The problem with it is that window manager has no clue what tabs to create, in what order... The same with auto-hide and arrangements. So expect some applications behaving "strange".
Well, I'm not sure if it's that difficult. What firefox/epiphany does, is: "when opening a new tab, add it to the end of the tab list of the current window". Now, why do you think a WM couldn't do this?
Another is that at different platforms/WMs the same application will behave differently. That's not very good.
Application knows better how to layout own windows than any window manager and can and ought to manage own windows in sensible manner.
Let me get this straight: it's not good that things are different on different platforms/WMs, so your solution is to implement it (possibly differently) in every app?
Ugh, no. That's one of the things on Windows I hate the most. These apps take the functionality over of the window manager, and you get several types of focus (the one in the app, the focused app, etc) - leading to confusion and clutter, and it makes it hard to use different apps together, which leads app to replicate alot of functionality in the application itself and become extremely bloated.
However, it's true that there should be some kind of "grouping", something to connect panels to their app. A good example of this is on Mac, where the secondary panels are only visible if one of the primary windows of the app is focused.
But that's a matter for the window manager - would be nice if that gets implemented in metacity or kwin or sawfish, or whatever floats your boat. But just because some functionality is missing in the WM, doesn't mean you should implement it in the wrong place - the applications.
(As a side note, I'd like to see the same for tabbed windows a la firefox - it would be nice if an app could signal the WM to make tabs for itself, or even if one could attach different applications to each other)
If you have HL2, and HL1/CS:CZ connected to the same account, and you want to transfer only HL1 to another account; You can't. If you give the login/password, you got two problems: I can't play HL2 while he's playing my ex-HL1, and the whole point is that I have an account on Steam I can chat with, find friends, connected to _my_ email address. Beats the point if I either have to make several accounts (one for each game - and you can't login to multiple accounts at the same time) , or share my account with other people.
As for "in 10 years": I have games right here on my desk, of about ten years ago that I recently started up and played a bit; this is not a "hypothetical" case, it happens to me and my friends from time to time. Sometimes old games really are good, despite being graphically dated.
I hear the HL2 CDs have the game content, but are lacking the executables, so without the help of Valve you won't be able to play it even if you preserved your original CD's.
This reeks of DIVX - style DRM, I wonder why it's more acceptable for games as compared to movie rentals?
I don't care about the content distribution aspect of steam. I'd even opt for it, because the money would go straight in the maker's pocket, and not in the shop/distributor/publisher/whatever.
What gets me fired up however is the ridiculous restrictions they have on STEAM. Want to give your old half-life version to a friend or your little brother? No can do, only option is give your account and password to them (at which point, you might not be able to play your new game at the same time, if they're on the same account)
Want to play your half-life 2 in 10 years, to reminisce or whatever? Good luck.
What I don't like about this scheme is that the consumer gets zero protection for their purchase.
If they fix these issues, like NOW, and not "maybe at a later date". I'd be ok with it. (transfering/detaching CDkey from an account, sunset clause in license about games being unlocked in 5-10 years etc)
Actually, no - it's not that they want to discourage closed-source drivers, it's just that they don't want to be prisoner of this "stable api" for the sake of some closed drivers.
They basically want to have the freedom to evolve the api as they see fit - and sometimes there's good reasons for changing it. If a stable API means being stuck with the design decisions which maybe made sense ten years ago but not anymore, I'd rather have an "unstable" API.
So basically, if you want to provide closed drivers - feel free, but don't come crying if the API changes. But it's not like Linus' does this to deliberately sabotage closed source driver providers.
As an aside, it's the same for people who provide open source drivers living that aren't merged with the Linux tree - they'd probably like a stable api too. In that sense they're just as screwed over or "discouraged" as the closed drivers. If they're merged, someone would probably make sure they're fixed up.
But, if a stable API gives people the excuse to not have to maintain their drivers, then maybe we're better off without. Like when hw manufacturers decide it's not profitable to support their previous generation hardware.
I don't agree. They've often tried to use existing languages/techniques for flash. Examples: they were probably one of the first to use the new ecmascript 4 in a major product. They could've rolled their own language, but they picked something familiar, and kept up to date with it. I hear the format they use for Flex is based on Mozilla's XUL. And their Flash VM (the plugin) is really quite good.
Now, as someone who has to use the tools quite often, I absolutely HATE Flash MX. It's buggy, bloated, the code editor sucks, FLA files aren't really portable, it crashes often, and it slows you down all the time (crap usability).
I wish I had a compiler that would take some XML files for graphics (a subset of SVG maybe?) and some.as files, and would generate an SWF.
Flex is a bit like that, but it's not exactly there yet. And it's incredibly expensive.
Well, if you're using Oracle et al, I suppose you're not using it on your desktop, in which case you'd probably want to have rock-solid "stable" instead of "unstable"?
If you really are using big closed/third-party apps on "unstable", I'd still wonder why bug reporting would be so problematic - these kinds of things are most often compiled statically, no? So what exactly would make the bug depend on your environment?
If it's still a problem, I'd say your way of reporting bugs is still likely some ways off. Saying "Doesn't work on FC2" doesn't say much. Some basic analysis of the problem and mentioning the versions/intricacies of your platform is probably much more valuable for the developers.
(Aside from the posts mentioning homeRF which Intel was pushing initially) Didn't intel drop firewire too? They were going to integrate it in chipsets after the 440BX iirc, but that never happened. Nevertheless, firewire is still here after all these years, and commonly used, and most motherboard manufacturers offer it on a good deal of their motherboards. Some chipset providers offer it as standard (SIS) for quite a while already, and you see it on practically all laptops sold today.
It's true it's not used much aside from harddrives and DV's though.
Also, about bluetooth. Intel is actually going to support it in son-of-centrino.
I have two 75GXP running without any apparent problems. I've lost a 60GXP, but IBM replaced it instantly with a 180GXP that's been running non-stop without any problems.
So, all in all good experiences. The thing is, with capacities increasing as they do, a small problem can have increasingly disastrous consequences. That's why I've started using RAID1 setups for all machines containing non-expendable data. It's just not worth running the risk - failures happen, simultaneous failures are less common.
It sounds to me like you're trying to connect two servers on different locations, which then serve out the files out to the clients through samba. And the connection between those offices might drop.
Maybe it's worth considering Unison - it's built to run over SSH, and can is like a two way rsync. It keeps state on both sides, and you can set it up so it automatically/regularly updates both sides with the changes of the other side. There's a window of conflicting updates, that's true, but you'd also have that with intermezzo or coda when they're in disconnected mode. Additionaly, unison is completely userspace, it doesn't care about what filesystem it might be running on. And there's Windows/MacOSX port too iirc.
And hey, it's only an apt-get away:) - it's in Debian.
There's no layout in NS4.7 - it looks quite crappy. I know life would be so much better without NS4.XX, but it's still a fact of life in a lot of corporate settings.
My suggestion would be to display the headlines first at the top, and the slashboxes after, in the no-layout version, I think it would render it a bit more useful.
The other problem is that for increased font size, the text starts overlapping other columns... not that big a deal for me.
Despite these problems I still hope Slashdot would adopt it.
www.finalscratch.com is something that was initially developed for BeOS, but when BeOS pretty much died, they ported it to MacOSX and Linux (I think it's a bootable knoppix cd, not sure)
The idea is that you get a couple of vinyl records, with a signal on that, when picked up by the software, accurately gives an indication of the position in a song. This means you can use pitch control, scratch, and the other usual trick you do on your SL1200's, with mp3's (or other) stored on your laptop.
Fantastic stuff. It's distributed by Stanton, you know, known for their needles.
you're right, I remember being very surprised that such short samples combined with simple tone generation could generate such good results.
I had (actually, I still have) a LAPC-I. I played with the SC-55 and variants, and from what I could tell, they were indeed entirely PCM based - by definition the sample sets of the MT32/CM32L/LAPC-I and the SC55 are totally unrelated.
This really is a worthwile project. I hope there will be more softsynth projects for Linux. This one is worthwile because a lot of games and music pieces were written with these in mind, and got _excellent_ results. (Most of these used their own rearranged "instruments" on the mt32, to get their results.)
I wonder if this project is fully compatible, sysex messages and all.
Well, we all knew things were going badly, so it didn't come very unexpectedly. I'm good friends with the sysadmin, and the fact that we were moving to be absorbed in the parent company, and the fact that the sysadmin told me that he had to lay out the network infrastructure in great detail to the IT team in the parent company, made all kinds of alarm bells go off in my head.
When the day came, we were all called in a meeting room, where we were told that if you're name isn't on the whiteboard, you're fired.
After that, me and the sysadmin (who obviously also got canned) went back to our workstations, backed up what we wanted to an offsite server, and had some fun with 'dd' and/dev/random.
Yeah, but people in general don't hold microwave units, fm broadcast transmitter, or television transmitter next to their ears for hours a day.
I agree the wattage are really low (I thought 2G was around 3W, i was surprised about the.1 - 100 milliwats), and probably won't affect people at all. At the same time, I do hope that the units will evolve to need less power over time, at the very least it's good for battery life.
Personally I don't think it has a substantial effect on people. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to find out - it is probably hard to do so, but it'd be good to know what effects if any, EM radiation has on bodies; with more and more technologies like 802.11b/a/g/..., UWB and 3G increasing this "ocean of EM energy", it is important to know. And who knows, maybe, just maybe, in the process we might even be able to put these potentially harmful effects to good use (for medical purposes, etc)
So to studies like this: bring it on, the more information there is to analyze, the better.
Jeez. Great attitude. I don't see the internet as a web-only pipe. P2P apps are, in my mind, using the internet as it originally was intended. And I'm not talking about Kazaa either, there's a lot of stuff that is worthwile P2P, like for instance bittorrent.
If people want a web-only link, you should advertise it as such.
I'm not against some reasonable limits. But if you want to use games (needs proper upstream and good latency), internet radio (listening for a couple of hours a day kills your volume), audio/video conferencing or a VPN (again, latency and upstream) - all those cases are things your ISP frowns upon.
What they should do is decent prioritizing: P2P traffic has lowest priority, but is basically unlimited (well, insofar the pipe supports it), whereas other types of traffic, like web or videoconferencing (bursty in nature) has high priority.
Well, maybe, just maybe this might happen. The DRI guys are starting work on drivers for Savage4 based cores (Prosavage like on the Epia boards, Twister, and some others). IIRC, these driver were apparently written in-house by via/s3 for mesa3, and then opened up and given to Alan Cox. It now needs to be cleaned up and ported to Mesa4 or 5, and integrated with the rest if the DRI drivers. That sure sounds open source friendly to me.
Concerning the older Savage3D/IX/MX, the Utah-GLX guys have some support for those, which might be ported to DRI.
Even the ancient S3 Virge might get some DRI support (there some stuff in DRI for it, but it hasn't been finished, and might never be)
So, maybe, just maybe they might be open to the idea to give out specs, or drivers for their new series.
You're right, and you use the same argument I used when PowerVR was considering open sourcing their DRI based drivers: PowerVR could not really compete with what came out of nVidia and ATI at the time the Kyro came out, so, if I have to use binary-only drivers, I might as well get nVidia cards, which are pretty well supported on Linux.
So my money goes to whoever offers a reasonable card with open drivers. Right now, for me personally, this means an ATI9200 on my desktop, and a 855GM in my laptop. Matrox used to get my money, but they dropped the ball big time: with the G550 you need a (user-space) binary only module if you want to use basic features like DVI, and the Parhelia Linux drivers are just a half-closed, buggy, no SMP, Quake3 only, total mess. And that is their on-request-only, "PRO" CAD driver.
I like the happy hacking series of keyboards, aside from the fact that it's too minimal - no F-keys included.
I'm interested in what Logitech will come out with to accompany their bluetooth MX900 mouse (this month).
I'll take a look at Apple's offering (esp. considering you can buy the bluetooth mouse and keyboard seperately, and the keyboard seems quite "slim", and has a good tilt like you ask).
Another entry that is often overlooked because it is marketed towards the Playstation 2 is this one:
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm?page=products/ de tails&CRID=1767&CONTENTID=6636&countryid=19&langua geid=1
Slashdot Mirror
So, you're saying apps should all handle their own focus management, possibly in different ways, possibly broken or buggy in different ways.
And if you don't like the focus management, and would like to change the focus policy, all you have to do is change all apps.
So yes, what you suggest is possible, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
At least with the choice of window manager comes the choice of focus policy, and you know that all apps will adhere to it.
Ugh, no. That's one of the things on Windows I hate the most. These apps take the functionality over of the window manager, and you get several types of focus (the one in the app, the focused app, etc) - leading to confusion and clutter, and it makes it hard to use different apps together, which leads app to replicate alot of functionality in the application itself and become extremely bloated.
However, it's true that there should be some kind of "grouping", something to connect panels to their app. A good example of this is on Mac, where the secondary panels are only visible if one of the primary windows of the app is focused.
But that's a matter for the window manager - would be nice if that gets implemented in metacity or kwin or sawfish, or whatever floats your boat. But just because some functionality is missing in the WM, doesn't mean you should implement it in the wrong place - the applications.
(As a side note, I'd like to see the same for tabbed windows a la firefox - it would be nice if an app could signal the WM to make tabs for itself, or even if one could attach different applications to each other)
You misunderstood:
If you have HL2, and HL1/CS:CZ connected to the same account, and you want to transfer only HL1 to another account; You can't. If you give the login/password, you got two problems: I can't play HL2 while he's playing my ex-HL1, and the whole point is that I have an account on Steam I can chat with, find friends, connected to _my_ email address. Beats the point if I either have to make several accounts (one for each game - and you can't login to multiple accounts at the same time) , or share my account with other people.
As for "in 10 years": I have games right here on my desk, of about ten years ago that I recently started up and played a bit; this is not a "hypothetical" case, it happens to me and my friends from time to time. Sometimes old games really are good, despite being graphically dated.
I hear the HL2 CDs have the game content, but are lacking the executables, so without the help of Valve you won't be able to play it even if you preserved your original CD's.
This reeks of DIVX - style DRM, I wonder why it's more acceptable for games as compared to movie rentals?
I don't care about the content distribution aspect of steam. I'd even opt for it, because the money would go straight in the maker's pocket, and not in the shop/distributor/publisher/whatever.
What gets me fired up however is the ridiculous restrictions they have on STEAM. Want to give your old half-life version to a friend or your little brother? No can do, only option is give your account and password to them (at which point, you might not be able to play your new game at the same time, if they're on the same account)
Want to play your half-life 2 in 10 years, to reminisce or whatever? Good luck.
What I don't like about this scheme is that the consumer gets zero protection for their purchase.
If they fix these issues, like NOW, and not "maybe at a later date". I'd be ok with it. (transfering/detaching CDkey from an account, sunset clause in license about games being unlocked in 5-10 years etc)
Actually, no - it's not that they want to discourage closed-source drivers, it's just that they don't want to be prisoner of this "stable api" for the sake of some closed drivers.
They basically want to have the freedom to evolve the api as they see fit - and sometimes there's good reasons for changing it. If a stable API means being stuck with the design decisions which maybe made sense ten years ago but not anymore, I'd rather have an "unstable" API.
So basically, if you want to provide closed drivers - feel free, but don't come crying if the API changes. But it's not like Linus' does this to deliberately sabotage closed source driver providers.
As an aside, it's the same for people who provide open source drivers living that aren't merged with the Linux tree - they'd probably like a stable api too. In that sense they're just as screwed over or "discouraged" as the closed drivers. If they're merged, someone would probably make sure they're fixed up.
But, if a stable API gives people the excuse to not have to maintain their drivers, then maybe we're better off without. Like when hw manufacturers decide it's not profitable to support their previous generation hardware.
I don't agree. They've often tried to use existing languages/techniques for flash. Examples: they were probably one of the first to use the new ecmascript 4 in a major product. They could've rolled their own language, but they picked something familiar, and kept up to date with it. I hear the format they use for Flex is based on Mozilla's XUL. And their Flash VM (the plugin) is really quite good.
.as files, and would generate an SWF.
Now, as someone who has to use the tools quite often, I absolutely HATE Flash MX. It's buggy, bloated, the code editor sucks, FLA files aren't really portable, it crashes often, and it slows you down all the time (crap usability).
I wish I had a compiler that would take some XML files for graphics (a subset of SVG maybe?) and some
Flex is a bit like that, but it's not exactly there yet. And it's incredibly expensive.
I'd be curious to see how ext3 would fare in these tests (especially the "lotsa files"-tests) if you use mke2fs with the "-O dir_index" option.
Well, if you're using Oracle et al, I suppose you're not using it on your desktop, in which case you'd probably want to have rock-solid "stable" instead of "unstable"?
If you really are using big closed/third-party apps on "unstable", I'd still wonder why bug reporting would be so problematic - these kinds of things are most often compiled statically, no? So what exactly would make the bug depend on your environment?
If it's still a problem, I'd say your way of reporting bugs is still likely some ways off. Saying "Doesn't work on FC2" doesn't say much. Some basic analysis of the problem and mentioning the versions/intricacies of your platform is probably much more valuable for the developers.
(Aside from the posts mentioning homeRF which Intel was pushing initially) Didn't intel drop firewire too? They were going to integrate it in chipsets after the 440BX iirc, but that never happened. Nevertheless, firewire is still here after all these years, and commonly used, and most motherboard manufacturers offer it on a good deal of their motherboards. Some chipset providers offer it as standard (SIS) for quite a while already, and you see it on practically all laptops sold today.
It's true it's not used much aside from harddrives and DV's though.
Also, about bluetooth. Intel is actually going to support it in son-of-centrino.
I have two 75GXP running without any apparent problems. I've lost a 60GXP, but IBM replaced it instantly with a 180GXP that's been running non-stop without any problems.
So, all in all good experiences. The thing is, with capacities increasing as they do, a small problem can have increasingly disastrous consequences. That's why I've started using RAID1 setups for all machines containing non-expendable data. It's just not worth running the risk - failures happen, simultaneous failures are less common.
think it's only $79.
And lot's of people seem very happy with it.
It sounds to me like you're trying to connect two servers on different locations, which then serve out the files out to the clients through samba. And the connection between those offices might drop.
:) - it's in Debian.
Maybe it's worth considering Unison - it's built to run over SSH, and can is like a two way rsync. It keeps state on both sides, and you can set it up so it automatically/regularly updates both sides with the changes of the other side. There's a window of conflicting updates, that's true, but you'd also have that with intermezzo or coda when they're in disconnected mode. Additionaly, unison is completely userspace, it doesn't care about what filesystem it might be running on. And there's Windows/MacOSX port too iirc.
And hey, it's only an apt-get away
There's no layout in NS4.7 - it looks quite crappy. I know life would be so much better without NS4.XX, but it's still a fact of life in a lot of corporate settings.
My suggestion would be to display the headlines first at the top, and the slashboxes after, in the no-layout version, I think it would render it a bit more useful.
The other problem is that for increased font size, the text starts overlapping other columns... not that big a deal for me.
Despite these problems I still hope Slashdot would adopt it.
oh, you mean, like www.sealandgov.com?
www.finalscratch.com is something that was initially developed for BeOS, but when BeOS pretty much died, they ported it to MacOSX and Linux (I think it's a bootable knoppix cd, not sure)
:-)
The idea is that you get a couple of vinyl records, with a signal on that, when picked up by the software, accurately gives an indication of the position in a song. This means you can use pitch control, scratch, and the other usual trick you do on your SL1200's, with mp3's (or other) stored on your laptop.
Fantastic stuff. It's distributed by Stanton, you know, known for their needles.
And hey, it runs on Linux!!
you're right, I remember being very surprised that such short samples combined with simple tone generation could generate such good results.
I had (actually, I still have) a LAPC-I. I played with the SC-55 and variants, and from what I could tell, they were indeed entirely PCM based - by definition the sample sets of the MT32/CM32L/LAPC-I and the SC55 are totally unrelated.
This really is a worthwile project. I hope there will be more softsynth projects for Linux. This one is worthwile because a lot of games and music pieces were written with these in mind, and got _excellent_ results. (Most of these used their own rearranged "instruments" on the mt32, to get their results.)
I wonder if this project is fully compatible, sysex messages and all.
Well, we all knew things were going badly, so it didn't come very unexpectedly. I'm good friends with the sysadmin, and the fact that we were moving to be absorbed in the parent company, and the fact that the sysadmin told me that he had to lay out the network infrastructure in great detail to the IT team in the parent company, made all kinds of alarm bells go off in my head.
/dev/random.
When the day came, we were all called in a meeting room, where we were told that if you're name isn't on the whiteboard, you're fired.
After that, me and the sysadmin (who obviously also got canned) went back to our workstations, backed up what we wanted to an offsite server, and had some fun with 'dd' and
Yeah, but people in general don't hold microwave units, fm broadcast transmitter, or television transmitter next to their ears for hours a day.
.1 - 100 milliwats), and probably won't affect people at all. At the same time, I do hope that the units will evolve to need less power over time, at the very least it's good for battery life.
I agree the wattage are really low (I thought 2G was around 3W, i was surprised about the
Personally I don't think it has a substantial effect on people. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to find out - it is probably hard to do so, but it'd be good to know what effects if any, EM radiation has on bodies; with more and more technologies like 802.11b/a/g/..., UWB and 3G increasing this "ocean of EM energy", it is important to know. And who knows, maybe, just maybe, in the process we might even be able to put these potentially harmful effects to good use (for medical purposes, etc)
So to studies like this: bring it on, the more information there is to analyze, the better.
Jeez. Great attitude. I don't see the internet as a web-only pipe. P2P apps are, in my mind, using the internet as it originally was intended. And I'm not talking about Kazaa either, there's a lot of stuff that is worthwile P2P, like for instance bittorrent.
If people want a web-only link, you should advertise it as such.
I'm not against some reasonable limits. But if you want to use games (needs proper upstream and good latency), internet radio (listening for a couple of hours a day kills your volume), audio/video conferencing or a VPN (again, latency and upstream) - all those cases are things your ISP frowns upon.
What they should do is decent prioritizing: P2P traffic has lowest priority, but is basically unlimited (well, insofar the pipe supports it), whereas other types of traffic, like web or videoconferencing (bursty in nature) has high priority.
I've heard PowerVR are into such things. And they have DRI drivers, albeit closed source at the moment.
Hear, hear!
Well, maybe, just maybe this might happen. The DRI guys are starting work on drivers for Savage4 based cores (Prosavage like on the Epia boards, Twister, and some others). IIRC, these driver were apparently written in-house by via/s3 for mesa3, and then opened up and given to Alan Cox. It now needs to be cleaned up and ported to Mesa4 or 5, and integrated with the rest if the DRI drivers. That sure sounds open source friendly to me.
Concerning the older Savage3D/IX/MX, the Utah-GLX guys have some support for those, which might be ported to DRI.
Even the ancient S3 Virge might get some DRI support (there some stuff in DRI for it, but it hasn't been finished, and might never be)
So, maybe, just maybe they might be open to the idea to give out specs, or drivers for their new series.
You're right, and you use the same argument I used when PowerVR was considering open sourcing their DRI based drivers: PowerVR could not really compete with what came out of nVidia and ATI at the time the Kyro came out, so, if I have to use binary-only drivers, I might as well get nVidia cards, which are pretty well supported on Linux.
So my money goes to whoever offers a reasonable card with open drivers. Right now, for me personally, this means an ATI9200 on my desktop, and a 855GM in my laptop. Matrox used to get my money, but they dropped the ball big time: with the G550 you need a (user-space) binary only module if you want to use basic features like DVI, and the Parhelia Linux drivers are just a half-closed, buggy, no SMP, Quake3 only, total mess. And that is their on-request-only, "PRO" CAD driver.
I like the happy hacking series of keyboards, aside from the fact that it's too minimal - no F-keys included.
/ de tails&CRID=1767&CONTENTID=6636&countryid=19&langua geid=1
I'm interested in what Logitech will come out with to accompany their bluetooth MX900 mouse (this month).
I'll take a look at Apple's offering (esp. considering you can buy the bluetooth mouse and keyboard seperately, and the keyboard seems quite "slim", and has a good tilt like you ask).
Another entry that is often overlooked because it is marketed towards the Playstation 2 is this one:
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm?page=products
Are you sure? This doesn't seem to sound too great:
b re akdown/index.php?hw_cat_id=4
... support for the 12"/17". I expect the 15" to be not very different.
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/hardware/
No video, airport extreme, sleep, bluetooth,
Is this document outdated?