Because hosting it yourself gives you infinitely better control of your content...snip... Blogger is pretty rudimentary compared to what you can do with something as basic as WordPress, and you can just go crazy with other free things like Drupal....snip... If blogging about music is your hobby...
Do you pay attention to what you're writing? If blogging about music were my hobby, I'm not sure I'd be eager to go crazy about Drupal.
Sadly, the old rule still applies: Freedom of speech applies only to those who own the printing press. And, as others have pointed out, merely paying for your service doesn't count.
I'm a bit confused by your post. Are you saying that this T-Mobile plan can be as low as $0.10 per minute, regardless of how the phone is connecting (cell tower or WiFi)? Why would it cost the same even if connecting over WiFi, and why would even being able to use WiFi be an advantage? (I've never had a cellphone so this is interesting)
The calling cost is the same. In addition, you need a phone with both GSM and WiFi hardware and the software to make calls via WiFi.
I guess it costs the same because the phone connects to the PSTN. You would want to pay it because you could use the same phone number for cell and WiFi. Ordinary VoIP providers also cost money if you want to connect to PSTN.
It's an advantage because of range and bandwidth. Buildings often have poor cell coverage and excellent WiFi coverage. It can also reduce the number of calls being placed via the cell phone tower, so you can be guaranteed to connect a call when you're near WiFi, and so more people in your area could connect.
Monty took VC money, which is basically legalized loan sharking. Taking VC money results, in the overwhelming majority of cases, in the complete screwing of the borrower. Monty was one of the lucky few who managed to get a fortune out of that situation, which makes his whining utterly unseemly.
I think, for Monty, the issue goes beyond just money. MySQL is his life work, his opus magnum, and I think it hurts him that his life work can be used in a way that he did not intend.
Not to say that I agree with him, no. He still thinks of MySQL as proprietary software. He's not really thinking about it as free software.
What has me puzzled is why Nokia hasn't got any commercials out for it's N900. It runs a Debian Linux variant, and runs full flash right now, and it's [sic] hardware is superior to the Droids in some ways. Why they aren't shouting about it from the rooftops, I don't know.
Well, the N900 doesn't seem to be intended to be a mass-market device. I can't find the exact quotes at the moment, but I think the Maemo people are discouraging ordinary consumers from buying the N900. It's definitely step four out of five for making a mass-market device, and not a mass-market device itself.
This is a service run by Microsoft. Microsoft is a bit hostile to consumers. It would be ironic and sad if Microsoft's failure to maintain the Sidekick service gets blamed on the faceless "Cloud" and it hurts Microsoft's competitors.
The iPhone is just a Darwin machine, which all of us here should know is based on FreeBSD. It, therefore, has a very good scheduler.
The iPhone is a Darwin machine, which all of us here should know is not based on FreeBSD, but Mach with a bunch of modifications and a BSD runtime layer on top. In fact, MacOS X has a pretty poor scheduler, as Anand et al have benchmarked and anybody's personal experience should corroborate.
Which has little to do with Apple's decision to forbid third-party background processes.
Because people like me will never use open soruce if it doesn't work and play well with the realities of earning a living. If you want an entirely isolated hippie utopia commune, hey, feel free, but you'll have no effect on the world of grown-ups.
Insulting ad hominem... How did this get modded 5 insightful? (Feel free not to answer. The question is rhetorical.)
I have no opinion on adding the Microsoft drivers. It's Linus's project. However, it's a mistake to discount the idealism that inspired the GNU project. Stallman could have made workarounds so his systems worked, hacked his way into a historical footnote. Instead, he chose to build his own OS based on freedom, and I think he certainly made an impact on "the world of grown-ups."
User centric design is the issue. When MS puts clippy in, I don't know how much of that was some developer of pinhead thinking it would be really cook, and how much of it was actually user centric design.
Actually, if the story I heard was correct, Bob was a pet project of Melinda Gates, aka Mrs. CEO of Microsoft.
It's not hard. If you give information, ANY INFORMATION, to anyone for anything you have to check *what* they are going to do with it. This means reading their T&C's, following up all that brings up etc. Or, you can just NOT give out personal information that you don't want spread around.
The problem with this approach is that Facebook just grants access to ALL INFORMATION when you accept an app. Whether the program is one of these silly quizzes or actually does something useful, you have to grant them the same level of access.
Doing the quiz using a fake profile is no good, either. For most of my circle of acquaintances, the quizzes and games are played for the social aspect. Otherwise, do you think you have a personal need to know your alchemical element or Disney princess or whatever? If you’re not careful, your fake profile could become as important as your real profile.
The articles are really obvious, but they’re important for being an authoritative source that I could point to, so I could explain my position to my friends.
Dude, compared to your idealistic hippie post (not that it's bad in itself), RMS sounds like the oracle of common sense.
The only problem is, society cannot operate without trust.
<snip>
You are thinking of what we would do if we did not have a money-based economy. This has nothing to do with trust.
Uh, money is nothing but trust.
I think everybody here is on the same side, but we may disagree on just how much we’ll trust a vendor. Personally, I see nothing fundamentally wrong with having someone else run your software for you, but of course most businesses will do it wrong. There will be scandals as the whole field is sorted out, but I’m optimistic that it’ll work out.
Personally, I think Stallman is so strident partly because he wants people really to think about what they’re doing, so there will be fewer horrible mistakes.
If you absolutely must have a Linux tablet PC get a Nokia N800. Fits in your pocket, runs Maemo, lots of online community support and they can be had for under $200.
Actually, Nokia discontinued the N800 some time ago, and it's practically impossible to find. They just discontinued the N810 Wimax Edition, too.
As a Nokia N800 owner, I can tell you that it is without a doubt one of the worst mobile devices you can own. Having owned one since mid-2007, I can tell you that I would *not* have bought it had I known it was so bad.
The way I see it, Nokia is only sort of experimenting with the Linux-based tablet category, and we who buy these things are merely coming along with them.
- Diablo, which is the update to OS2008 and was supposed to solve all problems is even more of a pain than 2008 and 2007 were. The horrible mozilla based browser on my N800 won't even START anymore, let alone go anywhere. WHAT was wrong with the Opera based browser that was available in 2007?! Nothing, that's what. Worst of all is that I can't even install it anymore!
Maemo has a bizarre need for a browserd in the background for the microb browser in the foreground to work. If you play with the maemo-control-services panel, it'll put browserd in the wrong startup order. And settings are haphazardly scattered among/etc/var and ~/.
The good thing about Mozilla is compatibility. The bad thing is that it's slow and a bit of a RAM hog, especially on a device with only 128MB of RAM.
- The only good media application for the N800 is Canola, and it's still in beta (and likes to corrupt it's database on a regular bases too)
I use MPlayer. Still performs miserably.
- Nokia has licensed the PowerVR 3D technology that's in the N800, however they have not, and have made it clear that they will not release a driver to use this piece of silicon which is wasting away otherwise. Instead, the N800 uses frame-buffer graphics, which are not only hard on the ARM CPU, but brutal when it comes to watching video.
Allegedly, the built-in video controller can't handle the 800x480 screen, so Nokia installed a slow Epson controller.
- If you do find a bug in the OS, Nokia will deny it's existence until some kind member of the community fixes it or someone within the company finally realizes after weeks of inquiries and bug reports that the bug is actually their fault. IF you're lucky enough for them to even take a look at it, you'll have an even harder time getting them to care about you more than you care about Charon orbiting Pluto. That's not how a company should treat their customers.
I suspect that it's only a small team at Nokia doing this tablet experiment, and they've gone mostly invisible working on their next tablet. And they're not bothering to backport the software improvements to the N8x0 tablets.
Perhaps the only good thing I can say about the N800 is that it makes a nice torrenting machine with two SDHC slots, but only if you're near a power outlet, otherwise, forget it.
Actually, with Nokia insisting on such slow SDHC speeds for stability, I wouldn't expect the N8x0 tablets to be that nice for torrenting.
Strong passwords / keys for WPA is not much of a burden. You only have to enter the damm things once.
Strong passphrases ARE a burden. You enter it only once... per device... per OS reinstall. As long as Windows wireless manager doesn't flake out. As more cell phones and such discover the wonders of WiFi, the problem grows worse.
Even worse, if you are in a small organization, is that you have to enter it on every employee's laptop and iPod. And if you make the passphrase simple enough that ordinary people can enter it themselves, then you have small security time bombs as the ordinary people are not as careful about the password as you are.
At home, I run my access point without any password. I don't mind a little community "sharing," and AT&T hasn't become evil enough to attack me, yet. Also, in the aforementioned case, I just consider the network "public," with an unusually high barrier to entry.
Personally, I would prefer EAP-TLS for real security. No more unauthorized clients connecting to my access point, really difficult to sniff anything useful, and the password doesn't have to be global. The password could be as secure as it needs to be on that device, and certificates can be revoked. However, no cheap access point comes with a RADIUS server (sucky Netgear doesn't support RADIUS at all), and installing the certificates is a burden, especially on consumer devices such as the Wii.
Months ago, I installed Numpty Physics and a substantial portion of NP-complete (the levels that didn't crash) on the computers at a tutorial center. For reference, they run Windows, except for a Pentium II that I "donated," running Xubuntu.
Now, it's the most popular computer pastime among both the kids and the (high school, lower-division college student) tutors.
I haven't worked out how to introduce level editing to them, yet.
I think university should be about education, not about job training. Aside from the entertainment value, the UNIX-HATERS Handbook provides interesting information about the design of Unix systems, as compared with other operating systems that have been tried. You can use sections from it to start off discussions, either about why Unix is like that, or how it has changed since then.
He invoques the need to have a formal definition of some features (formula definitions and legacy stuff) as benifiting ODF if OOXML pass, so this raises the questions:
1) Aren't these already included to some extend in what was submitted for iso acceptation?
No. His point seems to be that some features are not in ODF yet, so we might as well accept Microsoft's, and that way we have to support fewer different implementations of features. He's approaching this thing with a naivete that is stunning in an adult who has watched Microsoft's behavior with standards.
From the letter:
What happens if OpenDocument and OpenXML reach different definitions of those functions?
More importantly, what if ISO and Microsoft reach different definitions for the same OpenXML functions? After watching Java and Kerberos and CSS... We already have indications that Microsoft would ignore ISO on OOXML, too.
Ron Paul has some fantastic ideas...abolishing the drug war, his tech policy, etc...but come on. You cannot deny that the guy has a couple of screws loose. I'm all for getting government out of our lives as much as possible, but he is a complete loon.
And this is worse than what we have how?
I agree that his thinking about a lot of subjects (foreign affairs comes to mind) is very far off, but that is the beauty of rule by law. Legally prove that he should do something, and he'll do it. Otherwise, he'll get off our backs and let us do whatever we want.
This was highlighted for me last night while my family watched Die Hard 4.
Well, it's your problem if you expected that film to be serious. I mean, even if you didn't watch the previous 3 Die Hard films nor notice any of the reviews, the advertising and the title should have tipped you off.
When I watched Die Hard 4, I kept my mind active, and I found it hilarious. From everybody's ridiculous durability, to everything technical's absurdity, to everything about the bad guys.
Because Scots and Norse were not generally considered inferior to Anglos.
Because American racism means a 3rd-generation Japanese-American gets called a Chinaman.
Regarding the GPP: I work with immigrants, so I expect to see people from China when I wake up. Not recognizing that is an incredibly narrow-minded idea of what a modern Western society is like.
Don't like hard drive. Don't trust it. The happy failure is when the/var partition goes wonky, and I can retrieve my data from the/home partition. The unhappy failure is when the drive (less than 3 year old Seagate Barracuda) stops reading my/home partition, and the Linux kernel starts complaining and making stuff up. This is why the stuff I really don't want to lose, I put in more than one hard drive. And DVDs with separate par2 disks.
Eee doesn't have disk option; it's soldered for cost, energy, and space reasons. It seems too small to fit any hard drive that I've heard of, but you could try some external hard drive. (Disclaimer: Nobody I've heard of has tried that particular external hard drive with the Eee.)
Slashdot Mirror
Because hosting it yourself gives you infinitely better control of your content ...snip... Blogger is pretty rudimentary compared to what you can do with something as basic as WordPress, and you can just go crazy with other free things like Drupal. ...snip... If blogging about music is your hobby...
Do you pay attention to what you're writing? If blogging about music were my hobby, I'm not sure I'd be eager to go crazy about Drupal.
Sadly, the old rule still applies: Freedom of speech applies only to those who own the printing press. And, as others have pointed out, merely paying for your service doesn't count.
popping keys off when they catch on your zipper
I can't help but think that you're doing something wrong. When does your book go near your zipper?
I'm a bit confused by your post. Are you saying that this T-Mobile plan can be as low as $0.10 per minute, regardless of how the phone is connecting (cell tower or WiFi)? Why would it cost the same even if connecting over WiFi, and why would even being able to use WiFi be an advantage? (I've never had a cellphone so this is interesting)
The calling cost is the same. In addition, you need a phone with both GSM and WiFi hardware and the software to make calls via WiFi.
I guess it costs the same because the phone connects to the PSTN. You would want to pay it because you could use the same phone number for cell and WiFi. Ordinary VoIP providers also cost money if you want to connect to PSTN.
It's an advantage because of range and bandwidth. Buildings often have poor cell coverage and excellent WiFi coverage. It can also reduce the number of calls being placed via the cell phone tower, so you can be guaranteed to connect a call when you're near WiFi, and so more people in your area could connect.
Monty took VC money, which is basically legalized loan sharking. Taking VC money results, in the overwhelming majority of cases, in the complete screwing of the borrower. Monty was one of the lucky few who managed to get a fortune out of that situation, which makes his whining utterly unseemly.
I think, for Monty, the issue goes beyond just money. MySQL is his life work, his opus magnum, and I think it hurts him that his life work can be used in a way that he did not intend.
Not to say that I agree with him, no. He still thinks of MySQL as proprietary software. He's not really thinking about it as free software.
What has me puzzled is why Nokia hasn't got any commercials out for it's N900. It runs a Debian Linux variant, and runs full flash right now, and it's [sic] hardware is superior to the Droids in some ways. Why they aren't shouting about it from the rooftops, I don't know.
Well, the N900 doesn't seem to be intended to be a mass-market device. I can't find the exact quotes at the moment, but I think the Maemo people are discouraging ordinary consumers from buying the N900. It's definitely step four out of five for making a mass-market device, and not a mass-market device itself.
Nevertheless, they do have a few ads for the N900.
This is a service run by Microsoft. Microsoft is a bit hostile to consumers. It would be ironic and sad if Microsoft's failure to maintain the Sidekick service gets blamed on the faceless "Cloud" and it hurts Microsoft's competitors.
The problem is that most schools don't actually teach how to type, so kids type inefficiently and illegibly. I don't see this as an improvement.
The iPhone is just a Darwin machine, which all of us here should know is based on FreeBSD. It, therefore, has a very good scheduler.
The iPhone is a Darwin machine, which all of us here should know is not based on FreeBSD, but Mach with a bunch of modifications and a BSD runtime layer on top. In fact, MacOS X has a pretty poor scheduler, as Anand et al have benchmarked and anybody's personal experience should corroborate.
Which has little to do with Apple's decision to forbid third-party background processes.
Because people like me will never use open soruce if it doesn't work and play well with the realities of earning a living. If you want an entirely isolated hippie utopia commune, hey, feel free, but you'll have no effect on the world of grown-ups.
Insulting ad hominem... How did this get modded 5 insightful? (Feel free not to answer. The question is rhetorical.)
I have no opinion on adding the Microsoft drivers. It's Linus's project. However, it's a mistake to discount the idealism that inspired the GNU project. Stallman could have made workarounds so his systems worked, hacked his way into a historical footnote. Instead, he chose to build his own OS based on freedom, and I think he certainly made an impact on "the world of grown-ups."
User centric design is the issue. When MS puts clippy in, I don't know how much of that was some developer of pinhead thinking it would be really cook, and how much of it was actually user centric design.
Actually, if the story I heard was correct, Bob was a pet project of Melinda Gates, aka Mrs. CEO of Microsoft.
What does this say for the wisdom of non-US citizens relying on US companies for their business or communication?
About the same as the wisdom of US citizens relying on US companies for their business or communication.
Especially when the companies involved are Microsoft and GoDaddy.
It's not hard. If you give information, ANY INFORMATION, to anyone for anything you have to check *what* they are going to do with it. This means reading their T&C's, following up all that brings up etc. Or, you can just NOT give out personal information that you don't want spread around.
The problem with this approach is that Facebook just grants access to ALL INFORMATION when you accept an app. Whether the program is one of these silly quizzes or actually does something useful, you have to grant them the same level of access.
Doing the quiz using a fake profile is no good, either. For most of my circle of acquaintances, the quizzes and games are played for the social aspect. Otherwise, do you think you have a personal need to know your alchemical element or Disney princess or whatever? If you’re not careful, your fake profile could become as important as your real profile.
The articles are really obvious, but they’re important for being an authoritative source that I could point to, so I could explain my position to my friends.
Dude, compared to your idealistic hippie post (not that it's bad in itself), RMS sounds like the oracle of common sense.
The only problem is, society cannot operate without trust.
<snip>
You are thinking of what we would do if we did not have a money-based economy. This has nothing to do with trust.
Uh, money is nothing but trust.
I think everybody here is on the same side, but we may disagree on just how much we’ll trust a vendor. Personally, I see nothing fundamentally wrong with having someone else run your software for you, but of course most businesses will do it wrong. There will be scandals as the whole field is sorted out, but I’m optimistic that it’ll work out.
Personally, I think Stallman is so strident partly because he wants people really to think about what they’re doing, so there will be fewer horrible mistakes.
Others note the relatively cheap real estate
Silicon Valley and “cheap real estate”? Compared to what? The moon? San Francisco?
If you absolutely must have a Linux tablet PC get a Nokia N800. Fits in your pocket, runs Maemo, lots of online community support and they can be had for under $200.
Actually, Nokia discontinued the N800 some time ago, and it's practically impossible to find. They just discontinued the N810 Wimax Edition, too.
As a Nokia N800 owner, I can tell you that it is without a doubt one of the worst mobile devices you can own. Having owned one since mid-2007, I can tell you that I would *not* have bought it had I known it was so bad.
The way I see it, Nokia is only sort of experimenting with the Linux-based tablet category, and we who buy these things are merely coming along with them.
- Diablo, which is the update to OS2008 and was supposed to solve all problems is even more of a pain than 2008 and 2007 were. The horrible mozilla based browser on my N800 won't even START anymore, let alone go anywhere. WHAT was wrong with the Opera based browser that was available in 2007?! Nothing, that's what. Worst of all is that I can't even install it anymore!
Maemo has a bizarre need for a browserd in the background for the microb browser in the foreground to work. If you play with the maemo-control-services panel, it'll put browserd in the wrong startup order. And settings are haphazardly scattered among /etc /var and ~/.
The good thing about Mozilla is compatibility. The bad thing is that it's slow and a bit of a RAM hog, especially on a device with only 128MB of RAM.
- The only good media application for the N800 is Canola, and it's still in beta (and likes to corrupt it's database on a regular bases too)
I use MPlayer. Still performs miserably.
- Nokia has licensed the PowerVR 3D technology that's in the N800, however they have not, and have made it clear that they will not release a driver to use this piece of silicon which is wasting away otherwise. Instead, the N800 uses frame-buffer graphics, which are not only hard on the ARM CPU, but brutal when it comes to watching video.
Allegedly, the built-in video controller can't handle the 800x480 screen, so Nokia installed a slow Epson controller.
- If you do find a bug in the OS, Nokia will deny it's existence until some kind member of the community fixes it or someone within the company finally realizes after weeks of inquiries and bug reports that the bug is actually their fault. IF you're lucky enough for them to even take a look at it, you'll have an even harder time getting them to care about you more than you care about Charon orbiting Pluto. That's not how a company should treat their customers.
I suspect that it's only a small team at Nokia doing this tablet experiment, and they've gone mostly invisible working on their next tablet. And they're not bothering to backport the software improvements to the N8x0 tablets.
Perhaps the only good thing I can say about the N800 is that it makes a nice torrenting machine with two SDHC slots, but only if you're near a power outlet, otherwise, forget it.
Actually, with Nokia insisting on such slow SDHC speeds for stability, I wouldn't expect the N8x0 tablets to be that nice for torrenting.
My pet peeve is how unstable Diablo is. My "favorite" open bugs are the random desktop crashes (though for mine the desktop crashes just sitting by itself), Bluetooth keyboard disabling the onscreen keyboard (I do not appreciate shift-space turning into a trap that takes a minute to get out of), and keyboard events not getting to the system if you reconnect the keyboard too many times
Strong passwords / keys for WPA is not much of a burden. You only have to enter the damm things once.
Strong passphrases ARE a burden. You enter it only once... per device... per OS reinstall. As long as Windows wireless manager doesn't flake out. As more cell phones and such discover the wonders of WiFi, the problem grows worse.
Even worse, if you are in a small organization, is that you have to enter it on every employee's laptop and iPod. And if you make the passphrase simple enough that ordinary people can enter it themselves, then you have small security time bombs as the ordinary people are not as careful about the password as you are.
At home, I run my access point without any password. I don't mind a little community "sharing," and AT&T hasn't become evil enough to attack me, yet. Also, in the aforementioned case, I just consider the network "public," with an unusually high barrier to entry.
Personally, I would prefer EAP-TLS for real security. No more unauthorized clients connecting to my access point, really difficult to sniff anything useful, and the password doesn't have to be global. The password could be as secure as it needs to be on that device, and certificates can be revoked. However, no cheap access point comes with a RADIUS server (sucky Netgear doesn't support RADIUS at all), and installing the certificates is a burden, especially on consumer devices such as the Wii.
Months ago, I installed Numpty Physics and a substantial portion of NP-complete (the levels that didn't crash) on the computers at a tutorial center. For reference, they run Windows, except for a Pentium II that I "donated," running Xubuntu.
Now, it's the most popular computer pastime among both the kids and the (high school, lower-division college student) tutors.
I haven't worked out how to introduce level editing to them, yet.
Or, by the name I use to remember it, ugh.pdf
I think university should be about education, not about job training. Aside from the entertainment value, the UNIX-HATERS Handbook provides interesting information about the design of Unix systems, as compared with other operating systems that have been tried. You can use sections from it to start off discussions, either about why Unix is like that, or how it has changed since then.
No. His point seems to be that some features are not in ODF yet, so we might as well accept Microsoft's, and that way we have to support fewer different implementations of features. He's approaching this thing with a naivete that is stunning in an adult who has watched Microsoft's behavior with standards.
From the letter:
More importantly, what if ISO and Microsoft reach different definitions for the same OpenXML functions? After watching Java and Kerberos and CSS... We already have indications that Microsoft would ignore ISO on OOXML, too.
Not saying that those are bad, except for their reliance on Windows, but they're not that innovative.
To bring this more on topic, though, Microsoft's good is obscured by their cartoonish bad, what with their greed and deceit and backstabbing.
And this is worse than what we have how?
I agree that his thinking about a lot of subjects (foreign affairs comes to mind) is very far off, but that is the beauty of rule by law. Legally prove that he should do something, and he'll do it. Otherwise, he'll get off our backs and let us do whatever we want.
Ron Paul is the Libertarian Party candidate.
Well, it's your problem if you expected that film to be serious. I mean, even if you didn't watch the previous 3 Die Hard films nor notice any of the reviews, the advertising and the title should have tipped you off.
When I watched Die Hard 4, I kept my mind active, and I found it hilarious. From everybody's ridiculous durability, to everything technical's absurdity, to everything about the bad guys.
Because Scots and Norse were not generally considered inferior to Anglos.
Because American racism means a 3rd-generation Japanese-American gets called a Chinaman.
Regarding the GPP: I work with immigrants, so I expect to see people from China when I wake up. Not recognizing that is an incredibly narrow-minded idea of what a modern Western society is like.
Don't like hard drive. Don't trust it. The happy failure is when the /var partition goes wonky, and I can retrieve my data from the /home partition. The unhappy failure is when the drive (less than 3 year old Seagate Barracuda) stops reading my /home partition, and the Linux kernel starts complaining and making stuff up. This is why the stuff I really don't want to lose, I put in more than one hard drive. And DVDs with separate par2 disks.
Eee doesn't have disk option; it's soldered for cost, energy, and space reasons. It seems too small to fit any hard drive that I've heard of, but you could try some external hard drive. (Disclaimer: Nobody I've heard of has tried that particular external hard drive with the Eee.)