and then go and buy software without giving even a moment of thought into how fast it will perform.
That's easy.
Because, when it comes to software, there isn't much choice.
Like, for example, suppose my opinion was that MS Word starts too slowly and hogs too much memory. It would have to be agonizingly bad before my company would seriously consider a competitor to such a standard piece of software, even if it performed much better, cost less, offered equivalent functionality. The costs of migrating (user training, etc.) from the standard are too high.
The reality of today's consumer computer marketplace is that buyers want Single Numbers, one easy benchmark evaluation that conveniently helps them to decide which computer to buy for the price.
Everyone in this forum knows the fallacies inherent to MHz, or even to a particular benchmark rating.
But Joe Sixpack will not be budged from a position of not wanting to research and test computers. For him, straight across the board comparisons are all he can handle
52x CD vs 24x CD-RW
128 MB RAM vs 128 MB RAM
20 GB disk vs 30 GB disk
1.4 GHz vs 2 GHz
etc.
$1099 vs $1499
"I think it's worth the extra money, honey!"
You get the picture. Despite the growing mismatch between MHz and performance, that simple-minded benchmark is destined to live.
It's really kind of ironic, though, since AMD had a comfortable MHz lead last year that Intel was sweating to beat with the PIII. Intel's failure to release the 1.13 GHz part stood in marked contrast to AMD, yawning with boredom as it bumped Athlon speed grades at will. The only saving grace for the consumer was a rough comparability between the PIII and the Athlon. Not so with the Pentium 4.
The shoe is on the other foot, now. And despite the nice technology in the x86-64 chips, they won't dislodge Intel in the consumer market unless they can come up with a higher GHz rating. AMD should learn from Intel and just come out with an even shoddier cheaper piece of junk that can be clocked up to 3 or 4 GHz, even if it does no real work.
Cut off any company's air supply and it is quite possible to produce comedic staggering antics that appear funny, rife with incompetent execution, incomplete plans, etc.
I hope you never have to suffer the distinction of belonging to a company that has been choked in such a manner. But I'm guessing that you don't.
all benefitted from societal norms pushing women into these fields that could have earned more with their intelligence in other fields. Like many, I've seen the nurses do 90% of the MD's job at 10% of the pay, and the same thing in relation to secretaries that would effectively run 90% of the business while The Boss would schmooze over 2 hour lunches and golf in the afternoon.
All 3 of these fields are getting set to take a big hit in terms of quality of service for the money over the next few years as those 50-something women retire.
Meanwhile, in my locale, the radio call-in shows are full of complainers about "high taxes" and "poor quality of teaching". Go figure.
I know the problem is more complicated than what it seems, but I for one am apprehensive about being an doddering 85 year old in a world of the kind of people that are products of the educational system that we deserve.
I'm gonna get bitchslapped for this, but I wonder..
Since you asked for it...
First, you're right, we should wait for the facts before jumping to any conclusions.
Like, for example, waiting before speculating that:
the more I think about it, for all we know, it is actually a Linux supporter who is trying to discredit any valid grass-roots campaign that has sprung up for Microsoft.
I could speculate similarly about a recent piece decrying how some supposed Linux zealots were advocates in the worse way possible, screaming and cursing at hardware vendors for Linux support.
I thought to myself,
"What better way to slow this Linux groundswell than to poison their relations with technical developers at hardware companies. That way, the specs stay closed and people will have less choice about what software to run on their hardware. Lessee, would
that be in the financial interest of any particular company that I know?
IMHO, Slashdot itself is getting overrun just like Utah.
Slashdot used to be dismissed as a bunch of whining nerds, but Redmond's realized that nerds are the standard bearers in technology. Indeed, most of MSFT used to be nerds, before the money got to them. For that reason, it is important for them to counterbalance the Linux zealots with some opposing pro-MSFT opinion in this forum.
So, do you think there is any correlation between the pro-MSFT posts and moderators on/. and the IP addresses of companies that stand to gain the most from the continued financial success of Bill Gates and his company?
Thanks. I'll keep my thoughts to myself from now on. Between this Innovation® and the new unavoidable link to the front page of the site that started to afflict "older stuff" I'm about ready to fugged about/. entirely.
where the machine's owner actually doesn't know what specific data really resides on his machine?
I sympathize, but I suspect such a solution would be attacked brick by brick.
So, where you might think it ludicrous in the recent case against 2600 for the DMCA to make it illegal to reference code in another place that makes it possible to circumvent some hide'n'seek'n'pay technology, here's one more ludicrous:
Suppose the Freenet collective held the web page that 2600 constructed.
I would not be surprised in the least if any and everyone participating in Freenet could be sued for conspiracy to... violate the DMCA on the grounds that taboo information could be on your computer, just as much as child pornography could be stored on your computer.
My workplace monitors IP traffic left, right and sideways.
My thoughts on the matter...?
Well, lessee, <tap>,<tap>...areyou listening, OK!
"My employer is in full compliance with all regulations, procedures and the full letter of the law in every regard. All employees are fully educated in management's policies to respect rules governing our corporation. No corporate computer may be used for anything besides corporate business, during corporate business hours, that we all respect constantly. As a matter of fact, my co-workers and I came in 3 hours early this morning because we love our jobs so much and the compensation packages approved by upper management are, well, just darn so good. After work I'll volunteer at a local homeless shelter as long as I'm wearing my corporate logo T-shirt..."
One, Dell desktops are generally regarded among the best rated machines for PC hardware reliability. I know people that support a range (over a thousand desktops) of different PC machines day to day, week to week, year to year, and their experiences bear this out:
Dell's are among the most reliable PCs.
Published surveys like this and like that support the same conclusion.
Personally, I also like Dell's for their low decibel rating compared to other brands.
Their prices are only low if you're restricting yourselves to Intel processors. Dell's are not dirt cheap to buy in any case. It's just that for the level of hardware reliability and reduced maintenance costs, corporate buyers like them.
If you're willing to venture beyond the safe confines of 5 year track records that corporate buyers rely upon, then much better performance and price deals can be found if you're willing to do some research and testing.
I think Dell is vulnerable sticking to Intel for processors that are overpriced for the delivered level of performance. The technically inclined that support Dells at work buy Athlons for home - at some point they might notice their home Athlons great price performance ratio is augmented with tolerable reliability.
Yes, Dell operates on the slimmest of margins, assembling to order and not enduring the 1.5%/week depreciation that applies to computer inventory that the other firms keep. Maybe their Intel-only policy gets them on the priority list from Intel to compensate for no inventory.
Also, Dell minimizes the amount of high-powered technical staff they keep on hand, so it's little wonder they're bowing out of the small-sized high-knowledge overhead of the Linux market: it's not justified on a purely business level.
While Dell is making the right tactical business decision in this case, the long-term strategic consequences are that they will lose a small but vital share of the high end x86 workstation market to HP, IBM, Compaq and any other company willing to listen to the Linux desktop customer.
Case in point.
My organization is in the middle of evaluating various high-end x86 Linux desktops to replace some aging Suns. Dell was on our first round list, mainly because the corporate PC support people have them on the "approved" list and they're reliabile.
However, Dell's Linux technical support was never thicker than 2 web clicks. So it's no surprise that we're looking only at HP and IBM at the next stage.
We'll probably buy about 200 machines at around $5K apiece, but Dell won't be getting any of that. Given their size, I doubt they'll miss it.
are going to be used as a
rallying cry for Microsoft to take patching/updating out of the sysadmins hands and into XP, where it will be handled
automatically
Whaddya mean?
I thought that (ZAW) Zero Administration Windows was already long since a reality!
I'm puzzled by all this talk of "system administration" for Windows.
Shows how "out of it" I am. ZAW must have been superseded by Something Better.
I think the UltraSPARC III is about 2-3 years late to the table.
The old RISC hardware chips are dying off slowly since they can't afford the build the kind of expensive Fabs that are needed to compete with Intel and AMD.
Except IBM, of course. I did read something about the Power4 (see also this pdf ) and its emphasis on maximizing memory BW - some of the figures sounded awesome. I was really looking forward to being able to pick and choose between Power4 and 21364(pdf), but Compaq seems to have throttled the Alpha. As if the IA-64 is better!
For scalability, though, I have to wonder if rack-mounted Alpha4's connected with high-speed interfaces like Myrinet could provide an alternative to hardware like a Sun ES10000. I haven't tried Scyld or MOSIX to know if they make using such clusters a "smoothly scalable" solution. The big Sun SMP machines are nice, but they're also expensive and the aging UltraSPARC II processors are nothing to write home about anymore.
This case is unique, in that it it the only dispute I've heard of in the computer industry where I actually want *both* parties to
loose.
This fight could get real interesting as the XP public release comes down to the wire at approximately the same time that the remedy for the court ruling is being considered.
One conceivable outcome is for XP to be released without any default easy ISP connections, be it MSN or AOL:)
Ahmed Zewail is quite the physical chemist, and I have a lot of respect for him and his work. However, I have to be suspicious of such a claim, which might just be journalistic hype for what little I know.
I have to wonder if there's a shell game, where "incoherence" is a synonym for rejecting those particles whose (x,p) values would pollute the probability distribution in favor of Heisenberg's inequality.
I would have thought that going to the next level of spam filtering would require shoving messages of dubious origin into some delayed-delivery hopper that would be scrutinized carefully against the results of incoming messages from throw-away spam-gathering accounts on other machines.
Your system of historical analysis makes it possible to defer the date when we will be forced to resort to multi-account inbox comparisons to filter out spam.
Perl being perl, there is room for another explanation as well.
If you buy unprepared food from a grocery store instead of a restaurant, and if you go past all the freezers full of microwavable preparations, then you'll find a "produce section".
In said section, if you look carefully, you'll find "Pearl Onions"
The internet is chock full of scarcity. Landlines are scarce. Switches are scarce. Servers are scarce. IP addresses are scarce. Domain names are scarce. Bandwidth is scarce. Technical expertise is scarce. Reliability is scarce.
A fine list, but there are a couple of missing items that I think are important.
Privacy.
Anonymity.
These have been undervalued IMO, because they have generally been plentiful through most of the history of the internet. Lately, though, it seems that most of unwashed masses that use the internet are getting diminishing amounts of those resources. Effectively safeguarding your privacy seems to require scarce ingredients: technical sophistication, and either a lot of money or loose enough morals to be willing to illicitly acquire some 0wn3d zombie relays).
The masses, however, don't notice this privacy erosion except for rare occasions when they start getting personalized spam, or becoming victims of identity theft and credit card fraud.
I would rather, however, that measures be in place to preserve some semblance of privacy and anonymity so that free exchanges of ideas can proliferate. Just because many of us don't, at the moment, happen to live under the yoke of an authoritarian regime is no excuse for blithely surrendering valuable components for freedom of expression. If you surrender them now, be assured you won't retrieve them later.
You can see already in China, with the recent crackdowns on cyber cafes, that the authorities are uncomfortable with the current levels of freedom of expression and communication that are enabled by the internet. You can see their dilemna: they want the technology advances, but not all of the current possibilities for communication that might not be in the state's interest.
It would be the most ironic shame if it were US corporations, striving for making money, or US government regulators, protecting our kids from terrorists/pornographers, that were responsible for initiating changes in the underlying technology of the internet that enabled Chinese government authorities to clamp down on this medium.
Pardon my Digital Video Digression
on
The Joys of HDTV
·
· Score: 2
[My apologies in advance for drifting off topic here...]
Background
I'm a Linux user.
A few days ago, after about a week of research, I bought a TiVo.
It looks like a great product for viewing time-shifted recordings off DirecTV and off the air NTSC broadcasts with S-video display quality. I don't mind paying for both the DirecTV and the TiVo services I'm getting. But.
Observation
There seems to be a precarious balance going on between convenience of fair use playback and the underlying recording technology here. As in, playing back on arbitrary devices and in editting any recorded video and in getting high quality input from arbitrary sources into digital video recorders
AFAICT, TiVo's will likely save the video stream in a format that is not open. Worse, it looks like it will get more heavily encrypted with increasing generations of TiVo software and locked to such an extent that it can only be replayed by that particular TiVo (Write once, run one-where).
So, the end result is: I can only view the recordings through a particular piece of hardware, even if I do manage to get a terabyte file server connected up to the TiVo through Ethernet (assuming future revision of TiVo software don't close out hacker upgrades such as big disks and Ethernet but do close out easy reading of video format).
Are there any video capture cards with NTSC/PAL/S-video + (whatever is best) inputs that permit one to save quality video in an open digital format that can be played or editted at will?
I fear the digital video revolution is being postponed until the cost of hardware encryption/decryption comes down enough that it will be incorporated into the ends of every I/O channel that is of decent quality.
At work the Linux boxes generally get Redhat, so I get an opportunity to experience RH's default Gnome install there.
At home, my first RH 4.2 install has been giving way to several revisions of SuSE, lately 7.1 Professional.
SuSE's default distro is nice since:
I get to see how KDE feels.
My wife the Windows user tolerates KDE fairly well.
I love the heavy distribution with every application you can imagine on the 6 CD set.
Finally, I actually buy real distros at full cost instead of iso image copies, since I like to support RH and SuSE, both of which have contributed significantly to the open software community in various ways. That RH employs Alan Cox and that SuSE writes paychecks for Andrea Arcangeli means I will continue to buy distros from both of those houses.
One way to propagate those kinds of belief systems is to ingrain them into a religion.
For all practical purposes, Materialism is the new religion. Instead of writing down precepts on scrolls, however, its tenets are promulgated on television. Other religions must be envious of the way Materialism can get its adherents to watch TV for many hours per day while they have to goad their parishioners endlessly to get them to come to church for an hour a week.
Just wait. One day people will get tried directly by the corporations, and the gov't will enforce it.
It's beyond that!
People will get indoctrinated
to feel comfortable about behaving in ways that benefit corporations;
to feel guilty about behaving in ways that do not benefit corporations.
The government and its piddly laws are irrelevant to you if you have a chunk of people's minds working on your behalf.
Slashdot Mirror
and then go and buy software without giving even a moment of thought into how fast it will perform.
That's easy.
Because, when it comes to software, there isn't much choice.
Like, for example, suppose my opinion was that MS Word starts too slowly and hogs too much memory. It would have to be agonizingly bad before my company would seriously consider a competitor to such a standard piece of software, even if it performed much better, cost less, offered equivalent functionality. The costs of migrating (user training, etc.) from the standard are too high.
Unfortunately, it is.
The reality of today's consumer computer marketplace is that buyers want Single Numbers, one easy benchmark evaluation that conveniently helps them to decide which computer to buy for the price.
Everyone in this forum knows the fallacies inherent to MHz, or even to a particular benchmark rating.
But Joe Sixpack will not be budged from a position of not wanting to research and test computers. For him, straight across the board comparisons are all he can handle
You get the picture. Despite the growing mismatch between MHz and performance, that simple-minded benchmark is destined to live.
It's really kind of ironic, though, since AMD had a comfortable MHz lead last year that Intel was sweating to beat with the PIII. Intel's failure to release the 1.13 GHz part stood in marked contrast to AMD, yawning with boredom as it bumped Athlon speed grades at will. The only saving grace for the consumer was a rough comparability between the PIII and the Athlon. Not so with the Pentium 4.
The shoe is on the other foot, now. And despite the nice technology in the x86-64 chips, they won't dislodge Intel in the consumer market unless they can come up with a higher GHz rating. AMD should learn from Intel and just come out with an even shoddier cheaper piece of junk that can be clocked up to 3 or 4 GHz, even if it does no real work.
That's funny.
Cut off any company's air supply and it is quite possible to produce comedic staggering antics that appear funny, rife with incompetent execution, incomplete plans, etc.
I hope you never have to suffer the distinction of belonging to a company that has been choked in such a manner. But I'm guessing that you don't.
My observations exactly.
The professions of
all benefitted from societal norms pushing women into these fields that could have earned more with their intelligence in other fields. Like many, I've seen the nurses do 90% of the MD's job at 10% of the pay, and the same thing in relation to secretaries that would effectively run 90% of the business while The Boss would schmooze over 2 hour lunches and golf in the afternoon.
All 3 of these fields are getting set to take a big hit in terms of quality of service for the money over the next few years as those 50-something women retire.
Meanwhile, in my locale, the radio call-in shows are full of complainers about "high taxes" and "poor quality of teaching". Go figure.
I know the problem is more complicated than what it seems, but I for one am apprehensive about being an doddering 85 year old in a world of the kind of people that are products of the educational system that we deserve.
I'm gonna get bitchslapped for this, but I wonder..
Since you asked for it...
First, you're right, we should wait for the facts before jumping to any conclusions.
Like, for example, waiting before speculating that:
I could speculate similarly about a recent piece decrying how some supposed Linux zealots were advocates in the worse way possible, screaming and cursing at hardware vendors for Linux support.
I thought to myself,
IMHO, Slashdot itself is getting overrun just like Utah.
Slashdot used to be dismissed as a bunch of whining nerds, but Redmond's realized that nerds are the standard bearers in technology. Indeed, most of MSFT used to be nerds, before the money got to them. For that reason, it is important for them to counterbalance the Linux zealots with some opposing pro-MSFT opinion in this forum.
So, do you think there is any correlation between the pro-MSFT posts and moderators on /. and the IP addresses of companies that stand to gain the most from the continued financial success of Bill Gates and his company?
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
/. entirely.
Thanks. I'll keep my thoughts to myself from now on. Between this Innovation® and the new unavoidable link to the front page of the site that started to afflict "older stuff" I'm about ready to fugged about
where the machine's owner actually doesn't know what specific data really resides on his machine?
I sympathize, but I suspect such a solution would be attacked brick by brick.
So, where you might think it ludicrous in the recent case against 2600 for the DMCA to make it illegal to reference code in another place that makes it possible to circumvent some hide'n'seek'n'pay technology, here's one more ludicrous:
Suppose the Freenet collective held the web page that 2600 constructed.
I would not be surprised in the least if any and everyone participating in Freenet could be sued for conspiracy to ... violate the DMCA on the grounds that taboo information could be on your computer, just as much as child pornography could be stored on your computer.
Sigh.
My workplace monitors IP traffic left, right and sideways.
My thoughts on the matter...?
Well, lessee, <tap>,<tap> ...areyou listening, OK!
My opinion differs.
One, Dell desktops are generally regarded among the best rated machines for PC hardware reliability. I know people that support a range (over a thousand desktops) of different PC machines day to day, week to week, year to year, and their experiences bear this out:
Published surveys like this and like that support the same conclusion.Personally, I also like Dell's for their low decibel rating compared to other brands.
Their prices are only low if you're restricting yourselves to Intel processors. Dell's are not dirt cheap to buy in any case. It's just that for the level of hardware reliability and reduced maintenance costs, corporate buyers like them.
If you're willing to venture beyond the safe confines of 5 year track records that corporate buyers rely upon, then much better performance and price deals can be found if you're willing to do some research and testing.
I think Dell is vulnerable sticking to Intel for processors that are overpriced for the delivered level of performance. The technically inclined that support Dells at work buy Athlons for home - at some point they might notice their home Athlons great price performance ratio is augmented with tolerable reliability.
Yes, Dell operates on the slimmest of margins, assembling to order and not enduring the 1.5%/week depreciation that applies to computer inventory that the other firms keep. Maybe their Intel-only policy gets them on the priority list from Intel to compensate for no inventory.
Also, Dell minimizes the amount of high-powered technical staff they keep on hand, so it's little wonder they're bowing out of the small-sized high-knowledge overhead of the Linux market: it's not justified on a purely business level.
While Dell is making the right tactical business decision in this case, the long-term strategic consequences are that they will lose a small but vital share of the high end x86 workstation market to HP, IBM, Compaq and any other company willing to listen to the Linux desktop customer.
Case in point.
My organization is in the middle of evaluating various high-end x86 Linux desktops to replace some aging Suns. Dell was on our first round list, mainly because the corporate PC support people have them on the "approved" list and they're reliabile.
However, Dell's Linux technical support was never thicker than 2 web clicks. So it's no surprise that we're looking only at HP and IBM at the next stage.
We'll probably buy about 200 machines at around $5K apiece, but Dell won't be getting any of that. Given their size, I doubt they'll miss it.
Whaddya mean?
I thought that (ZAW) Zero Administration Windows was already long since a reality!
I'm puzzled by all this talk of "system administration" for Windows.
Shows how "out of it" I am. ZAW must have been superseded by Something Better.
I think the UltraSPARC III is about 2-3 years late to the table.
The old RISC hardware chips are dying off slowly since they can't afford the build the kind of expensive Fabs that are needed to compete with Intel and AMD.
Except IBM, of course. I did read something about the Power4 (see also this pdf ) and its emphasis on maximizing memory BW - some of the figures sounded awesome. I was really looking forward to being able to pick and choose between Power4 and 21364(pdf), but Compaq seems to have throttled the Alpha. As if the IA-64 is better!
For scalability, though, I have to wonder if rack-mounted Alpha4's connected with high-speed interfaces like Myrinet could provide an alternative to hardware like a Sun ES10000. I haven't tried Scyld or MOSIX to know if they make using such clusters a "smoothly scalable" solution. The big Sun SMP machines are nice, but they're also expensive and the aging UltraSPARC II processors are nothing to write home about anymore.
Probably tailored down past regional demographics to the individual level at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Expect
This fight could get real interesting as the XP public release comes down to the wire at approximately the same time that the remedy for the court ruling is being considered.
One conceivable outcome is for XP to be released without any default easy ISP connections, be it MSN or AOL:)
Ahmed Zewail is quite the physical chemist, and I have a lot of respect for him and his work. However, I have to be suspicious of such a claim, which might just be journalistic hype for what little I know.
I have to wonder if there's a shell game, where "incoherence" is a synonym for rejecting those particles whose (x,p) values would pollute the probability distribution in favor of Heisenberg's inequality.
Yes, it's irresistible to use the big club if you happen to be the one wielding it. Reminds me of another arena.
Ask any ISP or CLEC that attempts to compete with the local phone company what it's like to feel the blows from such a club.
Telco: "Whump!"
Competitor:"Ouch! No fair! Did you see him abuse me with that deliberate screw-up in the C.O.?"
Public/Regulators:"Technology? What's that? How interesting, another competitor bites the dust."
Amen.
There was some XML information related site that I stumbled into once that had pop-ups-the-wazoo.
My curiosity about XML technology was quickly quenched and I ventured elsewhere in a hurry.
Pretty impressive procedure!
I would have thought that going to the next level of spam filtering would require shoving messages of dubious origin into some delayed-delivery hopper that would be scrutinized carefully against the results of incoming messages from throw-away spam-gathering accounts on other machines.
Your system of historical analysis makes it possible to defer the date when we will be forced to resort to multi-account inbox comparisons to filter out spam.
saw this silly poster in the subway... It's bright yellow, and it says,
If I know my typical, jaded NYC dwellers, I sincerely doubt that they'd be cowed into software subservience by the Boy Scouts of America.
We should outlaw being a jerk.
Then I would feel much less nervous, as a sysadmin.
O, right, I am *so sure*.
Have you even thought about this for a minute?
Some of our ver best sysadmins are jerks!
Where would that leave us?
I'll tell you where: with clueless nice-guys running the computers, that's where!
People already dislike the idea of government-held key escrow so that idea is not likely to fly again any time soon either.
Hmmm. Sounds like a business opportunity to me.
How about "MS Visa Passport .NET", borrowing a few ideas from AOL marketing about it being "easy", "fun", "hip", "sexy", etc?
Perl being perl, there is room for another explanation as well.
If you buy unprepared food from a grocery store instead of a restaurant, and if you go past all the freezers full of microwavable preparations, then you'll find a "produce section".
In said section, if you look carefully, you'll find "Pearl Onions"
A fine list, but there are a couple of missing items that I think are important.
These have been undervalued IMO, because they have generally been plentiful through most of the history of the internet. Lately, though, it seems that most of unwashed masses that use the internet are getting diminishing amounts of those resources. Effectively safeguarding your privacy seems to require scarce ingredients: technical sophistication, and either a lot of money or loose enough morals to be willing to illicitly acquire some 0wn3d zombie relays).
The masses, however, don't notice this privacy erosion except for rare occasions when they start getting personalized spam, or becoming victims of identity theft and credit card fraud.
I would rather, however, that measures be in place to preserve some semblance of privacy and anonymity so that free exchanges of ideas can proliferate. Just because many of us don't, at the moment, happen to live under the yoke of an authoritarian regime is no excuse for blithely surrendering valuable components for freedom of expression. If you surrender them now, be assured you won't retrieve them later.
You can see already in China, with the recent crackdowns on cyber cafes, that the authorities are uncomfortable with the current levels of freedom of expression and communication that are enabled by the internet. You can see their dilemna: they want the technology advances, but not all of the current possibilities for communication that might not be in the state's interest.
It would be the most ironic shame if it were US corporations, striving for making money, or US government regulators, protecting our kids from terrorists/pornographers, that were responsible for initiating changes in the underlying technology of the internet that enabled Chinese government authorities to clamp down on this medium.
[My apologies in advance for drifting off topic here...]
Background
I'm a Linux user.
A few days ago, after about a week of research, I bought a TiVo.
It looks like a great product for viewing time-shifted recordings off DirecTV and off the air NTSC broadcasts with S-video display quality. I don't mind paying for both the DirecTV and the TiVo services I'm getting. But.
Observation
There seems to be a precarious balance going on between convenience of fair use playback and the underlying recording technology here. As in, playing back on arbitrary devices and in editting any recorded video and in getting high quality input from arbitrary sources into digital video recorders
AFAICT, TiVo's will likely save the video stream in a format that is not open. Worse, it looks like it will get more heavily encrypted with increasing generations of TiVo software and locked to such an extent that it can only be replayed by that particular TiVo (Write once, run one-where).
So, the end result is: I can only view the recordings through a particular piece of hardware, even if I do manage to get a terabyte file server connected up to the TiVo through Ethernet (assuming future revision of TiVo software don't close out hacker upgrades such as big disks and Ethernet but do close out easy reading of video format).
I fear the digital video revolution is being postponed until the cost of hardware encryption/decryption comes down enough that it will be incorporated into the ends of every I/O channel that is of decent quality.
SuSE is great.
At work the Linux boxes generally get Redhat, so I get an opportunity to experience RH's default Gnome install there.
At home, my first RH 4.2 install has been giving way to several revisions of SuSE, lately 7.1 Professional.
SuSE's default distro is nice since:
Finally, I actually buy real distros at full cost instead of iso image copies, since I like to support RH and SuSE, both of which have contributed significantly to the open software community in various ways. That RH employs Alan Cox and that SuSE writes paychecks for Andrea Arcangeli means I will continue to buy distros from both of those houses.
Carry it out one more step.
One way to propagate those kinds of belief systems is to ingrain them into a religion.
For all practical purposes, Materialism is the new religion. Instead of writing down precepts on scrolls, however, its tenets are promulgated on television. Other religions must be envious of the way Materialism can get its adherents to watch TV for many hours per day while they have to goad their parishioners endlessly to get them to come to church for an hour a week.
Just wait. One day people will get tried directly by the corporations, and the gov't will enforce it.
It's beyond that!
People will get indoctrinated
The government and its piddly laws are irrelevant to you if you have a chunk of people's minds working on your behalf.