Kinkatta. I am the lead developer of Kinkatta. Kinkatta uses the toc protocal so we don't have these login wars like oscar does. (although twice we did break something that caused us not to login, but that is another story). Because of this we have been using our coding time to write up a plugin system that allows me to talk to someone in another language (on the fly babelfish translation) or encryt messages, or append my current song in xmms to my info (get icefox2's info on aim to see for yourself what is playing in my room). These of course are just my example plugins that I have made and anyone can make cooler ones.
In fact I remember reading somewhere about a year ago on the linux terminal page about how they put a tb server together for right around 4K I can't find the link, but if someone does please post. But grabbing the third largest drive (100GB) out there will save you a bundle and you still only need 10.
If I were ever trying to launch some virus or whatnot using one of these open networks would be just the place were all they would have to so was probably drive through the drop off section...
I have that right now with my Zaurus (built in keyboard) and Kinkatta (aim application).
For anyone that was at ces and saw me, I was walking around chatting with folks back in Boston about what I was seeing (confirming that Royal's new pda was nothing more then a plastic prototype)
Best part about the Zaurus for me is that it is based on open source and I can add anything new that I want (as I did with Kinkatta).
I wonder if palm came out with it's keyboard just because of the pressure from the Zaurus?
Also where would you put the keyboard thingy if you wanted to keep you Palm in any sort of case?
Hmmm, no. At my highschool football was a big thing. The coach was paid 107K a year. They would go to the finals. We had a nice huge stadium style field. One year when they went to the superbowl the school was *required* to go to a pep-rally for the team during the school hours. Meanwhile when the math team go the chance to go to the internation competition they couldn't get the change to fly there and had to forfit. For all of these reasons and many other high-school football releated things I am anti-football.
I was a tv addict. Even though we didn't get cable back just a few years I would sit down and watch whatever was on and when it was done I would watch what was on next. It didn't have too be good, just on (ok, maybe not football, but that is about it). Out of the 5 channels I would find the "best" show and watch it. I was distructive and time wasting. When someone else was watching tv I would sit down and watch. The tv would just draw me over. It really stinked. When I went off to RIT I didn't bring a tv, life was good and I learned a lot and worked on projects. When moving into a new home with a few other guys for the year I found one of them bringing a tv, but not only a tv, but a tivo! I thought I was in for it, but to my surprise found just the other way around. With tivo I rarely ever view actual tv when it is on. When I had some free time I would turn it on and see what was in the lineup. These 10 shows that we all liked and only these 10 shows would be listed. I would watch 1 and when the show was over it didn't continue over to the next show on that station, but brought you back to the menu. There I was able to asses what I had to do and if something was more important I would turn off the tv knowing it would all be there for me later. There are two factors to this that halped me. First being when the show was over it was _over_. Second being that I didn't have to stay around and watch the 10 oclock news to see the top story of xyz sense I knew that tivo would record it and if I could see it when I had the time (and only the 2 minute story that I wanted to see, deleting it after that).
To sum up I moved out of that house and recently found a store shelf tivo as the local circut city for $50. You can guess that I walked out the door with a grin that day.
My Compaq persario 800 (dual Ppro) does just this anytime it is rebooted. In the lovely bios that they put on 4 boot floppies which means it takes forever to do anything.
Sondra can be downloaded and used right now without buying any hardware.
Sondra will create playlists based upon how good the song is (based upon ranking), # of times played, how new it is. i.e. the better a song is the more it will be played.
And anyone can go and re-compile it for windows if they want.
I am not saying that you should only stick to one desktop (note my mention of xmms). I use apps all the time that arn't "kde approved", but by using apps that are part of a desktop distrobution (see paragraph 1 of the previous post) you can almost assume that they will have a bit more polish then one that joe shmoe made. Ok so maybe I should have stated more then the "Cut" icon, but I figured that you would know what I mean. How about these: Constant widget look. Constant font look (this one really is high on my list), constant color, constant file dialog, constant drag and drop, constant mouse cut, copy, paste, constant help menu (and bug reporting tool), how is that for starters? It has more to do with app interaction then look and feel. Look and feel are just the icing on the cake.
Within the article I found that they mentioned quite a bit about kde and I thought I might respond.
There are many reasons why every kde app developer wants to get their app withing the base distrobution! First your app suddenly gets installed on (insert total kde desktops # here, some big ass number compared to said developers app downloads). Second you app then gets checked over many other developers as they are checking out the new kde app and because they are coders looking at your work they can provide good bug reports to quickly fix the problem. You application is quickly changed to conform to the rest of the desktop, making your application more pollished. The translation team will go through and convert your application to X (insert supported # of langues here) languages and you don't have to go out and find someone to do it for each language. Your Makefile etc worries are over as you no longer have to worry about then anymore (other then setting up your own Makefile.am, but if you can't do that then you still have some work to do before you should even think about going to kde's cvs) Also you can go and download just about any iso and there will now be a good chance that your app is sitting there. Now wouldn't you want to be part of this?
Second the windows manager debate page didn't have too much oomp to it. (more on this in the next paragraph) I think the major reason with this is because people don't want to think of them as seperate items, and with kde it simply comes with the desktop and works. (I am not currently up to date on gnome, but last I readup I think they are doing the same thing of a gtk based simple window manger that just works and ditched e). So other then e or some desktop that can only afford twm there isn't much to say on this.
Kmail, Konq, kword... A pattern here? Yes! The pattern is concistancy which I am surprised they didn't mention anywhere in their article (other then the corel dude, but that wasn't this type of consistancy). The applications look similar, behave similarly etc. The biggest reason I hated Netscape was how it did copy/paste differently then all the rest of my application. The reason I love Konq is similar. It does everything I need and looks the same as the rest of my applications and behaves the same. (this goes along with my own development of Kinkatta as an aim client for kde ) Things as small as that they all use the same "cut" icon in the end make life easier. You get anti-alias working for qt and suddenly all of the kde app have it, no getting it working for each app (cough mozilla cough). The like bobs_big_blue_theme? Go ahead and put it on. If you have all of 1 desktop then you don't have to worry about some apps not having it (besides xmms, but it has its own theme anyway). So I think one of the real reasons that these applications won is because not by themselves, but as a group they make something bigger and stronger.
No, they are looking even further then that. They want to be able to stream you the data over your boadband connection. You don't even get to have a disk! This simply gives them more power. When I first heard this at the conference I couldn't believe my ears that they would do that, but hey!
The mpeg2 format allows you to add new data to the stream as you go. Most players will simply ignore this new data, but the players that are hdtv compatible will use it to make the image bigger. I saw this working in person 2 years ago. A new format isn't going to replace mpeg2.
-Benjamin
Tivo thumb up/down mp3 app
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I wrote a playlist generator and a frontend for it that has a thumb up/down feature.:) I thought you might enjoy it. You could easily adapt ti for use in such an app for the SliMp3.
"less than successful", I doubt it. More like they are *never* ever released. I keep looking every few months for webpads, but they are _always_ 6 months away. And every month they have more and more features, but still with a pda interface, when they have more then some laptops nowadays!!! It is crazy. What every happened to the $250 webpad that was nothing more then a X-terminal? No sound, hd, usb, 1GB cpu, fan, floppy, keyboard, serial, parallel, firewire, scsi, and kitcken sink. Back when web pads were the rage their was a good reason. They *were* cool. They were a thin as my Palm 3x. They ran forever because they only had to power the wirless network, a small ass 486 cpu, and a screen. I looked cool and it was cool. They ran QtEmbedded or some other embeded Xish thing and you could make cool little apps for it. As a X terminal you had as much power as your server did. You could write little gui apps that would control you mp3 server that pipes to your living room. (don't need no stinkin laptop speakers now!) I have been temped to try to build one myself, but I just don't have the money or the time right now. (see kinkatta.sourceforge.net) And if I was to do it myself it would be a whole lot bigger then some of the webpad/crappola laptops that are out there. So were are these? Does anyone know? One idea I had was to merge 3 or 4 palm into 1 and then write palm software for it, but there are still issues with that...
I own the Sony GWM-900. This is a 24 inch widescreen. I run it at 1600*1000, but the optimal res is 1920*1200 (or something around that). I got it for 1700 earlier last year and I know someone who has the SGI flat panel that you are talking about. When I first saw it I was shocked at how much smaller it was then mine. Granted it runs at 1600*1000 also, but the screen is only 19" or so diagnally and this isn't saying much when it is a wide screen. Personally I am happy with my choice. The dual input, crystal clear image, yah it is sweet.
scroll down all the way to the botom or here is the link:
http://zzz.com.ru/pic98.jpg
It is the triangle problem and to stop many of you from banging your head here is the solution:
The top image is not a triangle... The red and dark green triangle do not form a straight lines and there slopes are different the what should be the slope of the large triangle. The top image is "concave down" while the bottom image is "concave up" The area of the slope when added up makes 1, thus where the box comes from.
From that start of Kinkatta (formally Kaim, kinkatta.sourceforge.net) two years ago one of my top priotities have been to get others involved. When I get e-mails I try to answer them right away and if it is a problem I save the e-mail and send another repley once it is fixed in cvs. I constantly ask people for problems that they have so I can fix it, I have been accepting patches and all of the other normal things a good lead developer should do. I figured that doing all of the above would make my app the best it could be. All of these would get people involved and they would know that if they submited their problems that they would not be ignored. When other developers have found interest in working in Kinkatta I have tried to help them out in getting involved. I wrote a hacking file that helps expleain what code is where. I would give them little bugs to try to fix and so forth until they were comfortable with the system. I do not think that I would have been anywhere as successfull if I hadn't done any of these and am surprised that people arn't doing them in the first place.
If you want all the latest bug fixes and features. Of course that was in the hay days. Now we are very stable and only release once a month at most with 3 or 4 bug fixes. Oh and I should have added that we don't change the format within a month or anything. There was a good 6 months per format easy. Oh and concidering how small of a user base our app has things can work out a little easier.
This is the story of my app, Kinkatta ( http://kinaktta.sourceforge.net/ ). It originally was a QT only app and only recently did it move over to utilizing KDE. But that in itself isn't exactly what this is about so I will talk about the more spisific case. From.25 to.91 today we have gone through I believe 4 different formats in which we save our settings, buddylists and so forth. In each of the changes we had to add some code to convert it over. The best solution we found is to know our users and make sure they know about us. What I mean about that is that we only support the previous settings format and make sure everyone uses it. Kinkatta's users are kept informated when a new release is out through a number of ways. We then keep that format for as long as it takes for us to be sure that 99% of the users are using that format. One of the nice things incorperated into kinkatta is the auto-check feature. On login it will goto the webpage and see if there is a new version and if there is then it will tell the user. This prompts them to stay up with the new releases much more then if the feature was not there (and yes you can disable it). Do to the gpl/lgpl nature of the app people will upgrade more often and are unlikly to stay with version 0.64.1 This is a true plus point for the open source. Because of it we havn't had to worry about users who don't want to pay the 29.95 for the new version.
Yah, the video stuff would get ripped out, but the DirectShow stuff is underneith that and isn't hardware dependant. DirectShow is the underlying framework that connects the dvd player system. Direct3d/video is only used to display stuff. You have to either A) write your own compatable direct show for linux. B) Port MS directShow to linux. C) Use one of the current Ditrect show type things currently in linux. I doubt B happend. The only linux alt I know of is Gstreamer's setup and all of the current open source dvd projects systesm. Both probably are missing things that they need. If they did want to keep the same codebase it would be a hell of a lot of work.
If they are using the same codebase as the windows team then they had to have ported Direct X to linux. Under MS's OEM clause all DVD players that want to be certified have to be using Direct X. An OEM wouldn't use one that isn't certified. If they did in fact to this and did it in a clean room way then they could release it open... But that is another topic. On the SCSI thing I am ruff on this ( my systems are now ide ), but I recall having no issues with working with SCSI or ide to access the drive. (But I could be wrong on this and if so then I can be spanked with a thousand nodles...)
Hehe, looking at the article again you are right, I guess I should have thunk about it for a sec. My appologies, sorry. It is much more a hardware review then a lindvd review. The title on the slashdot article made it to be a lindvd review more then a laptop review. I would be happy to write a review of of the lindvd player for you. I have about 400 dvd's I can test with(i.e. I cover all of the different things a dvd can do) here to test out the system fully. Just about anything you would want to test out on a dvd player with. Combined with my previous dvd development experiance I can dig up quite a bit for even the hardcore linux folks.
LinDVD is almost identical interface-wise to its WinDVD counterpart and should perform about the same on comparable hardware.
Ugg, talk about speaking out of your ass. Because the gui is the same means that everything else will be? Why would that be again? Speaking from first hand experiance (I was on the lsdvd team) the underlying code is entirly differenet. Heck other then the "skin" on the gui it to is probably a re-write too. There are many many spisific things that Linux is a part of that affects the end result that have nothing to do with the fact that it "has the same ui" The entire unerlayer (unless they ported direct show) is different then what was there before.
Where are the test disk? Motion menu's? Subpics? Stream tests? This is not a DVD player review by any means.
There is bit all about scsi vs ide. This is a very very moot point. It may be an issue under windows, but not linux. There is nothing special about saying that it can do both. Kinda like me saying I can boot off of both. Woopie.
The all important LinDVD performs quite well but not perfect. With most DVDs you will notice no difference from that of a standard hardware decoder but there are a few points on some "action-packed" movies that will skip a bit. Keep in mind that this is still a software DVD player on a laptop and the first iteration of the Linux version. This is no excuse. They are running 2.4, A 900mhz machine and they are using video acceleration. Cough my 450 cough... Unless the problem is with pthreads (which it might be if they didn't fix that) I would say that they have some work to do.
So here are some real questions that I want to know about. How about macrovision? Is it there? Can you take screenshots? Is there an video out? How about the kernel. Does the dvd player use a spesific kernel to run? Can I upgrade to 2.4.9 without it blowing up? What about changing distrobution? Will it blow up then? Are only Cakdera linux 2.4 binaries provided? What about the defacto red hat 6.x?
What about CSS, I presume it is kernel mode. Does that app barf when you run gdb on it? Did you test out the player with a large number of dvd's to see if any of them would fail? What about region changing. How well does it support that? Do you have to mount the drive before playing? How much cpu does it use while watching your average film? Can it play files? Can it play vcd's? How about SVCD? Does it do Kariokee mode? Can it play regular pcm (wav) file streams? How does the audio sound on the laptop? Can you pump it out to real speakers? Can you run more then just the DVD player at once? Does the ui play frendly with the rest of the desktop (kde, gnome, etc) How fast can you fast forward it? Can you make it go slow? Can you frame advace? Do multiple angle's work? Can it handle cool things like the Ghostbusters msk3000 subpic overlay and not loss performace? Can it handle non-css content (i.e. porn). Can you use 2 cpu's?
Sigh this isn't a review this is just a add for linuxhardware.org
Well the inevitable happened. Only weeks after I wrote
of how AOLcould kill Kaim in a moment notice if they really wanted they did just about that. I (along with Gaim) received a "Notice of Infringement" on two trademarks 2,423,368 and 2,423,367 These trademarks are for the word "aim". Several points that can be made are:
The trademarks were not given approval until 2001-01-23.
Kaim started more then a year before that and Gaim started in 1998.
If a company abandons a trademark for 3 years it is considered lost.
In 1999 AOL sent us a legal letter asking us to remove the aol images and name from our applications, they did not in any way refer to the aim name as one of the things we had to remove. By doing this they showed that they did not have a vested interest in the name which can *void*there trademark application which states that they first started using it back in 97 when it wasn't until recently that they cared about it. Also by not telling us to remove the name then, they were in essence giving us the right to use the name.
Gaim and Kaim can be argued are different enough from the word aim to be ok.
The reason that they sent us the notice of infringement was that they fear that kaim and gaim would "dilute" the aim name, when in fact both of our applications are superior to the official AOL linux client.
In that regard you can argue that their clients were diluting the trademark
and we would boosting it!
But even with all these things going for us this is a pure case of the
big bad company beating up on the loyal fans. Here we had given our
sweat and tears making an application to connect with and in the end promoting
them. They have made it harder and harder to do this and for me this
is the last straw.
As of the next release of Kaim it will have a new name. You can
submit name ideas to kaim-developer@lists.sourceforge.net
Submit a funny name and a real name.:) For those of you who have
been using Kaim we thank you. Kaims current status is very stable.
Because of that I will be fixing up the last few bugs and releasing the
next version as 1.0 To bad it can't be called Kaim.
The official kde aol client kit is being revamped as a jabber client.
The Kaim development team will most likely move over and join the kit team.
Kaim has done what Iset out to do. It is a stable aim client
with a clean interface. But that was then this is now. Next
comes the Jabber client. If you are trying to decide what im server
you should go to Iwould recommend jabber. Did you know you can run your own jabber server? Heck jabber is so much better then aim it isn't funny. This probably isn't the end of aol's attack so get out now. Be part of the resistance! Get yourself and others
away from aim. Here are two links to jabber sites.
Oh and one last thing... Hehe I don't mean to start something, but in a way (not really, but you get what I mean) it is now kinda illegal to have kaim and gaim on your computers. So stick it to the man and where is your mirror?
Grr I submitted a similar story also with Kaim, but is was rejected. Head over to http://kaim.sourceforge.net/ to see the whole trial and tribulation. Pretty much kaim also has to change our name, but I am so fed up with AOL that I might just pull kaim.
Slashdot Mirror
Kinkatta. I am the lead developer of Kinkatta. Kinkatta uses the toc protocal so we don't have these login wars like oscar does. (although twice we did break something that caused us not to login, but that is another story). Because of this we have been using our coding time to write up a plugin system that allows me to talk to someone in another language (on the fly babelfish translation) or encryt messages, or append my current song in xmms to my info (get icefox2's info on aim to see for yourself what is playing in my room). These of course are just my example plugins that I have made and anyone can make cooler ones.
-Benjamin Meyer
In fact I remember reading somewhere about a year ago on the linux terminal page about how they put a tb server together for right around 4K I can't find the link, but if someone does please post. But grabbing the third largest drive (100GB) out there will save you a bundle and you still only need 10.
Looking at the bad side:
If I were ever trying to launch some virus or whatnot using one of these open networks would be just the place were all they would have to so was probably drive through the drop off section...
Anyone else see this as a problem?
I have that right now with my Zaurus (built in keyboard) and Kinkatta (aim application).
For anyone that was at ces and saw me, I was walking around chatting with folks back in Boston about what I was seeing (confirming that Royal's new pda was nothing more then a plastic prototype)
Best part about the Zaurus for me is that it is based on open source and I can add anything new that I want (as I did with Kinkatta).
I wonder if palm came out with it's keyboard just because of the pressure from the Zaurus?
Also where would you put the keyboard thingy if you wanted to keep you Palm in any sort of case?
-Benjamin Meyer
Hmmm, no. At my highschool football was a big thing. The coach was paid 107K a year. They would go to the finals. We had a nice huge stadium style field. One year when they went to the superbowl the school was *required* to go to a pep-rally for the team during the school hours. Meanwhile when the math team go the chance to go to the internation competition they couldn't get the change to fly there and had to forfit. For all of these reasons and many other high-school football releated things I am anti-football.
I was a tv addict. Even though we didn't get cable back just a few years I would sit down and watch whatever was on and when it was done I would watch what was on next. It didn't have too be good, just on (ok, maybe not football, but that is about it). Out of the 5 channels I would find the "best" show and watch it. I was distructive and time wasting. When someone else was watching tv I would sit down and watch. The tv would just draw me over. It really stinked. When I went off to RIT I didn't bring a tv, life was good and I learned a lot and worked on projects. When moving into a new home with a few other guys for the year I found one of them bringing a tv, but not only a tv, but a tivo! I thought I was in for it, but to my surprise found just the other way around. With tivo I rarely ever view actual tv when it is on. When I had some free time I would turn it on and see what was in the lineup. These 10 shows that we all liked and only these 10 shows would be listed. I would watch 1 and when the show was over it didn't continue over to the next show on that station, but brought you back to the menu. There I was able to asses what I had to do and if something was more important I would turn off the tv knowing it would all be there for me later. There are two factors to this that halped me. First being when the show was over it was _over_. Second being that I didn't have to stay around and watch the 10 oclock news to see the top story of xyz sense I knew that tivo would record it and if I could see it when I had the time (and only the 2 minute story that I wanted to see, deleting it after that).
To sum up I moved out of that house and recently found a store shelf tivo as the local circut city for $50. You can guess that I walked out the door with a grin that day.
-Benjamin Meyer
My Compaq persario 800 (dual Ppro) does just this anytime it is rebooted. In the lovely bios that they put on 4 boot floppies which means it takes forever to do anything.
Their DJ functionality is vagly similar to my application Sondra that I made this last summer.
/ sondra/.
Visit the Sondra website at: http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/desktop/programs
Sondra can be downloaded and used right now without buying any hardware.
Sondra will create playlists based upon how good the song is (based upon ranking), # of times played, how new it is. i.e. the better a song is the more it will be played.
And anyone can go and re-compile it for windows if they want.
-Benjamin Meyer
I am not saying that you should only stick to one desktop (note my mention of xmms). I use apps all the time that arn't "kde approved", but by using apps that are part of a desktop distrobution (see paragraph 1 of the previous post) you can almost assume that they will have a bit more polish then one that joe shmoe made. Ok so maybe I should have stated more then the "Cut" icon, but I figured that you would know what I mean. How about these: Constant widget look. Constant font look (this one really is high on my list), constant color, constant file dialog, constant drag and drop, constant mouse cut, copy, paste, constant help menu (and bug reporting tool), how is that for starters? It has more to do with app interaction then look and feel. Look and feel are just the icing on the cake.
-Benjamin Meyer
Within the article I found that they mentioned quite a bit about kde and I thought I might respond.
There are many reasons why every kde app developer wants to get their app withing the base distrobution! First your app suddenly gets installed on (insert total kde desktops # here, some big ass number compared to said developers app downloads). Second you app then gets checked over many other developers as they are checking out the new kde app and because they are coders looking at your work they can provide good bug reports to quickly fix the problem. You application is quickly changed to conform to the rest of the desktop, making your application more pollished. The translation team will go through and convert your application to X (insert supported # of langues here) languages and you don't have to go out and find someone to do it for each language. Your Makefile etc worries are over as you no longer have to worry about then anymore (other then setting up your own Makefile.am, but if you can't do that then you still have some work to do before you should even think about going to kde's cvs) Also you can go and download just about any iso and there will now be a good chance that your app is sitting there. Now wouldn't you want to be part of this?
Second the windows manager debate page didn't have too much oomp to it. (more on this in the next paragraph) I think the major reason with this is because people don't want to think of them as seperate items, and with kde it simply comes with the desktop and works. (I am not currently up to date on gnome, but last I readup I think they are doing the same thing of a gtk based simple window manger that just works and ditched e). So other then e or some desktop that can only afford twm there isn't much to say on this.
Kmail, Konq, kword... A pattern here? Yes! The pattern is concistancy which I am surprised they didn't mention anywhere in their article (other then the corel dude, but that wasn't this type of consistancy). The applications look similar, behave similarly etc. The biggest reason I hated Netscape was how it did copy/paste differently then all the rest of my application. The reason I love Konq is similar. It does everything I need and looks the same as the rest of my applications and behaves the same. (this goes along with my own development of Kinkatta as an aim client for kde ) Things as small as that they all use the same "cut" icon in the end make life easier. You get anti-alias working for qt and suddenly all of the kde app have it, no getting it working for each app (cough mozilla cough). The like bobs_big_blue_theme? Go ahead and put it on. If you have all of 1 desktop then you don't have to worry about some apps not having it (besides xmms, but it has its own theme anyway). So I think one of the real reasons that these applications won is because not by themselves, but as a group they make something bigger and stronger.
-Benjamin Meyer
No, they are looking even further then that. They want to be able to stream you the data over your boadband connection. You don't even get to have a disk! This simply gives them more power. When I first heard this at the conference I couldn't believe my ears that they would do that, but hey!
The mpeg2 format allows you to add new data to the stream as you go. Most players will simply ignore this new data, but the players that are hdtv compatible will use it to make the image bigger. I saw this working in person 2 years ago. A new format isn't going to replace mpeg2.
-Benjamin
I wrote a playlist generator and a frontend for it that has a thumb up/down feature. :) I thought you might enjoy it. You could easily adapt ti for use in such an app for the SliMp3.
m s/ sondra/
source, screenshots (of frontend), etc:
http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/desktop/progra
-Benjamin Meyer
"less than successful", I doubt it. More like they are *never* ever released. I keep looking every few months for webpads, but they are _always_ 6 months away. And every month they have more and more features, but still with a pda interface, when they have more then some laptops nowadays!!! It is crazy. What every happened to the $250 webpad that was nothing more then a X-terminal? No sound, hd, usb, 1GB cpu, fan, floppy, keyboard, serial, parallel, firewire, scsi, and kitcken sink. Back when web pads were the rage their was a good reason. They *were* cool. They were a thin as my Palm 3x. They ran forever because they only had to power the wirless network, a small ass 486 cpu, and a screen. I looked cool and it was cool. They ran QtEmbedded or some other embeded Xish thing and you could make cool little apps for it. As a X terminal you had as much power as your server did. You could write little gui apps that would control you mp3 server that pipes to your living room. (don't need no stinkin laptop speakers now!) I have been temped to try to build one myself, but I just don't have the money or the time right now. (see kinkatta.sourceforge.net) And if I was to do it myself it would be a whole lot bigger then some of the webpad/crappola laptops that are out there. So were are these? Does anyone know? One idea I had was to merge 3 or 4 palm into 1 and then write palm software for it, but there are still issues with that...
I own the Sony GWM-900. This is a 24 inch widescreen. I run it at 1600*1000, but the optimal res is 1920*1200 (or something around that). I got it for 1700 earlier last year and I know someone who has the SGI flat panel that you are talking about. When I first saw it I was shocked at how much smaller it was then mine. Granted it runs at 1600*1000 also, but the screen is only 19" or so diagnally and this isn't saying much when it is a wide screen. Personally I am happy with my choice. The dual input, crystal clear image, yah it is sweet.
OFF TOPIC, but on the same page as the keyboard!!
scroll down all the way to the botom or here is the link:
http://zzz.com.ru/pic98.jpg
It is the triangle problem and to stop many of you from banging your head here is the solution:
The top image is not a triangle... The red and dark green triangle do not form a straight lines and there slopes are different the what should be the slope of the large triangle. The top image is "concave down" while the bottom image is "concave up" The area of the slope when added up makes 1, thus where the box comes from.
From that start of Kinkatta (formally Kaim, kinkatta.sourceforge.net) two years ago one of my top priotities have been to get others involved. When I get e-mails I try to answer them right away and if it is a problem I save the e-mail and send another repley once it is fixed in cvs. I constantly ask people for problems that they have so I can fix it, I have been accepting patches and all of the other normal things a good lead developer should do. I figured that doing all of the above would make my app the best it could be. All of these would get people involved and they would know that if they submited their problems that they would not be ignored. When other developers have found interest in working in Kinkatta I have tried to help them out in getting involved. I wrote a hacking file that helps expleain what code is where. I would give them little bugs to try to fix and so forth until they were comfortable with the system. I do not think that I would have been anywhere as successfull if I hadn't done any of these and am surprised that people arn't doing them in the first place.
If you want all the latest bug fixes and features. Of course that was in the hay days. Now we are very stable and only release once a month at most with 3 or 4 bug fixes. Oh and I should have added that we don't change the format within a month or anything. There was a good 6 months per format easy. Oh and concidering how small of a user base our app has things can work out a little easier.
This is the story of my app, Kinkatta ( http://kinaktta.sourceforge.net/ ). It originally was a QT only app and only recently did it move over to utilizing KDE. But that in itself isn't exactly what this is about so I will talk about the more spisific case. From .25 to .91 today we have gone through I believe 4 different formats in which we save our settings, buddylists and so forth. In each of the changes we had to add some code to convert it over. The best solution we found is to know our users and make sure they know about us. What I mean about that is that we only support the previous settings format and make sure everyone uses it. Kinkatta's users are kept informated when a new release is out through a number of ways. We then keep that format for as long as it takes for us to be sure that 99% of the users are using that format. One of the nice things incorperated into kinkatta is the auto-check feature. On login it will goto the webpage and see if there is a new version and if there is then it will tell the user. This prompts them to stay up with the new releases much more then if the feature was not there (and yes you can disable it). Do to the gpl/lgpl nature of the app people will upgrade more often and are unlikly to stay with version 0.64.1 This is a true plus point for the open source. Because of it we havn't had to worry about users who don't want to pay the 29.95 for the new version.
Yah, the video stuff would get ripped out, but the DirectShow stuff is underneith that and isn't hardware dependant. DirectShow is the underlying framework that connects the dvd player system. Direct3d/video is only used to display stuff. You have to either A) write your own compatable direct show for linux. B) Port MS directShow to linux. C) Use one of the current Ditrect show type things currently in linux. I doubt B happend. The only linux alt I know of is Gstreamer's setup and all of the current open source dvd projects systesm. Both probably are missing things that they need. If they did want to keep the same codebase it would be a hell of a lot of work.
-Ben
If they are using the same codebase as the windows team then they had to have ported Direct X to linux. Under MS's OEM clause all DVD players that want to be certified have to be using Direct X. An OEM wouldn't use one that isn't certified. If they did in fact to this and did it in a clean room way then they could release it open... But that is another topic. On the SCSI thing I am ruff on this ( my systems are now ide ), but I recall having no issues with working with SCSI or ide to access the drive. (But I could be wrong on this and if so then I can be spanked with a thousand nodles...)
Hehe, looking at the article again you are right, I guess I should have thunk about it for a sec. My appologies, sorry. It is much more a hardware review then a lindvd review. The title on the slashdot article made it to be a lindvd review more then a laptop review. I would be happy to write a review of of the lindvd player for you. I have about 400 dvd's I can test with(i.e. I cover all of the different things a dvd can do) here to test out the system fully. Just about anything you would want to test out on a dvd player with. Combined with my previous dvd development experiance I can dig up quite a bit for even the hardcore linux folks.
Ugg, talk about speaking out of your ass. Because the gui is the same means that everything else will be? Why would that be again? Speaking from first hand experiance (I was on the lsdvd team) the underlying code is entirly differenet. Heck other then the "skin" on the gui it to is probably a re-write too. There are many many spisific things that Linux is a part of that affects the end result that have nothing to do with the fact that it "has the same ui" The entire unerlayer (unless they ported direct show) is different then what was there before.
Where are the test disk? Motion menu's? Subpics? Stream tests? This is not a DVD player review by any means.
There is bit all about scsi vs ide. This is a very very moot point. It may be an issue under windows, but not linux. There is nothing special about saying that it can do both. Kinda like me saying I can boot off of both. Woopie.
The all important LinDVD performs quite well but not perfect. With most DVDs you will notice no difference from that of a standard hardware decoder but there are a few points on some "action-packed" movies that will skip a bit. Keep in mind that this is still a software DVD player on a laptop and the first iteration of the Linux version.
This is no excuse. They are running 2.4, A 900mhz machine and they are using video acceleration. Cough my 450 cough... Unless the problem is with pthreads (which it might be if they didn't fix that) I would say that they have some work to do.
So here are some real questions that I want to know about. How about macrovision? Is it there? Can you take screenshots? Is there an video out? How about the kernel. Does the dvd player use a spesific kernel to run? Can I upgrade to 2.4.9 without it blowing up? What about changing distrobution? Will it blow up then? Are only Cakdera linux 2.4 binaries provided? What about the defacto red hat 6.x?
What about CSS, I presume it is kernel mode. Does that app barf when you run gdb on it? Did you test out the player with a large number of dvd's to see if any of them would fail? What about region changing. How well does it support that? Do you have to mount the drive before playing? How much cpu does it use while watching your average film? Can it play files? Can it play vcd's? How about SVCD? Does it do Kariokee mode? Can it play regular pcm (wav) file streams? How does the audio sound on the laptop? Can you pump it out to real speakers? Can you run more then just the DVD player at once? Does the ui play frendly with the rest of the desktop (kde, gnome, etc) How fast can you fast forward it? Can you make it go slow? Can you frame advace? Do multiple angle's work? Can it handle cool things like the Ghostbusters msk3000 subpic overlay and not loss performace? Can it handle non-css content (i.e. porn). Can you use 2 cpu's?
Sigh this isn't a review this is just a add for linuxhardware.org
When will the box set of 1-6 (DVD) come out? Anyone know? Anyone have any information about it?
The trademarks were not given approval until 2001-01-23.
Kaim started more then a year before that and Gaim started in 1998.
If a company abandons a trademark for 3 years it is considered lost.
In 1999 AOL sent us a legal letter asking us to remove the aol images and name from our applications, they did not in any way refer to the aim name as one of the things we had to remove. By doing this they showed that they did not have a vested interest in the name which can *void*there trademark application which states that they first started using it back in 97 when it wasn't until recently that they cared about it. Also by not telling us to remove the name then, they were in essence giving us the right to use the name.
Gaim and Kaim can be argued are different enough from the word aim to be ok.
The reason that they sent us the notice of infringement was that they fear that kaim and gaim would "dilute" the aim name, when in fact both of our applications are superior to the official AOL linux client. In that regard you can argue that their clients were diluting the trademark and we would boosting it!
But even with all these things going for us this is a pure case of the big bad company beating up on the loyal fans. Here we had given our sweat and tears making an application to connect with and in the end promoting them. They have made it harder and harder to do this and for me this is the last straw.
As of the next release of Kaim it will have a new name. You can submit name ideas to kaim-developer@lists.sourceforge.net Submit a funny name and a real name. :) For those of you who have
been using Kaim we thank you. Kaims current status is very stable.
Because of that I will be fixing up the last few bugs and releasing the
next version as 1.0 To bad it can't be called Kaim.
The official kde aol client kit is being revamped as a jabber client. The Kaim development team will most likely move over and join the kit team. Kaim has done what Iset out to do. It is a stable aim client with a clean interface. But that was then this is now. Next comes the Jabber client. If you are trying to decide what im server you should go to Iwould recommend jabber. Did you know you can run your own jabber server? Heck jabber is so much better then aim it isn't funny. This probably isn't the end of aol's attack so get out now. Be part of the resistance! Get yourself and others away from aim. Here are two links to jabber sites.
http://www.jabber.org/
http://gabber.sourceforge.net/
Oh and one last thing... Hehe I don't mean to start something, but in a way (not really, but you get what I mean) it is now kinda illegal to have kaim and gaim on your computers. So stick it to the man and where is your mirror?
If you wish to contact me you can do so at icefox@mediaone.net
Grr I submitted a similar story also with Kaim, but is was rejected. Head over to http://kaim.sourceforge.net/ to see the whole trial and tribulation. Pretty much kaim also has to change our name, but I am so fed up with AOL that I might just pull kaim.