Additionally, youtube has annoying ads, while google video has no ads at all. Google video supports far more media formats for the videos that users upload. Google video has no file size limits. Youtube's file size and video length limits are far too conservative to make the service useful for anything but short little attention grabbers. Users split videos up into multiple clips to host them on youtube. This makes viewing a whole film much harder than on google video. Unfortunately both services offer video in the flash format instead of a nice open format like ogg theora. Both services censor content. There is room for someone to make a (possibly p2p based?) video hosting service that is far less flawed than ether youtube or google video.
Why is everyone speculating about "what will happen when google gets into the online video market"? Google has already been providing a flash based user submitted video service through google video. Why does adding youtube to the google empire change anything? Lawsuits are not a problem with google video; what is youtube providing that makes it more open to litigation? Moreover, IMHO google video is a much better service than youtube. Youtube appears to be flooded with stupid homemade clips, while google video has terabytes worth of both excellent amateur footage and quality feature length professional video, (along with a lots of crap but still less than on youtube).
For those complaining about firefox's memory footprint, I suggest you read this. In general firefox will use more RAM only if you have more RAM available; you WANT more of your memory to be used for caching to speed things up (as long as it doesn't result in swapping). That said, there are a few real bugs in plugins, and probably the main codebase too. They are hopefully being worked on. By the way, here are my referer browser stats for October so far, for anyone interested.
Why the hell aren't you using a free software chat client (so yahoo can't block anything client side), with encryption (so they can't block anything server side)? The are many benefits to free software and encryption beyond this particular situation. A proprietary chat client using a cleartext protocol just seams like idiocy from a security standpoint, especially in the age of Criminal/Corporate/ISP/NSA snooping.
Here's to wealth! So maybe alcohol is key to success in mainstream business, but it looks like acid is the drug for you if you want to make it in the tech industry.
Re:We need a bill of rights for the user.
on
Why Software Sucks
·
· Score: 1
We need something like an installation controller....present to the user a simple standard user interface and allow the users to check and uncheck to allow and disallow changes.
This is basically package management. Every usable modern operating system has it. The lack of package management, amoung other things, makes Window$ hopelessly broken.
Debian/Ubuntu: dpkg/apt and synaptic
Red Hat/SuSe/LSB: rpm and YaST or yum
Gentoo: portage and emerge
IRIX: inst and swmgr
BSD: ports/pkg
HP-UX: Software Distributor
NetBSD's pkgsrc is actually ported to just about every *nix, but is not that widly used.
When I first read the title of this post, I thought it was going to be an article about the military industrial complex. I remember hearing somewhere that the largest buyer of Microsoft products was the US government, and I know that the largest department of the federal government is the Department of Defense. Isn't the question of how important the US war machine is to Microsoft more important than this story about some game?
What are you so afraid of that makes you want to censor innocent people? Christian censors tend to have a real problem with sex. Normal healthy adult humans enjoy sex. They don't have some fucked up sense of guilty sin that makes them feel bad about their innate desires.
Maybe it's not sex that you're concerned about. Maybe it's violence. Do you not want young people to see the maimed bodies and ruined cities that result from your work at Northrop Grumman? (Ya got the real ethical high ground, Mr. War Profiteer!)
The words you offered as a crude example of porn, hot naked teen sluts, turn up 258 hits on google scholar, a search engine for academic papers. Those words most certainly are used in science, and censoring them would halt serious scholarship. The first hit at google scholar is for a study that is pro-censorship. You can't even begin to discus important public policy issues if some of the words used to describe them are banned! Even the pro censorship folks wouldn't be able to talk if they were being censored! Censoring profanity and obscenity halts important political and scientific discussions. If you can't say "FUCK", then you can't say "FUCK the government".
Humans should circumvent censorship so that they can be free to express and learn about whatever they want. I want young people to grow up well informed and well educated. If you grow up sheltered from the real world, you will be weak and ignorant.
I am not "an atheistic asshole who wants to make all the children in the world little sexual perverts". I don't want to make children into anything. I want human beings to be free to lean on their own, and I expect them to develop into rational sane people if they are allowed to do so. Sheltering teens (post-pubescents, meaning sexually mature human beings) from sexual content is more likely to pervert their sexuality than letting them explore freely.
"dark age of sexual perversion" O NO!!!!!!!!!!!
BE SERIOUS! War, environmental degradation, the shrinking middle class, lack of public healthcare and education, and numerous other sociopolitical problems are a far greater threat to our civilization than people trying out new kinds of sex.
This is a message for all the kids living in any Theocracy, whether it happens to be in Iran or the USA:
Do you think your parents are spying on you and taking Draconian measures to mold you into a little puritan? Want to be free to learn about the real world and maybe even use your own body as you desire? Do you want to learn about evolution, but have fundie nut parents trying to censor your entire environment? Don't want to loose your legal home (which includes perhaps your only access to food, shelter, and healthcare?), and risk getting jailed for leaving it? If you are reading this, you probably have some place where you can access the Internet with minimal restrictions. Maybe you are lucky enough to be online at a friend's house or library. Maybe you hacked the filter at your public school or church. If you want to expand your access and keep your freedom, you will need to take some precautions. To get around any logging or filtering software running on a local machine, I suggest getting your own computer. Try ebay. If you can't afford a full computer, and just want to chat, I recommend the zipit, it runs Linux, so you can modify it and add features like encryption. If these are not viable options, you should use a Linux (or BSD, or OpenSolaris) bootable CD. If you suspect that there is network based monitoring, you should use gaim-otr or gaim-encryption for your chatting and gpg for your email. Learn to tunnel your network traffic through http, ssh, and other protocols. If you are using someone else's PC, you should also check for a hardware keylogger. Use the presumption of your ignorance to your advantage. Play the naïve little kid. If you get caught trying to circumvent censorship and spying, act like you have no idea what you are doing and just got lost. Act like the computer is broken and you are confused and frustrated.
A brief message to the parents:
Kids like sex. Kids are curious. Remember back when you were a teenager? Wouldn't you have really liked a (select gender based on sexual preference) about ten years older than you (someone in their 20s), to fuck? As illegal and "wrong" as that is, it's what we've evolved to desire. You become sexually mature as a teen, and you want the most fit sexual partner. People older than you are probably the most fit. As you get older, people younger than you are probably the most fit. All the technology in the wold will not change this. It's human nature. Your irrational fear of pleasure is no excuse to stunt your offspring's intellectual growth. Do you really want to keep them from accessing the biggest store of human knowledge ever amassed, just because you don't like the idea that they might actually want to enjoy sex? Or...is it worse than that? Are you a religious asshole that wants to keep your kid from learning about science? If so, you are the reason why your nation is going to plunge deep into a second dark age of technological decay and theocratic war. Thanks a lot!
How many real ATMs have been exploited using this information? Manuals for common hardware are basically public information (although I'm sure the vendor retains copyright to them and could conceivably also use trade secret law to keep people from sharing proprietary information). I don't really think this is much of a threat. If you are a security researcher and want to learn more, here are two ATM manuals that I've found. Images scanned from a physical ATM manual A different manual in PDF form
Since the GPL is based on well established copyright and contract law, in most nations it shouldn't really need to be "tested" in court. IANAL, but I would think that it would have a far stronger legal standing than EULAs which often make the people who agree to them take all sorts of measures that have nothing to do with traditional copyright protection.
I actually agree with rms for the most part, but will play devil's advocate for a bit here. Stallman never liked conventional software licenses. He wanted to create and use free software but licenses got in the way. He could have fought all licenses and even all copyrights, and demanded that all information be free. Instead he built a license upon established copyright law, and the GNU GPL was born. Now he has a problem with software patents. Instead of supporting the free and open use of patents, he is saying that all software patents are unjust. Why does Stallman consider the OSDL patent initiative so bad? If it is unfair because it uses the same legal protections as the corporate trolls, then doesn't the GPL legitimate the unjust system of software licenses in the same way?
Your history of SDF is correct, but this particular case does not prove that Linux is less secure than BSD. Depending on how you configure your system, either OS can be rock solid impenetrable, or more exploitable than an unpatched Windows98 box. Very few successful break ins are due to kernel flaws; usually the problem is an application bug, bad configuration, or incorrect policy. I also run a public shell service, and it too often comes under attempted exploit and DoS attacks. I've successfully managed to run it using Linux. I also run OpenBSD on another machine. Linux and BSD both have strong security as strengths, if you use them correctly. However, there is something to be said for OpenBSD's policy of "secure by default".
OpenBSD was a fork() of netbsd. Is there any chance they could reunite to make a single stronger OS? How difficult would reconciling the politics and the codebase be?
Why not display the video using a PC with a video card that has composite or S-video output? You should be able to hook up to any modern TV or projector. You could encode the video in whatever format you want: lossless DV, Ogg Theora, XviD, even WMV if you are really sadistic. You could store it on whatever medium you want: DVD, a hard disk, a NAS, CD, usb flash drives, whatever. Backups should be easy.
As other posters have mentioned, cooperatives and collectives are one option for a more free business model; there are many others. You may be interested in Anarcho-Syndicalism. Syndicalists see labor unions as a force for revolutionary social change, replacing capitalism and the State with a new society democratically self-managed by workers. Millions of human hours have been spent thinking about and articulating radically free economic paradigms. Your idea for an open source business is interesting, but doesn't go into much detail. You just say that it would be web based, have startup costs, and will go in whatever direction the workers want. It's not a bad idea, but if you and anyone who reads your "plan" are serious, then you should look at the history of nonhierarchical organizations and learn from the theories, failures, and successes of the past. After you develop stronger ideas about how to create democracy in the workplace, you should create a more concrete plan.
Yes, when the government intervenes in the economy, it tends to do so in favor of the interests of large corporations, because big business leaders either own the politicians or are the politicians. It should be obvious that this isn't what those campaigning for net neutrality want. We want an Internet where a user can connect to any host just as easily as any other. Servers that get more traffic have to pay for more bandwidth, just like clients that want to transfer more data must buy a faster connection. However, the ISPs in between client and server should not artificially make extra money by demanding additional charges for popular content or by throttling some services and prioritizing others. ISPs should just route IP data and not look at what application layer information is being carried. Those who want net neutrality should use whatever tools they can to achieve this goal. They can take a political route by lobbying for common carrier and pro net neutrality laws. Politicians don't really serve us, so civil disobedience might be more effective. We can subvert attempts to split up the Internet by mirroring, port redirecting, various types of data encapsulation, and proxying. We can also try to work within the free market by switching to more neutral carriers, starting up more neutral ISPs if none exist in an area, and by educating consumers. The principal of net neutrality is sound. There may be legitimate criticism of certain tactics (like trusting congress to do what we want), but that doesn't invalidate what we are trying to do.
I don't know about VAX, but Debian runs great on MIPS and many other platforms. I installed and used it on several Sgi Indys and X worked fine, as did sound, networking, and all the hardware features I had used under IRIX. Some software was slower (gcc is notorously less optomised for MIPS then the commericial Sgi c compiler MIPS Pro), but more modern software was available. Most Debian packages are available for most architectures.
I also run Debian on PA-RISC for my shell server. Add an account for yourself and do a few apt-cache searches to see which packages are available. All the major desktop and server packages are there (various apache mods, firefox, gaim, amule, etc). I found Debian to provide more modern software then HP-UX or BSD for PA-RISC. Even most of the somewhat obscure Debain provided applications are available. I run Debian and Ubuntu on x86, OpenBSD and Solaris on SPARC64 (Solaris is better for SMP systems), IRIX and Debian on MIPS (IRIX is better for newer Sgis like the Octane2), and HP-UX and Debian on PA-RISC. Overall I've found Debian to be the most portable complete Operating Environment. I have not used NetBSD that much so I am not aware of it's current state. It has a reputation for portability, but seams to lag behind in terms of real world testing (many of the ports apparently consist of cross compiling code), and also doesn't seem to have as many packages as Debian. Overall it just looks less up to date then Debian or OpenBSD.
You might be interested in Smedley Butler, if you haven't already learned about the most decorated marine in history. He understood the interested behind US foreign intervention.
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.
He spoke to the U.S. Congress in 1934 to reveal and thwart a fascist takeover of the government that had been plotted by wealthy industrialists. I wish a heroes from the military would have the courage today to stop the neo-conservative fascist (backed by wealthy industrialists) takeover of the US government.
It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the chickens will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new centrifuge generated superchicken overlords.
I can't recommend a specific provider, but I would like to point out that moving to Linux does not mean abandoning your ASP code. Java System ASP is cross platform; you can provide ASP content using a Linux, Windows, Solaris, or other *nix server.
Slashdot Mirror
Additionally, youtube has annoying ads, while google video has no ads at all. Google video supports far more media formats for the videos that users upload. Google video has no file size limits. Youtube's file size and video length limits are far too conservative to make the service useful for anything but short little attention grabbers. Users split videos up into multiple clips to host them on youtube. This makes viewing a whole film much harder than on google video. Unfortunately both services offer video in the flash format instead of a nice open format like ogg theora. Both services censor content. There is room for someone to make a (possibly p2p based?) video hosting service that is far less flawed than ether youtube or google video.
Why is everyone speculating about "what will happen when google gets into the online video market"? Google has already been providing a flash based user submitted video service through google video. Why does adding youtube to the google empire change anything? Lawsuits are not a problem with google video; what is youtube providing that makes it more open to litigation? Moreover, IMHO google video is a much better service than youtube. Youtube appears to be flooded with stupid homemade clips, while google video has terabytes worth of both excellent amateur footage and quality feature length professional video, (along with a lots of crap but still less than on youtube).
For those complaining about firefox's memory footprint, I suggest you read this. In general firefox will use more RAM only if you have more RAM available; you WANT more of your memory to be used for caching to speed things up (as long as it doesn't result in swapping). That said, there are a few real bugs in plugins, and probably the main codebase too. They are hopefully being worked on. By the way, here are my referer browser stats for October so far, for anyone interested.
Why the hell aren't you using a free software chat client (so yahoo can't block anything client side), with encryption (so they can't block anything server side)? The are many benefits to free software and encryption beyond this particular situation. A proprietary chat client using a cleartext protocol just seams like idiocy from a security standpoint, especially in the age of Criminal/Corporate/ISP/NSA snooping.
Want to listen to better music and still help the people of Sudan? Check out the Genocide in Sudan compilation. All proceeds go to UNICEF and The UN Refugee Agency. Or you could donate directly to UNICEF, the UN Refugee Agency, or the UN world food programme
Here's to wealth! So maybe alcohol is key to success in mainstream business, but it looks like acid is the drug for you if you want to make it in the tech industry.
We need something like an installation controller....present to the user a simple standard user interface and allow the users to check and uncheck to allow and disallow changes.
This is basically package management. Every usable modern operating system has it. The lack of package management, amoung other things, makes Window$ hopelessly broken.
Debian/Ubuntu: dpkg/apt and synaptic
Red Hat/SuSe/LSB: rpm and YaST or yum
Gentoo: portage and emerge
IRIX: inst and swmgr
BSD: ports/pkg
HP-UX: Software Distributor
NetBSD's pkgsrc is actually ported to just about every *nix, but is not that widly used.
When I first read the title of this post, I thought it was going to be an article about the military industrial complex. I remember hearing somewhere that the largest buyer of Microsoft products was the US government, and I know that the largest department of the federal government is the Department of Defense. Isn't the question of how important the US war machine is to Microsoft more important than this story about some game?
What are you so afraid of that makes you want to censor innocent people? Christian censors tend to have a real problem with sex. Normal healthy adult humans enjoy sex. They don't have some fucked up sense of guilty sin that makes them feel bad about their innate desires.
Maybe it's not sex that you're concerned about. Maybe it's violence. Do you not want young people to see the maimed bodies and ruined cities that result from your work at Northrop Grumman? (Ya got the real ethical high ground, Mr. War Profiteer!)
The words you offered as a crude example of porn, hot naked teen sluts, turn up 258 hits on google scholar, a search engine for academic papers. Those words most certainly are used in science, and censoring them would halt serious scholarship. The first hit at google scholar is for a study that is pro-censorship. You can't even begin to discus important public policy issues if some of the words used to describe them are banned! Even the pro censorship folks wouldn't be able to talk if they were being censored! Censoring profanity and obscenity halts important political and scientific discussions. If you can't say "FUCK", then you can't say "FUCK the government".
Humans should circumvent censorship so that they can be free to express and learn about whatever they want. I want young people to grow up well informed and well educated. If you grow up sheltered from the real world, you will be weak and ignorant.
I am not "an atheistic asshole who wants to make all the children in the world little sexual perverts". I don't want to make children into anything. I want human beings to be free to lean on their own, and I expect them to develop into rational sane people if they are allowed to do so. Sheltering teens (post-pubescents, meaning sexually mature human beings) from sexual content is more likely to pervert their sexuality than letting them explore freely.
"dark age of sexual perversion" O NO!!!!!!!!!!!
BE SERIOUS! War, environmental degradation, the shrinking middle class, lack of public healthcare and education, and numerous other sociopolitical problems are a far greater threat to our civilization than people trying out new kinds of sex.
This is a message for all the kids living in any Theocracy, whether it happens to be in Iran or the USA:
Do you think your parents are spying on you and taking Draconian measures to mold you into a little puritan? Want to be free to learn about the real world and maybe even use your own body as you desire? Do you want to learn about evolution, but have fundie nut parents trying to censor your entire environment? Don't want to loose your legal home (which includes perhaps your only access to food, shelter, and healthcare?), and risk getting jailed for leaving it? If you are reading this, you probably have some place where you can access the Internet with minimal restrictions. Maybe you are lucky enough to be online at a friend's house or library. Maybe you hacked the filter at your public school or church. If you want to expand your access and keep your freedom, you will need to take some precautions. To get around any logging or filtering software running on a local machine, I suggest getting your own computer. Try ebay. If you can't afford a full computer, and just want to chat, I recommend the zipit, it runs Linux, so you can modify it and add features like encryption. If these are not viable options, you should use a Linux (or BSD, or OpenSolaris) bootable CD. If you suspect that there is network based monitoring, you should use gaim-otr or gaim-encryption for your chatting and gpg for your email. Learn to tunnel your network traffic through http, ssh, and other protocols. If you are using someone else's PC, you should also check for a hardware keylogger. Use the presumption of your ignorance to your advantage. Play the naïve little kid. If you get caught trying to circumvent censorship and spying, act like you have no idea what you are doing and just got lost. Act like the computer is broken and you are confused and frustrated.
A brief message to the parents: Kids like sex. Kids are curious. Remember back when you were a teenager? Wouldn't you have really liked a (select gender based on sexual preference) about ten years older than you (someone in their 20s), to fuck? As illegal and "wrong" as that is, it's what we've evolved to desire. You become sexually mature as a teen, and you want the most fit sexual partner. People older than you are probably the most fit. As you get older, people younger than you are probably the most fit. All the technology in the wold will not change this. It's human nature. Your irrational fear of pleasure is no excuse to stunt your offspring's intellectual growth. Do you really want to keep them from accessing the biggest store of human knowledge ever amassed, just because you don't like the idea that they might actually want to enjoy sex? Or...is it worse than that? Are you a religious asshole that wants to keep your kid from learning about science? If so, you are the reason why your nation is going to plunge deep into a second dark age of technological decay and theocratic war. Thanks a lot!
Coca-Cola, for example, does not harm anyone who does not buy it.
Tell that to the workers of Coke in Colombia who try to organize a union.
How many real ATMs have been exploited using this information? Manuals for common hardware are basically public information (although I'm sure the vendor retains copyright to them and could conceivably also use trade secret law to keep people from sharing proprietary information). I don't really think this is much of a threat. If you are a security researcher and want to learn more, here are two ATM manuals that I've found.
Images scanned from a physical ATM manual
A different manual in PDF form
Since the GPL is based on well established copyright and contract law, in most nations it shouldn't really need to be "tested" in court. IANAL, but I would think that it would have a far stronger legal standing than EULAs which often make the people who agree to them take all sorts of measures that have nothing to do with traditional copyright protection.
I actually agree with rms for the most part, but will play devil's advocate for a bit here. Stallman never liked conventional software licenses. He wanted to create and use free software but licenses got in the way. He could have fought all licenses and even all copyrights, and demanded that all information be free. Instead he built a license upon established copyright law, and the GNU GPL was born. Now he has a problem with software patents. Instead of supporting the free and open use of patents, he is saying that all software patents are unjust. Why does Stallman consider the OSDL patent initiative so bad? If it is unfair because it uses the same legal protections as the corporate trolls, then doesn't the GPL legitimate the unjust system of software licenses in the same way?
China and the USA are behind in the broadband race; each have to catch up with Sweden.
Your history of SDF is correct, but this particular case does not prove that Linux is less secure than BSD. Depending on how you configure your system, either OS can be rock solid impenetrable, or more exploitable than an unpatched Windows98 box. Very few successful break ins are due to kernel flaws; usually the problem is an application bug, bad configuration, or incorrect policy. I also run a public shell service, and it too often comes under attempted exploit and DoS attacks. I've successfully managed to run it using Linux. I also run OpenBSD on another machine. Linux and BSD both have strong security as strengths, if you use them correctly. However, there is something to be said for OpenBSD's policy of "secure by default".
OpenBSD was a fork() of netbsd. Is there any chance they could reunite to make a single stronger OS? How difficult would reconciling the politics and the codebase be?
If radio shack cuts anymore costs , what will be left?
Why not display the video using a PC with a video card that has composite or S-video output? You should be able to hook up to any modern TV or projector. You could encode the video in whatever format you want: lossless DV, Ogg Theora, XviD, even WMV if you are really sadistic. You could store it on whatever medium you want: DVD, a hard disk, a NAS, CD, usb flash drives, whatever. Backups should be easy.
As other posters have mentioned, cooperatives and collectives are one option for a more free business model; there are many others. You may be interested in Anarcho-Syndicalism. Syndicalists see labor unions as a force for revolutionary social change, replacing capitalism and the State with a new society democratically self-managed by workers. Millions of human hours have been spent thinking about and articulating radically free economic paradigms. Your idea for an open source business is interesting, but doesn't go into much detail. You just say that it would be web based, have startup costs, and will go in whatever direction the workers want. It's not a bad idea, but if you and anyone who reads your "plan" are serious, then you should look at the history of nonhierarchical organizations and learn from the theories, failures, and successes of the past. After you develop stronger ideas about how to create democracy in the workplace, you should create a more concrete plan.
Yes, when the government intervenes in the economy, it tends to do so in favor of the interests of large corporations, because big business leaders either own the politicians or are the politicians. It should be obvious that this isn't what those campaigning for net neutrality want. We want an Internet where a user can connect to any host just as easily as any other. Servers that get more traffic have to pay for more bandwidth, just like clients that want to transfer more data must buy a faster connection. However, the ISPs in between client and server should not artificially make extra money by demanding additional charges for popular content or by throttling some services and prioritizing others. ISPs should just route IP data and not look at what application layer information is being carried. Those who want net neutrality should use whatever tools they can to achieve this goal. They can take a political route by lobbying for common carrier and pro net neutrality laws. Politicians don't really serve us, so civil disobedience might be more effective. We can subvert attempts to split up the Internet by mirroring, port redirecting, various types of data encapsulation, and proxying. We can also try to work within the free market by switching to more neutral carriers, starting up more neutral ISPs if none exist in an area, and by educating consumers. The principal of net neutrality is sound. There may be legitimate criticism of certain tactics (like trusting congress to do what we want), but that doesn't invalidate what we are trying to do.
I don't know about VAX, but Debian runs great on MIPS and many other platforms. I installed and used it on several Sgi Indys and X worked fine, as did sound, networking, and all the hardware features I had used under IRIX. Some software was slower (gcc is notorously less optomised for MIPS then the commericial Sgi c compiler MIPS Pro), but more modern software was available. Most Debian packages are available for most architectures.
I also run Debian on PA-RISC for my shell server. Add an account for yourself and do a few apt-cache searches to see which packages are available. All the major desktop and server packages are there (various apache mods, firefox, gaim, amule, etc). I found Debian to provide more modern software then HP-UX or BSD for PA-RISC. Even most of the somewhat obscure Debain provided applications are available. I run Debian and Ubuntu on x86, OpenBSD and Solaris on SPARC64 (Solaris is better for SMP systems), IRIX and Debian on MIPS (IRIX is better for newer Sgis like the Octane2), and HP-UX and Debian on PA-RISC. Overall I've found Debian to be the most portable complete Operating Environment. I have not used NetBSD that much so I am not aware of it's current state. It has a reputation for portability, but seams to lag behind in terms of real world testing (many of the ports apparently consist of cross compiling code), and also doesn't seem to have as many packages as Debian. Overall it just looks less up to date then Debian or OpenBSD.
You might be interested in Smedley Butler, if you haven't already learned about the most decorated marine in history. He understood the interested behind US foreign intervention.
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.
He spoke to the U.S. Congress in 1934 to reveal and thwart a fascist takeover of the government that had been plotted by wealthy industrialists. I wish a heroes from the military would have the courage today to stop the neo-conservative fascist (backed by wealthy industrialists) takeover of the US government.
It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the chickens will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new centrifuge generated superchicken overlords.
I can't recommend a specific provider, but I would like to point out that moving to Linux does not mean abandoning your ASP code. Java System ASP is cross platform; you can provide ASP content using a Linux, Windows, Solaris, or other *nix server.