Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, except at Infinium labs where it's Groundhog Day ALL the time. Why doesn't this company DIE? Why doesn't the fat ass behind the company do the same? Jesus every time I hear more stories about Infinium...
A few weeks ago I was telling a Mac using friend of mine that knowing Apple and the really slick way that they do things, they have something big up their sleeve. Witness:
1. They switched to Intel. Why? VERY LIKELY to take advantage of the coming virtualization technology that will allow one CPU to run multiple OSes simultaneously without the overhead of a guest OS. Intrigued? 2. The release of Bootcamp is a test to see how Windows will run on the Mac. Once they've worked out the bugs and it's stable, it's time to virtualize with a hypervisor. 3. Apple announced that they will be releasing an API to allow Mac applications to run on Windows.
Put this all together and I'm betting that Apple has plans for a unified desktop experience running both Windows and Mac applications side by side with no emulation and no performance hit. (Remember hypervisors make the performance hit so low that the OSes may as well be running on bare metal)
See my "GRRRR" journal entry from April 20th that dispels commonly held myths about virtualization.
Keeping people alert by trying to "test" them by potentially scaring them? Regardless as to whether the "this is a test" message shows up or not, this is basically someone poking an employee with a sharp stick every so often. Why not, instead of having to keep your staff interested by frightening them, hire people who actually live for this sort of thing? There are plenty of people out there who could concentrate on this sort of task and never miss. Of course they might not be too socially skilled either. But if it's really that important that we look for this sort of thing (which I really don't agree with) should't we be employing people more suited to the task and paying them well for their abilities?
Agreed. As soon as I saw Digg pop up in an issue of Wired magazine (AKA Tech Poseur's Journal) I knew it had to be crap. I went over there for a bit and perused articles. There's too much crap over there. Who cares about the social implications of technology for example? That's highly UNINTERESTING to a real tech. Then there's also way too many things like the notification of hard drives on sale for cheap at Best Buy or what have you. You also see too many stories about Windows only software. Again what REAL tech cares about Windows? Frankly, I think the Digg will eventually blow up. One more gripe... not enough opportunity to troll idiot users there. When someone is an idiot, they need to be made aware of it and what better way to do that then troll them? Trolling is an integral part of a real community. Suppress trolling, and you lose the ommunity entirely or even worse, wind up with a virtual gated community. How dull.
Oddly I think working in the computer industry bears some strong similarities to other aspects of life like maturity, politics, being or not being a parent. You can't relate to one side until you've been there and you can't relate to where you've been once you've crossed over to the other side. That pretty much sums it up.
When I first started to work with PCs I came over from the Atari, Amiga and Macintosh worlds. I really only knew the GUI because I barely used the computer beyond just creating music, and working with graphics. I didn't use the CLI on the Amiga very much. I used some "TTP" apps on the Atari but only with GUI wrappers. And the Mac... well with the Mac I just primarily focused on my creative work and had NO inkling of the underlying aspects of the system. (We're talking Mac OS 7 and later here)
Then I graduated from college and needed to get my own computer. I couldn't afford a Mac since even with student discounts a decent Mac was still $4000 and that didn't include all the software I wanted. Instead I spent $4000 on the parts to build my own DOS 6.22/Windows 3.1 PC, all the software I wanted and more and a few peripherals too. I did it because it was cheaper. But it hamstrung me in terms of being cretive because I was spending more time trying to get the system working right since there were driver and software conflicts out the wazoo.
In fact I remember when I first put all the hardware together I was confounded about how I was supposed to format my HD. On all the other OSes (excepting the Amiga Workbench) I'd dealt with primarily, All I needed to do was turn the computer on, and the base GUI would load from ROM. Then I'd just point and click my way to a formatted drive. So I called the computer store and asked them where the formatting utility was in the BIOS. They seemed annoyed with my question. They said I needed to boot the OS to format the drive. OK... well how do I boot the OS if it isn't in the ROM? Is my ROM bad? So the guy walked me through booting my DOS setup disks. Then I finally "got it" and I was on my way. But it seemed so archaic compared to what I was used to. No GUI to format and I also had to consider this new concept of partitioning...
So now here I am twelve years later. I'm a Unix admin where I work, a pure Linux user at home and I still have a foot in the Windows world thanks to work. But now that I'm on "the other side" I find it much harder to relate to users. This is odd because I used to be great at relating to users. I remember when I first started out that I could explain very clearly any software on the Windows platform to a user and they'd usually "get it". I was told many times how "friendly" and "accessible" I was. A lot of people commented on how I could make all this stuff make sense to them. Today, it's a lot harder for me. Part of it is because in order to communicate effetively the concepts that you use on a computer, you really need to speak a different language. And that language confounds users. If I take a step back and translate, "the close window widget" to "The 'X' in the upper right that closes a window" I find myself being annoyed at having to do that for a user. It's needless if they'd just come around to my way of thinking. And therein lies the problem.
Just like being a parent changes certain things and there is no way to relate those changes to a non-parent without them feeling like you're insulting them. They assume that when you say, "having a kid really made my life complete" that you're implying to them, "your life sucks because you don't have a kid yet but just you wait until you do you worthless whipper snapper". When that's not really the case. On the other hand when someone who isn't a parent makes an off color joke about children or babies to someone who might be a "normal" parent (I'm not.;P) the parent might take great offense because they can only picture their own child as the butt of the joke. It's the same with where you are in your understandin
Ahahaha!!! Good use of language! "Penultimate bullet point" as in "The Pen Ultimate Ball Point Pen"!!!! Hahahaha!!! I love it when people use subtle humour like that. Pure comic genius!
Well you might be commenting on the other poster, but I hit 30 six years ago and I'm still going strong with a natural diet. In fact, I changed my diet at 33 because I was almost a victim of Purple pill marketing. But when I read the indications on the box I decided that I wasn't going to make a lifetime commitment to a pharmaceutical at 33. Too young to be tied to medications. After I changed my diet (and no I still eat REALLY tasty and healthful foods, in fact better than what most folks eat) the need for the purple pill went away. My sources of trouble were: sugar, white flour, and meat. Cleaning that crap out of my system eliminated all signs of my gastroesophageal reflux condition. And I threw the Nexium away without having taken it even once. So turning 30 has nothing to do with not eating right. Unless you're already a lardass before you turn 30...
Are you nuts? Do you have any idea just how poisonous the foods on American grocer's shelves, dinner tables and especially restaurants are? And we're sharing that crap with the rest of the world. There are so many toxic chemicals, detrimental organisms and carcinogens in our food supply today it's no wonder that we've been seeing massive increases in:
And that just barely scratches the surface. We've got heavy metals in all of our fish no matter where you get them from which many suspect accounts for the increase in various diseases that affect the developing nervous systems of our children. The hormones we pump into our meat and poultry make it into us and are again suspects for the increases in many immune system disorders and psychological disorders, not to mention the possible cancer link. But I'm willing to bet that you sit down at a nice steak dinner thinking you're eating in style... Keep it up. Eat more steak. We could do with a bit of self-reduced population around here.
I've been studying diet and the effect of foods on the body for the past few years now and I can safely say that what you eat is literally a matter of life and death and it's much more intricate than just the "food pyramid". Think of the food pyramid as the Windows OS. It works. Just barely. But it's good enough to make people think they're actually getting the most out of their machines. And an actual researched and controlled home made diet is more akin to Unix. It works VERY WELL. It's good for you. It might be harder to do and take up a lot more time, but he end results are far better than what you get from the pap that gets thrown on your plate in even the finest restaurants.
I'm not kidding you. Take a look at how many foods on the shelves in your grocer's have white processed sugar in them (a substance that's more dangerous than you think if not taken in controlled amounts) that DON'T NEED sugar. Why on earth do they put sugar in canned beans? Why is there sugar in spaghetti sauce? And if there isn't sugar in a food then it's either going to have Nutrasweet or Splenda which are far worse than sugar where your health is concerned. The food production industry as defined by the US is an appalling mess of things that are BAD for you. And we're pushing this crap out to the rest of the world. The food won't kill you right away. It might take decades of decreasing wellness. But, is that any way to live? Why not live a healthful life all the way to your last days by eating REAL food produced the old fashioned way? Oh and who stands to make a lot of money off of the decades of decreasing wellness??? The pharmaceutical industry. Think about how popular medications like "Nexium" (The Purple Pill), "Paxil" and "Ritalin" are. If I wore a tin foil hat I'd make a connection but I draw the line there. I do find it very interesting though that the makers of artificial sweeteners that are bad for you (Nutrasweet et al) are pharmaceutical companies. Even more interesting is that a natural alternative sweetener was illegal in this country until 1997. It was made illegal because a nameless artifical sweetener comapany requested that it be outlawed just before Nutrasweet was approved for public consumption in the 80s. I leave you to draw your own conclusions. More and better foods worldwide, huh? Yeah and Bush is the saviour of the world.
...what does it matter? We'll be controlling the weather in another decade or so, right? Man is the master of all he surveys and his technology is superior to the forces of nature. When we're pressed by desperate situations we always come up with solutions that are much better than anything nature could ever come up with in retaliation. I call for regime change on the global climate. Nature is using weapons of mass destruction to try and keep us from democratizing the weather patterns. Let's use the nuclear option and then we'll see who's boss on this planet! Are you with me people!!!? (fist raised in air chanting: Viva la preemptive global climate strike!!!)
Thanks for the interesting link. I'll probably take a look at this for testing with a specific application. However, reading the FAQ the only thing that seems to be missing that Xen does provide is controlled directe hardware access. For example, if I've got two video capture cards in my Xen system, I can assign each of them to their own specific VM. That way I can have two VMs acting like independent PVRs. Similar things can be done with NICs if I want greater isolation between physical networks. But I see that OpenVZ definitely would fit well in a server room environment for SQL DBs, web, mail, DNS or other network services.
I'm using Xen on Gentoo Linux running on an OLD Celeron 400Mhz box with 384 megs of RAM and it runs three VMs at completely native speeds. There ARE no drawbacks. Period. Xen blows EVERYTHING else away in terms of ease of use, flexibility, and even the ability to keep a VM running while it's original physical host is down by migrating it to another physical host. When you combine it with Vanderpool or AMD's upcoming Pacifica hardware virtualization techniques, the sky will be the limit.
I agree. However, where is the proprietary legal DVD player for Linux? There was a company that was going to make one but they were only doing so for the embedded market and at this point it seems that they've abandoned that idea. The only ways to play DVDs on Linux these days are highly questionable legally speaking. If only what you said were true, but there are far too many restrictions to allow one to do so. If a group of people said, "OK, let's make a legal Linux DVD player that doesn't use DeCSS" that group would still have to pay for each DVD player that they sell and $1-2 per buyer isn't going to cover the costs. The big industry players want to make sure they DON'T have to support people like us.
I think my only problem with that is the "prefab" factor. DirecTV with Tivo would place a few restricions on me that I don't want. Right now, I can stream my TV signal to wherever I happen to be. The prefab units don't do this yet and when they do, they'll likely have more artificial restrictions controlling where I can watch my signal. Using Xine I'm able to use any of my computers (even the 802.11 laptops) as "TV terminals". That kind of control wouldn't be available to me with a Tivo. Not to mention the extra cost for the Tivo. But that's just me.;)
I agree. But I also realize that we are at a crossroads here. I predict that Linux users are going to find that access to popular content is going to get increasingly harder. Sadly many of us will probably have to buy appliances to access this stuff which will take away from the elegance of home made devices. I'm already in that boat with DirecTV. The only PCI card that can play subscription content for PVR use is VERY expensive. Much more than just buying a ready made box. So I've had to circumvent by using a video capture card and LIRC to change the channels. It works, but it's not as pretty as having a DirecTV card in my mPC. Hence the reason my homemade PVR lives in the basement and the DVI cable comes up through the wall into my LCD monitor.
The big problem with buying ready made devices is that you spend so much money in aggregate when you have multiple services. And of course, those devices rarely do what YOU want them to. This will be no different if some Linux distros decide to support DRM. The software will, obviously, not be open source. And it's likely that the software will not do what you want it to. This is going to be a nasty battle and I don't see how Linux can win. Since most people just go out and buy set top boxes, the won't even understand the DRM argument since it won't even be an issue to them. Joe and Jane average aren't typically interested in watching programming from outside of their region, so they'll never notice that their player can't play data from Europe (if they are USians) or vice-versa.
Which leads to the really big question. WHY are the media companies so intent on controlling things by region? What is the possible reason? There is tons of brilliant programming from outside the US that is not available to Americans simply because of artificial restrictions like region codes or sales blocks. For example, I attempted to order the entire Hitchhiker's Guide radio series including the latest "Tertiary, Quandry and Quintessential" phases boradcast on the BBC in 2004/2005. The order was processed, but then I recieved an e-mail from the BBC store informing me that I wasn't allowed to buy that content due to licensing restrictions. Why? Why would licensing be involved at all? Who profits from this (since all artificial restrictions have financial reasons behind them)? How does this put the consumer first? What it really does is point to the fact that these systems are broken and it's getting worse. But only a small segment of the population will be inconvenienced. "...at least, no one worth speaking of", to throw out an Adams quote.
The only way that Linux will gain access to this kind of media in the future will likely be through means that are considered to be "illegal" or "violate copyright laws" or some other language meant to demonize the people who expect more from their media than these corporations want them to. At that point it will be time to just say goodnight to these companies and find something else to do for entertainment. Sadly there are no viable options right now. Reading a book is nice, but it doesn't satisfy the urge for junk entertainment... And that is how the world becomes less pleasnt.
Just what I was going to say. Tech support typically sucks when you're dealing with OS, driver or software support. The morons who man the phones are usually reading from a canned script or knowledgebase and have no real understanding of what they're saying. When you ask them any deeper questions (speaking from a sound footing of experience), they direct you back to the idiot questions. We have Gates and company to thank for this because they took what Apple did (made computers easy with GUIs) and mainstreamed it so that any yob who knows Windows can get a job being a tech support person. That's why we have "webmasters" who don't know how HTML works. It's why we have programmers who don't know anything about the structured programming paradigm. It's why we're saddled with substandard software products churned out by people who think Rapid Application Development is a good thing never mind that the code sucks, the products suck and the support is abysmal. In all honesty, you get MUCH better support if you're the person providing your own support and you have a reasonable programmer's mindset. This is why Open Source projects are kicking the pants off of proprietary products for customers in the know. Everyone else is stuck with substandard software and OSes and has to deal with technical support constantly and they get nowhere. Meanwhile the FOSS stuff "just works" as long as you keep in mind that if you want computers to work well, the AREN'T easy to install, configure and maintain.
If it's good enough for SCO, Microsoft, and pretty much any other large computer industry player, then it's good enough for the black hats out there. I wonder if there's a yearly conference that all these folks go to? Oh yeah, it's called "ConCon".;P
I'm well aware of that dickwad. When did I even bring up the term fossil fuel and how does that even have any bearing on what I was saying? God you're thick.
And it won't be until these particles have intelligence. Calling this kind of crap nanotech is like calling a lump of silica a "computer". Geezus marketroids are idiots!
Feh! Trying to confuse the issue are you? I'm not talking petroleum products here. Shell USED to deal exclusively in petroleum products. They now sell the stuff that you use to cook food and heat your water and home with. Unless you're a moron who heats with electricity...
OK. I'll put it in terms that Slashdotters can understand. Imagine that the Earth and it's vital resources (air, water and food) are a server providing services to users. You load up the server, get the services ready for the users and you start off with a base of 10,000 users. You've sized the server for growth with a maximum of 40,000 users. Time goes by and your user base increases until you reach about 39,999 users. Then you add users 40,000 and it all goes to hell (an oversimplification but it works for now). The real truth is that by the time you'd hit about 25,000 users you are probably already feeling a lot of pain in those services. The users are complaining about strange errors, lost data, or somesuch. Now... assume that the IT department has been completely axed because management decided they were too much of a money pit. So you continue on. You eventually have 70,000 users. The server is REALLY unstable and unrealiable. But not because it was poorly designed. Simply because it wasn't meant for that capacity. And that is the key word. In ecology, there is a term for the Earth called "carrying capacity". It refers to how many human beings the planet can sustain at a very, very basic level. This doesn't mean the "I can have a laptop, iPod, cell phone, SUV and nice suburban house" level. It doesn't even mean the "I'll only eat McDonald's, drive a Yugo, and use an 80s Walkman" level. It means the basic primitive level of living for EVERY human on the planet. The "I live in a grass hut, eat rice every day, and walk everywhere" level. The estimated carrying capactity for the Earth the last time I was studying this stuff was 11,000,000,000 humans. If we're talking in terms of servers, we're fucked unless the admin can grow our capcity or give us a second server.
The truth will come out when cell phones are a dying industry. Just like the truth about combustion engine emissions affecting the climate will come out when the auto/oilindustry has moved onto other things. Note, I expect the auto/oil industry to continue to move into various energy industries like natural gas and electricity. That way no matter what kind of transportation we wind up moving to, they'll still be able to profit. Anyone think it's odd that Shell Oil now sells natural gas?
Slashdot Mirror
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, except at Infinium labs where it's Groundhog Day ALL the time. Why doesn't this company DIE? Why doesn't the fat ass behind the company do the same? Jesus every time I hear more stories about Infinium...
A few weeks ago I was telling a Mac using friend of mine that knowing Apple and the really slick way that they do things, they have something big up their sleeve. Witness:
1. They switched to Intel. Why? VERY LIKELY to take advantage of the coming virtualization technology that will allow one CPU to run multiple OSes simultaneously without the overhead of a guest OS. Intrigued?
2. The release of Bootcamp is a test to see how Windows will run on the Mac. Once they've worked out the bugs and it's stable, it's time to virtualize with a hypervisor.
3. Apple announced that they will be releasing an API to allow Mac applications to run on Windows.
Put this all together and I'm betting that Apple has plans for a unified desktop experience running both Windows and Mac applications side by side with no emulation and no performance hit. (Remember hypervisors make the performance hit so low that the OSes may as well be running on bare metal)
See my "GRRRR" journal entry from April 20th that dispels commonly held myths about virtualization.
Keeping people alert by trying to "test" them by potentially scaring them? Regardless as to whether the "this is a test" message shows up or not, this is basically someone poking an employee with a sharp stick every so often. Why not, instead of having to keep your staff interested by frightening them, hire people who actually live for this sort of thing? There are plenty of people out there who could concentrate on this sort of task and never miss. Of course they might not be too socially skilled either. But if it's really that important that we look for this sort of thing (which I really don't agree with) should't we be employing people more suited to the task and paying them well for their abilities?
Agreed. As soon as I saw Digg pop up in an issue of Wired magazine (AKA Tech Poseur's Journal) I knew it had to be crap. I went over there for a bit and perused articles. There's too much crap over there. Who cares about the social implications of technology for example? That's highly UNINTERESTING to a real tech. Then there's also way too many things like the notification of hard drives on sale for cheap at Best Buy or what have you. You also see too many stories about Windows only software. Again what REAL tech cares about Windows? Frankly, I think the Digg will eventually blow up. One more gripe... not enough opportunity to troll idiot users there. When someone is an idiot, they need to be made aware of it and what better way to do that then troll them? Trolling is an integral part of a real community. Suppress trolling, and you lose the ommunity entirely or even worse, wind up with a virtual gated community. How dull.
Oddly I think working in the computer industry bears some strong similarities to other aspects of life like maturity, politics, being or not being a parent. You can't relate to one side until you've been there and you can't relate to where you've been once you've crossed over to the other side. That pretty much sums it up.
;P) the parent might take great offense because they can only picture their own child as the butt of the joke. It's the same with where you are in your understandin
When I first started to work with PCs I came over from the Atari, Amiga and Macintosh worlds. I really only knew the GUI because I barely used the computer beyond just creating music, and working with graphics. I didn't use the CLI on the Amiga very much. I used some "TTP" apps on the Atari but only with GUI wrappers. And the Mac... well with the Mac I just primarily focused on my creative work and had NO inkling of the underlying aspects of the system. (We're talking Mac OS 7 and later here)
Then I graduated from college and needed to get my own computer. I couldn't afford a Mac since even with student discounts a decent Mac was still $4000 and that didn't include all the software I wanted. Instead I spent $4000 on the parts to build my own DOS 6.22/Windows 3.1 PC, all the software I wanted and more and a few peripherals too. I did it because it was cheaper. But it hamstrung me in terms of being cretive because I was spending more time trying to get the system working right since there were driver and software conflicts out the wazoo.
In fact I remember when I first put all the hardware together I was confounded about how I was supposed to format my HD. On all the other OSes (excepting the Amiga Workbench) I'd dealt with primarily, All I needed to do was turn the computer on, and the base GUI would load from ROM. Then I'd just point and click my way to a formatted drive. So I called the computer store and asked them where the formatting utility was in the BIOS. They seemed annoyed with my question. They said I needed to boot the OS to format the drive. OK... well how do I boot the OS if it isn't in the ROM? Is my ROM bad? So the guy walked me through booting my DOS setup disks. Then I finally "got it" and I was on my way. But it seemed so archaic compared to what I was used to. No GUI to format and I also had to consider this new concept of partitioning...
So now here I am twelve years later. I'm a Unix admin where I work, a pure Linux user at home and I still have a foot in the Windows world thanks to work. But now that I'm on "the other side" I find it much harder to relate to users. This is odd because I used to be great at relating to users. I remember when I first started out that I could explain very clearly any software on the Windows platform to a user and they'd usually "get it". I was told many times how "friendly" and "accessible" I was. A lot of people commented on how I could make all this stuff make sense to them. Today, it's a lot harder for me. Part of it is because in order to communicate effetively the concepts that you use on a computer, you really need to speak a different language. And that language confounds users. If I take a step back and translate, "the close window widget" to "The 'X' in the upper right that closes a window" I find myself being annoyed at having to do that for a user. It's needless if they'd just come around to my way of thinking. And therein lies the problem.
Just like being a parent changes certain things and there is no way to relate those changes to a non-parent without them feeling like you're insulting them. They assume that when you say, "having a kid really made my life complete" that you're implying to them, "your life sucks because you don't have a kid yet but just you wait until you do you worthless whipper snapper". When that's not really the case. On the other hand when someone who isn't a parent makes an off color joke about children or babies to someone who might be a "normal" parent (I'm not.
Rather...
Ahahaha!!! Good use of language! "Penultimate bullet point" as in "The Pen Ultimate Ball Point Pen"!!!! Hahahaha!!! I love it when people use subtle humour like that. Pure comic genius!
Such mastery of the art. Wonderful stuff.
Based on recent news events those guys seem to be experts on all things "pedo". ;P I'm sure they'd LOVE to "investigate" more kiddie porn.
Well you might be commenting on the other poster, but I hit 30 six years ago and I'm still going strong with a natural diet. In fact, I changed my diet at 33 because I was almost a victim of Purple pill marketing. But when I read the indications on the box I decided that I wasn't going to make a lifetime commitment to a pharmaceutical at 33. Too young to be tied to medications. After I changed my diet (and no I still eat REALLY tasty and healthful foods, in fact better than what most folks eat) the need for the purple pill went away. My sources of trouble were: sugar, white flour, and meat. Cleaning that crap out of my system eliminated all signs of my gastroesophageal reflux condition. And I threw the Nexium away without having taken it even once. So turning 30 has nothing to do with not eating right. Unless you're already a lardass before you turn 30...
Are you nuts? Do you have any idea just how poisonous the foods on American grocer's shelves, dinner tables and especially restaurants are? And we're sharing that crap with the rest of the world. There are so many toxic chemicals, detrimental organisms and carcinogens in our food supply today it's no wonder that we've been seeing massive increases in:
1. Colitis
2. Chron's Disease
3. Colon cancer
4. ADHD
5. Autism
6. Depression
And that just barely scratches the surface. We've got heavy metals in all of our fish no matter where you get them from which many suspect accounts for the increase in various diseases that affect the developing nervous systems of our children. The hormones we pump into our meat and poultry make it into us and are again suspects for the increases in many immune system disorders and psychological disorders, not to mention the possible cancer link. But I'm willing to bet that you sit down at a nice steak dinner thinking you're eating in style... Keep it up. Eat more steak. We could do with a bit of self-reduced population around here.
I've been studying diet and the effect of foods on the body for the past few years now and I can safely say that what you eat is literally a matter of life and death and it's much more intricate than just the "food pyramid". Think of the food pyramid as the Windows OS. It works. Just barely. But it's good enough to make people think they're actually getting the most out of their machines. And an actual researched and controlled home made diet is more akin to Unix. It works VERY WELL. It's good for you. It might be harder to do and take up a lot more time, but he end results are far better than what you get from the pap that gets thrown on your plate in even the finest restaurants.
I'm not kidding you. Take a look at how many foods on the shelves in your grocer's have white processed sugar in them (a substance that's more dangerous than you think if not taken in controlled amounts) that DON'T NEED sugar. Why on earth do they put sugar in canned beans? Why is there sugar in spaghetti sauce? And if there isn't sugar in a food then it's either going to have Nutrasweet or Splenda which are far worse than sugar where your health is concerned. The food production industry as defined by the US is an appalling mess of things that are BAD for you. And we're pushing this crap out to the rest of the world. The food won't kill you right away. It might take decades of decreasing wellness. But, is that any way to live? Why not live a healthful life all the way to your last days by eating REAL food produced the old fashioned way? Oh and who stands to make a lot of money off of the decades of decreasing wellness??? The pharmaceutical industry. Think about how popular medications like "Nexium" (The Purple Pill), "Paxil" and "Ritalin" are. If I wore a tin foil hat I'd make a connection but I draw the line there. I do find it very interesting though that the makers of artificial sweeteners that are bad for you (Nutrasweet et al) are pharmaceutical companies. Even more interesting is that a natural alternative sweetener was illegal in this country until 1997. It was made illegal because a nameless artifical sweetener comapany requested that it be outlawed just before Nutrasweet was approved for public consumption in the 80s. I leave you to draw your own conclusions. More and better foods worldwide, huh? Yeah and Bush is the saviour of the world.
...what does it matter? We'll be controlling the weather in another decade or so, right? Man is the master of all he surveys and his technology is superior to the forces of nature. When we're pressed by desperate situations we always come up with solutions that are much better than anything nature could ever come up with in retaliation. I call for regime change on the global climate. Nature is using weapons of mass destruction to try and keep us from democratizing the weather patterns. Let's use the nuclear option and then we'll see who's boss on this planet! Are you with me people!!!? (fist raised in air chanting: Viva la preemptive global climate strike!!!)
Thanks again. I'll definitely have to give this a look over to see if it fits my needs and how it runs on my admittedly old hardware.
Thanks for the interesting link. I'll probably take a look at this for testing with a specific application. However, reading the FAQ the only thing that seems to be missing that Xen does provide is controlled directe hardware access. For example, if I've got two video capture cards in my Xen system, I can assign each of them to their own specific VM. That way I can have two VMs acting like independent PVRs. Similar things can be done with NICs if I want greater isolation between physical networks. But I see that OpenVZ definitely would fit well in a server room environment for SQL DBs, web, mail, DNS or other network services.
I'm using Xen on Gentoo Linux running on an OLD Celeron 400Mhz box with 384 megs of RAM and it runs three VMs at completely native speeds. There ARE no drawbacks. Period. Xen blows EVERYTHING else away in terms of ease of use, flexibility, and even the ability to keep a VM running while it's original physical host is down by migrating it to another physical host. When you combine it with Vanderpool or AMD's upcoming Pacifica hardware virtualization techniques, the sky will be the limit.
I agree. However, where is the proprietary legal DVD player for Linux? There was a company that was going to make one but they were only doing so for the embedded market and at this point it seems that they've abandoned that idea. The only ways to play DVDs on Linux these days are highly questionable legally speaking. If only what you said were true, but there are far too many restrictions to allow one to do so. If a group of people said, "OK, let's make a legal Linux DVD player that doesn't use DeCSS" that group would still have to pay for each DVD player that they sell and $1-2 per buyer isn't going to cover the costs. The big industry players want to make sure they DON'T have to support people like us.
I think my only problem with that is the "prefab" factor. DirecTV with Tivo would place a few restricions on me that I don't want. Right now, I can stream my TV signal to wherever I happen to be. The prefab units don't do this yet and when they do, they'll likely have more artificial restrictions controlling where I can watch my signal. Using Xine I'm able to use any of my computers (even the 802.11 laptops) as "TV terminals". That kind of control wouldn't be available to me with a Tivo. Not to mention the extra cost for the Tivo. But that's just me. ;)
I agree. But I also realize that we are at a crossroads here. I predict that Linux users are going to find that access to popular content is going to get increasingly harder. Sadly many of us will probably have to buy appliances to access this stuff which will take away from the elegance of home made devices. I'm already in that boat with DirecTV. The only PCI card that can play subscription content for PVR use is VERY expensive. Much more than just buying a ready made box. So I've had to circumvent by using a video capture card and LIRC to change the channels. It works, but it's not as pretty as having a DirecTV card in my mPC. Hence the reason my homemade PVR lives in the basement and the DVI cable comes up through the wall into my LCD monitor.
The big problem with buying ready made devices is that you spend so much money in aggregate when you have multiple services. And of course, those devices rarely do what YOU want them to. This will be no different if some Linux distros decide to support DRM. The software will, obviously, not be open source. And it's likely that the software will not do what you want it to. This is going to be a nasty battle and I don't see how Linux can win. Since most people just go out and buy set top boxes, the won't even understand the DRM argument since it won't even be an issue to them. Joe and Jane average aren't typically interested in watching programming from outside of their region, so they'll never notice that their player can't play data from Europe (if they are USians) or vice-versa.
Which leads to the really big question. WHY are the media companies so intent on controlling things by region? What is the possible reason? There is tons of brilliant programming from outside the US that is not available to Americans simply because of artificial restrictions like region codes or sales blocks. For example, I attempted to order the entire Hitchhiker's Guide radio series including the latest "Tertiary, Quandry and Quintessential" phases boradcast on the BBC in 2004/2005. The order was processed, but then I recieved an e-mail from the BBC store informing me that I wasn't allowed to buy that content due to licensing restrictions. Why? Why would licensing be involved at all? Who profits from this (since all artificial restrictions have financial reasons behind them)? How does this put the consumer first? What it really does is point to the fact that these systems are broken and it's getting worse. But only a small segment of the population will be inconvenienced. "...at least, no one worth speaking of", to throw out an Adams quote.
The only way that Linux will gain access to this kind of media in the future will likely be through means that are considered to be "illegal" or "violate copyright laws" or some other language meant to demonize the people who expect more from their media than these corporations want them to. At that point it will be time to just say goodnight to these companies and find something else to do for entertainment. Sadly there are no viable options right now. Reading a book is nice, but it doesn't satisfy the urge for junk entertainment... And that is how the world becomes less pleasnt.
Just what I was going to say. Tech support typically sucks when you're dealing with OS, driver or software support. The morons who man the phones are usually reading from a canned script or knowledgebase and have no real understanding of what they're saying. When you ask them any deeper questions (speaking from a sound footing of experience), they direct you back to the idiot questions. We have Gates and company to thank for this because they took what Apple did (made computers easy with GUIs) and mainstreamed it so that any yob who knows Windows can get a job being a tech support person. That's why we have "webmasters" who don't know how HTML works. It's why we have programmers who don't know anything about the structured programming paradigm. It's why we're saddled with substandard software products churned out by people who think Rapid Application Development is a good thing never mind that the code sucks, the products suck and the support is abysmal. In all honesty, you get MUCH better support if you're the person providing your own support and you have a reasonable programmer's mindset. This is why Open Source projects are kicking the pants off of proprietary products for customers in the know. Everyone else is stuck with substandard software and OSes and has to deal with technical support constantly and they get nowhere. Meanwhile the FOSS stuff "just works" as long as you keep in mind that if you want computers to work well, the AREN'T easy to install, configure and maintain.
If it's good enough for SCO, Microsoft, and pretty much any other large computer industry player, then it's good enough for the black hats out there. I wonder if there's a yearly conference that all these folks go to? Oh yeah, it's called "ConCon". ;P
I'm well aware of that dickwad. When did I even bring up the term fossil fuel and how does that even have any bearing on what I was saying? God you're thick.
And it won't be until these particles have intelligence. Calling this kind of crap nanotech is like calling a lump of silica a "computer". Geezus marketroids are idiots!
Feh! Trying to confuse the issue are you? I'm not talking petroleum products here. Shell USED to deal exclusively in petroleum products. They now sell the stuff that you use to cook food and heat your water and home with. Unless you're a moron who heats with electricity...
OK. I'll put it in terms that Slashdotters can understand. Imagine that the Earth and it's vital resources (air, water and food) are a server providing services to users. You load up the server, get the services ready for the users and you start off with a base of 10,000 users. You've sized the server for growth with a maximum of 40,000 users. Time goes by and your user base increases until you reach about 39,999 users. Then you add users 40,000 and it all goes to hell (an oversimplification but it works for now). The real truth is that by the time you'd hit about 25,000 users you are probably already feeling a lot of pain in those services. The users are complaining about strange errors, lost data, or somesuch. Now... assume that the IT department has been completely axed because management decided they were too much of a money pit. So you continue on. You eventually have 70,000 users. The server is REALLY unstable and unrealiable. But not because it was poorly designed. Simply because it wasn't meant for that capacity. And that is the key word. In ecology, there is a term for the Earth called "carrying capacity". It refers to how many human beings the planet can sustain at a very, very basic level. This doesn't mean the "I can have a laptop, iPod, cell phone, SUV and nice suburban house" level. It doesn't even mean the "I'll only eat McDonald's, drive a Yugo, and use an 80s Walkman" level. It means the basic primitive level of living for EVERY human on the planet. The "I live in a grass hut, eat rice every day, and walk everywhere" level. The estimated carrying capactity for the Earth the last time I was studying this stuff was 11,000,000,000 humans. If we're talking in terms of servers, we're fucked unless the admin can grow our capcity or give us a second server.
The truth will come out when cell phones are a dying industry. Just like the truth about combustion engine emissions affecting the climate will come out when the auto /oilindustry has moved onto other things. Note, I expect the auto/oil industry to continue to move into various energy industries like natural gas and electricity. That way no matter what kind of transportation we wind up moving to, they'll still be able to profit. Anyone think it's odd that Shell Oil now sells natural gas?