people like me" comment is a little off base. I am by no means a Stallman-loving GPL nazi. I'm just tired of people bitching about him, when I find him quite easy to ignore. A lot more so than spam, or even people bitching about him. Now Stallman-bashing has become a sport on this website just as blind faith in the man was before. Both are equally retarded.
I completely disagree with Stallman's entire basis for his philosophy. He falls in to the trap of using the language of "rights" as opposed to the language of "duties." For each right there should be one or more correlative duties that you can univeralize. Ahh, but I'm wandering entirely too far into Kant. But I have a duty to preserve his right to free speech, and am acting according to that:-).
Also I don't think comp.os.plan9 is the appropriate place to discuss issues such as this, and I would probably try to encourage people to have these debates in another, more appropriate, forum.
I suggest that if you're not interested in Stallman's comments, don't bother reading them. He didn't put out an ad campaign, he just put a comment on his website. You sought his advice and you recieved it. He's not forcing you to do anything.
I may or may not agree with him, but I agree that he has a right to put his opinion on his organization's website.
Re:The author of that article needs some cheese...
on
The Future of Ogg Vorbis
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hey, at my school they just built a new dorm last year that has apartment-like rooms in it. When I moved in I was suprised to find my microwave telling me I had a message. I thought WTF? Why is my microwave telling me I have a message? So I hit the message button like it told me to, and I got to hear half a conversation about hardware that the guy who was installing it must have been having.
Anyway, talking microwaves exist now. Why? I have no idea.
Woops! You're right. I screwed it up trying to rewrite the sentence so it made sense. He was a German, and a German Philosophy professor in the US (I don't remember what school off hand and I don't feel like grabbing the book), then he got offered a job in Tokyo. The Japanese were generally very interested in German Philosophy at the time.
No to sound cheesy but I really enjoyed _Zen and the Art of Archery_, the story of an American who is a professor of German philosophy teaching in Tokyo. He studies Zen through archery (as opposed to swordsmanship, tea ceremony, flower arangement, etc) and has a perspective that is fairly easily digestable to the average Western reader. It made me move past my perception of Buddhism as just a religion for crystal wearing, new age music loving, aging hippies. And without a doubt it has helped me find my coding "zone".
You said KDE has it's niche defined. Just out of curiosity, what would you say it is? I don't pay a whole lot of attention to KDE just because I don't personally use it.
My name comes from salmo trutta commonly known as the Brown Trout, a relative of the salmon. I just want to say that I'm glad that the salmonoids are finally getting their due props. It's a pretty big deal to have the color of the universe called the color you are (or can exhibit). I just hope that in the future people don't end up saying that salmon are universe colored.
I worked for a professor last summer writing LaTeX for an upcoming calculus book. Everyone involved used a Mac, but we all used LaTeX on the Mac. It was a real change for me getting used to typing in Mac paths for graphics and getting used to using something other than Emacs as my text editor. As far as Math goes, TeX is pretty much the only game in town, or at least anything else is frowned upon. And its so easy to use compared to anything else I've messed with. You never have to leave the keyboard, yet it sets math beautifully. As for being lower quality, it all depends on the implementation you use. It's not like there's one version of TeX out there anyway.
> But then again why would I invest that much time to give a shit about a crappy DOA browser?
Probably the same reason you would spend so much time reading this far down in the comments about the "crappy DOA browser" you hate so much and then taking the time to comment.
I think you sir, may be in desperate need of a hug.
Asa, I just wanted to say thanks. You're always answering lowly user's questions on Slashdot and Mozillazine and such. You don't get peeved because people don't keep track of every minute detail of the Mozilla construction process. You only rant at the people who act like complete tools. Your informative answers to people's problems and questions have definitly made my Mozilla experience much better and I'm sure you've had the same effect on others.
Thanks for putting up with all the crap that you put up with and for helping us little guys out. I appreciate it.
Normally I don't respond to things like this, but this time I had to...
Funny you mention media players, Windows XP, and secure in the same comment. I guess you call it secure when Windows Media PlayerXP phones home to MS to tell you what you're watching. Either that or you don't read Bugtraq. Nothing against XP, never used it, and I might not ever just 'cause I've never had the need to.
Also, I think any OS is probably as real as the next, unless its vaporware. Unfortunately DOS was all too real.
I think the interesting thing (and probably the purpose of teh email) was not the 23 sec. compile time but the relative increases due to the patches. 23 sec does undeniably kick some serious tail, though.
And as for your subject, I don't believe this was ever intended to be a benchmark to show off the machine, it was just an experiment. When you have a 16 way NUMA, you don't need to show off.:-)
Actually the 2.2.x kernels have better support for this type of thing via kernel modules (which netfilter also requires). There are a few modules that haven't been ported to netfilter yet (see http://www.netfilter.org for more info on this).
Also, in my experience with my NAT box (a PII 266, w/ 96 MB of RAM I have had lying around) I found that for some reason 2.2 w/ ipchains handles the traffic much more efficiently than 2.4 w/ iptables. This may have to do with the fact that I am using old EISA 3c515 card and an onboard tlan NIC (I know some changes have been made to the 3c515 driver, but you think that would have improved performance). The rules were rougly the same (based off the IP Masq HowTo) and the only things I am running on it are sshd and bind as a caching name server. (If anyone can tell me why this is the case please do!)
Also, I know it sounds silly to run bind on a firewall, but this is more to provide access to my network at home, not for security per se. I was working around having to update the configs of all of my machines every time road runner changed the DNS servers on me. (Again, if anybody has a better work around, let me know!)
I tinkered around with it in the early days, but haven't touched it since all these commercial projects have popped up. I'd use one that worked on either windows or linux, but it would have to be able to work from behind a NAT.
I think it's really funny that in an article about intellectual property and prior art Tim O'Reilly cites Morgan's Tarot as the origination of the quote "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger." All good geeks know that's from J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings. Woops!
The GPL does not keep you from charging for your product.
And besides that, it's not like there's a huge market for geek character racing games anyway. How many copies of a game with a penguin sliding down a hill do you think you're going to sell, when I could be playing something a little more interesting for more money. Hell, I can buy kick ass PS1 games for $15 right now.
I'm sure you could get more money in donations, than you could selling the thing. Also you could get sponsors. Let companies buy an opportunity to have their mascot/logo race their way down the track or appear somewhere in the game. That's not against the GPL and seems perfectly reasonable to me.
But most of all don't be a punk and take one of the mascots of free software and throw it in a proprietary game. I think by doing that you just lost most of your market anyway. You going to stick the GNU gnu or a GNOME gnome in there too? It reminds me of all the people selling American flags on the side of the street in late September.
I live in Memphis and have friends who lift boxes for FedEx (which is based in Memphis). Most of the people working there do something else during the day (school, second job, whatever) and work FedEx at night. Just think about it. You're making little money lifting boxes. You boss gets pissed at you for being too slow. So you speed things up a little bit and occasionally punt a box or two when no one's looking to keep up the pace and relieve the aggression.
My general rule is never ship anything you can't replace and always get insurance. So in the case of a computer, make sure you have nice backups of everything. That way in case it gets killed, they'll replace the machine and you can replace the data. And if it's an old machine, maybe it'll be a good reason to get a new one!
Slashdot Mirror
The reason I'm for Google has little to do with technology. It has everything to do with advertisements and capitalism.
;-).
I'd rather support a company that uses subtle advertisements like Google does than a company that uses in your face banner ads, etc. (Then again I'm posting on Slashdot!) Also I make a point to check out the ads evey now and then on Google and visit the company's site. I may be getting hosting from an advertiser on Google soon.
If people who advertise on Google make more money than they do with banner ads, pop-ups, etc. then we'll see the idea spread. I don't like in-my-face ads, so I do what I can to tell companies that. It's called being a responsible consumer.
Plus more valid hits come up when I search for myself on Google
Actually gconf doesn't care what the back end is. The standard one is based on XML files but you could use a database or an ldap server or just about anything you want that can store its key/value pairs.
Gconf is also great because its easy as hell to work on. Either tinkering with the files by hand or from the command line or using the ever nifty gconf-editor. The schemas are available to the user to check out so no configuration variable is completely undocumented although they do not explain what exactly they are used for.
People forget the biggest problem with the registry is not the registry itself its the number of undocumented keys that take difficult to comprehend values. Microsoft makes it difficult to understand on purpose under the guise of making it so "You have to know what you're doing to mess with it" which roughly translates to "Even if you work for Microsoft you shouldn't be messing with it. Bill knows whats best for you."
The registry-like idea is a natural decision. If you have a set of programs that use a similar text based config file format and they store all their config files in the same directory, thats registry-like. If you're building a DE, you're going to build a configuration API so that people can get and set values without having to reinvent the wheel every time. Gconf just makes it easy on programmers, users and sys admins.
We shouldn't be zealots that hate all things Microsoft just because they're Microsoft. If you find yourself needing something Microsoftish that you don't like, think about why you really don't like it and see how you can not fall into the same trap they did.
It's interesting to me that, at least in the US, people talk alot about how important your vote is, but they neglect to point out that we vote every day with the money we spend. If you disagree with the company, go somewhere else with your money. Find another cable or DSL provider, or (dear god!) suffer through having to use dialup. Maybe consider getting together with your neighbors and getting a commercial solution and share it via 802.11.
As long as you support that company they'll remain and they'll continue their business practices. You have to motivate them (you could say provide an evolutionary pressure) for them to change. Sure you're only a few dollars in their pocket, but you can provide an example for other to follow, otherwise you're just part of the problem.
Next time you're having a brewski with your buds or whatever you do where you have moderately intelligent conversation, bring this up. Remind them that capitalism takes effort (I'm not speaking for or against the system, just a statement of fact).
Don't forget the classic sound of a man getting bearhugged until his ribs crack with a mic taped to his chest that they actually used in a track.
I just can't wait till R2 can project my voicemail in stunning 3D. You know, for when you have that message that says "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."
I installed the Ximian Gnome 2 snapshots on a PII 333 machine w/ 64 MB RAM. I know it sounds like suicide, but when I used metacity instead of sawfish and didn't use nautilus to draw the desktop (I don't use desktop icons anyway) it ran pretty snappy.
Well, first I killed nautilus (duh!), noted it was still a little slow, and decided to try out Metacity. I use blackbox normally on my other slow machine, but I wanted something Gnome complaint. Metacity fit the bill perfectly since it uses the same libs as everything else. I've been using the thinice theme for Gnome2 as well.
Oh, and you can find metacity themes at sunshine in a bag.
You won't last long selling someone a trick. Your trick soon becomes thought of as a cheap imitation.
I don't know why the company would pick a name like Lindows, though. Thats like those movies that are hyped up as "If you liked X you're gonna love Y." Or "The best ___ since X." Everyone I know who reads something like that immediately moves on. Rather than selling themselves as a cheap immitation product they should try and sell themselves as a better alternative that happens to also be much cheaper.
This seems especially silly when they have to fight legal battles for the right to use a bad name. Even if they win it's going to cost them a fortune.
I'd just move on and make a big anti-Microsoft PR stunt out of Microsoft trying to pressure my compnay legally. You'd be getting articles in all the ZDnet type news sites, where it seems Lindows target audience hangs out. They'd talk first about the big MS v. Lindows and Linux in general thing plus they'd mention your new snazzy name. Then the reviews start rolling in when the reporters have nothing to talk about because they get a review and a chance to drag up old MS v. Linux garbage. I guess they get all this now, but I think the costs would be a lot less the other way.
Plus, you have to admit the only reason they are using the name is to trick people into using their product. The name basicly says "Like Windows? Try Lindows." Without MS, they'd have no reason to name their product that.
I really don't see how that email is "in your face". He urges people to not use any software that is non-free. Does anyone listen to him? No. He has every right to urge people to wear briefs over boxers. Again, will I follow his directions? No.
:-).
And the "people like me" comment is a little off base. I am by no means a Stallman-loving GPL nazi. I'm just tired of people bitching about him, when I find him quite easy to ignore. A lot more so than spam, or even people bitching about him. Now Stallman-bashing has become a sport on this website just as blind faith in the man was before. Both are equally retarded.
I completely disagree with Stallman's entire basis for his philosophy. He falls in to the trap of using the language of "rights" as opposed to the language of "duties." For each right there should be one or more correlative duties that you can univeralize. Ahh, but I'm wandering entirely too far into Kant. But I have a duty to preserve his right to free speech, and am acting according to that
Also I don't think comp.os.plan9 is the appropriate place to discuss issues such as this, and I would probably try to encourage people to have these debates in another, more appropriate, forum.
I suggest that if you're not interested in Stallman's comments, don't bother reading them. He didn't put out an ad campaign, he just put a comment on his website. You sought his advice and you recieved it. He's not forcing you to do anything.
I may or may not agree with him, but I agree that he has a right to put his opinion on his organization's website.
Hey, at my school they just built a new dorm last year that has apartment-like rooms in it. When I moved in I was suprised to find my microwave telling me I had a message. I thought WTF? Why is my microwave telling me I have a message? So I hit the message button like it told me to, and I got to hear half a conversation about hardware that the guy who was installing it must have been having.
Anyway, talking microwaves exist now. Why? I have no idea.
Woops! You're right. I screwed it up trying to rewrite the sentence so it made sense. He was a German, and a German Philosophy professor in the US (I don't remember what school off hand and I don't feel like grabbing the book), then he got offered a job in Tokyo. The Japanese were generally very interested in German Philosophy at the time.
No to sound cheesy but I really enjoyed _Zen and the Art of Archery_, the story of an American who is a professor of German philosophy teaching in Tokyo. He studies Zen through archery (as opposed to swordsmanship, tea ceremony, flower arangement, etc) and has a perspective that is fairly easily digestable to the average Western reader. It made me move past my perception of Buddhism as just a religion for crystal wearing, new age music loving, aging hippies. And without a doubt it has helped me find my coding "zone".
You said KDE has it's niche defined. Just out of curiosity, what would you say it is? I don't pay a whole lot of attention to KDE just because I don't personally use it.
My name comes from salmo trutta commonly known as the Brown Trout, a relative of the salmon. I just want to say that I'm glad that the salmonoids are finally getting their due props. It's a pretty big deal to have the color of the universe called the color you are (or can exhibit). I just hope that in the future people don't end up saying that salmon are universe colored.
I worked for a professor last summer writing LaTeX for an upcoming calculus book. Everyone involved used a Mac, but we all used LaTeX on the Mac. It was a real change for me getting used to typing in Mac paths for graphics and getting used to using something other than Emacs as my text editor. As far as Math goes, TeX is pretty much the only game in town, or at least anything else is frowned upon. And its so easy to use compared to anything else I've messed with. You never have to leave the keyboard, yet it sets math beautifully. As for being lower quality, it all depends on the implementation you use. It's not like there's one version of TeX out there anyway.
> But then again why would I invest that much time to give a shit about a crappy DOA browser?
Probably the same reason you would spend so much time reading this far down in the comments about the "crappy DOA browser" you hate so much and then taking the time to comment.
I think you sir, may be in desperate need of a hug.
Asa, I just wanted to say thanks. You're always answering lowly user's questions on Slashdot and Mozillazine and such. You don't get peeved because people don't keep track of every minute detail of the Mozilla construction process. You only rant at the people who act like complete tools. Your informative answers to people's problems and questions have definitly made my Mozilla experience much better and I'm sure you've had the same effect on others.
Thanks for putting up with all the crap that you put up with and for helping us little guys out. I appreciate it.
Normally I don't respond to things like this, but this time I had to...
Funny you mention media players, Windows XP, and secure in the same comment. I guess you call it secure when Windows Media PlayerXP phones home to MS to tell you what you're watching. Either that or you don't read Bugtraq. Nothing against XP, never used it, and I might not ever just 'cause I've never had the need to.
Also, I think any OS is probably as real as the next, unless its vaporware. Unfortunately DOS was all too real.
I think the interesting thing (and probably the purpose of teh email) was not the 23 sec. compile time but the relative increases due to the patches. 23 sec does undeniably kick some serious tail, though.
:-)
And as for your subject, I don't believe this was ever intended to be a benchmark to show off the machine, it was just an experiment. When you have a 16 way NUMA, you don't need to show off.
Actually the 2.2.x kernels have better support for this type of thing via kernel modules (which netfilter also requires). There are a few modules that haven't been ported to netfilter yet (see http://www.netfilter.org for more info on this).
Also, in my experience with my NAT box (a PII 266, w/ 96 MB of RAM I have had lying around) I found that for some reason 2.2 w/ ipchains handles the traffic much more efficiently than 2.4 w/ iptables. This may have to do with the fact that I am using old EISA 3c515 card and an onboard tlan NIC (I know some changes have been made to the 3c515 driver, but you think that would have improved performance). The rules were rougly the same (based off the IP Masq HowTo) and the only things I am running on it are sshd and bind as a caching name server. (If anyone can tell me why this is the case please do!)
Also, I know it sounds silly to run bind on a firewall, but this is more to provide access to my network at home, not for security per se. I was working around having to update the configs of all of my machines every time road runner changed the DNS servers on me. (Again, if anybody has a better work around, let me know!)
What are the best Gnutella interfaces out there?
I tinkered around with it in the early days, but haven't touched it since all these commercial projects have popped up. I'd use one that worked on either windows or linux, but it would have to be able to work from behind a NAT.
I think it's really funny that in an article about intellectual property and prior art Tim O'Reilly cites Morgan's Tarot as the origination of the quote "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger." All good geeks know that's from J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings. Woops!
The GPL does not keep you from charging for your product.
And besides that, it's not like there's a huge market for geek character racing games anyway. How many copies of a game with a penguin sliding down a hill do you think you're going to sell, when I could be playing something a little more interesting for more money. Hell, I can buy kick ass PS1 games for $15 right now.
I'm sure you could get more money in donations, than you could selling the thing. Also you could get sponsors. Let companies buy an opportunity to have their mascot/logo race their way down the track or appear somewhere in the game. That's not against the GPL and seems perfectly reasonable to me.
But most of all don't be a punk and take one of the mascots of free software and throw it in a proprietary game. I think by doing that you just lost most of your market anyway. You going to stick the GNU gnu or a GNOME gnome in there too? It reminds me of all the people selling American flags on the side of the street in late September.
I live in Memphis and have friends who lift boxes for FedEx (which is based in Memphis). Most of the people working there do something else during the day (school, second job, whatever) and work FedEx at night. Just think about it. You're making little money lifting boxes. You boss gets pissed at you for being too slow. So you speed things up a little bit and occasionally punt a box or two when no one's looking to keep up the pace and relieve the aggression.
My general rule is never ship anything you can't replace and always get insurance. So in the case of a computer, make sure you have nice backups of everything. That way in case it gets killed, they'll replace the machine and you can replace the data. And if it's an old machine, maybe it'll be a good reason to get a new one!