I think you are viewing konqueror in the wrong light. Konqueror is best thought of as a general system interface that happens to be able to view web pages more than a web browser that happens to happen to be able to act as a system interface.
I.E. Konqueror just loads the appropriate kio slave for whatever task it is doing at the moment. If it is loading a web page it starts up the http kio slave. If that kio slave did not exist then konqueror would no longer be a web browser, but chances are with litle to no modification it'd still be fully functional. Konqueror has kio slaves for many many things.. such as sftp, audiocd, imap, smtp, pop, man, info, etc. The list is quite large and you can get a complete one in the control center.
I can understand the "this is way to windowsish" feeling when konqueror appears to be a straight copy of i.e. an dit's annoying integration into windows. However when viewed from a technical standpoint konqueror is a very well designed and very well done system interface that is very different in spirit than IE integration in windows.
The author lost a lot of credibility when he mentions the ability to disallow javascript popups in konqueror and "Does not move your cursor focus to a new window as it opens." in th elist of what's new. It's painfully obvious the author has little experience with what he is reviewing. I will give him credi tint hat he's partially right for both. A new METHOD for blocking popups was introduced (smart), and focus code has changed somewhat.
Also I'm not an expert with rpm as I rarely use it but his method for installing kde3 is insane. I use SuSE rpm's to try out rc2 simply because I didn't feel like compilin git at the time, and the installed to/opt. He's talking about grepping through the rpm's looking for certain files. It's not so tough. Simply install the arts rpm, the kdelibs rpm, and th ekdebase rpm and you got yourself a very basic installed kde. I'm not exactly sure what it is he was trying to do.
Beyond the install process there's only a couple of paragraphs dedicated to the actual use and performance of kde. Nowhere are aditional things such as new kio slaves like sftp, performance enhancements to konq, the much improved css/js handling, etc. I think he covers the new features of kmail (which btw filtering does not work with imap folders yet which is bothersome). Also kde3 comes with a very impressive new theme called keramik and a couple of new icon sets (these icon sets were previously available as seperate packages).
This review could have been a lot more informative than it was and really is a waste of space. Putting a little more time into something called a review should be required. This is more of a dumbed down installation guide.
Dark Matter isn't this super mysterious thing as you make it out to be.. it's exactly what it's called. It's so elusive because it's dark.. it does not emit radiation of any sort therefore our current techniques for "looking" at things can't "see" it. For all we know it coul djust be a bunch of inert rocks floating around. The reason why dark matter is claimed to exist in such large quantities is because by observing the movement of galaxies things react as if there was a lot more gravity than what we know of being there could produce.
This is all recalled from a 2nd level physics course at high school so someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Of course it's not likely... kind of why it's called fiction and not reality. When will people get it through their heads that the whole beauty of story telling is that you don't have to tell about reality. The insane strength of the fighters in the Z series and the insane amounts of incredibly huge ass kicking are what makes dragonball z so much fun imho.
What's the big deal with running a dual boot
system? I'd be happy to tell you. For an
admittedly small few of us windows isn't just
a pile of bugs... it doesn't work at all. I
have tried every version of windows that has
support for all of my hardware, and not a
single one even boots once I install all my
drivers and apply patches to fix known bugs.
Linux however supports all my hardware as
well, and it not only boots.. it runs fast
and reliable for as long as I need it to. It's
people in similar situations that dual booting
is utterly useless.
I'm gonna be pissing on your parade here too, but I honestly don't think the intention was to change the state of linux gaming. Believe it or not Quake2 isn't a Linux only game. This also might surprise you, but it's been out for a while too... What you just said would be like saying releasing the doom source was for the purpose of improving linux gaming. That wasn't the idea.
It's not as if we lack the hardware needed to convert a decent computer system into a similar unit. First off you have the hauppauge WinTV-PVR card, although I've heard it's mpeg2 compression quality leaves a bit to be desired. Apparantly the Kfir chip it uses is capable of much better, so it must just be the design of the card or the drivers. Linux drivers are not yet ready but are being developed at pvr.sourceforge.net.
Then there's the REALMagic DVR board which costs a pretty penny but I hear has incredible quality, though ultra sensitive macrovision detection. That is unfortunate however there are ways, albeit expensive ways to get around that. I also do not believe this card has much in the way of linux support, however I believe it uses the same decoding chip as the Hollywood+ board, so the linux drivers for that card may work with this one for mpeg2 decompression (including dvd support). The website mentions that this board also does the audio in hardware which the hollywood+ does not, however software audio is still of course possible. The mpeg encoder chip is the Kfir chip the wintv-pvr uses, and pvr.sourceforge.net looks to be coming along pretty well now. Figuring out the audio encoding hardware however is probably yet to be done. Full linux support looks quite possible, but it's a good ways away I'm willing to bet just by how few people I'm sure own this card.
Then there is a card being made per order by some german company I believe.. (I read this on an old article so I'm not sure of the current status). There was information on it on the video4linux website. This card was built especially for linux. It comes with nothing but the card in the package, and drivers may be downloaded from the video4linux website. Again I'm still not sure of the availability of this card and it may be rather expensive. I also believe that this card falls somewhere inbetween the wintv-pvr and the sigma designs DVR in quality. I'm not sure of this cards audio capabilities.
Put this hardware together with some good software (you will most likely need to write it yourself), and you've got a nice PVR system of your own to do with as you please.
I do however realize these set top units have their advantages, such as not having to be in the same room as the computer. I'm just making sure that people realize these other options do exist =).
Two terms. Contributary and Vicarious Copyright Infringment. My Spelling my not be 100% accurate, but look them up. Napster was guilty as charged, and so will ReplayTV be.
OK First of all what does the XBox have to do with emulating windows PC games on linux? My guess is nothing.
Second off has the thought maybe crossed your mind that directx8 also includes directx 7, 6, 5, and so on. It only makes logical sense to start at the first directx version, then add the new features each version included one at a time if you are developing a directx compatibility layer. If directx 7 compatibility is almost done then they are doing very well and can move on to 8 soon.
And remember... they are trying to get PC games working here, not XBox games.
Maybe I'm just being a little too simplistic here.. but why exactly does EVERY program need to be in the path? Of course I'm not exactly a command line person... it's a lot easier to be lazy with a mouse and a big pretty menu, but nonetheless when I do use a command line I'd much rather have sensible organization rather than a little less to type.
"x86 instructions are pretty compact, but they have a serious lack of registers."
You'll have to excuse my uncalled for amount of obvious thinking... but did some supreme power ever forbid adding more registers or smthn? It would be entirely possible (and most likely pretty easy tho I am not an engineer) to just add 8 or so new registers while maintaining backwards compatibility... ?
You will also have to excuse my cynicism... I just wait patiently for the day for someone to give me a good reason why x86 needs to be replaced. Not an easily solved half assed excuse like lack of registers.
This is a late response and may not get read but I'm gonna say it anyways.
"What's illegal is impacting the profit of the copyright holders."
You make a good point that no real good evidence has been shown that p2p is impacting the RIAAs bottom line, but I can understand their fear that it could and still might. It may hurt my slashdot popularity but seeing as that is not very important to me.. I sympathize with the RIAA's reasoning and support what they do. A typical example I use is associated with computer hardware, which for the time being isn't so easy to copy. If you want a brand new geforce3 you'll have to buy it, or live without it. I feel the RIAA has the right to do the same with the music they and the artists under them own. If you want to own a song you need to buy it, or just listen to it on the radio or something. My main point is p2p services are so popular because most people who use them are cheap punks who believe that they not only should have, but deserve to get everything for free. Again the only evidence I have backing me here is my variuos experiences with people who use them for downloading tons of songs every day.
Anyways.. these are just my personal beliefs.. and I feel that I don't need to impose them on anyone nor convince anyone that they are right, so you will have to excuse me if I don't back up what I say or explain why I think a particular way about something. I prefer to sit back and watch what happens.
Now, about my "law is law" argument. What I meant to convey is that just because you believe a law to be unjustified or wrong does not make you immune to it. You still cannot or should not be able to break it with impunity. The reason why I brought this up is again it seems to be a common attitude with people I have personally interacted with. I do NOT disagree with the civil disobedience idea.. hell I use that as my excuse for smoking weed =). If I believe a law is wrong I usually will break it without a second thought.. I will try to not get caught though, and I don't fool myself into thinking that I'm going to change anything or escape punishment because I personally think it is wrong.
With my little anarchy bit I was mainly just talking about a massive group of people rebelling agaisnt the law not because the law is wrong, but because the law is inconvieniant or because it forces them to open their pocket book or something.. some law is good, some is bad, and most people cant differentiate between the two.
Now... I found your arguments rather enlightening in some aspects and you had some very good points. The original intent of my post was to solicit someone who knew more than I did about the specifics to reply with a post as intelligent as yours =). I just wanted to clarify my thoughts with this post.
"In the movie industry, Actors get paid a lot of money, and they have a union, and they go on strike together when things are bad."
And what actors consider bad I'd give an arm and a leg for... go figure.
"In the music industry, Artists get paid sweet FA, they obviously don't have a union, and they don't go on strike to get a better deal when they are being done over."
In the movie industry actors do a different contract for each movie, and usually have sections that allow them to quite. AFAIK music "artists" sign long term contracts with no way out... and if they even tried to go on strike they'd be sued back to the stone age.
you'll have to excuse this shittiness of this post.. I had almost 9 nice paragraphs done before IE thought it'd be funny to hit the back button for me and lose the whole damned thing.
Anyways.. check here. It is a slashdot article linking to a p2p copyright paper. Here's the gist of it:
vicarious infringment: 1) proove infringment is taking place 2) admin must be have ability to stop it 3) admin must stand to gain finacially from the infringment
contributory infringment: 1) proove infringment is taking place 2) admin must know or should know about infringment 3) admin must have contributed
Napster obviously matched all 3 for vicarious very cleanly. Napster can match contributory if you inteprit contribution as making the client and/or providing the network.
Also, I am not familiar with how morpheus operates.. but I see it being highly doubtfull that it is decentralized. If I can open up my morpheus client and click "connect" and it magically knows which server to connect to and does it there's a reason... some form of centralization.
Now.. this shows how napster is illegal and morpheus might be.. lets get the other 2 popular arguments out of the way
First off, fair use. Fair use is there to let you do what you want with what you bought for your enjoyment or potentially for you and a few friends enjoyment... it doesn't allow you to record that tape for your best bud anymore than it allows you to make that mp3 and give it to 100 people on the internet. Now it DOES entitle you to make that mp3 for yourself and that tape for yourself.
The law is wrong argument is next... all I got to say is to damned bad.. until it changes we got to abide by it, just deciding laws are bad and ignoring them may seem to you like some glorified form of civil disobediance, but law prevents anarchy, and I don't care how much you think anarchy would be nice, the second some guy comes after you with a knife or gun after you walked the wrong way and he found it insulting... you won't like anarchy anymore.
If you don't like the law try to get it changed... but until it is, these people are guilty.. face it.. as much as you'd like illegal pirating to be as easy as it is, that still doesn't make it legal now.
I'll admit to downloading a few mp3's illegaly.. and I'll admit that it was illegal... I also download mp3's to replace lost tracks on my large collection of miskept CD's... wether or not that is illegal is open to interpritation. I'm not for or agaisnt anyone here.. because no matter which side I take I appear to be a hypocrite to that side, so I remain neutral, I just like to remind people what the facts really are sometimes.
I hear you on that one. My interest in programming has been dropping like a rock the more I realizethat those days are gone and nobody wants or even thinks good code is required anymore.
"What annoys me is that the disk drive manufaturers seem to be unable to comprehend the idea of 'automatic configuration'. Why should I have to spend time telling my BIOS how many cylinders and tracks my drive has? "
If you use any system made after 1990 you would probably be stunned that that "modern" bios atatched to an equally modern hard disk actually does detect its own size! Heck... even my 8086 does that, though that may have been some unusual feature at the time. The only systems I have ever had to manually put size in are old 486's before the use of ziff sockets and earlier.
I don't know about where you are.. but here digital cable isn't just about the program guide. DVD quality movie channels makes it worth any ads in the guide =D
"that improved previously crappy MDI implementations in programs like Visual Studio and KDevelop"
Could someone explain to me why MDI is "crappy"? Did someone with a lot of influence one day say "MDI is crappy" and everyne just blindly nod and agree or smthn?
The way I see it... just like everything else it has its place in some things. I LOVE MDI text editors. MDI is also very well done in Cool Edit Pro.
I don't suppose you've ever looked into many modern satellite systems? Pretty much all movie channels, many networks such as the discovery channel... even MTV broadcast high definition stations that you can only get with a satellite system that supports it such as DirecTV. The rumors of the death of hdtv have been greatly exagerated.
For DVD, use ogle (http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/). For Linux games, go Loki's website (http://www.lokigames.com/). For windows games... sure I could run them in windows. But that means sacrificing some space to create a windows partition. It also requires me to shut everything down and reboot to play the game. While not the worst thing that can happen, it sure is somewhat annoying. About sircam, wine runs programs in a simulated environment.. sircam running over wine would have no access to your real linux system. In fact I doubt it would even run considering wine doesn't simulate the startup scripts for the windows boot process and other such things.
All in all though all I have to say is one thing.. I would LIKE to be able to play some games that are released as windows only software, and I don't want to have to run or buy windows or reboot to run those games.
I applaud anyone who is working to make this possible, and I admire their work.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are viewing konqueror in the wrong light. Konqueror is best thought of as a general system interface that happens to be able to view web pages more than a web browser that happens to happen to be able to act as a system interface.
I.E. Konqueror just loads the appropriate kio slave for whatever task it is doing at the moment. If it is loading a web page it starts up the http kio slave. If that kio slave did not exist then konqueror would no longer be a web browser, but chances are with litle to no modification it'd still be fully functional. Konqueror has kio slaves for many many things.. such as sftp, audiocd, imap, smtp, pop, man, info, etc. The list is quite large and you can get a complete one in the control center.
I can understand the "this is way to windowsish" feeling when konqueror appears to be a straight copy of i.e. an dit's annoying integration into windows. However when viewed from a technical standpoint konqueror is a very well designed and very well done system interface that is very different in spirit than IE integration in windows.
The author lost a lot of credibility when he mentions the ability to disallow javascript popups in konqueror and "Does not move your cursor focus to a new window as it opens." in th elist of what's new. It's painfully obvious the author has little experience with what he is reviewing. I will give him credi tint hat he's partially right for both. A new METHOD for blocking popups was introduced (smart), and focus code has changed somewhat.
/opt. He's talking about grepping through the rpm's looking for certain files. It's not so tough. Simply install the arts rpm, the kdelibs rpm, and th ekdebase rpm and you got yourself a very basic installed kde. I'm not exactly sure what it is he was trying to do.
Also I'm not an expert with rpm as I rarely use it but his method for installing kde3 is insane. I use SuSE rpm's to try out rc2 simply because I didn't feel like compilin git at the time, and the installed to
Beyond the install process there's only a couple of paragraphs dedicated to the actual use and performance of kde. Nowhere are aditional things such as new kio slaves like sftp, performance enhancements to konq, the much improved css/js handling, etc. I think he covers the new features of kmail (which btw filtering does not work with imap folders yet which is bothersome). Also kde3 comes with a very impressive new theme called keramik and a couple of new icon sets (these icon sets were previously available as seperate packages).
This review could have been a lot more informative than it was and really is a waste of space. Putting a little more time into something called a review should be required. This is more of a dumbed down installation guide.
Dark Matter isn't this super mysterious thing as you make it out to be.. it's exactly what it's called. It's so elusive because it's dark.. it does not emit radiation of any sort therefore our current techniques for "looking" at things can't "see" it. For all we know it coul djust be a bunch of inert rocks floating around. The reason why dark matter is claimed to exist in such large quantities is because by observing the movement of galaxies things react as if there was a lot more gravity than what we know of being there could produce.
This is all recalled from a 2nd level physics course at high school so someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Of course it's not likely... kind of why it's called fiction and not reality. When will people get it through their heads that the whole beauty of story telling is that you don't have to tell about reality. The insane strength of the fighters in the Z series and the insane amounts of incredibly huge ass kicking are what makes dragonball z so much fun imho.
What's the big deal with running a dual boot
system? I'd be happy to tell you. For an
admittedly small few of us windows isn't just
a pile of bugs... it doesn't work at all. I
have tried every version of windows that has
support for all of my hardware, and not a
single one even boots once I install all my
drivers and apply patches to fix known bugs.
Linux however supports all my hardware as
well, and it not only boots.. it runs fast
and reliable for as long as I need it to. It's
people in similar situations that dual booting
is utterly useless.
... or do those screenshots look a lot like a
modified version of KDE + Wine?
Are they trying to charge $99 for a copy of KDE
and wine with some minor modifications?
$10k is how much it'd cost for a non-hd plasma display... you can find good hdtv's for $2k depending on where you look.
I'm gonna be pissing on your parade here too, but I honestly don't think the intention was to change the state of linux gaming. Believe it or not Quake2 isn't a Linux only game. This also might surprise you, but it's been out for a while too... What you just said would be like saying releasing the doom source was for the purpose of improving linux gaming. That wasn't the idea.
It's not as if we lack the hardware needed to convert a decent computer system into a similar unit. First off you have the hauppauge WinTV-PVR card, although I've heard it's mpeg2 compression quality leaves a bit to be desired. Apparantly the Kfir chip it uses is capable of much better, so it must just be the design of the card or the drivers. Linux drivers are not yet ready but are being developed at pvr.sourceforge.net.
Then there's the REALMagic DVR board which costs a pretty penny but I hear has incredible quality, though ultra sensitive macrovision detection. That is unfortunate however there are ways, albeit expensive ways to get around that. I also do not believe this card has much in the way of linux support, however I believe it uses the same decoding chip as the Hollywood+ board, so the linux drivers for that card may work with this one for mpeg2 decompression (including dvd support). The website mentions that this board also does the audio in hardware which the hollywood+ does not, however software audio is still of course possible. The mpeg encoder chip is the Kfir chip the wintv-pvr uses, and pvr.sourceforge.net looks to be coming along pretty well now. Figuring out the audio encoding hardware however is probably yet to be done. Full linux support looks quite possible, but it's a good ways away I'm willing to bet just by how few people I'm sure own this card.
Then there is a card being made per order by some german company I believe.. (I read this on an old article so I'm not sure of the current status). There was information on it on the video4linux website. This card was built especially for linux. It comes with nothing but the card in the package, and drivers may be downloaded from the video4linux website. Again I'm still not sure of the availability of this card and it may be rather expensive. I also believe that this card falls somewhere inbetween the wintv-pvr and the sigma designs DVR in quality. I'm not sure of this cards audio capabilities.
Put this hardware together with some good software (you will most likely need to write it yourself), and you've got a nice PVR system of your own to do with as you please.
I do however realize these set top units have their advantages, such as not having to be in the same room as the computer. I'm just making sure that people realize these other options do exist =).
Two terms. Contributary and Vicarious Copyright Infringment. My Spelling my not be 100% accurate, but look them up. Napster was guilty as charged, and so will ReplayTV be.
OK First of all what does the XBox have to do with emulating windows PC games on linux? My guess is nothing.
Second off has the thought maybe crossed your mind that directx8 also includes directx 7, 6, 5, and so on. It only makes logical sense to start at the first directx version, then add the new features each version included one at a time if you are developing a directx compatibility layer. If directx 7 compatibility is almost done then they are doing very well and can move on to 8 soon.
And remember... they are trying to get PC games working here, not XBox games.
Can we say cache trashing?
ME!! =D
Just use html
Maybe I'm just being a little too simplistic here.. but why exactly does EVERY program need to be in the path? Of course I'm not exactly a command line person... it's a lot easier to be lazy with a mouse and a big pretty menu, but nonetheless when I do use a command line I'd much rather have sensible organization rather than a little less to type.
"x86 instructions are pretty compact, but they have a serious lack of registers."
You'll have to excuse my uncalled for amount of obvious thinking... but did some supreme power ever forbid adding more registers or smthn? It would be entirely possible (and most likely pretty easy tho I am not an engineer) to just add 8 or so new registers while maintaining backwards compatibility... ?
You will also have to excuse my cynicism... I just wait patiently for the day for someone to give me a good reason why x86 needs to be replaced. Not an easily solved half assed excuse like lack of registers.
This is a late response and may not get read but I'm gonna say it anyways.
"What's illegal is impacting the profit of the copyright holders."
You make a good point that no real good evidence has been shown that p2p is impacting the RIAAs bottom line, but I can understand their fear that it could and still might. It may hurt my slashdot popularity but seeing as that is not very important to me.. I sympathize with the RIAA's reasoning and support what they do. A typical example I use is associated with computer hardware, which for the time being isn't so easy to copy. If you want a brand new geforce3 you'll have to buy it, or live without it. I feel the RIAA has the right to do the same with the music they and the artists under them own. If you want to own a song you need to buy it, or just listen to it on the radio or something. My main point is p2p services are so popular because most people who use them are cheap punks who believe that they not only should have, but deserve to get everything for free. Again the only evidence I have backing me here is my variuos experiences with people who use them for downloading tons of songs every day.
Anyways.. these are just my personal beliefs.. and I feel that I don't need to impose them on anyone nor convince anyone that they are right, so you will have to excuse me if I don't back up what I say or explain why I think a particular way about something. I prefer to sit back and watch what happens.
Now, about my "law is law" argument. What I meant to convey is that just because you believe a law to be unjustified or wrong does not make you immune to it. You still cannot or should not be able to break it with impunity. The reason why I brought this up is again it seems to be a common attitude with people I have personally interacted with. I do NOT disagree with the civil disobedience idea.. hell I use that as my excuse for smoking weed =). If I believe a law is wrong I usually will break it without a second thought.. I will try to not get caught though, and I don't fool myself into thinking that I'm going to change anything or escape punishment because I personally think it is wrong.
With my little anarchy bit I was mainly just talking about a massive group of people rebelling agaisnt the law not because the law is wrong, but because the law is inconvieniant or because it forces them to open their pocket book or something.. some law is good, some is bad, and most people cant differentiate between the two.
Now... I found your arguments rather enlightening in some aspects and you had some very good points. The original intent of my post was to solicit someone who knew more than I did about the specifics to reply with a post as intelligent as yours =). I just wanted to clarify my thoughts with this post.
"In the movie industry, Actors get paid a lot of money, and they have a union, and they go on strike together when things are bad."
And what actors consider bad I'd give an arm and a leg for... go figure.
"In the music industry, Artists get paid sweet FA, they obviously don't have a union, and they don't go on strike to get a better deal when they are being done over."
In the movie industry actors do a different contract for each movie, and usually have sections that allow them to quite. AFAIK music "artists" sign long term contracts with no way out... and if they even tried to go on strike they'd be sued back to the stone age.
you'll have to excuse this shittiness of this post.. I had almost 9 nice paragraphs done before IE thought it'd be funny to hit the back button for me and lose the whole damned thing.
Anyways.. check here. It is a slashdot article linking to a p2p copyright paper. Here's the gist of it:
vicarious infringment: 1) proove infringment is taking place 2) admin must be have ability to stop it 3) admin must stand to gain finacially from the infringment
contributory infringment: 1) proove infringment is taking place 2) admin must know or should know about infringment 3) admin must have contributed
Napster obviously matched all 3 for vicarious very cleanly. Napster can match contributory if you inteprit contribution as making the client and/or providing the network.
Also, I am not familiar with how morpheus operates.. but I see it being highly doubtfull that it is decentralized. If I can open up my morpheus client and click "connect" and it magically knows which server to connect to and does it there's a reason... some form of centralization.
Now.. this shows how napster is illegal and morpheus might be.. lets get the other 2 popular arguments out of the way
First off, fair use. Fair use is there to let you do what you want with what you bought for your enjoyment or potentially for you and a few friends enjoyment... it doesn't allow you to record that tape for your best bud anymore than it allows you to make that mp3 and give it to 100 people on the internet. Now it DOES entitle you to make that mp3 for yourself and that tape for yourself.
The law is wrong argument is next... all I got to say is to damned bad.. until it changes we got to abide by it, just deciding laws are bad and ignoring them may seem to you like some glorified form of civil disobediance, but law prevents anarchy, and I don't care how much you think anarchy would be nice, the second some guy comes after you with a knife or gun after you walked the wrong way and he found it insulting... you won't like anarchy anymore.
If you don't like the law try to get it changed... but until it is, these people are guilty.. face it.. as much as you'd like illegal pirating to be as easy as it is, that still doesn't make it legal now.
I'll admit to downloading a few mp3's illegaly.. and I'll admit that it was illegal... I also download mp3's to replace lost tracks on my large collection of miskept CD's... wether or not that is illegal is open to interpritation. I'm not for or agaisnt anyone here.. because no matter which side I take I appear to be a hypocrite to that side, so I remain neutral, I just like to remind people what the facts really are sometimes.
Also... IANAL
I hear you on that one. My interest in programming has been dropping like a rock the more I realizethat those days are gone and nobody wants or even thinks good code is required anymore.
"What annoys me is that the disk drive manufaturers seem to be unable to comprehend the idea of 'automatic configuration'. Why should I have to spend time telling my BIOS how many cylinders and tracks my drive has? "
If you use any system made after 1990 you would probably be stunned that that "modern" bios atatched to an equally modern hard disk actually does detect its own size! Heck... even my 8086 does that, though that may have been some unusual feature at the time. The only systems I have ever had to manually put size in are old 486's before the use of ziff sockets and earlier.
I don't know about where you are.. but here digital cable isn't just about the program guide. DVD quality movie channels makes it worth any ads in the guide =D
"that improved previously crappy MDI implementations in programs like Visual Studio and KDevelop"
Could someone explain to me why MDI is "crappy"? Did someone with a lot of influence one day say "MDI is crappy" and everyne just blindly nod and agree or smthn?
The way I see it... just like everything else it has its place in some things. I LOVE MDI text editors. MDI is also very well done in Cool Edit Pro.
I don't suppose you've ever looked into many modern satellite systems? Pretty much all movie channels, many networks such as the discovery channel... even MTV broadcast high definition stations that you can only get with a satellite system that supports it such as DirecTV. The rumors of the death of hdtv have been greatly exagerated.
For DVD, use ogle (http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/). For Linux games, go Loki's website (http://www.lokigames.com/). For windows games... sure I could run them in windows. But that means sacrificing some space to create a windows partition. It also requires me to shut everything down and reboot to play the game. While not the worst thing that can happen, it sure is somewhat annoying. About sircam, wine runs programs in a simulated environment.. sircam running over wine would have no access to your real linux system. In fact I doubt it would even run considering wine doesn't simulate the startup scripts for the windows boot process and other such things.
All in all though all I have to say is one thing.. I would LIKE to be able to play some games that are released as windows only software, and I don't want to have to run or buy windows or reboot to run those games.
I applaud anyone who is working to make this possible, and I admire their work.