Hmmm... you sound like a "gadget guy" and not a tech. If you feel OK with just buying something that's already built and bending over for the restrictions imposed on you by corporate head office, that's actually OK. Just not for people like me. The main reason I don't go with the Tivo that DirecTV offers me is that I can't archive the TV shows for my collection. But, to a tech (vs. a "gadget guy"), there is more fun to be had in building a system from scratch and then perfecting it so it has more features than commercial units offer. My current Linux based media center runs on a PIII from 1999. It does a damn fine job to thanks to some smart hardware choices and knowledge about how to take advantage of said choices. I, however, did not choose to go the MythTV or Freevo routes because I'm not a gadget guy and those are still to "prefab" for me. I, instead, opted to not have to teach my family a whole new UI and went with a typical Gnome desktop, custom Bash scripts, Zenity for GUI interaction with the scripts, and some very basic Gnome desktop cutomization (custom icons that launch the scripts). I, unlike many of my bretheren, acknowledge that not everyone wants to or enjoys doing this sort of thing. Mostly I'm posting to explain why someone WOULD want to bother with this sort of thing. In my case, I wanted to be able to watch TV from anywhere, anytime. And thanks to Xine and it's broadcast mode + Lirc and OpenSSH, all computers in my house can watch TV and change channels or watch recorded programs. And thanks to Network Block Device support, the normally unused DVD drive in the livingroom laptop is now the DVD player for theLinux media center in the basement that displays on the 37" LCD monitor in the living room. As one of my Slashdot friends put it, "Some motherfucker is always wanting to swim upstream". That would be people like me. If we didn't do it, then there would be lots of discoveries that would go undiscovered.
Forget everything you know about Windows. Linux is not Windows even if some of the GUI environments are starting to resemble aspects of them. Linux is closer to the Unix ideal of MANY MANY MANY tools that do one thing really well and need to be intertwined with other things to do more. As a non-programmer, I find Linux much easier to customize than Windows in terms of actually building new functionality. This is not something easily accomplished on Windows unless you want to get a Devel kit. In Linux it's practically a survival skill. Take a look through some of my Slashdot Journal Entries for examples of how I accomplished some interesting things with Linux that would have been nearly impossible with Windows.
Only because some PHB bought in and took the ship down with them. Where I work (also in IT for an organization that covers nearly half of my state) we at least have bosses who sometimes listen to reason. In the real world, MS isn't the only solution to a problem and you typically have a system comprised of multiple OSes and flavors of OSes. Where I work, we've got OpenVMS (awesome OS), Sun Solaris, Tru64 Unix, HP-UX, Various flaovrs of Linux, Soon to have OpenBSD, Mac OS X, and of course Windows. I use Linux on the desktop at work everyday because it "just works" unlike MS Windows. Now don't get me wrong, I'm no "zealot" no matter what you might think. If someone find Windows to provide them with what they need at work or at home, I let them be. My main point is to stop people from telling others to not even consider Linux. That's where my biggest argument lies. If Linux (or some other OS) can do something in the server room OR on the desktop, then I see no reason to discourage others from going that route. I don't go around telling people to not use Windows or Mac OS X for example. Like I said, "if the shoe fits, wear it". Just don't tell people, "don't even bother trying, it's not worth your time" because that's disrespectful to the individual.
My other peeve is the slap in the face that "Home Based PCs" or "hobbiest" is when applied to someone like me. Whenever I've seen that kind of comment used it's usually to try and take away from the argument that a certain OS is suitable for professional use. The logic here is that "home based" is never mission critical. However, this is not true. If you're running a web server that hosts various important web applications for a variety of friends, family and clients, or a mail server that needs 24/7 uptime, then it's clearly important. Of couse the argument again is "...well if it's not being used to make money then it's not really 'mission critical'". To which I say, "making money is not really of the utmost importance to many people. It certainly isn't for me". Again, the bottom line here is that what works for some people may not work for others. In my case, I LIKE having enterprise class technologies at home (virtualization, SAN-like features of Logical Volume Manager, industrial strength encrypted VPN, database backed IMAP, etc...). Since I do this stuff professionally during the day, why not apply the knowledge at home? And since I do it professionally during the day, I think it's a little insulting to imply that what I do at home is any less important than what I do at work for pay. After all, as I like to say, when a plumber, electrician or carpenter works on his home, we don't call him an "amateur" or "hobbiest" unless we want to intentionally denigrate his skill. The fact is that some of us actually LIKE working with this stuff and who better to do this both professionally and at home with equivalent results in both locations? Trust me, the systems that harcore Linux users set up at home are a wholly different animal from the systems that average Windows guys (I'm excluding hardcore Windows buys because some of them are damn clever and actually work on setting up enterprise class stuff at home) set up at home. Most people using terms like "hobbiest" or "Home Based PC" tend to be comparing the average Windows user with the hardcore Linux users. Totally wrong in my mind.
Well this is totally off topic but a while back I had an idea for the free/open source community to build a system based on DNS that would contain information about filetypes and applications that can handle them. This would be an open/free project that would have to run in a similar way to DNS and there would have to be a filetype resolver in the OS distribution that would query this name system when it encounters an application that doesn't have a current association. It could even be extended to work just like DNS, where organizations or home users who run servers at home (like me) could even hav e local versions that would contain custom entries that take precedence over the "root servers". The main idea being that when someone attempts to open a non-associated filetype, they would get a prompt that would list the applications known to handle the filetype with links (where possible) to install the application from the net using any of the popular package managers if the app isn't present. Mainly this is in an effort to make the distros easier to use for non-technical people or... technical folks who are lazy and don't want to bother with downloading or associating the apps themselves (they exist although I'm not one of them). Anyway, your comment made me think about this again...
Well if you noted the disclaimer in my original post, you'd see that I'm 110% on your side. My folks and my wife use Linux and they are all non-technical people.
And you apparently have no sense of humor because you obviously took it all too seriously. Sure, I'm a Linux guy, but I don't fault people for using Windows. If they don't have the same needs that people like me do, there's nothing wrong with using Windows. I obviously don't have the same needs they do which is why I don't use Windows as well. But there's a whole lot of fun to be had poking at both sides of the argument and that's the point you missed. I think it is YOU who take the OS argument far too seriously since you're the one who is offended by such a post. If you didn't take these things so seriously the post should have cracked a smile on your face...
But, but, but... what about the high cost of retraining everyone to use all these new weird applications that don't make as much sense as Windows applications!!!? What about the steep learning curve since Linux is just inherently harder to use!!!? What about the fact that when the user tries to hit some valid work related site that needs to access media like Powerpoint, Flash 9 and higher, Windows Media Video, and the like that they won't be able to or will have a reduced quality end-user experience compared to MS Windows??? I've seen the Xine plug-in for Firefox and it doesn't work right. Instead of embedding the content in the browser as it should it pops open a new window and only about 20% of the time does the content actually play!! What about the fact that unless you've got a few gurus on your staff, when there's a problem there's NO ONE to go to for support once the problem is out of your league? Forums? HAH! Yeah, you've got a down critical situation with your users and you're going to fart away valuable time on forums where you may or may not get an answer in a day? A week? A month? A year? Never? The only answer if to get Windows Vista because it was built for real work and not for geeks with no life. Got that?
[DISCLAIMER: The poster called 'eno2001' does not believe in what he stated above at all and is merely parodying the typical lies and misconceptions about GNU/Linux that come from the anti-Linux crowd. The poster called 'eno2001' expects many good responses to the false arguments presented above from the pro-Linux community. All anti-linux sentiments will be laughed at unless you're really good at what you do. The 'eno2001' has spoken.]
As the caste system is firmly being embedded in Western culture, it's a logical conclusion that there would be a drive to label certain types of people as potential criminals based on the way they think. I suspect that it will at some point in the future be a crime if you feel that businesses have no right to force you to buy something. Or you will be branded a potential criminal if your mind works in such a way that you do not believe that there should be financial and social inequity between people. Very treacherous ground and about the only thing that makes libertarians seem like they're onto something. The only reason I'm not a libertarian is because I can't just turn inwardly and stop caring about the world around me AND I have no belief that my individual efforts can make a change to the world around me. Things need to be done in groups to have any effect sadly and not too many people want to gather around the homeless and help them...
...are in it together, along with the aliens, the illuminati, the CIA, the Clintons and the Bushes. Having photos of the squirrels and pigeons would allow the hackers to identify which agents are on campus without a doubt. It's plainly obvious if you're in the know.
...there aren't many things that can be done to the Windows+Icons+Mouse+Pointer (WIMP) paradigm. Even with all the eye candy that Mac OS X has had for the past few years and that has recently been added to Windows Vista, there isn't a whole lot new under the sun in terms of user interaction. The Dashboard (which MS mercilessly and poorly apes in Vista) from Apple was about the only interesting thing above pre Mac OS X Mac OSes. And it's not so much a new way of doing things as it is a revisiting of the old "Desktop apps" from the 80s. I remember on my Atari I used to load desktop apps that I could pull to the foreground that did various interesting things in the background for me. Since they were memory resident, wasn't "running" them each time I interacted. They were already there. Dashboard is just a really jazzed up way of doing that. Expose is the same deal. It's a pretty app manager, and that's all. I was using similar features in Enlightment in the late 90s. And now with XGL, Compiz and Beryl for *nix, you'll see the same things happening in *nix distros fairly soon. The 3Dness of Vista, Sun JavaOS and Compiz really still doesn't change user interaction much other than making it "cooler" in some opinions. It's still, "look at a list of apps in some visual fashion, and switch tasks" or "set up a group of apps on one virtual desktop, do the same on a few others, then switch between the deskstop to change your workmode".
Until there is actually a change in user interaction with the machines themselves, we're stuck with uninspiring WIMPs on all platforms. They might have better tailfins, but I am hard pressed to find anything that increases efficiency in workflow that doesn't already exist on nearly all the platforms (with Windows being notably behind a bit). Really accurate and non-training-based voice recognition could enhance the end user experience a bit. But we've been promised this stuff for some time and it's not yet come to pass on the desktop. I remember when IBM was touting it for a version of OS2 and nothing happened. I played around with DragonDictate on Windows XP a few years back and it was usable but the training portion seemed a bit ridiculous. I also played with some speech recognition in Linux and was able to launch apps by saying things like "netscape" or "realplay" back in the 90s, but that was largely pointless. My cell phone coupled with the bluetooth headset and it's voice recognition is far more useful and accurate sadly... But, for a media center I think voice commands would be awesome. Imagine, "Tune BBC America", or "Schedule a recording for Saturday night at nine PM on the Discover channel". The computer asks, "Program duration"? You reply, "Two hours and five minutes. Start it about two minutes early". The computer then asks, "Program to be scheduled for 8:58PM on Saturday December 23rd 2006 on the Discovery Channel for two hours and five minutes. Recording will end at 11:03PM. Please Confirm or wait sixty seconds for program to automatically add to recording schedule". Now THAT would be very useful. Hands free scheduling of your shows with fuzzy input and confirmation prompts. The same could be applied to listening/managing a music library.
Other changes that would be useful would be largely based on the development of new input devices beyond mouse and keyboard. Motion tracking would be somewhat useful. Tracking where a user is in a building would also be useful. (Imagine walking up to any machine in a building and it brings your desktop in it's persistent state to you based on your beacon) Predictive interfaces would be very good too where the OS makes assumptions based on your previous usage history combined with standard cues. Until that happens, it's just going to be more tailfins.
I was talking ReiserFS3 as 4 hasn't even made it into the kernel. In fact I believe Hans was rebuffed by Linus as the latter didn't think that ReiseFS4 was really ready yet especially considering some of the things that would need to be changed in the mainline kernel to support these things. From what I remember, Linus suggested that a lot of that functionality could be implemented in Fuse and didn't belong in kernel space. So in my mind ReiserFS4 is a non-entity. At least until it makes it into the mainline kernel.
I notice you said, "database-like". That's not good enough. If we're talking WinFS (which was likely going to be based on MS SQL [shudder]) then to compete I want a DB that rides on MySQL or PostgreSQL or some kind of SQL db. It doesn't appear that ReiserFS4 is that at all. Having database-like qualities is not the same as actually being a DB based file system. If it's truly DB based you should be able to connect to the DB and issue SQL queries to work with file system objects at a low level (metadata, permissions, owner, group, extents, etc...). One thing I wish someone would do in kernel space file systems that I think is a HUGE ommision is a versioning feature like OpenVMS has. I know that Emacs can be configured to do that, but I think all files on the filesystem should have versions with a limit that you set (ie. keep the last five revisions, or keep multiple versions of files for a week, etc...). Again, if it was a DB backed file system, this would be totally possible and very likely easy to implement. I don't think something like ReiserFS4 could do that.
Don't misunderstand me, I use ResierFS3 when I need performance and I like it a whole lot more than ext3. But it's not what WinFS promised and ResierFS4 likely isn't either.
Sorry... while I might be in favor of opening Java, it IS very late in the game. And Java apps generally suck ass no matter what platform you run the JRE on. I've had to deal with many java apps that are total shit in terms of quality and performance:
1. HP Commandview SDM (for managing an HP VA7410 array) 2. Cisco ASDM (for managing Cisco firewalls. As of 5.0 they finally got it somewhat right, but it took nearly five years for what I consider a critical app. See my rant below.) 3. Rio Music Manager Lite (for managing the music on my Rio Karma in Linux)
They ALL suck. I mention just those three to illustrate just how broad a sampling of Java applications I've dealt with. The HP Commandview SDM application needed a few HP-UX kernel tweaks in order to perform fairly. Really. Kernel tweaks for a userspace application that SHOULD be part of HP-UX to begin with. Pathetic. I can't even rant about the Cisco ASDM app sufficiently to talk about how much... Let's see, where do I begin?
In the beginning I was handed a Cisco PIX to manage. It was all telnet. Life was good. Then there was an upgrade to the IOS that included a new Java based management tool called ASDM (it was actually called something else at first but I can't remember the name). It was meant to make life "easier". So I tried it. It looked OK. Now I had a GUI to manage the firewall and could potentially do things faster than before at the telnet prompt. Or at least that was the theory. So I had an IP network migration to work on moving one class C network to four class C networks. I couldn't afford downtime. Against my better judgment, our new network person suggested that we just use the GUI to take care of. Halfway through the renumbering the Java app lost it's network connection to the PIX due to exceeding some kind of timeout. That was all she wrote... The config was totally hosed. We lost half of the original config and only had half of the new config. We could restore from our backed up config but we'd lose the entire night's work and have to start over. It had already taken a good six or seven hours to get where we were.
Having had a good deal of experience with the telnet interface and knowing the wonders of X window system's cut and paste I thought that I'd just telnet in and alter the existing rules that way. Wrong answer. To accomadate some new fields that the GUI utility needed, the config format was changed into this horribly broken format that really forces you to use the GUI. The old config format used to contain all pertinent information to a NAT or port fowarding on one or two lines. Now there were multiple lines that gave the IP addresses "friendly" names. bascially labels with ID numbers. And the rules used the ID numbers or friendly names instead of the IPs. The lines that all related to one host or network's configuration were strewn about in the different blocks. So you'd have to find your actual rule, figure out what the ID or names were, see if that matched up to the IP you wanted to edit the rule for, etc... and it you did it wrong, you ended up with duplicate rules in the firewall with only the GUI created one showing up in the GUI and the CLI created one being largely invisible outside of the telnet interface.
So back to the Java GUI. We wound up having to read the old config in a text editor and then poke through even slower than before adding the rules that were now missing. In total we were up and working on this thing for 20 hours straight with downtime for multiple locations that extended four hours into their workday. The reason it was so slow was that the GUI kept crapping out every hour or two and we had to keep picking up slightly behind where we were each time. We saved the configs as we went along but that only shaved off a little time. When waiting for the changes to be applied by the Java GUI we were loathe to just kill the Java app when it took a long time because it gave us no indication as to how far it was in the application of the new rules.
Huh??? I hate Microsoft and even I find that suggestion to be hollow. ReiserFS offers NOTHING that MS claimed WinFS would offer. Most specifically it isn't a DB backed file system as WinFS was supposed to be. ReiserFS also doesn't employ any method of storing metadata as MS promised WinFS would. Imagine not needing to use file extensions or know what sort of data is in a file... the file system would take care of that for you and automatically handle associations with applications without messy kludges like file extensions or MIME types. That's what MS promised and what they couldn't deliver. ReiserFS doesn't offer any of that either. It just offers a really high performance potentially 64-bit journalling FS with fast transaction replay. That's it.
...is that very few people seem to understand exactly how they work well enough to be able to make decent judgments as to what constitutes a risk. First off we have the people who are afraid of ANY kind of electromagnetic radiation passing through the body. They worry that being hit with cell phone signals, WiFi and microwave range cordless phones will cause a variety of ills ranging from cancer to genetic mutations. The people who argue that these things can't happen don't have much to back them up either. So in reality the jury is still out as to whether or not having all that artificial man-made radiation passing through you is really dangerous or not. There also hasn't been a significant period of time to produce a useful study. Face it, we're the guinea pigs and the businesses behind these devices don't care if 25 years from now it's suddenly proven that these signals caused a rise in some kind of illness. It's likely that the technology will have been supplanted anyway.
Next you have places like hospitals that demand that you turn your cell phone off because the signal between it and the cell tower may disrupt hospital equipment, pace makers and the like. There are some examples from the past that illustrate this but they were most probably from the era of analogue cell phones which had stronger signals and *may* have interfered with someone's pace maker or some hospital equipment at some point in some unusual circumstances. On the other side of the argument you have the people who are in love with their mobile devices and are livid that they have to turn them off in hospitals. You hear a lot of them complain about how the doctors happily use WiFi tablets and other microwave devices and yet they forbid cell phones.
Then the airplanes... Although no one has ever come out and directly stated why electronics on board a plane are forbidden during takeoff and landing. The rumours I've heard are that the generation of signals by those devices is strong enough to disrupt the plane's guidance systems thereby creating a risk of crashing. Not having been a pilot at any point, I can neither verify nor discredit this claim (but I'm sure some Slashdot reader who is a commercial airline pilot in his spare time will verify it for me).
My main point is that there ARE people who DO know the realities of microwave devices and interference. They are more than likely the engineers who develop these devices. And they are noticeably absent from the discussion. This leads me to believe that there may be some truth to the risks that they don't wish to publicly discuss since it would probably cost them their jobs. I can say that with a background in electronics myself, that I can see how under certain freak circumstances a small device like a cell phone could interfere with some other device utilizing the same or resonant frequencies. But there'd have to be some special circumstances. In my experience it seems that microwaves, due to their very very small wavelengths, don't act like radio waves in the AM or FM radio or TV bands. This leads to a little less predictability in discovering possible interference situations unless you're an engineer who is studying this. So, it's best to be safe. If some studies were done by qualified radio engineers who weren't paid by the cell phone industry and they determined that using cell phones on planes is safe, then it's probably fine. But I think I'll be waiting on the ground for the next half a decade if all the airlines decide to allow this overnight.
It's not like people are gonna be able to get anything valuable out of the cut and paste buffer. It's like what? 8k max? And how many people cut and paste valuable things like password, credit card numbers, user IDs, and the like anyway. The most any hacker will get would be part of someone's goofy school paper, a portion of an e-male, maybe at worst a URL (GASP!). This is so like a non-issue. As if...
[SLASHDOT CLIPBOARD IE7 CONTENT DUMP for User eno2001]:
ub3rsm00vem4l3: So baby... my wife's out of town the whole weekend. Cum over and play? SororityBabe6500000: Oh yeah! Let's party!
Books to read: How to Build a Nukyelar Bomb in Your Basement for Less than the cost of a Washing Machine, Trisexuals are People Too: A Study in Prejudice, How to Win an Election the Easy Way (Diebold Hacking)
Important investment info: Steve B said I should sell the Novell stock early next week. Remember to tell Feingold ASAP.
It's all hypothetical, but I'm speaking strictly from the vantage point of a non-technical person (I am an IT person, I'm just playing non-tech's advocate.) and that is likely the way they will see things. "Oh... I heard that you shouldn't use RedHat in the server room because it can't run on the latest servers since they didn't go with the Trusted Computing option that Novell did". Or... "Yeah, I could use Debian to run a web server but this review I read said that Novell's Apache based web server has full IIS compatibility and is able to essentially duplicate the previous version of IIS". To those people, Novell is going to seem like the easy choice and the others will be fairly irrelevant. Of course to those same people anything that isn't "Big name/corporate backed" isn't relevant anyway. My bosses keep trying to convince me that we should have paid support for EVERYTHING we run in the server room so they really want Redhat or Novell. With the latest, they are starting to lean towards Novell and away from Redhat. Not wise, but that's the typical impression of non-technical folks.
Personally Gentoo rocks my world and I run it on all the boxen at home as well as on a few Xen VMs here doing some fairly important stuff (syslog for our network switches routers and firewall for example). The only thing that makes me run "supported" Linux distros are product requirements. Oracle's management package MUST run on RedHat Linux Enterprise for example. Can't get away from that... So if these companies eventually start dictating that only the "one true" Novell Linux is the only supported one, I'll be stuck. And you know there are going to be people who will see the Microsoft "blessing" of a Linux distro as meaning that it's got a higher level of quality over non-blessed distros regardless of the truth.
This is what I predicted from the beginning. The goal here was fragmentation of the Linux development community. It looks like they could succeed. It's basic "divide and conquer" because there will be some developers who don't see much wrong with the deal and will support the Novell Microsoft deal and there will be others who will not. The ones who don't MAY start new forks/projects and join other distros, or... they may just move on to other things entirely. This ensures a two-tiered Linux world with crappy underdeveloped software in non-blessed distros (Gentoo, Debian, etc...) and second-rate (compared to Microsoft Windows solutions) software in the intentionally stunted Novell Suse Linux and anyone else who decides to sign on. Microsoft very likely wants Novell Linux to be as successful as Apple's Mac OS was pre-OS X. That is to say, "enough to stay alive and prove that there is competition but not alive enough to compete on Microsoft's turf in the profitable business markets".
Microsoft couldn't care less if Apple Macs were all the rage in schools early on because that wasn't one of their markets. Schools aren't as comparatively profitable as businesses. Once Microsoft had conquered the business world, they then started paying attention to schools and libraries and took those markets away from Apple. If the Apple platform actually started to make major inroads in server rooms, office suites, groupware and provided a killer alternative to Exchange, MS would be actively trying to take them down a few pegs again. Many Linux distros are doing exactly that and that's why taking Linux down a few pegs is a necessity to MS. MS doesn't want Linux dead. They just want it to smell funny. Probably something like pee. (I keep doing that)
Hmmm... H.264 Quicktime files in Cinelerra seem to work OK from the DV I pull in. But I create them myself, so I can't say for non-Cinelerra generated content. And only Cinelerra seems to be able to play them back, not Xine. But that wouldn't seem to be a CPU issue. It seems more like a codec problem.
Well it appears to be geolocation because many of those download services don't allow access to even the base site from outside the UK. As they charge for the downloads I don't think they will be asking for a license number. However, one other sticking point would be the method of payment. I suppose a credit or debit card from Anytown, USA would not work...
Correction: It's for everyone above certain income levels. I happen to live in an "inner-ring" suburb very close to the inner-city. It's mostly working to middle class professionals. We aren't a "profitable" area to most businesses which is why they generally don't want to serve us. But some of us WANT their services. Is it right that they can close us out? NO! Now I'm sure that people who make more money that me and people in my suburb would say, "well why don't you move to a better neighborhood". My answer? Because I like being close to the city and sadly most areas that are considered "better neighborhoods" have some major problems where I'm concerned:
1. Few if any liberal residents 2. Poor schools that only ensure the basics instead of providing extended learning opportunities for kids (The high school I went to offered far more foreign language choices than most small town high schools do) 3. Not enough racial integration (ie. too many white people. Note that I *AM* white) 4. Cultural amenities that are few to none. (I love being able to eat at Ethiopian, Indian, Thai, restaurants. I love being able to go to the library and check out books that other communities ban. I love having "revolutionary" and alternative book stores in the area with great selection and lots of business.) 5. Too many of them are new construction. I've worked on new construction homes and can tell you that they are piles of crap compared to a good old home that's been standing for nearly 100 years.
So moving to some "better" neighborhood would be a step down for me in many cases. I don't think businesses should be allowed to dictate the demographics of their customers. The customers should dictate the demographics based on their natural buying patterns.
What OS and software are you using? I'm able to do it fine on a P4 (with HT) that I bought in 2002 with Gentoo Linux. DV in from an 1080i Sony Handycam and it works great. I also can easily play back 1080i video files. I've got a WMF file in 1080i and it looks great and plays without hassle or even making the CPU break a sweat using Xine.
Well in that case... sure a spammer deserves to be bubba's babe. All I'm saying is that I don't want people reading my mail without my knowledge via surreptitious means. That's where the darknet comes in. I'm hoping that someone will eventually release a full darknet kit that can be used by anyone to establish private networks over the internet. It would cut down on lots of problems and give people a lot more freedom and power to publish unfettered.
...why I say; run your own mail server. I do it. I've done it since 2001. I've had too many instances of incompetence at ISPs and large mail service providers losing my mail and not restoring it. Sure, they can read it on the way in or out, but then it's a different beast than actually getting onto my system without a warrant. Plus I have the added benefit of having a private mail system that is not accessible to anyone on the net as it's on a darknet used by friends and family. Simple solutions really. Until someone decides to make them "illegal".
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Hmmm... you sound like a "gadget guy" and not a tech. If you feel OK with just buying something that's already built and bending over for the restrictions imposed on you by corporate head office, that's actually OK. Just not for people like me. The main reason I don't go with the Tivo that DirecTV offers me is that I can't archive the TV shows for my collection. But, to a tech (vs. a "gadget guy"), there is more fun to be had in building a system from scratch and then perfecting it so it has more features than commercial units offer. My current Linux based media center runs on a PIII from 1999. It does a damn fine job to thanks to some smart hardware choices and knowledge about how to take advantage of said choices. I, however, did not choose to go the MythTV or Freevo routes because I'm not a gadget guy and those are still to "prefab" for me. I, instead, opted to not have to teach my family a whole new UI and went with a typical Gnome desktop, custom Bash scripts, Zenity for GUI interaction with the scripts, and some very basic Gnome desktop cutomization (custom icons that launch the scripts). I, unlike many of my bretheren, acknowledge that not everyone wants to or enjoys doing this sort of thing. Mostly I'm posting to explain why someone WOULD want to bother with this sort of thing. In my case, I wanted to be able to watch TV from anywhere, anytime. And thanks to Xine and it's broadcast mode + Lirc and OpenSSH, all computers in my house can watch TV and change channels or watch recorded programs. And thanks to Network Block Device support, the normally unused DVD drive in the livingroom laptop is now the DVD player for theLinux media center in the basement that displays on the 37" LCD monitor in the living room. As one of my Slashdot friends put it, "Some motherfucker is always wanting to swim upstream". That would be people like me. If we didn't do it, then there would be lots of discoveries that would go undiscovered.
Forget everything you know about Windows. Linux is not Windows even if some of the GUI environments are starting to resemble aspects of them. Linux is closer to the Unix ideal of MANY MANY MANY tools that do one thing really well and need to be intertwined with other things to do more. As a non-programmer, I find Linux much easier to customize than Windows in terms of actually building new functionality. This is not something easily accomplished on Windows unless you want to get a Devel kit. In Linux it's practically a survival skill. Take a look through some of my Slashdot Journal Entries for examples of how I accomplished some interesting things with Linux that would have been nearly impossible with Windows.
Only because some PHB bought in and took the ship down with them. Where I work (also in IT for an organization that covers nearly half of my state) we at least have bosses who sometimes listen to reason. In the real world, MS isn't the only solution to a problem and you typically have a system comprised of multiple OSes and flavors of OSes. Where I work, we've got OpenVMS (awesome OS), Sun Solaris, Tru64 Unix, HP-UX, Various flaovrs of Linux, Soon to have OpenBSD, Mac OS X, and of course Windows. I use Linux on the desktop at work everyday because it "just works" unlike MS Windows. Now don't get me wrong, I'm no "zealot" no matter what you might think. If someone find Windows to provide them with what they need at work or at home, I let them be. My main point is to stop people from telling others to not even consider Linux. That's where my biggest argument lies. If Linux (or some other OS) can do something in the server room OR on the desktop, then I see no reason to discourage others from going that route. I don't go around telling people to not use Windows or Mac OS X for example. Like I said, "if the shoe fits, wear it". Just don't tell people, "don't even bother trying, it's not worth your time" because that's disrespectful to the individual.
My other peeve is the slap in the face that "Home Based PCs" or "hobbiest" is when applied to someone like me. Whenever I've seen that kind of comment used it's usually to try and take away from the argument that a certain OS is suitable for professional use. The logic here is that "home based" is never mission critical. However, this is not true. If you're running a web server that hosts various important web applications for a variety of friends, family and clients, or a mail server that needs 24/7 uptime, then it's clearly important. Of couse the argument again is "...well if it's not being used to make money then it's not really 'mission critical'". To which I say, "making money is not really of the utmost importance to many people. It certainly isn't for me". Again, the bottom line here is that what works for some people may not work for others. In my case, I LIKE having enterprise class technologies at home (virtualization, SAN-like features of Logical Volume Manager, industrial strength encrypted VPN, database backed IMAP, etc...). Since I do this stuff professionally during the day, why not apply the knowledge at home? And since I do it professionally during the day, I think it's a little insulting to imply that what I do at home is any less important than what I do at work for pay. After all, as I like to say, when a plumber, electrician or carpenter works on his home, we don't call him an "amateur" or "hobbiest" unless we want to intentionally denigrate his skill. The fact is that some of us actually LIKE working with this stuff and who better to do this both professionally and at home with equivalent results in both locations? Trust me, the systems that harcore Linux users set up at home are a wholly different animal from the systems that average Windows guys (I'm excluding hardcore Windows buys because some of them are damn clever and actually work on setting up enterprise class stuff at home) set up at home. Most people using terms like "hobbiest" or "Home Based PC" tend to be comparing the average Windows user with the hardcore Linux users. Totally wrong in my mind.
And BTW everyone... MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Well this is totally off topic but a while back I had an idea for the free/open source community to build a system based on DNS that would contain information about filetypes and applications that can handle them. This would be an open/free project that would have to run in a similar way to DNS and there would have to be a filetype resolver in the OS distribution that would query this name system when it encounters an application that doesn't have a current association. It could even be extended to work just like DNS, where organizations or home users who run servers at home (like me) could even hav e local versions that would contain custom entries that take precedence over the "root servers". The main idea being that when someone attempts to open a non-associated filetype, they would get a prompt that would list the applications known to handle the filetype with links (where possible) to install the application from the net using any of the popular package managers if the app isn't present. Mainly this is in an effort to make the distros easier to use for non-technical people or... technical folks who are lazy and don't want to bother with downloading or associating the apps themselves (they exist although I'm not one of them). Anyway, your comment made me think about this again...
Well if you noted the disclaimer in my original post, you'd see that I'm 110% on your side. My folks and my wife use Linux and they are all non-technical people.
And you apparently have no sense of humor because you obviously took it all too seriously. Sure, I'm a Linux guy, but I don't fault people for using Windows. If they don't have the same needs that people like me do, there's nothing wrong with using Windows. I obviously don't have the same needs they do which is why I don't use Windows as well. But there's a whole lot of fun to be had poking at both sides of the argument and that's the point you missed. I think it is YOU who take the OS argument far too seriously since you're the one who is offended by such a post. If you didn't take these things so seriously the post should have cracked a smile on your face...
But, but, but... what about the high cost of retraining everyone to use all these new weird applications that don't make as much sense as Windows applications!!!? What about the steep learning curve since Linux is just inherently harder to use!!!? What about the fact that when the user tries to hit some valid work related site that needs to access media like Powerpoint, Flash 9 and higher, Windows Media Video, and the like that they won't be able to or will have a reduced quality end-user experience compared to MS Windows??? I've seen the Xine plug-in for Firefox and it doesn't work right. Instead of embedding the content in the browser as it should it pops open a new window and only about 20% of the time does the content actually play!! What about the fact that unless you've got a few gurus on your staff, when there's a problem there's NO ONE to go to for support once the problem is out of your league? Forums? HAH! Yeah, you've got a down critical situation with your users and you're going to fart away valuable time on forums where you may or may not get an answer in a day? A week? A month? A year? Never? The only answer if to get Windows Vista because it was built for real work and not for geeks with no life. Got that?
[DISCLAIMER: The poster called 'eno2001' does not believe in what he stated above at all and is merely parodying the typical lies and misconceptions about GNU/Linux that come from the anti-Linux crowd. The poster called 'eno2001' expects many good responses to the false arguments presented above from the pro-Linux community. All anti-linux sentiments will be laughed at unless you're really good at what you do. The 'eno2001' has spoken.]
As the caste system is firmly being embedded in Western culture, it's a logical conclusion that there would be a drive to label certain types of people as potential criminals based on the way they think. I suspect that it will at some point in the future be a crime if you feel that businesses have no right to force you to buy something. Or you will be branded a potential criminal if your mind works in such a way that you do not believe that there should be financial and social inequity between people. Very treacherous ground and about the only thing that makes libertarians seem like they're onto something. The only reason I'm not a libertarian is because I can't just turn inwardly and stop caring about the world around me AND I have no belief that my individual efforts can make a change to the world around me. Things need to be done in groups to have any effect sadly and not too many people want to gather around the homeless and help them...
...are in it together, along with the aliens, the illuminati, the CIA, the Clintons and the Bushes. Having photos of the squirrels and pigeons would allow the hackers to identify which agents are on campus without a doubt. It's plainly obvious if you're in the know.
...there aren't many things that can be done to the Windows+Icons+Mouse+Pointer (WIMP) paradigm. Even with all the eye candy that Mac OS X has had for the past few years and that has recently been added to Windows Vista, there isn't a whole lot new under the sun in terms of user interaction. The Dashboard (which MS mercilessly and poorly apes in Vista) from Apple was about the only interesting thing above pre Mac OS X Mac OSes. And it's not so much a new way of doing things as it is a revisiting of the old "Desktop apps" from the 80s. I remember on my Atari I used to load desktop apps that I could pull to the foreground that did various interesting things in the background for me. Since they were memory resident, wasn't "running" them each time I interacted. They were already there. Dashboard is just a really jazzed up way of doing that. Expose is the same deal. It's a pretty app manager, and that's all. I was using similar features in Enlightment in the late 90s. And now with XGL, Compiz and Beryl for *nix, you'll see the same things happening in *nix distros fairly soon. The 3Dness of Vista, Sun JavaOS and Compiz really still doesn't change user interaction much other than making it "cooler" in some opinions. It's still, "look at a list of apps in some visual fashion, and switch tasks" or "set up a group of apps on one virtual desktop, do the same on a few others, then switch between the deskstop to change your workmode".
/managing a music library.
Until there is actually a change in user interaction with the machines themselves, we're stuck with uninspiring WIMPs on all platforms. They might have better tailfins, but I am hard pressed to find anything that increases efficiency in workflow that doesn't already exist on nearly all the platforms (with Windows being notably behind a bit). Really accurate and non-training-based voice recognition could enhance the end user experience a bit. But we've been promised this stuff for some time and it's not yet come to pass on the desktop. I remember when IBM was touting it for a version of OS2 and nothing happened. I played around with DragonDictate on Windows XP a few years back and it was usable but the training portion seemed a bit ridiculous. I also played with some speech recognition in Linux and was able to launch apps by saying things like "netscape" or "realplay" back in the 90s, but that was largely pointless. My cell phone coupled with the bluetooth headset and it's voice recognition is far more useful and accurate sadly... But, for a media center I think voice commands would be awesome. Imagine, "Tune BBC America", or "Schedule a recording for Saturday night at nine PM on the Discover channel". The computer asks, "Program duration"? You reply, "Two hours and five minutes. Start it about two minutes early". The computer then asks, "Program to be scheduled for 8:58PM on Saturday December 23rd 2006 on the Discovery Channel for two hours and five minutes. Recording will end at 11:03PM. Please Confirm or wait sixty seconds for program to automatically add to recording schedule". Now THAT would be very useful. Hands free scheduling of your shows with fuzzy input and confirmation prompts. The same could be applied to listening
Other changes that would be useful would be largely based on the development of new input devices beyond mouse and keyboard. Motion tracking would be somewhat useful. Tracking where a user is in a building would also be useful. (Imagine walking up to any machine in a building and it brings your desktop in it's persistent state to you based on your beacon) Predictive interfaces would be very good too where the OS makes assumptions based on your previous usage history combined with standard cues. Until that happens, it's just going to be more tailfins.
I was talking ReiserFS3 as 4 hasn't even made it into the kernel. In fact I believe Hans was rebuffed by Linus as the latter didn't think that ReiseFS4 was really ready yet especially considering some of the things that would need to be changed in the mainline kernel to support these things. From what I remember, Linus suggested that a lot of that functionality could be implemented in Fuse and didn't belong in kernel space. So in my mind ReiserFS4 is a non-entity. At least until it makes it into the mainline kernel.
I notice you said, "database-like". That's not good enough. If we're talking WinFS (which was likely going to be based on MS SQL [shudder]) then to compete I want a DB that rides on MySQL or PostgreSQL or some kind of SQL db. It doesn't appear that ReiserFS4 is that at all. Having database-like qualities is not the same as actually being a DB based file system. If it's truly DB based you should be able to connect to the DB and issue SQL queries to work with file system objects at a low level (metadata, permissions, owner, group, extents, etc...). One thing I wish someone would do in kernel space file systems that I think is a HUGE ommision is a versioning feature like OpenVMS has. I know that Emacs can be configured to do that, but I think all files on the filesystem should have versions with a limit that you set (ie. keep the last five revisions, or keep multiple versions of files for a week, etc...). Again, if it was a DB backed file system, this would be totally possible and very likely easy to implement. I don't think something like ReiserFS4 could do that.
Don't misunderstand me, I use ResierFS3 when I need performance and I like it a whole lot more than ext3. But it's not what WinFS promised and ResierFS4 likely isn't either.
Sorry... while I might be in favor of opening Java, it IS very late in the game. And Java apps generally suck ass no matter what platform you run the JRE on. I've had to deal with many java apps that are total shit in terms of quality and performance:
1. HP Commandview SDM (for managing an HP VA7410 array)
2. Cisco ASDM (for managing Cisco firewalls. As of 5.0 they finally got it somewhat right, but it took nearly five years for what I consider a critical app. See my rant below.)
3. Rio Music Manager Lite (for managing the music on my Rio Karma in Linux)
They ALL suck. I mention just those three to illustrate just how broad a sampling of Java applications I've dealt with. The HP Commandview SDM application needed a few HP-UX kernel tweaks in order to perform fairly. Really. Kernel tweaks for a userspace application that SHOULD be part of HP-UX to begin with. Pathetic. I can't even rant about the Cisco ASDM app sufficiently to talk about how much... Let's see, where do I begin?
In the beginning I was handed a Cisco PIX to manage. It was all telnet. Life was good. Then there was an upgrade to the IOS that included a new Java based management tool called ASDM (it was actually called something else at first but I can't remember the name). It was meant to make life "easier". So I tried it. It looked OK. Now I had a GUI to manage the firewall and could potentially do things faster than before at the telnet prompt. Or at least that was the theory. So I had an IP network migration to work on moving one class C network to four class C networks. I couldn't afford downtime. Against my better judgment, our new network person suggested that we just use the GUI to take care of. Halfway through the renumbering the Java app lost it's network connection to the PIX due to exceeding some kind of timeout. That was all she wrote... The config was totally hosed. We lost half of the original config and only had half of the new config. We could restore from our backed up config but we'd lose the entire night's work and have to start over. It had already taken a good six or seven hours to get where we were.
Having had a good deal of experience with the telnet interface and knowing the wonders of X window system's cut and paste I thought that I'd just telnet in and alter the existing rules that way. Wrong answer. To accomadate some new fields that the GUI utility needed, the config format was changed into this horribly broken format that really forces you to use the GUI. The old config format used to contain all pertinent information to a NAT or port fowarding on one or two lines. Now there were multiple lines that gave the IP addresses "friendly" names. bascially labels with ID numbers. And the rules used the ID numbers or friendly names instead of the IPs. The lines that all related to one host or network's configuration were strewn about in the different blocks. So you'd have to find your actual rule, figure out what the ID or names were, see if that matched up to the IP you wanted to edit the rule for, etc... and it you did it wrong, you ended up with duplicate rules in the firewall with only the GUI created one showing up in the GUI and the CLI created one being largely invisible outside of the telnet interface.
So back to the Java GUI. We wound up having to read the old config in a text editor and then poke through even slower than before adding the rules that were now missing. In total we were up and working on this thing for 20 hours straight with downtime for multiple locations that extended four hours into their workday. The reason it was so slow was that the GUI kept crapping out every hour or two and we had to keep picking up slightly behind where we were each time. We saved the configs as we went along but that only shaved off a little time. When waiting for the changes to be applied by the Java GUI we were loathe to just kill the Java app when it took a long time because it gave us no indication as to how far it was in the application of the new rules.
Huh??? I hate Microsoft and even I find that suggestion to be hollow. ReiserFS offers NOTHING that MS claimed WinFS would offer. Most specifically it isn't a DB backed file system as WinFS was supposed to be. ReiserFS also doesn't employ any method of storing metadata as MS promised WinFS would. Imagine not needing to use file extensions or know what sort of data is in a file... the file system would take care of that for you and automatically handle associations with applications without messy kludges like file extensions or MIME types. That's what MS promised and what they couldn't deliver. ReiserFS doesn't offer any of that either. It just offers a really high performance potentially 64-bit journalling FS with fast transaction replay. That's it.
Great comic timing. Superb. No really.
...is that very few people seem to understand exactly how they work well enough to be able to make decent judgments as to what constitutes a risk. First off we have the people who are afraid of ANY kind of electromagnetic radiation passing through the body. They worry that being hit with cell phone signals, WiFi and microwave range cordless phones will cause a variety of ills ranging from cancer to genetic mutations. The people who argue that these things can't happen don't have much to back them up either. So in reality the jury is still out as to whether or not having all that artificial man-made radiation passing through you is really dangerous or not. There also hasn't been a significant period of time to produce a useful study. Face it, we're the guinea pigs and the businesses behind these devices don't care if 25 years from now it's suddenly proven that these signals caused a rise in some kind of illness. It's likely that the technology will have been supplanted anyway.
Next you have places like hospitals that demand that you turn your cell phone off because the signal between it and the cell tower may disrupt hospital equipment, pace makers and the like. There are some examples from the past that illustrate this but they were most probably from the era of analogue cell phones which had stronger signals and *may* have interfered with someone's pace maker or some hospital equipment at some point in some unusual circumstances. On the other side of the argument you have the people who are in love with their mobile devices and are livid that they have to turn them off in hospitals. You hear a lot of them complain about how the doctors happily use WiFi tablets and other microwave devices and yet they forbid cell phones.
Then the airplanes... Although no one has ever come out and directly stated why electronics on board a plane are forbidden during takeoff and landing. The rumours I've heard are that the generation of signals by those devices is strong enough to disrupt the plane's guidance systems thereby creating a risk of crashing. Not having been a pilot at any point, I can neither verify nor discredit this claim (but I'm sure some Slashdot reader who is a commercial airline pilot in his spare time will verify it for me).
My main point is that there ARE people who DO know the realities of microwave devices and interference. They are more than likely the engineers who develop these devices. And they are noticeably absent from the discussion. This leads me to believe that there may be some truth to the risks that they don't wish to publicly discuss since it would probably cost them their jobs. I can say that with a background in electronics myself, that I can see how under certain freak circumstances a small device like a cell phone could interfere with some other device utilizing the same or resonant frequencies. But there'd have to be some special circumstances. In my experience it seems that microwaves, due to their very very small wavelengths, don't act like radio waves in the AM or FM radio or TV bands. This leads to a little less predictability in discovering possible interference situations unless you're an engineer who is studying this. So, it's best to be safe. If some studies were done by qualified radio engineers who weren't paid by the cell phone industry and they determined that using cell phones on planes is safe, then it's probably fine. But I think I'll be waiting on the ground for the next half a decade if all the airlines decide to allow this overnight.
It's not like people are gonna be able to get anything valuable out of the cut and paste buffer. It's like what? 8k max? And how many people cut and paste valuable things like password, credit card numbers, user IDs, and the like anyway. The most any hacker will get would be part of someone's goofy school paper, a portion of an e-male, maybe at worst a URL (GASP!). This is so like a non-issue. As if...
[SLASHDOT CLIPBOARD IE7 CONTENT DUMP for User eno2001]:
eno2001 14m431337h4ck3r (419)555-2727
Look at this later: http://www.iheartfurries.com/
ub3rsm00vem4l3: So baby... my wife's out of town the whole weekend. Cum over and play?
SororityBabe6500000: Oh yeah! Let's party!
Books to read: How to Build a Nukyelar Bomb in Your Basement for Less than the cost of a Washing Machine, Trisexuals are People Too: A Study in Prejudice, How to Win an Election the Easy Way (Diebold Hacking)
Important investment info: Steve B said I should sell the Novell stock early next week. Remember to tell Feingold ASAP.
[END SLASHDOT IE7 CLIPBOARD CONTENT DUMP]
Your family being nudists does not count.
Then I read this:
What, even lawayers? My word, Jeeves, these chaps know how to push the envelope too far.
And my first reaction for posting was this:
ESPECIALLY lawyers!
Come on... laugh. You KNOW you WANT to.
It's all hypothetical, but I'm speaking strictly from the vantage point of a non-technical person (I am an IT person, I'm just playing non-tech's advocate.) and that is likely the way they will see things. "Oh... I heard that you shouldn't use RedHat in the server room because it can't run on the latest servers since they didn't go with the Trusted Computing option that Novell did". Or... "Yeah, I could use Debian to run a web server but this review I read said that Novell's Apache based web server has full IIS compatibility and is able to essentially duplicate the previous version of IIS". To those people, Novell is going to seem like the easy choice and the others will be fairly irrelevant. Of course to those same people anything that isn't "Big name/corporate backed" isn't relevant anyway. My bosses keep trying to convince me that we should have paid support for EVERYTHING we run in the server room so they really want Redhat or Novell. With the latest, they are starting to lean towards Novell and away from Redhat. Not wise, but that's the typical impression of non-technical folks.
Personally Gentoo rocks my world and I run it on all the boxen at home as well as on a few Xen VMs here doing some fairly important stuff (syslog for our network switches routers and firewall for example). The only thing that makes me run "supported" Linux distros are product requirements. Oracle's management package MUST run on RedHat Linux Enterprise for example. Can't get away from that... So if these companies eventually start dictating that only the "one true" Novell Linux is the only supported one, I'll be stuck. And you know there are going to be people who will see the Microsoft "blessing" of a Linux distro as meaning that it's got a higher level of quality over non-blessed distros regardless of the truth.
This is what I predicted from the beginning. The goal here was fragmentation of the Linux development community. It looks like they could succeed. It's basic "divide and conquer" because there will be some developers who don't see much wrong with the deal and will support the Novell Microsoft deal and there will be others who will not. The ones who don't MAY start new forks/projects and join other distros, or... they may just move on to other things entirely. This ensures a two-tiered Linux world with crappy underdeveloped software in non-blessed distros (Gentoo, Debian, etc...) and second-rate (compared to Microsoft Windows solutions) software in the intentionally stunted Novell Suse Linux and anyone else who decides to sign on. Microsoft very likely wants Novell Linux to be as successful as Apple's Mac OS was pre-OS X. That is to say, "enough to stay alive and prove that there is competition but not alive enough to compete on Microsoft's turf in the profitable business markets".
Microsoft couldn't care less if Apple Macs were all the rage in schools early on because that wasn't one of their markets. Schools aren't as comparatively profitable as businesses. Once Microsoft had conquered the business world, they then started paying attention to schools and libraries and took those markets away from Apple. If the Apple platform actually started to make major inroads in server rooms, office suites, groupware and provided a killer alternative to Exchange, MS would be actively trying to take them down a few pegs again. Many Linux distros are doing exactly that and that's why taking Linux down a few pegs is a necessity to MS. MS doesn't want Linux dead. They just want it to smell funny. Probably something like pee. (I keep doing that)
Hmmm... H.264 Quicktime files in Cinelerra seem to work OK from the DV I pull in. But I create them myself, so I can't say for non-Cinelerra generated content. And only Cinelerra seems to be able to play them back, not Xine. But that wouldn't seem to be a CPU issue. It seems more like a codec problem.
Well it appears to be geolocation because many of those download services don't allow access to even the base site from outside the UK. As they charge for the downloads I don't think they will be asking for a license number. However, one other sticking point would be the method of payment. I suppose a credit or debit card from Anytown, USA would not work...
Correction: It's for everyone above certain income levels. I happen to live in an "inner-ring" suburb very close to the inner-city. It's mostly working to middle class professionals. We aren't a "profitable" area to most businesses which is why they generally don't want to serve us. But some of us WANT their services. Is it right that they can close us out? NO! Now I'm sure that people who make more money that me and people in my suburb would say, "well why don't you move to a better neighborhood". My answer? Because I like being close to the city and sadly most areas that are considered "better neighborhoods" have some major problems where I'm concerned:
1. Few if any liberal residents
2. Poor schools that only ensure the basics instead of providing extended learning opportunities for kids (The high school I went to offered far more foreign language choices than most small town high schools do)
3. Not enough racial integration (ie. too many white people. Note that I *AM* white)
4. Cultural amenities that are few to none. (I love being able to eat at Ethiopian, Indian, Thai, restaurants. I love being able to go to the library and check out books that other communities ban. I love having "revolutionary" and alternative book stores in the area with great selection and lots of business.)
5. Too many of them are new construction. I've worked on new construction homes and can tell you that they are piles of crap compared to a good old home that's been standing for nearly 100 years.
So moving to some "better" neighborhood would be a step down for me in many cases. I don't think businesses should be allowed to dictate the demographics of their customers. The customers should dictate the demographics based on their natural buying patterns.
What OS and software are you using? I'm able to do it fine on a P4 (with HT) that I bought in 2002 with Gentoo Linux. DV in from an 1080i Sony Handycam and it works great. I also can easily play back 1080i video files. I've got a WMF file in 1080i and it looks great and plays without hassle or even making the CPU break a sweat using Xine.
Well in that case... sure a spammer deserves to be bubba's babe. All I'm saying is that I don't want people reading my mail without my knowledge via surreptitious means. That's where the darknet comes in. I'm hoping that someone will eventually release a full darknet kit that can be used by anyone to establish private networks over the internet. It would cut down on lots of problems and give people a lot more freedom and power to publish unfettered.
...why I say; run your own mail server. I do it. I've done it since 2001. I've had too many instances of incompetence at ISPs and large mail service providers losing my mail and not restoring it. Sure, they can read it on the way in or out, but then it's a different beast than actually getting onto my system without a warrant. Plus I have the added benefit of having a private mail system that is not accessible to anyone on the net as it's on a darknet used by friends and family. Simple solutions really. Until someone decides to make them "illegal".