It's really tempting, although the ironic thing is that my refurbed m125 cost half the price of this case/802.11b docking system. Yeah, WiFi would suck copious amounts of battery life from my poor m125...it eats batteries as it is for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I wonder if a Bluetooth SDIO card has a similarly voracious appetite...my soon-come Ericsson cell phone has not only Bluetooth but a built-in cell modem.
It would be a tad more expensive, but it does everything the combination of this DVD player and an existing computer can do. Even the ones with fans (and you can get fanless EPIA boards) are pretty quiet. There is a MPEG2 decoder onboard. Unfortunately the decoder doesn't work under Linux (yet) but if you don't mind running The Evil OS (bwahaha) everything is 100% ready to go.
The board+cpu is sold together and can be installed into a case yourself, or you can get barebones systems inside little cases cheaply. You can even get them prebuilt with drives inside a few places.
I find this to be an interesting turn of events. At my university, they have site licenses for all of Microsoft's software, so you can get Windows XP for precisely $0 dollars. Now, my classmates will have the opportunity to purchase RedHat or SuSE for a mere $25!
The first one's always free, boyo. Guess what will happen when you graduate? Poof! Your license goes up in a puff of bits. You have two choices after that:
Keep using the software, and basically have warez on your system, or:
Buy an official copy and bend over, because Bill's driving.
Actually there is a third choice: tell Microsoft to stuff themselves, and run a F/OSS operating system instead. This is why more Colleges and Universities should have LUGs, particularly Colleges and Universities with site licenses with Microsoft.
And last I checked, Knoppix is still 100% free, as in beer, speech and freedom. You can't beat that.
IBM *did* take a chance on selling Linux ThinkPads, but killed the line due to poor sales.
I happen to own one of those ThinkPads they took a chance on. Well, I am not sure that it is one of the actual ThinkPad 600E notebooks they sold with Red Hat preinstalled, but I did buy it off-lease, and all that was on the HD when I got it was enough of Windows98SE to kick it over into DOS-mode.
However, Linux runs beautifully on it. Knoppix kicked almost everything over but sound, and I liked the results so much I installed Knoppix to the hard drive.
There is nothing to say that IBM will never, ever, support Linux again on their ThinkPads. In fact, seeing as IBM will be at SCALE next Saturday, I expect the topic of IBM support for Linux on ThinkPads will be something I will broach with their reps there.
Something like this, with full Linux support, would kick all manner of butt.
Perhaps IBM should start loading Linux onto their off-lease machines. Start there, and move back into new machines after the momentum has been built up with the refurbs. I'm not an MBA but I think that might be a great way for them to test the waters again.
There is a Mandrake for PowerPC. It is stuck at 9.1 while the i386 version is at 9.2, but that's not a major problem. When Mandrake goes to v.10 there will be a new PPC version out. I haven't used it...my Wallstreet PowerBook runs Yellow Dog. But from what I have heard it's as brain-dead easy as MDK i386.
Good, we're thinking Knoppix here. Anyway, for those who want a brain-dead easy Debian install, this is exactly what we want to do.
Let's break this down like the old Mac commercials. Step one, boot your CD-ROM bootable computer to Knoppix. Step two, open the Root Shell and type knx-hdinstall.
There's no step three! There's no step three!
This is the reason why what Debian is doing to make their text-mode installer more friendly and more modern is just fine, and why Knoppix is a viable graphical installer for Debian, or at least the Knoppix flavor of Debian.
By PPC Linux in my journal entry I meant it generically and not distro-specifically. LinuxPPC has been basically deprecated from what I understand...in the dustbin with MKLinux.
My recommendations for newer (but pre-Old World) PPCs is Yellow Dog Linux, which relieves you of a lot of the fiddliness of installing Linux on a Mac, but is still somewhat more fiddly than, say, Linux on an x86. For those machines older than what is recommended for Yellow Dog, DebianPPC will do the trick. And of course, for a chosen few 68K Macs, there is also Debian68K.
Of course, NetBSD will run on just about any 68K or PPC Mac, but we all know that [sarcasm] *BSD is dying[/sarcasm] so...;-)
Knoppix: Debian for wusses. I hard-disk installed it on my Thinkpad 600E and it might be a little rough around the edges, but mostly It Just Works(tm). knx-hdinstall in the Root Shell. Just do it. I am torn now between my liking for Mandrake 9.x and this new reality of apt-get as my software genie. There's much I need to tune on here, but this is going to force me to LEARN LINUX rather than just be crying to my guru buddies in Santa Barbara. Mandrake with its plug-and-play simplicity spoiled me. I still would advise Mandrake for the absolute n00b, but when it's time to take off the training wheels this is the way to go.
Knoppix rocks. If you can boot the live Knoppix filesystem with the disk, you can install Debian and be happy.
"Giving up on hand-drawn animation is akin to abandoning pianos because synthesizers have come along."
This sums the entire issue up beautifully. Drawn 2D animation is an unique art form, and there is nothing quite like it. 3D animation is also an unique art form. If the American studios leave drawn animation to the Japanese, it's our loss, not theirs.
BTW, this is an old story. This entry in my Journal is from August 15th. This is old news as far as the animation industry goes.
Now that it's becoming clear that IBM has no interest in buying out SCO or settling, and that SCO bargained with their lawyers specifically to handle such instances, they have started attacking Linux.
However, IBM helped Novell buy SuSE, AG. And since Novell is the REAL owner of the UNIX IP, I am waiting on pins and needles for them to lay the smack down on the Smoking Crack Organization. Which is going to happen. Soon. That's the first thing I thought when the SuSE/Novell deal went down.
The Star Wars shorts are great...I saw the first one at San Diego Comic-Con. Genndy Tartakovsky has created the first good installment in the Star Wars franchise since "Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back." Although I did sorta, kinda like "Episode 6: Return of the Jedi" when I first saw it...I was young, the rebels prevailed, I had fun. It looked way worse than I remembered it when I saw it again when the deluxe VHS box set came out in 1995.:(
I can't get back the 3 hours I lost watching "Episode 1: The Phantom Menace." But those 6 minutes I saw at Comic-Con gave me reason to hope. These shorts, taken together, will do a great deal to salve the wounds suffered by old-school Star Wars fans, wounds inflicted by George Lucas himself.
Of course, who wants to bring their computer into a greasy McDonald's and get Secret Sauce all over it while surfing the 'Net. Ew... forget I went there!
You just put two very ugly images in my mind. My Wallstreet PowerBook, and my Thinkpad 600E, both slimed. With Filet-O-Fish tartar sauce, actually, if it was IRL. This reminds me why this is such a bad idea.
Starbucks. Those guys would do well with an iTunes promo. They've already rolled out the WiFi part of the equation.
Then again, coffee spillage has always been a hazard when surfing at your local Wired coffeehouse. Venti Frappucino Mocha...all over your brand spanking new G4 iBook. [shudder]
unfortunately for anime they have alot of bad cliches that keep reappearing.. (see the bishi evil villian.)
Just wait for the "All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku" TV Series to come out from ADV Films. This is different from the OAV "Nuku Nuku DASH!" of which the first DVD was released about a week ago. It's also different from the original APCCNN OAV which ADV released on DVD last year, and very well for that matter. (It's only one DVD, buy it!)
ALL the bad cliches you speak of get clobbered with tons of humor. Before "Excel Saga" and "FLCL" this was the funniest goddamn anime ever. Transforming robots, high school angst, sulphurously evil bishounen villains, noble but absent-minded scientist heroes, Office Ladies, even a musical episode which ADV should release with Karaoke subtitles! It's insane!
If ADV Films wants to pay me to talk up NNTV they can, but I can assure you I am talking this up without any compensation at the time I post this.
"Excel Saga", however, is now the absolute champion satirical funny anime to ever hit these shores. "Excel Saga" is 100% bust-a-gut funny from start to finish. It goes off on some weird tangents but I love it. And unlike "FLCL" it will NEVER show on Cartoon Network. I assure you of that. It makes "FLCL" look normal by comparison .
Diet Mountain Dew. Gift of the Geek Gods. I have no trouble finding it here in Los Angeles. Walk into most stores and it's right there ready to assimilate. I drink diet not only because I want to keep away from simple sugars but also because I have drunk diet soda for so long the regular stuff tastes like chugging a bottle of Karo Syrup to me now.
He claims he runs Debian Gnu/Linux on his G5, and is posting a lot of bull faeces about it.
Ummm...just so you know...there really is a PowerPC port of Debian GNU/Linux. It's not as up-to-date as the bleeding edge Yellow Dog, but DebianPPC and Debian68K support more Macs than Yellow Dog does.
However, it is probably true that Debian hasn't made it to the Apple ][ yet. Not even NetBSD has taken that challenge on. So you are prolly right about 1337 Apple Zealot being a troll.
The Banias CPU, now known as the Pentium M, forced Intel to come face to face with the Megahertz Myth. It was an extension of the Pentium III, this is quite true. Banias is also faster, megahertz for megahertz, than a similar speed Pentium 4. This proved to be such an embarrassment to Intel that they decided not to create a desktop chipset for it as once planned.
I suspect that Pentium M will show up in blade servers and 1U servers eventually, but alas, I will never see a Banias desktop.
Oh yeah...the Pentium III is still pretty damn powerful too, MHz for MHz, and it sucks way less power too. Banias is proof that PIII still had room to scale.
Lycoris. Oh man. Icky poo! Linux for Windows users for dummies. Who is the intended market for this thing?
Actually, Lycoris is a pretty serviceable distro once you install the development tools. Lycoris was the only distro I have ever dealt with that would show non-encrypted DVDs right out of the box, complete with working menus. They have some other slick things in there that from what I understand are 100% GPLed. The only thing not GPLed is Iris, their equivalent of Lindows' "Click And Run".
My beef about Lycoris now is that it is a fork of Caldera Linux, now known as...god help us all...SCO Linux. I mean, they forked Caldera before all this insanity started with Darth McBride but still, it makes me very uneasy to use it now. This is why I switched back to Mandrake from being a Lycoris advocate. I have now gone from advocating Mandrake to advocating using Knoppix as a friendly installer for Debian, but that's a story for another post.
Who woulda thunk that they'd make a computer with Linux preloaded that the first thing you had to do was wipe the drive so you could install Linux?
Actually that sounds more like the drill for those $200 Fry's computers preloaded with ThizLinux. Thiz is alright, as long as Mandarin Chinese is your first language. For everyone else, Thiz is a pain in the butt.
...for BBEdit. Because It Doesn't Suck. Someone needs to build a workalike for BBEdit that runs on Linux, because Bluefish, Quanta and Screem all are wannabe HomeSite clones. I mean, HomeSite is nice, but BBEdit just...rocks, y'know?
They don't have to. There is a perfectly good kernel that Microsoft can grab, lock, stock and barrel, and assimilate into Longhorn. It's called the BSD kernel. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD...it's all fair game because of the BSD license. Microsoft has assimilated BSD code in the past...run Strings on ftp.exe and see the "Regents of the University of California" copyright notice for yourself.
Fearless prediction: we will see WinBSD in our lifetimes. Only it will be referred to as just another iteration of NT.
Slashdot Mirror
Notice the reference to Big Blue as the enemy?
OK, you have your evidence...it really *is* Microsoft with its hand up Darl McBride's...um...sock.
Unless this is some sort of elaborate reference to Steve Jobs' demonization of IBM in the famous Mac "1984" commercial...
In any event, I'm _damn_ proud that I'm the owner of a ThinkPad now.
It's really tempting, although the ironic thing is that my refurbed m125 cost half the price of this case/802.11b docking system. Yeah, WiFi would suck copious amounts of battery life from my poor m125...it eats batteries as it is for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I wonder if a Bluetooth SDIO card has a similarly voracious appetite...my soon-come Ericsson cell phone has not only Bluetooth but a built-in cell modem.
It would be a tad more expensive, but it does everything the combination of this DVD player and an existing computer can do. Even the ones with fans (and you can get fanless EPIA boards) are pretty quiet. There is a MPEG2 decoder onboard. Unfortunately the decoder doesn't work under Linux (yet) but if you don't mind running The Evil OS (bwahaha) everything is 100% ready to go.
The board+cpu is sold together and can be installed into a case yourself, or you can get barebones systems inside little cases cheaply. You can even get them prebuilt with drives inside a few places.
The first one's always free, boyo. Guess what will happen when you graduate? Poof! Your license goes up in a puff of bits. You have two choices after that:
Actually there is a third choice: tell Microsoft to stuff themselves, and run a F/OSS operating system instead. This is why more Colleges and Universities should have LUGs, particularly Colleges and Universities with site licenses with Microsoft.
And last I checked, Knoppix is still 100% free, as in beer, speech and freedom. You can't beat that.
I happen to own one of those ThinkPads they took a chance on. Well, I am not sure that it is one of the actual ThinkPad 600E notebooks they sold with Red Hat preinstalled, but I did buy it off-lease, and all that was on the HD when I got it was enough of Windows98SE to kick it over into DOS-mode.
However, Linux runs beautifully on it. Knoppix kicked almost everything over but sound, and I liked the results so much I installed Knoppix to the hard drive.
There is nothing to say that IBM will never, ever, support Linux again on their ThinkPads. In fact, seeing as IBM will be at SCALE next Saturday, I expect the topic of IBM support for Linux on ThinkPads will be something I will broach with their reps there.
Something like this, with full Linux support, would kick all manner of butt.
Perhaps IBM should start loading Linux onto their off-lease machines. Start there, and move back into new machines after the momentum has been built up with the refurbs. I'm not an MBA but I think that might be a great way for them to test the waters again.
There is a Mandrake for PowerPC. It is stuck at 9.1 while the i386 version is at 9.2, but that's not a major problem. When Mandrake goes to v.10 there will be a new PPC version out. I haven't used it...my Wallstreet PowerBook runs Yellow Dog. But from what I have heard it's as brain-dead easy as MDK i386.
Good, we're thinking Knoppix here. Anyway, for those who want a brain-dead easy Debian install, this is exactly what we want to do.
Let's break this down like the old Mac commercials. Step one, boot your CD-ROM bootable computer to Knoppix. Step two, open the Root Shell and type knx-hdinstall.
There's no step three! There's no step three!
This is the reason why what Debian is doing to make their text-mode installer more friendly and more modern is just fine, and why Knoppix is a viable graphical installer for Debian, or at least the Knoppix flavor of Debian.
By PPC Linux in my journal entry I meant it generically and not distro-specifically. LinuxPPC has been basically deprecated from what I understand...in the dustbin with MKLinux.
My recommendations for newer (but pre-Old World) PPCs is Yellow Dog Linux, which relieves you of a lot of the fiddliness of installing Linux on a Mac, but is still somewhat more fiddly than, say, Linux on an x86. For those machines older than what is recommended for Yellow Dog, DebianPPC will do the trick. And of course, for a chosen few 68K Macs, there is also Debian68K.
Of course, NetBSD will run on just about any 68K or PPC Mac, but we all know that [sarcasm] *BSD is dying[/sarcasm] so...;-)
Knoppix: Debian for wusses. I hard-disk installed it on my Thinkpad 600E and it might be a little rough around the edges, but mostly It Just Works(tm). knx-hdinstall in the Root Shell. Just do it. I am torn now between my liking for Mandrake 9.x and this new reality of apt-get as my software genie. There's much I need to tune on here, but this is going to force me to LEARN LINUX rather than just be crying to my guru buddies in Santa Barbara. Mandrake with its plug-and-play simplicity spoiled me. I still would advise Mandrake for the absolute n00b, but when it's time to take off the training wheels this is the way to go.
Knoppix rocks. If you can boot the live Knoppix filesystem with the disk, you can install Debian and be happy.
This sums the entire issue up beautifully. Drawn 2D animation is an unique art form, and there is nothing quite like it. 3D animation is also an unique art form. If the American studios leave drawn animation to the Japanese, it's our loss, not theirs.
BTW, this is an old story. This entry in my Journal is from August 15th. This is old news as far as the animation industry goes.
I did. And yes, it runs Linux. Knoppix HD install. It's a thing of beauty. Ha ha IN YOUR FACE, Darth McBride!!!
However, IBM helped Novell buy SuSE, AG. And since Novell is the REAL owner of the UNIX IP, I am waiting on pins and needles for them to lay the smack down on the Smoking Crack Organization. Which is going to happen. Soon. That's the first thing I thought when the SuSE/Novell deal went down.
The Star Wars shorts are great...I saw the first one at San Diego Comic-Con. Genndy Tartakovsky has created the first good installment in the Star Wars franchise since "Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back." Although I did sorta, kinda like "Episode 6: Return of the Jedi" when I first saw it...I was young, the rebels prevailed, I had fun. It looked way worse than I remembered it when I saw it again when the deluxe VHS box set came out in 1995. :(
I can't get back the 3 hours I lost watching "Episode 1: The Phantom Menace." But those 6 minutes I saw at Comic-Con gave me reason to hope. These shorts, taken together, will do a great deal to salve the wounds suffered by old-school Star Wars fans, wounds inflicted by George Lucas himself.
You just put two very ugly images in my mind. My Wallstreet PowerBook, and my Thinkpad 600E, both slimed. With Filet-O-Fish tartar sauce, actually, if it was IRL. This reminds me why this is such a bad idea.
Starbucks. Those guys would do well with an iTunes promo. They've already rolled out the WiFi part of the equation.
Then again, coffee spillage has always been a hazard when surfing at your local Wired coffeehouse. Venti Frappucino Mocha...all over your brand spanking new G4 iBook. [shudder]
Just wait for the "All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku" TV Series to come out from ADV Films. This is different from the OAV "Nuku Nuku DASH!" of which the first DVD was released about a week ago. It's also different from the original APCCNN OAV which ADV released on DVD last year, and very well for that matter. (It's only one DVD, buy it!)
ALL the bad cliches you speak of get clobbered with tons of humor. Before "Excel Saga" and "FLCL" this was the funniest goddamn anime ever. Transforming robots, high school angst, sulphurously evil bishounen villains, noble but absent-minded scientist heroes, Office Ladies, even a musical episode which ADV should release with Karaoke subtitles! It's insane!
If ADV Films wants to pay me to talk up NNTV they can, but I can assure you I am talking this up without any compensation at the time I post this.
"Excel Saga", however, is now the absolute champion satirical funny anime to ever hit these shores. "Excel Saga" is 100% bust-a-gut funny from start to finish. It goes off on some weird tangents but I love it. And unlike "FLCL" it will NEVER show on Cartoon Network. I assure you of that. It makes "FLCL" look normal by comparison .
If you can't get it out your way, here's a link to someone who'll ship: http://store.yahoo.com/drsoda/dietmtdew.html.
Share and Enjoy!
OOH!!! That really looks good. Too bad I don't have a spare $350 to spare...
Ummm...just so you know...there really is a PowerPC port of Debian GNU/Linux. It's not as up-to-date as the bleeding edge Yellow Dog, but DebianPPC and Debian68K support more Macs than Yellow Dog does.
However, it is probably true that Debian hasn't made it to the Apple ][ yet. Not even NetBSD has taken that challenge on. So you are prolly right about 1337 Apple Zealot being a troll.
The Banias CPU, now known as the Pentium M, forced Intel to come face to face with the Megahertz Myth. It was an extension of the Pentium III, this is quite true. Banias is also faster, megahertz for megahertz, than a similar speed Pentium 4. This proved to be such an embarrassment to Intel that they decided not to create a desktop chipset for it as once planned.
I suspect that Pentium M will show up in blade servers and 1U servers eventually, but alas, I will never see a Banias desktop.
Oh yeah...the Pentium III is still pretty damn powerful too, MHz for MHz, and it sucks way less power too. Banias is proof that PIII still had room to scale.
Actually, Lycoris is a pretty serviceable distro once you install the development tools. Lycoris was the only distro I have ever dealt with that would show non-encrypted DVDs right out of the box, complete with working menus. They have some other slick things in there that from what I understand are 100% GPLed. The only thing not GPLed is Iris, their equivalent of Lindows' "Click And Run".
My beef about Lycoris now is that it is a fork of Caldera Linux, now known as...god help us all...SCO Linux. I mean, they forked Caldera before all this insanity started with Darth McBride but still, it makes me very uneasy to use it now. This is why I switched back to Mandrake from being a Lycoris advocate. I have now gone from advocating Mandrake to advocating using Knoppix as a friendly installer for Debian, but that's a story for another post.
Who woulda thunk that they'd make a computer with Linux preloaded that the first thing you had to do was wipe the drive so you could install Linux?
Actually that sounds more like the drill for those $200 Fry's computers preloaded with ThizLinux. Thiz is alright, as long as Mandarin Chinese is your first language. For everyone else, Thiz is a pain in the butt.
Screw that, someone needs to invent a way for the Chicago Cubs to get there. That would be some accomplishment!
"Sarcasm. It's a great way to deal." -- Aunt Amy, "Daria"
...for BBEdit. Because It Doesn't Suck. Someone needs to build a workalike for BBEdit that runs on Linux, because Bluefish, Quanta and Screem all are wannabe HomeSite clones. I mean, HomeSite is nice, but BBEdit just...rocks, y'know?
Well it makes as much sense as ditching the NT kernel for Linux, as the article cited in the parent of my original post suggests...
They don't have to. There is a perfectly good kernel that Microsoft can grab, lock, stock and barrel, and assimilate into Longhorn. It's called the BSD kernel. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD...it's all fair game because of the BSD license. Microsoft has assimilated BSD code in the past...run Strings on ftp.exe and see the "Regents of the University of California" copyright notice for yourself.
Fearless prediction: we will see WinBSD in our lifetimes. Only it will be referred to as just another iteration of NT.