First of all, comparing KDE to Blackbox in size is like saying "but Netscape is much smaller than Windows!". KDE is not just a window manager, and if you want to compare window managers, look at kwin.. It's about 3.1kb, I don't think you can beat that.:-) (Yes, I know about shared libraries. If you do want to know, kwin uses about 2MB of RAM here and starts in under a second.
Yes, KDE is big. That's because it does so much more than just window management, and provides a complete API set for applications (via Qt). It's a very important step towards a "common" desktop interface, the lack of which is one reason why many companies hesitate to port their apps to Unix systems.
That said, of course there is room for improvement. And those things happen, 2.1.1 has improved a LOT in respect to speed.
And THAT said: A fully blown KDE desktop with mixer, licq, project manager applet, newsticker, XMMS, and two Konqueror browser windows uses LESS memory on my machine say IceWM and two Netscape windows. Blame Netscape if you want, but then what browser did you say you were using?
Have you guys (and gals:) had a look at "Troops"? It's available here (http://www.accessdenied.net/troops.htm). Blurb:
"This is a spoof of the Fox show COPS, but set in the Star Wars universe. Hillarious and well done. Made with less than $2,000, a video camera and a home computer."
The quesion of "bloated code" reminds me of the posting I wrote in one of the KDE developers' lists a couple months ago. Perhaps code isn't all "bloated" nowadays, the problem that many developers have is that they develop so much more abstracted from the hardware than, say, five years ago.
Speaking of KDE: It's a great environment, and in many ways it's faster than Windows. (In others it still lacks, but most of the criticism it receives is pure bullshit.) Anyway, if I remember correctly, I was using a much more powerful GUI in 1994, on a P60, with 16 MB RAM (instead of 192 now) which was just as smooth to use and fast like hell. (I'm talking about OS/2's workplace shell).
The question is: Where has all that performance gone? Why can't you comfortably use Windows ME, or 2000, or Linux with KDE 2.1 on a P60 with 16 MB RAM? What are CPU cycles doing nowadays that they didn't need to do five years ago, although most apps had almost the same features? That is, while you are not watching your daily DivX porn;)
Some probable answers come to my mind.
Unicode. Double every string in length, double the memory requirements of application resources. This makes for great internationalization, but it requires memory.
OOP. I overheard in a PHP mailing list that when you develop PHP3 apps without objects, just flat procedures, you can gain up to 30% in raw performance. (This has greatly improved in PHP4, IIRC.) I don't know how representative this is but I suspect that in languages like C++ and Smalltalk (and Perl:-) some CPU cycles are needed to take care of all those relationships, overloaded items and whatnot.
Standards. The good thing about standards is that there are so many of them. I.e. nowadays a browser (prime example) needs not only to render a little plain text with different fonts and one or two images, but it needs to know XHTML, XML, Javascript, ECMAScript, Java, CSS, cope with thousands of objects and plug-ins that mess up the system, and so on. Sure, these are features - but are they innovations? I don't think so, and I don't think most other apps received as much "feature bloat" as browsers did in the last couple years.
What do you think? Why does a word processor need 128MB nowadays when it doesn't _really_ have more features than what was available in 1994?
(Having said that, I have a K6-2 350 for my primary machine and I don't plan on buying a new one this year. It does what I want, it does it fast enough, and if I need more CPU power I can always ssh to our university cluster.;)
You know what "instinct" is? Most animals don't THINK about what they are doing, they just DO it. Mice don't know WHY they eat cheese, or run away from cats, but it has been a healthy behaviour so the non-running mice probably expired quite quickly. Same with sex, most of the time.
Just the same, most animals don't actively think about why (or whom) they are fscking - The exception being humans and some apes (I heard that some have sex to kill off aggressions within the group, instead of fighting each other).
Thinking about it, humans should develop that way too. Make love, not war.
You're right. And I want my paycheck from CDDB.com next time I take the time (read: MONEY!) to type in all those track titles to register a new CD into their database.
Bottom line: If cddb.com wants to charge for accessing their service, that's fine by me. BUT then I want my piece of the cake when I help them making money.
Nothing is free. But sometimes you pay with money, other times you pay by helping out, again somewhere else you perhaps pay by advertising a partner's products along with yours, or by viewing banners.
A company who charges money BUT is still expecting people to work for them for free, isn't worth my time. Or money.
Like forcing you to use cookies in Internet Explorer, or rather, transmitting cookies to *.msn.com sites no matter what you configured, containing personal information about your windows installation.
Think that's bad? How 'bout msid.msn.com cookies set as part of your install, and re-created even after deletion?
Grab a hex editor or other file viewing tool (e.g. LIST.COM) and examine MSIE's cookie files, you'll see that msid.msn.com has a cookie set even if you don't use IE. (Reproduce: Delete - from within DOS, not Windoze, all MSIE cookie files. Reboot. Do not connect to the 'net.
Observe that IE has re-created cookies pointing to msid.msn.com with your information in 'em, even though you never connected to the 'net. They're there on a clean install from CD-ROM, and they come back every time you delete 'em.
For the sake of the privacy of those who must use Internet Explorer: Firewall msid.msn.com. Forever.
non-Americans.
WTF is a "SAT"? I gather it's some kind of entry test for school or college in the US. But I'd appreciate if someone could shed a little light on this definition and tell me what "SAT" is an acronym for.
RTFMs welcome.
The trouble isn't that it cannot be hacked. The trouble is that Microsoft now makes all the big media companies BELIEVE that their formats are secure.
It doesn't matter that it takes the average geek two weeks to figure out how to put a wrapper around the codec DLLs and play the stuff under Linux. What matters is that companies will start investing into this "secure" format, and that means they will haveto buy Windows 2000 because the server software exists only there.
Example: Internet Movie Database. Started out as a hobby project (I still have their old text-based complete database here, on CD). Nowadays, they provide advertisements, DVDs, lots of ads - and trailers. Guess in what format.
So, you see, this is another of Microsoft's attempts at getting into the server market. Take something that people will BELIEVE is good and offer it only in combination with that other product that OTHERWISE nobody would have wanted (but which is critical to take over the world), Windows 2000.
This really hurts in combination with the recent Netcraft survey. Microsoft still has a measly 20% of the web server market (and that's not about to change), but they seem to have the 20% where 80% of the money is made.
6. More on ASP:.... visit the page with IE 6 and you won't be able to tell the difference between it and a regular app. Visit it with Netscape 3, and you'll see a regular static page. The difference here is that the programmer doesn't have to worry about it.
Ex-squeeze me? You don't honestly believe that Microsoft is going to support its competition??
What you will see is just like what everyone sees that tries to use the Microsot web services like Windows update, Knowledge base etc etc. A redirection to download Internet Explorer.
After all, with Netscape, or a secure (i.e. non-Microsoft) OS, Microsoft couldn't as easily spy on their users than with their own products. It's funny how IE barfs out completely when I block msid.msn.com with a couple ipchains rules. Even if I didn't access MSN at all.
Brave New World, indeed. Take a little SOMA.NET and all will be well.
Quoting Tristan: Only readable on Windows and Mac machines? Fair enough assessment, but then again, that is some 95% of the desktop market.
The problem is not that it's "only" readable with a EUR200 OS and a EUR800 office suite. The problem is that Microsoft makes extra effort to make it hard for other people/OS/apps to read their formats.
If they didn't do that (and perhaps even published proper specs on the.doc format, and made it not uselessly depend on half of the Win32 API, COM, DCOM and all that other stuff), there wouldn't be half as much bitching about MS Office.
But, this is not going to happen: Microsoft makes their money by forcing people on their platform. If they were forced to compete on quality and continuity [read: When was the last time two different versions of MS Office used the SAME file formats?], Microsoft would probably go into serious problems. There are really few people who use Windows voluntarily.
Yes! After all, why does one use Windows? The main three reasons:
What, you mean there are other operating systems out there? Ridiculous.
My boss told me so. (tough luck.)
I need this and that specific application. (and I'm too stupid to develop it myself, don't have the time, money, or whatever.)
My hardware is Windows-specific / missing driver /... . (Well, now I got you. Then why did you buy the hardware? I buy hardware to run the software I need, not the other way round.) Actually, this is probably No.2, if you bought the hardware because you needed it to run a specific Windows based software.
Almost nobody uses Windows because it is Windows. OTOH, I know a hell of a lot of people who use Linux/BSD/Mac/... just because it is Linux/BSD/Mac/..., not because someone told them to.
(If you want an answer, please CC: to me. I don't read all of Slashdot every day. Thanks.)
Scanners, in Germany, are sold with drivers that slow them down to avoid the GEMA tax on copying functions. Above a certain speed the scanner is considered a copying machine and costs taxes.
PC boards like Hauppauge WinTV are crippled in their recording capabilities to 320x240, because if the software allowed full PAL recording there would be an extra tax. (Of course, it's not a hardware limitation, it's the -Windows- software that is crippled. Check out KWinTV or xawtv and see the difference.)
I'm just waiting for the GEMA to tax my brain, because from time to time, we do a little Blues Brothers music in our free time (and at University festivals). And I know the music by heart (i.e. brain).
What I'd like to know is how much the GEMA actually forwards to the musicians, and how much they keep for themselves. Anyone?
I think all this censorship about "inappropriate words" is going too far. (The problem being, I suspect, that people in the US have successfully sued ISPs/registrars who have offered such domain names to customers, no matter who really was responsible for the name).
Another example:
In Germany, at ebay.de, you can criticize/endorse the person you bought something from. I think it's the same as with the US ebay auctioning service. If I write "war schnell" (meaning "was fast"), the system rejects this because it parses
"wAR SCHnell"
- where "ARSCH" means "asshole".
Are there really so many illiterate idiots on the web that the big companies must "protect" us from dirty words like in kindergarten? Or is the problem that it's so easy to sue somebody over anything and the companies want to avoid the paperwork?
Anyway, I think the above is WAY out of line... how does ebay.com handle this?
I think this is what IBM has been doing for years with the AS/400. Basically, they embed a complete PC system with a customized firewall OS into an AS/400. You can, if necessary, reset the PC system no matter what state it is in, without harming or interrupting the AS/400. And AS/400 boxen are "somewhat" more reliable than PCs, even if you run a "real OS" on the PCs.
I mean, honestly. Knives can be used for crime. So starting tomorrow, all knives sold in Germany must be taxed, and the taxes will go straight to the National Association of Kitchen-Knife Crime Victims. Er, no. Of course the money will go to the National Association of Kitchen-Knife Producers, because they have all the trouble and extra cost with people sueing them and so on. Er.
Seriously: Europe has embraced Open Source, Germany has dumped Windows 2000 (here and here) in some government departments in favor of Linux & Staroffice (yes, on the Desktop!) and there have already been so many rumours about taxing the Internet, taxing Computers, taxing raw CDR media, and so on.
NOTHING of this all will happen. That's because all the "big evil players" will and can not agree on one common path. The minute that most ISPs ban Napster, there will be ISPs advertising "No banning" and charging extra, and gaining customers. The minute somebody imposes a tax on CDR media, there will be cheap imports from South India (or wherever) and nobody will buy the taxed versions any more. (Is anyone in Germany actually buying GEMA-approved CD-Audio media right now?)
Look at CNN (owned by Time Warner, btw.). Did they keep their big mouth shut when Napster was there? NO! They shouted it out for all the world to see: "There's a way to get illegal MP3z on the internet!" Great thing for the mass media: everybody was listening...
Now how much less people would have known about Napster, if CNN had worked together with Time Warner and Sony and all the others to try to SILENTLY counter Napster?
Their diversity is our strength... and as long as they try to fight everything they don't (cannot) control, I'm not their customer, I'm their enemy. Period.
I have done this (on 40 machines, not 2500, but WTH) with Mandrake 7.0. I'm not sure about the distro (it fit our needs, yours might be different) but I installed one distro, created an "exclude file" containing things like/tmp,/var/log/* etc which are never touched and then used rsync to clone the machines.
Whenever I change something on the "master client" I fire up a script I wrote to rsync all the other machines. For 40 machines, this takes about 2min per machine (unloaded 100MBit network).
So:
Pick your distro of choice
Get to know the configuration things (this is probably easiest with Debian, as they use raw/etc maintenance anyway) and create your exclude file
Use five or something hosts to get rsync parameters right (I use rsync -vae ssh --exclude-from=$exfile / $IP:/)
Do a couple updates and try them out
This works perfectly for us. We haven't tried a distro upgrade though. and of course it only works if all machines have at least SIMILAR hardware, and should be installed identically.
I have begun to document this at www.linuxfaq.de (German, though). Please tell us what you decide to do.
Helping a school is a very good idea. I've done this - converted a complete school network from a heap of badly maintained, half-working Win9x machines (*) to a Linux network that even lets more people do work because we can use old 386 boxen as X terminals. (*) mostly because the "teacher in charge", who had the unfortunate reputation of "knowing computers" and was therefore simply _put_ in charge, couldn not care to reinstall every time virus some kid cracker tried out the newest trojan/virus/...
Second, every wednesday I go there and together with interested pupils we configure one thing or the other on the Linux machines. The point is, that many, many pupils are interested in learning something new, but there are no teaches who are willing or able to do the teaching. And that must change.
I've documented the migration and my class papers (well, it's work in progress actually but quite a lot is already there) at http://www.linuxfaq.de/. It's in German but I welcome any volunteering translators:)
[Documentation, btw, is the second most important thing you can do to educate people. Write it so that other people can duplicate and extend your work.]
This sounds very science-fiction, but I think it might happen quite soon. Relatively speaking. I think in fifty to a hundred years, you won't need computers any more to access the Internet - or any other source of information to which you are allowed access.
The world is now in a situation in which a change of mind regarding genetics and biotechnology must take place. Whether it is for the better, I cannot say, but my opinion is that computers (and networks) will be really mature only when we can regard them as real extensions to our own senses. Not some clunky TV with a typewriter in front, but real mind interfaces.
Of course, this is dangerous in some ways. Of course, this might (and WILL) make lots of people scream "mind control!". Of course, I would never install Windows for Telepaths;-) But, in the long run, I don't think merging biology with technology is avoidable. The benefits are too big - theoretically, you can replace every organ with a better working steel one (and I want a special high performance liver...)
And this is a topic that has been exploited in so many good sci-fi novels (Peter Hamilton, Asimov, Silverberg, etc.)... I surely am not the only one taking this seriously.
Ex-squeeeze me? Linux was "born" in Europe. Finland, to be precise. The "computer" was inittiated by Charles Babbage (1822). In England. The first "real computer" was build by Konrad Zuse. In Germany. Blaise Pascal & Wilhelm Schickard, first (mechanical) calculator, 1642 resp. 1623. Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, binary system, 1673. Hollerith, American census, 1880, card punching machines. A "bit" (pun intended) later: Konrad Zuse, 1934: AND, OR, NOT, XOR. ENIAC, 1946, Pensylvania. About 10 years ago (in school) I did an essay about computer history: http://www.pinguin.co netix.de/krimskrams/computer-aufsatz.zip Und um noch etwas Salz in die Wunde zu streuen: Look into _any_ one of your "advanced technology" (cars, buildings, IT, electronics, NASA, etc): you find _very_ few parts that does not have "Siemens" or the like stamped on it somewhere. Oh sure, the design is yours. But the technology... Oh yes... Nokia. Ericsson. Fraunhofer. (MP3!) There are weird laws here as well. (for examples, look at www.freedomforlinks.de - German, sorry.) But for one thing, just a couple examples of what I frown at in the USA: - Microsoft is not allowed to forbid MSDN members to publish benchmarks and bugs (they apparently do this in the US). - If you buy something, you may do with it whatever you want - i.e. you may play DVDs or Videos on whatever device you like (it is another quesion if you are able to). This may void warranty but nobody can e.g. prevent you from using DeCSS. (just an example) etc. America wouldn't even exist today were it not for all the other countries. (and that is not just because of foreign technologies...)
Slashdot Mirror
Correct?
http://www.alancoxonachip.com/
So THAT is why you get all the chicks.
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Yes, KDE is big. That's because it does so much more than just window management, and provides a complete API set for applications (via Qt). It's a very important step towards a "common" desktop interface, the lack of which is one reason why many companies hesitate to port their apps to Unix systems.
That said, of course there is room for improvement. And those things happen, 2.1.1 has improved a LOT in respect to speed.
And THAT said: A fully blown KDE desktop with mixer, licq, project manager applet, newsticker, XMMS, and two Konqueror browser windows uses LESS memory on my machine say IceWM and two Netscape windows. Blame Netscape if you want, but then what browser did you say you were using?
"This is a spoof of the Fox show COPS, but set in the Star Wars universe. Hillarious and well done. Made with less than $2,000, a video camera and a home computer."
View it. It's worth it.
Speaking of KDE: It's a great environment, and in many ways it's faster than Windows. (In others it still lacks, but most of the criticism it receives is pure bullshit.) Anyway, if I remember correctly, I was using a much more powerful GUI in 1994, on a P60, with 16 MB RAM (instead of 192 now) which was just as smooth to use and fast like hell. (I'm talking about OS/2's workplace shell).
The question is: Where has all that performance gone? Why can't you comfortably use Windows ME, or 2000, or Linux with KDE 2.1 on a P60 with 16 MB RAM? What are CPU cycles doing nowadays that they didn't need to do five years ago, although most apps had almost the same features? That is, while you are not watching your daily DivX porn ;)
Some probable answers come to my mind.
Unicode. Double every string in length, double the memory requirements of application resources. This makes for great internationalization, but it requires memory.
OOP. I overheard in a PHP mailing list that when you develop PHP3 apps without objects, just flat procedures, you can gain up to 30% in raw performance. (This has greatly improved in PHP4, IIRC.) I don't know how representative this is but I suspect that in languages like C++ and Smalltalk (and Perl :-) some CPU cycles are needed to take care of all those relationships, overloaded items and whatnot.
Standards. The good thing about standards is that there are so many of them. I.e. nowadays a browser (prime example) needs not only to render a little plain text with different fonts and one or two images, but it needs to know XHTML, XML, Javascript, ECMAScript, Java, CSS, cope with thousands of objects and plug-ins that mess up the system, and so on. Sure, these are features - but are they innovations? I don't think so, and I don't think most other apps received as much "feature bloat" as browsers did in the last couple years.
What do you think? Why does a word processor need 128MB nowadays when it doesn't _really_ have more features than what was available in 1994?
(Having said that, I have a K6-2 350 for my primary machine and I don't plan on buying a new one this year. It does what I want, it does it fast enough, and if I need more CPU power I can always ssh to our university cluster. ;)
2001 - The Reality:
Oh yes: "One of Bill's first programs was for making class schedules at his school. He devised it so he could share classes with the prettiest girls. He earned $4200 for this project."- discovery-gates.html
Read it at http://www.esllessons.com/lessons/reading/reading
This -- "person" -- is supposed to create a voting software that decides over America's future?
I'M SCARED.
Just the same, most animals don't actively think about why (or whom) they are fscking - The exception being humans and some apes (I heard that some have sex to kill off aggressions within the group, instead of fighting each other).
Thinking about it, humans should develop that way too. Make love, not war.
"Hello, this is the FBI. We need your encryption keys. <BLAM> <BLAM> Thank you. Have a good day."
Bottom line: If cddb.com wants to charge for accessing their service, that's fine by me. BUT then I want my piece of the cake when I help them making money.
Nothing is free. But sometimes you pay with money, other times you pay by helping out, again somewhere else you perhaps pay by advertising a partner's products along with yours, or by viewing banners.
A company who charges money BUT is still expecting people to work for them for free, isn't worth my time. Or money.
Like forcing you to use cookies in Internet Explorer, or rather, transmitting cookies to *.msn.com sites no matter what you configured, containing personal information about your windows installation.
See also here (http://slashdot.org/yro/00/11/02/1639247.shtml):
For the sake of the privacy of those who must use Internet Explorer: Firewall msid.msn.com. Forever.
non-Americans. WTF is a "SAT"? I gather it's some kind of entry test for school or college in the US. But I'd appreciate if someone could shed a little light on this definition and tell me what "SAT" is an acronym for. RTFMs welcome.
It doesn't matter that it takes the average geek two weeks to figure out how to put a wrapper around the codec DLLs and play the stuff under Linux. What matters is that companies will start investing into this "secure" format, and that means they will haveto buy Windows 2000 because the server software exists only there.
Example: Internet Movie Database. Started out as a hobby project (I still have their old text-based complete database here, on CD). Nowadays, they provide advertisements, DVDs, lots of ads - and trailers. Guess in what format. So, you see, this is another of Microsoft's attempts at getting into the server market. Take something that people will BELIEVE is good and offer it only in combination with that other product that OTHERWISE nobody would have wanted (but which is critical to take over the world), Windows 2000.
This really hurts in combination with the recent Netcraft survey. Microsoft still has a measly 20% of the web server market (and that's not about to change), but they seem to have the 20% where 80% of the money is made.
Ex-squeeze me? You don't honestly believe that Microsoft is going to support its competition??
What you will see is just like what everyone sees that tries to use the Microsot web services like Windows update, Knowledge base etc etc. A redirection to download Internet Explorer.
After all, with Netscape, or a secure (i.e. non-Microsoft) OS, Microsoft couldn't as easily spy on their users than with their own products. It's funny how IE barfs out completely when I block msid.msn.com with a couple ipchains rules. Even if I didn't access MSN at all.
Brave New World, indeed. Take a little SOMA.NET and all will be well.
(Just don't ask any questions.)
Legalize drugs, sell them in drugstores (pun intended) and let IBM's OS/2 department market them.
Only readable on Windows and Mac machines? Fair enough assessment, but then again, that is some 95% of the desktop market.
The problem is not that it's "only" readable with a EUR200 OS and a EUR800 office suite. The problem is that Microsoft makes extra effort to make it hard for other people/OS/apps to read their formats.
If they didn't do that (and perhaps even published proper specs on the .doc format, and made it not uselessly depend on half of the Win32 API, COM, DCOM and all that other stuff), there wouldn't be half as much bitching about MS Office.
But, this is not going to happen: Microsoft makes their money by forcing people on their platform. If they were forced to compete on quality and continuity [read: When was the last time two different versions of MS Office used the SAME file formats?], Microsoft would probably go into serious problems. There are really few people who use Windows voluntarily.
Yes! After all, why does one use Windows? The main three reasons:
- What, you mean there are other operating systems out there? Ridiculous.
- My boss told me so. (tough luck.)
- I need this and that specific application. (and I'm too stupid to develop it myself, don't have the time, money, or whatever.)
- My hardware is Windows-specific / missing driver /
... . (Well, now I got you. Then why did you buy the hardware? I buy hardware to run the software I need, not the other way round.) Actually, this is probably No.2, if you bought the hardware because you needed it to run a specific Windows based software.
Almost nobody uses Windows because it is Windows. OTOH, I know a hell of a lot of people who use Linux/BSD/Mac/... just because it is Linux/BSD/Mac/..., not because someone told them to.(If you want an answer, please CC: to me. I don't read all of Slashdot every day. Thanks.)
- Scanners, in Germany, are sold with drivers that slow them down to avoid the GEMA tax on copying functions. Above a certain speed the scanner is considered a copying machine and costs taxes.
- PC boards like Hauppauge WinTV are crippled in their recording capabilities to 320x240, because if the software allowed full PAL recording there would be an extra tax. (Of course, it's not a hardware limitation, it's the -Windows- software that is crippled. Check out KWinTV or xawtv and see the difference.)
I'm just waiting for the GEMA to tax my brain, because from time to time, we do a little Blues Brothers music in our free time (and at University festivals). And I know the music by heart (i.e. brain).What I'd like to know is how much the GEMA actually forwards to the musicians, and how much they keep for themselves. Anyone?
Another example:
In Germany, at ebay.de, you can criticize/endorse the person you bought something from. I think it's the same as with the US ebay auctioning service. If I write "war schnell" (meaning "was fast"), the system rejects this because it parses
- where "ARSCH" means "asshole".
Are there really so many illiterate idiots on the web that the big companies must "protect" us from dirty words like in kindergarten? Or is the problem that it's so easy to sue somebody over anything and the companies want to avoid the paperwork?
Anyway, I think the above is WAY out of line... how does ebay.com handle this?
After quick-parsing some search results from the IBM AS/400 website, I think this is what you'll want to read: http://www.as400.ibm.com/sftsol/fir ewa ll.htm
It's a good thing you cannot patent elect... um. Wait.
I didn't say this. Don't want any ideas emerging here...
Seriously: Europe has embraced Open Source, Germany has dumped Windows 2000 (here and here) in some government departments in favor of Linux & Staroffice (yes, on the Desktop!) and there have already been so many rumours about taxing the Internet, taxing Computers, taxing raw CDR media, and so on.
NOTHING of this all will happen. That's because all the "big evil players" will and can not agree on one common path. The minute that most ISPs ban Napster, there will be ISPs advertising "No banning" and charging extra, and gaining customers. The minute somebody imposes a tax on CDR media, there will be cheap imports from South India (or wherever) and nobody will buy the taxed versions any more. (Is anyone in Germany actually buying GEMA-approved CD-Audio media right now?)
Look at CNN (owned by Time Warner, btw.). Did they keep their big mouth shut when Napster was there? NO! They shouted it out for all the world to see: "There's a way to get illegal MP3z on the internet!" Great thing for the mass media: everybody was listening...
Now how much less people would have known about Napster, if CNN had worked together with Time Warner and Sony and all the others to try to SILENTLY counter Napster?
Their diversity is our strength ... and as long as they try to fight everything they don't (cannot) control, I'm not their customer, I'm their enemy. Period.
Whenever I change something on the "master client" I fire up a script I wrote to rsync all the other machines. For 40 machines, this takes about 2min per machine (unloaded 100MBit network).
So:
- Pick your distro of choice
- Get to know the configuration things (this is probably easiest with Debian, as they use raw
/etc maintenance anyway) and create your exclude file - Use five or something hosts to get rsync parameters right (I use rsync -vae ssh --exclude-from=$exfile / $IP:/)
- Do a couple updates and try them out
This works perfectly for us. We haven't tried a distro upgrade though. and of course it only works if all machines have at least SIMILAR hardware, and should be installed identically.I have begun to document this at www.linuxfaq.de (German, though). Please tell us what you decide to do.
Have fun! :)
(*) mostly because the "teacher in charge", who had the unfortunate reputation of "knowing computers" and was therefore simply _put_ in charge, couldn not care to reinstall every time virus some kid cracker tried out the newest trojan/virus/...
Second, every wednesday I go there and together with interested pupils we configure one thing or the other on the Linux machines. The point is, that many, many pupils are interested in learning something new, but there are no teaches who are willing or able to do the teaching. And that must change.
I've documented the migration and my class papers (well, it's work in progress actually but quite a lot is already there) at http://www.linuxfaq.de/. It's in German but I welcome any volunteering translators :)
[Documentation, btw, is the second most important thing you can do to educate people. Write it so that other people can duplicate and extend your work.]
The world is now in a situation in which a change of mind regarding genetics and biotechnology must take place. Whether it is for the better, I cannot say, but my opinion is that computers (and networks) will be really mature only when we can regard them as real extensions to our own senses. Not some clunky TV with a typewriter in front, but real mind interfaces.
Of course, this is dangerous in some ways. Of course, this might (and WILL) make lots of people scream "mind control!". Of course, I would never install Windows for Telepaths ;-) But, in the long run, I don't think merging biology with technology is avoidable. The benefits are too big - theoretically, you can replace every organ with a better working steel one (and I want a special high performance liver...)
And this is a topic that has been exploited in so many good sci-fi novels (Peter Hamilton, Asimov, Silverberg, etc.) ... I surely am not the only one taking this seriously.
Ex-squeeeze me? Linux was "born" in Europe. Finland, to be precise. The "computer" was inittiated by Charles Babbage (1822). In England. The first "real computer" was build by Konrad Zuse. In Germany. Blaise Pascal & Wilhelm Schickard, first (mechanical) calculator, 1642 resp. 1623. Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, binary system, 1673. Hollerith, American census, 1880, card punching machines. A "bit" (pun intended) later: Konrad Zuse, 1934: AND, OR, NOT, XOR. ENIAC, 1946, Pensylvania. About 10 years ago (in school) I did an essay about computer history: http://www.pinguin.co netix.de/krimskrams/computer-aufsatz.zip Und um noch etwas Salz in die Wunde zu streuen: Look into _any_ one of your "advanced technology" (cars, buildings, IT, electronics, NASA, etc): you find _very_ few parts that does not have "Siemens" or the like stamped on it somewhere. Oh sure, the design is yours. But the technology... Oh yes ... Nokia. Ericsson. Fraunhofer. (MP3!) There are weird laws here as well. (for examples, look at www.freedomforlinks.de - German, sorry.) But for one thing, just a couple examples of what I frown at in the USA: - Microsoft is not allowed to forbid MSDN members to publish benchmarks and bugs (they apparently do this in the US). - If you buy something, you may do with it whatever you want - i.e. you may play DVDs or Videos on whatever device you like (it is another quesion if you are able to). This may void warranty but nobody can e.g. prevent you from using DeCSS. (just an example) etc. America wouldn't even exist today were it not for all the other countries. (and that is not just because of foreign technologies...)