Wow, thanks for bringing that to my attention! I just tried it (on a Celeron 300A->450 with 196MB of RAM), and it seems considerably quicker loading apps and the UI reacts noticeably quicker. Memory useage is drastically reduced too - right now I have three Konquerors and KMail running, and memory is about 20MB less than usual!
They tried to do a similar bicycle scheme in Cambridge here in the UK. The bicycles were green. They started with 150 bicycles if my memory is accurate. The very last bicycle went missing during the scheme's second week.
At one point I moved into a student house there, which had a bicycle with a hand-painted black frame, rusting away at the bottom of the garden. Care to guess which colour paint was showing through where the black paint had fallen off?
Yes, this has been available for months. It must have been reported here before, too. News seems stuck in an infinite loop recently on/. Back in the day this didn't happen very often, and the actual number of front-page stories wasn't lower, so what could be the cause? Is there a drop in the quality of the story queue, or of the attention of the editors? In this case, how could the submittor have failed to notice that this wasn't new? I believe it has quite a high version number, and the diary page on the web site goes back to February of this year. And this thing is often mentioned in the most consumable version of the kernel mailing list, Kernel Traffic.
I'm fairly sure you are right about being allowed to keep the goods if you truly buy stolen without realising. Here in the UK I have certainly heard of cases where people have their motorcycle stolen, and like a year later the police find it when they pull someone over for a traffic crime, but the new owner gets to keep it. But then this guy just couldn't possibly fail to have known that there was a stolen Enigma machine about at the time, because it was on the national TV news (if he is from the UK too, which seems likely) for several days after the theft, which was only what, three months ago?
With the common utilities water, electricity, gas and telephone, the cost of measuring usage, calculating the bill and sending out the bill is the largest portion of the total cost. That's why here in the UK you can get your gas from any one of a number of companies, including your electricity provider, even though they don't own any infrastructure. They pay a flat rate to the infrastructure owner for supplying you with gas, and then do the billing to you. They are betting that they can do the billing more cheaply than the infrastructure company can, and thus charge you less and still make a profit.
And that just goes to illustrate why charging for usage for consumer Internet is stupid.
I find Konqueror works for all but one website that I regularly visit, and that is a JavaScript issue - it runs off hierarchical menus in JavaScript that don't work on Konqueror (http://www.cex.co.uk/). I use it as my main browser now. Its about as stable as Netscape 4 at the moment, but it was a lot flakier two weeks ago, so I hope that it will just keep getting better and better up to KDE 2.0's release in about two weeks time.
Apart from its rendering speed, and the way that it renders content as it loads instead of once its all down, the most compelling reason to use it I find is the way it allows you to set cookie, Java and JavaScript settings on a per-site basis. With the cookies, you just tell it to ask you for all domains it doesn't know about. For the first week you have to tell it whether to accept or reject for this session at the site, or always at this site. You quickly build a list of banned ad-banner cookies. Soon you get asked less and less, and you are surfing with considerably more privacy, without having to install and configure a proxy.
I've been using ReiserFS for over a year. I have never had any problems with it (this is a desktop machine). Six months ago I decided to build a completely ReiserFS system (Slackware-based), and I haven't looked back. I believe you can get this out of the box on the current SuSe distribution.
There seems to be a lot of politics surrounding ReiserFS's exclusion from the mainstream kernel. I have been reading KT for a few months and following that thread in particular. It appears to an end-user like me that the VFS guy and the EXT3 guy are close, and Hans Reiser isn't well liked on a personal level. The VFS guy says that journalling can't work without his super-duper journalling API (which he hasn't released), which flies in the face of my experience with a fully working journalling filesystem (yes I have thrown the power a couple of times to see if it really does work). Reiser has promised to port his FS to the new API when it is available, but that isn't considered enough. To this end-user, it looks like the VFS guy doesn't want anyone to get a head start in gathering users before EXT3 is ready. Its sad, because in the meantime, end-users have to jump through hoops to get journaling, when it could be so much easier.
I'm guessing you are using one of the released beta versions here. AFAIK they have all been pretty buggy - it's amazing how bad they are. I build from CVS most days, and it just gets better every day. I have had trouble with downloading some files with Konqueror too (last night, Java plugin 1.2.2, about 10MB).
As far as the JavaScript goes, when its final, it could be worth a look. I had a few sites that were causing trouble with it, but the only one that still doesn't work (as of two days ago) is www.cex.co.uk.
Could you provide links to some of the sites that only work in IE? Assuming they are sites that are worthwhile visiting...
I have been using Konqueror as my main browser for a month now, and going by the CVS of two days ago, the only site I value that has serious problems is www.cex.co.uk, where a JavaScript menuing system doesn't work. Other than that, it just works! I haven't looked at Mozilla for a month or so, but I would hope that it has even better compatibility than Konqueror - I only stopped using it because I didn't like the slowness of its UI.
I totally agree with you. The only King book I ever tried to read was Misery (because I enjoyed the film of it so much). But after reading the first 20 pages, which consisted almost entirely of describing a severe headache in terms of pounding waves crashing against a concrete sea defense wall or something, I gave up in sheer boredom.
I now assume that his books are so long because he takes 20 times as many pages as anyone else to describe something.
I also read Brunner's The Jagged Orbit, and from that I take it that he has a thing about making up new slang based on other languages. In The Jagged Orbit, everyone who isn't white is called a Kneeblank, a corruption of 'ne blanc', which he claims comes from South Africa.
I very much enjoyed The Shockwave Rider, and I thoroughly recommend The Jagged Orbit too. One of the interesting things that went on in it was media manipulation, to the point where one could use a graphics workstation to create photo-realistic news-footage, and therefore make up the news for your own ends. I was reminded of this when there was that thing about one TV company altering the feed from another company to change or remove the advertising in a large sporting event last year. Also, looking at the current screenshots for the forthcoming PS2 game 'The Getaway', it looks like entertainment software is beginning to push the technology to the point where this is almost doable.
Spot on! The Final Fantasy series on NES/SNES/PlayStation/PS2 is one of the greatest series of videogames created so far. The next release, Final Fantasy 9, will be the last on PlayStation, with 10 and 11 already announced for PS2. Final Fantasy 11 has been announced as being massively multiplayer, to the point where you cannot expect to complete the game without going on-line (the gameworld still lives on a DVD) to gain the co-operation of other players.
This is a perfect example of using on-line play to bleed off extra revenue (assuming that you have to subscribe - nothing has been said, it could be a free extension once you have bought the game). There are millions of Final Fantasy fans across the world, all of whom will now be forced (if they want to play the next installment) to go on-line, pay whatever is required for the connection, and rely on being able to find some other people that want to play the same game at the same time, with the same level of commitment, compatible motives and all of whom have reached close to the same point in the game. Thats a lot of effort compared to the current scenario - get home from work, make cup of tea, switch on PlayStation and TV, continue with game.
And Final Fantasy isn't the only example. According to a feature in the well respected Edge magazine, Sega's upcoming Phantasy Star Online, one of the most eagerly awaited RPGs for Dreamcast, can only be completed by co-operative groups of four players! Enough to put me off buying a Dreamcast...
Sega Saturn (as well as PSX) also has a lightshow built in.
Re:Freenet really needs the support of the communi
on
Freenet 0.3 Released
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· Score: 2
My initial interest was to see what kind of content was available right now. Specifically, whether the content that could get mirrored at my machine if I ran the server was likely to be a worthwhile use of resources, or indeed likely to get me put in jail. Looking at the public key listings (indexes of content) on the project big-wigs' web pages, I was struck by the fact that the guy with the most content was mainly hosting MP3s, porn and copies of current best-selling books. I didn't see any warez on the list, but going by what is there already, how long is it likely to be before it floods with 0-day? Is this really what 'the community' should be getting behind? Maybe I misunderstood which community the parent comment was refering to? I was thinking of the Internet community, but maybe they meant the piracy community?
but doesn't this invalidate any research they might want to do? Presumably they are trying to find out what the maximum price they can get people to pay is. So by saying this, in future people might see that the price is higher, but think its a test, and pay the higher price believing they will get a discount. You might choose to shop at Amazon for convenience (you already have an account set up, you don't at a rival), trust (you know that they will deliver because they delivered in the past) or any number of other reasons, and this last thing could swing the balance for you...
Erm, could it be because Microsoft are tracking which sites you visit that have nothing to do with them at all? I mean with a banner, the site you are clicking from is going to want to know how many people clicked so they can get paid... Or are you implying that Microsoft are getting paid click-through from the default favourites? I would have thought it would be the other way round, companies paying Microsoft to have their site in the default favourites. Of course Microsoft could be providing statistics back to the default favourite sites so that they can see how much value they are getting for their investment. This is shifting things from the web-page right into the app... I don't care, who are the/.ers that use IE5.5 anyway? Don't they know this is Linux country;-)
For something close to that right now, try Square's recently released Chrono Cross. Two friends and I are playing this at the moment. We are all in roughly the same place in the game (the overall plot doesn't change) but we got here by completely different paths. The game has 44 chararcters that can be in your party! OK, I know Suikoden had 106, but I haven't played it far enough to find out if they have a profound effect on the story. I can say that they do in Chrono Cross.
You could use Konqueror, the browser included in the upcoming KDE 2.0 release. It allows you to specify your JavaScript and cookie acceptance settings on a site-by-site basis.
The current CVS version of KMail (for the upcoming KDE 2.0) has 'view as HTML' as a per-folder setting, and the default is off. The idea is that you create a folder with HTML enabled and a rule that moves email from trusted HTML-mail senders into that folder when you get new email. Its a pretty neat feature.
In the article they mention that the price difference they saw was evident when they made the first request with Netscape (cheaper) and the second with Internet Explorer. Is it possible that one of the criteria Amazon are using in their pricing decisions is what browser you are using?
Like Netscape users are cheap-skates? 'I bought this browser in 1996 and it still works, I'm not gonna buy another one dammit!' etc. Or maybe they assume that if you use Netscape you probably run Linux (yeah I know that its available from the User-Agent header, but if you had to dual boot, you might use Netscape when you were in Windows too for consistency), and maybe they think that if don't pay for software, you're not likely to buy a DVD if it costs a lot?
Maybe its just me. I have geek interests, and yet I have never heard of this company or their product before. The details on their website are very sketchy. There are no downloads, the pages look very second-rate, and their on-line ordering isn't over SSL. There are broken images everywhere, where you would expect pictures of flashy shrink-wrap. The user manual for this 'super o/s' is full of screen-shots of a DOS app running in a Win9x comand window. And although they claim to be a US company, the text gives the feeling it was written by someone who doesn't often use the English language.
OK, I am a constant skeptic. Is it just me, or does this look like a hoax to anyone else? Isn't it the sort of thing one would expect to have seen a feature on at a geek site like Ars Technica? Can anyone present any evidence that this is real?
Think of the economic implications...
on
Qt Going GPL
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· Score: 1
...for news websites;-) Without the opportunity to post stories about this topic, banner impressions will drop like a stone! Who will be the first to file bankruptcy?
Or maybe they will move over to stirring up anxiety between BSD and Linux now...
Dude, this is about Napster, not Gnutella. I can understand some people can't be bothered to read the linked article before posting, but not reading the/. header before posting, wow;-)
I don't really understand this censorware thing, not as far as bunched-up-panties, anyway. I thought you needed uncensored public Inet because not everyone could afford it at home. But the other day I saw something that shook that.
There was a story about how somewhere in the US the state is issuing everyone who wanted it with a set-top box, for free. And then they showed this family using their set-top box, saying how they would never have had Inet without it. The only obvious reason they couldn't afford Inet was because they may have still been paying off a loan that paid for their 60 inch back-projector TV!
A set like that would cost about 2000 pounds sterling here in the UK. If the poverty-stricken poor in the US have enough spare change for high-end TVs, I can't get too sympathetic.
Are you saying that the purpose of Napster is to try to change the system so that there is no longer any reward for those who nurture bands, pay for music production, and promote music, not to mention being a musician?
Further you appear to be saying that Project Gutenburg's true purpose is to make all books available to everyone, now, and without remuneration to the author.
Hey, last time I looked, MP3 swapping was still pirating. Did I miss something? If you make a tape of a CD your friend lends you, are you saying that isn't piracy? Let me get this straight, you said:
"The MP3 community sees it as sharing something in order to fight what amounts to a corporate monopoly."
So 'the MP3 community' don't actually listen to the files they transfer? They don't even discriminate enough to bother downloading things they like, they just pass files around to stick it to the Man?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, thanks for bringing that to my attention! I just tried it (on a Celeron 300A->450 with 196MB of RAM), and it seems considerably quicker loading apps and the UI reacts noticeably quicker. Memory useage is drastically reduced too - right now I have three Konquerors and KMail running, and memory is about 20MB less than usual!
They tried to do a similar bicycle scheme in Cambridge here in the UK. The bicycles were green. They started with 150 bicycles if my memory is accurate. The very last bicycle went missing during the scheme's second week.
At one point I moved into a student house there, which had a bicycle with a hand-painted black frame, rusting away at the bottom of the garden. Care to guess which colour paint was showing through where the black paint had fallen off?
Yes, this has been available for months. It must have been reported here before, too. News seems stuck in an infinite loop recently on /. Back in the day this didn't happen very often, and the actual number of front-page stories wasn't lower, so what could be the cause? Is there a drop in the quality of the story queue, or of the attention of the editors? In this case, how could the submittor have failed to notice that this wasn't new? I believe it has quite a high version number, and the diary page on the web site goes back to February of this year. And this thing is often mentioned in the most consumable version of the kernel mailing list, Kernel Traffic.
I'm fairly sure you are right about being allowed to keep the goods if you truly buy stolen without realising. Here in the UK I have certainly heard of cases where people have their motorcycle stolen, and like a year later the police find it when they pull someone over for a traffic crime, but the new owner gets to keep it. But then this guy just couldn't possibly fail to have known that there was a stolen Enigma machine about at the time, because it was on the national TV news (if he is from the UK too, which seems likely) for several days after the theft, which was only what, three months ago?
With the common utilities water, electricity, gas and telephone, the cost of measuring usage, calculating the bill and sending out the bill is the largest portion of the total cost. That's why here in the UK you can get your gas from any one of a number of companies, including your electricity provider, even though they don't own any infrastructure. They pay a flat rate to the infrastructure owner for supplying you with gas, and then do the billing to you. They are betting that they can do the billing more cheaply than the infrastructure company can, and thus charge you less and still make a profit.
And that just goes to illustrate why charging for usage for consumer Internet is stupid.
I find Konqueror works for all but one website that I regularly visit, and that is a JavaScript issue - it runs off hierarchical menus in JavaScript that don't work on Konqueror (http://www.cex.co.uk/). I use it as my main browser now. Its about as stable as Netscape 4 at the moment, but it was a lot flakier two weeks ago, so I hope that it will just keep getting better and better up to KDE 2.0's release in about two weeks time.
Apart from its rendering speed, and the way that it renders content as it loads instead of once its all down, the most compelling reason to use it I find is the way it allows you to set cookie, Java and JavaScript settings on a per-site basis. With the cookies, you just tell it to ask you for all domains it doesn't know about. For the first week you have to tell it whether to accept or reject for this session at the site, or always at this site. You quickly build a list of banned ad-banner cookies. Soon you get asked less and less, and you are surfing with considerably more privacy, without having to install and configure a proxy.
I've been using ReiserFS for over a year. I have never had any problems with it (this is a desktop machine). Six months ago I decided to build a completely ReiserFS system (Slackware-based), and I haven't looked back. I believe you can get this out of the box on the current SuSe distribution.
There seems to be a lot of politics surrounding ReiserFS's exclusion from the mainstream kernel. I have been reading KT for a few months and following that thread in particular. It appears to an end-user like me that the VFS guy and the EXT3 guy are close, and Hans Reiser isn't well liked on a personal level. The VFS guy says that journalling can't work without his super-duper journalling API (which he hasn't released), which flies in the face of my experience with a fully working journalling filesystem (yes I have thrown the power a couple of times to see if it really does work). Reiser has promised to port his FS to the new API when it is available, but that isn't considered enough. To this end-user, it looks like the VFS guy doesn't want anyone to get a head start in gathering users before EXT3 is ready. Its sad, because in the meantime, end-users have to jump through hoops to get journaling, when it could be so much easier.
Come on guys, even NT has had this for years!
I'm guessing you are using one of the released beta versions here. AFAIK they have all been pretty buggy - it's amazing how bad they are. I build from CVS most days, and it just gets better every day. I have had trouble with downloading some files with Konqueror too (last night, Java plugin 1.2.2, about 10MB).
As far as the JavaScript goes, when its final, it could be worth a look. I had a few sites that were causing trouble with it, but the only one that still doesn't work (as of two days ago) is www.cex.co.uk.
Could you provide links to some of the sites that only work in IE? Assuming they are sites that are worthwhile visiting...
I have been using Konqueror as my main browser for a month now, and going by the CVS of two days ago, the only site I value that has serious problems is www.cex.co.uk, where a JavaScript menuing system doesn't work. Other than that, it just works! I haven't looked at Mozilla for a month or so, but I would hope that it has even better compatibility than Konqueror - I only stopped using it because I didn't like the slowness of its UI.
I totally agree with you. The only King book I ever tried to read was Misery (because I enjoyed the film of it so much). But after reading the first 20 pages, which consisted almost entirely of describing a severe headache in terms of pounding waves crashing against a concrete sea defense wall or something, I gave up in sheer boredom.
I now assume that his books are so long because he takes 20 times as many pages as anyone else to describe something.
I also read Brunner's The Jagged Orbit, and from that I take it that he has a thing about making up new slang based on other languages. In The Jagged Orbit, everyone who isn't white is called a Kneeblank, a corruption of 'ne blanc', which he claims comes from South Africa.
I very much enjoyed The Shockwave Rider, and I thoroughly recommend The Jagged Orbit too. One of the interesting things that went on in it was media manipulation, to the point where one could use a graphics workstation to create photo-realistic news-footage, and therefore make up the news for your own ends. I was reminded of this when there was that thing about one TV company altering the feed from another company to change or remove the advertising in a large sporting event last year. Also, looking at the current screenshots for the forthcoming PS2 game 'The Getaway', it looks like entertainment software is beginning to push the technology to the point where this is almost doable.
Spot on! The Final Fantasy series on NES/SNES/PlayStation/PS2 is one of the greatest series of videogames created so far. The next release, Final Fantasy 9, will be the last on PlayStation, with 10 and 11 already announced for PS2. Final Fantasy 11 has been announced as being massively multiplayer, to the point where you cannot expect to complete the game without going on-line (the gameworld still lives on a DVD) to gain the co-operation of other players.
This is a perfect example of using on-line play to bleed off extra revenue (assuming that you have to subscribe - nothing has been said, it could be a free extension once you have bought the game). There are millions of Final Fantasy fans across the world, all of whom will now be forced (if they want to play the next installment) to go on-line, pay whatever is required for the connection, and rely on being able to find some other people that want to play the same game at the same time, with the same level of commitment, compatible motives and all of whom have reached close to the same point in the game. Thats a lot of effort compared to the current scenario - get home from work, make cup of tea, switch on PlayStation and TV, continue with game.
And Final Fantasy isn't the only example. According to a feature in the well respected Edge magazine, Sega's upcoming Phantasy Star Online, one of the most eagerly awaited RPGs for Dreamcast, can only be completed by co-operative groups of four players! Enough to put me off buying a Dreamcast...
Sega Saturn (as well as PSX) also has a lightshow built in.
My initial interest was to see what kind of content was available right now. Specifically, whether the content that could get mirrored at my machine if I ran the server was likely to be a worthwhile use of resources, or indeed likely to get me put in jail. Looking at the public key listings (indexes of content) on the project big-wigs' web pages, I was struck by the fact that the guy with the most content was mainly hosting MP3s, porn and copies of current best-selling books. I didn't see any warez on the list, but going by what is there already, how long is it likely to be before it floods with 0-day? Is this really what 'the community' should be getting behind? Maybe I misunderstood which community the parent comment was refering to? I was thinking of the Internet community, but maybe they meant the piracy community?
but doesn't this invalidate any research they might want to do? Presumably they are trying to find out what the maximum price they can get people to pay is. So by saying this, in future people might see that the price is higher, but think its a test, and pay the higher price believing they will get a discount. You might choose to shop at Amazon for convenience (you already have an account set up, you don't at a rival), trust (you know that they will deliver because they delivered in the past) or any number of other reasons, and this last thing could swing the balance for you...
Erm, could it be because Microsoft are tracking which sites you visit that have nothing to do with them at all? I mean with a banner, the site you are clicking from is going to want to know how many people clicked so they can get paid... Or are you implying that Microsoft are getting paid click-through from the default favourites? I would have thought it would be the other way round, companies paying Microsoft to have their site in the default favourites. Of course Microsoft could be providing statistics back to the default favourite sites so that they can see how much value they are getting for their investment. This is shifting things from the web-page right into the app... I don't care, who are the /.ers that use IE5.5 anyway? Don't they know this is Linux country ;-)
For something close to that right now, try Square's recently released Chrono Cross. Two friends and I are playing this at the moment. We are all in roughly the same place in the game (the overall plot doesn't change) but we got here by completely different paths. The game has 44 chararcters that can be in your party! OK, I know Suikoden had 106, but I haven't played it far enough to find out if they have a profound effect on the story. I can say that they do in Chrono Cross.
You could use Konqueror, the browser included in the upcoming KDE 2.0 release. It allows you to specify your JavaScript and cookie acceptance settings on a site-by-site basis.
The current CVS version of KMail (for the upcoming KDE 2.0) has 'view as HTML' as a per-folder setting, and the default is off. The idea is that you create a folder with HTML enabled and a rule that moves email from trusted HTML-mail senders into that folder when you get new email. Its a pretty neat feature.
In the article they mention that the price difference they saw was evident when they made the first request with Netscape (cheaper) and the second with Internet Explorer. Is it possible that one of the criteria Amazon are using in their pricing decisions is what browser you are using?
Like Netscape users are cheap-skates? 'I bought this browser in 1996 and it still works, I'm not gonna buy another one dammit!' etc. Or maybe they assume that if you use Netscape you probably run Linux (yeah I know that its available from the User-Agent header, but if you had to dual boot, you might use Netscape when you were in Windows too for consistency), and maybe they think that if don't pay for software, you're not likely to buy a DVD if it costs a lot?
Maybe its just me. I have geek interests, and yet I have never heard of this company or their product before. The details on their website are very sketchy. There are no downloads, the pages look very second-rate, and their on-line ordering isn't over SSL. There are broken images everywhere, where you would expect pictures of flashy shrink-wrap. The user manual for this 'super o/s' is full of screen-shots of a DOS app running in a Win9x comand window. And although they claim to be a US company, the text gives the feeling it was written by someone who doesn't often use the English language.
OK, I am a constant skeptic. Is it just me, or does this look like a hoax to anyone else? Isn't it the sort of thing one would expect to have seen a feature on at a geek site like Ars Technica? Can anyone present any evidence that this is real?
...for news websites ;-) Without the opportunity to post stories about this topic, banner impressions will drop like a stone! Who will be the first to file bankruptcy?
Or maybe they will move over to stirring up anxiety between BSD and Linux now...
Dude, this is about Napster, not Gnutella. I can understand some people can't be bothered to read the linked article before posting, but not reading the /. header before posting, wow ;-)
I don't really understand this censorware thing, not as far as bunched-up-panties, anyway. I thought you needed uncensored public Inet because not everyone could afford it at home. But the other day I saw something that shook that.
There was a story about how somewhere in the US the state is issuing everyone who wanted it with a set-top box, for free. And then they showed this family using their set-top box, saying how they would never have had Inet without it. The only obvious reason they couldn't afford Inet was because they may have still been paying off a loan that paid for their 60 inch back-projector TV!
A set like that would cost about 2000 pounds sterling here in the UK. If the poverty-stricken poor in the US have enough spare change for high-end TVs, I can't get too sympathetic.
Are you saying that the purpose of Napster is to try to change the system so that there is no longer any reward for those who nurture bands, pay for music production, and promote music, not to mention being a musician? Further you appear to be saying that Project Gutenburg's true purpose is to make all books available to everyone, now, and without remuneration to the author. Hey, last time I looked, MP3 swapping was still pirating. Did I miss something? If you make a tape of a CD your friend lends you, are you saying that isn't piracy? Let me get this straight, you said: "The MP3 community sees it as sharing something in order to fight what amounts to a corporate monopoly." So 'the MP3 community' don't actually listen to the files they transfer? They don't even discriminate enough to bother downloading things they like, they just pass files around to stick it to the Man?