It's mostly a review of how much Lindows is similar to Windows, with a short note at the end on they gave it to his mom. I can summarize that part up much more quickly.
"We gave out mom a pre install Lindows box. She clicked around and stuff and had trouble finding MS Office, but opened Open Office once she found it."
"Mplayer is great and all but it still doesn't compare to Media Player. And it's the best there is!"
What the hell have you been smoking? Mplayer kicks the living crap out of EVERY other media player in existance, and out of every media player in existance Media Player is the worst. Mplayer has way more features, plays more AV formats out of the box, uses WAY less system resources, and is several times faster. Media Player's playback control is horrible. Finding a spot in a large video or movie is next to impossible, hope 5 minutes is close enough for you.
Even Media Player's GUI now lacks comparitively to the new and still developing gmplayer.
My point is, mplayer is a perfect example of OSS done right. No other video player for any platform I have come across offers anything coming anywhere near close to what mplayer already has to offer.
It seems that Novell is really and truly dedicated to the OSS community. I didn't know until I looked at their page, but Novell is offering a Linux certification, the CLE (Certified Linux Engineer) apparently somewhat equivalent to the LPI cert (at least that's what they recommend for studying), but also including Novell Nterprise services for Linux.
This has got to be the smartest marketing Novelll has ever done. (Any of you familiar with Novell know how absolutely BAD they are at marketing). I actually have a renewed interest in Novell products, and I may just dust off my CNE cert and hang it on my wall proudly, rather than hiding it at the bottom of my underwear drawer where no man but me dares tread. A CNE and a CLE might look nice together on a resume.
Well they sued some poor kid for his life savings for writing a search engine that searched open SMB shares. That had nothing to do with music. The RIAA wants any file sharing to be illegal. The called a LAN a local area napster network, followed by explaining that Napster was found to be illegal and this is no different. They want to shut down windows print & file sharing. Don't let the PR crap from a PBS debate tell you what their intentions are. Actions speak infinitely louder than words.
And as for everyone making assertations with no proof... show me proof that has been happening before you make that assertation.
"Jeez, breeding for particular traits is NOT at all the same as inserting genes from other species."
I'm not so sure about that. We have created hybrid animals through selective breeding of differing species that wouldn't exist in the wild, such as tigons, ligers, and all sorts of equine hybrids.
I think the big deal here is that they are not only taking genes from different species, but also different classes, orders, etc.
I read somewhere about a french artist who worked with a bioengineering company to produce a rabbit that glowed green (using jellyfish genes as well). There was some sort of scandal about him not getting to take it home to film it interacting as a family pet which was what the whole project was about in the first place.
I'd like to see a pic of these fish though, or some video. I have no problem with a genetically modified pet. In the future, maybe we can have tigers that get no bigger than house cats, or something cool like that. Or photosynthetic pets that you don't have to feed! Just stick them outside for a few hours!
There are alot (and I mean ALOT) of downfalls to using this as a type of fs. First and most obvious is the latency involved with network communication. If it takes as long to copy a divx movie from partition A on drive A to partition B on drive B as it did to download it, I don't really see this as being any more viable than sftp, or a basic VPN.
Also, what happens if one of your email addresses goes kaput? Was it housing important data? And since most free email providers give you like 5 megs of space, you'd need several hundred accounts before you had any sort of decent storage space. Of course, now you have to clean the spam out of several hundred mail boxes to acheive the level of data storage you were looking for. If a server where you have several email accounts goes down, your data will be nearly unretreivable. Your almost better off having a crashed HDD sent to a recovery lab.
It's an interesting and innovative idea, but I don't think it has a whole lot of real world implementations.
" hell add another $59.00 and you can get a low end Geforce 4 and make it scream for games."
We've used a few Wal-mart PCs as lightwieght servers, and they do great at that, but the expandability really is limited. Any card you got would have to be PCI, as there is only one expansion slot, and it's pci. The integrated video is AGP, but big deal because it sucks. Also, the cases are really small and everything is packed in tight, so even fitting an extra card in can be a task. A linksys 10/100 NIC only has a small area of clearance, so a GeForce may be kinda big. Of course, imaginative case modding can solve this problem.
Do they make newer 3d cards in PCI anymore? It's been so long since I've checked..
I really didn't expect to get any money from it, especially after it was posted on/. If enough people signed up to make it too expensive to send out too small of a check, they were just going to give donations to charity. I'm certainly suprised to see it's at $13 a chack, as opposed to the maximum $20.
How should I spend this moeny? Maybe we can start some sort of collective slashdot "Anti-RIAA/MPAA fund" out of all the checks we get. I doubt we could all agree on 1 use for the moeny that hurts the RIAA, but it's sure be nice (and fun).
Infrastructure costs money. It's easy to say "Let's just stick a bunch of wireless radios all over the world", but it's much more difficult to implement. Who is going to foot the costs of the radios, leasing land or roof space, maintaining connections, etc. etc.
This question has most definately come from someone with end-user only experience. Anyone who actually "makes the wires work" knows it isn't easy, and it's certainly not cheap. This is just the unchecked imagination of an idealistic DSL user fed up with paying for services. You don't get your electricity, water, gas, cable, or any of the other utilities free, why should communication services be any different?
A more reasonable question would be, why are we still paying such high prices for these services. The answer to that, however, is simple. The public infrastructure is owned by government sponsored monopolies.
Ok, so they say the need to do this to meet a defecit. How much is it going to cost tax payers to implement? How much overhead will there be with maintaining the system?
They don't want to raise the gas tax, as this is unpopular with voters. Well if the voters in your state don't want to pay the costs to keep roads in good condition, they can deal with bad roads.
I happen to think they have plenty of money to do what they need to do. Most likely they are just spending it poorly. Let's not forget that the US pays a great deal of money to states for roads to keep the drinking age at 21. If Oregon roads are really that bad (I've only traveled through) maybe they should implement a truck/semi-trailer/SUV tax. My civic doesn't tear the road up anywhere close to what my friends Excursion does.
I'd say you've proven yourself wrong by the fact that your inane rant was summarily modded down into oblivion. Stupidity gets modded down. Seems like a good system to me.
1.> Napster has a cetralized server and thus could be fingered as the point of distribution.
2.> The big deal behind bittorrent is not the software, it is the open protocol. There are already several, IMHO better clients and servers out there. Even if they went after Bram, they couldn't shut the protocol down. This isn't like kazaa.
This certainly doesn't mean they won't be going after him anyways, but it does give him a set of legs in court. Napster lost because of it's accountability. Kazaa has so far won because of the lack of accountability.
I agree to the point that money should be spent on data storage, but I'm not sure that money should be taken out of the "super computing" budget or wherever the money comes from. I think it should be another priority, but really, we need both. Clusters aren't the solution to every problem, and super computers have their place. All in all I think it amounts to we need more government spending in the IT sector, and better spending in general. The ISP where I work at is also a geological data and oil resevoir company. We recently did a project for the DOE and they budgeted us $2 Mil. just for a web page about the project. Ridiculous. That $2 Million would buy a pretty nice data storage center I would think. But I guess that's what happens when your govt pays $500 for a hammer.
"The/. crowd is still missing a valuable lesson in "building your own tivo" -- it's freaking EXPENSIVE!"
It can be, if you're building a total TiVo killer. It's reasonably priced if you just want a PVR. In fact, my two PVR's both cost me $45 a peice. That's just the cost of the Tv tuner card I used. Other than that it cost me nothing but time and a little bit of know how, and I built an awesome PVR out of Free (from the colleges dumpster) and readily available hardware. Total cost for 2 PVR's.. ~$90. That's like half of ONE Tivo.
"I love how all the lists of "needed hardware" included multiple super high-end video capture cards -- each of which costs the same as a full TiVo."
You're looking at the wrong damn list then, I use one cheap ass TV tuner card in each and it works just fine. It can support multiple super high end video cards (Unlike your TiVO which is stuck basically as-is), but they are not requirements. It only has to be as bad ass as you want it to be.
"I love my TiVo (I own two of them). The software rocks. My wife can use it. My 2-year old can use it, and yet I'm still amazed at how powerful it is. Then along comes the OSS community. Builds a competitive box at 3x the price, software that's more difficult to use, and a feature-set that still can't compete. (yay for OSS). "
What a crock of shit. Try this..
I love my Linux PVR's. I own two of them. The software rocks. *I* can use it, and *I* can extend to it in any way I see fit. I don't pay a service fee to use them either. The software rocks, and I can change it how I see fit instead of being stuck with what some other guy determined would be best for everyone. My mom can use it, my grandma can use it, and it's infinately more powerful than a TiVO. Then comes along some guy who simply doesn't understand the power of "rolling your own" and bashes free software that he's never used basing his arguments off of complete crap.
Freevo or MythTV may not come with the features you want, so you can put them in yourself. TiVo may not come with features you want... too bad.. pay up anyways, sucker.
Just because you fail to see the incredible usefulness behind an Open Source, freely available PVR, doesn't detract from the immense badassedness of those projects. Your argument is akin to "Just use Microsoft, Linux can't compare".
Some of us like to USE our equipment and at times that might not include a feature already in this one size fits all jogging suit you like to wear.
I've run both Freevo and MythTV and they are both great projects, each with it's own weaknesses and strengths. For a non-OSS geek I'd recommend just getting a Tivo, as the true power of these projects is their "hackability". In other words, if you want to put the time, effort, and perhaps deal with a learning curve then a homebrew PVR is definately for you. If you just want to hit a button and get your favorite shows, a Tivo is cheaper/easier.
Sorry, you're just wrong, parent poster was correct. All this info is easily verifiable with a quick and simple google search. Also note that direct connection is an option, not a default.
..and I have to say it is the most powerful combo I've come across. Ease of adding/updating/removing snort rules, and an excellent interface for actually viewing the data in a meaningful manner. I'd highly recommend this combination to get the most out of your IDS.
No ISP worth their salt would. I work for an ISP, and I can confirm that it does cost us money to give you an IP, so it's going to cost you money too. When IPv6 is implemented it won't cost us anything, so it won't cost you anything. I've seen both our cost and our customers cost for IP addresses/ranges so much that it amazes me IPv6 isn't being implemented by every ISP already. It's just the chicken and the egg problem.
I'll admit it, they got me once. I don't think the company was Bonzi, but this company had a really dirty trick:) They had a regular FUI, then an extra control menu graphic on top of the regular FUI, in a window with no menus. I instantly recognized it as another fake windows popup, and as I have been so accustomed to doing, I went to close it down, and clicked on the added destroy window button graphic and was of course taken to some site with no interest to me.
Slashdot Mirror
It's mostly a review of how much Lindows is similar to Windows, with a short note at the end on they gave it to his mom. I can summarize that part up much more quickly.
"We gave out mom a pre install Lindows box. She clicked around and stuff and had trouble finding MS Office, but opened Open Office once she found it."
"Mplayer is great and all but it still doesn't compare to Media Player. And it's the best there is!"
What the hell have you been smoking? Mplayer kicks the living crap out of EVERY other media player in existance, and out of every media player in existance Media Player is the worst. Mplayer has way more features, plays more AV formats out of the box, uses WAY less system resources, and is several times faster. Media Player's playback control is horrible. Finding a spot in a large video or movie is next to impossible, hope 5 minutes is close enough for you.
Even Media Player's GUI now lacks comparitively to the new and still developing gmplayer.
My point is, mplayer is a perfect example of OSS done right. No other video player for any platform I have come across offers anything coming anywhere near close to what mplayer already has to offer.
It seems that Novell is really and truly dedicated to the OSS community. I didn't know until I looked at their page, but Novell is offering a Linux certification, the CLE (Certified Linux Engineer) apparently somewhat equivalent to the LPI cert (at least that's what they recommend for studying), but also including Novell Nterprise services for Linux.
This has got to be the smartest marketing Novelll has ever done. (Any of you familiar with Novell know how absolutely BAD they are at marketing). I actually have a renewed interest in Novell products, and I may just dust off my CNE cert and hang it on my wall proudly, rather than hiding it at the bottom of my underwear drawer where no man but me dares tread. A CNE and a CLE might look nice together on a resume.
Well they sued some poor kid for his life savings for writing a search engine that searched open SMB shares. That had nothing to do with music. The RIAA wants any file sharing to be illegal. The called a LAN a local area napster network, followed by explaining that Napster was found to be illegal and this is no different. They want to shut down windows print & file sharing. Don't let the PR crap from a PBS debate tell you what their intentions are. Actions speak infinitely louder than words.
And as for everyone making assertations with no proof... show me proof that has been happening before you make that assertation.
But where is the software to *add* sex and violence to my movies where I don't feel there's enough?
"Jeez, breeding for particular traits is NOT at all the same as inserting genes from other species."
I'm not so sure about that. We have created hybrid animals through selective breeding of differing species that wouldn't exist in the wild, such as tigons, ligers, and all sorts of equine hybrids.
I think the big deal here is that they are not only taking genes from different species, but also different classes, orders, etc.
I read somewhere about a french artist who worked with a bioengineering company to produce a rabbit that glowed green (using jellyfish genes as well). There was some sort of scandal about him not getting to take it home to film it interacting as a family pet which was what the whole project was about in the first place.
I'd like to see a pic of these fish though, or some video. I have no problem with a genetically modified pet. In the future, maybe we can have tigers that get no bigger than house cats, or something cool like that. Or photosynthetic pets that you don't have to feed! Just stick them outside for a few hours!
Nor is it there for idiots to post inanity incarnate on slashdot. Get a clue.
I'm guessing you've never met a stock broker before.
There are alot (and I mean ALOT) of downfalls to using this as a type of fs. First and most obvious is the latency involved with network communication. If it takes as long to copy a divx movie from partition A on drive A to partition B on drive B as it did to download it, I don't really see this as being any more viable than sftp, or a basic VPN.
Also, what happens if one of your email addresses goes kaput? Was it housing important data? And since most free email providers give you like 5 megs of space, you'd need several hundred accounts before you had any sort of decent storage space. Of course, now you have to clean the spam out of several hundred mail boxes to acheive the level of data storage you were looking for. If a server where you have several email accounts goes down, your data will be nearly unretreivable. Your almost better off having a crashed HDD sent to a recovery lab.
It's an interesting and innovative idea, but I don't think it has a whole lot of real world implementations.
" hell add another $59.00 and you can get a low end Geforce 4 and make it scream for games."
We've used a few Wal-mart PCs as lightwieght servers, and they do great at that, but the expandability really is limited. Any card you got would have to be PCI, as there is only one expansion slot, and it's pci. The integrated video is AGP, but big deal because it sucks. Also, the cases are really small and everything is packed in tight, so even fitting an extra card in can be a task. A linksys 10/100 NIC only has a small area of clearance, so a GeForce may be kinda big. Of course, imaginative case modding can solve this problem.
Do they make newer 3d cards in PCI anymore? It's been so long since I've checked..
I really didn't expect to get any money from it, especially after it was posted on /. If enough people signed up to make it too expensive to send out too small of a check, they were just going to give donations to charity. I'm certainly suprised to see it's at $13 a chack, as opposed to the maximum $20.
How should I spend this moeny? Maybe we can start some sort of collective slashdot "Anti-RIAA/MPAA fund" out of all the checks we get. I doubt we could all agree on 1 use for the moeny that hurts the RIAA, but it's sure be nice (and fun).
Infrastructure costs money. It's easy to say "Let's just stick a bunch of wireless radios all over the world", but it's much more difficult to implement. Who is going to foot the costs of the radios, leasing land or roof space, maintaining connections, etc. etc.
This question has most definately come from someone with end-user only experience. Anyone who actually "makes the wires work" knows it isn't easy, and it's certainly not cheap. This is just the unchecked imagination of an idealistic DSL user fed up with paying for services. You don't get your electricity, water, gas, cable, or any of the other utilities free, why should communication services be any different?
A more reasonable question would be, why are we still paying such high prices for these services. The answer to that, however, is simple. The public infrastructure is owned by government sponsored monopolies.
Now if I can just think of a reason why I would need this..
Ok, so they say the need to do this to meet a defecit. How much is it going to cost tax payers to implement? How much overhead will there be with maintaining the system?
They don't want to raise the gas tax, as this is unpopular with voters. Well if the voters in your state don't want to pay the costs to keep roads in good condition, they can deal with bad roads.
I happen to think they have plenty of money to do what they need to do. Most likely they are just spending it poorly. Let's not forget that the US pays a great deal of money to states for roads to keep the drinking age at 21. If Oregon roads are really that bad (I've only traveled through) maybe they should implement a truck/semi-trailer/SUV tax. My civic doesn't tear the road up anywhere close to what my friends Excursion does.
I'd say you've proven yourself wrong by the fact that your inane rant was summarily modded down into oblivion. Stupidity gets modded down. Seems like a good system to me.
Napster was a very different case...
1.> Napster has a cetralized server and thus could be fingered as the point of distribution.
2.> The big deal behind bittorrent is not the software, it is the open protocol. There are already several, IMHO better clients and servers out there. Even if they went after Bram, they couldn't shut the protocol down. This isn't like kazaa.
This certainly doesn't mean they won't be going after him anyways, but it does give him a set of legs in court. Napster lost because of it's accountability. Kazaa has so far won because of the lack of accountability.
I agree to the point that money should be spent on data storage, but I'm not sure that money should be taken out of the "super computing" budget or wherever the money comes from. I think it should be another priority, but really, we need both. Clusters aren't the solution to every problem, and super computers have their place. All in all I think it amounts to we need more government spending in the IT sector, and better spending in general. The ISP where I work at is also a geological data and oil resevoir company. We recently did a project for the DOE and they budgeted us $2 Mil. just for a web page about the project. Ridiculous. That $2 Million would buy a pretty nice data storage center I would think. But I guess that's what happens when your govt pays $500 for a hammer.
Better than your average troll.. and I hate eminem :)
"The /. crowd is still missing a valuable lesson in "building your own tivo" -- it's freaking EXPENSIVE!"
It can be, if you're building a total TiVo killer. It's reasonably priced if you just want a PVR. In fact, my two PVR's both cost me $45 a peice. That's just the cost of the Tv tuner card I used. Other than that it cost me nothing but time and a little bit of know how, and I built an awesome PVR out of Free (from the colleges dumpster) and readily available hardware. Total cost for 2 PVR's.. ~$90. That's like half of ONE Tivo.
"I love how all the lists of "needed hardware" included multiple super high-end video capture cards -- each of which costs the same as a full TiVo."
You're looking at the wrong damn list then, I use one cheap ass TV tuner card in each and it works just fine. It can support multiple super high end video cards (Unlike your TiVO which is stuck basically as-is), but they are not requirements. It only has to be as bad ass as you want it to be.
"I love my TiVo (I own two of them). The software rocks. My wife can use it. My 2-year old can use it, and yet I'm still amazed at how powerful it is. Then along comes the OSS community. Builds a competitive box at 3x the price, software that's more difficult to use, and a feature-set that still can't compete. (yay for OSS).
"
What a crock of shit. Try this..
I love my Linux PVR's. I own two of them. The software rocks. *I* can use it, and *I* can extend to it in any way I see fit. I don't pay a service fee to use them either. The software rocks, and I can change it how I see fit instead of being stuck with what some other guy determined would be best for everyone. My mom can use it, my grandma can use it, and it's infinately more powerful than a TiVO. Then comes along some guy who simply doesn't understand the power of "rolling your own" and bashes free software that he's never used basing his arguments off of complete crap.
Freevo or MythTV may not come with the features you want, so you can put them in yourself. TiVo may not come with features you want... too bad.. pay up anyways, sucker.
Just because you fail to see the incredible usefulness behind an Open Source, freely available PVR, doesn't detract from the immense badassedness of those projects. Your argument is akin to "Just use Microsoft, Linux can't compare".
Some of us like to USE our equipment and at times that might not include a feature already in this one size fits all jogging suit you like to wear.
I've run both Freevo and MythTV and they are both great projects, each with it's own weaknesses and strengths. For a non-OSS geek I'd recommend just getting a Tivo, as the true power of these projects is their "hackability". In other words, if you want to put the time, effort, and perhaps deal with a learning curve then a homebrew PVR is definately for you. If you just want to hit a button and get your favorite shows, a Tivo is cheaper/easier.
Sorry, you're just wrong, parent poster was correct. All this info is easily verifiable with a quick and simple google search. Also note that direct connection is an option, not a default.
..and I have to say it is the most powerful combo I've come across. Ease of adding/updating/removing snort rules, and an excellent interface for actually viewing the data in a meaningful manner. I'd highly recommend this combination to get the most out of your IDS.
No ISP worth their salt would. I work for an ISP, and I can confirm that it does cost us money to give you an IP, so it's going to cost you money too. When IPv6 is implemented it won't cost us anything, so it won't cost you anything. I've seen both our cost and our customers cost for IP addresses/ranges so much that it amazes me IPv6 isn't being implemented by every ISP already. It's just the chicken and the egg problem.
I'll admit it, they got me once. I don't think the company was Bonzi, but this company had a really dirty trick :) They had a regular FUI, then an extra control menu graphic on top of the regular FUI, in a window with no menus. I instantly recognized it as another fake windows popup, and as I have been so accustomed to doing, I went to close it down, and clicked on the added destroy window button graphic and was of course taken to some site with no interest to me.
That's just dirty..