I own 2 Virtual Boys, and the best ways to play it that I found were to lie on the floor on your stomach and look into it (screwed up your neck after a while) and to lay on your back and rest the unit on your head (worked good if you put a little foam tape or something inbetween the eye pieces, otherwise it cut into your nose).
So many consoles, so many comments. Oh well, here is what I think of some things.
Virtual Boy - I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I LOVED this system. The tennis game was great, and Mario Clash was great too. The pinball game really showed off the 3D. The red thing never realy bothered me, and I actually own two of these things (bought them both for $20 from a Blockbuster after the system failed). The biggest mistake they made was naming this thing "VirtualBoy." This made it sound like a GameBoy, and many people I know thought that it was meant to be a replacement to the GameBoy. The problem with this fact was... say it with me now... IT'S NOT PORTABLE. It's about as portable as a PSOne with a little LCD screen on it. This isn't something you can just slip in your pocket like a GameBoy. The other big mistake was that the head unit contained all the guts and so it was heavy and cumbersome. They should have put all the electronics in a little box that went in between the controller (which was quite nice, actualy) and the "display". Personally, I'd really love to see them re-release this. They could probably do color for a reasonable price (GameBoy Color type color, not GBA type) and make a great system because they could make it much smaller. I liked this system.
Atari Jaguar - Why wasn't this on the list? I rented this thing too, and it sucked. First of all, if you think that the X-Box's origional controller was big (which it wasn't that bad) try this thing. It's like they took a "normal" controller, and stuck a calculator in the middle of it. Plus, the games... well... sucked. The only one I remember wasn't THAT bad. I think it was the pack in. The game was you in a spaceship, or something, that transformed, or something. The fact that they actually made addons (like the CD drive, and wasn't there a modem?) amazes me.
32X - Owned one of these too (bought from Toys 'r' Us for $50 after it bombed, great way to get stuff;). The games varried. The only one I really liked I still own. It had you flying around in a spaceship in a little 3D polygonal universe (sorta like StarFox but not on rails and no planets). You could play with two players at once (one controlled the ship, the other the gun). It was actually a pretty good game. I also tried some of the 32XCD games, but I don't remember them. One of the big flaws with this thing was that the saturn was already announced (or at least rumored as the Dural or BlackBelt or whatever. Things always have cooler codenames than final names. Project Dolphin.) and many people wouldn't buy it because it wouldn't play Saturn games. If it had done that, it probably would have done quite well.
3DO - I always thought that it looked neat, and I heard it had a few great games. But the fact is when your 10 years old, you don't have $500 to drop on a video game machine. It did hang around for a LONG time though.
CDI - To tell you the truth, I remember hearing of this, and seeing games in magazines. But I never saw a single one for sale, that I can remember. That's a great recipe for success. I also remember hearing it was expensive.
Saturn - Two games I wanted to play. I wanted to play Nights (still waiting for a rerelease of that) and Panzer Dragoon (that game looked so amazing at the time.) Plus, the Saturn had all those cool "Theater of the Eye" commercials. Very cool. But of course, it was expensive as hell, the analog controller (when it finally came out for Nights) was weird (and fixed (somewhat) in the Dreamcast). Part of it's problem what that it was supposed to be terrible to develop for because of it's dual CPU nature. There were some good games, but let's face it, Sega has always had a hard time with consoles after the Genesis. The Saturn and Dreamcast didn't do too well (Dreamcast was good). I would have bought one of these if that 3D Sonic game that they previewed ever came out. The only Sonic game was that terrible racing game.
Lynx - I never played one (it was supposed to be quite good) but I had a friend who thought it was amazing. I don't remember anything about it. I don't know why it failed.
When I saw the title to this story, I thought that this would be another anti-internet radio story. And with the fact that Sen. Feingold's name was attached to the story, I thought that was certainly the case. I have to say that I don't usually like the Senetor's ideas at all (I'm a very strong conservative) but I LOVE like this idea. The fact that McCain (a strong conservative who's ideas I almost always like) is expect to co-sponser says alot about how good this bill really is. Whichever party your alegiance lies with, you've got to admid this is a pretty good idea.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm sick of how all radio stations sound the same because there are only a few companies controlling them. When I moved from central OH to KS, I could have swarn that the local radio stations were the same in both places, just with different call letters. All the hosts even sound exactly the same. The contests the stations do are identicle. You can't tell the difference, because they are controlled by the same companies, and made for mass market (not local tastes). At least with TV it's obvious who controlls things(NBC, CBS, Disn^H^H^H^HABC, etc). But with radio they almost never make it easy to find out who they belong with. Your best bet is to guess by where they get their top of the hour news ("Now this from our ABC affiliate...")
It's really nice to see legislation that will most likely make a difference like this have a good chance. All I can say is I hope another bill comes down soon: one to prevent the Disney-ABC type thing. How only 3 or 4 companies own the major networks, most cable network, the movie studios, and everything else. I don't know about the rest of you, but the national morning news shows are some of the most thinly veiled infomercials for movies and TV shows that I've ever seen.
I know I'll be telling my Senators to vote for this, I hope you all do the same.
I too, used Debian for a long time; and I too now use Gentoo. But, the fact is that your missing the point. Debian is free. Debian is COMPLETELY FREE. AFIK, it's the only true FREE distro, in that they don't include anything that's not free.
Let's not forget that your free to choose whatever distro you like. Like I said above, I now use Gentoo for my desktop for a variety of reasons (all source, newer packages, faster due to optimisations, etc) but I use Debian on all my other boxes.
It's an unfair comparison, to put Gentoo and Debian together. Gentoo is like Mandrake (IMHO), it's a desktop distro. It's got great stuff that's pretty new, it's fast, etc.
Debian is, to me, a base distro. It's a rock. NOTHING gets into Debian unless it's been well tested. If you run Stable, you should NEVER have a single crash, it's that stable. The fact is, Debian's unstable branch is equivelent to most other distros out that, in my expirence. If you want a rock solid server, use Debian. If you want to create a great desktop distro, and want a great foundation to build on, use Debian.
Also don't forget that Debian is not just another distro, it's THE distro. Where would free software be without Debian? If you have some odd architecutre, what distro will you run? You can choose some little distro that no one has ever heard of. You could use Linux From Scratch. Or you could use Debian. Debian is on tons of different archs and it's identicle on all of them. Debian is largely responsible for for the porting of, and testing of, XFree on many of the more exotic platforms (IIRC).
Debian may be slow to get new packages, but Debian has a quality that just can't be matched. I may use Gentoo for my desktop system, but I use Debian for everything else. Why? For one thing, whether the machine is a Mac, a PC, or anything else, it looks just the same. I don't have to remember 30 diferent filesystem layouts from 35 diferent distros. I don't have to keep a cheat sheet of how to install packages on that computer (was it "rpm -Uvh", or "emerge", or "cast", or...). Debian may not be as good a desktop distro as Mandrake, Gentoo, Suse, or others. But the fact is that it's the best for just about everything else. Debian is the swiss-army knife of distros. Any platform, any task, anything; Debian can do it. It runs out of the box on 386s or on the newest P4.
In short, Debian is one of the best things to happen to free software, IMHO. Just because it no longer works for you doesn't mean that it now sucks! If I was a corporation deploying Linux on lots of desktops and I wanted something that wouldn't cause me any problems, I'd run Debian.
You can say that think kind of issue is what's keeping Debian off the desktop, and you might be right. You can say that it's the kind of thing that proves that some projects can just get too large to work well as OSS. But it's these kind of issues that make Debian so good. So please don't go saying "Debian will die because of this," when the fact is this is what makes Debian so strong.
And if you don't like the direction that Debian is going in, change it. The elections for the top positions on the Debian project is about to be held. Run for a position.
But I guess it's just easier to whine here on/. than to actually try to influence things the correct way.
This isn't an article, it's a free online educational course. That's why they want you to register. It's still free. Why don't you try LOOKING at things before you start to complain?
Most of the stuff on PG is public domain, IIRC. Unless Poe, Melville (I know it's wrong, so sue me), Shakespere, and others all climb out of their graves and form some kind of union (RIAA - Recently-undeceased Inkers of Aged Albums etc.) will people complain that they're getting ripped off by these works being put on the web.
... aren't they? I mean, even if I buy "Moby Dick", isn't all that text in a computer at the publisher somewhere? They format it to fit the pages, etc, and then send that file off to the printers, correct? So it is still on the publisher's compuer, and it shouldn't be TOO hard to get it into the simple text files instead of whatever odd format they might use. What about when books get published in Braille. A computer must do that, right? There isn't some guy pokeing dots in steel plates to emboss the pages with, right? I could be wrong, this is my guess. Anyone in the publishing industry out there?
So the point of this post is: why not ask publishers for the material? If it's already public domain, it's not like they'll lose profits, and maybe Project Gutenberg could let them put a little
This text donated by Joe Bob Publishers Inc, of Wala Wala Washington (www.joebobbooks.inc)
kind of thing at the top of each book they donate. Plus, maybe it's a tax write off. I don't know. That said, I'd thing it'd be much easier to just type things in than OCR it or use Speach-To-Text.
Yes, there is. There isn't a standard capacity, but the interface is standard (IDE) and the form factor is too (3.5" drive slot)
You're perfectly right. Of course, swapping a stereo isn't supposed to be a ten-minute pull swap. It shouldn't take more than a half hour to completely take off all parts needed, and if it takes one longer than that, they shouldn't be trying to install their car stereo.
I agree that it shouldn't take 30 seconds. But I should be able to do it easily. It should at least say how to do it in the owners manual. As far as I can tell, instructions aren't published anywhere.
Yeah, and I want a Firewire port for my ECU - but 99 percent of other car driver's don't. (well, maybe more people want it with my car than with average joe car)
I think alot of people would like the ability to simply plug something into their car stereo using a standard earphone jack. I'm just saying that there should be standards for how you extend a stereo (the tape/cd changer/minidisc drive interface).
It's not a safety thing. It's an auto shop conspiracy thing. You think the car dealers WANT tuners to be able to plug in a serial cable and reprogram their fuel maps? Hell no!
It's not pretty, but there are some ugly things elsewhere. The Aztec (Pontiac I think?), Honda's new Element (it's a square boxy delivery van looking thing), and many others. Where has all the taste gone? My other complaint on car looks is "What's with Mercades?" They have nice cars, but on alot of them they have HUGE emblems on the front that are just hideous. Otherwise, they are nice.
I don't think you'll see tinkering any time soon. First of all, there is (as stated in a story a while ago) the legal question of who's fault it is if I tinker with my cars computer and it screws up or something. But besides that, let me tell you about why this won't happen any time soon.
Cars have had radios (of some sort) standard for a VERY long time; and they were an option for a while before that. Yet there is no standard stereo. There is a standard SIZE (I think) but I can't just pull mine out and slide a new one in. To start, I have no idea how to get to my stereo. I'd have to take off my dash (I assume) and get to a ton of screws. (I have a 2k Honda Oddessey). I found this out while trying to find out how to plug something into my car stereo. I wanted to plug in my iPod through a standard dual RCA stereo cable, but I can't do that without buying an aftermarket stereo. And if I did that, chances are the volume thing on my steering wheel wouldn't work.
It seems to me that untill I can just swapout the stereo on my car like swapping the harddrive on my laptop (just one screw), wanting to have any controll over the chips in your car easily is a LOT to ask.
I completely agree with this. Even without a merge, it would be very nice to see Mandrake people go over to develop Debain. Debian is great, but Mandrake is very user friendly and easy to use. A distro with the quality and stability of Debian along with the UI knowhow of Mandrake (making graphical front ends for stuff, arranging menus, making GUI programs to do all sorts of system administration, etc) would be great. I haven't used Mandrake in a while but I have to say I've missed their "control panels" type things more than a few times.
I'd imagine that as long as you attached to where there is a bulkhead on the other side of the hull, you'd be fine. They may not have been designed for force in that direction, but I doubt that there would really be enough force to worry about.
I agree with the parent that standard CDs can never be fully protected. They should just forcus all their efforts on SACDs and DVD-A. The installed base is just too big. They won't find any way to make it work with all CD players. Unless they just decide that anything older than a few years (like, all the ones that won't read copy protected CDs) are just too old and tell customers "Too bad loser. Buy something new once in a while."
(unless MS intercepts this at the OS level)
This is what Sony did (IIRC) with the PS2's Linux kit. To prevent people from copying audio CDs, movies, games, etc, they put a layer in between the Linux kernel and the hardware. This allows them to make it so you can't read CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. So unless MS tries to do this, it's pointless. Even if they do try to lock things at the OS level, you still have Apple and the rest of the world that will probably let users actually USE their PCs (wow! what a concept). To really make this work on all computers, you'd have to have it at the drive firmware level.
On a side note, there is nothing preventing a user of the PS2 Linux kit from plugging in a USB or Firewire CD or DVD drive and reading copied disks. Maybe MS will screwup just as blatently.
Does anyone here remember something that was on TV a few years ago? It was a documentary (fake, but well done and cool) and I'm not sure what it was called (or which network, but based on content is was almost certainly FOX). They showed cars and boats as stuff that had gone crazy from a "disease" or something that spread between machines. IIRC They claimed it all started when Henry Ford refused to accept his illegetimate kid (Mortimer Ford) and just gave him some little job in the department that made motor. So to get back at his father he designed some little part of the engine that could cause the car to go crazy, but the engine wouldn't work without it. And no one knows how it works! (insert music from that twilightly show about that zone).
On a more serious note, while this is funny, it shouldn't happen. A computer is one thing. There are lots of different pieces of hardware and other things to have to deal with. So you have to expect that something will go wrong every once in a while with a well written OS and software. But there is no excuse for crashing and random behavoir in a closed system like that in a car. People don't like to reboot their VCRs. If you had to reset TiVos contantly, do you think they'd be so popular? You should be able to use something for months without a single problem. My DirecTV reciever, my VCR, my Linksys Router, my networked HP Laserjet, and other things don't need any of my attention. They work without me having to reset them. Do they have problems? No, but even when something happens, just turning it off and on and that always fixes it. I can do it myself. I shouldn't have to call a repairman to come reboot something. So nothing should ever go wrong, but if it does it should be easy for the user to make it work correctly again. Just turning the car off and back on should fix the problem. There is no excuse for being lazy and having bugs in a closed system. (Closed in that the user doesn't change the hardware on it like they can upgrade a computer)
To end, I think it's fitting that I add this lyric from the song A Meticulous Analysis of History from Pinky and the Brain...
Brain: I won't need world alliances,
when I'm controlling everyone's appliances.
Pinky: Well Brain it would really smart,
to be bitten on the bottom by a cuisinart!
I'm getting really sick of this. This is a major pet peeve of mine. It seems like more than half the time I find an article on something (especially something where a picture is NEEDED, like this) there is no picture. What is so hard about including one little picture in an article? Thanks for finding the picture for us.
That's pretty cool, but personally I'd probably just run OS X, it's a very nice OS. I can see where this would be nice though. Now if they can make this run on x86s (I know, VERY though, that requires emulating a ton more stuff) then I'll rush to download it.
Re:Stability means less work for sysadmins
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Linux Is Cheaper
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I completely agree with this. I have a small box sitting in one of the rooms in my house serving MP3s. It just sits there, and all the computers in the house get their MP3s over the LAN. I've had it doing this for a few months, and the fact is if I didn't physically SEE it once in a while, I'd forget it was there. I never have to touch the thing. Even with things like the power going out (which happens semi-often around here, unfortunatly), my little server is to the point where it just boots right back up and works again. The last time I actually had to touch it was because the RTC battery died so when the computer was reset one day, it didn't come back up because the BIOS lost all it's settings, not Linux's fault by any means. A new battery and it worked again.
I have used windows boxes in the past, but Linux just seems to work better. I can use Samba for my Windows boxes, and I use NFS for other *NIXes. But the fact of the matter is Windows just doesn't like not having a video card, or a keyboard. It doesn't always come up after a power outage. And you can't remotely administer them nearly as easily as you can with Linux.
Like I said at the start, I find this is perfectly correct. I have forgotten about my little server for WEEKS on end, it's just that transparent for me.
Re:How man more servers? LOOK AGAIN
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Linux Is Cheaper
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· Score: 2
If you read again, the example they give has the Windows guy doing 10-15 (as you say), but the Linux guy is doing about 45. No one could admin 1000 boxes unless they were all perfect clones that net-boot (like in a cluster) where they just have to change one machine and issue a command to fix the rest. No one could administer 1000 different servers effectivly.
The list looks quite logical to me, except for Java being so high up. Is that right? I would expect it to be 2nd or 3rd, 4th at most, but not 1st. I'd say that "java" serches were including "javascript" and that accounted for it, but if you look at his searches they are "java AND NOT javascript", so unless the search script is majorly borked (a technical term;) I'm still confused.
Also, it would be very interesting to see C and C++ both, instead of just C++. I bet there are still tons of jobs for C programers. Also, why not search for "c-sharp" along with "c#", you know, do an OR. That might make a difference. And where is objective C?
Last but not least, where are some other languages? What about...
Assembly/machine code
Chef
Yacc
Basic (not visual, just plain 'ol basic;)
Awk
C (not ++, not +, not #, just C)
Pascal
Eiffel
BASH
(V)HDL
Objective-C
(Visual) FoxPro
VBScript (Javascript is there, so why not?)
Brainfuck (ok, just had to include this. Google says it exists)
Obviously, most aren't serious. The "real" ommisions are in bold. Please no "FoxPro is important you insensitive clod!" replies.
I've used many many distros over the last few years, and I can tell you the things I like easily. Below are some of my top ones:
Dependencies - This is probably the most important for me. The thing that makes apt so great is that it can do dependencies. Gentoo's emerge also does a great job of this. I haven't used an RPM distro in about 2 years, but back then they didn't do anything but complain that you needed some other package. YOU had to go find it. YOU had to go install it. YOU had to get IT'S dependencies, etc. It meant installing one package could take forever.
Source - I like being able to easily build from source. With RPMs (at least in my expirence) it would build the package, then put it in some odd location and you'd then have to "rpm -Uvh" (or whatever) from there. Gentoo does a great job of this, but it's a source distro;). Basically, when I install from source, it should install the package for me. If I only want to make some kind of binary that I can distribute, that should be a seperate command.
Compatibility - RPMs never seemd to work across distros, quel suprise. This is one thing that I really like about slackware's.tgz files. They are nothing but a.tar.gz with some extra info, so no matter what system you use, you could just download the slackware.tgz and use it, right? Gentoo doesn't have packages, but "ebuilds". These are nice because they are small little text files, and your computer goes and fetches the latest version of the package (or whatever version is specified). It uses the standard source and it gets it the same way you might.
The Unistall - This can be a PAIN. This is the one feature that, IMHO, makes packages better than source. If this doesn't work, why not take the extra 3 steps to use source? When I uninstall something it should be removed completely. No empty directories, it should offer to remove it's config files or back them up, it should offer to restore any files that it's changed, etc. Both Debian and Gentoo do a great job with this. I don't remember what it's like with RPMs very well.
I'll post more if I can think of them. Why does constructive criticism have to be so much harder than normal criticism? He he he. I talk alot about Debian and Gentoo because those are the two distros that I use regularly, and the package systems are a big reason for that. Packaging makes a difference. I'd probably run Mandrake if it wasn't RPM based. It's a great distro, but I just CAN'T STAND RPMs. Are they much better now than a year or two or three ago? Almost certanly. But I've been so soured to them by my expirence, it will be quite a while before I try them again; especially since I found apt and emerge.
Scroll down on the HardOCP homepage and you'll see a graph from that German magazine pitting a 1.2GHz x86-64 against a P4 2.2GHz. Even at about half the clockspeed, it gets very close or beats the P4 most of the time. When it's behind, it's not by far. And sometimes when it's ahead, it's WAY ahead. And this is at about half the clock speed too. So if AMD can get these things out at about 2GHz, I'll be in line for sure.
As to people saying that AMD is dead if x86-64 doesn't work, I agree. They are basically betting the farm on the x86-64 chips. If they don't payoff, they'll most likely leave the desktop/server/whatever CPU market. They'll still be alive in microcontrollers and millions of other things, but they won't be competing with Intel for the CPU of your PC. If this happens, I'll be worried, becase we all know that we need a second big name in CPUs to keep prices in the "ludicrous and below" area.
BUT... if they don't take off on the PC side, the chip is still superior to the little 1.x GHz PPCs that Apple is using. If they could be the new chip for Apple, then they could stay in the CPU market, and Apple could get a major contender again (CPU wise). I'd love this to happen. OS X is already proted (according to rumors, and we know that the kernel already runs on x86s, so it would be fast ported to the -64s, especially by AMD). Software would be easy to port from PCs to Macs (no endianess mess). Even as just a failed market expirament, this could mean alot to Apple, AMD, and Intel.
All speculations, my opinions, and such. If you doubt me, send $200 to me and I'll consider your point of view better. The address is below....
Some (many?) offer their motherboards with varying amounts of integrated stuff (I know Tyan does this, at least to a degree), but they are hard to find because most people like integrated stuff. That said, I know what you're going through. I've got a great old motherboard but the SCSI on it is completely useless. It really annoys me to have built in SCSI that doesn't work. The rest of it works fine, but it just seems "broken" anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I own 2 Virtual Boys, and the best ways to play it that I found were to lie on the floor on your stomach and look into it (screwed up your neck after a while) and to lay on your back and rest the unit on your head (worked good if you put a little foam tape or something inbetween the eye pieces, otherwise it cut into your nose).
There you have it.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm sick of how all radio stations sound the same because there are only a few companies controlling them. When I moved from central OH to KS, I could have swarn that the local radio stations were the same in both places, just with different call letters. All the hosts even sound exactly the same. The contests the stations do are identicle. You can't tell the difference, because they are controlled by the same companies, and made for mass market (not local tastes). At least with TV it's obvious who controlls things(NBC, CBS, Disn^H^H^H^HABC, etc). But with radio they almost never make it easy to find out who they belong with. Your best bet is to guess by where they get their top of the hour news ("Now this from our ABC affiliate...")
It's really nice to see legislation that will most likely make a difference like this have a good chance. All I can say is I hope another bill comes down soon: one to prevent the Disney-ABC type thing. How only 3 or 4 companies own the major networks, most cable network, the movie studios, and everything else. I don't know about the rest of you, but the national morning news shows are some of the most thinly veiled infomercials for movies and TV shows that I've ever seen.
I know I'll be telling my Senators to vote for this, I hope you all do the same.
Let's not forget that your free to choose whatever distro you like. Like I said above, I now use Gentoo for my desktop for a variety of reasons (all source, newer packages, faster due to optimisations, etc) but I use Debian on all my other boxes.
It's an unfair comparison, to put Gentoo and Debian together. Gentoo is like Mandrake (IMHO), it's a desktop distro. It's got great stuff that's pretty new, it's fast, etc.
Debian is, to me, a base distro. It's a rock. NOTHING gets into Debian unless it's been well tested. If you run Stable, you should NEVER have a single crash, it's that stable. The fact is, Debian's unstable branch is equivelent to most other distros out that, in my expirence. If you want a rock solid server, use Debian. If you want to create a great desktop distro, and want a great foundation to build on, use Debian.
Also don't forget that Debian is not just another distro, it's THE distro. Where would free software be without Debian? If you have some odd architecutre, what distro will you run? You can choose some little distro that no one has ever heard of. You could use Linux From Scratch. Or you could use Debian. Debian is on tons of different archs and it's identicle on all of them. Debian is largely responsible for for the porting of, and testing of, XFree on many of the more exotic platforms (IIRC).
Debian may be slow to get new packages, but Debian has a quality that just can't be matched. I may use Gentoo for my desktop system, but I use Debian for everything else. Why? For one thing, whether the machine is a Mac, a PC, or anything else, it looks just the same. I don't have to remember 30 diferent filesystem layouts from 35 diferent distros. I don't have to keep a cheat sheet of how to install packages on that computer (was it "rpm -Uvh", or "emerge", or "cast", or...). Debian may not be as good a desktop distro as Mandrake, Gentoo, Suse, or others. But the fact is that it's the best for just about everything else. Debian is the swiss-army knife of distros. Any platform, any task, anything; Debian can do it. It runs out of the box on 386s or on the newest P4.
In short, Debian is one of the best things to happen to free software, IMHO. Just because it no longer works for you doesn't mean that it now sucks! If I was a corporation deploying Linux on lots of desktops and I wanted something that wouldn't cause me any problems, I'd run Debian.
You can say that think kind of issue is what's keeping Debian off the desktop, and you might be right. You can say that it's the kind of thing that proves that some projects can just get too large to work well as OSS. But it's these kind of issues that make Debian so good. So please don't go saying "Debian will die because of this," when the fact is this is what makes Debian so strong.
And if you don't like the direction that Debian is going in, change it. The elections for the top positions on the Debian project is about to be held. Run for a position.
But I guess it's just easier to whine here on /. than to actually try to influence things the correct way.
Bye bye karma :(...
Most of the stuff on PG is public domain, IIRC. Unless Poe, Melville (I know it's wrong, so sue me), Shakespere, and others all climb out of their graves and form some kind of union (RIAA - Recently-undeceased Inkers of Aged Albums etc.) will people complain that they're getting ripped off by these works being put on the web.
So the point of this post is: why not ask publishers for the material? If it's already public domain, it's not like they'll lose profits, and maybe Project Gutenberg could let them put a little
kind of thing at the top of each book they donate. Plus, maybe it's a tax write off. I don't know. That said, I'd thing it'd be much easier to just type things in than OCR it or use Speach-To-Text.Yes, there is. There isn't a standard capacity, but the interface is standard (IDE) and the form factor is too (3.5" drive slot)
You're perfectly right. Of course, swapping a stereo isn't supposed to be a ten-minute pull swap. It shouldn't take more than a half hour to completely take off all parts needed, and if it takes one longer than that, they shouldn't be trying to install their car stereo.
I agree that it shouldn't take 30 seconds. But I should be able to do it easily. It should at least say how to do it in the owners manual. As far as I can tell, instructions aren't published anywhere.
Yeah, and I want a Firewire port for my ECU - but 99 percent of other car driver's don't. (well, maybe more people want it with my car than with average joe car)
I think alot of people would like the ability to simply plug something into their car stereo using a standard earphone jack. I'm just saying that there should be standards for how you extend a stereo (the tape/cd changer/minidisc drive interface).
It's not a safety thing. It's an auto shop conspiracy thing. You think the car dealers WANT tuners to be able to plug in a serial cable and reprogram their fuel maps? Hell no!
Must everything be a conspiracy?
It's not pretty, but there are some ugly things elsewhere. The Aztec (Pontiac I think?), Honda's new Element (it's a square boxy delivery van looking thing), and many others. Where has all the taste gone? My other complaint on car looks is "What's with Mercades?" They have nice cars, but on alot of them they have HUGE emblems on the front that are just hideous. Otherwise, they are nice.
Cars have had radios (of some sort) standard for a VERY long time; and they were an option for a while before that. Yet there is no standard stereo. There is a standard SIZE (I think) but I can't just pull mine out and slide a new one in. To start, I have no idea how to get to my stereo. I'd have to take off my dash (I assume) and get to a ton of screws. (I have a 2k Honda Oddessey). I found this out while trying to find out how to plug something into my car stereo. I wanted to plug in my iPod through a standard dual RCA stereo cable, but I can't do that without buying an aftermarket stereo. And if I did that, chances are the volume thing on my steering wheel wouldn't work.
It seems to me that untill I can just swapout the stereo on my car like swapping the harddrive on my laptop (just one screw), wanting to have any controll over the chips in your car easily is a LOT to ask.
I completely agree with this. Even without a merge, it would be very nice to see Mandrake people go over to develop Debain. Debian is great, but Mandrake is very user friendly and easy to use. A distro with the quality and stability of Debian along with the UI knowhow of Mandrake (making graphical front ends for stuff, arranging menus, making GUI programs to do all sorts of system administration, etc) would be great. I haven't used Mandrake in a while but I have to say I've missed their "control panels" type things more than a few times.
I'd imagine that as long as you attached to where there is a bulkhead on the other side of the hull, you'd be fine. They may not have been designed for force in that direction, but I doubt that there would really be enough force to worry about.
I agree with the parent that standard CDs can never be fully protected. They should just forcus all their efforts on SACDs and DVD-A. The installed base is just too big. They won't find any way to make it work with all CD players. Unless they just decide that anything older than a few years (like, all the ones that won't read copy protected CDs) are just too old and tell customers "Too bad loser. Buy something new once in a while."
This is what Sony did (IIRC) with the PS2's Linux kit. To prevent people from copying audio CDs, movies, games, etc, they put a layer in between the Linux kernel and the hardware. This allows them to make it so you can't read CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. So unless MS tries to do this, it's pointless. Even if they do try to lock things at the OS level, you still have Apple and the rest of the world that will probably let users actually USE their PCs (wow! what a concept). To really make this work on all computers, you'd have to have it at the drive firmware level.
On a side note, there is nothing preventing a user of the PS2 Linux kit from plugging in a USB or Firewire CD or DVD drive and reading copied disks. Maybe MS will screwup just as blatently.
Couldn't eject CDs from the drive. Ha. You'll wish for those days...
On a more serious note, while this is funny, it shouldn't happen. A computer is one thing. There are lots of different pieces of hardware and other things to have to deal with. So you have to expect that something will go wrong every once in a while with a well written OS and software. But there is no excuse for crashing and random behavoir in a closed system like that in a car. People don't like to reboot their VCRs. If you had to reset TiVos contantly, do you think they'd be so popular? You should be able to use something for months without a single problem. My DirecTV reciever, my VCR, my Linksys Router, my networked HP Laserjet, and other things don't need any of my attention. They work without me having to reset them. Do they have problems? No, but even when something happens, just turning it off and on and that always fixes it. I can do it myself. I shouldn't have to call a repairman to come reboot something. So nothing should ever go wrong, but if it does it should be easy for the user to make it work correctly again. Just turning the car off and back on should fix the problem. There is no excuse for being lazy and having bugs in a closed system. (Closed in that the user doesn't change the hardware on it like they can upgrade a computer)
To end, I think it's fitting that I add this lyric from the song A Meticulous Analysis of History from Pinky and the Brain...
He he he.
Does he have to scan a can of Spam to check his e-mail? Note: Don't blame me, only one post and it's already /.ed, how am I supposed to read it?
I'm getting really sick of this. This is a major pet peeve of mine. It seems like more than half the time I find an article on something (especially something where a picture is NEEDED, like this) there is no picture. What is so hard about including one little picture in an article? Thanks for finding the picture for us.
That's pretty cool, but personally I'd probably just run OS X, it's a very nice OS. I can see where this would be nice though. Now if they can make this run on x86s (I know, VERY though, that requires emulating a ton more stuff) then I'll rush to download it.
I have used windows boxes in the past, but Linux just seems to work better. I can use Samba for my Windows boxes, and I use NFS for other *NIXes. But the fact of the matter is Windows just doesn't like not having a video card, or a keyboard. It doesn't always come up after a power outage. And you can't remotely administer them nearly as easily as you can with Linux.
Like I said at the start, I find this is perfectly correct. I have forgotten about my little server for WEEKS on end, it's just that transparent for me.
If you read again, the example they give has the Windows guy doing 10-15 (as you say), but the Linux guy is doing about 45. No one could admin 1000 boxes unless they were all perfect clones that net-boot (like in a cluster) where they just have to change one machine and issue a command to fix the rest. No one could administer 1000 different servers effectivly.
Also, it would be very interesting to see C and C++ both, instead of just C++. I bet there are still tons of jobs for C programers. Also, why not search for "c-sharp" along with "c#", you know, do an OR. That might make a difference. And where is objective C?
Last but not least, where are some other languages? What about...
Obviously, most aren't serious. The "real" ommisions are in bold. Please no "FoxPro is important you insensitive clod!" replies.
I'll post more if I can think of them. Why does constructive criticism have to be so much harder than normal criticism? He he he. I talk alot about Debian and Gentoo because those are the two distros that I use regularly, and the package systems are a big reason for that. Packaging makes a difference. I'd probably run Mandrake if it wasn't RPM based. It's a great distro, but I just CAN'T STAND RPMs. Are they much better now than a year or two or three ago? Almost certanly. But I've been so soured to them by my expirence, it will be quite a while before I try them again; especially since I found apt and emerge.
As to people saying that AMD is dead if x86-64 doesn't work, I agree. They are basically betting the farm on the x86-64 chips. If they don't payoff, they'll most likely leave the desktop/server/whatever CPU market. They'll still be alive in microcontrollers and millions of other things, but they won't be competing with Intel for the CPU of your PC. If this happens, I'll be worried, becase we all know that we need a second big name in CPUs to keep prices in the "ludicrous and below" area.
BUT... if they don't take off on the PC side, the chip is still superior to the little 1.x GHz PPCs that Apple is using. If they could be the new chip for Apple, then they could stay in the CPU market, and Apple could get a major contender again (CPU wise). I'd love this to happen. OS X is already proted (according to rumors, and we know that the kernel already runs on x86s, so it would be fast ported to the -64s, especially by AMD). Software would be easy to port from PCs to Macs (no endianess mess). Even as just a failed market expirament, this could mean alot to Apple, AMD, and Intel.
All speculations, my opinions, and such. If you doubt me, send $200 to me and I'll consider your point of view better. The address is below....
(address cut due to excessive donations)
(WOOT!)
Some (many?) offer their motherboards with varying amounts of integrated stuff (I know Tyan does this, at least to a degree), but they are hard to find because most people like integrated stuff. That said, I know what you're going through. I've got a great old motherboard but the SCSI on it is completely useless. It really annoys me to have built in SCSI that doesn't work. The rest of it works fine, but it just seems "broken" anyway.