I spent $500 on a decent Yamaha Amplifier, and $400 on two Klipsch tower speakers. I don't know what your problem is. Stick to those plastic cased PC speakers that came with your sound card, if that's what you enjoy.
I'm not sure where the snake oil comes in.
But if you think MP3 files offer any form of 'high fidelity' you indeed should watch out for snake oil salesmen. You've already proven how susceptable you are.
Back in the late 80's when I and some friends used to hang out and make trouble on multi-line 'Chat' BBSes, we would sometimes just start typing out messages like 'SRH' once in awhile. Generally it was to make fun of the people who would type 'AFK' in the open. Our point was almost always who gives a fsck if you're away from your &$@*$ keyboard, idiot!.
SRH, of course, stands for Staying Right Here. Proper usage is to alternate your SRHs with AKs. (At Keyboard).
Oh, yeah. I can't wait for all the asides, like where they pop the hood on the Batmobile and somehow wedge in a half hour of geek dialogue talking about how the engine works.
Yeah, Stephenson will bring much needed substance.
Canadian Mountain Dew has absolutely zero caffiene in it!!! I bought a twelve pack of it a few weeks ago in Thunder Bay, and I'm gonna slip it to some of the hard-core programmers at work and see how long it takes them to catch on.
Tbug rocks! It's the only real way to hack the TRS-80 if you don't have the Expansion Interface.
I made the mistake of buying the Cassette version of the Editor/Assembler, thinking it would be so much more powerful. But who wants to do a 20 minute load from Cassette every time you want to run the Assembler?
The Tbug monitor and hand coded machine language was the way to go back then.
Any book with 'Linux' in the title is a mistake to purchase. I've accumulated a lot of really good reference books by focusing on the Unix books by O'Reilly and a few other high quality publishers. 'Linux' books are 'it's the latest thing' books, whereas Unix books are durable, and useful even when you shift to using a BSD variant. 'Essential System Administration' published by O'Reilly should be on any serious Freenix enthusiast's shelf. So should the blue-spined networking books (the BIND, NFS, PPP, etc. series).
The books I've regretted buying in the past have been the ones with a Linux CD glued into the spine, that spend the first three chapters on 'how to install distro xxx'. That material should be included with the distribution itself.
The Matt Welsh 'Running Linux' book is the one exception. In fact, that's probably the first book a beginner should buy.
I remember when the only book at all for Linux was Yggdrasil's 'Linux Bible,' which I ordered for $50, and which turned out to just be a bound up copy of all the HOWTO documents that I already had.
Any book with 'Linux' in the title is a mistake to purchase. I've accumulated a lot of really good reference books by focusing on the Unix books by O'Reilly and a few other high quality publishers. 'Linux' books are 'it's the latest thing' books, whereas Unix books are durable, and useful even when you shift to using a BSD variant. 'Essential System Administration' published by O'Reilly should be on any serious Freenix enthusiast's shelf. So should the blue-spined networking books (the BIND, NFS, PPP, etc. series).
The books I've regretted buying in the past have been the ones with a Linux CD glued into the spine, that spend the first three chapters on 'how to install distro xxx'. That material should be included with the distribution itself.
The Matt Welsh 'Running Linux' book is the one exception. In fact, that's probably the first book a beginner should buy in the first place.
I remember when the only book at all for Linux was Yggdrasil's 'Linux Bible,' which I ordered for $50, and which turned out to just be a bound up copy of all the HOWTO documents that I already had.
I used to use MP3.com. They used to have a really big well-stocked download area where MP3 related utilities were widely available. Now they have a limited number of 'featured' programs that's a feeble subset of what used to be available. So I really have no use for them any longer.
So now you're reverting to calling the only entities producing Entertainment Content That People Enjoy Listening To (you can forget all the second rate ramblin' noise that 'independent artists' make in daddy's basement) 'fat-but-quickly-becoming-desperate'.
We know who is fat and quickly becoming desperate, and it's the people hunkered over a keyboard getting a monitor tan, not those in the Entertainment Industry.
No, that's merely the nihilist re-interpretation of the American Dream.
The American Dream is not bound by geography, by the way. People all around the world look at it as an inspiration for how they want to live their lives.
Any two rips of a track on a CD should produce exactly the same Waveform data file. It's only when you encode it using a different algorhythm that you end up with a different data file.
Of course, many people do the rip/encode with the same tool in a single operation. But if Joe Smith uses 'ripper software #1' and Rob Williams uses the same software to rip/encode the same CD on an entirely different continent, the resultant MP3 file should be identical.
I record vinyl to WAV files and burn that to CD audio, anyway. I didn't pay for a Yamaha integrated amplifier and Klipsch speakers to listen to degraded music that was run through a lossy compression scheme.
I can always tell I'm dealing with someone who is very young, when they start claiming that the interface for 5-1/4" drives (34 pins) is the same as the interface for 8" drives (50 pins).
You've seen two or three 5-1/4" drives in your life, only seen a picture of an 8" drive on a website, right?
In the case of the Microsoft Basic interpreter (the software that the famous Gates 'You're stealing my software...' letter came from) the software was entirely the creation of Microsoft, and was NOT created in a bazaar community. There are and were other Basic implementations. Gates just had a really good one at the time and wanted to sell it, not give it away. The 'You're stealing...' letter is these days severely distorted for political reasons by people with a contemporary agenda. At the time products like CP/M were severely weakened by the rampant piracy going on. Very, very few CP/M hackers had any original printed material from Digital Research. I could probably sell my original Digital Research CP/M-80 manual for a mint on eBay, because it's an extremely rare document.
I have a whole ton of bandwidth at work. So what I did was download a snapshot of the entire 'distfiles/All' directory at ftp.netbsd.org one night. It makes a huge (I mean huge) tarball that has to be split across three CD-ROMs, but now I have a reasonably complete set of the whole ports collection in source form. I just share it across NFS on one of my machines (in my case a Slackware box) and every other machine on my home network can run squeaky clean built-from-source-only apps.
It was, I sometimes feel, a bandwidth crime to grab the whole thing that way, but it worked. And so many people into this stuff have high speed connections these days... There's no need for any of them not to use the Ports collection the way it's designed (the urls of ftp sites are built right into the makefiles, so it downloads every source package it needs). It's actually a very very cool way to run a BSD system, if you refuse to install ANY binary packages (except your base system).
I think you're forgetting, or you were never told, the the 'Cathederal' development model ESR was criticizing when he wrote that essay was the 'Cathederal' development model the GNU Emacs team follows. Other examples of 'Cathederal' development teams would be the NetBSD Foundation and numerous other projects.
If you think the GNU Emacs team are people who 'don't really care beyond a pay-cheque' I'm not sure how to reply to your arguement.
Of course fvwm95 sucks. All it does is present a poor copy of the Windows 95 desktop with little or no of the ease of use/configuration. If you want a clean simple desktop, you install plain fvwm. I prefer fvwm1 instead of fvwm2, but that's probably just because I know the config file inside out.
I run twm on my Mac SE/30 (it has NetBSD installed). On a machine with a 512x384 one-bit display, you don't want any extra widgets and stuff at all using up screen architecture.
I recommend a few weeks of a minimalist approach, running fvwm or twm, to anybody who wants to clear their head and figure out what they really have a computer for in the first place.
I think NetBSD has it down better than anything else I've used, actually. Install the base OS (it's about an 80 Meg download) then install the pkgsrc.bin.tgz tree properly, get your system online, cd to the subdirectory in/usr/pkgsrc and type 'make && make install && make clean && make clean-depends'. If you want to install KDE, just go to some esoteric higher-level package like kdegames, do the above command, and it installs all dependencies, which amounts to everything in the base KDE package scheme.
There's as easy a system for installing FreeBSD, too, but they tend to push a lot more at you in the default install than NetBSD. And NetBSD runs on anything, even your old Mac.
Back when I ran CPM/80 on a machine with two 8" floppy drives, it was habit to hit the reset switch any time the program disk was swapped in. This was because there were often OS 'tweaks' to make each application run optimally. Plus, the operating system fit onto a 2K area at track zero on every floppy diskette. The space was held empty unless the OS was put on it, so it made sense to put an OS on each program disk. And it only took about 2 seconds to boot. On a 4 Mhz 8 bit processor.
No, it's almost always better to use the drivers provided by Microsoft, unless there is a compelling reason. Sometimes there is a slight performance edge in using the Manufactuer's drivers for a video card, but there's almost always a stability hit in adding third party drivers to the mix on a Windows machine.
In my experience from talking to people and hearing anecdotes, it's always the 'tweaks' who have the most trouble with Windows installs. The 'I'll take control now, because I know better' type person who pokes around and customizes everything in sight.
I've had friends who claim they did nothing at all except for the default when installing. Eventually it comes out what they've done to screw it up, and it's usually some folklore they heard in a chat room.
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I spent $500 on a decent Yamaha Amplifier, and $400 on two Klipsch tower speakers. I don't know what your problem is. Stick to those plastic cased PC speakers that came with your sound card, if that's what you enjoy.
I'm not sure where the snake oil comes in.
But if you think MP3 files offer any form of 'high fidelity' you indeed should watch out for snake oil salesmen. You've already proven how susceptable you are.
Back in the late 80's when I and some friends used to hang out and make trouble on multi-line 'Chat' BBSes, we would sometimes just start typing out messages like 'SRH' once in awhile. Generally it was to make fun of the people who would type 'AFK' in the open. Our point was almost always who gives a fsck if you're away from your &$@*$ keyboard, idiot!.
SRH, of course, stands for Staying Right Here. Proper usage is to alternate your SRHs with AKs. (At Keyboard).
Yes, we were annoying little pisses at times.
Oh, yeah. I can't wait for all the asides, like where they pop the hood on the Batmobile and somehow wedge in a half hour of geek dialogue talking about how the engine works.
Yeah, Stephenson will bring much needed substance.
Canadian Mountain Dew has absolutely zero caffiene in it!!! I bought a twelve pack of it a few weeks ago in Thunder Bay, and I'm gonna slip it to some of the hard-core programmers at work and see how long it takes them to catch on.
What's 'holier than thou' about being able to discern high quality music reproduction?
I don't listen to AM radio when I want to hear music. I don't listen to MP3's either. How is that snobbery?
Metaphorically speaking.
People all over the world want to be promoted over their Boss.
Tbug rocks! It's the only real way to hack the TRS-80 if you don't have the Expansion Interface.
I made the mistake of buying the Cassette version of the Editor/Assembler, thinking it would be so much more powerful. But who wants to do a 20 minute load from Cassette every time you want to run the Assembler?
The Tbug monitor and hand coded machine language was the way to go back then.
Any book with 'Linux' in the title is a mistake to purchase. I've accumulated a lot of really good reference books by focusing on the Unix books by O'Reilly and a few other high quality publishers. 'Linux' books are 'it's the latest thing' books, whereas Unix books are durable, and useful even when you shift to using a BSD variant. 'Essential System Administration' published by O'Reilly should be on any serious Freenix enthusiast's shelf. So should the blue-spined networking books (the BIND, NFS, PPP, etc. series).
The books I've regretted buying in the past have been the ones with a Linux CD glued into the spine, that spend the first three chapters on 'how to install distro xxx'. That material should be included with the distribution itself.
The Matt Welsh 'Running Linux' book is the one exception. In fact, that's probably the first book a beginner should buy.
I remember when the only book at all for Linux was Yggdrasil's 'Linux Bible,' which I ordered for $50, and which turned out to just be a bound up copy of all the HOWTO documents that I already had.
Any book with 'Linux' in the title is a mistake to purchase. I've accumulated a lot of really good reference books by focusing on the Unix books by O'Reilly and a few other high quality publishers. 'Linux' books are 'it's the latest thing' books, whereas Unix books are durable, and useful even when you shift to using a BSD variant. 'Essential System Administration' published by O'Reilly should be on any serious Freenix enthusiast's shelf. So should the blue-spined networking books (the BIND, NFS, PPP, etc. series).
The books I've regretted buying in the past have been the ones with a Linux CD glued into the spine, that spend the first three chapters on 'how to install distro xxx'. That material should be included with the distribution itself.
The Matt Welsh 'Running Linux' book is the one exception. In fact, that's probably the first book a beginner should buy in the first place.
I remember when the only book at all for Linux was Yggdrasil's 'Linux Bible,' which I ordered for $50, and which turned out to just be a bound up copy of all the HOWTO documents that I already had.
I used to use MP3.com. They used to have a really big well-stocked download area where MP3 related utilities were widely available. Now they have a limited number of 'featured' programs that's a feeble subset of what used to be available. So I really have no use for them any longer.
So now you're reverting to calling the only entities producing Entertainment Content That People Enjoy Listening To (you can forget all the second rate ramblin' noise that 'independent artists' make in daddy's basement) 'fat-but-quickly-becoming-desperate'.
We know who is fat and quickly becoming desperate, and it's the people hunkered over a keyboard getting a monitor tan, not those in the Entertainment Industry.
No, that's merely the nihilist re-interpretation of the American Dream.
The American Dream is not bound by geography, by the way. People all around the world look at it as an inspiration for how they want to live their lives.
Any two rips of a track on a CD should produce exactly the same Waveform data file. It's only when you encode it using a different algorhythm that you end up with a different data file.
Of course, many people do the rip/encode with the same tool in a single operation. But if Joe Smith uses 'ripper software #1' and Rob Williams uses the same software to rip/encode the same CD on an entirely different continent, the resultant MP3 file should be identical.
I record vinyl to WAV files and burn that to CD audio, anyway. I didn't pay for a Yamaha integrated amplifier and Klipsch speakers to listen to degraded music that was run through a lossy compression scheme.
I can always tell I'm dealing with someone who is very young, when they start claiming that the interface for 5-1/4" drives (34 pins) is the same as the interface for 8" drives (50 pins).
You've seen two or three 5-1/4" drives in your life, only seen a picture of an 8" drive on a website, right?
Most of us don't care who says it first. What's most important is who says it best, because we're intereted a high quality discussion.
Then along come the people who fuss and sputter about their individual little karma points.....
Why don't you guys go out and play horseshoes if you insist on making everything into a competition between individuals.
In the case of the Microsoft Basic interpreter (the software that the famous Gates 'You're stealing my software...' letter came from) the software was entirely the creation of Microsoft, and was NOT created in a bazaar community. There are and were other Basic implementations. Gates just had a really good one at the time and wanted to sell it, not give it away. The 'You're stealing...' letter is these days severely distorted for political reasons by people with a contemporary agenda. At the time products like CP/M were severely weakened by the rampant piracy going on. Very, very few CP/M hackers had any original printed material from Digital Research. I could probably sell my original Digital Research CP/M-80 manual for a mint on eBay, because it's an extremely rare document.
I have a whole ton of bandwidth at work. So what I did was download a snapshot of the entire 'distfiles/All' directory at ftp.netbsd.org one night. It makes a huge (I mean huge) tarball that has to be split across three CD-ROMs, but now I have a reasonably complete set of the whole ports collection in source form. I just share it across NFS on one of my machines (in my case a Slackware box) and every other machine on my home network can run squeaky clean built-from-source-only apps.
It was, I sometimes feel, a bandwidth crime to grab the whole thing that way, but it worked. And so many people into this stuff have high speed connections these days... There's no need for any of them not to use the Ports collection the way it's designed (the urls of ftp sites are built right into the makefiles, so it downloads every source package it needs). It's actually a very very cool way to run a BSD system, if you refuse to install ANY binary packages (except your base system).
I think you're forgetting, or you were never told, the the 'Cathederal' development model ESR was criticizing when he wrote that essay was the 'Cathederal' development model the GNU Emacs team follows. Other examples of 'Cathederal' development teams would be the NetBSD Foundation and numerous other projects.
If you think the GNU Emacs team are people who 'don't really care beyond a pay-cheque' I'm not sure how to reply to your arguement.
Of course fvwm95 sucks. All it does is present a poor copy of the Windows 95 desktop with little or no of the ease of use/configuration. If you want a clean simple desktop, you install plain fvwm. I prefer fvwm1 instead of fvwm2, but that's probably just because I know the config file inside out.
I run twm on my Mac SE/30 (it has NetBSD installed). On a machine with a 512x384 one-bit display, you don't want any extra widgets and stuff at all using up screen architecture.
I recommend a few weeks of a minimalist approach, running fvwm or twm, to anybody who wants to clear their head and figure out what they really have a computer for in the first place.
There is no way that MS can compete with thousands of free developers world-wide.
Why is it that when I hear 'thousands of free developers world-wide' what I visualise is a whole room full of cats?
There's /usr/local/bin and such.
/usr/pkg/...
/usr/pkgsrc and type 'make && make install && make clean && make clean-depends'. If you want to install KDE, just go to some esoteric higher-level package like kdegames, do the above command, and it installs all dependencies, which amounts to everything in the base KDE package scheme.
On NetBSD, there's
I think NetBSD has it down better than anything else I've used, actually. Install the base OS (it's about an 80 Meg download) then install the pkgsrc.bin.tgz tree properly, get your system online, cd to the subdirectory in
There's as easy a system for installing FreeBSD, too, but they tend to push a lot more at you in the default install than NetBSD. And NetBSD runs on anything, even your old Mac.
I scoured the Web to find Linux drivers for my USB speakers. They just don't exist!
With Windows 2000 I just installed the OS and the startup music came out of them the first time I booted the system.
Back when I ran CPM/80 on a machine with two 8" floppy drives, it was habit to hit the reset switch any time the program disk was swapped in. This was because there were often OS 'tweaks' to make each application run optimally. Plus, the operating system fit onto a 2K area at track zero on every floppy diskette. The space was held empty unless the OS was put on it, so it made sense to put an OS on each program disk. And it only took about 2 seconds to boot. On a 4 Mhz 8 bit processor.
Those were the days.
No, it's almost always better to use the drivers provided by Microsoft, unless there is a compelling reason. Sometimes there is a slight performance edge in using the Manufactuer's drivers for a video card, but there's almost always a stability hit in adding third party drivers to the mix on a Windows machine.
In my experience from talking to people and hearing anecdotes, it's always the 'tweaks' who have the most trouble with Windows installs. The 'I'll take control now, because I know better' type person who pokes around and customizes everything in sight.
I've had friends who claim they did nothing at all except for the default when installing. Eventually it comes out what they've done to screw it up, and it's usually some folklore they heard in a chat room.
There is an anti-virus feature in Microsoft's fdisk program that few people know of. Add the following line to your autoexec.bat file:
/mbr
C:\windows\command\fdisk
It will automatically clear out any boot sector viruses on your hard drive every time you boot the machine!