BSD & Gaming

NEWS ALERT!  The powers that be in Washington D.C. are doing their best to destroy the last vestiges of Free Speech online under the false pretenses of preventing stolen intellectual property.

Read all the gory details about this farce that is attempting to strip away one more layer of your personal rights – [LINK]

If you already know about SOPA and want to do something to stop this insanity go here [LINK] to contact your Congressmen.

There is also some good stuff covering the topic over at this [LINK] and here [LINK].

Fight for your rights before they are gone FOREVER!!

TIME IS RUNNING OUT !!

Articles Include:

• Drupal on FreeBSD – part 3
• Email MX server in FreeBSD – Confguring FreeBSD as a mail MX server with Postfx
• Installing NGINX and PHP 5.3.x on FreeBSD 8.1
• Text Terminal magic with tmux
• Writing ‘bots using XMPP
• How to quickly make a bootable USB stick with FreeBSD
• FreeBSD and simple char device driver for real PCI-hardware
• BSD’s and Solaris on the Desktop. Are they ready to serve?
• Games Geeks Play!
• Why can’t offce employees get along with open source offce suites?

Get it fresh off the press by going to BSDMagazine.Org for your free copy now.

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It’s unbelievably sad that the upcoming launch of the Shuttle “Discovery” will be the final flight for that vehicle. There may be a few more flights by other Shuttles, but the fleet is definitely getting ready to retire soon.

What is amazing is how long and how well the shuttle fleet has performed despite problems and the Challenger disaster. The shuttles were not originally planned to be used so much for as long as they have been, they were originally slated to be mothballed and replaced by newer technology years ago.

It’s sad to me that the fleet will be retired, I remember when the first launches took place and it was a huge moment in history. It’s pathetic that the government has left NASA unsupported for so long that we now have nothing to take it’s place as was originally planned for. It’s also a sad statement about the average citizen being so apathetic that we did not demand the necessary financial support for the Space Progam.

Telstar Logistics reports that Hanger One could become a location for the Smithsonian. Pictures and full details on Telstar’s web site.

[LINK]

In a New York Times article Amazon.com says it was selling 143 eBooks for every 100 paper copies and now sales are on the increase hitting 180 per 100. I can understand why sales are up from my own perspective. I love to read …and I love books! However years of lugging around tons of books every time I move has been a nightmare, being able to have all those hundreds of pounds of books on a few data disks…. it’s just too convenient.

It’s not an easy choice when you sentimentalize hard-copy books the way some of us do. Some books in my collection were gifts from people and those are especially hard to consider getting rid of. Every book holds a memory for me, not just the work itself…  where I was, what I was doing and experiencing at the time when I read it. That experience doesn’t hold for me with the digital editions. Getting rid of my hard-copy versions is something I’ve been contemplating for some time now but not a choice I’ve been able to make yet.

NYT’s story is here – [LINK]

WIRED had an article marking today’s anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing. It got me thinking about a lot of things, mainly about where we have been as a country and where we are going in the future. It’s tough to see positive things when, as a nation, we are so dispirited. It was huge events like Apollo 11 that helped us to see we can do great things and we can reach outside of our petty worldly fears and selfishness for something bigger. I just hope in today’s apologetic rhetoric we don’t rush to rewrite history into a more politically correct version forgetting the accomplishments made and losing hard won lessons.

The knowledge gained from NASA’s work has affected everything from the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the homes we live in to the technology that goes into the cars, computers, phones, and every other gadget we love. Maybe the short sighted folks in D.C. will remember that and realize that while it may cost a little to keep it fed, NASA is the “golden goose” that pays us back a thousand fold everyday.

For WIRED’s article go here – [LINK]

I eventually plan to move to a more rural area, but this has a serious downside. By that I mean having very limited access to the internet. The area I want to live in some day is currently saddled with only one real option and that is mobile broadband. Almost all of the plans I see are capped around 5gig a month depending on the provider. If you’re a serious geek a mere 5gig per month is nothing. Hell just thinking of chopping my access down that much makes me feel panicky and claustrophobic!

There doesn’t really seem to be much choice but to learn to live with the 5gig and adjust my net habits – ugh it’s a damned depressing thought. Maybe by that point I’ll have a real life (whatever that is) and won’t care, or perhaps the zombie apocalypse will occur and I’ll be too busy reloading to worry about my internet connection. Who knows.

I did think of one small thing to help cut back on bandwidth, instead of browsing with Firefox which sucks down tons of flash, pictures, and various other media… I could use the browser called Lynx.

For those not familiar, Lynx is an old school text only browser that won’t hog your bandwidth so much. It’s not pointy clicky,  but if you just want to surf, read the news, or check blogs it works great. It’s available for just about every OS (FreeBSD, linux, Windows, etc).

If you want to check it out take a look here – [LINK]