I had an interesting experience. I have one of those motherboards that had the VIA bug - 686B or something like that (it's a slightly older motherboard)- but anyway, using their ATA 100 interface, with an ATA66 disk, and an 8x CD-R burner, the machine would basically slow to a crawl, basically to the point where it just wasn't usable at all, it didn't crash, but it was so slow that you could see it in the mouse, and text wouldn't show up while you were typing, etc.. - while the CD was burning. Horrible.
Anyway, I re-did the computer with a SCSI disk and controller just recently, and I still haven't replaced that 8x CD-R with anything, but with the SCSI disk, you would never even know you were burning a CD-R. I often forget, until the CD ejects. I can totally burn a CD in the background, whereas before, doing anything else was impossible when the CD was burning. The SCSI disk is an 80 MB/s drive, so it's not that much faster than the ATA66, but it's just a world of difference.
If you can't get a SCSI CD, you can always get a SCSI PCI card and a SCSI hard drive. Unbelievable - I haven't put a faster CD-R in the drive, but that is of course the next thing. I may have to try out a DVD-R on the now almost completely empty (except for a CD-R drive) ATA100 buses that came with the motherboard.
I am also curious if maybe this kind of performance improvement could be had by purchasing one of those SATA controllers and hanging an SATA drive off of it.
I think there are also measurable improvements in many other areas that you can get by using a SCSI drive; and now that you don't need the scsi emulation anymore, you can probably set those jumpers on the CD burners to do ATA33, a newer Plextor 52x one I have has those jumpers, but I was under the impression they don't work with SCSI emulation, but seeing as how SCSI emulation is not necessary anymore in the newer software, I will have to try them out now.
Considering that SCSI hardware is more expensive, I would definitely opt for a disk, with which you will have noticable improvement in many, many areas, as opposed to a CD or DVD drive, where the improvements will not be as many, and good performance could be had with the burner devices on your now freed-up onboard ATA buses.
Even a newer ATA motherboard I have shows a little bit of a slowdown when burning a CD (one onboard ATA bus to another). It's still quite usable though, even while it's burning at 52x. And it's done pretty quick as well, so it's not a really big deal. With a SCSI disk, there is absolutely no noticable performace difference when burning the CD. It's an incredible sense of freedom. 8x is no big deal, I just does it in the background - who cares how long it takes, it doesn't interfere with anything you do, no coasters, even when opening up apps Burning a CD and opening up OpenOffice, for instance, at the same time used to require some planning ahead - not anymore, at least on this computer. Open Office opens up just as fast - I don't know if it's the SCSI, or the fact that it's a PCI non-onboard controller and if SATA would give the same results, but it's definitely a really great sense of freedom, that's for sure.
I still have on one of my hard drives somewhere a PDF file that points out really horrible errors in typical school textbooks; these were mostly high-school books, but in any case, it really points to the pressures that are placed on book publishers; many pressures that have nothing to do with accuracy of information, but coming from a sense of policital correctedness, and so on. There are influential people in the management levels of the textbook publishers, and there are certain standards that must be upheld in order for that book to be selected by a school system, especially a school system that is funded with taxpayer dollars. Obviously, having checks and balances when it comes to taxpayer dollars is an important thing. But the errors are pretty bad, and there are quite a few of them, at least in the one review there that I read.
Perhaps the idea of putting this kind of information online, if there is a way that this can be done without too much lost inertia from the fact that you are just giving away your hard work for nothing (i.e. also sell the book in hard-copy), have a donation place for it, or somehow organize funding in some other way. Also, you don't necessarily go through a big publisher to do it this way - you can have more freedom to simply produce an accurate textbook, without having some committee breathing down your neck or having your work thrown in haphazardly with ten other authors' work.
And there may be more control over the authorship, and the way the whole thing is put together.
But generally speaking, for instance, O'Reilly books are not that particularly expensive, and I just kind of feel better contributing some type of financial money to the author, and having a hard-copy book has its benefits as well, in case you feel like not being tied down to the computer or laptop screen. I like buying books, but I also like using electronic formats sometimes (it's easier and faster to take notes), it's especially cool when you are studying a programming language and you can see examples in the book and try out your own while you are physically sitting at your computer.
Electronic formats are good, and hard-copies are good too. What really needs to happen is that the cost of the textbooks, the hardcopy textbooks, need to come down by at least 50%. Again, this can be blamed on the "big publishing companies" - many of the policies and procedures that are commonplace at these types of embedded publishers drive the costs of textbooks up, and increase the number of errors in those textbooks at the same time. Paying some 30 dollars for a very excellent O'Reilly book, for instance, is really no big deal, considering how long it's going to take to read it and work through it, and hopefully the authors are getting some kind of reward in there too. Having an electronic format available for free, especially in the situation where one has purchased the hardcopy, is, I think, a really good idea; especially if that electronic format can have an errata somewhere or something.
To sum up, I think that the price of textbooks needs to come down, and the errors need to be lesser in number as well. These two things appear to be tied in together, to some extent. Furthermore, there should be a means to reward the authors for their work; I don't think that giving away books for free is really going to encourage people to write quality material; there needs to be some sort of way to integrate the hard copy and the electronic copy in a way that increases the benefits to the reader and still rewards the author and encourages more people to write quality material.
I think that this is going to turn out to not be quite as easy as it sounds.
The nature of the internet is different from the nature of cable TV - the idea that Comcast can tell you how many computers you can hang off of your router is fallacious; they have as much right to tell someone how many computers there are behind their router (the one device connected to Comcast's network) as they do what color window treatments you have in your house. Now, how much data you pull up or down on their network, whether or not you can run servers, whether or not you can host adult websites on computers connected to their network, that's a different story. Most routers are like black holes, nothing comes out from them (in terms of serving something), only in. It's a LAN, it's private, and it's going to stay that way. It's just real easy to get sick of all the Comcast bashing; it usually leads nowhere.
The internet is *not* cable TV; it is an entirely different beast. What purpose does it serve to charge an individual extra money for a network printer on their LAN. What purpose does it serve to give a printer a WAN IP in a residential setting. Or would the electrical company, for instance, charge you extra money for each lamp you have. It's not cable TV.
All I'm saying is that the most overwhelming problem with Comcast is the individuals who are fired up against Comcast, not Comcast itself.
The only people saying routers are against the law, or that "multiple computers" are going to be "banned", are customers who are fired up, not Comcast. Comcast has never said that, they are never going to say that. This is because their competition is never going to say that. They "look out" for the telcos. There are some very basic, fundamental misunderstandings about cable that I think are sending many customers the wrong message.
For many folks, Comcast broadband works fine. There is no reason to start a broadband co-op based on theoretical possibilities of what someone can or cannot, may or may not do.
Don't let Comcast (or should I people who bash Comcast) freak you out.
Most of the people complaining have, in the end, been wrong. Despite all the bitching, whining, moaning, complaining, etc, the broadband stays on; the connection stays connected.
People have a right to use broadband; furthermore, people have a right to feel confident that their right to use broadband will not be questioned; despite all of the stuff that has gone on, despite all of the doomsday scenarios concerning Comcast that have ever been explored, the connection has stayed connected, the broadband has remained solid.
People need to get a clue. Go build a campfire and tell your ghost stories there.
It won't happen. That's just wrong. Everyone hates Comcast; that's what's going on.
Please remember that there are people who use Comcast on a daily basis and by targeting Comcast with these nonsensical imaginary worst-case scenarios that everyone does, the end-users of Comcast are being taregeted as well.
So while you may not like Comcast, you should respect that many people who use Comcast don't have a choice in the matter ATM.
Linux is OK. Home networking is OK. If you go to Comcast's home page, and if you go to their online forums, you will see that these things are widely talked about and widely discussed. Comcast encourages and enables it.
Remember, when you "bash" Comcast, you are also affecting the users of Comcast, many of which don't have a choice.
I just try to encourage everyone to chill out and not over-react, like everyone does, when it comes to Comcast. Everyone hates Comcast, but most of the people that use it don't have a choice! That's what really kind of makes it a bad situation.
On the one hand, "bashers" expect Comcast to "get a clue" about respecting other people's privacy, but while "bashing", these folks don't respect that people who use Comcast DON'T, often times, have a choice. So it's like getting reamed twice: Once by Comcast, who insist on providing everyone the "broadband for dummies", and don't "officially" recognize that there are non-dummies out there who can't get DSL, and twice by the "bashers", who try to imagine the worst horror stories imaginable in order to prove how awful Comcast is. What they don't realize is that many folks just DON'T HAVE A CHOICE.
Like it or not, what most users want is broadband. With Comcast, that's what you get. It's fast, it's reliable, and it kicks. Home networking, no problem. Linux, BSD, no problem. Gigs upon gigs upon gigs of download, no problem.
Now, OK, they don't allow servers, but most ISPs don't allow servers.
Comcast is OK. I think what's going on is that it's just such a huge company that one hand doesn't realize what the other is doing sometimes, so they come up with stupid policies like "no VPN" or trying to set bandwidth limits that don't exist, stuff like that. But in both of those cases, they backed down. So it's a bumpy road, but overall, the worst thing is having to try to get the facts when everyone is trying to scare the living daylights out of you with doomsday scenarious. Honestly, it's other people's posts that have to be the worst thing about being a Comcast customer not by choice. Seems like it, anyway.
If there is one thing to be learned from Comcast, it's that they have an IMMENSE subscriber base. Outrage is commonplace. But it's also important to not let it consume you. It seems like over at Comcast, there are like "too many chefs in the kitchen" sometimes. Every now and then, one of these chefs will do something that is extremely unpopular. It takes a little while, and then things fall back into place the way they should.
In any case, Comcast does eventually get the message, but you may have to speak somewhat louder or go down to the office yourself, or write the "right person" a letter, describing your problem.
So while you, as an individual, may have to, at some point, stand up and assert your rights in the face of an immense company such as Comcast, the important thing is to do it with conviction, to not panic, and to maintain a level-headed approach to the whole situation.
There is nothing worse than being constantly dragged into these massive online bitching sessions that explore every possible worst-case scenario from every possible angle.
The most important thing to do with Comcast is to remain calm, and chill out, while trying to stay informed. This, unfortunately, is a serious challenge, because the information that you need to know is usually buried in a veritable hastack of hatred and negative emotions. It's unfortunate, really.
Eventually, when there are options, other options, for those folks who don't live within the necessary distance from the CO, or, when Comcast learns that many very technically knowledgable users don't have a choice when it comes to broadband access (whichever comes first), then these problems are going to go away, for good. The sooner the better.
I think Comcast has come a long way towards making things more friendly for alternative OS's and do-it-yourself home networking, and I have a feeling that these two things will be around to stay. That's just my feeling.
Linux is not the solution to everything. Simply having people switch over to Linux isn't going to solve the problem. People don't want Linux. They want Windows for free. It's as simple as that.
Linux is, like it or not, in a technical sense, far more advanced than Windows. Or, perhaps, "elegant", for lack of a better word. As an operating system, that is. As a development platform, Windows has some very serious gaming software, entrenched Office applications, and things like that, so there are some reasons why people want to use Windows, understandably. But in terms of technical advancement, in terms of technical superiority, so to speak, Linux, in its raw, unadulterated form, is to Windows what a Formula 1 car is to a pickup truck. (or something along those lines). Of course, the user-friendly distributions don't fit this analogy, they are "tuned down", so to speak, and easier, more comfortable to use, but the heart of the technology is not unlike the analogy.
Formula 1 cars can't be driven on the street; the oil-change intervals are not necessarily particularly impressive; they don't do very well in traffic jams, they are loud, and not particularly comfortable to drive. Not to mention that it would almost be a necessity to have a machine shop in your garage and a crew of mechanics (or a lot of spare time on your hands) if you are going to keep it in running order. But in terms of being technically superior, there is not doubt that a Formula 1 car trumps a passenger car. Most people will want a passenger car. There are Linux distributions that make this easier, but then again, that's not what a lot of people want. They want Windows, and they want it for free.
So yes, those patches should be made free. That's what the people want. If Windows is going to continue to give people what they want, why not do like Sun - allow people to download Windows for free, and install it themselves. What's wrong with that? How many people are going to actually bother to install Windows by themselves? It's not that easy; Linux is easier to install if you get a distribution that is designed to be easy to install.
There is no doubt that the patches should be free. Furthermore, Windows, if you are willing to install it yourself, should also be free. It's pretty much as simple as that. Even if MS offered, perhaps a "Windows XP Lite" for those who would like to install it themselves, they probably wouldn't lost that much business because most people would just buy a new computer with everything set up anyway. Plus, the "Home" and "Pro" editions could still cost money.
But the patches should definitely be free. Absolutely. It is ridiculous that they are not free. It's just absurd. Like that's going to discourage anyone. Oh yeah, "I won't pirate XP because I can't get security patches for it" or "I was just going to pirate XP but when I realized that security patches weren't going to be available for it, I changed my mind and went out and bought it". Suuuuure. Makes a LOT of sense to me.
What I see is that the Java Desktop part of it will allow (or can allow) another layer within which users can have access to applications that do things on other machines, with other vendor's proprietary technologies.
It's a layer that has possibilities for things. Certainly, if all you wanted was Linux, or FreeBSD, for instance, you could just install that - what the Java Desktop System will give you is the opportunity to integrate the end user's system with other, perhaps larger computers, running other applications that only run on those remote, larger computers, whatever those applications may be.
It's like a virtual layer that can bring remotely-running apps to the end-user desktop. What those remotely-running apps are would probably depend on your particular setup at your particular business.
I imagine it this way: for instance, a developer, working in Java, either outsourced as a contractor by the company, or working for the company as an employee, or (most likely) a group of individuals working together that are combination of both, coding in Java, can produce a multi-user application in Java, on a very powerful remote machine, and then the end users can use remote desktop to connect to that very large remote machine and use these applications, whatever those applications might be. Perhaps a Java front end to the database?
It's going to make it easier to create an application on a powerful multi-user machine, and have the entire workforce using that app, via the remote desktop, in a nice, "user-friendly", point-and-click, GUI front end window.
The difference is that this allows Java to bridge the gap between the end user's machine and a more computationally powerful environment. Also, with a JRE running on the end user's machine, perhaps certain parts of the functionality can be offloaded to ease the load on the powerful machine that is running the "parent" process.
I think that this is the idea; and of course, there may be other ways to accomplish the same thing, but if I understand this correctly, the idea is to use Java to bridge these things together and make life easier for everyone. Down side, you would be stuck with Java in order to get the fullest functionality, and some people feel that Linux is "just being used", transparently, to leverage the cookie-cutter Intel hardware at the moment, and that Solaris X86 might replace it at some point.
It's probably a time-saver for those organizations that work in Java, and, for people who see value in being computer-illiterate and having to have a GUI for everything, for people who would rather use a mouse with 2 or 3 buttons as opposed to a keyboard with 100+ buttons, etc...
But it's kind of a neat idea, even though in a way, it's tying you to Java as much as Office ties you to Windows.
I don't mean Microsoft, I mean the functionality that we do with our computers. Gamers will have gaming machines, internet surfers and e-mailers will have machines for that a-la Imac-type machines, and then there will be entertainment-center type machines, and so on. There isn't really much of a point of having one machine do it all, unless, of course, you configure it as a server, and then hang terminals here and there around your house; perhaps one in the kitchen for recipes, one next to the TV to look up things that come up while you are watching TV, perhaps some kind of DRM-enabled storage device with brains plugged into your TV/entertainment center, things like that. The Linux-type OS's would probably be much better at enabling this kind of thing, although with work, and maybe some reboots every now and then, Longhorn-type OS's could do it too.
The whole concept of one computer doing everything is fine, but in that case it's going to have to function as a server, with perhaps smaller devices booting off of it throughout the house. Families have more than one person in them, and if we are really going to have stuff this powerful, eventually it's just going to split up into seperate devices, each with a specialized task. There is not really any reason to have everyone purchase a computer that does everything when they don't need that. If you aren't a gamer, you don't need a gaming machine. If you are fine with DVDs and CDs, you don't need mp3s. Things like that. But it sure does sound like one awesome gaming machine, this thing they are describing. No doubt about that. It's just that not everyone needs this kind of power, certainly not to read the web and post comments on Slashdot.
Personally, there is nothing that I have needed to do in a non-commercial sense (I am not a graphic artist) that I have not been able to do with the Gimp. It's mostly resizing images for background wallpapers, maybe some web type stuff, that kind of thing. It's all there.
Also, to a certain extent, it takes a lot of effort to compete with something like Photoshop. As we are moving forward in this new world that we are creating, the value of "competition" is being re-evaluated to some extent, and in the coming decades, the value and necessity of pure competition for its own sake is going to be reevaluated even more often and to a greater extent.
Is Gimp "competing" with Photoshop? Is is fair to characterize Gimp as even attempting to compete with Photoshop? There are many really cool things that you can do with the Gimp. It's a world in and of itself - there are extensions, plugins, all kinds of things. I have no idea about what most of them do, but that's not the point. If I need something done, I can figure out how to do it, and then do it. It's there, when I need it, and I don't really need it that often. One does not need to be graphics designer to need at least some of the functionality of a graphics application. It's a cool application, it's a good application. It's a useful application. It rocks.
One of the easier ways to save time is to not duplicate someone else's work. To have the Gimp attempting to compete with Photoshop is a waste of time in that sense, unless, of course, one clings to the tenets of patriarchy, and assumes that the only way to cooperate is to compete. Everything at its extreme becomes its own opposite. If you want to use Photoshop - Use Photoshop. Duh. If you want to understand how the Gimp works, then get yourself a Unix-like OS (there are many of them, Linux being only one) and explore the Gimp, it's 600+ page (last time I checked) manual, and do so for a week or a month - explore its plugins, the gimp-perl modules, the freetype stuff, etc... Gimp is a world in and of itself, it does things that Photoshop cannot.
Get the idea that "competition" is necessary out of your mind, get the idea that the only way to make a positive and lasting contribution to society is to "compete and win" out of your mind, get the idea out of your mind that there needs to be a loser in order for there to be anything positive in the world, and hopefully, Photoshop can get ported to Linux or something, that would rock. Try it out on a 4-way Itanium or something; that would be nice.
Adobe is cool. Linux and the BSDs, for instance, output print in Postscript. If you want to print on a non-Postscript printer, you need to convert from Postscript. There is no reason, no particular reason to shy away from Adobe products.
I have heard before that Photoshop is better for print, for hard-copy, and that Gimp is better for online stuff. Also remember that you can be really creative and not only make your own art but you can work on the Gimp as well and create effects and filters and extensions and scripts that have not been written before, as well as change the underlying source code, if you feel so inclined. Is there a law against a graphic artist designing their own tools? Wouldn't being able to modify, extend, or change the tools that you use as an artist simply be an extension of your creativity, and a deeper understanding and mastery of your craft? I certainly think so. Or does the extent of being a graphic artist involve paying someone else to produce a generic tool, a tool that cannot be modified, unless that functionality is designed into that tool in the first place? Here we are talking about creativity, but the MOST IMPORTANT creative aspect, that of open source, that of being able to actively design and collaborate with other artists to build a better tool, this aspect is being ignored in the interest of a type of disingenous consumerism and a stereotypically erudite sense of product quality. Coding IS an art. Coding IS a creative task. It's like arguing that comput
I know that in enlightenment there are window "groups", so you can add the image you are working on to a an existing group of other image windows, and other window managers also have ways of keeping windows that are open grouped together. Combine that with, for instance, in enlightenment - alt-shift held down plus an arrow key (up,down,left,right) and you have keyboard access to up to 8x8 virtual desktops, ctrl-alt held down plus right arrow or left arrow gives you access to up to 32 "multiple desktops", within each of which there are, as I previously mentioned, up to 8x8 (64) virtual desktops. That's a total of 2048 desktop areas the size of your monitor, all accessible "out of the box" from your keyboard, as if that weren't enough space. Windows and Apple are decidedly claustrophobic.
That being said, I believe that in order to really be productive with your graphics work, you need to be able to be proficient at BOTH. There are things that Photoshop can do that Gimp can not, there are things that Gimp can do that Photoshop can not.
And I thought that there was a way that you could fire up Linux on your Mac and then fire up OS X within Linux, so you could have a full Linux install with Linux Gimp, which is the best version, and then fire up OS X and use the multitude of art-and-graphics related programs on OS X, which are one of the things that OS X is known for.
I don't think that you can get the most out of your graphics abilities and skills without having access to both the OS X tools (perhaps SGI as well), and Linux tools like the Gimp and the productivity improvements of having a good window manager.
There is no doubt that OS X is an important thing to have if you do graphics. Gimp can help fill out your skills, but you really need Linux or some type of BSD and a good window manager to really use it effectively. If that means two computers and a KVM or something...
The type 6 keyboard is not something you would want to spend a significant amount of time with. Having to convert your favorite keyboard/trackball to USB in order to use it, not to mention being in a position where there isn't enough space to use a regular PC -that's not good stuff. I like the idea, it's a cool idea. You can put together a quiet PC if you work at it. Besides, not being able to plop a CD into the drive to listen to it kind of sucks.
It's interesting that Sun is producing these end-user products, desktop solutions, products designed to simplify cubicle management - but the thing about it is, cubicles are bad news for workers, just like assembly lines are. OK, I'm being picky, but it's sort of like using your physics degree to make stuff that kills, injures, and maims people, and causes immeasurable suffering to thousands of innocent people.
The future of the end user workspace revolves around ergonomics. Sacrificing the PS/2 interface, sacrificing a choice of video cards, sacrificing the personalization of your work environment for peace and quiet is just not worth it.
I only wish one thing - just one thing. If Sun wants to provide solutions for the end user, solutions to manage large offices filled with cubicles for call centers or whatever, I would wish (I feel it's their responsibility) to focus on ergonomics. The type 5 keyboard was OK, but the type 6 is not as good, and give me a Microsoft Natural any day. For $1000, I can put together a whisper-quiet, awesome, upgradable Linux box where I have the choice of peripherals (Ok, not the high-end peripherals for $1000), but I could choose the trackball/mouse from a huge selection, I could choose the keyboard from a large selection, I could choose the graphics cards and monitors from a large selection that is not overpriced (Sun's entry level monitor is over $300, you can buy a comparable one for probably half that). This stuff adds up in terms of job satisfaction, upgradability, configurability, and things like that.
But overall, even if they charge twice as much for what is essentially a normal 17-inch monitor with a Sun logo on it, even if the price of a used PC is half that of a new thin client - I wouldn't object to that one bit if there was even one bit of consideration for the ergonomics of the keyboard/mouse combo. It's just that ergonomics, and ergonomics includes things like how are you going to rotate those 3-D windows with your mouse all day long and not get sore? It's the design of the window manager as well. So to make a long story short, there is just no emphasis that I can see on ergonomics. I think that this is sad, and short-sighted. It's obviously not being thought through from the perspective of the end-user, it's being thought through from an apersonal point of view of a product line, or something like that.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. On a personal level, it's much more, at this point, about whether or not people LIKE Sun products, not whether or not they are going under. A lot of the products that Sun puts out are too expensive. Monitors are a good example. RAM is another example. The ultra-high end SMP boxes are going to have viable alternatives as the price of other offerings keep dropping. The competition there is probably from the lower-end mini mainframes; if not now, then soon. SMP Intel and AMD 64-bit motherboards. 4-way, 8-way.
It's like they are spread too thin, trying to do too much, but not doing anything in a very visionary or progressive manner. Instead of questioning what the user wants and needs, they are trying to combine what the company needs with what users might need, still adhering to the same "$600 toilet seat" strategy. They should perhaps think about hiring a priest and maybe having the hardware recieve a special blessing, then they could sell it at those ridiculous prices.
When I first got Linux, it was SuSE 6.4 (not THAT long ago). I had NO idea what the GPL was. I wanted a hard drive large enough to install ALL the software. I had no idea what the GPL was. But I was convinced that Linux was "better". Superior technology, like a Porsche or something.
Now, to the article. I went back to read it. The article on Groklaw claims that Sun wants to destroy the internet. To destroy freedom of speech, or at least the ability to blog. That's an exaggeration, and FUD is bad, no matter who you aim it at. FUD clouds the issues, and affects the "genuineness" of your decisions. I don't like FUD. Sun Microsystems is out to destroy the internet? Let me guess, I need insurance, right? Sorry, just kidding... I had to say that.
I purchased several SuSE distros and upgrades and never had any idea there was GPL inside (I didn't know what the GPL was). I do now. It grows on you, you figure it out. It does bring up a good point, though - I was reading this Linux tutorial, and it started out, first chapter, presenting you with the GPL, and explaining that right off the bat. That's how I learned about the GPL in the first place. Someone has to say it, because it's a cool concept and it's central to what GNU/Linux is. But Sun Microsystems out to destroy the internet? I just don't know about that.
I really do appreciate Groklaw, I think that it is a very informative site. But I have been noticing recently that it goes a little too far sometimes. Yes, I am worried about Sun pulling a SCO. That might mean that Java and the Java Desktop might at some point become things to stay away from. As for right now, the Java Desktop is entering a very difficult market - a properly configured Linux runs like a charm, installs easily. It's the support that hurts. The handholding. That's the liability, having to teach people how to use a Unix-like operating system. You're going to get more support calls to your 1-800 number than Microsoft or Apple do, people will get frustrated, they will power-cycle and create filesystem corruption. All kinds of things will happen. Any Linux distro, not just Sun's, has tough competition; has its work cut out for it. Sun is going to have a really tough time competing, it's going to be rough; they might do well, I won't wish anyone any harm, but we'll have to wait and see. With Windows computers being as inexpensive as they are these days, a few extra hundred dollars for a "real" PC (at least in the eyes of many individuals), the most profitable market for Linux may be in the bundled, software-like market, not pre-installed. Sun is going to have a tough time, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them doing fairly well either. They have a name for themselves, and a good reputation in some sectors.
Sun Microsystems out to "destroy the internet?" I don't know about that. Sun Microsystems out to destroy freedom of speech on the internet? Seriously? This is very strange... but I understand perfectly what's going on - I'm just not going to say it right now. I'm curious to see what is going to happen here. Probably nothing.
But I'm going to stay tuned, because I have a thrist for knowledge and I enjoy learning new things.
I never quite figured out the very first chapter of Genesis until somewhat recently when I read it very carefully - there is a firmament that seperates the waters below the firmament from the waters above the firmament, or something along those lines.
But then, the waters below the firmament get seperated out, or split up, by landmasses. So I just never quite "got" it until I thought about it a little bit.
The "firmament" is not the land, like I thought it was, the "firmament" is heaven? (I think). Heaven (the firmament) is like a checkpoint or something, something you pass through as you are leaving or entering the "waters" below the firmament, which are now seperated by land masses. Above, or on the other side of that firmament, are the waters "above" the firmament. My hunch is that these "waters" on the other side of heaven (the firmament) are moving away from us at the speed of light, quite possibly with heaven itself trailing close behind these waters. This might help explain why heaven is only 4000 years old while our universe as we know it is some 14 billion or so.
So in any case, there are "waters" on the other side of the firmament, which have nothing to do with anything in our universe as we know it. I never quite "got" that. Back then, or perhaps even now, who is to say that a dream is any less real than "reality". What is reality? Perhaps there are mountains in heaven? Perhaps Noah rose above. Our physical bodies, and our physical reality, is not the only thing that has significance, you know. Obviously, Noah did go on a journey; there was a flood. That everything else died while Noah was on this journey, that may carry some significance. Part of what happened from Noah is still with us today, so that's significant. It's a beautiful thing. Noah, and those he brought with him, experienced this journey. The others, they did not experience the journey. If you are alive today, then your DNA has experienced that journey. Even if that journey was a dream. Call it a theory if it makes you more comfortable. I like to call it a dream, or a dream world. It gives your imagination more freedom and brings the whole thing into perspective. Although it may not necessarily be a "dream", that's just what I feel comfortable calling it, and that's what helps me relate to it better.
I think what happens is that we look at the dream world and it acts like a mirror of ourselves, we see ourselves, not the dream world. We "see" science, and we fail to see Noah and his journey. I have a feeling this might be an issue for those individuals who are climing this mountain, because their faith has led them to a point where they are literally searching for remnants of a dream. Now, if they were climing the mountain to try to find the Lord God, that would be an entirely different story. That would be a worthwhile endeavor. They won't find the ark; it's highly unlikely. Although, to some extent, anything is possible. But maybe, perhaps, they just might find the Lord God. Now that would be cool.
One can definitely argue that it's not fair. But in the context of the DRM, it's obvious that playfair removes a parameter of control from the track.
Limiting the number of CD's you can burn, limiting the number of copies that you can make, basically, limiting the number of copies in one way or another. That would seem, to me, to be an important parameter.
I don't think this has anything to do with open source at all. It's basically removing a very important parameter as far as Apple is concerned.
What it is doing is setting a bad precedent; Apple is being a bad role model; Apple is showing other wanna-be companies how to intimidate people by them. I am not going to talk about this anymore.
The file-sharing phenomenon is exactly that. It's a phenomenon. Is it unethical? I don't know enough about ethics to say yes or no. Personally, the way I feel is that if you can purchase the music somewhere, either online or brick and mortar, then it's wrong to download that music. Music that you can't buy, like live shows, especially bands that allow trading of their live shows, that is perfectly ethical to download and trade those.
I have felt for a long time what is really important for us right now is to move the technology of sound quality forward, not backwards. We have bent sound quality to fit within our new internet phenomenon. I don't know about you, but I have gotten some pretty nasty headaches from listening to mp3 files. I don't like being at a party or something along those lines where mp3 music is being played. mpc files don't help the issue, although they sound a lot better in some cases. Apple's format is not that much better. It's the subtle nuances, it's the stuff you don't hear. I might be overly sensitive, but it still does give me a headache sometimes.
Once the legal and economic systems allow us to move away from the CD to something like DVD Audio, file sharing will change, and it will truly become a haven for the young and the poor. Why on earth would somebody opt for a free mp3 when the "real deal" is 24bit 96khz? No money, don't care about sound quality, etc...
Nothing wrong with being young and poor, but it's no way to live. Growing up, in the future, is going to involve listening to "real" audio formats with "excellent" sound quality. And if iTunes doesn't keep up the pace, they will fall behind. So the real question becomes bandwidth, and can an online distribution center, Apple's or any other, sustain the bandwidth that is necessary to be able to provide 24bit 96khz downloads of stuff? Or 24bit 96khz resampled, reworked, remastered stuff? Will the price and profitability of an online download service scale well when DVD Audio becomes the mainstream, and the bandwidth required increases exponentially, both at the server end, and at the last-mile?
With a 3Mbps cable modem, a gig still takes slightly less than an hour; with slower services it can take much longer, and dialup will take you a month or more of leaving the modem connected all night. A gigabyte of 24bit 96Khz audio is not that much; I haven't done the math precisely, but my rough calculations show that it's about 20 minutes worth of music. Bending sound quality to enable downloading of tunes is only going to go so far. The only real solution is to have fiber running through the neighborhood.
So in the long run, if the economy improves, and as the fascination of the "PC" fades somewhat, sound quality will again see a rebirth, and there is no worse enemy of file sharing and p2p than sound quality. I still wonder why the music industry doesn't see this. In many areas of the world, broadband is a metered service, and ultimately, it's just less expensive to order the CD than it is to download 3+ gigs of data, plus having to pay for the tracks from the download service.
In any case, you will gain productivity if you exercise more, and you will feel better to boot.
Stress is your body's reaction to something outside of your body. You may not be able to control what is going on outside of your body, but you can, and should, at least _believe_ that you can control your body's reaction to it.
Make a commitment, even 30 minutes a day, every day, in the morning when you wake up, or something along those lines. I find that when a project hits, and I have to get it done ASAP, that it's easy to forget to exercise.
Here's the thing. If you forget the exercise commitment, even if it's just 30 minutes a day, you are actually being less efficient. I have known managers (including myself) that tend towards the fallacious theory that as long as an employee (or manager) is stressed out, the job is getting done as well as it can be. After all, if you are so carefree, and everything is behind schedule, isn't there something wrong with that? But guess what? If you are stressed out, the project will be just as behind schedule as if you aren't. There is a "fad", if you will, where we are essentially being paid for being stressed out. This is wrong, and unnecessary. It is easier to be busy, for instance, if you eat a proper diet, exercise, and get enough sleep. A proper diet and exercise can also reduce the amount of time that you need to sleep.
So while being stressed out may be inevitable and ubiquitous, one thing it won't do is get the job done faster and better. Stress, in my experience, has just been used as a coping mechanism, as an excuse for poor management. Just look around and you will see that it is. Managers trying to do stuff they shouldn't be doing to try to save money is one symptom of this.
Bring your level of skill (including social engineering skills), your level of input into the workplace to a point where you don't have time to be stressed out. [ busy != stressed out ]. Problem is, if your manager is stressed out, and insists on being busier than you, you may have a problem on your hands. There is no work, no job that needs, in any way, to "inherently" be stress-causing. I just don't believe that. On the other hand, unnecessary stress that destroys lives can be found in almost any sector, in any job, anywhere in the world.
Exercise, exercise, exercise is that answer to so many problems that it's not even funny. Speaking of exercise....
OK, let's see... a CD-R, on average, if you are crafty, will probably contain 600-650 megs each. Let's say that in ten years, we have a media format that can store 16 gigs, perhaps a DVD-like removable media. So maybe 25 CD's will fit on one of these mega-storage optical removable thingees. I don't think that's entirely unreasonable to expect something with this kind of capacity in the next decade or two.
Floppies, for instance 450+ floppies on one CD. So all that we really need to do is move the data from the CD's, perhaps even keeping the CD's, to the latest greatest optical storage that might appear at some point in the next decade or two. Meantime, take good care of the CDR's.
So if I have 2500 CDR's, which is a lot, that's only 100 of these new, as-of-yet-nonexistant 16 gigabyte optical storage media. I would imagine that we could have 16 gig digital storage disks or even greater. We'll just have to take the time to move them from one media to another; that's what will take the time.
Now they have those DAT 72 (that's 72 gigs compressed) tapes for about $20 each, so maybe it's time to think about backing up the data with a small DAT-sized tape. I think that's kind of cool. It's 36 gigs uncompressed, and for archival type data, that may be as good as it gets (some data compresses better than other data) That's still pretty impressive, for compressed music files or things like that that don't compress very well. About 60 CDR's in something the size of a DAT. Not bad. Certainly for text files, word processing files, things like that that compress well, 72 gigs (that 120 CD-R's) makes it even more impressive. But shn files and flac files probably don't really compress much more than they already are, so it's more like 36 gigs per tape.
There are ways around it; who wants to lug around a huge box full of thousands of CDRs?
I do think that Groklaw is cool, and some of the people that post there are some very experienced programmers - I have learned quite a few things from reading the posts over there. It is a very, very valuable source of information, if you can weed through the garbage (every site like that, including/. has garbage (no offense meant))- so I have a lot of respect for Groklaw, but there is one disturbing trend that bothers me; it goes like this. It starts when a self-proclaimed IP holder, or an analyst, or a reporter says something absurd or uninformed or uneducated or something in bad faith about Linux - this quote, article, statement, etc... then makes it onto Groklaw's toplevel story, a sense of outrage and injustice is built up, worst-case scenarios are explored, and then there is a constructive, facts-based, breaking-down of the rhetoric. That's all fine, in and of itself, but the way I see it, all you need to do is break down the facts once and it becomes obvious that the situation is not quite as bad as you can make it out to be if you freak out about it in your own mind. It's another implementation of Hades to have to do this every day for the rest of eternity. I find sometimes that it's easier to remain calm, and not worry. So my concern is that there appears to be a need to amplify, or that Groklaw has, at times, amplified the FUD, prior to breaking it down. Instead of amplifying the FUD, ignore it, then you don't need to break it down. That's my complaint. So tie that in with an open-source insurance company, and I don't like what I see one bit. Of course insurance companies will amplify FUD if it is in their best interests, but you shouldn't on the one hand complain about FUD and on the other amplify it whilst offering a solution to it from which you will reap financial gain. I don't like that at all. Maybe the open-source insurance company will be non-profit, that's one thing, but if it needs backers, those people will be in it for money. Somewhere down the line, "open-source insurance" will be making someone rich. That's my point. So don't amplify the FUD, please.
What is an appropriate remedy if there were to have been some misappropriated code, which there more than likely is not? Certainly not what SCO is suggesting. They aren't actually focused on a remedy, they appear to be focused on the "freedom" part, the freedom to view source code and modify it. This freedom is going to be extremely, extremely, extremely difficult to insure, because you never know who is modifying what, where, when, and how; to have to submit your source code to the insurance people every time you change something is kind of absurd, but that's of course what you are going to have to do. The "price" of Linux is what it is. You can either afford it or you can't. It's the freedom to modify, the freedom to change the source, that's the freedom that is being attacked. Losing that freedom is not an appropriate remedy for copyright, patent, or trademark infringement. There are more appropriate remedies for those types of violations. Insurance will also have to put some kind of damper on that freedom in order to be financially plausible. That's why I think it's a bad idea.
I think it's an overreaction. People aren't going to stop using Linux, it's going to be very hard to get people to stop using Linux. Especially in an international sense. Linux is not just about the US, it's about the world. Worst-case scenario, those countries who don't adopt an attitude like Germany has are going to lose out. Obviously, insurance is neither a particularly desirable thing, nor is it anyone's first choice. Now, insurance against a poor legal system, that's a good idea!
Find a way to insure freely modifiable software without putting a damper on the freedom to modify. I bet you can't.
I just thought of this. It's a fine line between how secure you want something to be, and how much of a pain it is. It's the whole 9/11 thing. Too much security is a bad thing, because it shuts down the economy, and makes life exceedingly difficult, not to mention that it affects freedoms that we are used to. We hear this kind of talk in the media all the time. It's a fine line - too little security, disaster happens - too much, life gets difficult and the economy suffers.
So the fact that it takes a certain amount of time to respond to security problems is indicative of the superior nature of Linux. Even though some analyst may say that this is technically not as secure as something else, with Linux you can let things slide a little more because that's just the kind of OS it is. The distros are "on top" of it, because still, nothing bad really happens. That's the test - what bad happens. If nothing bad happens, it doesn't matter how you look at it, because the bottom line - your data is safe.
Furthermore, if need be, you can "crank up" the security level in Linux. Way up. National security level. Hardened. Trusted. It's just unnecessary, and makes it harder to use for non-critical situations.
So look at the bottom line, and look at the ability to crank up the security level. Windows has very little ability to crank up any security level, it needs hardware to do that. Linux can crank up the security without needing specialized hardware.
Linux is superior, and the fact that it is "less secure than Windows", yet nothing bad happens, just goes to prove how technically superior it really is. These analysts have just shown how superior Linux really is.
I remember once I installed OpenBSD on an old SparcStation 1+ (that's 25Mhz) with a 1gig scsi drive. I was new to it, and so when the install process asked what "security level" I wanted to install at, I installed at one below the most secure. It was very strange. Very hard to get anything done, it had no path.
I changed the security level to "normal" because I just got freaked out by how strange it was; I only wanted to see if I could get the box running at all, and the heightened security level was making life difficult.
So the real study that someone should do, is how "ease of use" affects "security". Because that's where the real deal is at. It's just like having to go through the lines at the airport - the more secure we need to be, the more of a pain it is for everyone.
There is definitely an inverse relationship between "ease of use" and "security". Seeing as how there is a big focus on making Linux easy to use, or at least it seems to me that there is; I get the feeling that people won't accept Linux if it's not as easy to use as Windows or OS X, I wouldn't be surprised to see Linux security, or "user friendly" Linux security suffer a little bit.
But still, Linux has been designed from the outset with security in mind; other user-friendly OS's are designed for ease of use. It's going to take some time, but we are slowly going to move in the right direction. If Linux is a secure OS now, and some consultancy group says that it isn't, then the trick would be to make it LESS secure by making it more user-friendly, and immediately, consultancy groups and analysts will be saying that it is secure. But that's a sacrifice that's not really worth it. However, unfortunately, given the open nature of Linux, and that fact that it can go in many directions, we will probably see Linuxes that are less secure than they could be because of the focus on user-friendliness. So I guess that means that analysts are going to change their minds? I wouldn't be surprised.
I have been thinking a lot about the/. article about a week or so ago that concerned what the world would be like without Microsoft. I saw another article elsewhere that was talking about business software, spreadsheets, and the like, and how the current crop of spreadsheets has affected the way business thinks about these kinds of things.
And I can relate to the "unpopular opinion" concept that the parent post has just talked about, because I was just feeling that way yesterday. I guess the best we can do is to try to present our opinions respectfully and honestly.
So here it is:
If you want to play a DVD, get a DVD player. That's what they are for.
Certainly, there are many other issues, and wouldn't it be nice if my computer could do this, or do that, and so on, but I have been thinking a LOT about what a computer is, what its place is in my life, and maybe just redefine a little bit what a computer really is, and what the most effective things to do with a computer are.
Personally, I would rather watch the DVD on a couch, with a plasma screen, with larger speakers and the surround sound. The entire thing of DVD on your computer, or music on your computer, or other things on your computer, which you had to purchase seperately before - it's a "something for nothing" proposition, kind of. Is watching DVDs on a computer just really cool or something, or is it just done just to do it, just for fun - of course there is nothing wrong with that, but I just see a DVD as something that belongs on a plasma with surround sound, with a nice couch. Of course, you may not be able to afford these things, but what I am trying to say is that "computers", as such, are (or should) be about more than just saving money because you can't afford nice things.
Would it be better that we turn computers into DVD players by crippling them and turning them into something that is no longer a computer? I would rather have a computer be a computer, "computer" still being something that we probably will keep redefining, and something that actually, lots of people don't really need as much as they think they do, or maybe it's more like they don't need it as bad as the big computer firms need them to buy millions of computers.
For instance, if there were small airborne transportation vehicles that you could buy, the sky would be all different. Setting up traffic lanes in the air, crashes in mid-air that come through your roof, things like that. Maybe it's better to not have everyone flying around in their personal aircraft, and to reserve aircraft for longer distances. There are many folks that feel that there are also too many cars, and that the focus has become one of car companies selling more of them, oil companies selling more fuel, "in the name of jobs". It's a stone age - it's a stone age.
It's one thing to say "I have the RIGHT to play DVDs on my PC" - that's something in and of itself. It's another to say "I NEED to play DVDs on my PC". Wouldn't it be better with a nice couch , a plasma screen, and a high-end surround sound setup? To some extent, the same thing can be said about mp3 files and crappy computer speakers, although listening to music while you study or surf the net or are doing some kind of boring work in the office IS a nice touch. But watching a DVD is a fairly all-encompassing experience - it pretty much takes up all your senses. You have to stop what you are doing, more or less, to watch a DVD.
I think that part of making computers integrate better with our lives is to not have one thing try to do everything. That's actually the whole Unix philosphy, GNU Coreutils, piping commands from simple building blocks, from one stdout to another stdin, instead of having one single monolithic application that takes an hour to just fire up. Split it up. DVD players cost $100 sometimes, sometimes even less. Who doesn't have a TV? I would rather that the manufacturers don't cripple the PC than go out of their way to bend the PC just so that you can p
apt? It's from a mirror. Mirrors have md5 lists. If you worry, check the md5.
Maybe I am missing something here, but transparency is a bad thing, if the locations aren't hard-coded somewhere. On top of that, making things easy for people who don't know what's going on is a little too good to be true. The only thing holding a malicious person back would be permissions on the devices (i.e. ethernet card). If I can download a small smtp server "transparently" with everything necessary to run it, how is this prevented? Permissions on ethernet card?
I guess it just boils down to "known" apps. I know what dict is. I know what gaim is. I know what xmms is. When I go to a debian mirror, or cd/usr/ports/whatever on a FreeBSD box, I know where the dependencies are coming from, or more specifically, I know that the port maintainer has programmed various locations, in order of preference, where the dependencies come from. With Debian, the dependencies come from the same place as the package you are getting.
What's wrong with/usr/local/bin, and how does installing rpms and debs from known sources constitute a security risk? Check the md5 if you don't trust it.
I was at a friend's house the other night, and I happened to use the Windows 2000 computer to look up something we were talking about. I couldn't even read the webpage for 10 seconds without a pop-up showing up - not from the website, from some processes that were spawning from somewhere. I would estimate that 90% of the system resources of that one computer were being used by malicious third parties. Disgusting.
So, my point is... stupidity is no excuse. Why, please... this is what I want to know. Why is it OK to be stupid? Calculus is bad because it's too hard for most people. It needs to be replaced with arithemetic. Mathematical Physics is even harder for the "average joe", just give him a girly mag.
If you want to use computers, you need to know how they work. If you want your car to work, you'd better learn how to fix it yourself or pay a mechanic to fix it. Brain surgery is too difficult, we should just replace it with prayer.
Do I run it from the net, or do I run it from my computer. If I don't need to run my app over the internet, after the first time, then it IS installed. Or no, it's not installed, it's cached. But that's the same thing, or is it?
I support freedom, I support freedom for people to do what they want. I was reading the Gentoo webpages, and the author was saying that the goal of Gentoo is to enable the user of the Linux box to do what they want. Not what the designer of the distro wants, what the user wants. That means that the distro may need to be able to do 10,000 things - that's the whole idea.
So, from that perspective, I support people doing what they will with the technology, whatever they want to do, they should be able to do it. More power to the people!
Personally, however, this sounds to me like something that I would have absolutely no interest in whatsoever. I'm not installing, but I'm installing? What's up with that? Automatically goes out and finds missing dependencies? Who's dependencies?
I don't like it. But that's just me. That's just my opinion. It's an interesting concept, but to say that you're not installing, that's just not what is going on, and I just smell licensing issues big time. Sort of like DRM or something.
This type of thing could be abused by spammers, malware, and greedy organizations. If it's an application, and it runs on my machine, it's installed. To create a seperate directory, I mean... what's wrong with/usr/local/bin?
I support diversity, and it sounds like this is a popular idea - but I see a potential for abuse, because it's saying "you don't have to install, it runs over the internet", but it actually IS on your hard drive. Cached...installed...
But just because I don't like it doesn't mean that others have to also not like it. It sounds interesting, and certainly could prove useful for certain things.
So I wish the project well, but in expressing my opinion about it, I don't like it one bit. That's just my opinion, though, it doesn't mean it's a bad idea. You could probably get very rich doing this.
If you can PURCHASE the media (song, movie, dvd) somwhere, anywhere... online store, for-fee download, brick and mortar store - if you can buy it somewhere, then you should really question why you are downloading it "illegally". It's pretty much as simple as that.
You may have to search the internet for the label; you may have to purchase from the label directly - if that's the case, do it. If you think it's too expensive, if you can't afford to buy it, then don't. But that's no excuse to download it. Bascially, just don't download anything that is available for purchase somewhere. It's unethical. Unless, of course, it's one of those rare books or works of art that are available under a creative commons license or some other license that allows you to do that. But those are exceptions, not the rule.
And this is sort of a catch-22, because prior to the "PC", young folks have often spent money on media (music, magazines, movies) that they couldn't really afford; it would be fair to say that the entertainment industry thrives on money collected from millions of people that really couldn't afford to give that money in the first place but were sort of suckered into it by the hype and the fanatacism that surrounds celebrity.
So the "PC", a.k.a Redmond, has usurped the scam; replacing it with another one.
But seriously, if you can buy it somewhere, don't download it. If you can't afford it, just be tough and don't download it either. Maybe if enough people don't buy because they can't afford, maybe the industry will recognize that and do something about it. Doubtful, but in any case, it's your money, and you shouldn't allow people to sucker you into spending it on something you can't afford. But that's not an excuse to try to circumvent the system, either.
They could patent this rice too. You can't patent regular rice (IIRC), or regular anything, or, as the original poster mentioned, crossing two tomatoes to make a redder, juicer tomato. You can put your name on it, but this "biotech" stuff can be patented.
The scary part, for the most part, is that it's a business methodology, if you will - it's just an "excuse" to make money, a way to create value - they could probably care less (some of patent-heads do care less) about whether or not the rice would benefit anyone. They would patent regular rice if they could do it, but they can't. The whole biotech movement is almost as much about patents and ways to create value and monetize things as it is about the supposed benefits that these crops have.
It takes longer to develop the crop than it does to respond to the dynamic environmental conditions that the crop is being designed to solve. I thought breast feeding was in style these days. Furthermore, getting the equivalent of a "nutritional label" on real breast milk is impossible, because the nutritional content of breast milk changes from day to day, perhaps even hour to hour - some say this is to adapt to the baby's needs; it's a type of connection between the mother and the child. Given this dynamic nature of breast milk, and its ancient origin, it is ill-advised to even attempt to duplicate its complexity, because we don't fully understand how it works to begin with. You can't mass-produce breast milk - it's not that kind of thing. Human beings are biologically set up to be weaned off of it - some sooner, some later.
I can understand growing your own tomatoes, but growing your own rice is a different story. Not quite the same thing. But it's kind of where we are headed, is having to grow your own if you live in an area where this patent madness is going on.
On the other hand, why pay money to go to a gym when you can save money by working in your own garden? I have figured it out, sort of, that gardening, if you do it right, works out to around $20 per hour or so in terms of money that you save. So get your exercise and save yourself from spending $20 an hour on food that you can grow in your back yard, or someone else's back yard.
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I had an interesting experience. I have one of those motherboards that had the VIA bug - 686B or something like that (it's a slightly older motherboard)- but anyway, using their ATA 100 interface, with an ATA66 disk, and an 8x CD-R burner, the machine would basically slow to a crawl, basically to the point where it just wasn't usable at all, it didn't crash, but it was so slow that you could see it in the mouse, and text wouldn't show up while you were typing, etc.. - while the CD was burning. Horrible.
Anyway, I re-did the computer with a SCSI disk and controller just recently, and I still haven't replaced that 8x CD-R with anything, but with the SCSI disk, you would never even know you were burning a CD-R. I often forget, until the CD ejects. I can totally burn a CD in the background, whereas before, doing anything else was impossible when the CD was burning. The SCSI disk is an 80 MB/s drive, so it's not that much faster than the ATA66, but it's just a world of difference.
If you can't get a SCSI CD, you can always get a SCSI PCI card and a SCSI hard drive. Unbelievable - I haven't put a faster CD-R in the drive, but that is of course the next thing. I may have to try out a DVD-R on the now almost completely empty (except for a CD-R drive) ATA100 buses that came with the motherboard.
I am also curious if maybe this kind of performance improvement could be had by purchasing one of those SATA controllers and hanging an SATA drive off of it.
I think there are also measurable improvements in many other areas that you can get by using a SCSI drive; and now that you don't need the scsi emulation anymore, you can probably set those jumpers on the CD burners to do ATA33, a newer Plextor 52x one I have has those jumpers, but I was under the impression they don't work with SCSI emulation, but seeing as how SCSI emulation is not necessary anymore in the newer software, I will have to try them out now.
Considering that SCSI hardware is more expensive, I would definitely opt for a disk, with which you will have noticable improvement in many, many areas, as opposed to a CD or DVD drive, where the improvements will not be as many, and good performance could be had with the burner devices on your now freed-up onboard ATA buses.
Even a newer ATA motherboard I have shows a little bit of a slowdown when burning a CD (one onboard ATA bus to another). It's still quite usable though, even while it's burning at 52x. And it's done pretty quick as well, so it's not a really big deal. With a SCSI disk, there is absolutely no noticable performace difference when burning the CD. It's an incredible sense of freedom. 8x is no big deal, I just does it in the background - who cares how long it takes, it doesn't interfere with anything you do, no coasters, even when opening up apps Burning a CD and opening up OpenOffice, for instance, at the same time used to require some planning ahead - not anymore, at least on this computer. Open Office opens up just as fast - I don't know if it's the SCSI, or the fact that it's a PCI non-onboard controller and if SATA would give the same results, but it's definitely a really great sense of freedom, that's for sure.
I still have on one of my hard drives somewhere a PDF file that points out really horrible errors in typical school textbooks; these were mostly high-school books, but in any case, it really points to the pressures that are placed on book publishers; many pressures that have nothing to do with accuracy of information, but coming from a sense of policital correctedness, and so on. There are influential people in the management levels of the textbook publishers, and there are certain standards that must be upheld in order for that book to be selected by a school system, especially a school system that is funded with taxpayer dollars. Obviously, having checks and balances when it comes to taxpayer dollars is an important thing. But the errors are pretty bad, and there are quite a few of them, at least in the one review there that I read.
Perhaps the idea of putting this kind of information online, if there is a way that this can be done without too much lost inertia from the fact that you are just giving away your hard work for nothing (i.e. also sell the book in hard-copy), have a donation place for it, or somehow organize funding in some other way. Also, you don't necessarily go through a big publisher to do it this way - you can have more freedom to simply produce an accurate textbook, without having some committee breathing down your neck or having your work thrown in haphazardly with ten other authors' work.
And there may be more control over the authorship, and the way the whole thing is put together.
But generally speaking, for instance, O'Reilly books are not that particularly expensive, and I just kind of feel better contributing some type of financial money to the author, and having a hard-copy book has its benefits as well, in case you feel like not being tied down to the computer or laptop screen. I like buying books, but I also like using electronic formats sometimes (it's easier and faster to take notes), it's especially cool when you are studying a programming language and you can see examples in the book and try out your own while you are physically sitting at your computer.
Electronic formats are good, and hard-copies are good too. What really needs to happen is that the cost of the textbooks, the hardcopy textbooks, need to come down by at least 50%. Again, this can be blamed on the "big publishing companies" - many of the policies and procedures that are commonplace at these types of embedded publishers drive the costs of textbooks up, and increase the number of errors in those textbooks at the same time. Paying some 30 dollars for a very excellent O'Reilly book, for instance, is really no big deal, considering how long it's going to take to read it and work through it, and hopefully the authors are getting some kind of reward in there too. Having an electronic format available for free, especially in the situation where one has purchased the hardcopy, is, I think, a really good idea; especially if that electronic format can have an errata somewhere or something.
To sum up, I think that the price of textbooks needs to come down, and the errors need to be lesser in number as well. These two things appear to be tied in together, to some extent. Furthermore, there should be a means to reward the authors for their work; I don't think that giving away books for free is really going to encourage people to write quality material; there needs to be some sort of way to integrate the hard copy and the electronic copy in a way that increases the benefits to the reader and still rewards the author and encourages more people to write quality material.
I think that this is going to turn out to not be quite as easy as it sounds.
The nature of the internet is different from the nature of cable TV - the idea that Comcast can tell you how many computers you can hang off of your router is fallacious; they have as much right to tell someone how many computers there are behind their router (the one device connected to Comcast's network) as they do what color window treatments you have in your house. Now, how much data you pull up or down on their network, whether or not you can run servers, whether or not you can host adult websites on computers connected to their network, that's a different story. Most routers are like black holes, nothing comes out from them (in terms of serving something), only in. It's a LAN, it's private, and it's going to stay that way. It's just real easy to get sick of all the Comcast bashing; it usually leads nowhere.
The internet is *not* cable TV; it is an entirely different beast. What purpose does it serve to charge an individual extra money for a network printer on their LAN. What purpose does it serve to give a printer a WAN IP in a residential setting. Or would the electrical company, for instance, charge you extra money for each lamp you have. It's not cable TV.
All I'm saying is that the most overwhelming problem with Comcast is the individuals who are fired up against Comcast, not Comcast itself.
The only people saying routers are against the law, or that "multiple computers" are going to be "banned", are customers who are fired up, not Comcast. Comcast has never said that, they are never going to say that. This is because their competition is never going to say that. They "look out" for the telcos. There are some very basic, fundamental misunderstandings about cable that I think are sending many customers the wrong message.
For many folks, Comcast broadband works fine. There is no reason to start a broadband co-op based on theoretical possibilities of what someone can or cannot, may or may not do.
Don't let Comcast (or should I people who bash Comcast) freak you out.
It doesn't matter what Comcast wants.
People have a right to use broadband.
It doesn't matter if Comcast doesn't care.
People have a right to use broadband.
Most of the people complaining have, in the end, been wrong. Despite all the bitching, whining, moaning, complaining, etc, the broadband stays on; the connection stays connected.
People have a right to use broadband; furthermore, people have a right to feel confident that their right to use broadband will not be questioned; despite all of the stuff that has gone on, despite all of the doomsday scenarios concerning Comcast that have ever been explored, the connection has stayed connected, the broadband has remained solid.
People need to get a clue. Go build a campfire and tell your ghost stories there.
It won't happen. That's just wrong. Everyone hates Comcast; that's what's going on.
Please remember that there are people who use Comcast on a daily basis and by targeting Comcast with these nonsensical imaginary worst-case scenarios that everyone does, the end-users of Comcast are being taregeted as well.
So while you may not like Comcast, you should respect that many people who use Comcast don't have a choice in the matter ATM.
Linux is OK. Home networking is OK. If you go to Comcast's home page, and if you go to their online forums, you will see that these things are widely talked about and widely discussed. Comcast encourages and enables it.
Remember, when you "bash" Comcast, you are also affecting the users of Comcast, many of which don't have a choice.
I just try to encourage everyone to chill out and not over-react, like everyone does, when it comes to Comcast. Everyone hates Comcast, but most of the people that use it don't have a choice! That's what really kind of makes it a bad situation.
On the one hand, "bashers" expect Comcast to "get a clue" about respecting other people's privacy, but while "bashing", these folks don't respect that people who use Comcast DON'T, often times, have a choice. So it's like getting reamed twice: Once by Comcast, who insist on providing everyone the "broadband for dummies", and don't "officially" recognize that there are non-dummies out there who can't get DSL, and twice by the "bashers", who try to imagine the worst horror stories imaginable in order to prove how awful Comcast is. What they don't realize is that many folks just DON'T HAVE A CHOICE.
Like it or not, what most users want is broadband. With Comcast, that's what you get. It's fast, it's reliable, and it kicks. Home networking, no problem. Linux, BSD, no problem. Gigs upon gigs upon gigs of download, no problem.
Now, OK, they don't allow servers, but most ISPs don't allow servers.
Comcast is OK. I think what's going on is that it's just such a huge company that one hand doesn't realize what the other is doing sometimes, so they come up with stupid policies like "no VPN" or trying to set bandwidth limits that don't exist, stuff like that. But in both of those cases, they backed down. So it's a bumpy road, but overall, the worst thing is having to try to get the facts when everyone is trying to scare the living daylights out of you with doomsday scenarious. Honestly, it's other people's posts that have to be the worst thing about being a Comcast customer not by choice. Seems like it, anyway.
If there is one thing to be learned from Comcast, it's that they have an IMMENSE subscriber base. Outrage is commonplace. But it's also important to not let it consume you. It seems like over at Comcast, there are like "too many chefs in the kitchen" sometimes. Every now and then, one of these chefs will do something that is extremely unpopular. It takes a little while, and then things fall back into place the way they should.
In any case, Comcast does eventually get the message, but you may have to speak somewhat louder or go down to the office yourself, or write the "right person" a letter, describing your problem.
So while you, as an individual, may have to, at some point, stand up and assert your rights in the face of an immense company such as Comcast, the important thing is to do it with conviction, to not panic, and to maintain a level-headed approach to the whole situation.
There is nothing worse than being constantly dragged into these massive online bitching sessions that explore every possible worst-case scenario from every possible angle.
The most important thing to do with Comcast is to remain calm, and chill out, while trying to stay informed. This, unfortunately, is a serious challenge, because the information that you need to know is usually buried in a veritable hastack of hatred and negative emotions. It's unfortunate, really.
Eventually, when there are options, other options, for those folks who don't live within the necessary distance from the CO, or, when Comcast learns that many very technically knowledgable users don't have a choice when it comes to broadband access (whichever comes first), then these problems are going to go away, for good. The sooner the better.
I think Comcast has come a long way towards making things more friendly for alternative OS's and do-it-yourself home networking, and I have a feeling that these two things will be around to stay. That's just my feeling.
Linux is not the solution to everything. Simply having people switch over to Linux isn't going to solve the problem. People don't want Linux. They want Windows for free. It's as simple as that.
Linux is, like it or not, in a technical sense, far more advanced than Windows. Or, perhaps, "elegant", for lack of a better word. As an operating system, that is. As a development platform, Windows has some very serious gaming software, entrenched Office applications, and things like that, so there are some reasons why people want to use Windows, understandably. But in terms of technical advancement, in terms of technical superiority, so to speak, Linux, in its raw, unadulterated form, is to Windows what a Formula 1 car is to a pickup truck. (or something along those lines). Of course, the user-friendly distributions don't fit this analogy, they are "tuned down", so to speak, and easier, more comfortable to use, but the heart of the technology is not unlike the analogy.
Formula 1 cars can't be driven on the street; the oil-change intervals are not necessarily particularly impressive; they don't do very well in traffic jams, they are loud, and not particularly comfortable to drive. Not to mention that it would almost be a necessity to have a machine shop in your garage and a crew of mechanics (or a lot of spare time on your hands) if you are going to keep it in running order. But in terms of being technically superior, there is not doubt that a Formula 1 car trumps a passenger car. Most people will want a passenger car. There are Linux distributions that make this easier, but then again, that's not what a lot of people want. They want Windows, and they want it for free.
So yes, those patches should be made free. That's what the people want. If Windows is going to continue to give people what they want, why not do like Sun - allow people to download Windows for free, and install it themselves. What's wrong with that? How many people are going to actually bother to install Windows by themselves? It's not that easy; Linux is easier to install if you get a distribution that is designed to be easy to install.
There is no doubt that the patches should be free. Furthermore, Windows, if you are willing to install it yourself, should also be free. It's pretty much as simple as that. Even if MS offered, perhaps a "Windows XP Lite" for those who would like to install it themselves, they probably wouldn't lost that much business because most people would just buy a new computer with everything set up anyway. Plus, the "Home" and "Pro" editions could still cost money.
But the patches should definitely be free. Absolutely. It is ridiculous that they are not free. It's just absurd. Like that's going to discourage anyone. Oh yeah, "I won't pirate XP because I can't get security patches for it" or "I was just going to pirate XP but when I realized that security patches weren't going to be available for it, I changed my mind and went out and bought it". Suuuuure. Makes a LOT of sense to me.
What I see is that the Java Desktop part of it will allow (or can allow) another layer within which users can have access to applications that do things on other machines, with other vendor's proprietary technologies.
It's a layer that has possibilities for things. Certainly, if all you wanted was Linux, or FreeBSD, for instance, you could just install that - what the Java Desktop System will give you is the opportunity to integrate the end user's system with other, perhaps larger computers, running other applications that only run on those remote, larger computers, whatever those applications may be.
It's like a virtual layer that can bring remotely-running apps to the end-user desktop. What those remotely-running apps are would probably depend on your particular setup at your particular business.
I imagine it this way: for instance, a developer, working in Java, either outsourced as a contractor by the company, or working for the company as an employee, or (most likely) a group of individuals working together that are combination of both, coding in Java, can produce a multi-user application in Java, on a very powerful remote machine, and then the end users can use remote desktop to connect to that very large remote machine and use these applications, whatever those applications might be. Perhaps a Java front end to the database?
It's going to make it easier to create an application on a powerful multi-user machine, and have the entire workforce using that app, via the remote desktop, in a nice, "user-friendly", point-and-click, GUI front end window.
The difference is that this allows Java to bridge the gap between the end user's machine and a more computationally powerful environment. Also, with a JRE running on the end user's machine, perhaps certain parts of the functionality can be offloaded to ease the load on the powerful machine that is running the "parent" process.
I think that this is the idea; and of course, there may be other ways to accomplish the same thing, but if I understand this correctly, the idea is to use Java to bridge these things together and make life easier for everyone. Down side, you would be stuck with Java in order to get the fullest functionality, and some people feel that Linux is "just being used", transparently, to leverage the cookie-cutter Intel hardware at the moment, and that Solaris X86 might replace it at some point.
It's probably a time-saver for those organizations that work in Java, and, for people who see value in being computer-illiterate and having to have a GUI for everything, for people who would rather use a mouse with 2 or 3 buttons as opposed to a keyboard with 100+ buttons, etc...
But it's kind of a neat idea, even though in a way, it's tying you to Java as much as Office ties you to Windows.
I don't mean Microsoft, I mean the functionality that we do with our computers. Gamers will have gaming machines, internet surfers and e-mailers will have machines for that a-la Imac-type machines, and then there will be entertainment-center type machines, and so on. There isn't really much of a point of having one machine do it all, unless, of course, you configure it as a server, and then hang terminals here and there around your house; perhaps one in the kitchen for recipes, one next to the TV to look up things that come up while you are watching TV, perhaps some kind of DRM-enabled storage device with brains plugged into your TV/entertainment center, things like that. The Linux-type OS's would probably be much better at enabling this kind of thing, although with work, and maybe some reboots every now and then, Longhorn-type OS's could do it too.
The whole concept of one computer doing everything is fine, but in that case it's going to have to function as a server, with perhaps smaller devices booting off of it throughout the house. Families have more than one person in them, and if we are really going to have stuff this powerful, eventually it's just going to split up into seperate devices, each with a specialized task. There is not really any reason to have everyone purchase a computer that does everything when they don't need that. If you aren't a gamer, you don't need a gaming machine. If you are fine with DVDs and CDs, you don't need mp3s. Things like that. But it sure does sound like one awesome gaming machine, this thing they are describing. No doubt about that. It's just that not everyone needs this kind of power, certainly not to read the web and post comments on Slashdot.
Personally, there is nothing that I have needed to do in a non-commercial sense (I am not a graphic artist) that I have not been able to do with the Gimp. It's mostly resizing images for background wallpapers, maybe some web type stuff, that kind of thing. It's all there.
Also, to a certain extent, it takes a lot of effort to compete with something like Photoshop. As we are moving forward in this new world that we are creating, the value of "competition" is being re-evaluated to some extent, and in the coming decades, the value and necessity of pure competition for its own sake is going to be reevaluated even more often and to a greater extent.
Is Gimp "competing" with Photoshop? Is is fair to characterize Gimp as even attempting to compete with Photoshop? There are many really cool things that you can do with the Gimp. It's a world in and of itself - there are extensions, plugins, all kinds of things. I have no idea about what most of them do, but that's not the point. If I need something done, I can figure out how to do it, and then do it. It's there, when I need it, and I don't really need it that often. One does not need to be graphics designer to need at least some of the functionality of a graphics application. It's a cool application, it's a good application. It's a useful application. It rocks.
One of the easier ways to save time is to not duplicate someone else's work. To have the Gimp attempting to compete with Photoshop is a waste of time in that sense, unless, of course, one clings to the tenets of patriarchy, and assumes that the only way to cooperate is to compete. Everything at its extreme becomes its own opposite. If you want to use Photoshop - Use Photoshop. Duh. If you want to understand how the Gimp works, then get yourself a Unix-like OS (there are many of them, Linux being only one) and explore the Gimp, it's 600+ page (last time I checked) manual, and do so for a week or a month - explore its plugins, the gimp-perl modules, the freetype stuff, etc... Gimp is a world in and of itself, it does things that Photoshop cannot.
Get the idea that "competition" is necessary out of your mind, get the idea that the only way to make a positive and lasting contribution to society is to "compete and win" out of your mind, get the idea out of your mind that there needs to be a loser in order for there to be anything positive in the world, and hopefully, Photoshop can get ported to Linux or something, that would rock. Try it out on a 4-way Itanium or something; that would be nice.
Adobe is cool. Linux and the BSDs, for instance, output print in Postscript. If you want to print on a non-Postscript printer, you need to convert from Postscript. There is no reason, no particular reason to shy away from Adobe products.
I have heard before that Photoshop is better for print, for hard-copy, and that Gimp is better for online stuff. Also remember that you can be really creative and not only make your own art but you can work on the Gimp as well and create effects and filters and extensions and scripts that have not been written before, as well as change the underlying source code, if you feel so inclined. Is there a law against a graphic artist designing their own tools? Wouldn't being able to modify, extend, or change the tools that you use as an artist simply be an extension of your creativity, and a deeper understanding and mastery of your craft? I certainly think so. Or does the extent of being a graphic artist involve paying someone else to produce a generic tool, a tool that cannot be modified, unless that functionality is designed into that tool in the first place? Here we are talking about creativity, but the MOST IMPORTANT creative aspect, that of open source, that of being able to actively design and collaborate with other artists to build a better tool, this aspect is being ignored in the interest of a type of disingenous consumerism and a stereotypically erudite sense of product quality. Coding IS an art. Coding IS a creative task. It's like arguing that comput
I know that in enlightenment there are window "groups", so you can add the image you are working on to a an existing group of other image windows, and other window managers also have ways of keeping windows that are open grouped together. Combine that with, for instance, in enlightenment - alt-shift held down plus an arrow key (up,down,left,right) and you have keyboard access to up to 8x8 virtual desktops, ctrl-alt held down plus right arrow or left arrow gives you access to up to 32 "multiple desktops", within each of which there are, as I previously mentioned, up to 8x8 (64) virtual desktops. That's a total of 2048 desktop areas the size of your monitor, all accessible "out of the box" from your keyboard, as if that weren't enough space. Windows and Apple are decidedly claustrophobic.
That being said, I believe that in order to really be productive with your graphics work, you need to be able to be proficient at BOTH. There are things that Photoshop can do that Gimp can not, there are things that Gimp can do that Photoshop can not.
And I thought that there was a way that you could fire up Linux on your Mac and then fire up OS X within Linux, so you could have a full Linux install with Linux Gimp, which is the best version, and then fire up OS X and use the multitude of art-and-graphics related programs on OS X, which are one of the things that OS X is known for.
I don't think that you can get the most out of your graphics abilities and skills without having access to both the OS X tools (perhaps SGI as well), and Linux tools like the Gimp and the productivity improvements of having a good window manager.
There is no doubt that OS X is an important thing to have if you do graphics. Gimp can help fill out your skills, but you really need Linux or some type of BSD and a good window manager to really use it effectively. If that means two computers and a KVM or something...
The type 6 keyboard is not something you would want to spend a significant amount of time with. Having to convert your favorite keyboard/trackball to USB in order to use it, not to mention being in a position where there isn't enough space to use a regular PC -that's not good stuff. I like the idea, it's a cool idea. You can put together a quiet PC if you work at it. Besides, not being able to plop a CD into the drive to listen to it kind of sucks.
It's interesting that Sun is producing these end-user products, desktop solutions, products designed to simplify cubicle management - but the thing about it is, cubicles are bad news for workers, just like assembly lines are. OK, I'm being picky, but it's sort of like using your physics degree to make stuff that kills, injures, and maims people, and causes immeasurable suffering to thousands of innocent people.
The future of the end user workspace revolves around ergonomics. Sacrificing the PS/2 interface, sacrificing a choice of video cards, sacrificing the personalization of your work environment for peace and quiet is just not worth it.
I only wish one thing - just one thing. If Sun wants to provide solutions for the end user, solutions to manage large offices filled with cubicles for call centers or whatever, I would wish (I feel it's their responsibility) to focus on ergonomics. The type 5 keyboard was OK, but the type 6 is not as good, and give me a Microsoft Natural any day. For $1000, I can put together a whisper-quiet, awesome, upgradable Linux box where I have the choice of peripherals (Ok, not the high-end peripherals for $1000), but I could choose the trackball/mouse from a huge selection, I could choose the keyboard from a large selection, I could choose the graphics cards and monitors from a large selection that is not overpriced (Sun's entry level monitor is over $300, you can buy a comparable one for probably half that). This stuff adds up in terms of job satisfaction, upgradability, configurability, and things like that.
But overall, even if they charge twice as much for what is essentially a normal 17-inch monitor with a Sun logo on it, even if the price of a used PC is half that of a new thin client - I wouldn't object to that one bit if there was even one bit of consideration for the ergonomics of the keyboard/mouse combo. It's just that ergonomics, and ergonomics includes things like how are you going to rotate those 3-D windows with your mouse all day long and not get sore? It's the design of the window manager as well. So to make a long story short, there is just no emphasis that I can see on ergonomics. I think that this is sad, and short-sighted. It's obviously not being thought through from the perspective of the end-user, it's being thought through from an apersonal point of view of a product line, or something like that.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. On a personal level, it's much more, at this point, about whether or not people LIKE Sun products, not whether or not they are going under. A lot of the products that Sun puts out are too expensive. Monitors are a good example. RAM is another example. The ultra-high end SMP boxes are going to have viable alternatives as the price of other offerings keep dropping. The competition there is probably from the lower-end mini mainframes; if not now, then soon. SMP Intel and AMD 64-bit motherboards. 4-way, 8-way.
It's like they are spread too thin, trying to do too much, but not doing anything in a very visionary or progressive manner. Instead of questioning what the user wants and needs, they are trying to combine what the company needs with what users might need, still adhering to the same "$600 toilet seat" strategy. They should perhaps think about hiring a priest and maybe having the hardware recieve a special blessing, then they could sell it at those ridiculous prices.
I wish that they would just get real.
When I first got Linux, it was SuSE 6.4 (not THAT long ago). I had NO idea what the GPL was. I wanted a hard drive large enough to install ALL the software. I had no idea what the GPL was. But I was convinced that Linux was "better". Superior technology, like a Porsche or something.
Now, to the article. I went back to read it. The article on Groklaw claims that Sun wants to destroy the internet. To destroy freedom of speech, or at least the ability to blog. That's an exaggeration, and FUD is bad, no matter who you aim it at. FUD clouds the issues, and affects the "genuineness" of your decisions. I don't like FUD. Sun Microsystems is out to destroy the internet? Let me guess, I need insurance, right? Sorry, just kidding... I had to say that.
I purchased several SuSE distros and upgrades and never had any idea there was GPL inside (I didn't know what the GPL was). I do now. It grows on you, you figure it out. It does bring up a good point, though - I was reading this Linux tutorial, and it started out, first chapter, presenting you with the GPL, and explaining that right off the bat. That's how I learned about the GPL in the first place. Someone has to say it, because it's a cool concept and it's central to what GNU/Linux is. But Sun Microsystems out to destroy the internet? I just don't know about that.
I really do appreciate Groklaw, I think that it is a very informative site. But I have been noticing recently that it goes a little too far sometimes. Yes, I am worried about Sun pulling a SCO. That might mean that Java and the Java Desktop might at some point become things to stay away from. As for right now, the Java Desktop is entering a very difficult market - a properly configured Linux runs like a charm, installs easily. It's the support that hurts. The handholding. That's the liability, having to teach people how to use a Unix-like operating system. You're going to get more support calls to your 1-800 number than Microsoft or Apple do, people will get frustrated, they will power-cycle and create filesystem corruption. All kinds of things will happen. Any Linux distro, not just Sun's, has tough competition; has its work cut out for it. Sun is going to have a really tough time competing, it's going to be rough; they might do well, I won't wish anyone any harm, but we'll have to wait and see. With Windows computers being as inexpensive as they are these days, a few extra hundred dollars for a "real" PC (at least in the eyes of many individuals), the most profitable market for Linux may be in the bundled, software-like market, not pre-installed. Sun is going to have a tough time, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them doing fairly well either. They have a name for themselves, and a good reputation in some sectors.
Sun Microsystems out to "destroy the internet?" I don't know about that. Sun Microsystems out to destroy freedom of speech on the internet? Seriously? This is very strange... but I understand perfectly what's going on - I'm just not going to say it right now. I'm curious to see what is going to happen here. Probably nothing.
But I'm going to stay tuned, because I have a thrist for knowledge and I enjoy learning new things.
I never quite figured out the very first chapter of Genesis until somewhat recently when I read it very carefully - there is a firmament that seperates the waters below the firmament from the waters above the firmament, or something along those lines.
But then, the waters below the firmament get seperated out, or split up, by landmasses. So I just never quite "got" it until I thought about it a little bit.
The "firmament" is not the land, like I thought it was, the "firmament" is heaven? (I think). Heaven (the firmament) is like a checkpoint or something, something you pass through as you are leaving or entering the "waters" below the firmament, which are now seperated by land masses. Above, or on the other side of that firmament, are the waters "above" the firmament. My hunch is that these "waters" on the other side of heaven (the firmament) are moving away from us at the speed of light, quite possibly with heaven itself trailing close behind these waters. This might help explain why heaven is only 4000 years old while our universe as we know it is some 14 billion or so.
So in any case, there are "waters" on the other side of the firmament, which have nothing to do with anything in our universe as we know it. I never quite "got" that. Back then, or perhaps even now, who is to say that a dream is any less real than "reality". What is reality? Perhaps there are mountains in heaven? Perhaps Noah rose above. Our physical bodies, and our physical reality, is not the only thing that has significance, you know. Obviously, Noah did go on a journey; there was a flood. That everything else died while Noah was on this journey, that may carry some significance. Part of what happened from Noah is still with us today, so that's significant. It's a beautiful thing. Noah, and those he brought with him, experienced this journey. The others, they did not experience the journey. If you are alive today, then your DNA has experienced that journey. Even if that journey was a dream. Call it a theory if it makes you more comfortable. I like to call it a dream, or a dream world. It gives your imagination more freedom and brings the whole thing into perspective. Although it may not necessarily be a "dream", that's just what I feel comfortable calling it, and that's what helps me relate to it better.
I think what happens is that we look at the dream world and it acts like a mirror of ourselves, we see ourselves, not the dream world. We "see" science, and we fail to see Noah and his journey. I have a feeling this might be an issue for those individuals who are climing this mountain, because their faith has led them to a point where they are literally searching for remnants of a dream. Now, if they were climing the mountain to try to find the Lord God, that would be an entirely different story. That would be a worthwhile endeavor. They won't find the ark; it's highly unlikely. Although, to some extent, anything is possible. But maybe, perhaps, they just might find the Lord God. Now that would be cool.
One can definitely argue that it's not fair. But in the context of the DRM, it's obvious that playfair removes a parameter of control from the track.
Limiting the number of CD's you can burn, limiting the number of copies that you can make, basically, limiting the number of copies in one way or another. That would seem, to me, to be an important parameter.
I don't think this has anything to do with open source at all. It's basically removing a very important parameter as far as Apple is concerned.
What it is doing is setting a bad precedent; Apple is being a bad role model; Apple is showing other wanna-be companies how to intimidate people by them. I am not going to talk about this anymore.
The file-sharing phenomenon is exactly that. It's a phenomenon. Is it unethical? I don't know enough about ethics to say yes or no. Personally, the way I feel is that if you can purchase the music somewhere, either online or brick and mortar, then it's wrong to download that music. Music that you can't buy, like live shows, especially bands that allow trading of their live shows, that is perfectly ethical to download and trade those.
I have felt for a long time what is really important for us right now is to move the technology of sound quality forward, not backwards. We have bent sound quality to fit within our new internet phenomenon. I don't know about you, but I have gotten some pretty nasty headaches from listening to mp3 files. I don't like being at a party or something along those lines where mp3 music is being played. mpc files don't help the issue, although they sound a lot better in some cases. Apple's format is not that much better. It's the subtle nuances, it's the stuff you don't hear. I might be overly sensitive, but it still does give me a headache sometimes.
Once the legal and economic systems allow us to move away from the CD to something like DVD Audio, file sharing will change, and it will truly become a haven for the young and the poor. Why on earth would somebody opt for a free mp3 when the "real deal" is 24bit 96khz? No money, don't care about sound quality, etc...
Nothing wrong with being young and poor, but it's no way to live. Growing up, in the future, is going to involve listening to "real" audio formats with "excellent" sound quality. And if iTunes doesn't keep up the pace, they will fall behind. So the real question becomes bandwidth, and can an online distribution center, Apple's or any other, sustain the bandwidth that is necessary to be able to provide 24bit 96khz downloads of stuff? Or 24bit 96khz resampled, reworked, remastered stuff? Will the price and profitability of an online download service scale well when DVD Audio becomes the mainstream, and the bandwidth required increases exponentially, both at the server end, and at the last-mile?
With a 3Mbps cable modem, a gig still takes slightly less than an hour; with slower services it can take much longer, and dialup will take you a month or more of leaving the modem connected all night. A gigabyte of 24bit 96Khz audio is not that much; I haven't done the math precisely, but my rough calculations show that it's about 20 minutes worth of music. Bending sound quality to enable downloading of tunes is only going to go so far. The only real solution is to have fiber running through the neighborhood.
So in the long run, if the economy improves, and as the fascination of the "PC" fades somewhat, sound quality will again see a rebirth, and there is no worse enemy of file sharing and p2p than sound quality. I still wonder why the music industry doesn't see this. In many areas of the world, broadband is a metered service, and ultimately, it's just less expensive to order the CD than it is to download 3+ gigs of data, plus having to pay for the tracks from the download service.
Probably one of the best ways to relieve stress.
In any case, you will gain productivity if you exercise more, and you will feel better to boot.
Stress is your body's reaction to something outside of your body. You may not be able to control what is going on outside of your body, but you can, and should, at least _believe_ that you can control your body's reaction to it.
Make a commitment, even 30 minutes a day, every day, in the morning when you wake up, or something along those lines. I find that when a project hits, and I have to get it done ASAP, that it's easy to forget to exercise.
Here's the thing. If you forget the exercise commitment, even if it's just 30 minutes a day, you are actually being less efficient. I have known managers (including myself) that tend towards the fallacious theory that as long as an employee (or manager) is stressed out, the job is getting done as well as it can be. After all, if you are so carefree, and everything is behind schedule, isn't there something wrong with that? But guess what? If you are stressed out, the project will be just as behind schedule as if you aren't. There is a "fad", if you will, where we are essentially being paid for being stressed out. This is wrong, and unnecessary. It is easier to be busy, for instance, if you eat a proper diet, exercise, and get enough sleep. A proper diet and exercise can also reduce the amount of time that you need to sleep.
So while being stressed out may be inevitable and ubiquitous, one thing it won't do is get the job done faster and better. Stress, in my experience, has just been used as a coping mechanism, as an excuse for poor management. Just look around and you will see that it is. Managers trying to do stuff they shouldn't be doing to try to save money is one symptom of this.
Bring your level of skill (including social engineering skills), your level of input into the workplace to a point where you don't have time to be stressed out. [ busy != stressed out ]. Problem is, if your manager is stressed out, and insists on being busier than you, you may have a problem on your hands. There is no work, no job that needs, in any way, to "inherently" be stress-causing. I just don't believe that. On the other hand, unnecessary stress that destroys lives can be found in almost any sector, in any job, anywhere in the world.
Exercise, exercise, exercise is that answer to so many problems that it's not even funny. Speaking of exercise....
OK, let's see... a CD-R, on average, if you are crafty, will probably contain 600-650 megs each. Let's say that in ten years, we have a media format that can store 16 gigs, perhaps a DVD-like removable media. So maybe 25 CD's will fit on one of these mega-storage optical removable thingees. I don't think that's entirely unreasonable to expect something with this kind of capacity in the next decade or two.
Floppies, for instance 450+ floppies on one CD. So all that we really need to do is move the data from the CD's, perhaps even keeping the CD's, to the latest greatest optical storage that might appear at some point in the next decade or two. Meantime, take good care of the CDR's.
So if I have 2500 CDR's, which is a lot, that's only 100 of these new, as-of-yet-nonexistant 16 gigabyte optical storage media. I would imagine that we could have 16 gig digital storage disks or even greater. We'll just have to take the time to move them from one media to another; that's what will take the time.
Now they have those DAT 72 (that's 72 gigs compressed) tapes for about $20 each, so maybe it's time to think about backing up the data with a small DAT-sized tape. I think that's kind of cool. It's 36 gigs uncompressed, and for archival type data, that may be as good as it gets (some data compresses better than other data) That's still pretty impressive, for compressed music files or things like that that don't compress very well. About 60 CDR's in something the size of a DAT. Not bad. Certainly for text files, word processing files, things like that that compress well, 72 gigs (that 120 CD-R's) makes it even more impressive. But shn files and flac files probably don't really compress much more than they already are, so it's more like 36 gigs per tape.
There are ways around it; who wants to lug around a huge box full of thousands of CDRs?
I do think that Groklaw is cool, and some of the people that post there are some very experienced programmers - I have learned quite a few things from reading the posts over there. It is a very, very valuable source of information, if you can weed through the garbage (every site like that, including /. has garbage (no offense meant))- so I have a lot of respect for Groklaw, but there is one disturbing trend that bothers me; it goes like this. It starts when a self-proclaimed IP holder, or an analyst, or a reporter says something absurd or uninformed or uneducated or something in bad faith about Linux - this quote, article, statement, etc... then makes it onto Groklaw's toplevel story, a sense of outrage and injustice is built up, worst-case scenarios are explored, and then there is a constructive, facts-based, breaking-down of the rhetoric. That's all fine, in and of itself, but the way I see it, all you need to do is break down the facts once and it becomes obvious that the situation is not quite as bad as you can make it out to be if you freak out about it in your own mind. It's another implementation of Hades to have to do this every day for the rest of eternity. I find sometimes that it's easier to remain calm, and not worry. So my concern is that there appears to be a need to amplify, or that Groklaw has, at times, amplified the FUD, prior to breaking it down. Instead of amplifying the FUD, ignore it, then you don't need to break it down. That's my complaint. So tie that in with an open-source insurance company, and I don't like what I see one bit. Of course insurance companies will amplify FUD if it is in their best interests, but you shouldn't on the one hand complain about FUD and on the other amplify it whilst offering a solution to it from which you will reap financial gain. I don't like that at all. Maybe the open-source insurance company will be non-profit, that's one thing, but if it needs backers, those people will be in it for money. Somewhere down the line, "open-source insurance" will be making someone rich. That's my point. So don't amplify the FUD, please.
What is an appropriate remedy if there were to have been some misappropriated code, which there more than likely is not? Certainly not what SCO is suggesting. They aren't actually focused on a remedy, they appear to be focused on the "freedom" part, the freedom to view source code and modify it. This freedom is going to be extremely, extremely, extremely difficult to insure, because you never know who is modifying what, where, when, and how; to have to submit your source code to the insurance people every time you change something is kind of absurd, but that's of course what you are going to have to do. The "price" of Linux is what it is. You can either afford it or you can't. It's the freedom to modify, the freedom to change the source, that's the freedom that is being attacked. Losing that freedom is not an appropriate remedy for copyright, patent, or trademark infringement. There are more appropriate remedies for those types of violations. Insurance will also have to put some kind of damper on that freedom in order to be financially plausible. That's why I think it's a bad idea.
I think it's an overreaction. People aren't going to stop using Linux, it's going to be very hard to get people to stop using Linux. Especially in an international sense. Linux is not just about the US, it's about the world. Worst-case scenario, those countries who don't adopt an attitude like Germany has are going to lose out. Obviously, insurance is neither a particularly desirable thing, nor is it anyone's first choice. Now, insurance against a poor legal system, that's a good idea!
Find a way to insure freely modifiable software without putting a damper on the freedom to modify. I bet you can't.
I just thought of this. It's a fine line between how secure you want something to be, and how much of a pain it is. It's the whole 9/11 thing. Too much security is a bad thing, because it shuts down the economy, and makes life exceedingly difficult, not to mention that it affects freedoms that we are used to. We hear this kind of talk in the media all the time. It's a fine line - too little security, disaster happens - too much, life gets difficult and the economy suffers.
So the fact that it takes a certain amount of time to respond to security problems is indicative of the superior nature of Linux. Even though some analyst may say that this is technically not as secure as something else, with Linux you can let things slide a little more because that's just the kind of OS it is. The distros are "on top" of it, because still, nothing bad really happens. That's the test - what bad happens. If nothing bad happens, it doesn't matter how you look at it, because the bottom line - your data is safe.
Furthermore, if need be, you can "crank up" the security level in Linux. Way up. National security level. Hardened. Trusted. It's just unnecessary, and makes it harder to use for non-critical situations.
So look at the bottom line, and look at the ability to crank up the security level. Windows has very little ability to crank up any security level, it needs hardware to do that. Linux can crank up the security without needing specialized hardware.
Linux is superior, and the fact that it is "less secure than Windows", yet nothing bad happens, just goes to prove how technically superior it really is. These analysts have just shown how superior Linux really is.
I remember once I installed OpenBSD on an old SparcStation 1+ (that's 25Mhz) with a 1gig scsi drive. I was new to it, and so when the install process asked what "security level" I wanted to install at, I installed at one below the most secure. It was very strange. Very hard to get anything done, it had no path.
I changed the security level to "normal" because I just got freaked out by how strange it was; I only wanted to see if I could get the box running at all, and the heightened security level was making life difficult.
So the real study that someone should do, is how "ease of use" affects "security". Because that's where the real deal is at. It's just like having to go through the lines at the airport - the more secure we need to be, the more of a pain it is for everyone.
There is definitely an inverse relationship between "ease of use" and "security". Seeing as how there is a big focus on making Linux easy to use, or at least it seems to me that there is; I get the feeling that people won't accept Linux if it's not as easy to use as Windows or OS X, I wouldn't be surprised to see Linux security, or "user friendly" Linux security suffer a little bit.
But still, Linux has been designed from the outset with security in mind; other user-friendly OS's are designed for ease of use. It's going to take some time, but we are slowly going to move in the right direction. If Linux is a secure OS now, and some consultancy group says that it isn't, then the trick would be to make it LESS secure by making it more user-friendly, and immediately, consultancy groups and analysts will be saying that it is secure. But that's a sacrifice that's not really worth it. However, unfortunately, given the open nature of Linux, and that fact that it can go in many directions, we will probably see Linuxes that are less secure than they could be because of the focus on user-friendliness. So I guess that means that analysts are going to change their minds? I wouldn't be surprised.
I have been thinking a lot about the /. article about a week or so ago that concerned what the world would be like without Microsoft. I saw another article elsewhere that was talking about business software, spreadsheets, and the like, and how the current crop of spreadsheets has affected the way business thinks about these kinds of things.
And I can relate to the "unpopular opinion" concept that the parent post has just talked about, because I was just feeling that way yesterday. I guess the best we can do is to try to present our opinions respectfully and honestly.
So here it is:
If you want to play a DVD, get a DVD player. That's what they are for.
Certainly, there are many other issues, and wouldn't it be nice if my computer could do this, or do that, and so on, but I have been thinking a LOT about what a computer is, what its place is in my life, and maybe just redefine a little bit what a computer really is, and what the most effective things to do with a computer are.
Personally, I would rather watch the DVD on a couch, with a plasma screen, with larger speakers and the surround sound. The entire thing of DVD on your computer, or music on your computer, or other things on your computer, which you had to purchase seperately before - it's a "something for nothing" proposition, kind of. Is watching DVDs on a computer just really cool or something, or is it just done just to do it, just for fun - of course there is nothing wrong with that, but I just see a DVD as something that belongs on a plasma with surround sound, with a nice couch. Of course, you may not be able to afford these things, but what I am trying to say is that "computers", as such, are (or should) be about more than just saving money because you can't afford nice things.
Would it be better that we turn computers into DVD players by crippling them and turning them into something that is no longer a computer? I would rather have a computer be a computer, "computer" still being something that we probably will keep redefining, and something that actually, lots of people don't really need as much as they think they do, or maybe it's more like they don't need it as bad as the big computer firms need them to buy millions of computers.
For instance, if there were small airborne transportation vehicles that you could buy, the sky would be all different. Setting up traffic lanes in the air, crashes in mid-air that come through your roof, things like that. Maybe it's better to not have everyone flying around in their personal aircraft, and to reserve aircraft for longer distances. There are many folks that feel that there are also too many cars, and that the focus has become one of car companies selling more of them, oil companies selling more fuel, "in the name of jobs". It's a stone age - it's a stone age.
It's one thing to say "I have the RIGHT to play DVDs on my PC" - that's something in and of itself. It's another to say "I NEED to play DVDs on my PC". Wouldn't it be better with a nice couch , a plasma screen, and a high-end surround sound setup? To some extent, the same thing can be said about mp3 files and crappy computer speakers, although listening to music while you study or surf the net or are doing some kind of boring work in the office IS a nice touch. But watching a DVD is a fairly all-encompassing experience - it pretty much takes up all your senses. You have to stop what you are doing, more or less, to watch a DVD.
I think that part of making computers integrate better with our lives is to not have one thing try to do everything. That's actually the whole Unix philosphy, GNU Coreutils, piping commands from simple building blocks, from one stdout to another stdin, instead of having one single monolithic application that takes an hour to just fire up. Split it up. DVD players cost $100 sometimes, sometimes even less. Who doesn't have a TV? I would rather that the manufacturers don't cripple the PC than go out of their way to bend the PC just so that you can p
Yeah, this bothers me, the more I think about it.
/usr/ports/whatever on a FreeBSD box, I know where the dependencies are coming from, or more specifically, I know that the port maintainer has programmed various locations, in order of preference, where the dependencies come from. With Debian, the dependencies come from the same place as the package you are getting.
/usr/local/bin, and how does installing rpms and debs from known sources constitute a security risk? Check the md5 if you don't trust it.
apt? It's from a mirror. Mirrors have md5 lists. If you worry, check the md5.
Maybe I am missing something here, but transparency is a bad thing, if the locations aren't hard-coded somewhere. On top of that, making things easy for people who don't know what's going on is a little too good to be true.
The only thing holding a malicious person back would be permissions on the devices (i.e. ethernet card). If I can download a small smtp server "transparently" with everything necessary to run it, how is this prevented? Permissions on ethernet card?
I guess it just boils down to "known" apps. I know what dict is. I know what gaim is. I know what xmms is. When I go to a debian mirror, or cd
What's wrong with
I was at a friend's house the other night, and I happened to use the Windows 2000 computer to look up something we were talking about. I couldn't even read the webpage for 10 seconds without a pop-up showing up - not from the website, from some processes that were spawning from somewhere. I would estimate that 90% of the system resources of that one computer were being used by malicious third parties. Disgusting.
So, my point is... stupidity is no excuse. Why, please... this is what I want to know. Why is it OK to be stupid? Calculus is bad because it's too hard for most people. It needs to be replaced with arithemetic. Mathematical Physics is even harder for the "average joe", just give him a girly mag.
If you want to use computers, you need to know how they work. If you want your car to work, you'd better learn how to fix it yourself or pay a mechanic to fix it. Brain surgery is too difficult, we should just replace it with prayer.
Come on people! Please.
What does the word "install" mean?
/usr/local/bin?
Do I run it from the net, or do I run it from my computer. If I don't need to run my app over the internet, after the first time, then it IS installed. Or no, it's not installed, it's cached. But that's the same thing, or is it?
I support freedom, I support freedom for people to do what they want. I was reading the Gentoo webpages, and the author was saying that the goal of Gentoo is to enable the user of the Linux box to do what they want. Not what the designer of the distro wants, what the user wants. That means that the distro may need to be able to do 10,000 things - that's the whole idea.
So, from that perspective, I support people doing what they will with the technology, whatever they want to do, they should be able to do it. More power to the people!
Personally, however, this sounds to me like something that I would have absolutely no interest in whatsoever. I'm not installing, but I'm installing? What's up with that? Automatically goes out and finds missing dependencies? Who's dependencies?
I don't like it. But that's just me. That's just my opinion. It's an interesting concept, but to say that you're not installing, that's just not what is going on, and I just smell licensing issues big time. Sort of like DRM or something.
This type of thing could be abused by spammers, malware, and greedy organizations. If it's an application, and it runs on my machine, it's installed. To create a seperate directory, I mean... what's wrong with
I support diversity, and it sounds like this is a popular idea - but I see a potential for abuse, because it's saying "you don't have to install, it runs over the internet", but it actually IS on your hard drive. Cached...installed...
But just because I don't like it doesn't mean that others have to also not like it. It sounds interesting, and certainly could prove useful for certain things.
So I wish the project well, but in expressing my opinion about it, I don't like it one bit. That's just my opinion, though, it doesn't mean it's a bad idea. You could probably get very rich doing this.
Here is how I feel about it.
If you can PURCHASE the media (song, movie, dvd) somwhere, anywhere... online store, for-fee download, brick and mortar store - if you can buy it somewhere, then you should really question why you are downloading it "illegally". It's pretty much as simple as that.
You may have to search the internet for the label; you may have to purchase from the label directly - if that's the case, do it. If you think it's too expensive, if you can't afford to buy it, then don't. But that's no excuse to download it. Bascially, just don't download anything that is available for purchase somewhere. It's unethical. Unless, of course, it's one of those rare books or works of art that are available under a creative commons license or some other license that allows you to do that. But those are exceptions, not the rule.
And this is sort of a catch-22, because prior to the "PC", young folks have often spent money on media (music, magazines, movies) that they couldn't really afford; it would be fair to say that the entertainment industry thrives on money collected from millions of people that really couldn't afford to give that money in the first place but were sort of suckered into it by the hype and the fanatacism that surrounds celebrity.
So the "PC", a.k.a Redmond, has usurped the scam; replacing it with another one.
But seriously, if you can buy it somewhere, don't download it. If you can't afford it, just be tough and don't download it either. Maybe if enough people don't buy because they can't afford, maybe the industry will recognize that and do something about it. Doubtful, but in any case, it's your money, and you shouldn't allow people to sucker you into spending it on something you can't afford. But that's not an excuse to try to circumvent the system, either.
They could patent this rice too. You can't patent regular rice (IIRC), or regular anything, or, as the original poster mentioned, crossing two tomatoes to make a redder, juicer tomato. You can put your name on it, but this "biotech" stuff can be patented.
The scary part, for the most part, is that it's a business methodology, if you will - it's just an "excuse" to make money, a way to create value - they could probably care less (some of patent-heads do care less) about whether or not the rice would benefit anyone. They would patent regular rice if they could do it, but they can't. The whole biotech movement is almost as much about patents and ways to create value and monetize things as it is about the supposed benefits that these crops have.
It takes longer to develop the crop than it does to respond to the dynamic environmental conditions that the crop is being designed to solve. I thought breast feeding was in style these days. Furthermore, getting the equivalent of a "nutritional label" on real breast milk is impossible, because the nutritional content of breast milk changes from day to day, perhaps even hour to hour - some say this is to adapt to the baby's needs; it's a type of connection between the mother and the child. Given this dynamic nature of breast milk, and its ancient origin, it is ill-advised to even attempt to duplicate its complexity, because we don't fully understand how it works to begin with. You can't mass-produce breast milk - it's not that kind of thing. Human beings are biologically set up to be weaned off of it - some sooner, some later.
I can understand growing your own tomatoes, but growing your own rice is a different story. Not quite the same thing. But it's kind of where we are headed, is having to grow your own if you live in an area where this patent madness is going on.
On the other hand, why pay money to go to a gym when you can save money by working in your own garden? I have figured it out, sort of, that gardening, if you do it right, works out to around $20 per hour or so in terms of money that you save. So get your exercise and save yourself from spending $20 an hour on food that you can grow in your back yard, or someone else's back yard.