Slashdot Mirror

sPh

After seeing the pictures of RoboSweep, I was curious how well Roomba (the original product) performed. Here's a review

I'm still kind of surprised that Adobe wouldn't port Photoshop over to Linux even for a company with as much clout as Disney

I'm still kind of surprised that Adobe wouldn't port Photoshop over to Linux even for a company with as much clout as Disney

1) 50 million people is not most of them.
2) There are not 50 million users trading illegal files on P2P networks. Maybe 10 million. Maybe.
3) Downloading is not a felony. Distributing is. Most users download but do not distribute.

They probably come from sites like this:

... and finally WETA who did Lord of the Rings effects. The first film was rendered on Linux, and for the second film they were using Linux on desktops too...

And this:

[Talking about Gollum] The most incredible special effects in recent movie history were not created on high-end Silicon Graphics workstations running Unix. They were built on farms of industry-standard servers and workstations with Intel processors and running Red Hat Linux ... To Weta Digital's delight, performance with Linux has been exceptional. As a former user of Silicon Graphics systems and the Irix operating system (based on Unix), the company now runs its high-end applications on Linux, including Alias|Wavefront's Maya, Apple's Shake, and Pixar's RenderMan and Alfred

And this:

Wellington-based digital effects facility Weta Digital, Ltd. will move a significant proportion of production work related to The Lord of the Rings film trilogy onto IBM Intellistations running Linux ... The first of the new machines were installed at Weta Digital in early May for use by the special effects artists working on The Two Towers, the second film in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

(I couldn't provide a link to IBM as their site was broken when I tried to access the article.)

So where do the rumors come from? WETA and IBM, apparently. (Not to mention various little Linux sites that jump all over press releases like this)

There are many tablet PCs without real keyboards built in.

Dvorak's latest on Linux (rejected as a story submission). I had been trying to figure out what might create a consumer rush to Linux, but for some reason, I had not considered the obvious: the development of the must-have critical application. This means an end-user killer application that runs on Linux only.

In a recent PC Magazine article by John Dvorak, He mentioned a irider. I haven't tried it yet, but he sure seemed to think it was cool. Apparently, it is loaded with features, and was developed by "some old XTree Hackers". I don't know if that means authors of XTree, or fans of XTree, but either way, it sounds like it's worth a look. Unfortunately, it sounds like it is only for Windows, and it costs $29.95.

But there is free 30 day trial..

Yeah, I just read an article by John Dvorak that claimed that the whole stink with the RIAA is making privacy and anonimity forefront issues for many internet users. He says that all this is only going to make it harder for the RIAA/government to catch downloaders, and it will aid in things like child porn rings and ... I dunno I forget his other examples ;].

It's a good article, check it out Not sure if /. already posted it, but its relevant and worth it.

• IPv6- The Next Generation Internet - About IPv6.
• IPv6 Forum
• IP Version 6 (IPv6) - IPv6 at Sun.
• No shortage of IP addresses - Cnet Asia
• Big players push IPv6, but masses resist.
• Ready for IPv6 - PC World
• Ready for IPv6, Part 2 - PC World
• Verio Brings IPv6 to North America
• NTT Com Expands IPv6 Coverage
• KDDI Labs Pilots IPv6 Network Between Japan and the US
• Foundry Does 10GigE for N+I
• Perspective: IPv6, the Net's next frontier

• IPv6- The Next Generation Internet - About IPv6.
• IPv6 Forum
• IP Version 6 (IPv6) - IPv6 at Sun.
• No shortage of IP addresses - Cnet Asia
• Big players push IPv6, but masses resist.
• Ready for IPv6 - PC World
• Ready for IPv6, Part 2 - PC World
• Verio Brings IPv6 to North America
• NTT Com Expands IPv6 Coverage
• KDDI Labs Pilots IPv6 Network Between Japan and the US
• Foundry Does 10GigE for N+I
• Perspective: IPv6, the Net's next frontier

The latest PC Magazine has an article on alternative e-mail. Their Editors' Choice, Oddpost ($10/yr, free trial), uses Bayesian filters, and blocked 22 of 29 spam messages, and only legitimate e-mail ended up in their spam folder. Also worth noting is these are the results with minimal training, so, in theory Bayesian filters could quite possibly block virtually all e-mail with time.

This is unclear on the concept, I think, but Toshiba also announced the first Media Center notebook. We reviewed it if anyone's interested. The TV playback sucked.

That would be through a magical means. So obviously you're trying to stretch your argument into the realm of magic to try and produce a believable arguement. how ironic.

read some things...
When is stealing not stealing?
Criminal Intellectual Property Laws
IP theft losses -- if the EFF refers to it as theft all over their site then you really can't argue.

PC Magazine takes a look inside the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Mythic Entertainment's Dark Age of Camelot. Camelot, it turns out, is in Fairfax, Virginia where Mythic keeps 120 dual-processor Pentium servers running Linux for its 225,000 players. Each group of six servers runs what Mythic calls a gamespace. An additional 30 servers handle customer support (character data, stats ,etc). Mythic claims that it can handle up to 20,000 simultaneous players per server but limits them to 4,000 per server for a better customer experience. The software is written so that most of the code runs on the servers, including artificial intelligence, combat calculations, and character data, resulting in a mere 10 Kbps data stream that lets dial-up modem customers join in the fun.

PC Magazine takes a look inside the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Mythic Entertainment's Dark Age of Camelot. Camelot, it turns out, is in Fairfax, Virginia where Mythic keeps 120 dual-processor Pentium servers running Linux for its 225,000 players. Each group of six servers runs what Mythic calls a gamespace. An additional 30 servers handle customer support (character data, stats ,etc). Mythic claims that it can handle up to 20,000 simultaneous players per server but limits them to 4,000 per server for a better customer experience. The software is written so that most of the code runs on the servers, including artificial intelligence, combat calculations, and character data, resulting in a mere 10 Kbps data stream that lets dial-up modem customers join in the fun.

I agree with most of your post, but I'm going out on a limb here to reccomend that we do abandon the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer) interface and find another GUI that is better. (Why?) I don't have any ideas, but somebody out there does.

Open IE and click on View | Explorer Bar | Search. This opens a side panel for searches. If your side panel has the animated search character, select Change Preferences and then select Change Internet Search Behavior. A list of popular search engines appears, and you can select your favorite from the list.

This new default setting applies only to searches done from the side panel. Entering keywords into the address bar will still trigger an MSN search. But if you leave the side panel open, you can search with your favorite engine without having to navigate to its site first. And you'll get search refinement suggestions in the sidebar along with your engine's results.

If you'd rather search from the address bar, after selecting Change Internet Search Behavior select With Classic Internet Search. Then close IE and reopen it. The side panel will now contain a Customize selection on the menu bar. Click on that to open the Customize Search Settings dialog. Click on the Autosearch settings button and you'll see a second dialog that lets you change the default engine for searches from the address bar itself. Once you've chosen the engine you prefer, you can close the side panel. Searches entered in the address bar will now be sent to your preferred search engine.

Dvorak predicted this would happen in a PCMag editorial back in 2001:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,6271,00.asp

His reasoning is fairly sanguine as well - Virus updating over the web gives MS a perfect excuse to connect to your Windows PC and - along with updating your virus software (perhaps daily!) - sniff around to see what apps you have installed, check out any illegal software/music/etc, look for that Linux partition (and corrupt it?)... pretty scary.

MS connecting to your PC daily... Dvorak was right about something... its all just too much at once. Perhaps this article should be under 'Further signs of the apocalypse'?

He subscribes to the GNU software = communism FUD. Although I disagree, I do get a bit worried when he makes the following point: the issue isn't about whether or not Linux has code stolen from SCO, it's about their intellectual property. My co-worker loves to make the point that when you talk about open source software, it's about communal ownership of intellectual property (and I agree, that's the whole point). But he claims that principle clashes with capitalism, because, eventually, some open source software will look a lot like some commercial offering. Even if there's no actual stolen code, the commerical compnay will see it as an intellectual property violation---they're going to come looking for their due profits.

John Dvorak kind of hints to this in the following article:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1115156,00.as p"

Code or no code, it's possible that SCO sees their concepts or ideas being used in Linux, probably something they could (at one time) consider a competetive advantage.

How hard would it have been for some IBM staff working with SCO during their deal to go home and put the same ideas or technology (in the general sense, i.e. no actual code) into Linux?

I'm afraid the Dvorak article makes the following valid point: this whole mess is bad for Linux unless it's completely thrown out. The worst case is a settlement or ruling in favor of SCO: it sets a precedent for other companies to sue open source businesses for intellectual property theft.

But would it be any better if IBM purchased SCO
Nott according to this guy

It gets better Look what else he said. Finally via Google we can see what these clowns said.

The real outcome of this fiasco is easy to see. Dvorak thinks he's got the scenarios covered, but in my book, he's missing the likely outcome if SCO somehow wins this case.

Linux is free and available. Provided SCO wins anything, they will HAVE TO come clean about what parts are offending code and which are clear. As soon as that's done, SCO will have a field day with IBM, RH, and other Linux vendors.

However, within a few weeks/months, the Linunx community will rally to replace all offending parts of the kernel/GNU utilities/whatever with something equal if not better, it will be tested, and deployed within a year. Linux will suffer a setback, but Linux will NOT die.

It's been said that open source projects never die, they just cease to be developed. Linux ain't going anywhere. There's no imaginable way that hackers around the world will simulaneously abandon Linux and move to FreeBSD or some other alternative. If, by some miracle, there's something to all this, we'll have it behind us within a few months. ...but I'd still hate to be Red Hat.

Don't shoot the messenger...

Killing Linux by John Dvorak

Sensationalism bullshit at it's very worst, IMO.

John C. Dvorak weights in his two cents

If you expect to need computers while outdoors (geology majors, film school, etc.), consider getting a NEC Versa Daylite E120.

Not the best bang-for-the-buck laptop, but my god how wonderful it is to be able to work under direct sunlight! And it is a nice lightweight unit.

The screen is just shy of adequate indoors, however, so make sure you consider that.

Would Consumer Reports let a car thief review cars?

Following that logic...

With P2P (as various ISPs posting to this thread have said) it is 60% of all traffic on an ISPs network.

... and RIAA has this ;-)

No kidding, all Microsoft has is this loser

There was an opinion piece at PcMag.com written about a week ago regarding the CANSPAM bill. Link here

Slashdotters defending DRM... am I crazy or am I the last sane one? I'm not sure sure anymore.

Slashdot continues to get more mainstream readership, even getting mentioned in print articles these days. As a side effect of this visibility, the activity of astroturfers has increased -- notice that the pro-MS AC(s) tend to have the same writing style and logical fallacies. When other readers put them in their place, a handful UIDs dog pile one or two posters with ad hominem attacks or the "you-just-don't-like-Microsoft" (appeal to emotion?) attack. Microsoft has a long practice of 'turfing in it's marketing:

• MSFT paid Gartner to publish MSFT material as Gartner's
• fake "grass roots" letter writing
• another fake letter writing campaign
• paid for people to hang out in AOL forums
• paid for people to hang out in ZDNet "talkback" forums
• paid for people to hang out in CompuServe forums
• MSNBC doctored Wall Street Journal material
• Stuffed an on-line ballot box
• planned to plant fake op-ed pieces in local newspapers
• funded favorable think-tank whitepapers
• 'Astroturf' PR campaign exposes Microsoft goals.
• Joseph Menn. "Lobbyists Tied to Microsoft Wrote Citizens' Letters." The Los Angeles Times; Aug 23, 2001; pg. A.1 (print)
• Windows Outstuffs Linux in Poll
• Dead People, Fake Letters, Support Microsoft - Report
• Dead people rise in support of Microsoft
• Microsoft employee's move against AOL backfires
• The Freedom to Innovate Network - an 'Astroturf' Organisation

Also, right now MS is in a panicked marketing blitz. notice all the product placement on the tech sites. The embarassing stuff just disappears from the top page less than a day, but the press releases sit there for weeks.

It makes sense. Most Windows users have both Windows and Office because it's what the OEMs had installed on the machines they bought, nothing more or less. Most of these are either apathetic or know nothin else, so they will not write. Others are pissed off at the low quality, made worse by Microsoft treating security and stability issues as PR issues -- How many times have you heard "computers" crash from BSD, Novell, QNX, Linux, or OS X users? Or is it just the MSCEs? Most remaining clients could go easily over to OS X or one of the Linux distros and the next IT boom would start, like the previous one, without Microsoft.

In short, they need DRM to survive the summer and few, except for MS and RIAA staff

There really does seem to be no difference between someone who cannot read and someone who does not. Those that can read wouldn't be caught using MS-Passport. Sadly, signal can be drowned out by noise coming from a colossal marketing blitz to last through september.

We'll see if they last that long. Windows2003 seems to be more of a push to get users over to OS X or Linux. Their other (2nd of 2) cash cow, the new MS-Office has already been postponed and seems to be more of an incentive to move to OpenOffice than to upgrade.

Either problem alone would scare potential buyers, so it seems to be forbidden to discuss.

It would be convenient to skip the upcoming deluge of advertisements and astroturf and see trade magazines feature the F/OSS tools instead. Ads cost a fortune and MS could instead use the money to 1) hire developers to rewrite software in a secure, stable form, 2) hire lawyers for the upcoming willful negligence lawsuits.

A few weeks ago, CompUSA was selling the Linksys 802.11g card that works in the TiBook for $60. I'm using it right now, along with the driver hack here and I like it not only for the 802.11g but for the fact that it increases signal strength relative to the internal TiBook airport card by about a factor of 2 or 3. It uses the same BroadCom chipset that Apple calls "Airport Extreme" and Buffalo and D-Link also make cards which use this chip as well.

The software DRM will soon be followed by a hardware implementation. With both the hardware and software DRM in place, non-military control of the Germans is possible if needed. If worse comes to worse, the White House can order Microsoft to use WPA to pull the plug on German computers. That will not be needed often because it will be possible to monitor general activities, and even the contents of specific documents, to effect smoother diplomatic solutions. In a tight spot, the desktop set's microphone activated to pick up conversations.

Audits by the Business Software Alliance can be used as a milder intermediate measure than pulling the plug and as a supliment to monitoring.

...IEEE 1394...

Careful: FireWire at a Glance

Where's the rating for speed and UI?

As for the other issues, not all of them are relevant. "Skinning"? Whoopee. "Sidebar support"? Hmmm, isn't that a Mozilla unique feature? Why not add a "feature": "Is named Mozilla?".

Seriously, though, through the power of Proxomitron and Cookie Cop I get more configurability than I know what to do with. Throw in POPFile and I've got the power, baby. As for security I've never had a virus, never been hacked, never had any problems. I keep my stuff patched, run a good cheap virus scanner and, oh yeah, use common sense.

An article month's PC Magazine mentioned this. The author shuddered at what a Microsoft Google would look like, perhaps something similar to the "teenage clutter" of MSN.

Dvorak is predicting that Apple will start migrating from Motorola to Intel's Itanium within a year, and he has some credible arguments to back it up.

Be sure to see this picture to see what I mean!

Apple has yet to announce whether or not they'll use IBM's chip, but (John Dvorak's unusual beliefs notwithstanding) it's a relatively safe bet they probably will.

http://www.flickerdown.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p= 28501#28501 ---
---
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,939886,00.asp
by John C. Dvorak

Prediction: Apple Computer Corp. will switch to Intel processors within the next 12 to 18 months.

Counter-Prediction: You're a moron, and here's why...

The story starts with January's Intel sales conference. The surprise keynote speaker was Steve Jobs. And then, in the front row of Steve Jobs's keynote address at the last Macworld Expo were top Intel executives. Shortly thereafter, Pixar announced that it would become an Intel shop. That was all step one. Step two is coming.

So what? Intel has long realised that as a marketing company, Apple is bar-none the best one out there. If Intel exec were in the audience, it was more to learn from Steve "Sno-blowing" Jobs than anything else. Anyone have a count of how many shares Intel has in Apple? In regards to Pixar, it was a logical step. Use of their entirely antiquated systems from sgi, et al. forced the move more than anything else. Ever heard of TCO? By moving to a commodity processing platform Pixar is able to cut operating losses in off-seasons and dynamically increase their performance...

Apple has been concerned about Motorola dragging its heels in the processor wars and failing to achieve clock speeds that are even half of what AMD and Intel are achieving. Apple has attempted to rationalize clock-speed issues, but the company knows that it cannot do this forever. Worse is the feud between Motorola and Apple, which began after Apple suddenly pulled the plug on the license it gave Motorola to clone the Mac.

Thats the first intelligent (but already stagnant) idea you've written in recent times.

Change is good. Apple has a unique ability to get away with changing processors radically. It has used the 6502, then the 68K, and now the PowerPC. Each transition happened almost flawlessly. On the PC side of the fence, no Z-80 maker survived even the transition to the 8080. Apple has also cultivated a fanatical following, who have long since accepted the fact that Apple eschews long-term backward compatibility. The legacy concept does not hold the power over Apple users that it does in the PC universe.

That's more a testament to Jobs', et al. stubborness in the face of ever-shrinking margins. A "price cut" to Apple amounts to a maximum of 5% off the top of their systems. Compare this to the whopping cuts you see from AMD and Intel and you get the picture.

Apple's only concern is cannibalization. It cannot change architectures with a pipeline full of PowerPC products. So expect a slow transition that will start with the high-end workstations. Apple's concern is that Motorola may muddy the situation, so Jobs will have to convince Motorola and customers that the PowerPC will not be phased out but will remain as part of a dual-processor architecture.

How the heck are they going to do that? You're already building a pay-as-you-go OS on top of the FreeBSD/Unix operating system. Gee, how many x86 ports are out there? Motorola has already moved on. There is more money to be made in the consumer electronic market than there is in Apple's kludgedom. And, I would shy away from calling anything that Apple makes "high-end".

Scenario. Apple will announce its Intel initiative by showing a transition machine that uses both the Intel and Motorola processors. "So current Mac owners will not have to worry." This will be a high-end machine optimized to run Photoshop. Apple is adept at creating dual-processor architectures, so this won't be too radical. We've heard rumors of this kind of scenario for some time, under the code name Marklar.

Prove it. How are you going to saddle two

The 10.1 upgrade was free from Apple stores and resellers or $20 for shipping and handling. Here.

Macslash's article on the 10.2 pricing outrage had anecdotal posts saying that Apple typically charges for every other upgrade.

True enough.. though I see some scary so-called "security" measures being taken against things in our general life, including the net and our freedom thereof. Glad your current guy is around to take responsibilty, I'm just not looking forward to having some of the US's laws eventually forced upon us. (up here in the Great White North)

True enough.. though I see some scary so-called "security" measures being taken against things in our general life, including the net and our freedom thereof. Glad your current guy is around to take responsibilty, I'm just not looking forward to having some of the US's laws eventually forced upon us. (up here in the Great White North)

PC Magazine did one a while ago...

It's on their website at
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,28639,00.asp

The results were:
3 - Ofoto

3 - PhotoPoint

2 - PhotoWorks

4 - Shutterfly (Editor's Choice)

3 - Snapfish

Phillips' MP3/DVD portable may be yet to be released but the Sony MPDAP20U has already been out for a couple of months. It seems like the Holy Grail of Portables: 24X/10X/24X CD-RW, 8X DVD-ROM (plays MP3/DVDs), USB 2.0, LCD remote, no DRM, and oh yeah, it has a Memory Stick slot, too. It's a little spendy at $299. Page 33 of the User Guide confirms that MP3 on DVD-R/RW is a go (and via Memory Stick as well). Here's a review.

• Spam Gourmet
• Spamex
• Sneakemail
• Mailsehll
• Emailias

Briefly, I'll explain how they work in theory. After signing up with a disposable email service, they give you a disposable email address that you can, for example, enter into forms. Mail sent to that disposable email address gets automatically forwarded to your email account of choice. But here's where they supposedly come in handy. You can sign up for a different disposable email address everytime you fill in a web form. If you start getting spam, you can look at the disposable email address the spam was sent to and you can do 2 things: (1) cancel the disposable email address so you no longer get spam sent to that address; and (2) you know who gave out your disposable address and you can take whatever action you deem appropriate.

This seems like a cool product, in theory, but I haven't seen anyone with real world experience with these services. If anyone here can describe their experiences, it would be greatly appreciated.