... but I'm having to fight a little too hard to find neat things to do with Bluetooth. I made my laptop connecton the net once with my cell phone... but.. uh yeah.
Some newer cars (eg, BMW 5) have bluetooth integration so your phone works directly without needing a car-kit or cradle. Kind of neat.
In comparison, my 1.6Ghz, 512Mb desktop machine running Linux and GNOME 2.6 is noticably slower. The memory footprint with a similar list of apps running (Mozilla instead of Firebird) is around 400Mb.
I'm not sure what you're running but I'm on Linux 2.6 and GNOME 2.6 and with the following apps running with their respective windows on the desktop.
GIMP
X-chat
OpenOffice
Evolution
Rhythmbox
Nautilus
Epiphany
GNOME Terminal
My total memory usage, including all the sub systems like the mail server and web server that I'm always running, comes to a grand total of 240MB.
-/+ buffers/cache: 242392 273340
It's not lightweight. But with default desktop computers shipping with 256MB and "power desktop" configurations shipping with 512MB, it's not that unusual a memory usage.
Indeed. I was very interested in MythTV, but given that there are currently no active, reliable ways to obtain the program listings for New Zealand television (such as it is...) the whole thing became rather moot.
Yeah, good point. The live-tv stuff I must admit isn't very useful to me. What I use MythTV for is saying "I want all episodes of BLAH and you figure it out". Then I come back a few weeks later and watch them all back to back.
Without a functional tv_grab script I simply wouldn't bother. Thankfully the tv_grab_au script does seem to work pretty well. I see tv_grab_nz in the xmltv install. Does it not work for you?
The goal of any business is to do what the business owners want. The goals are often stated in the mission statement. If the business owners are greedy swine then sure, the businesses goals will solely be to make profit. But most businesses are not that narrow minded. Most businesses have an agenda and the profit motive is secondary. For example, most businesses aim to provide a certain product or service. Other businesses have stated codes of conduct (eg, Google's "do no evil" rule). Any business you look at will have a similar set of profit unrelated goals. I guarantee you will have great difficulty finding any business whose single stated goal is to "make money".
If what you said was true (and it is not) then companies like Ford could just stop making cars and start playing hedge funds on the stock market. That's tying in with "making money". But that's not what Ford does. The goal of Ford is to make cars at an affordable price. Everything else is a secondary goal; including the profit motive.
Look, I'm not exactly in love with Microsoft here, but the reason that they're in this monopoly in the first place is they have made a VERY useful app. Spare me the "Oh they made a monopoly out of nothing and then put a gun to millions of people's heads" theories, as long as people are complaining that the alternatives are missing features then the Microsoft 'doctrine' is going to remain quite strong.
I'm no lover of Microsoft either but there's no denying that some of their products are quite good. Microsoft haters need to realise that Microsoft makes stuff that is "good enough". It isn't always the best but similarly it isn't always the worst.
Of course, this "good enough" mentality in customers is what will destroy Microsoft. Free software like Linux is also "good enough". So Microsoft might invest considerable effort to make their products better but the vast majority of customers just won't care. Superior quality didn't save Microsoft's competitors in the 80s and 90s and it won't save Microsoft now.
However, I will make a point that Microsoft got this large mostly through luck. They owned the popular OS which ran on the hardware platform that grew from the expected run of several 1000 IBM units to several 100 million cloned units worldwide. That success could have just as equally gone to Apple if the Apple II was a clonable platform, or to Digital Research if the Kildalls hadn't balked at IBM's NDA. Mr Gates was in the right place at the right time and knew someone willing to sell him the right product. You might call that "business genius" but honestly I think Gates isn't that smart. He might have had some inkling the deal with IBM was "important" but I doubt he realised it was worth tens of billions.
Mr. Brown seems to be making the argument later than Linus couldn't of possibly have written Linux 2.6 in six months. Of course! He came up with version 0.1 instead. Although it was functional, it wasn't terribly useful.
Actually 0.0.1 was the first release and the complexity was entirely realistic for a smart and dedicated student. I'm not sure I could have done it (I'm not that good a coder) but I knew plenty of friends during university who had sufficient skill to write a kernel if they hadn't thought it was too difficult. History is full of people like Linus who don't know it can't be done!
Version 1.0 wasn't until 2.5 years later and already had several 100 contributors by then. But Ken Brown accidentally (purposefully?) confuses Linus's actual first kernel (0.0.1) with the much more complex but community written 1.0 kernel.
If ATI and NVIDIA open sourced their drivers, it would make it very difficult for them to compete with each other.
They don't have to open source their drivers. They just have to release the register information so we can write our own drivers.
Anybody who thinks the register information would give the competition an unfair advantage is nuts. We *know* what the cards do. You can work that out from the existing information. It's just the stupid numbers and bytecodes (of which they are umpty zillion to work out) that aren't known. There is no competitive disadvantage in releasing the numbers.
And anybody who think there are patents and/or trade secrets associated with register information is even more nuts. ATI/nVidia simply don't care about Linux or open source. They care about selling cards. So long as they can convince 90% of Linux users that closed-source binary-only x86-only drivers are "good enough" they will continue to screw us like this.
No, Given the fact that soon after IBM public requested that Sun Open Source Java,
Yes. How nice of IBM to volunteer Sun's software like that.
Sun asked IBM to open source Websphere first. IBM was deafening in their silence.
If you're going to attack Sun for not giving away their software - despite the fact that Sun has done their level best to make it possible for competitors to produce their own 100% compatible implementations, with NO PATENT INFRINGEMENTS POSSIBLE (that's written into the Java license) - then how about attacking IBM as well.
Doesn't anyone else find it strange that we have a Microsoft and Sun deal and now Sun starts touting, "You should not be using Linux,...
It wasn't a "deal". It was a settlement. As in, Microsoft acknowledged that they had done wrong and owed compensation to Sun to the tune of approximately $2 billion in cash and stock and other stuff.
And you can buy supported versions of Linux from Sun. I hardly see how that is them saying you "should not be using Linux". You can buy an AMD64 server running Linux, right now, today, right on their website.
You might also notice that they have certified their AMD64 servers to run Red Hat Enterprise or SuSe Enterprise (or Windows 2003 *cough*). Sun doesn't prevent you from installing and running competitor software on their hardware. Though of course, they won't support any software except their own.
You can also get Sun's Java Desktop which is NOT just a rebadged SuSe Linux. There is a fair bit of value-add on top of SuSe, including all the nifty enterprise management software. The EMS won't mean anything to you unless you have 1000+ seats to maintain. But if you are in that space then NONE of the other Linux distros come anywhere near JDS. Of course, dimwitted reviewers who expect JDS to be in the same space as Lindows and Mandrake are inevitably disappointed when it doesn't support their SATA hard drives. But that says volumes about dimwitted reviewers and very little about Sun's commitment to Linux.
I realise Sun-bashing is extremely popular right now but honestly it's entirely unjustified.
Why would I want to see them a second time? If I'm going to spend another 10 hours in front of the television, it's at least going to be with NEW movies.
Why listen to the same song more than once? Why eat the same type of meal more than once? Why have sex with the same person more than once?
BECAUSE IT IS ENJOYABLE YOU MORON.
I don't like Star Wars but I've watched Metropolis (Fritz Lang) a dozen times. I still enjoy watching it even though I know every single scene by heart.
If people enjoy watching LOTR ten times then let them. Don't be a dickhead and make them feel bad about it.
Actually, getting free used oil is easier than you think owing to:
It's only easy until everybody jumps on the band wagon and starts "brewing" their own fuel. There are perhaps 1,000 restaurants in my town. There are easily 50,000 cars. There simply aren't enough restaurants for everybody to be getting free cooking oil.
If they sold the games for two-thirds of their original price, the price of second hand software would simply fall to even lower levels, and the cycle would repeat.
Nah. The local stores offer me $15 for a used game (which they subsequently sell for $35). If the prices dropped 33% then they'd be offering me $10 at which point I'd rather just keep the game than sell it.
There seem to be two things in Gnome 2.6 that annoy people - the spacial mode in nautilus (which is configurable anyway) and the file selector. I'd dearly like to see the whole file selector business go away and be replaced by a nautilus window of the right kind of files in the right location (where location is relevant)
After all why should someone have to learn *two* ways to select files ?
100% agreed. The file dialog is a legacy from when the first Mac didn't have enough memory to run the Finder plus an application at the same time. It would be so much more sensible to click "File -> Open" and be presented with a nautilus window with files of the right type highlighted in some way. Saving a file would put a special "Save Here" button on the nautilus toolbar, and clicking that would create the document with a generic name, pre-selected so you can overwrite or just hit enter to accept the default.
Looking at modern file dialogs it's amazing how much functionality is replicated. They're like mini-file explorers only more difficult to use and without all the functionality. It makes no sense.
Look at it like this. If the police really thought your friend was a terrorist, there's no way they would have given him a warning. They would have just called Homeland and his house would have been searched while your friend was away from home.
The fact that they turned up, asked nicely, and gave him a choice, means that they thought your friend was innocent but they were under an obligation to investigate all reports.
Annoying, yes. But when I was a youngster I once got stopped by the police at 2am while I was walking home. They asked me who I was, where I was going, asked to search my backpack (and I let them), etc. I fumed and thought "fascist pigs" at the time but in hindsight, they did the right thing. Here was me wandering around suburbia at 2am with a big backpack and computer gear under my arm. Suspicious? I think so. The police would have been remiss if they hadn't asked nicely. They probably thought "he's too dorky to be a thief, but we better check anyway, because THAT IS OUR DUTY".
Same here with your friend. Somebody reported him. It's not up to the police to ignore reports from the public. They _should_ investigate. That is their purpose.
First time I did it in mp3, later in vorbis. So there's no way I'm gonna do it again. Besides, there are vorbis hardware players on the market, which can't be said about MPC.
"First time I did it in MP3. So there's no way I'm gonna do it again. Besides, there are MP3 hardware players on the market, which can't be said about Ogg Vorbis." -- Robert, 3 years ago.
If it's good, and free, the hardware decoders will come. But yeah, I'm dreading recoding for the THIRD time.
There are a lot of posts here claiming that Americans just won't be able to get the subtle British humor of HHGTTG, and pointing to various great Brit comedies to support this. The thing is, when people talk about 'British comedy', they mean the comedy of one particular period, the golden age of really great British comedy from about 1965 - 1985, when Fawlty, Python, and HHGTGG flourished.
Umm... Black Adder, Red Dwarf, Men Behaving Badly. The golden age never ended. The Brits keep churning out brilliant comedy.
The only good comedy sitcom to ever come out of America was Frasier.
Plenty of businesses get by without the latest technology. Are you saying a restaurant is going to fail because they don't have a website?
Any restaurant that doesn't have EFTPOS, electronic credit services, and telephones, is certainly starting from a bad position.
And many restaurants have electronic inventory systems, fax machines for ordering new stock, electronic payroll systems, electronic accounting packages to manage their cash flows.
And many of the competitive restaurants around my town have now invested in PDAs instead of paper notepads. At first my friends and I thought this was stupid ($200 for a PDA vs $1 for a notepad and pen?) but on reflection it's not that dumb. The PDAs are wireless. Any amendments to the menu (eg, "we're out of chicken") are right there on the PDA. The orders are beamed directly to the kitchen and have a time set against them so the chefs can prioritize their meals. And the bill is always perfect. The PDAs make sense.
So sure, restaurants mightn't need websites, but they are investing in the latest technology.
Firstly, In terms of sales, Xbox is second. Gamecube is third. PS2 is first, and not surprisingly, as they had a two year head start on the pair.
In the USA it goes PS2 - Xbox - Gamecube. If you consider world wide sales then Gamecube slightly edges out Xbox.
And yes, PS2 had a 2 year head start, but if I recall the figures correctly it's like 70 million PS2 and 13 million Xbox. Ahh yes, here are the figures.
Face it, the PS2 "won". It had more games and better games. The tide is turning but it's too little too late for Xbox. It was a good console too, and very good price, but the games weren't there in sufficient numbers. It's better now, but we're about to see the next gen consoles. Xbox lost the battle. Microsoft might not have lost the war though. They gained a lot of respect with the Xbox. It wasn't a farce. They did a lot of things really well. I was surprised.
Secondly, in terms of capability, Xbox is the winner, hands down.
Yup, can't deny that.
Thirdly, the reason you've only heard Halo included with 'good game' and 'Xbox' was because you're not a console gamer. Otherwise you'd have heard Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Knights of the Old Republic, Crimson Skies, as well as plenty of cross-platform games like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Grand Theft Auto 3/Vice City (The last three all have better graphics on the Xbox than the PS2 counterpart).
Can't deny that either. Games look sweet on the Xbox. But it's all about the games. You buy the console which has your games. Only a dolt buys the console based on tech specs.
The true console warrior has all three consoles though, and these silly console wars are for gamer wannabes.
Linux asks you to learn a tremendous amount in order to use it. Fine - but you can't expect to sell a product with such a steep learning curve to people who barely made it out of High School.
Oh, and a reality check: millions of people in America alone are functionally illiterate. They are NOT going to rewrite their.confs.
Reality check: you haven't needed to edit a.conf file on a modern Linux distro for ages. On Fedora Core 2 I have managed to install the OS, configure the network card, install the printer, connect to the Internet, do a software update, download a movie and watch it, and not once did I need to edit a.conf file. In fact, I only used the keyboard to enter a password. Everything else was done with the mouse.
Microsoft, at this point, is damn near unstoppable because it plays to the crowd - the REAL crowd. The Slashdot Community is a tiny niche in a tiny minority. Let's all work together to write linux apps that are actually easier to use than their microsoft equivalents?
Linux doesn't have to be easier to use than their Microsoft equivalents. Windows was never (and still isn't) easier than Macintosh. Linux just needs to be "easy enough", do most of the job, and be cost effective. Most people are quite happy with a half-arsed solution; the popularity of Windows is proof of that.
I know that's not a good slogan for Linux - "we do it half arsed" - but it's the truth. You don't need to be perfect, or even better than the competition. You just need to be "good enough".
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Some newer cars (eg, BMW 5) have bluetooth integration so your phone works directly without needing a car-kit or cradle. Kind of neat.
I'm not sure what you're running but I'm on Linux 2.6 and GNOME 2.6 and with the following apps running with their respective windows on the desktop.
My total memory usage, including all the sub systems like the mail server and web server that I'm always running, comes to a grand total of 240MB.
It's not lightweight. But with default desktop computers shipping with 256MB and "power desktop" configurations shipping with 512MB, it's not that unusual a memory usage.
Yeah, good point. The live-tv stuff I must admit isn't very useful to me. What I use MythTV for is saying "I want all episodes of BLAH and you figure it out". Then I come back a few weeks later and watch them all back to back.
Without a functional tv_grab script I simply wouldn't bother. Thankfully the tv_grab_au script does seem to work pretty well. I see tv_grab_nz in the xmltv install. Does it not work for you?
The goal of any business is to do what the business owners want. The goals are often stated in the mission statement. If the business owners are greedy swine then sure, the businesses goals will solely be to make profit. But most businesses are not that narrow minded. Most businesses have an agenda and the profit motive is secondary. For example, most businesses aim to provide a certain product or service. Other businesses have stated codes of conduct (eg, Google's "do no evil" rule). Any business you look at will have a similar set of profit unrelated goals. I guarantee you will have great difficulty finding any business whose single stated goal is to "make money".
If what you said was true (and it is not) then companies like Ford could just stop making cars and start playing hedge funds on the stock market. That's tying in with "making money". But that's not what Ford does. The goal of Ford is to make cars at an affordable price. Everything else is a secondary goal; including the profit motive.
I'm no lover of Microsoft either but there's no denying that some of their products are quite good. Microsoft haters need to realise that Microsoft makes stuff that is "good enough". It isn't always the best but similarly it isn't always the worst.
Of course, this "good enough" mentality in customers is what will destroy Microsoft. Free software like Linux is also "good enough". So Microsoft might invest considerable effort to make their products better but the vast majority of customers just won't care. Superior quality didn't save Microsoft's competitors in the 80s and 90s and it won't save Microsoft now.
However, I will make a point that Microsoft got this large mostly through luck. They owned the popular OS which ran on the hardware platform that grew from the expected run of several 1000 IBM units to several 100 million cloned units worldwide. That success could have just as equally gone to Apple if the Apple II was a clonable platform, or to Digital Research if the Kildalls hadn't balked at IBM's NDA. Mr Gates was in the right place at the right time and knew someone willing to sell him the right product. You might call that "business genius" but honestly I think Gates isn't that smart. He might have had some inkling the deal with IBM was "important" but I doubt he realised it was worth tens of billions.
Actually 0.0.1 was the first release and the complexity was entirely realistic for a smart and dedicated student. I'm not sure I could have done it (I'm not that good a coder) but I knew plenty of friends during university who had sufficient skill to write a kernel if they hadn't thought it was too difficult. History is full of people like Linus who don't know it can't be done!
Version 1.0 wasn't until 2.5 years later and already had several 100 contributors by then. But Ken Brown accidentally (purposefully?) confuses Linus's actual first kernel (0.0.1) with the much more complex but community written 1.0 kernel.
They don't have to open source their drivers. They just have to release the register information so we can write our own drivers.
Anybody who thinks the register information would give the competition an unfair advantage is nuts. We *know* what the cards do. You can work that out from the existing information. It's just the stupid numbers and bytecodes (of which they are umpty zillion to work out) that aren't known. There is no competitive disadvantage in releasing the numbers.
And anybody who think there are patents and/or trade secrets associated with register information is even more nuts. ATI/nVidia simply don't care about Linux or open source. They care about selling cards. So long as they can convince 90% of Linux users that closed-source binary-only x86-only drivers are "good enough" they will continue to screw us like this.
Yes. How nice of IBM to volunteer Sun's software like that.
Sun asked IBM to open source Websphere first. IBM was deafening in their silence.
If you're going to attack Sun for not giving away their software - despite the fact that Sun has done their level best to make it possible for competitors to produce their own 100% compatible implementations, with NO PATENT INFRINGEMENTS POSSIBLE (that's written into the Java license) - then how about attacking IBM as well.
It wasn't a "deal". It was a settlement. As in, Microsoft acknowledged that they had done wrong and owed compensation to Sun to the tune of approximately $2 billion in cash and stock and other stuff.
And you can buy supported versions of Linux from Sun. I hardly see how that is them saying you "should not be using Linux". You can buy an AMD64 server running Linux, right now, today, right on their website.
You might also notice that they have certified their AMD64 servers to run Red Hat Enterprise or SuSe Enterprise (or Windows 2003 *cough*). Sun doesn't prevent you from installing and running competitor software on their hardware. Though of course, they won't support any software except their own.
You can also get Sun's Java Desktop which is NOT just a rebadged SuSe Linux. There is a fair bit of value-add on top of SuSe, including all the nifty enterprise management software. The EMS won't mean anything to you unless you have 1000+ seats to maintain. But if you are in that space then NONE of the other Linux distros come anywhere near JDS. Of course, dimwitted reviewers who expect JDS to be in the same space as Lindows and Mandrake are inevitably disappointed when it doesn't support their SATA hard drives. But that says volumes about dimwitted reviewers and very little about Sun's commitment to Linux.
I realise Sun-bashing is extremely popular right now but honestly it's entirely unjustified.
Metropolis is a silent movie.
Obviously not. Australian.
Why listen to the same song more than once? Why eat the same type of meal more than once? Why have sex with the same person more than once?
BECAUSE IT IS ENJOYABLE YOU MORON.
I don't like Star Wars but I've watched Metropolis (Fritz Lang) a dozen times. I still enjoy watching it even though I know every single scene by heart.
If people enjoy watching LOTR ten times then let them. Don't be a dickhead and make them feel bad about it.
It's only easy until everybody jumps on the band wagon and starts "brewing" their own fuel. There are perhaps 1,000 restaurants in my town. There are easily 50,000 cars. There simply aren't enough restaurants for everybody to be getting free cooking oil.
$30 for a new game would be a 70% reduction from what they currently cost. That seems unlikely.
Nah. The local stores offer me $15 for a used game (which they subsequently sell for $35). If the prices dropped 33% then they'd be offering me $10 at which point I'd rather just keep the game than sell it.
On discs 4, 5 and 6.
You did get all 7 discs, right?
Apparently the kernel. FC2 uses the latest 2.6 kernel which has revised disk geometry code.
Of course, if you're dual booting Windows with Linux then I say karma gave you what you deserve :-P
100% agreed. The file dialog is a legacy from when the first Mac didn't have enough memory to run the Finder plus an application at the same time. It would be so much more sensible to click "File -> Open" and be presented with a nautilus window with files of the right type highlighted in some way. Saving a file would put a special "Save Here" button on the nautilus toolbar, and clicking that would create the document with a generic name, pre-selected so you can overwrite or just hit enter to accept the default.
Looking at modern file dialogs it's amazing how much functionality is replicated. They're like mini-file explorers only more difficult to use and without all the functionality. It makes no sense.
Look at it like this. If the police really thought your friend was a terrorist, there's no way they would have given him a warning. They would have just called Homeland and his house would have been searched while your friend was away from home.
The fact that they turned up, asked nicely, and gave him a choice, means that they thought your friend was innocent but they were under an obligation to investigate all reports.
Annoying, yes. But when I was a youngster I once got stopped by the police at 2am while I was walking home. They asked me who I was, where I was going, asked to search my backpack (and I let them), etc. I fumed and thought "fascist pigs" at the time but in hindsight, they did the right thing. Here was me wandering around suburbia at 2am with a big backpack and computer gear under my arm. Suspicious? I think so. The police would have been remiss if they hadn't asked nicely. They probably thought "he's too dorky to be a thief, but we better check anyway, because THAT IS OUR DUTY".
Same here with your friend. Somebody reported him. It's not up to the police to ignore reports from the public. They _should_ investigate. That is their purpose.
"First time I did it in MP3. So there's no way I'm gonna do it again. Besides, there are MP3 hardware players on the market, which can't be said about Ogg Vorbis." -- Robert, 3 years ago.
If it's good, and free, the hardware decoders will come. But yeah, I'm dreading recoding for the THIRD time.
Umm... Black Adder, Red Dwarf, Men Behaving Badly. The golden age never ended. The Brits keep churning out brilliant comedy.
The only good comedy sitcom to ever come out of America was Frasier.
Gilliam isn't really an American; he's an honorary Brit :-P
Any restaurant that doesn't have EFTPOS, electronic credit services, and telephones, is certainly starting from a bad position.
And many restaurants have electronic inventory systems, fax machines for ordering new stock, electronic payroll systems, electronic accounting packages to manage their cash flows.
And many of the competitive restaurants around my town have now invested in PDAs instead of paper notepads. At first my friends and I thought this was stupid ($200 for a PDA vs $1 for a notepad and pen?) but on reflection it's not that dumb. The PDAs are wireless. Any amendments to the menu (eg, "we're out of chicken") are right there on the PDA. The orders are beamed directly to the kitchen and have a time set against them so the chefs can prioritize their meals. And the bill is always perfect. The PDAs make sense.
So sure, restaurants mightn't need websites, but they are investing in the latest technology.
In the USA it goes PS2 - Xbox - Gamecube. If you consider world wide sales then Gamecube slightly edges out Xbox.
And yes, PS2 had a 2 year head start, but if I recall the figures correctly it's like 70 million PS2 and 13 million Xbox. Ahh yes, here are the figures.
Face it, the PS2 "won". It had more games and better games. The tide is turning but it's too little too late for Xbox. It was a good console too, and very good price, but the games weren't there in sufficient numbers. It's better now, but we're about to see the next gen consoles. Xbox lost the battle. Microsoft might not have lost the war though. They gained a lot of respect with the Xbox. It wasn't a farce. They did a lot of things really well. I was surprised.
Yup, can't deny that.
Can't deny that either. Games look sweet on the Xbox. But it's all about the games. You buy the console which has your games. Only a dolt buys the console based on tech specs.
The true console warrior has all three consoles though, and these silly console wars are for gamer wannabes.
Reality check: you haven't needed to edit a .conf file on a modern Linux distro for ages. On Fedora Core 2 I have managed to install the OS, configure the network card, install the printer, connect to the Internet, do a software update, download a movie and watch it, and not once did I need to edit a .conf file. In fact, I only used the keyboard to enter a password. Everything else was done with the mouse.
Linux doesn't have to be easier to use than their Microsoft equivalents. Windows was never (and still isn't) easier than Macintosh. Linux just needs to be "easy enough", do most of the job, and be cost effective. Most people are quite happy with a half-arsed solution; the popularity of Windows is proof of that.
I know that's not a good slogan for Linux - "we do it half arsed" - but it's the truth. You don't need to be perfect, or even better than the competition. You just need to be "good enough".