The telcos or cable companies find Mr. Taco off the map for anything above POTS connections -- but yet he has hopes that the local cable company or sat provider to the sticks is going to rollover on some respectful unsuspecting channel like lifetime or the golf network and put in "All Anime, all the time" -- now that is wishful thinking.
I don't know abnout easier install. Installing a new version of IE always requires me to reboot. When I install a new (binary) version of Mozilla it usually is just an unzip or untar and then running the executable.
Living in a portable, and unplugged environment day in day out -- it perplexes me how something that can go 10+ hours unplugged is not rolling in more money than one can imagine. By far our biggest issue is battery life. All of our devices are currentlly hardened -- can withstand a drop from a car onto concrete, withstand temps of -30 and +120, etc... etc.. etc.. and guess what I talk to the vendors and tech reps from all of these companies and guess what -- they have hardly even heard of the crusoe, let alone are they investigating anything that does not start with I and end in TEL....talk about thinking outside the box. Why do so many (seemingly) killer products end up never breaking through?
I have no problem understanding that they actually did land on -- and take off from the moon, and return to earth. My compassion for the conspiricy theorists only extends to the fact that if we did so much with so little (technology) why have we done so little (in comparisson) since.
With all of the gaps being closed in being able to pick one distribution over the next, I give the bounty to the first distribution to NOT include Emacs in the "default install" button. Oh yea, and include blackbox/fluxbox as one of the "default" window managers. (they can put KDE and GNOME on the "options" or "Contributed" CD). And why they are at it, they can decide on 1 font manager (xfstt) for the whole distribution VS. the 1 font manager for each app you see nowdays. That should be a pretty cool distro that I could throw at this old assed hardware that I have.
PS -- The article made me laugh hard, and miss satirewire even more.
Not a product in sight. If any of these people where to actually be bright enough to deal in actual "see, order, touch, own" products -- then would not the money better be spent on shipping, distribution, collections, customer service. I think that was the whole problem with the.com bust -- all sorts of tools (leather chairs, compuers, ping pong tables) and no tangible product. In the end the consumer spends money on the same things they have always spent money on. Technology can only offer different avenues for shopping for and ordering product. All the technology and VC in the world is not going to replace air with product.
PHP is what J2EE coders use on their own sites. In a big enterprise, J2EE has gotten enough buzz and is well rounded enough and powerful enough to keep everyone happy. The coders like it because it pays well and the work is there even in this economy. But believe me -- J2EE is not really fun, and not really something people would use if given the choice of any toolset. Now -- this is just what I see, the coders that report to me have been developing great "enterprise level" J2EE apps all year with no complaints and only few YAWNS to this point -- but everyone of them I talk to always say that PHP is what they use when given the choice -- and/or if they have to throw up a site at home....
for anybody downloading or streaming random video these days -- trying to find out how to decode the 3 million different codecs and or "slightly different" formats of video is no small task. Can you imagine how un-succesfull or frustrating music trading would have been with 75% of music files be labeled "mp3" yet needing 55 different decoders in order to be able to play most of them? And then having to have commercial (proprietary -- Sorenson) codecs to play the other 25%?
I wonder if someone will make a XMMS plugin to play wma files now. That would be cool. I gave in to the darkside awhile back when I purchased a 64 Meg portable music player -- and converted a bunch of my CD's to WMA for size VS. performance reasons (a 64K WMA sounded better to me than a 64K mp3). THe only problem being now I have 4 CD's worth of WMA's that are only playable on Windows -- and I don't have a windows partition anyomore. So at least for me -- this sounds like a good thing.
I know this is OT -- but your description of the Xbox was about the best I have heard yet. If you visit the demo centers usually the PS2's and Gamecubes are running strong, and then you have the Xbox's sitting their with the "blank screen of death". The fact that they die on demo in so many places is one feature that has reminded me not to pick one up.
I agree. It not only should be easy -- but what is up with app font support relying on how you compile the app? X should be allowed to handle font rendering. As soon as each app and or toolkit has to worry about which libraries to use to render what fonts -- what ways....You end up with a mess. Imagine getting a shirt with no buttons and then having to buy 8 different buttons at 8 different stores, then sew them on and hope eveything matches. Is it not just easier to take care of the button issue at manufacture time...
Well if you look at the font fiascos in recent distributions and desktops (I am speaking of Mandrake 9.0 -- and from what I have heard RedHat), then you end up having about 5000 fonts and each application you run can use about 10 of them. So you end up with some applications able to use some fonts , and other applications able to see others. Depending on what type of app or window manager you are running -- you see a variety of "effects" that may or may not resemble AA. Gtk 1.x apps see some fonts, Gtk 2.x apps see others, QT sees others AND PLEASE don't even get me started on font sizes, most apps just asumme that size 12 is about all they want to use, and some gtk apps occasionally start up with a nice 72 point font staring back at you for some crazy reason or another -- Xfontsel can see a bunch of them but in itself does not do much. (to me it just looks like multiple levels of blur.)
I bet one could write a book with a chapter on each different method for displaying fonts in these new distributions. And if you want to get really confused you can look at the 7 or 8 different font configuration files used to put this clusterfuck together. Whatever happened to the good old days where I could just run XFSTT on a port and get all of my TT fonts pretty much the same as in Windows -- and this was even before XFree 4. With the advent of XFS and XFree 4 we got some primitive looking Jaggy things that "claimed" to be our TT fonts -- but at least where I was standing you could not pick them out from a lineup.
I still don't see how we are any better off in the "font world" than we were 4 years ago -- it seems that each toolkit has just decided to try to invent there own ways to render fonts.. Crazy -- Crazy -- Crazy.
For about $2600 for this I could buy 2 regular laptops and have an extra one for the bathroom. Or better yet I could buy about 10 early pentium laptops on Ebay -- and have the whole house networked. With old hardware it is not hard to find the best OS. You just stick with the first OS that will let you browse the web while decoding MP3's without the MP3's skipping. (Hint: it is not Windows)
While Everyone
on
Blogger Hacked
·
· Score: 5, Informative
is looking for alternatives. b2 is a really good and powerful altewrnative. PHP, MySQl, and all the goodies.
Wish I had mod points for this one. Really how important is the installation? Sure -- with an easy installation you may be up and configured in 45 minutes --- a tough one may take a week. But in the end -- both are small periods of time compared to the 12 Months -- 3 years+ that you will actually be using the software on a day to day basis. I am more into "How often will this distro be updated?", "How many 3rd party packages will be available?" --- I don't want to install a new distribution every 3 months no matter if it takes 3 minutes or 3 weeks -- I want to install a distribution 1 time and then move on to productivity, and hope that I can keep my distribution up to date and compatible without having to go through any more installs.
Yes. Good article. (Where is Part 2 BTW?) That is what I am saying -- but at what dollar figure (cost of that CompUSA box of SuSe) would you have decided that it was in your best interest to take your empty bucket to the stream? At $19.95 it is easier than downloading and burning and crossing your fingers. At $29.00 it is still a matter of saving you time. At $39.00, well it's still cheaper than a single new game. But when I see people trying to charge $99.99 -- well at that point I grab my bucket and head for the river.
No company is going to feel compelled to offer OGG support until the competition offers OGG support. Kind of a catch-22. Not that some off brand could not make a name for themseleves (or at least push a few units to the/. crowd) by decoding OGG....But I guarentee you that no major brand is going to take the plunge (and spend the extra engineering and production fees) until they are forced to by the competition.
I agree with this. The essence of Freedom remains -- but the days seem numbered as far as being able to freely distribute whole distributions. I guess this is how the money will be made hu? I thought it would be more of the bottled water methodology. I can freely drink all of the water I want -- but if I want to drink water from fancy plastic containers with sealed caps -- I pay around $1 for 16 oz. It is beyond me how these companies that sale bottled water are profitable, but they are. (A six pack of bottled water will be priced right up there with soda pop and beer -- yet the stuff still moves off the shelf in droves.)
What if when the smoke clears from the annihilation of life as we know it: the half cockroach/half human forms that rise from the ashes decide to use these AOL CD's as the basis for their new form of currency? That is why I am hoarding my precious few -- and will be laughing at you all on my way to the post apocolypic exchange center of the future.
I have been a HUGE Mandrake fan for a long time. I always choose to install it on machines I am to lazy to configure manually. This being said -- after a wonderful install -- I have had all sorts of "weird" things happen. The biggest 2 being issues I am sure may be attributed to my video card setup and the Frankenstein stuff going with the AA Fonts and other issues. (Matrox G450 Dual + Xinerama). I had the same problems the reviewer had with various apps trying to spin my CDROM into submission for no obvious reason. Control panel apps that take 2 minutes to start. Etc. Etc. I think maybe I will give the new RedHat a shot -- I have not used RedHat since Mandrake appeared on the scene.
THey must have been hanging around the RIAA people.
Monday Page 1: CD Sales booming, best year ever, most money ever made in one year by CD sales.
Tuesday Page 2: Online music trading killing CD sales. Artists starving.
I mean really -- I have seen 4 or 5 individual movies make more money in the last 3 or 4 years than the total money made by all movies 10 years ago. You go wait in line for Harry Potter or LOTR tickets in the next few months and then tell me that DVD's are killing the movie thaters....sheeeze...
Slashdot Mirror
The telcos or cable companies find Mr. Taco off the map for anything above POTS connections -- but yet he has hopes that the local cable company or sat provider to the sticks is going to rollover on some respectful unsuspecting channel like lifetime or the golf network and put in "All Anime, all the time" -- now that is wishful thinking.
I don't know abnout easier install. Installing a new version of IE always requires me to reboot. When I install a new (binary) version of Mozilla it usually is just an unzip or untar and then running the executable.
Maybe things are different on the Mac.
Living in a portable, and unplugged environment day in day out -- it perplexes me how something that can go 10+ hours unplugged is not rolling in more money than one can imagine. By far our biggest issue is battery life. All of our devices are currentlly hardened -- can withstand a drop from a car onto concrete, withstand temps of -30 and +120, etc... etc.. etc.. and guess what I talk to the vendors and tech reps from all of these companies and guess what -- they have hardly even heard of the crusoe, let alone are they investigating anything that does not start with I and end in TEL....talk about thinking outside the box. Why do so many (seemingly) killer products end up never breaking through?
I have no problem understanding that they actually did land on -- and take off from the moon, and return to earth. My compassion for the conspiricy theorists only extends to the fact that if we did so much with so little (technology) why have we done so little (in comparisson) since.
With all of the gaps being closed in being able to pick one distribution over the next, I give the bounty to the first distribution to NOT include Emacs in the "default install" button. Oh yea, and include blackbox/fluxbox as one of the "default" window managers. (they can put KDE and GNOME on the "options" or "Contributed" CD). And why they are at it, they can decide on 1 font manager (xfstt) for the whole distribution VS. the 1 font manager for each app you see nowdays. That should be a pretty cool distro that I could throw at this old assed hardware that I have.
PS -- The article made me laugh hard, and miss satirewire even more.
I think it is the reverse /. effect since Drudge linked back to /. on the article about Doom III being linked.
Not a product in sight. If any of these people where to actually be bright enough to deal in actual "see, order, touch, own" products -- then would not the money better be spent on shipping, distribution, collections, customer service. I think that was the whole problem with the .com bust -- all sorts of tools (leather chairs, compuers, ping pong tables) and no tangible product. In the end the consumer spends money on the same things they have always spent money on. Technology can only offer different avenues for shopping for and ordering product. All the technology and VC in the world is not going to replace air with product.
PHP is what J2EE coders use on their own sites. In a big enterprise, J2EE has gotten enough buzz and is well rounded enough and powerful enough to keep everyone happy. The coders like it because it pays well and the work is there even in this economy. But believe me -- J2EE is not really fun, and not really something people would use if given the choice of any toolset. Now -- this is just what I see, the coders that report to me have been developing great "enterprise level" J2EE apps all year with no complaints and only few YAWNS to this point -- but everyone of them I talk to always say that PHP is what they use when given the choice -- and/or if they have to throw up a site at home....
for anybody downloading or streaming random video these days -- trying to find out how to decode the 3 million different codecs and or "slightly different" formats of video is no small task. Can you imagine how un-succesfull or frustrating music trading would have been with 75% of music files be labeled "mp3" yet needing 55 different decoders in order to be able to play most of them? And then having to have commercial (proprietary -- Sorenson) codecs to play the other 25%?
Jason will have to be asleep during the whole movie.
I wonder if someone will make a XMMS plugin to play wma files now. That would be cool. I gave in to the darkside awhile back when I purchased a 64 Meg portable music player -- and converted a bunch of my CD's to WMA for size VS. performance reasons (a 64K WMA sounded better to me than a 64K mp3). THe only problem being now I have 4 CD's worth of WMA's that are only playable on Windows -- and I don't have a windows partition anyomore. So at least for me -- this sounds like a good thing.
I know this is OT -- but your description of the Xbox was about the best I have heard yet. If you visit the demo centers usually the PS2's and Gamecubes are running strong, and then you have the Xbox's sitting their with the "blank screen of death". The fact that they die on demo in so many places is one feature that has reminded me not to pick one up.
I agree. It not only should be easy -- but what is up with app font support relying on how you compile the app? X should be allowed to handle font rendering. As soon as each app and or toolkit has to worry about which libraries to use to render what fonts -- what ways....You end up with a mess. Imagine getting a shirt with no buttons and then having to buy 8 different buttons at 8 different stores, then sew them on and hope eveything matches. Is it not just easier to take care of the button issue at manufacture time...
Well if you look at the font fiascos in recent distributions and desktops (I am speaking of Mandrake 9.0 -- and from what I have heard RedHat), then you end up having about 5000 fonts and each application you run can use about 10 of them. So you end up with some applications able to use some fonts , and other applications able to see others. Depending on what type of app or window manager you are running -- you see a variety of "effects" that may or may not resemble AA. Gtk 1.x apps see some fonts, Gtk 2.x apps see others, QT sees others AND PLEASE don't even get me started on font sizes, most apps just asumme that size 12 is about all they want to use, and some gtk apps occasionally start up with a nice 72 point font staring back at you for some crazy reason or another -- Xfontsel can see a bunch of them but in itself does not do much. (to me it just looks like multiple levels of blur.)
I bet one could write a book with a chapter on each different method for displaying fonts in these new distributions. And if you want to get really confused you can look at the 7 or 8 different font configuration files used to put this clusterfuck together. Whatever happened to the good old days where I could just run XFSTT on a port and get all of my TT fonts pretty much the same as in Windows -- and this was even before XFree 4. With the advent of XFS and XFree 4 we got some primitive looking Jaggy things that "claimed" to be our TT fonts -- but at least where I was standing you could not pick them out from a lineup.
I still don't see how we are any better off in the "font world" than we were 4 years ago -- it seems that each toolkit has just decided to try to invent there own ways to render fonts.. Crazy -- Crazy -- Crazy.
Ya -- I just turned off registration and pretend that I don't know what good code looks like...And it does a wonderful job for me.
For about $2600 for this I could buy 2 regular laptops and have an extra one for the bathroom. Or better yet I could buy about 10 early pentium laptops on Ebay -- and have the whole house networked. With old hardware it is not hard to find the best OS. You just stick with the first OS that will let you browse the web while decoding MP3's without the MP3's skipping. (Hint: it is not Windows)
is looking for alternatives. b2 is a really good and powerful altewrnative. PHP, MySQl, and all the goodies.
Wish I had mod points for this one. Really how important is the installation? Sure -- with an easy installation you may be up and configured in 45 minutes --- a tough one may take a week. But in the end -- both are small periods of time compared to the 12 Months -- 3 years+ that you will actually be using the software on a day to day basis. I am more into "How often will this distro be updated?", "How many 3rd party packages will be available?" --- I don't want to install a new distribution every 3 months no matter if it takes 3 minutes or 3 weeks -- I want to install a distribution 1 time and then move on to productivity, and hope that I can keep my distribution up to date and compatible without having to go through any more installs.
Most of the difference in the flavers above is just in pricing structure and what is enabled or disabled.
Yes. Good article. (Where is Part 2 BTW?) That is what I am saying -- but at what dollar figure (cost of that CompUSA box of SuSe) would you have decided that it was in your best interest to take your empty bucket to the stream? At $19.95 it is easier than downloading and burning and crossing your fingers. At $29.00 it is still a matter of saving you time. At $39.00, well it's still cheaper than a single new game. But when I see people trying to charge $99.99 -- well at that point I grab my bucket and head for the river.
No company is going to feel compelled to offer OGG support until the competition offers OGG support. Kind of a catch-22. Not that some off brand could not make a name for themseleves (or at least push a few units to the /. crowd) by decoding OGG....But I guarentee you that no major brand is going to take the plunge (and spend the extra engineering and production fees) until they are forced to by the competition.
I agree with this. The essence of Freedom remains -- but the days seem numbered as far as being able to freely distribute whole distributions. I guess this is how the money will be made hu? I thought it would be more of the bottled water methodology. I can freely drink all of the water I want -- but if I want to drink water from fancy plastic containers with sealed caps -- I pay around $1 for 16 oz. It is beyond me how these companies that sale bottled water are profitable, but they are. (A six pack of bottled water will be priced right up there with soda pop and beer -- yet the stuff still moves off the shelf in droves.)
What if when the smoke clears from the annihilation of life as we know it: the half cockroach/half human forms that rise from the ashes decide to use these AOL CD's as the basis for their new form of currency? That is why I am hoarding my precious few -- and will be laughing at you all on my way to the post apocolypic exchange center of the future.
I have been a HUGE Mandrake fan for a long time. I always choose to install it on machines I am to lazy to configure manually. This being said -- after a wonderful install -- I have had all sorts of "weird" things happen. The biggest 2 being issues I am sure may be attributed to my video card setup and the Frankenstein stuff going with the AA Fonts and other issues. (Matrox G450 Dual + Xinerama). I had the same problems the reviewer had with various apps trying to spin my CDROM into submission for no obvious reason. Control panel apps that take 2 minutes to start. Etc. Etc. I think maybe I will give the new RedHat a shot -- I have not used RedHat since Mandrake appeared on the scene.
THey must have been hanging around the RIAA people.
Monday Page 1: CD Sales booming, best year ever, most money ever made in one year by CD sales.
Tuesday Page 2: Online music trading killing CD sales. Artists starving.
I mean really -- I have seen 4 or 5 individual movies make more money in the last 3 or 4 years than the total money made by all movies 10 years ago. You go wait in line for Harry Potter or LOTR tickets in the next few months and then tell me that DVD's are killing the movie thaters....sheeeze...