If "easy to use" was vital for market share, we'd all be Mac users today, and would've been since 1984. Ultimately, nobody cares about "ease of use" or OSes in general; people want applications.
Linux (and Unix) have killer native applications for the server side like Apache and Oracle, and that's why it's been so successful there. When a killer application arrives for the Linux desktop that has no equal anywhere else, the users will follow. That's all there is to it.
Heck, I wanted to show it to my little cousin, but then decided not to since she might ask me to explain what the movie was about. (BTW, I'm serious. Can someone please explain to me what the movie meant?)
Mr. Miyazaki has a nice explanation. It's basically a story about keeping in touch with one's past, and it's nicely told IMHO.
Aren't there only 13 episodes of the Lupin tv show? Seems like we'll be cycling pretty quickly.
The original series had 23 eps, the second series had 155 and the third had 50. So, that *should* be enough to run weekdays for some time before cycling around - depending on how much of it is dubbed.
Does cartoon network still have Spike smoking tooth picks?
I'm assuming you mean Cowboy Bebop, which never ran at 3pm on the Cartoon Network anywhere and never had "toothpicks" of any sort edited into it; the cast has always been shown smoking genuine cigarettes. Are you sure you're not thinking of Outlaw Star? That title has been shown during the day, and with significant cuts/edits for content.
hell hath no fury like a thousand angry anime fans.
A thousand is actually quite an understatement. This blunder is the rough equivalent of "the Lion King" or "Fellowship of the Ring" shipping with a dreadful color imbalance. Lots of japanese fans are pissed, big-time.
It hasn't opened in 1000 theaters yet; it only has the potential to because that's how much Disney has budgeted for release - assuming there's an Oscar possibility. I'd pay to see it in a real theater, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
I believe if these criteria is met, computer vendors would be more than happy to install Linux by default.
Not likely. Computer venders aren't going to preinstall Linux in place of Microsoft simply because they don't see enough profit in it; not enough to risk Microsoft's ire, at any rate. Turning all distros into HighlanderLinux ("There can be only one!") isn't going to change that, realistically.
If the desktop is going to be changed from an all-Windows platform, Linux isn't going to accomplish it by trying to out-Windows Windows; it'll have to try and change the desktop instead (integration, ala TiVo? or perhaps something else entirely)
In any case, nobody can force Linux to de-splinter - I doubt few of the existing users would like it anyway. And since Linux isn't a single commercial entity, it isn't going anywhere unless the existing users/developers decide to stop working on improving it.
That particular card has a very large limit, so I'm a bit reluctant to cancel it for another one:-/ I've mulled over small claims court, if only to document and expose Yahoo's incompetence, but that's an awful lot of work for the $9.95 charge per month. Fortunately, this month my credit card company is sending a more forceful letter to Yahoo this time around, so I'm more hopeful something will actually get done.
Interestingly, the reason I decided to try Yahoo's service was because I thought that a larger company might give better support in case something went wrong. Yet the service I'm using now and the binary newsfeed I pay for are both small companies that have great support. So, I guess if my little tale of woe has a moral, it is that one is often just as good, or better, sticking with small companies (that have no choice but to be accountable) to provide services than with larger ones (like Yahoo).
I've spent the last five months trying to cancel Yahoo's premium service, but they still keep charging me their fee every single month. You can't send a message to their online help system without some sort of Yahoo account (which I no longer have) and the only phone number is long distance (and typically with a 1+ hour wait on hold). Disputing the charges with my credit card company every month is getting more than a little tedious, also.
In short, don't buy any sort of Yahoo premium service. There are plenty of great services out there with better tech support; I recommend using one of those instead.
I hope you were joking. Not only are you wrong, it's also way simpler than that.
For Unix-heads, X11's client-server terminology is simple to understand (e.g. lots of different screens aren't connecting to a single xterm, but lots of xterms might connect to my screen - so my screen is naturally a sort of server). However, in Windows land, ordinary users are conditioned to think that their machine and everything on it is always the client and never the server; servers are magic things run in ivory towers that require expen$ive licenses to operate. Therefore, the notion that a screen might be providing services is a novel concept that takes awhile for them to wrap their brains around. Heck, even the trivial serving done by P2P programs is somewhat novel to the average Joe Windows user, so it's not surprising that X11's technology terminology might seem foreign to those unused to it.
Not for blackjack. Blackjack is a balance between skill and chance, just like Tetris (which MAME currently emulates). A player who know what he doing can beat the dealer pretty reliably in four-deck blackjack.
The beat-ability of a title isn't entirely relevent, however. Gambling titles (defined as those games that payout money) aren't going to wind up in actual arcades. And since MAME only emulates arcade games, gambling titles will have to settle for their own MGME or some such emulator. Anyone is free to write one, but don't expect it in MAME.
AAC doesn't have the open source buzzword compliance.
Is the AAC spec patent-free? And if not, why should I bother encoding my purchased music to a format that I don't have control over? Especially since Fraunhofer seems hell-bent on making it fully "Digital Restrictions Management" compliant, according to this press release.
Timothy and his fan club aside, does anyone actually USE ogg?
Yes. Every day. I've got over five hundred of them and won't be going back to mp3s for encoding, ever.
Re:Why Bother
on
LCD Round-up
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Obviously LCD still hasn't bettered CRT so keep you old monitor and spend the dosh on something else instead.
If you want to stare at text all day long, you'll need a CRT with a fast refresh rate to approach LCD's "no refresh" approach, so in that respect LCDs are far superior. But, if you want to play action games, you'll need an LCD with a fast update to approach a CRTs refresh rate. On the other hand, if you have too much desk space and need to put more watts through your UPS, CRTs are superior in that respect also. But, LCDs still don't have the brightness of a CRT.
In short, LCD and CRT tech are different and the value of each will depend on just what the user is looking for in a monitor.
This is simply 5.1 channel music. It sounds better.
Fortunately, ogg vorbis already supports multiple channels. So, I can still get the benefit of them without the hassle of juggling physical discs - assuming the music I want to hear can be converted accordingly (and if I can't oggify it, I'm not gonna bother)
You know, it's vocal, endorsed and promoted projects like this that give the OSS and free software community a bad name. YOU might view it as tinkering or whatever but the general populace views it as "pissing in the pool" so to speak.
Judging from the X-Box's market share (or lack thereof), the general populace cares about as much about the X-Box as they do about Linux (which isn't a whole lot).
And even though the number of people using X-Boxes as cheap PCs is small, Microsoft certainly appreciates not having those consoles as unsold inventory (which would cost them even more).
If files from ftp.sendmail.org get infected, then people could probably get a bogus key as well.
This difference, though, is that one can download a public GPG key from a site (like sendmail.org or something) and continue using it to verify software over several versions. So, for example, you could use a 2002 public GPG key to verify software in 2004 and be reasonably sure the key hasn't been tampered with for two years straight without someone noticing. With an md5sum, the checksum is only good for that version of the software and can forged much easier in the short term.
That said, I think md5sums are better for ensuring integrity, GPGs are better for ensuring security and both should be as automated as possible (like with the help of RPM and friends).
That's great that all you college kids have the money to buy new computers, but for us in the real world, using computers *gasp* more than a year old *gasp*, serial & parallel and the PS2 ports work just fine. They're cheap, and they always work.
Serial, parallel and PS/2 ports are nice, as long as you don't have a lot of peripherals and plan on using the IBM-PC platform forever. Personally, I was glad to switch over all my crap to USB if only to avoid juggling four different types of connectors (if you count the joystick port) that all need to be hooked onto the back of the box rather than a nice accessible hub.
USB may not be a great standard. But it is a standard, it's here now, and it works on Linux.
A local video store here in Atlanta already has the original Japanese version (with subtitles) on VHS and DVD. If you really want to see this film, get the subtitled version. Disney's doing the dubbing and I know they're going to screw it up.
Except for the whole red tint debacle with the region 2 release. In any case, unlike other Ghibli flicks that are still stuck in region 2, this one should be region 1-bound sooner rather than later. And since it'll likely be bilingual (at least), it's probably best to wait for the region 1 version and hope for proper color correction.
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Linux (and Unix) have killer native applications for the server side like Apache and Oracle, and that's why it's been so successful there. When a killer application arrives for the Linux desktop that has no equal anywhere else, the users will follow. That's all there is to it.
Judging by the box office returns (or lack thereof) from "Treasure Planet", I'd say the bar has already been raised...
Mr. Miyazaki has a nice explanation. It's basically a story about keeping in touch with one's past, and it's nicely told IMHO.
The original series had 23 eps, the second series had 155 and the third had 50. So, that *should* be enough to run weekdays for some time before cycling around - depending on how much of it is dubbed.
I'm assuming you mean Cowboy Bebop, which never ran at 3pm on the Cartoon Network anywhere and never had "toothpicks" of any sort edited into it; the cast has always been shown smoking genuine cigarettes. Are you sure you're not thinking of Outlaw Star? That title has been shown during the day, and with significant cuts/edits for content.
The japanese economy is in a bad state, but not quite *that* bad. "Spirited Away" is 4700 yen at cdjapan.co.jp, which translates to about $38 US.
A thousand is actually quite an understatement. This blunder is the rough equivalent of "the Lion King" or "Fellowship of the Ring" shipping with a dreadful color imbalance. Lots of japanese fans are pissed, big-time.
Did you download the experimental xft version? The regular version doesn't have the smoothing code, so that one won't work.
It hasn't opened in 1000 theaters yet; it only has the potential to because that's how much Disney has budgeted for release - assuming there's an Oscar possibility. I'd pay to see it in a real theater, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Not likely. Computer venders aren't going to preinstall Linux in place of Microsoft simply because they don't see enough profit in it; not enough to risk Microsoft's ire, at any rate. Turning all distros into HighlanderLinux ("There can be only one!") isn't going to change that, realistically.
If the desktop is going to be changed from an all-Windows platform, Linux isn't going to accomplish it by trying to out-Windows Windows; it'll have to try and change the desktop instead (integration, ala TiVo? or perhaps something else entirely)
In any case, nobody can force Linux to de-splinter - I doubt few of the existing users would like it anyway. And since Linux isn't a single commercial entity, it isn't going anywhere unless the existing users/developers decide to stop working on improving it.
Interestingly, the reason I decided to try Yahoo's service was because I thought that a larger company might give better support in case something went wrong. Yet the service I'm using now and the binary newsfeed I pay for are both small companies that have great support. So, I guess if my little tale of woe has a moral, it is that one is often just as good, or better, sticking with small companies (that have no choice but to be accountable) to provide services than with larger ones (like Yahoo).
The very first DS9 episode had Borg (and Picard), but that's it.
In short, don't buy any sort of Yahoo premium service. There are plenty of great services out there with better tech support; I recommend using one of those instead.
For Unix-heads, X11's client-server terminology is simple to understand (e.g. lots of different screens aren't connecting to a single xterm, but lots of xterms might connect to my screen - so my screen is naturally a sort of server). However, in Windows land, ordinary users are conditioned to think that their machine and everything on it is always the client and never the server; servers are magic things run in ivory towers that require expen$ive licenses to operate. Therefore, the notion that a screen might be providing services is a novel concept that takes awhile for them to wrap their brains around. Heck, even the trivial serving done by P2P programs is somewhat novel to the average Joe Windows user, so it's not surprising that X11's technology terminology might seem foreign to those unused to it.
The beat-ability of a title isn't entirely relevent, however. Gambling titles (defined as those games that payout money) aren't going to wind up in actual arcades. And since MAME only emulates arcade games, gambling titles will have to settle for their own MGME or some such emulator. Anyone is free to write one, but don't expect it in MAME.
Is the AAC spec patent-free? And if not, why should I bother encoding my purchased music to a format that I don't have control over? Especially since Fraunhofer seems hell-bent on making it fully "Digital Restrictions Management" compliant, according to this press release.
I'll stick with an open format, personally.
Yes. Every day. I've got over five hundred of them and won't be going back to mp3s for encoding, ever.
If you want to stare at text all day long, you'll need a CRT with a fast refresh rate to approach LCD's "no refresh" approach, so in that respect LCDs are far superior. But, if you want to play action games, you'll need an LCD with a fast update to approach a CRTs refresh rate. On the other hand, if you have too much desk space and need to put more watts through your UPS, CRTs are superior in that respect also. But, LCDs still don't have the brightness of a CRT.
In short, LCD and CRT tech are different and the value of each will depend on just what the user is looking for in a monitor.
Fortunately, ogg vorbis already supports multiple channels. So, I can still get the benefit of them without the hassle of juggling physical discs - assuming the music I want to hear can be converted accordingly (and if I can't oggify it, I'm not gonna bother)
Judging from the X-Box's market share (or lack thereof), the general populace cares about as much about the X-Box as they do about Linux (which isn't a whole lot).
And even though the number of people using X-Boxes as cheap PCs is small, Microsoft certainly appreciates not having those consoles as unsold inventory (which would cost them even more).
This difference, though, is that one can download a public GPG key from a site (like sendmail.org or something) and continue using it to verify software over several versions. So, for example, you could use a 2002 public GPG key to verify software in 2004 and be reasonably sure the key hasn't been tampered with for two years straight without someone noticing. With an md5sum, the checksum is only good for that version of the software and can forged much easier in the short term.
That said, I think md5sums are better for ensuring integrity, GPGs are better for ensuring security and both should be as automated as possible (like with the help of RPM and friends).
Why not just download an RPM containing the mp3 plugin? Sheesh. I'm more annoyed that xlockmore was removed, but one can't have everything.
Serial, parallel and PS/2 ports are nice, as long as you don't have a lot of peripherals and plan on using the IBM-PC platform forever. Personally, I was glad to switch over all my crap to USB if only to avoid juggling four different types of connectors (if you count the joystick port) that all need to be hooked onto the back of the box rather than a nice accessible hub.
USB may not be a great standard. But it is a standard, it's here now, and it works on Linux.
Except for the whole red tint debacle with the region 2 release. In any case, unlike other Ghibli flicks that are still stuck in region 2, this one should be region 1-bound sooner rather than later. And since it'll likely be bilingual (at least), it's probably best to wait for the region 1 version and hope for proper color correction.