I have a gateway 2500 (the economy end of Gateway's notebooks). Although it doesn't have a DVD, it does come with a "zoomed video" port - a composite video jack to allow you to connect the laptop to either an NTSC or PAL video device (you make this selection in the BIOS).
The proplem with the onboard zoomed video port is that it only produces output at a resolution of 640x480. I have been able to get this to work under SVGALIB (using the VESA driver) but under X I only get garbled output on the television. You may (shudder) have to use Windows.
Gateway has a number of good options for a laptop home theatre. Many of their notebooks come with PCMCIA hardware DVD decoders. I would suggest, however, that you get the optional docking station - it will speed up the time it would otherwise take to connect all of your devices.
An external wireless PS/2 or USB mouse would be a good investment... you'll want it for remote control. Also, a number of companies sell PCMCIA devices to allow you to receive cable directly to your laptop. This might be something to look at also.
A cheap home theatre laptop could consist of the old MPEG CDs. You can get MPEG movie CDs very cheap now (they are having to clear stock now that DVD has become the standard.
You have a lot of options to accomplish this. There are external VGA/SVGA to NTSC/PAL boxes available almost anywhere. This is a great option if you already have a laptop. Also, you can get a PCMCIA SCSI card (I use one manufactured by IOMEGA for use with their external SCSI zip drive. I works excellent under both Linux and Windows. My PCMCIA controller card has never worked under OS/2, so I can't help you there. With the SCSI, you can just get an external SCSI DVD drive. Best performance is with a decoder card!
A lot of people have posted comments about using an Apple Powerbook for Laptop Home Theatre. This is an EXCELLENT option if you are planning on buying a new notebook. Macs BREATHE multimedia, so you are sure to have a good experience (if you aren't anti-mac to begin with).
Of course video games increase violent behavior. So does my 40 minute commute through bumper to bumper trafic just to get to a job that doesn't pay me enough. But what really makes me violent? Silly studies that try to place the blame for societies ills on the latest scapegoat. In Nazi Germany, the cause of all human woes was the Jews (according to Hitler and his posse) Today, John Carmack is the father of all things unholy. Get a grip! It's not the games. The people who are blowing away folks in the real world have just never developed a sense of right and wrong. My Dad used to carry a rifle to school every day (in the 40's) to go hunting after school. He never shot, or killed anyone. His parents, at home, taught him better.
You make an excellent point here. If the comment is owned by the poster, what right does anybody (including andover) have to use the post in any fashion other than that to which the poster originally intended? Personally, I have a real problem knowing that any comments that I might post to slashdot might appear at any time in a book. I really feel that this Hellmouth book has done a GREAT dis-service to the Slashdot Community. YRO: Who owns your Slashdot comments? I can't say it enough. This REALLY BUGS ME. I have NEVER intended for my Slashdot Comments to be used outside of the Slashdot forum. But here is something you CAN quote me on: This will be my final post to Slashdot, UNLESS these guys can give me a button on the Post Comment page to opt out of having my comment used in a forum outside of Slashdot. And that won't be too hard. Just give me a little button that says "Do you consent to allowing John Katz to further his career by using your comment in his next book? . ------------------------------------------- As the owner of the above post, I do not give permission to any entity to use my post in a forum outside of slashdot.org. -------------------------------------------
The major error here is that Russian space travelers are Cosmonauts and not Astronauts. That makes these gentlemen Cosmonuts and probably related in some strange way to Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld.
Of interesting note concerning Cosmonuts is the first Cosmoanimal. Many of us might remember that the Russians were the first to put an animal in space back in the 50's - Lieka the space dog. A few years ago I came to sudden realization... Lieka was put into space in a modified Sputnik! A spacecraft that had no means of reentering the Earth's atmosphere.
MY DOG! IT'S FULL OF STARS!
What the Hell happened to Lieka? How come nobody ever mentions what happened to that damn dog!?! Did he burn up in reentry, starve to death, or become one with the "Space Baby" from 2001? He can't possibly be in orbit can he? Or maybe he is still circling the earth at thousands of miles per second along with Gene Roddenbury and Timothy Leary.
Funny. Apple Computer has always seemed to have troubles because they insist on being both a hardware AND software company. Now Microsoft want's to do the same? Get me a hammer and a nail!
Unlike the vast majority of my fellow posters, I don't think this article, or SCO's expected losses are an end for the Santa Cruz Organization. This step is completely logical. Right now, SCO is having to maintain it's own flavor of UNIX, along with it's own pool of programmers, etc, etc, etc. With SCO moving to support Linux, they are lifting from themselves the terrible burden of maintaining their own operating system and putting that burden on a group that appears to be more than willing to tote it: Open Source programmers. By moving to Linux, they won't be able to make quite as much profit as they did selling their own proprietary UNIX, which is one of the reasons they expect their figures to be down. But in the longrun they will be able to cut their expenditures making SCO's final bottem line figure even more profitable than before. This is nothing new, and something we will be seeing more venders of proprietary UNIX versions moving toward. I'll give you these three articles from Slashdot's past that point to this trend: Number 1 Number 2 Number 3 I think we should start seeing some great things out of SCO, maybe even "SCO LinuxOS", whatever. Just don't write their epitath quite yet (save your energy for M$)
I live in a very rural part of the country (literally in Slapout, Alabama... yes that is the name of the town) which is serviced by Time Warner Cable. We have been left behind in the high-access cable modem market (despite Time Warner's promise of cable modem access by 2000). Hopefully, this will soon bring high bandwidth access to my area.
What will be interesting is what the internet will look like in 50 years. With the mergers of large internet companies with large media companies (like AOL/Time Warner) we may see the internet fragment to where you will only be able to get to information services that are sanctioned by your provider. "Hey, you use AOL/Time Warner as an ISP? Well, don't expect to get your news from FOX or ABC." We may have an internet market where you have to choose your ISP based on what kind of content they can deliver... like no porn if you use Disney as an ISP etc, etc. The internet as we know it today might eventually become more of an "undernet". It won't provide the content that most of the masses are looking for, but it will still be there as a undercurrent, available to dinosaurs (folk like us who remember the way the internet used to be.)
Yes. But why the patent? Since RTLinux is GPL'd, any project that uses the code would already have to abide by that license.
Are you saying that if Corel decided to come out with a "Corel RTLinux OS" distribution they should have to pay for the kernel because the distribution contains closed source software (Wordperfect 8)? That seems a bit rediculous to me.
Let the GPL sort the issue out. The GPL has worked in the past and will continue to work in the future.
My big question is how (if RTLinux is under the GPL) someone can force someone else to pay for the software's use. The GPL states the GPL software must remain freely available.
I don't have a problem with someone making money off of GPL'd software. But this is NOT the way to do it.
While it may be wise for open source developers to register patents (to keep others from registering them) it is totally wrong to wrap a patent around open source software and then use it to extort money from persons wishing to use the code. Don't kill a good thing
Perhaps worse than cybersquatting would be setting up another regulatory agency responsible for overseeing domain redistribution. I would rather see someone make some big $$ than have my taxpayers $$ spent in congress debating the issue. If the domain is of a high demand than let someone make money.
Let's see... Every day I delete my entire.netscape directory from my home directory. This does a number of things for me: it clears my history, removes my cache, and deletes all of my unwanted cookies. The most anyone will ever be able to track of my movements on the web are a day's worth of browsing.
I seldom fill out forms on the internet which include my name, address, phone, email.
You can still have as much privacy on the internet as you are willing to have. Most people actually prefer the convenience of cookies to protecting their privacy.
And actually, collecting data about web surfers is a far cry from an actual invasion of privacy. The only data the "offending" parties can get is data the you GIVE them. If you worry about privacy, just don't submit any personal data over the net. The most anyone can get from you is generic data that won't point it's finger back to you (without a warrant, that is.)
My point is not how much power the network card uses. Three to four hours of battery life won't work for me. Heck, my laptops only three months old and I'm lucky for the battery to hold out for two hours.
For wireless networking to work for ME, I need a portable that can keep going for at least ten hours. That's long enough for me to leave the house, spend the day at work, and get home to recharge.
I have been using portable computers for many years now. Wireless networking is only one half of fixing the portable problem. The number one problem is POWER CONSUMPTION. Sure, it's great to be able to wander about with your portable and still access the network, but you are still constrained by having to run back to your power supply and juice up those batteries.
Hopefully, now that Crusoe is here, the power problem has it's answer. That will be the biggest boost for wireless networking.
It is interesting how a nation formed from emmigrants is so dead set on booting out modern day emmigrants. What a country.
On another note, this reminds me of a story I heard recently about a Palistinian emmigrant who was convicted of possessing drugs. After he had served his time, the government was required by law to ship him home to his own country. PROBLEM: There is no Palistinian homeland, and Israel wouldn't take him.
This poor guy is still in prison in the U.S., even though he has served his full sentence. And you think Mitnick had it rough?
Oh darn, I was going to suggest a great smell for the U.S. Patent Office, but it looks like all of the really good eSmells have already got patents pending.
Keep your history in mind. OS/2 was designed BY MICROSOFT for IBM. Microsoft still had contractual obligations to IBM that they managed to sabotage by purposely creating OS/2 with a less intuitive interface. Those are the facts.
For me, not having to return a movie would mean a lot. It's about a two hour drive from my house to the nearest movie rental place. I don't rent movies now, but not having to return them would mean that when I do go to town, I could pick up some rentals instead of always having to buy the movies.
Sorry. I like landfills. When I finish drinking a coke while driving, I toss it out my window. Seeing as I have no hope for the future, I don't really give a rat's ass about the environment.
I figure that these CDs will go to the same place as all of the copies of Windows that I get everytime the company gets a new PC.
You have a point about the polution problem, but I live in a situation where returning movies (on time) is not always feasible. I live WAY out in the country (the closest town is called Slapout, Alabama.) The used CDs would probably end up in the same box that holds all of those AOL, CompuServe and programs that don't run under WINE.
Of coure nobody is going to BUY a distructible DVD, but it would be nice if you could RENT a movie from Blockbuster, and NOT HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT RETURNING THE THING! That is the obvious and ONLY possible explanation for creating this DVD format. I sure wouldn't mind something like that, considering my ability to acrue huge fees in late charges.
The GEOS (Graphical Environment Operating System) was introduced by Br0derbund software during the mid 80's for the Commodore 64. Later versions were available for the C128, and I believe for the Atari and Apple II.
Around the same time that Microsoft began shipping Windows 1.1, the first versions of GEOS were made available for the PC, running on top of DOS (just like Windows). GEOS was a technically superior product, but like Apple, they discovered that superior technology does not beat out Microsoft's superior marketing. Around this same time, Br0derbund became Geoworks.
Geoworks experimented with and 8088 based PDA around '93-'94, called the Zoomer (marketed by Radio Shack, Casio, and a third manufacturer whom I cannot recall at the moment. The Zoomer was superior in many ways to it's contemporary PDA, the original Apple Newton, in fact the Zoomer was responsible for the creation of the Palm pilot as Palm created Graffitti to originally run on the Zoomer to replace it's less then perfect handwritting recognition engine. The Zoomer came with a version of the America Online client which allowed you to send and receive email as well as read news. America Online also produced a client for the desktop GEOS which was everybit as good as the Windows client.
Geoworks soon got out of the desktop market, giving the desktop license to New Deal Inc., and began focusing on "Smart Phones" - PDA enabled mobile phones.
I have been using geoworks' products for a longtime, both a hand-held device and their desktop operating system (now sold via NewDeal Inc.) as well as the old 6-64 GEOS (Graphical Environment Operting System.) While Geoworks could certainly use the revenue generated from charging royalties for WAP, it will be a big mistake. What this is going to do is force people to move to other protocols. That is going to make Geoworks devices incompatible with the rest of the world, cutting deaply into their marketshare.
Sometimes, like in the case, enforcing a patent to protect your intellectual property is more likely to hurt your bottom line than simply allowing free use (and thus universal compatibility with your devices.)
Slashdot Mirror
I have a gateway 2500 (the economy end of Gateway's notebooks). Although it doesn't have a DVD, it does come with a "zoomed video" port - a composite video jack to allow you to connect the laptop to either an NTSC or PAL video device (you make this selection in the BIOS).
The proplem with the onboard zoomed video port is that it only produces output at a resolution of 640x480. I have been able to get this to work under SVGALIB (using the VESA driver) but under X I only get garbled output on the television. You may (shudder) have to use Windows.
Gateway has a number of good options for a laptop home theatre. Many of their notebooks come with PCMCIA hardware DVD decoders. I would suggest, however, that you get the optional docking station - it will speed up the time it would otherwise take to connect all of your devices.
An external wireless PS/2 or USB mouse would be a good investment... you'll want it for remote control. Also, a number of companies sell PCMCIA devices to allow you to receive cable directly to your laptop. This might be something to look at also.
A cheap home theatre laptop could consist of the old MPEG CDs. You can get MPEG movie CDs very cheap now (they are having to clear stock now that DVD has become the standard.
You have a lot of options to accomplish this. There are external VGA/SVGA to NTSC/PAL boxes available almost anywhere. This is a great option if you already have a laptop. Also, you can get a PCMCIA SCSI card (I use one manufactured by IOMEGA for use with their external SCSI zip drive. I works excellent under both Linux and Windows. My PCMCIA controller card has never worked under OS/2, so I can't help you there. With the SCSI, you can just get an external SCSI DVD drive. Best performance is with a decoder card!
A lot of people have posted comments about using an Apple Powerbook for Laptop Home Theatre. This is an EXCELLENT option if you are planning on buying a new notebook. Macs BREATHE multimedia, so you are sure to have a good experience (if you aren't anti-mac to begin with).
Have fun. Enjoy. Watch movie.
Of course video games increase violent behavior. So does my 40 minute commute through bumper to bumper trafic just to get to a job that doesn't pay me enough. But what really makes me violent? Silly studies that try to place the blame for societies ills on the latest scapegoat. In Nazi Germany, the cause of all human woes was the Jews (according to Hitler and his posse) Today, John Carmack is the father of all things unholy. Get a grip! It's not the games. The people who are blowing away folks in the real world have just never developed a sense of right and wrong. My Dad used to carry a rifle to school every day (in the 40's) to go hunting after school. He never shot, or killed anyone. His parents, at home, taught him better.
You make an excellent point here. If the comment is owned by the poster, what right does anybody (including andover) have to use the post in any fashion other than that to which the poster originally intended? Personally, I have a real problem knowing that any comments that I might post to slashdot might appear at any time in a book. I really feel that this Hellmouth book has done a GREAT dis-service to the Slashdot Community. YRO: Who owns your Slashdot comments? I can't say it enough. This REALLY BUGS ME. I have NEVER intended for my Slashdot Comments to be used outside of the Slashdot forum. But here is something you CAN quote me on: This will be my final post to Slashdot, UNLESS these guys can give me a button on the Post Comment page to opt out of having my comment used in a forum outside of Slashdot. And that won't be too hard. Just give me a little button that says "Do you consent to allowing John Katz to further his career by using your comment in his next book? . ------------------------------------------- As the owner of the above post, I do not give permission to any entity to use my post in a forum outside of slashdot.org. -------------------------------------------
The major error here is that Russian space travelers are Cosmonauts and not Astronauts. That makes these gentlemen Cosmonuts and probably related in some strange way to Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld.
Of interesting note concerning Cosmonuts is the first Cosmoanimal. Many of us might remember that the Russians were the first to put an animal in space back in the 50's - Lieka the space dog. A few years ago I came to sudden realization... Lieka was put into space in a modified Sputnik! A spacecraft that had no means of reentering the Earth's atmosphere.
MY DOG! IT'S FULL OF STARS!
What the Hell happened to Lieka? How come nobody ever mentions what happened to that damn dog!?! Did he burn up in reentry, starve to death, or become one with the "Space Baby" from 2001? He can't possibly be in orbit can he? Or maybe he is still circling the earth at thousands of miles per second along with Gene Roddenbury and Timothy Leary.
Forget rescueing Mir! SAVE THE DOG!
I think your right about the Pippin. And didn't Commodore come out with an Amiga console right before it bellied up as well?
Maybe history is on our side...
Funny. Apple Computer has always seemed to have troubles because they insist on being both a hardware AND software company. Now Microsoft want's to do the same? Get me a hammer and a nail!
So... Where do you want Bill to go today?
H-E-L-L
Unlike the vast majority of my fellow posters, I don't think this article, or SCO's expected losses are an end for the Santa Cruz Organization. This step is completely logical. Right now, SCO is having to maintain it's own flavor of UNIX, along with it's own pool of programmers, etc, etc, etc. With SCO moving to support Linux, they are lifting from themselves the terrible burden of maintaining their own operating system and putting that burden on a group that appears to be more than willing to tote it: Open Source programmers. By moving to Linux, they won't be able to make quite as much profit as they did selling their own proprietary UNIX, which is one of the reasons they expect their figures to be down. But in the longrun they will be able to cut their expenditures making SCO's final bottem line figure even more profitable than before. This is nothing new, and something we will be seeing more venders of proprietary UNIX versions moving toward. I'll give you these three articles from Slashdot's past that point to this trend: Number 1 Number 2 Number 3 I think we should start seeing some great things out of SCO, maybe even "SCO LinuxOS", whatever. Just don't write their epitath quite yet (save your energy for M$)
I live in a very rural part of the country (literally in Slapout, Alabama... yes that is the name of the town) which is serviced by Time Warner Cable. We have been left behind in the high-access cable modem market (despite Time Warner's promise of cable modem access by 2000). Hopefully, this will soon bring high bandwidth access to my area.
What will be interesting is what the internet will look like in 50 years. With the mergers of large internet companies with large media companies (like AOL/Time Warner) we may see the internet fragment to where you will only be able to get to information services that are sanctioned by your provider. "Hey, you use AOL/Time Warner as an ISP? Well, don't expect to get your news from FOX or ABC." We may have an internet market where you have to choose your ISP based on what kind of content they can deliver... like no porn if you use Disney as an ISP etc, etc. The internet as we know it today might eventually become more of an "undernet". It won't provide the content that most of the masses are looking for, but it will still be there as a undercurrent, available to dinosaurs (folk like us who remember the way the internet used to be.)
Yes. But why the patent? Since RTLinux is GPL'd, any project that uses the code would already have to abide by that license.
Are you saying that if Corel decided to come out with a "Corel RTLinux OS" distribution they should have to pay for the kernel because the distribution contains closed source software (Wordperfect 8)? That seems a bit rediculous to me.
Let the GPL sort the issue out. The GPL has worked in the past and will continue to work in the future.
My big question is how (if RTLinux is under the GPL) someone can force someone else to pay for the software's use. The GPL states the GPL software must remain freely available.
I don't have a problem with someone making money off of GPL'd software. But this is NOT the way to do it.
While it may be wise for open source developers to register patents (to keep others from registering them) it is totally wrong to wrap a patent around open source software and then use it to extort money from persons wishing to use the code. Don't kill a good thing
Perhaps worse than cybersquatting would be setting up another regulatory agency responsible for overseeing domain redistribution. I would rather see someone make some big $$ than have my taxpayers $$ spent in congress debating the issue. If the domain is of a high demand than let someone make money.
Let's see... Every day I delete my entire .netscape directory from my home directory. This does a number of things for me: it clears my history, removes my cache, and deletes all of my unwanted cookies. The most anyone will ever be able to track of my movements on the web are a day's worth of browsing.
I seldom fill out forms on the internet which include my name, address, phone, email.
You can still have as much privacy on the internet as you are willing to have. Most people actually prefer the convenience of cookies to protecting their privacy.
And actually, collecting data about web surfers is a far cry from an actual invasion of privacy. The only data the "offending" parties can get is data the you GIVE them. If you worry about privacy, just don't submit any personal data over the net. The most anyone can get from you is generic data that won't point it's finger back to you (without a warrant, that is.)
My point is not how much power the network card uses. Three to four hours of battery life won't work for me. Heck, my laptops only three months old and I'm lucky for the battery to hold out for two hours.
For wireless networking to work for ME, I need a portable that can keep going for at least ten hours. That's long enough for me to leave the house, spend the day at work, and get home to recharge.
I have been using portable computers for many years now. Wireless networking is only one half of fixing the portable problem. The number one problem is POWER CONSUMPTION. Sure, it's great to be able to wander about with your portable and still access the network, but you are still constrained by having to run back to your power supply and juice up those batteries.
Hopefully, now that Crusoe is here, the power problem has it's answer. That will be the biggest boost for wireless networking.
First, I don't take kindly to being termed a "Troll". Thank you very much.
Second, check this web site out for information on the case in question: http://www.injusticeline.com/mohd.html.
Third, I am NOT part of the "Anti-Americanism" crowd on slashdot. I am a patriot, a disabled veteran, and a "conservative" voter.
Fourth, The United States, like any other nation, at times commits grevious acts, like the imprisonment faced by Mohd. It's a fact.
Fifth, I can't believe that your lame, insubstantiated comment was moderated up to a 2. Another case of poor slashdot moderation.
And sixth, you are a piece of shit.
It is interesting how a nation formed from emmigrants is so dead set on booting out modern day emmigrants. What a country.
On another note, this reminds me of a story I heard recently about a Palistinian emmigrant who was convicted of possessing drugs. After he had served his time, the government was required by law to ship him home to his own country. PROBLEM: There is no Palistinian homeland, and Israel wouldn't take him.
This poor guy is still in prison in the U.S., even though he has served his full sentence. And you think Mitnick had it rough?
Oh darn, I was going to suggest a great smell for the U.S. Patent Office, but it looks like all of the really good eSmells have already got patents pending.
Keep your history in mind. OS/2 was designed BY MICROSOFT for IBM. Microsoft still had contractual obligations to IBM that they managed to sabotage by purposely creating OS/2 with a less intuitive interface. Those are the facts.
For me, not having to return a movie would mean a lot. It's about a two hour drive from my house to the nearest movie rental place. I don't rent movies now, but not having to return them would mean that when I do go to town, I could pick up some rentals instead of always having to buy the movies.
Sorry. I like landfills. When I finish drinking a coke while driving, I toss it out my window. Seeing as I have no hope for the future, I don't really give a rat's ass about the environment.
I figure that these CDs will go to the same place as all of the copies of Windows that I get everytime the company gets a new PC.
You have a point about the polution problem, but I live in a situation where returning movies (on time) is not always feasible. I live WAY out in the country (the closest town is called Slapout, Alabama.) The used CDs would probably end up in the same box that holds all of those AOL, CompuServe and programs that don't run under WINE.
Of coure nobody is going to BUY a distructible DVD, but it would be nice if you could RENT a movie from Blockbuster, and NOT HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT RETURNING THE THING! That is the obvious and ONLY possible explanation for creating this DVD format. I sure wouldn't mind something like that, considering my ability to acrue huge fees in late charges.
Hmmmm. I stand corrected. You're right. It was Berkeley Softworks. I guess that's what I get for being to quick to troll for Karma.
The GEOS (Graphical Environment Operating System) was introduced by Br0derbund software during the mid 80's for the Commodore 64. Later versions were available for the C128, and I believe for the Atari and Apple II.
Around the same time that Microsoft began shipping Windows 1.1, the first versions of GEOS were made available for the PC, running on top of DOS (just like Windows). GEOS was a technically superior product, but like Apple, they discovered that superior technology does not beat out Microsoft's superior marketing. Around this same time, Br0derbund became Geoworks.
Geoworks experimented with and 8088 based PDA around '93-'94, called the Zoomer (marketed by Radio Shack, Casio, and a third manufacturer whom I cannot recall at the moment. The Zoomer was superior in many ways to it's contemporary PDA, the original Apple Newton, in fact the Zoomer was responsible for the creation of the Palm pilot as Palm created Graffitti to originally run on the Zoomer to replace it's less then perfect handwritting recognition engine. The Zoomer came with a version of the America Online client which allowed you to send and receive email as well as read news. America Online also produced a client for the desktop GEOS which was everybit as good as the Windows client.
Geoworks soon got out of the desktop market, giving the desktop license to New Deal Inc., and began focusing on "Smart Phones" - PDA enabled mobile phones.
So yes, GEOS was for the 64/128
I have been using geoworks' products for a longtime, both a hand-held device and their desktop operating system (now sold via NewDeal Inc.) as well as the old 6-64 GEOS (Graphical Environment Operting System.) While Geoworks could certainly use the revenue generated from charging royalties for WAP, it will be a big mistake. What this is going to do is force people to move to other protocols. That is going to make Geoworks devices incompatible with the rest of the world, cutting deaply into their marketshare.
Sometimes, like in the case, enforcing a patent to protect your intellectual property is more likely to hurt your bottom line than simply allowing free use (and thus universal compatibility with your devices.)