Caldera's the worst Linux distribution in my book. Red Hat, Debian, SUSE, Slackware, they all have some good things and some bad things. But I can't say anything good about Caldera.
I don't know whose fault it is, but more than once I've seen/etc/passwd world writable on old Caldera boxes. More to the point, they're so preoccupied with running commercial software on Linux in binary form that they strategically leave out.h files to make it hard to compile things...
I'm using VRML for 3-d visualization of invariant structures in Hamiltonian mechanics (chaos theory.) It beats writing your own 3-d engine and you can share your models with people over the web. Also, there is a lot of demand for 3-d content on the web from somebody -- our most popular page at honeylocust is a 3-d visualization.
I haven't used Cosmo player on Unix, but I've used it on Windows and it's the best VRML viewer on that platform. I would be delighted if Cosmo were to become available for Linux and other unixes that aren't Irix -- open source seems to be the best way for that to happen.
As for the use of VRML on the web, the strength of VRML is that, cleverly used, it can pack a big media experience in a small file. For instance, with a 3k VRML file I can let you can fly around Star-trek style near the 100 closest stars to the Sun. That can fill up your whole screen and it's smaller than most people's stupid animated.gifs and the stupid drop shadow logos that people like to make with the GIMP. The trouble with VRML is that it's very hard to tell stories in 3-d. It takes a whole skill set in 3-d modelling, and anybody who is good at it could be making a lot more money making television commercials than they could make with the web. The web can only make a small amount of money off content, so web content must be ~very~ cheap to produce for a site to be profitable.
Like usual, Slashdot is full of comments by people who don't know what they're talking about. Have any of you tried registering a domain in the past two months? NSI's registration system has been hosed by DNS spammers who've been waging an electronic warfare campaign against the internet for their own profit.
DNS spammers search the DNS database for valuable domains that are about to expire, then send repeated requests for the domain by E-mail, hoping they'll get it first. NSI is getting hit with thousands of spam requests a minute. As a result, it took me two weeks and a few phone calls to get a new domain registered. Fortunately, NSI's customer service is pretty good -- it had better be for what we pay.
Although NSI is certainly in the pocket of the military-industrial complex, I have even more contempt for most of the people who have complaints about namespace issues. In our culture, such disputes generally have nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with rip-offs, con artists and scumsuckers like the Canadian who owns 200,000 domain names and the "whitehouse.com" guy.
I am sipping my tea and waking out of my morning stupor in a place that used to be East Germany. The East Germans built the wall, because technically trained people were leaving the country in droves -- not, primarily, because the government was repressive, but because they could get higher salaries in the west. (Readers Digest and other anticommunists tried to make it sound much worse that it was, but it still was bringing East Germany to it's knees.)
In Europe, unskilled and semiskilled workers are much more powerful than their counterparts in the US. For instance, in Germany the workweek is enforced by law and you can't do any shopping at all on Sunday or Saturday afternoon. On the other hand, companies and governments don't try hard at all to retain talented people. As a result, they leave, usually to the US.
Famous examples are Linus Torvalds and Guido van Rossum (although he might have just gotten tired of the rain in the Netherlands...)
Call it socialism or what you want, the great labor struggles before 1950 ended with labor unions having much greater power on the behalf of lower class workers. Upper classes always take care of themselves, so as usual it's the people in the middle, knowledge workers, who bear the brunt.
SGI plans to support Linux on it's new intel-architecture workstations -- supporting advanced 3-d on Linux will mean porting GLX. Every commercial Unix has already licensed GLX, so the giveaway won't cost SGI anything. Since SGI has gotten a great Unix for free to bundle with their machines, it only makes sense that they give away GLX. Yes, you'll be able to use GLX on other Linux machines, but SGI believes that some people will be willing to pay for machines with really kick-ass hardware.
I don't know how anyone who makes commercials can be proud of what they do for a living. If it was one commercial, maybe I could forgive them, but their huge list of commercials just turns me off -- can't ad execs think of something creative to do rather than copying other ads?
Yes, they've got a nice camera. I'm sure a lot of good things can be done with it. Prehaps I've just gotten cynical as I get older, but I can't have any respect for people that make beer commercials. They don't make me think about nubile girls in bikinis, but rather about the times the room was spinning around, when I had to clean up vomit, and the many times I've been punched by a drunk. When I see a Discover card commercial, I think about how they got in trouble with the FTC a few years ago for a slick series of ads that claimed that the Discover card didn't charge interest for cash advances -- that you'd get money extracted from your pocket if you used another card -- it didn't tell you that you had to pay a "service fee" which would have been more than the interest on most cards...
People won't be able to unpack a home media network for Linux from a nice.tar file until somebody builds a prototype. It seems like you've got the money, so it's just a question of your time and how much Linux talent you can scavenge.
Mp3: linux support is great and the performance requirements are low enough that you won't need incredible hardware. At home we plug my laptop into our desktop machine, and we stream mp3's over the network with NFS and play them all the time. Even a Pentium/133 class machine, hooked up to a pair of good pair of speakers, could be a good sound system for a room. You could dispense with screen and keyboard and operate the machine entirely from the ethernet. Networking:Don't buy into one of these crazy phone-line or power-line networks. Since you're building the house, have it wired with gigabit-ethernet ready cable with a topology that would enable switched ethernet. You could probably start with 100 Mbit/S unswitched and upgrade in the future if necessary. DVD This is an area where Linux is behind. With MpegTV you can play MPEG streams -- it's a shareware product, but they do maintain it, and you've got a budget, so that's fine. Linux can also talk to DVD drives on the hardware level, but Linux cannot yet read the UDF filesystem which is used on DVDs. Top men are working on it, but there is always some risk when you base future plans on a product which isn't shipping: be it free or commercial. That said, if you've got a budget, a donation of $500 could make a big difference to a free software author and convince him to code in a feature or fig a bug for you.
Chips: The mainstream of Linux is on the x86 and you'll have an easier time with x86 machines since the most software is available for them. The worst things, on the two ends of the market, about the x86 are: (1) it's 32-bit (not 64) and (2) it's a power pig, requiring lots of cooling fans and huge cases. If you can cope with these issues, this is the conservative solution.
If, on the other hand, you want to take a RISC, look at the Alpha architecture on the server end and something based on ARM or MIPS on the client end. These days you could almost certainly find a tiny RISC machine without a cooling fan that could, at the very least, stream MP3's off the net into your stereo.
Overall:Start by wiring the house for ethernet. Set up a server and at least one client and try to set up MP3 service. At this point you can experiment with different architectures. Watch emerging technology for Linux, and there is a good chance that you'll be able to upgrade to the DVD server you want.
Invent your own business model
on
MP3 Testimonial
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· Score: 1
For years record sales have been dominated by big companies with huge marketing power. Mp3 puts marketing power into the hands of small bands, making it possible for them to decide how they'd like to make money of music rather than have the big record companies tell them how. The Greatful Dead ran the most successful live show in history while letting tapers record and copy their concerts freely. Other bands might sell their records in MP3 form or give away a few songs and sell CD's. There's no guarantee that they'll be successful, but for the first time they've got a chance to try without selling their soul to an A&R man.
Don't forget that web browsers are the best "clients" for database applications like Slashdot and these "enterprise" applications we keep hearing about. Forget the failure of Active X, Java Applets and Dynamic HTML -- Classic HTML and forms are here to stay, at least until Microsoft finds a way to embrace and extend...
There are two categories of EMP generators. (1) Explosive, and (2) Re-usable. (1) Explosive generators: early research was done on these in the 1950s in Russia. In 1992, I saw a videotape of the test of a unit about 10 tons in weight which had a peak output of 10 TW for a good part of a millisecond. Works by using explosives to rapidly compress a magnetic field, doing work which can be obtained by induction. (2) Re-usable generators: there are many designs, but the Marx bank stands out. This is a stack of capacitors with a controlling diode matrix which can be charged individually and discharged in parallel. Look up Marx banks if you want to build your own.
I think this "source release" is great -- it isn't like you can download a binary anymore, so anything that keeps UltraHLE in circulation is a good thing. Yes, it might have been made by a total idiot in five minutes, but it's set off a media bombshell, added to the frezny around the emulator scene and might pressure the real authors to release the code. Now it's time to rise up and smash the state!
You meet these people on USENET sometimes. A few years back, when Java was brand new and the network was just starting to be commercialized, there was an exodus of people from corporations coming onto USENET to try to sell us their junkware. For example, some guy from Macromedia would tell us we were fools to be writing Java applets when we could be pointing and clicking with Shockwave. I tell him, but you can't make or view Shockwave on Linux and he writes back "There aren't enough people that use Unix for that to be profitable, most people use Windows or the Mac." I tell him, "We might be the only ones, but we use Unix and you can shove Shockwave up your butt."
Most of these guys could take about a week of abuse and then they'd go back to their hole, where they could put ads in magazines and on TV where the victims of propaganda don't get a chance to shoot back.
Then Active X came across the land and a lot of people from microsoft.com told us Java programmers that we were real losers to be programming Java applets -- we could be writing Active X controls that take over people's whole screens, use Windows this and Windows that, and everybody will be able to see it because everybody uses Windows. We bitched them out. Then people started talking about the security problem with Active X and they're saying we're full of sh*t. Next we know, some guy writes an Active X control that shuts off your computer. When I posted about that, they say "That's impossible." I said "Go see it for yourself" and that was the last I heard from them.
I have to hand it to them, those Microsoft PR flaks are hardy -- it took two weeks of abuse for them to run for cover.
Since then I've seen a lot of pro-Microsoft posts from non-Microsoft addresses that look suspicious, both on USENET and web forums such as Slashdot and ZD Net. I think Rob had better record the IP numbers of all the AC posts; maybe we can catch them in the act, or in the very least, publish the IP numbers of "first post" offendors.
Recording contracts are pretty nasty. They make it very hard for a band to quit working for a label even if their relationship sours. Chuck D and the boys have certainly become more jaded as time as has passed -- so prehaps they didn't know how bad it was when they first got into it.
I hate "fashion marketing" as much as the next person, but I have to admit that the average Intel machine is, visually, an abomination. We bought a new one recently and it's an ugly ugly ugly box which is made even more ugly by it's attempts to be less ugly. Worst of all, it's cooling fans, all six of them for what I know, make such a racket that I can hardly see myself think. The only saving grace is that you can stuff the machine under your desk and only look at it when you need to stuff floppies and CD-ROMs in.
I'd love to have something ~small~, at least as a head.
I've learned my lesson about early "stable" kernels. I lived through 2.0.0 to 2.0.32 with a slowly disintegrating 486 machine whose death was complicated by kernels with landmines in them. I fondly remember 2.0.17 which actually crashed! I have to admit that it was really a blast downloading a patch every two days, recompling and hoping that this time they'd get it right.
I'm not complaining -- after that period we got a series of kernels which have been superb. I'm sure that the 2.2.* kernels will become mature and then they'll be great. I just wouldn't run 2.2.0 on any machine that I use for anything more important than playing Super Nintendo cartridges.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know whose fault it is, but more than once I've seen /etc/passwd world writable on old Caldera boxes. More to the point, they're so preoccupied with running commercial software on Linux in binary form that they strategically leave out .h files to make it hard to compile things...
I haven't used Cosmo player on Unix, but I've used it on Windows and it's the best VRML viewer on that platform. I would be delighted if Cosmo were to become available for Linux and other unixes that aren't Irix -- open source seems to be the best way for that to happen.
As for the use of VRML on the web, the strength of VRML is that, cleverly used, it can pack a big media experience in a small file. For instance, with a 3k VRML file I can let you can fly around Star-trek style near the 100 closest stars to the Sun. That can fill up your whole screen and it's smaller than most people's stupid animated .gifs and the stupid drop shadow logos that people like to make with the GIMP. The trouble with VRML is that it's very hard to tell stories in 3-d. It takes a whole skill set in 3-d modelling, and anybody who is good at it could be making a lot more money making television commercials than they could make with the web. The web can only make a small amount of money off content, so web content must be ~very~ cheap to produce for a site to be profitable.
DNS spammers search the DNS database for valuable domains that are about to expire, then send repeated requests for the domain by E-mail, hoping they'll get it first. NSI is getting hit with thousands of spam requests a minute. As a result, it took me two weeks and a few phone calls to get a new domain registered. Fortunately, NSI's customer service is pretty good -- it had better be for what we pay.
Although NSI is certainly in the pocket of the military-industrial complex, I have even more contempt for most of the people who have complaints about namespace issues. In our culture, such disputes generally have nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with rip-offs, con artists and scumsuckers like the Canadian who owns 200,000 domain names and the "whitehouse.com" guy.
In Europe, unskilled and semiskilled workers are much more powerful than their counterparts in the US. For instance, in Germany the workweek is enforced by law and you can't do any shopping at all on Sunday or Saturday afternoon. On the other hand, companies and governments don't try hard at all to retain talented people. As a result, they leave, usually to the US.
Famous examples are Linus Torvalds and Guido van Rossum (although he might have just gotten tired of the rain in the Netherlands...)
Call it socialism or what you want, the great labor struggles before 1950 ended with labor unions having much greater power on the behalf of lower class workers. Upper classes always take care of themselves, so as usual it's the people in the middle, knowledge workers, who bear the brunt.
SGI plans to support Linux on it's new intel-architecture workstations -- supporting advanced 3-d on Linux will mean porting GLX. Every commercial Unix has already licensed GLX, so the giveaway won't cost SGI anything. Since SGI has gotten a great Unix for free to bundle with their machines, it only makes sense that they give away GLX. Yes, you'll be able to use GLX on other Linux machines, but SGI believes that some people will be willing to pay for machines with really kick-ass hardware.
Yes, they've got a nice camera. I'm sure a lot of good things can be done with it. Prehaps I've just gotten cynical as I get older, but I can't have any respect for people that make beer commercials. They don't make me think about nubile girls in bikinis, but rather about the times the room was spinning around, when I had to clean up vomit, and the many times I've been punched by a drunk. When I see a Discover card commercial, I think about how they got in trouble with the FTC a few years ago for a slick series of ads that claimed that the Discover card didn't charge interest for cash advances -- that you'd get money extracted from your pocket if you used another card -- it didn't tell you that you had to pay a "service fee" which would have been more than the interest on most cards...
Mp3: linux support is great and the performance requirements are low enough that you won't need incredible hardware. At home we plug my laptop into our desktop machine, and we stream mp3's over the network with NFS and play them all the time. Even a Pentium/133 class machine, hooked up to a pair of good pair of speakers, could be a good sound system for a room. You could dispense with screen and keyboard and operate the machine entirely from the ethernet. Networking:Don't buy into one of these crazy phone-line or power-line networks. Since you're building the house, have it wired with gigabit-ethernet ready cable with a topology that would enable switched ethernet. You could probably start with 100 Mbit/S unswitched and upgrade in the future if necessary. DVD This is an area where Linux is behind. With MpegTV you can play MPEG streams -- it's a shareware product, but they do maintain it, and you've got a budget, so that's fine. Linux can also talk to DVD drives on the hardware level, but Linux cannot yet read the UDF filesystem which is used on DVDs. Top men are working on it, but there is always some risk when you base future plans on a product which isn't shipping: be it free or commercial. That said, if you've got a budget, a donation of $500 could make a big difference to a free software author and convince him to code in a feature or fig a bug for you.
Chips: The mainstream of Linux is on the x86 and you'll have an easier time with x86 machines since the most software is available for them. The worst things, on the two ends of the market, about the x86 are: (1) it's 32-bit (not 64) and (2) it's a power pig, requiring lots of cooling fans and huge cases. If you can cope with these issues, this is the conservative solution.
If, on the other hand, you want to take a RISC, look at the Alpha architecture on the server end and something based on ARM or MIPS on the client end. These days you could almost certainly find a tiny RISC machine without a cooling fan that could, at the very least, stream MP3's off the net into your stereo.
Overall:Start by wiring the house for ethernet. Set up a server and at least one client and try to set up MP3 service. At this point you can experiment with different architectures. Watch emerging technology for Linux, and there is a good chance that you'll be able to upgrade to the DVD server you want.
For years record sales have been dominated by big companies with huge marketing power. Mp3 puts marketing power into the hands of small bands, making it possible for them to decide how they'd like to make money of music rather than have the big record companies tell them how. The Greatful Dead ran the most successful live show in history while letting tapers record and copy their concerts freely. Other bands might sell their records in MP3 form or give away a few songs and sell CD's. There's no guarantee that they'll be successful, but for the first time they've got a chance to try without selling their soul to an A&R man.
Don't forget that web browsers are the best "clients" for database applications like Slashdot and these "enterprise" applications we keep hearing about. Forget the failure of Active X, Java Applets and Dynamic HTML -- Classic HTML and forms are here to stay, at least until Microsoft finds a way to embrace and extend...
There are two categories of EMP generators. (1) Explosive, and (2) Re-usable.
(1) Explosive generators: early research was done on these in the 1950s in Russia. In 1992, I saw a videotape of the test of a unit about 10 tons in weight which had a peak output of 10 TW for a good part of a millisecond. Works by using explosives to rapidly compress a magnetic field, doing work which can be obtained by induction.
(2) Re-usable generators: there are many designs, but the Marx bank stands out. This is a stack of capacitors with a controlling diode matrix which can be charged individually and discharged in parallel. Look up Marx banks if you want to build your own.
I think this "source release" is great -- it isn't like you can download a binary anymore, so anything that keeps UltraHLE in circulation is a good thing. Yes, it might have been made by a total idiot in five minutes, but it's set off a media bombshell, added to the frezny around the emulator scene and might pressure the real authors to release the code. Now it's time to rise up and smash the state!
Most of these guys could take about a week of abuse and then they'd go back to their hole, where they could put ads in magazines and on TV where the victims of propaganda don't get a chance to shoot back.
Then Active X came across the land and a lot of people from microsoft.com told us Java programmers that we were real losers to be programming Java applets -- we could be writing Active X controls that take over people's whole screens, use Windows this and Windows that, and everybody will be able to see it because everybody uses Windows. We bitched them out. Then people started talking about the security problem with Active X and they're saying we're full of sh*t. Next we know, some guy writes an Active X control that shuts off your computer. When I posted about that, they say "That's impossible." I said "Go see it for yourself" and that was the last I heard from them.
I have to hand it to them, those Microsoft PR flaks are hardy -- it took two weeks of abuse for them to run for cover.
Since then I've seen a lot of pro-Microsoft posts from non-Microsoft addresses that look suspicious, both on USENET and web forums such as Slashdot and ZD Net. I think Rob had better record the IP numbers of all the AC posts; maybe we can catch them in the act, or in the very least, publish the IP numbers of "first post" offendors.
Recording contracts are pretty nasty. They make it very hard for a band to quit working for a label even if their relationship sours. Chuck D and the boys have certainly become more jaded as time as has passed -- so prehaps they didn't know how bad it was when they first got into it.
I'd love to have something ~small~, at least as a head.
I'm not complaining -- after that period we got a series of kernels which have been superb. I'm sure that the 2.2.* kernels will become mature and then they'll be great. I just wouldn't run 2.2.0 on any machine that I use for anything more important than playing Super Nintendo cartridges.