Fair warning: Everything referenced in this article is very long. Sorry. It’s all worth reading and I would highly suggest you do so. On top of that, I’d say that every OS nerd of any kind should read both of the referenced articles.
Several times.
Now, about that hell frezing over thing:
I discovered ESR & Rob Landley’s World Domination 201 yesterday, 6 months or so after ESR and Rob Landley posted it. Frankly, I disagree with a hugely large amount of things that ESR says, and most of how he suggests we accomplish his goals - he’s the one “open source” guy that really bugs me. However, this article in question sticks out as a very sane, very logical analysis of where we’re going.
I was going to post about Peter Gutmann’s article about the Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection but at this point I believe it serves as a decent (if far from NPOV) sidebar to the ESR/Landley article, as a justification as to why ESR/Landley’s view of World Domination is so horribly important.
ESR/Landley’s article in a nutshell relies on the following points, which I consider valid:
- The transition to 64-bit operating systems begins for serious with Vista.
- Per Moore’s Law the transition will usually be in full swing by the end of 2008.
- The rise of high-definition codecs and memory-intensive media applications is going to play a key role in deciding which platform becomes dominant.
- Closed-source OS vendors and media companies are making software that is incompatible with open-source operating systems like Linux.
- This incompatibility will continue to increase as closed-source software becomes less friendly to reverse engineering and more friendly to DRM.
- If Linux is ever to be adopted as a desktop OS, it must be friendly and easy to use.
- If Linux is ever to be adopted as a desktop OS, it must be legally compatible with these media formats.
For once in my life, I am completely and unequivically in agreement with ESR: without major unification and changes in the next 2 years, Linux is going to be relegated to a position as a second-tier server OS only. It will be completely excluded from the playback - or creation - of high-definition formats. Linux on the desktop will be far less useful now than it already is.
This is very disheartening.
There are some moments in film that, no matter who you are, no matter what you like, you feel anyway.
I decided to watch Return of the King on Christmas day. Not as though it’s a religous symbol or anything, but because it’s a damn good movie.
The scene from the point where Pippin Took drops the lamp on the beacon, followed by the wonderful scene through the mountains as the beacons are lit, one by one… ending with Aragorn running into the Rohan throne room:
“The beacons of Minis Tirith! The beacons are lit! Gondor calls for aid.”
:pause for dramatic effect:
“…And Rohan will answer.”
There are many scenes like this but this one sticks with me.
It’s 01:52 MST and so it’s been Christmas for one hour and fifty-two minutes. I used to use little details like this to talk my parents into letting me open my presents when I couldn’t sleep on Christmas night. Oddly, it worked. Maybe my mom loves me, maybe she’s just a sucker. Pick one.
Any rate, I have some thinkin’ shit to talk about. Nerdy shit will come after this.
FAIR WARNING: This is fucked up. Coming from me this should tell you something. If you’re at work watch your clicks. Nothing NWS will be here but links might be. In addition, it is a very long story.
Continue reading “Have yourself a merry little Xmas, part 1: on debate”
Last night everything was snowy and the roads were pure shit - ice covered with snow. So I get up this morning and what do I find? There’s a good 4 inches of snow on everything. And our call center is of course not closed. If any of our sister centers get a single flake of snow, they call the whole goddamn thing off. But if we get snow, the center has to be buried up to the doors before we close.
Fuck my two-faced employer right in the ass. I wanted a snow day.
A few months back I had a water leak in the sink in my back bathroom. It dripped constantly for about four days before I caught it - it wasn’t really obvious until the floor was obviously wet. The problem was fixed and the floor tiles dried out, but many of them curled up. I figured I was gonna have to have the floor redone at some point.
Just to make my life more difficult, over the last few days the tiles have gotten a lot worse, and upon examination the subfloor is wet. This time it looks pretty bad. This is probably going to mean I have to completely rework the whole room. Oh, and somehow I’ve gotta FIND THE GODDAMN LEAK.
I’d call a plumber ASAP but I’m going to be working my ass off for the next three days as we are down to 2 NOS guys for the whole fucking floor for the remainder of the week. So I’m going to be the busiest I have been since I got the job. Meanwhile, my home is falling apart.
Oh, and to add insult to injury when I got home tonight my roof in the back room is leaking- right next to my subwoofer. Which is 2 feet from my HDTV. So I had to tear down my whole video setup and move it.
Merry fucking Christmas. I hate this time of year so much.
I need a new hobby.
I started off Friday trying to reinstall Windows in my Bootcamp partition so I could use the newest Parallels beta. Among the zillion or so cool things it can do, it can use the Bootcamp Windows XP as a virtual machine. The obvious neat part being that you don’t have to waste disk space on the same OS twice, or do double the effort to get two different copies of Windows set up the way you want. So let’s run through the crazy fucking shit I have been through this weekend:
- Installed MSDN XP SP2 in bootcamp. Went seamlessly once I figured out that the Mighty Mouse fucks up XP’s USB driver but good.
- Installed Parallels tools and rebooted to set up Parallels vm. Parallels creates an alternative HW profile that can be used to boot XP. No problem, or so I thought. XP needed to be activated so I rebooted into Bootcamp and activated it.
- Upon rebooting into OSX and starting Parallels XP asks to be activated again. Uh-oh. Checked Parallels forum and it turns out this is a MAJOR problem, XP ends up asking for activation every time you change boot method. Fuck. Only solution at present is to use a corporate copy.
- I try to install from my corporate media. It’s only SP1. The install works, and completes OK. Thank God for small miracles.
- I download a copy of SP2 and try to install it. No go, the installer is stupid and it breaks. Keeps demanding for 4 additional megabytes (yeah, you heard me) of disk space. There are 20 or so gigs of unused space. Fuck. I guess it’s getting confused by my HFS partition, or something. I figure there’s no way to make this work, since I can’t exactly delete the HFS partition, so I go to the alternate plan: slipstream a copy of SP2 onto my corp media. Can’t be that hard, right?
- I go to work on my gaming rig trying to do the slipstreaming. I use CDBurnerXP these days as it’s free and very fast. But it doesn’t support some of the nitpicky little gotchas needed to burn a bootable XP media. Double fuck.
- I install Nero 7 to burn the disc. This would be the last time I ever see my desktop XP install alive. After installing Nero, my system just does crazy weird shit - it boots up to 640×480x4bit color, gives me all sorts of crazy weird messages anytime I try and do *anything*. Try the usual shit to fix it, nogo, it’s totally boned.
- Try to boot gaming rig to XP media. Works. Media doesn’t see old XP install. So much for in-place upgrade, it’s totally fucking hosex0red. Do a parallel install so I can get all my Usenet shit off the C drive.
- Reformat my handy dandy portable USB disk so I can copy the few gigs of useful shit I actually need off the C disk. It locks up during the copy. FUCK Try again. They say insanity is repeating the same action and expecting different results, so I don’t try it a 3rd time. Try copying to another hard drive I have, seems to work. Hm. nVidia chipset weirdness, probably. Fucking USB.
- Finally get the OS reinstalled on the ol’ gamin’ rig. Install Nero. Run through the slipstream process. Burn another media. IT BOOTS! Finally it fucking boots. Fuck. FUCK. That’s 48 hours of my life I won’t get back.
Conclusion:
Windows activation screws up everything good, and makes it so if you’re using Windows in the slightest of odd configurations, you’re fucked no matter how much you want to be legal. At this point it really shouldn’t be much of a mystery as to why I don’t like it.
So, after all that, what was the point? I’d say this was the point. Check out *nix/X, OS X, and Windows apps running together on the same box.
Striking, ain’t it?
Check out this awesome Irn-Bru ad. It’s so awesome I might have to buy some.
“What we do in life echoes in eternity.” -Maximus Decimus Meridius
Mirriam-Webster recently posted the Top 10 Words of 2006, as selected by their internet readers. Everyone is tripping over themselves to tell us about the #1 entry, truthiness, that word invented by Stephen Colbert for his show, but it’s interesting to look at all of the words on the list rather than just the one at the top and see what we can deduce from them. It’s interesting to note that with the exception of the neutral “google” (which, interestingly, M-W is officially listing as a transitive verb) there really isn’t a lot of happy to be had on that list. All the words on it - including, if only in spirit, Colbert’s truthiness - have some sort of negative connotation. Most relate to war. Admittedly understandable, as we’re in one. Some relate to the war at home - quagmire and corruption being at the bottom of the list.
Interestingly, truthiness isn’t the only made-up word on the list. Dubya’s decider. He may not have invented the word but it seems he invented his particular use of it.
I’m having the Neal Stephenson problem here (I can’t seem to write an ending to this entry) but for some crazy reason this list just strikes me as the best slice of americana I’ve seen in a long time - lots of news about war, political corruption, and Google - and at the top of the list, two made-up words; one representing our mistakes, another our desperate need to laugh at those mistakes. I suppose if our options are to laugh or cry, laughing is the best option; it prepares us for the long road ahead so much better.
I just realized, just this very moment, that it has been over eighteen months since my dad died. This seems completely wrong.
Once a couple weeks back my mom was coming in the door to my house, and I heard a familiar key jingling noise, and it didn’t even occur to me that it wasn’t my dad walking in. I thought “Hey, Dad’s here!” and then I realized…
I’ve been promoted twice, got 2 laptops (1 work, 1 home) since then. The saddest part is that I can’t think of anything outside of work that I am doing now and wasn’t doing then.
You know you’re bored when…
But seriously, folks, I updated the site. Brought Wordpress into the industrial age (still a bit behind the age of the transistor, I’m afraid) and updated the header graphic. I want to spend some time doing something cool this weekend, but for now you get the Bizarro-Wild Kingdom graphic. Deal.
