Can you call a thing paradise if, in order for it to exist, someone else has to suffer? And in fact can you call the life the average U.S. geek lives paradise anyway? I mean, if you're one house payment away from the street and pulling down $120k/year, is that really a desirable situation? It's just crazy.
Mass outbreaks of prosperity. Why is this so scary? If wages were pretty much the same in all countries, you would never again have to worry about your job being outsourced, and you wouldn't have to listen to lectures about children starving in China either. Granted, you'd probably be able to afford fewer toys, but I am pretty sure you would not starve to death.
There will be a winning desktop on Linux eventually. But it probably won't be either Gnome or KDE unless something dramatic changes in one of these two communities. It will probably be a fork of Qt and KDE, done by a different team that's more in touch with the intended user base. And the user community will be very fortunate when the results of that fork come to fruition. Forks aren't inherently bad. Forks that don't produce a useful improvement are bad.
Let me go a step farther: if you are a linux geek, and it's important to you that Linux is widely adopted, then by buying a computer on which linux runs flawlessly with no hacking, you are actually hurting your own cause. You should buy a computer that requires some hacking to get working, and make damned sure that you get your hacks into your favorite distro so that the people who *aren't* geeks and *can't* fix problems like this benefit.
Um. Ahem. If I want a computer that works without fussing, I buy a Macbook, because (a) it runs OSX and (b) OSX has drivers that work on all mac hardware, so (c) I don't have to worry about whether or not I'll have some weird kind of problem with my particular hardware that never gets fixed.
If I want to buy a computer because I want to make Linux work better, then I buy whatever computer I fancy, because (a) that's the computer I want, (b) I'm a geek, and presumably I can get it working with some hacking, and (c) I'll be helping people by doing so.
Both are perfectly valid ways of thinking about the process of buying a computer, so I'm not sure why you made that crack about the it not being Linux's fault that the driver doesn't work. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. What matters is that the driver doesn't work.
The free driver draws bad data on the screen. I think it's because the GeForce does some kind of weird shared memory thing that the free driver doesn't understand. So I'm stuck with the nvidia driver, which is *supposed* to work for suspend, but unfortunately does not *actually* work.:'(
My point is that it doesn't Just Work. If your goal is to put yourself in a position where you will try to make a different - that is, to get it closer to Just Working - then I encourage you to go for it. If on the other hand you really want it to Just Work, I'd get the Macbook. You can run Linux on it if you want - I think the Intel GPU drivers are pretty good.:')
I don't know why you'd care about a good graphics chip on a laptop running Linux, although I am happy that my Vaio has a fast chip for when I boot into Windows to run games. The main problem with laptops and Linux for me is that sleep and suspend to disk don't work very reliably. Despite multiple fixes to the nvidia drivers, I have never gotten my laptop to successfully resume from suspend to ram or from suspend to disk. This is a royal pain in the neck - it means I have to shutdown every time I move from one place to another. The kernel also seems to get the CPU fan spinning even when the system isn't loaded, which is pretty weird.
IMHO it's not ready for primetime yet. I'd recommend just getting a Macbook, unless your goal is to try to improve the situation. That's the only reason I'm running Linux on a laptop.
Sad but true. They're a weed where my mom comes from in Oklahoma, too, although a very welcome weed. I live in Arizona, and blackberries do not grow like weeds here.:'(
If you live in the states, Perrier and San Pelligrino are imported, which seems kind of silly. Why not use local water? Get a reverse osmosis filter if you're concerned about contaminants. My wife and I use a soda club carbonation device to carbonate regular local water, and that works really well for us. I usually mix about one part juice to five parts water to get a very nice drink - flavorful, but not too sweet, and no weird artificial sweeteners. The really nice thing about this is that it reduces waste substantially - the soda club has a large carbon dioxide bottle, instead of one of those stupid little one-shot things, and it lasts us about six months. And when we're done, we return it for our deposit, and they reuse it. So the only remaining significant waste is the juice bottle, which is minimized because I'm using such a low ratio of juice to water. If only we could grow enough blackberries ourselves...:'}
What you're talking about is more theoretical than actual. Nobody has a majority of the state of a typical linux box in their head to the extent that they could actually solve a problem you were having with it for a price you could afford. The degree to which things are intertwined is too severe - it's impossible to be a "linux expert" anymore. Vast swaths of the kernel are undocumented and very difficult for even a person who knows theoretically what they do to actually modify (I'm thinking in particular about the network stack). So sure, there are four guys somewhere who know how to fix your problem, and if you're lucky you can get them to do it, probably for free, but they have limited time, and if you can't get it, you're going to have to grow the knowledge from scratch, which is quite expensive and time-consuming.
One huge problem I have with Linux right now is that for any given problem, there are typically at least three competing solutions (in the case of audio, it's actually about six). And they're all running on your Linux box at the same time. This means that audio behaves inconsistently, for example - one app works, another complains that it can't open sound devices. A third seems like it might work, but you can't actually get it to do what you want, because it uses an API that hides the labels of sound devices.
It's easy to say "naw, he's just grousing, he doesn't get it." But this is a real problem. It's what makes Windows so awful - heaps of stuff on top of heaps of stuff. There really is a strong need for some garbage collection here. I don't mean that any of this stuff is garbage - it's not. I just mean that there's too much of it, and a distribution that can be grokked needs to throw a lot of it out.
Personally, my dream is to have a Linux distro that includes the source, only has one audio system, only has one toolkit, and when an app core dumps, it pops you into the debugger and shows you where the segfault happened, and gives you the opportunity to patch and proceed. But it would have to be a pretty compact system before that would have a hope of working.
M-Audio's drivers are awful. If the device you get works out of the box, e.g. with ALSA, go for it, but if you're running Windows or Mac, it's kind of a crap shoot. MOTU used to have some really good hackers, but I can't speak for their current drivers. Right now I'm using a USB iMic for audio input, and it's rock solid on Linux, but of course there's no real way to ensure that the audio is synced if you use more than one of these.
More to the point, if you really care about freedom, you want as many people as possible running Linux, because when Linux becomes mainstream, it gains clout. Vendors start to *care* about Linux. Right now they don't care very much. This attitude of "I want everything my way, now," is understandable, but not effective.
The problem is that if _you_ download a decss library, _you_ are theoretically in trouble. _You_ are theoretically violating the DMCA. The Ubuntu guys don't want to expose you to that risk unknowingly. So they make you jump through hoops to do it. Which is as it should be, until at some point in the (hopefully not far-distant) future the DMCA is repealed.
They own the copyright. That means they have the right, by law, to restrict how you copy the product. This right is limited, both in duration and in effect - there are fairly complicated fair use practices established by legal precedent and by acts of Congress, that govern the circumstances under which you do not need permission to make a copy.
So in fact they do have a right to dictate certain things you might do with your copy of the software. But one of those rights is not the right to coerce you into not selling it.
Indeed, the fact that software vendors typically will not send you replacement media if your media is lost, without charging you for a full additional license, also suggests that the value is in the media, not in the license.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but there is a big difference between predicting global average temperatures and predicting the precise path that a storm or even a large weather system will follow. One is a prediction about averages in a large system; the other is a prediction about the exact behavior of a strongly chaotic system. If you look at global average temperature graphs, you can see that the system is not strongly chaotic - there are local cycles, and there are trends.
Even predicting "this will be a warm year" is a lot different than predicting "the general temperature trend will be upward over the next decade." I'm not asserting that it will or won't - I'm not an atmosphere scientist. What I am saying is that your reasoning is based on an erroneous conflation of two very different ideas because the same word, "weather" can be used to refer to either. So whether or not your conclusion turns out to be correct in the long run, we have no way to predict based upon the argument you have made.
The article says that the single *might* hit the number one spot. It doesn't say it *did* hit the number one spot. The person they were quoting said "mid-week sales figures are confidential," which means to me that we don't yet know that this single has in fact topped the charts. Maybe it will, though. Not sure why we should care.
Apple's lock on the market is a weakness, just as the wireless phone companies' lock on their market is a weakness. The question is really who blinks first: Apple, the wireless companies, or us. I guess the smart money right now is on us - we seem thus far to have accepted whatever the market hands us. But the cell phone/ipod split is interesting.
Consider this: I have a Samsung t809 phone from t-mobile. This little baby has a transmedia flash card, which holds up to a gigabyte. And t-mobile seems to be pretty smart about not crippling their phones. I spent several weeks dithering over the fancier phones and networks that Verizon and Sprint offer, but finally just got disgusted with their attempts to squeeze the maximum amount of blood out of me and went with t-mobile, who bent over backwards to make me happy.
So now I've got this cute little phone, and guess what? It doubles as an iPod killer. Granted, 1G isn't very much storage, but it's early days. Wait for it. When t-mobile starts shipping 30g phones, things could change suddenly.
The bad news for Verizon, Sprint and their ilk? I don't have to pay t-mobile to listen to tunes on my phone, but I do have to pay Verizon and Sprint. This is a no-brainer to me - the cost of being with the big providers is too much. (Don't talk to me about Cingular - they're even *more* expensive). So now t-mobile, which arguably has a worse network, has a competitive advantage: they aren't assholes. So what if I'm a little bit harder to reach? I don't really like being interrupted anyway.
What does this mean for Apple? Simple: I can't use iTMS music on my phone. It's not an apple product, it doesn't support fairplay, and so I am shut out. My solution: buy CDs, rip them, load them into the phone. Sure, the CDs cost a little extra, but it's worth it to escape the DRM. Oh, right, you're running Windows, so the CD installs a rootkit on your machine. Consider a different operating system. Ubuntu is nice. No CD-based rootkits, no autorun at all. Your favorite artist uses too much DRM? Well, either buy the music from iTMS and burn it to CD and then rip it, or consider whether or not you really like that artist as much as you thought you did. There are a lot of other fish in the sea.
I was fairly enthusiastic about iTMS to begin with, but when the DRM started biting me in the ass, I stopped buying iTMS music.
So I think the author is right that Apple's clock is about to get cleaned, and he's right that cell phones will be the vector for the cleaning. But I think he's wrong about how it will actually happen. I think what will really happen is that nobody will blink, we the listeners will leave Apple, Verizon and Sprint in droves, t-mobile will take over the world, and I'll happily listen to music on my phone.
That reminds me: it's time for me to burn and rip all my iTMS music, so I can load it on my phone...
Too true. If there'd been copies of V for Vendetta for sale outside the theater at a reasonable price, Andrea and I would definitely have snagged a copy.
I think what's going on there is that there was a pent-up demand for something that didn't previously exist, and then when they rolled out the thing for which there was demand, at the level of demand, there was an audience waiting. The situation in the states is the opposite - there is too large a supply of theaters for the demand that will exist once DVDs are released at the same time as the movie. I don't know what the difference will be - the only way to find out is for the studios to start releasing DVDs early.
BTW, I'm surprised to hear you say that there were no theaters in Asia - when I was in Thailand in ~1994, there were theaters. I remember La Femme Nikita was big then.
I always look forward to movie previews - they're part of the experience, and have been for years. What gets me is all the stupid ads that come before the trailers. The fandango ads are at least on topic, but I still don't like them - they're annoying, like any ad. And now they have ads for coke, for the local car dealer, god knows what else. Yech.
It is possible to do too many trailers before the movie, but I've only rarely seen that recently. What I've seen recently is just a bunch of annoying ads before the movie, and maybe two or three trailers.
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Can you call a thing paradise if, in order for it to exist, someone else has to suffer? And in fact can you call the life the average U.S. geek lives paradise anyway? I mean, if you're one house payment away from the street and pulling down $120k/year, is that really a desirable situation? It's just crazy.
Mass outbreaks of prosperity. Why is this so scary? If wages were pretty much the same in all countries, you would never again have to worry about your job being outsourced, and you wouldn't have to listen to lectures about children starving in China either. Granted, you'd probably be able to afford fewer toys, but I am pretty sure you would not starve to death.
There will be a winning desktop on Linux eventually. But it probably won't be either Gnome or KDE unless something dramatic changes in one of these two communities. It will probably be a fork of Qt and KDE, done by a different team that's more in touch with the intended user base. And the user community will be very fortunate when the results of that fork come to fruition. Forks aren't inherently bad. Forks that don't produce a useful improvement are bad.
Let me go a step farther: if you are a linux geek, and it's important to you that Linux is widely adopted, then by buying a computer on which linux runs flawlessly with no hacking, you are actually hurting your own cause. You should buy a computer that requires some hacking to get working, and make damned sure that you get your hacks into your favorite distro so that the people who *aren't* geeks and *can't* fix problems like this benefit.
In the end, isn't that the whole point?
Um. Ahem. If I want a computer that works without fussing, I buy a Macbook, because (a) it runs OSX and (b) OSX has drivers that work on all mac hardware, so (c) I don't have to worry about whether or not I'll have some weird kind of problem with my particular hardware that never gets fixed.
If I want to buy a computer because I want to make Linux work better, then I buy whatever computer I fancy, because (a) that's the computer I want, (b) I'm a geek, and presumably I can get it working with some hacking, and (c) I'll be helping people by doing so.
Both are perfectly valid ways of thinking about the process of buying a computer, so I'm not sure why you made that crack about the it not being Linux's fault that the driver doesn't work. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. What matters is that the driver doesn't work.
The free driver draws bad data on the screen. I think it's because the GeForce does some kind of weird shared memory thing that the free driver doesn't understand. So I'm stuck with the nvidia driver, which is *supposed* to work for suspend, but unfortunately does not *actually* work. :'(
:')
My point is that it doesn't Just Work. If your goal is to put yourself in a position where you will try to make a different - that is, to get it closer to Just Working - then I encourage you to go for it. If on the other hand you really want it to Just Work, I'd get the Macbook. You can run Linux on it if you want - I think the Intel GPU drivers are pretty good.
I don't know why you'd care about a good graphics chip on a laptop running Linux, although I am happy that my Vaio has a fast chip for when I boot into Windows to run games. The main problem with laptops and Linux for me is that sleep and suspend to disk don't work very reliably. Despite multiple fixes to the nvidia drivers, I have never gotten my laptop to successfully resume from suspend to ram or from suspend to disk. This is a royal pain in the neck - it means I have to shutdown every time I move from one place to another. The kernel also seems to get the CPU fan spinning even when the system isn't loaded, which is pretty weird.
IMHO it's not ready for primetime yet. I'd recommend just getting a Macbook, unless your goal is to try to improve the situation. That's the only reason I'm running Linux on a laptop.
I've taken it too! :')
But a little smell of garbage as you travel is a small price to pay for getting to the other end of the journey alive...
Am I the only one here who's starting to think Amtrak is a really good deal?
Sad but true. They're a weed where my mom comes from in Oklahoma, too, although a very welcome weed. I live in Arizona, and blackberries do not grow like weeds here. :'(
If you live in the states, Perrier and San Pelligrino are imported, which seems kind of silly. Why not use local water? Get a reverse osmosis filter if you're concerned about contaminants. My wife and I use a soda club carbonation device to carbonate regular local water, and that works really well for us. I usually mix about one part juice to five parts water to get a very nice drink - flavorful, but not too sweet, and no weird artificial sweeteners. The really nice thing about this is that it reduces waste substantially - the soda club has a large carbon dioxide bottle, instead of one of those stupid little one-shot things, and it lasts us about six months. And when we're done, we return it for our deposit, and they reuse it. So the only remaining significant waste is the juice bottle, which is minimized because I'm using such a low ratio of juice to water. If only we could grow enough blackberries ourselves... :'}
What you're talking about is more theoretical than actual. Nobody has a majority of the state of a typical linux box in their head to the extent that they could actually solve a problem you were having with it for a price you could afford. The degree to which things are intertwined is too severe - it's impossible to be a "linux expert" anymore. Vast swaths of the kernel are undocumented and very difficult for even a person who knows theoretically what they do to actually modify (I'm thinking in particular about the network stack). So sure, there are four guys somewhere who know how to fix your problem, and if you're lucky you can get them to do it, probably for free, but they have limited time, and if you can't get it, you're going to have to grow the knowledge from scratch, which is quite expensive and time-consuming.
One huge problem I have with Linux right now is that for any given problem, there are typically at least three competing solutions (in the case of audio, it's actually about six). And they're all running on your Linux box at the same time. This means that audio behaves inconsistently, for example - one app works, another complains that it can't open sound devices. A third seems like it might work, but you can't actually get it to do what you want, because it uses an API that hides the labels of sound devices.
It's easy to say "naw, he's just grousing, he doesn't get it." But this is a real problem. It's what makes Windows so awful - heaps of stuff on top of heaps of stuff. There really is a strong need for some garbage collection here. I don't mean that any of this stuff is garbage - it's not. I just mean that there's too much of it, and a distribution that can be grokked needs to throw a lot of it out.
Personally, my dream is to have a Linux distro that includes the source, only has one audio system, only has one toolkit, and when an app core dumps, it pops you into the debugger and shows you where the segfault happened, and gives you the opportunity to patch and proceed. But it would have to be a pretty compact system before that would have a hope of working.
M-Audio's drivers are awful. If the device you get works out of the box, e.g. with ALSA, go for it, but if you're running Windows or Mac, it's kind of a crap shoot. MOTU used to have some really good hackers, but I can't speak for their current drivers. Right now I'm using a USB iMic for audio input, and it's rock solid on Linux, but of course there's no real way to ensure that the audio is synced if you use more than one of these.
More to the point, if you really care about freedom, you want as many people as possible running Linux, because when Linux becomes mainstream, it gains clout. Vendors start to *care* about Linux. Right now they don't care very much. This attitude of "I want everything my way, now," is understandable, but not effective.
The problem is that if _you_ download a decss library, _you_ are theoretically in trouble. _You_ are theoretically violating the DMCA. The Ubuntu guys don't want to expose you to that risk unknowingly. So they make you jump through hoops to do it. Which is as it should be, until at some point in the (hopefully not far-distant) future the DMCA is repealed.
They own the copyright. That means they have the right, by law, to restrict how you copy the product. This right is limited, both in duration and in effect - there are fairly complicated fair use practices established by legal precedent and by acts of Congress, that govern the circumstances under which you do not need permission to make a copy.
So in fact they do have a right to dictate certain things you might do with your copy of the software. But one of those rights is not the right to coerce you into not selling it.
Indeed, the fact that software vendors typically will not send you replacement media if your media is lost, without charging you for a full additional license, also suggests that the value is in the media, not in the license.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but there is a big difference between predicting global average temperatures and predicting the precise path that a storm or even a large weather system will follow. One is a prediction about averages in a large system; the other is a prediction about the exact behavior of a strongly chaotic system. If you look at global average temperature graphs, you can see that the system is not strongly chaotic - there are local cycles, and there are trends.
Even predicting "this will be a warm year" is a lot different than predicting "the general temperature trend will be upward over the next decade." I'm not asserting that it will or won't - I'm not an atmosphere scientist. What I am saying is that your reasoning is based on an erroneous conflation of two very different ideas because the same word, "weather" can be used to refer to either. So whether or not your conclusion turns out to be correct in the long run, we have no way to predict based upon the argument you have made.
Thank you for playing, though.
The article says that the single *might* hit the number one spot. It doesn't say it *did* hit the number one spot. The person they were quoting said "mid-week sales figures are confidential," which means to me that we don't yet know that this single has in fact topped the charts. Maybe it will, though. Not sure why we should care.
Apple's lock on the market is a weakness, just as the wireless phone companies' lock on their market is a weakness. The question is really who blinks first: Apple, the wireless companies, or us. I guess the smart money right now is on us - we seem thus far to have accepted whatever the market hands us. But the cell phone/ipod split is interesting.
Consider this: I have a Samsung t809 phone from t-mobile. This little baby has a transmedia flash card, which holds up to a gigabyte. And t-mobile seems to be pretty smart about not crippling their phones. I spent several weeks dithering over the fancier phones and networks that Verizon and Sprint offer, but finally just got disgusted with their attempts to squeeze the maximum amount of blood out of me and went with t-mobile, who bent over backwards to make me happy.
So now I've got this cute little phone, and guess what? It doubles as an iPod killer. Granted, 1G isn't very much storage, but it's early days. Wait for it. When t-mobile starts shipping 30g phones, things could change suddenly.
The bad news for Verizon, Sprint and their ilk? I don't have to pay t-mobile to listen to tunes on my phone, but I do have to pay Verizon and Sprint. This is a no-brainer to me - the cost of being with the big providers is too much. (Don't talk to me about Cingular - they're even *more* expensive). So now t-mobile, which arguably has a worse network, has a competitive advantage: they aren't assholes. So what if I'm a little bit harder to reach? I don't really like being interrupted anyway.
What does this mean for Apple? Simple: I can't use iTMS music on my phone. It's not an apple product, it doesn't support fairplay, and so I am shut out. My solution: buy CDs, rip them, load them into the phone. Sure, the CDs cost a little extra, but it's worth it to escape the DRM. Oh, right, you're running Windows, so the CD installs a rootkit on your machine. Consider a different operating system. Ubuntu is nice. No CD-based rootkits, no autorun at all. Your favorite artist uses too much DRM? Well, either buy the music from iTMS and burn it to CD and then rip it, or consider whether or not you really like that artist as much as you thought you did. There are a lot of other fish in the sea.
I was fairly enthusiastic about iTMS to begin with, but when the DRM started biting me in the ass, I stopped buying iTMS music.
So I think the author is right that Apple's clock is about to get cleaned, and he's right that cell phones will be the vector for the cleaning. But I think he's wrong about how it will actually happen. I think what will really happen is that nobody will blink, we the listeners will leave Apple, Verizon and Sprint in droves, t-mobile will take over the world, and I'll happily listen to music on my phone.
That reminds me: it's time for me to burn and rip all my iTMS music, so I can load it on my phone...
Pink. Spelling is Hard.
...ping and waybitchen fucsia keyboards! That would so rock my world! I wonder if it's USB compatible?!??!!!111 :')
Too true. If there'd been copies of V for Vendetta for sale outside the theater at a reasonable price, Andrea and I would definitely have snagged a copy.
I think what's going on there is that there was a pent-up demand for something that didn't previously exist, and then when they rolled out the thing for which there was demand, at the level of demand, there was an audience waiting. The situation in the states is the opposite - there is too large a supply of theaters for the demand that will exist once DVDs are released at the same time as the movie. I don't know what the difference will be - the only way to find out is for the studios to start releasing DVDs early.
BTW, I'm surprised to hear you say that there were no theaters in Asia - when I was in Thailand in ~1994, there were theaters. I remember La Femme Nikita was big then.
I always look forward to movie previews - they're part of the experience, and have been for years. What gets me is all the stupid ads that come before the trailers. The fandango ads are at least on topic, but I still don't like them - they're annoying, like any ad. And now they have ads for coke, for the local car dealer, god knows what else. Yech.
It is possible to do too many trailers before the movie, but I've only rarely seen that recently. What I've seen recently is just a bunch of annoying ads before the movie, and maybe two or three trailers.