No, WinModems died out fairly rapidly for obvious reasons.
I can't talk for America, but here in the UK it's practically impossible to get a non-winmodem these days.
Also, how did WinModems die out for "obvious reasons"? It obviously wasn't because they worked and were cheaper than normal modems and I seriously doubt that it had anything to do with Linux. WinModems are alive and kicking down at your local PC store.
No. Real modems work. WinModems don't. Spend the $20 to upgrade.
WinModems work just fine. On Windows machines. Why should Joe Bloggs spend $20 extra for something that, to him, gives him exactly no additional benifit.
You're correct to say that WinModems don't work because they require software to replace the missing hardware - but to imply they "don't work" is flat out wrong.
The vast majority of modems on the market these days are winmodems. They are everywhere.
Real modems are often double to three times more expensive and (to the end user) do exactly the same as a WinModem. Therefore they are seen as a rip-off.
Telling someone that they have to go purchase something else to replace an item that already works perfectly is hardly going to encourage people to switch.
... if his experience with WinModems is anything like mine.
Is there any simple (as in Joe User simple, not simple as in run this script, patch this file, compile this kernal simple) way to get WinModem support under Linux?
I always said that the user interface needed to be slicker to get people using it. With Redhat 9 (and Gnome) I think it's there - but the absolute killer for me is that i've wasted far too much time so far farting around with trying to get a WinModem to work.
If Joe User can't dial up to check his hotmail - Linux will be off the PC before you know it.
Ok, this is a serious question, not an attempt to start a flame war or anything, but why does this always happen to MS systems? I use a Mac and have only had to work with Windows at my college and a few other times here and there. I've NEVER seen a live Mac trojan or worm and have only ever encountered one virus (the 666 one) that wasn't really malicious and only added some extra resources labeled "(Box thingy)666" in an application's resource fork that caused an application to run a little slower. And that was 4 or 5 years ago in OS 7.5 or 8.
Couple of reasons:
There are far less Mac's out there in the world than PC's with Windows on them. Therefore when you're writing a worm which has the sole goal of infecting as many people as possible (which is what writers aim for these days) then you go for the majority.
There are a lot of unpatched versions of Internet Explorer out there. There is a bug in the HTML renderer that allows code to be executed without input from the user. Since Outlook uses the IE DLL's to do HTML rendering, simply viewing an email can cause the program to run.
Under other operating systems you have to explicitly state that a file is an executable. Windows doesn't have such a thing - in effect everything is treated as executable. Combine this with the fact that Windows comes out of the box with extensions for known filetypes hidden means that something like "Invoice.doc.exe" will be shown as "Invoice.doc".
Generally there are far more tech savvy people using OS X or Linux than Windows who don't blindly open unknown attachments.
Contratry to popular Slashdot belief, the fact that it's easy to get details of your contacts in your address book is not a major reason why worms propogate so frequently. I can write a perl script to extract the details from Pine or most other UNIX mail programs just as easily - the actual problem is getting the virus launched on the victims PC in the first place.
Since the original hardware manufacturers (Thompson) for TiVo in the UK have pulled out of the market and you can now only get them on eBay - is it actually worth purchasing TiVo if you live on our little island?
Alternativily I was thinking about purchasing a silent PC (such as the one at Tranquil PC) and installing MythTV on it, but I don't know how well it would work given that it's a hell of a lot more expensive than TiVo off eBay.
Also just looking at mini-itx.com I see something called OneBox. It looks to be running Windows but apparantly it allows you to run MAME on it too.
So, ignoring the waffle above - what i'm saying is
Is TiVo still a viable option in the UK despite the fact there is no hardware manfacturers? (ie. could they just pull out at any time)
Would a homebrew PVR be better? (it would have to be substantially given that it costs twice as much and requires work from me)
Would the tranquil PC or other box mentioned in the preview/. article be any good as a PVR? (processor power, graphics, IR, to name three things to think about)
Would something like a onebox be better?
I like Linux and I use it, but I'm loath to spend lots of money on a homebrew kit only to spend several hours tearing my hair out and not getting anywhere. If it's going to be that, I'd rather just pay more and have it work.
Has anyone built a PVR using a Mini-ITX? The thought of a silent small pc sitting below the television is a tad more acceptable than a standard PC shoved in a cupboard and padded to hell to reduce the noise.
Any recommendations or suggestions? Is the computer powerful enough for something like MythTV? How would you deal with the remote on one of these things?
His previous essay made sure to bash Apple for copying the original windows GUI for the Mac(!).
If you're talking about this (section entitled "Apple Copies Ideas From Microsoft") then you'll find that he admits that Microsoft copies stuff from Apple, but that Apple have copied things from Microsoft too. Which wouldn't seem a too unreasonable claim.
If you're going to claim someone is a troll, the least you could do is give us an example which isn't guaranteed to mislead us.
Here's a novel idea: Why not actually hold software companies to the promises they make? They promise you a product that suits your needs, make sure you get one. I think this sort of feedback would really bug the heck out the them. And well it should. They've been delivering crap for almost three decades now.
The problem is often that you're forced to accept the incomplete buggy and generally crap product because you have pressure from "on high" to deliver something that requires this piece of code.
It's all very well to say you'd stand back and tell them it isn't going to happen because the code is crap, however when you have a multi-million pound marketing campagne kicking off, several other companies with deals signed ready to provide auxillary services and support and a whole host of other interdependencies to have that all fall through because of a "few bugs" just isn't possible.
I'm more concerned on my MS boxes that MS only puts out one paid upgrade every 3-5 years. What's wrong with their R&D that it takes 3 to 5 years to put out an upgrade of any significance. I remember in the NT 3.5/3.51 days that MS said they'd be on an annual OS update schedule. That sure didn't last long.
It's because they have the majority market share. They don't need to make the effort. Other companies who want to gain market share need to find ways to make their product more attractive. The market leader has enought inertia and market penetration to not need to do this.
This is indicative of all markets not just IT and Microsoft.
a jury could reasonably conclude that the log showing you downloaded a 10,303,334mb file named "Metallica_Enter_Sandman.mp3" on such and such day is evidence that you downloaded a copyrighted song
Assuming that a 5 meg file at 192 kbps is 3 minutes 30 seconds long then a 10,303,334 meg file is approximately 13.75 years worth of Metalica.
How will Microsoft be able to take on Google? Google is currently every geek's favored search engine, and has wide popularity among everyone else as well.
Easy. They'll target non-geeks. There are more of them out there in the world.
Most people will use whatever produces the best results and, contratry to popular Slashdot belief, don't use "google" as a verb. If Microsoft do a better job than Google, then good for them. Competition is healthy and benefits us all.
I also find it odd that no-one has mentioned that this is a dupe of this article.
As an alternative, if you already have a Palm, try Plucker at http://www.plkr.org [plkr.org]. It's an offline HTML reader for Palm PDAs, and it's Free Software (GPL license). If you can get it in HTML or ASCII text, you can read it.
OT I admit, but once you've installed Plucker, head on over to here and either download and install Avantslash or point it to the one already set up on the site (you'll have to put up with my settings though).
Have you really looked at and understood the errors it found? Most cascade from putting TABLE inside FONT and serving a page as HTML 3.2 while using 4.x options. If you inserted FONT after BODY in practically any page you'd get a ton of errors too, even though they arise from a single mistake.
They're still errors. As for the tonne of errors, you get this in programming langauges too when one line causes the compiler to go out of whack and start flagging other lines as errors erronously. However it's still not much of an excuse to say "Hey, it's only one line causing the problem and it still compiles" when the compiler dumps 200k's worth of warnings to your terminal.
And lastly, you can't expect full compliance at all times from a page that sources HTML from elsewhere, such as advertisements which require ads be run without any modification to the markup provided, or contain other content that hasn't been vetted for compliance like story submissions.
Most advert code is standards complient because there isn't much to it. The story submissions at the most contain the A tag and possibly B and I'm at a loss to think of other tags which would be needed. Granted, it would be a difficult task to make the comments section validate because people can write comments in HTML.
But still, for a geek site that pushes for adherance of standard and open protocols and file formats (PNG over GIF, of which there are no PNG's on the front page at all - but a tonne of GIF's) it is a pretty poor show.
We represent www.pigsfly.com, and your unauthorized use of pigsfly's trade secret mark copright thingy is completely unacceptable. Please correct this infraction immediately, or we will tell Bill Gates, SCO, and Slashdot.
Whoops. I shall now go install Windows ME on a DX2-66 for my punishment.
OK, you web "coders", listen up. We, the general surfing public, are sick of Java, Flash, Javascript, CSS and "dynamic" anything. HTML was good enough for our grandparents and parents, HTML is good enough for us.
[snip] Look at Slashdot.
Yes, look at Slashdot. The geek site that is so ashamed of it's HTML, it blocks the validator.
If you try a different validator site, you find there are over a hundred errors on the front page.
Most people I know using Windows 2000 just blow past their EULAs without reading them. What was so onerous? I didn't think it was out of the ordinary for Media Player to fetch new DRM information with codec updates if the old DRM was cracked, and really didn't care because I hardly use it (I prefer RealOne's encoding.)
I installed Service Pack 3 a couple of weeks ago on a new PC and didn't see any EULA at all. I didn't do anything special either.
Or Palm got it right the first time, and you're a sore loser.
Your comment makes no sense unless I was a rabid OS zealot - which, despite the fact I'm posting to Slashdot, I'm not:o)
Personally I'll happily purchase whatever PDA by whatever manufacturer that meets my needs. Whoever made it concerns me very little. Although I did purchase my Vx (full price when it first came out 3 years ago) I've had given to me (and used a fair amount) Symbian (P800) and PocketPC (iPAQ 3850). I'm not aligned to any one manufacturer.
So do two address entries, or put the second address in the note field.
Why waste two address entries? Why can't you put it in one? How do you differentiate between the two without putting "Home" and "Work" somewhere in the persons name? Why should your notes section be filled with something that isn't a note?
It's cludges upon cludges for something that is really a rather basic requirement.
I assume the organizer on the PPC side is equivalent to the functionality in Outlook? Because that's only one feature up on palm (alarms), and since it has no sub-task nesting, it's still useless for real work.
There are plenty of other features the Palm lack, I just used those as an example.
Windows hasn't significantly updated Notepad since Win95, and the app has glaring deficiencies, but it hardly means Windows has been standing still.
I never stated the platform has been standing still. Indeed it hasn't, although the greatest leaps have been the update to the filing system, support for greater amounts of memory, support for additional media formats, colour screens and the movement from Motorola Dragonball CPU's to ARM. All hardware related.
The Palm platform has seen continuous improvement in almost every area since its inception, but they got a lot of things right in the first generation that didn't need changing.
Hardware, definately yes (although not without some coersion from other manufacturers - without MS, Symbian and Handspring Palm would have still been churning out black and white jobs). But, compare the PIM software of, say, the Palm III (released 1998) to that of the Tungstun T (released 2003) series. To my mind the only major differences have been a small amount of colour, the ability to tap on the menu bar (which was an OS level enhancement not application level), private appointments, support for bigger screen estate (which was hardware led and not software led) and repeating alarms. In 5 years.
It's not really a lot to ask and given that other PIM's and Manufacturers of PDA's sell well on the fact that they provide more than standard Palm functionality it wouldn't be too wide off the mark to suggest they are missing a trick or two by letting their software essentially rot.
Looking at the sales figures for Palm, they may still lead, but others are making significant inroads on, what was once, their market share. It would be naive to suggest that it didn't have anything to do with the underpowered nature of their software.
Yes, both, in fact. Palm has good applications built-in, and Clies come with really excellent additional ones.
Even if you aren't stuck with Outlook, i would still dispute your assertion. Palm's built in applications haven't seen a major overhawl in over 5 years - anyone who considers them "good" is either an undemanding user, happy with mediocrity or hasn't seen any other PIM's on organisers.
I wouldn't consider myself a power user but I find it pretty depressing in all this time Palm haven't figured out that people often have more than one address associated with a contact or that a task may need an alarm with it. That is just for starters.
Microsoft and Symbian have addressed all these issues in their OS' that Palm has failed to do so (and left the market open for DateBk5 and other PIM alternatives). I can't comment about Linux alternatives because i've never seen them but I would hazard a guess that they address the above too.
The SonyEricsson P800 has better PIM functionality than a Palm and it's primarily a mobile phone!
The Institute for Software Choice is saying that Governments and other organisations select the best tool for any particular job rather than being essentially biased towards Open Source.
Under this reasoning, Open Source would have several major points in its favour - mainly:
Open source code to adapt and modify
Open file formats
Free (as in beer) cost when purchased
Less restrictive licencing for republishing
Easy to maintain through open code even after the file format becomes "old"
Given all those initial advantages before you even start looking at the pros and cons of the actual software, I can't quite work out why Open Source feel they need this law in force to give them extra (and IMO, unneeded given the list above) advantages.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't talk for America, but here in the UK it's practically impossible to get a non-winmodem these days.
Also, how did WinModems die out for "obvious reasons"? It obviously wasn't because they worked and were cheaper than normal modems and I seriously doubt that it had anything to do with Linux. WinModems are alive and kicking down at your local PC store.
No. Real modems work. WinModems don't. Spend the $20 to upgrade.
WinModems work just fine. On Windows machines. Why should Joe Bloggs spend $20 extra for something that, to him, gives him exactly no additional benifit.
You're correct to say that WinModems don't work because they require software to replace the missing hardware - but to imply they "don't work" is flat out wrong.
- The vast majority of modems on the market these days are winmodems. They are everywhere.
- Real modems are often double to three times more expensive and (to the end user) do exactly the same as a WinModem. Therefore they are seen as a rip-off.
- Telling someone that they have to go purchase something else to replace an item that already works perfectly is hardly going to encourage people to switch.
Sure, it's a solution - but not a very good one.It could be worse.
It could be a for-profit company who don't release a free product at all.
Which would you prefer?
Is there any simple (as in Joe User simple, not simple as in run this script, patch this file, compile this kernal simple) way to get WinModem support under Linux?
I always said that the user interface needed to be slicker to get people using it. With Redhat 9 (and Gnome) I think it's there - but the absolute killer for me is that i've wasted far too much time so far farting around with trying to get a WinModem to work.
If Joe User can't dial up to check his hotmail - Linux will be off the PC before you know it.
Couple of reasons:
- There are far less Mac's out there in the world than PC's with Windows on them. Therefore when you're writing a worm which has the sole goal of infecting as many people as possible (which is what writers aim for these days) then you go for the majority.
- There are a lot of unpatched versions of Internet Explorer out there. There is a bug in the HTML renderer that allows code to be executed without input from the user. Since Outlook uses the IE DLL's to do HTML rendering, simply viewing an email can cause the program to run.
- Under other operating systems you have to explicitly state that a file is an executable. Windows doesn't have such a thing - in effect everything is treated as executable. Combine this with the fact that Windows comes out of the box with extensions for known filetypes hidden means that something like "Invoice.doc.exe" will be shown as "Invoice.doc".
- Generally there are far more tech savvy people using OS X or Linux than Windows who don't blindly open unknown attachments.
Contratry to popular Slashdot belief, the fact that it's easy to get details of your contacts in your address book is not a major reason why worms propogate so frequently. I can write a perl script to extract the details from Pine or most other UNIX mail programs just as easily - the actual problem is getting the virus launched on the victims PC in the first place.Alternativily I was thinking about purchasing a silent PC (such as the one at Tranquil PC) and installing MythTV on it, but I don't know how well it would work given that it's a hell of a lot more expensive than TiVo off eBay.
Also just looking at mini-itx.com I see something called OneBox. It looks to be running Windows but apparantly it allows you to run MAME on it too.
So, ignoring the waffle above - what i'm saying is
- Is TiVo still a viable option in the UK despite the fact there is no hardware manfacturers? (ie. could they just pull out at any time)
- Would a homebrew PVR be better? (it would have to be substantially given that it costs twice as much and requires work from me)
- Would the tranquil PC or other box mentioned in the preview
/. article be any good as a PVR? (processor power, graphics, IR, to name three things to think about)
- Would something like a onebox be better?
I like Linux and I use it, but I'm loath to spend lots of money on a homebrew kit only to spend several hours tearing my hair out and not getting anywhere. If it's going to be that, I'd rather just pay more and have it work.Has anyone built a PVR using a Mini-ITX? The thought of a silent small pc sitting below the television is a tad more acceptable than a standard PC shoved in a cupboard and padded to hell to reduce the noise.
Any recommendations or suggestions? Is the computer powerful enough for something like MythTV? How would you deal with the remote on one of these things?
If you're talking about this (section entitled "Apple Copies Ideas From Microsoft") then you'll find that he admits that Microsoft copies stuff from Apple, but that Apple have copied things from Microsoft too. Which wouldn't seem a too unreasonable claim.
If you're going to claim someone is a troll, the least you could do is give us an example which isn't guaranteed to mislead us.
The problem is often that you're forced to accept the incomplete buggy and generally crap product because you have pressure from "on high" to deliver something that requires this piece of code.
It's all very well to say you'd stand back and tell them it isn't going to happen because the code is crap, however when you have a multi-million pound marketing campagne kicking off, several other companies with deals signed ready to provide auxillary services and support and a whole host of other interdependencies to have that all fall through because of a "few bugs" just isn't possible.
It's because they have the majority market share. They don't need to make the effort. Other companies who want to gain market share need to find ways to make their product more attractive. The market leader has enought inertia and market penetration to not need to do this.
This is indicative of all markets not just IT and Microsoft.
Assuming that a 5 meg file at 192 kbps is 3 minutes 30 seconds long then a 10,303,334 meg file is approximately 13.75 years worth of Metalica.
That shouldn't be a crime, but the punishment.
Easy. They'll target non-geeks. There are more of them out there in the world.
Most people will use whatever produces the best results and, contratry to popular Slashdot belief, don't use "google" as a verb. If Microsoft do a better job than Google, then good for them. Competition is healthy and benefits us all.
I also find it odd that no-one has mentioned that this is a dupe of this article.
OT I admit, but once you've installed Plucker, head on over to here and either download and install Avantslash or point it to the one already set up on the site (you'll have to put up with my settings though).
Then you can read Slashdot on the go.
Try READING my comment again - at no point do I say that I never read the article.
I did, and it'll still never fly.
They're still errors. As for the tonne of errors, you get this in programming langauges too when one line causes the compiler to go out of whack and start flagging other lines as errors erronously. However it's still not much of an excuse to say "Hey, it's only one line causing the problem and it still compiles" when the compiler dumps 200k's worth of warnings to your terminal.
And lastly, you can't expect full compliance at all times from a page that sources HTML from elsewhere, such as advertisements which require ads be run without any modification to the markup provided, or contain other content that hasn't been vetted for compliance like story submissions.
Most advert code is standards complient because there isn't much to it. The story submissions at the most contain the A tag and possibly B and I'm at a loss to think of other tags which would be needed. Granted, it would be a difficult task to make the comments section validate because people can write comments in HTML.
But still, for a geek site that pushes for adherance of standard and open protocols and file formats (PNG over GIF, of which there are no PNG's on the front page at all - but a tonne of GIF's) it is a pretty poor show.
That's the joke :o)
Whoops. I shall now go install Windows ME on a DX2-66 for my punishment.
Come on, just reading the blurb on Slashdot makes it blatently obvious that it'll never work for 1001 reasons.
I'm all for OSS, but this is just a too "pie in the sky" for my liking.
[snip]
Look at Slashdot.
Yes, look at Slashdot. The geek site that is so ashamed of it's HTML, it blocks the validator.
If you try a different validator site, you find there are over a hundred errors on the front page.
Lead by example?
Check out the Tungstun T. A workmate has one and it's small and light enough to slip into his shirt pocket.
For me, the watch is a little too dorky and small :o)
I installed Service Pack 3 a couple of weeks ago on a new PC and didn't see any EULA at all. I didn't do anything special either.
Your comment makes no sense unless I was a rabid OS zealot - which, despite the fact I'm posting to Slashdot, I'm not :o)
Personally I'll happily purchase whatever PDA by whatever manufacturer that meets my needs. Whoever made it concerns me very little. Although I did purchase my Vx (full price when it first came out 3 years ago) I've had given to me (and used a fair amount) Symbian (P800) and PocketPC (iPAQ 3850). I'm not aligned to any one manufacturer.
So do two address entries, or put the second address in the note field.
Why waste two address entries? Why can't you put it in one? How do you differentiate between the two without putting "Home" and "Work" somewhere in the persons name? Why should your notes section be filled with something that isn't a note?
It's cludges upon cludges for something that is really a rather basic requirement.
I assume the organizer on the PPC side is equivalent to the functionality in Outlook? Because that's only one feature up on palm (alarms), and since it has no sub-task nesting, it's still useless for real work.
There are plenty of other features the Palm lack, I just used those as an example.
Windows hasn't significantly updated Notepad since Win95, and the app has glaring deficiencies, but it hardly means Windows has been standing still.
I never stated the platform has been standing still. Indeed it hasn't, although the greatest leaps have been the update to the filing system, support for greater amounts of memory, support for additional media formats, colour screens and the movement from Motorola Dragonball CPU's to ARM. All hardware related.
The Palm platform has seen continuous improvement in almost every area since its inception, but they got a lot of things right in the first generation that didn't need changing.
Hardware, definately yes (although not without some coersion from other manufacturers - without MS, Symbian and Handspring Palm would have still been churning out black and white jobs). But, compare the PIM software of, say, the Palm III (released 1998) to that of the Tungstun T (released 2003) series. To my mind the only major differences have been a small amount of colour, the ability to tap on the menu bar (which was an OS level enhancement not application level), private appointments, support for bigger screen estate (which was hardware led and not software led) and repeating alarms. In 5 years.
It's not really a lot to ask and given that other PIM's and Manufacturers of PDA's sell well on the fact that they provide more than standard Palm functionality it wouldn't be too wide off the mark to suggest they are missing a trick or two by letting their software essentially rot.
Looking at the sales figures for Palm, they may still lead, but others are making significant inroads on, what was once, their market share. It would be naive to suggest that it didn't have anything to do with the underpowered nature of their software.
Even if you aren't stuck with Outlook, i would still dispute your assertion. Palm's built in applications haven't seen a major overhawl in over 5 years - anyone who considers them "good" is either an undemanding user, happy with mediocrity or hasn't seen any other PIM's on organisers.
I wouldn't consider myself a power user but I find it pretty depressing in all this time Palm haven't figured out that people often have more than one address associated with a contact or that a task may need an alarm with it. That is just for starters.
Microsoft and Symbian have addressed all these issues in their OS' that Palm has failed to do so (and left the market open for DateBk5 and other PIM alternatives). I can't comment about Linux alternatives because i've never seen them but I would hazard a guess that they address the above too.
The SonyEricsson P800 has better PIM functionality than a Palm and it's primarily a mobile phone!
Under this reasoning, Open Source would have several major points in its favour - mainly:
Given all those initial advantages before you even start looking at the pros and cons of the actual software, I can't quite work out why Open Source feel they need this law in force to give them extra (and IMO, unneeded given the list above) advantages.