That's it. I'm going to mail Daniel Robbins and ask him to make the next in his brilliant series of articles at IBM DeveloperWorks a "OS advocacy for overzealous Gentoo freaks" piece.
The first and most important bit: Always bring up Gentoo whenever ANYONE mentions ANY other operating system! This is of UTMOST importance! Just like annoying potential customers works for Internet advertisers, annoying potential users must work for OS advocates!
Longhorn would kick ass if they installed unwanted software using PORTAGE instead of Windows Update!!!!! PR0T4G3 R0XX0RZ J00R B0XX0RS!
I'm going to be burned at the stake for this, but don't worry, my karma ensures that I'll be back as a lotus blossom to annoy all you bloody geeks with pollen.
For IBM, standard practice has usually been to shut up until the lawsuit, which is exactly what they're doing now. We should probably be more worried if they were hissing and screaming like SCO.
What worries me is exactly the justice system you guys have running over there. SCO has claimed that it might attempt to get a "friend of the court" brief because Linux is allegedly used by terrorists, as well as the fact that one of their lawyers happens to be the son of Orrin Hatch.
SCO found some mysterious amendment to their contract that said they do in fact have those ownership rights, and while Novell couldn't find a copy of the file in its own archive, it had a valid Novell signature.
Quoth McBribe: "Novell took its ball and went home."
Matrox' open-source driver is apparently based on what XFree86 coders had already done. It is written in approximately the same style as what you see in the rest of those X drivers, so it's reasonably readable. They apparently haven't been needlessly obfuscating things, which is cool. It would be nice if other vendors adopted the model of isolating the non-free stuff in an optional library and using an open-source driver with that. If they can, that is; if crucial code in the main driver is non-free it may be a little more complicated.
The G400 was pretty cool in its day, though, or at least it was in my opinion. Since the only games I can ever be bothered to play are Freeciv and Nethack, I haven't gotten around to replacing mine yet.:) The one thing I still like about that old junker is the image quality; Matrox' reputation in that regard is well-deserved (unfortunately, the same can be said about their reputation for piss-poor 3D performance). For someone who tends to sit in front of the computer for hours and hours primarily dealing with text and still graphics, image quality is important.
They could handle this like Matrox did with their G-series of cards on Linux. Matrox put all the stuff that they couldn't legally free in a library (mga_HALlib.so), which the driver (which is free software itself) can call. Interestingly, the driver can run without the HALlib being present, but the graphics card loses some of its features in that case.
That seems to me like the way to go for companies who want to embrace free software, but aren't legally allowed to release all their code.
Oh I perfectly well understand the desire to reduce noise from a PC.
Me too. My point wasn't that PC noise pollution is a good thing, but that it's absurd that the noise and cooling problems have come to such an extreme that a non-overclocker needs to do things like this. PCs should be quiet by default, like older home computers were.
Who the hell would need that sort of cooling for a firewall, though? And if it's standing in the garage anyway, is noise really an issue? I don't get it.
It's definitely an ingenious little hardware hack, kudos to him for thinking of it, but still -- it's a bad sign that this sort of thing is needed for silence.
Am I the only one who thinks it's absurd that there even is a need for something like this for reducing noise in current computers? I mean, I could understand it if the guy was some compulsive tinkerer who overclocks everything in sight, but for silence in a home office PC?! It seems insane.
I sometimes think that, for those of us who don't play the latest games anyway, PC's are becoming too powerful for their own good. Most current PCs have a large pile of case fans, a big noisy CPU fan, two fans in the power supply (sometimes very noisy, sometimes not), a small and very noisy fan on the graphics card, and another one on the chipset. I've seen mods that add fans to RAM, although those are still only needed by overclockers.
The obvious fix, of course, is to make a Jargon File fork that is collectively maintained, like Everything2 or your favourite wikipedia.
I'd never in Hell actually start such a project though. Judging from ESR's recent divorce with sanity, the poor sod who headed such a project would probably be treated to a surprise showing of Eric's gun collection.
Actually that makes Vorbis even more suitable for this sort of application than MP3. You can use Bitrate Peeling to reduce the quality (and size) of your Vorbis files, allowing you to keep a collection of high-quality Vorbis files on your computer, and transfer lower-quality peeled files to your portable. No need to turn them into MP3s and apply another lossy compression algorithm than what they already took when they were Vorbised. Peeling should be faster than turning the files into waves and then MP3'ing them, too.
And then, of course, Vorbis has the advantage that it isn't encumbered by patents. You may or may not care about this.
Am I insane for wearing Sennheiser HD 437's with my Discman?:-)
I suppose you've met all Indian programmers, have you? You know all of them? You know exactly how all of them program?
He obviously haven't. That's probably why he writes: "Of course, there's always exceptions, and that's why we still interview people..."
If someone else won't say it, I will: "You are a racist."
He isn't, though. He wrote: "It's amazing the difference in talent between American vs Indian (graduated undergrad and/or grad in India, not of Indian decent) programmers." (emphasis mine). He explicitly states that programmers of indian descent (or, if you prefer the archaic term, "race") are no worse or better than others, but those who are educated in India tend to have some problems. He is criticizing India's education system, not making a slur against Indian people.
I hate racists as much as the next guy, but to pull that term out whenever someone makes a comment about a completely non-racially related aspect of a foreign people is just silly.
Whenever I've been to one of those concerts I have tinnitus for two days afterwards, their guitar amps and drum kits must have embedded lossy compression software.
Actually I prefer an "alternative" OS to a "competitor" OS.
The cool thing about Linux (for me, anyway) is that GNU/Linux as a whole is not entangled in the marketplace like MS is. We're not a competitor in the traditional way, because Linux as a whole is not a company, it's a community. MS, as it has obviously shown many times over, is a lot better at combating competing companies than they are at dealing with a community-driven alternative. We don't have to win MS mindshare, or devise product strategies for toppling the MS king. We're an alternative, people can freely choose Linux or whatever else suits their fancy, we're not trying to force anything on anybody, and we sure never should go down that road.
We don't have to be Anti-Microsoft. We can go our own way. I'm a little sad with the whole "de-geekify Linux so we can grab MS users!" crowd; I don't want a de-geekified Linux that acts as if I'm clueless. I'm a geek. Geeks built Linux. It's only fair that geeks get to keep a system they like to use; geeks were the ones who got this whole show rolling in the first place. I think we need a different paradigm of user-friendliness than MS; what worked for them might not be what works for us.
The paradigm of user-friendliness that powers Microsoft is that computer programs should be made so that even people completely without understanding can use them; the flip side is that these programs are hard to attain a deeper understanding of, and that you only have as much control as the "user-friendly" GUI will let you. I'm afraid Linux' nature will keep us from ever successfully implementing such a model, though. I think a model with very simple interfaces, where the system helps the user educate herself and get a deeper understanding of what is going on. "User-friendliness by helping the user get smarter" rather than "user-friendliness by assuming stupid users", so to speak.
My friends don't treat me as if I'm clueless, why should I call a computer friendly for doing so?
Therefore, if you are hurting a label, you are also hurting the artist.
You're not taking away his ability to make music. The sort of artist who just wants to reach as big an audience as possible (they sure do exist, and among amateurs and semi-pro's they even seem to be a majority) understandably doesn't have a big problem with seeing their stuff on P2P networks. P2P networks are a way to reach a bigger audience; I don't think anybody can find a serious argument against that.
However, you also assume that artists either care about the music, or they care about the money. Who says it can't be both? Everyone cares if they have food in their stomachs, so money is a necessary part of life.
But again, most small-label artists have day jobs and can get food in their stomachs anyway. Most would like the ability to make a living off of music, but that has been hard for small-time artists a long time before P2P networks were around. They tend to make a lot more on playing live gigs than on store sales (always did), and you can never warez a concert experience -- which is why some of us still keep going to concerts even though we have the band's studio recordings.
Given the choice, most artists would choose to make money rather than not make money. Get it?
I was never arguing that they don't want to make money; almost everyone does and there's nothing wrong with that. However, as said, many small-time artists prioritize "big audience" over "big money", which is why they may not feel that P2P sharing is all that bad for them. It may keep them out of obscurity, which many artists seem to fear more than the fact that some people are listening without paying. The labels understandably have a different view.
Wow, you managed to contradict yourself all in the same sentence!
Not really. I said that sort of artist doesn't generally care if their music is traded. This doesn't mean that their label feels the same way. Many artists who release under small labels aren't working full-time making music, so they usually have day jobs and can manage financially even if their music isn't earning them a lot. It's different for a label, since releasing music is (basically) all that the label does. If you're making unauthorized music downloads, you may be hurting a label even though the artist doesn't really care. Get it?
And if souls are in demand, then they have a right to sell theirs.
Sure, but the result is soulless music.
But you're here defending P2P networks, because artists "shouldn't care" if their files are shared? Hm, contradicting yourself again.
I'd only be contradicting myself if I indeed had the agenda you seem to be trying to force on me. I don't use P2P. I don't like current P2P networks and how they're used. I figure that if I want to listen to small-label music, I might as well support the small labels, and I think many P2P users have stupid habits in this regard. It's not my place to decide whether artists should or shouldn't care about sharing of their files (that's really up to themselves to decide), I'm just saying that the artists that are in it for the music instead of the money generally seem to not care all that much. I like to buy their stuff rather than make an unauthorized download, because I think boycotting the scum who've made most current P2P software is in order, and because I like giving my money to artists I enjoy. I guess I'm crazy that way. Another reason why I don't often buy big-label music; they tend to treat their artists less than well, and I don't want to give them any of my money if I can help it. (and they don't really cater to people with obscure tastes in music anyway -- there isn't as much money to be made in death metal as there is in pop)
There's nothing wrong with expecting to make a living off music (or writing code, or books, or whatever), the problem arises when you expect to make millions off it.
Some artists (most of the so-called nu-metal scene spring to mind) seem to be more interested in the money than the music, just like many dotcommers were more interested in the money than the technology. That's when it crosses the line between wanting economic security and petty greed. I would love nothing more than to make a living off playing my bass, writing code or making computer graphics, but I don't need a big mansion or ten cars and a thousand groupies (of course, bass players are cursed by God anyway, and never get groupies, groupies can sense such things).
Some artists just want to make music, and it'd be a bonus if it's enjoyed by lots of people. These tend to be the folks who don't give a flying fuck about their music being traded on P2P networks (although they often release through small labels, who are hit harder by filesharing than Sony and BMG -- let's face it, many filesharing fans don't buy what they've already downloaded). Others want the fame, riches and glory associated with the popular media representation of a musician, and will happily sell their souls to the highest bidder to fulfill that particular dream.
Most of the music I listen to is published by small labels, and I don't use P2P because I want to help keep the small labels alive. Paradoxically, the big ones are the ones most actively combating so-called piracy, but they are also the ones most financially resistant to it. Of course, it may be because they fear obsoletion, and 'piracy' is a good smokescreen to put up while they're destroying online music distribution.
No more getting spanked by some 12 year old who can play 16 hours a day because you have a real job and they don't
Nah, now you'll have the opportuntiy to be spanked by the 12-year-old whose parents have the most money instead! The wonders of progress! And your equipment deteriorates over time, so you'll have to keep spending money to stay on top. After reading this Slashdot discussion, am I the only one who senses a disturbing similarity to dope dealers' business model?
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, at new year, the chatterbox topic / MOTD at everything2 was "2003: Year of the Lawyer"
:)
I'm not really sure you'd want to fertilize rainforest soil with bottled evil, though
That's it. I'm going to mail Daniel Robbins and ask him to make the next in his brilliant series of articles at IBM DeveloperWorks a "OS advocacy for overzealous Gentoo freaks" piece.
The first and most important bit: Always bring up Gentoo whenever ANYONE mentions ANY other operating system! This is of UTMOST importance! Just like annoying potential customers works for Internet advertisers, annoying potential users must work for OS advocates!
Longhorn would kick ass if they installed unwanted software using PORTAGE instead of Windows Update!!!!! PR0T4G3 R0XX0RZ J00R B0XX0RS!
I'm going to be burned at the stake for this, but don't worry, my karma ensures that I'll be back as a lotus blossom to annoy all you bloody geeks with pollen.
Linus Torvalds says "Linux Kicks Ass".
For IBM, standard practice has usually been to shut up until the lawsuit, which is exactly what they're doing now. We should probably be more worried if they were hissing and screaming like SCO.
What worries me is exactly the justice system you guys have running over there. SCO has claimed that it might attempt to get a "friend of the court" brief because Linux is allegedly used by terrorists, as well as the fact that one of their lawyers happens to be the son of Orrin Hatch.
I'm afraid that's ancient history by now, though.
SCO found some mysterious amendment to their contract that said they do in fact have those ownership rights, and while Novell couldn't find a copy of the file in its own archive, it had a valid Novell signature.
Quoth McBribe: "Novell took its ball and went home."
Matrox' open-source driver is apparently based on what XFree86 coders had already done. It is written in approximately the same style as what you see in the rest of those X drivers, so it's reasonably readable. They apparently haven't been needlessly obfuscating things, which is cool. It would be nice if other vendors adopted the model of isolating the non-free stuff in an optional library and using an open-source driver with that. If they can, that is; if crucial code in the main driver is non-free it may be a little more complicated.
The G400 was pretty cool in its day, though, or at least it was in my opinion. Since the only games I can ever be bothered to play are Freeciv and Nethack, I haven't gotten around to replacing mine yet. :) The one thing I still like about that old junker is the image quality; Matrox' reputation in that regard is well-deserved (unfortunately, the same can be said about their reputation for piss-poor 3D performance). For someone who tends to sit in front of the computer for hours and hours primarily dealing with text and still graphics, image quality is important.
They could handle this like Matrox did with their G-series of cards on Linux. Matrox put all the stuff that they couldn't legally free in a library (mga_HALlib.so), which the driver (which is free software itself) can call. Interestingly, the driver can run without the HALlib being present, but the graphics card loses some of its features in that case.
That seems to me like the way to go for companies who want to embrace free software, but aren't legally allowed to release all their code.
Me too. My point wasn't that PC noise pollution is a good thing, but that it's absurd that the noise and cooling problems have come to such an extreme that a non-overclocker needs to do things like this. PCs should be quiet by default, like older home computers were.
Who the hell would need that sort of cooling for a firewall, though? And if it's standing in the garage anyway, is noise really an issue? I don't get it.
It's definitely an ingenious little hardware hack, kudos to him for thinking of it, but still -- it's a bad sign that this sort of thing is needed for silence.
Am I the only one who thinks it's absurd that there even is a need for something like this for reducing noise in current computers? I mean, I could understand it if the guy was some compulsive tinkerer who overclocks everything in sight, but for silence in a home office PC?! It seems insane.
I sometimes think that, for those of us who don't play the latest games anyway, PC's are becoming too powerful for their own good. Most current PCs have a large pile of case fans, a big noisy CPU fan, two fans in the power supply (sometimes very noisy, sometimes not), a small and very noisy fan on the graphics card, and another one on the chipset. I've seen mods that add fans to RAM, although those are still only needed by overclockers.
Cool! Are there any side effects?
And to make it seem credible, it should be an abbreviation for Ego Standard Rating.
The obvious fix, of course, is to make a Jargon File fork that is collectively maintained, like Everything2 or your favourite wikipedia.
I'd never in Hell actually start such a project though. Judging from ESR's recent divorce with sanity, the poor sod who headed such a project would probably be treated to a surprise showing of Eric's gun collection.
Actually that makes Vorbis even more suitable for this sort of application than MP3. You can use Bitrate Peeling to reduce the quality (and size) of your Vorbis files, allowing you to keep a collection of high-quality Vorbis files on your computer, and transfer lower-quality peeled files to your portable. No need to turn them into MP3s and apply another lossy compression algorithm than what they already took when they were Vorbised. Peeling should be faster than turning the files into waves and then MP3'ing them, too.
And then, of course, Vorbis has the advantage that it isn't encumbered by patents. You may or may not care about this.
Am I insane for wearing Sennheiser HD 437's with my Discman? :-)
He obviously haven't. That's probably why he writes: "Of course, there's always exceptions, and that's why we still interview people..."
If someone else won't say it, I will: "You are a racist."He isn't, though. He wrote: "It's amazing the difference in talent between American vs Indian (graduated undergrad and/or grad in India, not of Indian decent) programmers." (emphasis mine). He explicitly states that programmers of indian descent (or, if you prefer the archaic term, "race") are no worse or better than others, but those who are educated in India tend to have some problems. He is criticizing India's education system, not making a slur against Indian people.
I hate racists as much as the next guy, but to pull that term out whenever someone makes a comment about a completely non-racially related aspect of a foreign people is just silly.
Unfortunately, LVM is on its way out. 2.5 kernels no longer have it, and it appears that the jury's still out regarding its replacement.
True Redmond Advanced SHell (TRASH)
Let's Emulate A SHell (LEASH)
God damn local death metal bands.
Whenever I've been to one of those concerts I have tinnitus for two days afterwards, their guitar amps and drum kits must have embedded lossy compression software.
'Net marketers truly operate with a crazy paradigm. Why is it they think that by annoying people as much as possible, they get more customers?
Actually I prefer an "alternative" OS to a "competitor" OS.
The cool thing about Linux (for me, anyway) is that GNU/Linux as a whole is not entangled in the marketplace like MS is. We're not a competitor in the traditional way, because Linux as a whole is not a company, it's a community. MS, as it has obviously shown many times over, is a lot better at combating competing companies than they are at dealing with a community-driven alternative. We don't have to win MS mindshare, or devise product strategies for toppling the MS king. We're an alternative, people can freely choose Linux or whatever else suits their fancy, we're not trying to force anything on anybody, and we sure never should go down that road.
We don't have to be Anti-Microsoft. We can go our own way. I'm a little sad with the whole "de-geekify Linux so we can grab MS users!" crowd; I don't want a de-geekified Linux that acts as if I'm clueless. I'm a geek. Geeks built Linux. It's only fair that geeks get to keep a system they like to use; geeks were the ones who got this whole show rolling in the first place. I think we need a different paradigm of user-friendliness than MS; what worked for them might not be what works for us.
The paradigm of user-friendliness that powers Microsoft is that computer programs should be made so that even people completely without understanding can use them; the flip side is that these programs are hard to attain a deeper understanding of, and that you only have as much control as the "user-friendly" GUI will let you. I'm afraid Linux' nature will keep us from ever successfully implementing such a model, though. I think a model with very simple interfaces, where the system helps the user educate herself and get a deeper understanding of what is going on. "User-friendliness by helping the user get smarter" rather than "user-friendliness by assuming stupid users", so to speak.
My friends don't treat me as if I'm clueless, why should I call a computer friendly for doing so?
You're not taking away his ability to make music. The sort of artist who just wants to reach as big an audience as possible (they sure do exist, and among amateurs and semi-pro's they even seem to be a majority) understandably doesn't have a big problem with seeing their stuff on P2P networks. P2P networks are a way to reach a bigger audience; I don't think anybody can find a serious argument against that.
But again, most small-label artists have day jobs and can get food in their stomachs anyway. Most would like the ability to make a living off of music, but that has been hard for small-time artists a long time before P2P networks were around. They tend to make a lot more on playing live gigs than on store sales (always did), and you can never warez a concert experience -- which is why some of us still keep going to concerts even though we have the band's studio recordings.
I was never arguing that they don't want to make money; almost everyone does and there's nothing wrong with that. However, as said, many small-time artists prioritize "big audience" over "big money", which is why they may not feel that P2P sharing is all that bad for them. It may keep them out of obscurity, which many artists seem to fear more than the fact that some people are listening without paying. The labels understandably have a different view.
Hey Thorkytel,
You wrote:
Not really. I said that sort of artist doesn't generally care if their music is traded. This doesn't mean that their label feels the same way. Many artists who release under small labels aren't working full-time making music, so they usually have day jobs and can manage financially even if their music isn't earning them a lot. It's different for a label, since releasing music is (basically) all that the label does. If you're making unauthorized music downloads, you may be hurting a label even though the artist doesn't really care. Get it?
Sure, but the result is soulless music.
I'd only be contradicting myself if I indeed had the agenda you seem to be trying to force on me. I don't use P2P. I don't like current P2P networks and how they're used. I figure that if I want to listen to small-label music, I might as well support the small labels, and I think many P2P users have stupid habits in this regard. It's not my place to decide whether artists should or shouldn't care about sharing of their files (that's really up to themselves to decide), I'm just saying that the artists that are in it for the music instead of the money generally seem to not care all that much. I like to buy their stuff rather than make an unauthorized download, because I think boycotting the scum who've made most current P2P software is in order, and because I like giving my money to artists I enjoy. I guess I'm crazy that way. Another reason why I don't often buy big-label music; they tend to treat their artists less than well, and I don't want to give them any of my money if I can help it. (and they don't really cater to people with obscure tastes in music anyway -- there isn't as much money to be made in death metal as there is in pop)
There's nothing wrong with expecting to make a living off music (or writing code, or books, or whatever), the problem arises when you expect to make millions off it.
Some artists (most of the so-called nu-metal scene spring to mind) seem to be more interested in the money than the music, just like many dotcommers were more interested in the money than the technology. That's when it crosses the line between wanting economic security and petty greed. I would love nothing more than to make a living off playing my bass, writing code or making computer graphics, but I don't need a big mansion or ten cars and a thousand groupies (of course, bass players are cursed by God anyway, and never get groupies, groupies can sense such things).
Some artists just want to make music, and it'd be a bonus if it's enjoyed by lots of people. These tend to be the folks who don't give a flying fuck about their music being traded on P2P networks (although they often release through small labels, who are hit harder by filesharing than Sony and BMG -- let's face it, many filesharing fans don't buy what they've already downloaded). Others want the fame, riches and glory associated with the popular media representation of a musician, and will happily sell their souls to the highest bidder to fulfill that particular dream.
Most of the music I listen to is published by small labels, and I don't use P2P because I want to help keep the small labels alive. Paradoxically, the big ones are the ones most actively combating so-called piracy, but they are also the ones most financially resistant to it. Of course, it may be because they fear obsoletion, and 'piracy' is a good smokescreen to put up while they're destroying online music distribution.
Nah, now you'll have the opportuntiy to be spanked by the 12-year-old whose parents have the most money instead! The wonders of progress! And your equipment deteriorates over time, so you'll have to keep spending money to stay on top. After reading this Slashdot discussion, am I the only one who senses a disturbing similarity to dope dealers' business model?