A lot of comments have noted that there are already a number of office suites and desktop standards. What this will lend is credibility and weight to narrowing down to one. The same way IBM and Microsoft's weight pushed Presentation Manager, which eventually became Windows as we know it.
However, the nature of UNIX, even with well natured efforts like CDE, just doesn't lend itself politically to one standard, the point of UNIX's community is to embrace as many systems as possible with so many vendors, developer groups etc. Technically speaking, the system has always been made flexible enough to support many. Let me point out there aren't even standards in UNIX for how commandline toggles and options work for common commands like ps.
I unfortunately must agree this is doomed to fail.
--Calum
Smore comments on online voting
on
Online Voting?
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· Score: 1
The major problems I see with online voting is that such an affair will lower the bar for distant special interest groups and splinter elections. Assume of course, that you get past the security and verification, plus access problems.
If you offer electronic voting, the barriers to access are lowered. That's not necessarily a good thing. It used to be, you'd have to get your ass off the couch, walk down to your local town hall/library/school and mark yer ballot. If you honestly cared enough to vote, you'd take the effort to do so and made your choice count. Electronic voting would be as cautious as me filling out a Slashdot poll-inconsequential because the bar is so low anyways. Click click.
Now, that said, take it to the next level-now, special interest groups don't have to try hard to convince reasonable minded people to out and vote. Usually, you round up a bunch of people, put them in a bus and drive to the polling station. But now, they can just herd their followers through a portal!
What ends up happening, I'll guess, is that lots of minor special interest candidates end up getting more recognition than they deserve-splintering the vote. Because when more people get a voice through a lowered level of entry, the end result is usually more noise.
I'll offer the situation with publishing-it used to be, only certain people got to write for magazines because there was an abstraction of editors, publishers and peers that one had to deal with as a writer. Nowadays, anyone can write their own web page, and get some form of authenticity.
This sort of noise is acceptable, because we the reader get to synthesize and deal with all these sources. But in voting, you don't get the chance-those thousands of voices are not just spouting an opinion, they're making a choice. Without the layers of abstraction of having to get yourself out to the voting booth, speeches, campaigns, we'll end up with a million choices, a million decisions and no clear winner.
Geek hacks TiVo, adds features, makes it better, makes it GPL. TiVo likes mods, adds them to next version, everybody benefits. I'm waiting for my RAIDed, mp3 playing, networkable, quake playing TiVo. Seeya WebTV!
Has anyone ever considered some features as not beneficial to Tivo? As Open Source advocates, most folks here think any feature is a good feature. But that's not the case in all situations, especially not if you're trying to run a business.
What if someone figures out how to hack a Tivo to download TV Guide listings off the web instead of their schedule service, effectively freeing the machine from monthly fees? That'd kill Tivo's business model. So no, hacking is not always good.
A lot of folks here don't realize that companies don't just sell hardware anymore-in Netpliance and Tivo's case, the hardware platform is just the entry-the software and more importantly, service, is the key part of their business.
They are not. The NATO designation Flanker (see this page) is the Su-27/30/35 etc. It is from Sukhoi, not from the Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG) design bureau.
Before we all go off and ask "Could you imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these?":) I'd like to ask if this is actually for real. I mean it looks cool and all, but...
A quick search of "Samowar" or "PR-964" didn't turn up much on Google, nor on the Federation of American Scientists, one of the most respected military analysis sites on the Internet. Where would they get the documentation for a military surplus processor? Why not the scads of other cheap embedded, well known, processors out there like ARM, i960? I know the Eastern European nations are hard for cash and selling say MiG's and Flankers but this is an odd way to make money:)
Anyways, why would anyone want such a thing? I love seti@home (running at work, our research lab, total about 22 machines) as much as anyone else, but I wouldn't buy specialized hardware for the thing...
Actually, *any* old TBC is great to have around the house, period.
Nowadays, of course, you can do all this on your home computer. But having a few 3/4" VTRs, an old Amiga 500, a couple of TBCs and a home-built genlock gave me a tiny little TV studio a full decade before the iMac.
Well, actually, that's why I had one too-we used them with a Toaster. Didn't realize how useful they were until someone asked me to try copying a tape...:)
Get yourself a timebase corrector. A DPS Personal TBC for a few hundred bucks stuck in an old XT chassis will nicely clean out any copyprotection. Calum
Small review sites written by nonprofessional reviewers are bribed by (fill in the blank: video chip manufacturers, Linux software vendors). End of world we as know it.
Who cares?! These are enthusiast run websites-sort out opinions yourself! Sheesh.
Re:Big enough that nobody cares any more
on
Maxtor's 80GB Drive
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· Score: 1
As such, I don't see much point in them getting bigger, or at least in headlines about them getting bigger.
Speak for yourself. Anyone who does video editing certainly wants more storage. I have a 20GByte disk dedicated for video storage for my MotionJPEG industrial edit card and I'm always in a pinch for space.
This isn't just for professionals either-ask anyone who has purchased an iMac DV-a regular consumer machine with FireWire. At 3MB/sec, it fills fast!
The CCD's on the cameras, which are custom Sony HDW-F900W/24P series models, use two million pixel (3CCD) and incorporate Panavision lenses. The cameras can be programmed via setup cards to emulate certain film stocks. They are recording AFAIK on HDCAM/24 which would be 1920x1080 progressive at 24 frames a second.
If anyone would like to know more about the business and technical models for using HD for film production, visit my website, and mail me for a copy of my thesis.:)
Steve Mann teachs ECE1766, which is a grad class that allows interested fourth year ECE and Engineering Science students as well. By all accounts, it's a pretty cool class, scrounging for parts to build Linux based PC104 portable machines. The thesis students are from the Engineering Science option, and they are few and far between (a relatively elite group in the Faculty), ie, not just any fourth year students, and isn't a particularily widespread topic available at U of T.
I'm very happy with our Sony Mavicas as well, but it really depends on what you do and who will use the camera-every camera will tradeoff certain features so the best fit depends for every use:
We bought Mavicas because want wanted students to use them for projects: A CF or SmartMedia camera would be impossible to implement. Floppies are great because every student has them.
They're also large, unattractive and have really long lasting batteries which fit perfectly for institutional use. On the downside, they cost three times more than most 1Kx7 cameras and the image quality isn't as great as other comparable models.
But it's a perfect fit for us. So before you go off talking about what's the best camera recommendation, ask what camera fits for your application...
Slashdot Mirror
However, the nature of UNIX, even with well natured efforts like CDE, just doesn't lend itself politically to one standard, the point of UNIX's community is to embrace as many systems as possible with so many vendors, developer groups etc. Technically speaking, the system has always been made flexible enough to support many. Let me point out there aren't even standards in UNIX for how commandline toggles and options work for common commands like ps.
I unfortunately must agree this is doomed to fail.
--Calum
If you offer electronic voting, the barriers to access are lowered. That's not necessarily a good thing. It used to be, you'd have to get your ass off the couch, walk down to your local town hall/library/school and mark yer ballot. If you honestly cared enough to vote, you'd take the effort to do so and made your choice count. Electronic voting would be as cautious as me filling out a Slashdot poll-inconsequential because the bar is so low anyways. Click click.
Now, that said, take it to the next level-now, special interest groups don't have to try hard to convince reasonable minded people to out and vote. Usually, you round up a bunch of people, put them in a bus and drive to the polling station. But now, they can just herd their followers through a portal!
What ends up happening, I'll guess, is that lots of minor special interest candidates end up getting more recognition than they deserve-splintering the vote. Because when more people get a voice through a lowered level of entry, the end result is usually more noise.
I'll offer the situation with publishing-it used to be, only certain people got to write for magazines because there was an abstraction of editors, publishers and peers that one had to deal with as a writer. Nowadays, anyone can write their own web page, and get some form of authenticity.
This sort of noise is acceptable, because we the reader get to synthesize and deal with all these sources. But in voting, you don't get the chance-those thousands of voices are not just spouting an opinion, they're making a choice. Without the layers of abstraction of having to get yourself out to the voting booth, speeches, campaigns, we'll end up with a million choices, a million decisions and no clear winner.
--Calum
Has anyone ever considered some features as not beneficial to Tivo? As Open Source advocates, most folks here think any feature is a good feature. But that's not the case in all situations, especially not if you're trying to run a business.
What if someone figures out how to hack a Tivo to download TV Guide listings off the web instead of their schedule service, effectively freeing the machine from monthly fees? That'd kill Tivo's business model. So no, hacking is not always good.
A lot of folks here don't realize that companies don't just sell hardware anymore-in Netpliance and Tivo's case, the hardware platform is just the entry-the software and more importantly, service, is the key part of their business.
--Calum
They are not. The NATO designation Flanker (see this page) is the Su-27/30/35 etc. It is from Sukhoi, not from the Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG) design bureau.
--Calum
A quick search of "Samowar" or "PR-964" didn't turn up much on Google, nor on the Federation of American Scientists, one of the most respected military analysis sites on the Internet. Where would they get the documentation for a military surplus processor? Why not the scads of other cheap embedded, well known, processors out there like ARM, i960? I know the Eastern European nations are hard for cash and selling say MiG's and Flankers but this is an odd way to make money :)
Anyways, why would anyone want such a thing? I love seti@home (running at work, our research lab, total about 22 machines) as much as anyone else, but I wouldn't buy specialized hardware for the thing...
--Calum
Nowadays, of course, you can do all this on your home computer. But having a few 3/4" VTRs, an old Amiga 500, a couple of TBCs and a home-built genlock gave me a tiny little TV studio a full decade before the iMac.
Well, actually, that's why I had one too-we used them with a Toaster. Didn't realize how useful they were until someone asked me to try copying a tape... :)
--Calum
Get yourself a timebase corrector. A DPS Personal TBC for a few hundred bucks stuck in an old XT chassis will nicely clean out any copyprotection. Calum
Who cares?! These are enthusiast run websites-sort out opinions yourself! Sheesh.
Speak for yourself. Anyone who does video editing certainly wants more storage. I have a 20GByte disk dedicated for video storage for my MotionJPEG industrial edit card and I'm always in a pinch for space.
This isn't just for professionals either-ask anyone who has purchased an iMac DV-a regular consumer machine with FireWire. At 3MB/sec, it fills fast!
If anyone would like to know more about the business and technical models for using HD for film production, visit my website, and mail me for a copy of my thesis. :)
Steve Mann teachs ECE1766, which is a grad class that allows interested fourth year ECE and Engineering Science students as well. By all accounts, it's a pretty cool class, scrounging for parts to build Linux based PC104 portable machines. The thesis students are from the Engineering Science option, and they are few and far between (a relatively elite group in the Faculty), ie, not just any fourth year students, and isn't a particularily widespread topic available at U of T.
I'm very happy with our Sony Mavicas as well, but it really depends on what you do and who will use the camera-every camera will tradeoff certain features so the best fit depends for every use:
We bought Mavicas because want wanted students to use them for projects: A CF or SmartMedia camera would be impossible to implement. Floppies are great because every student has them.
They're also large, unattractive and have really long lasting batteries which fit perfectly for institutional use. On the downside, they cost three times more than most 1Kx7 cameras and the image quality isn't as great as other comparable models.
But it's a perfect fit for us. So before you go off talking about what's the best camera recommendation, ask what camera fits for your application...