It's a Linux-based product that supports every codec you'd probably need but the open source one I use all the time, Ogg Vorbis. They really did a great job on that one.
...and I don't mean to be rude about this, and feel free to mod me down the hole, but a night at the pub, seeing a movie, spending time with friends or having sex will always take precadence over a video game for me. I love video games, I've been playing them since the Coleco days. But I play them like I would also read a book. You take a quiet afternoon, toss in Metroid Prime, and play for a few hours. Sunday night? Why not play some UT2K4 with the fellas? It's all good.
If someone doesn't have something more fulfilling in their life besides an online-game, then the problem isn't their addiction to the game, the problem is their fear of taking risks to make the rest of their life worth it. If you were to compare it to a relationship, you're spending all of your efforts and money into this game, and all it's giving back to you is small neural responses that have a half-life of about 4 minutes (no pun intended). It's just not worth it.
I think people have to start examining themselves and decide what's more important, their future, or Urukul's Flaming Sword of Fury.
To be honest with you, I think the retro-futuristic theme of the movie was the only genre they had available. In order to film the entire set in CG with real actors in the foreground, they would have had to blur the elements in order to make it blend. Otherwise you'd have a clear definition of where the actors ended and the CG began.
The sepia-tonesque film style was useful for how they wanted to film the movie. I doubt a very crisp, clean environment would have turned out as well.
Now I'm not saying I didn't love the movie, but I think the theme was a result of the idea behind filming it more than the intention.
Aside from patches to 3.3, I don't think we'll see another major KDE release until Qt4 is finalized and we see KDE 4 creep up beside it. So for all of us who are reveling in a new release of our favourite desktop environment, just remember to hold onto that feeling, it could be another year before it happens again.:)
When I was in High School here in Ottawa, Ontario, we were learning to perform word-processing tasks with WordPerfect 5.1. Now, for those of you who were fortunate enough to not have to learn WP51, I can tell you that the blue screen could drive anyone mad.
If I was able to use Star Office in High School though, I probably wouldn't have learned to type so quickly due to having to memorize arcane keystrokes.
But still, Slashdot readers do not form a useful congress of any kind. As far as I've seen we're all pretty environmentally conscious, and are all well aware that hybrid vehicles, or electric vehicles would be the way to go, as well as ridding ourselves of unnecessary industrialization (and by saying that I mean factories and plants that produce air and ground-water pollution, not to mention other forms) where possible. But we're so scattered throughout our respective continents and countries that we make a weak voice for any fashion of change. Unless of course we sent some kind of petition to the U.N.
Also inherently flawed, since when was the last time a world super power listened to the U.N. when it strongly urged them not to do something?
Besides, Lovelock should know that it's easier to pump gasoline from an underground storage tank than it is to pump uranium. Not to mention the fact that you have to dispose of the remaining materials somewhere. Not nuclear, I don't know what aside from it, but not nuclear.
I worked for a small company called cs-live.com before it was purchased by 800america and destroyed a couple of years ago. cs-live had a similar product to LivePerson, HumanClick, and eGain. I can assure you they are *not* robots.
The problem is all of the folks in the support center are "push happy". You can create a support database with canned phrases to send to the end user to quickly ask questions as you move through the conversation. This greatly reduces the worry of support staff not being able to type as quickly as other support staff. They simply double click on the phrase to push, and it gets sent to you. Equally, they have a library of URLs they can push to you too.
This was designed to narrow down a problem enough that a tech or a support rep. could actually give you a solution, either by pushing you a URL or by typing it themselves. Where I do think that it's absolutely ridiculous that these online chat systems are really used by large corporations, I can tell you that I enjoyed developing it.:)
If I want to talk to a support rep. I'll always call them. I tend to buy products that I know will come with 90 days of installation phone support. Otherwise, to hell with them.
The Vorlons return from beyond the rim and drag Babylon 5 into a seperate reality. When the 1701-E stumbles upon it, they request aid from Admiral Janeway who sends Voyageur (with her on board) and she also commands the crew of DS9 to arrive with the Defiant in case we need Worf to make rude noises. O'Brien happens to be on the 1701-E, as Picard missed his old transporter-chief and decided to liberate him from Starfleet Academy.
So, we have all these crews here, but we're missing two. Sisko, while speaking with the wormhole aliens, asks them to drag the NX-01 and the NCC-1701 from the past to the planet where Babylon 5 is orbiting. All hell breaks loose. Sisko materializes on the bridge of the Defiant and begins to command the fleet (while Picard quietly plots his death, feeling upstaged). Babylon 5 launches it's fighers, and the harrowing corpse of Sheridan begins to emanate a strange energy signature. All of a sudden, three Spacing Guild ships appear above the station, and the fighters of Muad'dib begin to use their illegaly-taught Bene Gesserit teachings to subdue Starfleet. Babylon 5 lays waste to all Starfleet ships with the White Star, and subsequently becomes entranced themselves by the wily ways of the Fedaykin.
Afterwards, another Guild Highliner arrives carrying a delegation of the Bene Gesserit who tames the Vorlons with lessons they've learned from The Scattering.
The movie ends with Captain Kirk in an escape pod singing "Row Row Row your Boat"
I don't accurately remember what time the power went out in Ottawa, but I do recall having to cook a whole bunch of hamburgers on the barbecue, partly because if we didn't we wouldn't eat, and partly because the meat would have gone bad. Once that was over with, my friends all stopped by my place and we started to wonder what exactly we'd do. CFRA (local talk radio) was spewing off about all sorts of crap, theories, ideas, etc.
The only thing we could do really is go find something to cool us down. Luckily, Ottawa is right across the river from Quebec, so we went to Dairy Queen.:)I don't think Gatineau has ever seen that much business all at once. There were a few hundred cars parked on the bridge, slowly edging forward into Quebec; people seeking dinner, cold drinks, family, etc. The city of Gatineau being on a separate power grid, we didn't notice the blackout really. There were streetlights, gas stations, businesses were open, we didn't think anything of it.
After Dairy Queen we drove from Gatineau to Buckingham, which is about 45 minutes from downtown Ottawa, to get some Tim Horton's coffee. Now, if you ever visit the Ottawa area, or live here, the Tim Horton's in Buckingham makes the best Timmy's coffee I've ever had.:)
So those purchases all taken care of, we drove from Buckingham back into the city after nightfall and beheld a wonder. The clocktower on Parliament was the only thing in the city that was light, besides generator powered floodlights in stairwells throughout the office buildings in the downtown core. The whole city was sleeping, and it was as eerie as I could imagine eerie being.
We didn't have much trouble getting back into the city, and drove down the parkway very slowly to get back to my home. Emperor Ave. was black. Flashlights shone from verandas here and there. We parked, went inside and then realized just how festive this had all been. Aside from losing a freezer full of food, it was a beautiful night. We wandered down to Fisher Ave. which is usually well lit, and watched the cars like ghosts making their way back home.
We topped the evening off by smoking a joint on the back porch, then I fell asleep not hearing anything but my own breathing.
How can a single track, let's say Days Go By by Dirty Vegas, be worth $10,000.00? Why can't users caught with illegal tracks have to pay the market price for the digital media, say, $1.00 a track? Isn't that fair? If I had 2GB of MP3s, OGGs, or other, I would have roughly 571 songs (at 3.5MB a pop on average). So why not pay the $571.00 for the digital music?
I don't understand how the RIAA can place a value that high on a single track when someone can easily get it from iTunes for $1.00. Any ideas?
I don't think anyone should consider any language over another unless the decision is about the task at hand. PHP has it's place, and so does Perl. PHP is great for small - medium sized websites that you want to develop fast and use a database to a reasonable degree with. Perl is great for building that too; however, I think using a scripting language that's designed for the web would likely be a better choice.
Now, if you wanted to build an enterprise level application, I would tell you to dump both of those in favour of Java Servlets/JSPs or ASP.NET. I get really tired of hearing people talk about this language over that language. They all have their benefits, and their places. I wouldn't build a GTK+ app in PHP, and I wouldn't build a website with C++ CGI software. Don't choose a "default" programming language for all tasks, choose a language for the task at hand. I think that's the best way to approach it.
...that a bushel of potatoes is equal to a quart of milk, but I'm going to.
The fact that the chip inside of your laptop is called Mobility Radeon 9200 means that brand could be an old ATI Rage and nobody could complain. Mobility Radeon 9200 is a brand of it's own. The fact that you equate the Radeon 9200 with the Mobility Radeon 9200 is your problem, not a problem with their marketing.
So yes, you can feel duped, or you can realize that this kind of thing happens all the time and is now considered fair marketing practice.:)
This is a 2D shooter which is *hard* and completely innovative for a shooter. Your ship has two polarities, black and white. When your ship is in white polarity, it can absorb white enemy fire and you can easily destroy black ships. When you're in black polarity, the situation is opposite. You can destroy white ships easily and absorb black enemy fire. The more enemy fire you absorb, the more it powers your super weapon (and there's only one of them). Object of the game is to survive really, but it's amazing.
Another game I've played is Bejeweled by Popcap Games. Definately the most addicitve puzzle game I've ever played. Between those two I've wasted enough time to limit my capability to produce the cure for cancer this year.
The main problem I've seen users face is not the design of the site necessarily, but whether or not the content of the navigation was meaningful in any way. Having a link called "Info" is not very helpful. Info in this context? Info in what other context? Navigation plays a large role in someone clicking through, realizing this was not at all what they wanted, then clicking the back button and trying again. There are *tons* of sites that have this problem. And how do they solve it usually? They create a FAQ. And that's all good and fine, but a user has to know if this is the kind of site you need to read the FAQ for to navigate.
Layout is also important yes. The navigation should be on of the first things rendered. A user should be looking at their navigation options before the page is finished loading. This is often times not the case.
Another way to solve it is to have a flat website with a large number of very specific links that go to once place only, but of course laying that out is problematic.
Secondly, The Supreme Court of Canada should never make a ruling in which it punishes all the children for a portion of the children's activities. I realize that our government is corrupt and there's no hope for us, but this is going too far.
"Hello Canadians, this is The Liberal Party speaking. Though many of you have done nothing wrong, you will all be taxed by the music industry, because we get to tax them. Blame them though, they did it! It has nothing to do with the fact that we have appointed several of the Justices in the Supreme Court! Blame the music industry, don't look this way, ignore the man behind the curtain while we collect taxes from you until you bleed from your eyes!"
The issue with PHP is not whether or not it scales as well as Java, but whether or not it's useful in a real-world application. In my opinion, it isn't that useful.
PHP offers us no way to build an application server (unless you write one in C or C++ and send commands to it via a cli or directly through sockets). If you embed Tomcat in your application server, you can simply create contexts and mount them with mod_jk. Quite simply, you can take any server that you've written in Java and web enbale it fairly quickly. PHP lacks persistence, and I'm not talking about sessions.
Let's say that we want to add a request to our application from the web. With Java I can toss the request on a queue which a thread picks up and balances to several other worker threads who interpret the request and works with it. With PHP I would have to enter data into a flat file, or a database, and have a cronjob setup to run every minute or so and do something with data in the database. Even then, at that point, I can only have one thread unless I want to mix and match several cronjobs to run at seperate times (or unless I want to fork the process off very uncleanly using exec() or system()). In any case, does PHP scale as well as Java? Maybe, I'd need to do more tests. Is it nearly as useful? No, not right now, probably not ever. Unless you are willing to write your own custom PHP module in C and play with PHP that way, I think big jobs should be left to the heavyweight in this discussion.
I think a lot of people would agree with me on this if they knew the number of new Linux users I do. X is fast, very fast. Most new Linux users complain how slow it is until I tell them it *is* a good idea to install drivers for your video card. Just because the card *can* do 1280x1024 with a VESA driver doesn't mean your GUI's going to be fast. Installing your nVidia or ATI driver is going to dramatically speed up the windowing system (especially Nautilus for those who use it, the whole solid icon-selection box doesn't stutter when you've installed your specific driver). Many new Linux users that I know assume that due to the fact that a high resolution is possible means that X has loaded the appropriate driver.
As we all know, this is wrong. I have a PIII 800 with a GeForce4MX and with nVidia's drivers installed KDE widgets (kdelibs on top of Qt) and windows display 30% faster. Having troubles with speed? Make sure you have the correct drivers installed.
I've been thinking for a long time (and had a discussion with a friend a few weeks ago with some ideas) that we should drop the System V init and move to a multi-threaded startup in order to avoid the heinous startup time we currently are stuck with. If we could have some software that reads a dep. map of all the software in init.d/ and runs all the processes it can before encountering dependancies we could probably cut bootup by 1/3 or maybe even 2/3.
It's nice to see that others have been thinking about this too.
ask them to prioritize. One phrase that's saved me from insanity quite a bit is "There are only so many keystrokes in a day." This way they realize there really is an upper limit.
This blackout has to be the single spookiest thing I'd ever seen considering how well lit Ottawa usually is at night (especially the Byward Market). Before the sun went down my friends and I drove to Gatineau for some Dairy Queen (because, well, it was bloody hot outside) and there were hordes of Ontario residents in Gatineau that night searching for gas, food, ATMs, and many just wanting to be where there was light.
We drove to Buckingham, QC (and if you're from the region, it's about 30 minutes from the Byward Market area) to get some Tim Hortons coffee because the entirety of Gatineau was swamped. Oddly enough one of my first priorities was coffee, even on a hot night.
Once our trip was done (four hours, the Jacques Cartier bridge was swamped taking us twenty-five minutes to get across) we drove back into the city. Now, the market was somewhat lit by then, but we got in one fender benders, and avoid six other very near collisions. People on the roads seemed panicky. But by far the creepiest thing was getting on the Queensway near King Edward. It was practically pitch-black, and the Queensway was very dark. The whole ride home was some sort of post-apocolyptic journey into the unknown.
So once back in the city we delivered doughtnuts to those who requested and rolled one for the occasion. Nothing like sitting on your porch by the light of the moon on the eve of a crisis smoking one for the hell of it.
Anyway, I'm just glad the air-conditioning is back on.:)
Anyone else have my kind of fun during the blackout?
What I'd like to know is if Caldera is going to charge it's own users the fee for Caldera Linux? If they do, they cut off a huge source of revenue (not to mention potentially putting themselves in the arena for legal action from their own customer base who now have to pay twice for a product) and if they don't is it antitrust time?
After reading the article I started thinking about economics and the way a system or a thing can become stagnant. 83% of the Linux users stated that the software, OS, etc. left them wanting more. 100% of the Windows XP users stated that the software, OS, etc. was on the money.
Given the fact that an economy without unemployment is an economy that cannot grow, could we reasonably assume that Linux is an OS that has not become stagnant? And could we also reasonably assume that MS Windows XP has reached the end of it's usability growth level? I know applying an economical standpoint to a desktop environment is rather unorthodox, but I think this shows that Windows XP, with it's ancestry, may be at the peak of it's usable evolution.
Given that KDE (or GNOME, not going to pick favorites here, but KDE was the environment of choice) has a vastly different desktop model than Windows XP (ok, I agree that's arguable for those who use Blackbox or Xfce, but bear with me) is it possible that KDE can grow and evolve beyond the boundaries of Windows XP? And given that a Linux distribution generally gives you all the software you require out of the box to start being productive on many levels, does it not stand to reason that this combination produces a large field for growth?
Supply and demand is being met in the desktop market. Those who need one and have the means, have one. However, a splinter in the market might end up showing us that those who have one may need more. What does everyone think? And for those economists out there consider MS thinking about charging for updates to your OS as a tax, thereby stagnating the OS economy further. The users who have a desktop that cannot grow are also being taxed for the desktop. If this actually makes money in the long run I'll be shocked considering that this disobeys the laws of a robust economy across the board.
So, I need a question answered by some kernel maintainers, contributors, etc. Just how much code are we talking about? 2K lines? 10K lines? Or is it small portions of copywritten code? If it's small portions, can we simply not rewrite that part of the codebase more effeciently (effeciency is a good reason) and re-release the kernel with the updated code? It seems to me that (and this was earlier with their comparison of a few lines of code) that you elminate that problem, do something in a slightly different way to avoid copyright infringement, and everyone's happy (not SCO, but we'll leave them out of this).
Secondly, does anyone think that SCO will release their Linux distribution royalty free of these copyright charges? If so, does it seem to anyone else as it does to me that we've finally met the MS of the Linux world?
Not that I think they'll succeed, but that's just hope talking. I think an action like this can sour Enterprise on Linux and shift many Linux customers back over to MS. Way to go, SCO.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a Linux-based product that supports every codec you'd probably need but the open source one I use all the time, Ogg Vorbis. They really did a great job on that one.
I'm not much of a Windows user, but some of the techs I know would recommend Hijack This for browser hijackers.
If someone doesn't have something more fulfilling in their life besides an online-game, then the problem isn't their addiction to the game, the problem is their fear of taking risks to make the rest of their life worth it. If you were to compare it to a relationship, you're spending all of your efforts and money into this game, and all it's giving back to you is small neural responses that have a half-life of about 4 minutes (no pun intended). It's just not worth it.
I think people have to start examining themselves and decide what's more important, their future, or Urukul's Flaming Sword of Fury.
The sepia-tonesque film style was useful for how they wanted to film the movie. I doubt a very crisp, clean environment would have turned out as well.
Now I'm not saying I didn't love the movie, but I think the theme was a result of the idea behind filming it more than the intention.
Aside from patches to 3.3, I don't think we'll see another major KDE release until Qt4 is finalized and we see KDE 4 creep up beside it. So for all of us who are reveling in a new release of our favourite desktop environment, just remember to hold onto that feeling, it could be another year before it happens again. :)
If I was able to use Star Office in High School though, I probably wouldn't have learned to type so quickly due to having to memorize arcane keystrokes.
Well, then again, there was always IRC. :)
Also inherently flawed, since when was the last time a world super power listened to the U.N. when it strongly urged them not to do something?
Besides, Lovelock should know that it's easier to pump gasoline from an underground storage tank than it is to pump uranium. Not to mention the fact that you have to dispose of the remaining materials somewhere. Not nuclear, I don't know what aside from it, but not nuclear.
The problem is all of the folks in the support center are "push happy". You can create a support database with canned phrases to send to the end user to quickly ask questions as you move through the conversation. This greatly reduces the worry of support staff not being able to type as quickly as other support staff. They simply double click on the phrase to push, and it gets sent to you. Equally, they have a library of URLs they can push to you too.
This was designed to narrow down a problem enough that a tech or a support rep. could actually give you a solution, either by pushing you a URL or by typing it themselves. Where I do think that it's absolutely ridiculous that these online chat systems are really used by large corporations, I can tell you that I enjoyed developing it. :)
If I want to talk to a support rep. I'll always call them. I tend to buy products that I know will come with 90 days of installation phone support. Otherwise, to hell with them.
Windows: I install a Windows application it asks me all sorts of questions. I install a Linux application, it installs. I don't know how OSX does it.
And as for anti-aliasing, my KDE desktop is more readable to me than my Windows desktop. I use Vertical RGB, try it out.
The Vorlons return from beyond the rim and drag Babylon 5 into a seperate reality. When the 1701-E stumbles upon it, they request aid from Admiral Janeway who sends Voyageur (with her on board) and she also commands the crew of DS9 to arrive with the Defiant in case we need Worf to make rude noises. O'Brien happens to be on the 1701-E, as Picard missed his old transporter-chief and decided to liberate him from Starfleet Academy.
So, we have all these crews here, but we're missing two. Sisko, while speaking with the wormhole aliens, asks them to drag the NX-01 and the NCC-1701 from the past to the planet where Babylon 5 is orbiting. All hell breaks loose. Sisko materializes on the bridge of the Defiant and begins to command the fleet (while Picard quietly plots his death, feeling upstaged). Babylon 5 launches it's fighers, and the harrowing corpse of Sheridan begins to emanate a strange energy signature. All of a sudden, three Spacing Guild ships appear above the station, and the fighters of Muad'dib begin to use their illegaly-taught Bene Gesserit teachings to subdue Starfleet. Babylon 5 lays waste to all Starfleet ships with the White Star, and subsequently becomes entranced themselves by the wily ways of the Fedaykin.
Afterwards, another Guild Highliner arrives carrying a delegation of the Bene Gesserit who tames the Vorlons with lessons they've learned from The Scattering.
The movie ends with Captain Kirk in an escape pod singing "Row Row Row your Boat"
The only thing we could do really is go find something to cool us down. Luckily, Ottawa is right across the river from Quebec, so we went to Dairy Queen. :)I don't think Gatineau has ever seen that much business all at once. There were a few hundred cars parked on the bridge, slowly edging forward into Quebec; people seeking dinner, cold drinks, family, etc. The city of Gatineau being on a separate power grid, we didn't notice the blackout really. There were streetlights, gas stations, businesses were open, we didn't think anything of it.
After Dairy Queen we drove from Gatineau to Buckingham, which is about 45 minutes from downtown Ottawa, to get some Tim Horton's coffee. Now, if you ever visit the Ottawa area, or live here, the Tim Horton's in Buckingham makes the best Timmy's coffee I've ever had. :)
So those purchases all taken care of, we drove from Buckingham back into the city after nightfall and beheld a wonder. The clocktower on Parliament was the only thing in the city that was light, besides generator powered floodlights in stairwells throughout the office buildings in the downtown core. The whole city was sleeping, and it was as eerie as I could imagine eerie being.
We didn't have much trouble getting back into the city, and drove down the parkway very slowly to get back to my home. Emperor Ave. was black. Flashlights shone from verandas here and there. We parked, went inside and then realized just how festive this had all been. Aside from losing a freezer full of food, it was a beautiful night. We wandered down to Fisher Ave. which is usually well lit, and watched the cars like ghosts making their way back home.
We topped the evening off by smoking a joint on the back porch, then I fell asleep not hearing anything but my own breathing.
I don't understand how the RIAA can place a value that high on a single track when someone can easily get it from iTunes for $1.00. Any ideas?
Now, if you wanted to build an enterprise level application, I would tell you to dump both of those in favour of Java Servlets/JSPs or ASP.NET. I get really tired of hearing people talk about this language over that language. They all have their benefits, and their places. I wouldn't build a GTK+ app in PHP, and I wouldn't build a website with C++ CGI software. Don't choose a "default" programming language for all tasks, choose a language for the task at hand. I think that's the best way to approach it.
The fact that the chip inside of your laptop is called Mobility Radeon 9200 means that brand could be an old ATI Rage and nobody could complain. Mobility Radeon 9200 is a brand of it's own. The fact that you equate the Radeon 9200 with the Mobility Radeon 9200 is your problem, not a problem with their marketing.
So yes, you can feel duped, or you can realize that this kind of thing happens all the time and is now considered fair marketing practice. :)
Another game I've played is Bejeweled by Popcap Games. Definately the most addicitve puzzle game I've ever played. Between those two I've wasted enough time to limit my capability to produce the cure for cancer this year.
Layout is also important yes. The navigation should be on of the first things rendered. A user should be looking at their navigation options before the page is finished loading. This is often times not the case.
Another way to solve it is to have a flat website with a large number of very specific links that go to once place only, but of course laying that out is problematic.
Secondly, The Supreme Court of Canada should never make a ruling in which it punishes all the children for a portion of the children's activities. I realize that our government is corrupt and there's no hope for us, but this is going too far.
"Hello Canadians, this is The Liberal Party speaking. Though many of you have done nothing wrong, you will all be taxed by the music industry, because we get to tax them. Blame them though, they did it! It has nothing to do with the fact that we have appointed several of the Justices in the Supreme Court! Blame the music industry, don't look this way, ignore the man behind the curtain while we collect taxes from you until you bleed from your eyes!"
Soon, they will tax air.
PHP offers us no way to build an application server (unless you write one in C or C++ and send commands to it via a cli or directly through sockets). If you embed Tomcat in your application server, you can simply create contexts and mount them with mod_jk. Quite simply, you can take any server that you've written in Java and web enbale it fairly quickly. PHP lacks persistence, and I'm not talking about sessions.
Let's say that we want to add a request to our application from the web. With Java I can toss the request on a queue which a thread picks up and balances to several other worker threads who interpret the request and works with it. With PHP I would have to enter data into a flat file, or a database, and have a cronjob setup to run every minute or so and do something with data in the database. Even then, at that point, I can only have one thread unless I want to mix and match several cronjobs to run at seperate times (or unless I want to fork the process off very uncleanly using exec() or system()). In any case, does PHP scale as well as Java? Maybe, I'd need to do more tests. Is it nearly as useful? No, not right now, probably not ever. Unless you are willing to write your own custom PHP module in C and play with PHP that way, I think big jobs should be left to the heavyweight in this discussion.
As we all know, this is wrong. I have a PIII 800 with a GeForce4MX and with nVidia's drivers installed KDE widgets (kdelibs on top of Qt) and windows display 30% faster. Having troubles with speed? Make sure you have the correct drivers installed.
It's nice to see that others have been thinking about this too.
ask them to prioritize. One phrase that's saved me from insanity quite a bit is "There are only so many keystrokes in a day." This way they realize there really is an upper limit.
We drove to Buckingham, QC (and if you're from the region, it's about 30 minutes from the Byward Market area) to get some Tim Hortons coffee because the entirety of Gatineau was swamped. Oddly enough one of my first priorities was coffee, even on a hot night.
Once our trip was done (four hours, the Jacques Cartier bridge was swamped taking us twenty-five minutes to get across) we drove back into the city. Now, the market was somewhat lit by then, but we got in one fender benders, and avoid six other very near collisions. People on the roads seemed panicky. But by far the creepiest thing was getting on the Queensway near King Edward. It was practically pitch-black, and the Queensway was very dark. The whole ride home was some sort of post-apocolyptic journey into the unknown.
So once back in the city we delivered doughtnuts to those who requested and rolled one for the occasion. Nothing like sitting on your porch by the light of the moon on the eve of a crisis smoking one for the hell of it.
Anyway, I'm just glad the air-conditioning is back on. :)
Anyone else have my kind of fun during the blackout?
What I'd like to know is if Caldera is going to charge it's own users the fee for Caldera Linux? If they do, they cut off a huge source of revenue (not to mention potentially putting themselves in the arena for legal action from their own customer base who now have to pay twice for a product) and if they don't is it antitrust time?
Given the fact that an economy without unemployment is an economy that cannot grow, could we reasonably assume that Linux is an OS that has not become stagnant? And could we also reasonably assume that MS Windows XP has reached the end of it's usability growth level? I know applying an economical standpoint to a desktop environment is rather unorthodox, but I think this shows that Windows XP, with it's ancestry, may be at the peak of it's usable evolution.
Given that KDE (or GNOME, not going to pick favorites here, but KDE was the environment of choice) has a vastly different desktop model than Windows XP (ok, I agree that's arguable for those who use Blackbox or Xfce, but bear with me) is it possible that KDE can grow and evolve beyond the boundaries of Windows XP? And given that a Linux distribution generally gives you all the software you require out of the box to start being productive on many levels, does it not stand to reason that this combination produces a large field for growth?
Supply and demand is being met in the desktop market. Those who need one and have the means, have one. However, a splinter in the market might end up showing us that those who have one may need more. What does everyone think? And for those economists out there consider MS thinking about charging for updates to your OS as a tax, thereby stagnating the OS economy further. The users who have a desktop that cannot grow are also being taxed for the desktop. If this actually makes money in the long run I'll be shocked considering that this disobeys the laws of a robust economy across the board.
So, I need a question answered by some kernel maintainers, contributors, etc. Just how much code are we talking about? 2K lines? 10K lines? Or is it small portions of copywritten code? If it's small portions, can we simply not rewrite that part of the codebase more effeciently (effeciency is a good reason) and re-release the kernel with the updated code? It seems to me that (and this was earlier with their comparison of a few lines of code) that you elminate that problem, do something in a slightly different way to avoid copyright infringement, and everyone's happy (not SCO, but we'll leave them out of this).
Secondly, does anyone think that SCO will release their Linux distribution royalty free of these copyright charges? If so, does it seem to anyone else as it does to me that we've finally met the MS of the Linux world?
Not that I think they'll succeed, but that's just hope talking. I think an action like this can sour Enterprise on Linux and shift many Linux customers back over to MS. Way to go, SCO.