Agreed. I mostly use command line stuff, but enjoy certain GUI niceities - like being able to see thumbnails of my pr0n, thumbnails of random non-pr0n movies, icons that i can click on in a nice little dock-like-doohicky for often-used programs, etc. I don't need a super powerful GUI with tons of customization options. I just want options that are needed. So, I use Gnome. I still keep my mind open to the KDE side, and give it a spin after every major release...but it just doesn't fit me. If it fits you other people out there - great, use it. Lots of people seem completely enamoured with it and thats awesome. But, for me, it's too much. Fluxbox or Gnome, coupled with a command line, give me the ideal desktop experience.
How about red for republican, blue for democrat, green for green, black/white checkers for libertarians (since they see things in black and white, even when they're not black and white) pink for communist, etc etc
audiolunchbox.com sells both ogg and mp3 encoded music. So...there you go. Maybe not millions per week (mostly indie labels - not many big ticket players are sold because audiolunchbox will not include DRM in their files...big record companies don't like that), but a significant ammount.
Searched google for "biogas production" first hid yeilded this:
Waste used: 10-40% kitchen, 40-75% garden, 14-20% paper
Production of Biogas: 118 m^3/ton of waste
I assume that's a metric ton, so approx 1.102 english tons. There are about 7.99x10^8 cubic meters in 28,210,075 Mcf, so it would take 6.77 million metric tons of waste 11 months to produce the same ammount of methane that one basin (far greater than 100 separate fields and greater than 100 separate private drilling companies) in wyoming produces in 1 month. A few questions remain: How many metric tons of waste does the US produce daily, monthly, and yearly - on average? And what percentage of that is digestable?
So yeah, there's a HUGE amount of natural gas under the earth, far greater than what biogas could seeminly produce on the short term. However, here's my slant on it. Natural gas under the ground is non-renewable over a short period of time, an arbitrary metric would be one human life time, rounded up to 100 years. In 100 years, there's not going to be a whole lot of input to the global supply of fossil-fuel derived natural gas. However, consumption will at best remain constant, and more probably increase over those 100 years. You've got a deficient system, the outputs far excedes the inputs. In economic terms, it's called debt. Taking this into account, does this negate the use of biogas plants to produce methane from human-produced waste? I contend it doesn't. If anything, the biogas produced can go to power certain applications, be they these nifty power generators, or the pilot light in your water heater, and thus lift the strain on natural, non-renewable reserves. I am aware that the current supply far excedes the amount biogas plants could produce, but the whole appeal to biogas production is that it's can take a huge chunk of waste out of landfills, and turn it into something useful. That's something I'm all for.
Good for apple, but they can take their low-playback quality and shove it as far up their colonic sphincter as possible. They lost my business as a music player manufacturor by appealing more towards fashion and trendiness than actual useful features. I want to play ogg, i want be able to play FLAC if the need arises. I want playback to be as good as possible. the iPod doesn't do this. The Rio Karma does, so i got that instead. And it's working plenty fine for me as I type this.
Eh, Darwin - in it's form prior to OS X, Rhapsody and NeXT/OPENSTEP, was really only slightly removed from Apple. Jobs split from Apple, made NeXT, got re-associated with apple, incorporated NeXT into Rhapsody. Rhapsody => Darwin, Darwin underlies OS X. I dunno if the developers what worked on NeXT came with Jobs when apple took him back, but it's safe to say apple didn't steal most of the OS X is, nor did they buy out some completely innovative garage software company like Palm did with Be inc. It was more like...well you break up with your girlfriend, she goes off and does her own things, then you and her get back together. All of her experiences...er...wait...slashdot...
Yeah, this is what i wanted. Had they put an ipod out in black and red, I would have bought one. But, no, they put them out in lame colors like pink and light puke green. Fuck that man, I want black and red.
BTW, i agree with you about solar. There should be more investment in solar power, especially resident-based solar power. Why not start by making prices equal by putting the same heavy subsidies on the solar industry as are on the fossil fuel and nuclear industries that keep the myth of cheap nuclear power alive? Or, better yet, remove the subsidies all together. This is supposed to be a market economy, right?
And do you have these estimates off hand? I'm aware there's a massive amount of methane being sucked out of the ground right now, but what I'm saying is simply that it doesn't have to come out of the ground. That's all. Oil, coal, etc - on the other hand, have to be mined. It takes a hell of a lot of heat and pressure to make the stuff. Methane has the possibility of becoming a sustainable energy source, whereas Oil, coal, etc do not.
Hah, what i was implying was that either the North Korean hackers had cracked boxes in South Korea (elementary schools make sense, since they're usually not very secured and don't have any kind of IT staff on site to deal with security on a regular basis), or someone else did.
He's talking about biogas. No CO2 is produced (or perhaps a negligable ammount), since biogas fermentation is anaerobic. All of the carbon from the plant goes into the hydrocarbon string CH4, instead of CO2. Basically it's a positive feeback loop:
1. Take existing methane, create power + liquid CO2
2. Grow fast-growing plants in a CO2-rich greenhouse
3. Produce biogas from the plant biomass
4. Use biogas as fuel to create power + liquid CO2
5. See step 2.
This is one sink for the CO2, but there are others in industry, especially as nanotechnology goes into full tilt and needs a cheap, available source of carbon. Liquid CO2 will basically saturate the maket, driving down prices and making nanotech even more viable as a real industry. I see this as a good idea. What confuses me are the so-called environmentalists that don't base their rederick in science. I'm proud to call myself an environmentalist, but in order to really create a sustainable society, we need creative solutions like these. We need to be able to live off our waste, and I think this is one way we can do that.
hydrogen storage and transportation systems sowe don't produce *any* emissions.
Hydrogent electrolization emits water vapor, the *most* potent greenhouse gas. However, it also as about an 11 day residence time in the atmosphere, so it'll end up back on land or in the ocean fairly quickly. I'm all for hydrogen power, but to say it's completely without emissions is a false statement.
Sequestration is one possibility, another is reuse. By the time this technology will be a viable alternative energy source, nano technology will have grown by leaps and bounds. Nano technology is built upon Organic Chemistry which, suprise suprise, has to do with completely carbon-based compounds. Here we have a huge source of Carbon as a by product of power generation. Sure, we can pump it into the ground, but we can also bottle it in pressurized tanks and sell it to nanotech companies, or other people who might need carbon dioxide. On top of that, the hydrocarbon used in combustion is renewable. So we have a renewable energy source, which produces useful, containable waste. Name one other kind of energy source that might provide this same relationship. As an environmentalist I see this as a very big step towards sustainability.
Another thing - you can reduce demand in highly developed nations, but as less developed nations become further developed, demand is only going to increase. In the mean time, we need clean, efficient technologies that can make up for the difference as demand grows. This, I think, is one of them. As i mentioned in a previous post, you can use CO2 for other things, and as technology grows so will techniques for utilizing the massive supply of carbon that we will develop. Some people have mentioned nanotechnology. Basically all we'll need is an efficient way to break the carbon-oxygen double bonds, which would produce quite stable O2 gas and a carbon, which (and i'm not a chemist, though i've got formal chemistry training - so i could be wrong here) would string together with other carbon atoms. Throw in some hydrogen atoms and some other substituents along the chain and you have the possibility of making just about any material you can think of, including more methane. Right now the mechanisms for this kind of materials synthesis are still being experimentally proven, but there's lots and lots of potential. This sysem can prove to be a huge jump in the quest for global sustainability.
Oh and the methane magically appears out of nowhere
Methane/Biogas is one product of anaerobic respiration. Bacteria in landfills and sewage treatment plants quickly use up oxygen whilst eating our waste, and shift to anaerobic respiration to process the energy they derive from biomass. Welcome to sustainable living - living off our own waste. There are other sources for Methane than drilling under ground, renewable sources, that will be around as long as live exists on Earth as we know it. Also the CO2 can be used for industrial uses, unlike spend nuclear fuel. This is a GOOD ALTERNATIVE TO NUCLEAR POWER AND FOSSIL FUELS! Gah, i'm starting to despise the groupthink of fellow environmentalists as much as i despise the conservative groupthink.
Methane is a renewable source. It's a different story here. You can capture methane from over landfills or simplay create a slurty of biological waste (think water treatment plants) and capture Methane from there. This isn't a fossil fuel-based hydrocarbon, it's the same hydrocarbon that comes out of you ass after eating too much mexican food. If we use these power plants, we'll basically be living off our own waste which IS renewable.
Yeah, I read this article and wondered if this would explain all the unsuccesful attempts at logging into my server as root (which is disabled, of course) from South Korean elementary schools, Australian universities, and a few hits from UC Irvine. I've had a steady stream since August.
One problem i have with this analysis of Wind and Solar is that it relies on the assumption of a centralized power grid. If the grid were decentralized, and mounting solar pannels on household rooftops became more of the general rule, not the exception, I think electrochemical renewables (solar) would be abel to take on a larger chunk of the power demand. I am not so naive to think, however, that it will be an end-all be-all solution. But I think it's part of the solution.
That said, I like this idea. I think it has real promise to not only usurp fossil fuels as the primary source of energy production, but it's wast e - as you mentioned - can be used in the future. That's the one thing I have against nuclear power - it's not sustainable (in the classical sense), and it's waste is useless. This idea, from my point of view, seems the most viable solution so far, and I don't mind it living side by side with nuclear power, so long as nuclear power is eventually phased out (as it will have to be as uranium deposits dwindle in the future). This might be the boost the world needs to try and realize a hydrogen economy.
Fairly simple - Compressed (ie, liquid) CO2 can be used by industry to create other products. This would provide a fairly large source of raw, compressed CO2 can could further be refined and reused. The main problem with the current CO2 emissions is that, while they orginate from a point source, there's no viable way to contain the CO2 gas, collect it, and use it. It all goes to waste. The problem with nuclear power is that, although the waste is more or less contained, you can't do anything with the waste. It just sits there, and it sits there dangerously.
To me, at least (as an environmentalist and someone who believes that sustainable living should be our global goal), this seems like a reasonable alternative to nuclear power: It's reactants are easily created from the environment around us, without any real danger of being diminished (so, no expensive, destructive mining processes go on), and it's product is usable in it's raw form for other means. the CO2 doesn't have to be stored underground - it can be used in industry, in academia, hell we can all have a whole lot more of dry ice every halloween! I dig this idea. I think it's time to RTFA and see if i'm wrong.
Sorry for the late reply. I do use 5.2.1 as my webserver at home. It runs, and it runs well. But I've read the technical flaws that Matt has with it, and I agree with them. I think Matt's fork is more than just a "disgruntled developer's fork." He's making major, major changes to the base, and the resulting API design is just much nicer, from a programmer's point of view. The theory behind his model also just makes sense to me. I recommend you put down your religious zealotry, put on a nice little "skeptic" hat, and review Dragonfly for what it is. Check out the actual code changes, the clean ups, etc, and see what you think. I'm not here to change your mind, I'm just here to open it. And for the sake of all truth, the FreeBSD developers are still people. They can make wrong decisions, go down the wrong design path. Just because it works doesn't mean it's ideal, or that it's the best solution. For example, Linux runs beautifully...but compared to FreeBSD it's code is a mess, for a while it's TCP/IP stack was inferior...but it still ran, and people still rallied behind it. FreeBSD had a better solution, technically speaking, but since the stack in linux worked, there wasn't much of a drive to change it.
It's important to point out that I don't *hate* FreeBSD. It was my first real OS love. It's still, speaking from a strictly pragmatic standpoint, a better choice than Dragonfly when you take into account the flux that Dragonfly is currently going through. Which will be better in the long run? Only time will tell, but Dragonfly definitely presents an interesting alternative to the status quo in the BSD world.
I do take strong issue with one thing you said, though:
Parallel efforts are a waste.
I really don't believe this is true. Parallel efforts provide the community with choice and a deviance from the status quo. The status quo might be the best solution, or it might not. How would you know if it is or not if you don't challenge it? Simply because it works well enough? I don't accept that as an answer. Competing efforts are good.
Anyway, Keep using FreeBSD if you're happy with it, but I'm becoming to be annoyed with the way things are being done. To each their own, right?
Re:From the next-article-please dept.
on
Rio Karma User Review
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Interesting. I've dropped my karma 3 times. The only damage is, after the thrid drop, the little wheel on the upper right hand corner no longer works. The thing still plays, with better quality than the iPod, I might add. The wheel, incase you don't know, really isn't a necesary control. Everything that can be done with the wheel can also be done with one button and the joystick doo-dad. My karma also bounces around it my backpack, which has been thrown several times into my car, on to my bedroom floor, and basically treated like shit. The karma is scratched up pretty nicely, there's some lint behind the screen, but like I said...it still plays. I take it basically everywhere I go. It's not babied at all, and it hasn't died on me yet. Again, interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I mostly use command line stuff, but enjoy certain GUI niceities - like being able to see thumbnails of my pr0n, thumbnails of random non-pr0n movies, icons that i can click on in a nice little dock-like-doohicky for often-used programs, etc. I don't need a super powerful GUI with tons of customization options. I just want options that are needed. So, I use Gnome. I still keep my mind open to the KDE side, and give it a spin after every major release...but it just doesn't fit me. If it fits you other people out there - great, use it. Lots of people seem completely enamoured with it and thats awesome. But, for me, it's too much. Fluxbox or Gnome, coupled with a command line, give me the ideal desktop experience.
Yeah man, but you used FreeBSD. FreeBSD is inherently faster than Linux.
How about red for republican, blue for democrat, green for green, black/white checkers for libertarians (since they see things in black and white, even when they're not black and white) pink for communist, etc etc
audiolunchbox.com sells both ogg and mp3 encoded music. So...there you go. Maybe not millions per week (mostly indie labels - not many big ticket players are sold because audiolunchbox will not include DRM in their files...big record companies don't like that), but a significant ammount.
I had a similar problem on my AMD 64 box, I don't know if this problem is related to yours, but compiling a kernel without ACPI worked like a charm.
Searched google for "biogas production" first hid yeilded this:
Waste used: 10-40% kitchen, 40-75% garden, 14-20% paper
Production of Biogas: 118 m^3/ton of waste
I assume that's a metric ton, so approx 1.102 english tons. There are about 7.99x10^8 cubic meters in 28,210,075 Mcf, so it would take 6.77 million metric tons of waste 11 months to produce the same ammount of methane that one basin (far greater than 100 separate fields and greater than 100 separate private drilling companies) in wyoming produces in 1 month. A few questions remain: How many metric tons of waste does the US produce daily, monthly, and yearly - on average? And what percentage of that is digestable?
So yeah, there's a HUGE amount of natural gas under the earth, far greater than what biogas could seeminly produce on the short term. However, here's my slant on it. Natural gas under the ground is non-renewable over a short period of time, an arbitrary metric would be one human life time, rounded up to 100 years. In 100 years, there's not going to be a whole lot of input to the global supply of fossil-fuel derived natural gas. However, consumption will at best remain constant, and more probably increase over those 100 years. You've got a deficient system, the outputs far excedes the inputs. In economic terms, it's called debt. Taking this into account, does this negate the use of biogas plants to produce methane from human-produced waste? I contend it doesn't. If anything, the biogas produced can go to power certain applications, be they these nifty power generators, or the pilot light in your water heater, and thus lift the strain on natural, non-renewable reserves. I am aware that the current supply far excedes the amount biogas plants could produce, but the whole appeal to biogas production is that it's can take a huge chunk of waste out of landfills, and turn it into something useful. That's something I'm all for.
Good for apple, but they can take their low-playback quality and shove it as far up their colonic sphincter as possible. They lost my business as a music player manufacturor by appealing more towards fashion and trendiness than actual useful features. I want to play ogg, i want be able to play FLAC if the need arises. I want playback to be as good as possible. the iPod doesn't do this. The Rio Karma does, so i got that instead. And it's working plenty fine for me as I type this.
Eh, Darwin - in it's form prior to OS X, Rhapsody and NeXT/OPENSTEP, was really only slightly removed from Apple. Jobs split from Apple, made NeXT, got re-associated with apple, incorporated NeXT into Rhapsody. Rhapsody => Darwin, Darwin underlies OS X. I dunno if the developers what worked on NeXT came with Jobs when apple took him back, but it's safe to say apple didn't steal most of the OS X is, nor did they buy out some completely innovative garage software company like Palm did with Be inc. It was more like...well you break up with your girlfriend, she goes off and does her own things, then you and her get back together. All of her experiences...er...wait...slashdot...
So, Captain Kurk and Spock get into a fight...
Yeah, this is what i wanted. Had they put an ipod out in black and red, I would have bought one. But, no, they put them out in lame colors like pink and light puke green. Fuck that man, I want black and red.
anything U2 "covers" is rape.
But then again, I never was a real fan of them.
Also note that perl wasn't mentioned in the abreviated list - how important does he really consider it?
I took his answer as more of a slam on perl than anything else, and that made me smile.
BTW, i agree with you about solar. There should be more investment in solar power, especially resident-based solar power. Why not start by making prices equal by putting the same heavy subsidies on the solar industry as are on the fossil fuel and nuclear industries that keep the myth of cheap nuclear power alive? Or, better yet, remove the subsidies all together. This is supposed to be a market economy, right?
And do you have these estimates off hand? I'm aware there's a massive amount of methane being sucked out of the ground right now, but what I'm saying is simply that it doesn't have to come out of the ground. That's all. Oil, coal, etc - on the other hand, have to be mined. It takes a hell of a lot of heat and pressure to make the stuff. Methane has the possibility of becoming a sustainable energy source, whereas Oil, coal, etc do not.
Hah, what i was implying was that either the North Korean hackers had cracked boxes in South Korea (elementary schools make sense, since they're usually not very secured and don't have any kind of IT staff on site to deal with security on a regular basis), or someone else did.
He's talking about biogas. No CO2 is produced (or perhaps a negligable ammount), since biogas fermentation is anaerobic. All of the carbon from the plant goes into the hydrocarbon string CH4, instead of CO2. Basically it's a positive feeback loop:
1. Take existing methane, create power + liquid CO2
2. Grow fast-growing plants in a CO2-rich greenhouse
3. Produce biogas from the plant biomass
4. Use biogas as fuel to create power + liquid CO2
5. See step 2.
This is one sink for the CO2, but there are others in industry, especially as nanotechnology goes into full tilt and needs a cheap, available source of carbon. Liquid CO2 will basically saturate the maket, driving down prices and making nanotech even more viable as a real industry. I see this as a good idea. What confuses me are the so-called environmentalists that don't base their rederick in science. I'm proud to call myself an environmentalist, but in order to really create a sustainable society, we need creative solutions like these. We need to be able to live off our waste, and I think this is one way we can do that.
hydrogen storage and transportation systems sowe don't produce *any* emissions.
Hydrogent electrolization emits water vapor, the *most* potent greenhouse gas. However, it also as about an 11 day residence time in the atmosphere, so it'll end up back on land or in the ocean fairly quickly. I'm all for hydrogen power, but to say it's completely without emissions is a false statement.
Sequestration is one possibility, another is reuse. By the time this technology will be a viable alternative energy source, nano technology will have grown by leaps and bounds. Nano technology is built upon Organic Chemistry which, suprise suprise, has to do with completely carbon-based compounds. Here we have a huge source of Carbon as a by product of power generation. Sure, we can pump it into the ground, but we can also bottle it in pressurized tanks and sell it to nanotech companies, or other people who might need carbon dioxide. On top of that, the hydrocarbon used in combustion is renewable. So we have a renewable energy source, which produces useful, containable waste. Name one other kind of energy source that might provide this same relationship. As an environmentalist I see this as a very big step towards sustainability.
Another thing - you can reduce demand in highly developed nations, but as less developed nations become further developed, demand is only going to increase. In the mean time, we need clean, efficient technologies that can make up for the difference as demand grows. This, I think, is one of them. As i mentioned in a previous post, you can use CO2 for other things, and as technology grows so will techniques for utilizing the massive supply of carbon that we will develop. Some people have mentioned nanotechnology. Basically all we'll need is an efficient way to break the carbon-oxygen double bonds, which would produce quite stable O2 gas and a carbon, which (and i'm not a chemist, though i've got formal chemistry training - so i could be wrong here) would string together with other carbon atoms. Throw in some hydrogen atoms and some other substituents along the chain and you have the possibility of making just about any material you can think of, including more methane. Right now the mechanisms for this kind of materials synthesis are still being experimentally proven, but there's lots and lots of potential. This sysem can prove to be a huge jump in the quest for global sustainability.
Oh and the methane magically appears out of nowhere
Methane/Biogas is one product of anaerobic respiration. Bacteria in landfills and sewage treatment plants quickly use up oxygen whilst eating our waste, and shift to anaerobic respiration to process the energy they derive from biomass. Welcome to sustainable living - living off our own waste. There are other sources for Methane than drilling under ground, renewable sources, that will be around as long as live exists on Earth as we know it. Also the CO2 can be used for industrial uses, unlike spend nuclear fuel. This is a GOOD ALTERNATIVE TO NUCLEAR POWER AND FOSSIL FUELS! Gah, i'm starting to despise the groupthink of fellow environmentalists as much as i despise the conservative groupthink.
Methane is a renewable source. It's a different story here. You can capture methane from over landfills or simplay create a slurty of biological waste (think water treatment plants) and capture Methane from there. This isn't a fossil fuel-based hydrocarbon, it's the same hydrocarbon that comes out of you ass after eating too much mexican food. If we use these power plants, we'll basically be living off our own waste which IS renewable.
Yeah, I read this article and wondered if this would explain all the unsuccesful attempts at logging into my server as root (which is disabled, of course) from South Korean elementary schools, Australian universities, and a few hits from UC Irvine. I've had a steady stream since August.
One problem i have with this analysis of Wind and Solar is that it relies on the assumption of a centralized power grid. If the grid were decentralized, and mounting solar pannels on household rooftops became more of the general rule, not the exception, I think electrochemical renewables (solar) would be abel to take on a larger chunk of the power demand. I am not so naive to think, however, that it will be an end-all be-all solution. But I think it's part of the solution.
That said, I like this idea. I think it has real promise to not only usurp fossil fuels as the primary source of energy production, but it's wast e - as you mentioned - can be used in the future. That's the one thing I have against nuclear power - it's not sustainable (in the classical sense), and it's waste is useless. This idea, from my point of view, seems the most viable solution so far, and I don't mind it living side by side with nuclear power, so long as nuclear power is eventually phased out (as it will have to be as uranium deposits dwindle in the future). This might be the boost the world needs to try and realize a hydrogen economy.
Fairly simple - Compressed (ie, liquid) CO2 can be used by industry to create other products. This would provide a fairly large source of raw, compressed CO2 can could further be refined and reused. The main problem with the current CO2 emissions is that, while they orginate from a point source, there's no viable way to contain the CO2 gas, collect it, and use it. It all goes to waste. The problem with nuclear power is that, although the waste is more or less contained, you can't do anything with the waste. It just sits there, and it sits there dangerously.
To me, at least (as an environmentalist and someone who believes that sustainable living should be our global goal), this seems like a reasonable alternative to nuclear power: It's reactants are easily created from the environment around us, without any real danger of being diminished (so, no expensive, destructive mining processes go on), and it's product is usable in it's raw form for other means. the CO2 doesn't have to be stored underground - it can be used in industry, in academia, hell we can all have a whole lot more of dry ice every halloween! I dig this idea. I think it's time to RTFA and see if i'm wrong.
Sorry for the late reply. I do use 5.2.1 as my webserver at home. It runs, and it runs well. But I've read the technical flaws that Matt has with it, and I agree with them. I think Matt's fork is more than just a "disgruntled developer's fork." He's making major, major changes to the base, and the resulting API design is just much nicer, from a programmer's point of view. The theory behind his model also just makes sense to me. I recommend you put down your religious zealotry, put on a nice little "skeptic" hat, and review Dragonfly for what it is. Check out the actual code changes, the clean ups, etc, and see what you think. I'm not here to change your mind, I'm just here to open it. And for the sake of all truth, the FreeBSD developers are still people. They can make wrong decisions, go down the wrong design path. Just because it works doesn't mean it's ideal, or that it's the best solution. For example, Linux runs beautifully...but compared to FreeBSD it's code is a mess, for a while it's TCP/IP stack was inferior...but it still ran, and people still rallied behind it. FreeBSD had a better solution, technically speaking, but since the stack in linux worked, there wasn't much of a drive to change it.
It's important to point out that I don't *hate* FreeBSD. It was my first real OS love. It's still, speaking from a strictly pragmatic standpoint, a better choice than Dragonfly when you take into account the flux that Dragonfly is currently going through. Which will be better in the long run? Only time will tell, but Dragonfly definitely presents an interesting alternative to the status quo in the BSD world.
I do take strong issue with one thing you said, though:
Parallel efforts are a waste.
I really don't believe this is true. Parallel efforts provide the community with choice and a deviance from the status quo. The status quo might be the best solution, or it might not. How would you know if it is or not if you don't challenge it? Simply because it works well enough? I don't accept that as an answer. Competing efforts are good.
Anyway, Keep using FreeBSD if you're happy with it, but I'm becoming to be annoyed with the way things are being done. To each their own, right?
Interesting. I've dropped my karma 3 times. The only damage is, after the thrid drop, the little wheel on the upper right hand corner no longer works. The thing still plays, with better quality than the iPod, I might add. The wheel, incase you don't know, really isn't a necesary control. Everything that can be done with the wheel can also be done with one button and the joystick doo-dad. My karma also bounces around it my backpack, which has been thrown several times into my car, on to my bedroom floor, and basically treated like shit. The karma is scratched up pretty nicely, there's some lint behind the screen, but like I said...it still plays. I take it basically everywhere I go. It's not babied at all, and it hasn't died on me yet. Again, interesting.