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I will be completely surprised if this works on the PS3 slim.
I understood that one of the ways Sony cut the price and reduced the size for the slim was that they did not include the IBM hypervisor that made the whole thing possible.
(see:
      http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-linux-ps3-1/
      http://www.osnews.com/story/22073/Why_No_OtherOS_Option_on_PS3_Slim_Sony_Answers
for a few more details)

Without the hypervisor, its just not possible.

Please, enough of the iPad.

I'm more interested in the Joo Joo review.

Just so everyone knows, Thom Holwerda is one of the Big Boys over at OSNews. Some people think that OSNews is a shitty site, but I think it's one of the best news resources around. They know their subject, and they know it well. When Thom Holwerda speaks, I LISTEN.

Just so everyone knows, Thom Holwerda is one of the Big Boys over at OSNews. Some people think that OSNews is a shitty site, but I think it's one of the best news resources around. They know their subject, and they know it well. When Thom Holwerda speaks, I LISTEN.

http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_Is_a_Disease_

http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_Is_a_Disease_

Can you please name what are those technical problems if you know what you're babbling?

Lower compression rate for the same bandwidth (which a 5s Google search will tell you).

Those comparing Theora and H.264 do not consider H.264 has profiles, however theora is a single profile. Theora is not for high bit rate applications as in Blue-ray (although in high bitrates difference in human observable visual artefacts approach to zero), but it's very well suitable for web based streaming and content.

Specifically for web based streaming, cramming as much picture quality as possible into the limited bandwidth of a typical Internet connection is of utmost importance, and Theora barely beats previous generation codecs there.

Check answer of Greg Maxwell as a reply to similar FUD that Chris diBona tried to spread [xiph.org] if you want to see it with your own eyes.

Well, duh. It says everything right there in the link. Theora is observably better than H.263, and it's observably worse than H.264, for the same bitrate. It then tries to weasel out by saying that difference "isn't that huge" and "is not important".

Also, isn't it that very flawed test where they compare Theora at best settings to H.264 baseline (as currently used by YouTube) - which means, among other things, no CABAC, which is where most of H.264 advantage is supposed to come from? (this Google search is also interesting in this context)

Oh, and who says that Web is "supposed" to use baseline?

Meanwhile, those indie artists who actually WANT free distribution get screwed by the general assumption that all songs/movies are controlled by the RIAA/MPAA.

If an artist ever had a contract with a big label, that label will try to control their songs, permanently. It's happened before, and it will happen again. It doesn't matter what the details of the contract were. Somebody's going to make a poor design choice (possibly but deniably with intent), and say "For all these billion songs we published, start sending DMCA notices to Youtube users," and their automated system will do it. It doesn't matter that since that original (non-exclusive) contract, the song is now freely available. If they get caught, they say "Oops, sorry!" and pay no fine, and make no effort to prevent it from happening again. If they don't get caught, then it's another person who might pay them a $2000 settlement for music they don't own.

It's not even likely that tougher laws will prevent the recording labels from trampling your rights anyway. According to OSNews, each label has a list of songs they used without permission, such as for compilation albums and such. They say they're making an effort to track down the artists on that list, and that's good enough for them. They can claim that with such a huge number of songs to deal with, and so many contracts, such things fall through the cracks. They'll get sympathy from courts, and go on their merry way.

The system, especially when designed by big groups, screws over normal people.

That doesn't sound like the sort of thing Apple would do.

No, cuz it's not like Apple has a long track record of inventing or perfecting whole concepts and standards and then releasing them to the public.

Oh, wait...

One of the serious downsides was the length of time they kept the 16-bit subsystem alive. This was shown to be exploitable for privilege escalation as recently as last year.

http://www.osnews.com/story/22767/Windows_NT_VDM_Vulnerability_Detected_After_17_Years

The question is - how do we know that this wasn't discovered by someone with nefarious intentions years ago. After all, the Windows 2000 source code has been floating around for years.
I can't fathom why they wouldn't have killed this off with XP was released. At the latest, it should have been removed or disabled when XP SP2 was released.

I have heard similar praise of the iLiad. About Sony, though, look at the PS3. Until just recently, they actually went out of their way to make it possible to put Linux on them. If you ask me, you're right on about Sony knowing what the consumer wants.

There is an excellent thread talking about how recent (2.6.31+) linux kernels try to report the underlying hard drive architecture (found via the OSNews comments). Alas, it looks like some of these drives are not reporting this data correctly and thus automatic adjustment (at partitioning time) is not taking place. It looks like in the future rather than trying to do detection by reported capability fdisk (and hopefully gparted) will default to sectors of 1MiB if the topology can't be found by default (unless your media is small).

Additionally, I gather that recent Fedoras will try to adjust things like LVM to match larger sectors too. Hopefully whatever is laying out LVM will also be fixed too.

Coincidentally, it looks like Oracle have a very committed dev trying to make this stuff work by default...

http://www.osnews.com/thread?409281

One of the comments in that thread suggests switching to GPT if you aren't using Windows.
I haven't used Windows at home since ~2001.

Can you just wipe/reinstall using GPT? I thought the BIOS was involved with the type of partition table and that I had to be using the msdos partition type because of the BIOS. Can a geek with deeper knowledge of partitions and and all things boot drop some knowledge?

$ time cp winxp.img /mnt/sdc # ALIGNED
real 5m9.360s
user 0m0.090s
sys 0m20.420s

$ time cp winxp.img /mnt/sdd # UNALIGNED
real 13m26.943s
user 0m0.110s
sys 0m19.350s

$ time cp -r Computer Architecture/ /mnt/sdc # ALIGNED
real 42m9.602s
user 0m0.680s
sys 1m59.070s

$ time cp -r Computer Architecture/ /mnt/sdd # UNALIGNED
real 138m54.610s
user 0m0.660s
sys 2m15.630s

The first two being a single file, the latter two being multiple files in a larger directory structure.

I would heartily disagree with you on the matter.

http://www.osnews.com/thread?409281

http://www.osnews.com/story/22828/MPEG-LA_Will_Not_Change_h264_Licensing

mpeg-LA seems to be letting broadcasts go free for the next couple of years. Note that is only for the actual broadcast. They can open a can of whoop ass on various licensing fees whenever they feel it gets entrenched.

Theora support will have problems from those who really don't want open solutions (Microsoft,Apple).

So we have an impasse.

Here's a quote about it from Mike Shaver, VP of Engineering at Mozilla:
http://www.osnews.com/story/22787/Mozilla_Explains_Why_it_Doesn_t_License_h264

The licensing fees for H.264 are well-known and widely published. The current cap is $5,000,000 per year (which Mozilla easily hits considering their userbase). The cap is going up again next year. Previous raises were an additional $750,000 per year, but you never know what it's going to be. There's no contractual limit on how much they raise the cap, only a promise of how much they raise the per-unit fees which doesn't affect Mozilla (they have so many units, they'll always hit the cap).

Must be a typo. I think you'll find most seem to be pretty favourable to H.264. Unless that is you could provide a single link that shows a Theora video with higher quality than H.264 at the same bitrate?

I could give you about 10 that show otherwise. here's one

Once you compare Theora to a high quality H.264 encoder it looks pretty bad, unfortunately most people here only seem to know that one comparison done by Xiph themselves against the (relatively crappy) Youtube H.264 encoder with animated content where differences are generally harder to spot. The differences at the same bitrate are obvious in other comparisons.

Here are some more:
Videos Encoded with Theora 1.1 and x264 r1259. The "Island" trailer shows the differences well because there are lots of high motion scenes.
Metrics Animated content. Relatively new.
Metrics By one of the Xiph guys. A little older. Huge lead for H.264.

Must be a typo. I think you'll find most seem to be pretty favourable to H.264. Unless that is you could provide a single link that shows a Theora video with higher quality than H.264 at the same bitrate?

I could give you about 10 that show otherwise. here's one

Why throw around bullshit claims based on nothing more than your vague and absurd assertion that "every time you hear..."? You can easily search for that info yourself, which would take less time than it took to post to slashdot. For example, you have this purely subjective analysis which was done by encoding Theora and h.264 files with equivalent size and then having a dude claim what image he preferred. Although he claimed that h.264 was better according to his own personal tastes, you can easily see for yourself that, when comparing Theora and h.264, you get pratically the same quality with the same file size. It's the same bandwidth, same size, practically (and in some cases) indistinguishable quality and although Theora's developers had to intentionally avoid more efficient algorithms due to patents.

So who exactly is spewing those bullshit, FUD claims of "Theora needs triple storage capacity and wastes twice as much bandwidth"?

BSD holds the crone for the bug unpatched for the longest time (25 years):
http://www.osnews.com/story/19731/The-25-Year-Old-UNIX-Bug

Well, at least they patch them.

Very good point so is GPL, LGPL, and most other open source licenses.

Also lets be honest with ourselves folks as to why do we want to get rid of copyright? Should it be limited yes. Is the limit too big right now, absolutely. Bit the only reason you would want to get rid of it is to swipe a copy of something you like. It does however have its uses.

This shows very well what is wrong with copyright and what is right with it.
http://www.osnews.com/story/22716/Lessig_on_Copyright_and_Science_at_the_University_of_Amsterdam

The for profit motivation of copyright has become the elephant in the room.

But it's trivially easy to do.

Trivially? I mean...

In fact, there's no license cost at all,

Is the R&D cost for developing this really going to be lower than a license cost for a hardware design that already exists?

with major players like Mozilla on the desktop and mobile browser leader Opera pushing it in the mobile market, there's a real reason to support it.

Nope, you're still missing a major component -- content.

Theora is more than good enough.

Tell that to Google. Again, we are talking about a major investment in real hardware to store larger files to keep the same amount of quality.

you are indeed arguing that private, commercial entities should be able to dictate what we use where.

You'll note in my original post that I said that Google is unlikely to choose an inferior codec. I didn't say what I would prefer that Google do, only what I suspect they will do, regardless of feedback.

You are also conflating one outcome of a suggestion I've made with the purpose of the suggestion. For example:

With closed, proprietary, costly technology like H.264, corporations are basically dictating what devices you are supposed to access online content from.

First, have you ever seen a corporation refused access to H.264? It costs money, but it's not "dictating" devices any more than the use of ARM is letting ARM dictate what devices you can use. Even OpenMoko used ARM.

But you almost seem to be deliberately missing my point. I am not claiming that I would prefer H.264. I am only claiming that it's ludicrous to suggest that the standard should dictate a format, or that a browser should refuse to support a format (even as a plugin), because of temporary legal restrictions.

Imagine where we'd be now if similar steps had been taken with <img> -- if some genius had "standardized" us on PNG, declaring it to be "good enough", and in particular, refusing to support GIF. Aside from the fact that GIF can be animated, and PNG still hasn't settled on a standard for animation (with poor browser and tool support for each of the options), there's also the need for lossy compression, like JPEG.

And on top of all that, there's the usefulness of being able to simply upload an image in whatever format you've got and expect it to display properly.

You seem to be arguing one size fits all, because you desperately don't want to allow even the possibility of a proprietary codec entering the mix. In the short term, I agree with your goal, and I'd rather not have proprietary codecs involved, at least until their patents expire. In the long term, forcing everyone to transcode to a single codec hurts adoption of the standard today, and its long-term viability.

The quality isn't notiecably lower,

Surely, you must be joking.

I mean, here's the very first hit from a Google search for "h.264 vs theora", which also brings up another problem: Dirac. Suppose Dirac gets their act together and becomes a viable alternative. Should Firefox have to be patched?

Wouldn't it be better if Firefox would simply automatically pick up Dirac, as soon as people install the codec for whatever their OS media framework is?

http://www.osnews.com/story/22666/_Google_Chrome_OS_Netbook_strike_Bogus_strike_Specs_Leaked_ * Just thought I'd help with the OSNews article link as I was unable to go to the slashdot.org link you provided... * --Stak

Despite news that VLC might not have anyone to work on the Mac release

You mean despite the news that was clarified and proven false by the VLC project the day after everyone in the blogsphere and on tech forums went nuts : http://www.osnews.com/story/22629/VLC_for_Mac_Death_Greatly_Exaggerated_

Why repeat it if it never was true ? It didn't need to be part of the summary at all for that matter, the true story here has nothing at all to do with the Mac port.

Yes, Worse Is Better.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

http://www.osnews.com/permalink?291395

The software loaded onto the Psystar machines were legally paid for.

Oh, really?

This licensing agreement is trying to assert a right of a copyright holder to tell you what you can and cannot do with the works that do not include copying.

Copyright also makes it illegal to modify software without the copyright owners permission. Psystar installs a modified OS X on it's PCs.

Copyright licenses attempt to assert some pretty unfriendly terms of use and the terms keep getting worse and worse. It's about time these creeping terms are hedged off.

It's about tyme people try to profit off others' hard work and expenses.

Falcon

Psystar had legally owned copies, purchased from Apple.

Oh, really?

Falcon

I think morally and legally, companies should not be able to control what you do with products you have acquired legitimately.

Would you feel the same if you wrote a book, then someone else took a copy, edited it then sold copies of the edited version? That is what Psystar is doing. Pystar has even "failed to produce "customer purchase receipts or order documents" from April 2008 (when Psystar began selling their computers with Mac OS X preinstalled) until October 2008."

Falcon

What is the difference though? Lots of manufacturers like Dell use master copies to clone their PCs.

The difference? Microsoft licenses Dell to do that, Apple does not license Pystar though.

What's the difference as long as Apple got the same amount of money?

Pystar "failed to produce "customer purchase receipts or order documents" from April 2008 (when Psystar began selling their computers with Mac OS X preinstalled) until October 2008."

Falcon

Why hire someone with knowledge of a nearly obsolete ISA and no experience in multithreading, when you can just get someone with experience in threading and use an optimizing compiler? Or hire someone with relevant experience with modern CPUs?

Because the current versions of multithreading are in flux, and preset skills are great, but may be worthless in tomorrow's environment. Because 'modern' processors and their features come and go, but algorithms and proper methods don't. Because a programmer who knows why O(1) is better than O(log(n)) is better than O(n) is worth the effort to find.

We're in an odd age where people are proud of the fact that they've never heard of Communications of the ACM. It's a shame.

You don't hire people for their short term worth, implying that you intend to discard them like wet tissues when they prove inadequate to adapt, do you? That would be rude and counterproductive. It's a reliable way to produce crappy products, late and buggy.

Well it looks like Microsoft has turned the Vista blunder into a Windows 7 success, money making opportunity... great move on their part. They did this by basically just waiting for drivers to mature, waiting for the hardware to catch up, and focusing on creating some fancy ads like these: Windows 7 Ad Campaign Kicks Off, Focuses on Features

I tend to agree with Dvorak... Windows 7 is more like Vista SP3...plus some fancy interface updates but basically the same deep down.

I wonder who pays these gentlemen.

If you had read the summary you'd see they work for the OSI and the Linux Foundation. Hardly organizations that are anti-GPL, anti-FOSS or anti-Linux.

OSI was founded by people who were unhappy with the Free Software Foundation and the GPL. OSI Founder Eric S. Raymond recently said that the GPL is no longer needed.

Not to mention the fact that Acer has taken the #2 spot away from Dell, so is it a surprise to anyone that Dell is singing the praises of Windows 7 and trashing Netbooks?

I bet there are two words that scare the living hell out of somebody like Michael Dell...good enough. If you think XP is good enough, you won't be in a hurry to jump on the upgrade treadmill, if you think your Netbook is good enough there is no reason to buy an expensive laptop, etc. And with the economy in the shitter I'm sure the words good enough cause old Mike to wake up with the cold sweats. I myself have been doing pretty decent business selling 3 to 5 year old off lease office machines. Why would anyone be lining up for 5 year old tech? Because for the jobs the average Joe does (web surfing, video watching, disc burning) any machine over 2.4GHz with more than 512Mb of RAM is good enough, and they save quite a bit by going used.

So Mike better hope that Windows 7 is the second coming of WinXP, because his business is getting seriously hammered. And considering the fact that I've had quite a few customers lately that came to me after seeing Windows 7 wanting to know if I could build them a new WinXP machine...well that ain't a good sign. For them WinXP is more than good enough and by the time that WinXP hits EOL they'll be ready for another machine anyway. And I've had a lot of customers wanting to know about "those cute baby laptops" so good luck Mike, you're gonna need it.

NOTE: These are benefits when upgrading from XP. Vista has some of these features, but usually 7's implementation of these is more refined.

The biggie is that display driver crashes don't bring down your system. The display flickers for a bit and the driver is reloaded.

7 also supports multiple drivers for multiple adapters, but that's a bit esoteric.

Libraries are useful if you're not compulsive about organizing your files.

The user home folder is now sanely organized (C:\Users\User\Videos, C:\Users\User\Downloads, C:\Users\User\Documents, not C:\Documents and Settings\Username\My Documents\My Videos).

Ships with Powershell. Decent scripting out of the box.

The taskbar works MUCH better than XP/Vista and imho even the OSX dock. You no longer have to choose between the insanity of XP style grouped taskbar buttons and an overflowing taskbar. Much better window mgmt tools (e.g. desktop peek).

Very subjective, but feels snappy. Time to login screen and time to a usable desktop is much lower than Vista.

Built-in Windows Media Player (v12) starts quickly and is a pleasure to use. To be fair v11 was pretty good too, but v12 plays DivX (and all the xvids I've thrown at it) and most Quicktime MOVs. The interface is minimal if you double-click a media file. You get a simple rectangle containing the media, or a small square if it's an audio file. You get the full interface only if you start the app or click the expand UI button. This is what iTunes should have been like.

Explorer has improved its "are you sure" dialogs and made them much more usable/informative. Thumbnail previews are much faster. On the other hand, the new explorer takes some getting used to over the XP one -- the toolbar is non-customizable and not very useful imho.

How about Richard Stallman's completely bizarre behaviour at GCDS this year -- and his even more bizarre response (completely avoiding the key question -- twice!) to the complainer:

http://opensourcetogo.blogspot.com/2009/07/emailing-richard-stallman.html
http://www.osnews.com/story/21803
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3830651/Richard-Stallman-Leadership-and-Sexism.htm (Slashdot got a mention here, ha ha ha)

Possibly Stallman needs to revamp his Free Software Song to include his behaviour.

This has been discussed on OSNews and it is most likely about the filesystem or FPU and not memory addressing.

http://www.osnews.com/story/22301/128-Bit_Support_in_Windows_8_9_

That depends upon what you mean by veteran, and what you mean by UNIX. FreeBsd is closer to Unix due to its BSDness. So if you are used to kernels that are more Unix-y than Linux-y you may prefer it for that reason. If you are simply a fan of OSS that runs it as a desktop, there may not be any obvious advantages and perhaps some disadvantages due to lack of desktop like software. It should also include ZFS & dtrace which may entice you. Its also just a different kernel with a different schedule that may perform better for your specific tasks. Osnews carried a story about a benchmark between FreeBSD and Ubuntu the comments from osnews readers are also pretty insightful which is why I linked to them and not the source article. .

linux has held pretty steadily at sub-1%

Steve Ballmer says otherwise

P.S. Headphones that aren't iPod certified will now sound like crap because of DRM. We hope you enjoy the difference as much as we will.

did you *read* the link you pointed to? Headphones accept an analog signal.... the DRM doesn't change the *sound* (like you state), but whether or not play/pause/stop/next/etc buttons work or not.

Chill out.

P.S. Headphones that aren't iPod certified will now sound like crap because of DRM. We hope you enjoy the difference as much as we will.

dang, they finally did. Still my point is the following:

http://www.osnews.com/story/21522

As said here : http://www.osnews.com/comments/22120 What about Java? What about Quicktime? What about Unity? What about VLC? What about ... http://latest-version.org/latest-version.txt http://latest-version.org/linux.txt http://latest-version.org/quicktime-version.txt ...

The first concept of a task bar (dock) was created in England, in 1987. The OS was called Arthur and it included the Iconbar. In 1989, this OS was renamed RISC OS. Also in 1989, NeXTSTEP was released and included a dock. Later versions of Amiga OS had it as an add-on. And the interface I was using when Windows 95 first came out, the Common Desktop Environment under SunOS also had it. Microsoft was a bit late to the game.

Here is an article with some screen-shots and descriptions of functionality: http://www.osnews.com/story/18941/pt_VI_the_Dock

I've personally experienced issues with my laptop BIOS. It works properly in Windows, but a lot of the ACPI functions just flat out don't work in Linux. This is due to a compiler that lets the code compile with errors (Mainly functions that don't return a value when they should). This allows the BIOS programmers to be lazy, and write half assed power functions that don't work properly.

You can fix a lot of these issues by following the instructions in one of the links below to decompile that portion of the BIOS, and recompile it using the Intel compiler. It isn't easy, and certainly isn't something an user should ever have to do. It did fix a lot of the power issues with my HP laptop though (Running hot, not booting on battery power unless a key was pressed, hibernation).

See
http://www.osnews.com/thread?230516
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1036051
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/272247?comments=all


In this instance, you can blame MS's poor compiler for Linux's poor battery life.

>How does that help? Java runs on Windows, as on pretty much everything else.
>Explain to me how Microsoft's monopoly makes .NET a better choice than anything
>else that targets the Windows platform.

Because of the interoperability between apps is a lot more robust, and what I did NOT know is that you claim that OpenOffice was created by Sun and therefor should be able to tie into Java nicely..
if this is the case, I thank you for at least informing me of one new tidbit I did not know, this might change my point of view a little bit, giving Java a much longer lifespan then I first thought
however, I still think they are too far behind and might go semi-extinct in 5 years...with a few harcode fans still using it..

>Calling it a scam isn't just insulting, it's dishonest, and you know it
I wasnt calling Java a scam, I was calling the fact that it states it is cross platform a scam,
and still is, because you need to download the VM for each type of environment, might as well just download wine and the linux framework, and can port all my .NET apps over to linux !

Citation for benchmarks here
http://gmarceau.qc.ca/blog/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependability-of.html
and here to start
http://www.osnews.com/story/5602/Nine_Language_Performance_Round-up_Benchmarking_Math_File_I_O/page3/

but I do not have the time to be showing you all the listings, this is something that takes research and long hours to accumulate, as you can see these are very extensive benchmarks,
and need to be done properly.

Yes, Canonical. It is nowhere to be seen in contributions to the linux kernel. Why won't the biggest name in desktop linux, which is funded by a millionaire, doesn't contribute to the linux kernel?

"Shuttleworth Offers Canonical Employees to Debian".

Falcon

...whatever their ranking algorithm is rates yahoo answers as a better source than other sites.

That's convenient

One word: WebKit.

All current OSes suck. If you want to read about other ideas, OSNews tries to cover more obscure OS projects along with the major ones. BeOS (there is a free reimplementation in progress called Haiku) and Singularity are two of the more interesting recent ones. For modularity, see Plan 9, which is Unix ("everything is a file") done right. We use Unix instead today because worse is better: Unix had too strong a foothold for people to switch to the far superior (in fundamental design) Plan 9.

That said, I have no idea what you are talking about.