Re:Are they reinventing the wheel ?
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Eclipse in Action
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· Score: 1
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Oh man. Now you're going to get flamed by all the rabid lynx/links users...
So.. there is nothing we can do for 5 years or so? They can just keep pumping out fud and making their stock price go up?
Well, you can claim harm to your business, libel, slander, or any one of a number of civil violations and sue them yourself, or as part of a class action lawsuit.
And your case will be heard somewhat after the IBM v SCO case, particularly since any judge will probably delay your case until the primary case is resolved.
Thing is, if SCO's claims are found to be false then the judge is going to rip them a new one. Their stock would fall and they'd probably end up out of business. It's an all or nothing gamble at this point, and there's little that can be done about it.
In some countries the libel/slander laws are not as strict as in the US. In those cases you can bring suit against SCO to cease and desist and have it ruled on fairly promptly (c.f. Germany).
Because all statements regarding this case are legally admissible in court.
IBM is not stupid enough to make statements outside of court prior to the first hearing. The last thing they want to do is get their defense caught up on some point based on a statement made a couple years prior.
SCO doesn't appear to get this little issue though... which is why there's a lot of questioning about just how valid their case is in the first place.
But when they called it 9 instead of 9.0, I considered it a very bad sign.
So when they released "Redhat 7" did you consider it a bad sign then as well? There was no 7.0 -- there was 7, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. Any reference to "7.0" was either not following the official Redhat naming scheme or was changed after 7.1 was released.
As has been stated many times before (to no apparent effect... but this is/., so why am I surprised?), Redhat increments major version numbers only when there is binary incompatibility. Right now there's no reason not to make this 9.1. If they integrate the 2.6 kernel later on in beta, however, then this will probably need to become Redhat 10.
I can confirm that for the guy. I get that effect sometimes on my 19" Hitachi CM771. It certainly is the mpeg2 encoding.
And I can confirm for you that I don't get this on my ancient Sanyo 20", my wife's 27" (can't remember the brand), my 32" Phillips, or my 43" Samsung DLP. And, funny thing... people with 61" rear projection setups or 80"+ front projection setups don't report this either... unless they're using an uncalibrated set. Some smaller TVs may have problems no matter what because they're manufactured poorly and can't decode NTSC properly. You get what you pay for.
It goes out of its way to screw you over by refusing to route video signal through a VCR, thus rendering it inoperable with most legacy TVs.
You have a shitty VCR then, one which is overly sensitive to macrovision. You also have a fairly shitty DVD player which doesn't allow you to disable macrovision.
We used to route a DVD player through a VCR all the time. Finally switched out the TV in that room so we don't need to anymore. Oh, and funny that... the picture quality improved. Substantially.
artifacts. DVD players (or at least the Sony my sister lent me) can't seem to keep the most basic artifacts suppressed. I remember seeing a white-painted wall, and noticing that the paint "crawled" like white noise as action elsewhere in the frame caused a wacky encoding of a simple signal. Call me back when you can film white walls.
They can film white walls. Your TV is incapable of displaying them. The dot crawl almost never originates from the DVD player, but instead from the incredibly poorly setup TV - odds are the sharpness, contrast, and brightness are completely fucked up and the DVD player is showing you just how poorly the setup is. So sorry. No, you don't need to buy a new TV (although, from the sounds of it, that wouldn't be a bad idea either), but you do need to learn what the hell the controls do and set them up properly (sharp at 0, contrast at 25%, brightness tends to vary). No, you don't see that on VHS. Big surprise. VHS is utter crap.
Another issue is heat... most DVD players are very sensitive to overheating and the decoder starts crapping out at that point. Never put something on top of the DVD player, and leave at least 3-4" for ventillation.
As for the scratches and rental issues... yeah, they can be problems. But it sounds mostly like you have bad players and a poorly setup display.
Of course, you could continue to believe that DVD is crap and VHS is better, but then I suspect you also think that 8 tracks rule and CDs just plain suck. The quality and capability differences are about the same.
No, it means there was one stupid moderator and two who realized you're clueless.
The flamebait is onbase because you don't know what you're talking about. Just because someone is running a P3-800 doesn't mean everyone else is going to be scaled back to their level of detail. The game will adapt to whatever settings you want... if you're doing multiplayer then the admin may enforce some options (I'd imagine they'll enable this in HL2 MP since it's already in HL), and then those who can't handle that level of gameplay will just have to find a different server.
You didn't provide a concrete example, you provided meaningless spewage.
Good to know... I haven't been looking into them all that seriously yet, but with a kid on the way and a new MiniDV camcorder, I'm probably going to be getting one sooner or later to send video to the grandparents. Most likely I'll get the A06 or whatever's current at that time. And make sure that whatever I write can be read by the players our parents have.
Last generation drives, no Sony
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DVD Burner Round-up
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Ok, I admit, I didn't read the article. Why? Because I looked at the drives they're reviewing and knew it was pointless.
First off, they're reviewing the previous generation of DVD burners. The new Pioneer A06 is a multi-format drive, capable of burning everything but DVD-RAM (which is a dead standard - it required usage of caddies and was incompatible with stand alone DVD players). The Plextor and Panasonic are so-so drives at best. They didn't review the Sony, which is considered the other "best" drive (Pioneer and Sony have been the only two major players until recently), which is also multi-format.
There are a ton of new companies on the DVD burner front too -- LiteOn, NEC, Mitsumi, etc. which I suspect OEM either the Sony or Pioneer drives (no, I haven't looked into it enough to know for sure).
If you want a real resource for DVD burner comparisons, don't even bother with Techspot. Their "review" is about 6 months out of date. Instead go to DVDR Help, which is pretty much the place for anything you could want to know about DVD players, burners, software, etc.
Format wars are essentially over too... most new (and even most 2-3 year old) players can read any of the formats except DVD-RAM. The new burners can write any format you choose, and are at or under $200 now (pricing from NewEgg). Buying a single format burner is just silly.
Honestly though, unless you're burning home videos then you're probably still better off with a CD-RW drive. At under $50 it's hard to go wrong, and there's a lot more computers with CD drives than DVD drives. On the other hand, more games are starting to come out on DVD now (HL2 will be, as well as CD and via Steam), so you may want a DVD drive in your computer (although DVD-ROMs are only $30-40, so CD-RW + DVD-ROM is less than half the price and gives you 2 drives).
Yes, but they're much lower quality -- they were grabbed via a steadycam, while these are direct screen captures. People who have watched them frame-by-frame (not me, I'm not insane) have noticed some irregularities like things breaking before they're hit -- apparantly caused by the hyper compression done on the steadycam shots and multiple re-encodings.
The downside to the Bink movies is that you don't get the commentary given at E3. This is pretty valuable (and humorous) stuff at points, since it's exposition for what's being shown.
If you have bandwidth to burn, get both... the video quality of the Bink videos puts the DivX to shame.
There are forthcoming TiVo models from Toshiba and Panasonic that integrate a rewritable DVD drive. They'll cost considerably more than $99 or $199 though - I think somewhere close to $600. Given that stand alone DVD rewriters are in the $400-500 range still, it's not a bad price (presuming I recall the price right... it may be $800, I dunno).
Honestly, I could get rid of one of my VCRs. I seriously considered not hooking it up when I bought a new receiver and entertainment center. But it's only a couple additional cables, so I went ahead and did so. If I need to dump something to tape, I'm likely to transfer it to the bedroom TiVo first -- the connections are much simpler.
Just as a note, you can replace the HD with little difficulty at all. It does not require any modding of the TiVo, and the method for doing it is quite easy. If you're comfy with opening up your PC, you can replace the HD in your TiVo.
I hadn't heard that the S2 SA's had been hacked though, so I went and checked into it... sure enough, it's doable now, even with 4.0 software. Very cool. It's certainly not the most straightforward thing in the world, but it's laid out well. No, I'm not going to link to the sites... I don't want anyone getting in trouble, and/. has a bit higher visibility than some of the hacking sites. I stopped reading the TiVo Underground on the semi-official boards, so I don't know if it's made it there. Last time a S2 hack made it there it got shut down, and quickly.
I don't have any plans on hacking my S2's at this point though... between standard TiVo functionality and HMO they do pretty much all I'd want. I don't particularly need video extraction... uploading external video (like camcorder data) is another matter, but I'll look into that when I feel the need.
I'm not sure of how much dominance Microsoft had in 1984!! These were the days of the Commodore 64 and Apple ][. The IBM compatible wasn't a market leader at the time
You have your history slightly messed up.
Yes, MS was a market dominator at the time. Not as much as it is now, but it certainly had the burgeoning PC market tied up. IBM was the market leader at the time, and was totally dominant. There were compatibles out by this time (Compaq debuted in 1982), but this was the heyday of "IBM compatible" -- meaning that it ran MS-DOS and could run intensive applications like VisiCalc and MS Flight Simulator. If you wanted to make a PC compatible you only had one OS to chose from -- MS-DOS. IBM used PC-DOS, which was a licensed derivative of MS-DOS. DR-DOS didn't appear until 1988.
1984 was not the days of the C64 and Apple ][. This was the year that Apple introduced the Macintosh, with the "1984" commercial during the Superbowl. The C64 and AppleII were well on their way to their deathbeds. The mid 80s were the rise of the Mac and Amiga, and the overwhelming adoption of the PC.
That said, I agree that it's unlikely that MS blocked the adoption of TRON. I would like to know what forces were behind that, but I'm willing to bet the company in question was IBM, not MS.
Because he doesn't want to be the face of anything. If you tried to make him that then you'd make his life miserable -- he appears to be happy with where he is and what he does. Pushing fame onto him would upset that.
RMS is what we get because he wants the job. I don't particularly care for a lot of his statements, but he's a zealot because he wants to be one.
Frankly, Linus sounds a lot more like Mr Sakamura than anything else... he is outspoken, but he also doesn't give a damn about the politics or other crap. He just wants to get his job done. Which is why you have disagreements over things like BitKeeper. RMS has a gold standard to uphold, Linus has a job to get done. Linus has become something of a poster boy, but by his own statement he doesn't want to be one. Some of his actions would indicate otherwise, but that doesn't surprise me. Being recognized for what you do is usually an endorphin rush. Time will tell whether or not Linus wants the spotlight.
I whole heartedly agree with you on Mr. Sakamura though. His statements about infrastructure are dead on, as is his statement regarding Mr. Gates.
How many people here have Netscape as a browser on their computer NOT as a primary browser, and why did you install it? WHy is it not the primary browser?
I have Mozilla at home on my XP system. It's no longer my primary browser for one reason. Microsoft doesn't play nice with others.
To whit, the crash reporting functionality in XP will not work with Mozilla. If you have a crash and report it back to MS then it will pull up a web browser to let you view the crash report. But if you have Mozilla as your default then it gives a "wrong browser" error saying you must use IE 5.0+ or Netscape 6.0+. Unsurprisingly, MS doesn't bother to properly identify Mozilla as a compatible browser, and I'm not going to change my id string for this.
I actually use Mozilla for browsing and email, but if I want to ever have hope of figuring out which device driver is causing my system crashes, I have to let IE be my "default".
First off, it's going to be a long time before prices drop that low (computers only recently reached the $200 price point, and Tivos are souped-up computers)
Er... you can buy a new 40 hour TiVo S2 for $199. It's not the $100 price point yet (although as people have pointed out, low end S1's are available for that much), but it's close. Yes, you'll need service still.
Personally, paying $20/month for Tivo would nearly double my monthly TV expenses, and all for a unit that still can't hope to replace a single VCR
It's not $20/month. It's $12.95/mo. Or you can get a lifetime subscription for $300 that's good until the box dies (which it's unlikely to do for a decade or so).
As far as not replacing a VCR... uh... whatever. It does so much more than a VCR it's absurd. Comparing a TiVo to a VCR is about like comparing a Coleman camp stove to a top end Viking range. Yeah, there's a couple things the camp stove can do that the Viking can't, but even then it does a paltry job of it and there's so much more that the Viking range can do.
In fact, the only thing I've used a VCR for in the past 2 years was to dump something off TiVo to give to a friend. I've often considered just removing the VCR entirely because it's unused. The VCR doesn't automatically record all the shows I want, has a small fraction of the storage of the TiVo, doesn't allow me to see what's recorded easily, or what's on easily, has horrible picture quality, lousy FF/REW capabilities, doesn't help at all with live TV, and requires far more attention than TiVo ever will.
My brother-in-law used to do the VCR shuffle to record what he wanted for time shifting. Three VCRs, with tapes having to be replaced every day or two. He bought a couple of TiVos and can't imagine ever going back to his VCR now.
Because the US Government is not allowed to hold intellectual property. It's against the Constitution. And you really, really wouldn't want it the other way around.
Some of it is classified. I would assume (don't know for sure) that only NASA knows for sure where it all is and how to safely avoid it all
Sure it's classified. So what? It's still tracked by a multitude of civilian organizations. Just because it's classified doesn't mean that it doesn't return a radar ping or show up on a tracking sweep for a telescope. The US is far from the only nation putting stuff into orbit anyway. Each nation with an orbital presence has the same issues with making sure you don't whack into something up there (and there's quite a bit of up there too - it's not like a Disney parking lot after all).
Of course, you'll find an amazing number of "communications" satellites orbiting the earth with no comm band registered with the FCC. Funny that.
Why would AOL give Mozilla a $2M kiss-off (assuming that were actually what is happening here) when they could give Mozilla a $0 kiss-off instead?
Someone may have been clued in enough to know that doing so would generate immense ill-will. Besides, Mozilla is a viable product... just not one well suited to AOL/TW's core business (as you say).
Additionally the $2M can be written off for tax purposes. Small, but it doesn't hurt.
I guess the real question is how much funding has AOL given the Mozilla project over the past few years? Is $1M/year an improvement or a reduction in funding? And to be totally cynical -- even if it is an improvement, remember it's only for two years. Will they be able to make up the money if AOL doesn't continue funding after that time period is up?
Honestly, I'd pretty much read this as AOL kicking the project out as well, but unless the above question is answered I can't be sure of that.
Just like I cannot buy microsoft office then call them up and demand that they make it load OpenOffice format files.
Uh... but you can.
If you're a sufficiently large company, and you need a particular feature in a product before you'll buy it, the developer will add it. Usually at no additional cost to you.
I'm a developer, and I see shit like that all the time. We've done several one-of projects because we wanted to please a customer... even though there's absolutely no chance that revenues from that particular project will ever make up the money spent on developing it. It's hoped that the good will created and future revenue from other products will make up for it.
The same is most certainly true for any developer that wants to stay in business. Including Microsoft.
My wife emailed me her resume (in.doc format, which, like it or not, is the standard nowadays) so I could review it.
OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 crashed upon trying to open it. This is a Word doc that was exported from OO.org 1.0.3... how sad is that? I installed 1.1RC1 and it was just fine though. So I'd guess the import is improved.
Installing RC1 on her system was rather more difficult... since the installer kept bombing about a UNICOWS.DLL error. Yes, the solution was easy to find on the website, but why not have a more useful error message than that in the first place? If it's a FAQ, it should be reasonable to integrate the error message into the installer rather than confuse the user. Most people will get an error like that and say screw it and go back to Word/Works/whatever.
I think you're going to be in for a rude awakening next year.
Right now, it looks almost certain that Bush is going to be re-elected. He has a 60% approval rating, and while that's slipped, it's still very high. The Democrats are, once again, utterly failing to put forth a significant presidential candidate and are flailing hopelessly without a significant platform to stand on. Oh, and Bush has so far raised something like $25M for his re-election campaign. The leading Democrat candidate (in fund raising anyway) has only raised about $10-15M. It's looking like Bush will be able to run his campaign without any matching Federal funds, while the Democrats will have to apply for them. This means that Bush will not be constrained in how or how much he spends the funds... which is not true if you apply for Federal funds.
I'm not at all happy with Bush, and will certainly not be voting for him (I'm most likely to vote Libretarian, but that depends on the candidate). But right now it's looking very much like another 4 years of idiocy in the White House. Of course, that's likely to be true even if someone else gets elected, but it's a matter of which idiot:)
Client-side filtering is for where it's appropriate.
I like Mozilla Mail's filtering... works great for my ISP provided mailbox. But that's because it's infeasible for me to put in server side filtering... DSL, dynamic IP, yadda yadda yadda. All of these can be worked around, but it's frankly not worth the effort to me.
Of course, if you're using Evolution's features (calendaring, groupware, etc) then you almost certainly do have your own mail server and should do server side spam filtering.
Yeah, but how reliable is that "source"? Did they actually have any contacts inside the CIA that would allow them to know this kind of thing? Is there any proof of such an event in print? If not, then there's no basis for this and, like most urban legends, it's probably untrue.
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Oh man. Now you're going to get flamed by all the rabid lynx/links users...
So.. there is nothing we can do for 5 years or so? They can just keep pumping out fud and making their stock price go up?
Well, you can claim harm to your business, libel, slander, or any one of a number of civil violations and sue them yourself, or as part of a class action lawsuit.
And your case will be heard somewhat after the IBM v SCO case, particularly since any judge will probably delay your case until the primary case is resolved.
Thing is, if SCO's claims are found to be false then the judge is going to rip them a new one. Their stock would fall and they'd probably end up out of business. It's an all or nothing gamble at this point, and there's little that can be done about it.
In some countries the libel/slander laws are not as strict as in the US. In those cases you can bring suit against SCO to cease and desist and have it ruled on fairly promptly (c.f. Germany).
Because all statements regarding this case are legally admissible in court.
IBM is not stupid enough to make statements outside of court prior to the first hearing. The last thing they want to do is get their defense caught up on some point based on a statement made a couple years prior.
SCO doesn't appear to get this little issue though... which is why there's a lot of questioning about just how valid their case is in the first place.
But when they called it 9 instead of 9.0, I considered it a very bad sign.
/., so why am I surprised?), Redhat increments major version numbers only when there is binary incompatibility. Right now there's no reason not to make this 9.1. If they integrate the 2.6 kernel later on in beta, however, then this will probably need to become Redhat 10.
So when they released "Redhat 7" did you consider it a bad sign then as well? There was no 7.0 -- there was 7, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. Any reference to "7.0" was either not following the official Redhat naming scheme or was changed after 7.1 was released.
As has been stated many times before (to no apparent effect... but this is
I can confirm that for the guy. I get that effect sometimes on my 19" Hitachi CM771. It certainly is the mpeg2 encoding.
And I can confirm for you that I don't get this on my ancient Sanyo 20", my wife's 27" (can't remember the brand), my 32" Phillips, or my 43" Samsung DLP. And, funny thing... people with 61" rear projection setups or 80"+ front projection setups don't report this either... unless they're using an uncalibrated set. Some smaller TVs may have problems no matter what because they're manufactured poorly and can't decode NTSC properly. You get what you pay for.
Such bad math.
It's not 8^62, it's 62^8 = 2.18e+14
To get a similar number using only 26 characters, you only need 9 characters (yielding 1.41e+14 combinations).
Think of it this way, if you only have binary values, and a 3 bit pattern, how many combinations do you have? 2^3 or 3^2?
A 20 character password using only [a-z] yields 1.99e+28 combinations. Which is pretty reasonable.
It goes out of its way to screw you over by refusing to route video signal through a VCR, thus rendering it inoperable with most legacy TVs.
You have a shitty VCR then, one which is overly sensitive to macrovision. You also have a fairly shitty DVD player which doesn't allow you to disable macrovision.
We used to route a DVD player through a VCR all the time. Finally switched out the TV in that room so we don't need to anymore. Oh, and funny that... the picture quality improved. Substantially.
artifacts. DVD players (or at least the Sony my sister lent me) can't seem to keep the most basic artifacts suppressed. I remember seeing a white-painted wall, and noticing that the paint "crawled" like white noise as action elsewhere in the frame caused a wacky encoding of a simple signal. Call me back when you can film white walls.
They can film white walls. Your TV is incapable of displaying them. The dot crawl almost never originates from the DVD player, but instead from the incredibly poorly setup TV - odds are the sharpness, contrast, and brightness are completely fucked up and the DVD player is showing you just how poorly the setup is. So sorry. No, you don't need to buy a new TV (although, from the sounds of it, that wouldn't be a bad idea either), but you do need to learn what the hell the controls do and set them up properly (sharp at 0, contrast at 25%, brightness tends to vary). No, you don't see that on VHS. Big surprise. VHS is utter crap.
Another issue is heat... most DVD players are very sensitive to overheating and the decoder starts crapping out at that point. Never put something on top of the DVD player, and leave at least 3-4" for ventillation.
As for the scratches and rental issues... yeah, they can be problems. But it sounds mostly like you have bad players and a poorly setup display.
Of course, you could continue to believe that DVD is crap and VHS is better, but then I suspect you also think that 8 tracks rule and CDs just plain suck. The quality and capability differences are about the same.
No, it means there was one stupid moderator and two who realized you're clueless.
The flamebait is onbase because you don't know what you're talking about. Just because someone is running a P3-800 doesn't mean everyone else is going to be scaled back to their level of detail. The game will adapt to whatever settings you want... if you're doing multiplayer then the admin may enforce some options (I'd imagine they'll enable this in HL2 MP since it's already in HL), and then those who can't handle that level of gameplay will just have to find a different server.
You didn't provide a concrete example, you provided meaningless spewage.
Good to know... I haven't been looking into them all that seriously yet, but with a kid on the way and a new MiniDV camcorder, I'm probably going to be getting one sooner or later to send video to the grandparents. Most likely I'll get the A06 or whatever's current at that time. And make sure that whatever I write can be read by the players our parents have.
Ok, I admit, I didn't read the article. Why? Because I looked at the drives they're reviewing and knew it was pointless.
First off, they're reviewing the previous generation of DVD burners. The new Pioneer A06 is a multi-format drive, capable of burning everything but DVD-RAM (which is a dead standard - it required usage of caddies and was incompatible with stand alone DVD players). The Plextor and Panasonic are so-so drives at best. They didn't review the Sony, which is considered the other "best" drive (Pioneer and Sony have been the only two major players until recently), which is also multi-format.
There are a ton of new companies on the DVD burner front too -- LiteOn, NEC, Mitsumi, etc. which I suspect OEM either the Sony or Pioneer drives (no, I haven't looked into it enough to know for sure).
If you want a real resource for DVD burner comparisons, don't even bother with Techspot. Their "review" is about 6 months out of date. Instead go to DVDR Help, which is pretty much the place for anything you could want to know about DVD players, burners, software, etc.
Format wars are essentially over too... most new (and even most 2-3 year old) players can read any of the formats except DVD-RAM. The new burners can write any format you choose, and are at or under $200 now (pricing from NewEgg). Buying a single format burner is just silly.
Honestly though, unless you're burning home videos then you're probably still better off with a CD-RW drive. At under $50 it's hard to go wrong, and there's a lot more computers with CD drives than DVD drives. On the other hand, more games are starting to come out on DVD now (HL2 will be, as well as CD and via Steam), so you may want a DVD drive in your computer (although DVD-ROMs are only $30-40, so CD-RW + DVD-ROM is less than half the price and gives you 2 drives).
Yes, but they're much lower quality -- they were grabbed via a steadycam, while these are direct screen captures. People who have watched them frame-by-frame (not me, I'm not insane) have noticed some irregularities like things breaking before they're hit -- apparantly caused by the hyper compression done on the steadycam shots and multiple re-encodings.
The downside to the Bink movies is that you don't get the commentary given at E3. This is pretty valuable (and humorous) stuff at points, since it's exposition for what's being shown.
If you have bandwidth to burn, get both... the video quality of the Bink videos puts the DivX to shame.
There are forthcoming TiVo models from Toshiba and Panasonic that integrate a rewritable DVD drive. They'll cost considerably more than $99 or $199 though - I think somewhere close to $600. Given that stand alone DVD rewriters are in the $400-500 range still, it's not a bad price (presuming I recall the price right... it may be $800, I dunno).
Honestly, I could get rid of one of my VCRs. I seriously considered not hooking it up when I bought a new receiver and entertainment center. But it's only a couple additional cables, so I went ahead and did so. If I need to dump something to tape, I'm likely to transfer it to the bedroom TiVo first -- the connections are much simpler.
Just as a note, you can replace the HD with little difficulty at all. It does not require any modding of the TiVo, and the method for doing it is quite easy. If you're comfy with opening up your PC, you can replace the HD in your TiVo.
/. has a bit higher visibility than some of the hacking sites. I stopped reading the TiVo Underground on the semi-official boards, so I don't know if it's made it there. Last time a S2 hack made it there it got shut down, and quickly.
I hadn't heard that the S2 SA's had been hacked though, so I went and checked into it... sure enough, it's doable now, even with 4.0 software. Very cool. It's certainly not the most straightforward thing in the world, but it's laid out well. No, I'm not going to link to the sites... I don't want anyone getting in trouble, and
I don't have any plans on hacking my S2's at this point though... between standard TiVo functionality and HMO they do pretty much all I'd want. I don't particularly need video extraction... uploading external video (like camcorder data) is another matter, but I'll look into that when I feel the need.
I'm not sure of how much dominance Microsoft had in 1984!! These were the days of the Commodore 64 and Apple ][. The IBM compatible wasn't a market leader at the time
You have your history slightly messed up.
Yes, MS was a market dominator at the time. Not as much as it is now, but it certainly had the burgeoning PC market tied up. IBM was the market leader at the time, and was totally dominant. There were compatibles out by this time (Compaq debuted in 1982), but this was the heyday of "IBM compatible" -- meaning that it ran MS-DOS and could run intensive applications like VisiCalc and MS Flight Simulator. If you wanted to make a PC compatible you only had one OS to chose from -- MS-DOS. IBM used PC-DOS, which was a licensed derivative of MS-DOS. DR-DOS didn't appear until 1988.
1984 was not the days of the C64 and Apple ][. This was the year that Apple introduced the Macintosh, with the "1984" commercial during the Superbowl. The C64 and AppleII were well on their way to their deathbeds. The mid 80s were the rise of the Mac and Amiga, and the overwhelming adoption of the PC.
That said, I agree that it's unlikely that MS blocked the adoption of TRON. I would like to know what forces were behind that, but I'm willing to bet the company in question was IBM, not MS.
Because he doesn't want to be the face of anything. If you tried to make him that then you'd make his life miserable -- he appears to be happy with where he is and what he does. Pushing fame onto him would upset that.
RMS is what we get because he wants the job. I don't particularly care for a lot of his statements, but he's a zealot because he wants to be one.
Frankly, Linus sounds a lot more like Mr Sakamura than anything else... he is outspoken, but he also doesn't give a damn about the politics or other crap. He just wants to get his job done. Which is why you have disagreements over things like BitKeeper. RMS has a gold standard to uphold, Linus has a job to get done. Linus has become something of a poster boy, but by his own statement he doesn't want to be one. Some of his actions would indicate otherwise, but that doesn't surprise me. Being recognized for what you do is usually an endorphin rush. Time will tell whether or not Linus wants the spotlight.
I whole heartedly agree with you on Mr. Sakamura though. His statements about infrastructure are dead on, as is his statement regarding Mr. Gates.
How many people here have Netscape as a browser on their computer NOT as a primary browser, and why did you install it? WHy is it not the primary browser?
I have Mozilla at home on my XP system. It's no longer my primary browser for one reason. Microsoft doesn't play nice with others.
To whit, the crash reporting functionality in XP will not work with Mozilla. If you have a crash and report it back to MS then it will pull up a web browser to let you view the crash report. But if you have Mozilla as your default then it gives a "wrong browser" error saying you must use IE 5.0+ or Netscape 6.0+. Unsurprisingly, MS doesn't bother to properly identify Mozilla as a compatible browser, and I'm not going to change my id string for this.
I actually use Mozilla for browsing and email, but if I want to ever have hope of figuring out which device driver is causing my system crashes, I have to let IE be my "default".
First off, it's going to be a long time before prices drop that low (computers only recently reached the $200 price point, and Tivos are souped-up computers)
Er... you can buy a new 40 hour TiVo S2 for $199. It's not the $100 price point yet (although as people have pointed out, low end S1's are available for that much), but it's close. Yes, you'll need service still.
Personally, paying $20/month for Tivo would nearly double my monthly TV expenses, and all for a unit that still can't hope to replace a single VCR
It's not $20/month. It's $12.95/mo. Or you can get a lifetime subscription for $300 that's good until the box dies (which it's unlikely to do for a decade or so).
As far as not replacing a VCR... uh... whatever. It does so much more than a VCR it's absurd. Comparing a TiVo to a VCR is about like comparing a Coleman camp stove to a top end Viking range. Yeah, there's a couple things the camp stove can do that the Viking can't, but even then it does a paltry job of it and there's so much more that the Viking range can do.
In fact, the only thing I've used a VCR for in the past 2 years was to dump something off TiVo to give to a friend. I've often considered just removing the VCR entirely because it's unused. The VCR doesn't automatically record all the shows I want, has a small fraction of the storage of the TiVo, doesn't allow me to see what's recorded easily, or what's on easily, has horrible picture quality, lousy FF/REW capabilities, doesn't help at all with live TV, and requires far more attention than TiVo ever will.
My brother-in-law used to do the VCR shuffle to record what he wanted for time shifting. Three VCRs, with tapes having to be replaced every day or two. He bought a couple of TiVos and can't imagine ever going back to his VCR now.
Because the US Government is not allowed to hold intellectual property. It's against the Constitution. And you really, really wouldn't want it the other way around.
Some of it is classified. I would assume (don't know for sure) that only NASA knows for sure where it all is and how to safely avoid it all
Sure it's classified. So what? It's still tracked by a multitude of civilian organizations. Just because it's classified doesn't mean that it doesn't return a radar ping or show up on a tracking sweep for a telescope. The US is far from the only nation putting stuff into orbit anyway. Each nation with an orbital presence has the same issues with making sure you don't whack into something up there (and there's quite a bit of up there too - it's not like a Disney parking lot after all).
Of course, you'll find an amazing number of "communications" satellites orbiting the earth with no comm band registered with the FCC. Funny that.
Why would AOL give Mozilla a $2M kiss-off (assuming that were actually what is happening here) when they could give Mozilla a $0 kiss-off instead?
Someone may have been clued in enough to know that doing so would generate immense ill-will. Besides, Mozilla is a viable product... just not one well suited to AOL/TW's core business (as you say).
Additionally the $2M can be written off for tax purposes. Small, but it doesn't hurt.
I guess the real question is how much funding has AOL given the Mozilla project over the past few years? Is $1M/year an improvement or a reduction in funding? And to be totally cynical -- even if it is an improvement, remember it's only for two years. Will they be able to make up the money if AOL doesn't continue funding after that time period is up?
Honestly, I'd pretty much read this as AOL kicking the project out as well, but unless the above question is answered I can't be sure of that.
Just like I cannot buy microsoft office then call them up and demand that they make it load OpenOffice format files.
Uh... but you can.
If you're a sufficiently large company, and you need a particular feature in a product before you'll buy it, the developer will add it. Usually at no additional cost to you.
I'm a developer, and I see shit like that all the time. We've done several one-of projects because we wanted to please a customer... even though there's absolutely no chance that revenues from that particular project will ever make up the money spent on developing it. It's hoped that the good will created and future revenue from other products will make up for it.
The same is most certainly true for any developer that wants to stay in business. Including Microsoft.
My wife emailed me her resume (in .doc format, which, like it or not, is the standard nowadays) so I could review it.
OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 crashed upon trying to open it. This is a Word doc that was exported from OO.org 1.0.3... how sad is that? I installed 1.1RC1 and it was just fine though. So I'd guess the import is improved.
Installing RC1 on her system was rather more difficult... since the installer kept bombing about a UNICOWS.DLL error. Yes, the solution was easy to find on the website, but why not have a more useful error message than that in the first place? If it's a FAQ, it should be reasonable to integrate the error message into the installer rather than confuse the user. Most people will get an error like that and say screw it and go back to Word/Works/whatever.
I think you're going to be in for a rude awakening next year.
:)
Right now, it looks almost certain that Bush is going to be re-elected. He has a 60% approval rating, and while that's slipped, it's still very high. The Democrats are, once again, utterly failing to put forth a significant presidential candidate and are flailing hopelessly without a significant platform to stand on. Oh, and Bush has so far raised something like $25M for his re-election campaign. The leading Democrat candidate (in fund raising anyway) has only raised about $10-15M. It's looking like Bush will be able to run his campaign without any matching Federal funds, while the Democrats will have to apply for them. This means that Bush will not be constrained in how or how much he spends the funds... which is not true if you apply for Federal funds.
I'm not at all happy with Bush, and will certainly not be voting for him (I'm most likely to vote Libretarian, but that depends on the candidate). But right now it's looking very much like another 4 years of idiocy in the White House. Of course, that's likely to be true even if someone else gets elected, but it's a matter of which idiot
Client-side filtering is for where it's appropriate.
I like Mozilla Mail's filtering... works great for my ISP provided mailbox. But that's because it's infeasible for me to put in server side filtering... DSL, dynamic IP, yadda yadda yadda. All of these can be worked around, but it's frankly not worth the effort to me.
Of course, if you're using Evolution's features (calendaring, groupware, etc) then you almost certainly do have your own mail server and should do server side spam filtering.
Yeah, but how reliable is that "source"? Did they actually have any contacts inside the CIA that would allow them to know this kind of thing? Is there any proof of such an event in print? If not, then there's no basis for this and, like most urban legends, it's probably untrue.