I don't know where this article comes from but even in the late 90s [e.g. 97 and on] IRC was laregely bunk. The "best" rooms were always invite only private rooms. The rest were full of dialup junkies trying to get warez or bots annoying the fuck out of others.
You can still have software development as a hobby though you are right that depending on the project you have to use some capitalism judgement here and there [e.g. I make a living by doing commercial support for my public domain software].
The spirit isn't dead, it's just lost in the S/N ratio that is modern day "capitalism".
10 years from now... just like the "paperless office" right?
People will still want to control their information. I'm not saying nobody would use the online versions, I'm saying it won't make the desktop obsolete.
Specially considering the trend is towards home and small businesses where desktop boxes normally serve as cheap workstations and servers.
First off, most peeps I know who use windows when I confront them either say
1. Fuck you stranger, get out of my office! 2. So what? I pirated it 3. So what? My business bought it
To #1 I say, sorry and I'll respect the restraining order.
To #2 I say, fuck you, people work for a living and you're ripping them off [even if it is windows].
To #3 I say, enjoy your layoffs, expenses and salaries come from the same bank account.
As for the developers... well you should know better. I mean when you have to use cygwin to develop anything in a remotely free fashion that should be your first hint. Stop denying what you already know is true and join the winning team.
Enough people do software development and number crunching that computers won't become appliances.
Things like MSNTV [or whatever it's called] have been around for quite some time. People still buy their redundant power hogging P4 boxes from Dell...Imagine that. The US and Canada are just not in the mindset of "limited resources". At all. I mean gas hits all time highs and people are still buying SUVs and what not.
A web version of office will never fly for two reasons
1. Inability to work offline [including backup storage]
2. Security. I'm sure every company in the world would want to put their sales figures, internal documents and business slides on a website that is just as likely to leak them to a million users as it is to render them appropriately.
If you have to manually download your work instead of just keeping it on a samba share that gets tape backed every night nobody will use it.
Now shut your stupid hysteria and get a firm grip on reality. Hold tight!
Tom
Re:Regulate Sales As Well As Content Creation
on
The ESRB Bites Back
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't believe sales to minors is the problem. Where are these kids getting the 60, 70, 80 dollars to buy a video game anyways?
When I was 12 I sure as fuck didn't have $80 to blow on a game whenever it suited my fancy.
And frankly, after I my department store [Zellers, like Walmart only Canadian, less evil, etc] aapron to sell towels and home electronic bullshit I think I was old enough to play GTA [though the cool GTAs were not out yet at that time...].
I encountered more grief from parents yelling about shortages of Zelda64 that was tramatizing then some fucking pow pow in a video game. I mean think about it. A fully grown adult parent was yelling at me [I was 16 yrs old at the time] about a video game that was on sale not being in the store.
That's ok. Work experience good. But playing some game in the safety of my house is a negative influence...
So basically you want to stop 12 yr olds from getting their mitts on video games they shouldn't have? Stop giving them so much money to spend however they please.
And if your 16 yr old kid can't take cartoon violence... you failed as a parent.
In the music downloading case, do you know how much a USB cable costs? I do, about 30$. And they break. What does a download cost for a song? Don't know? About 3$. You do the math.
You're kidding right? I have DB9 serial cables from when I was 12 still in my "box of wires".
As for the cost it's largely immaterial as a lot of things use AB or A-mini plugs. My cables for my mp3 player also work for my phone, etc... Though I'm not discounting the ripoff that 28AWG wire is when bundled in USB packaging.
HOWERVER, you do realize that
1. You need a snake maybe once a year. That's why it rusts between uses
2. You don't plan on buying er... renting... er licensing more than 10 tracks per decade?
If you buy fewer than one song per year than YES, I can see the $3 charge being ok... but if you're like the typical user you'll probably buy a half dozen songs to start then one every so often. Probably more than 5 a year. In the 10 year lifespan of that cable you can buy 5*10*3= 150$ worth of songs off the telco or 5*10*0.99 + $30 ~ 80$ worth of songs off itunes.
In fact since the songs only cost 99 cents on itunes you're probably going to get more songs than you would at the $3/song rate and in the end get more use out of your headset.
You don't need virtualization for task migration. OpenMOSIX is an example of that. It can send processes to any number of hosts and can detect when they're dead.
The VM game is because "everyone wants to be root"...
In the same box where you host 100 users in VMs you can probably host 200 natively.
Your "desktop" shouldn't be your server if you really use the desktop [e.g. crashes because the latest nvidia driver isn't stable isn't a good thing].
In my case I do nightly backups of my home dirs and what not. In the grand scheme of things if my desktop got fucked up it would take me a days worth of building to get it back, If I'm lucky and I've done a recent ghost it can be back up in minutes...
I can see the whole VMware shit for windows servers but UNIXly servers like apache are meant to host multiple sites, they run on an OS that has multiple users, etc, etc.
In the plumbing case, do you know how much a snake costs? I do, about 100$. And they rust. What does a plumber cost for an hour? Don't know? About 65-85$. You do the math.
As for the car case. In the "ideal" world your car mechanic is supposed to be a professional [and in many cases I suspect they are]. So the idea is when you go in for your "once every few months or whatever" oil change you get the car looked at.
You can't be an expert plumber, car mechanic, pilot, doctor, etc... We need experts.
As for this service... nobodies head will explode if you hook a USB cable to your phone. The fact that people don't is two sided
1. Telcos often lock phones to prevent things [e.g. bluetooth? what bluetooth?]
2. People think "fewer dials and more shiny" is progress. They don't like being given control of what they are doing because clearly if you're capable of controlling your PC it's not advanced enough.
What I don't get... is for 0.99$ you can buy legit copy that sounds a "tad" better than the "beeps" and "boops" that is crappy ringtone satire...You probably pay data and air usage for the download!!! This is why telcos are slowly but surely getting assraped by all new technologies out there [cough cough voip].
They think they can just charge whatever the fuck they want and people will "just put up with it".
VoIP is the future. Why can I route an HTTP packet to Iran but not a packet with audio?
The more they fight it the stupider they look and eventually will lobby to play catchup [e.g. force the actual players to comply with stupid laws like E911]. Hey SBC, wake the fuck up, the days of $1.30 a minute to Europe are long over.
That and what of peering? You gonna charge me money to talk to a voip user who uses your ISP services? Ok, how about my ISP charge your customers money for using my ISP?
This is just more of "I don't get it, I don't want it, it shouldn't be".
I don't get what you mean by "overlay to TV". You mean you want the program to display on your TV and then have your normal apps on your display?... um last I checked X supports multiple displays. So you should be able to just start mplayer and move the window over to the other display [e.g. your TV]. That's up to your video adapter driver [e.g. not X and specially not Linux] to sort out.
My media box is just that, a media box. It isn't a home PC or whatever that I also sit at. so in my case the primary display is the TV. As for "convince you to switch"... if the only reason you won't switch to an OSS operating system [and userland tools] is because WMP is "user friendly" then you probably don't see the tangible benefits to switching and you're probably better off.
In my case the first and foremost are the development tools. I live in bash, I write small scripts for everything [as I develop my software]. I use it to automate all sorts of things [e.g. import code into a new tree, etc]. The development tools are highly professional and don't just "fit the bill" they surpass it [e.g. gcc vs. msvc].
Then there is the selection of tools and apps. there are so many to pick from in the OSS world vs. what you can scrounge for in the Win32 world. Most win32 apps are commercial or shareware or nagware or just plain fucking annoying because everyone and their brother is trying to eek out a living as a "coder". The S/N ratio is so high that when a good tool for win32 is developed it's easy to miss.
Then there is the actual act of paying for win32. I bought a new PC, like fuck I want to shell out the 400$ [it's 399$ for a full edition of WinXP pro] so I can put an OS on it that is half-ass and developer angry.
Of course win32 is soooo good right, that's why the first thing you do [after the reboot-patch-reboot cycles] is install 100s of third party tools. E.g. divx codec, messenger software, shell, cygwin, anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-omg-make-it-stopware, etc...
So you pay $400 for windows [or pirate, which is just as stupid] then "enhance it" by adding tools to make the OS actually useful for the average professional... Or you can grab a gentoo CD for all of 50 cents, spend the day installing it exactly like you want and end up with professional tools that do more than look pretty [e.g. MSFT's C compiler is competitive if this is 1995].
And yes, there are compromises. Lack of games [developers fault not OSS]. Lack of drivers [manufacturers fault not OSS] and lack of shiny buttons [windows fault, I can navigate a filesystem just fine without 3D acceleration...].
"In Linux. Make a custom x-config-file. Then make a separate launch file for mplayer, spawning it in a second x-session with your new custom file config-file. This new mplayer session then in turn lacks any player-controls on your main display unless you want it overlapping your video output, leaving you only with shortcut keys and 5 second-a-time skipping. A lot more work, a lot less functional."
What?
Ever look at gmplayer? It's the GTK front-end for mplayer that COMES WITH MPLAYER.
I think you ought to read a man page or two as well
mplayer -fs mymovie.avi
Is about as complex as it gets for most 4:3 aspect avi files [for instance]. Where mplayer beats WMP is the amount of control. Full screen? caching? aspect ratio [movie and screen]? re-encode it? etc...
mplayer also is portable. What you call "complexity" I call "oh, it DOES work on my amd64 in 64-bit mode" or "it does work on my PPC box running BSD!" etc...
WMP certainly works fine as a 32-bit x86 windows only media player [with annoying ads and other lockdowns].
Whereas mplayer works fine as a portable media player capable of using more codecs than WMP [out of the box] without the annoying ads/lockdowns and with more fine control over the media.
It's multimedia is ahead of Linux? How? First off Linux is just a Kernel.. I suppose you mean a distro?
Like Gentoo? Oh where can I get a music player? XMMS
But videos!!?!?!? mplayer
But games!!! OpenGL + OpenAL [or SDL or OSS or ALSA]...
Don't confuse "lack of industry support" for inability. GNU/Linux based desktops like those based off of Gentoo and Debian are QUITE CAPABLE of being entertainment boxes [hint: my movie box that hooks up to my TV in the living room runs Gentoo and is controllable by a website and Perl CGI backend].
Best part yet, I didn't have to shell out money for the "deluxe web home media edition" of WinXP.
Last time I checked, Gentoo [and the BSDs and other Linux distros] don't have the "Activation" feature. They're really falling behind MSFT in this respect.
I mean each time you build a new computer [or rebuild an old one] you SHOULD call Linus to ask permission!
Why can't they create life? Because even a one cell microorganism has a fairly hefty length of DNA. [or RNA or whatever]. The fact is cloning bacteria is already a well developed science [so is splicing cells from different organisms].
The problem ID people have is they look at ANY holes in existing science as proof that their is a god. Scientists just look at it as shit we don't know yet. They're not basing it on any logical form of argument and they basically use social peer pressure and intimidation to get their way [try being an atheist in a bible thumping town...].
Vector has had people at my school in Ottawa. I promptly told them off [realizing it was some sort of pyramid scheme].
If students want to make money they just have to be able to produce something of value. If they stopped looking at "learning" as a means to an ends [e.g. I only do as much thinking as is required to gradudate] they'd have the ability and energy to achieve something bigger than just a degree....
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know where this article comes from but even in the late 90s [e.g. 97 and on] IRC was laregely bunk. The "best" rooms were always invite only private rooms. The rest were full of dialup junkies trying to get warez or bots annoying the fuck out of others.
You can still have software development as a hobby though you are right that depending on the project you have to use some capitalism judgement here and there [e.g. I make a living by doing commercial support for my public domain software].
The spirit isn't dead, it's just lost in the S/N ratio that is modern day "capitalism".
Tom
10 years from now ... just like the "paperless office" right?
People will still want to control their information. I'm not saying nobody would use the online versions, I'm saying it won't make the desktop obsolete.
Specially considering the trend is towards home and small businesses where desktop boxes normally serve as cheap workstations and servers.
Tom
First off, most peeps I know who use windows when I confront them either say
... well you should know better. I mean when you have to use cygwin to develop anything in a remotely free fashion that should be your first hint. Stop denying what you already know is true and join the winning team.
1. Fuck you stranger, get out of my office!
2. So what? I pirated it
3. So what? My business bought it
To #1 I say, sorry and I'll respect the restraining order.
To #2 I say, fuck you, people work for a living and you're ripping them off [even if it is windows].
To #3 I say, enjoy your layoffs, expenses and salaries come from the same bank account.
As for the developers
Tom
Two words. "Get fucked".
Enough people do software development and number crunching that computers won't become appliances.
Things like MSNTV [or whatever it's called] have been around for quite some time. People still buy their redundant power hogging P4 boxes from Dell...Imagine that. The US and Canada are just not in the mindset of "limited resources". At all. I mean gas hits all time highs and people are still buying SUVs and what not.
A web version of office will never fly for two reasons
1. Inability to work offline [including backup storage]
2. Security. I'm sure every company in the world would want to put their sales figures, internal documents and business slides on a website that is just as likely to leak them to a million users as it is to render them appropriately.
If you have to manually download your work instead of just keeping it on a samba share that gets tape backed every night nobody will use it.
Now shut your stupid hysteria and get a firm grip on reality. Hold tight!
Tom
I don't believe sales to minors is the problem. Where are these kids getting the 60, 70, 80 dollars to buy a video game anyways?
... you failed as a parent.
When I was 12 I sure as fuck didn't have $80 to blow on a game whenever it suited my fancy.
And frankly, after I my department store [Zellers, like Walmart only Canadian, less evil, etc] aapron to sell towels and home electronic bullshit I think I was old enough to play GTA [though the cool GTAs were not out yet at that time...].
I encountered more grief from parents yelling about shortages of Zelda64 that was tramatizing then some fucking pow pow in a video game. I mean think about it. A fully grown adult parent was yelling at me [I was 16 yrs old at the time] about a video game that was on sale not being in the store.
That's ok. Work experience good. But playing some game in the safety of my house is a negative influence...
So basically you want to stop 12 yr olds from getting their mitts on video games they shouldn't have? Stop giving them so much money to spend however they please.
And if your 16 yr old kid can't take cartoon violence
Tom
I dunno about you but all of my GSM motorola phones have been USB connected...
Maybe you just don't show around enough?
Tom
In the music downloading case, do you know how much a USB cable costs? I do, about 30$. And they break. What does a download cost for a song? Don't know? About 3$. You do the math.
... er licensing more than 10 tracks per decade?
You're kidding right? I have DB9 serial cables from when I was 12 still in my "box of wires".
As for the cost it's largely immaterial as a lot of things use AB or A-mini plugs. My cables for my mp3 player also work for my phone, etc... Though I'm not discounting the ripoff that 28AWG wire is when bundled in USB packaging.
HOWERVER, you do realize that
1. You need a snake maybe once a year. That's why it rusts between uses
2. You don't plan on buying er... renting
If you buy fewer than one song per year than YES, I can see the $3 charge being ok... but if you're like the typical user you'll probably buy a half dozen songs to start then one every so often. Probably more than 5 a year. In the 10 year lifespan of that cable you can buy 5*10*3= 150$ worth of songs off the telco or 5*10*0.99 + $30 ~ 80$ worth of songs off itunes.
In fact since the songs only cost 99 cents on itunes you're probably going to get more songs than you would at the $3/song rate and in the end get more use out of your headset.
Tom
two words. "multiple desktops".
Oh yeah and "natively".
I can't stand to sit at a windows desktop. It infuriates me. The "cmd" shell is inept, the desktop is one-paned, etc...
It may do fine for non-developers and/or people with money. But X11 works much better for developres and people who spend their money elsewhere.
Tom
Well I can see it making sense if you are hosting non-friendly users [e.g. different companies].
... well you're not gonna try and cheat yourself?
... the flipside is you have to administer patches, updates, config fixes multiple times.
If you're one company and you're hosting say 10 domains
As for apps misbehaving
Tom
You don't need virtualization for task migration. OpenMOSIX is an example of that. It can send processes to any number of hosts and can detect when they're dead.
...
The VM game is because "everyone wants to be root"
In the same box where you host 100 users in VMs you can probably host 200 natively.
Tom
Your "desktop" shouldn't be your server if you really use the desktop [e.g. crashes because the latest nvidia driver isn't stable isn't a good thing].
In my case I do nightly backups of my home dirs and what not. In the grand scheme of things if my desktop got fucked up it would take me a days worth of building to get it back, If I'm lucky and I've done a recent ghost it can be back up in minutes...
I can see the whole VMware shit for windows servers but UNIXly servers like apache are meant to host multiple sites, they run on an OS that has multiple users, etc, etc.
Tom
Multiple OSes at once? Isn't this a step backwards for the push for portable software?
...
I never got the whole concept of virtual servers..... this is why they invented vhosts and servers which could bind to multiple IPs
Tom
Those are a bit different.
In the plumbing case, do you know how much a snake costs? I do, about 100$. And they rust. What does a plumber cost for an hour? Don't know? About 65-85$. You do the math.
As for the car case. In the "ideal" world your car mechanic is supposed to be a professional [and in many cases I suspect they are]. So the idea is when you go in for your "once every few months or whatever" oil change you get the car looked at.
You can't be an expert plumber, car mechanic, pilot, doctor, etc... We need experts.
As for this service... nobodies head will explode if you hook a USB cable to your phone. The fact that people don't is two sided
1. Telcos often lock phones to prevent things [e.g. bluetooth? what bluetooth?]
2. People think "fewer dials and more shiny" is progress. They don't like being given control of what they are doing because clearly if you're capable of controlling your PC it's not advanced enough.
Tom
What I don't get ... is for 0.99$ you can buy legit copy that sounds a "tad" better than the "beeps" and "boops" that is crappy ringtone satire...You probably pay data and air usage for the download!!! This is why telcos are slowly but surely getting assraped by all new technologies out there [cough cough voip].
They think they can just charge whatever the fuck they want and people will "just put up with it".
Answer: No they won't.
Tom
1. Look smart in airport
2. Cover head in rain
3. It's better than nothing when you run out of TP.
**stop cutting down trees for what ammounts to voyeurism and blatant stupidity!***
Tom
VoIP is the future. Why can I route an HTTP packet to Iran but not a packet with audio?
The more they fight it the stupider they look and eventually will lobby to play catchup [e.g. force the actual players to comply with stupid laws like E911]. Hey SBC, wake the fuck up, the days of $1.30 a minute to Europe are long over.
That and what of peering? You gonna charge me money to talk to a voip user who uses your ISP services? Ok, how about my ISP charge your customers money for using my ISP?
This is just more of "I don't get it, I don't want it, it shouldn't be".
Tom
I don't get what you mean by "overlay to TV". You mean you want the program to display on your TV and then have your normal apps on your display? ... um last I checked X supports multiple displays. So you should be able to just start mplayer and move the window over to the other display [e.g. your TV]. That's up to your video adapter driver [e.g. not X and specially not Linux] to sort out.
... if the only reason you won't switch to an OSS operating system [and userland tools] is because WMP is "user friendly" then you probably don't see the tangible benefits to switching and you're probably better off.
My media box is just that, a media box. It isn't a home PC or whatever that I also sit at. so in my case the primary display is the TV. As for "convince you to switch"
In my case the first and foremost are the development tools. I live in bash, I write small scripts for everything [as I develop my software]. I use it to automate all sorts of things [e.g. import code into a new tree, etc]. The development tools are highly professional and don't just "fit the bill" they surpass it [e.g. gcc vs. msvc].
Then there is the selection of tools and apps. there are so many to pick from in the OSS world vs. what you can scrounge for in the Win32 world. Most win32 apps are commercial or shareware or nagware or just plain fucking annoying because everyone and their brother is trying to eek out a living as a "coder". The S/N ratio is so high that when a good tool for win32 is developed it's easy to miss.
Then there is the actual act of paying for win32. I bought a new PC, like fuck I want to shell out the 400$ [it's 399$ for a full edition of WinXP pro] so I can put an OS on it that is half-ass and developer angry.
Of course win32 is soooo good right, that's why the first thing you do [after the reboot-patch-reboot cycles] is install 100s of third party tools. E.g. divx codec, messenger software, shell, cygwin, anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-omg-make-it-stopware, etc...
So you pay $400 for windows [or pirate, which is just as stupid] then "enhance it" by adding tools to make the OS actually useful for the average professional... Or you can grab a gentoo CD for all of 50 cents, spend the day installing it exactly like you want and end up with professional tools that do more than look pretty [e.g. MSFT's C compiler is competitive if this is 1995].
And yes, there are compromises. Lack of games [developers fault not OSS]. Lack of drivers [manufacturers fault not OSS] and lack of shiny buttons [windows fault, I can navigate a filesystem just fine without 3D acceleration...].
Tom
"In Linux. Make a custom x-config-file. Then make a separate launch file for mplayer, spawning it in a second x-session with your new custom file config-file. This new mplayer session then in turn lacks any player-controls on your main display unless you want it overlapping your video output, leaving you only with shortcut keys and 5 second-a-time skipping. A lot more work, a lot less functional."
What?
Ever look at gmplayer? It's the GTK front-end for mplayer that COMES WITH MPLAYER.
I think you ought to read a man page or two as well
mplayer -fs mymovie.avi
Is about as complex as it gets for most 4:3 aspect avi files [for instance]. Where mplayer beats WMP is the amount of control. Full screen? caching? aspect ratio [movie and screen]? re-encode it? etc...
mplayer also is portable. What you call "complexity" I call "oh, it DOES work on my amd64 in 64-bit mode" or "it does work on my PPC box running BSD!" etc...
WMP certainly works fine as a 32-bit x86 windows only media player [with annoying ads and other lockdowns].
Whereas mplayer works fine as a portable media player capable of using more codecs than WMP [out of the box] without the annoying ads/lockdowns and with more fine control over the media.
Tom
It's multimedia is ahead of Linux? How? First off Linux is just a Kernel.. I suppose you mean a distro?
...
Like Gentoo? Oh where can I get a music player? XMMS
But videos!!?!?!? mplayer
But games!!! OpenGL + OpenAL [or SDL or OSS or ALSA]
Don't confuse "lack of industry support" for inability. GNU/Linux based desktops like those based off of Gentoo and Debian are QUITE CAPABLE of being entertainment boxes [hint: my movie box that hooks up to my TV in the living room runs Gentoo and is controllable by a website and Perl CGI backend].
Best part yet, I didn't have to shell out money for the "deluxe web home media edition" of WinXP.
Tom
Last time I checked, Gentoo [and the BSDs and other Linux distros] don't have the "Activation" feature. They're really falling behind MSFT in this respect.
I mean each time you build a new computer [or rebuild an old one] you SHOULD call Linus to ask permission!
Tom
Well put I guess ;-)
but you missed a bit
Well then, it seems the IDers in the way of academia, are the "atheist[s] in a bible thumping town".
What I don't get is what does ID teach you that you can use in the real world?
Biology tries to teach you genetics [to a sort of limited mendel sorta way] among other things where the ID "theory" doesn't apply.
I mean why does this spliced plant have offspring that look different? Genetics? NO! it's gods will!!!! hahahahamauahahahah
Seriously. How can the ID folk sit there and think that's a rational course of thought when the experiments are REPRODUCIBLE!
Tom
Why can't they create life? Because even a one cell microorganism has a fairly hefty length of DNA. [or RNA or whatever]. The fact is cloning bacteria is already a well developed science [so is splicing cells from different organisms].
The problem ID people have is they look at ANY holes in existing science as proof that their is a god. Scientists just look at it as shit we don't know yet. They're not basing it on any logical form of argument and they basically use social peer pressure and intimidation to get their way [try being an atheist in a bible thumping town...].
Tom
As another person pointed out....Jesus ain't no god or creator. Just a poser who got himself in trouble with the mob.
But I think you're just being sarcastic anyways.
Tom
Vector has had people at my school in Ottawa. I promptly told them off [realizing it was some sort of pyramid scheme].
...
If students want to make money they just have to be able to produce something of value. If they stopped looking at "learning" as a means to an ends [e.g. I only do as much thinking as is required to gradudate] they'd have the ability and energy to achieve something bigger than just a degree.
Oh well.
Tom