So you want to install a new operating system, but three additional clicks is what stops you? Really? Given that changing OSs is a fairly major change, I don't think that a little bit of reading and two minutes more of your time is too much to ask.
Leaving aside the satire of your post -- for I can only assume it's satire -- here is what you need to do to get Debian:
1) Visit Debian.org
2) Click the "Getting Debian" link. You're presented with a page with the following text: "If you simply want to install Debian, these are your options:"
3) The first option leads to a page with both ISOs and an explanation of what "netinst" is.
Of course if you lack the patience, attention span, or ability to read not more than two paragraphs of only mildly-technical, perhaps you shouldn't be installing an OS to begin with.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but it's hard to take any post seriously when one of the complaints ends with "lol wut". That just makes you sound like a smarmy, sarcastic teen more interested on criticizing than providing meaningful feedback.
From the pulmonologist who completed the 2,000+ subject study mentioned above:
"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."
No, it hadn't. By the officer's own statement, he witnessed something that might be child porn, which is not the same thing.
Fair enough, but IIRC the ruling was made not on the basis of what the officer may have seen, but rather on the fact that Boucher initially did grant access, and only later refused it.
Using the safe analogy, it's as though he first opened it for the police, then, when they had their backs turned, slammed it shut and refused to re-open it.
Slightly different -- but in the world of law, even slight differences matter.
IANAL, of course, but I don't think it's quite the Orwellian ruling that some folks seem to.
He's getting off easy. In the USA, the cops would get a court order and the judge could order him jailed for contempt of court until he gives up the password.
What about that pesky 5th Ammendment? Yeah, I know about US v. Boucher -- but that was for different circumstances (he had already incriminated himself by revealing the contents of the drive to investigators before he refused to decrypt it.)
He's making fun of people who believe without evidence in the invisible hand of the free market with regards to broadband competition in the US.
Oh, you mean the "free market" in the country with a decades-long history of both tightly controlling and lavishly coddling telecommunications via licensing, government subsidies, right-of-use grants, and "exclusivity agreements" with local governments (i.e. government-sponsored monopolies)?
Just like picking between cellular providers or big banks. Unregulated markets tend to function more like a cartel than a true open market. Limiting choices and competition instead of enhancing it.
I love how the two examples you picked to illustrate the evils of a totally-free market are two of the heavilyregulated industries in the nation.
See that's the thing about regulation: it doesn't necessarily help people.* Sometimes, it just raises the barrier of entry to market so high that only a few large, select companies can afford to exist. As you are no doubt aware, it is precisely such a scenario -- a market with only a few massive "competitors" -- that leads to problems.
If the communications market were *truely* free, you'd see scads of small, local GSM-based mobile data providers, innumerable independent OTA broadcasts, etc. As it is now, spectrum licensing fees are so high that "mom and pop" wireless is basically impossible. It's no better when it comes to landlines. AT&T and friends get all sorts of concessions by state and local governments that, were you to ask for the same treatment, would simply get you laughed out of your representative's office.
I'm with you. I want to like Obama too. I'm not convinced that he is to blame. I am more inclined to believe that there are limits to what he can do in the face of extremely powerful opposition.
Faith is quite an impressive force in some people.
I think that it wasn't until he assumed office that reality smacked him in the face.
Are you seriously suggesting that the man heading a campaign with hundreds of millions of dollars of support and funding, aided by some of the best political strategists in recent times, advised by some of the top strategists in the business simply had no idea what awaited him in office?
Not quite. That's for tracking the popularity of individual packages, not the distro as a whole. (It's available for Ubuntu too, as it is for most Debian-derived distros.)
Furthermore, it's not installed by default, (apparently) unlike the software that the article is about.
So your defense of the current administration's invasive, abusive spying is... that Obama wants to protect criminals?
Really? Your justification an illegal action is that it's to prevent someone else to from being tried for doing the same thing?
Wow.
And as for you smart-ass comment about health care: yes, I shall. I will enjoy my private health care: first-dollar coverage with no co-pay and no lifetime maximum, provided by my employer at no cost to me. A good thing too, since getting insurance on my own -- even *with* the new "Obamacare" stipulations (let's not pretend it's a full overhaul) -- would cost several hundred dollars per month for incomplete coverage... that is, of course, assuming that I could find an insurer willing to take me on at a feasible rate, given my existing health history. Not to worry though, because at least we've got the public option that Obama promised!
1. What do you think the US government's encryption-breaking capability REALLY is these days? e.g. for example, are common encryption protocols and key-lengths used in, say, online banking and e-commerce readily crackable by the Feds?
Well considering the number of poorly-configured servers that still negotiate RC4, probably a good bit. (Tip: get CipherFox or otherwise remove that cipher from the list of acceptable ones.)
As far as block ciphers go: AES-128 is probably well past the point where it's easier to just torture the person than it is to break the key. 3DES I'm not so sure, as it is a much older cipher, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true for it.
For public key: Do security agencies of the federal government automatically flag for further investigation all people who use "an excess amount of encrypted traffic"?
No. Not all ISPs monitor customer traffic enough to be able to provide even those statistics (speaking as a recently-ex employee of a national ISP).
Does the FBI, a "domestic" intelligence agency, have the right to spy on foreign residents whose net transactions traverse the US border?
Insofar as they have the "right" to do any spying, yes -- I believe that's about the jist of it.
He just PAYS FOR IT, because it really is faster, and easier. The pirate who wants to play Super Duper Mario Brothers Meet the Exterminator and Predator has to find a download, find a crack, apply the crack, etc ad nauseum. Then, he probably can't play the online version, which includes the "value added" appearance of Alien.
Kinda.
That's how it's supposed to work. If a company is smart, they go to lengths to ensure that the value of their product is higher than that of the pirated product.
Unfortunately, some companies (like EA and Ubisoft) don't quite get it right. Instead of ensuring that the legitimate copies are the best, they layer on obtrusive DRM (e.g. Spore) and stupid limitations (requiring a network connection to play a single-player game), thereby changing the value proposition in the wrong direction.
This is complicated by the fact that your description of piracy isn't really how it works anymore. Here's how it usually works:
User wants "Game X"
User goes to favorite torrent tracker and searches for "Game X"
User picks highest-ranked/highest-voted torrent.
User downloads "Game X" via BitTorrent.
As with all "quality" piracy releases, the copy of "Game X" that the user has downloaded is completely stripped of DRM and requires no additional software to play.
Now faced with the above scenario, you can see how the value comparison changes. In this scenario, the user can either 1) pay for the product and be subject to a number of limitations (DRM, etc.) or 2) get the product for free and deal with fewer restrictions on its usage.
And that's not even including the folks who "pirate" things that they already licensed. Case in point: I licensed NFS: Most Wanted a couple years ago. Unfortunately, the copy protection (SafeDisc IIRC) didn't function correctly, and the game refused to recognize that I had the CD in the drive with any degree of reliability. As a result, I downloaded a "pirated" release of the game, which work flawlessly.
Conversely, Positech Games (who make some kick-ass strategy/management games) sells all of their games DRM-free. I've purchased several of his games, primarily because the pirated product adds nothing other than a count of copyright infringement.
That's video shot by a national news outlet, of a US Coast Guard officer, threatening the news crew with arrest if they don't comply with a BP policy. Color of law, anyone?
TAPPER: Lastly, I saw firsthand when I was down in Louisiana over the weekend, all the workers there, whether they work for the governor or for BP or for private contractors who work for BP, they've all been told not to talk to the press, not to talk to the public about their work. Shouldn't they be allowed to share with the public the work that they're doing?
ALLEN: I put out a written directive and I can provide it for the record that says the media will have uninhibited access anywhere we're doing operations, except for two things, if it's a security or safety problem. That is my policy. I'm the national incident commander.
TAPPER: Well, I can tell you firsthand people are not -- people are not following that.
ALLEN: You take (ph) the information and you tell me where it's at, and we'll get the word to them.
TAPPER: All right, Admiral Allen, thanks so much for joining us.
> How would you switch if the offending company were a monopoly, such as the local electric power company or (in a case like this) the only bank with ATMs in your town?
Well... you can't. Instead, you pay them in the least convenient way (for them) possible, and you complain to every manager you can find, explaining in clear, laymen-friendly terms why you have to go to such a hassle. "Hi Dave, I'm sorry I have to bother you, but I can't settle my bill online because your website... etc."
I've done this with a couple regional businesses in my area, and you better believe that it got results. A pissed-off geek that quietly complains on Slashdot doesn't make life any less pleasant for J. Random Manager. A customer who politely, professionally, yet consistently ends up making extra work for and taking extra time from said manager will provide an excellent motivation to fix the problem, if only so he'll shut about and go away.
Be polite, but clear: you'd *like* to pay your bill / manage your service / etc. in a way that didn't waste his time and you really hate having to do this, but $CLEAR_EXPLANATION.
You are right: there is no such "trick" in the sense that there's not really anything to be gained by storing swathes of game state client-side.
He is right: presuming you implement your crypto correctly, you could (in theory) store bits of game state client-side without the fear of tampering by cheaters.
I'm afraid I can't see any real benefit in doing so -- it seems like a lot more trouble than it's worth, and I'm not sure it's a good solution to any problem -- but you could certainly do it.
Want rounded corners (like on this site)? Firefox and Webkit browsers use different syntax, and IE8 won't do it at all without some really ugly hacks.) Maybe full implementation of HTML5 and CSS3 will catch up with (or nearly so) what you could do with, say Flash 5, but quite frankly they haven't yet. Any designer without a seething hate-on against Adobe will confirm this.
I sure do!
And when I do, all I need to do is this:
$(".things_i_want_to_round").corners("5px");
And it works. In IE 6+, Chrome, Opera, Firefox, etc.
Oh, and it also works on the iPhone and iPad too...
Its news for me because Apple got an operating system for free (BSD and Mach underlie OSX) because of those free software guys.
Let's not spread that FUD, shall we?
Mach as it exists in xnu (i.e. Mac OS X's kernel) is basically the product of NeXT and Apple at this point. Further, xnu is a very different beast than the FreeBSD kernel, and almost all of the development has been done by the Mac OS X team and its precursors (i.e. NeXT devs).
A massive chunk of the libraries, from Core Animation to Core Audio, from libdispatch to Bonjour certainly *weren't* from "those free software guys". And the GUI-level userland? Almost none of it's from "those free software guys".
So while it's fun to think that Apple just waltzed in and lifted an OS from the OSS movement, the reality is that Mac OS X has a *huge* amount of proprietary Apple code in addition to its open-source components.
Actually, DRM enables e-book libraries. There are quite a few libraries actively loaning out e-books.
And that, dear reader, is an excellent example of why our entire notion of copyright and intellectual property is horribly, horribly wrong.
The *only*, I repeat: *only*, reason for a library to lend books was so that more than one person might access them over a period of time. Lending is a vestige of when information was inseparably bound to the media upon which it was printed; lending and late fees were necessitated by the scarcity of the good itself.
We live in a different world now, one in which that scarcity is purely artificial. The purpose of public libraries -- to use public funds to provide public access to books and the like -- remains the same. Our notion of copyright, however, has shifted from that of an incentive to contribute towards a society's creative output to a sense of entitlement. At first, copyright functioned to reward those contributors with a limited-term grant of exclusive rights to their contribution. Those same contributors now view it as their god-given right to profit from said contribution in perpetuity. Worse still, this corruption of copyright's purpose has endangered the modern function of libraries by encouraging the use of restrictive technologies to enforce a limitation which has no reason to exist in the modern world, save to line the pockets of those responsible for said corruption.
Please, I beseech you, do not think of DRM as an "enabler" of public libraries. Rather, see it for what it is: an artificial restriction on public resources designed to wrest control from the public, to limit access to societal contributions, and to discourage the distribution and dissemination of culture -- all in the name of maximizing profits for the select group of individuals responsible for manipulating the legal and public concepts of copyright.
Put gently, you don't know what you're talking about. Either that, or you're not thinking of the same company.
php and mysql performance is very slow. the servers are overloaded
Except you're not on any given server. You can't "be on an overloaded server", because your site isn't static -- it's not assigned to a single server.
As for performance, I've had no problems running a large (several thousand active users/day) MediaWiki installation on it for several years. sub-1 sec page loads, all the time.
ssh is very slow. there is lag between every command. This is especially noticeable when using sshfs
That's entirely dependent on your location. Far away from the host? Laggy SSH. Near the host? No lag. Simple as that. As for SSHFS... well... that's not really a defect, given that the explicitly caution you that their SSH implementation isn't intended for that sort of thing.
sometimes there is lag for simple page loads
Rare, but it happens. It's shared hosting. If you need to discount any host which occasionally has sub-optimal performance, you probably shouldn't be looking at shared hosting in the first place.
no cron, no https, several little things you may have come to expect from a host are not provided by NFSN...
... and many things that you wouldn't expect are. That's only really a big deal if they were hiding the limitations, or if they weren't up-front about them. They offer an unusual service, to be sure, but they're completely up-front about what they do and do not support.
reliability: a couple of times a year, NFSN will make some arbitrary change that may cause your sites to go down.
Bullshit. It's happened once that I can remember (since I started using them in 2004), and even that was solely because it was a scenario that required immediate action (security.)
I don't think NFSN even has 2 9's. (ie less than 99% uptime). When NFSN is down, they still charge you for storage, but not bandwidth. This is fine for them, but might not be for you.
Again, bull.
Reliability-wise (to respond to your claim with another, equally-meaningless, point of anecdotal evidence), they're better than most shared hosts (key word being *shared*).
Yes, you're right about the fee structure re: outages. Guess what? That's exactly how every other shared host works. Don't like it? Don't go shared (or get an SLA).
NFSN is a one-man LLC, named Jeffrey Wheelhouse. If you ever need to deal with support, you will notice that this guy is a self-righteous asshole. Just look at the forums, and his responses.
NFSN has several contract employees. If you ever cared to take your own advice, and read the explanation of who makes up NFSN, you would know this.
As far as the self-righteous asshole part goes, that is (in my experience), false. Is the guy opinionated? Sure. But the only times I've ever seen anything that could possibly qualify as the behavior you described is when he's dealing with someone who is verbally abusive, abusive to the service, or incapable of reading the documentation yet insistent on bad-mouthing the service and the provider repeatedly. In light of your post, I can guess why you have that opinion of NFSN...
Now, a quick note on the service: it's not for everyone. It supports a lot of cool stuff, and lacks some stuff you might want. It's definitely more of a "self-catered" option; if you want a host to hold your hand every step of the way, it won't be a good choice. If you expect 100% reliability, an SLA, etc. it's not for you ('course neither is shared hosting...)
Who is it for? People who want a host that will actively refuse to take down sites for any reason other than illegal activity. People who like a host that states: "[W]hile we aren't lawyers, neither are we idiots. We can tell the
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, you mean my phone? The one without a camera, and from which I remove the battery when not in use? That one?
So you want to install a new operating system, but three additional clicks is what stops you? Really? Given that changing OSs is a fairly major change, I don't think that a little bit of reading and two minutes more of your time is too much to ask.
Leaving aside the satire of your post -- for I can only assume it's satire -- here is what you need to do to get Debian:
1) Visit Debian.org
2) Click the "Getting Debian" link. You're presented with a page with the following text: "If you simply want to install Debian, these are your options:"
3) The first option leads to a page with both ISOs and an explanation of what "netinst" is.
Of course if you lack the patience, attention span, or ability to read not more than two paragraphs of only mildly-technical, perhaps you shouldn't be installing an OS to begin with.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but it's hard to take any post seriously when one of the complaints ends with "lol wut". That just makes you sound like a smarmy, sarcastic teen more interested on criticizing than providing meaningful feedback.
> tl;dr
Is that the emacs command used to indicate you're a twat?
Stellar post, with just one flaw:
it can cause lung cancer, like any inhaled smoke
Maybe not.
From the pulmonologist who completed the 2,000+ subject study mentioned above:
"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."
No, it hadn't. By the officer's own statement, he witnessed something that might be child porn, which is not the same thing.
Fair enough, but IIRC the ruling was made not on the basis of what the officer may have seen, but rather on the fact that Boucher initially did grant access, and only later refused it.
Using the safe analogy, it's as though he first opened it for the police, then, when they had their backs turned, slammed it shut and refused to re-open it.
Slightly different -- but in the world of law, even slight differences matter.
IANAL, of course, but I don't think it's quite the Orwellian ruling that some folks seem to.
He's getting off easy. In the USA, the cops would get a court order and the judge could order him jailed for contempt of court until he gives up the password.
What about that pesky 5th Ammendment? Yeah, I know about US v. Boucher -- but that was for different circumstances (he had already incriminated himself by revealing the contents of the drive to investigators before he refused to decrypt it.)
I know It's the UK, but couldn't this be defended as the right to not self incriminate? IANAL, but I'm just throwing that out there.
Not in the UK. No such ammendment, I'm afraid.
He's making fun of people who believe without evidence in the invisible hand of the free market with regards to broadband competition in the US.
Oh, you mean the "free market" in the country with a decades-long history of both tightly controlling and lavishly coddling telecommunications via licensing, government subsidies, right-of-use grants, and "exclusivity agreements" with local governments (i.e. government-sponsored monopolies)?
That free market?
So, what is the point of this article then?
Well...
Finally at the end he mentions his book with a link to where you can buy it.
Just like picking between cellular providers or big banks. Unregulated markets tend to function more like a cartel than a true open market. Limiting choices and competition instead of enhancing it.
I love how the two examples you picked to illustrate the evils of a totally-free market are two of the heavily regulated industries in the nation.
See that's the thing about regulation: it doesn't necessarily help people.* Sometimes, it just raises the barrier of entry to market so high that only a few large, select companies can afford to exist. As you are no doubt aware, it is precisely such a scenario -- a market with only a few massive "competitors" -- that leads to problems.
If the communications market were *truely* free, you'd see scads of small, local GSM-based mobile data providers, innumerable independent OTA broadcasts, etc. As it is now, spectrum licensing fees are so high that "mom and pop" wireless is basically impossible. It's no better when it comes to landlines. AT&T and friends get all sorts of concessions by state and local governments that, were you to ask for the same treatment, would simply get you laughed out of your representative's office.
* Although in many cases it does.
I'm with you. I want to like Obama too. I'm not convinced that he is to blame. I am more inclined to believe that there are limits to what he can do in the face of extremely powerful opposition.
Faith is quite an impressive force in some people.
I think that it wasn't until he assumed office that reality smacked him in the face.
Are you seriously suggesting that the man heading a campaign with hundreds of millions of dollars of support and funding, aided by some of the best political strategists in recent times, advised by some of the top strategists in the business simply had no idea what awaited him in office?
Debian has a similar usage tracking package: http://popcon.debian.org/ .
Not quite. That's for tracking the popularity of individual packages, not the distro as a whole. (It's available for Ubuntu too, as it is for most Debian-derived distros.)
Furthermore, it's not installed by default, (apparently) unlike the software that the article is about.
My root partition is read-only.
Good luck updating my software without me sitting a root prompt, jerks.
So your defense of the current administration's invasive, abusive spying is... that Obama wants to protect criminals?
Really? Your justification an illegal action is that it's to prevent someone else to from being tried for doing the same thing?
Wow.
And as for you smart-ass comment about health care: yes, I shall. I will enjoy my private health care: first-dollar coverage with no co-pay and no lifetime maximum, provided by my employer at no cost to me. A good thing too, since getting insurance on my own -- even *with* the new "Obamacare" stipulations (let's not pretend it's a full overhaul) -- would cost several hundred dollars per month for incomplete coverage... that is, of course, assuming that I could find an insurer willing to take me on at a feasible rate, given my existing health history. Not to worry though, because at least we've got the public option that Obama promised!
1. What do you think the US government's encryption-breaking capability REALLY is these days? e.g. for example,
are common encryption protocols and key-lengths used in, say, online banking and e-commerce readily crackable by the Feds?
Well considering the number of poorly-configured servers that still negotiate RC4, probably a good bit. (Tip: get CipherFox or otherwise remove that cipher from the list of acceptable ones.)
As far as block ciphers go: AES-128 is probably well past the point where it's easier to just torture the person than it is to break the key. 3DES I'm not so sure, as it is a much older cipher, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true for it.
For public key: Do security agencies of the federal government automatically flag for further investigation all people who use "an excess
amount of encrypted traffic"?
No. Not all ISPs monitor customer traffic enough to be able to provide even those statistics (speaking as a recently-ex employee of a national ISP).
Does the FBI, a "domestic" intelligence agency, have the right to spy on foreign residents whose net transactions
traverse the US border?
Insofar as they have the "right" to do any spying, yes -- I believe that's about the jist of it.
He just PAYS FOR IT, because it really is faster, and easier. The pirate who wants to play Super Duper Mario Brothers Meet the Exterminator and Predator has to find a download, find a crack, apply the crack, etc ad nauseum. Then, he probably can't play the online version, which includes the "value added" appearance of Alien.
Kinda.
That's how it's supposed to work. If a company is smart, they go to lengths to ensure that the value of their product is higher than that of the pirated product.
Unfortunately, some companies (like EA and Ubisoft) don't quite get it right. Instead of ensuring that the legitimate copies are the best, they layer on obtrusive DRM (e.g. Spore) and stupid limitations (requiring a network connection to play a single-player game), thereby changing the value proposition in the wrong direction.
This is complicated by the fact that your description of piracy isn't really how it works anymore. Here's how it usually works:
Now faced with the above scenario, you can see how the value comparison changes. In this scenario, the user can either 1) pay for the product and be subject to a number of limitations (DRM, etc.) or 2) get the product for free and deal with fewer restrictions on its usage.
And that's not even including the folks who "pirate" things that they already licensed. Case in point: I licensed NFS: Most Wanted a couple years ago. Unfortunately, the copy protection (SafeDisc IIRC) didn't function correctly, and the game refused to recognize that I had the CD in the drive with any degree of reliability. As a result, I downloaded a "pirated" release of the game, which work flawlessly.
Conversely, Positech Games (who make some kick-ass strategy/management games) sells all of their games DRM-free. I've purchased several of his games, primarily because the pirated product adds nothing other than a count of copyright infringement.
Indeed.
That was in May. It doesn't appear to have been official policy though -- more likely the "grown boys with too much power" phenomenon at play -- and in June, Admiral Thad Allen was a lot clearer on what the Coast Guard does and did not allow:
> How would you switch if the offending company were a monopoly, such as the local electric power company or (in a case like this) the only bank with ATMs in your town?
Well... you can't. Instead, you pay them in the least convenient way (for them) possible, and you complain to every manager you can find, explaining in clear, laymen-friendly terms why you have to go to such a hassle. "Hi Dave, I'm sorry I have to bother you, but I can't settle my bill online because your website... etc."
I've done this with a couple regional businesses in my area, and you better believe that it got results. A pissed-off geek that quietly complains on Slashdot doesn't make life any less pleasant for J. Random Manager. A customer who politely, professionally, yet consistently ends up making extra work for and taking extra time from said manager will provide an excellent motivation to fix the problem, if only so he'll shut about and go away.
Be polite, but clear: you'd *like* to pay your bill / manage your service / etc. in a way that didn't waste his time and you really hate having to do this, but $CLEAR_EXPLANATION.
You're both right.
You are right: there is no such "trick" in the sense that there's not really anything to be gained by storing swathes of game state client-side.
He is right: presuming you implement your crypto correctly, you could (in theory) store bits of game state client-side without the fear of tampering by cheaters.
I'm afraid I can't see any real benefit in doing so -- it seems like a lot more trouble than it's worth, and I'm not sure it's a good solution to any problem -- but you could certainly do it.
I sure do!
And when I do, all I need to do is this:
$(".things_i_want_to_round").corners("5px");
And it works. In IE 6+, Chrome, Opera, Firefox, etc.
Oh, and it also works on the iPhone and iPad too...
Would I be allowed to drive slowly down a street taking pictures of kids at a park as long as I wasn't a convicted pedophile?
Yes, actually. Taking pictures in a public place of people in a public place is completely legal.
How am I going to get rid of the obnoxious ads written in HTML5?
The same way you do now.
Its news for me because Apple got an operating system for free (BSD and Mach underlie OSX) because of those free software guys.
Let's not spread that FUD, shall we?
Mach as it exists in xnu (i.e. Mac OS X's kernel) is basically the product of NeXT and Apple at this point. Further, xnu is a very different beast than the FreeBSD kernel, and almost all of the development has been done by the Mac OS X team and its precursors (i.e. NeXT devs).
A massive chunk of the libraries, from Core Animation to Core Audio, from libdispatch to Bonjour certainly *weren't* from "those free software guys". And the GUI-level userland? Almost none of it's from "those free software guys".
So while it's fun to think that Apple just waltzed in and lifted an OS from the OSS movement, the reality is that Mac OS X has a *huge* amount of proprietary Apple code in addition to its open-source components.
Actually, DRM enables e-book libraries. There are quite a few libraries actively loaning out e-books.
And that, dear reader, is an excellent example of why our entire notion of copyright and intellectual property is horribly, horribly wrong.
The *only*, I repeat: *only*, reason for a library to lend books was so that more than one person might access them over a period of time. Lending is a vestige of when information was inseparably bound to the media upon which it was printed; lending and late fees were necessitated by the scarcity of the good itself.
We live in a different world now, one in which that scarcity is purely artificial. The purpose of public libraries -- to use public funds to provide public access to books and the like -- remains the same. Our notion of copyright, however, has shifted from that of an incentive to contribute towards a society's creative output to a sense of entitlement. At first, copyright functioned to reward those contributors with a limited-term grant of exclusive rights to their contribution. Those same contributors now view it as their god-given right to profit from said contribution in perpetuity. Worse still, this corruption of copyright's purpose has endangered the modern function of libraries by encouraging the use of restrictive technologies to enforce a limitation which has no reason to exist in the modern world, save to line the pockets of those responsible for said corruption.
Please, I beseech you, do not think of DRM as an "enabler" of public libraries. Rather, see it for what it is: an artificial restriction on public resources designed to wrest control from the public, to limit access to societal contributions, and to discourage the distribution and dissemination of culture -- all in the name of maximizing profits for the select group of individuals responsible for manipulating the legal and public concepts of copyright.
Put gently, you don't know what you're talking about. Either that, or you're not thinking of the same company.
php and mysql performance is very slow. the servers are overloaded
Except you're not on any given server. You can't "be on an overloaded server", because your site isn't static -- it's not assigned to a single server.
As for performance, I've had no problems running a large (several thousand active users/day) MediaWiki installation on it for several years. sub-1 sec page loads, all the time.
ssh is very slow. there is lag between every command. This is especially noticeable when using sshfs
That's entirely dependent on your location. Far away from the host? Laggy SSH. Near the host? No lag. Simple as that. As for SSHFS... well... that's not really a defect, given that the explicitly caution you that their SSH implementation isn't intended for that sort of thing.
sometimes there is lag for simple page loads
Rare, but it happens. It's shared hosting. If you need to discount any host which occasionally has sub-optimal performance, you probably shouldn't be looking at shared hosting in the first place.
no cron, no https, several little things you may have come to expect from a host are not provided by NFSN...
... and many things that you wouldn't expect are. That's only really a big deal if they were hiding the limitations, or if they weren't up-front about them. They offer an unusual service, to be sure, but they're completely up-front about what they do and do not support.
reliability: a couple of times a year, NFSN will make some arbitrary change that may cause your sites to go down.
Bullshit. It's happened once that I can remember (since I started using them in 2004), and even that was solely because it was a scenario that required immediate action (security.)
I don't think NFSN even has 2 9's. (ie less than 99% uptime). When NFSN is down, they still charge you for storage, but not bandwidth. This is fine for them, but might not be for you.
Again, bull.
Reliability-wise (to respond to your claim with another, equally-meaningless, point of anecdotal evidence), they're better than most shared hosts (key word being *shared*).
Yes, you're right about the fee structure re: outages. Guess what? That's exactly how every other shared host works. Don't like it? Don't go shared (or get an SLA).
NFSN is a one-man LLC, named Jeffrey Wheelhouse. If you ever need to deal with support, you will notice that this guy is a self-righteous asshole. Just look at the forums, and his responses.
NFSN has several contract employees. If you ever cared to take your own advice, and read the explanation of who makes up NFSN, you would know this.
As far as the self-righteous asshole part goes, that is (in my experience), false. Is the guy opinionated? Sure. But the only times I've ever seen anything that could possibly qualify as the behavior you described is when he's dealing with someone who is verbally abusive, abusive to the service, or incapable of reading the documentation yet insistent on bad-mouthing the service and the provider repeatedly. In light of your post, I can guess why you have that opinion of NFSN...
Now, a quick note on the service: it's not for everyone. It supports a lot of cool stuff, and lacks some stuff you might want. It's definitely more of a "self-catered" option; if you want a host to hold your hand every step of the way, it won't be a good choice. If you expect 100% reliability, an SLA, etc. it's not for you ('course neither is shared hosting...)
Who is it for? People who want a host that will actively refuse to take down sites for any reason other than illegal activity. People who like a host that states: "[W]hile we aren't lawyers, neither are we idiots. We can tell the