The Internet is basically fair, because when it was designed no one knew how insanely profitable and important it would be. At the time, no one cared about the net except the people who designed it, so they could do it honestly.
Any new design will inevitably be corrupted by the interests of large companies, and of governments who would feel the need to have their ability to spy on and control traffic protected.
If free software ever goes truly mainstream, and the stacks people use are free from top to bottom, lock in goes away in general. Even hardware lock in.
A couple of years ago, I was shifting some stuff around and I needed to clean off my main desktop machine, an x86 box. I installed the same linux distro on a G4 mac and just copied my home directory over. Everything was exactly the same -- my browser bookmarks and stored passwords, my email, my office docs, etc.
A lot of people take Apple's jump from PowerPC to x86 as a sign that x86 is unstoppable. But I'd argue that the comparative ease with which the migration took place shows how weak processor lock in is becoming. The shift from PPC to x86 was nothing compared to the jump from MacOS Classic to OS X.
The real reason x86 won't go away any time soon is that MS has decided that's the only thing it's going to support, and MS powers most of the computers in the world. Windows is closed, so MS's decision on this is final, and impossible to appeal.
If an observer on a rail platform measures the MTF of a hard disk on a rail car moving at speeds close to the speed of light...
This is a big deal, and should be thought about
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Visual Basic on GNU/Linux
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Miguel de Icaza appeared on the LUG Radio podcast, and gave a really good description of how this sort of thing fits into a coherent business strategy:
Basically, the argument goes like this. If you look at what's locking people in to windows now, it's not so much the big stuff -- office apps, browsers, email programs, etc. We have all of that stuff, and most of what we have is pretty terrific.
The stuff that locks people in is small and narrow -- software to do some odd, specific, business related thing. Some app that's tweaked to run scheduling in a dental office, or whatever. My mom has a travel agency, and she uses an app that manages all of her customers, and that's windows specific. I have a friend who installs burglar alarm systems, and he has software that programs alarms, and which only runs under windows.
There isn't one big thing that's locking people in -- it's thousands and thousands of small things. Everyone has something different, but almost everyone has *something*. And a giant chunk of those little things, now, are running under.NET.
The Mono guys have been using an automated tool that looks at what libraries.NET apps use, and they've been trying to pick off the APIs that will give them the most apps running in the real world on linux.
On top of that, they've been working with.NET people who want to make their apps more portable -- which mostly means doing things one way, using some APIs, instead of another, using other APIs. According to Miguel, they're getting a good response from.NET developers, who would like to see their stuff become more portable -- they'd love to see.NET pick up some of that "write once run anywhere" magic that java has. They'd like to not be locked in.
The point that's getting lost in a lot of the fights over Mono and the infamous deal (about which I personally have many misgivings) is that Novell is mounting an incredibly audacious attack on the Desktop, and this sort of thing is a big part of it. They're not satisfied with servers.
I don't know if it will work, and again, every time I read something about Ballmer talking smack about linux, I get nervous about that deal. But at the same time, I sort of love the bigness of what Novell is doing, the audacity of it.
For whatever reason, Novell is doing an incredibly bad job of explaining all of this to us. Which is why I really encourage everyone to grab that podcast episode, linked above, and listen to what Miguel says about mono.
Don't we want one giant media commons, where everyone has basically the same access? Isn't similar equipment the best guarantee of that?
If all of the poor people in the world run one platform, and only poor people run it, aren't they more likely to use different file formats? And if that happens, won't it be harder for us to talk to each other?
I know we don't do much talking now, but I think that's a big problem, and one we should be trying to chip away at, and not reinforce.
I doubt you'll see this, because I didn't see your reply until today. Sorry to be so slow.
FreeNX is really fast, while X is unsuably slow, even over a broadband connection. FreeNX is the first remote access technology I've used that seemed "good enough". It's also an area where the linux tech is best of breed -- using a linux box remotely with FreeNX is noticably better than using a remote system with Citrix technology, for example.
It's really, really great. It's kind of a pain to get it set up under many distros, but definitely worth the trouble.
I use FreeNX to go back to my home desktop through a ssh tunnel. I use the local desktop only if I want some multimedia -- I'll start streaming a radio station, then pull up my home desktop, etc.
FreeNX is fast enough to make this viable.
You get a lot of advantages from doing it this way. There's the privacy angle, which is a big thing. But you also get your main desktop -- the one with all of your stuff on it.
And you don't need a really fast laptop. Once it's fast enough to run FreeNX, you're ok. I use a thinkpad I bought on ebay for $200. It's not just cheap, it's from the era when laptops ran cool enough to actually hold on your lap.
The problem is exacerbated by the reluctance of MS and PC vendors to give out Windows CDs that can be used to wipe and reinstall systems. They should build pockets into the sides of cases for the CDs so people don't lose them, and slipstream all the drivers in, and put instructions to boot the restore disk on the CD label itself.
Heck, a 700MB USB flash drive isn't expensive now. They should build read only flash drives with windows into the box, and put an option to run a reinstall in the bios. Solder it in so no one will steal it.
It's the least they could do, considering. I mean, Windows compes preinstalled on almost every PC sold, and there are a zillion pirate copies of Windows floating around on the net, so hardly anyone needs to steal it, and anyone who wants to steal it can. But legitimate users are screwed when they have problems because they don't get CDs, because giving them CDs would encourage piracy. And, I suspect, because it's good for business if people trapped in a monopoly have to buy extra computers to solve this problem.
These articles are always frustrating to me, because I can read about chipsets that work, but not about which cards support them. It's hard to go to newegg and buy a card, because many of the cards that have the good chipsets come in different versions with bad chipsets.
My ancient orinoco silver pcmcia card stopped working with ubuntu as of edgy. I don't know why. It works with other distros. But it's not 802.11g, and it doesn't do WPA, and although it's not important to me, it's not great for scanning.
So I want to buy a card. I'd order one today, but I don't know what to get.
I know our buying power as a community is small, but I'd think that some no-name card manufacturer would find it worthwhile to make a card that has a picture of a penguin on it, and that is fully supported by free software. I'd pay a little more for a card that I know will just work, and that will continue to work.
I keep two copies of my mail. One goes into a pop account, and gets pulled into my main machine, and the other goes to gmail. But you could send one to an IMAP account, one to a POP account, etc.
My SMTP mail server is running on a VPS. I send incoming mail to an account on that machine, and use a.forward file to send it to a pop account provided by my cable modem company, and to my gmail account. I've configured the gmail account to send mail from my vanity domain.
It's not a perfect solution -- if I send an email from gmail, it doesn't show up in the sent folder on my main machine. But it's very easy to set up, and I can get at gmail from anywhere.
I think it would be better to use an IMAP server, to roll my own webmail solution that talks to the IMAP server, and to make it possible for the laptop to talk to the IMAP server. But the amount of work that would take deters me. My solution was easy to set up, even if its flawed.
In the book "Getting Things Done", David Allen talks about this, and he claims his system addresses it. His system is fairly elaborate, and starting to use it is a big committment that I haven't made, so I can't verify that it works. What he says sounds plausible, though.
Allen's theory is that stress comes from "open loops" -- things you have to keep in your head, and worry about. As you get further and further in the hole, the open loops accumulate, and your stress level goes up.
Allen's answer is to put everything into a system, and get it ouf of your head. You don't have to remember anything, because it's all written down and recorded.
The idea is that you don't have to worry about it because you can trust the system. Once you record it, you can be confident that it will get taken care of, because the system is robust, and you know that it works. So at any given time, you just think about what's on your plate at that moment, and tune other stuff out.
It's a big problem for me, and one that I've only had limited success in dealing with. So I don't want to claim to have found the answer or anything.
But I think the key is to formalize the process of deciding what to do *now*. Another way of saying that is that procrastination is a problem with deciding what to do in the moment -- that if you procrastinate, you have to recognize that your ability to do that is broken.
The easiest way to manage this is with a to-do list -- you just go through the things on your list, and try not to think about what else you could be doing, or what you should be doing. Just work the list.
The more robust way is to try to embrace the "Getting Things Done" system (it's described in a book of the same name). The book describes a system that's good enough to keep track of pretty much everything you have going on, and an algorithm that will let you pop off tasks and do them effectively. If you do the system, presumably (it's a big jump, and I haven't made it), you won't drop the ball on tasks, and you'll always know what to do right now.
Try vmware first. It will let you run a virtual system in a window on top of windows, so you won't have to reformat your drive, or repartition, or do anything like that. It's a very inobtrusive way to get started.
The virtualization penalty in terms of performance is very slight, and you don't have to worry about drivers at all, which is huge, especially if you're new to linux, and haven't selected your hardware with linux in mind.
Which distro depends a lot on the specific apps you want to run. As you probably know, linux doesn't have universal installers the way windows does -- packages have to be rolled up for your specific distro. (They don't *have* to be, but it's a lot easier if they are.) I don't use TeX often, but I think it should be pretty widely avaialble on most distros. Python is ubiquitous, you won't have any trouble anywhere.
I tend to think of apt as the "killer app" of linux. You just ask for an applicaiton, and it downloads and installs automatically. Not all distros have it -- it's something that exists in distros that are part of the debian family tree. Ubuntu is a debian based distro, and so it has apt.
So Ubuntu is really the safe answer.
There's a fair amount of stuff that doesn't work out of the box in Ubuntu -- almost always for licensning reasons. Software to play multimedia files often falls into this category, and it's sort of a pain to get all of that set up, and things like flash for your web browser don't work out of the box either.
So my advice to you would be to do virtualization for your math stuff with unbuntu, and to stick to the host layer windows install for multimedia stuff. Once you know your way around linux, you can take the plunge and go all linux. But this way, you never have a machine that won't do whatever you need it to do.
SuSE is in disfavor now for political reasons (fights over licensing, and I'm pretty down on them myself), but if you want a really slick desktop, it's hard to beat. It's better for multimedia after the initial install, and it tends to work better out of the box generally. There are lots of little details that are handled better.
My main problems with SuSE are mostly ideological now, and those problems are severe enough that I wouldn't use it. So I don't want to downlplay the political stuff, it's real, and it's important, and I think that Novell is on the wrong side of it. But one of the reasons the fight with Novell is so painful is that very shortly before the problem emerged, they came out with what were pretty much the most beautiful linux desktops ever.
My other problem is the lack of apt, the package manager, which you really, really want, even if you don't realize it now. Life without apt can't really be called living.
Finally, if you're in a math department somewhere, ask around and see what other people are using. Because the single most valuable thing for you as a new user will be someone you can ask for help.
(This is pure hot air, and not informed by much actual knowledge. Hah! I beat you to saying it!)
For a long time before they switched, we kept hearing about x86 versions of OS X.
The impression I have is that they developed that version of the OS so that they'd always have the option to switch if they had to, not because they knew they were definitely going to switch when they started work on the x86 version.
It makes sense for them to to an embedded version, just in case. If they ever decide they want to jump, they'll be in the position of polishing something they already have, rather than starting from scratch.
And if they want to play with prototypes of things like iPhones, they'll have a really clear understanding of what it is they'd be bringing to market. They can build them, and play with them, and figure out if they'll suck or not, look at them realistically in comparison to what other people are selling, etc. Then if all of the planets are lined up, they can ramp up for a real product.
Imagine that MS had kept a few guys building audio players for all the years the iPod has been out, and that they had built a few generations of prototypes in the lab, and leaned on them for a few years. When people at the top of the company decided it was strategically important for them to be in that space, they'd have been able to jump in in a different way than they did.
MS decides that they have to be in music players, then they star a massive effort to get there. The decision is made before anyone really knows how what they'll ultimately produce will stack up against the iPod. If they had a few guys making music players for years, they'd have a much better idea of how their product would stack up before the decided to jump in.
So I'd be inclined to interpret this as a sign that Apple wants to stay within striking distance of the embedded market, not that they're definitely going in. Apple's not going to make a crummy iPhone. If they do it, they'll want it to be the best phone ever. They're not going to trash their brand just because people keep telling them that they have to be in phones.
Whatever you think about what Allison has done, you have to repsect him for living up to his convictions. This sort of thing can't be good for your career, or for your bank account.
I really admire people who choose to live by their principles, even when it's hard or costly to do so.
I have a vanity domain, and I run a mail server on a VPS. I have things set up to forward my email to both a POP3 account provided by my ISP and to gmail. Every now and then, I'll have an email that makes it to gmail but never shows up in my POP3 account. The ratio isn't anything close to what's reported in the article, though -- I think it happens once in several thousand emails.
I'm not posting my ISP here because I haven't done a rigourous test, and don't want to accuse anyone unfairly with estimated numbers. It's a big cable provider, and it's not Earthlink.
My inclination has always been to think of the freedom guys as a little strident, and a little too extreme. The things Linus says about licensing have always made the most sense to me intuitively, and the other guys have always come across as a little controlling, and a little crusading.
The one thing I've taken away from the Novell/MS deal, though, is that this stuff is really complicated, and it's really dangerous. I'll be honest -- I don't understand all of the implications of the deal, or why each of the two parties decided to do it. But I feel like something's going on -- like I'm playing 3 card monte on the street or something.
I don't think that non-specialists (ie., geeks who don't think much about law) are in a good position to know what's best.
Novell, and the guys that came to Novell when they bought Ximian and SUSE, have done an incredible amount of good for our community. We are, to a certain extent, depending on Novell's patents to protect us in this coming fight. I think they're good guys, doing what they feel they have to do in order to survive.
But even if this isn't nefarious, it's made us realize that we'd be open to something similar that was nefarious. Those crazy freedom guys weren't so crazy after all.
So I think we have to trust the people who understand these treacherous waters the best -- I think that's Eban Moglen. He says that GPL3 is necessary to counter this threat, and he says it will be effective, even if the kernel remains under GPL2. The toolchain will be enough to do what we need.
I don't want to demonize Novell, because they've given me a lot of great code, and because there are people there who are real heroes to our community. I think they're mistaken, and I think Linus is mistaken to stick with GPL2. It just ain't viral enough to keep us safe.
But instead of attacking people, or getting hysterical, I think the thing to do is to listen to our best legal minds, and back GPL3. So my feeling is that Linus's honor is beyond question, he's obviously a lot smarter than I am, and he might even be smarter than Eban Moglen. But when it comes to law, I'm going to listen to Moglen.
And I would say that the Ximian guys' honor is beyond question, and that they're a lot smarter than I am as well. But I'm still going to listen to Moglen about the law.
Again, my feeling is that we shouldn't let this break down cooperation, we shouldn't let it affect the civility of our community, and we shouldn't attribute bad motives to anyone. But we should play it safe, and innoculate with GPL3.
Ubuntu isn't made soley by volunteers, although volunteers play a big role in it. A lot of companies pay people to work on linux, and they do it because it fits into their business plan.
MS is probably never going to come after you for license money. But they might go after big companies that support linux -- IBM, RedHat, etc. And they might scare large enterprise customers away from linux.
If these things happen, your free ubuntu starts to wither and die. All of a sudden there aren't the hardware drivers you need, the fancy new desktop software, etc.
Linux is an ecosystem, and all of the parts need to be healthy in order for it to continue. While this situation doesn't threaten you personally, it does effect other vital members of our ecosystem, and if they go down, we're all going to be a lot worse off over the long run,
I worked for a company that photographed many buildings on the north side of chicago. We used it so that we could pull up photos of apartment buildings when condos went up for sale -- we could put ads online and in print without having to send a photographer out for a new photo.
It's been years since I looked at it, but I used to use a web site that would show you pictures of buildings in paris -- I think it was a yellow pages type site. I had a reservation in a hotel, and used the web site to find out what my hotel looked like, both so I could decide about whether or not to stay there, and also so I'd be able to recognize it when I was walking through the streets. You could look at any specific building in town, and move up and down the street to see what was around it.
I'm inclined to agree with the person who pointed out that people can see things that are outside anyway. At least this takes that public information and puts it into a usable form. If they want to put trucks in the street to take these photos, and if they want to put the fruit of that labor up on the web, more power to them.
I just hope that their web app works with firefox and linux.
One of the things that's pretty depressing about all of this is that the contest between MS and Linux has moved into a legal phase. Presumably, most of us are here because we like technology. But it's not about technology any more, or building cool things.
Our general is Eban Moglen -- he's the guy who will lead the fight, and he has more influence over the success or failure of linux than Linus or any other geek.
For me, individually, that's the big realization that's come out of the Novell/MS deal. It's about the law now, and because of that, we have to listen to the lawyers. When Linus says he doesn't like GPL3 and Moglen says we need it to stave off the kinds of attacks that will come out of deals like the Novell/MS deal, from here on out, my inclination is to assume that Linus is in over his head, and doesn't understand the issues, and that Moglen is right.
To put it another way, I think a talented engineer's opinions on legal matters should carry about as much weight as a lawyer's opinions on the design of the kernel. I know that Linus gets to decide about the kernel's license, and I don't begrudge him that power. But I think he's in over his head on the legal issues, and that he's wrong.
The other big thing for me is that it's not very much fun any more. It's the tech that's fun, while the legal stuff is horribly unpleasant. This SCO debacle seems perverse and ugly to me, and the overhead the courts impose on the search for justice seems to guarantee that justice can never be truly achieved, no matter how the final result comes down. The whole thing is stuff I'd rather not think about, but feel compelled to because my own interests as a user are being attacked.
Nat said, "We're glad they're talking about GPLv3, also, because it means that they don't think there are any incompatiblities between GPLv2 and the covenants issued by Novell and Microsoft."
But here I read that, "Moglen offered no opinion on whether the Microsoft-Novell deal violates the GPL currently in effect (known as version 2), but merely pledged that version 3 would clearly bar such "discriminatory" deals."
Maybe the quote I've used here is wrong, or maybe it's been superceded by something Moglen has said since then. Or maybe Nat made an honest mistake.
But I think the Novell people should be as careful as possible not to misprepresent any of the facts in this situation -- once it seems like spinning, people will just tune Novell out.
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The Internet is basically fair, because when it was designed no one knew how insanely profitable and important it would be. At the time, no one cared about the net except the people who designed it, so they could do it honestly.
Any new design will inevitably be corrupted by the interests of large companies, and of governments who would feel the need to have their ability to spy on and control traffic protected.
If free software ever goes truly mainstream, and the stacks people use are free from top to bottom, lock in goes away in general. Even hardware lock in.
A couple of years ago, I was shifting some stuff around and I needed to clean off my main desktop machine, an x86 box. I installed the same linux distro on a G4 mac and just copied my home directory over. Everything was exactly the same -- my browser bookmarks and stored passwords, my email, my office docs, etc.
A lot of people take Apple's jump from PowerPC to x86 as a sign that x86 is unstoppable. But I'd argue that the comparative ease with which the migration took place shows how weak processor lock in is becoming. The shift from PPC to x86 was nothing compared to the jump from MacOS Classic to OS X.
The real reason x86 won't go away any time soon is that MS has decided that's the only thing it's going to support, and MS powers most of the computers in the world. Windows is closed, so MS's decision on this is final, and impossible to appeal.
Does this make people more or less likely to use Coldwell Banker for real (ie., meatspace) houses? Or does it matter?
I will definitely try it -- thanks a lot, that's really helpful.
Is there any linux software that will convert flacs to mp3s and preserve the tags?
If an observer on a rail platform measures the MTF of a hard disk on a rail car moving at speeds close to the speed of light...
Miguel de Icaza appeared on the LUG Radio podcast, and gave a really good description of how this sort of thing fits into a coherent business strategy:
.NET.
.NET apps use, and they've been trying to pick off the APIs that will give them the most apps running in the real world on linux.
.NET people who want to make their apps more portable -- which mostly means doing things one way, using some APIs, instead of another, using other APIs. According to Miguel, they're getting a good response from .NET developers, who would like to see their stuff become more portable -- they'd love to see .NET pick up some of that "write once run anywhere" magic that java has. They'd like to not be locked in.
http://www.lugradio.org/episodes/69/
Basically, the argument goes like this. If you look at what's locking people in to windows now, it's not so much the big stuff -- office apps, browsers, email programs, etc. We have all of that stuff, and most of what we have is pretty terrific.
The stuff that locks people in is small and narrow -- software to do some odd, specific, business related thing. Some app that's tweaked to run scheduling in a dental office, or whatever. My mom has a travel agency, and she uses an app that manages all of her customers, and that's windows specific. I have a friend who installs burglar alarm systems, and he has software that programs alarms, and which only runs under windows.
There isn't one big thing that's locking people in -- it's thousands and thousands of small things. Everyone has something different, but almost everyone has *something*. And a giant chunk of those little things, now, are running under
The Mono guys have been using an automated tool that looks at what libraries
On top of that, they've been working with
The point that's getting lost in a lot of the fights over Mono and the infamous deal (about which I personally have many misgivings) is that Novell is mounting an incredibly audacious attack on the Desktop, and this sort of thing is a big part of it. They're not satisfied with servers.
I don't know if it will work, and again, every time I read something about Ballmer talking smack about linux, I get nervous about that deal. But at the same time, I sort of love the bigness of what Novell is doing, the audacity of it.
For whatever reason, Novell is doing an incredibly bad job of explaining all of this to us. Which is why I really encourage everyone to grab that podcast episode, linked above, and listen to what Miguel says about mono.
Don't we want one giant media commons, where everyone has basically the same access? Isn't similar equipment the best guarantee of that?
If all of the poor people in the world run one platform, and only poor people run it, aren't they more likely to use different file formats? And if that happens, won't it be harder for us to talk to each other?
I know we don't do much talking now, but I think that's a big problem, and one we should be trying to chip away at, and not reinforce.
I doubt you'll see this, because I didn't see your reply until today. Sorry to be so slow.
FreeNX is really fast, while X is unsuably slow, even over a broadband connection. FreeNX is the first remote access technology I've used that seemed "good enough". It's also an area where the linux tech is best of breed -- using a linux box remotely with FreeNX is noticably better than using a remote system with Citrix technology, for example.
It's really, really great. It's kind of a pain to get it set up under many distros, but definitely worth the trouble.
I use FreeNX to go back to my home desktop through a ssh tunnel. I use the local desktop only if I want some multimedia -- I'll start streaming a radio station, then pull up my home desktop, etc.
FreeNX is fast enough to make this viable.
You get a lot of advantages from doing it this way. There's the privacy angle, which is a big thing. But you also get your main desktop -- the one with all of your stuff on it.
And you don't need a really fast laptop. Once it's fast enough to run FreeNX, you're ok. I use a thinkpad I bought on ebay for $200. It's not just cheap, it's from the era when laptops ran cool enough to actually hold on your lap.
The problem is exacerbated by the reluctance of MS and PC vendors to give out Windows CDs that can be used to wipe and reinstall systems. They should build pockets into the sides of cases for the CDs so people don't lose them, and slipstream all the drivers in, and put instructions to boot the restore disk on the CD label itself.
Heck, a 700MB USB flash drive isn't expensive now. They should build read only flash drives with windows into the box, and put an option to run a reinstall in the bios. Solder it in so no one will steal it.
It's the least they could do, considering. I mean, Windows compes preinstalled on almost every PC sold, and there are a zillion pirate copies of Windows floating around on the net, so hardly anyone needs to steal it, and anyone who wants to steal it can. But legitimate users are screwed when they have problems because they don't get CDs, because giving them CDs would encourage piracy. And, I suspect, because it's good for business if people trapped in a monopoly have to buy extra computers to solve this problem.
These articles are always frustrating to me, because I can read about chipsets that work, but not about which cards support them. It's hard to go to newegg and buy a card, because many of the cards that have the good chipsets come in different versions with bad chipsets.
My ancient orinoco silver pcmcia card stopped working with ubuntu as of edgy. I don't know why. It works with other distros. But it's not 802.11g, and it doesn't do WPA, and although it's not important to me, it's not great for scanning.
So I want to buy a card. I'd order one today, but I don't know what to get.
I know our buying power as a community is small, but I'd think that some no-name card manufacturer would find it worthwhile to make a card that has a picture of a penguin on it, and that is fully supported by free software. I'd pay a little more for a card that I know will just work, and that will continue to work.
I keep two copies of my mail. One goes into a pop account, and gets pulled into my main machine, and the other goes to gmail. But you could send one to an IMAP account, one to a POP account, etc.
.forward file to send it to a pop account provided by my cable modem company, and to my gmail account. I've configured the gmail account to send mail from my vanity domain.
My SMTP mail server is running on a VPS. I send incoming mail to an account on that machine, and use a
It's not a perfect solution -- if I send an email from gmail, it doesn't show up in the sent folder on my main machine. But it's very easy to set up, and I can get at gmail from anywhere.
I think it would be better to use an IMAP server, to roll my own webmail solution that talks to the IMAP server, and to make it possible for the laptop to talk to the IMAP server. But the amount of work that would take deters me. My solution was easy to set up, even if its flawed.
In the book "Getting Things Done", David Allen talks about this, and he claims his system addresses it. His system is fairly elaborate, and starting to use it is a big committment that I haven't made, so I can't verify that it works. What he says sounds plausible, though.
Allen's theory is that stress comes from "open loops" -- things you have to keep in your head, and worry about. As you get further and further in the hole, the open loops accumulate, and your stress level goes up.
Allen's answer is to put everything into a system, and get it ouf of your head. You don't have to remember anything, because it's all written down and recorded.
The idea is that you don't have to worry about it because you can trust the system. Once you record it, you can be confident that it will get taken care of, because the system is robust, and you know that it works. So at any given time, you just think about what's on your plate at that moment, and tune other stuff out.
It's a big problem for me, and one that I've only had limited success in dealing with. So I don't want to claim to have found the answer or anything.
But I think the key is to formalize the process of deciding what to do *now*. Another way of saying that is that procrastination is a problem with deciding what to do in the moment -- that if you procrastinate, you have to recognize that your ability to do that is broken.
The easiest way to manage this is with a to-do list -- you just go through the things on your list, and try not to think about what else you could be doing, or what you should be doing. Just work the list.
The more robust way is to try to embrace the "Getting Things Done" system (it's described in a book of the same name). The book describes a system that's good enough to keep track of pretty much everything you have going on, and an algorithm that will let you pop off tasks and do them effectively. If you do the system, presumably (it's a big jump, and I haven't made it), you won't drop the ball on tasks, and you'll always know what to do right now.
Try vmware first. It will let you run a virtual system in a window on top of windows, so you won't have to reformat your drive, or repartition, or do anything like that. It's a very inobtrusive way to get started.
The virtualization penalty in terms of performance is very slight, and you don't have to worry about drivers at all, which is huge, especially if you're new to linux, and haven't selected your hardware with linux in mind.
Which distro depends a lot on the specific apps you want to run. As you probably know, linux doesn't have universal installers the way windows does -- packages have to be rolled up for your specific distro. (They don't *have* to be, but it's a lot easier if they are.) I don't use TeX often, but I think it should be pretty widely avaialble on most distros. Python is ubiquitous, you won't have any trouble anywhere.
I tend to think of apt as the "killer app" of linux. You just ask for an applicaiton, and it downloads and installs automatically. Not all distros have it -- it's something that exists in distros that are part of the debian family tree. Ubuntu is a debian based distro, and so it has apt.
So Ubuntu is really the safe answer.
There's a fair amount of stuff that doesn't work out of the box in Ubuntu -- almost always for licensning reasons. Software to play multimedia files often falls into this category, and it's sort of a pain to get all of that set up, and things like flash for your web browser don't work out of the box either.
So my advice to you would be to do virtualization for your math stuff with unbuntu, and to stick to the host layer windows install for multimedia stuff. Once you know your way around linux, you can take the plunge and go all linux. But this way, you never have a machine that won't do whatever you need it to do.
SuSE is in disfavor now for political reasons (fights over licensing, and I'm pretty down on them myself), but if you want a really slick desktop, it's hard to beat. It's better for multimedia after the initial install, and it tends to work better out of the box generally. There are lots of little details that are handled better.
My main problems with SuSE are mostly ideological now, and those problems are severe enough that I wouldn't use it. So I don't want to downlplay the political stuff, it's real, and it's important, and I think that Novell is on the wrong side of it. But one of the reasons the fight with Novell is so painful is that very shortly before the problem emerged, they came out with what were pretty much the most beautiful linux desktops ever.
My other problem is the lack of apt, the package manager, which you really, really want, even if you don't realize it now. Life without apt can't really be called living.
Finally, if you're in a math department somewhere, ask around and see what other people are using. Because the single most valuable thing for you as a new user will be someone you can ask for help.
(This is pure hot air, and not informed by much actual knowledge. Hah! I beat you to saying it!)
For a long time before they switched, we kept hearing about x86 versions of OS X.
The impression I have is that they developed that version of the OS so that they'd always have the option to switch if they had to, not because they knew they were definitely going to switch when they started work on the x86 version.
It makes sense for them to to an embedded version, just in case. If they ever decide they want to jump, they'll be in the position of polishing something they already have, rather than starting from scratch.
And if they want to play with prototypes of things like iPhones, they'll have a really clear understanding of what it is they'd be bringing to market. They can build them, and play with them, and figure out if they'll suck or not, look at them realistically in comparison to what other people are selling, etc. Then if all of the planets are lined up, they can ramp up for a real product.
Imagine that MS had kept a few guys building audio players for all the years the iPod has been out, and that they had built a few generations of prototypes in the lab, and leaned on them for a few years. When people at the top of the company decided it was strategically important for them to be in that space, they'd have been able to jump in in a different way than they did.
MS decides that they have to be in music players, then they star a massive effort to get there. The decision is made before anyone really knows how what they'll ultimately produce will stack up against the iPod. If they had a few guys making music players for years, they'd have a much better idea of how their product would stack up before the decided to jump in.
So I'd be inclined to interpret this as a sign that Apple wants to stay within striking distance of the embedded market, not that they're definitely going in. Apple's not going to make a crummy iPhone. If they do it, they'll want it to be the best phone ever. They're not going to trash their brand just because people keep telling them that they have to be in phones.
Whatever you think about what Allison has done, you have to repsect him for living up to his convictions. This sort of thing can't be good for your career, or for your bank account.
I really admire people who choose to live by their principles, even when it's hard or costly to do so.
You're right. They're not early adopters. They do painstakingly difficult code audits, and certify products for use years after they've come out.
This is a non-issue for a long time.
I have a vanity domain, and I run a mail server on a VPS. I have things set up to forward my email to both a POP3 account provided by my ISP and to gmail. Every now and then, I'll have an email that makes it to gmail but never shows up in my POP3 account. The ratio isn't anything close to what's reported in the article, though -- I think it happens once in several thousand emails.
I'm not posting my ISP here because I haven't done a rigourous test, and don't want to accuse anyone unfairly with estimated numbers. It's a big cable provider, and it's not Earthlink.
My inclination has always been to think of the freedom guys as a little strident, and a little too extreme. The things Linus says about licensing have always made the most sense to me intuitively, and the other guys have always come across as a little controlling, and a little crusading.
The one thing I've taken away from the Novell/MS deal, though, is that this stuff is really complicated, and it's really dangerous. I'll be honest -- I don't understand all of the implications of the deal, or why each of the two parties decided to do it. But I feel like something's going on -- like I'm playing 3 card monte on the street or something.
I don't think that non-specialists (ie., geeks who don't think much about law) are in a good position to know what's best.
Novell, and the guys that came to Novell when they bought Ximian and SUSE, have done an incredible amount of good for our community. We are, to a certain extent, depending on Novell's patents to protect us in this coming fight. I think they're good guys, doing what they feel they have to do in order to survive.
But even if this isn't nefarious, it's made us realize that we'd be open to something similar that was nefarious. Those crazy freedom guys weren't so crazy after all.
So I think we have to trust the people who understand these treacherous waters the best -- I think that's Eban Moglen. He says that GPL3 is necessary to counter this threat, and he says it will be effective, even if the kernel remains under GPL2. The toolchain will be enough to do what we need.
I don't want to demonize Novell, because they've given me a lot of great code, and because there are people there who are real heroes to our community. I think they're mistaken, and I think Linus is mistaken to stick with GPL2. It just ain't viral enough to keep us safe.
But instead of attacking people, or getting hysterical, I think the thing to do is to listen to our best legal minds, and back GPL3. So my feeling is that Linus's honor is beyond question, he's obviously a lot smarter than I am, and he might even be smarter than Eban Moglen. But when it comes to law, I'm going to listen to Moglen.
And I would say that the Ximian guys' honor is beyond question, and that they're a lot smarter than I am as well. But I'm still going to listen to Moglen about the law.
Again, my feeling is that we shouldn't let this break down cooperation, we shouldn't let it affect the civility of our community, and we shouldn't attribute bad motives to anyone. But we should play it safe, and innoculate with GPL3.
Ubuntu isn't made soley by volunteers, although volunteers play a big role in it. A lot of companies pay people to work on linux, and they do it because it fits into their business plan.
MS is probably never going to come after you for license money. But they might go after big companies that support linux -- IBM, RedHat, etc. And they might scare large enterprise customers away from linux.
If these things happen, your free ubuntu starts to wither and die. All of a sudden there aren't the hardware drivers you need, the fancy new desktop software, etc.
Linux is an ecosystem, and all of the parts need to be healthy in order for it to continue. While this situation doesn't threaten you personally, it does effect other vital members of our ecosystem, and if they go down, we're all going to be a lot worse off over the long run,
I worked for a company that photographed many buildings on the north side of chicago. We used it so that we could pull up photos of apartment buildings when condos went up for sale -- we could put ads online and in print without having to send a photographer out for a new photo.
It's been years since I looked at it, but I used to use a web site that would show you pictures of buildings in paris -- I think it was a yellow pages type site. I had a reservation in a hotel, and used the web site to find out what my hotel looked like, both so I could decide about whether or not to stay there, and also so I'd be able to recognize it when I was walking through the streets. You could look at any specific building in town, and move up and down the street to see what was around it.
I'm inclined to agree with the person who pointed out that people can see things that are outside anyway. At least this takes that public information and puts it into a usable form. If they want to put trucks in the street to take these photos, and if they want to put the fruit of that labor up on the web, more power to them.
I just hope that their web app works with firefox and linux.
One of the things that's pretty depressing about all of this is that the contest between MS and Linux has moved into a legal phase. Presumably, most of us are here because we like technology. But it's not about technology any more, or building cool things.
Our general is Eban Moglen -- he's the guy who will lead the fight, and he has more influence over the success or failure of linux than Linus or any other geek.
For me, individually, that's the big realization that's come out of the Novell/MS deal. It's about the law now, and because of that, we have to listen to the lawyers. When Linus says he doesn't like GPL3 and Moglen says we need it to stave off the kinds of attacks that will come out of deals like the Novell/MS deal, from here on out, my inclination is to assume that Linus is in over his head, and doesn't understand the issues, and that Moglen is right.
To put it another way, I think a talented engineer's opinions on legal matters should carry about as much weight as a lawyer's opinions on the design of the kernel. I know that Linus gets to decide about the kernel's license, and I don't begrudge him that power. But I think he's in over his head on the legal issues, and that he's wrong.
The other big thing for me is that it's not very much fun any more. It's the tech that's fun, while the legal stuff is horribly unpleasant. This SCO debacle seems perverse and ugly to me, and the overhead the courts impose on the search for justice seems to guarantee that justice can never be truly achieved, no matter how the final result comes down. The whole thing is stuff I'd rather not think about, but feel compelled to because my own interests as a user are being attacked.
This is why people dislike lawyers so much.
Nat said, "We're glad they're talking about GPLv3, also, because it means that they don't think there are any incompatiblities between GPLv2 and the covenants issued by Novell and Microsoft."
But here I read that, "Moglen offered no opinion on whether the Microsoft-Novell deal violates the GPL currently in effect (known as version 2), but merely pledged that version 3 would clearly bar such "discriminatory" deals."
Maybe the quote I've used here is wrong, or maybe it's been superceded by something Moglen has said since then. Or maybe Nat made an honest mistake.
But I think the Novell people should be as careful as possible not to misprepresent any of the facts in this situation -- once it seems like spinning, people will just tune Novell out.