A blockage on the flow of knowledge could seem to imply that this is ok, common place, even, accepted. Pull yer heads out of yer asses and realize we're passing forward through time, not regressing. Resist the lure of the farmers of adult stagnancy and realize that we now have a huge potential to bootstrap humanity with a larger quantity of knowledge (and hence achieve better integration) than ever before. A stand for the restricted flow of information is a stand for repression of the printing press, and, for the general public, three's precious little free information left. If anything, there should be a push to use this new technology to break new ground and foster innovation, come up with new systems, rather that cowering to the old. Don't believe the hype, unlike the actors, your script is not written (tho whether its assumed may be another question entirely). Make films about making films in movies.
Like most First Monday articles, well written and valid. All those issues are valid, perhaps not totally specific to FOSS. I've always given leeway to open source projects, often, everybody involved is doing it without (financial) compensation, and learning along the way.
The interface problem is directly proportional to experience, and is often unnoticed without training, or without learning guidelines (apple's gui guidelines, etc). GUI building training and guidelines should be a pre-requestite for GUI building. GUI's also relies on the more visually artistic side, which is often of lesser focus for developers, for what it's worth.
The developer centric problem is often due to a lack of resources... when it must work ASAP, core functionality is implemented at the dev level and niceness is supposed to come later (but often doesn't. I see this in the gstreamer project, brilliant, but unusable for a novice).
Most of these problems can be minimized with forsight, dilligence, a good team of devs and a nice feedback loop to the users. It's perhaps also worthy to note that it's never the wrong time to learn and to push oneself towards better (coding) practice.
Sun did convince the UofC to move their labs to solaris on Sun hardware a few years ago. Threw in a great deal (eager to strengthen relations with the school from which sprung James Gosling, engineer of java). Financially and technologically, Sun is now not the best way to go... linux is cheaper, and, a global effort of the self interested in an open environment. Any closed system has a hard time competing with that. Also, the sysadmins are not dumb. Solaris is a good (if closed) OS and Sun make good (if overpriced) hardware. Running an MS OS in the labs makes very little sense technologically, and moving to an MS OS from Linux, even less.
Mmm, yeah, the wind project stands out. There's been remarkably little R&D put into the energy sector (I read 1% somewhere). The wind project is a fine example of progress. A great match for the windy Alberta plains. More info on the wind field can be had here.
Actually, half of the energy for my boxen comes from green sources.
<bile>
Calgary does have it's share of earth blood on it's hands, however. There are far too many single passanger lifeless bimbo's driving Cadillac Escalades for the commute to their new white picket fenced house on the edge of the city, of which there are more being built all the time. (Calgary is largest city by area in the world, yet has <1M people). If the town needs anything, it's a sense of responsibility for it's environmental misdirection. That being said, the engineers of the earthbound carbon consuming behemoths are unworthy their skin.
</bile>
Well, a couple: price/performance and service mentality.
- Sun boxes are better built, and more expensive. For most tasks, PCs running linux are the better choice. For the rare others (datacenters, highend workstations (arguably), big number crunching), they may be a better choice, tho there's less and less reasons for using them. Also, support is not cheap.
- The service mentality is a different issue... one shared by most of the large vendors (m$, oracle, etc). An open (software) platform breaks the service mentality of one way distribution, shifting the focus from a 'user' to a 'participant', even if only at a small level. The 'participant' is encouraged to have a fuller understanding of the system they use, and can contribute directly back into the system, if so desired. Doing similar with any closed, 'push-based' OS is more difficult, if impossible.
Don't get me wrong, generic pc hardware is just that, generic. It may not perform as well as a more refined solution, but it's cheap and quite hackable. Often, the free support of the community is quite good, too.
Not only is the city now run on linux, but the Light Rail Transit system is powered by wind power. Go Calgary (about time they did something to balance all the non-renewable promotion coming from this town). Now, they just need to move the University away from Sun.
I run a similar configuration here for similar reasons. Love the flexibility and community of gentoo. AFA the multi day install goes, I'm just about due for one, and this time, am going to do it right.... do the multi day install, then, once the base is installed and working, dd a compressed image of the partitions and mbr and burn it to a dvd. Perhaps make up scripts to auto-recreate the new gentoo on hdb. A simple sync and -u world will get the system mostly up to date after that.
I guess, in a pinch, one could also use stage3 packages from a 2004.0 for athMP iso, if such builds exist. Though one'd have to repeat the not-so-nice installation procedure.
I think at that point you may be able to help out maintaining packages. There's always going to be some rough edges maintaining (an interface to) a system of such size as linux and all associated projects. Distributed peerage tells us the load can be best shouldered by lots of people doing small tasks, so, help out... start from the old ebuild, fix the problems, submit an ebuild patch to gentoo bugzilla and remove the reason for others to repeat your actions. The benefit that comes from a continually up-to-date distribution far outweighs the small bit of effort required to maintain the occasional ebuild. Otherwise, there's other distros/os's that are more than happy to take money in exchange for immediate reduction in frustration (just shuffling it around, really).
On one hand the politicos take money from an industry repressing p2p usage and with the other they complain about centralized systems. One may wonder if it's not just a case of nationalism. Not much heard about the content filters in libraries, schools, etc, the content filtering by the fcc and others (mostly under the guise of protecting the children). Want to protect the children? Don't burden the unborn with billions of dollars of debt due to an unnessary invasion. If you stand back and listen closely, you can make out the squack of the gaggle.
The trick is to create a bootstrap to a muliplatform native game environment, sdl + crystalspace + bindings for pc, ps2, xbox, gamecube, etc. Throw it into a machine, spark up bootstrap env game and launch networking and login to a distributed collaborative environment. Then perhaps realize that gaming is not just for fun, but also, potentially, a huge enabler of the potential of mankind, if only we can loose the taste for blood, virtual or not.
Grow towards progress and keep wheel of enropy spinning, a spring of sustainability, just around the corner. A real carrot for a virtual donkey.
Game environments, however, must be seen as more than time wasters before viability is reached. One could argue that such a endpoint is unreachable from the current state of Game Company vs. Game Company (vs. Game Company) in persuit of the mightly downtime of teenagers, as brutal competition never results in sustained peace, only room to inhale before the next thrust. It is the open community that holds the knowledge of cooperation. It is much easier to sleep well in the company of friends, and the well rested are far more productive.
It looks quite similar to me. Eye candy is a bit different, but not much more than that. It looks to be basically the same functionally with a brand applied. The sync application is perhaps the biggest custom piece, tho i've no problem syncing data from my zaurus (calendar, mail and contacts) to evolution. Ssh, scp, http, for the rest. Don't get me wrong, the Z is _great_, but don't put it off to wait for this distribution, and if you are considering, consider the C7x0 series.
I've often thought that 'the high maintenance of databases' problem lends itself very well to a distributed maintanence solution. With the right interface, meritocratic access and enough eyeballs, it's very possible that the open db would eclipse a closed db, without the need for more repressive laws.
Distributed document scanning projects, data cataloging (everything2,etc), and high traffic organized forum based sites are great examples of open solutions to data maintenance issues (such as slashdot).
The artists are still getting shafted, the big 5 companies are making more money than the quality of the content would dictate. Even the device manufactures are selling at a loss to prop up this otherwise unsustainable obesity.
Shun the major labels (if you're not already doing that), shifing support to the smaller labels, which are thriving due to the internet. iTunes, etc would be great if they worked directly with artists or small labels. There'd be more food on the table of the talented artist (and not just the promoted), more good food to the minds of the listening public and less SUVs and waste.
Stand up against those who wish to dictate what you can see or hear. Push for the distributed, open, fair and optimal archive which is possible with the tech that we push. The vision can only be realized with (continued) effort.
Learning to live with yourself is one of the most valuable things you can do. We're all used to interaction, from as soon as we pop, but don't forget that we all had 9 months of relative seclusion before popping. Learn to enjoy your seclusion and use it to your advantage. Learn to embrace your unique view. Follow thru on ideas that may have been repressed in situations involving others. Sing your song. A better way of looking at madness is perhaps as a guiding exception. When you feel you're over the top, pull back a bit.
There are things you can do which keep your performance on track. Lots of houseplants is great. Increased oxygen supply is fantastic. Engineer your lifestyle to best integrate your entire life, eliminating the artificial polarization of work and non-work. Excercise is good, either outside or inside (ie a stationary bike during the winters). Look after your body, especially the rough bits that have to interact with the computer. Optimize your interactions with the box and eliminate potential problems for years to come. A good keyboard, chair, multi monitor setup and good audio help out. Rituals should come naturally. If dissatisfied, change slightly and approach your goal. Expecting to hit it right on the first time is counter productive (even counter biological). Don't forget to breathe. Eat well. Suppliment with good array of vitamins+minerals. Drink lots of water. Take time off liberally (your doing so much more with your time). Get yourself a zaurus or a laptop and go to a park for reading.
I'm thankful daily that I'm not in the dry, torturous, stupid communinal blather-pots others call places of work.
I'd consider the iPod if it'd do flac and high sampling. FLAC is brilliant (flawless, open, etc). My Zaurus will do xmms/flac over 802.11g wireless (tho now, without wireless, I convert to ogg), with excellent quality delivered to a nice pair of Sennheisers, and I can read a book at the same time, even.
Why is content still stuck at 44.1. I heard an SACD the other day (1.4Mhz 1bit sampled, iirc, not easily comparable to PCM) and it way fantastic. When are we going to see the rollout of audio tech keeping up with computer tech? IE there is no reason that audio quality cant fall in line with Moore's law. Perhaps when the record labels stop treating their customers as criminals and take a more pro-active role in advancing the presentation of art/noise. Maximizing sensory input is always good. Until then, I guess we route around the presentation industries and synthesize our own music and generate our own machinima... as it should be, perhaps.
Perhaps a network where one can donate to worthy artists, such as musiclink.com (ex-FairTunes). Perhaps a donation even allows dl'ing of album.FLACs on donation. It's not a hard idea, tho the music industry is concerned more with not loosing money than making a profit.
The wrong hands are the hands that believe in the theory of wrong hands. If distributed applications and development have taught anything, it's that progress is more sound when coming through open channels. I see nothing wrong with a more open approach to major (currently archaic) infrastructure. It may demand more participation from both the end and middle users, but is far more progressive. The question of whether the power grid is so ingrained as to be unchangable still remains./me votes for distributed clean self sufficient energy networks (solar, wind, etc). Gets us out of this mega uber global corp dependancy we're currently in too, perhaps fostering collaboration at the same time.
I have been using datahands for three years now, and for the price of the orbit, I advise saving up a bit more and going with the datahands. I have a hard time thinking that equivalent 'flat keyboard' speeds could be reached with the orbitm and the fixed nature of the right and left hands would make chair arm mounting more difficult. (Having the datahands mounted to the chair arms allows so much more freedom. Less of a feeling of being 'inserted' in your workstation.) That being said, I'd take one of those over a flat or natural kbd in a second, if only for the integrated mouse.
Are there any plans to create cooperating servers for bittorrent? The client bandwidth sharing is great, however, it would be nice to start downloads from a group of servers, even when there are no clients downloading (ie the servers would communicate and share the load of the requests). The BitTorrent architecture is flexible enough to handle such a thing. In this way, perhaps the load of emerging EclipseSDK would be distributed over the many gentoo mirrors as well as the clients currently downloading. A great application. Keep it up, and others, donate if you can.
Is it possible not to in the digital domain? Old world blocks (legal, threats, etc) are so easy to route around in community based bit world. Use another OS... deprecate the problematic code... span the problem over the community and inevitably come up with a better solution than the proprietary. In the end, everybody gets off. Let the litagous litigate themselves into (further) obsolescence, while the knowledgable lead the way.
B&O and BOSE are two manufactures that go for esthetics over acoustic quality. They both have the marketing budgets required to reach those who can't be bothered to do the research. Sure, they look nice, but don't be buying them for sound.
I've a pair of 6'x4'x2' magnaplanar mg2b's from the mid eighties which sound amazing when powered with good gear... for <1/10th the price of those new B&0s. If you want a good set of speakers within that price range, try somethingworthy.
Slashdot Mirror
A blockage on the flow of knowledge could seem to imply that this is ok, common place, even, accepted. Pull yer heads out of yer asses and realize we're passing forward through time, not regressing. Resist the lure of the farmers of adult stagnancy and realize that we now have a huge potential to bootstrap humanity with a larger quantity of knowledge (and hence achieve better integration) than ever before. A stand for the restricted flow of information is a stand for repression of the printing press, and, for the general public, three's precious little free information left. If anything, there should be a push to use this new technology to break new ground and foster innovation, come up with new systems, rather that cowering to the old. Don't believe the hype, unlike the actors, your script is not written (tho whether its assumed may be another question entirely). Make films about making films in movies.
The interface problem is directly proportional to experience, and is often unnoticed without training, or without learning guidelines (apple's gui guidelines, etc). GUI building training and guidelines should be a pre-requestite for GUI building. GUI's also relies on the more visually artistic side, which is often of lesser focus for developers, for what it's worth.
The developer centric problem is often due to a lack of resources... when it must work ASAP, core functionality is implemented at the dev level and niceness is supposed to come later (but often doesn't. I see this in the gstreamer project, brilliant, but unusable for a novice).
Most of these problems can be minimized with forsight, dilligence, a good team of devs and a nice feedback loop to the users. It's perhaps also worthy to note that it's never the wrong time to learn and to push oneself towards better (coding) practice.
Sun did convince the UofC to move their labs to solaris on Sun hardware a few years ago. Threw in a great deal (eager to strengthen relations with the school from which sprung James Gosling, engineer of java). Financially and technologically, Sun is now not the best way to go... linux is cheaper, and, a global effort of the self interested in an open environment. Any closed system has a hard time competing with that. Also, the sysadmins are not dumb. Solaris is a good (if closed) OS and Sun make good (if overpriced) hardware. Running an MS OS in the labs makes very little sense technologically, and moving to an MS OS from Linux, even less.
<bile>
Calgary does have it's share of earth blood on it's hands, however. There are far too many single passanger lifeless bimbo's driving Cadillac Escalades for the commute to their new white picket fenced house on the edge of the city, of which there are more being built all the time. (Calgary is largest city by area in the world, yet has <1M people). If the town needs anything, it's a sense of responsibility for it's environmental misdirection. That being said, the engineers of the earthbound carbon consuming behemoths are unworthy their skin.
</bile>
Andy
- Sun boxes are better built, and more expensive. For most tasks, PCs running linux are the better choice. For the rare others (datacenters, highend workstations (arguably), big number crunching), they may be a better choice, tho there's less and less reasons for using them. Also, support is not cheap.
- The service mentality is a different issue... one shared by most of the large vendors (m$, oracle, etc). An open (software) platform breaks the service mentality of one way distribution, shifting the focus from a 'user' to a 'participant', even if only at a small level. The 'participant' is encouraged to have a fuller understanding of the system they use, and can contribute directly back into the system, if so desired. Doing similar with any closed, 'push-based' OS is more difficult, if impossible.
Don't get me wrong, generic pc hardware is just that, generic. It may not perform as well as a more refined solution, but it's cheap and quite hackable. Often, the free support of the community is quite good, too.
Andy
A (Mostly) Proud Calgarian.
I guess, in a pinch, one could also use stage3 packages from a 2004.0 for athMP iso, if such builds exist. Though one'd have to repeat the not-so-nice installation procedure.
I think at that point you may be able to help out maintaining packages. There's always going to be some rough edges maintaining (an interface to) a system of such size as linux and all associated projects. Distributed peerage tells us the load can be best shouldered by lots of people doing small tasks, so, help out... start from the old ebuild, fix the problems, submit an ebuild patch to gentoo bugzilla and remove the reason for others to repeat your actions. The benefit that comes from a continually up-to-date distribution far outweighs the small bit of effort required to maintain the occasional ebuild. Otherwise, there's other distros/os's that are more than happy to take money in exchange for immediate reduction in frustration (just shuffling it around, really).
On one hand the politicos take money from an industry repressing p2p usage and with the other they complain about centralized systems. One may wonder if it's not just a case of nationalism. Not much heard about the content filters in libraries, schools, etc, the content filtering by the fcc and others (mostly under the guise of protecting the children). Want to protect the children? Don't burden the unborn with billions of dollars of debt due to an unnessary invasion. If you stand back and listen closely, you can make out the squack of the gaggle.
I do want I want, if you don't like it, and have no valid reason for protesting, I walk.
Grow towards progress and keep wheel of enropy spinning, a spring of sustainability, just around the corner. A real carrot for a virtual donkey.
Game environments, however, must be seen as more than time wasters before viability is reached. One could argue that such a endpoint is unreachable from the current state of Game Company vs. Game Company (vs. Game Company) in persuit of the mightly downtime of teenagers, as brutal competition never results in sustained peace, only room to inhale before the next thrust. It is the open community that holds the knowledge of cooperation. It is much easier to sleep well in the company of friends, and the well rested are far more productive.
It looks quite similar to me. Eye candy is a bit different, but not much more than that. It looks to be basically the same functionally with a brand applied. The sync application is perhaps the biggest custom piece, tho i've no problem syncing data from my zaurus (calendar, mail and contacts) to evolution. Ssh, scp, http, for the rest. Don't get me wrong, the Z is _great_, but don't put it off to wait for this distribution, and if you are considering, consider the C7x0 series.
Andrew
Distributed document scanning projects, data cataloging (everything2,etc), and high traffic organized forum based sites are great examples of open solutions to data maintenance issues (such as slashdot).
Sure, many reasons... Good coffee, good beer, donunts, water, trees, oil and complaining about the weather and ignorance of americans ;)
Shun the major labels (if you're not already doing that), shifing support to the smaller labels, which are thriving due to the internet. iTunes, etc would be great if they worked directly with artists or small labels. There'd be more food on the table of the talented artist (and not just the promoted), more good food to the minds of the listening public and less SUVs and waste.
Stand up against those who wish to dictate what you can see or hear. Push for the distributed, open, fair and optimal archive which is possible with the tech that we push. The vision can only be realized with (continued) effort.
Andy
There are things you can do which keep your performance on track. Lots of houseplants is great. Increased oxygen supply is fantastic. Engineer your lifestyle to best integrate your entire life, eliminating the artificial polarization of work and non-work. Excercise is good, either outside or inside (ie a stationary bike during the winters). Look after your body, especially the rough bits that have to interact with the computer. Optimize your interactions with the box and eliminate potential problems for years to come. A good keyboard, chair, multi monitor setup and good audio help out. Rituals should come naturally. If dissatisfied, change slightly and approach your goal. Expecting to hit it right on the first time is counter productive (even counter biological). Don't forget to breathe. Eat well. Suppliment with good array of vitamins+minerals. Drink lots of water. Take time off liberally (your doing so much more with your time). Get yourself a zaurus or a laptop and go to a park for reading.
I'm thankful daily that I'm not in the dry, torturous, stupid communinal blather-pots others call places of work.
Andy
I'd consider the iPod if it'd do flac and high sampling. FLAC is brilliant (flawless, open, etc). My Zaurus will do xmms/flac over 802.11g wireless (tho now, without wireless, I convert to ogg), with excellent quality delivered to a nice pair of Sennheisers, and I can read a book at the same time, even.
Why is content still stuck at 44.1. I heard an SACD the other day (1.4Mhz 1bit sampled, iirc, not easily comparable to PCM) and it way fantastic. When are we going to see the rollout of audio tech keeping up with computer tech? IE there is no reason that audio quality cant fall in line with Moore's law. Perhaps when the record labels stop treating their customers as criminals and take a more pro-active role in advancing the presentation of art/noise. Maximizing sensory input is always good. Until then, I guess we route around the presentation industries and synthesize our own music and generate our own machinima... as it should be, perhaps.
Andy
Perhaps a network where one can donate to worthy artists, such as musiclink.com (ex-FairTunes). Perhaps a donation even allows dl'ing of album .FLACs on donation. It's not a hard idea, tho the music industry is concerned more with not loosing money than making a profit.
The wrong hands are the hands that believe in the theory of wrong hands. If distributed applications and development have taught anything, it's that progress is more sound when coming through open channels. I see nothing wrong with a more open approach to major (currently archaic) infrastructure. It may demand more participation from both the end and middle users, but is far more progressive. The question of whether the power grid is so ingrained as to be unchangable still remains. /me votes for distributed clean self sufficient energy networks (solar, wind, etc). Gets us out of this mega uber global corp dependancy we're currently in too, perhaps fostering collaboration at the same time.
Try a float tank. Lots of fun, great for reorganization/confrontation and they'll teach you about nothing.
I have been using datahands for three years now, and for the price of the orbit, I advise saving up a bit more and going with the datahands. I have a hard time thinking that equivalent 'flat keyboard' speeds could be reached with the orbitm and the fixed nature of the right and left hands would make chair arm mounting more difficult. (Having the datahands mounted to the chair arms allows so much more freedom. Less of a feeling of being 'inserted' in your workstation.) That being said, I'd take one of those over a flat or natural kbd in a second, if only for the integrated mouse.
Are there any plans to create cooperating servers for bittorrent? The client bandwidth sharing is great, however, it would be nice to start downloads from a group of servers, even when there are no clients downloading (ie the servers would communicate and share the load of the requests). The BitTorrent architecture is flexible enough to handle such a thing. In this way, perhaps the load of emerging EclipseSDK would be distributed over the many gentoo mirrors as well as the clients currently downloading. A great application. Keep it up, and others, donate if you can.
Andy
Is it possible not to in the digital domain? Old world blocks (legal, threats, etc) are so easy to route around in community based bit world. Use another OS... deprecate the problematic code... span the problem over the community and inevitably come up with a better solution than the proprietary. In the end, everybody gets off. Let the litagous litigate themselves into (further) obsolescence, while the knowledgable lead the way.
Andy
> Musicians will have to make a living from live performances. ... or donations.
I've a pair of 6'x4'x2' magnaplanar mg2b's from the mid eighties which sound amazing when powered with good gear... for <1/10th the price of those new B&0s. If you want a good set of speakers within that price range, try something worthy.