"We could all do the world a favor if we really, truly start using the P2P systems of the world as a general repository for information. Find some public domain stuff and share it. The more we do this, the more evidence there is of 'substantial noninfringing use.'"
Yep. It's silly, but people are busily engaged in making this a self-fulfilling prophesy (that is, the defeatist argument that 'everyone *knows* that these networks are only used for illegal trading."). L. Lessig had a machine running morpheus in his office serving audio files of his speeches (maybe it was lectures, point is the same;)), and was "alerted" by the university that hackers must have installed a morpheus server on his machine, because that's the assumption. Why check the content? That's the *bad* protocol.
Each seemingly (at times) at odds, each carefully planned by a shadowy and secret originator to ensure that the job each thinks is its own will (we hope) be done.
But marital conversations? No. That's just too far out.
One of my all-time favorite Slashdot sigs (and probably comes from somewhere else, but hey, that's where I've noticed it:)) is "If you like Microsoft software, then you haven't read the EULA." (probably slightly mangled, but you get the idea.)
For existing software, I think all the major Free software licenses* are pretty nice to users with no interest in reselling software, and at least some of them (BSD esp) are very friendly to (for instance) embedded or other developers who want a code base more than they want to sell packaged software. (And even for folks who *do* want to resell the software, licenses like the GPL are actually quite friendly as well, *providing you can live with its terms.* If you can't, no point discussing it, eh?)
For those who want to sell packaged software the same way eggs are sold (one sale at a time, repeat as necessary, and Oh yeah, these go bad.), freedom-enhancing licenses might not be as good... so they can continue to sell it with first-born-child provisions, and I can continue for the forseeable future not to buy their chainware.
timothy
(* And by that, I'm referring to any that allow access to source code, modification and free redistribution... I'm not dogmatic about the closing-off process, so BSD-style is just great:))
I like your system, generally agree with it. This is why I like to own my (used, unglamorous) car, live at least somewhat below my means. Not as far below as I'd like and prefer, but being conscious of it helps. Yes, I bought two DVDs this morning -- but at least they were cheap, were ones I'd considered beforehand rather than a complete impulse purchase, and out of money segregated for such a purpose.
Some people are very concerned with being superficially "normal," to the point that the whole point of normalcy (or, let's say, the sum of the best aspects of normalcy) is lost completely.
I wish that company (atechfabrication) made a nice little mini-itx case... looks like a sturdy box for a car media / blackbox / gps-map do-everything machine.
$350 is a lot of money for a case; if I were a millionaire, one of those would be in my underground lair:)
a no-subscription alternative TiVo-alike ...
on
Home-Grown TiVo Stories?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I have no idea if anyone has ever ordered, received, and been happy with one.
I have no idea why it looks like it has built in speaker thingies.
Just the same, it looked like a cool box, so someone out there besides me is probably interested:) Until I am older and more settled, I would like to avoid (to the extent practical) things that require subscriptions, telephone priveleges, etc. I'd pay quite a bit more for a box where the programming / scheduling fee was built in up-front, or (of course, better) didn't exist at all. I can program a VCR, and by extension a DVR, if it has a decent UI;)
a safe, handy tool for disposing of whatever sadistic bastard came up with the molded-plastic clamshell packaging that too many smallish products come in?
Bonus points if it also opens the stupid %$#@ packages themselves, without leaving finger-cutting edges, and double bonus if it leaves the package in a state where the thing can be returned to the store if unsatisfactory.
In the future, responsible academics and other researchers will all attach liberal-use licenses (hopefully ones putting the documents into the public domain or similar) to such research documents, so that they're not still under onerous restrictions 80 years (or, say, 99) after the study has been done. Maybe there is some exception (though none spring to mind) where a company / organization believes that it will be able to benefit substantially by withholding such research, but I think there's a far greater possibility for gaining goodwill by acknowledging that for many / most / nearly-all / note-how-much-I'm conceding-here copyrighted materials, the current slouch toward Forever is at best silly and often worse.
The link, as prostalex points out, was valid when submitted. Had I known it would die, I might have updated the first cheap-Zaurus story; the problem is, then no one would have seen it, which is the whole reason I put it into Slashback, and Slashbacks run on weekday nights, generally either Mon / Wed or Tues / Thurs.
http://data.energizer.com/datasheets/library/fla sh lights/active/hdl33a1.PDF
$15 at Target stores (in the U.S.), available for just under $10 on sale online some places.
3 AA batteries (works great with rechargeables). I am on #2 because I gave #1 to my mom when she took a medical missionary trip to Haiti (motto: "Sometimes we have electricity.")
Great for reading in bed, but in the computer context great for looking inside cases, looking for tiny screws that fell on the floor, etc. Small enough that it can fit into odd spaces inside a case, too, and sometimes the angle of illumination makes all the difference.
If I have any anticipated need for a burner when I'm traveling for more than a day or two, I can just pop the CD burner into a bag with a laptop (since I don't have a laptop with built-in burner). Can't do that with the internal drive.
Also, I trust a direct connection more than I trust my network... with my linksys + cable modem combination, sometimes the only way to restore a down connection is powercycling the router -- and I can't do that in the middle of burning an ISO. So, though I know network burning is possible, I swap a cable (takes 10 seconds) instead. Maybe one day...
timothy
ports and such are still important ...
on
Legacy-Free PCs
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· Score: 1
but the floppy should have been shot long ago:)
I used to deride the really aggressive "legacy free" systems as actually being "planned obsolescence systems." --> "Hey, look, Mrs. Smith, your perfectly functional system is now really *dated* and it makes you look like a %$#@ *spinster!*" or, more likely, "Gee Biff, I know we've done a lot of business in the past, but as I look around your offices I see that your employees are still using technology from *six months* ago. I think this round, we're going to have to select a supplier with a little more technological currency!" [condescending chuckle]
However, now that firewire and USB (and USB2, and FirewireInfinityOneBillion) are well established (and a pretty decent trade in accessories has emerged), I find that even a lot old peripherals I resent the new ports for "taking away" again work fine again. My AT keyboard goes through an ATPS/2 adapter, and then through a PS/2 USB adapter. IT's ugly, but it works.)
What I most like about the "legacy free" approach is that it tends to encourage external peripherals, which I like:) My USB HP CD writer may be useless under any Apple operating system (c'mon HP, can't you write an OS X driver, for old tim's sake?), but it floats freely among and works well with all my linux machines. It's slower than the internal burner I have in another machine, but actually gets a lot more use because of the convenience.
First: This article makes some very good points, ones that people who push Free and otherwise Open Source software on others to the point of being annoying (like me) often have to skirt around. This kind of criticism is really important!
Second: The author talks about the need (in her case) of a dual-boot system, and that's surely a common situation. However: What about Windows? If someone has a mostly happy, generally successfull Linux installation on a machine with a few tens of gigs of hard drive space, can Windows be nicely (non-destructively) installed as a novelty or... for what Windows users use it for?
I have installed Mandrake Linux (versions 7.1 and 8.0) on Laptops which arrived with different versions of Windows, and contrary to the upshot of this article, those installs (dual-booting with Windows) went pretty automagically (though I regret that I ended up with a big never-used partition on each of those hard-drives;)). However, that's because Linux distros know they exist in a MS-dominant environment. Microsoft seems to offer tips on removing Linux, but how difficult would it be to go about creating a dual-boot system the other way?
(This question is out of ignorance, and is not rhetorical.)
timothy
p.s. A very similar, just-as-damning article could be written about the various interface flaws that infest Microsoft Windows; a few recent visits to my dad, trying to help him set up wireless networking under Windows led me to show him how if I popped in a Knoppix CD, everything Just Worked, but we never did get Windows XP happy with his network.
A lot of the responses to this story basically accuse the web-page poster of pedandtry and nickpickism, or trying to embarrass Microsoft for what could be described as an oversight (and one they made while attempting to be, or at least to appear, generous -- in a straightforwardly self-interested kinda way).
That's not the big problem, really -- because it's not that they made a little slip up, it's that Microsoft is extremely selective about claimed valuation (is a pack of 6 CDs worth $130 if it's given away en masse to students around the country? What is the sound one one hand clapping?) and license enforcement.
For instance: what would Microsoft have said to the fellow in charge of Virginia Beach's IT dept if he had attempted the same thing from the other direction? ("Oh, don't worry, yeah, we bought licenses, it's all OK... look, we inquired a while ago when we noticed we didn't have some of our licenses handy, but one of your employees sent us an email. Want me to print it out?")
Now, (micromanagement by the USDOJ aside) Microsoft should be free to give away all the software they want, and (IMO) can charge as much or as little as they want for it, license as freely or tightly as they want, but it's *not* fair play to act as if a casual "yup, it's OK" is fine in some cases while a rigorous, affirmative proof is needed in others.
"I think thats the key to dealing with the trouble. As for the OSS developers shouldn't reinvent the wheel? Thats crap. Let them go at it, I think its wonderful."
Amen:) Until we have a perfect wheel, please -- reinvent!
As to the distros including by default a smorgasbord of choices when a smaller selection would be less overwhelming, that's true. Sometimes is makes more sense than others; luckily, the big name distros at least tend to have some mechanisms for choosing more stripped down versions. I may just have paid less attention lately, but I think Mandrake has dropped the excellent slider they used to have (to adjust the total quantity of supplied software). It was limited information (since it didn't tell you *exactly what* was being dropped as you moved the slider toward Zero, but it was at least an intuitive way to do it, and if you trusted the priorities of the packagers it was a great idea. (I found their choices reasonable to the extent I ever noticed them.)
Knoppix includes buckets of software by default, and that's actually a good thing in that case, because it means I can demonstrate buckets of software to (most) anyone with an x86 machine.
One big problem is that there are good reasons and arguments for both KDE and GNOME on "casual" desktops (since there are good apps that rely on each of their libraries), so you're already seeing some duplication likely. I happen to prefer gnome-terminal to theKonsole, and I like certain KDE apps better than their GNOME counterparts.
I'd like to see some trimming in the distributions that I generally install (which of late are Mandrake, Red Hat and Knoppix-as-an-installer. Not that the apps should disappear from the install CDs / isos, it would just be great to have more "stripped down collection" choices.
- functional system with X and blackbox - functional system with X, blackbox, gnome and kde libs - functional system with X, full blown KDE, gnome libraries - functional system with X, full blown KDE, GNOME installs, light on games and amusements - functional system with X, full blown KDE, GNOME installs, heavy on games and amusements
RH and Mandrake *do* do a credible job at providing a few such descriptions, but it would be great to have a sort of guided-adventure option which would assemble applications for installation based on some questions to which the answers could be multiple choice, T/F, or free-response. Things like:
Q - I program a lot, want a lot of IDEs and languages. (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) [default 5]
Q - I like to play First Person Shooter games (T F) [default N\
Q - I would like the following text editors *besides* emacs, vi, nano and joe: ( __________________ ) [default: none]
This would have tend to create a bias towards dominant apps, it's true, and semi-unfortunate... perhaps a bit of randomness would be in order, so that certain defaults are more "default classes" so you're just as likely to get the gnome terminal as your default as one of several other terminal emulators, unless you choose specifically.
Idle thoughts there:)
timothy
Re:More than two possibilities (monolith, anarchy)
on
Too Much Free Software
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· Score: 1
You're certainly right -- there are a lot more than two possibilities:) The class of "things between anarchy and monolith" is a big one.
However, I still see free entry (even with resultant messiness) as more important than any particular standard to work toward.
I'm not (trivial statement, I know) against people working together, deciding to pursue common aims or goals. If KDE and GNOME want to get together tomorrow and form the K/GNOMDE Foundation in order to create a single unified desktop, Great! (That is, "Great for them." Maybe not for me, since I like them both in different ways.) But there would *still* be a large number of other desktops competing (or at least overlapping) even in the tiny, *tiny* corner of the idea world that is Desktops for X11. A lot of these can cooperate to some degree or another, but I'm only thinking of the differences right now. (And Enlightenment does nearly everything differently. Maybe it's better -- it certainly is cool to look at; better is in the eye of the beholder.) If *every* X11 desktop project, as well as desktops which skip X altogether, could smoothly decide to get together tomorrow to create The Grand Unified Desktop, the next day someone would decide they had a better way to do job Z, and start a new one.
I like that large groups of developers have decided to coordinate on certain standards, work toward interoperability -- it's great. I just don't like to see "Standards" (which are arbitrary and should be chosen for their overall workability and practicality, not handed down from on high) venerated above choice and new ideas. For instance, I think it's great that the audio standards you mention are being largely adopted by software developers in the Linux audio world -- but it's good for others to be constantly pecking at the backdoor with others. (I look forward to the day when sound works out-of-box with Linux on all my hardware; right now I'm going to give a wild guess and call it 70% there;))
My initial rant was not so much about that one editorial as the often-repeated shouts to consolidate projects of all kinds because of perceptions, however well founded, that they're "reinventing the wheel." Sure, people can advocate whatever they want -- but some apparently overlapping projects will never merge, and there's nothing wrong with that. If nothing else, it means that more people have a go at coordinating a software development project with their friends, enemies and acquaintances. Maybe they decide after 3 months that their text-editing widget is really adding nothing so cool that it justifies the effort, so they give up. OK. So they (and other people) move on, more good done than harm IMO.
The argument that there's "too much choice" (and people make this argument in a lot of domains, not just software) has a certain merit. Choice is difficult; every day we face a series of tradeoffs. In areas with fewer choices, it's sometimes simpler for that reason to actually select one over the others.
However, it seems that this argument also has an underlying assumption that there is a single, common goal which "we" could all achieve if we would only just let emacs and vi have a final, conclusive deathmatch, and if we could make every GUI user draw straws between KDE and GNOME (and WindowMaker and the various *boxes, too, but they'd get fewer straws) so all this unproductive wheel-reinvention strife would go away. If you think there is such a common goal, name it -- I bet good money that counterclaims would pop up to invalidate the claim:) I can think of several offhand. And let's face it, a lot of people just want to "stick it to Microsoft."
The point (in my opinion, and noting that a more important metapoint is that your opinion may be different) is that the best outcome of having a real marketplace of ideas is not the construction of the perfect widget, but rather the constant, distributed reconsideration of what and how to do things. That means churn, and lots of broken eggs.* Maybe in the end you decide you don't even need the widget, because you've found another way to sufficiently increase your happiness by other means that spending your time in widgetland is a bad investment.
If you think there too many choices in the world of software (leaving aside the question of how open the code is for a moment), there are lots of ways to *reduce* your choices without harming anyone else's ability to wade through them. Example one: here are lots of consultants who would love to trade your money, if you have some, for their time and expertise. You can specify what you want the resulting computer setup to do, and your consultant will attempt to create one in a way which a) makes him money yet b) is pleasing enough to you that you recommend him to your friends. Example two: in the free software world specifically, you can download and use any of several (sorry, choice again) of the stripped down distributions designed for efficiency, like Peanut Linux and ignore other things available. If it does *your* job, it does.
Remember, UNIX was (in part) created because Thompson and Ritchie wanted to play a game. So they did it. What if they'd been hampered by a committee with a lot of predetermined goals about "what the world really needs"? Could be that the world would now be perfect thanks to T&R's Famine Reduction Machine, but I think it's more likely that all the cool things their desire to play a game with has led to (including the OS I'm typing from right now) would most likely just not exist.
That said, there are a lot of dead projects on SourceForge which should probably be spidered and marked for death in as non-destructive a way as possible. Like sending out multiple notices to all listed project heads in an attempt to make sure that dead-seeming projects really *are* dead.
timothy
*Eggs are good scrambled, until you create the ommellette which best pleases you, or egg custard, or goldenrod eggs...
That Mozilla has been and is robust enough to triage that many reports at all (all bugs, all duplicates, all RFEs, some mix of these -- not the point) is the thing that most impresses me.
Considering that many if not most *are* duplicates and generally get quickly marked that way is proof of how well it works.
My mention of 200,000 bugs was an admiring one -- they've built a project so good that (so far) has inspired users nearly a quarter of a million times to point out a flaw or suggest an improvement. That says they're doing something very right:)
This is the same thing I picked up about 2 weeks ago, and has since then been great. Bright, good viewing angle.
One problem, perhaps fixed in the new Red Hat, is that on this machine (Red Hat 8.0 on a shuttle all-in-one shoebox) I can't get the [OS + video card + monitor, not sure which of them are really at fault] system to run at the claimed native resolution of 1280x1024. However, I am surprised at how little I mind 1024x768 and some mouse-panning;)
$400 for this... hmmm, I also don't expect it to last that long, there's something too good to be true here;)
A nice ultra-localized distro would be a good project for a high school (or college, or middle school).
Similar to the way C. Knopper includes slides from his talks and some (interesting) Free Software-oriented music on Knoppix, such a distro might include...
- a "yearbook" with photos of all students who want a photo in there and some fun snapshots
- a selection or two (as oggs) from the school jazz band, choral groups, orchestra, student-formed rock bands, whatever
- a school directory. When I switched schools from one with a directory (the students lived across a much larger geographic area at that one) to one which did not, I frequently missed having a directory. Even if it's just "long term contact info to the best of your ability, as much as you care to volunteer" rather than a list of current local numbers.
- browser bookmarks which are useful to students (good research sites, etc.)
- history of the school to the degree that students are willing to research and prepare one
- archive of all the last year's school newspaper stories
- sports statistics and other (notable to someone) figures and noteworthy events. Maybe the physics club built a hovercraft out of vacuum cleaner parts -- include some photos, diagrams, and a HOWTO.
The exact things are going to vary by school, but this sort of thing would be much harder with Windows -- you might be able to make a big disc full of "multimedia stuff" but it would not be able to boot / run by itself.
I've been showing it to my dad, demonstrating how his Windows machine (constant swapping, frequent failure) is really not bad *hardware* with the new Knoppix version... he's impressed at how well it runs his printer; next we're going to see if it works well with the color laser which Windows 98 renders a very big very expensive paperweight.
Maybe then he'll let me convert his household to Linux;)
It was from some spammer advertising a cable descrambling device. I talked to the guy who answered the phone (I love calling 800 numbers attached to spam), and he was ruder than he should have been. Of course, by sending spam he'd already been ruder than he should have been, but I digress...
So, if that sig is outdated, good -- I hope the whole operation dried up and shriveled away.
Joe Barr wrote a good piece about this; I'm still burning my Knoppix 3.2, but I can testify that what he wrote here is a good guide for the previous versions and I'm guessing will be applicable to the new one.
(Upshot: there's a script called something like "knxhdinstall" which leads you through formatting hard drive etc, then transfers the Knoppix base OS and included apps. Previous Linux experience strongly recommended, but it's certainly easier than going in with zero experience with, say, regular Debian:))
I have used Knoppix as an installer for several machines; that's one reason I keep extra desktops around, for playing with different distros as we asymptotically approach The (mythical) Perfect OS.
It works well, but there are some glitches: with some versions of Knoppix, the hard-drive install method seems to jump between English version and German version, doesn't matter that I had the EN iso, doesn't matter that the system seemed otherwise localized to English... However, I am optimistic that this is no longer a problem with the new one:) (And my German is good enough that I could get through the German screens, so it *did work* it was just... worrisome:)). And that was a glitch -- I forget which ISO had the German jumping, but I downloaded another one afterward (the next rev) and it worked fine.
As a perpetual fumbler, this is the only way I have gotten Debian working well, and it was quick n' easy. Knopper deserves the computing version of the Nobel for this:)
I have enjoyed the sudhian forums, looked at them extensively before and after purchasing my Shuttle system. (Before to make sure it would work without problems, after to angrily investigate the problems I had making it work;)
I need to check back there now, though, because the idea of running a 1GHz processor without a fan is very appealing. The fan noise (something I used to not notice) really is pretty bad on my Athlon shuttle.
The biggest reason I'm holding off on purchase is that from what I've heard, even the fastest (GHz model) epias would have trouble doing what TiVO does, that is to say, pausing / playing live TV smoothly while continuing to record it with a program like MythTV. Maybe I'm only seeing the word of the naysayers. (And I'm guessing that's an application that uses some floating point math, too...) I'm skeptical about this working because even on this (1.3GHz?) Athlon, xawtv stutters when I start up new apps etc, even small ones -- and MythTV is heavier duty.
While I'd also like to use a little video-fun-box for compressing movies and CDs etc, that's much more time flexible: I can put the disk in and go to sleep, and wake up to find it mostly done or something. With TV pausing / watching though, I'd prefer it to be pretty snappy.
Thanks for info on flexible power supply -- good to know. I've hit some pretty dodgy power here in the U.S., too, so it's not just for intl. travel.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple heavily advertises that it is a true UNIX ... at least, they like to say "UNIX-based" ... http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/unix.html
I remember it being a semi-big deal that they were now the largest UNIX vendor overall.
timothy
Yep. It's silly, but people are busily engaged in making this a self-fulfilling prophesy (that is, the defeatist argument that 'everyone *knows* that these networks are only used for illegal trading."). L. Lessig had a machine running morpheus in his office serving audio files of his speeches (maybe it was lectures, point is the same ;)), and was "alerted" by the university that hackers must have installed a morpheus server on his machine, because that's the assumption. Why check the content? That's the *bad* protocol.
timothy
GNOME.
KDE.
Each seemingly (at times) at odds, each carefully planned by a shadowy and secret originator to ensure that the job each thinks is its own will (we hope) be done.
But marital conversations? No. That's just too far out.
One of my all-time favorite Slashdot sigs (and probably comes from somewhere else, but hey, that's where I've noticed it :)) is "If you like Microsoft software, then you haven't read the EULA." (probably slightly mangled, but you get the idea.)
... so they can continue to sell it with first-born-child provisions, and I can continue for the forseeable future not to buy their chainware.
... I'm not dogmatic about the closing-off process, so BSD-style is just great :))
For existing software, I think all the major Free software licenses* are pretty nice to users with no interest in reselling software, and at least some of them (BSD esp) are very friendly to (for instance) embedded or other developers who want a code base more than they want to sell packaged software. (And even for folks who *do* want to resell the software, licenses like the GPL are actually quite friendly as well, *providing you can live with its terms.* If you can't, no point discussing it, eh?)
For those who want to sell packaged software the same way eggs are sold (one sale at a time, repeat as necessary, and Oh yeah, these go bad.), freedom-enhancing licenses might not be as good
timothy
(* And by that, I'm referring to any that allow access to source code, modification and free redistribution
I like your system, generally agree with it. This is why I like to own my (used, unglamorous) car, live at least somewhat below my means. Not as far below as I'd like and prefer, but being conscious of it helps. Yes, I bought two DVDs this morning -- but at least they were cheap, were ones I'd considered beforehand rather than a complete impulse purchase, and out of money segregated for such a purpose.
Some people are very concerned with being superficially "normal," to the point that the whole point of normalcy (or, let's say, the sum of the best aspects of normalcy) is lost completely.
timothy
I wish that company (atechfabrication) made a nice little mini-itx case ... looks like a sturdy box for a car media / blackbox / gps-map do-everything machine.
:)
$350 is a lot of money for a case; if I were a millionaire, one of those would be in my underground lair
Spotted this earlier today in a web advertisment: http://www.lbdata.net/dvr/
:) Until I am older and more settled, I would like to avoid (to the extent practical) things that require subscriptions, telephone priveleges, etc. I'd pay quite a bit more for a box where the programming / scheduling fee was built in up-front, or (of course, better) didn't exist at all. I can program a VCR, and by extension a DVR, if it has a decent UI ;)
I have no idea what OS it runs.
I have no idea if anyone has ever ordered, received, and been happy with one.
I have no idea why it looks like it has built in speaker thingies.
Just the same, it looked like a cool box, so someone out there besides me is probably interested
timothy
a safe, handy tool for disposing of whatever sadistic bastard came up with the molded-plastic clamshell packaging that too many smallish products come in?
Bonus points if it also opens the stupid %$#@ packages themselves, without leaving finger-cutting edges, and double bonus if it leaves the package in a state where the thing can be returned to the store if unsatisfactory.
timothy
is the continuing copyright-extension fight.
In the future, responsible academics and other researchers will all attach liberal-use licenses (hopefully ones putting the documents into the public domain or similar) to such research documents, so that they're not still under onerous restrictions 80 years (or, say, 99) after the study has been done. Maybe there is some exception (though none spring to mind) where a company / organization believes that it will be able to benefit substantially by withholding such research, but I think there's a far greater possibility for gaining goodwill by acknowledging that for many / most / nearly-all / note-how-much-I'm conceding-here copyrighted materials, the current slouch toward Forever is at best silly and often worse.
timothy
The link, as prostalex points out, was valid when submitted. Had I known it would die, I might have updated the first cheap-Zaurus story; the problem is, then no one would have seen it, which is the whole reason I put it into Slashback, and Slashbacks run on weekday nights, generally either Mon / Wed or Tues / Thurs.
... sorry. Cheap Zauri will return!
So
timothy
You need one of these :)
a sh lights/active/hdl33a1.PDF
http://data.energizer.com/datasheets/library/fl
$15 at Target stores (in the U.S.), available for just under $10 on sale online some places.
3 AA batteries (works great with rechargeables). I am on #2 because I gave #1 to my mom when she took a medical missionary trip to Haiti (motto: "Sometimes we have electricity.")
Great for reading in bed, but in the computer context great for looking inside cases, looking for tiny screws that fell on the floor, etc. Small enough that it can fit into odd spaces inside a case, too, and sometimes the angle of illumination makes all the difference.
timothy
If I have any anticipated need for a burner when I'm traveling for more than a day or two, I can just pop the CD burner into a bag with a laptop (since I don't have a laptop with built-in burner). Can't do that with the internal drive.
... with my linksys + cable modem combination, sometimes the only way to restore a down connection is powercycling the router -- and I can't do that in the middle of burning an ISO. So, though I know network burning is possible, I swap a cable (takes 10 seconds) instead. Maybe one day ...
Also, I trust a direct connection more than I trust my network
timothy
but the floppy should have been shot long ago :)
:) My USB HP CD writer may be useless under any Apple operating system (c'mon HP, can't you write an OS X driver, for old tim's sake?), but it floats freely among and works well with all my linux machines. It's slower than the internal burner I have in another machine, but actually gets a lot more use because of the convenience.
I used to deride the really aggressive "legacy free" systems as actually being "planned obsolescence systems." --> "Hey, look, Mrs. Smith, your perfectly functional system is now really *dated* and it makes you look like a %$#@ *spinster!*" or, more likely, "Gee Biff, I know we've done a lot of business in the past, but as I look around your offices I see that your employees are still using technology from *six months* ago. I think this round, we're going to have to select a supplier with a little more technological currency!" [condescending chuckle]
However, now that firewire and USB (and USB2, and FirewireInfinityOneBillion) are well established (and a pretty decent trade in accessories has emerged), I find that even a lot old peripherals I resent the new ports for "taking away" again work fine again. My AT keyboard goes through an ATPS/2 adapter, and then through a PS/2 USB adapter. IT's ugly, but it works.)
What I most like about the "legacy free" approach is that it tends to encourage external peripherals, which I like
timothy
First: This article makes some very good points, ones that people who push Free and otherwise Open Source software on others to the point of being annoying (like me) often have to skirt around. This kind of criticism is really important!
... for what Windows users use it for?
;)). However, that's because Linux distros know they exist in a MS-dominant environment. Microsoft seems to offer tips on removing Linux, but how difficult would it be to go about creating a dual-boot system the other way?
Second: The author talks about the need (in her case) of a dual-boot system, and that's surely a common situation. However: What about Windows? If someone has a mostly happy, generally successfull Linux installation on a machine with a few tens of gigs of hard drive space, can Windows be nicely (non-destructively) installed as a novelty or
I have installed Mandrake Linux (versions 7.1 and 8.0) on Laptops which arrived with different versions of Windows, and contrary to the upshot of this article, those installs (dual-booting with Windows) went pretty automagically (though I regret that I ended up with a big never-used partition on each of those hard-drives
(This question is out of ignorance, and is not rhetorical.)
timothy
p.s. A very similar, just-as-damning article could be written about the various interface flaws that infest Microsoft Windows; a few recent visits to my dad, trying to help him set up wireless networking under Windows led me to show him how if I popped in a Knoppix CD, everything Just Worked, but we never did get Windows XP happy with his network.
A lot of the responses to this story basically accuse the web-page poster of pedandtry and nickpickism, or trying to embarrass Microsoft for what could be described as an oversight (and one they made while attempting to be, or at least to appear, generous -- in a straightforwardly self-interested kinda way).
... look, we inquired a while ago when we noticed we didn't have some of our licenses handy, but one of your employees sent us an email. Want me to print it out?")
:)
That's not the big problem, really -- because it's not that they made a little slip up, it's that Microsoft is extremely selective about claimed valuation (is a pack of 6 CDs worth $130 if it's given away en masse to students around the country? What is the sound one one hand clapping?) and license enforcement.
For instance: what would Microsoft have said to the fellow in charge of Virginia Beach's IT dept if he had attempted the same thing from the other direction? ("Oh, don't worry, yeah, we bought licenses, it's all OK
(Story one,
story two)
I don't think that would have worked
Now, (micromanagement by the USDOJ aside) Microsoft should be free to give away all the software they want, and (IMO) can charge as much or as little as they want for it, license as freely or tightly as they want, but it's *not* fair play to act as if a casual "yup, it's OK" is fine in some cases while a rigorous, affirmative proof is needed in others.
timothy
Amen
As to the distros including by default a smorgasbord of choices when a smaller selection would be less overwhelming, that's true. Sometimes is makes more sense than others; luckily, the big name distros at least tend to have some mechanisms for choosing more stripped down versions. I may just have paid less attention lately, but I think Mandrake has dropped the excellent slider they used to have (to adjust the total quantity of supplied software). It was limited information (since it didn't tell you *exactly what* was being dropped as you moved the slider toward Zero, but it was at least an intuitive way to do it, and if you trusted the priorities of the packagers it was a great idea. (I found their choices reasonable to the extent I ever noticed them.)
Knoppix includes buckets of software by default, and that's actually a good thing in that case, because it means I can demonstrate buckets of software to (most) anyone with an x86 machine.
One big problem is that there are good reasons and arguments for both KDE and GNOME on "casual" desktops (since there are good apps that rely on each of their libraries), so you're already seeing some duplication likely. I happen to prefer gnome-terminal to theKonsole, and I like certain KDE apps better than their GNOME counterparts.
I'd like to see some trimming in the distributions that I generally install (which of late are Mandrake, Red Hat and Knoppix-as-an-installer. Not that the apps should disappear from the install CDs / isos, it would just be great to have more "stripped down collection" choices.
- functional system with X and blackbox
- functional system with X, blackbox, gnome and kde libs
- functional system with X, full blown KDE, gnome libraries
- functional system with X, full blown KDE, GNOME installs, light on games and amusements
- functional system with X, full blown KDE, GNOME installs, heavy on games and amusements
RH and Mandrake *do* do a credible job at providing a few such descriptions, but it would be great to have a sort of guided-adventure option which would assemble applications for installation based on some questions to which the answers could be multiple choice, T/F, or free-response. Things like:
Q - I program a lot, want a lot of IDEs and languages. (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) [default 5]
Q - I like to play First Person Shooter games (T F) [default N\
Q - I would like the following text editors *besides* emacs, vi, nano and joe: ( __________________ ) [default: none]
This would have tend to create a bias towards dominant apps, it's true, and semi-unfortunate
Idle thoughts there
timothy
You're certainly right -- there are a lot more than two possibilities :) The class of "things between anarchy and monolith" is a big one.
;))
However, I still see free entry (even with resultant messiness) as more important than any particular standard to work toward.
I'm not (trivial statement, I know) against people working together, deciding to pursue common aims or goals. If KDE and GNOME want to get together tomorrow and form the K/GNOMDE Foundation in order to create a single unified desktop, Great! (That is, "Great for them." Maybe not for me, since I like them both in different ways.) But there would *still* be a large number of other desktops competing (or at least overlapping) even in the tiny, *tiny* corner of the idea world that is Desktops for X11. A lot of these can cooperate to some degree or another, but I'm only thinking of the differences right now. (And Enlightenment does nearly everything differently. Maybe it's better -- it certainly is cool to look at; better is in the eye of the beholder.) If *every* X11 desktop project, as well as desktops which skip X altogether, could smoothly decide to get together tomorrow to create The Grand Unified Desktop, the next day someone would decide they had a better way to do job Z, and start a new one.
I like that large groups of developers have decided to coordinate on certain standards, work toward interoperability -- it's great. I just don't like to see "Standards" (which are arbitrary and should be chosen for their overall workability and practicality, not handed down from on high) venerated above choice and new ideas. For instance, I think it's great that the audio standards you mention are being largely adopted by software developers in the Linux audio world -- but it's good for others to be constantly pecking at the backdoor with others. (I look forward to the day when sound works out-of-box with Linux on all my hardware; right now I'm going to give a wild guess and call it 70% there
My initial rant was not so much about that one editorial as the often-repeated shouts to consolidate projects of all kinds because of perceptions, however well founded, that they're "reinventing the wheel." Sure, people can advocate whatever they want -- but some apparently overlapping projects will never merge, and there's nothing wrong with that. If nothing else, it means that more people have a go at coordinating a software development project with their friends, enemies and acquaintances. Maybe they decide after 3 months that their text-editing widget is really adding nothing so cool that it justifies the effort, so they give up. OK. So they (and other people) move on, more good done than harm IMO.
timothy
(At least that's what I call this.)
:) I can think of several offhand. And let's face it, a lot of people just want to "stick it to Microsoft."
...
The argument that there's "too much choice" (and people make this argument in a lot of domains, not just software) has a certain merit. Choice is difficult; every day we face a series of tradeoffs. In areas with fewer choices, it's sometimes simpler for that reason to actually select one over the others.
However, it seems that this argument also has an underlying assumption that there is a single, common goal which "we" could all achieve if we would only just let emacs and vi have a final, conclusive deathmatch, and if we could make every GUI user draw straws between KDE and GNOME (and WindowMaker and the various *boxes, too, but they'd get fewer straws) so all this unproductive wheel-reinvention strife would go away. If you think there is such a common goal, name it -- I bet good money that counterclaims would pop up to invalidate the claim
The point (in my opinion, and noting that a more important metapoint is that your opinion may be different) is that the best outcome of having a real marketplace of ideas is not the construction of the perfect widget, but rather the constant, distributed reconsideration of what and how to do things. That means churn, and lots of broken eggs.* Maybe in the end you decide you don't even need the widget, because you've found another way to sufficiently increase your happiness by other means that spending your time in widgetland is a bad investment.
If you think there too many choices in the world of software (leaving aside the question of how open the code is for a moment), there are lots of ways to *reduce* your choices without harming anyone else's ability to wade through them. Example one: here are lots of consultants who would love to trade your money, if you have some, for their time and expertise. You can specify what you want the resulting computer setup to do, and your consultant will attempt to create one in a way which a) makes him money yet b) is pleasing enough to you that you recommend him to your friends. Example two: in the free software world specifically, you can download and use any of several (sorry, choice again) of the stripped down distributions designed for efficiency, like Peanut Linux and ignore other things available. If it does *your* job, it does.
Remember, UNIX was (in part) created because Thompson and Ritchie wanted to play a game. So they did it. What if they'd been hampered by a committee with a lot of predetermined goals about "what the world really needs"? Could be that the world would now be perfect thanks to T&R's Famine Reduction Machine, but I think it's more likely that all the cool things their desire to play a game with has led to (including the OS I'm typing from right now) would most likely just not exist.
That said, there are a lot of dead projects on SourceForge which should probably be spidered and marked for death in as non-destructive a way as possible. Like sending out multiple notices to all listed project heads in an attempt to make sure that dead-seeming projects really *are* dead.
timothy
*Eggs are good scrambled, until you create the ommellette which best pleases you, or egg custard, or goldenrod eggs
Even if they were all bugs.
:)
That Mozilla has been and is robust enough to triage that many reports at all (all bugs, all duplicates, all RFEs, some mix of these -- not the point) is the thing that most impresses me.
Considering that many if not most *are* duplicates and generally get quickly marked that way is proof of how well it works.
My mention of 200,000 bugs was an admiring one -- they've built a project so good that (so far) has inspired users nearly a quarter of a million times to point out a flaw or suggest an improvement. That says they're doing something very right
timothy
This is the same thing I picked up about 2 weeks ago, and has since then been great. Bright, good viewing angle.
;)
... hmmm, I also don't expect it to last that long, there's something too good to be true here ;)
One problem, perhaps fixed in the new Red Hat, is that on this machine (Red Hat 8.0 on a shuttle all-in-one shoebox) I can't get the [OS + video card + monitor, not sure which of them are really at fault] system to run at the claimed native resolution of 1280x1024. However, I am surprised at how little I mind 1024x768 and some mouse-panning
$400 for this
timothy
A nice ultra-localized distro would be a good project for a high school (or college, or middle school).
...
Similar to the way C. Knopper includes slides from his talks and some (interesting) Free Software-oriented music on Knoppix, such a distro might include
- a "yearbook" with photos of all students who want a photo in there and some fun snapshots
- a selection or two (as oggs) from the school jazz band, choral groups, orchestra, student-formed rock bands, whatever
- a school directory. When I switched schools from one with a directory (the students lived across a much larger geographic area at that one) to one which did not, I frequently missed having a directory. Even if it's just "long term contact info to the best of your ability, as much as you care to volunteer" rather than a list of current local numbers.
- browser bookmarks which are useful to students (good research sites, etc.)
- history of the school to the degree that students are willing to research and prepare one
- archive of all the last year's school newspaper stories
- sports statistics and other (notable to someone) figures and noteworthy events. Maybe the physics club built a hovercraft out of vacuum cleaner parts -- include some photos, diagrams, and a HOWTO.
The exact things are going to vary by school, but this sort of thing would be much harder with Windows -- you might be able to make a big disc full of "multimedia stuff" but it would not be able to boot / run by itself.
timothy
I've been showing it to my dad, demonstrating how his Windows machine (constant swapping, frequent failure) is really not bad *hardware* with the new Knoppix version ... he's impressed at how well it runs his printer; next we're going to see if it works well with the color laser which Windows 98 renders a very big very expensive paperweight.
;)
Maybe then he'll let me convert his household to Linux
timothy
It was from some spammer advertising a cable descrambling device. I talked to the guy who answered the phone (I love calling 800 numbers attached to spam), and he was ruder than he should have been. Of course, by sending spam he'd already been ruder than he should have been, but I digress ...
So, if that sig is outdated, good -- I hope the whole operation dried up and shriveled away.
timothy
Joe Barr wrote a good piece about this; I'm still burning my Knoppix 3.2, but I can testify that what he wrote here is a good guide for the previous versions and I'm guessing will be applicable to the new one.
:))
... However, I am optimistic that this is no longer a problem with the new one :) (And my German is good enough that I could get through the German screens, so it *did work* it was just ... worrisome :)). And that was a glitch -- I forget which ISO had the German jumping, but I downloaded another one afterward (the next rev) and it worked fine.
:)
(Upshot: there's a script called something like "knxhdinstall" which leads you through formatting hard drive etc, then transfers the Knoppix base OS and included apps. Previous Linux experience strongly recommended, but it's certainly easier than going in with zero experience with, say, regular Debian
I have used Knoppix as an installer for several machines; that's one reason I keep extra desktops around, for playing with different distros as we asymptotically approach The (mythical) Perfect OS.
It works well, but there are some glitches: with some versions of Knoppix, the hard-drive install method seems to jump between English version and German version, doesn't matter that I had the EN iso, doesn't matter that the system seemed otherwise localized to English
As a perpetual fumbler, this is the only way I have gotten Debian working well, and it was quick n' easy. Knopper deserves the computing version of the Nobel for this
timothy
I have enjoyed the sudhian forums, looked at them extensively before and after purchasing my Shuttle system. (Before to make sure it would work without problems, after to angrily investigate the problems I had making it work ;)
...) I'm skeptical about this working because even on this (1.3GHz?) Athlon, xawtv stutters when I start up new apps etc, even small ones -- and MythTV is heavier duty.
I need to check back there now, though, because the idea of running a 1GHz processor without a fan is very appealing. The fan noise (something I used to not notice) really is pretty bad on my Athlon shuttle.
The biggest reason I'm holding off on purchase is that from what I've heard, even the fastest (GHz model) epias would have trouble doing what TiVO does, that is to say, pausing / playing live TV smoothly while continuing to record it with a program like MythTV. Maybe I'm only seeing the word of the naysayers. (And I'm guessing that's an application that uses some floating point math, too
While I'd also like to use a little video-fun-box for compressing movies and CDs etc, that's much more time flexible: I can put the disk in and go to sleep, and wake up to find it mostly done or something. With TV pausing / watching though, I'd prefer it to be pretty snappy.
Thanks for info on flexible power supply -- good to know. I've hit some pretty dodgy power here in the U.S., too, so it's not just for intl. travel.
timothy