what about permacrete? I wonder if we'll get any closer to wedge impeller drives for starships, along with Warshawski sails for FTL travel... Who knows what science holds for us in the future...
Ever heard of something called "Farady's cage"? Besides, once you're on landing, you don't need that much information, you can visually SEE the spot where you're going. It doesn't mean the systems weren't damaged, but they weren't needed to the same level. On landing you're relying mostly on onboard gyroscopes to give you attitude data and on ground radar for accurate altitude. A plane's GPS still isn't precise enough to guarantee that level of precision. Hence you can get hit by lightning and not worry about much, but a cell phone from inside your cage can totally garble up your radio signals...
Believe it or not, but it's not the FAA or the airlines doing the cellphone testing. It's the aircraft manufacturers. Boeing and Airbus both run tests, and there IS interference with some of the more sensitive systems on the plane, like, duh, navigation. GPS is better at high altitudes, but when you have to get 6 data values from GPS, you need many more satellite receptions than for just location. Modern planes don't use just gyros for roll/pitch/yaw rates, they confirm it with GPS data. As one might expect, the radio antennaes receiving those can become jammed. That's the reason you can call on your phone when you're on the ground, but not in the air. That post is just another Rosie-style conspiracy theory about the FAA and the FCC. I have no respect for people that don't try to understand the sensitivity of avionics and then reject every technical argument as "political cover-up". Wifi isn't so much of an issue because it is lower power, and on a narrower and very different radio range. Gees people, stop seeing evil everywhere, there's enough already that we don't need to paint the world as COMPLETELY depressing!
For tag edition, consider Picard, from musicbrainz.org It may not have all of your music files, but the ones it does it will make sure they are tagged properly, and it can move the files into a specific folder arrangement. If musicbrainz doesn't have those tags, well, upload them, and be safe in knowing that the tags will be available for your files, so even if they get screwed up, you can find them again.
Now, for managing something that big, something along the lines of Amarok is recommended, where it uses an external DB, like SQLite or MySql, or other. Try looking around on sourceforge.net, or any other famous OSX software download sites. Not a OSX user myself, my meager 50GB of music loads just fine in Amarok on gentoo. Good luck with that repository.
just because I'm in school doesn't mean I haven't had professional experience. And I'm not talking about life critical systems like hospitals or stock markets, whose managers will know to get SAs worth their salt, but rather your average company with 1000+ desktops and a few dozen servers around. Most of the SAs in those situations aren't always that smart. And school is as good a learning experience as professional if you're learning outside the classroom. The point of the menu.lst file I was talking about shows precisely how an SA for a certain environment doesn't always have the reflexes to look for a man page, or documentation online. You can bitch and moan all you want, the fact remains that non-mission critical systems constitute most of the computers out there, and most SAs don't have to know nearly as much as you do. As for my own experience, managing 5 different machines (different OSes and arch) remotely (2 hour flight) is just as valid as managing 1000, except maybe less time consuming, and not as time critical. Had enough ranting yet? I can go on all night if I have to.
Actually, I've helped out the SAs in my school's IT department figure out stuff as simple as grub's menu.lst file. And they're Solaris certified. No offense, but certification doesn't make a good SA, unlike what the rest of the world thinks. Granted, the servers never go down, and Ubuntu is not Solaris. But it just shows how sometimes people can be somewhat obtuse as to where to look for configuration options or documentation... A GOOD SA is what you describe. But do you know how hard it is to stumble onto them? And yes, I will test my metal in the workplace, that's one of the things on my after graduation to-do list...
Exactly. Any decent linux SA will also have a higher pay as well, because it's not as common a skill as windows SA. Again, stereotyping here, but windows SAs hate the command line in general and keep their skills at "point and tick the right box, restart". If you count the cost of your SA's pay, then yes, I would expect the TCO of linux to be a tad higher, if you omit the cost of windows licenses on the other side. Linux/*nix SAs in general know more of the underlying OS than their windows counterparts do, it's just a fact because of how the system works. Where windows provides GUIs for all aspects of configuration, *nix provides.conf files that you can edit by hand and get exactly the configuration you want in just the same amount of time, and with Linux, you don't need to reboot, just restart the service. More efficient and faster! Not user-friendly for a granny's desktop, but for a SA, whose very job it is to make sure everything's configured right, it is. I haven't seen Vista, but XP and the little bit I've seen of Server 2003 all seemed very GUI based to me. There was an article about Windows finally receiving a decent command-line utility. Is Vista Pro going to get it so that SAs can actually do linux-style administration? Or is everything still going to be a mix of.ini files and registry keys to be activated using a GUI?
Gentoo is mostly compiled from scratch, but I never really believed it was for performance gain as far as software speed and responsiveness goes, but rather as features builtin to the software goes. Other people have already pointed most of that out, but the whole point of gentoo/portage is the USE variables, that let you quickly select what your system is going to be built for. Want it as a multimedia box? easy, just add all the multimedia-relevant use flags into your make.conf, then start emerge mplayer or whatever other media player you like, want a server? Just say so: USE="-X -gtk -qt apache2 xml php " and emerge -av apache2 php, etc. That's the whole point. Portage is just plain EASIER to deal with, imo, than any.rpm or.deb distro. Also easy for you to create builds of non-official packages with the overlay. That's what Gentoo's about, and I don't think it'll die. It's just too easy to use to let go. Sure the mailing lists are not that great, but the forums are among the best I've found, and #gentoo when it's not too crowded is pretty good too. Doesn't mean it's going to die out.
I agree wholehartedly. But I think that in the short run, they're going to end up in a position where people are just either going to download illegally more and more, and what are they going to do then? If they go to trial before a jury, most of which are themselves downloaders, the RIAA will lose all cases, and then collapse because their revenue source is disappearing completely, or people will just stop listening to music altogether, and radio, CDs and podcasts then become useless, and the RIAA collapses because of an even faster loss of revenue. Isn't this a lose-lose situation for the RIAA? If radios start going off the air, and the RIAA starts making their own, which, imo, will most likely be a pay service, then people are going to find ways to live without music. Either way, the current mafia system on music is going down the drain. And soon to follow will be the movie system, if they keep the same attitude. I'd love to see that happen. Most of what I listen to is classical, and I'm in an orchestra. The RIAA can't claim to own copyrights to my own recordings of old pieces, so no money from me! Haha!
That's exactly it. What ticked me off is that they claimed I could verify their PGP signature on a given website, and when I tried looking for it, there was no such signature. Thanks Enigmail! I replied saying that I would not accept a fraudulent email as notification of anything, and haven't heard back since. I'm guessing it was either a spammer trying to scare me and/or campus IT, or they have a problem in their system and they can't move forward without cleaning it up first. Anyway, I ain't paying anything until I get sued. Not that I have money to burn, but as a matter of principle. Plus the law school here is bound to have contacts with lawyers who could handle a case like this (not students, I'm not stupid, but alumns that have done well, etc.).
I'm talking about people like myself, who don't use P2P download, yet STILL get those freaking letters! It's like living next door to a drug dealer and the cops accuse you of dealing along with him! I have no issue with them trying to make downloaders pay, but people who DON'T download, and who don't have enough money to spend on that, that's extortion and it's illegal.
Except when they target students on financial aid, whose very education could be depending on the few thousands of dollars they're demanding! If anything, the RIAA is going to create a whole generation of people who could've afforded school, but thanks to those annoying bastards can't really finish their degree, are left with huge loans and don't have a degree allowing them to pay their debts. The RIAA is really pissing me off, they're not helping educate people, they're helping them drop out of school and get even further into debt! If the RIAA had any kind of patriotic interest whatsoever, they would stop suing students right NOW and instead try to have lotteries for scholarships for people who legally buy music. That'll get any students' attention, and they'll want to buy music in the process!
What I'm more curious to see is if they changed the keyboard shortcuts. Even on a mac there are shortcuts that allow you to do many window operations (minimize, maximize, switch apps). Now I like the fact that Xorg seems to have a builtin key + button combo, so if you hit alt and click-drag a window, it will move, regardless of where the cursor is inside that window. That there is true productivity. Menus? Who really needs them, if you have shortcuts well defined in your application bar (quicklaunch on XP, dock on OSX and dock/sysbar on KDE/Gnome/E17/...). My point is, if you know how to configure and use your system, it's much faster than using menus, finding the appropriate click, etc. Why can't people use Alt+F4 to quit on windows, Apple+Q on OSX, Ctrl+Q on Linux? It seems to me that learning those shortcuts might save a LOT of time! And people won't be too confused by them, they're usually easy to learn. I'd like to see a study comparing keyboard shortcuts and properly setup desktops, and THEN compare productivity. I'm willing to bet that you won't see much difference in those cases.
It's not. The issue here is not which distro is better than the other in some very personal sense, it's whether or not it makes sense to update all the time. I personally feel that, yes, gentoo does require lots of time to update constantly, but it's meant for a park of desktops, not specifically servers, or else you'd better have a number of machines you have a servers + 1 to run updates and then just use packages compiled on your external machine. Yes new patches come out all the time, but the real question is whether you trust developers to improve their code over time, or to destroy it. We've seen one end of the spectrum with what MS did between 98 and ME, and I believe that gentoo shows us the other end. While you theoretically always ARE at the bleeding edge with Gentoo, it does have a "safe window" built in, the way it handles portage with the keyword system. New packages are usually in CVS within 48 hours of release. If they compile and run, they get thrown into the ~arch (testing) rapidly. Then, depending on what kind of update has been done on it, you'll have to wait anywhere from 2 days to 5 months to see it come down into the actual arch repository, which is deemed the "stable" gentoo. I personally run ~arch, yet I can't seem to recall a problem that portage couldn't solve with minimum input on my part. Yes, I'm a gentoo fanboy, but I'm not so glued down into distro patriotism to refuse to see flaws where they are. Some people seem to want to spend time in maintenance to keep a system up to date and continually tinker and let their knowledge grow by frequent maintenance, and other people seem more interested in setting something up and being lazy about having to deal with updates/upgrades. I personally trust that most open source coders, and especially the ones for the big projects like apache, ssh, mysql and others of that caliber, usually improve the code from release to release, not damage it. Security fixes, bug fixes, and plain new features are usually the goal of coders, and I trust that they do that.
that's not too hard. Get a projection screen with a spotlight aimed at it. There's your screen. Then you can create your layer fairly easily, no? Any meeting room, or multimedia classroom will have one of those, anywhere with a projector will work. You just need a pair of tripods, your camera and a fairly powerful wide range spotlight. Done!
What about Realplayer exactly is illegal? I know it won't solve *BSDs and other *Nix users' problems, but Linux has a realplayer version. So why again is it illegal to run something that is not MS specific? Hello, welcome to the new year, we're in the 21st century, not in the early 90s, there's something called "interoperability" that has been growing in the tech world... Time for reality to harvest!
Re:HELP MEEEEEE
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Plasma or LCD?
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Plasma doesn't have the longevity of LCD TVs, and to be honest, LCD TVs have in general better viewing angles. And LCD TVs are cheaper for sizes up to 42". Just things I've gleaned walking in Fry's Electronics this afternoon.
I saw it coming a while ago. When I heard of Longhorn in preparation I knew that it would fail. For several reasons, but mostly one simple thing. Microsoft tried to protect its interests with XP, using the WGA scheme, and service packs that checked for validity and so forth. Consumers *hated* those measures. How many false positives has the WGA detected? More than enough. Virii, spyware, spam, it's taken too much toll on the users' ability to perform their tasks. Now, when you buy a PC, you have to have Anti-this, anti-that, firewall and so forth. Those services eat ressources. People running 3 year old machines that have installed all those things can expect lag while webpages load because of all that padding to prevent infection of their system, and then even after waiting for too long, non-responsive windows and so forth, they will STILL get spyware/adware and always spam. Well no sh*t Sherlock! Microsoft has long ago decided it's in the money making business, not customer satisfaction business. Companies used MS because that was the only viable alternative for a while, and even today, many industries still rely on Windows 2000 rather than XP, for the simple reason that it works with what they've invested in. However, Linux and OSX have been working VERY hard to get ahead, and thankfully, these systems are designed to fit the customer/users' needs. Linux? Do anything you want with it. Run webservers, databases, phone systems, rendering, and even desktop applications on it. All that flexibility for very little cost of actual software. You're not paying for software AND support, you're paying only support. As XP came out, Linux wasn't ready for prime time. RedHat was providing an Entreprise version, as were SuSE and Mandrake, but in all honesty, there was a gap that existed, Windows wasn't evil enough, and there weren't quite yet enough advantages to Linux to warrant the switch, retraining everyone and so forth. Today however, after Service Pack 2 failed to properly secure XP, and all those DRM addons have been force fed into media player, and all other wmv portable players, well, simplicity, stability and functionality seem to have somewhat disappeared from the leading OS on the market. Apple has reminded everyone that alternatives do exist, like OSX, and, because it is Unix based, Unix has appeared once more on the radar of common knowledge. If Apple can make Unix look and work well, then why can't Linux? Oh sure, there are more than enough Macboys out there preaching OSX, but not everyone likes Aqua, or an already made system that will lock you into some things you don't want to be force-fed (iTMS' DRM for instance). But it reminded people of that newcomer on the playing field, Linux. In the past few years, I've watched gnome go from a squarish desktop reminiscent of OS 9 and in some ways windows 3.11 to a full featured Desktop that offers as much integration, and much more logic, than the XP interface ever did. KDE has made at least as much progress, and we're seeing more options than ever, and from all the development that has happened since 2002 a LOT of good things have come out. Openoffice 2 pioneered the use of the ODF, Firefox has been gnawing stronger and stronger on the share of Internet Explorer, and even Safari in some respect. Ubuntu is probably the biggest advantage Linux can get to date. I am ready to claim that anyone, anywhere, that really wants to use an alternative to windows, can burn an Ubuntu disc and use their computer freely, to satisfy their needs (save gamers, and even they aren't going to lose for very long, some major games already have native releases, like the UT and Quake series). It is time that players like Adobe invest in the alternative, because the tide is coming, and it would hurt for them to be behind.
Point taken. I probably should've shut up in the first place, the only embedded programming I've done was on MicaZ motes, and that was using TinyOS, which has been refined over time, developped purposely to be a stable code base that you could then assemble into a realtime OS. TinyOS gave the impression that the embedded programming evolved, yes, but that released code would always be stable. Maybe it's true for TinyOS, but from your description, Linux embedded is more like regular gentoo development anyway. I just don't see you wanting to update all your code base daily, as you develop an app for a device... But maybe it's just me.
I'm a gentoo fan as well, but for an embedded OS, I don't know if it'd be that great. For one thing, Gentoo's philosophy is "bleeding edge". If you're dealing with embedded software that's never going to be on a network for updates (think medical devices), then Gentoo's no good. I would see gentoo in an mp3 player (constant link with a PC for updates), but not, say, in a cardiogram machine, a mica-style mote, or other small non-networked devices. The problem is that Gentoo fixes bugs by using the next available version of software, which works well, up to a point. It is the unfortunate truth that a new software version fixes bugs, but introduces new ones (i.e security is never tested against brand new code, gentoo has very little testing time). Usually less, of course, but still not good enough for an embedded OS. Sorry, but for embedded stuff, a binairy based distro is probably safer (bundle the source with it, to give choice, and to comply with the GPL) for an embedded application. My own $0.02 of opinion.
What kind of logic is this??? Either you fight the pirates and try to sell your music via the iTMS or you get a royalty payment and let your music be available for free. I'm fed up with the *AAs trying to tell me that I owe them money. I don't. I go see the GOOD movies in theater (there's one coming out every eon or so, maybe you need to check that?) and when I want to watch something, well I have Blockbuster and NetFlix. Music-wise? Most of the bands they produce suck, and I'd much rather go to a concert, and find the occasional song playing on a radio station than buy a CD or DRM files, because they just want a constant money stream. My wallet says no, and I live just fine without music. Ever walk outside without an iPod plugged into your ears? Sometimes a good hike without music does you good. The *AAs are beyond a pain in the ass, they're thieving not just people, but businesses as well, and I sure hope that Apple takes them to court for diffamation on that one.
Sooner or later he's going to have to enforce some sort of IP address logging, like most services of that type do. For instance, www.jetable.org, a french site along the lines of mailinator forwards given emaisl to your account for the specified duration, but it logs your IP address and the time you were on, in case it becomes essential to know who was whom in a legal case. With that info, it's *still* possible that a 10 minute email will lead back to you. Not just an email account, but an ISP account this time, which is even more identifiable, imo.
Maybe, maybe not? To be honest, I doubt that this will happen. Most MS devs are, well, used to develop on Windows. Having to deal with an other OS's calls (compiling Visual C++ isn't about just taking the source, unpacking, running./configure and make) is something that is going to be scary at least. The idea of a.NET move is pretty interesting however, as it gets MS standards on both Unix/MS platforms, and tries to shut out Mac, but afaik there's a Mono port on MacOS. So they're probably trying to steal some of the pie from Sun and RedHat, in one single move. Good try. We'll see how it works out, but I'm not moving from Gentoo, and that's a road I KNOW MS won't want to go, because even some linux zealots refuse to... *evil laugh*
you try and find a cheap host, that doesn't provide ads, that will allow the traffic needed to run a campaign. Good luck my friend. grandparent is right, without enough money, you're not going to get your message across at all. But this is O/T anyway.
No. Let me fix your mistake. Communism means everyone gets everything equally. They are TOTALITARIANS. They believe in government control everywhere. Communism, or actually, Marxism to be precise, means everyone has access to all the information equally. In a truly marxist system, the leaders are in no way above the common man. Unfortunately, the problem with Marx's theory is that he forgot a major piece of human nature, greed. That's why the people who are supposed to be communists, and share everything, don't. Like information. The PRC is a totalitarian country, regardless of their political face and speeches. They control virtually everything, and they don't allow people who might propose new ideas, or a change that would weaken the oligarchs to happen. It's sad really, but it's a simple flaw that exists in the human nature. Everyone wants power, and those at the top have it, thus they want to keep it. So blocking off parts of the web they don't think are appropriate is just yet another way of ensuring they don't allow weaknesses to enter their system while they wack out the old ones. Of course, it's always a dynamic situation with new cracks in their "great firewall of China".
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what about permacrete?
I wonder if we'll get any closer to wedge impeller drives for starships, along with Warshawski sails for FTL travel... Who knows what science holds for us in the future...
Ever heard of something called "Farady's cage"? Besides, once you're on landing, you don't need that much information, you can visually SEE the spot where you're going. It doesn't mean the systems weren't damaged, but they weren't needed to the same level. On landing you're relying mostly on onboard gyroscopes to give you attitude data and on ground radar for accurate altitude. A plane's GPS still isn't precise enough to guarantee that level of precision. Hence you can get hit by lightning and not worry about much, but a cell phone from inside your cage can totally garble up your radio signals...
Believe it or not, but it's not the FAA or the airlines doing the cellphone testing.
It's the aircraft manufacturers.
Boeing and Airbus both run tests, and there IS interference with some of the more sensitive systems on the plane, like, duh, navigation. GPS is better at high altitudes, but when you have to get 6 data values from GPS, you need many more satellite receptions than for just location. Modern planes don't use just gyros for roll/pitch/yaw rates, they confirm it with GPS data. As one might expect, the radio antennaes receiving those can become jammed.
That's the reason you can call on your phone when you're on the ground, but not in the air.
That post is just another Rosie-style conspiracy theory about the FAA and the FCC. I have no respect for people that don't try to understand the sensitivity of avionics and then reject every technical argument as "political cover-up".
Wifi isn't so much of an issue because it is lower power, and on a narrower and very different radio range.
Gees people, stop seeing evil everywhere, there's enough already that we don't need to paint the world as COMPLETELY depressing!
For tag edition, consider Picard, from musicbrainz.org
It may not have all of your music files, but the ones it does it will make sure they are tagged properly, and it can move the files into a specific folder arrangement. If musicbrainz doesn't have those tags, well, upload them, and be safe in knowing that the tags will be available for your files, so even if they get screwed up, you can find them again.
Now, for managing something that big, something along the lines of Amarok is recommended, where it uses an external DB, like SQLite or MySql, or other.
Try looking around on sourceforge.net, or any other famous OSX software download sites.
Not a OSX user myself, my meager 50GB of music loads just fine in Amarok on gentoo.
Good luck with that repository.
just because I'm in school doesn't mean I haven't had professional experience. And I'm not talking about life critical systems like hospitals or stock markets, whose managers will know to get SAs worth their salt, but rather your average company with 1000+ desktops and a few dozen servers around. Most of the SAs in those situations aren't always that smart.
And school is as good a learning experience as professional if you're learning outside the classroom.
The point of the menu.lst file I was talking about shows precisely how an SA for a certain environment doesn't always have the reflexes to look for a man page, or documentation online.
You can bitch and moan all you want, the fact remains that non-mission critical systems constitute most of the computers out there, and most SAs don't have to know nearly as much as you do.
As for my own experience, managing 5 different machines (different OSes and arch) remotely (2 hour flight) is just as valid as managing 1000, except maybe less time consuming, and not as time critical.
Had enough ranting yet? I can go on all night if I have to.
Actually, I've helped out the SAs in my school's IT department figure out stuff as simple as grub's menu.lst file. And they're Solaris certified.
No offense, but certification doesn't make a good SA, unlike what the rest of the world thinks.
Granted, the servers never go down, and Ubuntu is not Solaris. But it just shows how sometimes people can be somewhat obtuse as to where to look for configuration options or documentation...
A GOOD SA is what you describe. But do you know how hard it is to stumble onto them?
And yes, I will test my metal in the workplace, that's one of the things on my after graduation to-do list...
Exactly. Any decent linux SA will also have a higher pay as well, because it's not as common a skill as windows SA. Again, stereotyping here, but windows SAs hate the command line in general and keep their skills at "point and tick the right box, restart". .conf files that you can edit by hand and get exactly the configuration you want in just the same amount of time, and with Linux, you don't need to reboot, just restart the service. More efficient and faster! Not user-friendly for a granny's desktop, but for a SA, whose very job it is to make sure everything's configured right, it is. .ini files and registry keys to be activated using a GUI?
If you count the cost of your SA's pay, then yes, I would expect the TCO of linux to be a tad higher, if you omit the cost of windows licenses on the other side. Linux/*nix SAs in general know more of the underlying OS than their windows counterparts do, it's just a fact because of how the system works. Where windows provides GUIs for all aspects of configuration, *nix provides
I haven't seen Vista, but XP and the little bit I've seen of Server 2003 all seemed very GUI based to me. There was an article about Windows finally receiving a decent command-line utility. Is Vista Pro going to get it so that SAs can actually do linux-style administration? Or is everything still going to be a mix of
Gentoo is mostly compiled from scratch, but I never really believed it was for performance gain as far as software speed and responsiveness goes, but rather as features builtin to the software goes. .rpm or .deb distro.
Other people have already pointed most of that out, but the whole point of gentoo/portage is the USE variables, that let you quickly select what your system is going to be built for.
Want it as a multimedia box? easy, just add all the multimedia-relevant use flags into your make.conf, then start emerge mplayer or whatever other media player you like, want a server? Just say so: USE="-X -gtk -qt apache2 xml php " and emerge -av apache2 php, etc.
That's the whole point. Portage is just plain EASIER to deal with, imo, than any
Also easy for you to create builds of non-official packages with the overlay.
That's what Gentoo's about, and I don't think it'll die. It's just too easy to use to let go.
Sure the mailing lists are not that great, but the forums are among the best I've found, and #gentoo when it's not too crowded is pretty good too. Doesn't mean it's going to die out.
I agree wholehartedly.
But I think that in the short run, they're going to end up in a position where people are just either going to download illegally more and more, and what are they going to do then? If they go to trial before a jury, most of which are themselves downloaders, the RIAA will lose all cases, and then collapse because their revenue source is disappearing completely, or people will just stop listening to music altogether, and radio, CDs and podcasts then become useless, and the RIAA collapses because of an even faster loss of revenue. Isn't this a lose-lose situation for the RIAA?
If radios start going off the air, and the RIAA starts making their own, which, imo, will most likely be a pay service, then people are going to find ways to live without music. Either way, the current mafia system on music is going down the drain. And soon to follow will be the movie system, if they keep the same attitude.
I'd love to see that happen. Most of what I listen to is classical, and I'm in an orchestra. The RIAA can't claim to own copyrights to my own recordings of old pieces, so no money from me! Haha!
That's exactly it. What ticked me off is that they claimed I could verify their PGP signature on a given website, and when I tried looking for it, there was no such signature. Thanks Enigmail! I replied saying that I would not accept a fraudulent email as notification of anything, and haven't heard back since. I'm guessing it was either a spammer trying to scare me and/or campus IT, or they have a problem in their system and they can't move forward without cleaning it up first.
Anyway, I ain't paying anything until I get sued. Not that I have money to burn, but as a matter of principle. Plus the law school here is bound to have contacts with lawyers who could handle a case like this (not students, I'm not stupid, but alumns that have done well, etc.).
I'm talking about people like myself, who don't use P2P download, yet STILL get those freaking letters! It's like living next door to a drug dealer and the cops accuse you of dealing along with him! I have no issue with them trying to make downloaders pay, but people who DON'T download, and who don't have enough money to spend on that, that's extortion and it's illegal.
Except when they target students on financial aid, whose very education could be depending on the few thousands of dollars they're demanding!
If anything, the RIAA is going to create a whole generation of people who could've afforded school, but thanks to those annoying bastards can't really finish their degree, are left with huge loans and don't have a degree allowing them to pay their debts. The RIAA is really pissing me off, they're not helping educate people, they're helping them drop out of school and get even further into debt!
If the RIAA had any kind of patriotic interest whatsoever, they would stop suing students right NOW and instead try to have lotteries for scholarships for people who legally buy music. That'll get any students' attention, and they'll want to buy music in the process!
What I'm more curious to see is if they changed the keyboard shortcuts. Even on a mac there are shortcuts that allow you to do many window operations (minimize, maximize, switch apps). Now I like the fact that Xorg seems to have a builtin key + button combo, so if you hit alt and click-drag a window, it will move, regardless of where the cursor is inside that window.
That there is true productivity. Menus? Who really needs them, if you have shortcuts well defined in your application bar (quicklaunch on XP, dock on OSX and dock/sysbar on KDE/Gnome/E17/...). My point is, if you know how to configure and use your system, it's much faster than using menus, finding the appropriate click, etc. Why can't people use Alt+F4 to quit on windows, Apple+Q on OSX, Ctrl+Q on Linux? It seems to me that learning those shortcuts might save a LOT of time! And people won't be too confused by them, they're usually easy to learn. I'd like to see a study comparing keyboard shortcuts and properly setup desktops, and THEN compare productivity. I'm willing to bet that you won't see much difference in those cases.
It's not. The issue here is not which distro is better than the other in some very personal sense, it's whether or not it makes sense to update all the time. I personally feel that, yes, gentoo does require lots of time to update constantly, but it's meant for a park of desktops, not specifically servers, or else you'd better have a number of machines you have a servers + 1 to run updates and then just use packages compiled on your external machine.
Yes new patches come out all the time, but the real question is whether you trust developers to improve their code over time, or to destroy it. We've seen one end of the spectrum with what MS did between 98 and ME, and I believe that gentoo shows us the other end. While you theoretically always ARE at the bleeding edge with Gentoo, it does have a "safe window" built in, the way it handles portage with the keyword system. New packages are usually in CVS within 48 hours of release. If they compile and run, they get thrown into the ~arch (testing) rapidly. Then, depending on what kind of update has been done on it, you'll have to wait anywhere from 2 days to 5 months to see it come down into the actual arch repository, which is deemed the "stable" gentoo. I personally run ~arch, yet I can't seem to recall a problem that portage couldn't solve with minimum input on my part.
Yes, I'm a gentoo fanboy, but I'm not so glued down into distro patriotism to refuse to see flaws where they are.
Some people seem to want to spend time in maintenance to keep a system up to date and continually tinker and let their knowledge grow by frequent maintenance, and other people seem more interested in setting something up and being lazy about having to deal with updates/upgrades. I personally trust that most open source coders, and especially the ones for the big projects like apache, ssh, mysql and others of that caliber, usually improve the code from release to release, not damage it. Security fixes, bug fixes, and plain new features are usually the goal of coders, and I trust that they do that.
that's not too hard. Get a projection screen with a spotlight aimed at it. There's your screen. Then you can create your layer fairly easily, no?
Any meeting room, or multimedia classroom will have one of those, anywhere with a projector will work. You just need a pair of tripods, your camera and a fairly powerful wide range spotlight. Done!
What about Realplayer exactly is illegal? I know it won't solve *BSDs and other *Nix users' problems, but Linux has a realplayer version.
So why again is it illegal to run something that is not MS specific?
Hello, welcome to the new year, we're in the 21st century, not in the early 90s, there's something called "interoperability" that has been growing in the tech world... Time for reality to harvest!
Plasma doesn't have the longevity of LCD TVs, and to be honest, LCD TVs have in general better viewing angles. And LCD TVs are cheaper for sizes up to 42".
Just things I've gleaned walking in Fry's Electronics this afternoon.
I saw it coming a while ago. When I heard of Longhorn in preparation I knew that it would fail. For several reasons, but mostly one simple thing.
Microsoft tried to protect its interests with XP, using the WGA scheme, and service packs that checked for validity and so forth. Consumers *hated* those measures. How many false positives has the WGA detected? More than enough. Virii, spyware, spam, it's taken too much toll on the users' ability to perform their tasks. Now, when you buy a PC, you have to have Anti-this, anti-that, firewall and so forth. Those services eat ressources. People running 3 year old machines that have installed all those things can expect lag while webpages load because of all that padding to prevent infection of their system, and then even after waiting for too long, non-responsive windows and so forth, they will STILL get spyware/adware and always spam.
Well no sh*t Sherlock!
Microsoft has long ago decided it's in the money making business, not customer satisfaction business. Companies used MS because that was the only viable alternative for a while, and even today, many industries still rely on Windows 2000 rather than XP, for the simple reason that it works with what they've invested in. However, Linux and OSX have been working VERY hard to get ahead, and thankfully, these systems are designed to fit the customer/users' needs.
Linux? Do anything you want with it. Run webservers, databases, phone systems, rendering, and even desktop applications on it. All that flexibility for very little cost of actual software. You're not paying for software AND support, you're paying only support.
As XP came out, Linux wasn't ready for prime time. RedHat was providing an Entreprise version, as were SuSE and Mandrake, but in all honesty, there was a gap that existed, Windows wasn't evil enough, and there weren't quite yet enough advantages to Linux to warrant the switch, retraining everyone and so forth.
Today however, after Service Pack 2 failed to properly secure XP, and all those DRM addons have been force fed into media player, and all other wmv portable players, well, simplicity, stability and functionality seem to have somewhat disappeared from the leading OS on the market. Apple has reminded everyone that alternatives do exist, like OSX, and, because it is Unix based, Unix has appeared once more on the radar of common knowledge. If Apple can make Unix look and work well, then why can't Linux? Oh sure, there are more than enough Macboys out there preaching OSX, but not everyone likes Aqua, or an already made system that will lock you into some things you don't want to be force-fed (iTMS' DRM for instance). But it reminded people of that newcomer on the playing field, Linux.
In the past few years, I've watched gnome go from a squarish desktop reminiscent of OS 9 and in some ways windows 3.11 to a full featured Desktop that offers as much integration, and much more logic, than the XP interface ever did. KDE has made at least as much progress, and we're seeing more options than ever, and from all the development that has happened since 2002 a LOT of good things have come out. Openoffice 2 pioneered the use of the ODF, Firefox has been gnawing stronger and stronger on the share of Internet Explorer, and even Safari in some respect.
Ubuntu is probably the biggest advantage Linux can get to date. I am ready to claim that anyone, anywhere, that really wants to use an alternative to windows, can burn an Ubuntu disc and use their computer freely, to satisfy their needs (save gamers, and even they aren't going to lose for very long, some major games already have native releases, like the UT and Quake series).
It is time that players like Adobe invest in the alternative, because the tide is coming, and it would hurt for them to be behind.
Point taken. I probably should've shut up in the first place, the only embedded programming I've done was on MicaZ motes, and that was using TinyOS, which has been refined over time, developped purposely to be a stable code base that you could then assemble into a realtime OS. TinyOS gave the impression that the embedded programming evolved, yes, but that released code would always be stable. Maybe it's true for TinyOS, but from your description, Linux embedded is more like regular gentoo development anyway. I just don't see you wanting to update all your code base daily, as you develop an app for a device... But maybe it's just me.
I'm a gentoo fan as well, but for an embedded OS, I don't know if it'd be that great. For one thing, Gentoo's philosophy is "bleeding edge". If you're dealing with embedded software that's never going to be on a network for updates (think medical devices), then Gentoo's no good. I would see gentoo in an mp3 player (constant link with a PC for updates), but not, say, in a cardiogram machine, a mica-style mote, or other small non-networked devices. The problem is that Gentoo fixes bugs by using the next available version of software, which works well, up to a point. It is the unfortunate truth that a new software version fixes bugs, but introduces new ones (i.e security is never tested against brand new code, gentoo has very little testing time). Usually less, of course, but still not good enough for an embedded OS.
Sorry, but for embedded stuff, a binairy based distro is probably safer (bundle the source with it, to give choice, and to comply with the GPL) for an embedded application.
My own $0.02 of opinion.
What kind of logic is this???
Either you fight the pirates and try to sell your music via the iTMS or you get a royalty payment and let your music be available for free.
I'm fed up with the *AAs trying to tell me that I owe them money. I don't. I go see the GOOD movies in theater (there's one coming out every eon or so, maybe you need to check that?) and when I want to watch something, well I have Blockbuster and NetFlix.
Music-wise? Most of the bands they produce suck, and I'd much rather go to a concert, and find the occasional song playing on a radio station than buy a CD or DRM files, because they just want a constant money stream. My wallet says no, and I live just fine without music. Ever walk outside without an iPod plugged into your ears? Sometimes a good hike without music does you good.
The *AAs are beyond a pain in the ass, they're thieving not just people, but businesses as well, and I sure hope that Apple takes them to court for diffamation on that one.
Sooner or later he's going to have to enforce some sort of IP address logging, like most services of that type do.
For instance, www.jetable.org, a french site along the lines of mailinator forwards given emaisl to your account for the specified duration, but it logs your IP address and the time you were on, in case it becomes essential to know who was whom in a legal case.
With that info, it's *still* possible that a 10 minute email will lead back to you. Not just an email account, but an ISP account this time, which is even more identifiable, imo.
Maybe, maybe not? ./configure and make) is something that is going to be scary at least. The idea of a .NET move is pretty interesting however, as it gets MS standards on both Unix/MS platforms, and tries to shut out Mac, but afaik there's a Mono port on MacOS.
To be honest, I doubt that this will happen. Most MS devs are, well, used to develop on Windows. Having to deal with an other OS's calls (compiling Visual C++ isn't about just taking the source, unpacking, running
So they're probably trying to steal some of the pie from Sun and RedHat, in one single move. Good try. We'll see how it works out, but I'm not moving from Gentoo, and that's a road I KNOW MS won't want to go, because even some linux zealots refuse to... *evil laugh*
you try and find a cheap host, that doesn't provide ads, that will allow the traffic needed to run a campaign. Good luck my friend. grandparent is right, without enough money, you're not going to get your message across at all. But this is O/T anyway.
No. Let me fix your mistake. Communism means everyone gets everything equally. They are TOTALITARIANS. They believe in government control everywhere. Communism, or actually, Marxism to be precise, means everyone has access to all the information equally. In a truly marxist system, the leaders are in no way above the common man. Unfortunately, the problem with Marx's theory is that he forgot a major piece of human nature, greed. That's why the people who are supposed to be communists, and share everything, don't. Like information. The PRC is a totalitarian country, regardless of their political face and speeches. They control virtually everything, and they don't allow people who might propose new ideas, or a change that would weaken the oligarchs to happen. It's sad really, but it's a simple flaw that exists in the human nature. Everyone wants power, and those at the top have it, thus they want to keep it. So blocking off parts of the web they don't think are appropriate is just yet another way of ensuring they don't allow weaknesses to enter their system while they wack out the old ones. Of course, it's always a dynamic situation with new cracks in their "great firewall of China".