I like it when I see a "tie in" to another industry or scientific discipline. I could read this book, learn all about DNA, crack it with a perl script, then get served papers by $DEITY so I can be prosecuted under the DMCA.
Of an admin legend I heard once about an overzealous equipment cage guy that spent years doing tcpdumps scanning for the mac addresses that belonged to a shipment of missing ethernet cards, and eventually caught the guy that did it. Anybody ever heard that one?
A common ploy. Go ahead and capitalize on how
lazy people are for the most part by making your
refund/replacement process the biggest pain in the
ass possible so people are discouraged from dealing with it. Flood the market with a substandard copyright protected product, then make refunds a pain in the butt. That's not what I call putting the customer first.
Not to be offtopic or rude or anything, but is this news? Who cares how fast the transparent window render is in any OS. Do most of you honestly care if your GUI is pretty? How shallow is that? Why should I be drooling? Show me a well done OS with good VM, FS, and outstanding uptimes under intense load and I'll be standing in a puddle of drool. Pretty colored things that made neat noises ceased to be overly exciting about the time I started crawling out of my playpen a few decades ago.
I'm ok with sky driving on one big condition. The test you have to take has to be hard as hell. I could officially kill this idea by rounding up members of congress, putting them on a schoolbus, and taking a field trip to Atlanta in the morning. I'd close off the top of spaghetti junction, park there, and hand out binoculars.
Drunk drivers would immediately lose their driving priveledges forever. No debate. Vehicle inspections would have to be monthly. Litigation would be through the roof. Good lord. There is no way this would work. Imagine the people you are on the road with in the morning piloting a one ton aircraft at high speed. I'm personally of the opinion that better testing should be implemented now long before we make it into the sky. Your score should have bearing on when you have to test next. Hand eye coordination tests should be taken into account. Age should no longer matter. As long as somebody can reach the petals and pass the very hard tests, they should be able to drive. If not, insurance is going to be so high that only the ultrarich will be able to buy skycars. They might as well start requiring people to take a test before they are allowed to get married or have kids.:) That would probably do the most to make the roads safer.
The only problem is, it looks like they made this story out of thin air.
I could write a story like this claiming that condom use is on a decline.
I'd find one guy that claims that he just doesn't see the point anymore.
Then I'd call trojan and naturalamb and any other prophalactic company
I could and bug the heck out of their PR department. The ones that didn't
hang up on me, or swear at me, I'd quote. If someone said something really
stupid like "I'd rather sell my Grandma than give up using condoms" I'd
make sure to print that. I'd also write the story in such a way that the
fact that I've presented no hard data to support my claim of decreased
condom use isn't immediately obvious.
The problem with stories like this are people believe this crap.
A story like this will make john q. bandwidth actually think about getting
rid of his high speed connection. He'll worry that he'll be the only guy
on his block still using it. I wouldn't be surprised if someone paid to have
this story written (ok, I'd be a little surprised). When I see something
like this, the first thing on my mind is who benefits if this is true.
Sometimes the answer is not what you initially think it is.:)
It doesn't take that long to learn a new window manager. I suggest looking at as many as you can and then deciding. Get used to the idea that you have a lot of choices, and revel in it. Don't be afraid to try out new stuff. That fear is what keeps certain monopolies in business.
I work in a sun shop. I'm allowed to run FreeBSD on an old poweredge instead of using solaris on a blade or ultra5. Almost every person around (all sun) has grabbed the gnome addons cd and installed it. At first it's so they can get xmms installed easily. As soon as they see someone else running the gnome desktop and ask about it, they are hours away from running it themselves. I pretty much compile and run blackbox on everything including solaris when I'm forced to use it.:)
You watch this show on another level that I appreciate. I've been too busy the last few years to really do much of anything but watch the show. I'm just now starting to get into reading up on it. I don't even know the name of a director of a single episode. I'll probably be about where you are with it in about 6 months though. I just wish they'd release more on DvD.
you could actually purchase the ones you can get on DvD, and watch them every night at 8pm on scifi. Not to be a dick about getting something for nothing, but I'd actually feel guilty about getting pirated copies of this show. This is not your father's scifi.
Good God. There are a billion nameservers out there to use. Try something on a big pipe like:
24.48.64.2
or
24.48.57.2
or
207.69.188.185 (the example in DNS and BIND:) )
or it's brothers.186 and.187 (which are really the same machine, I used to work there)
Hope this helps you live up to your silly technical goal.
Farscape completely nails the space opera genre. Period. While nailing it, the characters are very well developed, and you actually care about them. The plots are incredible because:
1. They don't always come out on top, or completely walk away supreme victors in conflict.
2. A lot of the time (much like in cowboy bebop) they don't come out ahead in the end because of something they did, they do because of weird luck, or the source of conflict making a huge mistake. So it's not predictable.
3. They focus a lot on things that happen in the past to season plots without overdoing flashback sequences (also like cowboy bebop)
4. Their technical voodoo bullshit sounds reasonable.
5. They will kill a character off.
6. They have the soap opera feel, and the cliffhanger crafting completely nailed also.
So basically, it's done intelligently. I hate watching a show and having my intelligence insulted. There's only been once episode (that crappy dance club, people milking episode) that truly sucked ass. I swear they accidentally let some brain dead shitty 60's movie director man the helm for some unknown reason. The only scifi I watch on TV at this point is Farscape, Outer Limits, cowboy bebop, outlaw star (more to see where they are going with it) and Stargate SG1 reruns. Even though Stargate SG1 is pretty predictable most of the time, it still has a big screen feel to it that I like. The characters are better than the plot, but good enough that watching it is still fun. I initially caught the first episode of farscape on scifi by accident at a friends house (Hey Dave) around the time it first aired, and they were playing it 3 times a day. I was hooked from then on. I had just grown completely sick of X-Files, and it completely replaced it. I can't wait for the new episodes. The awesome thing is that as the show matures, it gets better. My girlfriend and I were really worried that they'd apply the LEXX treatment to the show to try to push the ratings, or keep it on top. Then they brought the annoying big titted redhead on the show, and it really looked like it was going that way. I swear they must have changed directors or something for a little bit. Either way, things improved and it's me and my girlfriends favorite show at this point.
Recently Lister was nice enough to do a cameo on LEXX.:) Personally, I loath lexx, but it's usually the least shitty thing on at that hour, which isn't saying much. I wish they'd just make farscape 2 hours long and ditch LEXX altogether.
I mean, isn't that the argument for closed source? How is it that all the source code is out there for apache, and the open source operating systems that it runs on most of the time, but microsoft + IIS is still the exploit king?
And I suppose if I wanted to play DVD's under FreeBSD with ac3 audio, I could use:
http://xine.sourceforge.net/
And it looks like we had a working dxr3 driver back in december of 2000:
http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gadde/freebsd/em8300/
Ported from the linux driver you use. If the interest is there, it gets done. I'm sure I could finish that driver if I had a need for a dxr3. I'm thrilled with my playstation2 and madcat remote control though.;)
And therein lies the difference. I'm not a casual UNIX user. I started playing with commercial UNIX variants around 18 years ago. There was and still is a UNIX subculture. There is the concept of "The UNIX way" of doing things. FreeBSD is more in line with that. RTFM means something. BOFH's are idolized. They didn't get that way on their own. They are creatures of their environment. You don't bitch about things, you hack the code to make what you need if need be. I do the types of things for a living where you notice things like poor performance from a network stack, or poor memory management. You notice what OS's work better with certain hardware and memory. When I'm at home, I like having the same type of confidence in my home system as I have in my work systems. I love the fact that I can lovingly and with extreme prejudice craft a home machine, one hand selected piece at a time, install FreeBSD, and have the same, if not more reliability on inexpensive x86 hardware. At the same time, I like that you can recycle old machines. Recently at work (huge sun shop) the 2nd tier tech's were having nothing but problems and long bitch sessions about their sunray workstations. For those not familiar, it's basically a diskless X terminal that feeds off an e250 to e450 class machine. They are now in the process of replacing the lot of them with a bunch of deemed worthless optiplex celeron machines running FreeBSD-stable. Are they faster? sure are. More reliable? sure are. Cheaper? by far. The optiplex's had been sitting in storage for a while collecting dust. They probably would have been given away or sold for next to nothing. The sunray's are now piling up in their own stack in that room while the techs marvel at how nice and clean blackbox is and easier to configure. All of them are getting involved. Some guys working on a custom blackbox theme for their department, as other guys set up apache on a spare optiplex for a departmental webserver. It's like they found hidden gold to listen to them talk. They come to me and ask questions. If it's a question they could have found the answer to in 5 seconds with google, I tell them that. If it's something they can learn from a particular O'reilly book, I let them borrow it or tell them who already borrowed it.:) You can never have too many armadillo books on hand. The point is, they are shaking loose the "I'll just ask someone that knows" mentality and developing the "I can probably figure this out on my own, and learn a lot of useful things" mentality. Very few times do I find I need to bug anyone to find the answer to a problem. Either google, or deja(which is google now also) almost always has the answers I'm looking for. And when I'm in the middle of doing 5 different coding projects, 3 migrations, preparing for 3 different meetings, BEFORE lunch, and some tech walks up to me and asks me what that command is to figure out free disk space, you better believe I'm going to be VERY rude and condescending. It's very effective when you don't have time. You can't be thin skinned and work in a real UNIX shop. Not if you have hardcore admin types about. But I digress...
I hope we can sell the sunray's back to sun, or find something else useful to do with them. The tech guys did keep the cool sun 18inch LCD's though. I hope I can get my hands on one of them. We've been steadily using FreeBSD machines for things traditionally done by an e250, or scsi netra. I'm hoping at some point I can get our company name added to the freebsd site list of large fortune 100 companies that use FreeBSD for mission critical things. That's where I'm coming from. It has to do with what level of user you are. For the most part, I find that the FreeBSD user base is a higher level of clued in individual. Most of them doing something with UNIX for a living. If I want to play a DVD, that's what my playstation2 is for. If I want to play games, same deal. If I want to surf the net, script out some perl, check my mail, ssh to a few work machines, run some test code with sun binary compatibility, listen to mp3's, play quake3, burn some cd's, do some instant messaging, connect to some opennap servers and grab some pixies, that's what my FreeBSD machine is for. Add to that the ease of updating my OS,/usr/ports for really easy software install, enhanced security, rock solid stability, and very little need to ever mess with anything(This machine was installed as freebsd 2.2.7 a billion years ago and is now 4.4-stable without reinstalling) and I can't think of a reason to use anything else. I wish all OS's were this perfect.
If the general public loved freebsd, then I'd probably hate it. It would mean that it had been dumbed down to the point that it would be quite possibly useless to me. That and, I don't think most hardcore FreeBSD users really care if the General Public likes FreeBSD or not. We like things nice and quiet. People find FreeBSD that are looking for it. FreeBSD isn't out there actively trying to recruit users much, or force you to use it by preinstalling it on your dell or hp machine. There isn't any FreeBSD movement to 'dominate the world'. FreeBSD users don't care. We are happy with our OS. That's all that matters. That's why the userbase steadily grows as people find it and tell their friends, without the benefit of hardcore evangelism or sketchy marketing practices. It's just good enough that word of mouth works well enough to get the kind of people using it that won't piss off the ones already using it.:)
#1 Modules
#2 Industry recognition
#3 Most linux binaries run faster under FreeBSD than they do on linux natively
#4 Fewer morons asking stupid questions they could find the answer to in 15 seconds with a google search
#5 simple/etc/rc.conf to configure almost EVERYTHING. That's one stop shopping folks.
#6 Good, fast, filesystem (softupdates)
#7 FreeBSD has more stable hardware support thanks to better code (thanks to more stringent coding practices)
#8 I can play quake3 using linux compatibility mode while doing just about anything else, and get a 10-15ms ping improvement thanks to the best tcp/ip stack on the planet.
#9 ALL my hardware works because I compiled my kernel specifically for my hardware, instead of running some lazy precompiled crap that wastes memory.
#10 I can use burncd to burn to EIDE burners if I feel like it.
#11 FreeBSD runs the largest FTP site in the world. Gotta love that.
#12 Fewer kids.
As a friend of mine says,
Linux is Luke, FreeBSD is Yoda.
I've seen a ton of people migrate from windows, to Linux, to FreeBSD. I've seen a lot of people with short attention spans and no clue give up on Linux after one week and go back to windows. I've seen a lot of people whine about how hard FreeBSD is, then come up with as many other reasons they can to justify their lack of clue. I've never seen someone that's fallen in love with FreeBSD go back to Linux. Ever. Linux is this 'in' movement. It's the momentum that got slashdot started in the first place. This idea of a big movement taking over the world. Some of us just want a stable, secure, OS that isn't treated like a testbed for unreliable code. Something rock solid that does what we need. We aren't out to change the world. We aren't planning to 'dominate' the world. We think all that stuff is silly. We just like our stable, fast, safe OS. If enough people take interest in something (DRI for example) we'll get some people together and do it up. And you can be sure that it will be a stable, awesome solution. Good things take time. It is harder to get large companies to play ball when you are a freebsd developer, but not impossible. The nVidia drivers are on the way thanks to the good folks at http://nvidia.netexplorer.org/. Instead of going nuts trying to get every silly thing in the world that runs on linux compiled for FreeBSD, some smart person put the linuxator inside FreeBSD making it a moot point. It's nice running linux stuff with the benefit of better VM and tcp/ip. Things are done differently in this camp. Some of us are more than a little easy to troll, and that's because we honestly can't understand why so many misinformed people say such clueless things about our OS. It's painfully obvious that most of the FreeBSD haters have either:
A: never used it
B: tried but couldn't figure it out.
And yes, there is some eleetism. Big surprise. We know something you don't, and it makes us swell up a little. Clue doesn't come easy. I swear I'm not trolling, that's just how it is. It's how UNIX has been traditionally for a long long time. I did my time in the trenches, and got laid wide open by yoda level sysadmins. It's a great way to learn how computers really work. Don't knock it. And don't for one second try to tell me that you haven't taken an uppity attitude towards some 'clueless windows user' at some point. Thought that "if they were just smarter they'd know Linux is the way". Me and a lot of my FreeBSD using friends feel pretty much the same way about the average Linux user most of the time.:) The point is to take the time to truly know your OS. You also have to be the sick kind of bastard that enjoys figuring out problems. I've been struggling with DRI under FreeBSD for months now, and grinning my head off. In the meantime, everything else works wonderfully. FreeBSD isn't afraid of y
ou.:) It's never going away because it has no predators. The userbase grows because it's good, not because of corporate sponsorship and good *cough* marketing *cough* press.
AMI was nice enough to totally open up their specs to the FreeBSD developers a while ago. I'm happily using a MegaRAID 1400 right now. The driver support is incredible. It's rock solid stable. They probably chose FreeBSD because it's rock solid, reliable, free(as in BSD license), and their hardware loves it. Linux would have been a fine option, but they are already very friendly with the BSD crowd. The microsoft offering might have even been an option, but why bother. With FreeBSD they'll have automatic access to a huge talent pool if they need help, and it won't cost a dime. Plus they get the source code. Given all that, I think they made the smartest choice.
I've been waiting 3 weeks for items I won at auction. According to their policy, if they don't ship me my items within another week, they will be nice enough to "cancel my order for me". That kinda sucks because I got a great price on some drives. I wish they'd put things back the way they were before this whole egghead mess happened at all. I prefered www.onsale.com because I figured it was more reliable than Ebay. Now years later, I have more faith in 'joe ebay user' than I do in egghead. And Fry's can just light themselves on fire and throw themselves down a flight of stairs. I've never had anything but complete hell getting anything resembling service from them.
"However, Windows 95 sucks! That is right, it sucks. However, it is still entirely DOS based."
entirely dos based eh?
"One system crash a day is an average."
One system crash a year would bother me.
"When released it had a counted 63,000 known bugs! "
I don't think any variant of UNIX has ever been released with that many bugs.
"System restore so you can roll back your system to an earlier date if it becomes unstable."
Some of us take stability for granted I guess.
Now, lets check out your 'expert' review of the linux OS.:)
"Linux - This is a touchy subject among all fans of Open Source. This is a totally free operating system. It is just totally
different from Windows. Do not be expecting an easy transition."
Somehow I don't see it being a very difficult transition for me.
"It was built back in 1991 and has evolved into kernel build 2.4. It is stable in a manner of speaking. Different kernel
builds mean re-compiling (meaning un-stability"
Means 'un-stability'. You must be some Linux expert to say this. Usually recompiling adds a feature or improves
performance. I think you are confusing recompiling with service packs.
"that is why ID Software stopped writing for Linux)."
Last time I checked, ID is backing Loki games and Doom 3 will be released for Linux at the same time as the Mac and
Windows version. Care to comment on that?
"Not to many people know how to do that, in fact 98 percent of people have no idea what compiling is."
Including you it seems. 98 percent of most people have no idea what brain surgury is like, but that doesn't stop people
from learning it.
"It does not run any Win16 or Win32 apps."
Really? The WINE developers would be amused to hear that.
"It has its own API. Its main mode of support is forums where many new users get shot down by the older
techno-junkies."
You sound bitter. Tried running Linux and couldn't do it I bet. With your attitude, it's no wonder they shot you down.
"It is, how do I say, complex."
Complex for you perhaps. You seem to be yet another scared windows user that can't learn something new. I feel for
you.
"One upside to it is that everything is free for it. You can download it right now if you want to. Its problems lie in an
unstable UI. As in, there isn't any standard UI. Seriously!"
The hell you say! Having the choice between thousands of 'UI's' or being locked into one. Which do you think is better?
How does having the choice to run whatever 'UI' I want make it unstable? Some people are afraid of choice it seems.
Especially those that are used to letting microsoft think for them.
"There are many programs for many different UI's. My advice, if you don't know how to set up a home network or
don't know what the word compile means... stay away..."
Using your logic, I advise you to stay away. We don't need you. However, if there are any windows users out there that
would like to start thinking for themselves, Please consider one of the many free UNIX variants out there.
"there are 11 bin folders and you will get totally confused."
Naw, they won't. You did though didn't ya. Your page speaks tomes. I almost feel sorry for starting this little flame war
with you. You truly have no idea what you are talking about. Heed my advice from the prior post. Please go learn
something. The professionals that do use this site don't need your posts. Good luck to you.
"However, Windows 95 sucks! That is right, it sucks. However, it is still entirely DOS based."
entirely dos based eh?
"One system crash a day is an average."
One system crash a year would bother me.
"When released it had a counted 63,000 known bugs! "
I don't think any variant of UNIX has ever been released with that many bugs.
"System restore so you can roll back your system to an earlier date if it becomes unstable."
Some of us take stability for granted I guess.
Now, lets check out your 'expert' review of the linux OS.:)
"Linux - This is a touchy subject among all fans of Open Source. This is a totally free operating system. It is just totally
different from Windows. Do not be expecting an easy transition."
Somehow I don't see it being a very difficult transition for me.
"It was built back in 1991 and has evolved into kernel build 2.4. It is stable in a manner of speaking. Different kernel
builds mean re-compiling (meaning un-stability"
Means 'un-stability'. You must be some Linux expert to say this. Usually recompiling adds a feature or improves
performance. I think you are confusing recompiling with service packs.
"that is why ID Software stopped writing for Linux)."
Last time I checked, ID is backing Loki games and Doom 3 will be released for Linux at the same time as the Mac and
Windows version. Care to comment on that?
"Not to many people know how to do that, in fact 98 percent of people have no idea what compiling is."
Including you it seems. 98 percent of most people have no idea what brain surgury is like, but that doesn't stop people
from learning it.
"It does not run any Win16 or Win32 apps."
Really? The WINE developers would be amused to hear that.
"It has its own API. Its main mode of support is forums where many new users get shot down by the older
techno-junkies."
You sound bitter. Tried running Linux and couldn't do it I bet. With your attitude, it's no wonder they shot you down.
"It is, how do I say, complex."
Complex for you perhaps. You seem to be yet another scared windows user that can't learn something new. I feel for
you.
"One upside to it is that everything is free for it. You can download it right now if you want to. Its problems lie in an
unstable UI. As in, there isn't any standard UI. Seriously!"
The hell you say! Having the choice between thousands of 'UI's' or being locked into one. Which do you think is better?
How does having the choice to run whatever 'UI' I want make it unstable? Some people are afraid of choice it seems.
Especially those that are used to letting microsoft think for them.
"There are many programs for many different UI's. My advice, if you don't know how to set up a home network or
don't know what the word compile means... stay away..."
Using your logic, I advise you to stay away. We don't need you. However, if there are any windows users out there that
would like to start thinking for themselves, Please consider one of the many free UNIX variants out there.
"there are 11 bin folders and you will get totally confused."
Naw, they won't. You did though didn't ya. Your page speaks tomes. I almost feel sorry for starting this little flame war
with you. You truly have no idea what you are talking about. Heed my advice from the prior post. Please go learn
something. The professionals that do use this site don't need your posts. Good luck to you.
"However, Windows 95 sucks! That is right, it sucks. However, it is still entirely DOS based."
entirely dos based eh?
"One system crash a day is an average."
One system crash a year would bother me.
"When released it had a counted 63,000 known bugs! "
I don't think any variant of UNIX has ever been released with that many bugs.
"System restore so you can roll back your system to an earlier date if it becomes unstable."
Some of us take stability for granted I guess.
Now, lets check out your 'expert' review of the linux OS.:)
"Linux - This is a touchy subject among all fans of Open Source. This is a totally free operating system. It is just totally different from Windows. Do not be expecting an easy transition."
Somehow I don't see it being a very difficult transition for me.
"It was built back in 1991 and has evolved into kernel build 2.4. It is stable in a manner of speaking. Different kernel builds mean re-compiling (meaning un-stability"
Means 'un-stability'. You must be some Linux expert to say this. Usually recompiling adds a feature or improves performance. I think you are confusing recompiling with service packs.
"that is why ID Software stopped writing for Linux)."
Last time I checked, ID is backing Loki games and Doom 3 will be released for Linux at the same time as the Mac and Windows version. Care to comment on that?
"Not to many people know how to do that, in fact 98 percent of people have no idea what compiling is."
Including you it seems. 98 percent of most people have no idea what brain surgury is like, but that doesn't stop people from learning it.
"It does not run any Win16 or Win32 apps."
Really? The WINE developers would be amused to hear that.
"It has its own API. Its main mode of support is forums where many new users get shot down by the older techno-junkies."
You sound bitter. Tried running Linux and couldn't do it I bet. With your attitude, it's no wonder they shot you down.
"It is, how do I say, complex."
Complex for you perhaps. You seem to be yet another scared windows user that can't learn something new. I feel for you.
"One upside to it is that everything is free for it. You can download it right now if you want to. Its problems lie in an unstable UI. As in, there isn't any standard UI. Seriously!"
The hell you say! Having the choice between thousands of 'UI's' or being locked into one. Which do you think is better? How does having the choice to run whatever 'UI' I want make it unstable? Some people are afraid of choice it seems. Especially those that are used to letting microsoft think for them.
"There are many programs for many different UI's. My advice, if you don't know how to set up a home network or don't know what the word compile means... stay away..."
Using your logic, I advise you to stay away. We don't need you. However, if there are any windows users out there that would like to start thinking for themselves, Please consider one of the many free UNIX variants out there.
"there are 11 bin folders and you will get totally confused."
Naw, they won't. You did though didn't ya. Your page speaks tomes. I almost feel sorry for starting this little flame war with you. You truly have no idea what you are talking about. Heed my advice from the prior post. Please go learn something. The professionals that do use this site don't need your posts. Good luck to you.
Slashdot Mirror
I like it when I see a "tie in" to another industry or scientific discipline. I could read this book, learn all about DNA, crack it with a perl script, then get served papers by $DEITY so I can be prosecuted under the DMCA.
Of an admin legend I heard once about an overzealous equipment cage guy that spent years doing tcpdumps scanning for the mac addresses that belonged to a shipment of missing ethernet cards, and eventually caught the guy that did it. Anybody ever heard that one?
A common ploy. Go ahead and capitalize on how
lazy people are for the most part by making your
refund/replacement process the biggest pain in the
ass possible so people are discouraged from dealing with it. Flood the market with a substandard copyright protected product, then make refunds a pain in the butt. That's not what I call putting the customer first.
Not to be offtopic or rude or anything, but is this news? Who cares how fast the transparent window render is in any OS. Do most of you honestly care if your GUI is pretty? How shallow is that? Why should I be drooling? Show me a well done OS with good VM, FS, and outstanding uptimes under intense load and I'll be standing in a puddle of drool. Pretty colored things that made neat noises ceased to be overly exciting about the time I started crawling out of my playpen a few decades ago.
I'm ok with sky driving on one big condition. The test you have to take has to be hard as hell. I could officially kill this idea by rounding up members of congress, putting them on a schoolbus, and taking a field trip to Atlanta in the morning. I'd close off the top of spaghetti junction, park there, and hand out binoculars. :) That would probably do the most to make the roads safer.
Drunk drivers would immediately lose their driving priveledges forever. No debate. Vehicle inspections would have to be monthly. Litigation would be through the roof. Good lord. There is no way this would work. Imagine the people you are on the road with in the morning piloting a one ton aircraft at high speed. I'm personally of the opinion that better testing should be implemented now long before we make it into the sky. Your score should have bearing on when you have to test next. Hand eye coordination tests should be taken into account. Age should no longer matter. As long as somebody can reach the petals and pass the very hard tests, they should be able to drive. If not, insurance is going to be so high that only the ultrarich will be able to buy skycars. They might as well start requiring people to take a test before they are allowed to get married or have kids.
The only problem is, it looks like they made this story out of thin air. :)
I could write a story like this claiming that condom use is on a decline.
I'd find one guy that claims that he just doesn't see the point anymore.
Then I'd call trojan and naturalamb and any other prophalactic company
I could and bug the heck out of their PR department. The ones that didn't
hang up on me, or swear at me, I'd quote. If someone said something really
stupid like "I'd rather sell my Grandma than give up using condoms" I'd
make sure to print that. I'd also write the story in such a way that the
fact that I've presented no hard data to support my claim of decreased
condom use isn't immediately obvious.
The problem with stories like this are people believe this crap.
A story like this will make john q. bandwidth actually think about getting
rid of his high speed connection. He'll worry that he'll be the only guy
on his block still using it. I wouldn't be surprised if someone paid to have
this story written (ok, I'd be a little surprised). When I see something
like this, the first thing on my mind is who benefits if this is true.
Sometimes the answer is not what you initially think it is.
It doesn't take that long to learn a new window manager. I suggest looking at as many as you can and then deciding. Get used to the idea that you have a lot of choices, and revel in it. Don't be afraid to try out new stuff. That fear is what keeps certain monopolies in business.
I work in a sun shop. I'm allowed to run FreeBSD on an old poweredge instead of using solaris on a blade or ultra5. Almost every person around (all sun) has grabbed the gnome addons cd and installed it. At first it's so they can get xmms installed easily. As soon as they see someone else running the gnome desktop and ask about it, they are hours away from running it themselves. I pretty much compile and run blackbox on everything including solaris when I'm forced to use it. :)
HAHAHAHHA
:)
You watch this show on another level that I appreciate. I've been too busy the last few years to really do much of anything but watch the show. I'm just now starting to get into reading up on it. I don't even know the name of a director of a single episode. I'll probably be about where you are with it in about 6 months though. I just wish they'd release more on DvD.
you could actually purchase the ones you can get on DvD, and watch them every night at 8pm on scifi. Not to be a dick about getting something for nothing, but I'd actually feel guilty about getting pirated copies of this show. This is not your father's scifi.
Good God. There are a billion nameservers out there to use. Try something on a big pipe like:
:) )
.186 and .187 (which are really the same machine, I used to work there)
24.48.64.2
or
24.48.57.2
or
207.69.188.185 (the example in DNS and BIND
or it's brothers
Hope this helps you live up to your silly technical goal.
Farscape completely nails the space opera genre. Period. While nailing it, the characters are very well developed, and you actually care about them. The plots are incredible because:
1. They don't always come out on top, or completely walk away supreme victors in conflict.
2. A lot of the time (much like in cowboy bebop) they don't come out ahead in the end because of something they did, they do because of weird luck, or the source of conflict making a huge mistake. So it's not predictable.
3. They focus a lot on things that happen in the past to season plots without overdoing flashback sequences (also like cowboy bebop)
4. Their technical voodoo bullshit sounds reasonable.
5. They will kill a character off.
6. They have the soap opera feel, and the cliffhanger crafting completely nailed also.
So basically, it's done intelligently. I hate watching a show and having my intelligence insulted. There's only been once episode (that crappy dance club, people milking episode) that truly sucked ass. I swear they accidentally let some brain dead shitty 60's movie director man the helm for some unknown reason. The only scifi I watch on TV at this point is Farscape, Outer Limits, cowboy bebop, outlaw star (more to see where they are going with it) and Stargate SG1 reruns. Even though Stargate SG1 is pretty predictable most of the time, it still has a big screen feel to it that I like. The characters are better than the plot, but good enough that watching it is still fun. I initially caught the first episode of farscape on scifi by accident at a friends house (Hey Dave) around the time it first aired, and they were playing it 3 times a day. I was hooked from then on. I had just grown completely sick of X-Files, and it completely replaced it. I can't wait for the new episodes. The awesome thing is that as the show matures, it gets better. My girlfriend and I were really worried that they'd apply the LEXX treatment to the show to try to push the ratings, or keep it on top. Then they brought the annoying big titted redhead on the show, and it really looked like it was going that way. I swear they must have changed directors or something for a little bit. Either way, things improved and it's me and my girlfriends favorite show at this point.
Recently Lister was nice enough to do a cameo on LEXX. :) Personally, I loath lexx, but it's usually the least shitty thing on at that hour, which isn't saying much. I wish they'd just make farscape 2 hours long and ditch LEXX altogether.
I mean, isn't that the argument for closed source? How is it that all the source code is out there for apache, and the open source operating systems that it runs on most of the time, but microsoft + IIS is still the exploit king?
And I suppose if I wanted to play DVD's under FreeBSD with ac3 audio, I could use:
;)
http://xine.sourceforge.net/
And it looks like we had a working dxr3 driver back in december of 2000:
http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gadde/freebsd/em8300/
Ported from the linux driver you use. If the interest is there, it gets done. I'm sure I could finish that driver if I had a need for a dxr3. I'm thrilled with my playstation2 and madcat remote control though.
And therein lies the difference. I'm not a casual UNIX user. I started playing with commercial UNIX variants around 18 years ago. There was and still is a UNIX subculture. There is the concept of "The UNIX way" of doing things. FreeBSD is more in line with that. RTFM means something. BOFH's are idolized. They didn't get that way on their own. They are creatures of their environment. You don't bitch about things, you hack the code to make what you need if need be. I do the types of things for a living where you notice things like poor performance from a network stack, or poor memory management. You notice what OS's work better with certain hardware and memory. When I'm at home, I like having the same type of confidence in my home system as I have in my work systems. I love the fact that I can lovingly and with extreme prejudice craft a home machine, one hand selected piece at a time, install FreeBSD, and have the same, if not more reliability on inexpensive x86 hardware. At the same time, I like that you can recycle old machines. Recently at work (huge sun shop) the 2nd tier tech's were having nothing but problems and long bitch sessions about their sunray workstations. For those not familiar, it's basically a diskless X terminal that feeds off an e250 to e450 class machine. They are now in the process of replacing the lot of them with a bunch of deemed worthless optiplex celeron machines running FreeBSD-stable. Are they faster? sure are. More reliable? sure are. Cheaper? by far. The optiplex's had been sitting in storage for a while collecting dust. They probably would have been given away or sold for next to nothing. The sunray's are now piling up in their own stack in that room while the techs marvel at how nice and clean blackbox is and easier to configure. All of them are getting involved. Some guys working on a custom blackbox theme for their department, as other guys set up apache on a spare optiplex for a departmental webserver. It's like they found hidden gold to listen to them talk. They come to me and ask questions. If it's a question they could have found the answer to in 5 seconds with google, I tell them that. If it's something they can learn from a particular O'reilly book, I let them borrow it or tell them who already borrowed it. :) You can never have too many armadillo books on hand. The point is, they are shaking loose the "I'll just ask someone that knows" mentality and developing the "I can probably figure this out on my own, and learn a lot of useful things" mentality. Very few times do I find I need to bug anyone to find the answer to a problem. Either google, or deja(which is google now also) almost always has the answers I'm looking for. And when I'm in the middle of doing 5 different coding projects, 3 migrations, preparing for 3 different meetings, BEFORE lunch, and some tech walks up to me and asks me what that command is to figure out free disk space, you better believe I'm going to be VERY rude and condescending. It's very effective when you don't have time. You can't be thin skinned and work in a real UNIX shop. Not if you have hardcore admin types about. But I digress...
/usr/ports for really easy software install, enhanced security, rock solid stability, and very little need to ever mess with anything(This machine was installed as freebsd 2.2.7 a billion years ago and is now 4.4-stable without reinstalling) and I can't think of a reason to use anything else. I wish all OS's were this perfect.
I hope we can sell the sunray's back to sun, or find something else useful to do with them. The tech guys did keep the cool sun 18inch LCD's though. I hope I can get my hands on one of them. We've been steadily using FreeBSD machines for things traditionally done by an e250, or scsi netra. I'm hoping at some point I can get our company name added to the freebsd site list of large fortune 100 companies that use FreeBSD for mission critical things. That's where I'm coming from. It has to do with what level of user you are. For the most part, I find that the FreeBSD user base is a higher level of clued in individual. Most of them doing something with UNIX for a living. If I want to play a DVD, that's what my playstation2 is for. If I want to play games, same deal. If I want to surf the net, script out some perl, check my mail, ssh to a few work machines, run some test code with sun binary compatibility, listen to mp3's, play quake3, burn some cd's, do some instant messaging, connect to some opennap servers and grab some pixies, that's what my FreeBSD machine is for. Add to that the ease of updating my OS,
You are obviously a windows user, so it's understandable that you'd mess something up. :)
:) It's just as effective. Try asking the paperclip for help next time!
SEE!!!
Try not using scarcasm and just being really damn mean and honest.
If the general public loved freebsd, then I'd probably hate it. It would mean that it had been dumbed down to the point that it would be quite possibly useless to me. That and, I don't think most hardcore FreeBSD users really care if the General Public likes FreeBSD or not. We like things nice and quiet. People find FreeBSD that are looking for it. FreeBSD isn't out there actively trying to recruit users much, or force you to use it by preinstalling it on your dell or hp machine. There isn't any FreeBSD movement to 'dominate the world'. FreeBSD users don't care. We are happy with our OS. That's all that matters. That's why the userbase steadily grows as people find it and tell their friends, without the benefit of hardcore evangelism or sketchy marketing practices. It's just good enough that word of mouth works well enough to get the kind of people using it that won't piss off the ones already using it. :)
#1 Modules /etc/rc.conf to configure almost EVERYTHING. That's one stop shopping folks.
:) The point is to take the time to truly know your OS. You also have to be the sick kind of bastard that enjoys figuring out problems. I've been struggling with DRI under FreeBSD for months now, and grinning my head off. In the meantime, everything else works wonderfully. FreeBSD isn't afraid of y
:) It's never going away because it has no predators. The userbase grows because it's good, not because of corporate sponsorship and good *cough* marketing *cough* press.
#2 Industry recognition
#3 Most linux binaries run faster under FreeBSD than they do on linux natively
#4 Fewer morons asking stupid questions they could find the answer to in 15 seconds with a google search
#5 simple
#6 Good, fast, filesystem (softupdates)
#7 FreeBSD has more stable hardware support thanks to better code (thanks to more stringent coding practices)
#8 I can play quake3 using linux compatibility mode while doing just about anything else, and get a 10-15ms ping improvement thanks to the best tcp/ip stack on the planet.
#9 ALL my hardware works because I compiled my kernel specifically for my hardware, instead of running some lazy precompiled crap that wastes memory.
#10 I can use burncd to burn to EIDE burners if I feel like it.
#11 FreeBSD runs the largest FTP site in the world. Gotta love that.
#12 Fewer kids.
As a friend of mine says,
Linux is Luke, FreeBSD is Yoda.
I've seen a ton of people migrate from windows, to Linux, to FreeBSD. I've seen a lot of people with short attention spans and no clue give up on Linux after one week and go back to windows. I've seen a lot of people whine about how hard FreeBSD is, then come up with as many other reasons they can to justify their lack of clue. I've never seen someone that's fallen in love with FreeBSD go back to Linux. Ever. Linux is this 'in' movement. It's the momentum that got slashdot started in the first place. This idea of a big movement taking over the world. Some of us just want a stable, secure, OS that isn't treated like a testbed for unreliable code. Something rock solid that does what we need. We aren't out to change the world. We aren't planning to 'dominate' the world. We think all that stuff is silly. We just like our stable, fast, safe OS. If enough people take interest in something (DRI for example) we'll get some people together and do it up. And you can be sure that it will be a stable, awesome solution. Good things take time. It is harder to get large companies to play ball when you are a freebsd developer, but not impossible. The nVidia drivers are on the way thanks to the good folks at http://nvidia.netexplorer.org/. Instead of going nuts trying to get every silly thing in the world that runs on linux compiled for FreeBSD, some smart person put the linuxator inside FreeBSD making it a moot point. It's nice running linux stuff with the benefit of better VM and tcp/ip. Things are done differently in this camp. Some of us are more than a little easy to troll, and that's because we honestly can't understand why so many misinformed people say such clueless things about our OS. It's painfully obvious that most of the FreeBSD haters have either:
A: never used it
B: tried but couldn't figure it out.
And yes, there is some eleetism. Big surprise. We know something you don't, and it makes us swell up a little. Clue doesn't come easy. I swear I'm not trolling, that's just how it is. It's how UNIX has been traditionally for a long long time. I did my time in the trenches, and got laid wide open by yoda level sysadmins. It's a great way to learn how computers really work. Don't knock it. And don't for one second try to tell me that you haven't taken an uppity attitude towards some 'clueless windows user' at some point. Thought that "if they were just smarter they'd know Linux is the way". Me and a lot of my FreeBSD using friends feel pretty much the same way about the average Linux user most of the time.
ou.
Flame away. At least I was dead honest.
Well,
AMI was nice enough to totally open up their specs to the FreeBSD developers a while ago. I'm happily using a MegaRAID 1400 right now. The driver support is incredible. It's rock solid stable. They probably chose FreeBSD because it's rock solid, reliable, free(as in BSD license), and their hardware loves it. Linux would have been a fine option, but they are already very friendly with the BSD crowd. The microsoft offering might have even been an option, but why bother. With FreeBSD they'll have automatic access to a huge talent pool if they need help, and it won't cost a dime. Plus they get the source code. Given all that, I think they made the smartest choice.
I've been waiting 3 weeks for items I won at auction. According to their policy, if they don't ship me my items within another week, they will be nice enough to "cancel my order for me". That kinda sucks because I got a great price on some drives. I wish they'd put things back the way they were before this whole egghead mess happened at all. I prefered www.onsale.com because I figured it was more reliable than Ebay. Now years later, I have more faith in 'joe ebay user' than I do in egghead. And Fry's can just light themselves on fire and throw themselves down a flight of stairs. I've never had anything but complete hell getting anything resembling service from them.
You put your page in your profile, so this is fair. :)
h tm
:)
http://home.earthlink.net/~admiralnixon/geek/OSR.
"However, Windows 95 sucks! That is right, it sucks. However, it is still entirely DOS based."
entirely dos based eh?
"One system crash a day is an average."
One system crash a year would bother me.
"When released it had a counted 63,000 known bugs! "
I don't think any variant of UNIX has ever been released with that many bugs.
"System restore so you can roll back your system to an earlier date if it becomes unstable."
Some of us take stability for granted I guess.
Now, lets check out your 'expert' review of the linux OS.
"Linux - This is a touchy subject among all fans of Open Source. This is a totally free operating system. It is just totally different from Windows. Do not be expecting an easy transition."
Somehow I don't see it being a very difficult transition for me.
"It was built back in 1991 and has evolved into kernel build 2.4. It is stable in a manner of speaking. Different kernel builds mean re-compiling (meaning un-stability"
Means 'un-stability'. You must be some Linux expert to say this. Usually recompiling adds a feature or improves performance. I think you are confusing recompiling with service packs.
"that is why ID Software stopped writing for Linux)."
Last time I checked, ID is backing Loki games and Doom 3 will be released for Linux at the same time as the Mac and Windows version. Care to comment on that?
"Not to many people know how to do that, in fact 98 percent of people have no idea what compiling is."
Including you it seems. 98 percent of most people have no idea what brain surgury is like, but that doesn't stop people from learning it.
"It does not run any Win16 or Win32 apps."
Really? The WINE developers would be amused to hear that.
"It has its own API. Its main mode of support is forums where many new users get shot down by the older techno-junkies."
You sound bitter. Tried running Linux and couldn't do it I bet. With your attitude, it's no wonder they shot you down.
"It is, how do I say, complex."
Complex for you perhaps. You seem to be yet another scared windows user that can't learn something new. I feel for you.
"One upside to it is that everything is free for it. You can download it right now if you want to. Its problems lie in an unstable UI. As in, there isn't any standard UI. Seriously!"
The hell you say! Having the choice between thousands of 'UI's' or being locked into one. Which do you think is better? How does having the choice to run whatever 'UI' I want make it unstable? Some people are afraid of choice it seems. Especially those that are used to letting microsoft think for them.
"There are many programs for many different UI's. My advice, if you don't know how to set up a home network or don't know what the word compile means... stay away..."
Using your logic, I advise you to stay away. We don't need you. However, if there are any windows users out there that would like to start thinking for themselves, Please consider one of the many free UNIX variants out there.
"there are 11 bin folders and you will get totally confused."
Naw, they won't. You did though didn't ya. Your page speaks tomes. I almost feel sorry for starting this little flame war with you. You truly have no idea what you are talking about. Heed my advice from the prior post. Please go learn something. The professionals that do use this site don't need your posts. Good luck to you.
You put your page in your profile, so this is fair. :)
h tm
:)
http://home.earthlink.net/~admiralnixon/geek/OSR.
"However, Windows 95 sucks! That is right, it sucks. However, it is still entirely DOS based."
entirely dos based eh?
"One system crash a day is an average."
One system crash a year would bother me.
"When released it had a counted 63,000 known bugs! "
I don't think any variant of UNIX has ever been released with that many bugs.
"System restore so you can roll back your system to an earlier date if it becomes unstable."
Some of us take stability for granted I guess.
Now, lets check out your 'expert' review of the linux OS.
"Linux - This is a touchy subject among all fans of Open Source. This is a totally free operating system. It is just totally different from Windows. Do not be expecting an easy transition."
Somehow I don't see it being a very difficult transition for me.
"It was built back in 1991 and has evolved into kernel build 2.4. It is stable in a manner of speaking. Different kernel builds mean re-compiling (meaning un-stability"
Means 'un-stability'. You must be some Linux expert to say this. Usually recompiling adds a feature or improves performance. I think you are confusing recompiling with service packs.
"that is why ID Software stopped writing for Linux)."
Last time I checked, ID is backing Loki games and Doom 3 will be released for Linux at the same time as the Mac and Windows version. Care to comment on that?
"Not to many people know how to do that, in fact 98 percent of people have no idea what compiling is."
Including you it seems. 98 percent of most people have no idea what brain surgury is like, but that doesn't stop people from learning it.
"It does not run any Win16 or Win32 apps."
Really? The WINE developers would be amused to hear that.
"It has its own API. Its main mode of support is forums where many new users get shot down by the older techno-junkies."
You sound bitter. Tried running Linux and couldn't do it I bet. With your attitude, it's no wonder they shot you down.
"It is, how do I say, complex."
Complex for you perhaps. You seem to be yet another scared windows user that can't learn something new. I feel for you.
"One upside to it is that everything is free for it. You can download it right now if you want to. Its problems lie in an unstable UI. As in, there isn't any standard UI. Seriously!"
The hell you say! Having the choice between thousands of 'UI's' or being locked into one. Which do you think is better? How does having the choice to run whatever 'UI' I want make it unstable? Some people are afraid of choice it seems. Especially those that are used to letting microsoft think for them.
"There are many programs for many different UI's. My advice, if you don't know how to set up a home network or don't know what the word compile means... stay away..."
Using your logic, I advise you to stay away. We don't need you. However, if there are any windows users out there that would like to start thinking for themselves, Please consider one of the many free UNIX variants out there.
"there are 11 bin folders and you will get totally confused."
Naw, they won't. You did though didn't ya. Your page speaks tomes. I almost feel sorry for starting this little flame war with you. You truly have no idea what you are talking about. Heed my advice from the prior post. Please go learn something. The professionals that do use this site don't need your posts. Good luck to you.
You put your page in your profile, so this is fair. :)
h tm
:)
http://home.earthlink.net/~admiralnixon/geek/OSR.
"However, Windows 95 sucks! That is right, it sucks. However, it is still entirely DOS based."
entirely dos based eh?
"One system crash a day is an average."
One system crash a year would bother me.
"When released it had a counted 63,000 known bugs! "
I don't think any variant of UNIX has ever been released with that many bugs.
"System restore so you can roll back your system to an earlier date if it becomes unstable."
Some of us take stability for granted I guess.
Now, lets check out your 'expert' review of the linux OS.
"Linux - This is a touchy subject among all fans of Open Source. This is a totally free operating system. It is just totally different from Windows. Do not be expecting an easy transition."
Somehow I don't see it being a very difficult transition for me.
"It was built back in 1991 and has evolved into kernel build 2.4. It is stable in a manner of speaking. Different kernel builds mean re-compiling (meaning un-stability"
Means 'un-stability'. You must be some Linux expert to say this. Usually recompiling adds a feature or improves performance. I think you are confusing recompiling with service packs.
"that is why ID Software stopped writing for Linux)."
Last time I checked, ID is backing Loki games and Doom 3 will be released for Linux at the same time as the Mac and Windows version. Care to comment on that?
"Not to many people know how to do that, in fact 98 percent of people have no idea what compiling is."
Including you it seems. 98 percent of most people have no idea what brain surgury is like, but that doesn't stop people from learning it.
"It does not run any Win16 or Win32 apps."
Really? The WINE developers would be amused to hear that.
"It has its own API. Its main mode of support is forums where many new users get shot down by the older techno-junkies."
You sound bitter. Tried running Linux and couldn't do it I bet. With your attitude, it's no wonder they shot you down.
"It is, how do I say, complex."
Complex for you perhaps. You seem to be yet another scared windows user that can't learn something new. I feel for you.
"One upside to it is that everything is free for it. You can download it right now if you want to. Its problems lie in an unstable UI. As in, there isn't any standard UI. Seriously!"
The hell you say! Having the choice between thousands of 'UI's' or being locked into one. Which do you think is better? How does having the choice to run whatever 'UI' I want make it unstable? Some people are afraid of choice it seems. Especially those that are used to letting microsoft think for them.
"There are many programs for many different UI's. My advice, if you don't know how to set up a home network or don't know what the word compile means... stay away..."
Using your logic, I advise you to stay away. We don't need you. However, if there are any windows users out there that would like to start thinking for themselves, Please consider one of the many free UNIX variants out there.
"there are 11 bin folders and you will get totally confused."
Naw, they won't. You did though didn't ya. Your page speaks tomes. I almost feel sorry for starting this little flame war with you. You truly have no idea what you are talking about. Heed my advice from the prior post. Please go learn something. The professionals that do use this site don't need your posts. Good luck to you.