edonkey/emule supports swarming, good searching, and browser hooks. It's decentralized. There are open source clients. The only thing it lacks is that anonymity feature.
Besides, bittorrent already hooks into the browser. The browser will autolaunch.torrent files in the bittorrent client if it's configured correctly.
XFree 4.3 only went into unstable a few weeks ago, so don't be too proud debian users can finally install it from an official source.
I also got horribly burned, because I was using daniel stone's experimental packages, and they didn't upgrade cleanly to the unstable release. Since experimental packages aren't supported in any way and questions regarding them are ignored, I was left to figure out how to solve my problems. In the end I had to use a lot of force options (first time I ever did that), and was very lucky to get everything going again.
Debian IS outdated, don't lie about it. Unstable always takes way too long to catch up to whatever the latest insert_big_package_here version is. KDE, GNOME, XFree, they always take too long. And to top it off, there is no policy for security updates for unstable. If you're running unstable it's a "whenever the new version enters unstable" thing, if you're running stable, well, I've never been able to run a pure stable system, too old, way too old.
I like debian, and I use it on all my systems, but I wish they stopped denying their problems and actually started fixing them. They've finally admitted that the installer and the desktop usability suck, and are doing something about them. Now they need to admit apt isn't perfect the way it's currently used, and that the package system needs an overhaul to accurately reflect the way people actually use it.
It also wouldn't help admitting that the obscure platforms DO slow down development for the major platforms. XFree 4.3 would have been in unstable ages ago had it not been for the need to get it to run on platforms nobody in their right mind would use for anything besides clowning around. But ofcourse, admitting that the crossplatform nature of debian is slowing it down is a physical impossibility for most debian developers.
The etymotics are in-ear. Most people don't want to wear in-ear for hours upon hours (I get ear infections if I do that).
I sleep with my bose quietcomforts. All night long. I have to. My neighbour loves playing loud techno music late at night (it ironically helps him sleep). Without the headphones I'd have to call the cops before I could get some sleep.
The original quietcomforts were indeed becoming outdated. The competition had caught up to them and improved upon them. Which is why bose released a new generation. Better audio quality, no more background hiss (this never annoyed me, but it did with some people), lighter weight, no more separate audio processing box.
I agree bose makes a lot of crappy products, but the quietcomfort headphones are not among those. As an owner of them I can attest to them being a quality product. And one you can no longer miss when you own it. It's surprising how much annoying noise there is once you get used to being able to shut it out on command.
It's true that the modem is limited to current speeds because of the way the phone network is designed, but this has nothing to do with physical ability of the wires to carry data, but rather of how pots hardware makes use of them. A phone signal is repeated and multiplexed, and no more bandwidth than those 64kbit (actually, slightly less than that) is guaranteed to be available over any single phone circuit. The physical copper wires have huge bandwidth ability compared to that, and that's what dsl takes advantage of. DSL uses the full bandwidth of the physical wire, but that means that the signal can't be repeated by regular POTS hardware (which is why the phone network had to be upgraded locally for it to become available). Old-style modems are designed to use the maximum of what repeaters will allow a phone conversation to carry information-wise, and so they make it possible to dial into anywhere in the world, as long as the phone network connects the two points.
Noise tends to limit the available bandwidth of a phone circuit even more (because noise is information and so takes up bandwidth that could be used by useful information). So a noisy circuit will make a modem fall back to even lower speeds. But even on an absolutely (entirely digital) phone circuit, there is still no more bandwidth available than 64k.
it takes a lot of cash to research something like cancer drugs and if nobody can make money off of it, nobody will invest in the research
In that case, let's call the patent system what it is and say that it is a tax to fund innovation. I'd rather see this be done above board, by a genuine "innovation tax", where you could clearly see where the tax flows to, whereas with patents a considerable chunk of the tax does not produce more innovation.
I think that society would be better off if patents were abolished and all the things that aren't viable/done without patents would be funded by government. That's the job of government anyway, improving the lives of its citizens. Also, the benefit in this case would be that any research done in this way would become public property, whereas with patents you have to wait 20 years before anyone but the patent owner can use that technology freely. This is a useless and quite damaging delay in today's fast-paced society.
And how would you go about detecting gravity? Last I heard we still hadn't even observed gravitons in controlled circumstances, let alone out in the wild.
Let's take the hypothetical case of someone serving up songs from a country where it is legal to where it is illegal. The person who is downloading them is committing the crime, not the person who is serving them.
In this case, if what the guy did was truly legal in australia (which I highly doubt), then only the owners of the computers he communicated with would be liable. They would not necessarily be guilty, only if they wilfully committed the crime or were negligent wrt letting it happen. No matter what, the australian should be tried under australian law, since for all intents and purposes, the possible crime was committed on australian soil.
I think this entire "vagueness" of internet location with respect to crimes was conceived by the IP maffia to get their draconian laws exported worldwide. The sad thing is that they seem to be succeeding.
How many times have you watched "dark city"? I find regardless of my original opinion on a movie, if I don't feel the need to watch it at least 3 times, it's not as good a movie as I thought it was.
Are you saying when we buy a product that requires us to buy another product before it becomes useful we have to buy those from the same company?
Imagine if you had to buy paper from your printer company (at ridiculously overcharged prices), or ink fillings from the pen company, or garbage bags from the bin company. In a world like that, we'd be constantly overcharged for everything. Free competition is what makes capitalism work. Get rid of free competition, and you destroy your economy. And yes, free competition means less profits for the manufacturers (under perfectly free competition, you only break even), which is why they don't like it, no matter how much they say they're all for capitalism.
Windows is a house made of wood, linux is a house made of stone.
Yes, that house of wood is much easier to build, less skills and less effort required. But after years of (ab)use, guess which house requires least maintenance?
A correctly managed linux (debian) system needs to be installed only once, and can then be kept current indefinitely, without becoming less stable, and without becoming slower. I've yet to see a windows system manage that, no matter how competent the admin.
I think he means copy/pasting anything but text. Linux is still notoriously poor and non-standardised at that. Still, it's only a matter of time before the freedesktop project fixes that little oversight.
You can't tell me that Linux is easier to use and install hardware drivers for than Windows.
Well... As far as system configuration goes, I'd say modern linux and windows systems are pretty much on par, except for hardware installation and configuration.
The reason there is no rich library of third-party closed source hardware drivers is because linus wants drivers to be open source, and so constantly breaks backwards compatibility for binary modules. Almost every new kernel version requires a freshly compiled module (just look at the nvidia kernel module that needs to be recompiled for your system in order to be able to load the nvidia closed source drivers). Contrasted to that is the windows model, where you can install kernel modules (drivers) that are 5 years old, and still have them work, because windows' main goal is to preserve driver compatibility.
If linus hadn't made that decision, there would be more drivers for linux, but the majority would be closed source, leading to lower stability and more problematic maintenance. It's a trade off. Either you have a rocksolid system, or you have excellent hardware support. There is no system that combines both features. And yes, I do know windows can be made to run stable, but only if you stick to the certified drivers, negating the whole hardware support advantage.
Sure some things might not work, but I haven't run into anything in the past 2-3 years that I couldn't get working in linux although setting up my ATI card was a real pain.
Try cheap webcams. The majority don't work in linux. And it's only in the last 6 months that the nvidia driver has been stable enough that it didn't nuke my X within 5 minutes when I watch tv and browse the web at the same time. Still, I agree hardware support is becoming acceptable.
On the other hand, with nested loops I can't count how many times I've mixed up j and i, and not seen it at a cursory glance of the bugridden code. If I used outerCounter and innerCounter that wouldn't happen (as much). Not that I'm going to abandon my i's and j's ofcourse.
I remember it mattered a lot what program you used to format and copy those floppies. Standard format and diskcopy was dogslow, but when you used something like diskdupe, it was nice and fast. Quick formats in less than a second, anyone?
Boy are you misremembering things. "Demonizing" the CLI and console mode programs was a mainstay of Apple's advertising for over 10 years.
While at the same time, if you installed the official mac developer tools, you got *pause for dramatic effect* a command-line. And its use wasn't optional either.
Power users have always used the CLI, even on the mac.
If every man page had at least a few examples of how to do stuff most people want to do, it'd be easier to both do those things and learn the more complex commands.
You're not seeing that because of the FSF campaign to get rid of manpages and replace them with the more awkward info program. Anything GNU tends to have very poor manpages. Debian tend to improve the manpages. I don't know about other distro's.
I still think all documentation for anything should be in html. It is universal, easily readable, powerful, and yet you can cat it to the shell and still read its contents reasonably easy (which is much more difficult with unparsed manpages).
My 16 yo sister uses nedit to edit her website, and then runs a shell script on the command line to upload it with rsync over ssh. She also uses firefox, kopete, gentoo, edonkey and xmms. And she likes it now (there were complaints at first when I took away the dualbooting powers, but that was just inertia).
People get pissed when large companies break the GPL why shouldn't microsoft get the same people being irate for them?
The difference is that the GPL removes restrictions imposed by copyright, if you accept to use those new freedoms in stipulateed ways, whereas the microsoft EULA adds new restrictions on top of what copyright already limits. As a result, the MS EULA is on very shaky legal ground. It's not the same thing at all.
The question here is: should a copyright license be allowed to limit fair use (time- or spaceshifting a copyrighted work, which is basically what installing on multiple pc's is as long as you don't use them all at once)? Copyright law seems to say no, but with the poor state of today's courts, you just don't know.
The ogg support only matters if you intend to copy files back from the ipod to the pc. I don't do that, I encoded to AAC. Yes, my files are stuck on the ipod, but I don't care, and they sound identical to the CD at decent bitrates (encoded at 192k, 256k for classical music).
Honestly, I don't see the point behind ogg support. If you were to be all "principled", yes then I understand. But if you make a fuss about something unimportant like that, either you're ignoring the more important of life's problems, or you spend every waking moment protesting something.
The battery thing... that I understand, I wish they never cut battery life from 10 to 8 hours. Still, 8 hours is a long time between wall plugs.
The cost of going to mars is not significantly higher than going to the moon. Yes, the trip to the moon is shorter, but it still long enough that you can't provide "emergency escape" functionality. The "life support during the trip to mars" question is not all that relevant, since we have years of experience doing that thing on the space stations, and you need to be doing that in any mars- or moonbase anyway. Once on the moon you need to truck in most of your resources (water, oxygen,...), while these are abundantly available on mars. Long-distance transportation, a necessity if you're going to do scientific research (the only reason for leaving earth in the first place), is also much easier to achieve on mars. The climate allows you to use airplanes (though they need to be considerably lighter than their earthbound equivalents). The moons total lack of atmosphere means the only way to leave the planet surface is by using a rocket, for which you need rocket fuel, which needs to be flown in from earth.
I don't get why anyone would prefer a moon mission over mars. We know enough about the moon to know we don't want to go there. Mars is the really interesting place science-wise. And mars could be a huge experimental playground for terraforming, something we will need to learn sooner or later if we intend to colonize planets in other solar systems (once we invent FTL travel).
A moon base would be the Top of the Hill for the Pentagon. Its very, very difficult to defend against moon-launched attacks...
That's the only part of your post I would agree with, but only because any kind of off-planet-originated assault is hard to defend against. A planet is a 3D target, it is near impossible to "shield" the entireness of it.
The only effective defense is to engage your enemy before they reach the planet. Or some kind of star wars like planet-sized energy barrier, if they ever figure that out.
You might want to read up on your history yourself. Jobs took over the mac project when he was kicked out of the lisa project, and Raskin quit over what Jobs did to it.
The problem with Jobs is that he always wanted perfection, and perfection is too expensive. The lisa, the mac, next, all suffered from overdesign and the resulting price tag.
Slashdot Mirror
edonkey/emule supports swarming, good searching, and browser hooks. It's decentralized. There are open source clients. The only thing it lacks is that anonymity feature.
.torrent files in the bittorrent client if it's configured correctly.
Besides, bittorrent already hooks into the browser. The browser will autolaunch
XFree 4.3 only went into unstable a few weeks ago, so don't be too proud debian users can finally install it from an official source.
I also got horribly burned, because I was using daniel stone's experimental packages, and they didn't upgrade cleanly to the unstable release. Since experimental packages aren't supported in any way and questions regarding them are ignored, I was left to figure out how to solve my problems. In the end I had to use a lot of force options (first time I ever did that), and was very lucky to get everything going again.
Debian IS outdated, don't lie about it. Unstable always takes way too long to catch up to whatever the latest insert_big_package_here version is. KDE, GNOME, XFree, they always take too long. And to top it off, there is no policy for security updates for unstable. If you're running unstable it's a "whenever the new version enters unstable" thing, if you're running stable, well, I've never been able to run a pure stable system, too old, way too old.
I like debian, and I use it on all my systems, but I wish they stopped denying their problems and actually started fixing them. They've finally admitted that the installer and the desktop usability suck, and are doing something about them. Now they need to admit apt isn't perfect the way it's currently used, and that the package system needs an overhaul to accurately reflect the way people actually use it.
It also wouldn't help admitting that the obscure platforms DO slow down development for the major platforms. XFree 4.3 would have been in unstable ages ago had it not been for the need to get it to run on platforms nobody in their right mind would use for anything besides clowning around. But ofcourse, admitting that the crossplatform nature of debian is slowing it down is a physical impossibility for most debian developers.
The etymotics are in-ear. Most people don't want to wear in-ear for hours upon hours (I get ear infections if I do that).
I sleep with my bose quietcomforts. All night long. I have to. My neighbour loves playing loud techno music late at night (it ironically helps him sleep). Without the headphones I'd have to call the cops before I could get some sleep.
The original quietcomforts were indeed becoming outdated. The competition had caught up to them and improved upon them. Which is why bose released a new generation. Better audio quality, no more background hiss (this never annoyed me, but it did with some people), lighter weight, no more separate audio processing box.
I agree bose makes a lot of crappy products, but the quietcomfort headphones are not among those. As an owner of them I can attest to them being a quality product. And one you can no longer miss when you own it. It's surprising how much annoying noise there is once you get used to being able to shut it out on command.
Damn that not previewing habit I have. I meant "absolutely noiseless" instead of just "absolutely".
It's true that the modem is limited to current speeds because of the way the phone network is designed, but this has nothing to do with physical ability of the wires to carry data, but rather of how pots hardware makes use of them. A phone signal is repeated and multiplexed, and no more bandwidth than those 64kbit (actually, slightly less than that) is guaranteed to be available over any single phone circuit. The physical copper wires have huge bandwidth ability compared to that, and that's what dsl takes advantage of. DSL uses the full bandwidth of the physical wire, but that means that the signal can't be repeated by regular POTS hardware (which is why the phone network had to be upgraded locally for it to become available). Old-style modems are designed to use the maximum of what repeaters will allow a phone conversation to carry information-wise, and so they make it possible to dial into anywhere in the world, as long as the phone network connects the two points.
Noise tends to limit the available bandwidth of a phone circuit even more (because noise is information and so takes up bandwidth that could be used by useful information). So a noisy circuit will make a modem fall back to even lower speeds. But even on an absolutely (entirely digital) phone circuit, there is still no more bandwidth available than 64k.
it takes a lot of cash to research something like cancer drugs and if nobody can make money off of it, nobody will invest in the research
In that case, let's call the patent system what it is and say that it is a tax to fund innovation. I'd rather see this be done above board, by a genuine "innovation tax", where you could clearly see where the tax flows to, whereas with patents a considerable chunk of the tax does not produce more innovation.
I think that society would be better off if patents were abolished and all the things that aren't viable/done without patents would be funded by government. That's the job of government anyway, improving the lives of its citizens. Also, the benefit in this case would be that any research done in this way would become public property, whereas with patents you have to wait 20 years before anyone but the patent owner can use that technology freely. This is a useless and quite damaging delay in today's fast-paced society.
And how would you go about detecting gravity? Last I heard we still hadn't even observed gravitons in controlled circumstances, let alone out in the wild.
More important than where is who.
Let's take the hypothetical case of someone serving up songs from a country where it is legal to where it is illegal. The person who is downloading them is committing the crime, not the person who is serving them.
In this case, if what the guy did was truly legal in australia (which I highly doubt), then only the owners of the computers he communicated with would be liable. They would not necessarily be guilty, only if they wilfully committed the crime or were negligent wrt letting it happen. No matter what, the australian should be tried under australian law, since for all intents and purposes, the possible crime was committed on australian soil.
I think this entire "vagueness" of internet location with respect to crimes was conceived by the IP maffia to get their draconian laws exported worldwide. The sad thing is that they seem to be succeeding.
How many times have you watched "dark city"? I find regardless of my original opinion on a movie, if I don't feel the need to watch it at least 3 times, it's not as good a movie as I thought it was.
Are you saying when we buy a product that requires us to buy another product before it becomes useful we have to buy those from the same company?
Imagine if you had to buy paper from your printer company (at ridiculously overcharged prices), or ink fillings from the pen company, or garbage bags from the bin company. In a world like that, we'd be constantly overcharged for everything. Free competition is what makes capitalism work. Get rid of free competition, and you destroy your economy. And yes, free competition means less profits for the manufacturers (under perfectly free competition, you only break even), which is why they don't like it, no matter how much they say they're all for capitalism.
Let me put it differently:
Windows is a house made of wood, linux is a house made of stone.
Yes, that house of wood is much easier to build, less skills and less effort required. But after years of (ab)use, guess which house requires least maintenance?
A correctly managed linux (debian) system needs to be installed only once, and can then be kept current indefinitely, without becoming less stable, and without becoming slower. I've yet to see a windows system manage that, no matter how competent the admin.
I think he means copy/pasting anything but text. Linux is still notoriously poor and non-standardised at that. Still, it's only a matter of time before the freedesktop project fixes that little oversight.
You can't tell me that Linux is easier to use and install hardware drivers for than Windows.
... As far as system configuration goes, I'd say modern linux and windows systems are pretty much on par, except for hardware installation and configuration.
Well
The reason there is no rich library of third-party closed source hardware drivers is because linus wants drivers to be open source, and so constantly breaks backwards compatibility for binary modules. Almost every new kernel version requires a freshly compiled module (just look at the nvidia kernel module that needs to be recompiled for your system in order to be able to load the nvidia closed source drivers). Contrasted to that is the windows model, where you can install kernel modules (drivers) that are 5 years old, and still have them work, because windows' main goal is to preserve driver compatibility.
If linus hadn't made that decision, there would be more drivers for linux, but the majority would be closed source, leading to lower stability and more problematic maintenance. It's a trade off. Either you have a rocksolid system, or you have excellent hardware support. There is no system that combines both features. And yes, I do know windows can be made to run stable, but only if you stick to the certified drivers, negating the whole hardware support advantage.
Sure some things might not work, but I haven't run into anything in the past 2-3 years that I couldn't get working in linux although setting up my ATI card was a real pain.
Try cheap webcams. The majority don't work in linux. And it's only in the last 6 months that the nvidia driver has been stable enough that it didn't nuke my X within 5 minutes when I watch tv and browse the web at the same time. Still, I agree hardware support is becoming acceptable.
On the other hand, with nested loops I can't count how many times I've mixed up j and i, and not seen it at a cursory glance of the bugridden code. If I used outerCounter and innerCounter that wouldn't happen (as much). Not that I'm going to abandon my i's and j's ofcourse.
Windows ME for the NT generation.
MENTOS?
OK, I know, I know, not funny.
I remember it mattered a lot what program you used to format and copy those floppies. Standard format and diskcopy was dogslow, but when you used something like diskdupe, it was nice and fast. Quick formats in less than a second, anyone?
Boy are you misremembering things. "Demonizing" the CLI and console mode programs was a mainstay of Apple's advertising for over 10 years.
While at the same time, if you installed the official mac developer tools, you got *pause for dramatic effect* a command-line. And its use wasn't optional either.
Power users have always used the CLI, even on the mac.
If every man page had at least a few examples of how to do stuff most people want to do, it'd be easier to both do those things and learn the more complex commands.
You're not seeing that because of the FSF campaign to get rid of manpages and replace them with the more awkward info program. Anything GNU tends to have very poor manpages. Debian tend to improve the manpages. I don't know about other distro's.
I still think all documentation for anything should be in html. It is universal, easily readable, powerful, and yet you can cat it to the shell and still read its contents reasonably easy (which is much more difficult with unparsed manpages).
My 16 yo sister uses nedit to edit her website, and then runs a shell script on the command line to upload it with rsync over ssh. She also uses firefox, kopete, gentoo, edonkey and xmms. And she likes it now (there were complaints at first when I took away the dualbooting powers, but that was just inertia).
People get pissed when large companies break the GPL why shouldn't microsoft get the same people being irate for them?
The difference is that the GPL removes restrictions imposed by copyright, if you accept to use those new freedoms in stipulateed ways, whereas the microsoft EULA adds new restrictions on top of what copyright already limits. As a result, the MS EULA is on very shaky legal ground. It's not the same thing at all.
The question here is: should a copyright license be allowed to limit fair use (time- or spaceshifting a copyrighted work, which is basically what installing on multiple pc's is as long as you don't use them all at once)? Copyright law seems to say no, but with the poor state of today's courts, you just don't know.
The ogg support only matters if you intend to copy files back from the ipod to the pc. I don't do that, I encoded to AAC. Yes, my files are stuck on the ipod, but I don't care, and they sound identical to the CD at decent bitrates (encoded at 192k, 256k for classical music).
... that I understand, I wish they never cut battery life from 10 to 8 hours. Still, 8 hours is a long time between wall plugs.
Honestly, I don't see the point behind ogg support. If you were to be all "principled", yes then I understand. But if you make a fuss about something unimportant like that, either you're ignoring the more important of life's problems, or you spend every waking moment protesting something.
The battery thing
The cost of going to mars is not significantly higher than going to the moon. Yes, the trip to the moon is shorter, but it still long enough that you can't provide "emergency escape" functionality. The "life support during the trip to mars" question is not all that relevant, since we have years of experience doing that thing on the space stations, and you need to be doing that in any mars- or moonbase anyway. Once on the moon you need to truck in most of your resources (water, oxygen, ...), while these are abundantly available on mars. Long-distance transportation, a necessity if you're going to do scientific research (the only reason for leaving earth in the first place), is also much easier to achieve on mars. The climate allows you to use airplanes (though they need to be considerably lighter than their earthbound equivalents). The moons total lack of atmosphere means the only way to leave the planet surface is by using a rocket, for which you need rocket fuel, which needs to be flown in from earth.
I don't get why anyone would prefer a moon mission over mars. We know enough about the moon to know we don't want to go there. Mars is the really interesting place science-wise. And mars could be a huge experimental playground for terraforming, something we will need to learn sooner or later if we intend to colonize planets in other solar systems (once we invent FTL travel).
A moon base would be the Top of the Hill for the Pentagon. Its very, very difficult to defend against moon-launched attacks ...
That's the only part of your post I would agree with, but only because any kind of off-planet-originated assault is hard to defend against. A planet is a 3D target, it is near impossible to "shield" the entireness of it.
The only effective defense is to engage your enemy before they reach the planet. Or some kind of star wars like planet-sized energy barrier, if they ever figure that out.
You might want to read up on your history yourself. Jobs took over the mac project when he was kicked out of the lisa project, and Raskin quit over what Jobs did to it.
The problem with Jobs is that he always wanted perfection, and perfection is too expensive. The lisa, the mac, next, all suffered from overdesign and the resulting price tag.