And yet... Linux and the thousands of other open source projects that make a usable desktop remain Free, while the others do not.
Even if I concede that open source clones of proprietary software are often inferior (which is certainly not a given), I'm ok with that given the benefits. If you *need* pivot tables in Excel or the bazillion features in Photoshop, then spend the money for your single license, possbily DRM'ed, binary-only product that can only be installed and run on a single OS a single hardware platform. More power to you! Isn't choice wonderful?
I, along with many others, choose cost-free software that affords us the freedom to copy it indefinitely, install it on whatever OS/hardware we have, and tweak and fiddle with it without fear of DMCA violations or SPA audits.
Your snide "not quite as good" remark totally ignores the benefits beyond technical features.
The command sequence I listed earlier was meant for FreeBSD, which is what I use. So far as I know, the only UNIX variants to have a/usr/ports tree are FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Calm down -- I was just ribbing. Nobody's suggesting you use Windows.
"But.. a lot of people sell things at casual sales, barter services, and do things online without paying tax. It's wrong..."
Yeah, it's *illegal* in the strictest sense, but wrong?!? Taxing barter particularly chaps my hide, as actual currency isn't exchanged. It's not like people who don't pay sales/income taxes for sales of this nature aren't contributing to taxes via sales/VAT taxes further down stream. Sure, the feds won't see any of it, except maybe on gas taxes (at least here in the U.S.), but then again, money spent at retail gets taxed by the feds anyway (taxes of employees and the corporation itself).
In reality, the money made "under the table" by these women (or any other "underground economy" transaction) always gets taxed downstream anyway. I truly don't see what the big deal is.
"Land o' Goshen!" stammered the bull-dyke prostitute as the bung-hole stuffing drug sucker diddled her muscular buds and hammered his spouting earthmover into her hungry paradise valley.
Same effect without all the poetic subtlety of a more prudish era! Everything old is new again. The creators of both programs obviously had too much time on their hands.
I use FreeBSD/amd64, and Wine will not work on that platform due to a missing kernel syscall. As I said in my first post, I installed the FreeBSD Linux emulation layer (aka "linuxulator") to use the Linux flash9 package as a plugin for the native Firefox 3 port, and that works well enough, even if it is a *huge* memory hog (but I have 4GB, so I don't care too much).
That's not my problem. I don't even own a TV, so it's not like I can't live without Fringe and Terminator. If the rest of the TV junkies want to pay for my freeloading because they can't find something interesting to do in the absence of TV programming, more power to them.
The content providers are already catching on. Knight Rider is one big Ford ad. Terminator is a Dodge ad. And Fringe is a Dell ad. It's not too conspicuous, so all is good for now. If the shows are really interesting, I may even invest in the DVD sets once the series has run its course. The networks make a ton from merchadise licensing: that cool Spaceballs Flamethrower, CSI Forensic kits for kids, sountracks, Valentines Day cards, and branded folders for school-kids. I can't go anywhere without having to endure the sight of fraking Hannah Montana tripe, so don't tell me merchandising isn't making someone some major coin!
But I won't tolerate incessant bliverts for the sake of pimping my eyeballs to the networks. I know what I want/need in my purchasing habits; I don't need them pre-programming me with brand recognition. Sure, that doesn't help Hulu... yet. In the future, when more people ditch the absurd habit of actually paying directly for cable and satellite (and watching ads, as a bonus!), the content producers will be starving for exposure, and *they* will be the ones paying the likes of Hulu to promote their precious franchises.
Ads are evil. They really are. There are other more ethical ways to make money from content creation, and these companies will eventually have to face that particular reality.
To be fair (and it is a gripe of mine -- see previous post), the amd64+nvidia problem is in FreeBSD's hands. The FreeBSD/amd64 kernel lacks a syscall required by nvidia. Same problem with Wine, too (different syscall, I assume). I'm guessing that it's either too difficult to add these syscalls into the kernel or the developers have more important issues to work on.
I agree on the virtualization thing, though. Qemu is ok for some things, but more mature VM software would be very useful for me, and is the only reason that I may switch back to Linux in the foreseeable future.
If you tune it correctly for i386, it's pretty damned stable. Without tuning on the amd64 arch, it's damned stable. After all, ZFS was developed for 64-bit Solaris, which, by all accounts, runs better than on 32-bit Solaris. And this is with the ZFS v6 available on 7.1 and the soon-to-be-released 7.2 -- v13 is slated for 8.0 (May or June of this year), and it's reported to be *much* better.
As someone who's run FreeBSD for their dedicated desktop for close to 5 years now, my only gripes are this:
Lack of more cutting edge virtualization software. At this point, Qemu is the only real option. Right now, you have to jump through hoops to get a FreeBSD *guest* under Zen, so being a Zen host is probably out of the question.
Lack of 3D acceleration, especially in the amd64 world. I had to scavenge a thrift-store "Radeon 7500 Series (RV200)" (as listed in pciconf) card to get any hardware acceleration, after years of using a newer Nvidia card. (nouveau isn't quite there). Granted, this can be more generally chalked up to a lack of open source drivers across the board (Hey, Nvidia! I'm buying ATI for my next card. You can stuff those binary blobs where the sun don't shine!)
Lack of native "shiny" proprietary software, such as Flash (and commercial games). In fact, I *just* finally gave in and installed the Linux emulation layer in order to install the flash9 plugin so I could check out all the "hey check this out..." links friends and family are always sending me.
I love FreeBSD, though. There have many times when I downloaded and and burned a new Linux distro CD with the intent of moving back to Linux (5 years prior to my jump to FreeBSD, I ran Redhat or Fedora on my desktop). However, when I tried the live CD, I just couldn't bring myself to go back, even with the few shortcomings I highlight above.
While the mating of Debian and FreeBSD is cool for its own sake, I really don't see how someone from either camp would be happy with the result. If you like the cutting edge hardware support, virtualization, filesystems, and software support of Linux, you'll miss them in FreeBSD. If you enjoy the Zen-like simplicity of the base FreeBSD OS (including its rock solid nature) and the "ports" system, you'll be left wanting with even the best Linux solution (which, in my opinion, would probably be Debian). I applaud the effort, but I doubt it will have much adoption in the long run.
Yeah, and I'd like a full-service gas station at every fracking corner so I'm not required to learn how to pump gas.
The the hell is wrong with people?!? Not everyone in the 80's with PCs were early-adopter whiz-kids. You remember the 80s, right? The pre-GUI-centric days of the PC where people had to actually type in commands to get shit done? Where the hottest programs of the day were Lotus 123 and Wordstar and Wordperfect that required byzantine key combinations to do half the interesting stuff? If Granny could figure out Word Perfect 20 years ago while being a secretary at the local elementary school she sure as hell can deal with popping open an xterm and typing a few "apt-get" commands today.
We see phrases today about people being more "technology savvy"? Give me a break. Pressing "Play" on the Blu-Ray player, being addicted to WoW, or running around like a pompous ass with a bluetooth phone dongle hanging from your ear at the 7-11 does not make people "savvy" at anything, except knowing how to fashionably piss away their money.
An "apt-get" or "portage" one-liner or two typed into a command prompt is no more effort than going to a web site, finding the downloads page, clicking a button, and then running the installer with all its options to choose from and EULA to read. In fact, the typical command line package manager is LESS work for the end user.
I've had it, man. I'm totally fed up. I've been rooting for the Linux underdog since the late 90s. No more. Linux just is what it is, which is a kick-ass operating system for the PC and various other devices. Chasing the "Year of the Desktop" is a fool's errand for Linux and other open source efforts. Come *ON* people, quit making excuses for the users. If Linux were the the only OS in the mass market, people would be doing wonderfully, just like in the 80s when MS-DOS was king. The truth is, people don't want it. Period. They like what they have (Windows mostly, with some OS-X sprinkled around), and fear change. At least Linux is gaining traction in the netbook market, where at least some people will inevitably cut their teeth on the OS and become set in their ways.
There is simply no point in these articles, as all they do is highlight not only how lazy the end user has become, but how tech-oriented people not only expect, but condone, such laziness. It's really sad when you think about it. To hell with the lowest common denominator. Let them sink or swim on their own. They truly don't deserve the fruits of open source developers' labors unless they're willing to roll up their sleeves once in a while.
So the whole concept of the Renaissance Man is lost on our modern world?
I get where you're coming from, but sometimes being exposed to something is just plain good for you. I can't count the number of adults I have met who have memories of absolutely hating their piano lessons as kids but are so thankful for them as adults even though they don't (or can't) play any more.
As a homeschooling parent, I agree that we should allow kids to focus most of their energies on topics that interest them or skills they have a natural knack for. However, I think that some brief compulsory exposure to some topics/skills is ultimately helpful in the end.
Google wood gas stoves for plans and vendors. Most require a battery (or something) to power the down-draft fan, but there are plans for stoves not needing a fan. Several videos on the Tube about their use and making your own. That, and "rocket stoves", which are cool, too (I've got a half-assed prototype of one of these on my back porch right now, and it's fairly effective).
So? My DSL cannot support the bandwidth needed for the best quality, so the only option I really had was to batch-download shows on my FreeBSD machine and then copy them to the family entertainment PC. I don't see what the big deal is. It's nearly impossible to dis-arm the DRM -- Windows Media Player had to validate the media files anyway. I figured I was saving NF bandwidth by not d/l'ing the same movies or episodes multiple times.
This new development sucks. My account is on hold at the moment, mostly due to limited cash flow until the tax bill is paid. I've been getting by w/ Hulu in the interim. After hearing this, I just may call them and cancel permanently, telling them exactly why.
If anything, they really should start becoming *less* restrictive w/ the media, not more.
Apparently, bash's own compatibility mode leaves a lot to be desired. There's no end to people on FreeBSD lists who bitch about porting some script from Linux, to have someone point out that/bin/sh on Linux 99.9% of the time equals/bin/bash in compatibility mode. Best to code for strict Bourne shell syntax even if you use Linux, since you can be reasonably assured that it will work nicely on other systems. Not sure what the de-facto open source Bourne shell clone is. Perhaps "ash" is close enough, as the various BSD's use it (or a modification of it) as the system/bin/sh.
This past holiday season, my local Wal Mart had an entire end-cap of 2GB (or was it 4GB) black Kingston DataTraveler sticks for $5/each. I'm sure in large enough quantity, distributing compressed movies in this fashion could be profitable.
Imagine collections of hundreds of decent-quality movies on USB sticks (or, even better, mini-SD) fitting in a cigar box? I could see myself paying $2.50 to *maybe* $5 per film in this format, assuming the Netflix high-quality stream format (they weigh in at around 1000MB per hour in size). When I need some mindless background entertainment, I can deal with the lower quality. If there's a movie or series that I want to watch over and over again in DVD+ quality, I'd splurge for the better format.
More format options would be a win for all parties involved. Seems to be working for the music market. I just wish the music distributors would lower their prices. I'd love to jump on the Amazon MP3 offerings, but not until a full album purchase is no more than 50% the price of the physical CD. This $1/track offering (on average) is still way too high.
I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that tax filers were required to keep records for something like 10 years. Or maybe it's just a common practice recommendation for the odd-ball chance you get audited. I don't know for sure. However, if this is true, then there is precedent set for The Man telling you to keep records.
And just what kind of information should be logged? DNS queries? DHCP leases (per the headline)? All stream/socket connections? There are a million permutations of potentially useful data that can be logged by a router, and probably just as many ways to flood, obfuscate, or otherwise make those logs useless. Random MAC address at boot-up, anyone?
If this passes, maybe I should I should invest in CAT5 cable vendors, or companies who make ethernet-over-electrical-outlet devices. I'll be damned if I'm keeping any logs in my home for government tracking -- I'll wire the whole damned house if I need to.
I just can't see how this law would work in practice, especially for the home user. Very poorly, is my guess. Juts more useless think-of-the-children feel-good pandering legislation to add yet more mandatory time to sentences that (in many cases) are already way too harsh. Oh yeah, the perennially-strapped-for-cash FBI needs more cash for their little pedo porn database.
The HPV ad bugs me. Having said that... ads, by design, cause anxiety and try to jar you into paying attention to them. They totally disrupt the viewing experience, in that they can totally bump your frame of mind out of the program you were watching. A nearly-blank screen without audio is neutral, and allows one to more easily slip into the show again.
Ads? On Hulu? Running Firefox w/ adblock will get you a black screen for 30 seconds with poor Hulu telling you how they can't display a word from their sponsors. Still a touch irritating, but much less so than true ads.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet... Linux and the thousands of other open source projects that make a usable desktop remain Free, while the others do not.
Even if I concede that open source clones of proprietary software are often inferior (which is certainly not a given), I'm ok with that given the benefits. If you *need* pivot tables in Excel or the bazillion features in Photoshop, then spend the money for your single license, possbily DRM'ed, binary-only product that can only be installed and run on a single OS a single hardware platform. More power to you! Isn't choice wonderful?
I, along with many others, choose cost-free software that affords us the freedom to copy it indefinitely, install it on whatever OS/hardware we have, and tweak and fiddle with it without fear of DMCA violations or SPA audits.
Your snide "not quite as good" remark totally ignores the benefits beyond technical features.
The command sequence I listed earlier was meant for FreeBSD, which is what I use. So far as I know, the only UNIX variants to have a /usr/ports tree are FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Calm down -- I was just ribbing. Nobody's suggesting you use Windows.
"Gentoo, muthafucka"
Here's a quarter, kid. *ting!* Go get yourself a real OS. ;-)
"But.. a lot of people sell things at casual sales, barter services, and do things online without paying tax. It's wrong..."
Yeah, it's *illegal* in the strictest sense, but wrong?!? Taxing barter particularly chaps my hide, as actual currency isn't exchanged. It's not like people who don't pay sales/income taxes for sales of this nature aren't contributing to taxes via sales/VAT taxes further down stream. Sure, the feds won't see any of it, except maybe on gas taxes (at least here in the U.S.), but then again, money spent at retail gets taxed by the feds anyway (taxes of employees and the corporation itself).
In reality, the money made "under the table" by these women (or any other "underground economy" transaction) always gets taxed downstream anyway. I truly don't see what the big deal is.
Meh! Check *this* out:
cd /usr/ports/games/sex ; make install clean ; sex
"Land o' Goshen!" stammered the bull-dyke prostitute as the bung-hole stuffing drug sucker diddled her muscular buds and hammered his spouting earthmover into her hungry paradise valley.
Same effect without all the poetic subtlety of a more prudish era! Everything old is new again. The creators of both programs obviously had too much time on their hands.
That, or they're acknowledging the true value of bits on a disk: zero.
I use FreeBSD/amd64, and Wine will not work on that platform due to a missing kernel syscall. As I said in my first post, I installed the FreeBSD Linux emulation layer (aka "linuxulator") to use the Linux flash9 package as a plugin for the native Firefox 3 port, and that works well enough, even if it is a *huge* memory hog (but I have 4GB, so I don't care too much).
That's not my problem. I don't even own a TV, so it's not like I can't live without Fringe and Terminator. If the rest of the TV junkies want to pay for my freeloading because they can't find something interesting to do in the absence of TV programming, more power to them.
The content providers are already catching on. Knight Rider is one big Ford ad. Terminator is a Dodge ad. And Fringe is a Dell ad. It's not too conspicuous, so all is good for now. If the shows are really interesting, I may even invest in the DVD sets once the series has run its course. The networks make a ton from merchadise licensing: that cool Spaceballs Flamethrower, CSI Forensic kits for kids, sountracks, Valentines Day cards, and branded folders for school-kids. I can't go anywhere without having to endure the sight of fraking Hannah Montana tripe, so don't tell me merchandising isn't making someone some major coin!
But I won't tolerate incessant bliverts for the sake of pimping my eyeballs to the networks. I know what I want/need in my purchasing habits; I don't need them pre-programming me with brand recognition. Sure, that doesn't help Hulu... yet. In the future, when more people ditch the absurd habit of actually paying directly for cable and satellite (and watching ads, as a bonus!), the content producers will be starving for exposure, and *they* will be the ones paying the likes of Hulu to promote their precious franchises.
Ads are evil. They really are. There are other more ethical ways to make money from content creation, and these companies will eventually have to face that particular reality.
What? I use Adblock Plus on Firefox 3, and Hulu works just fine. I don't see the ads, though I do see the nag screen.
My apologies to Xen! I should have caught the misspelling.
You are correct. I forgot about the distinction, as I have an older Athlon 64, which doesn't have the hardware virtualization extension.
Indeed. However, I can watch Hulu shows now without resorting to Qemu (which is too slow anyway for the task) or the family XP machine (*shudder*).
I agree on the virtualization thing, though. Qemu is ok for some things, but more mature VM software would be very useful for me, and is the only reason that I may switch back to Linux in the foreseeable future.
As someone who's run FreeBSD for their dedicated desktop for close to 5 years now, my only gripes are this:
I love FreeBSD, though. There have many times when I downloaded and and burned a new Linux distro CD with the intent of moving back to Linux (5 years prior to my jump to FreeBSD, I ran Redhat or Fedora on my desktop). However, when I tried the live CD, I just couldn't bring myself to go back, even with the few shortcomings I highlight above.
While the mating of Debian and FreeBSD is cool for its own sake, I really don't see how someone from either camp would be happy with the result. If you like the cutting edge hardware support, virtualization, filesystems, and software support of Linux, you'll miss them in FreeBSD. If you enjoy the Zen-like simplicity of the base FreeBSD OS (including its rock solid nature) and the "ports" system, you'll be left wanting with even the best Linux solution (which, in my opinion, would probably be Debian). I applaud the effort, but I doubt it will have much adoption in the long run.
Are there, or aren't there, Cartesians?
Do you think one will ever be found?
$10/month? Please, *please* name names.
The only one I know of is prgmr.com -- but they don't do FreeBSD, which is what I'd prefer.
Yeah, and I'd like a full-service gas station at every fracking corner so I'm not required to learn how to pump gas.
The the hell is wrong with people?!? Not everyone in the 80's with PCs were early-adopter whiz-kids. You remember the 80s, right? The pre-GUI-centric days of the PC where people had to actually type in commands to get shit done? Where the hottest programs of the day were Lotus 123 and Wordstar and Wordperfect that required byzantine key combinations to do half the interesting stuff? If Granny could figure out Word Perfect 20 years ago while being a secretary at the local elementary school she sure as hell can deal with popping open an xterm and typing a few "apt-get" commands today.
We see phrases today about people being more "technology savvy"? Give me a break. Pressing "Play" on the Blu-Ray player, being addicted to WoW, or running around like a pompous ass with a bluetooth phone dongle hanging from your ear at the 7-11 does not make people "savvy" at anything, except knowing how to fashionably piss away their money.
An "apt-get" or "portage" one-liner or two typed into a command prompt is no more effort than going to a web site, finding the downloads page, clicking a button, and then running the installer with all its options to choose from and EULA to read. In fact, the typical command line package manager is LESS work for the end user.
I've had it, man. I'm totally fed up. I've been rooting for the Linux underdog since the late 90s. No more. Linux just is what it is, which is a kick-ass operating system for the PC and various other devices. Chasing the "Year of the Desktop" is a fool's errand for Linux and other open source efforts. Come *ON* people, quit making excuses for the users. If Linux were the the only OS in the mass market, people would be doing wonderfully, just like in the 80s when MS-DOS was king. The truth is, people don't want it. Period. They like what they have (Windows mostly, with some OS-X sprinkled around), and fear change. At least Linux is gaining traction in the netbook market, where at least some people will inevitably cut their teeth on the OS and become set in their ways.
There is simply no point in these articles, as all they do is highlight not only how lazy the end user has become, but how tech-oriented people not only expect, but condone, such laziness. It's really sad when you think about it. To hell with the lowest common denominator. Let them sink or swim on their own. They truly don't deserve the fruits of open source developers' labors unless they're willing to roll up their sleeves once in a while.
So the whole concept of the Renaissance Man is lost on our modern world?
I get where you're coming from, but sometimes being exposed to something is just plain good for you. I can't count the number of adults I have met who have memories of absolutely hating their piano lessons as kids but are so thankful for them as adults even though they don't (or can't) play any more.
As a homeschooling parent, I agree that we should allow kids to focus most of their energies on topics that interest them or skills they have a natural knack for. However, I think that some brief compulsory exposure to some topics/skills is ultimately helpful in the end.
Google wood gas stoves for plans and vendors. Most require a battery (or something) to power the down-draft fan, but there are plans for stoves not needing a fan. Several videos on the Tube about their use and making your own. That, and "rocket stoves", which are cool, too (I've got a half-assed prototype of one of these on my back porch right now, and it's fairly effective).
So? My DSL cannot support the bandwidth needed for the best quality, so the only option I really had was to batch-download shows on my FreeBSD machine and then copy them to the family entertainment PC. I don't see what the big deal is. It's nearly impossible to dis-arm the DRM -- Windows Media Player had to validate the media files anyway. I figured I was saving NF bandwidth by not d/l'ing the same movies or episodes multiple times.
This new development sucks. My account is on hold at the moment, mostly due to limited cash flow until the tax bill is paid. I've been getting by w/ Hulu in the interim. After hearing this, I just may call them and cancel permanently, telling them exactly why.
If anything, they really should start becoming *less* restrictive w/ the media, not more.
Apparently, bash's own compatibility mode leaves a lot to be desired. There's no end to people on FreeBSD lists who bitch about porting some script from Linux, to have someone point out that /bin/sh on Linux 99.9% of the time equals /bin/bash in compatibility mode. Best to code for strict Bourne shell syntax even if you use Linux, since you can be reasonably assured that it will work nicely on other systems. Not sure what the de-facto open source Bourne shell clone is. Perhaps "ash" is close enough, as the various BSD's use it (or a modification of it) as the system /bin/sh.
He's the dude who bags flour at Lehi Mills, 30 minutes south of Salt Lake City.
This past holiday season, my local Wal Mart had an entire end-cap of 2GB (or was it 4GB) black Kingston DataTraveler sticks for $5/each. I'm sure in large enough quantity, distributing compressed movies in this fashion could be profitable.
Imagine collections of hundreds of decent-quality movies on USB sticks (or, even better, mini-SD) fitting in a cigar box? I could see myself paying $2.50 to *maybe* $5 per film in this format, assuming the Netflix high-quality stream format (they weigh in at around 1000MB per hour in size). When I need some mindless background entertainment, I can deal with the lower quality. If there's a movie or series that I want to watch over and over again in DVD+ quality, I'd splurge for the better format.
More format options would be a win for all parties involved. Seems to be working for the music market. I just wish the music distributors would lower their prices. I'd love to jump on the Amazon MP3 offerings, but not until a full album purchase is no more than 50% the price of the physical CD. This $1/track offering (on average) is still way too high.
I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that tax filers were required to keep records for something like 10 years. Or maybe it's just a common practice recommendation for the odd-ball chance you get audited. I don't know for sure. However, if this is true, then there is precedent set for The Man telling you to keep records.
And just what kind of information should be logged? DNS queries? DHCP leases (per the headline)? All stream/socket connections? There are a million permutations of potentially useful data that can be logged by a router, and probably just as many ways to flood, obfuscate, or otherwise make those logs useless. Random MAC address at boot-up, anyone?
If this passes, maybe I should I should invest in CAT5 cable vendors, or companies who make ethernet-over-electrical-outlet devices. I'll be damned if I'm keeping any logs in my home for government tracking -- I'll wire the whole damned house if I need to.
I just can't see how this law would work in practice, especially for the home user. Very poorly, is my guess. Juts more useless think-of-the-children feel-good pandering legislation to add yet more mandatory time to sentences that (in many cases) are already way too harsh. Oh yeah, the perennially-strapped-for-cash FBI needs more cash for their little pedo porn database.
The HPV ad bugs me. Having said that... ads, by design, cause anxiety and try to jar you into paying attention to them. They totally disrupt the viewing experience, in that they can totally bump your frame of mind out of the program you were watching. A nearly-blank screen without audio is neutral, and allows one to more easily slip into the show again.
But that's just me.
Ads? On Hulu? Running Firefox w/ adblock will get you a black screen for 30 seconds with poor Hulu telling you how they can't display a word from their sponsors. Still a touch irritating, but much less so than true ads.