I don't think anything decent has come out of Disney in the past five or ten years
Occasionally Disney will pull some absolutely incredible stunt, like The Emperor's New Groove (which, by all rights and means, should have been horrible), or releasing the Miyazaki films in the US (Spirited Away at least). I'm always shocked when they end up doing something like that, because it seems so out of character nowadays, but it does happen.
They also had the good sense to start releasing Miyazaki films in the U.S. That kind of blew me away. Well, they did Spirited Away anyway; weren't they planning on doing others?
I'm sure there's already thousands of responses similar to this, but I've just got a very simple lightweight Linux box running Freevo. It works out really well for me. I got the cheapest nVidia graphics card I could find that had a TV-out, which I had running basically immediately thanks to nVidia's drivers (which, despite what others may say, and despite their being closed-source, have never given me any problems), and the box mounts my Video and Audio partitions over NFS from the fileserver that lives over by my central computing area. Total setup time (once the OS was installed anyway) was probably no more than 4 hours or so, and that's all just tweaking Freevo settings to only include the menus that I want, making sure that I'm passing the proper options into mplayer, etc, playing with video modes to find out what works best on my TV...
As for a calendar server system, have you tried TUTOS or eGroupware?
I'm rather adverse to using a web application for this kind of thing, for reasons I've enumerated elsewhere on the site. I've played with TUTOS in the past, but not eGroupware.
Don't really know what you mean re: office 2003, etc... I'm on Linux so I haven't gone to an Office of any sort.
As to your other point, yeah, I'm down with the necessity of a server. I've always seen that as an integral part, and that's the bit which is most lacking in the OSS community I think. Some other people have pointed out Ximian/Novell Connector now, which looks like it's a good clientside app, so that's good on that front, but I'd like to see an OSS calendar server that's good as well.
Your company could use my company's simple solution: for everyone that normally uses a Linux desktop, just shell out a mere $2700 for a nice IBM Thinkpad for them to use to read their email and do calendaring.
Ugh, that's really really annoying though. The company that used to use Netscape Calendar ended up moving to Exchange shortly before I left, and they did have the solution of giving people a windows PC to do email/calendar/etc on (which was a hell of a lot cheaper than $3k laptops), but it's just lame. Or at least it was for me, because I have yet to find any email client that gives me any reason whatsoever to move away from mutt, etc. In general having things on two different boxes is just really lame anyway, though. I like being able to copy-n-paste things into my email, which is difficult if what I'm copying is running on a different box, etc. I shouldn't have to either transfer files or set up Samba shares just to attach a file to an email easily.
Regardless, email itself isn't a problem, because you can configure Exchange to do your ordinary average IMAP, etc, so any client that understands IMAP can talk to it. I think what they're doing for calendar type stuff is maybe giving the Ximian/Novell Connector thing a try.
It looks like it's still fairly tied into an Exchange background, which kind of sucks; I'd really love to have an OSS backend server as well. At least this'd be a way to run a client in Linux though.
Well, as I said elsewhere in the thread, while I'm not opposed to a web-based calendar system, I'd much prefer having a dedicated client. Apparently Ximian Connector's been GPLed and released as Novell Connector now, though, so perhaps what I'm looking for *does* exist.
At a company I used to work for, we used the Netscape Calendar system (this was back in the 4.x days), and it was actually a really really good system. It had Windows and Linux clients too, which was great because the company was pretty much split 50/50 that way. I've never really run Outlook's calendar myself, as I only run Linux, but I really do miss having something like that on my Linux box. The Netscape product seems to have basically disappeared (I think it was on the way out when I joined up with the company, even).
The company I'm at now just started a big transition over to Outlook and all that, and I know the calendaring system was one of the factors affecting the decision. All the internal mail stuff used to be handled by OSS boxes, now it's Outlook. (Granted, the company is like 95% windows internally at least, so it kind of makes sense for them to be doing it, but it's painful for those of us in the 5% who don't even really live on the internal corporate network.)
The last time I used Evolution, the calendar was only designed for a single user... Have they added in the kind of collaborative system that I'm more concerned about? (scheduling appointments, reserving rooms, selecting a group of people and saying "when are all these people free?", etc?) Just curious, because things may have changed since last I looked.
There's a lot of things that HTML isn't good for, and while it's certainly possible to write a good HTML-based calendar app, I feel there are very good reasons to have a dedicated client. It's very nice in a calendar app to be able to click on 2:00 and drag until 3:30. It's nice to be able to right-click on things and have appropriate context menus to pop up. It's wonderful to be able to not have to worry about the fundamental sessionlessness of HTML, and having to deal with HTML form input processing and state maintenance (not that you can't just have a Session ID and store all your data there, but still, it's a pain). It's nice to have an app which can pop up a reminder 5 minutes before your meeting is about to come up, without having to resort to hokey meta refresh tags. HTML formatting isn't very well suited for doing things like having multiple blocks of time laid out on a calendar with what you'd expect to be clickable being actually clickable (not that it's impossible, especially with DHTML, etc, but still).
I could probably go on for awhile. Again, I'm sure that you could write a good calendar app on a webpage. But I don't think it would be nearly as good as an actual client. When you write a client you've got the power to construct protocols that make *sense* for the application you're designing. You've got a great deal more control in general. I know some people are of the opinion that everything should be a webapp, but I disagree. I find webapps for this kind of thing to be, in general, quite clunky and nonintuitive.
You could argue, of course, that many of these concerns could be addressed by using Java applets or something similar on the page, but once you start doing that you may as well just take the extra step and write an actual Java based client or the like...
... that's cross-platform and lets you reserve conference rooms, schedule meetings, etc, etc, etc. Haven't found anything quite like that yet, not that can be used on coworkers' windows machines too, anyway.
it's still against the law, and they have the right to prosecute (and to claim as much damages as they want, to the limit that the court finds reasonable for the offense).
Yeah, I agree that they've got a right to prosecute, and that what they're prosecuting against is illegal. It just seems to me that they're shooting themselves in the foot, when they should be going after the people who are actually causing them to lose money.
Yes, yes, I'm aware of all that. My point is that they're twisting the facts here to imply that filesharing is costing them $3 billion a year, when in fact filesharing has nothing to do with that "loss." That's the bit that's always bugged me about this kind of stuff. Sure, somebody selling bootlegs of your stuff is certainly stealing money that could otherwise be yours. But I've never been convinced that p2p filesharing has any negative impact on sales, because whoever downloads an album or a song and doesn't buy the physical copy never would have bought the physical copy in the first place. IMO, anyway. I'm not denying the illegality of filesharing, or that it's definitely a copyright infringement.
The MPAA claims the U.S. movie industry loses more than $3 billion annually in potential global revenue because of physical piracy, or bogus copies of videos and DVDs of its films.
Yeah, sure. Somebody sells a cheap bootleg of your stuff, that's money that should have been going into your pocket. I've got no problem with going after that.
But what exactly does that have to do with filesharers?
These Sanrio characters are the only ones not controlable by you. They are the main theme and "God" of one Nation. For example, in Hello Kitty World, Hello Kitty reigns supreme as the overseer of the land. With her guidance, love and happiness is abound and people are able to live in the cute land of Kitty Kingdom in Hello Kitty World. Hello Kitty will be there during your important occasions to bless and help you. Hello Kitty will also arrive to give guidance and new missions to residents of her world.
I dunno, that just sounds really damn freaky to me.
I know he's supposed to be making a Star Wars TV Series
Unless you've got some info that I don't, that's all just rumor with no basis in fact. Additionally, after Episode I came out Kevin Smith apparently said that he wouldn't touch Star Wars with a 10-foot pole because he doesn't want to be in the position of millions of rabid fans screaming that he's "raped their childhood," as many have claimed Lucas to be doing.
So yeah, unless you've got some actual bit of news (which I'd like to hear about, 'cause yes, Kevin Smith would be great for a SW show), it's highly unlikely to happen.
May added, "In future there won't be many movies without digital doubles, and those movies without them will seem boring by comparison."
I know that *I'm* always excited when I know that it's just some videogame onscreen. I'd love to see him explain how CG stuntmen would enhance a Jackie Chan flick somehow. It certainly didn't work for the Matrix sequels. Or practically any action flick I've seen since CG started becoming popular.
I had actually hoped to avoid playing stupid little pedantic games with dictionaries, but since you've brought it up, mine makes frequent use of words such as coerce, threats, fear-inspiring force, browbeat, etc. There are, of course, some definitions which omit such language, but if you insist on using a watered-down, meaningless version of the word, then by all means, feel free to rail at the government for sending a couple of people to investigate. Do you also feel this kind of rancor when suspects to other crimes get questioned? Should we feel sorry for all of the people intimidated by the presence of a police car checking for speeders?
Fact: it is illegal, in the United States of America, to make a death threat directed at the President or Vice President, however inept and loathsome they are. Fact: this person posted something to a public forum which, while not being a direct threat, certainly implied that the writer would be glad to see some violence done. Fact: it is the Secret Service's *job* to investigate possible threats to the presidency, and in general enforce the law mentioned two sentences ago.
Her comments are just a few grammatical changes away from being in direct violation of that law. Sure, they're not in direct violation, but I can easily understand how they may warrant a quick investigation. If you think that there's some way the SS officers could have handled the situation differently, given that they were probably under a mandate to do the investigations, then I'd love to hear it. Or rather, I wouldn't really, because I doubt that either of us is going to be able to "win" this over the other.
If you want to live in your delusional world that the FBI is deeply concerned with stifling the innovation and freedoms of LiveJournal users, feel free. Myself, I'll stick to the many real examples that can be found of rights abuses, and content myself with ignoring this little trifle.
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They also had the good sense to start releasing Miyazaki films in the U.S. That kind of blew me away. Well, they did Spirited Away anyway; weren't they planning on doing others?
The Emperor's New Groove, now there was a great Disney movie. I suppose that's been out for awhile though.
Also, FYI, the one I got can do 1024x768 on the TV-out.
I'm sure there's already thousands of responses similar to this, but I've just got a very simple lightweight Linux box running Freevo. It works out really well for me. I got the cheapest nVidia graphics card I could find that had a TV-out, which I had running basically immediately thanks to nVidia's drivers (which, despite what others may say, and despite their being closed-source, have never given me any problems), and the box mounts my Video and Audio partitions over NFS from the fileserver that lives over by my central computing area. Total setup time (once the OS was installed anyway) was probably no more than 4 hours or so, and that's all just tweaking Freevo settings to only include the menus that I want, making sure that I'm passing the proper options into mplayer, etc, playing with video modes to find out what works best on my TV...
As to your other point, yeah, I'm down with the necessity of a server. I've always seen that as an integral part, and that's the bit which is most lacking in the OSS community I think. Some other people have pointed out Ximian/Novell Connector now, which looks like it's a good clientside app, so that's good on that front, but I'd like to see an OSS calendar server that's good as well.
Regardless, email itself isn't a problem, because you can configure Exchange to do your ordinary average IMAP, etc, so any client that understands IMAP can talk to it. I think what they're doing for calendar type stuff is maybe giving the Ximian/Novell Connector thing a try.
It looks like it's still fairly tied into an Exchange background, which kind of sucks; I'd really love to have an OSS backend server as well. At least this'd be a way to run a client in Linux though.
Well, as I said elsewhere in the thread, while I'm not opposed to a web-based calendar system, I'd much prefer having a dedicated client. Apparently Ximian Connector's been GPLed and released as Novell Connector now, though, so perhaps what I'm looking for *does* exist.
Hm, fun, I'll have to check it out then. Is iCalendar a Mac thing?
Isn't Ximian Connector non-free, and doesn't it require an Exchange server on the backend?
The company I'm at now just started a big transition over to Outlook and all that, and I know the calendaring system was one of the factors affecting the decision. All the internal mail stuff used to be handled by OSS boxes, now it's Outlook. (Granted, the company is like 95% windows internally at least, so it kind of makes sense for them to be doing it, but it's painful for those of us in the 5% who don't even really live on the internal corporate network.)
I could probably go on for awhile. Again, I'm sure that you could write a good calendar app on a webpage. But I don't think it would be nearly as good as an actual client. When you write a client you've got the power to construct protocols that make *sense* for the application you're designing. You've got a great deal more control in general. I know some people are of the opinion that everything should be a webapp, but I disagree. I find webapps for this kind of thing to be, in general, quite clunky and nonintuitive.
You could argue, of course, that many of these concerns could be addressed by using Java applets or something similar on the page, but once you start doing that you may as well just take the extra step and write an actual Java based client or the like...
Maybe somebody forgot to update the website.
... that's cross-platform and lets you reserve conference rooms, schedule meetings, etc, etc, etc. Haven't found anything quite like that yet, not that can be used on coworkers' windows machines too, anyway.
Yes, yes, I'm aware of all that. My point is that they're twisting the facts here to imply that filesharing is costing them $3 billion a year, when in fact filesharing has nothing to do with that "loss." That's the bit that's always bugged me about this kind of stuff. Sure, somebody selling bootlegs of your stuff is certainly stealing money that could otherwise be yours. But I've never been convinced that p2p filesharing has any negative impact on sales, because whoever downloads an album or a song and doesn't buy the physical copy never would have bought the physical copy in the first place. IMO, anyway. I'm not denying the illegality of filesharing, or that it's definitely a copyright infringement.
But what exactly does that have to do with filesharers?
So yeah, unless you've got some actual bit of news (which I'd like to hear about, 'cause yes, Kevin Smith would be great for a SW show), it's highly unlikely to happen.
Fact: it is illegal, in the United States of America, to make a death threat directed at the President or Vice President, however inept and loathsome they are. Fact: this person posted something to a public forum which, while not being a direct threat, certainly implied that the writer would be glad to see some violence done. Fact: it is the Secret Service's *job* to investigate possible threats to the presidency, and in general enforce the law mentioned two sentences ago.
Her comments are just a few grammatical changes away from being in direct violation of that law. Sure, they're not in direct violation, but I can easily understand how they may warrant a quick investigation. If you think that there's some way the SS officers could have handled the situation differently, given that they were probably under a mandate to do the investigations, then I'd love to hear it. Or rather, I wouldn't really, because I doubt that either of us is going to be able to "win" this over the other.
If you want to live in your delusional world that the FBI is deeply concerned with stifling the innovation and freedoms of LiveJournal users, feel free. Myself, I'll stick to the many real examples that can be found of rights abuses, and content myself with ignoring this little trifle.