This explains a lot. Obviously we got the "Starter Edition" government, which is why they can't seem to work on solving more than three or so problems at a time
"For removable media, UDF could be a good candidate too. It's getting widespread availability, specially since Microsoft added support for writing on Vista and Win7."
Getting slightly off-topic, but after the FAT patent-trolling recently this interests me.
I went and dug up the sadly-neglected udftools package and installed it. Sure enough, the following command (found with a bit of Googling) seems to produce a filesystem on my SD card that can be read from and written to just fine by Linux, Mac OSX (Leopard), and Vista at least: mkudffs --media-type=hd --blocksize=512/dev/sdc
(Obviously one should substitute the appropriate device there...) No partition table needed. I'm not sure if the "blocksize=512" is necessary, but it appeared that it might be.
The only real problems I see are the fact that udftools appears to have been abandoned half a decade ago, so there is no fsck tool[1], and that all those elderly Windows XP machines apparently can't write to this format without 3rd-party software.
Looks promising to me, if development on udftools is picked up by anyone (and in the meantime is definitely usable), so thanks for the tip...
[1] Well, udftools does include a "udffsck", but it quite literally does nothing - the source code is a stub that consists entirely of a single "void main()" function that returns 0 immediately. Mac OSX has a newfs_udf, but also appears to lack a way of repairing/validating the filesystem.
"if you're looking for HAL, you have another 2001 years to wait. "
Incorrect! In fact Microsoft® has had "I'm afraid I can't let you do that" technology in place for at least a decade!
"Nokia is one of the two main companies that objected to OGG formats[...]"
That's a good point, actually - I'd forgotten about that.
The whole "If it's free, who do we pay protection money to in order to avoid patent lawsuits?" is the new "If it's free, who do we yell at if it breaks?"
Previous posts mention a port of VLC to the platform, so I doubt it'll be too hard to activate support for Legally Free formats...
I'm a bit surprised that "Maemo media player" does not list Ogg Vorbis or Theora as supported formats...
I assume there are add-on packages that do support them, but it seems like an odd omission for a Linux-based platform that's been around plenty long enough to have developed support for legally-free codecs.
Judging by the comments here, the situation with Linux power efficiency sounds like it's more or less where printing was, say, 4-5 years ago. That is, it actually works pretty well and gives you a lot of control, but how you set it up and control it is somewhat obscure.
To be honest, I like to think I'm a pretty hardcore Linux user (exclusively Linux on all my machines since 1997) but even now I haven't really messed with power management beyond figuring out how to change the current CPU frequency from the command prompt when I want to (and making some minor tweaks to the default settings in KDE's battery monitor plasmoid. Well, yes, and making sure my kernel was compiled tickless...). I get 4-5 hours out of the battery in the little netbook that is now my current main computer. Arguably, I ought to be able to get that up to 6-7 hours with some agressive modification and obvious things like "remember to turn off bluetooth and wifi when not in use", but why bother? It still beats the crap out of the 1.5 hours I got out of the now-old gigantic Compaq laptop and gives me plenty of off-the-wire time. ("Get off my lawn", etc...)
Anyway, the point is that it looks like there is a decent amount of power-management capability already existing in Linux systems, and what's missing is a simple way to make sure it's turned on and configured the way you want it.
Some links to projects trying to make the "CUPS" of Power Management would be appreciated if anyone knows of any...
Are you insane? Do you REALLY want to tick off the Tax Accountants and Tax Lawyers unions???
(Okay, I have no idea if either profession even has a union, but I couldn't resist...)
"software patents would last 5 years max [my least favorite]"
I'd like to see this kind of thing for ALL patents - but the duration would be negotiable.
Basically, what the patent office is doing for us (citizens of the country the patent office in question works for) is buying "trade secrets" and making them available to us. The duration of the monopoly control of the idea is the currency we use to make the purchase. Since obviously not all patents are equally valuable to us, the duration of any patent granted should be variable. "Gosh, using XML to store Word documents? I'll give you 3 months for that." "Sure-fire cure for all cancers, and you have proof? I'll give you 50 years for that one."
This "17-20 years no matter the context or value to the public" is just plain government waste.
"implementation in silicon (hardware acceleration)."
I'd argue that's far less of an issue for Theora than people make it out to be. Theora is nearly a decade old, remember, and was quite usable on the now-nearly-decade-old computers. Most modern CPU's - even embedded ones - have got to have more power than my K6-2/300 did, and it decoded Theora video with Vorbis audio just fine.
(That said, I would expect to see a lot more "firmware" decoding to become common using DSP's and FPGA's [I would have sworn the Theora mailing list had someone who was working on FPGA-based Theora decoding or encoding some time back...].)
"[...]just like "clouds", "waves" do not reside on your computer[...]"
Unless, of course, the wave server in question is your computer.
My main objection to the whole "cloud" crap isn't so much that it's not running on the piece of hardware that I'm sitting in front of, but that everyone assumes that it has to be running somewhere "out there", instead of running on a piece of hardware under your own direct control. Admittedly, I think that's why so many people are all hot and bothered about it - "It's almost like I'm running my own server, except I can abdicate responsibility for maintaining it! Wow!" (Yeah, I'm kind of cynical about people's motivations here, I'll admit it.)
Google Wave appears to be explicitly designed so that, just as with XMPP ("Jabber")-based IM, or email for that matter, anyone can run their own system and still have it interoperate with everyone else. A company with interest in maintaining possession and control over "Wave" communications can just plug in a box within the walls of their buildings and use it. The fact that Google is openly promoting the "anyone can run this themselves if they want to" aspect of the project is encouraging to me.
That would explain why the "Gnote" fork of Tomboy was apparently easy enough to implement in C++ instead - which suggests that the use of Mono (rather than C++) was, while not necessarily outright "pointless", at least "unnecessary".
Hypothetically (I haven't confirmed this) you can also just install XiphQT and subsequently, Ogg Vorbis audio and Ogg Theora video should work in Safari just as it does in the Firefox 3.5 and Opera browsers.
I'm sorry, citizen. This message board is not cleared for that information.
Please stand very still with your eyes closed, and one or more agents will be along to assist you shortly.
Have a nice daycycle.
(Why do I suddenly have an urge to check to see if there's a "-1 Above Your Security Clearance" moderation option?...)
The point is, a lot of "SD Card readers" are only slightly larger than a glued-shut "USB Flash Drive". Buy one and a cheap SD card and you effectively HAVE a "USB Flash Drive", except that it happens to be upgradeable rather than disposable.
I was wondering about that myself, though it sounds like this was a compromised website issue rather than an OS issue.
(So I guess the question is "was this a hole some programmer left in an ASP.NET page, or was it PHP? (or python or perl cgi)"...)
Slashdot Mirror
That would be the Cheetohs® and Mountain Dew®...
"Germany, UK, Finland, or even Thailand."
Are they hiring? (And actually allowing immigration?)
The whole situation amuses me given that the only reason Gnome exists is because back during KDE 1.x days it was "OMG QT is too proprietary!"
I prefer to think of it as "Government ME", where "Government" can also be assumed to be a euphemistic verb ....
(do double-entendres get double-taxed?)
This explains a lot. Obviously we got the "Starter Edition" government, which is why they can't seem to work on solving more than three or so problems at a time
Getting slightly off-topic, but after the FAT patent-trolling recently this interests me.
I went and dug up the sadly-neglected udftools package and installed it. Sure enough, the following command (found with a bit of Googling) seems to produce a filesystem on my SD card that can be read from and written to just fine by Linux, Mac OSX (Leopard), and Vista at least: /dev/sdc
mkudffs --media-type=hd --blocksize=512
(Obviously one should substitute the appropriate device there...) No partition table needed. I'm not sure if the "blocksize=512" is necessary, but it appeared that it might be.
The only real problems I see are the fact that udftools appears to have been abandoned half a decade ago, so there is no fsck tool[1], and that all those elderly Windows XP machines apparently can't write to this format without 3rd-party software.
Looks promising to me, if development on udftools is picked up by anyone (and in the meantime is definitely usable), so thanks for the tip...
[1] Well, udftools does include a "udffsck", but it quite literally does nothing - the source code is a stub that consists entirely of a single "void main()" function that returns 0 immediately. Mac OSX has a newfs_udf, but also appears to lack a way of repairing/validating the filesystem.
"if you're looking for HAL, you have another 2001 years to wait. "
Incorrect! In fact Microsoft® has had "I'm afraid I can't let you do that" technology in place for at least a decade!
That's a good point, actually - I'd forgotten about that.
The whole "If it's free, who do we pay protection money to in order to avoid patent lawsuits?" is the new "If it's free, who do we yell at if it breaks?"
Previous posts mention a port of VLC to the platform, so I doubt it'll be too hard to activate support for Legally Free formats...
I'm a bit surprised that "Maemo media player" does not list Ogg Vorbis or Theora as supported formats...
I assume there are add-on packages that do support them, but it seems like an odd omission for a Linux-based platform that's been around plenty long enough to have developed support for legally-free codecs.
(I still want one...)
Judging by the comments here, the situation with Linux power efficiency sounds like it's more or less where printing was, say, 4-5 years ago. That is, it actually works pretty well and gives you a lot of control, but how you set it up and control it is somewhat obscure.
To be honest, I like to think I'm a pretty hardcore Linux user (exclusively Linux on all my machines since 1997) but even now I haven't really messed with power management beyond figuring out how to change the current CPU frequency from the command prompt when I want to (and making some minor tweaks to the default settings in KDE's battery monitor plasmoid. Well, yes, and making sure my kernel was compiled tickless...). I get 4-5 hours out of the battery in the little netbook that is now my current main computer. Arguably, I ought to be able to get that up to 6-7 hours with some agressive modification and obvious things like "remember to turn off bluetooth and wifi when not in use", but why bother? It still beats the crap out of the 1.5 hours I got out of the now-old gigantic Compaq laptop and gives me plenty of off-the-wire time. ("Get off my lawn", etc...)
Anyway, the point is that it looks like there is a decent amount of power-management capability already existing in Linux systems, and what's missing is a simple way to make sure it's turned on and configured the way you want it.
Some links to projects trying to make the "CUPS" of Power Management would be appreciated if anyone knows of any...
Are you insane? Do you REALLY want to tick off the Tax Accountants and Tax Lawyers unions??? (Okay, I have no idea if either profession even has a union, but I couldn't resist...)
Let me guess, Microsoft is going to try "OOXML'ing" HTML5?
I'd like to see this kind of thing for ALL patents - but the duration would be negotiable.
Basically, what the patent office is doing for us (citizens of the country the patent office in question works for) is buying "trade secrets" and making them available to us. The duration of the monopoly control of the idea is the currency we use to make the purchase. Since obviously not all patents are equally valuable to us, the duration of any patent granted should be variable. "Gosh, using XML to store Word documents? I'll give you 3 months for that." "Sure-fire cure for all cancers, and you have proof? I'll give you 50 years for that one."
This "17-20 years no matter the context or value to the public" is just plain government waste.
I'd argue that's far less of an issue for Theora than people make it out to be. Theora is nearly a decade old, remember, and was quite usable on the now-nearly-decade-old computers. Most modern CPU's - even embedded ones - have got to have more power than my K6-2/300 did, and it decoded Theora video with Vorbis audio just fine.
(That said, I would expect to see a lot more "firmware" decoding to become common using DSP's and FPGA's [I would have sworn the Theora mailing list had someone who was working on FPGA-based Theora decoding or encoding some time back...].)
("Damned kids get off of my lawn" etc....)
"The Shack: You've got questions...
We've got cellphones."
Unless, of course, the wave server in question is your computer.
My main objection to the whole "cloud" crap isn't so much that it's not running on the piece of hardware that I'm sitting in front of, but that everyone assumes that it has to be running somewhere "out there", instead of running on a piece of hardware under your own direct control. Admittedly, I think that's why so many people are all hot and bothered about it - "It's almost like I'm running my own server, except I can abdicate responsibility for maintaining it! Wow!" (Yeah, I'm kind of cynical about people's motivations here, I'll admit it.)
Google Wave appears to be explicitly designed so that, just as with XMPP ("Jabber")-based IM, or email for that matter, anyone can run their own system and still have it interoperate with everyone else. A company with interest in maintaining possession and control over "Wave" communications can just plug in a box within the walls of their buildings and use it. The fact that Google is openly promoting the "anyone can run this themselves if they want to" aspect of the project is encouraging to me.
That would explain why the "Gnote" fork of Tomboy was apparently easy enough to implement in C++ instead - which suggests that the use of Mono (rather than C++) was, while not necessarily outright "pointless", at least "unnecessary".
Yeah, but what happens if instead, everything east of the San Andreas fault sinks into the Atlantic ocean?
(Working great for me on kde 4.2...)
Hypothetically (I haven't confirmed this) you can also just install XiphQT and subsequently, Ogg Vorbis audio and Ogg Theora video should work in Safari just as it does in the Firefox 3.5 and Opera browsers.
Whether Apple® wants that or not...
After all, We're talking about the company that named its "cloud computing" platform after the color of a cloudless sky...
I'm sorry, citizen. This message board is not cleared for that information. Please stand very still with your eyes closed, and one or more agents will be along to assist you shortly. Have a nice daycycle. (Why do I suddenly have an urge to check to see if there's a "-1 Above Your Security Clearance" moderation option?...)
The point is, a lot of "SD Card readers" are only slightly larger than a glued-shut "USB Flash Drive". Buy one and a cheap SD card and you effectively HAVE a "USB Flash Drive", except that it happens to be upgradeable rather than disposable.
I was wondering about that myself, though it sounds like this was a compromised website issue rather than an OS issue. (So I guess the question is "was this a hole some programmer left in an ASP.NET page, or was it PHP? (or python or perl cgi)"...)
No fair, *I* came here to say that (but you beat me to it). "Papyrus" is the new "MS Comic Sans".