Heh! You could be on to something there... when I stayed at a backpackers once, the toilets were very bad. The only ones worse are the ones you find at national parks and the like - many which are quite cheap water-wise to run also, since they are just a huge hole in the ground with a seat on top.
Woah there! I'll give you the "[GNU/]Linux is a clone of UNIX", but the Gaim and OpenOffice.org teams are reverse-engineering only for compatibility. It's not because ICQ/AOL/Yahoo's protocol or MS's.doc format is better and we should have done things that way.
I own around 250 audio CDs, and not one of them has copy protection. I use GNU/Linux to rip my entire music collection, and then sync (what I can fit of it) with my old 5Gb firewire iPod.
I don't distribute copies of any of these. Even my sister who never buys a thing (unless it's a cheap pirated copy) has begged me for a copy of my 'Story Of the Year' album, but didn't get her way. If I find a CD to be good enough for me to buy, then I also believe everyone who wants that disc should buy a copy.
My sister is too cheap to buy a copy if she didn't pirate, so I doubt Sony would lose much (if anything) from the likes of her. Sony does however lose money from the likes of me by throwing some troublesome non-standard disc my way that tries to prevent me from doing what I brought the disc for in the first place. I won't ever stand for that, and I always vote against the technology with my cash.
CDs I will not buy (but wanted to) until I see a copy in my CD store without copy protection: - Living End - MODERN ARTillery (I own five other Living End CDs/EPs/singles) - A Perfect Circle - the last two albums (I brought the first which was not copy-protected).
This all begs the question - to get music onto my iPod, is it easier to actually buy the album, or to grab it from a P2P program on my broadband connection?
When I was working at Sausage Software back in 1997 when the browser wars were on and Sausage was a serious threat to FrontPage, our newest version of the HotDog HTML editor was broken by a new beta version of IE. This was deliberate, and was easy to prove. Simply rename the HotDog.exe main executable (or whatever the name was to something else) and the program ran flawlessly!
More expensive by what... $5/hard drive? $20/computer?
Just purchased a DVD burner in a small town near where my parents lived. I was astonished to discover I had to pay AU$150 for a particular brand - and they only had on brand/model available. I could have ordered this model online for less than AU$100! Lucky for them I needed it in a hurry.
Maybe if the store offered to install the burner for me for free, the value wouldn't have been too bad. Instead, they wanted to charge me at least another AU$50 fee! Naturally, I just installed it myself and I'll be trying to avoid that store in the future.
Oh, and another thing - there was barely any software products for sale at this store. Apparently, they only make money from hardware and support. Still, they had no clue about GNU/Linux.
Yeah... for AU$145.00 a month! That's very expensive for just a 1.5 connection. I just came back from Hong Kong a month ago, and had a much cheaper "unlimited downloads" 3Mbps. Once you've had the good stuff, anything Australia has to offer (in country Victoria at least) will feel like crap. It's really hard to justify paying through the nose for something that's still going to feel much worse anyway, so I'm still on a much cheaper 512k connection.
Interesting that this news was posted today. Just this morning, I burnt my first DVD+R DL disc using K3b. I thought that since the disc was rather expensive, I really want this to work first time. I hit the 'Simulate' button, and hence the 'Verify Written Data' option was grayed out as I wasn't actually burning a real disc, but I had intended to use it later.
After the disc was ejected, I put it back in and selected the same options as I had before, with the exception of 'Verify Written Data' checked instead of 'Simulate'. I got an error straight away... something about already having a non-blank disc already in the drive. Looking at the disc, sure enough the disc had already burnt!
K3b has been around for a long time now. It sure looks pretty and is easy to use, but bugs like this keep me away from alternative GUI tools.
I used to be amazed by crashes under GNU/Linux, because they rarely happened compared to Windows 98 that I was running at the time. They still happened probably once every month or so, but it was nothing next to Windows 98 (configured as dual-boot) which crashed a few times each day. After a few years, my PSU blew up and I had it replaced. I've practically never experienced any crashing under GNU/Linux on the system since.
When I discovered that my Palm m130 didn't show the number of colours as advertised, I was quite upset. ScummVM for example refused to run because the colour depth was not high enough on my display. Palm said that they would offer a free copy of SimCity for m130 owners, due to the misleading advertising. Just fill out the details on an online form, and click the URL in the e-mail you get. The only problem... the e-mail they sent me contained a broken link! I sent them an e-mail explaining the situation, but never received a response.
Now PocketPCs are taking over the market, and it's clear to me at least one reason why this is. With the support Palm provided me, I'd never buy a Palm again. My current PDA is now a HP iPAQ 5400.
"EIN GEBUESCH" apparently shows up during the CherryOS 1.0 MacOS X boot process. Sebastian Biallas (lead PearPC developer) confirmed that this was a made-up name used by him to describe the emulated hard disk model. It has been used in PearPC for at least a year, and is probably considered the most significant evidence to date of CherryOS being PearPC repackaged.
FYI, in the same thread Alex Crouzen writes:
AFAIK it's a reference to "A Shrubbery!" from the Monty Python movie The Quest for the Holy Grail.
Firstly, I think my AMD AthlonXP 2500+ PC with Antec Super LAN-Boy case (with clear side-panel), CoolerMaster Aero 7+ HSF, ThermalTake PSU, 4 SATA hard disks, all rounded cables, etc. make my PC look beastly and very cool. I also know the design is nothing to be sneezed at, since it has excellent airflow and the case is made of aluminum - not cheap plastic like all Macs I've ever seen.
Now this may surprise you, but I haven't purchased a new computer in well over 4 years! I could never afford to fork out so much cash at any one point in time (being a student). I simply upgrade the bits and pieces as I need to when I can afford to. There is not a single component of the original computer (an old early Duron) left in the machine. Now the monitor is a 17-inch Hitachi LCD. The case has changed at least twice. Even the hard disks I originally had have all failed and been replaced.
The biggest upgrade I have ever performed was a simultaneous motherboard and RAM upgrade, and the lovely (almost) never-changing Socket A has let me get away with this.
So seriously... how can a Mac compete for somebody like me. I DO need an upgradable computer. Now take a look around - this is Slashdot! I'm not the only one who works this way.
As for malwares... I run a UNIX-based OS, just like you do. GNU/Linux, thanks.
I had to laugh when I saw this, since as of last night (or should I say, early this morning), I'm running Mac OS X Panther on PearPC on Gentoo GNU/Linux on an AMD Athlon XP 2500+. Sluggish, sure, but usable. I'm posting to Slashdot using this setup!
It appears performance is top on the adjenda for PearPC developers too, so things should only get better (if you have a SSE-capable CPU). I don't know how much slower a Windows host is though.
I read sound support is out for people willing to try a pre-release also. Neat!
I own an iPod, full of music (1004 tracks - I can't fit in enough on it) and just 7 songs are illegally downloaded. Everything else is ripped from about a quarter of my legit CD collection.
FYI, there are two bands that make up those tracks. One of them (Jill Sobule) according to my local store doesn't have any CDs in production anymore. I'm not American, and can't find any Internet store willing to sell to me that actually has any tracks by that artist.
The other few tracks are from The Living End's newest album Modern Artillery. I have every other album they have produced, two EPs and a single. I've seen them in concert at least once. I chose not to purchase from their newest album due to the DRM installed on the CD. I don't run Windows, and I am not going to waste my time trying to figure out how to get those tracks onto my iPod. Somebody else already did this, so I got them from him instead.
I think companies like Microsoft that enforce restrictions that previously never existed are ensuring the value of new media is far less than it used to be. Thus, there is less incentive to purchase new CDs. I'm certain this is at least the case for GNU/Linux users like myself. In 1997 and 1998, I purchased at least one album each week. This year, I have purchased just three CDs. A great many CDs have been scrubbed off my want list due to these DRM restrictions.
I did download Kong in Conert the other day, but I don't have enough space to fit it on my iPod.
One final note; I wanted the Story of the Year - Page Avenue album. I was told it had to be shipped, and would take up to 6 weeks (which it did). In the meantime, I grabbed some of the tracks from eMule. Is this harmful? I had my receipt to prove I owned the CD anyway.
I've applied all the firmware updates, but there hasn't been anything new come out in a very long time. This patch that SMC issued for your model... was it a standard firmware from the website, or something you could only get e-mailed from tech support directly? I may have to look into this some more, but I've almost finished installing Debian woody on a 486 to replace it.
I haven't found their support to be much chop. When I explained that their product didn't work with my Banksia Wave SP 56K modem (and sent detailed logs from using it under Debian informing them how to make it work), they just said "yeah, we know... other people have told us" but they never did anything about it. I was just told to buy a new modem!
Actually, I'm a dial-up user. I have to move around a bit, and dial-up accounts generally include no connection fee or minimum-contract.
I connect to the Internet using this SMC Networks Barricade SMC7004ABR NAT firewall/router. Set me back about AU$100 at the start of the year. Includes a print server too (which alone generally cost over $100 here).
It would be the perfect solution for any dial-up user... if only it worked the way it was supposed to. Unfortunately, mine crashes about once every 24 hours. I've read reports of other people with the same model have the same problem. In addition, the "dial on demand" functionality never works. You have to manually log in to the web interface, and tell it to connect. Very frustrating.
Anyone else know of other alternatives with dial-up support from other manufacturers?
...this event has graved itself into the national psyche...
It's been in the news a lot over the last month. Here I thought everyone was using the "Dingo's got my baby" quote because they were keeping up with the news, but instead they were just refering to some old movie. That's Slashdot for you.:)
Right now a 802.11b wireless connection from my laptop to my wireless router is faster than my DSL connection.
Right now a 802.11g wireless connection from my desktop to my WAP/router is faster than my 56k dial-up connection. Now this talk of 200Mbs... Can everyone stop teasing me?
If Nullsoft claims that the WASTE release is illegal, why haven't they bothered to take the waste project of SourceForge? Isn't this based on the same code?
I have a PS2. All games are legal, and I never considered a mod chip for it. I purchased the device the month they came out in Australia.
I also have a Dreamcast I purchased from the USA on eBay. Although it wasn't advertised, the device actually came with a mod chip installed, so I gave GNU/Linux a try. I got it all to boot, and had the mouse working. The keyboard I brought wasn't official however and refused to work. Typing commands using the middle button to copy and paste characters at the console is no fun.;)
Anyway, I brought 3 or 4 games for it (one imported from the USA, and the rest brought here). I am unsure if playing games from other regions is legal, however I certainly have never used a mod chip for pirating.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh! You could be on to something there... when I stayed at a backpackers once, the toilets were very bad. The only ones worse are the ones you find at national parks and the like - many which are quite cheap water-wise to run also, since they are just a huge hole in the ground with a seat on top.
The GNU/Linux kit for the PS2 included a USB keyboard and mouse. http://playstation2-linux.com/faq.php#What_is_in_t he_kit
Woah there! I'll give you the "[GNU/]Linux is a clone of UNIX", but the Gaim and OpenOffice.org teams are reverse-engineering only for compatibility. It's not because ICQ/AOL/Yahoo's protocol or MS's .doc format is better and we should have done things that way.
I own around 250 audio CDs, and not one of them has copy protection. I use GNU/Linux to rip my entire music collection, and then sync (what I can fit of it) with my old 5Gb firewire iPod.
I don't distribute copies of any of these. Even my sister who never buys a thing (unless it's a cheap pirated copy) has begged me for a copy of my 'Story Of the Year' album, but didn't get her way. If I find a CD to be good enough for me to buy, then I also believe everyone who wants that disc should buy a copy.
My sister is too cheap to buy a copy if she didn't pirate, so I doubt Sony would lose much (if anything) from the likes of her. Sony does however lose money from the likes of me by throwing some troublesome non-standard disc my way that tries to prevent me from doing what I brought the disc for in the first place. I won't ever stand for that, and I always vote against the technology with my cash.
CDs I will not buy (but wanted to) until I see a copy in my CD store without copy protection:
- Living End - MODERN ARTillery (I own five other Living End CDs/EPs/singles)
- A Perfect Circle - the last two albums (I brought the first which was not copy-protected).
This all begs the question - to get music onto my iPod, is it easier to actually buy the album, or to grab it from a P2P program on my broadband connection?
When I was working at Sausage Software back in 1997 when the browser wars were on and Sausage was a serious threat to FrontPage, our newest version of the HotDog HTML editor was broken by a new beta version of IE. This was deliberate, and was easy to prove. Simply rename the HotDog.exe main executable (or whatever the name was to something else) and the program ran flawlessly!
Shortly afterwards, I started learning GNU/Linux.
More expensive by what... $5/hard drive? $20/computer?
Just purchased a DVD burner in a small town near where my parents lived. I was astonished to discover I had to pay AU$150 for a particular brand - and they only had on brand/model available. I could have ordered this model online for less than AU$100! Lucky for them I needed it in a hurry.
Maybe if the store offered to install the burner for me for free, the value wouldn't have been too bad. Instead, they wanted to charge me at least another AU$50 fee! Naturally, I just installed it myself and I'll be trying to avoid that store in the future.
Oh, and another thing - there was barely any software products for sale at this store. Apparently, they only make money from hardware and support. Still, they had no clue about GNU/Linux.
Yeah... for AU$145.00 a month! That's very expensive for just a 1.5 connection. I just came back from Hong Kong a month ago, and had a much cheaper "unlimited downloads" 3Mbps. Once you've had the good stuff, anything Australia has to offer (in country Victoria at least) will feel like crap. It's really hard to justify paying through the nose for something that's still going to feel much worse anyway, so I'm still on a much cheaper 512k connection.
Interesting that this news was posted today. Just this morning, I burnt my first DVD+R DL disc using K3b. I thought that since the disc was rather expensive, I really want this to work first time. I hit the 'Simulate' button, and hence the 'Verify Written Data' option was grayed out as I wasn't actually burning a real disc, but I had intended to use it later.
After the disc was ejected, I put it back in and selected the same options as I had before, with the exception of 'Verify Written Data' checked instead of 'Simulate'. I got an error straight away... something about already having a non-blank disc already in the drive. Looking at the disc, sure enough the disc had already burnt!
K3b has been around for a long time now. It sure looks pretty and is easy to use, but bugs like this keep me away from alternative GUI tools.
I used to be amazed by crashes under GNU/Linux, because they rarely happened compared to Windows 98 that I was running at the time. They still happened probably once every month or so, but it was nothing next to Windows 98 (configured as dual-boot) which crashed a few times each day. After a few years, my PSU blew up and I had it replaced. I've practically never experienced any crashing under GNU/Linux on the system since.
When I discovered that my Palm m130 didn't show the number of colours as advertised, I was quite upset. ScummVM for example refused to run because the colour depth was not high enough on my display. Palm said that they would offer a free copy of SimCity for m130 owners, due to the misleading advertising. Just fill out the details on an online form, and click the URL in the e-mail you get. The only problem... the e-mail they sent me contained a broken link! I sent them an e-mail explaining the situation, but never received a response.
Now PocketPCs are taking over the market, and it's clear to me at least one reason why this is. With the support Palm provided me, I'd never buy a Palm again. My current PDA is now a HP iPAQ 5400.
FYI, in the same thread Alex Crouzen writes:
Typically I sell anything I no longer have a need for. I use iptables for my firewall.
Firstly, I think my AMD AthlonXP 2500+ PC with Antec Super LAN-Boy case (with clear side-panel), CoolerMaster Aero 7+ HSF, ThermalTake PSU, 4 SATA hard disks, all rounded cables, etc. make my PC look beastly and very cool. I also know the design is nothing to be sneezed at, since it has excellent airflow and the case is made of aluminum - not cheap plastic like all Macs I've ever seen.
Now this may surprise you, but I haven't purchased a new computer in well over 4 years! I could never afford to fork out so much cash at any one point in time (being a student). I simply upgrade the bits and pieces as I need to when I can afford to. There is not a single component of the original computer (an old early Duron) left in the machine. Now the monitor is a 17-inch Hitachi LCD. The case has changed at least twice. Even the hard disks I originally had have all failed and been replaced.
The biggest upgrade I have ever performed was a simultaneous motherboard and RAM upgrade, and the lovely (almost) never-changing Socket A has let me get away with this.
So seriously... how can a Mac compete for somebody like me. I DO need an upgradable computer. Now take a look around - this is Slashdot! I'm not the only one who works this way.
As for malwares... I run a UNIX-based OS, just like you do. GNU/Linux, thanks.
I had to laugh when I saw this, since as of last night (or should I say, early this morning), I'm running Mac OS X Panther on PearPC on Gentoo GNU/Linux on an AMD Athlon XP 2500+. Sluggish, sure, but usable. I'm posting to Slashdot using this setup!
It appears performance is top on the adjenda for PearPC developers too, so things should only get better (if you have a SSE-capable CPU). I don't know how much slower a Windows host is though.
I read sound support is out for people willing to try a pre-release also. Neat!
I own an iPod, full of music (1004 tracks - I can't fit in enough on it) and just 7 songs are illegally downloaded. Everything else is ripped from about a quarter of my legit CD collection.
FYI, there are two bands that make up those tracks. One of them (Jill Sobule) according to my local store doesn't have any CDs in production anymore. I'm not American, and can't find any Internet store willing to sell to me that actually has any tracks by that artist.
The other few tracks are from The Living End's newest album Modern Artillery. I have every other album they have produced, two EPs and a single. I've seen them in concert at least once. I chose not to purchase from their newest album due to the DRM installed on the CD. I don't run Windows, and I am not going to waste my time trying to figure out how to get those tracks onto my iPod. Somebody else already did this, so I got them from him instead.
I think companies like Microsoft that enforce restrictions that previously never existed are ensuring the value of new media is far less than it used to be. Thus, there is less incentive to purchase new CDs. I'm certain this is at least the case for GNU/Linux users like myself. In 1997 and 1998, I purchased at least one album each week. This year, I have purchased just three CDs. A great many CDs have been scrubbed off my want list due to these DRM restrictions.
I did download Kong in Conert the other day, but I don't have enough space to fit it on my iPod.
One final note; I wanted the Story of the Year - Page Avenue album. I was told it had to be shipped, and would take up to 6 weeks (which it did). In the meantime, I grabbed some of the tracks from eMule. Is this harmful? I had my receipt to prove I owned the CD anyway.
I've applied all the firmware updates, but there hasn't been anything new come out in a very long time. This patch that SMC issued for your model... was it a standard firmware from the website, or something you could only get e-mailed from tech support directly? I may have to look into this some more, but I've almost finished installing Debian woody on a 486 to replace it.
I haven't found their support to be much chop. When I explained that their product didn't work with my Banksia Wave SP 56K modem (and sent detailed logs from using it under Debian informing them how to make it work), they just said "yeah, we know... other people have told us" but they never did anything about it. I was just told to buy a new modem!
I never turn it off... too much anime to download...
Actually, I'm a dial-up user. I have to move around a bit, and dial-up accounts generally include no connection fee or minimum-contract.
I connect to the Internet using this SMC Networks Barricade SMC7004ABR NAT firewall/router. Set me back about AU$100 at the start of the year. Includes a print server too (which alone generally cost over $100 here).
SMC7004ABR
It would be the perfect solution for any dial-up user... if only it worked the way it was supposed to. Unfortunately, mine crashes about once every 24 hours. I've read reports of other people with the same model have the same problem. In addition, the "dial on demand" functionality never works. You have to manually log in to the web interface, and tell it to connect. Very frustrating.
Anyone else know of other alternatives with dial-up support from other manufacturers?
Also, a clickable version of the URL in the above post:
Belkin 4-Port Cable DSL Gateway Router
...this event has graved itself into the national psyche...
:)
It's been in the news a lot over the last month. Here I thought everyone was using the "Dingo's got my baby" quote because they were keeping up with the news, but instead they were just refering to some old movie. That's Slashdot for you.
Read about it at:
The Australian
ABC
That codec is used by firefly by Freshtel - an Australian company.
Right now a 802.11b wireless connection from my laptop to my wireless router is faster than my DSL connection.
Right now a 802.11g wireless connection from my desktop to my WAP/router is faster than my 56k dial-up connection. Now this talk of 200Mbs... Can everyone stop teasing me?
If Nullsoft claims that the WASTE release is illegal, why haven't they bothered to take the waste project of SourceForge? Isn't this based on the same code?
I have a PS2. All games are legal, and I never considered a mod chip for it. I purchased the device the month they came out in Australia.
;)
I also have a Dreamcast I purchased from the USA on eBay. Although it wasn't advertised, the device actually came with a mod chip installed, so I gave GNU/Linux a try. I got it all to boot, and had the mouse working. The keyboard I brought wasn't official however and refused to work. Typing commands using the middle button to copy and paste characters at the console is no fun.
Anyway, I brought 3 or 4 games for it (one imported from the USA, and the rest brought here). I am unsure if playing games from other regions is legal, however I certainly have never used a mod chip for pirating.
That has got to be one of the most negative ways of looking at things I have ever seen! :)