I think that the issue is that the system is broken right now, and the RIAA isn't willing to deal with it in a realistic manner. If they dropped the prices to something reasonable, and then raised them with inflation, just like many, many other products sold today, I think they'd be fine. Instead, they overcharge today, and tomorrow, they will either still be overcharging, or they will be out of business. My guess is the latter.
I understand that it isn't the RIAA itself, however the IFPI is the international body to which the RIAA belongs. So, I don't think that it is an unreasonable comparison.
I also don't understand why instead of looking at a broken system (the current distribution/pricing scheme) and doing something about it, they choose to prosecute people. My suggestion is that they can get their bills paid on less than $0.70/song, and if they tried to seriously compete with the prices of allofmp3.com that they might ramp down piracy and start turning a better profit because of increased sales.
Another thing about that $0.70/song price point, wasn't there a ruling that the record industry was fixing the prices of CD's distributed (about $17/album retail), and that the prices should be lowered to reflect the actual costs? The $17/album is only a couple of dollars above the $12/album that you get on iTunes, where the cost of distribution is significantly lower, and there is little overhead compared to a retail store. So, my argument is that $0.70 is a pretty high price, especially when there are other systems that sell music for much lower prices and are recognized by the appropriate international bodies.
attesting that popular music sound recording downloads and consumer license to use same are lawfully obtainable to the public at 99 cents per song, and of that 99 cents, roughly 70 cents per song is paid by the retailer to the record label.
I don't understand where this $0.70 comes from. There is the Chinese site which has legal downloads cheaper than allofmp3.com, and they have the support of the IFPI. So, my question then is why does a $0.70 sale in the US equal a $0.05 sale in China? And, if they offered a legal service like that over here (without the DRM) wouldn't piracy dissapear overnight?
I'm in Mass, and I think they do a decent job with handling the information. For those who are in a voting office, you can see their records. Another really helpful thing is to check the NPAT (National Political Awareness Test) results, if available. Being the day before the election, the site seems to be running a bit slow, so be patient. Hope the site is helpful. (I am not affilated with vote-smart.org in any way)
It seems to me that even if the pledges reached 100,000 that the OLPC may have rejected the offer anyways. They have been trying to collect orders in the range of millions, which drives down the cost of manufacturing and overhead. The other problem with this was that these devices seem to be specifically targeted at youths in developing nations, and IIRC they don't want them on the open market to avoid theft and misuse. The designs they have come up with stand out clearly as what it is, and only childeren in developing nations are supposed to have one.
I did sign up for the pledge myself, because I thought it'd be a cool thing to play with and to support the project. But I never thought that they'd reach 100,000 pledges, it seemed like a very high number.
I wouldn't mind having that bug replaced/sat-upon by a translucent Tux... and it'd be funny to download a bittorrent TV show and see Tux where a peacock should be.
of course the tubes will get clogged with all the internets being allowed now that weren't before! And it will probably take at least a day to get the new internets that are let through./sarcasm
I use mplayer, mencoder, and ffmpeg with the x264 library to encode dvd's to the h.264 standard mp4. I use mplayer to playback dvd's and videos. You can get frontends for mplayer, but I like it because you can easily integrate it into bash scripts. If I have some time when I get home, I can post some of the scripts that I use, and perhaps try to explain some of the settings I'm using.
For scheduled playback, you can do a playlist with mplayer and use a script and a cron job for it. Another nice thing about mplayer is that you can tell it when to start and stop playback of a file, if for example you wanted to interrupt a program 5 minutes in for a commercial break you could tell it to start at 0 and elapse 5 minutes. Then you could tell it, after the commercials, to start at 5 minutes and elapse another 10 minutes. (I'd post the code now, but the firewall here is blocking the mplayer site).
I have a really great idea that I would like to market. Without getting into specifics it's along the lines of (legal) media distribution, and would involve licensing from big television/media companies. I haven't seen anything like my idea out there, and have been activly looking, as I have intrest in this idea as a consumer as well. I think it has a lot of potential and would compete well in the current market.
My question is this, how does one go about getting started? Could you give a general overview of how a successful startup works, as well as perhaps some good references for further research?
Again, I'm in agreement with most of that, I think I might have an answer to your question about leaving vi as the only "must-have" editor. There was some discussion at my old job about vi vs. emacs, and how there were always a couple of people who perferred to use emacs over vi for editing. The problem was that with emacs, you have to go and install another package that isn't in the default install. I know that your point is that there should be a couple of editors in the default install, which would follow the standard. But right now, if you hop on a *nix system, you can expect to be able to use vi. I'm not saying that there is anything better about vi, just that it is already the default and widely accepted, so why change it? I don't think that it was really all that difficult to learn, I had a book, or two, and the man pages, and I went to town. Same deal with sed, awk, grep and a host of other useful utilities. They can be cryptic, but they are also fast and get the job done. I actually had time to learn sed and awk, and write a script to do some text manipulation, in less than half the time it would have taken me to edit all that stuff by hand. So, learning those things isn't all that bad, and with the proper motivators can be quite rapid.
Yes, that hardware compatability list would be quite nice. As it is now, I look it up on newegg, see if I can find the chipset it uses, then spend at least a half an hour googling around, trying to figure out if I'll have any problems getting it to work. It's funny that the OSx86 project wiki has such a list - which is quite useful. I learned quickly that buying cheap hardware that is incompatable ends up being more expensive than the right hardware that works, because you need to get the right hardware anyways.
I too have wondered how to push the Linux movement beyond what it is today, and I've thought of a lot of the same things that you brought up. Most of the time, I think about all the system libraries and dependancies that programs use. And how to build a system that would not just take care of the dependancies, but allow you to install certain libraries locally so that you can have multiple versions of a library installed. Say that MPlayer wants version "A" of a library and Xine wants version "B", well since version "B" was already on the system, and has some other dependancies, it cannot be replaced by the older version "A". So, instead you could tell the installer to put version "A" in a place where only MPlayer can get to it. In other words, version "A" is local, and version "B" is system wide. And on top of that, having the package manager do all that stuff automagically, go find the missing libraries, and install the unsolvable dependancies locally. This would also fit in with the standardized desktop wanting to run apps that were built with non-standard components. Anyways, that is my solution to dependancy hell, but it still has the issues we already discussed, such as the footprint and disk usage.
I also forgot to metion about the average user versus a power user. I advocate moving average users over because they have an easy target for bad things: viruses, spyware, identity theft, etc. While power users can generally be expected to deal with the required security. Average users don't know the systems well enough to have much trouble using the KDE or Gnome, while the power user would have some other things they are farmiliar with. I think that the power users are somewhere in the intermediate level, and while they could figure it out it would take them time to do that which they are not willing to spend. I think those people do well with windows because they know what to do (in general) to keep themselves protected and keep their box running well. Average users would do well with something besides windows because they do not know how to keep themselves protected, and keep their box running well.
I also wanted to mention how kick-ass man pages are, in general. Nobody should feel bad about telling somebody to RTFM because in the end they will gain more insight from the man pages then anyone's advice could give them. It was a bit daunting at first to me, but then after I got used to it, it has really helped me out. Instead of going to Google for something right away, I read the man pages first (google usually just reinforces what I already figured out).
Again, not so much dissagreement as I'm just throwing that out there.
Hmm... a few things, first I'm going to appologize for the comment I made about the repository thing, I missread your previous post. Second, I'm going to agree with most of what you said, because you make a lot of sense.
The things I don't agree with are the Core Desktop thing and apps not using system wide libraries. To me the idea of merging everything and filtering it down into one unit seems like a daunting task. I think it'd be really cool if the system wide libraries were standardized and all that jazz. But, I don't think that combining the different projects will happen.
Take Gnome and KDE for example, two projects that have similar capabilities trying to accomplish similar goals. I've used both for a good period of time before I settled on KDE. It's simply personal preference, and I'm glad I had that choice to make. I like the way KDE looks, and while I feel that Gnome can be more stable, KDE is my choice. I don't really see how these two projects (aside from just starting something from scratch) without losing the look and feel of one or the other, as to me, it seems they are both unique. This is how I feel that a lot of the competing projects are, they have their pluses and minuses, and the user ends up choosing the one they like best.
As far as different applications bundling the libraries in with them, I have a feeling there might be some legal issues with that, but aside from that I think that the different apps would greatly increase in size. I really like trying to keep my root partion under 12GB, and I have a ton of software installed on it. That wouldn't be possible if libraries were bundled with the apps. If you used standardized system wide libraries, then the apps that use those aren't going to run into dependancy hell. I think the big issue right now is using all of the bleeding edge stuff, some developers want to use the latest libraries for their new apps, and some users want the absolute latest everything. So, you end up with a half-updated system where you have a lot of older libraries and a lot of newer libraries and then you try installing an app that wants all newer libraries, or some older and some newer, but different from what you have.
Now, the sound server thing, again, I agree with you, I've had that same issue where the sound cuts out of one thing because another is going on. I was simply saying that while one of those projects might not support a card, another might.
Once again "average" PC users, not power users, not gamers, just the ones that don't actually need a computer, don't really know how it works, and can't keep the viruses and spyware off. My bet is that that is the largest percentage of users in the market (market of home users, non-buisness). Many have said that the Gimp is a viable replacement for Photoshop, and Quicken does have a linux version, if I am not mistaken.
I'm also not sure if you missed the part that I was agreeing with you on, which was that all the interdependance causes dependancy hell. This is not the fault of the RPM, or the Deb package managers, it is the programmers who decide to incorporate system libraries in their code. Now, this does a couple of things, first it shortens the development cycle as the programmers have certain bits of their code done for them in the form of those system libraries. It also makes the programs that you want smaller in hard disk space, and also the potential for a smaller footprint becasue libraries may be used by multiple programs (like the Desktop Manager for example). And while yes, it would be nice to just have everything neatly packaged with all the libraries needed, you would be wasting a lot of system rescources, and a lot of disk space doing things like that.
Now that said, someone doing AV interactivity is probably going to be looking at those system libraries that deal with audio and video, which are used by many other multimedia applications and most of the time, those libraries are going to be very similar between people with up to date software. So, why would they need to get into learning all the drivers?
I think that you are missinterpreting the structure of the RPM/Deb repositories and databases. A repository is where a user would go to get new programs, which is handled by a package manager and sometimes a front-end for that. The repositories themselves are links to servers different places out on the internet. The package manager will install software by grabbing packages from the repositories and fill in the requirements for you. This works especially well if you are using a well-defined set of repositoreis (Ubuntu does this well, and Freespire/Linspire looks like they are too). There is no interaction between the user and the database that keeps track of all the data, similar to the windows registry.
As for your comment on competing projects and lack of customer focus, you are right, and wrong at the same time. Yes, there are competing projects that can detract from having a single unit more forward faster. However, at the same time, people like being able to choose between them to get the look and feel that they like. Between the different sound servers, you will probably be able to find something that allows your strange, non-standard sound card to run. Also, you can't just merge these projects, how would you do that without throwing away large parts of their different code bases? The customer focus comes into play with Suse (the official one), RHEL, Ubuntu, Linspire/Freespire and others. Several of these offer tech support, Ubuntu and Linspire/Freespire have their own repositories that are designed to do away with dependancy hell (Suse and RHEL also have these, but you can't always find everything inside their repos). Another thing is that for the commercial projects like say, VMware, a closed source commercial product, it does come in a single RPM because it doesn't need any other libraries to make it run.
I've done some development in the RHEL environment and absolutly loved it. The company I was with was doing all their own software, and Linux had all the right tools, built in, to do some really nifty testing that you could just forget about in windows. And these boxes were up for up to a couple of years without any downtime. I know its not on the Desk, but my point is that you don't need system libraries to write software in Linux.
With the man pages they do in fact tell you everything that you need to know to run a program, suc
First, I was talking about average PC users, you know the people that use their computers to watch movies and listen to music, do homework, balance a checkbook and enjoy the internet. Those types of things are easily handled by the Distros that you mentioned in your original post. The Mac OS does do better in terms of dependency hell and viruses, but does not do very well in terms of flexability. You can't legally run OS X on anything but mac hardware, and then if you choose to get that expensive hardware, you are stuck with a very static UI, very pretty, but it hasn't seriously changed (with some minor exceptions) since 10.1. Linux has a number of window managers and desktop environments including some new opengl desktops that rethink the desktop as a flat 2D space.
Second, I also mentioned that I agreed with you on the need to standardize things like libraries, I think that most of us who use a linux distro on their desktop would bennefit from that.
Third, why would there be any issue in running code from one box to another? If she and her friends were into linux, then they might also be farmiliar with source code compilation. If the code was able to run on both a windows box and a linux box, then it doesn't sound like there was anything special about it. If she was using other libraries, then i guess it would get a little stickier, but not a whole lot as there are many projects out there that are able to manage it. The number of times I install something without any problems far outweighs the number of times I run into dependancy hell.
Finally, building RPM's are relativley straight forward, and nothing a trip to the man pages couldn't fix.
Also, as a side note, I've never had any issues running a dual-boot setup with windows (Suse, Ubuntu, Cent OS, etc) aside from the fact that I was allowing windows to take up precious hard drive space.
While I agree that standardizing parts of the Desktop Distributions would help, and will look forward to the future avoidance of "dependancy hell", I don't agree with the assesment that the non-standardness of these Desktop Distros causes any real undue problems for normal PC users.
An example is my roomate, I installed Suse 10.1 on his virus laden windows box, and he loves it. There have been no issues at all with it. The biggest plus with most of the desktop oriented distros that you mention, is that there is no need for the average user to install extra software, becuase everything that most of them need comes pre-installed.
Then there are the package managers like synaptic, yum, yast, smart, etc. which take care of everything for you, and can be easier than tracking down windows software.
So, if an average user wanted to use a linux distro as your desktop pc, I don't see where the big issue is. The fact is that the average user will run into problems with any desktop oriented operating system, say spyware and virii with windows, or dependancy hell with linux, that they will either need to figure out, or get help for.
I've started using RSS feeds instead of going to multiple sites for my news. I don't want to rely on a single outlet for my news, and at the same time, I would like to be able to choose which feeds I get. I just go to my rss reader and grab all the feeds I want.
Google will not become irrelavant, if they are smart, because they have an online rss reader - Google Reader. It's still under "Google Labs", but if they started pushing this service where the news organizations are not allowing them. They could still pick up the ad revanue, and with less effort on their part.
2. It makes it possible for large-scale storage of electric power, meaning power generated by wind turbines and/or solar cell farms can be stored for future use when the wind speed is low and during the night.
Couldn't windfarms just sell their energy back to the grid? I guess that it is very dependant upon the economics of energy, but it would seem to me that in any case it would be much easier to just feed the produced energy back into the grid, get paid for that, then pay for what you use in your home. This way, you still have the opportunity to get paid for what extra energy you produce, while still being able to purchase what you can't produce. It would also depend on your goal, if your goal was to get off the grid, this type of storage would be great. But, if your goal was simply to save money, it might be a lot easier and more economical feeding back into the grid.
The committee also passed two other surveillance measures, including one from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), one of the few senators to be briefed on the National Security Agency program. Feinstein's bill, which Specter co-sponsored before submitting another bill, rebuffs the administration's legal arguments and all but declares the warrantless wiretapping illegal.
Still, not all that confusing. From what I gather the bill that is the topic of discussion seeks to call surveillance something else in many cases, such as wiretapping. While the other bill is saying that to perform domestic surveillance without a warrant is illegal.
Hmm, I like the concept, and it might work in terms of security. ie - compramised boxes can infect other boxes, so if your box is compramised, you are responsible for making sure that your box does not infect others, and we know that you can be responsible to do this becuase that's what your 'internet license' says you are competent enough to do. It would be a good tool to hold people accountable for their actions online - defacing property, spreading virii, etc.
However, there seem to be several inherant problems with this. First, you loose the potential for anonymity, you are always being watched, and everything that you do gets recorded. 'Hey, remember that anti-government website that you visited last week? Well so do we.' Second, the 'internet license' itself would become a target of theft, so that the black hats can disguise themselves and avoid being held accountable. So, you're left with the wrong-doers still doing wrong and getting away with it, and those on the 'up and up' being watched.
It seems that people are simply going to need to take responsability for themselves and their own personal security, as well as demanding the banks and services they use are as secure as possible. Then track those trying to steal things the old fashioned way - following the IP around.
Disclaimer: I am in no way assuming that the parent poster wants to make every internet user 'licensed.' I simply wanted to work through the issues of the concept that was brought up.
It seems to me that most of the major desktop environments all have similar sets of features. KDE, Gnome, OS X, and M$ Windows all have features that seem very common to one another. Moving from M$ Windows to KDE for example is not a huge leap, in fact, I have put both my girlfriend and my apartment-mate on SuSE with the KDE environment and within a half an hour, both of them felt very comfortable with it. The same was true when I got my mom an iBook a few months ago, she had never used anything but M$ Windows -ever- and within about an hour she really enjoyed it. So, M$ Windows does not need to be everywhere for people to just hop on a computer and start using it, just a half-way decent windows manager.
I appologize for brining that up without a reference, but it was brought up in my Quantum Physics class by our prof. He went into a bit of detail about the theory that I don't recall now, and don't have time to google for. Perhaps after I get home from work. All I'm finding now are non-technical/ philisophical issues related to time travel.
According to the John Titor wiki page, to which I was refering, he used some sort of machine, images are posted on that page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor
There should be no need for using current events to disporve John Titor as a time traveller, you only need physics for that. If a machine were invented that was capable of time travel, the machine would only be able to travel back as far as the time the machine was created.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the issue is that the system is broken right now, and the RIAA isn't willing to deal with it in a realistic manner. If they dropped the prices to something reasonable, and then raised them with inflation, just like many, many other products sold today, I think they'd be fine. Instead, they overcharge today, and tomorrow, they will either still be overcharging, or they will be out of business. My guess is the latter.
I understand that it isn't the RIAA itself, however the IFPI is the international body to which the RIAA belongs. So, I don't think that it is an unreasonable comparison.
I also don't understand why instead of looking at a broken system (the current distribution/pricing scheme) and doing something about it, they choose to prosecute people. My suggestion is that they can get their bills paid on less than $0.70/song, and if they tried to seriously compete with the prices of allofmp3.com that they might ramp down piracy and start turning a better profit because of increased sales.
Another thing about that $0.70/song price point, wasn't there a ruling that the record industry was fixing the prices of CD's distributed (about $17/album retail), and that the prices should be lowered to reflect the actual costs? The $17/album is only a couple of dollars above the $12/album that you get on iTunes, where the cost of distribution is significantly lower, and there is little overhead compared to a retail store. So, my argument is that $0.70 is a pretty high price, especially when there are other systems that sell music for much lower prices and are recognized by the appropriate international bodies.
From TFA:
I don't understand where this $0.70 comes from. There is the Chinese site which has legal downloads cheaper than allofmp3.com, and they have the support of the IFPI. So, my question then is why does a $0.70 sale in the US equal a $0.05 sale in China? And, if they offered a legal service like that over here (without the DRM) wouldn't piracy dissapear overnight?
You can try this website:
http://www.vote-smart.org/
I'm in Mass, and I think they do a decent job with handling the information. For those who are in a voting office, you can see their records. Another really helpful thing is to check the NPAT (National Political Awareness Test) results, if available. Being the day before the election, the site seems to be running a bit slow, so be patient. Hope the site is helpful. (I am not affilated with vote-smart.org in any way)
It seems to me that even if the pledges reached 100,000 that the OLPC may have rejected the offer anyways. They have been trying to collect orders in the range of millions, which drives down the cost of manufacturing and overhead. The other problem with this was that these devices seem to be specifically targeted at youths in developing nations, and IIRC they don't want them on the open market to avoid theft and misuse. The designs they have come up with stand out clearly as what it is, and only childeren in developing nations are supposed to have one.
I did sign up for the pledge myself, because I thought it'd be a cool thing to play with and to support the project. But I never thought that they'd reach 100,000 pledges, it seemed like a very high number.
I wouldn't mind having that bug replaced/sat-upon by a translucent Tux... and it'd be funny to download a bittorrent TV show and see Tux where a peacock should be.
of course the tubes will get clogged with all the internets being allowed now that weren't before! And it will probably take at least a day to get the new internets that are let through. /sarcasm
MPlayer & MEncoder http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
ffmpeg
x264 (library)
I use mplayer, mencoder, and ffmpeg with the x264 library to encode dvd's to the h.264 standard mp4. I use mplayer to playback dvd's and videos. You can get frontends for mplayer, but I like it because you can easily integrate it into bash scripts. If I have some time when I get home, I can post some of the scripts that I use, and perhaps try to explain some of the settings I'm using.
For scheduled playback, you can do a playlist with mplayer and use a script and a cron job for it. Another nice thing about mplayer is that you can tell it when to start and stop playback of a file, if for example you wanted to interrupt a program 5 minutes in for a commercial break you could tell it to start at 0 and elapse 5 minutes. Then you could tell it, after the commercials, to start at 5 minutes and elapse another 10 minutes. (I'd post the code now, but the firewall here is blocking the mplayer site).
I have a really great idea that I would like to market. Without getting into specifics it's along the lines of (legal) media distribution, and would involve licensing from big television/media companies. I haven't seen anything like my idea out there, and have been activly looking, as I have intrest in this idea as a consumer as well. I think it has a lot of potential and would compete well in the current market.
My question is this, how does one go about getting started? Could you give a general overview of how a successful startup works, as well as perhaps some good references for further research?
Again, I'm in agreement with most of that, I think I might have an answer to your question about leaving vi as the only "must-have" editor. There was some discussion at my old job about vi vs. emacs, and how there were always a couple of people who perferred to use emacs over vi for editing. The problem was that with emacs, you have to go and install another package that isn't in the default install. I know that your point is that there should be a couple of editors in the default install, which would follow the standard. But right now, if you hop on a *nix system, you can expect to be able to use vi. I'm not saying that there is anything better about vi, just that it is already the default and widely accepted, so why change it? I don't think that it was really all that difficult to learn, I had a book, or two, and the man pages, and I went to town. Same deal with sed, awk, grep and a host of other useful utilities. They can be cryptic, but they are also fast and get the job done. I actually had time to learn sed and awk, and write a script to do some text manipulation, in less than half the time it would have taken me to edit all that stuff by hand. So, learning those things isn't all that bad, and with the proper motivators can be quite rapid.
Yes, that hardware compatability list would be quite nice. As it is now, I look it up on newegg, see if I can find the chipset it uses, then spend at least a half an hour googling around, trying to figure out if I'll have any problems getting it to work. It's funny that the OSx86 project wiki has such a list - which is quite useful. I learned quickly that buying cheap hardware that is incompatable ends up being more expensive than the right hardware that works, because you need to get the right hardware anyways.
I too have wondered how to push the Linux movement beyond what it is today, and I've thought of a lot of the same things that you brought up. Most of the time, I think about all the system libraries and dependancies that programs use. And how to build a system that would not just take care of the dependancies, but allow you to install certain libraries locally so that you can have multiple versions of a library installed. Say that MPlayer wants version "A" of a library and Xine wants version "B", well since version "B" was already on the system, and has some other dependancies, it cannot be replaced by the older version "A". So, instead you could tell the installer to put version "A" in a place where only MPlayer can get to it. In other words, version "A" is local, and version "B" is system wide. And on top of that, having the package manager do all that stuff automagically, go find the missing libraries, and install the unsolvable dependancies locally. This would also fit in with the standardized desktop wanting to run apps that were built with non-standard components. Anyways, that is my solution to dependancy hell, but it still has the issues we already discussed, such as the footprint and disk usage.
I also forgot to metion about the average user versus a power user. I advocate moving average users over because they have an easy target for bad things: viruses, spyware, identity theft, etc. While power users can generally be expected to deal with the required security. Average users don't know the systems well enough to have much trouble using the KDE or Gnome, while the power user would have some other things they are farmiliar with. I think that the power users are somewhere in the intermediate level, and while they could figure it out it would take them time to do that which they are not willing to spend. I think those people do well with windows because they know what to do (in general) to keep themselves protected and keep their box running well. Average users would do well with something besides windows because they do not know how to keep themselves protected, and keep their box running well.
I also wanted to mention how kick-ass man pages are, in general. Nobody should feel bad about telling somebody to RTFM because in the end they will gain more insight from the man pages then anyone's advice could give them. It was a bit daunting at first to me, but then after I got used to it, it has really helped me out. Instead of going to Google for something right away, I read the man pages first (google usually just reinforces what I already figured out).
Again, not so much dissagreement as I'm just throwing that out there.
... and thanks for the interesting conversation.
Hmm... a few things, first I'm going to appologize for the comment I made about the repository thing, I missread your previous post. Second, I'm going to agree with most of what you said, because you make a lot of sense.
The things I don't agree with are the Core Desktop thing and apps not using system wide libraries. To me the idea of merging everything and filtering it down into one unit seems like a daunting task. I think it'd be really cool if the system wide libraries were standardized and all that jazz. But, I don't think that combining the different projects will happen.
Take Gnome and KDE for example, two projects that have similar capabilities trying to accomplish similar goals. I've used both for a good period of time before I settled on KDE. It's simply personal preference, and I'm glad I had that choice to make. I like the way KDE looks, and while I feel that Gnome can be more stable, KDE is my choice. I don't really see how these two projects (aside from just starting something from scratch) without losing the look and feel of one or the other, as to me, it seems they are both unique. This is how I feel that a lot of the competing projects are, they have their pluses and minuses, and the user ends up choosing the one they like best.
As far as different applications bundling the libraries in with them, I have a feeling there might be some legal issues with that, but aside from that I think that the different apps would greatly increase in size. I really like trying to keep my root partion under 12GB, and I have a ton of software installed on it. That wouldn't be possible if libraries were bundled with the apps. If you used standardized system wide libraries, then the apps that use those aren't going to run into dependancy hell. I think the big issue right now is using all of the bleeding edge stuff, some developers want to use the latest libraries for their new apps, and some users want the absolute latest everything. So, you end up with a half-updated system where you have a lot of older libraries and a lot of newer libraries and then you try installing an app that wants all newer libraries, or some older and some newer, but different from what you have.
Now, the sound server thing, again, I agree with you, I've had that same issue where the sound cuts out of one thing because another is going on. I was simply saying that while one of those projects might not support a card, another might.
Once again "average" PC users, not power users, not gamers, just the ones that don't actually need a computer, don't really know how it works, and can't keep the viruses and spyware off. My bet is that that is the largest percentage of users in the market (market of home users, non-buisness). Many have said that the Gimp is a viable replacement for Photoshop, and Quicken does have a linux version, if I am not mistaken.
I'm also not sure if you missed the part that I was agreeing with you on, which was that all the interdependance causes dependancy hell. This is not the fault of the RPM, or the Deb package managers, it is the programmers who decide to incorporate system libraries in their code. Now, this does a couple of things, first it shortens the development cycle as the programmers have certain bits of their code done for them in the form of those system libraries. It also makes the programs that you want smaller in hard disk space, and also the potential for a smaller footprint becasue libraries may be used by multiple programs (like the Desktop Manager for example). And while yes, it would be nice to just have everything neatly packaged with all the libraries needed, you would be wasting a lot of system rescources, and a lot of disk space doing things like that.
Now that said, someone doing AV interactivity is probably going to be looking at those system libraries that deal with audio and video, which are used by many other multimedia applications and most of the time, those libraries are going to be very similar between people with up to date software. So, why would they need to get into learning all the drivers?
I think that you are missinterpreting the structure of the RPM/Deb repositories and databases. A repository is where a user would go to get new programs, which is handled by a package manager and sometimes a front-end for that. The repositories themselves are links to servers different places out on the internet. The package manager will install software by grabbing packages from the repositories and fill in the requirements for you. This works especially well if you are using a well-defined set of repositoreis (Ubuntu does this well, and Freespire/Linspire looks like they are too). There is no interaction between the user and the database that keeps track of all the data, similar to the windows registry.
As for your comment on competing projects and lack of customer focus, you are right, and wrong at the same time. Yes, there are competing projects that can detract from having a single unit more forward faster. However, at the same time, people like being able to choose between them to get the look and feel that they like. Between the different sound servers, you will probably be able to find something that allows your strange, non-standard sound card to run. Also, you can't just merge these projects, how would you do that without throwing away large parts of their different code bases? The customer focus comes into play with Suse (the official one), RHEL, Ubuntu, Linspire/Freespire and others. Several of these offer tech support, Ubuntu and Linspire/Freespire have their own repositories that are designed to do away with dependancy hell (Suse and RHEL also have these, but you can't always find everything inside their repos). Another thing is that for the commercial projects like say, VMware, a closed source commercial product, it does come in a single RPM because it doesn't need any other libraries to make it run.
I've done some development in the RHEL environment and absolutly loved it. The company I was with was doing all their own software, and Linux had all the right tools, built in, to do some really nifty testing that you could just forget about in windows. And these boxes were up for up to a couple of years without any downtime. I know its not on the Desk, but my point is that you don't need system libraries to write software in Linux.
With the man pages they do in fact tell you everything that you need to know to run a program, suc
Just a few points.
First, I was talking about average PC users, you know the people that use their computers to watch movies and listen to music, do homework, balance a checkbook and enjoy the internet. Those types of things are easily handled by the Distros that you mentioned in your original post. The Mac OS does do better in terms of dependency hell and viruses, but does not do very well in terms of flexability. You can't legally run OS X on anything but mac hardware, and then if you choose to get that expensive hardware, you are stuck with a very static UI, very pretty, but it hasn't seriously changed (with some minor exceptions) since 10.1. Linux has a number of window managers and desktop environments including some new opengl desktops that rethink the desktop as a flat 2D space.
Second, I also mentioned that I agreed with you on the need to standardize things like libraries, I think that most of us who use a linux distro on their desktop would bennefit from that.
Third, why would there be any issue in running code from one box to another? If she and her friends were into linux, then they might also be farmiliar with source code compilation. If the code was able to run on both a windows box and a linux box, then it doesn't sound like there was anything special about it. If she was using other libraries, then i guess it would get a little stickier, but not a whole lot as there are many projects out there that are able to manage it. The number of times I install something without any problems far outweighs the number of times I run into dependancy hell.
Finally, building RPM's are relativley straight forward, and nothing a trip to the man pages couldn't fix.
Also, as a side note, I've never had any issues running a dual-boot setup with windows (Suse, Ubuntu, Cent OS, etc) aside from the fact that I was allowing windows to take up precious hard drive space.
While I agree that standardizing parts of the Desktop Distributions would help, and will look forward to the future avoidance of "dependancy hell", I don't agree with the assesment that the non-standardness of these Desktop Distros causes any real undue problems for normal PC users.
An example is my roomate, I installed Suse 10.1 on his virus laden windows box, and he loves it. There have been no issues at all with it. The biggest plus with most of the desktop oriented distros that you mention, is that there is no need for the average user to install extra software, becuase everything that most of them need comes pre-installed.
Then there are the package managers like synaptic, yum, yast, smart, etc. which take care of everything for you, and can be easier than tracking down windows software.
So, if an average user wanted to use a linux distro as your desktop pc, I don't see where the big issue is. The fact is that the average user will run into problems with any desktop oriented operating system, say spyware and virii with windows, or dependancy hell with linux, that they will either need to figure out, or get help for.
will anybody trust Sony with usage-reporting software on their PS3?
I've started using RSS feeds instead of going to multiple sites for my news. I don't want to rely on a single outlet for my news, and at the same time, I would like to be able to choose which feeds I get. I just go to my rss reader and grab all the feeds I want.
Google will not become irrelavant, if they are smart, because they have an online rss reader - Google Reader. It's still under "Google Labs", but if they started pushing this service where the news organizations are not allowing them. They could still pick up the ad revanue, and with less effort on their part.
Couldn't windfarms just sell their energy back to the grid? I guess that it is very dependant upon the economics of energy, but it would seem to me that in any case it would be much easier to just feed the produced energy back into the grid, get paid for that, then pay for what you use in your home. This way, you still have the opportunity to get paid for what extra energy you produce, while still being able to purchase what you can't produce. It would also depend on your goal, if your goal was to get off the grid, this type of storage would be great. But, if your goal was simply to save money, it might be a lot easier and more economical feeding back into the grid.
Still, not all that confusing. From what I gather the bill that is the topic of discussion seeks to call surveillance something else in many cases, such as wiretapping. While the other bill is saying that to perform domestic surveillance without a warrant is illegal.
Hmm, I like the concept, and it might work in terms of security. ie - compramised boxes can infect other boxes, so if your box is compramised, you are responsible for making sure that your box does not infect others, and we know that you can be responsible to do this becuase that's what your 'internet license' says you are competent enough to do. It would be a good tool to hold people accountable for their actions online - defacing property, spreading virii, etc.
However, there seem to be several inherant problems with this. First, you loose the potential for anonymity, you are always being watched, and everything that you do gets recorded. 'Hey, remember that anti-government website that you visited last week? Well so do we.' Second, the 'internet license' itself would become a target of theft, so that the black hats can disguise themselves and avoid being held accountable. So, you're left with the wrong-doers still doing wrong and getting away with it, and those on the 'up and up' being watched.
It seems that people are simply going to need to take responsability for themselves and their own personal security, as well as demanding the banks and services they use are as secure as possible. Then track those trying to steal things the old fashioned way - following the IP around.
Disclaimer: I am in no way assuming that the parent poster wants to make every internet user 'licensed.' I simply wanted to work through the issues of the concept that was brought up.
It seems to me that most of the major desktop environments all have similar sets of features. KDE, Gnome, OS X, and M$ Windows all have features that seem very common to one another. Moving from M$ Windows to KDE for example is not a huge leap, in fact, I have put both my girlfriend and my apartment-mate on SuSE with the KDE environment and within a half an hour, both of them felt very comfortable with it. The same was true when I got my mom an iBook a few months ago, she had never used anything but M$ Windows -ever- and within about an hour she really enjoyed it. So, M$ Windows does not need to be everywhere for people to just hop on a computer and start using it, just a half-way decent windows manager.
I appologize for brining that up without a reference, but it was brought up in my Quantum Physics class by our prof. He went into a bit of detail about the theory that I don't recall now, and don't have time to google for. Perhaps after I get home from work. All I'm finding now are non-technical/ philisophical issues related to time travel.
According to the John Titor wiki page, to which I was refering, he used some sort of machine, images are posted on that page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor
There should be no need for using current events to disporve John Titor as a time traveller, you only need physics for that. If a machine were invented that was capable of time travel, the machine would only be able to travel back as far as the time the machine was created.
Shouldn't you be able to apt-get the updates? I've used Knoppmyth a little bit, and it comes with apt-get installed. Something like:
apt-get update (or upgrade? check man page) mythtv mythtvfrontend etc ...