Not trying to flame here, but here's my experience in Win98, haven't got my Linux build yet because I just happened to d/l 0.8 for windows earlier because I needed to view a page with PNG's on it and IE doesn't support them.
It's still got so many bugs. The text entry widget is broken. It kills Windows dead (real hard, I know). Changing the skin kills the menus (File and Edit works, everything after View doesn't). It crashed getting my POP email. On and on and on.
I haven't used it for mail, putty and pine do that good enough, but I'm entering this comment with it right now. Also, the first thing I did after firing it up was change to the "Modern" theme. So far no crashes, and I'm not losing windows resources every time I close a window like I do with IE. (For those of you who aren't familiar with windows resource problems, do a quick search on google) I know it's something to do with my graphics card driver, but for whatever reason IE leaks like a sieve and nothing else does, including mozilla.
As far as UI issues, I haven't seen any yet.
I've only had Mozilla going for a few hours now, but it renders fast and does pretty much what I want. I've run older versions of mozilla on my Linux box at work,.7 I think, and it worked fine for me as well. Maybe I'm not stress testing enough, but since I write web pages all freakin' day I would think I do.
I've also used the Mozilla rendering engine in a few other gtk apps, most notably galeon and some other interface that escapes my mind right now, but I noticed they had rendering problems such as ignoring text box sizes and such. Why would this happen, it's the same engine and mozilla...? Anyone else seen this problem?
I had given up on Opera about 3 or 4 months ago after seeing them release a "free" version for windows but that Linux still had a 4.0Beta release, which was the "non-free" release. I just checked again before sticking my foot in my mouth about them not supporting Linux, and good thing to because it seems they now have a Linux port of version 5.
It should be noted that the way opera stays "free" is by putting banner ads in the browser itself, much like Eudora started doing and several other newer online only applications. There is the option to purchase an ad-free version I believe.
What I'm wondering though, is, does anyone think this will work? We tried it on the web and everyone realised that you don't get out of the red with banner ads, but is it going to make a difference when they are embedded in the app with the option to purchase ad-free software? I like opera, I think it's fast and I especially like the idea of using MDI instead of new top-level windows for every page, but I don't think the ad thing is going to make any significant difference in revenue for them.
After browsing for several minutes (eternity is/. time) I have found almost zero information about it. Just "When you see it, you'll want it" crap. It appears, from what I can scrape together, that there must be some spider that populates a database and you run querys against it. Does this sound familiar? If you've ever been on the internet it better. It doesn't seem to be any more than a personal search engine, after all I can't believe that you'd just type in something and it'd magically pull up websites you didn't already tell it to search, either directly or inderectly through links.
What this reminds me of is those wolf programs from a couple of years back. They made FTPWolf, WebWolf, MP3Wolf, WarezWolf and some others. They were just little client spiders that scoured webpages for keywords and followed links. They started with search engines and followed the results to other pages and followed those pages, and on and on. Nothing that hasn't been done before.
The part that would make it useful, and which they claim to do, is comparative searches. i.e. Show me all the latest P4 prices by vendor, or what's the difference between these 3 drills. They mention on the products page that anyone familiar with perl and HTML can use it in no time. I would think anyone familiar with perl and the LWP or Net::FTP modules could create this system in no time. They say there are some wizards, but when have wizards been able to really do what a user wants?
I think IPv6 is a good solution to the addressing problem, but I don't see it making NAT go away. For example, at my work we chose NAT because we can lease 1 IP and configure the router for any special ports to redirect them internally. Sure it's harder, but the cost of 1 IP as opposed to buying a whole c-net is VERY cost effective, and people aren't supposed to be doing napster, irc, or anything out of the ordinary anyway so it's also a cheap way to weed out 90% of the problem protocols without any enforcement.
For that same reason, even if IPv6 came out and my ISP provided it, I probably wouldn't buy more than 1 IP anyway unless they were really cheap. My area is known for the high-speed connectivity, so I pay $60/mo for 384/128k DSL service, high by most standards. I'd still only lease the one IP and use NAT because it's cheaper, and again, I don't have to do security checks on all my home computers, just the NAT router. It can be an inconvenience at times, but my friends redir and ipchains fix most of that for the cost of a little work, and usually I learn something in the process.
Anyway, I see NAT as a solution for many people who don't need the capability that "real" IP's provide, mostly in the small business arena, where price ultimately determines what you do.
I agree, TV cards are great. I have a Haupauge WinTV, which is Bt848 compatible. I got it because it's cheap so it's not top of the line, only $50 at the local Office Depot. Anyway, recently I've found my self not watching my real TV at all any more because I have the monitor (extra video out) on my receiver piped in to my PC so I can watch TV, DVD's, video tapes, anything on my PC and still enjoy the Digital surround sound or whatever. Yeah, I live alone in a small apartment.:)
What put the final nail in the coffin for my TV though is when I figured out that I could make the TV window smaller, stick it in the corner, set the always on top and sticky bits for the window, and I'd have a little TV hovering in the corner of my screen. The cool part was I could work and if something on TV interested me, I never had to look away from my monitor. It's much less distracting to move your eyes a few inches rather than turn your head. Granted, a 3 inch window doesn't compare to a 32 inch TV, but the benefits are great when you're just casually watching TV or something while doing stuff on the computer.
This seems to be a cool project, but I see many people booing it because they can't:
for FILE in data0??0*.da? ; do sed 's/something/else/' $FILE > $FILE.done ; done
Sure, I like the shell. Yeah, you'll never make a GUI file manager as powerful as the CLI. BUT if we ever want to see Linux (or any *nix) on the desktop of NORMAL users, there needs to be something easier. It's pretty much already been proven that point and click is easier for most people to grasp than shell pipe streams. If we want to see our favorite OS, or any non-MS OS become common place, things like file management must be made easy for the user, not cryptic. This is the same reason why office suites, email clients, and any other GUI app is good. General users just want the computer to do what it does with little hassle, they're generally not looking for that killer CLI. They just want it to work.
The other thing here that is important is choice. Just because it's not your ideal file manager doesn't mean it isn't someone else's. I'd recommend emacs for serious text editing, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to a newbie, I'd probably recommend pico. Or if they have figured out how to get X working gnotepad. But is it bad to have all these editors? No. It gives me a choice to have an extensible programmable editor and people without the need to have an easy to use intuitive editor. Try to tell someone that C-x C-c is more intuitive then clicking 'File -> Exit'.
Most novice users are still figuring out what files are, let alone trying to remember a plethora of commands to attempt to manipulate them. Projects like this are necessary for any "fringe" OS to become commonplace on the desktop.
This is definately a good thing as maybe it will get those demo coders off their butts, maybe, just maybe, Future Crew will make a re-appearance.:)
Add kidding aside, this is a good thing, however you look at it. First off, it lets all us geeks play around with the PS2 without getting out a custom burner and forking over thousands of $$. If someone figures out how to pull the programs off the cards, I could easily see some people learning some nifty peeks and pokes to make the PS2 do some tricks and it could build a community.
Which get's me off to the other good thing. Allowing something to be modified by end users has always proven to be good, just look at the popularity of mods among the FPS's out there. I don't know how you would input code on this, but if it's easy then someone's gonna get bored and come up with some cool stuff. And if they've found an easy way to create code on the PS2, then maybe mod development would extend to the consoles. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to reprogram those street fighter characters or the snipers in syphon filter?
Game programmers are learning that scripting brings about easier content creation, leaving more for the artists requiring less programmer intervention, making better games in less time, and with some of the more creative mods, things that the developers probably never dreamed of, and since the power gamers eat this stuff up, it forms more of a gaming community and can only help to push the creativity of gaming further. I just hope other companies see this, and hopefully implement something similar for their games.
Every time a patent story comes up, some smartass posts a "I patent this!" comment, so here's mine:
I'm gonna patent the idea of creating comments on
slashdot relating to "me too!" style patents. These may also be known as "+4 Funny" or "-1 Troll".
Now to just get rid of any previous art on slashdot... I hear that QAZ trojan works pretty good... I just have to convince this so called CmdrTaco fellow to use windows instead of this "Linux" thing...
I wish my local LUG would get to the point of needing a speaker, that would at least mean there was worth-while interest in it. However, we've seemed to have a problem getting people to come and stay involved. Heck, it's probably been 6 mo. since we've had a meeting. First, realize that I am not in a Seattle or anything, there are bout 10,000 people where I live, so it's not really tiny either. What I would like to know is:
How do you get people interested in coming? We even had a booth at our local fair for the last 2 years, but interest never comes around. There is even a MajoDomo list running for the LUG, but the only thing ever posted is stuff like "Hey I signed this thing at the fair, what is this and how do I get off this list?"
One big problem we've had is the people trying to run things. They always seem too busy, and I would love to take over and start meetings, but where do you find a place to meet, and who do you ask? Like what would be a good starting point?
Another problem we'ver suffered from, in the area of lack of interest, is that the people we do get together are either newbies who've never even seen Linux or people who use it daily. It's very hard to find common ground, and to find topics that are interesting to everyone to talk about. And I would also like to do projects within the LUG, but ideas are something we have trouble with mostly because of a large lack of funding. With so few people, and especially so few dedicated, even purchasing web space or anything becomes the weight on only one or two peoples shoulders, there's no projects that spark any interest in the group as a whole to make us just that, a group.
A month ago I was visiting a nearby city, even smaller than my city, but they have a large mall, so I drove the 1.5 hrs to get there. When I got there I was pretty amazed to see that they had a LUG and it met every week! I'm almost to the point of just packing up and going down there every week or two to sit in with their LUG. Is this a normal thing? How far do others go to be with their LUG?
Please don't think this is a troll, and I don't even care if it gets mod'd down. What I would appreciate is some replys to this comment about others' expierences with their LUGs, what they do to be a community, and suggestions on how I might be able to make my LUG better.
on lower end systems like an Intel Celeron 700 and a AMD Duron 700.
Lower end machine.... I dunno, I run a PII 400 and it's speedy enough for me and emacs. But then again I don't play the latest whiz-bang games.
I do believe, though, that the graphics card can make a huge difference, if the game was written to take advantage of it, and with DirectX doing that for developers on Win32 now, that's pretty much a given. It reminds me of when I went over to see a friend playing jedi knight, on a 486 at 640x480 and it ran almost flawlessly. He had a nice 3d card though, and it showed. I had a P233 at the time and I tried to run it and it struggled in good old mode X (for those that don't remember mode X, that's 320x240x256). Now the jump from 486 to P-anything is huge, but it was the graphics card holding me back.
Please don't ask why he had a 486 and a 3d card though.;-)
I don't know if it's true, but it says on his profile that he gave the account away, though it's as active as ever. I would be interested to know if this is actually true, and if so, why give away the account, why not just have his "friend" create a new one?
Maybe this should be a story on/., after all it goes back a long ways, and it's news for nerds (/. nerds), cause no one else cares.:)
1) There is no reason for a console company to open source their SDK. After all, it's been pointed out way too many times that they simply don't make any money off the console itself, as in hardware, and sometimes even take a loss. Sure, Sony makes some games, but their real money comes from licensing the SDK and putting their <patented>Stamp of Approval</patented> on the games. It's not the consumers (directly anyways) that they make the real money from, it's the Squaresofts, Capcoms, and Konamis. By open sourcing the SDK, they would risk the potential of having another SDK or even modified SDK released, and that could be trouble even if they drag the people through court.
2) Games don't translate well (usually) from console to PC or the other way around. Sure, you could play Diablo 2 on a console, but the die hard gamers play it on PC. Why? Because that little controller doesn't do the game justice, I mean, how are you going to use any hotkeys? I'd imagine it's tuff to get far without being able to 1-9 hotkey those potions of health and mana. And on the other side of the fence, people on consoles get games because they aren't generally as complex, key wise, and it's just "Pop it in and play" and when you're pissed at that wyvern on level 7 for killing you for the hundreth time you just shut it off. There are some really involved console games, but the majority are fast action button crunching fun! Not learn 500 key combinations so that you can do that jump-spin-switch to railgun in midair-frag all while grabbing that extra health pak and landing on a moving platform-press hotkey for taunt and laugh at your oppenent move. They are different platforms for entertainment.
I read the quote and couldn't believe it, and yes, they actually say this:
Holden added that only if people are using their computers to store sensitive information will extra security software be necessary.
Now really, who doesn't store sensitive info on their computers? Really? I used to collect movie clips off scour when they had a web interface, and using trusty smbclient I'd search a number of peoples hard drives. And what's even more scary is at least 80% had anonymous un-password protected WRITE access! I left quite a few notes to people on their desktop.
But about secure information, most people want their computer to do useful things, and one large area of the useful-thing pie is finance management. Lots of people use quicken, and can't even recount the number of people I found who had quicken backups all over their drive, and what about people who use excel? C'mon, almost everyone has sensitive information on their computer, even if it's just a little address book.
I have DSL here and use NAT on my linux box to share the connection. I get at least 10 portscans a day, according to good old portsentry. I also run samba on that machine, and get lots of strange machine names in the log files of people trying to snoop. It's ridiculous to say that people are over-paranoid, most people really believe that hackers are just some movie fantasy and not a real threat.
I don't believe, however, that the answer is firewalls. They are annoying. They break lots of things, and I'm sure would increase the amount of tech support 10 fold if they employ any kind of sweeping policy. What really needs to happen is education. To help people know where the real dangers are, and what's imaginary. People learn about safe living, safe sex, and safe everything else, they also need to be taught safe computing. Sure, it sounds retarded, but IMHO, it's the only thing that will help. Awareness and education can stop lots of problems.
I have to agree with this, it's almost right on the button. Here is the problem that I see:
Many programmers are rushed to market. This contributes to the so called IT shortage. It's not a shortage of IT workers, but a shortage of competent workers.
This brings along shoddy code and short sighted goals, many people program but do not understand many of the important underlying aspects of good code, like re-usability, de-coupling, and most importantly, and the point of this entire rant, separating content from code.
I'm sure this causes lots of headache for people who create pages for Netscape, IE, Palm, etc. The problem is, many people approach this from the "Well, I'll make a version of each page for every browser" point of view. Of course, this isn't how the big boys do it, usually, and if people understood why then it wouldn't be a problem.
If content providers understood this better, and perhaps coded in a way that the content was actually separated from the viewer, then they could provide their content in any way they need, from the web, to mail, to printed flyers, to anything really. The gloss really has little to do with the information, unless of course you are advertising your new high quality printers.:)
Seems like this is just filling a hole for people who don't know any better.
Secondly, the boneheaded experiment you described is the most contrived piece of garbage I have ever heard of. Children imitate/mimic what they see around them, after all that's how they learn to talk. If you show children images of other children performing actions, it is extremely likely that they will imitate this behavior. The fact that they mimic the behavior of the children in the movie only shows that they are healthy and observant kids. To leap from the results of that experiment to then claim that RPGs cause violence is not only unreasonable but extremely illogical.
So, you're saying children will do as they see, or imitate. Wouldn't that also mean that if they saw violence, whether it's TV, on the streets, or in a semi-realistic video game, that they would imitate this? And wouldn't that mean that 'violence begats voilence'?
I'm not saying violent games or TV cause kids to become murderers. I AM saying however that I believe it contributes. Many households use the TV as a replacement for time spent with parents, and therefore expose their children to things that the parents may not yet have addressed as being morally or even legally right or wrong.
Just look a simple example of de-sensitization. Far back in history, women in america (european america) were not allowed to show very much skin. Now you can see scantily clad women in what would generally be considered thread with some nipple warmers. Obviously that would not have been acceptable then, but it is now because as a society we are bombarded with sexual images all the time and therefore are desensitized to it, so now as a whole it is morally accepted.
Stop!! Don't but them!! Everyone KNOWS that corps are in bed with the feds, they're just using Casio to make these uber-leet watches so they can actually <pun>Watch</pun> our every move!! And you were afraid of carnivore!</conspiracy>
Anyway, I have to admit that's pretty damn cool. I wonder what kind of quality it gets and how much you can store in it, I mean, it obviously can't use floppies and I'd think flash sticks would be out of the question too. Says on the site you transfer stuff off with IR only, too bad since I've personally never seen a PC with IR, only laptops. Still, it doesn't look cheap ( as in cheezy ) and I'll drool over it. It's about that time again, so I think I'll put this on my Geex X-Mas List.:)
BTW, casio, if you're listening, I'll peer review it for you if you want the conspiracy theories squashed. Hehe.
I see you're point. I have to admit, I frequently forget about those damn mass consumers and the general public.
I mean, really, if it weren't for them, we'd have all the cryptic command lines, zillions of virtual desktops, and enough config files to shake a stick at. Then maybe I'd be happy.
Personally I enjoy the challenge of setting up a new app, usually lots of neat new stuff to learn. Then I can rip it apart, find the problems, and fix it blind-folded. But alas, the average Joe has no interest in this. They only want it to work.
Now really, that's no fun! Think if linux 'just worked' the first time. I probably would have passed. That's also probably why I strive to get my FVWM working with Gnome and run slackware all the while throwing in KDE apps for this and that, because, after all I enjoy burning bandwidth, downloading tarballs, and trying to figure out just how the hell they're trying to get this thing to do what I want just so I can rummage around the source and inevitably break it.
And of course, the majority of the mass consumers would disagree with me here. Maybe that's why they aren't running Linux on the desktop just yet.;-)
This was actually what I was getting at before I started off. Heh. Here's me being a lamer and quoting myself:
But I guess here's where some of the beauty of open source come in. Browsers like galeon can just take gecko and repackage to make my dream browser, fast, small, and feature free. If you haven't seen in it action yet, go here.
I'd personally prefer less, to 'Mo'. While they've spent years making this, and it is a great program, I would rather have a BROWSER. Not a Browser/Mail/IM/Skinnable/Everything you want but the fabled sink. The only thing missing is a kernel. Joking, but on a serious side, why be a jack of all trades yet master at none? And on top of that, you need a "big honkin' machine" to run it!
If I wanted to do everything from one program, I'd just use emacs. But I like smaller programs that do their job well, back to the old unix philosophy of the toolchest of flixible tools.
For example, I still use pine to read mail. Why? Because I like it. It's fast, uses little resources, and I can use it through telnet or ssh. Now, I don't need a mail client, but if I use Mozilla there will be one there waiting for me, regardless of whether I want it or not. And I don't.
There are already many programs that do what the components of Mozilla do, from good ol pine for mail, to jaim for integrated instant messaging, to vi for HTML editing, and any of hundreds of other apps at friendly freshmeat.net.
But I guess here's where some of the beauty of open source come in. Browsers like galeon can just take gecko and repackage to make my dream browser, fast, small, and feature free. If you haven't seen in it action yet, go here.
When I do have days that I feel like running a monolithic program to browse, mail, and chat, I'll stick to xemacs. At least then I can still hack code.:)
This post is WAY too late, but hell, here's my humorous 2c.
I can't wait until they start bundling Windows with mice. Because, you know, someday, someone will use that mouse with a pirated copy of windows. And you can only use this copy of windows with this mouse.
Of course, the only next logical step would be to bundle Windows with money. Not MS money but real money. Because, you know, someone will use that money to buy a mouse for a naked PC where they will of course install a pirated copy of Windows. After all, money is the #1 source of computer piracy, right?:)
Does that mean that there will be informative news.... OR will we be greeted with voyeur style 'house scientists' that are all competing to be the last voted out of the lab to win a Nobel prize? Now that's MUST SEE TV!
Well, the last time this story aired on/., I decided "Hey cool" and figured I'd try it. I have DSL now, and lots of bandwidth to burn. I especially like cool or funny video clips.
I figured the windows version would be a little more polished than the *nix version, so I started there. Now, I have about 4 computers on my home network that share the DSL using masq.
OK, first I intalled the software. Everything great so far. So I read the README. This is where it started to go bad. The instructions aren't very clear, they say to start the broker. I did. Nothing happened. Apperently it's supposed to start your browser and make you click an agreement. After wrestling with this for an hour, we proceed on to the next mountain.
OK, so I finally got it running. Well, lets look around, shall we? I check my "stash" to see what I start with and I see I got Mojo dumping out like no tommorrow! Well, after some reading I find out about firewalls the hard way, and that include NAT. So I find out the port and I open it up to my machine on my LAN. Then I change their settings. It seems to work, kinda, but even when I do nothing I have more mojo going out than coming in. And I opted to host *ALL* the services they let you, so I expected to be raking in mojo! Well, that leads us on to the next and final problem I found.
No content. Legal anyways. I did a search for "funny" and after contacting 34 other proxies it found nothing. Nada. Zippo. <insert clever word for nothing here>. BTW, if you look at the search list, it's almost 99% illegal material for most people. They allow ROM searches, MP3 searches, and even **SOFTWARE**. Now, really, who's gonna do that? 3li73 juWaReZ kiddies I bet you.
So my opinion? Not really there yet. I never did figure out why I was using more mojo than I was making, even when doing NOTHING at all, not even searching. Never found anything I wanted to download either. So, I tried to uninstall.... That didn't work to smooth either. In the end I deleted some files by hand. Not a very good experience, but YMMV.
OK, the point has been missed. As expected. I'm replying to this thread because I believe it may come closest to my point.
You're right, porting ANY multi user evironment to anything as powerful as a 386 is probably useless. Cool, but useless. Now consider this, a PDA is usually less powerful than a 386. Linux has lots of stuff in it that make it cool, however they are major overkill for a PDA. I'm not saying parts are not usable, but again, why adapt something to do what it wasn't meant to do except for the thrill value?
The other part is, when does your PDA essentially become a laptop? General PDA's have some primary features. They are usually (and I use this loosely) small, minimal features, and consume little power. Laptops, in contrast, are bigger, try to cram as many desktop features in to them as possible, and while less than their desktop counterparts, consume LOTS more power than any PDA.
So I'm not saying I don't want to run Linux on a portable computer, I do that on my laptop, but not on a PDA. Eventually the distinguishing features will fade, but the point is the tech isn't here now. And the tech that brings this to us isn't likely to be based on the processer in these PDAs. All I'm saying is I think there is a bit of overkill here, featurewise. I'm not against an open source solution, however this one is pretty futile. Kudos for the coolness factor though.
I can't help but think of the oh so famous quote that "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." The reason I like my shell is because I have many special tools that each do their job well and don't try to be a jack of all trades. I have also heard many other people voice the same opinion. Now here's the stinger..
Why does Linux have to run on *everything*?
I know this will just be marked -1 troll, but really folks, we complain about Billy G making windows into things it was never meant to be, yet here we have people trying to cram a linux kernel in to a PDA. Now I have to ask why.
Sure, it's cool. But that's it. No PDA to date has had a CLI, nor do I believe one would be benificial. In the case of a PDA, pointing and clicking is many times faster than *ANY* kind of text input developed so far.
1) Now, let's look at Linux. No graphical interface, natively anyway. To get the GUI, you need an extra layer of programming. Now, look at the Palm. GUI through and though, no extra layer.
2) This is a good thing. Why? Because PDA's are obviously *NOT* desktop machine, or servers! They have a very limited capacity by todays standards. Every extra layer on something that small means more CPU, more memory, and more waiting.
3) Which gets me to my point. I love linux, I run it at home, at work, and everywhere I can reasonably in between. I like it to develop code. I don't use it because it's user friendly, I don't use it because it's got all the killer games. I use it to be productive, mainly on a CLI. Now take away that CLI. What do you have? Well, you have Mac, Windows, BeOS, whatever pretty WM you can run to emulate any of the above or do about anything you want. But consider this, wouldn't a kernel that natively used graphics fair a bit better?
Now like I said, mod me down all you want, I use Linux, I love Linux, and it's a great alternative to any other OS. But I have to say, I think the Linux crowd here has gotten out the hammer and decided this problem looks like a nail. I think maybe it looks more like a push pin.
Slashdot Mirror
For reference here's my build info:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; 0.8) Gecko/20010215
I haven't used it for mail, putty and pine do that good enough, but I'm entering this comment with it right now. Also, the first thing I did after firing it up was change to the "Modern" theme. So far no crashes, and I'm not losing windows resources every time I close a window like I do with IE. (For those of you who aren't familiar with windows resource problems, do a quick search on google) I know it's something to do with my graphics card driver, but for whatever reason IE leaks like a sieve and nothing else does, including mozilla. As far as UI issues, I haven't seen any yet.
I've only had Mozilla going for a few hours now, but it renders fast and does pretty much what I want. I've run older versions of mozilla on my Linux box at work, .7 I think, and it worked fine for me as well. Maybe I'm not stress testing enough, but since I write web pages all freakin' day I would think I do.
I've also used the Mozilla rendering engine in a few other gtk apps, most notably galeon and some other interface that escapes my mind right now, but I noticed they had rendering problems such as ignoring text box sizes and such. Why would this happen, it's the same engine and mozilla...? Anyone else seen this problem?
It should be noted that the way opera stays "free" is by putting banner ads in the browser itself, much like Eudora started doing and several other newer online only applications. There is the option to purchase an ad-free version I believe.
What I'm wondering though, is, does anyone think this will work? We tried it on the web and everyone realised that you don't get out of the red with banner ads, but is it going to make a difference when they are embedded in the app with the option to purchase ad-free software? I like opera, I think it's fast and I especially like the idea of using MDI instead of new top-level windows for every page, but I don't think the ad thing is going to make any significant difference in revenue for them.
Thoughts?
What this reminds me of is those wolf programs from a couple of years back. They made FTPWolf, WebWolf, MP3Wolf, WarezWolf and some others. They were just little client spiders that scoured webpages for keywords and followed links. They started with search engines and followed the results to other pages and followed those pages, and on and on. Nothing that hasn't been done before.
The part that would make it useful, and which they claim to do, is comparative searches. i.e. Show me all the latest P4 prices by vendor, or what's the difference between these 3 drills. They mention on the products page that anyone familiar with perl and HTML can use it in no time. I would think anyone familiar with perl and the LWP or Net::FTP modules could create this system in no time. They say there are some wizards, but when have wizards been able to really do what a user wants?
For that same reason, even if IPv6 came out and my ISP provided it, I probably wouldn't buy more than 1 IP anyway unless they were really cheap. My area is known for the high-speed connectivity, so I pay $60/mo for 384/128k DSL service, high by most standards. I'd still only lease the one IP and use NAT because it's cheaper, and again, I don't have to do security checks on all my home computers, just the NAT router. It can be an inconvenience at times, but my friends redir and ipchains fix most of that for the cost of a little work, and usually I learn something in the process.
Anyway, I see NAT as a solution for many people who don't need the capability that "real" IP's provide, mostly in the small business arena, where price ultimately determines what you do.
What put the final nail in the coffin for my TV though is when I figured out that I could make the TV window smaller, stick it in the corner, set the always on top and sticky bits for the window, and I'd have a little TV hovering in the corner of my screen. The cool part was I could work and if something on TV interested me, I never had to look away from my monitor. It's much less distracting to move your eyes a few inches rather than turn your head. Granted, a 3 inch window doesn't compare to a 32 inch TV, but the benefits are great when you're just casually watching TV or something while doing stuff on the computer.
for FILE in data0??0*.da? ; do sed 's/something/else/' $FILE > $FILE.done ; done
Sure, I like the shell. Yeah, you'll never make a GUI file manager as powerful as the CLI. BUT if we ever want to see Linux (or any *nix) on the desktop of NORMAL users, there needs to be something easier. It's pretty much already been proven that point and click is easier for most people to grasp than shell pipe streams. If we want to see our favorite OS, or any non-MS OS become common place, things like file management must be made easy for the user, not cryptic. This is the same reason why office suites, email clients, and any other GUI app is good. General users just want the computer to do what it does with little hassle, they're generally not looking for that killer CLI. They just want it to work.
The other thing here that is important is choice. Just because it's not your ideal file manager doesn't mean it isn't someone else's. I'd recommend emacs for serious text editing, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to a newbie, I'd probably recommend pico. Or if they have figured out how to get X working gnotepad. But is it bad to have all these editors? No. It gives me a choice to have an extensible programmable editor and people without the need to have an easy to use intuitive editor. Try to tell someone that C-x C-c is more intuitive then clicking 'File -> Exit'.
Most novice users are still figuring out what files are, let alone trying to remember a plethora of commands to attempt to manipulate them. Projects like this are necessary for any "fringe" OS to become commonplace on the desktop.
Add kidding aside, this is a good thing, however you look at it. First off, it lets all us geeks play around with the PS2 without getting out a custom burner and forking over thousands of $$. If someone figures out how to pull the programs off the cards, I could easily see some people learning some nifty peeks and pokes to make the PS2 do some tricks and it could build a community.
Which get's me off to the other good thing. Allowing something to be modified by end users has always proven to be good, just look at the popularity of mods among the FPS's out there. I don't know how you would input code on this, but if it's easy then someone's gonna get bored and come up with some cool stuff. And if they've found an easy way to create code on the PS2, then maybe mod development would extend to the consoles. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to reprogram those street fighter characters or the snipers in syphon filter?
Game programmers are learning that scripting brings about easier content creation, leaving more for the artists requiring less programmer intervention, making better games in less time, and with some of the more creative mods, things that the developers probably never dreamed of, and since the power gamers eat this stuff up, it forms more of a gaming community and can only help to push the creativity of gaming further. I just hope other companies see this, and hopefully implement something similar for their games.
I do recommend reading the article though if you are not a die hard well versed chess watcher, it has some interesting history about the players.
How do you get people interested in coming? We even had a booth at our local fair for the last 2 years, but interest never comes around. There is even a MajoDomo list running for the LUG, but the only thing ever posted is stuff like "Hey I signed this thing at the fair, what is this and how do I get off this list?"
One big problem we've had is the people trying to run things. They always seem too busy, and I would love to take over and start meetings, but where do you find a place to meet, and who do you ask? Like what would be a good starting point?
Another problem we'ver suffered from, in the area of lack of interest, is that the people we do get together are either newbies who've never even seen Linux or people who use it daily. It's very hard to find common ground, and to find topics that are interesting to everyone to talk about. And I would also like to do projects within the LUG, but ideas are something we have trouble with mostly because of a large lack of funding. With so few people, and especially so few dedicated, even purchasing web space or anything becomes the weight on only one or two peoples shoulders, there's no projects that spark any interest in the group as a whole to make us just that, a group.
A month ago I was visiting a nearby city, even smaller than my city, but they have a large mall, so I drove the 1.5 hrs to get there. When I got there I was pretty amazed to see that they had a LUG and it met every week! I'm almost to the point of just packing up and going down there every week or two to sit in with their LUG. Is this a normal thing? How far do others go to be with their LUG?
Please don't think this is a troll, and I don't even care if it gets mod'd down. What I would appreciate is some replys to this comment about others' expierences with their LUGs, what they do to be a community, and suggestions on how I might be able to make my LUG better.
I do believe, though, that the graphics card can make a huge difference, if the game was written to take advantage of it, and with DirectX doing that for developers on Win32 now, that's pretty much a given. It reminds me of when I went over to see a friend playing jedi knight, on a 486 at 640x480 and it ran almost flawlessly. He had a nice 3d card though, and it showed. I had a P233 at the time and I tried to run it and it struggled in good old mode X (for those that don't remember mode X, that's 320x240x256). Now the jump from 486 to P-anything is huge, but it was the graphics card holding me back.
Please don't ask why he had a 486 and a 3d card though. ;-)
Maybe this should be a story on /., after all it goes back a long ways, and it's news for nerds (/. nerds), cause no one else cares. :)
1) There is no reason for a console company to open source their SDK. After all, it's been pointed out way too many times that they simply don't make any money off the console itself, as in hardware, and sometimes even take a loss. Sure, Sony makes some games, but their real money comes from licensing the SDK and putting their <patented>Stamp of Approval</patented> on the games. It's not the consumers (directly anyways) that they make the real money from, it's the Squaresofts, Capcoms, and Konamis. By open sourcing the SDK, they would risk the potential of having another SDK or even modified SDK released, and that could be trouble even if they drag the people through court.
2) Games don't translate well (usually) from console to PC or the other way around. Sure, you could play Diablo 2 on a console, but the die hard gamers play it on PC. Why? Because that little controller doesn't do the game justice, I mean, how are you going to use any hotkeys? I'd imagine it's tuff to get far without being able to 1-9 hotkey those potions of health and mana. And on the other side of the fence, people on consoles get games because they aren't generally as complex, key wise, and it's just "Pop it in and play" and when you're pissed at that wyvern on level 7 for killing you for the hundreth time you just shut it off. There are some really involved console games, but the majority are fast action button crunching fun! Not learn 500 key combinations so that you can do that jump-spin-switch to railgun in midair-frag all while grabbing that extra health pak and landing on a moving platform-press hotkey for taunt and laugh at your oppenent move. They are different platforms for entertainment.
But about secure information, most people want their computer to do useful things, and one large area of the useful-thing pie is finance management. Lots of people use quicken, and can't even recount the number of people I found who had quicken backups all over their drive, and what about people who use excel? C'mon, almost everyone has sensitive information on their computer, even if it's just a little address book.
I have DSL here and use NAT on my linux box to share the connection. I get at least 10 portscans a day, according to good old portsentry. I also run samba on that machine, and get lots of strange machine names in the log files of people trying to snoop. It's ridiculous to say that people are over-paranoid, most people really believe that hackers are just some movie fantasy and not a real threat.
I don't believe, however, that the answer is firewalls. They are annoying. They break lots of things, and I'm sure would increase the amount of tech support 10 fold if they employ any kind of sweeping policy. What really needs to happen is education. To help people know where the real dangers are, and what's imaginary. People learn about safe living, safe sex, and safe everything else, they also need to be taught safe computing. Sure, it sounds retarded, but IMHO, it's the only thing that will help. Awareness and education can stop lots of problems.
Many programmers are rushed to market. This contributes to the so called IT shortage. It's not a shortage of IT workers, but a shortage of competent workers.
This brings along shoddy code and short sighted goals, many people program but do not understand many of the important underlying aspects of good code, like re-usability, de-coupling, and most importantly, and the point of this entire rant, separating content from code.
I'm sure this causes lots of headache for people who create pages for Netscape, IE, Palm, etc. The problem is, many people approach this from the "Well, I'll make a version of each page for every browser" point of view. Of course, this isn't how the big boys do it, usually, and if people understood why then it wouldn't be a problem.
If content providers understood this better, and perhaps coded in a way that the content was actually separated from the viewer, then they could provide their content in any way they need, from the web, to mail, to printed flyers, to anything really. The gloss really has little to do with the information, unless of course you are advertising your new high quality printers. :)
Seems like this is just filling a hole for people who don't know any better.
So, you're saying children will do as they see, or imitate. Wouldn't that also mean that if they saw violence, whether it's TV, on the streets, or in a semi-realistic video game, that they would imitate this? And wouldn't that mean that 'violence begats voilence'?
I'm not saying violent games or TV cause kids to become murderers. I AM saying however that I believe it contributes. Many households use the TV as a replacement for time spent with parents, and therefore expose their children to things that the parents may not yet have addressed as being morally or even legally right or wrong.
Just look a simple example of de-sensitization. Far back in history, women in america (european america) were not allowed to show very much skin. Now you can see scantily clad women in what would generally be considered thread with some nipple warmers. Obviously that would not have been acceptable then, but it is now because as a society we are bombarded with sexual images all the time and therefore are desensitized to it, so now as a whole it is morally accepted.
Anyway, I have to admit that's pretty damn cool. I wonder what kind of quality it gets and how much you can store in it, I mean, it obviously can't use floppies and I'd think flash sticks would be out of the question too. Says on the site you transfer stuff off with IR only, too bad since I've personally never seen a PC with IR, only laptops. Still, it doesn't look cheap ( as in cheezy ) and I'll drool over it. It's about that time again, so I think I'll put this on my Geex X-Mas List. :)
BTW, casio, if you're listening, I'll peer review it for you if you want the conspiracy theories squashed. Hehe.
I mean, really, if it weren't for them, we'd have all the cryptic command lines, zillions of virtual desktops, and enough config files to shake a stick at. Then maybe I'd be happy.
Personally I enjoy the challenge of setting up a new app, usually lots of neat new stuff to learn. Then I can rip it apart, find the problems, and fix it blind-folded. But alas, the average Joe has no interest in this. They only want it to work.
Now really, that's no fun! Think if linux 'just worked' the first time. I probably would have passed. That's also probably why I strive to get my FVWM working with Gnome and run slackware all the while throwing in KDE apps for this and that, because, after all I enjoy burning bandwidth, downloading tarballs, and trying to figure out just how the hell they're trying to get this thing to do what I want just so I can rummage around the source and inevitably break it.
And of course, the majority of the mass consumers would disagree with me here. Maybe that's why they aren't running Linux on the desktop just yet. ;-)
I'd personally prefer less, to 'Mo'. While they've spent years making this, and it is a great program, I would rather have a BROWSER. Not a Browser/Mail/IM/Skinnable/Everything you want but the fabled sink. The only thing missing is a kernel. Joking, but on a serious side, why be a jack of all trades yet master at none? And on top of that, you need a "big honkin' machine" to run it!
If I wanted to do everything from one program, I'd just use emacs. But I like smaller programs that do their job well, back to the old unix philosophy of the toolchest of flixible tools.
For example, I still use pine to read mail. Why? Because I like it. It's fast, uses little resources, and I can use it through telnet or ssh. Now, I don't need a mail client, but if I use Mozilla there will be one there waiting for me, regardless of whether I want it or not. And I don't.
There are already many programs that do what the components of Mozilla do, from good ol pine for mail, to jaim for integrated instant messaging, to vi for HTML editing, and any of hundreds of other apps at friendly freshmeat.net.
But I guess here's where some of the beauty of open source come in. Browsers like galeon can just take gecko and repackage to make my dream browser, fast, small, and feature free. If you haven't seen in it action yet, go here.
When I do have days that I feel like running a monolithic program to browse, mail, and chat, I'll stick to xemacs. At least then I can still hack code. :)
I can't wait until they start bundling Windows with mice. Because, you know, someday, someone will use that mouse with a pirated copy of windows. And you can only use this copy of windows with this mouse.
Of course, the only next logical step would be to bundle Windows with money. Not MS money but real money. Because, you know, someone will use that money to buy a mouse for a naked PC where they will of course install a pirated copy of Windows. After all, money is the #1 source of computer piracy, right? :)
Does that mean that there will be informative news.... OR will we be greeted with voyeur style 'house scientists' that are all competing to be the last voted out of the lab to win a Nobel prize? Now that's MUST SEE TV!
I figured the windows version would be a little more polished than the *nix version, so I started there. Now, I have about 4 computers on my home network that share the DSL using masq.
OK, first I intalled the software. Everything great so far. So I read the README. This is where it started to go bad. The instructions aren't very clear, they say to start the broker. I did. Nothing happened. Apperently it's supposed to start your browser and make you click an agreement. After wrestling with this for an hour, we proceed on to the next mountain.
OK, so I finally got it running. Well, lets look around, shall we? I check my "stash" to see what I start with and I see I got Mojo dumping out like no tommorrow! Well, after some reading I find out about firewalls the hard way, and that include NAT. So I find out the port and I open it up to my machine on my LAN. Then I change their settings. It seems to work, kinda, but even when I do nothing I have more mojo going out than coming in. And I opted to host *ALL* the services they let you, so I expected to be raking in mojo! Well, that leads us on to the next and final problem I found.
No content. Legal anyways. I did a search for "funny" and after contacting 34 other proxies it found nothing. Nada. Zippo. <insert clever word for nothing here>. BTW, if you look at the search list, it's almost 99% illegal material for most people. They allow ROM searches, MP3 searches, and even **SOFTWARE**. Now, really, who's gonna do that? 3li73 juWaReZ kiddies I bet you.
So my opinion? Not really there yet. I never did figure out why I was using more mojo than I was making, even when doing NOTHING at all, not even searching. Never found anything I wanted to download either. So, I tried to uninstall.... That didn't work to smooth either. In the end I deleted some files by hand. Not a very good experience, but YMMV.
You're right, porting ANY multi user evironment to anything as powerful as a 386 is probably useless. Cool, but useless. Now consider this, a PDA is usually less powerful than a 386. Linux has lots of stuff in it that make it cool, however they are major overkill for a PDA. I'm not saying parts are not usable, but again, why adapt something to do what it wasn't meant to do except for the thrill value?
The other part is, when does your PDA essentially become a laptop? General PDA's have some primary features. They are usually (and I use this loosely) small, minimal features, and consume little power. Laptops, in contrast, are bigger, try to cram as many desktop features in to them as possible, and while less than their desktop counterparts, consume LOTS more power than any PDA.
So I'm not saying I don't want to run Linux on a portable computer, I do that on my laptop, but not on a PDA. Eventually the distinguishing features will fade, but the point is the tech isn't here now. And the tech that brings this to us isn't likely to be based on the processer in these PDAs. All I'm saying is I think there is a bit of overkill here, featurewise. I'm not against an open source solution, however this one is pretty futile. Kudos for the coolness factor though.
Why does Linux have to run on *everything*?
I know this will just be marked -1 troll, but really folks, we complain about Billy G making windows into things it was never meant to be, yet here we have people trying to cram a linux kernel in to a PDA. Now I have to ask why.
Sure, it's cool. But that's it. No PDA to date has had a CLI, nor do I believe one would be benificial. In the case of a PDA, pointing and clicking is many times faster than *ANY* kind of text input developed so far.
1) Now, let's look at Linux. No graphical interface, natively anyway. To get the GUI, you need an extra layer of programming. Now, look at the Palm. GUI through and though, no extra layer.
2) This is a good thing. Why? Because PDA's are obviously *NOT* desktop machine, or servers! They have a very limited capacity by todays standards. Every extra layer on something that small means more CPU, more memory, and more waiting.
3) Which gets me to my point. I love linux, I run it at home, at work, and everywhere I can reasonably in between. I like it to develop code. I don't use it because it's user friendly, I don't use it because it's got all the killer games. I use it to be productive, mainly on a CLI. Now take away that CLI. What do you have? Well, you have Mac, Windows, BeOS, whatever pretty WM you can run to emulate any of the above or do about anything you want. But consider this, wouldn't a kernel that natively used graphics fair a bit better?
Now like I said, mod me down all you want, I use Linux, I love Linux, and it's a great alternative to any other OS. But I have to say, I think the Linux crowd here has gotten out the hammer and decided this problem looks like a nail. I think maybe it looks more like a push pin.