All of the digital SLRs (i.e. Canon D30/D60/10D/1D/1Ds/300D, Nikon D1X/D1H/D2H/D100/D70, Fuji S1/S2/S3, Olympus E-1/E-10/E-20, Sigma SD-9/SD-10, Pentax *istD, Kodak DCS-14N) will essentially let you click and take photos as fast as you can, zero delay, not feeling any different from an SLR film camera at all.
You can get a good 11x17 out of a 3mp camera if the camera has clean pixels (i.e. Canon EOS-D30 SLR or Fuji S1 Pro SLR). If you're going to use a consumer camera (i.e. lens is permanently attached, sensor is not APS sized) then you will need 4mp.
My suggestion is to try to avoid voting Democrat or Republican. So long as people vote one of these two major parties, they simply reify and reinforce the tendency that both of them have developed (after years of playing as exclusive competitors to one another) to take whatever money is on the table in order to out-leverage and out-spend the other to get into or stay in office.
Anyone who didn't see this distinct possibility as the result of DMCA et. al. either has forcefully inserted their head in the sand or hasn't been paying attention.
Information wants to be free isn't just a hacker hippie value. It's the foundation of western society, from acadamia through government. The sharing of information is fundamental to the stable and just growth of any society.
When can anything be done regardless of the Constutition?
Anytime. Or more specifically, whenever the Supreme Court says they can and law enforcement, guns and all (beginning with the Justice Dept.), sides with government. Who appoints justices and cabinet-level law enforcement? The President.
This is why presidential elections matter, even though it's supposedly congress that makes laws... the existence of checks and balances is not foreordained by the nature of the universe; it depends on a populace who votes carefully to keep these checks and balances in place and to keep the power-hungry or purchasable out of office.
I paid $270 for a Creative MuVo 4GB when they were still hard to come by. At that price, a 15 gig iPod was only $30 more. Here's why I bought what I bought:
Battery life of about 15 hours.
Inexpensive, replaceable battery.
Uses CompactFlash; microdrive will be easy to replace/upgrade if necessary.
It's tiny... about as thick as my wallet, and smaller in width and length, too.
No special software needed; just mount the player as a hard drive, mkdir whatever directory structure you want, copy your.mp3 tracks or standard.m3u playlists over to the player's hard drive using cp.
Sure there are things I'd like to improve about it, but I didn't want to deal with the iPod battery and I had trouble finding out whether iPod could simply operate in "mount/mnt/player; cp *.mp3 *.m3u/mnt/player; umount/mnt/player" terms, without needed extra software (my understanding is that it can't, but again, I couldn't find a clear answer on the Web).
I'm not one of those virulent mobile phone haters (I use mine all the time), but imagining a long flight with a cabin full of people having inane conversations with their chums and having to yell over the engine noise... all 100+ of them... is my idea of a bad time.
I've also been a Linux guy since 1993. Before that, I was a SunOS guy with a deskside VME sun4. My FVWM setup used to kick a$$, and before that, I also used TWM.
And you're wrong.
Sound under Linux is solved since KDE and artsd. I can't speak for GNOME because I'm not as familiar, but my sense is that the level of functionality is the same.
I can and do have sound enabled on my desktop, at the same time as I use xmms to listen to mp3s, at the same time as the flash plugin is running. No problem. No problem at all. Sound support for my system (Thinkpad T22) is in the vanilla kernel tree, too. No problem at all.
I've also recently run Fedora installs on systems with Ensoniq AudioPCI cards and Via integrated sound. No problem at all.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand
I own a Beige Mac G3. You know, the ones that Apple assured users would be supported by the "new" MacOS... only it wasn't. It was dog-slow, SCSI didn't work, graphics were unaccelerated and it crashed all the time. After replacing the SCSI hard drive and CD-ROM with IDE models just to get Mac OS X to install and then fighting with video that was so slow it took tens of seconds just to resize a window, I gave up and installed Linux on it.
And away we went with Yellow Dog. And audio. No problem at all.
It's not trivial, but it's not all that hard either. After all, the Red Hat file structure hasn't changed and each version of Red Hat or Fedora Core is closely related to the last.
I'm using kernel-2.6.3-1.116 (from Fedora Core) in RH9. Here's how to do it:
1. Download a 2.6.x kernel RPM from the Fedora repository. Try to install in in RH9 with rpm -U. You'll get a list of failed dependencies.
2. Download the needed/depended-upon RPMs from the same Fedora repository.
3. rpm -U *.rpm.
4. Reboot.
I think I had to download/upgrade maybe a total 12 packages or so to get a 2.6.x kernel package to install into Red Hat 9. Then, once I had confirmed that I had a working 2.6.x-ready system, I proceeded to immediately download vanilla 2.6.5 and roll my own.;-)
The only speed bumps that I ran into were:
1. The X config, in which I had to change my mouse from/dev/psaux to/dev/input/mice, but this is now well-documented (i.e. search for "kernel 2.6 mouse" in google and you'll get the same answer).
2. My own hack-ugly kludge to sr_mod.c to enable my USB DVD-RAM drive no longer works in 2.6.x. I haven't yet dug into sr_mod.c to fix it in 2.6. But most people won't have this problem (i.e. their own patches that will need to be rewritten).
These are judgments even humans are unable to make cleanly or clearly. Entire panels of professional medical ethicists are routinely unable to agree on whether this or that process or product harms or hurts humans, which humans, and whether that harm or hurt protects the existence of the species in the long run or sabotages it.
Medical technology, genetically modified foods, physician-assisted suicide, abortion, the spread of electronics-based technology, nuclear power, invasion of Iraq...
This is basically Ethical Paradoxes 101; before we can program this sort of thing into machines, we'd have to be able to reason it all out ourselves!
is Descartes Error, by Antonio Damasio. It's quite readable and presents a case for the conscious self (including emotions) being, at least in part, a manifestation of, or mechanism for representing, the ongoing state of the body.
I don't, however, use their kernel; instead, I use a kernel.org kernel that I compile myself.
The fact that this isn't just possible, but is easily (i.e. drop-in) possible, indicates that There Is No Problem Here.
The kernel is binary compatible. The.config files are compatible (i.e. make oldconfig). The config/menuconfig/xconfig interfaces are the same. Red Hat's kernels track kernel.org version numbers, but just apply extra patches.
This is not a "fork" of the kernel in any meaningful way.
Becuase there are decades of applications that will instantly break if those names are changed... Imagine if Microsoft had said with Windows XP, "by the way, no software written for DOS/Win3.1/Win95/Win98/WinME/Win2000 will work with XP." In the UNIX world, this problem is exacerbated because lots of the code was around years before DOS was even around.
The Windows file structure is just as hard to use. From the UNIX user's perspective, at least. Everything seems to be dumped halphazardly into C:\Windows or C:\Winnt... config files, libraries, drivers, executables... you can't tell what anything is, there are hundreds of odd 3-letter extensions and no command (that I know of) like the "file" command to tell you just what these things are.
At least the directory names in UNIX mean something.../home is where the users "live" while/bin is for binaries,/lib is for libraries,/dev is for devices,/proc is for processes,/mnt is for mounts... c:\windows doesn't tell you very much, apart from "Windows is installed here!"
And as a final aside, the reason for abbreviations, i.e./proc rather than/processes is that/processes takes about twice as long to type... important when a very significant portion of your users (including essentially all of the enterprise, IT, and advanced-level users) live at the command line.
The more writers/language focused people that get interested in linux, the more possibility there will be for better walkthrough type documentation.
I am a writer/language-focused person. I even spent years working as a tech writer. I code like crap. Yet all I've "given" to the world is a few freeware command line utilities and a couple of scripts.
The motivation for much of open source is need. Someone needs (or at least wants) some software functionality that just isn't out there, or isn't out there for the right price, or in the right color, or whatever.
So he or she codes it up... because he or she wants the software to use. That's the motivation for everything I've ever given away... it was a program that I'd wanted, that I'd written, and then decided to throw it up on FTP somewhere in case anyone else could use it.
Putting in the hours on the code got me the functionality I needed. Putting in hours on documentation would get me nothing... I already know how to use the program, I wrote it.
Third parties, too, come to an open-source utility not because they're hoping to document it... They find it because they're looking for the functionality that it offers. So third party finds the utility they're looking for. It comes with poor documentation... but they spend time trying to figure it out because they need the functionality that it offers. Once they grok it and use it, they move on. Even if they're language-inclined, they gain little more by writing documentation for the program that they've taken the time to figure out... because writing a manual is just not why they bothered to figure it out in the first place.
It's really sad... and I'd love to be able to claim that I have more of a social conscience (i.e. enough of one to have written tons of open documentation), but so far I'm just not that nice a person.:-(
As an aside, I would stipulate that there are probably a number of coders who code not for utility value, but for prestige... so-called "hack value." But these people have just as little in the way of motivation to write docs. Where's the hack value or the prestige in writing a bunch of mundane, beginner-level prose? Better to spend the time making the code 50% faster or the user interface 50% more "skinnable" or something, from the prestige-coder's perspective.
There are people who write prose for prestige... But these people are all working on essays, journal articles, or "literary" novels... If you're really a person who's from the "language and prose world," writing manuals is about as low-prestige as you can get.
Btw: one of the tenets of user interfaces is: if the user requires a manual, then the interface has failed in its task.
Stupid at best; ignores context, complexity of task at hand, thoroughness of job to be done, and any number of other variables.
If Boeing came up with a 747 that flew with a simple X-Box gamepad and required no pilot training to operate, would you buy a ticket? Or would you stick to the ubercomplex "failed interface" of a traditional 747 and demand a trained pilot who had read the books?
When you are in the hospital for surgery, would you rather have a trained nurse manning a heart monitor that shipped with a manual, or will any monkey do, since you're to be hooked up to a monitor with only one button, labeled "on" and "off" and only one indicator with two positions, labeled "alive" and "dead"?
Both are tasks requiring software and a user interface of some kind.
I'm still waiting for KMail to allow me to create HTML messages.:-( Until then, I use Evolution. But I'd prefer a native KDE mail client, and I much prefer KMail's speed to Evolution's sluggishness!
(I don't trust Mozilla with my mail, it's been too unstable over the years and I have a HUGE email archive that needs to be managed. Yes, I back it up frequently, but...)
P.S. For those about to say "Then Don't Send HTML Mail" or to complain about my need to create HTML email to send to Outlook users in my workgroup... WELCOME TO 2004.
25 minutes of MPEG-4 is what they claim on the Web site. That's not bad. I personally think any more than ten minutes of home video at any particular event begins to enter boring city. I certainly don't want to see a full two hours of little Jimmy's birthday or even Our Excellent Spring Break. A few minutes of footage is all that's required to get the gist of most events.
They won't make sure you don't REMEMBER the tune... Every time a tune floats through your head, they'll just deduct $2.79 from your bank account automatically. Every time you remember a scene from your favorite movie, they'll deduct $3.50 from your bank account automatically. If you remember a scene from a foreign film, they'll deduct $7.00 from your bank account automatically. And if you happen to visualize the Rolling Stones concert you went to last week, another $250.00 will be automatically deducted from your bank account.
If you accidentally imagine too many things and your bank balance goes negative, they will foreclose on your home and all of the proceeds will go to Time Warner or Viacom.
Aside from much better I/O performance, 2.6.x also has much better performance on my notebook (IBM T-series ThinkPad).
I don't know if it's due to SpeedStep support being in the kernel or what, but when I was running 2.4.x with the pre-emptible kernel patches, switching from wall power to battery power meant massive slowdowns, as though I had switched from a PIII-1GHz to a 100MHz Pentium classic. Simple commands like "ps" would take seconds to complete and screen redraws were visible. The whole system would feel like sludge. In spite of this fact, battery life was relatively poor. The combined effect (much slowed system, very short battery life) meant that it was difficult to get anything at all done on battery power.
Now with 2.6.x, when I switch to battery power, there is no perceptible slowdown whatsoever when compared to wall power, and battery life is much improved. Downside: suspending 2.6.x kills USB-uhci, so I've had to compile it as a module and hack up my suspend/resume scripts to reload it each time. But for the speed increase, it's well worth the trouble.
I'll bet nearly any music you can name would sound just as good with a $15 pair of headphones on a $600 flight to Hawai'i with the reamining $21,785.00 having gone to the charity of your choice...
Um, ask anyone in sociology, economics or even anthropology and you'll find that Marx's analysis of capital as a system is still canonical, though some (i.e. Harvey in Limits to Capital) have offered further analysis. Capital remains a seminal work in the social sciences; that can't be debated by anyone who hopes to be taken seriously as an academic or even as a thinker.
Sorry, but I own the product and am one of the few that have it installed and working in Red Hat 9 and I have personally edited the wpolauncher script to do all sorts of things, just to get it to load in a glibc 2.3.2 environment.
The FACTS are:
1) When it was released, the WPO wine would NOT run the other software that I ran under wineHQ wine (i.e. MS Office 97). Since there were never any real updates to WPO wine, this continues to be the case, naturally.
2) If WPO wine was running, wineHQ wine would NOT launch, and would either crash (sometimes) or hang (the rest of the time). Through trial and error on the Corel WPO4L newsgroup, it was established that so long as the wineserver process from WPO wine was running, wineHQ wine would not start correctly; kill of WPO's wineserver and wineHQ wine would then start. Yes, they were in different trees on the filesystem. No, this did not prevent them from interfering with one another at runtime.
Yes, I am still running fonttastic years later so that I can get my cobbled together WPO2K4L to launch so that I can still get at my old documents. Unfortunately, because of the glibc-2.3.2 compatibility issue, things like printing absolutely do not work any longer. If you are sure that you have a fix to any of this, FEEL ABSOLUTELY FREE TO VISIT THE COREL NEWSGROUPS and post your fix. The people who shelled out $$$$ (including myself) for WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux will be happy to hear that you have a way to make this stuff all play nicely together, as they've spent four years trying to make it happen now with very mixed results.
(Clue: some of them are damn bright people and/or Linux coders, as well.)
P.S. I now use Crossover Office to run MS Office 2002, and I still have the same conflict: if WPO wine has been launched first, cxoffice will not start properly and instead will just sit around and crank, without ever displaying a window.
I don't care if you are in the Wine business yourself (which clearly you are), empirical fact trumps whatever is in the whitepapers.
But not everyone does have such resources or the capability to get them.
So you would be "perfectly happy" to go around imposing death on those that don't have any means of supporting themselves, but yet you reject the thought that someone might impose even so much as a tax on you.
Your answer and your position on basic human rights speak for themselves, and say a great deal about the problems that we have in the world today.
Slashdot Mirror
All of the digital SLRs (i.e. Canon D30/D60/10D/1D/1Ds/300D, Nikon D1X/D1H/D2H/D100/D70, Fuji S1/S2/S3, Olympus E-1/E-10/E-20, Sigma SD-9/SD-10, Pentax *istD, Kodak DCS-14N) will essentially let you click and take photos as fast as you can, zero delay, not feeling any different from an SLR film camera at all.
You can get a good 11x17 out of a 3mp camera if the camera has clean pixels (i.e. Canon EOS-D30 SLR or Fuji S1 Pro SLR). If you're going to use a consumer camera (i.e. lens is permanently attached, sensor is not APS sized) then you will need 4mp.
My suggestion is to try to avoid voting Democrat or Republican. So long as people vote one of these two major parties, they simply reify and reinforce the tendency that both of them have developed (after years of playing as exclusive competitors to one another) to take whatever money is on the table in order to out-leverage and out-spend the other to get into or stay in office.
Anyone who didn't see this distinct possibility as the result of DMCA et. al. either has forcefully inserted their head in the sand or hasn't been paying attention.
Information wants to be free isn't just a hacker hippie value. It's the foundation of western society, from acadamia through government. The sharing of information is fundamental to the stable and just growth of any society.
When can anything be done regardless of the Constutition?
Anytime. Or more specifically, whenever the Supreme Court says they can and law enforcement, guns and all (beginning with the Justice Dept.), sides with government. Who appoints justices and cabinet-level law enforcement? The President.
This is why presidential elections matter, even though it's supposedly congress that makes laws... the existence of checks and balances is not foreordained by the nature of the universe; it depends on a populace who votes carefully to keep these checks and balances in place and to keep the power-hungry or purchasable out of office.
Sure there are things I'd like to improve about it, but I didn't want to deal with the iPod battery and I had trouble finding out whether iPod could simply operate in "mount
I'm not one of those virulent mobile phone haters (I use mine all the time), but imagining a long flight with a cabin full of people having inane conversations with their chums and having to yell over the engine noise... all 100+ of them... is my idea of a bad time.
I've also been a Linux guy since 1993. Before that, I was a SunOS guy with a deskside VME sun4. My FVWM setup used to kick a$$, and before that, I also used TWM.
And you're wrong.
Sound under Linux is solved since KDE and artsd. I can't speak for GNOME because I'm not as familiar, but my sense is that the level of functionality is the same.
I can and do have sound enabled on my desktop, at the same time as I use xmms to listen to mp3s, at the same time as the flash plugin is running. No problem. No problem at all. Sound support for my system (Thinkpad T22) is in the vanilla kernel tree, too. No problem at all.
I've also recently run Fedora installs on systems with Ensoniq AudioPCI cards and Via integrated sound. No problem at all.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand
I own a Beige Mac G3. You know, the ones that Apple assured users would be supported by the "new" MacOS... only it wasn't. It was dog-slow, SCSI didn't work, graphics were unaccelerated and it crashed all the time. After replacing the SCSI hard drive and CD-ROM with IDE models just to get Mac OS X to install and then fighting with video that was so slow it took tens of seconds just to resize a window, I gave up and installed Linux on it.
And away we went with Yellow Dog. And audio. No problem at all.
It's not trivial, but it's not all that hard either. After all, the Red Hat file structure hasn't changed and each version of Red Hat or Fedora Core is closely related to the last.
;-)
/dev/psaux to /dev/input/mice, but this is now well-documented (i.e. search for "kernel 2.6 mouse" in google and you'll get the same answer).
I'm using kernel-2.6.3-1.116 (from Fedora Core) in RH9. Here's how to do it:
1. Download a 2.6.x kernel RPM from the Fedora repository. Try to install in in RH9 with rpm -U. You'll get a list of failed dependencies.
2. Download the needed/depended-upon RPMs from the same Fedora repository.
3. rpm -U *.rpm.
4. Reboot.
I think I had to download/upgrade maybe a total 12 packages or so to get a 2.6.x kernel package to install into Red Hat 9. Then, once I had confirmed that I had a working 2.6.x-ready system, I proceeded to immediately download vanilla 2.6.5 and roll my own.
The only speed bumps that I ran into were:
1. The X config, in which I had to change my mouse from
2. My own hack-ugly kludge to sr_mod.c to enable my USB DVD-RAM drive no longer works in 2.6.x. I haven't yet dug into sr_mod.c to fix it in 2.6. But most people won't have this problem (i.e. their own patches that will need to be rewritten).
These are judgments even humans are unable to make cleanly or clearly. Entire panels of professional medical ethicists are routinely unable to agree on whether this or that process or product harms or hurts humans, which humans, and whether that harm or hurt protects the existence of the species in the long run or sabotages it.
Medical technology, genetically modified foods, physician-assisted suicide, abortion, the spread of electronics-based technology, nuclear power, invasion of Iraq...
This is basically Ethical Paradoxes 101; before we can program this sort of thing into machines, we'd have to be able to reason it all out ourselves!
is Descartes Error, by Antonio Damasio. It's quite readable and presents a case for the conscious self (including emotions) being, at least in part, a manifestation of, or mechanism for representing, the ongoing state of the body.
Red Hat's applying a few patches.
.config files are compatible (i.e. make oldconfig). The config/menuconfig/xconfig interfaces are the same. Red Hat's kernels track kernel.org version numbers, but just apply extra patches.
I use Red Hat's distribution.
I don't, however, use their kernel; instead, I use a kernel.org kernel that I compile myself.
The fact that this isn't just possible, but is easily (i.e. drop-in) possible, indicates that There Is No Problem Here.
The kernel is binary compatible. The
This is not a "fork" of the kernel in any meaningful way.
Becuase there are decades of applications that will instantly break if those names are changed... Imagine if Microsoft had said with Windows XP, "by the way, no software written for DOS/Win3.1/Win95/Win98/WinME/Win2000 will work with XP." In the UNIX world, this problem is exacerbated because lots of the code was around years before DOS was even around.
/home is where the users "live" while /bin is for binaries, /lib is for libraries, /dev is for devices, /proc is for processes, /mnt is for mounts... c:\windows doesn't tell you very much, apart from "Windows is installed here!"
/proc rather than /processes is that /processes takes about twice as long to type... important when a very significant portion of your users (including essentially all of the enterprise, IT, and advanced-level users) live at the command line.
The Windows file structure is just as hard to use. From the UNIX user's perspective, at least. Everything seems to be dumped halphazardly into C:\Windows or C:\Winnt... config files, libraries, drivers, executables... you can't tell what anything is, there are hundreds of odd 3-letter extensions and no command (that I know of) like the "file" command to tell you just what these things are.
At least the directory names in UNIX mean something...
And as a final aside, the reason for abbreviations, i.e.
The more writers/language focused people that get interested in linux, the more possibility there will be for better walkthrough type documentation.
:-(
I am a writer/language-focused person. I even spent years working as a tech writer. I code like crap. Yet all I've "given" to the world is a few freeware command line utilities and a couple of scripts.
The motivation for much of open source is need. Someone needs (or at least wants) some software functionality that just isn't out there, or isn't out there for the right price, or in the right color, or whatever.
So he or she codes it up... because he or she wants the software to use. That's the motivation for everything I've ever given away... it was a program that I'd wanted, that I'd written, and then decided to throw it up on FTP somewhere in case anyone else could use it.
Putting in the hours on the code got me the functionality I needed. Putting in hours on documentation would get me nothing... I already know how to use the program, I wrote it.
Third parties, too, come to an open-source utility not because they're hoping to document it... They find it because they're looking for the functionality that it offers. So third party finds the utility they're looking for. It comes with poor documentation... but they spend time trying to figure it out because they need the functionality that it offers. Once they grok it and use it, they move on. Even if they're language-inclined, they gain little more by writing documentation for the program that they've taken the time to figure out... because writing a manual is just not why they bothered to figure it out in the first place.
It's really sad... and I'd love to be able to claim that I have more of a social conscience (i.e. enough of one to have written tons of open documentation), but so far I'm just not that nice a person.
As an aside, I would stipulate that there are probably a number of coders who code not for utility value, but for prestige... so-called "hack value." But these people have just as little in the way of motivation to write docs. Where's the hack value or the prestige in writing a bunch of mundane, beginner-level prose? Better to spend the time making the code 50% faster or the user interface 50% more "skinnable" or something, from the prestige-coder's perspective.
There are people who write prose for prestige... But these people are all working on essays, journal articles, or "literary" novels... If you're really a person who's from the "language and prose world," writing manuals is about as low-prestige as you can get.
Download RPM in Web browser.
.RPM file, which has a cute icon like a little open box.
Double-click on "home" icon to open file manager.
Double-click on
GUI appears asking you to confirm installation of the package and any dependencies.
User clicks to accept. Popup asks for root password. User enters password.
Package(s) is/are installed, with progress bar.
Success dialog is displayed.
How is this difficult?
Btw: one of the tenets of user interfaces is: if the user requires a manual, then the interface has failed in its task.
Stupid at best; ignores context, complexity of task at hand, thoroughness of job to be done, and any number of other variables.
If Boeing came up with a 747 that flew with a simple X-Box gamepad and required no pilot training to operate, would you buy a ticket? Or would you stick to the ubercomplex "failed interface" of a traditional 747 and demand a trained pilot who had read the books?
When you are in the hospital for surgery, would you rather have a trained nurse manning a heart monitor that shipped with a manual, or will any monkey do, since you're to be hooked up to a monitor with only one button, labeled "on" and "off" and only one indicator with two positions, labeled "alive" and "dead"?
Both are tasks requiring software and a user interface of some kind.
If you're gonna spend $500 on booze...
Logan Fils
I'm still waiting for KMail to allow me to create HTML messages. :-( Until then, I use Evolution. But I'd prefer a native KDE mail client, and I much prefer KMail's speed to Evolution's sluggishness!
(I don't trust Mozilla with my mail, it's been too unstable over the years and I have a HUGE email archive that needs to be managed. Yes, I back it up frequently, but...)
P.S. For those about to say "Then Don't Send HTML Mail" or to complain about my need to create HTML email to send to Outlook users in my workgroup... WELCOME TO 2004.
25 minutes of MPEG-4 is what they claim on the Web site. That's not bad. I personally think any more than ten minutes of home video at any particular event begins to enter boring city. I certainly don't want to see a full two hours of little Jimmy's birthday or even Our Excellent Spring Break. A few minutes of footage is all that's required to get the gist of most events.
They won't make sure you don't REMEMBER the tune... Every time a tune floats through your head, they'll just deduct $2.79 from your bank account automatically. Every time you remember a scene from your favorite movie, they'll deduct $3.50 from your bank account automatically. If you remember a scene from a foreign film, they'll deduct $7.00 from your bank account automatically. And if you happen to visualize the Rolling Stones concert you went to last week, another $250.00 will be automatically deducted from your bank account.
If you accidentally imagine too many things and your bank balance goes negative, they will foreclose on your home and all of the proceeds will go to Time Warner or Viacom.
Aside from much better I/O performance, 2.6.x also has much better performance on my notebook (IBM T-series ThinkPad).
I don't know if it's due to SpeedStep support being in the kernel or what, but when I was running 2.4.x with the pre-emptible kernel patches, switching from wall power to battery power meant massive slowdowns, as though I had switched from a PIII-1GHz to a 100MHz Pentium classic. Simple commands like "ps" would take seconds to complete and screen redraws were visible. The whole system would feel like sludge. In spite of this fact, battery life was relatively poor. The combined effect (much slowed system, very short battery life) meant that it was difficult to get anything at all done on battery power.
Now with 2.6.x, when I switch to battery power, there is no perceptible slowdown whatsoever when compared to wall power, and battery life is much improved. Downside: suspending 2.6.x kills USB-uhci, so I've had to compile it as a module and hack up my suspend/resume scripts to reload it each time. But for the speed increase, it's well worth the trouble.
$22,400.00 for a pair of speakers?
I'll bet nearly any music you can name would sound just as good with a $15 pair of headphones on a $600 flight to Hawai'i with the reamining $21,785.00 having gone to the charity of your choice...
Um, ask anyone in sociology, economics or even anthropology and you'll find that Marx's analysis of capital as a system is still canonical, though some (i.e. Harvey in Limits to Capital) have offered further analysis. Capital remains a seminal work in the social sciences; that can't be debated by anyone who hopes to be taken seriously as an academic or even as a thinker.
Sorry, but I own the product and am one of the few that have it installed and working in Red Hat 9 and I have personally edited the wpolauncher script to do all sorts of things, just to get it to load in a glibc 2.3.2 environment.
The FACTS are:
1) When it was released, the WPO wine would NOT run the other software that I ran under wineHQ wine (i.e. MS Office 97). Since there were never any real updates to WPO wine, this continues to be the case, naturally.
2) If WPO wine was running, wineHQ wine would NOT launch, and would either crash (sometimes) or hang (the rest of the time). Through trial and error on the Corel WPO4L newsgroup, it was established that so long as the wineserver process from WPO wine was running, wineHQ wine would not start correctly; kill of WPO's wineserver and wineHQ wine would then start. Yes, they were in different trees on the filesystem. No, this did not prevent them from interfering with one another at runtime.
Yes, I am still running fonttastic years later so that I can get my cobbled together WPO2K4L to launch so that I can still get at my old documents. Unfortunately, because of the glibc-2.3.2 compatibility issue, things like printing absolutely do not work any longer. If you are sure that you have a fix to any of this, FEEL ABSOLUTELY FREE TO VISIT THE COREL NEWSGROUPS and post your fix. The people who shelled out $$$$ (including myself) for WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux will be happy to hear that you have a way to make this stuff all play nicely together, as they've spent four years trying to make it happen now with very mixed results.
(Clue: some of them are damn bright people and/or Linux coders, as well.)
P.S. I now use Crossover Office to run MS Office 2002, and I still have the same conflict: if WPO wine has been launched first, cxoffice will not start properly and instead will just sit around and crank, without ever displaying a window.
I don't care if you are in the Wine business yourself (which clearly you are), empirical fact trumps whatever is in the whitepapers.
But not everyone does have such resources or the capability to get them.
So you would be "perfectly happy" to go around imposing death on those that don't have any means of supporting themselves, but yet you reject the thought that someone might impose even so much as a tax on you.
Your answer and your position on basic human rights speak for themselves, and say a great deal about the problems that we have in the world today.