Why should using/dev/dsp lock out ALSA apps, or even other OSS apps for that matter?
Either way, on my SuSE 10.0 installation (with an SB Audigy), running RealPlayer, XMMS and Quake 3 all at once (all of which should be outputting to OSS) seems to work absolutely fine. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the infrastructure I can see, at least.
Actually, ALSA supports software mixing (and hardware mixing on some hardware) of different sound applications; see information on its dmix plugin. When used in conjunction with ALSA's OSS emulation, this allows (most) sound-using applications to co-operate.
Win-Pause opens System Properties on Windows ME too, at least. Can someone check this on earlier Windowses?
Of course, the die-hards with 101/102 key keyboards or worse are going to have problems with that, but they can usually find their version info on their own.
This makes choosing the right Windows version to install almost as hard as choosing the right Linux distribution. Imagine the sales:
- 1 copy of Windows Vista, please. - Will that be Starter Edition, Home Basic Edition, Home Premium Edition, Professional Edition, Small Business Edition, Enterprise Edition or Ultimate Edition? - Uh... Never mind, just give me the latest openSUSE Linux.
One can only hope...
Alternative ending:
- Does the Enterprise Edition come with Kirk or Picard?
A lot of these problems can be avoided by capitalising headlines as normal sentences. "Self-repairing spacecraft uses Ant logic" and "Self-repairing spacecraft uses ant logic" are easy to tell apart (assuming you can trust the writer to capitalise correctly, which may be unrealistic on Slashdot).
Another fine example of degenerate American English. B-)
The HP PSC series has been quite painful to configure for network use, especially on mixed Windows systems. HP has, for example, wrapped drivers together with a lot of other irrelevant software, preventing you from e.g. just reinstalling the printer driver. This is at least my experience with an HP PSC 1210; newer models may be better. Surprisingly, the Linux drivers are excellent.
That reminds me of Lotus Improv, the only sane spreadsheet program I've ever seen. I love its clear separation of the unrelated concepts of data structure and display position. My dad still occasionally uses Improv.
Way smaller than nanometers... if they're there, they're at the plank length...
You're wrong by at least 9 orders of magnitude. Based on observations, I'd say plank length is usually something like 1 to 10 metres. You mean Planck length, don't you?
Uh, the installation command is: yast2 -i mozilla flash-player, but you really don't need to do that unless you've told YaST not to install Flash; Firefox and Flash are installed by default on SuSE 9.3. Anyway, my point was that Flash is well supported and often preinstalled on Linux.
Sorry, I thought dolphinling was confused about Shockwave and Flash, but it turns out I was. Anyway, whether Shockwave works or not on Linux is mostly irrelevant; I can't say I've ever needed it. Flash is annoying enough, thank you.
Huh? Works fine in Mozilla for me. RPM version data follows:
> rpm --qf "%{NAME} - %{SUMMARY}: %{VERSION}\n%{VENDOR}\n" -q flash-player mozilla flash-player - Macromedia Flash plugin: 7.0.25.0 SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany mozilla - The Open Source successor of the Netscape browser: 1.7.5 SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany
Beneath a Steel Sky was reimplemented by the ScummVM team based on source code provided to the ScummVM team by Revolution Software Ltd. The original BaSS source code was not open sourced, but the ScummVM reimplementation is open source. Quoting from ScummVM AUTHORS file:
Special thanks to: [...]
Tony Warriner and everyone at Revolution Software Ltd. for sharing
with us the source of some of their brilliant games, allowing us to
release Beneath a Steel Sky as freeware... and generally being
supportive above and beyond the call of duty.
Similarly the original Star Control II source (PC or 3DO) was never released; what Toys for Bob released was a barely working Windows port of the 3DO version. This has been cleaned up into The Ur-Quan Masters.
SuSE put MP3 support back in 9.3 later; using YaST Online Update allows you to select MP3-enabled packages (grouped in Multimedia Option Packs, if you just want them all), and the FTP install seems to get the MP3-enabled versions, too. Not a problem if you run updates anyway (which you should) or are using the CD ISOs and want additional packages from the DVD edition.
In my experience, lots of old Windows 95/98/Me software fails to run properly without administrator rights due to nasty habits like writing lots of stuff all over the system registry and/or Windows directory. XP Home also makes the problem worse by making it very hard to set file access privileges. All in all, the problem here is that running most Windows software with lower privileges doesn't work, so nobody sets up their system with limited privileges. Also, there is too much stuff you have to do manually to switch to the right privilege level for every task that you have to understand to actually gain anything for the added complexity.
In contexts where the system administrator and user are two different people (and the system administrator is on the job), things usually work smoothly. These contexts are also those for which software is properly written; how much office software needs administrator access to run? The problem comes when you have a clueless user who is also admin for a machine; you try explaining to people why they should have to type a password (administrator password) to install something and when they should enter this password without confusing them or discouraging them from using limited privilege accounts altogether. Unfortunately, this sort of protection is almost useless if the user with the admin password is clueless.
However, I see no reason why Internet-facing software shouldn't be written to drop privileges on startup, much like a lot of suid root binaries open the files they need and then drop to normal user privilege levels. For example, preventing IE from installing or modifying stuff all over the OS would help a lot.
Microsoft could release an update to disable this functionality, but could they do so legally? Since when has Microsoft had the right to disable functionality on my computer at will?
Furthermore, the hack described by The Register involves using RegEdit to make the changes to what is apparently a configuration file for the installation program. I fail to see how Microsoft could even argue that using a tool they have written for its intended purpose (changing settings for Windows and Windows-based software) is illegal. What's the fundamental, legal difference between changing a value in RegEdit and checking a check box in Control Panel?
You could even argue that Microsoft put the functionality there and have to support it. In fact, you could even argue that Microsoft would not have the right to disable this functionality in a patch without warning the user (although their boilerplate patch EULA probably qualifies as a warning even though it probably isn't legally binding), as that would be functionally equivalent to a trojan.
If you download a warez copy of XP Pro, the person distributing XP Pro to you is violating copyright by distributing XP Pro to others without permission. In many countries, you're allowed to modify software for personal use in any way you like (assuming you aren't breaking any other laws by doing so, of course).
So, in short, the difference is that in some places, one is illegal and the other is legal. The moral view on this naturally depends on how much money you feel Microsoft should get.
Actually, Phoenix does sell a browser that runs off its own little operating system; FirstWare Connect. The article seems to be correct in this respect.
Swedish is quite similar to Norwegian, but the differences in spelling will almost certainly prevent all common machine translation systems with support for Swedish but not Norwegian from producing a meaningful translation.
And in case it doesn't, it means "I'd like to warn everyone who's going to go buy controllers after this. Check _carefully_ that the controller is supported by the kernel."
Slashdot Mirror
No. Flash and Shockwave are two different formats.
Why should using /dev/dsp lock out ALSA apps, or even other OSS apps for that matter?
Either way, on my SuSE 10.0 installation (with an SB Audigy), running RealPlayer, XMMS and Quake 3 all at once (all of which should be outputting to OSS) seems to work absolutely fine. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the infrastructure I can see, at least.
Actually, ALSA supports software mixing (and hardware mixing on some hardware) of different sound applications; see information on its dmix plugin. When used in conjunction with ALSA's OSS emulation, this allows (most) sound-using applications to co-operate.
Does it do presentations as well?
Yes. With LaTeX Beamer, you can create good-looking presentations quickly (especially the kind with lots of formulae).
Actually, it was "Micro-soft", not "MicroSoft", according to my memory and Wikipedia.
One minor clarification: CP/M-86 became DR-DOS, not MS-DOS. MS-DOS was based on QDOS. The rest of the post seems to be correct.
Win-Pause opens System Properties on Windows ME too, at least. Can someone check this on earlier Windowses?
Of course, the die-hards with 101/102 key keyboards or worse are going to have problems with that, but they can usually find their version info on their own.
This makes choosing the right Windows version to install almost as hard as choosing the right Linux distribution. Imagine the sales:
- 1 copy of Windows Vista, please.
- Will that be Starter Edition, Home Basic Edition, Home Premium Edition, Professional Edition, Small Business Edition, Enterprise Edition or Ultimate Edition?
- Uh... Never mind, just give me the latest openSUSE Linux.
One can only hope...
Alternative ending:
- Does the Enterprise Edition come with Kirk or Picard?
A lot of these problems can be avoided by capitalising headlines as normal sentences. "Self-repairing spacecraft uses Ant logic" and "Self-repairing spacecraft uses ant logic" are easy to tell apart (assuming you can trust the writer to capitalise correctly, which may be unrealistic on Slashdot).
Another fine example of degenerate American English. B-)
The HP PSC series has been quite painful to configure for network use, especially on mixed Windows systems. HP has, for example, wrapped drivers together with a lot of other irrelevant software, preventing you from e.g. just reinstalling the printer driver. This is at least my experience with an HP PSC 1210; newer models may be better. Surprisingly, the Linux drivers are excellent.
That reminds me of Lotus Improv, the only sane spreadsheet program I've ever seen. I love its clear separation of the unrelated concepts of data structure and display position. My dad still occasionally uses Improv.
Way smaller than nanometers... if they're there, they're at the plank length...
You're wrong by at least 9 orders of magnitude. Based on observations, I'd say plank length is usually something like 1 to 10 metres. You mean Planck length, don't you?
Uh, the installation command is: yast2 -i mozilla flash-player, but you really don't need to do that unless you've told YaST not to install Flash; Firefox and Flash are installed by default on SuSE 9.3. Anyway, my point was that Flash is well supported and often preinstalled on Linux.
Sorry, I thought dolphinling was confused about Shockwave and Flash, but it turns out I was. Anyway, whether Shockwave works or not on Linux is mostly irrelevant; I can't say I've ever needed it. Flash is annoying enough, thank you.
Huh? Works fine in Mozilla for me. RPM version data follows:
> rpm --qf "%{NAME} - %{SUMMARY}: %{VERSION}\n%{VENDOR}\n" -q flash-player mozilla
flash-player - Macromedia Flash plugin: 7.0.25.0
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany
mozilla - The Open Source successor of the Netscape browser: 1.7.5
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany
Hope this helps.
Beneath a Steel Sky was reimplemented by the ScummVM team based on source code provided to the ScummVM team by Revolution Software Ltd. The original BaSS source code was not open sourced, but the ScummVM reimplementation is open source. Quoting from ScummVM AUTHORS file:
Special thanks to:
[...]
Tony Warriner and everyone at Revolution Software Ltd. for sharing
with us the source of some of their brilliant games, allowing us to
release Beneath a Steel Sky as freeware... and generally being
supportive above and beyond the call of duty.
Similarly the original Star Control II source (PC or 3DO) was never released; what Toys for Bob released was a barely working Windows port of the 3DO version. This has been cleaned up into The Ur-Quan Masters.
SuSE put MP3 support back in 9.3 later; using YaST Online Update allows you to select MP3-enabled packages (grouped in Multimedia Option Packs, if you just want them all), and the FTP install seems to get the MP3-enabled versions, too. Not a problem if you run updates anyway (which you should) or are using the CD ISOs and want additional packages from the DVD edition.
But if you want AMD64 optimisation or support you have to pay up.
Nonsense. The AMD64 version is available for download as a DVD image or for FTP installation. Read SuSE's own download page.
In my experience, lots of old Windows 95/98/Me software fails to run properly without administrator rights due to nasty habits like writing lots of stuff all over the system registry and/or Windows directory. XP Home also makes the problem worse by making it very hard to set file access privileges. All in all, the problem here is that running most Windows software with lower privileges doesn't work, so nobody sets up their system with limited privileges. Also, there is too much stuff you have to do manually to switch to the right privilege level for every task that you have to understand to actually gain anything for the added complexity.
In contexts where the system administrator and user are two different people (and the system administrator is on the job), things usually work smoothly. These contexts are also those for which software is properly written; how much office software needs administrator access to run? The problem comes when you have a clueless user who is also admin for a machine; you try explaining to people why they should have to type a password (administrator password) to install something and when they should enter this password without confusing them or discouraging them from using limited privilege accounts altogether. Unfortunately, this sort of protection is almost useless if the user with the admin password is clueless.
However, I see no reason why Internet-facing software shouldn't be written to drop privileges on startup, much like a lot of suid root binaries open the files they need and then drop to normal user privilege levels. For example, preventing IE from installing or modifying stuff all over the OS would help a lot.
Microsoft could release an update to disable this functionality, but could they do so legally? Since when has Microsoft had the right to disable functionality on my computer at will?
Furthermore, the hack described by The Register involves using RegEdit to make the changes to what is apparently a configuration file for the installation program. I fail to see how Microsoft could even argue that using a tool they have written for its intended purpose (changing settings for Windows and Windows-based software) is illegal. What's the fundamental, legal difference between changing a value in RegEdit and checking a check box in Control Panel?
You could even argue that Microsoft put the functionality there and have to support it. In fact, you could even argue that Microsoft would not have the right to disable this functionality in a patch without warning the user (although their boilerplate patch EULA probably qualifies as a warning even though it probably isn't legally binding), as that would be functionally equivalent to a trojan.
If you download a warez copy of XP Pro, the person distributing XP Pro to you is violating copyright by distributing XP Pro to others without permission. In many countries, you're allowed to modify software for personal use in any way you like (assuming you aren't breaking any other laws by doing so, of course).
So, in short, the difference is that in some places, one is illegal and the other is legal. The moral view on this naturally depends on how much money you feel Microsoft should get.
Actually, Phoenix does sell a browser that runs off its own little operating system; FirstWare Connect. The article seems to be correct in this respect.
Swedish is quite similar to Norwegian, but the differences in spelling will almost certainly prevent all common machine translation systems with support for Swedish but not Norwegian from producing a meaningful translation.
And in case it doesn't, it means "I'd like to warn everyone who's going to go buy controllers after this. Check _carefully_ that the controller is supported by the kernel."