Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2005 06:36:21 -0600 From: "Ray Jenson" <rjenson@redheron.net> To: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Daemon, Devil... woops! Message-ID: <20050718123641.212FE43D45@mx1.FreeBSD.org>
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This is a long rambling. Please feel free to ignore any or all of it. I'm a bit frustrated, and this is me getting my frustrations out. Okay, look... I'm new at this. I haven't ever even USED FreeBSD before a couple of weeks ago, and now I'm being expected (mostly by my new staff) to configure servers. And here I am, looking at the logo, and thinking it's a devil. Well, I can be wrong, even if I am the CEO. It doesn't happen a lot, but hey... it's a daemon. It looks a little bit like a little devil. One of my guys has a tee-shirt that roughly resembles the "Intel Inside" logo, and it said "Devil Inside" and has a BSD logo on the reverse of the shirt. So, naturally, I figured it was a devil. The whole concept of the operating system seems pretty straightforward when it's explained to me, but practical application... well, that's another thing altogether. All I know is that I have 4 boxes in front of me, 3 x86 boxes with loads of RAM and one x64 box with too much RAM (I've threatened to donate the Micron RAM several times... and I know just the place to look for who needs a donation of a 1GB stick or two of DDR RAM... so if any of my guys are on this list, you'd better take note: I'm miffed about your not explaining the whole "daemon/devil" issue to me). As far as political correctness, why not adopt a scantily-clad female in black leather? Or... or... red. Red! Yes, red. Red is a good color. With... a whip. Or something. BSD: Binding Souls, One At A Time... riiiiiiight. I mean, really... a logo depicting a daemon, or even a devil, is just a logo. It's not like the Son of the Morning Star is a member of the board, or even an executive. It's not like everyone involved with the project are Satanists (well, trying to configure the systems with no real prior *ix experience has made me say you were all evil so-and-so's a few times, but that's not the same thing). It's not even as if you actively promote anything other than a different mode of thought. I've even got my girlfriend's reaction that the daemon is "cute" (to use her word for it). I will say this, however: the use of religious iconography in business is nothing new. We've been doing it for more than the past century to sell religious items, as well as a host of unrelated things (like tee-shirts, for example). There was an old country-western song that said something about "God, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz", and more recently there was that song about "What if God Was One of Us" that had the religious right up in arms. The religious fanatics in the world find a lot of things to gripe about. And it's not just Christians, either. The religious fanatics of al-Q'aida have said for YEARS that the United States is an evil, money-grubbing lot. Not all of us are evil, but I will say that a lot of us tend to focus a little too much on money. I'm of the opinion that fighting extremism with conformity is tantamount to surrender. And then there were the extremists a few years ago that killed themselves during the Hale-Bopp flyby. These people who gripe about how evil the world is, are, IMHO, mentally unbalanced. They want to complain, but they don't ever offer solutions. They demand change, but they won't give one smidgeon of support in doing so. It's as though they expect one simple decision that affects thousands of people will happen with one all-powerful person's say-so. It's all-or-nothing. Change or we'll make you. It's like a playground bully, really. I wouldn't worry about changing the logo. It's "cute" and has all of the requisite features a logo should have (distinctive and identifiable, attention-grabbing, and marketable). It isn't pornographic or offensive in nature (unless you are offended by representations that don't depict nudity, violence, or obscenity), and it's pretty well embedded into the BSD culture, from what I can tell (and that's not very long, really...). My employees are BSD-lovers. I'm not converted yet. I'm still tapping away on my Windows machine to get business done (it's where all of the software that I've learned to use and been brainwashed to love is based), and I'm fiddling with four BSD boxes, trying to get them to work. Amazingly, the manuals are entirely helpful (as opposed to Microsoft, who wants to put 24 pages into a printed manual where a 3-5 leaf pamphlet would work fine... not that my post in this case is much different than that in paradigm). I'm still having problems, but my guys laugh and just point at the manuals on my Windows screen and the book that one of them brought and tell me to keep reading. Which I do. And... well, frighteningly enough I'm actually starting to understand what a daemon (the software, not the devilishly-cute logo) actually does. So... the daemon, IMHO, should stay. It represents the structure of the system, and is a reminder of what is actually inside. Daemons are terribly useful, and make managing a very simple matter. However, I'm more of a business geek than a techno-geek. I like the "gee-whiz" factor a lot, and BSD seems to be all of the functionality without any of the glitz or glamour. Which I kinda like. Kinda. I'm still, as I said, not sold yet. It's growing on me, I'll say that much. Maybe the doctor has some cream for that... or maybe I should just get an exorcism. Anyway, to try to close this long and rambling post, I'm stuck with just two questions, only one of which has really been addressed. The one about the art has been addressed, and I'm just going to wait for Kirk's response. The other question that I had was one of finding BSD CD's or DVD's at wholesale. I like the packaging. A lot. Really! I want to have "official" media available, because... well, I just don't feel /right/ about charging five bucks for burned CD with no panache. I'd much rather charge the same prices that other places charge and offer something really professional-looking to the router geeks who have been drooling over the hardware configurations that I've come up with. Our cases are red. And no, they don't come in traditional beige or even black. And the guts are... not fully supported. I've had to lower my standards just a little. The 3DLabs Wildcat Realizm 800 video card is a little high-end, I think, approaching vertical. If an engineer wants that video rendering card in a BSD box, he can bloody well write the driver himself. It didn't like BSD all that much, but the Windows driver support was fine. The Linux side... well, I think that's the main drawback: open source isn't really taken seriously by the rest of the hardware industry at large, so they're kinda unwilling to release enough specs to the public so that the drivers can be developed with any degree of functionality. I will say that the "default" drivers worked, but didn't allow any of the cooler features of the card. And I don't program, so I don't know what to do, and I have to return the $2,000 video card in a week... that's when my friend's vacation is over, and he needs to get back to his molecular collision dynamics or whatever it is that he does with his machine. As you can see... it's been a long ordeal, and so when someone corrects me, I'm likely to go on and on about nothing at all in order to prove the point that I'm pretty well fed up with political correctness, and I don't really care if it's a "devil" or a "daemon" or whatever. It's a short red guy with horns and a pitchfork. Or a hammer. Or lotsa papers. Or whatever else. It looks like a "devil" but if you all prefer "daemon" then I'll gladly conform, surrendering my will to the political masses in order to appease the fears and worries that appear to be their own "daemons" in the making. Okay, okay, I'm going... -Ray
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