I'm out in a small community in Wisconsin and I've got a cable modem, if I held my breath waiting for the phone companies to do ASDL here I'd be dessicating before it happened.
Out in BFE, that's pretty much what it's like, I gather. But everywhere else, the situation is reversed. Most major cities don't have cable modems in any useful form, but DSL is all over the place.
I'd have loved to get cable if it were available, but since the projected availability date is still three to six years off, DSL is the right-here-right-now immediate solution.
The general trend I'm seeing is that in the burbs and in no-mans-land, cable has the better availability, and everywhere else DSL seems to be taking over. But then again, I live in California, so maybe I have it all backwards...
many companies have agreements with the author of Xanim to distribute binary only decoders for their formats. I don't see why Sorenson couldn't do the same.
My understanding is that Sorenson's agreement with Apple is such that they cannot distribute the codec in any way other than their "professional" product.
That story sounds a little odd to me, as one would think Sorenson could license and distribute their software in any way they please, but it's possible Apple asked them for exclusive rights.
I wouldn't mind paying a bit more for the overseas shipping, but excluding the non USA/Canada web-community is insane.
Don't let your envy get the better of you. 37,000 units (the claimed allotment for the freshmeat.net promotion) won't go too far to serve an international market.
I think the opposite, and say that when giving things away it is only sane to limit the target market.
I placed my order. But something about it confused me:
If the product is free, and I'm paying a $5.90 "administration fee," how come they added 8.5% California sales tax to the invoice?
Doesn't sales tax apply to the retail price of an item, not to associated fees for service? So is it free, or is it $6? Yeah, I know, it's a dinky sum regardless, but I still find it a little odd.
In any case, just a little warning to folks in California who may want to place their order: yer gonna get taxed.
Ah, well. I guess you could take that view, but the sad part is that the Amiga is barely hanging on for life.
By many accounts, it's dead. It certainly isn't breathing, although the heart may beat on.
I remember a friend's 500 with surround sound, 3D and so on...
I still have my A500 in service. Mostly I play games with it, as after 10 years I finally have a PC with equivalent capabilities. =)
I'd probably even use it more often if the Enter key weren't so busted -- something's wrong with the keyboard membrane connector just above the arrows and I have to whack on it a few times before some of the keys work. It's getting increasingly difficult to find a working mouse or joystick, too.
And maybe at some point I'll get PLIP working to the gateway router...
Just goes to show that you should never trust Commodore with anything.
Even you have indicated that there are versions of Debian which are too hard to install compared to other distributions.
Read a little more closely. I said that Debian is harder to maintain.
Maybe the newest version is better but up to now it has been hard to install for many of us.
potato (the "new version," still in unstable development) is no harder to install than slink (Debian 2.1, what you get if you grab a Debian CD). I was griping about the problems with the current development version.
Grab a copy of slink, and you'll find it's not much more difficult to install than, say, Red Hat. The fact that the installation procedure drops you into dselect is a little intimidating for the first-time user, but is really no more difficult than the package-selector during Red Hat's installtion. (In fact, I find it easier: the Red Hat selector has a very tedious, though colorful, interface that makes it difficult to trim away crud from the default installation.)
It's a true statement that Debian's installation procedure is "less pretty" than Red Hat's, and that it takes about twice as long because of package silliness, but it's not more difficult.
Personally, I rather like the BeOS installer: there are almost no options and basically one button to push. It's convenient if not powerful at all.
And I think we can all agree that any of the above are easier than an NT install!
Quite frankly, it's an OS that's ready for prime time--it fulfills the promise which the Mac used to have.
Umm... no. It's not ready for prime time.
Look at the list of things Be doesn't support: * DVD Playback - the number-one reason I don't sit in BeOS all the time. * SCSI Support - very poor, the variety of devices is very narrow. * Consumer 3D Hardware - No TNT? No go. * Consumer 2D Hardware - Be needs video drivers, badly. * Multiuser - Or even multiple user profiles! * Remote administration
Don't get me wrong, I like using the BeOS. It's a well-crafted piece of closedware, with a clean interface, an absurdly straightforward installation procedure, a nice API, fantastic multiprocessor support, and lots of potential. But those things don't make it ready for prime time. A boatload of drivers are still needed before Be has anything other than a really, really cool toy to offer.
I admit this is getting better as we speak, but it's blatantly incorrect to state that BeOS is ready for prime time. It only runs usably on less than one out of three machines, and even then, there are some things missing here and there.
I'd write some drivers myself, instead of just bitching about it, but I know fsck-all about good driver coding, and I'd be sure to do more harm than good. And of course, like everyone else, I can fall back on the "no time" excuse, too!
Okay Debian is "free" but you need to be a programmer just to install the thing.
I beg to differ. Debian is only marginally more complex to install than, say, Red Hat. It's just wildly more complex to maintain. Part of that comes from the very strong dependancy model the package system is using. Another part of it comes from the fact that the Debian folks seem to have modified the hell out of every piece of software they package, and that the packages themselves are more fragile -- they break reasonably often with even simple apt-get operations.
[Note that I'm talking about potato here, slink isn't quite so painful, as it is quite stable now.]
Using Debian, I do miss being able to rpm --rebuild a package, and have that just plain work. Unfortunately dpkg-buildpackage seems to have a terrifyingly high failure rate in potato. (Or am I the only one who can't rebuild apache or pam?)
I don't debate your point about freeness, though. I like that it takes only a glance to see if a package is non-free with Debian.
By the same token, other 'alternative' OSes were big in Europe but bombed in the US: Atari and above all Amiga (let's hope that they don't set a precedent for Linux).
The Amiga hardly bombed in the US. Everyone who could afford one pretty much went out and bought one. Everyone who couldn't afford one got an ST or stuck with their C64.
The Ami may never have achieved, in the US, the same phenomenal success it had in Europe, but it was by nobody's measure a bomb. The ST, now that was a bomb -- well, maybe a dud. =)
As anyone whos been on the net for any real length of time probably knows, the wacked out NuMb3rd Sp3Ak only existed to create hard to search filenames,...
Actually that kind of juvenile nonsense predates warez on the net by about 5 or 6 years. I should know, I was there.
Is Love right? Mostly yes. But, a community AND business can co-exist. To use the word MUST is WHY this will raise the ire of/.ers and the rabid GNU/Linux camp.
I forewarn you, this will probably look like rabid Gnulie ranting. It's still true:
The difference between these two communities: Macintosh users depend utterly on Apple to produce the hardware and the software that makes the community up. The community grew out of the product. Apple kicks the bucket, and Mac users are left with something worth less than an Amiga. This simply isn't the case with Linux.
I've used Linux since before anything even resembling a corporation packaged it, before there was a distribution (SLS) at all. I own it. I own Linux lock, stock and barrel, at least just as much as the next guy. It's not all that much ownership, but I have me my rights. As a result of the free licensing it's possible for Linus to get hit by a bus, Alan to get eaten by a toad, Stallman to be abducted by Microsoft... for Red Hat, Caldera, PHT, SPI, SuSE and all the rest to simply curl up and die -- and I still have Linux. I have source. I could maintain it myself, or pay someone else to. Or I could even bank on the fact that there is someone out there who needs Linux even more badly than I do, and let them maintain it, simply leeching a free ride. Hell, that's not so much different than what most users do today!
The community remains with or without commercial involvement. Viewing the community simply as a market is a very unwise assumption. Anyone betting their business on the assumption that Linux users are simply a market to be exploited is not someone I'd want to invest behind, that's for sure.
Will the community die? Maybe. MUST the community die? No. For if it does, it takes Linux with it. Without the community, Linux doesn't exist -- it's just another also-ran, like SCO.
I wouldn't say my ire is up, but I have to laugh as heartily as possible in the face of anyone who thinks that commercial success can and will come at the cost of the development and user communities. I could give a fsck less if Caldera (or any of the others) can't make enough to survive.
Can't sell Linux any more? Your users can drop a note, I'll burn you a source and binary CD. Can't sell your value-add product? Well, that's a damn shame, isn't it? Guess you should have paid more attention to that community you wished away.
I am praying, however, that we will finally get a president elected who will bring some concept of integrity and morality into the Whitehouse.
I think this would be a wonderful thing.
I just pray we don't get someone who feels that their sense of morality applies to the citizenship. Morality is a personal trait, not a template with which to make law.
It's a shame, really. I can look past all manner of foibles, but it simply goes against my principles to cast a vote for someone who comes out in favor of mandatory censorship.
If she had tried a different tack, perhaps saying: "I propose we set aside N dollars with which to assist libraries that wish to install and support filtering technologies," I probably would not have been bothered in the slightest. But extorting the installation of filtering with federal funds?
Sorry, that's not the kind of behavior I expect in a leader. Abusing my tax money to further an extremist moral crusade is just plain out of the question. It's utterly inappropriate.
er, not according to an interview I read with the programmer (can't remember his name, and the book's in Grand Rapids (I'm in Lansing).)
If you find that book, please do quote from it... I'd be interested in knowing what the programmer was thinking when he wrote it, because there are six or eight patterns that the player can variously run to clear each level. Perhaps the movement itself isn't fixed, but the optimal solution to each instance of a level is.
It's possible to play pac-man blindfolded. I've seen this done, although I don't have the actual skill. I do know the first couple levels of pattern, though.
Re:But that's just it - I can't seem to find one
on
Scott Hacker Responds
·
· Score: 1
That's very cool! Thanks!
Pardon me while I go reboot my workstation into BeOS.
This is incorrect. PBI DSL has a downstream CIR of 384kbit, but it almost always hits the 1.5Mbit peak rate. The upstream is capped at the line level to 128k.
Neither of these are 256k, individually or total.
Maybe what you say is true out in Podunk, Nowhere but that's certainly not the case everywhere. xDSL technologies are quite capable of rates far higher than those I get, and certainly more than what you're saying.
Re:But that's just it - I can't seem to find one
on
Scott Hacker Responds
·
· Score: 1
X116.3 server for BeOS. Wasn't very hard to find (Be.com-Products-3rd Party Apps-All-X)
I got excited about this for a moment, until I noticed that the only binaries available are for the now-obsolete PPC version of BeOS.
That's a shame. An X server would make Be a very good client platform for my household.
Re:Quality product? (buahaha)
on
qt 2.0 released
·
· Score: 1
Tell me, do you have ANY formal background in CS to qualify your wild assertions about what ideas of programming are good or bad?
Not to be terribly picky, but since when does owning a slip of sheepskin -- or the persuit of such -- make one better qualified to make assertions, wild or no?
I take exception to the idea that some self-styled elite knows what's best for me and the real world. In fact, I find it downright humorous, given that a noticable portion of the formally educated folk I know are essentially spreadsheet jockeys, and most of the best programmers and systems architects I know are graduates of U of Hard Knox.
And there's nothing like the anecdotal evidence of your own two eyes.
They're basically one-way devices- i.e. you can't easily extract the MP3's back out of them (AFAIK)
This is actually a fairly trivial task, and nearly all of the third-party file management utilities for the Rio support doing so.
Nonetheless, I somehow doubt that people are buying $150 worth of Rio to transport 32M of lossily-compressed contraband. 8" floppy would be more convenient for MP3 piracy.
I like in San Francisco, CA and mail order something from Clearwater, Florida. I had better not be charged any sales tax
And you live in what parallel-universe San Francisco in which the California state and San Francisco city sales taxes don't apply?
This has nothing to do with living in California and paying a bunch of schmoes in Florida for your purchases -- and everything to do with living in California and paying California regardless of where your purchase is made. This is something you are obligated to do in any case, even on snail-mail or telephone based transactions, even though you don't do it now. Nobody does. It's a law just about everyone breaks because it's utterly unenforcable.
Unfortunately, more legislation doesn't solve the problem. One of the greatest attractions to retail interstate commerce is the unenforcability of that extra 8.75% (or what have you) state sales tax. Take that incentive away and you are simply left paying extra for shipping, in which case you might as well just drive on down to WidgetCo and get your greasy paws on your purchase with instant gratification.
Additional taxation on interstate commerce is not necessary. Existing laws and taxes suffice.
What's scary for me is that "iToaster" is one of the names everyone in the office had given the pair of blue'n'white G3s that came in (the other being "iLoaf.")
Funny, when I go out shopping for media, I always come back with two or three DVDs at most (or four, when I stopped by the Virgin store and took advantage of the 3/4 promo) and ten or twelve laserdiscs.
DVD amounts monitarily to about a quarter of my home theater purchases and quantitatively about half. They're cheaper and more readily available than LD, and I love that. But there are way, way more laserdiscs out there right now. Retailers that sport both formats are reporting about double DVD sales in LD. Of course, that can be attributed to LD owners' "fire sale" mentality right now, as the format is inevitably going to die within a year or two.
Title selection on DVD is really, really poor, and will be so for another year or so in my estimation. LD is far from dead. I can buy backtitles all over the place, and there is still the occasional new release that goes to LD and not DVD.
LD is alive, if not exactly well. I just wish I could play some of those titles in my office as well as in the home theater. Maybe I shouldn't've given away the old CLD-201 after all -- it would have been worth keeping in the office for private viewing without having to boot everyone out of the living room.
FreeS/WAN does NOT work with 2.2.xx kernels yet, and fixing that is not simple.
Has this changed? I've been interested in trying it out, but the fact that "2.0.36 only!" is plastered all over the site and documentation kept me from looking at it more than cursorily. I wound up using tunnelvision for now, which is probably equally as difficult to intercept (and a fsck-load easier to set up, from the look of the freeswan docs!) although not necessarily as strong in terms of authentication.
If so, what's the lowdown on getting it to work in a 2.2 kernel environment?
-Games - Dedicated 3D rendering hardware is so cheap it can be embedded in $100 consoles - why not in TVs, VCRs, etc.
And what is it about dedicated console gaming that sucks? It's targeted at the lowest common denominator of player; it's nonupgradable; it's non-networked; platforms are tightly, centrally controlled (Hello, Sony and Tendo!)... I could bitch ages about consoles, but the point is that the last thing I want to do is introduce these factors into my choice of a TV (and why do I want to play games using a TV's embedded hardware? The lifespan of the display is vastly longer than the lifecycle of a game platform.)
-Surfing the Net - Your HDTV purhcased for $1000 in the year 2005 will have this built in.
Whoopee. And that will integrate with junkbuster coupled with my gig of shared local cache... how, again? That cache will reside locally on a... what? And I'll be able to script, automate, and customize browsing with... what? I'll publish my weblog and surfing habits... how?
A navigation interface for browsing and information collection is vastly different from a navigation and preference interface for a large public display device (like a TV). Or will I tune the characteristics of my display using some awful local web form / Java applet / ActiveX control / whatsit?
Sorry, but a TV with browsing functionality that I want *is* a PC with a really huge display. Never mind that I have no use for browsing in my home theater! Integration rocks, convergence sucks.
-Local storage (I gotta lotta stuff and I don't trust it on the internet) - So you buy a storage unit for your local wireless network. The minute you plug it in it announces its presence to all networked devices and voila, your VCR has a place to store movies, your TV a place to archive web pages, etc...
Fair enough. That's what I do with a PC server now. I rack up a bunch of disk in a box, throw it in the back room and hide it behind the couch. Every other networkable device uses it for persistant storage (even the Sun3/50 and the Amiga 500!). The household gig of squid sits on it.
Every CD I buy gets encoded to MP3 and stored on the disk array. It serves all but one audio output device in the house (the theater -- and only because I don't want disk & fan noise from a PC in there; I'm likely to fix that with a diskless MP3 client of some kind). If storage were cheap enough, and closed formats weren't, I'd archive my DVD collection, too, and stream that around the house.
I may not capture video to it, but that's partly because I don't capture video. (I don't even own a VCR!) If I wanted to store video, that's where it would go, then spool it out to DAT on a LRU basis of some kind.
A nitpick: if I'm that concerned about not sharing the my local storage, the hell if I'm going to translate it to RF broadcast and squirt it around the house!
But why do you need local storage if your ISP can offer terabytes of movies/audio/programs all over a broadband connection?
Because I barely trust my ISP to get packets to me, let alone store my data. I want my data on media I physically control, with access control at my sole discretion. Period.
Video/audio on demand is a waste of my time. Why should I download (even "instantly") data that I can store locally on LD, DVD, disk array, or whatnot? Even assuming infinite free bandwidth, the "I own this" factor is pretty strong here, too. This is the reason Divx failed -- people pay money to own something, and they own it. A transaction-based universe is overrated and assumes some things about privacy that I don't particularly like.
-Word processing, DTP, graphic design (general purpose applications) - broad band will most likely make it possible to rent the usage of such apps from your ISP and run them using a thin client. Might sound expensive now, but hardware and bandwidth prices keep falling. Do you want to buy photoshop with x plugins for $1000, or rent it at 50 cents an hour?
I apologize, but I could poke holes in the vision of a transaction-based outsourcing world all day. For one, I barely trust my ISP with my traffic, let alone with renting functionality with me. Why rent Photoshop at 50c an hour when I can "apt-get gimp" and be running in 20 seconds, for nothing?
For that matter, suppose I'm cleaning up my nude girlfriend snapshot library (assuming you don't banish secure, physical local storage with your fantasy of infinite bandwidth to outsourced servers, of course), do I want my usage tracked in that way?
"Oh, look, he's fired up Photoshop to touch up his girlfriend's nipples again!"
Do I want to rent an email client every time I interact with someone? What about PGP? Do I have to rent time on some master server to decrypt my mail? And is it then somehow transmitted to my thin client in a trusted way?
Assuming the existance and prevalence of Universal Thin Client Hardware (a long, long shot to say the least!) that runs whatever software I'm renting, that still isn't about the death of the PC in the first place. Thin clients have certain tasks their great at (manipulating data on remote servers using rich interfaces) and some things they suck at (being a PC and doing PC tasks).
Finally corporate drones will stop printing their email and schedules and just be able to carry their damned computer everywhere they go.
That would rock. I'd love to see that.
But mobile clients have limits given their lack of local storage, the requirement for wireless networking (which doesn't work well over long hauls, from in caves, on airplanes, or with data you don't want transmitted), and (presumably) limits on integration with other devices.
Compiling, rendering, other processor intensive tasks - Two words: server farms.
I'm with you 100%. Infinite bandwidth will make it much, much more cost effective to buy or borrow CPU time for intensive tasks from somewhere else.
Although if I'm rendering nudes of that girlfriend, I might still want some local CPU...
Some dork will always want a tremendously expensive box that does it all, but it will become less and less economically justified when most of the common devices in your home do 90% of your silicon based processing already, and the other 10% can be cheaply bought on demand.
I want a small number of cheapish boxes that are highly flexible, which sit at the center of a network of even cheaper dedicated devices. I want to have a high degree of control and flexibility over the application-specific sattelite units through a powerful programmable system. I want my sattelite devices to be able to access the greater resources (local storage/caching/connectivity/IPC and device coordination) of a central network of servers and fat clients.
Your home can be a network of microsmart devices that talk to each other. Mine'll be a network of smart, programmable PCs that integrate with dumb dedicated devices.
You distribute your computing tasks -- I'll distribute usability, accessibility, and flexibility.
I agree that a lot of what you say'll happen will happen, and probably in less than the 30 years you quote.
All I'm saying is that I like my way of doing things better.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm out in a small community in Wisconsin and I've got a cable modem, if I held my breath waiting for the phone companies to do ASDL here I'd be dessicating before it happened.
Out in BFE, that's pretty much what it's like, I gather. But everywhere else, the situation is reversed. Most major cities don't have cable modems in any useful form, but DSL is all over the place.
I'd have loved to get cable if it were available, but since the projected availability date is still three to six years off, DSL is the right-here-right-now immediate solution.
The general trend I'm seeing is that in the burbs and in no-mans-land, cable has the better availability, and everywhere else DSL seems to be taking over. But then again, I live in California, so maybe I have it all backwards...
many companies have agreements with the author of Xanim to distribute binary only decoders for their formats. I don't see why Sorenson couldn't do the same.
My understanding is that Sorenson's agreement with Apple is such that they cannot distribute the codec in any way other than their "professional" product.
That story sounds a little odd to me, as one would think Sorenson could license and distribute their software in any way they please, but it's possible Apple asked them for exclusive rights.
I wouldn't mind paying a bit more for the overseas shipping, but excluding the non USA/Canada web-community is insane.
Don't let your envy get the better of you. 37,000 units (the claimed allotment for the freshmeat.net promotion) won't go too far to serve an international market.
I think the opposite, and say that when giving things away it is only sane to limit the target market.
I placed my order. But something about it confused me:
If the product is free, and I'm paying a $5.90 "administration fee," how come they added 8.5% California sales tax to the invoice?
Doesn't sales tax apply to the retail price of an item, not to associated fees for service? So is it free, or is it $6? Yeah, I know, it's a dinky sum regardless, but I still find it a little odd.
In any case, just a little warning to folks in California who may want to place their order: yer gonna get taxed.
Ah, well. I guess you could take that view, but the sad part is that the Amiga is barely hanging on for life.
By many accounts, it's dead. It certainly isn't breathing, although the heart may beat on.
I remember a friend's 500 with surround sound, 3D and so on...
I still have my A500 in service. Mostly I play games with it, as after 10 years I finally have a PC with equivalent capabilities. =)
I'd probably even use it more often if the Enter key weren't so busted -- something's wrong with the keyboard membrane connector just above the arrows and I have to whack on it a few times before some of the keys work. It's getting increasingly difficult to find a working mouse or joystick, too.
And maybe at some point I'll get PLIP working to the gateway router...
Just goes to show that you should never trust Commodore with anything.
Amen.
Even you have indicated that there are versions of Debian which are too hard to install compared to other distributions.
Read a little more closely. I said that Debian is harder to maintain.
Maybe the newest version is better but up to now it has been hard to install for many of us.
potato (the "new version," still in unstable development) is no harder to install than slink (Debian 2.1, what you get if you grab a Debian CD). I was griping about the problems with the current development version.
Grab a copy of slink, and you'll find it's not much more difficult to install than, say, Red Hat. The fact that the installation procedure drops you into dselect is a little intimidating for the first-time user, but is really no more difficult than the package-selector during Red Hat's installtion. (In fact, I find it easier: the Red Hat selector has a very tedious, though colorful, interface that makes it difficult to trim away crud from the default installation.)
It's a true statement that Debian's installation procedure is "less pretty" than Red Hat's, and that it takes about twice as long because of package silliness, but it's not more difficult.
Personally, I rather like the BeOS installer: there are almost no options and basically one button to push. It's convenient if not powerful at all.
And I think we can all agree that any of the above are easier than an NT install!
Quite frankly, it's an OS that's ready for prime time--it fulfills the promise which the Mac used to have.
Umm... no. It's not ready for prime time.
Look at the list of things Be doesn't support:
* DVD Playback - the number-one reason I don't sit in BeOS all the time.
* SCSI Support - very poor, the variety of devices is very narrow.
* Consumer 3D Hardware - No TNT? No go.
* Consumer 2D Hardware - Be needs video drivers, badly.
* Multiuser - Or even multiple user profiles!
* Remote administration
Don't get me wrong, I like using the BeOS. It's a well-crafted piece of closedware, with a clean interface, an absurdly straightforward installation procedure, a nice API, fantastic multiprocessor support, and lots of potential. But those things don't make it ready for prime time. A boatload of drivers are still needed before Be has anything other than a really, really cool toy to offer.
I admit this is getting better as we speak, but it's blatantly incorrect to state that BeOS is ready for prime time. It only runs usably on less than one out of three machines, and even then, there are some things missing here and there.
I'd write some drivers myself, instead of just bitching about it, but I know fsck-all about good driver coding, and I'd be sure to do more harm than good. And of course, like everyone else, I can fall back on the "no time" excuse, too!
Okay Debian is "free" but you need to be a programmer just to install the thing.
I beg to differ. Debian is only marginally more complex to install than, say, Red Hat. It's just wildly more complex to maintain. Part of that comes from the very strong dependancy model the package system is using. Another part of it comes from the fact that the Debian folks seem to have modified the hell out of every piece of software they package, and that the packages themselves are more fragile -- they break reasonably often with even simple apt-get operations.
[Note that I'm talking about potato here, slink isn't quite so painful, as it is quite stable now.]
Using Debian, I do miss being able to rpm --rebuild a package, and have that just plain work. Unfortunately dpkg-buildpackage seems to have a terrifyingly high failure rate in potato. (Or am I the only one who can't rebuild apache or pam?)
I don't debate your point about freeness, though. I like that it takes only a glance to see if a package is non-free with Debian.
By the same token, other 'alternative' OSes were big in Europe but bombed in the US: Atari and above all Amiga (let's hope that they don't set a precedent for Linux).
The Amiga hardly bombed in the US. Everyone who could afford one pretty much went out and bought one. Everyone who couldn't afford one got an ST or stuck with their C64.
The Ami may never have achieved, in the US, the same phenomenal success it had in Europe, but it was by nobody's measure a bomb. The ST, now that was a bomb -- well, maybe a dud. =)
As anyone whos been on the net for any real length of time probably knows, the wacked out NuMb3rd Sp3Ak only existed to create hard to search filenames, ...
Actually that kind of juvenile nonsense predates warez on the net by about 5 or 6 years. I should know, I was there.
Is Love right? Mostly yes. But, a community AND business can co-exist. To use the word MUST is WHY this will raise the ire of /.ers and the rabid GNU/Linux camp.
I forewarn you, this will probably look like rabid Gnulie ranting. It's still true:
The difference between these two communities: Macintosh users depend utterly on Apple to produce the hardware and the software that makes the community up. The community grew out of the product. Apple kicks the bucket, and Mac users are left with something worth less than an Amiga. This simply isn't the case with Linux.
I've used Linux since before anything even resembling a corporation packaged it, before there was a distribution (SLS) at all. I own it. I own Linux lock, stock and barrel, at least just as much as the next guy. It's not all that much ownership, but I have me my rights. As a result of the free licensing it's possible for Linus to get hit by a bus, Alan to get eaten by a toad, Stallman to be abducted by Microsoft... for Red Hat, Caldera, PHT, SPI, SuSE and all the rest to simply curl up and die -- and I still have Linux. I have source. I could maintain it myself, or pay someone else to. Or I could even bank on the fact that there is someone out there who needs Linux even more badly than I do, and let them maintain it, simply leeching a free ride. Hell, that's not so much different than what most users do today!
The community remains with or without commercial involvement. Viewing the community simply as a market is a very unwise assumption. Anyone betting their business on the assumption that Linux users are simply a market to be exploited is not someone I'd want to invest behind, that's for sure.
Will the community die? Maybe. MUST the community die? No. For if it does, it takes Linux with it. Without the community, Linux doesn't exist -- it's just another also-ran, like SCO.
I wouldn't say my ire is up, but I have to laugh as heartily as possible in the face of anyone who thinks that commercial success can and will come at the cost of the development and user communities. I could give a fsck less if Caldera (or any of the others) can't make enough to survive.
Can't sell Linux any more? Your users can drop a note, I'll burn you a source and binary CD. Can't sell your value-add product? Well, that's a damn shame, isn't it? Guess you should have paid more attention to that community you wished away.
I am praying, however, that we will finally get a president elected who will bring some concept of integrity and morality into the Whitehouse.
I think this would be a wonderful thing.
I just pray we don't get someone who feels that their sense of morality applies to the citizenship. Morality is a personal trait, not a template with which to make law.
It's a shame, really. I can look past all manner of foibles, but it simply goes against my principles to cast a vote for someone who comes out in favor of mandatory censorship.
If she had tried a different tack, perhaps saying: "I propose we set aside N dollars with which to assist libraries that wish to install and support filtering technologies," I probably would not have been bothered in the slightest. But extorting the installation of filtering with federal funds?
Sorry, that's not the kind of behavior I expect in a leader. Abusing my tax money to further an extremist moral crusade is just plain out of the question. It's utterly inappropriate.
er, not according to an interview I read with the programmer (can't remember his name, and the book's in Grand Rapids (I'm in Lansing).)
If you find that book, please do quote from it... I'd be interested in knowing what the programmer was thinking when he wrote it, because there are six or eight patterns that the player can variously run to clear each level. Perhaps the movement itself isn't fixed, but the optimal solution to each instance of a level is.
It's possible to play pac-man blindfolded. I've seen this done, although I don't have the actual skill. I do know the first couple levels of pattern, though.
That's very cool! Thanks!
Pardon me while I go reboot my workstation into BeOS.
um dsl is only 256k total...
This is incorrect. PBI DSL has a downstream CIR of 384kbit, but it almost always hits the 1.5Mbit peak rate. The upstream is capped at the line level to 128k.
Neither of these are 256k, individually or total.
Maybe what you say is true out in Podunk, Nowhere but that's certainly not the case everywhere. xDSL technologies are quite capable of rates far higher than those I get, and certainly more than what you're saying.
X116.3 server for BeOS. Wasn't very hard to find (Be.com-Products-3rd Party Apps-All-X)
I got excited about this for a moment, until I noticed that the only binaries available are for the now-obsolete PPC version of BeOS.
That's a shame. An X server would make Be a very good client platform for my household.
Tell me, do you have ANY formal background in CS to qualify your wild assertions about what ideas of programming are good or bad?
Not to be terribly picky, but since when does owning a slip of sheepskin -- or the persuit of such -- make one better qualified to make assertions, wild or no?
I take exception to the idea that some self-styled elite knows what's best for me and the real world. In fact, I find it downright humorous, given that a noticable portion of the formally educated folk I know are essentially spreadsheet jockeys, and most of the best programmers and systems architects I know are graduates of U of Hard Knox.
And there's nothing like the anecdotal evidence of your own two eyes.
Someone ought to tell you that Pac Man had only fixed movement patterns assigned to the ghosts.
But that would be embarassing.
They're basically one-way devices- i.e. you can't easily extract the MP3's back out of them (AFAIK)
This is actually a fairly trivial task, and nearly all of the third-party file management utilities for the Rio support doing so.
Nonetheless, I somehow doubt that people are buying $150 worth of Rio to transport 32M of lossily-compressed contraband. 8" floppy would be more convenient for MP3 piracy.
I like in San Francisco, CA and mail order something from Clearwater, Florida. I had better not be charged any sales tax
And you live in what parallel-universe San Francisco in which the California state and San Francisco city sales taxes don't apply?
This has nothing to do with living in California and paying a bunch of schmoes in Florida for your purchases -- and everything to do with living in California and paying California regardless of where your purchase is made. This is something you are obligated to do in any case, even on snail-mail or telephone based transactions, even though you don't do it now. Nobody does. It's a law just about everyone breaks because it's utterly unenforcable.
Unfortunately, more legislation doesn't solve the problem. One of the greatest attractions to retail interstate commerce is the unenforcability of that extra 8.75% (or what have you) state sales tax. Take that incentive away and you are simply left paying extra for shipping, in which case you might as well just drive on down to WidgetCo and get your greasy paws on your purchase with instant gratification.
Additional taxation on interstate commerce is not necessary. Existing laws and taxes suffice.
What's scary for me is that "iToaster" is one of the names everyone in the office had given the pair of blue'n'white G3s that came in (the other being "iLoaf.")
(This disregards the big leap from 2.x to 10, of course. Everyone already knows that 3 through 9 are all unlucky.)
Funny, AutoCAD R9 worked wonderfully for me for the year or so I used it.
Funny, when I go out shopping for media, I always come back with two or three DVDs at most (or four, when I stopped by the Virgin store and took advantage of the 3/4 promo) and ten or twelve laserdiscs.
DVD amounts monitarily to about a quarter of my home theater purchases and quantitatively about half. They're cheaper and more readily available than LD, and I love that. But there are way, way more laserdiscs out there right now. Retailers that sport both formats are reporting about double DVD sales in LD. Of course, that can be attributed to LD owners' "fire sale" mentality right now, as the format is inevitably going to die within a year or two.
Title selection on DVD is really, really poor, and will be so for another year or so in my estimation. LD is far from dead. I can buy backtitles all over the place, and there is still the occasional new release that goes to LD and not DVD.
LD is alive, if not exactly well. I just wish I could play some of those titles in my office as well as in the home theater. Maybe I shouldn't've given away the old CLD-201 after all -- it would have been worth keeping in the office for private viewing without having to boot everyone out of the living room.
From http://www.xs4all .nl/~freeswan/freeswan_trees/freeswan-1.00/INSTALL :
Has this changed? I've been interested in trying it out, but the fact that "2.0.36 only!" is plastered all over the site and documentation kept me from looking at it more than cursorily. I wound up using tunnelvision for now, which is probably equally as difficult to intercept (and a fsck-load easier to set up, from the look of the freeswan docs!) although not necessarily as strong in terms of authentication.
If so, what's the lowdown on getting it to work in a 2.2 kernel environment?
-Games - Dedicated 3D rendering hardware is so cheap it can be embedded in $100 consoles - why not in TVs, VCRs, etc.
And what is it about dedicated console gaming that sucks? It's targeted at the lowest common denominator of player; it's nonupgradable; it's non-networked; platforms are tightly, centrally controlled (Hello, Sony and Tendo!)... I could bitch ages about consoles, but the point is that the last thing I want to do is introduce these factors into my choice of a TV (and why do I want to play games using a TV's embedded hardware? The lifespan of the display is vastly longer than the lifecycle of a game platform.)
-Surfing the Net - Your HDTV purhcased for $1000 in the year 2005 will have this built in.
Whoopee. And that will integrate with junkbuster coupled with my gig of shared local cache... how, again? That cache will reside locally on a... what? And I'll be able to script, automate, and customize browsing with... what? I'll publish my weblog and surfing habits... how?
A navigation interface for browsing and information collection is vastly different from a navigation and preference interface for a large public display device (like a TV). Or will I tune the characteristics of my display using some awful local web form / Java applet / ActiveX control / whatsit?
Sorry, but a TV with browsing functionality that I want *is* a PC with a really huge display. Never mind that I have no use for browsing in my home theater! Integration rocks, convergence sucks.
-Local storage (I gotta lotta stuff and I don't trust it on the internet) - So you buy a storage unit for your local wireless network. The minute you plug it in it announces its presence to all networked devices and voila, your VCR has a place to store movies, your TV a place to archive web pages, etc...
Fair enough. That's what I do with a PC server now. I rack up a bunch of disk in a box, throw it in the back room and hide it behind the couch. Every other networkable device uses it for persistant storage (even the Sun3/50 and the Amiga 500!). The household gig of squid sits on it.
Every CD I buy gets encoded to MP3 and stored on the disk array. It serves all but one audio output device in the house (the theater -- and only because I don't want disk & fan noise from a PC in there; I'm likely to fix that with a diskless MP3 client of some kind). If storage were cheap enough, and closed formats weren't, I'd archive my DVD collection, too, and stream that around the house.
I may not capture video to it, but that's partly because I don't capture video. (I don't even own a VCR!) If I wanted to store video, that's where it would go, then spool it out to DAT on a LRU basis of some kind.
A nitpick: if I'm that concerned about not sharing the my local storage, the hell if I'm going to translate it to RF broadcast and squirt it around the house!
But why do you need local storage if your ISP can offer terabytes of movies/audio/programs all over a broadband connection?
Because I barely trust my ISP to get packets to me, let alone store my data. I want my data on media I physically control, with access control at my sole discretion. Period.
Video/audio on demand is a waste of my time. Why should I download (even "instantly") data that I can store locally on LD, DVD, disk array, or whatnot? Even assuming infinite free bandwidth, the "I own this" factor is pretty strong here, too. This is the reason Divx failed -- people pay money to own something, and they own it. A transaction-based universe is overrated and assumes some things about privacy that I don't particularly like.
-Word processing, DTP, graphic design (general purpose applications) - broad band will most likely make it possible to rent the usage of such apps from your ISP and run them using a thin client. Might sound expensive now, but hardware and bandwidth prices keep falling. Do you want to buy photoshop with x plugins for $1000, or rent it at 50 cents an hour?
I apologize, but I could poke holes in the vision of a transaction-based outsourcing world all day. For one, I barely trust my ISP with my traffic, let alone with renting functionality with me. Why rent Photoshop at 50c an hour when I can "apt-get gimp" and be running in 20 seconds, for nothing?
For that matter, suppose I'm cleaning up my nude girlfriend snapshot library (assuming you don't banish secure, physical local storage with your fantasy of infinite bandwidth to outsourced servers, of course), do I want my usage tracked in that way?
"Oh, look, he's fired up Photoshop to touch up his girlfriend's nipples again!"
Do I want to rent an email client every time I interact with someone? What about PGP? Do I have to rent time on some master server to decrypt my mail? And is it then somehow transmitted to my thin client in a trusted way?
Assuming the existance and prevalence of Universal Thin Client Hardware (a long, long shot to say the least!) that runs whatever software I'm renting, that still isn't about the death of the PC in the first place. Thin clients have certain tasks their great at (manipulating data on remote servers using rich interfaces) and some things they suck at (being a PC and doing PC tasks).
Finally corporate drones will stop printing their email and schedules and just be able to carry their damned computer everywhere they go.
That would rock. I'd love to see that.
But mobile clients have limits given their lack of local storage, the requirement for wireless networking (which doesn't work well over long hauls, from in caves, on airplanes, or with data you don't want transmitted), and (presumably) limits on integration with other devices.
Compiling, rendering, other processor intensive tasks - Two words: server farms.
I'm with you 100%. Infinite bandwidth will make it much, much more cost effective to buy or borrow CPU time for intensive tasks from somewhere else.
Although if I'm rendering nudes of that girlfriend, I might still want some local CPU...
Some dork will always want a tremendously expensive box that does it all, but it will become less and less economically justified when most of the common devices in your home do 90% of your silicon based processing already, and the other 10% can be cheaply bought on demand.
I want a small number of cheapish boxes that are highly flexible, which sit at the center of a network of even cheaper dedicated devices. I want to have a high degree of control and flexibility over the application-specific sattelite units through a powerful programmable system. I want my sattelite devices to be able to access the greater resources (local storage/caching/connectivity/IPC and device coordination) of a central network of servers and fat clients.
Your home can be a network of microsmart devices that talk to each other. Mine'll be a network of smart, programmable PCs that integrate with dumb dedicated devices.
You distribute your computing tasks -- I'll distribute usability, accessibility, and flexibility.
I agree that a lot of what you say'll happen will happen, and probably in less than the 30 years you quote.
All I'm saying is that I like my way of doing things better.
-josh
Nice name. =)