Lots of tears over Usenet, but what about Fidonet??
If a technology or mode of communication means soo much to us, then, given that Usenet is not owned by Comcast, what is to stop us from cooking up a free and useful solution that does work? If geeks created Usenet, why do we have to let Comcast "kill" it?
I know it is not an option everywhere, but I do know that where I live, we have more than Comcast as an option for ISP... if someone wants Usenet here, they can just vote with their feet and get a DSL line from Verizon or one of the local telcom providers. Speed may not be the same, but it is up to use to decide what is important - not Comcast. They can say, well we dropped Usenet, but speed is more important anyway... and we can say that, no, Usenet is more important, and switch ISPs.
The claim that "if it is on your iPod but you can't produce the corresponding iTunes bill-of-sale, or a reciept, or a physical CD, or Tape, or Record, etc." still doesn't seem valid. What if I paid cash, threw out the receipt, ripped the CD, and then lost the CD? I would have made my rightful backup copy of the media, and then lost it, thus demonstrating the need for the backup copy. But now I have no proof of 'ownership' or 'right' to listen to the music?
What if my music collection of CDs was stolen out of my car? Now I have an iPod full of music I rightfully own, but, assuming I usually pay cash, and am bad with keeping reciepts for ten-year-old CDs, I will be prosecuted as a music thief. Meanwhile, the thief that stole my CDs can walk across the border and say, "Hey man! I'm legit, look, here's my CD collection!"
Will I be able to take a lie-detector test? Maybe they'll just scan my brain as I drive through, like a Speed-pass, to determine which songs on my iPod I paid for?
Can we PPPlease! drop this f*cking IP stuff and move on to a more reasonable society? If it was a governemnt of and for the people, this sort of thing would have been banished a long time ago.
I was clinically depressed due to a chronic pain condition brought on by a car accident and lots of broken bones. Counseling was not making the depression go away. Side effects of some drugs did not help my depression, they worsened it, but some other drugs did help - at least a little. That the drug did not cause me to be healed after one dose was not a problem - it helped slowly and surely and eventually I was better. I tried stopping taking the pill at one point and things got worse again. It seems like, if you are on the edge of a threshold of depression, whether or not the drugs do a huge amount of help, if they can just barely push you back onto the plus side of the threshold and you can gain ground against the depression, then that is all that matters. Was it placebo? What the hell do I care? It worked.
The real problem is the price of drugs - health care should be socialized, or something, so that drug companies are not ripping off drug consumers who are between a rock and a, well, let's say, suicide. I don't really care if the prescription is for obecalp or whatever, if it works. But when the drugs cost more than is normally within your means, that's bad. It seems like if drugs were more affordable or even free, with prescription, as long as they did not have a permanent negative side-effect, people wouldn't care if they were placebos or not.
I just attended the Mac OS X Leopard Server seminar Apple is touring through the country with... in Boston... and during the talk about CalDAV, the Apple tech reps said that Microsoft had a plugin available to Office for using CalDAV to some degree. I don't know more than that, but at least some Apple people think that MS is on board with CalDAV. Actually, they listed the steering committee members for CalDAV on a big screen, and buried among the 50-some-odd names was Microsoft.
I interviewed both FreeNAS and OpenFiler for my own home NAS. I started with OpenFiler - I was intrigued by iSCSI and after reading the feature set was convinced it was the best thing since sliced kiwi. But my home hardware was meager - a PII 350 running a variety of SCSI disks. OpenFiler technically worked, but it was sluggish - the user interface took ages to use. So I looked a bit and found FreeNAS. Install was easier and faster than OpenFiler - but was stunned me was how screaming fast the web user interface was compared to OpenFiler. My PII 350 was giving the instantaneous response I had hoped it would be able to provide. FreeNAS has been running my NAS with 8 different SCSI disks in one giant concatenated logical disk (don't remind me how unsafe this) for a year now. The software RAID is easy to use. I like that it does AFP sharing for my Macs really seamlessly. With no UPS, I was worried about power failure, but I've lost power multiple times and it worked fine afterwards. It is highly responsive on the network and all of my home computers can leech off of it with little problem. I played with OpenFiler at work on a more powerful machine and did like its iSCSI capabilities - but FreeNAS has those now as well, so I can't see any reason for a home user to bother with OpenFiler.
I sent in a photo submission, but never heard back. Should I assume the best, or worst?
Here in Central VT we had about 15 to 20 people show. We had a cake and poster and some brief presentations, lots of discussion... we retired to the local brewpub after the initial party and sat around drinking and talking about nerdy stuff until about 10:30pm... with the party starting at 6:30, that's not bad. T-shrits arrived late, but I won't complain about free schwag! We are going to use it to convince people to do awesome presentations at the monthly VAGUE meetings... do a good presentation, get a free T-shirt! Works out great for the organizers, the presenters, and the public!
Thanks Slashdot, for everything, and happy burfday!
The way I see things, a system is not dead unless 0 people are using it. Its relative. If 1 person is using a system (I do mean using it... as in not just keeping it around to look at it from time to time), then that system is not dead to that person.
It makes a lot more sense to say a system or community for a system is dying than that it is dead.
Newton as a platform has not yet died. It is dying, I feel, in that the size of the community is shrinking (slowly mind you). But there is no pre-determined date or time when the platform will be dead. Since there is no guarantee that a platform will totally die, moves like putting the software onto new hardware don't resurect the platform as much as breath new life into it. I understand that issue of actually acquiring these Sharp Zauruses and as such, this particular event may not be as large a breath of life as, say, porting Einstein to a Linux tablet PC available for purchase in Europe and the US. But this is something. If we put Einstein on a Zaurus, then we can put it on lots of things. Maybe this is just the start of a long awaited CPR session.
Newtons are not yet dead, I still use mine, and the NewtonTalk mailing list is very lively with lots of people who actively live life through their Newtons. Some of you reading this may think that people who still rely on Newtons are pathetic, but swallow your arrogance and think, for just a moment, that perhaps not everyone lives the same as you do nor lives on the edge of the technology curve. Perhaps some people care more about getting tasks done the way they want/need to do them than being cutting edge just for the sake of being cutting edge.
People say that Amigas are dead. People say that BeOS is dead. People say that SGI is dead. People say that NeXTStep/OpenStep is dead.
I see that all of these platforms are still very much alive. The communities may be smaller than they once were, but I would posit that perhaps the smaller communities are much tighter and more energetic than they were when they didn't have to depend on eachother for advances in the platform. Amigas are still getting updated operating systems (Pegagsos I think is the name). BeOS/Haiku is still under development and the community is still quite lively on BeShare at least. The SGI is far from dead... go check out nekochan.net if you disagree. And anyone who argues that NeXT/OpenStep is dead... they're the most wrong of all death vocalisers. MacOSX is probably the fastest growing platform on the planet at the moment (although not largest compared to Windows installations). MacOSX *is* OpenStep after it recieved that breath of life I was writing about above. Mac OS classic is closer to death than OpenStep (and thus NeXTStep) at this point. The only thing that changed (for a while) was the hardware that MacOSX/OpenStep 'v5' was running on. And now, with MacOSX running on Intel in the public eye, OpenStep has triumphantly returned to a platform it had to abandon (publicly) when it was bought by Apple.
People who call a platform dead should spend some time in the given community, with an open mind, before making any such declaration. Cutting edge enthusiasts are welcome to be cutting edge enthusiasts, but we all need to stop and consider that different people have different priorities and points of view.
BeOS drivers were user space, as were all services. This had is weaknesses in that some of the user space programs were not written as stably as they should have been (net_server), but hey, when they crash, you just launch the user-space program again, and that thing is restarted. I don't think Minix's approach to drivers is really so very different from BeOS' approach. It is unfortunate that so few people were honestly exposed to BeOS - it was a great leap forward at its time and for about 10 years after its time.
"This reality is not going to change. In fact it will only get worse as technology coverage is handed to newer, less-qualified observers who simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer. With no Microsoft-centric frame of reference, Microsoft cannot look good."
So, less qualified observers won't be able to use Windows? I don't know a single person who can't at least write a paper with MS Word on Windows. I know lots of people that look at the Mac with fear. I personally am one of the few people in my group that is a Mac owner, user, and preferrer (over Windows... I also use an SGI), so I don't feel like I try to hang out with only my own crowd of Windows zealots. I just don't believe that the differences between the basic user experience of Windows or Mac OS are so completely different that a Mac user could not sit down and write a paper on a Windows user, and vice versa. Heck, even the document writing software can be the same - Microsoft Word.. or OpenOffice.
Anywho, I don't see why being able to use Windows vs MacOS makes you more or less qualified to observe the industry and comment on its changes... a completely impartial observer that used typewriters would probably be a better tech columnist anyway.
Dvorak sounds like one of the dinosaurs defending any older technology that is being passed by. He also sounds like a typical PC elitist... which is no better than a Mac elitist. To say that the Windows system is soo much more complicated than the Mac system... Mac elitists claim that the Mac is soo much easier to use than a Windows system. They have the same file-system user interface structures (disks and directories filled with files), the same web browsers, the same icons to launch the same applications, the same names for menus (file, edit, view, help, etc.), the same buttons to maximize/shrink/close windows, and only slightly different methods for switching between open applications. What's the big deal? I'm not claiming that they are so the same that there is no difference, but the basic UI elements are so similiar in base-level functionality that a user of one system should not be totally thrown by the other system.
Just to be on the record, a number of local ISPs here in Vermont don't update DNS records for 2-3 weeks. Sovernet, our big local provider, is among them. Very frustrating.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of tears over Usenet, but what about Fidonet??
If a technology or mode of communication means soo much to us, then, given that Usenet is not owned by Comcast, what is to stop us from cooking up a free and useful solution that does work? If geeks created Usenet, why do we have to let Comcast "kill" it?
I know it is not an option everywhere, but I do know that where I live, we have more than Comcast as an option for ISP... if someone wants Usenet here, they can just vote with their feet and get a DSL line from Verizon or one of the local telcom providers. Speed may not be the same, but it is up to use to decide what is important - not Comcast. They can say, well we dropped Usenet, but speed is more important anyway... and we can say that, no, Usenet is more important, and switch ISPs.
The claim that "if it is on your iPod but you can't produce the corresponding iTunes bill-of-sale, or a reciept, or a physical CD, or Tape, or Record, etc." still doesn't seem valid. What if I paid cash, threw out the receipt, ripped the CD, and then lost the CD? I would have made my rightful backup copy of the media, and then lost it, thus demonstrating the need for the backup copy. But now I have no proof of 'ownership' or 'right' to listen to the music?
What if my music collection of CDs was stolen out of my car? Now I have an iPod full of music I rightfully own, but, assuming I usually pay cash, and am bad with keeping reciepts for ten-year-old CDs, I will be prosecuted as a music thief. Meanwhile, the thief that stole my CDs can walk across the border and say, "Hey man! I'm legit, look, here's my CD collection!"
Will I be able to take a lie-detector test? Maybe they'll just scan my brain as I drive through, like a Speed-pass, to determine which songs on my iPod I paid for?
Can we PPPlease! drop this f*cking IP stuff and move on to a more reasonable society? If it was a governemnt of and for the people, this sort of thing would have been banished a long time ago.
"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose..."
I thought this was a Mammals reference. Oh well!
I agree that the headline is off.
I was clinically depressed due to a chronic pain condition brought on by a car accident and lots of broken bones. Counseling was not making the depression go away. Side effects of some drugs did not help my depression, they worsened it, but some other drugs did help - at least a little. That the drug did not cause me to be healed after one dose was not a problem - it helped slowly and surely and eventually I was better. I tried stopping taking the pill at one point and things got worse again. It seems like, if you are on the edge of a threshold of depression, whether or not the drugs do a huge amount of help, if they can just barely push you back onto the plus side of the threshold and you can gain ground against the depression, then that is all that matters. Was it placebo? What the hell do I care? It worked.
The real problem is the price of drugs - health care should be socialized, or something, so that drug companies are not ripping off drug consumers who are between a rock and a, well, let's say, suicide. I don't really care if the prescription is for obecalp or whatever, if it works. But when the drugs cost more than is normally within your means, that's bad. It seems like if drugs were more affordable or even free, with prescription, as long as they did not have a permanent negative side-effect, people wouldn't care if they were placebos or not.
I just attended the Mac OS X Leopard Server seminar Apple is touring through the country with... in Boston... and during the talk about CalDAV, the Apple tech reps said that Microsoft had a plugin available to Office for using CalDAV to some degree. I don't know more than that, but at least some Apple people think that MS is on board with CalDAV. Actually, they listed the steering committee members for CalDAV on a big screen, and buried among the 50-some-odd names was Microsoft.
So, CalDAV maybe worth more investigation.
I interviewed both FreeNAS and OpenFiler for my own home NAS. I started with OpenFiler - I was intrigued by iSCSI and after reading the feature set was convinced it was the best thing since sliced kiwi. But my home hardware was meager - a PII 350 running a variety of SCSI disks. OpenFiler technically worked, but it was sluggish - the user interface took ages to use. So I looked a bit and found FreeNAS. Install was easier and faster than OpenFiler - but was stunned me was how screaming fast the web user interface was compared to OpenFiler. My PII 350 was giving the instantaneous response I had hoped it would be able to provide. FreeNAS has been running my NAS with 8 different SCSI disks in one giant concatenated logical disk (don't remind me how unsafe this) for a year now. The software RAID is easy to use. I like that it does AFP sharing for my Macs really seamlessly. With no UPS, I was worried about power failure, but I've lost power multiple times and it worked fine afterwards. It is highly responsive on the network and all of my home computers can leech off of it with little problem. I played with OpenFiler at work on a more powerful machine and did like its iSCSI capabilities - but FreeNAS has those now as well, so I can't see any reason for a home user to bother with OpenFiler.
I sent in a photo submission, but never heard back. Should I assume the best, or worst?
Here in Central VT we had about 15 to 20 people show. We had a cake and poster and some brief presentations, lots of discussion... we retired to the local brewpub after the initial party and sat around drinking and talking about nerdy stuff until about 10:30pm... with the party starting at 6:30, that's not bad. T-shrits arrived late, but I won't complain about free schwag! We are going to use it to convince people to do awesome presentations at the monthly VAGUE meetings... do a good presentation, get a free T-shirt! Works out great for the organizers, the presenters, and the public!
Thanks Slashdot, for everything, and happy burfday!
The way I see things, a system is not dead unless 0 people are using it. Its relative. If 1 person is using a system (I do mean using it... as in not just keeping it around to look at it from time to time), then that system is not dead to that person.
... go check out nekochan.net if you disagree. And anyone who argues that NeXT/OpenStep is dead... they're the most wrong of all death vocalisers. MacOSX is probably the fastest growing platform on the planet at the moment (although not largest compared to Windows installations). MacOSX *is* OpenStep after it recieved that breath of life I was writing about above. Mac OS classic is closer to death than OpenStep (and thus NeXTStep) at this point. The only thing that changed (for a while) was the hardware that MacOSX/OpenStep 'v5' was running on. And now, with MacOSX running on Intel in the public eye, OpenStep has triumphantly returned to a platform it had to abandon (publicly) when it was bought by Apple.
It makes a lot more sense to say a system or community for a system is dying than that it is dead.
Newton as a platform has not yet died. It is dying, I feel, in that the size of the community is shrinking (slowly mind you). But there is no pre-determined date or time when the platform will be dead. Since there is no guarantee that a platform will totally die, moves like putting the software onto new hardware don't resurect the platform as much as breath new life into it. I understand that issue of actually acquiring these Sharp Zauruses and as such, this particular event may not be as large a breath of life as, say, porting Einstein to a Linux tablet PC available for purchase in Europe and the US. But this is something. If we put Einstein on a Zaurus, then we can put it on lots of things. Maybe this is just the start of a long awaited CPR session.
Newtons are not yet dead, I still use mine, and the NewtonTalk mailing list is very lively with lots of people who actively live life through their Newtons. Some of you reading this may think that people who still rely on Newtons are pathetic, but swallow your arrogance and think, for just a moment, that perhaps not everyone lives the same as you do nor lives on the edge of the technology curve. Perhaps some people care more about getting tasks done the way they want/need to do them than being cutting edge just for the sake of being cutting edge.
People say that Amigas are dead. People say that BeOS is dead. People say that SGI is dead. People say that NeXTStep/OpenStep is dead.
I see that all of these platforms are still very much alive. The communities may be smaller than they once were, but I would posit that perhaps the smaller communities are much tighter and more energetic than they were when they didn't have to depend on eachother for advances in the platform. Amigas are still getting updated operating systems (Pegagsos I think is the name). BeOS/Haiku is still under development and the community is still quite lively on BeShare at least. The SGI is far from dead
People who call a platform dead should spend some time in the given community, with an open mind, before making any such declaration. Cutting edge enthusiasts are welcome to be cutting edge enthusiasts, but we all need to stop and consider that different people have different priorities and points of view.
From my point of view, NewtonOS is not dead.
This information has been available on various easter-egg lists for a long time.
It works fine with my SJ5 as well...
BeOS drivers were user space, as were all services. This had is weaknesses in that some of the user space programs were not written as stably as they should have been (net_server), but hey, when they crash, you just launch the user-space program again, and that thing is restarted. I don't think Minix's approach to drivers is really so very different from BeOS' approach. It is unfortunate that so few people were honestly exposed to BeOS - it was a great leap forward at its time and for about 10 years after its time.
"This reality is not going to change. In fact it will only get worse as technology coverage is handed to newer, less-qualified observers who simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer. With no Microsoft-centric frame of reference, Microsoft cannot look good."
So, less qualified observers won't be able to use Windows? I don't know a single person who can't at least write a paper with MS Word on Windows. I know lots of people that look at the Mac with fear. I personally am one of the few people in my group that is a Mac owner, user, and preferrer (over Windows... I also use an SGI), so I don't feel like I try to hang out with only my own crowd of Windows zealots. I just don't believe that the differences between the basic user experience of Windows or Mac OS are so completely different that a Mac user could not sit down and write a paper on a Windows user, and vice versa. Heck, even the document writing software can be the same - Microsoft Word.. or OpenOffice.
Anywho, I don't see why being able to use Windows vs MacOS makes you more or less qualified to observe the industry and comment on its changes... a completely impartial observer that used typewriters would probably be a better tech columnist anyway.
Dvorak sounds like one of the dinosaurs defending any older technology that is being passed by. He also sounds like a typical PC elitist... which is no better than a Mac elitist. To say that the Windows system is soo much more complicated than the Mac system... Mac elitists claim that the Mac is soo much easier to use than a Windows system. They have the same file-system user interface structures (disks and directories filled with files), the same web browsers, the same icons to launch the same applications, the same names for menus (file, edit, view, help, etc.), the same buttons to maximize/shrink/close windows, and only slightly different methods for switching between open applications. What's the big deal? I'm not claiming that they are so the same that there is no difference, but the basic UI elements are so similiar in base-level functionality that a user of one system should not be totally thrown by the other system.
Just to be on the record, a number of local ISPs here in Vermont don't update DNS records for 2-3 weeks. Sovernet, our big local provider, is among them. Very frustrating.