In my estimation, I do think that the coding of the NVidia drivers must be very clever. Even if you compare the Windows Nvidia drivers to the ATi drivers just from a user's perspective, the NVidia driver blows ATi out of the water. It is more stable, more usable, more reliable, and more compatible in every possible way. In fact, I bet what they are doing is so clever, that even if they released the specs for all their hardware, the open source driver would remain inferior for a very long time.
I don't use KDE, but I use Amarok. Honestly, it is the only media player on Linux worth anything. Banshee and others look fine at first, but you will realize they are unstable pieces of junk if you try to add more than 50 songs to the library. Also, if you use an iPod, you can get it to work with Amarok or other Linux apps quite easily. However, the experience will never be as smooth as iTunes. This is a serious problem. This is why even though I run Linux on all my machines, I still use an iPod with a Mac mini for podcast listening. There simply isn't any other solution that works as smoothly.
I actually agree that, for the most part, open source development happens because of boredom. You know what we call something people do when they are bored? We call it a hobby. Everyone gets bored. There are simply not enough things for people to do to pass the time while also achieving satisfaction. Open source developers should be praised for choosing to spend their free time doing something that is not only productive, but beneficial to the rest of society. Most people just sit on their ass watching TV when they are bored. Doing something productive when you are bored is what you are supposed to do!
I recently purchased a Fujitsu P7230. I couldn't avoid paying the Microsoft tax, even though I was going to run Ubuntu, so I got Vista Home Basic, which was the cheapest option available. I used it for a few weeks before installing Ubuntu, so I could learn about Vista. I might not use Vista full-time, but it would be a good experience. Besides, if I have to pay for it, I'm going to get something out of it.
The P7230 is an ultraportable laptop with incredible battery life. If you fill both battery bays and enable CPU frequency scaling, you can run it for 8 hours without plugging it in. In Vista without Aero (which this machine can't really handle anyway), I would get up to 11 hours of battery life. In Ubuntu I can maybe get 9. I still use Ubuntu full-time, but don't tell me that Vista has worse battery life. Turn off your useless eye-candy if you care about your battery. I'm sure beryl would kill my battery life even worse.
In order to do any sort of secure transaction on the web, you need SSL. If people don't see the little lock icon, they will be very unlikely to trust your website. To get that icon you need a signed SSL certificate. Sure, you can sign your own. However, if your cert isn't in the browser, then users will get a warning popup that your site might not be safe. That's worse than not having the lock in the first place.
Verisign, Comodo, and others have a big scam going on. Whoever wants to conduct secure business on the web needs to pay one of them a toll to get their certificates signed. There's no reason that this should cost money. Signing a certificate is such a trivial activity. It's more effort to write this post on Slashdot than it is to sign a cert.
We either need a new security mechanism for secure transactions on the web or we need a free and secure way to get certs signed. Without this, we will always have a few companies acting as gatekeepers deciding who is allowed to conduct secure commerce on the web. That is not cool.
A new computer used to mean days of tweaking and installing. When I used Windows it was trying to remember every program I wanted, finding the newest version, downloading, installing and rebooting.
When I switched to Gentoo it required a lot less manual labor, but still took a long time. A day or two of compiling required to get the box up and running in addition to the standard tweaking was unpleasant.
Just a few weeks ago I got a new laptop, and I threw the Fiesty Fawn on there. Tweaking doesn't take long at all. The environment I work in is pretty close to the default Ubuntu setup. I install the OS and get to work. As I get working I run into situations where I need something I don't have, or there is a customization I like that isn't set. I just install and change things as I go along my merry way. Installing all the Firefox extensions takes longer than anything else.
So thanks to Ubuntu and a change in attitude, the answer to this question is no longer several days, but under an hour.
There are some other reasons why USB was adopted so widely. First off, it was hotplug. All the other ports like PS/2, Serial and Paralell required you to restart your computer if you wanted to change what was plugged in. USB finally allowed you to change devices while the computer was on. Imagine iPods or thumb drives if USB was not hotplug!
The other advantage of USB was that the plug is simple. It's just a rectangle that goes in a rectangular hole. You can't put it in backwards. There are no screws to hold it in. It's very approachable. Unlike serial, paralell or game ports, which look like they belong in the back of the computer and not the front, USBs are safe to put on the front of just about anything. The design of the port itself invites people to use it, rather than scare them away.
These are the other reasons USB is awesome, and also yet more reasons why Powered USB will not work. Adding any sort of extra plug will just make USB scary again. The only way I see powered USB working is if you find a way to transmit that power with a connector that is identical to the existing USB port.
How is this news? I knew Debian was dead the first time I saw Ubuntu Warty Warthog. Feisty is due in less than a month. The only reason Debian still exists is for those crazy free-only people who refuse to install a proprietary driver that's free as in beer, increases the functionality if their computer, and they would never look at the code even if it were open source. I say let it die, who cares?
I'm no fan of ESR, but on this issue there are two important things to note.
First of all, he's absolutely right on this issue. Sure, Ubuntu has problems with package management just as much as the next distro. However, they will only bite you if you try to stray from what is supported. If you want to install something that requires newer libraries you will get bitten. If you try to install a weird package from source, you might get bitten. If you try to add too many third party repositories to your sources.lst, then conflicts will emerge. For the most part, it all works. Even if you stray a little bit and add an extra repository or two, you'll still be ok. If you stick with what Ubuntu supports, you'll be perfectly fine every time.
With Red Hat or Fedora this has never been true. In fact, it has never been true with any rpm distribution. It has almost always been nearly impossible to find anything but the most popular software in the standard repositories. Not only that, but it's even harder to get the newest versions of things when the come out. All you can do is stick with what they provide on the CDs and upgrade whenever they have a new version to get the newer packages. 9 times out of 10 when you find an rpm out in the wild it creates a dependency nightmare.
This brings me to the second point. All his complaints about Red Hat and Fedora have always been true. I've used Red Hat/Fedora at least once every year since '99 and every one of his complaints was as true then as it is now. He seems to be acting as if these problems are more recent, when my experience tells me that is not true. RPM has always sucked and it's never gotten better or worse. The only change now is that Ubuntu appeared and got better. Red Hat and Fedora haven't changed at all, and that's the problem.
Skype allows you to conference in more people if you have a newer Intel Core CPU. The easiest way to check what CPU you have, without letting you lie to Skype, is to check the BIOS. Also, checking the BIOS is code that works on all platforms. Saves them a little bit of trouble when porting Skype to the other platforms.
I was a Gentoo user for many years, now mostly an Ubuntu user. I still have one server I need to migrate. Let me tell you. I set it up with Gentoo a few years ago and never updated it. Now, it is impossible to update it. Absolutely impossible. If I simply try to emerge sync, the whole thing will probably die right there and then. Gentoo has its place and use. It's a great desktop OS if you can spend a week or so configuring it to perfection. It's a wonderful developer's OS. Probably still the best. It's a great OS for a development server. A production server it is not, nor ever will it be.
I agree 100%. Sure, we'd all rather have 100% open source solutions to all our problems, but that isn't possible at the present time. People need computers that work. A Linux computer without closed-sourced components like video codecs, flash plugins and 3D drivers is effectively a computer that doesn't work. People need computers with that functionality and open source doesn't offer it, and it won't in the foreseeable future. If the open source community insists upon idealism and purity, they will make themselves, and their software, useless. A purely open source Linux operating system is useless for a desktop computer. You either have to deal with it and toss ideals out the window, or you have to accept that Linux will never be able to compete in the desktop operating system market. I choose the former.
Maybe 5 or more years down the road we'll finally have open source nvidia drivers and such, and I look forward to that day. Until then, I'd rather use Linux than Windows on my desktop.
Of course you don't HAVE to use lossy compression, or any compression to put files on your DAP. Hard drives are big, and you can fit a lot of wav/flac music on a 60 or 80 gig player. However, a 256kbps VBR mp3 is just fine. If you're crazy, you can do 320kbps. I challenge anyone to tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and the original CD on the same stereo in a properly conducted, double-blind test. Don't give me that crap about a golden ear you audiophile nutcase. There is no evidence of that whatsoever. If you think otherwise, why not apply for James Randi's 1 million dollar prize? You'll win if I'm wrong.
I have a CS degree. I've got a high paying job. I found out I'm actually being paid way below average for my profession and location. I'm looking for another better job. There are plenty of them available, and they pay a lot. The key to being successful at CS is twofold. One, don't suck. Lots of people get CS degrees, but they actually don't give a crap about software. The people in college who code in their spare time for fun are the ones who succeed. The rest end up handling tech support calls. The second trick is to not insist on living somewhere crappy. You pretty much have to go to a major metropolitan area to get a job. You can't sit in hicksville and complain there aren't any programming jobs.
One other trick to being successful as a software engineer is to learn technologies in high demand. If you learn Ruby on Rails your chances of finding a hot job are pretty low. You might find work at a startup here and there, but that's about it. If you learn the J2EE platform, relational databases and all the associated stuff you are almost guaranteed to find a high paying job. Go look around on job sites, pretty much everyone is looking for Java Enterprise developers, but the supply is way low.
This stigman about being "truly free" is the #1 thing hindering the success of Linux today. I help Linux newbs via Qunu every day, and you know what problems they have most often? They can't set up the NVIDIA driver. They can't set up ndiswrapper. They need ntfs read/write support. They want the original Firefox icon. etc. etc.
If someone really wanted to, they could trivially create a Linux distribution which handled all of these things automatically. Some of it is actually kind of illegal to do, e.g: distributing software which is not freely distributable. It is understandable that a distribute would not include those things.
The Firefox icon is freely distributable. There is absolutely no reason not to include it. Mozilla isn't going to sue Debian. Mozilla just doesn't want people who have problems with Firefox as a result of Debian's weird patches to come to them for support or to blame them for possible bugs/holes. Can you really blame them? You wouldn't want someone modifying your product and distributing it under your name. It makes you look bad if they introduce a security hole or worse.
And what exactly do Debian's patches do for Firefox? I use Ubuntu, which I presume has the same patches, and you know what difference I notice? The Ubuntu/Debian Firefox is slower and less stable than Firefox on other platforms. I think I just might remove it and install the official Mozilla build. There is no reason Debian can not distribute the real Firefox with icons and about box and name. All they will achieve by switching to "IceWeasel" is to stroke their nonsense ideals while simultaneously making desktop Linux a tiny bit suckier. It's just one more thing to explain to newbs who might convert. It's giving them one more argument about why not to convert.
IMHO Debian lost almost all relevancy when Ubuntu appeared. Hopefully Ubuntu will not follow in their footsteps, and will distribute the real Firefox for the sake of their current and future users.
Hmm. Could it be that CEOs and other high-up executives are just used to having free food around. I've been around executive types quite a bit, and there is always some sort of platter of free food somewhere in their offices. The executives might not have noticed the dollar box, and just grabbed a muffin in passing. Lower end workers, who couldn't imagine free food, would stop and inspect it before taking. Thus, they would noticed the sign asking for a dollar.
Tomorrows cellphones are already available in Korea. Someday I hope to use them, but the outlook is grim. Why oh why does the US only offer yesterday's phones?
WoW is only doing a very small part of the total damage to the PC industry. The worst offender is the XBox. I mean really, it's a Windows/DirectX box with gamepads plugged into it. What better to run PC games on? I mean seriously, all the genres that are big on the PC such as fps, rts, etc. are either dying genres or they have been ported over to the 360. People play alot more Halo now than they play Quake or Counter-Strike. Notice how PC gaming is still huge internationally. It's just not as big in the US as it used to be. That's because most countries in the world are console-deficient. PC gaming is having a hard time because Microsoft won a competition against themselves.
Here are some guys my friend was looking at for a storage solution. Basically they just ethernet-ify as many hard drives as you want. How you configure them is up to you. It's a bit expensive, but it's incredibly simple and flexible. http://www.coraid.com/
I use Ubuntu as the server for the LAN in my house. I have to say it has one very big advantage over Debian. It's stupid easy to install. Ubuntu actually makes a really terrific server, no disadvantages when compared with plain Debian. The few disadvantages it does have, when compared to a distro like Gentoo, will be mostly fixed in Dapper Drake.
I used to be all about D+D. But ever since discovering Burning Wheel I really don't care anymore. As far as I'm concerned Burning Wheel is the be all end all of RPG systems.
This sounds absurd, but I ask it somewhat seriously. Why not just make less profit? If I had a business that was proftable I would be happy. If it become more profitable, that would be a bonus. But if it went back to lower levels of profitability, I wouldn't get bent out of shape. Kind of like when you're playing Civilization and the golden age ends. You move on. Only start worrying and ripping people off when you are in the red.
Sure, it would be nice if NVidia and ATi opened their drivers. But you know what? I've got a computer that I have to do things with. I need to do 3D things in Linux. The only way to do that is with their proprietary drivers. If you want to say it's illegal, or that I shouldn't do it, screw you.
Damn wacky idealists putting principle before pragmatism. You'd think these people are pro-Microsoft or something. It's like they're saying "If you want to actually use the expensive 3d card you bought you better use Windows because we wont let you do it in Linux!"
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In my estimation, I do think that the coding of the NVidia drivers must be very clever. Even if you compare the Windows Nvidia drivers to the ATi drivers just from a user's perspective, the NVidia driver blows ATi out of the water. It is more stable, more usable, more reliable, and more compatible in every possible way. In fact, I bet what they are doing is so clever, that even if they released the specs for all their hardware, the open source driver would remain inferior for a very long time.
I don't use KDE, but I use Amarok. Honestly, it is the only media player on Linux worth anything. Banshee and others look fine at first, but you will realize they are unstable pieces of junk if you try to add more than 50 songs to the library. Also, if you use an iPod, you can get it to work with Amarok or other Linux apps quite easily. However, the experience will never be as smooth as iTunes. This is a serious problem. This is why even though I run Linux on all my machines, I still use an iPod with a Mac mini for podcast listening. There simply isn't any other solution that works as smoothly.
I actually agree that, for the most part, open source development happens because of boredom. You know what we call something people do when they are bored? We call it a hobby. Everyone gets bored. There are simply not enough things for people to do to pass the time while also achieving satisfaction. Open source developers should be praised for choosing to spend their free time doing something that is not only productive, but beneficial to the rest of society. Most people just sit on their ass watching TV when they are bored. Doing something productive when you are bored is what you are supposed to do!
I recently purchased a Fujitsu P7230. I couldn't avoid paying the Microsoft tax, even though I was going to run Ubuntu, so I got Vista Home Basic, which was the cheapest option available. I used it for a few weeks before installing Ubuntu, so I could learn about Vista. I might not use Vista full-time, but it would be a good experience. Besides, if I have to pay for it, I'm going to get something out of it.
The P7230 is an ultraportable laptop with incredible battery life. If you fill both battery bays and enable CPU frequency scaling, you can run it for 8 hours without plugging it in. In Vista without Aero (which this machine can't really handle anyway), I would get up to 11 hours of battery life. In Ubuntu I can maybe get 9. I still use Ubuntu full-time, but don't tell me that Vista has worse battery life. Turn off your useless eye-candy if you care about your battery. I'm sure beryl would kill my battery life even worse.
In order to do any sort of secure transaction on the web, you need SSL. If people don't see the little lock icon, they will be very unlikely to trust your website. To get that icon you need a signed SSL certificate. Sure, you can sign your own. However, if your cert isn't in the browser, then users will get a warning popup that your site might not be safe. That's worse than not having the lock in the first place.
Verisign, Comodo, and others have a big scam going on. Whoever wants to conduct secure business on the web needs to pay one of them a toll to get their certificates signed. There's no reason that this should cost money. Signing a certificate is such a trivial activity. It's more effort to write this post on Slashdot than it is to sign a cert.
We either need a new security mechanism for secure transactions on the web or we need a free and secure way to get certs signed. Without this, we will always have a few companies acting as gatekeepers deciding who is allowed to conduct secure commerce on the web. That is not cool.
A new computer used to mean days of tweaking and installing. When I used Windows it was trying to remember every program I wanted, finding the newest version, downloading, installing and rebooting.
When I switched to Gentoo it required a lot less manual labor, but still took a long time. A day or two of compiling required to get the box up and running in addition to the standard tweaking was unpleasant.
Just a few weeks ago I got a new laptop, and I threw the Fiesty Fawn on there. Tweaking doesn't take long at all. The environment I work in is pretty close to the default Ubuntu setup. I install the OS and get to work. As I get working I run into situations where I need something I don't have, or there is a customization I like that isn't set. I just install and change things as I go along my merry way. Installing all the Firefox extensions takes longer than anything else.
So thanks to Ubuntu and a change in attitude, the answer to this question is no longer several days, but under an hour.
There are some other reasons why USB was adopted so widely. First off, it was hotplug. All the other ports like PS/2, Serial and Paralell required you to restart your computer if you wanted to change what was plugged in. USB finally allowed you to change devices while the computer was on. Imagine iPods or thumb drives if USB was not hotplug!
The other advantage of USB was that the plug is simple. It's just a rectangle that goes in a rectangular hole. You can't put it in backwards. There are no screws to hold it in. It's very approachable. Unlike serial, paralell or game ports, which look like they belong in the back of the computer and not the front, USBs are safe to put on the front of just about anything. The design of the port itself invites people to use it, rather than scare them away.
These are the other reasons USB is awesome, and also yet more reasons why Powered USB will not work. Adding any sort of extra plug will just make USB scary again. The only way I see powered USB working is if you find a way to transmit that power with a connector that is identical to the existing USB port.
How is this news? I knew Debian was dead the first time I saw Ubuntu Warty Warthog. Feisty is due in less than a month. The only reason Debian still exists is for those crazy free-only people who refuse to install a proprietary driver that's free as in beer, increases the functionality if their computer, and they would never look at the code even if it were open source. I say let it die, who cares?
I'm no fan of ESR, but on this issue there are two important things to note.
First of all, he's absolutely right on this issue. Sure, Ubuntu has problems with package management just as much as the next distro. However, they will only bite you if you try to stray from what is supported. If you want to install something that requires newer libraries you will get bitten. If you try to install a weird package from source, you might get bitten. If you try to add too many third party repositories to your sources.lst, then conflicts will emerge. For the most part, it all works. Even if you stray a little bit and add an extra repository or two, you'll still be ok. If you stick with what Ubuntu supports, you'll be perfectly fine every time.
With Red Hat or Fedora this has never been true. In fact, it has never been true with any rpm distribution. It has almost always been nearly impossible to find anything but the most popular software in the standard repositories. Not only that, but it's even harder to get the newest versions of things when the come out. All you can do is stick with what they provide on the CDs and upgrade whenever they have a new version to get the newer packages. 9 times out of 10 when you find an rpm out in the wild it creates a dependency nightmare.
This brings me to the second point. All his complaints about Red Hat and Fedora have always been true. I've used Red Hat/Fedora at least once every year since '99 and every one of his complaints was as true then as it is now. He seems to be acting as if these problems are more recent, when my experience tells me that is not true. RPM has always sucked and it's never gotten better or worse. The only change now is that Ubuntu appeared and got better. Red Hat and Fedora haven't changed at all, and that's the problem.
Skype allows you to conference in more people if you have a newer Intel Core CPU. The easiest way to check what CPU you have, without letting you lie to Skype, is to check the BIOS. Also, checking the BIOS is code that works on all platforms. Saves them a little bit of trouble when porting Skype to the other platforms.
I was a Gentoo user for many years, now mostly an Ubuntu user. I still have one server I need to migrate. Let me tell you. I set it up with Gentoo a few years ago and never updated it. Now, it is impossible to update it. Absolutely impossible. If I simply try to emerge sync, the whole thing will probably die right there and then. Gentoo has its place and use. It's a great desktop OS if you can spend a week or so configuring it to perfection. It's a wonderful developer's OS. Probably still the best. It's a great OS for a development server. A production server it is not, nor ever will it be.
I agree 100%. Sure, we'd all rather have 100% open source solutions to all our problems, but that isn't possible at the present time. People need computers that work. A Linux computer without closed-sourced components like video codecs, flash plugins and 3D drivers is effectively a computer that doesn't work. People need computers with that functionality and open source doesn't offer it, and it won't in the foreseeable future. If the open source community insists upon idealism and purity, they will make themselves, and their software, useless. A purely open source Linux operating system is useless for a desktop computer. You either have to deal with it and toss ideals out the window, or you have to accept that Linux will never be able to compete in the desktop operating system market. I choose the former.
Maybe 5 or more years down the road we'll finally have open source nvidia drivers and such, and I look forward to that day. Until then, I'd rather use Linux than Windows on my desktop.
If you ban all non-free software, you actually end up restricting the freedom to use non-free software. /me does a happy dance
Of course you don't HAVE to use lossy compression, or any compression to put files on your DAP. Hard drives are big, and you can fit a lot of wav/flac music on a 60 or 80 gig player. However, a 256kbps VBR mp3 is just fine. If you're crazy, you can do 320kbps. I challenge anyone to tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and the original CD on the same stereo in a properly conducted, double-blind test. Don't give me that crap about a golden ear you audiophile nutcase. There is no evidence of that whatsoever. If you think otherwise, why not apply for James Randi's 1 million dollar prize? You'll win if I'm wrong.
I have a CS degree. I've got a high paying job. I found out I'm actually being paid way below average for my profession and location. I'm looking for another better job. There are plenty of them available, and they pay a lot. The key to being successful at CS is twofold. One, don't suck. Lots of people get CS degrees, but they actually don't give a crap about software. The people in college who code in their spare time for fun are the ones who succeed. The rest end up handling tech support calls. The second trick is to not insist on living somewhere crappy. You pretty much have to go to a major metropolitan area to get a job. You can't sit in hicksville and complain there aren't any programming jobs.
One other trick to being successful as a software engineer is to learn technologies in high demand. If you learn Ruby on Rails your chances of finding a hot job are pretty low. You might find work at a startup here and there, but that's about it. If you learn the J2EE platform, relational databases and all the associated stuff you are almost guaranteed to find a high paying job. Go look around on job sites, pretty much everyone is looking for Java Enterprise developers, but the supply is way low.
This stigman about being "truly free" is the #1 thing hindering the success of Linux today. I help Linux newbs via Qunu every day, and you know what problems they have most often? They can't set up the NVIDIA driver. They can't set up ndiswrapper. They need ntfs read/write support. They want the original Firefox icon. etc. etc.
If someone really wanted to, they could trivially create a Linux distribution which handled all of these things automatically. Some of it is actually kind of illegal to do, e.g: distributing software which is not freely distributable. It is understandable that a distribute would not include those things.
The Firefox icon is freely distributable. There is absolutely no reason not to include it. Mozilla isn't going to sue Debian. Mozilla just doesn't want people who have problems with Firefox as a result of Debian's weird patches to come to them for support or to blame them for possible bugs/holes. Can you really blame them? You wouldn't want someone modifying your product and distributing it under your name. It makes you look bad if they introduce a security hole or worse.
And what exactly do Debian's patches do for Firefox? I use Ubuntu, which I presume has the same patches, and you know what difference I notice? The Ubuntu/Debian Firefox is slower and less stable than Firefox on other platforms. I think I just might remove it and install the official Mozilla build. There is no reason Debian can not distribute the real Firefox with icons and about box and name. All they will achieve by switching to "IceWeasel" is to stroke their nonsense ideals while simultaneously making desktop Linux a tiny bit suckier. It's just one more thing to explain to newbs who might convert. It's giving them one more argument about why not to convert.
IMHO Debian lost almost all relevancy when Ubuntu appeared. Hopefully Ubuntu will not follow in their footsteps, and will distribute the real Firefox for the sake of their current and future users.
Hmm. Could it be that CEOs and other high-up executives are just used to having free food around. I've been around executive types quite a bit, and there is always some sort of platter of free food somewhere in their offices. The executives might not have noticed the dollar box, and just grabbed a muffin in passing. Lower end workers, who couldn't imagine free food, would stop and inspect it before taking. Thus, they would noticed the sign asking for a dollar.
Just a possibility to consider.
Tomorrows cellphones are already available in Korea. Someday I hope to use them, but the outlook is grim. Why oh why does the US only offer yesterday's phones?
WoW is only doing a very small part of the total damage to the PC industry. The worst offender is the XBox. I mean really, it's a Windows/DirectX box with gamepads plugged into it. What better to run PC games on? I mean seriously, all the genres that are big on the PC such as fps, rts, etc. are either dying genres or they have been ported over to the 360. People play alot more Halo now than they play Quake or Counter-Strike. Notice how PC gaming is still huge internationally. It's just not as big in the US as it used to be. That's because most countries in the world are console-deficient. PC gaming is having a hard time because Microsoft won a competition against themselves.
Yes, they should be taught with an IDE. That IDE should be one of the following: Vim, emacs or NEdit.
Here are some guys my friend was looking at for a storage solution. Basically they just ethernet-ify as many hard drives as you want. How you configure them is up to you. It's a bit expensive, but it's incredibly simple and flexible.
http://www.coraid.com/
I use Ubuntu as the server for the LAN in my house. I have to say it has one very big advantage over Debian. It's stupid easy to install. Ubuntu actually makes a really terrific server, no disadvantages when compared with plain Debian. The few disadvantages it does have, when compared to a distro like Gentoo, will be mostly fixed in Dapper Drake.
I used to be all about D+D. But ever since discovering Burning Wheel I really don't care anymore. As far as I'm concerned Burning Wheel is the be all end all of RPG systems.
http://www.burningwheel.org/
This sounds absurd, but I ask it somewhat seriously. Why not just make less profit? If I had a business that was proftable I would be happy. If it become more profitable, that would be a bonus. But if it went back to lower levels of profitability, I wouldn't get bent out of shape. Kind of like when you're playing Civilization and the golden age ends. You move on. Only start worrying and ripping people off when you are in the red.
Sure, it would be nice if NVidia and ATi opened their drivers. But you know what? I've got a computer that I have to do things with. I need to do 3D things in Linux. The only way to do that is with their proprietary drivers. If you want to say it's illegal, or that I shouldn't do it, screw you.
Damn wacky idealists putting principle before pragmatism. You'd think these people are pro-Microsoft or something. It's like they're saying "If you want to actually use the expensive 3d card you bought you better use Windows because we wont let you do it in Linux!"