10:57 – Barbara is taking the day off from work. She stayed at her parents’ apartment last night to keep her mom company, and says that Sankie is doing well. She’s taking Sankie to a doctor’s appointment this afternoon and then coming home. Colin will be delighted to see her. It’s very hard on him when she’s gone overnight.
Yesterday afternoon, I had the new system pretty much ready to go. I almost shutdown the old system and pulled it off my desk. I’m glad I didn’t. When I came into my office this morning, the display on the new system was black with a blinking white cursor at the top left corner. The system now refuses to boot. It just comes up to that blinking white cursor. Fortunately, my old system is still connected and working. In fact, the Ethernet problems appear to have resolved themselves, and it’s now working perfectly. I really, really hated Kubuntu 12.04 anyway. I may just re-install everything on Ubuntu 12.04 and suffer from its horrible interface. It can’t be any worse than the horrible Kubuntu 12.04 interface.
Kit sales are on the rise. We’ve shipped four kits so far today, and with the month half gone our MTD sales are already more than twice those of the whole month of May 2012. Given that more than 90% of total May 2012 sales were in the second half of the month, this may turn out to be our biggest month so far in 2013. I’d better get back to work on building more kits. We’re down to less than a hundred in finished goods inventory.
Like I’ve mentioned elsewhere here; I’ve been pretty disappointed in the last year or so with the Canonical/Ubuntu family of operating systems, and their clones; more problems and hassles than ever used to be the case with them; I gave them up a few months ago.
I’m not sure anymore what I’d do for a small business system config/network; it seems that whatever o.s. we use we’re gonna run into problems and issues ranging from mundane and easily fixed, to insurmountable. It is unacceptable to move one’s whole enterprise to a new machine at night and then see it down and out the next morning.
Ubuntu became unusable here, and quite frankly I never had any problems with Windows 7 Ultimate and I’m not having any now with Windows 8. If this be heresy, make the most of it! And we have the capability now to really secure our Winblows systems more so than we did before, and I’ve taken full advantage of that. It takes a bit of work but it can be done.
“…Colin will be delighted to see her. It’s very hard on him when she’s gone overnight.”
Same deal here with the golden retriever mutt and the two cats; they’re surly and depressed when Mama-San is gone for her week-long gigs and they go nutz when she comes back through the door.
Yeah, I actually gave some passing thought to going to Windows, but I really, really don’t want to open that can of worms. What I may do is go to OS X. Or I may just stick with Linux.
I am with Colin. And dogs love the women more for some reason. My dog likes me (and I give better treats). She loves the wife.
OK, this is scary. The EPA is tracking CO2 emissions by state:
http://www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com/Article/3205597/Latest-News/Texas-California-top-US-states-for-CO2-emissions-from-energy-industry.html
I see carbon taxes coming down the pike. They do not even have to authorized by Congress as the Clean Air Act has provisions for “fines” in it.
BTW, who is going to be the first to say, “What did the President know and when did he know it?”.
I know it’s a can of worms, Bob, but so has Linux been for me lately and others; and OSX, if running on Apple’s hw, is another sort of can of worms. It’s for me right now whatever works and is consistent. And I’m just a home user bozo doing job search stuff and keeping in touch with people and running media streams to the tee-vee once in a while; running a going concern like you is more mission-critical and you gotta have your ducks lined up every day and quacking like they’re supposed to quack. Don’t know what to tell ya; you’re fah more in tune with what ya need, obviously.
Windows just works. The source code probably looks like the gnarliest piece of crap but it has fixes in it for all kinds of weird hardware and weird hardware problems. Of course, my only experience with Linux is my Bionic droid phone. I used to be a Unix / VMS / VM programmer back in the day but that is over two decades ago.
Doesn’t Chrome O/S run on desktops? Maybe not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_OS
“BTW, who is going to be the first to say, “What did the President know and when did he know it?”.
That is already being asked and he’s throwing others under the bus and so is his asshole AG, Holder. Just like Larry Klinton and his lovely wife Bruno did when they got into trouble. Throw the toddlers and old people from the sleigh to the pursuing wolves. Scum.
Thing is, though, this stuff is starting to pile up and he’s got two more years to run with his term; could be really entertaining shortly. Time for another wag-the-dog incident, maybe.
According to OdumbO, he only knows what he views on the news. For everything. Jon Stewart had a hilarious routine with OdumbO watching himself on TV announcing Bin Laden was dead. “Did we do that?” I’m still laughing.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/15/video-jon-stewart-notably-unimpressed-with-obamas-executive-ability/
Is there anybody anywhere that now doesn’t think our president is the weakest leader we have ever had? “I don’t know nuttin”. Axelrod’s excuse for him “government is so vast, Obama can’t control it.” Heh, yeah, let’s make it bigger then. His fucking job is to manage these departments, not going around campaigning an apologizing to the world.
BTW, Netflix is still burning up the intertubes every night:
http://allthingsd.com/20130514/netflix-still-eats-a-third-of-the-web-every-night-amazon-hbo-and-hulu-trail-behind/
I just met one of Enron’s former broadband guys. They were all set to do the video over intertubes thing with Blockbuster and then Enron came falling down. They had video servers set up on 30 floors in their office building in downtown Houston.
I am paying $98/month for DirecTV each month for a single HD TV and HD DVR. If I could just figure out how to get all the broadcast and cable channels easily, I would be gone today.
How about just running an antenna and dropping cable TV entirely? All this TV shit is just another addiction, like heroin. Just go cold turkey and you’ll be surprised how soon you stop missing all the shit.
I was gonna say what Bob just said; drop the stupid effin tee-vee. We dropped ours seven years ago and haven’t missed it at all; even the DVDs or Netflix gets watched here once in a blue moon. Books and radio.
I just did a search for and found a 2013 article that listed the author’s choice of distros. She picked Fubuntu for the desktop, so I headed over there only to find that the project had been killed. So I looked around some more and decided to download ARCHlinux. I booted the CD on the new system and have it running memtest right now. Then I’ll boot the distro from the CD and see what it looks like. If it looks reasonable, I’ll install it.
My son has been running Arch on his dual core 4gb RAM 5 year-old Thinkpad for some time now. He likes command line and uses it almost exclusively. His second favorite is Lubuntu. He is a math guy and runs a lot of analysis programs which I do not understand, so I cannot relate to any of that. I am going with CentOS when the new computer arrives. I am prepared for it to be hard, mostly because Red Hat puts things in different places than Debian and Slackware.
I cannot deal with Win8. I tried. But I am unwilling to give up so much time to learn methods that should never have been changed in the first place; they are all steps backwards, not forwards. Windows was mature in 2003, and needs no more changing—just bullet-proofing.
They have a long list of Linux distros at distrowatch.com and I’ve tried some others as well, but there are quite a few that are small, niche distros with very small user communities and probable limited lifespan/support cycles, with many projects like Fubuntu being killed outright. So far I like CrunchBang on older dilapidated laptops and suchlike, and so far Fedora 18 has been good as a vm here. But who’s to say that some update or other borks one or the other down the road and all my shit is gone, other than a backup? Like it or not, and I don’t, Windoze will be around a long while still and there are ways to bullet-proof it, security-wise. Windows 8 can be run via the regular old desktop we’re used to seeing but I haven’t found much difficulty running their default GUI interface, either.
That all said, running a going business and/or a specialty like Chuck and Ray have, among others here, means finding what will work best and be the most reliable, consistent and secure. YMMV, as they say; depending on the apps you need to run, with email being a huge one, you gotta make whatever choice fits your circumstances.
“I am going with CentOS when the new computer arrives. I am prepared for it to be hard, mostly because Red Hat puts things in different places than Debian and Slackware.”
Chuck, I’m not sure why your choice would be for CentOS given the stuff I know you do; RH and its clones like CentOS and Scientific Linux are great but after two years working with them at enterprise-level, very large enterprise I might add, they seem more suited to that than a small biz or home pooter setup. As a rock-solid server, yes; for the myriad of desktop things we do, not so much. And yeah, there’s a learning curve but also a host of support available out there from other users and professionals.
For what we do at this house up here, the mix of Windows and Linux seems to be working OK for now.
Well, I just booted the ARCHlinux CD and found that it comes up to a shell prompt. I could probably figure out how to partition the disks and do all the other stuff necessary, but like is too short to spend time with a distro that lacks a graphic installer. So I’m downloading Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I’m grabbing the 32-bit version, because I suspect many of the odd things that have happened to me were a result of the 64-bit versions I had been installing. I’ll be limited to 4 GB of RAM, but I can live with that. Now to see if I can live with Unity.
You could always build a Hackintosh.
Arch is a distribution that I may try out soon, mainly because often when I’ve searched for information on how something works in Linux I’ve found that the Arch people have a good web page on it. Also I like the “rolling release” style, where instead of the occasional big upgrade you get frequent smaller upgrades.
But it’s a distribution for hackers, or at least very knowledgeable users. When you boot up the Arch Linux CD, you get a command line prompt. If that “looks reasonable” to you (it did to me), go for it. You’ll be expected to manage the distribution by editing configuration files in a text editor. (That, again, is just fine with me.) It certainly wouldn’t be the Linux distribution I’d recommend to new users… and even Linus himself runs Fedora, the last I heard. (That is another option I’m considering — the Fedora Xfce spin, in particular, seems like the thing to choose for people who want stuff to just work and who want the traditional sort of desktop environment rather than the latest Gnome craziness.)
Bob, at least one of the variants of Mint (LMDE) had a recent problem with passwords after install. Something with special characters. Perhaps this is what you encountered.
Anybody have root password problems with LMDE 201303 RC?:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=198&t=127699
I’ve run different versions of Fedora since “Core 4” and have been pleasantly surprised that the most recent versions 17-19 work pretty good. Linus must know something.
http://fedoraproject.org/
How about just running an antenna and dropping cable TV entirely? All this TV **** is just another addiction, like heroin.
Yup. And it rots the brain too. But, I am addicted to “Defiance”, “The Walking Dead”, “Being Human” and “Justified”. The wife loves the old classics (B&W!) movie channel. And the local channel reception is freaking awesome whereas the old rabbit ears are terrible.
Cold turkey, Lynn. Cold turkey.
Only one of those I’ve seen has been “Justified,” which I also like but I got it otherwise than cable. Ditto old classic flicks.
Defiance and Justified aren’t available on Netflix streaming, but the other two you mention are. You can get the first two on DVD. You end up a season behind what’s currently on, but who cares? We binge-watch most stuff. When we’re ready for the newest (to us) series of Justified (or whatever), we’ll watch it over the course of a few nights. It makes more sense that way; you don’t lose track of what happened, and you can fast-forward past the “previously on” segments at the beginning of each episode.
And Netflix has tens of thousands of old movies.
I have an RCA powered antenna that works fairly well. I’d seriously consider ditching cable TV if not for non technical issues. Things like will Comcast let us keep Cable Internet without Cable TV?
A lot of the cable network only shows are available to stream over the Internet. If our PS3 had a Flash Player available, I think I could convince the Mrs. that we don’t need cable TV.
Oh, one thing about Fedora, though: at least in some versions, it wants to format your disk using LVM (Logical Volume Manager), when you first install. Don’t let it do that (choose regular partitions instead), unless you really want the extra features that LVM provides. Using LVM complicates things like using a rescue disk to fix the boot process, should that ever get messed up.
My only concern is to get a distro that actually works for audio/video. So far as I can see from the various forums I get mail from, CentOS is about the only one where you can count on audio and video parts to work, no matter what. Strangely, audio drivers work on some releases, but not on others outside of CentOS. The open-source radio automation software is developed on CentOS, so it’s a no-brainer to use CentOS for that. They actually have an appliance CD that installs everything, and all you have to do is to make sure Apache, MySQL, and audio store are connected (it creates them, if you don’t already have them from a previous installation), plus your audio card and driver and you’re off—no further configuration necessary.
Quite a few people doing video in Linux use Fedora. I may play around with that since Norman is high on it.
Damn, I had no idea CentOS had all that for media stuff like you use; good to know; learn something new every day, I always say.
I am downloading the latest Fedora (19) as we “speak” and it’s the Alpha. Yes, OFD lives on the edge, baby.
Of Red Hat’s products, Fedora is where they introduce new stuff and break things, while Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the stable, boring product derived from Fedora. So if CentOS (a rebranded RHEL) has all the features you want and supports your hardware, there’s no point in trying Fedora. (Well, maybe one point: the CentOS team, being unpaid, sometimes falls behind in passing on security updates.)
Yes, Fedora is the pilot o.s. and RH is the mostly boring stuff that runs lotsa enterprise-level, mission-critical servers and clusters. Agreed with Norman on running CentOS, being more stable than Fedora, for what Chuck wants and needs. Another possibility, although I have no idea if it would also meet Chuck’s needs as well, would be Scientific Linux, which, actually, Bob and others here may wanna take a look at. Both RH clone communities refer to RH as “TUV,” The Upstream Vendor.
Chuck obviously has special requirements for his video work, so I can’t speak to that. I’ve been pretty happy with Xubuntu for everything else. The main point are the last six letters: pretty much anything you want will have Ubuntu support (granted, that also include Debian, which Ubuntu is based on).
Linux isn’t perfect. For example, every second time I start my desktop, the window manager fails to start. So I have “xfwm4 –replace” programmed into my fingertips. But Windows is no better – just different. I have to use Windows on the office machine, and the entire update process (especially with updates requiring reboots) is incredibly irritating.
In the end, whatever you’re used to seems fine. When trying other systems you are very aware of all their little shortcomings, because you aren’t used to them. I can’t speak to Macs, because I have no experience, but Linux and Windows are about even for me in terms of usability; I have a slight preference for Linux, because (as a techie) I have a lot more control over how the system works. Plus I don’t have to even think about licensing issues.
I agree with Bob and OFD. Just go cold turkey, like I did about five years ago. Life’s too short to spend hours per day watching the tube, or at least give up cable. Free to air has fine reception here, and the local ‘added value’ providers charge far too much.
Unrelated question: when do you use single quotation marks like ‘ and when “?
If you’re American, you use double quotes to begin and end a direct quote, and you put the period inside the ending double quote. You use single quotes to set off a direct quote within a direct quote.
If you’re British, you use single quotes to begin and end a direct quote, and you put the period outside the ending single quote. You use double quotes to set off a direct quote within a direct quote.
If you’re me, you use double and single quotes in the American style, except that you put the period outside the ending double quote unless it’s actually part of the direct quote.
If you’re Australian, I guess you just use single or double quotes interchangeably.
If I’m quoting something that has double quotes I’ll use single quotes, if it has single quotes I’ll use doubles. If it has both I’m screwed.
I always like to put punctuation inside of quotes but occasionally don’t – sometimes for no good reason.
“If you’re Australian, I guess you just use single or double quotes interchangeably.”
Spelling also seems to be optional for them down there, judging by yesterday’s late entry.
Decades ago, there was some data that suggested the mechanics of watching TV was hypnotic. That all seemed along the same lines of alleged damage to kids that fluorescent tubes replacing incandescent bulbs in school rooms supposedly caused. To my knowledge, no definitive studies were ever done of either, but from my own perspective, I do believe television is addictive—the scientific reason yet to be discovered.
What has really been scary to me are the folks who turn the TV on the moment they bounce out of bed, and leave it on for the entire day. The number of hours of focused viewing per person has declined somewhat from a peak before the Internet and video games carved time out of that figure, but that average is still pretty scary high. Not much productive is going on while people are watching TV.
I guess actually making TV programs made me more discriminating, because I did not watch much TV at all outside of work, and have not even owned a TV since we moved to Germany well over 10 years ago. I definitely don’t miss it, and sure would be less productive if I had to carve out hours of viewing time from my current schedule. Just as an example, what do you miss on Letterman’ show, if you stop after the monologue? With only rare exceptions, it’s all downhill from there, and the same was true with Johnny Carson.
I have been instrumental in getting several people off cable and onto over-the-air broadcasts with new antenna systems, plus adding Netflix by mail for the series they formerly watched on cable. None of them complains about missing anything, and all of them love the $80+/mo they are now saving.
But wow—there is really nothing on cable or networks that is worth even an hour of my time. I have much better things to do that are far more interesting than watching the rambling fiction of somebody else’s mind.
Chuck has nailed it; an utter waste of time and bandwidth out of our valuable and dwindling lives that costs more per month than a billion or so people in this world earn in a year of backbreaking labor.
I’ve seen parents utilize the tee-vee as a baby-sitting device for their autistic and semi- or pseudo-autistic kids, or kids with other behavioral problems, or even just normal kids, and leave them in front of it, usually at deafening volume, all day and well into the night. Most of the programming aimed at them is filled with brilliant, even blinding colors, and nonstop noise and gibberish and the music is usually contemporary variations of loud-ass shitty rock and hip-hop.
The fucking North Korean POW camps couldn’t have done a better job of blasting young minds, and brains that are physically and physiologically still forming. It’s absolutely sick.
Then we have legions and legions of adults in this country who are apparently fucking hypnotized by the crap on nightly programming; and every once in a blue moon OFD gets to see a couple of hours of this shit and it boggles my mind that anyone with a lick of sense and reason can sit there in front of it for hours and hours, with deafening commercials every ten minutes and yet there they sit.
Kill your television. Seriously.
Read a book. Take a walk. Talk to another human being. Life’s too short.
What has really been scary to me are the folks who turn the TV on the moment they bounce out of bed, and leave it on for the entire day.
My mother used to do this. She lived alone, and the TV was pretty much just background noise. If the TV wasn’t on, then she was playing music. Granted, she also actually watched programs quite a lot, but when she wasn’t watching, she genuinely had no idea what was going on – counting that “watching” TV in any sense would be exaggerated.
I think the “addiction” has little to do with the technology and lots to do with human nature. The shows that people seem to really get addicted to are shows that give a view into the lives of the characters. Since time immemorial, people have enjoyed being voyeurs, gossiping about the neighbors; TV shows invite you straight into the houses of the “neighbors” and show you all the juicy bits.
We have a few shows that we watch regularly, but none of them are fiction. The news most evenings, and before the news there is a rotating series of factual programs: health, science, economics. Beyond that, the occasional tennis match (Roger Federer), and – this comes totally out of the blue – my wife will occasionally watch a snooker match on BBC. Probably between 5 and 10 hours a week, in total.
When I was in the US with the kids, closing down my mother’s affairs, the kids watched a lot of TV: cartoons and nature programs, mostly. Man, have those gone downhill. The sheer quantity of commercials. Cartoons that are themselves advertisements. The nature programs were low-budget crap with cute animals but little information. And the stuff repeats, and repeats, and repeats – it’s like the TV channels have enough content for 10 channels but feel obligated to fill up 50.
Anyway, I find the prices asked for television (or, for that matter, Internet) to be astounding. We are well served by the very basic packages we have. Even for Internet, where there are often four of us online at the same time, all intensive users, we do well with the basic service. The same for the mobile phones: we have a low-end package that allows data, some number of SMS, and free calls amongst ourselves.
I don’t have the exact prices in my head, but the total for TV, Internet, 10 ISDN phone lines (home/business in the same building), and four mobile phones is a total of somewhere around $150/Mt. I see “offers” all the time for worse packages at prices 2x, 3x, 4x what we pay. Then the prices y’all quote from the good ole USA – where I’d expect things to be cheaper – are even higher!
Of course, instead of being addicted to TV, we may all be addicted to Internet. Reading forums like this one…
Yeah, TV’s a waste of time unless Hawthorn or Arsenal are playing or the subject is women’s beach volleyball.
I’ll also make time to watch Clint Eastwood westerns or Dirty Harry type stuff. Also, the lovely Sandra Bullock is always worth watching, especially in Speed.
Brad wrote:
“I don’t have the exact prices in my head, but the total for TV, Internet, 10 ISDN phone lines (home/business in the same building), and four mobile phones is a total of somewhere around $150/Mt.”
I pay about $85 a month for cable Internet, landline phone, cell phone to TransACT and about $60 a month for 200GB peak + 200 GB off peak download to my ISP. I only make a few phone calls a month so that’s about it. Foxtell keeps trying to sign me up for basic TV + pay per view this and that and sport. I’m just not interested.
We spend about $340 for Cable TV and Internet, and an analog phone line and two cell phones. I’m hoping to drop the $120 Cable TV at some point. I am going to drop the analog phone line and replace it with a VOIP service, I just haven’t done it yet.