Let's push your argument about not needing for the desktop aside for a moment -- what about analytical work that outclasses portable devices? Think sketching up a simulation on your Gphone and then throwing it to the amazon could for number crunching.
That's unpossible! But seriously, there are enough good things to take from Solaris and merge into linux, that some purists might no longer call it linux, or to be fair, it wouldn't be the same linux we know today. Interesting times.
I anticipate developing apps for the phone and have purchased the dev G1. What if a) Twidroid (or a better competitor) goes paid, and b) I need to test live integration between Twidroid and my app? Google just told me I can't be trusted to do that lest I steal twidroid. Ironic, considering as a paid app developer I'm probably very sensitive to piracy and the *least likely person to pirate another developer's paid app.*
Just another reason for Cisco to opensource IOS and sell their hardware and service,instead. IOS has been famously pirated along with its hardware by Chinese knock-offs for years now. Might as well finish the transition. Then again I'd like to see Mac OSX opensourced, too, so it may be something in the water.:-)
You are of course correct. The media providers similarly fought cheap distribution of movies - VHS was going to kill the movie theatre. Then DVDs were going to kill the incredibly lucrative sale-of-movies industry (the one the MPAA didn't want) because you'll only ever sell one copy of a movie. Except of course until HD-DVD and Bluray came out and people wanted a better copy of the same movie. In fact bluray and HDDVD are a perfect example of something incrementally that gives more control to the media people, costs more and doesn't offer much more to the consumer in benefit. Hence the tepid adoption. What's my point? The content providers are already suppliers of streamed content, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, yet. Right now we have torrents (out of the control but highly adopted), and hulu (in their control, but not as widely used). Isn't it obvious that these content providers should be working with cable companies to form a streaming hub/spoke system so that their content is digitally packaged and forwarded? IPTV FTW, baby.
Been a UNIX sysadmin since 1984. What's on my desktop? Ubuntu. Why? My wife uses it and it works just fine for her. It replaced a Vista desktop and frankly Ubuntu makes much better use of the hardware. She's never installed a package and she never will, but when she docks her camera it works. When she docks a USB stick it works. Same for Youtube video, etc. It all just works. So I share your sentiment. My firewall / server is openbsd. I can ssh into it from my G1 phone. Eventually I'll set up VPN for same. The OpenBSD guys may ride roughshod over newbies but there stuff is rock solid.
I'm not being cynical in any way when I say I spent the last 1/2 hour checking out Fishworks due to the interesting analytics screen he used during the video. It occurred to me just now that's some (whether intentional or not) pretty effective viral marketing. LOL. The bad news is it appears Sun hasn't released Analytics as part of the base OpenSolaris distribution just yet. Too bad. I could just as easily use it to look at Veritas storage, assuming Veritas played nice with DTRACE. It'll be interesting to see what this looks like when Sun uses this on top of iSCSI served SAN disks instead of NAS. Don't know about you, but I don't park database filesystems on NAS. Perhaps that is outmoded / old-school thinking but that's the way it is.
Why would you need a camera when an RFID gun can just ping all the things within range? One RFID gun in the fridge and you are done. Of course it does nothing for things like "how full are you, Orange Juice?" and "how old are you, Sour Cream?" but I'll leave those details to the implementer. handwave. handwave.
Fun and interesting theory. I've noticed one of my really old XP installs is "busy (unresponsive or laggy) when it should be idle" for a while now. I encapsulated it into a virtualbox vm on a linux machine, and created a firewall rule to deny and log all direct internet access requests. Proxy access to a limit set of sites is available on squid, which also logs all traffic. It's never actually tried to go anywhere but vendor sites for software updates, but I have my eye on it none-the-less. It could just be it's a really, really old install of XP.
The great thing about moving it off to virtualbox, and parking the image on ZFS is it'll far outlive the hardware it was originally installed upon. In fact it already has which was the genesis of this project. It takes some effort to get XP moved to virtualbox (it really helps if you have a record of your original MAC address), but once XP is reregistered with the new hardware profile it's effortless to move that VDI around between vm server machines. As flash storage becomes cheaper and cheaper, I fully expect services to spring up which do all the hard work of snapping off a copy of your old desktop and letting you run XP on XP, XP on Linux or Windows 7 in case you ever need it.
To tie it back to virri and worms it makes a nice forensics tool, particularly if you use ZFS snapshotting. You can always roll the FS back external to the VM. Wouldn't be interesting to dust off an old XP VM in 5 years, apply the latest antivirus software and see what's been lurking?
This is why my openbsd box is called 'linksys'. LOL. Might as well have some fun with a little misdirection. Sure enough people try to log in as admin, but rarely root.
As a dyed in the wool nerd, I've been using MythTV for a while now. But its.21 user interface (prior to update in the slashdot story) leaves a lot to be desired even for TV watching. Try cancelling a scheduled recording sometime and getting the damn tuner back, for instance. It certainly has MCE beat to hell and back with its separation of front and back ends. Yeah you can do with MCE it on an xbox. So what. I don't own an xbox. Or a windows machine for that matter right now, lol. So MythTV has Windows beat for no vendor lock in. But it just doesn't pass the wife acceptance factor test for intuitive user interface.
Cable TV watching has bigger problems, however. Many cable companies gladly drop VCT information, and Myth and MCE's scanners can't find channels without that info. They both advise you add channels by hand to fix it. You can go vendor lock in and get a cablecard solution - tivo or mce+cablecard, both of which are pricey. Unfortunately open-source PVR is a very niche market. The mythtv guys are to be commended for that they've done, but at the end of the day I'll probably go back to satellite just because their PVR doesn't require me to script up stuff for the wife to restart mythTV when it isn't happy.
But why doesn't Nintendo just license the ScummVM and drop it as a small $ purchase on their online store? That way anyone who has an old scumm game can play it for free (by copying it to the SD card), and anyone else can buy a copy via the store. Seems like win/win for everyone. I know there are hacks to enable mplayer, and DVD playback and those are separate issues, probably more due to licensing the underlying patents for various compression technologies than anything.
OpenBSD -- It's what is on my firewall and should be on yours. My only complaint about OpenBSD? I can't afford to contribute enough $$ to get listed in the liner notes anymore.
I've never understood this particular attack against the Wii. The Wii shares plenty of titles with the other consoles that adults play.
Then again the only person I know who says this regularly really just wants everyone to play the XBOX 360 with him because he has no social life, no friends and nothing better to do.
LOL. You aren't kidding. The last time we had snow and ice in Houston, TX they just shut the city down. Safer than a) Natives trying to learn to drive in the stuff, and b) all the snowbirds who've moved down for jobs relearning.
It's funny you mention hurricane evacuation and electric cars. I understand you mean fully electric cars, of course. Having said that there were plenty of stories about people driving prius' to points north during the Katrina evacuation. Interestingly those were the ones who were able to run their AC and stay in relative comfort despite in some cases spending more than 24 hours in their car. Apparently you can just run everything from the batteries, and when they get low run the combustion engine just long enough to charge batteries. I saw one person mention getting to Austin in this manner on 1/2 of a tank of gas. Is it more efficient still to charge the batteries from your household power? Sure. But the true hybrid (gas+electric) seems like the safest way out of the specific situation you describe.
As a current user of both analog and digital over the air tuning devices, let me say that's not really true.
In the digital world my experience with several different devices is your signal decays into macroblocking, eventually goes into full frame freeze mode before simply giving you a "No signal available" display. This is using Hauppauge, Fusion and SiliconDust tuners on both Windows Media Center on XP and Vista, and MythTV under Ubuntu Linux.
In fact good old OTA will probably bring back the rotor antenna as people may need to point an antenna with directional lobes at the appropriate tower. Even here in Houston, TX with something like a Silver Sensor OTA reception required some hand tuning per station and most of our broadcasters are in the same antenna farm.
Both rides were fun. I see lots of people posting about the classic trek ride with a reproduction NCC-1701-? bridge, but there was a second Borg themed ride where you sat in half-circle theatre and watched a 3D film instead of taking a shuttle ride on a motion simulator. Just like on the shuttle, the best place was on the front row but doubly so for the 3D ride as you could feel the triggered FX: jets of cold, moist air. There were also seat "pokers" that jammed you in the ribs as you were assimilated.
Fun and very sorry to see it go. Also the price tag was a bit steep, but they did let you do the ride as many times as you wanted for that price. So it wasn't too bad if you had the patience.
It did mention the cap is for "residential" accounts. For another $10-$20/mo you can flip to Comcast commercial and voila no bandwidth caps. My guess is Comcast is going to get a flurry of "commercial" subscribers, and achieve what they wanted all along -- to jack up the costs of a truly unlimited account, and to cap everyone else.
The reason to casually encrypt phone calls or any other data is to prevent the casual snooping of same.
Look at this way -- the barrier to entry for snooping your data is very low, and getting lower with each new executive order. On the other hand the barrier to entry on snooping your data can be set arbitrarily high; you can choose anything from 56 bit single-DES to 2048 bit RC4. The effort required to casually snoop you for no other reason has now exploded. It was fear of people adopting this strategy and blocking the casual snooping that inspired the clipper chip. It was the people's laziness, ignorance or both towards protecting their privacy and their fear of terror that has eroded any expectation of privacy now, which is truly unfortunate.
If we had an expectation of privacy in this country, I think things would be very different now with regards to all the second order effects such as identity theft.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's push your argument about not needing for the desktop aside for a moment --
what about analytical work that outclasses portable devices? Think sketching up
a simulation on your Gphone and then throwing it to the amazon could for number crunching.
That's unpossible! But seriously, there are enough good things to take from Solaris and merge into linux, that some purists might no longer call it linux, or to be fair, it wouldn't be the same linux we know today. Interesting times.
I anticipate developing apps for the phone and have purchased the dev G1. What if a) Twidroid (or a better competitor) goes paid,
and b) I need to test live integration between Twidroid and my app? Google just told me I can't be trusted to do that lest
I steal twidroid. Ironic, considering as a paid app developer I'm probably very sensitive to piracy and the *least likely person
to pirate another developer's paid app.*
Just another reason for Cisco to opensource IOS and sell their hardware and service,instead. :-)
IOS has been famously pirated along with its hardware by Chinese knock-offs for years now.
Might as well finish the transition. Then again I'd like to see Mac OSX opensourced, too,
so it may be something in the water.
You are of course correct. The media providers similarly fought cheap distribution of movies - VHS was going to kill the movie theatre.
Then DVDs were going to kill the incredibly lucrative sale-of-movies industry (the one the MPAA didn't want) because you'll
only ever sell one copy of a movie. Except of course until HD-DVD and Bluray came out and people wanted a better copy of the same movie.
In fact bluray and HDDVD are a perfect example of something incrementally that gives more control to the media people, costs more
and doesn't offer much more to the consumer in benefit. Hence the tepid adoption. What's my point? The content providers are already
suppliers of streamed content, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, yet. Right now we have torrents (out of the control but highly
adopted), and hulu (in their control, but not as widely used). Isn't it obvious that these content providers should be working
with cable companies to form a streaming hub/spoke system so that their content is digitally packaged and forwarded? IPTV FTW, baby.
No problem, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, of course:
http://newsfeedresearcher.com/data/articles_t5/macs-trojan-users.html
Of course that's for a mac, but you can google it yourself.
Been a UNIX sysadmin since 1984. What's on my desktop? Ubuntu. Why? My wife uses it and it works just fine for her.
It replaced a Vista desktop and frankly Ubuntu makes much better use of the hardware. She's never installed a package
and she never will, but when she docks her camera it works. When she docks a USB stick it works. Same for Youtube video, etc.
It all just works. So I share your sentiment. My firewall / server is openbsd. I can ssh into it from my G1 phone. Eventually
I'll set up VPN for same. The OpenBSD guys may ride roughshod over newbies but there stuff is rock solid.
Not surprisingly, some of the TA's where were far better educators than the professors they worked for.
Fixed that for you, and please refer to the dictionary entry for irony.
No one yet has suggested that you bring your own PC and wireless hub!
Think of the all the crap you could sell!
1) E-mail addresses
2) Nethack
3) IRC
4) Blogs
If you wanna go high tech get a pico cell and sell everyone SMS access so they can text each
other or twit (via your twitter) clone.
Just because you aren't addicted to the net is no reason to not sell access to your simulacrum.
I'm not being cynical in any way when I say I spent the last 1/2 hour checking out Fishworks due to the interesting analytics screen he used during the video. It occurred to me just now that's some (whether intentional or not) pretty effective viral marketing. LOL. The bad news is it appears Sun hasn't released Analytics as part of the base OpenSolaris distribution just yet. Too bad. I could just as easily use it to look at Veritas storage, assuming Veritas played nice with DTRACE. It'll be interesting to see what this looks like when Sun uses this on top of iSCSI served SAN disks instead of NAS. Don't know about you, but I don't park database filesystems on NAS. Perhaps that is outmoded / old-school thinking but that's the way it is.
Eh, really? You mean except all the people who cut their teeth on UNIX before Linux was around, right?
Why would you need a camera when an RFID gun can just ping all the things within range?
One RFID gun in the fridge and you are done. Of course it does nothing for things like "how full are you, Orange Juice?"
and "how old are you, Sour Cream?" but I'll leave those details to the implementer. handwave. handwave.
Fun and interesting theory. I've noticed one of my really old XP installs is "busy (unresponsive or laggy) when it should be idle" for a while now.
I encapsulated it into a virtualbox vm on a linux machine, and created a firewall rule to deny and log all direct internet access requests.
Proxy access to a limit set of sites is available on squid, which also logs all traffic. It's never actually tried to go anywhere but vendor sites
for software updates, but I have my eye on it none-the-less. It could just be it's a really, really old install of XP.
The great thing about moving it off to virtualbox, and parking the image on ZFS is it'll far outlive the hardware it was originally installed upon.
In fact it already has which was the genesis of this project. It takes some effort to get XP moved to virtualbox (it really helps if you
have a record of your original MAC address), but once XP is reregistered with the new hardware profile it's effortless to move that VDI around
between vm server machines. As flash storage becomes cheaper and cheaper, I fully expect services to spring up which do all the hard
work of snapping off a copy of your old desktop and letting you run XP on XP, XP on Linux or Windows 7 in case you ever need it.
To tie it back to virri and worms it makes a nice forensics tool, particularly if you use ZFS snapshotting. You can always roll the FS back
external to the VM. Wouldn't be interesting to dust off an old XP VM in 5 years, apply the latest antivirus software and see what's been lurking?
This is why my openbsd box is called 'linksys'. LOL. Might as well have some
fun with a little misdirection. Sure enough people try to log in as admin, but rarely root.
As a dyed in the wool nerd, I've been using MythTV for a while now. But its .21 user interface (prior to
update in the slashdot story) leaves a lot to be desired even for TV watching. Try cancelling a scheduled
recording sometime and getting the damn tuner back, for instance. It certainly has MCE beat to hell and back
with its separation of front and back ends. Yeah you can do with MCE it on an xbox. So what. I don't own an xbox.
Or a windows machine for that matter right now, lol. So MythTV has Windows beat for no vendor lock in. But
it just doesn't pass the wife acceptance factor test for intuitive user interface.
Cable TV watching has bigger problems, however. Many cable companies gladly drop VCT information, and Myth and MCE's
scanners can't find channels without that info. They both advise you add channels by hand to fix it.
You can go vendor lock in and get a cablecard solution - tivo or mce+cablecard, both of which are pricey.
Unfortunately open-source PVR is a very niche market. The mythtv guys are to be commended for that they've done,
but at the end of the day I'll probably go back to satellite just because their PVR doesn't require me to
script up stuff for the wife to restart mythTV when it isn't happy.
But why doesn't Nintendo just license the ScummVM and drop it as a small $ purchase on their online store?
That way anyone who has an old scumm game can play it for free (by copying it to the SD card), and anyone else
can buy a copy via the store. Seems like win/win for everyone. I know there are hacks to enable mplayer, and DVD playback
and those are separate issues, probably more due to licensing the underlying patents for various compression technologies
than anything.
OpenBSD -- It's what is on my firewall and should be on yours. My only complaint about OpenBSD?
I can't afford to contribute enough $$ to get listed in the liner notes anymore.
I've never understood this particular attack against the Wii. The Wii shares plenty of titles
with the other consoles that adults play.
Then again the only person I know who says this regularly really just wants everyone to play
the XBOX 360 with him because he has no social life, no friends and nothing better to do.
LOL. You aren't kidding. The last time we had snow and ice in Houston, TX they just shut the city down.
Safer than a) Natives trying to learn to drive in the stuff, and b) all the snowbirds who've moved down
for jobs relearning.
It's funny you mention hurricane evacuation and electric cars. I understand you mean fully electric cars, of course.
Having said that there were plenty of stories about people driving prius' to points north during the Katrina evacuation.
Interestingly those were the ones who were able to run their AC and stay in relative comfort despite in some cases
spending more than 24 hours in their car. Apparently you can just run everything from the batteries, and when they
get low run the combustion engine just long enough to charge batteries. I saw one person mention getting to Austin
in this manner on 1/2 of a tank of gas. Is it more efficient still to charge the batteries from your household power?
Sure. But the true hybrid (gas+electric) seems like the safest way out of the specific situation you describe.
As a current user of both analog and digital over the air tuning devices, let me say that's not really true.
In the digital world my experience with several different devices is your signal decays into macroblocking,
eventually goes into full frame freeze mode before simply giving you a "No signal available" display. This is
using Hauppauge, Fusion and SiliconDust tuners on both Windows Media Center on XP and Vista, and MythTV under Ubuntu Linux.
In fact good old OTA will probably bring back the rotor antenna as people may need to point an antenna with directional
lobes at the appropriate tower. Even here in Houston, TX with something like a Silver Sensor OTA reception required some
hand tuning per station and most of our broadcasters are in the same antenna farm.
If the dude gets internet access, he's not going to have much else to do.
Both rides were fun. I see lots of people posting about the classic trek ride with a
reproduction NCC-1701-? bridge, but there was a second Borg themed ride where you sat in half-circle
theatre and watched a 3D film instead of taking a shuttle ride on a motion simulator. Just like on
the shuttle, the best place was on the front row but doubly so for the 3D ride as you could feel the
triggered FX: jets of cold, moist air. There were also seat "pokers" that jammed you in the ribs
as you were assimilated.
Fun and very sorry to see it go. Also the price tag was a bit steep, but they did let you do the ride
as many times as you wanted for that price. So it wasn't too bad if you had the patience.
It did mention the cap is for "residential" accounts. For another $10-$20/mo you can flip to Comcast commercial
and voila no bandwidth caps. My guess is Comcast is going to get a flurry of "commercial" subscribers, and
achieve what they wanted all along -- to jack up the costs of a truly unlimited account, and to cap everyone else.
The reason to casually encrypt phone calls or any other data is to prevent the casual snooping of same.
Look at this way -- the barrier to entry for snooping your data is very low, and getting lower with each
new executive order. On the other hand the barrier to entry on snooping your data can be set arbitrarily high;
you can choose anything from 56 bit single-DES to 2048 bit RC4. The effort required to casually snoop you for
no other reason has now exploded. It was fear of people adopting this strategy and blocking the casual snooping
that inspired the clipper chip. It was the people's laziness, ignorance or both towards protecting their privacy
and their fear of terror that has eroded any expectation of privacy now, which is truly unfortunate.
If we had an expectation of privacy in this country, I think things would be very different now with regards to
all the second order effects such as identity theft.