riddlebox wrote:Hey guys, I wanted to tell you that I did call in during your mac talk but the sound got choppy so I dropped off, thinking I could save the bandwith. I will definitely be there next week though, and btw good job!
Yeah you better be!
Don't go pull a Devon on us man! The prick, wetting his pants over his new car stereo, and then forgetting about the show!!
jaz wrote:I think you guys did a really good job. The sound quality was good, I couldn't really notice any sound lag which surprised me since you & Jza were 5000 miles apart.
All thanks to the magic of these series of tubes
jaz wrote:You two bounce well off each other.
Yeah I thought so too, I really liked Jza's Qt story from his office, that was good to hear, then my theory of Qt kicking ass for easy cross-platform development was semi-confirmed (I will need to have Pat ask a KDE developer about this next time he gets one on the show).
jaz wrote:Maybe it is because you seem like a BSD type of guy , stable and reasonable whereas Jza seems to a Linux type of guy who likes being on thae edge and is just a bit of a zelot.
Nice! I got a kick outta that man!
Well, I do use BSD a lot (OpenBSD for the most part, I have FreeBSD on two boxes, I'm looking to get rid of it on one of them), so you're definitely right on some level. I usually say that I like to use recent versions of software, not bleeding-edge. For example, I don't care if the KDE version I use is a version or two behind the latest version. I don't care if the Linux kernel that I use is even six versions behind.
Some people like to be on the bleeding-edge and run the latest of everything (A large group of these people are known as Gentooists
). And if that's what they wanna do, more power to 'em, go ahead.
<Rant>
My big beef with people (Bryan for The Linux Action Show being the primary one) who say "Ubuntu is insane for not including Beryl, Beryl is so awesome, and kittens die because Beryl is not included", is that they seem to miss something extremely obvious. Beryl works fine on a typical hacker's desktop, for the standard things it does, it does OK (Although I have different experiences). But when you use it 24/7, you start to notice problems. Beryl, to this day, still has problems with multi-monitor setups, video playback can be quite iffy at times, it has problems with Java applications I hear (This is the fault of Beryl, not the Java application, because every other window manager seems to work fine), and just general maturity from a "proven by time" point of view. KWin (KDE's window manager) and Metacity (GNOME's window manger) has been in active development for over 8 years! They have been proven by time. Sure it can encourage some people to try out GNU/Linux if they see some cool bling like Beryl, but if it doesn't work properly they just go back to Windows and don't even come close to coming back for the next 8 years. If you are gonna include something by default in a distro that's meant to be of production quality, then it HAS to work. Beryl can completely choke itself on obscure setups, meanwhile, KWin, Metacity, Fluxbox, Blackbox etc. just runs perfect. These are issues that only gets solved by the test of time, eventually some person is gonna try Beryl on some weird-ass setup, and report that it doesn't work, post it on digg or some Apple/Vista whoring site and then just bad mouth free software to eternity. Also, remember that most people who use Beryl use NVIDIA graphics cards, with proprietary drivers. Do we want to say "Sorry, you have crappy hardware, you get no cool stuff, now go f-ck yourself!". That's what both Microsoft and Apple does, and I think doing the same stupid crap that those guys do is just retarded. Today it's primarily hackers, and bleeding-edge users who use Beryl, and typically they use it on NVIDIA hardware, because it doesn't work on other hardware. To average Windows users you can't say "Sorry we don't have driver support for this, please buy another piece of hardware", if they expect something to work by default, because they're told that it does. That concept just doesn't exist in their mind, because under Windows, all their hardware is usually supported (Although a lot of drivers are crappier than a garbage dump, don't get me started on printer drivers). In addition to all of this, remember that GNU/Linux is not just being used by people with modern computers like we have in the US and western Europe. GNU/Linux and tons of free software is being used in poor parts of Asia and Africa. Is some temporary hype about immature 3D desktop effects, worth making compatibility with lower-end hardware (Which could bring in millions of users in the long term) worth it? I don't think it is. Also, if you're in a poor country and you experience the concept of "Oh, you don't get this and that, because you are too a broke-ass guy who either didn't pay us enough cash (Hint: Windows XP Starter) or are too poor to buy a wazza-gozza graphics card!", I think you'd feel depressed, or upset. I personally refuse to be treated as a 2nd grade citizen, that actually pisses me greatly off when stuff in the area happens to me.
</Rant>
And besides all of that, supporting Beryl well, on a wide set of hardware, requires the use of proprietary graphics drivers, and from the distributions' side, that involves distributing these, which is a GPL violation. I doubt anybody is gonna come after you for doing it, because the Linux kernel developers couldn't care less about users' freedoms. It impresses me that Apple havn't hired more of them by now.
By the way, it's funny kind of refer to Jza as seeming like a "zealot" (Which I don't see him as), and me being reasonable. Because I am the person you would typically call a zealot! I'm pretty much a free software guy, which a lot of people look down upon, I guess. Oh well, we can't all agree with each other, and thank god for that, I for sure wouldn't want to agree with Mao Zedong on anything.
jaz wrote:Show seemed to go a little long, might want to map out the next show so "a" is the subject for approx "x" min but logistically that may be difficult.
Well, I listened to the entire thing myself (I eat my own dogfood), and it's no longer than any traditional TLLTS episode. I think the reason you felt it was longer is because it was just me and Jza discussing stuff. Plus we talked about A LOT of stuff.
jaz wrote:Thanks for filling in, look forword to listening to you next week.
Well, thank you for listening! I certainly hope that I'll be doing next week's episode, I plan to do a tutorial on how to use FreeBSD's jail feature, and talk about ways to avoid stuff like Flash, even for watching YouTube videos.
adam wrote:I enjoyed it. I guess I could deal with it for 3 more weeks
Well, like I said in the show, you're gonna have to put up with it whether you want to or not!