I wonder also about the Word Perfect for Linux product. Its not available at the Corel site any more. Presumably people chose StarOffice or Abiword over WP, but I thought it was nice that a name brand productivity package was available for the platform.
I also wonder about Corel's deal with the devil to port the.NET framework to Linux. Will that entanglement go with the buyer.
Hmmmm... Corel may not be out of the Linux business just yet.
I see a lot of Corel boxes on retail shelves. There always seems to be Red Hat and a second distro, usually either Mandrake or Corel, but I sometimes see SuSE. I wonder how they get those numbers, tho, if that's by retail. Also, I've never heard of PC Data - could that be a Canadian research firm?
I imagine these "smart clients" would look something like an IBM z50, and unfortunately discontinued machine. Although they couldn't use off the shelf machines, devices he describes certainly exist. And yes, Wyse and others, create all-solid-state thin clients running WinCE and NT Embedded that run apps out of flash memory.
Re: DSL over Dry Copper - already done
on
Make Your Own DSL
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· Score: 2, Informative
Re:Slashdot readership stats ... get 'em fresh!
on
Stopping The 56K Hate
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· Score: 1
9 poor saps are surfing at 640x480 [bravenet.com].
That's another usability pet peeve of mine - pages not designed for little monitors. Its seems like two, three years ago, most designers were conscientious enough to design pages for 640x480, or noted that the page was "best viewed at 800x600", but now it seems that monitor/window size is no longer taken into account.
I guess with the rise of those vertical "tower" ads, that guideline went out the window, and they assume all the readers worth reaching surf on 17" monitors with the window maximized, but, still, it annoys me.
Yes, I've got a 17" monitor at work, and a 19" here at home, but I bought a big monitor so I could scan across different windows at the same time, not waste a third of my screen real estate.
I have an AVC Soul and its firmware is upgradable. You download the the upgrade, burn it onto a CD, then "play" the CD, which upgrades the flash. The AVC Soul supposedly has the same guts as the Rio Volt, so I imagine the firmware is upgradable on that joint, too.
I'm not sure how these devices are architected, but if the mp3 codecs are in ASICs, rather than the firmware, it would be difficult to add support for.ogg. Does anyone know if its done in hardware or software?
I have to agree that mp3 quality doesn't begin to match CD sound, and sadly the AVC Soul is not a great CD player. When you play a CD, the sound is a lot flatter than what I get on my discman. I use it primarily on the subway, so its a non-issue for me, but I was a little disappointed.
mp3/CD players are a cool toy, but they're not ready for primetime. It takes about 20 seconds for it to boot up, whether you are playing a CD or mp3s. It's clearly designed as a computer gadget, rather than something for music enthusiasts.
I imagine, however, Palm would be interested in many of Be's base multimedia technologies. Since BeOS was designed from the outset as a media platform a la Amiga, Be was pretty aggressive in developing video and audio capabilities. By today's standards, they're pretty lightweight. If Palm want to keep competing with PocketPC, they're going to have to integrate more multimedia functionality into the OS. New adopters expect handhelds to do more than just PIM - they expect it to be a portable media platform. Video and mp3 players designed for four-year-old hardware might translate well to a handheld device.
i think when they say "services" they mean "interactive network functionality" in the sense of "telnet services". Microsoft has done a great job of muddying the waters with.NET by lumping Web Services with end-to-end consumer XML stuff, but the way that IBM, Ariba, et al seem to envision Web Services is more on an enterprise play, using XML, SOAP, etc. as a common middleware or messaging standard to let companies' J.D. Edwards, SAP, etc. systems talk to each other for business automation. For example, a company could manage its supply chain by plugging its databases into its vendors' and suppliers' inventory apps.
Re:somewhat overstated.
on
Seanbaby.com
·
· Score: 1
Not withstanding the fact that the Simpsons is a product of one of the biggest Media conglomerates in the world.
Don't forget, though, that Simpsons creator Matt Groening's Life In Hell comic strip ran for years in alternative weeklies before he ever gained mainstream attention with The Simpsons. In the late eighties, when The Simpsons first aired, Fox, was an edgy upstart network. Yes, Fox Studios had been around for half a decade, but the network itself was out to shake the market up. I don't think Murdoch's News Corp. owned Fox at that time, but I could be wrong.
The counterculture-from-the-big-boys phenomenon is not new. Mainstream media sources have always picked up on popular elements from the fringe and taken them as their own, whether its Elvis Presley singing R&B or Toyota commericals saying a car is "like punk rock", its a recurring phenomenon in American culture.
"'There was an audible buzz in the room' when Dr. Kraut started to discuss his findings." (The audible buzzes are more pesky than the inaudible ones.)
In the media, "buzz" means something like pre-hype - something talked about among insiders in an industry. So like if people are talking on the phone about a new report its buzz. If people are "buzzing" about something at the event to the degree that a reporter picks up on it, or it drowns out other sounds, its "audible buzz."
I guess what I'm saying, is in this sense, buzz is an air of excitement or anticipation, not a noise.
Yeah, Terra Soft distributions, Yellow Dog and Black Lab, both target users who want custom apps that can take advantage of the AltiVec engine - a good chunk of their market is people who have clusters of Mac doing rendering and scientific applications, according to this article at Enterprise Linux. I'm pretty sure they're targeting these machines at academic users who want big vector processing clusters out of the box.
Yeah, I was really surprised by the tone of the article at times. He could be almost strident: Adobe has opted to employ the service of lawyers and federal agents instead of better engineers.
I agree with you about the national forests, et al, but this seems to be an egregious example of the US government helping an entrenched business and harming the consumer. I'm sure that having another company handle the domain names is preferable to using the resources of the government, but a give-away like this seems a little sketchy. It seems like there could be another organization that could take these duties on, rather than give the domain name away to entrenched businesses, who charge consumers undefined "adminstrative costs."
OTOH, this could become very price competitive, since anyone can come in and undercut prices since there is no fee to pay. They just have to keep the servers running and bandwidth available.
Finally, how do we know that it will just be the same big companies protecting their trademarks and narrowing the pool by getting redundant.us domains to complement their.coms?
Yeah, as much as I hate to admit it, when I'm encoding mp3s, it takes longer and uses more resources than when I copy stuff as wma. Of course it may be differences in hardware. At home, I have a Celeron 533 with 192MB of RAM and at work, where I encode as wma, I use a Pentium III 667 with 64MB of RAM. I would think the machine with more RAM would actually do better, but I haven't done an apples-to-apples comparison.
Yeah, I was going to point out a story in today's New York Times about Holographic storage. It appears that they may be making some breakthroughs that will enable them to bring the technology to market.
Sounds like you could get hella storage for your mp3 player, if holographic disks are only 2-3cm in diameter.;-)
Re:Books about Graphic Software...
on
The Blender Book
·
· Score: 2
I think No Starch Press does a good job of making Linux applications accessible to non-technical/creative users. Yes, there's no substitute for experience, but Linux Music and Sound opened my eyes to applications on Linux that I had no idea existed, and I found The Blender Book to be very accessible. Now, I wish they would write a book on using Broadcast 2000, which was treated briefly in Linux Music and Sound. I think the press might evangelize a few users simply by having their book available at Barnes & Noble or whatever, reminding users there are free alternatives to Photoshop or Media 100, which can be out of the reach of many starving artists.
In additon, the instructions in the book are written for the layman, unlike much of the documentation included in RPMs or on websites, which seem to focus on revisions or technical feature discussions. Its about how to use the program, not how the program works or was made.
Finally, although the CDs No Starch includes with the books may not be the most up-to-date versions of the software, they are very useful for users who do not have broadband connections and may not be able to easily download large applications. Since they are all on one CD, it is trivial for a user to try many applications, finding which ones best suit his or her needs.
Seems odd that they would cash out for 44 billion at this point.
The figure is low, but AT&T was already planning to split the company into three different division: wireless, cable, and long distance. In addition, there would be separate tracking stocks for consumer and business long distance. I believe the wireless spinoff is going to happen pretty soon, like tomorrow.
So, yeah, it isn't strange that AT&T would consider selling a division it was already planning to spin off. However, AT&T spent over $90 billion to purchase TCI and some other cable assets, so getting half what they paid for is a little weird, but, of course, there will be other non-cash factors such as stock swaps, and the possiblility that Armstrong might grab a job at the new Comcast.
Honestly, why in the world would I purchase Caldera Linux with their ridiculous per seat license when I can purchase one copy of RedHat Linux (at a lower price) and install it on as many machines as I like.
OK, according to the press release , this distribution includes Borland JBuilder 4 from Borland. Since JBuilder is proprietary software with a seat license, Caldera is obligated to charge for each install. Its not a matter of charging for GPL software, but a matter of honoring Borland's license for their closed source software.
If you want to do Java Development (which is what Caldera is targeting with the distro) this is probably a good deal, since JBuilder costs $49.99, and the cost of the distro is $59 with support. I think that compares favorably with Red Hat's vanilla 7.1 version that checks in at $39.95.
I think the main difference between Motorola and IBM PowerPCs is certain extensions. Motorola G4 processors have the AltiVec extensions, while the IBM chips do not. Also I know IBM adds hooks to the chips used in the AS/400, erm, iSeries to support OS/400. I would think that they do something similar for the pSeries (RS/6000) and the zSeries (390) mainframes. I'm sure there's more cache in their server processors as well.
Much the same way you find out about Linux - doing your homework. Although my taste in Indie Rock was fueled by more mainstream artists like Pavement and Liz Phair, I was gradually introduced by more obscure bands by friends. Now that I'm away from the scene, I read magazines like Magnet and mailing lists like the droneon list to learn about new bands and labels.
Although I think that a lot of the criticism lobbed at "Indie Rock snobs" is unwarranted, you do need a certain level of rock-critic-literacy in order to discover bands you will like from reading reviews. Although critics have their own argot, much like technical types, it does not take that long to gain a base-level of understanding. I do find it rewarding to learn about bands outside of the media conglomerates, learning about older, overlooked bands in the process.
Oddly enough, my interest in Linux arose from Indie Rock sensibilities, rather than my latent geek tendencies.
According to the Salon Story: But because the FM dial is so crowded already, insisting on third channel protection would eliminate 75 percent of all possible locations for new LPFM outlets. That means that, whereas the FCC had hoped to license hundereds of stations, it would only be able to license about 70 nationwide.
70 stations is hardly "dozens of slots available in the busiest of markets." Its more like stations in rural areas and small cities.
Actually French folklorist Charles Perrault introduced the Cinderella story into written culture in the 16th century, so neither the Germans nor the Grimm family could lay any title to the Cinderella story.
Slashdot Mirror
Cripes, I found Word Perfect on the site, after all. It was under Linux instead of office productivity. :(
I wonder also about the Word Perfect for Linux product. Its not available at the Corel site any more. Presumably people chose StarOffice or Abiword over WP, but I thought it was nice that a name brand productivity package was available for the platform. .NET framework to Linux. Will that entanglement go with the buyer.
I also wonder about Corel's deal with the devil to port the
Hmmmm... Corel may not be out of the Linux business just yet.
I see a lot of Corel boxes on retail shelves. There always seems to be Red Hat and a second distro, usually either Mandrake or Corel, but I sometimes see SuSE. I wonder how they get those numbers, tho, if that's by retail. Also, I've never heard of PC Data - could that be a Canadian research firm?
I imagine these "smart clients" would look something like an IBM z50, and unfortunately discontinued machine. Although they couldn't use off the shelf machines, devices he describes certainly exist. And yes, Wyse and others, create all-solid-state thin clients running WinCE and NT Embedded that run apps out of flash memory.
Yup, even Slashdot has covered it before. I guess its novel 'cause Cringely's talking about it tho.
9 poor saps are surfing at 640x480 [bravenet.com].
That's another usability pet peeve of mine - pages not designed for little monitors. Its seems like two, three years ago, most designers were conscientious enough to design pages for 640x480, or noted that the page was "best viewed at 800x600", but now it seems that monitor/window size is no longer taken into account.
I guess with the rise of those vertical "tower" ads, that guideline went out the window, and they assume all the readers worth reaching surf on 17" monitors with the window maximized, but, still, it annoys me.
Yes, I've got a 17" monitor at work, and a 19" here at home, but I bought a big monitor so I could scan across different windows at the same time, not waste a third of my screen real estate.
I have an AVC Soul and its firmware is upgradable. You download the the upgrade, burn it onto a CD, then "play" the CD, which upgrades the flash. The AVC Soul supposedly has the same guts as the Rio Volt, so I imagine the firmware is upgradable on that joint, too. .ogg. Does anyone know if its done in hardware or software?
I'm not sure how these devices are architected, but if the mp3 codecs are in ASICs, rather than the firmware, it would be difficult to add support for
I have to agree that mp3 quality doesn't begin to match CD sound, and sadly the AVC Soul is not a great CD player. When you play a CD, the sound is a lot flatter than what I get on my discman. I use it primarily on the subway, so its a non-issue for me, but I was a little disappointed.
mp3/CD players are a cool toy, but they're not ready for primetime. It takes about 20 seconds for it to boot up, whether you are playing a CD or mp3s. It's clearly designed as a computer gadget, rather than something for music enthusiasts.
I imagine, however, Palm would be interested in many of Be's base multimedia technologies. Since BeOS was designed from the outset as a media platform a la Amiga, Be was pretty aggressive in developing video and audio capabilities. By today's standards, they're pretty lightweight. If Palm want to keep competing with PocketPC, they're going to have to integrate more multimedia functionality into the OS. New adopters expect handhelds to do more than just PIM - they expect it to be a portable media platform. Video and mp3 players designed for four-year-old hardware might translate well to a handheld device.
i think when they say "services" they mean "interactive network functionality" in the sense of "telnet services". Microsoft has done a great job of muddying the waters with .NET by lumping Web Services with end-to-end consumer XML stuff, but the way that IBM, Ariba, et al seem to envision Web Services is more on an enterprise play, using XML, SOAP, etc. as a common middleware or messaging standard to let companies' J.D. Edwards, SAP, etc. systems talk to each other for business automation. For example, a company could manage its supply chain by plugging its databases into its vendors' and suppliers' inventory apps.
Not withstanding the fact that the Simpsons is a product of one of the biggest Media conglomerates in the world.
Don't forget, though, that Simpsons creator Matt Groening's Life In Hell comic strip ran for years in alternative weeklies before he ever gained mainstream attention with The Simpsons. In the late eighties, when The Simpsons first aired, Fox, was an edgy upstart network. Yes, Fox Studios had been around for half a decade, but the network itself was out to shake the market up. I don't think Murdoch's News Corp. owned Fox at that time, but I could be wrong.
The counterculture-from-the-big-boys phenomenon is not new. Mainstream media sources have always picked up on popular elements from the fringe and taken them as their own, whether its Elvis Presley singing R&B or Toyota commericals saying a car is "like punk rock", its a recurring phenomenon in American culture.
"'There was an audible buzz in the room' when Dr. Kraut started to discuss his findings." (The audible buzzes are more pesky than the inaudible ones.)
In the media, "buzz" means something like pre-hype - something talked about among insiders in an industry. So like if people are talking on the phone about a new report its buzz. If people are "buzzing" about something at the event to the degree that a reporter picks up on it, or it drowns out other sounds, its "audible buzz."
I guess what I'm saying, is in this sense, buzz is an air of excitement or anticipation, not a noise.
Yeah, Terra Soft distributions, Yellow Dog and Black Lab, both target users who want custom apps that can take advantage of the AltiVec engine - a good chunk of their market is people who have clusters of Mac doing rendering and scientific applications, according to this article at Enterprise Linux. I'm pretty sure they're targeting these machines at academic users who want big vector processing clusters out of the box.
Yeah, I was really surprised by the tone of the article at times. He could be almost strident:
Adobe has opted to employ the service of lawyers and federal agents instead of better engineers.
I agree with you about the national forests, et al, but this seems to be an egregious example of the US government helping an entrenched business and harming the consumer. I'm sure that having another company handle the domain names is preferable to using the resources of the government, but a give-away like this seems a little sketchy. It seems like there could be another organization that could take these duties on, rather than give the domain name away to entrenched businesses, who charge consumers undefined "adminstrative costs." .us domains to complement their .coms?
OTOH, this could become very price competitive, since anyone can come in and undercut prices since there is no fee to pay. They just have to keep the servers running and bandwidth available.
Finally, how do we know that it will just be the same big companies protecting their trademarks and narrowing the pool by getting redundant
Yeah, as much as I hate to admit it, when I'm encoding mp3s, it takes longer and uses more resources than when I copy stuff as wma. Of course it may be differences in hardware. At home, I have a Celeron 533 with 192MB of RAM and at work, where I encode as wma, I use a Pentium III 667 with 64MB of RAM. I would think the machine with more RAM would actually do better, but I haven't done an apples-to-apples comparison.
Yeah, I was going to point out a story in today's New York Times about Holographic storage. It appears that they may be making some breakthroughs that will enable them to bring the technology to market.
;-)
Sounds like you could get hella storage for your mp3 player, if holographic disks are only 2-3cm in diameter.
I think No Starch Press does a good job of making Linux applications accessible to non-technical/creative users. Yes, there's no substitute for experience, but Linux Music and Sound opened my eyes to applications on Linux that I had no idea existed, and I found The Blender Book to be very accessible. Now, I wish they would write a book on using Broadcast 2000, which was treated briefly in Linux Music and Sound. I think the press might evangelize a few users simply by having their book available at Barnes & Noble or whatever, reminding users there are free alternatives to Photoshop or Media 100, which can be out of the reach of many starving artists.
In additon, the instructions in the book are written for the layman, unlike much of the documentation included in RPMs or on websites, which seem to focus on revisions or technical feature discussions. Its about how to use the program, not how the program works or was made.
Finally, although the CDs No Starch includes with the books may not be the most up-to-date versions of the software, they are very useful for users who do not have broadband connections and may not be able to easily download large applications. Since they are all on one CD, it is trivial for a user to try many applications, finding which ones best suit his or her needs.
Seems odd that they would cash out for 44 billion at this point.
The figure is low, but AT&T was already planning to split the company into three different division: wireless, cable, and long distance. In addition, there would be separate tracking stocks for consumer and business long distance. I believe the wireless spinoff is going to happen pretty soon, like tomorrow.
So, yeah, it isn't strange that AT&T would consider selling a division it was already planning to spin off. However, AT&T spent over $90 billion to purchase TCI and some other cable assets, so getting half what they paid for is a little weird, but, of course, there will be other non-cash factors such as stock swaps, and the possiblility that Armstrong might grab a job at the new Comcast.
Honestly, why in the world would I purchase Caldera Linux with their ridiculous per seat license when I can purchase one copy of RedHat Linux (at a lower price) and install it on as many machines as I like.
OK, according to the press release
, this distribution includes Borland JBuilder 4 from Borland. Since JBuilder is proprietary software with a seat license, Caldera is obligated to charge for each install. Its not a matter of charging for GPL software, but a matter of honoring Borland's license for their closed source software.
If you want to do Java Development (which is what Caldera is targeting with the distro) this is probably a good deal, since JBuilder costs $49.99, and the cost of the distro is $59 with support. I think that compares favorably with Red Hat's vanilla 7.1 version that checks in at $39.95.
I think the main difference between Motorola and IBM PowerPCs is certain extensions. Motorola G4 processors have the AltiVec extensions, while the IBM chips do not. Also I know IBM adds hooks to the chips used in the AS/400, erm, iSeries to support OS/400. I would think that they do something similar for the pSeries (RS/6000) and the zSeries (390) mainframes. I'm sure there's more cache in their server processors as well.
How do I find the good music among 50,000 bands?
Much the same way you find out about Linux - doing your homework. Although my taste in Indie Rock was fueled by more mainstream artists like Pavement and Liz Phair, I was gradually introduced by more obscure bands by friends. Now that I'm away from the scene, I read magazines like Magnet and mailing lists like the droneon list to learn about new bands and labels.
Although I think that a lot of the criticism lobbed at "Indie Rock snobs" is unwarranted, you do need a certain level of rock-critic-literacy in order to discover bands you will like from reading reviews. Although critics have their own argot, much like technical types, it does not take that long to gain a base-level of understanding. I do find it rewarding to learn about bands outside of the media conglomerates, learning about older, overlooked bands in the process.
Oddly enough, my interest in Linux arose from Indie Rock sensibilities, rather than my latent geek tendencies.
According to the Salon Story:
But because the FM dial is so crowded already, insisting on third channel protection would eliminate 75 percent of all possible locations for new LPFM outlets. That means that, whereas the FCC had hoped to license hundereds of stations, it would only be able to license about 70 nationwide.
70 stations is hardly "dozens of slots available in the busiest of markets." Its more like stations in rural areas and small cities.
It is 'open source news' in a way, after all)
I wouldn't go that far - NPR has been pretty aggressive in lobbying against microbroadcasting, and other independent media. Fearing that microbroadcast operators might threaten its monopoly on community-oriented broadcasting, it lobbied the FCC and Congress to keep low-power operations illegal, narrowing the pool of voices you hear on air.
In a recent article in Seattle's The Stranger, NPR host Ira Glass criticized NPR for being risk-averse and uninnovative, noting there are few young or minority voices in NPR programs.
I used to be a big NPR supporter, until they began to strong arm the government to exclude other community broadcasters.
Actually French folklorist Charles Perrault introduced the Cinderella story into written culture in the 16th century, so neither the Germans nor the Grimm family could lay any title to the Cinderella story.
Actually this story at Windows NT magazine ENT, pointed that out back in November.