Having my very own Freeloader, I can say that incompatibilities with it are nothing worth writing a slashdot news story about. I've had a success rate of 1/5 games so far. Using 3 different boot methods.
The thing doesn't work properly. 007 Nightfire doesn't go past the start screen. Harry Potter, Chamber of Secrets is in black and white. Luigis Mansion is in black and white. Zelda doesn't load. Super Monkey Ball 2 works perfectly!
So yeah, if there's anything to blame for not working as advertisied, it's the Freeloader itself.
Probably cheaper to buy a different region cube anyway:-)
Well, I'm not sure, but my 9 months of CTS might contradict this finding.
Let me just start off by saying that you wouldn't want to wish CTS on your worst enemy. It's not a pleasant experience.
That out of the way, I can say, without a doubt, that typing was the cause of my CTS.
I was hacking up an Ericsson PABX controller for many many hours for many many days. I wasn't taking breaks, I wasn't stretching, and I was using a mouse and a normal keyboard.
At first my hands went numb on a Friday. I thought it was strange, but my wrists were fine and feeling was restored after the weekend.
About 3 weeks later, I suddenly got this huge amount of pain in my right wrist. The next day my whole right hand was paralised, and I took 2 weeks off work.
I returned to work after having trained Dragon NaturallySpeaking to program C with Emacs. After about a week, my voice was gone, and my throat hurt like hell. So I gave up on that.
I got an MS Natural Keyboard. It helped. I got a trackball and used my left hand instead of my right hand. That helped.
I also discovered an amazing program called Workrave that forced me to take breaks. I highly recommend that people use this program. Prevention is a good thing.
So anyway, it's been 9 months. I've been to physiotherapists, chiropractors, hand therapists, hand surgeons, etc. None have really fixed the problem. But it's "managable" now.
Anyway, I'm probably looking at some form of surgery in the next few months as I seem to be stuck in a "rut", having good wrist days and bad wrist days.
The moral of my story: if you're typing a lot, and you're not taking breaks, then you're in for an aweful experience. Do some stretches and stuff as well. Seems to help. CTS isn't fun. Very depressing at times.
Oh yeah, I'm 20. I've been programming for maybe 6 years. So you don't necessarily have to be old to get a form of RSI.
RedHat comes on 3 binary CDs. It's on 3 CDs because:
It includes a base system. (Disc 1) It includes GNOME and KDE. (Disc 1, 2) It includes servers. (Disc 1, 2) It includes development libraries and tools. (Disc 1, 2) It includes language support for many languages (most of Disc 3)
Then again, complaining about how many CDs RedHat consists of is pretty stupid in itself.
See, the thing is, you can choose what to install from the CDs. Wow. Yes, Choice. It's a wonderful thing. Don't want that Kerberos 5 server? Don't install it (it's not installed by default.) But there's only one included. Don't want a SQL server? You don't have to install it.
But once you want to play around with SQL, it's nice to know that you can bring up the GUI package manager and click 'PostgreSQL', and have it set it up for you, or just typing 'rpm -ivh postgresql-*'.
You could easily build a 1 CD RedHat that just installed GNOME or KDE and a base system. And then you'd have something that's very pretty and extremely easy to use.
Oh, let's not forget that it's free as in beer and speech.
Linux does not want to be Mac OS X. I don't know where anyone would get that impression from.
Having bought an iBook, then selling it because Mac OS X did not live up to the hype, I can honestly say that RedHat 8 (and now, RedHat 9 -- which adds even more polish/seamlessness to the desktop experience) with either KDE or GNOME is a better desktop than Mac OS X.
I seem to be one of the few on/. who don't think Mac OS X is humankind's greatest creation.
Then again, I really have no problems with the Windows 2000/XP desktop (used both as my primary desktop OS until RedHat 8 was released) and would also rate it above Mac OS X.
You miss the point (everything below here is probably not applicable to North Americans. I can't find any data on this stuff for the US.)
A console is NOT a PC. No one cares how fast their console's CPU is. Or how much RAM it has.
They care about the games.
And the XBox had 1 above average, extremely repetitive game for well over a year. 1 game. (Splinter Cell just came out! Woo! The next Halo for the year. Not that the MGS2 resemblence isn't apparent...)
Compare that to the PS2 or the GC and you can see why it's sucking.
Of course, the PS2 has already beaten both. But the GC is catching up in terms of weekly sales.
Let me back this up with some numbers.
Console sales in Japan this week:
Game Boy Advance: 150,000 (Annual: 2,313,400) PlayStation 2: 38,400 (Annual: 3,101,500) GameCube: 37,400 (Annual: 939,400) Xbox: 1,900 (Annual: 273,600) PSOne: 1,800 (Annual: 205,900)
Is that enough to convince you? This has been happening for months. The number of people buying Xboxes is almost the same as those buying a 7 year old console.
In Australia, the GC had 53% growth in sales, Sept 02 vs Oct 02. The PS2 had 2% growth, and the XBox -1% growth. ( http://www.informbd.com.au/i3/html/Market%20Watch% 20All%20Games.html ) Also, the GC is now outselling the XBox by a fair bit. Of course, the PS2 is beating them both, but that is expected.
Microsoft started this "Extreme XBox Pack" price war recently... Xbox + Halo + JSRF + Rally Sport + DVD kit for AU$453 (~US$254.) Sony then came out with their "Extra Pack" (PS2 + THPS4 + DVD remote + PS2 Magazine and some blockbuster rentals) at the same price.
They lowered the prices again this week. AU$400 (~US$224) gets you one of the two. Guess which one people are buying? The PS2. It doesn't take a genius to understand why.
Microsoft is doing alot of advertising over here. Buses are plastered with XBox propaganda. I havn't seen a single PS2 ad for the new bundle. D
Dick Smith Electronics ( http://www.dse.com.au/ ) were pushing the new Xbox bundle pretty hard. But if you go to their website, you'll see a banner for the PS2 bundle (it replaced a banner for the XBox.)
My local EB has 4 racks of shelves of PS2 games. GC and the Xbox have 1 each.
Anyway... I have all 3 machines. The only one gathering dust is the Xbox. I don't know what that tells you.
I'd sell it if I could, but I'd be making a huge loss (I paid full price [AU$649]for it. Before Microsoft decided to get into a price war. They're selling it for AU$50 now [$100 * 3 games + $50 * dvd pack = $350, $400 - $350 = $50.])
I wish they followed up on their "threat". I don't know who they were threatening, though.
The consumers? I don't think they are going to cry about it.
"Oh no! I can't buy an XBox! I've been PUNISHED!!! Quickly, give me something else to buy! I MUST CONSUME!!! Oh well, I'll just buy the PS2. Or the GameCube. Microsoft just lost a sale. Ha! Take that, Microsoft"
What a punishment.
Not like the XBox is worth it, anyway. No games (other than "American" games... that'll change soon though (I hope)...).
My XBox has a layer of dust on it. I lost so much money when Microsoft dropped the price to compete with Sony that I can't afford to sell it. I'd be making a huge loss.
I finished Halo. It was pretty good. And repetitive. And that's about all that the XBox had/has going for it. It's been quite a while since it was released, and I'm still waiting for something worthwhile.
Just out of curiosity (I work for a courier company here in Sydney, Australia), what type of system does "the sort" run on? (We have "the sort" here too:-)
She's deleted my posts numerous times. Posts that contained real, factual information. Not the crap she makes up. Any time you post something disagreeing with her, you'll either get moderated down or have your post deleted.
Her husband later said that he'd never used valgrind. He just had a glimpse at the webpage.
When people realise Eugenia is a moron, the world will be a better place.
I really would like to know what, if any, qualifications Eugenia has. Why do people pay any attention to her? What makes her reviews so much more important than someone elses?
Yeah we can play fast games on X but window dragging with content is still very jerky compared to X on SGI, Exceed on Solaris over a network, and Windows (they're all silky smooth). Until this one is fixed, XFree86 is still very unresponsive to me.
Hmmm. I don't experience that at all. I'm moving my Qt/KDE-based Air Traffic Control application which has lots of little sprites/canvas/views/widgets and I can move it around the screen with no jerkyness.
Also, I've always wondered... Who reads the contents of a window while dragging it? Can't you wait the extra half a second it'd take to drop the window into a new position?
Apart from the obvious (can comment it out, yada, yada), most people already see enough advertising everywhere they look.
Anyway, this also goes against all the ideology associated with OSS (for me, at least.) I'd rather donatedirectly to the developers. At least you know were your money is going.
You do business on the web? Whoa. There's a new concept.
IE should not be the standard, because it's broken. Every IE release has different bugs, so you have to write stupid workarounds for every version/service pack/hotfix/etc. It's a nightmare, and anyone who has to support their website will attest to it. We get at least 10 calls a day because some client has a different IE on a different Windows version and theres some obscure thing that it does that none of the other configurations do. VMware comes in handy here, but it can still take hours to replicate the error, and come up with a fix.
We have not had a single problem with any mozilla release since 0.9.7. "Rendering bugs" is ambiguous. What rendering bugs?...
To sum it up: Mozilla is great. It's standards compliant (yes, W3C is the standards body. It has been for years... there's nothing arbitary about it,) and is a great platform for web development.
Also, I've been using it as my one and only browser on my Windows box for about 6 months now, and I have yet to see it crash, nor render a website thats worth caring about incorrectly. It does flash perfectly. It even embeds Acrobat reader in there just like IE does.
These 3 companies have large market share in different regions of the world:
SuSE == Europe (Sans France => Mandrake) TurboLinux == Asia (Well, more SE) Conectiva == South America
I don't know where Caldera fits into the equation... maybe their IP is worth something or they have lots of support/consultancy staff with Linux expertise...
IBM have enough presence in North America, and also Australia (which probably services New Zealand as well...)
So... lets say IBM is behind this "merging" of distros... which in reality is a conglomorate of Linux services/consultancy companies which spans the majority of the world (Sans Africa/Middle East -- there's probably enough IBM staff there to cover the demand, although maybe SuSE services this region as well...)
Genius? I think so.
I would not be surprised if these companies were receiving funding from IBM... or if they were bought out by IBM in the future...
Whilst "If only they were using Open Source Software in the aviation industry..." is stupidity beyond belief,... there are actually a few open source air traffic control programs available....
Hmmm... no, I can configure sendmail with the best of 'em!:-)
But you fail to state anything worthwhile. Firstly, there's no logical connection between me saying it has a non-productive configuration syntax and me not being able to configure the thing properly. It's just a relative comparison to the configuration of exim postfix, and qmail.
Secondly, it's a valid point. Why use something that's complex when a simpler alternative exists? (which is superior anyway!)
I don't like the colour red. I don't own a car, a bicycle or a scooter. And... keep my mum out of this!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Having my very own Freeloader, I can say that incompatibilities with it are nothing worth writing a slashdot news story about. I've had a success rate of 1/5 games so far. Using 3 different boot methods.
:-)
The thing doesn't work properly.
007 Nightfire doesn't go past the start screen.
Harry Potter, Chamber of Secrets is in black and white.
Luigis Mansion is in black and white.
Zelda doesn't load.
Super Monkey Ball 2 works perfectly!
So yeah, if there's anything to blame for not working as advertisied, it's the Freeloader itself.
Probably cheaper to buy a different region cube anyway
So, just copy the rexec.py and make it local to your application, then import it.
Problem solved.
Well, I'm not sure, but my 9 months of CTS might contradict this finding.
Let me just start off by saying that you wouldn't want to wish CTS on your worst enemy. It's not a pleasant experience.
That out of the way, I can say, without a doubt, that typing was the cause of my CTS.
I was hacking up an Ericsson PABX controller for many many hours for many many days. I wasn't taking breaks, I wasn't stretching, and I was using a mouse and a normal keyboard.
At first my hands went numb on a Friday. I thought it was strange, but my wrists were fine and feeling was restored after the weekend.
About 3 weeks later, I suddenly got this huge amount of pain in my right wrist. The next day my whole right hand was paralised, and I took 2 weeks off work.
I returned to work after having trained Dragon NaturallySpeaking to program C with Emacs. After about a week, my voice was gone, and my throat hurt like hell. So I gave up on that.
I got an MS Natural Keyboard. It helped. I got a trackball and used my left hand instead of my right hand. That helped.
I also discovered an amazing program called Workrave that forced me to take breaks. I highly recommend that people use this program. Prevention is a good thing.
So anyway, it's been 9 months. I've been to physiotherapists, chiropractors, hand therapists, hand surgeons, etc. None have really fixed the problem. But it's "managable" now.
Anyway, I'm probably looking at some form of surgery in the next few months as I seem to be stuck in a "rut", having good wrist days and bad wrist days.
The moral of my story: if you're typing a lot, and you're not taking breaks, then you're in for an aweful experience. Do some stretches and stuff as well. Seems to help. CTS isn't fun. Very depressing at times.
Oh yeah, I'm 20. I've been programming for maybe 6 years. So you don't necessarily have to be old to get a form of RSI.
Oh, another good resource is the Typing Injury FAQ.
RedHat comes on 3 binary CDs.
/. who don't think Mac OS X is humankind's greatest creation.
It's on 3 CDs because:
It includes a base system. (Disc 1)
It includes GNOME and KDE. (Disc 1, 2)
It includes servers. (Disc 1, 2)
It includes development libraries and tools. (Disc 1, 2)
It includes language support for many languages (most of Disc 3)
Then again, complaining about how many CDs RedHat consists of is pretty stupid in itself.
See, the thing is, you can choose what to install from the CDs. Wow. Yes, Choice. It's a wonderful thing. Don't want that Kerberos 5 server? Don't install it (it's not installed by default.) But there's only one included. Don't want a SQL server? You don't have to install it.
But once you want to play around with SQL, it's nice to know that you can bring up the GUI package manager and click 'PostgreSQL', and have it set it up for you, or just typing 'rpm -ivh postgresql-*'.
You could easily build a 1 CD RedHat that just installed GNOME or KDE and a base system. And then you'd have something that's very pretty and extremely easy to use.
Oh, let's not forget that it's free as in beer and speech.
Linux does not want to be Mac OS X. I don't know where anyone would get that impression from.
Having bought an iBook, then selling it because Mac OS X did not live up to the hype, I can honestly say that RedHat 8 (and now, RedHat 9 -- which adds even more polish/seamlessness to the desktop experience) with either KDE or GNOME is a better desktop than Mac OS X.
I seem to be one of the few on
Then again, I really have no problems with the Windows 2000/XP desktop (used both as my primary desktop OS until RedHat 8 was released) and would also rate it above Mac OS X.
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=4116
Start at number 1 and work your way down.
mkdir moz1.3/ Red_Hat_8x_RPMS/xft/RPMS/i386
cd moz1.3
lftp ftp.mozilla.org:/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.3a
mget *
[close mozilla]
rpm -Uvh *
You now have a beautiful browser.
You miss the point (everything below here is probably not applicable to North Americans. I can't find any data on this stuff for the US.)
% 20All%20Games.html ) Also, the GC is now outselling the XBox by a fair bit. Of course, the PS2 is beating them both, but that is expected.
A console is NOT a PC.
No one cares how fast their console's CPU is.
Or how much RAM it has.
They care about the games.
And the XBox had 1 above average, extremely repetitive game for well over a year. 1 game. (Splinter Cell just came out! Woo! The next Halo for the year. Not that the MGS2 resemblence isn't apparent...)
Compare that to the PS2 or the GC and you can see why it's sucking.
Of course, the PS2 has already beaten both. But the GC is catching up in terms of weekly sales.
Let me back this up with some numbers.
Console sales in Japan this week:
Game Boy Advance: 150,000 (Annual: 2,313,400)
PlayStation 2: 38,400 (Annual: 3,101,500)
GameCube: 37,400 (Annual: 939,400)
Xbox: 1,900 (Annual: 273,600)
PSOne: 1,800 (Annual: 205,900)
Is that enough to convince you? This has been happening for months. The number of people buying Xboxes is almost the same as those buying a 7 year old console.
In Australia, the GC had 53% growth in sales, Sept 02 vs Oct 02. The PS2 had 2% growth, and the XBox -1% growth. ( http://www.informbd.com.au/i3/html/Market%20Watch
Microsoft started this "Extreme XBox Pack" price war recently... Xbox + Halo + JSRF + Rally Sport + DVD kit for AU$453 (~US$254.) Sony then came out with their "Extra Pack" (PS2 + THPS4 + DVD remote + PS2 Magazine and some blockbuster rentals) at the same price.
They lowered the prices again this week. AU$400 (~US$224) gets you one of the two. Guess which one people are buying? The PS2. It doesn't take a genius to understand why.
Microsoft is doing alot of advertising over here. Buses are plastered with XBox propaganda. I havn't seen a single PS2 ad for the new bundle. D
Dick Smith Electronics ( http://www.dse.com.au/ ) were pushing the new Xbox bundle pretty hard. But if you go to their website, you'll see a banner for the PS2 bundle (it replaced a banner for the XBox.)
My local EB has 4 racks of shelves of PS2 games. GC and the Xbox have 1 each.
Anyway... I have all 3 machines. The only one gathering dust is the Xbox. I don't know what that tells you.
I'd sell it if I could, but I'd be making a huge loss (I paid full price [AU$649]for it. Before Microsoft decided to get into a price war. They're selling it for AU$50 now [$100 * 3 games + $50 * dvd pack = $350, $400 - $350 = $50.])
I wish they followed up on their "threat".
I don't know who they were threatening, though.
The consumers? I don't think they are going to cry about it.
"Oh no! I can't buy an XBox! I've been PUNISHED!!! Quickly, give me something else to buy! I MUST CONSUME!!! Oh well, I'll just buy the PS2. Or the GameCube. Microsoft just lost a sale. Ha! Take that, Microsoft"
What a punishment.
Not like the XBox is worth it, anyway.
No games (other than "American" games... that'll change soon though (I hope)...).
My XBox has a layer of dust on it. I lost so much money when Microsoft dropped the price to compete with Sony that I can't afford to sell it. I'd be making a huge loss.
I finished Halo. It was pretty good. And repetitive. And that's about all that the XBox had/has going for it. It's been quite a while since it was released, and I'm still waiting for something worthwhile.
Assuming the guy isn't colo'ing and just getting a virtual host...
He can't really use apt-get anyway.
Pretty stupid "Ask Slashdot", as usual.
Just out of curiosity (I work for a courier company here in Sydney, Australia), what type of system does "the sort" run on? (We have "the sort" here too :-)
She's deleted my posts numerous times.
Posts that contained real, factual information.
Not the crap she makes up.
Any time you post something disagreeing with her, you'll either get moderated down or have your post deleted.
I couldn't agree with you more.
Her husband later said that he'd never used valgrind. He just had a glimpse at the webpage.
When people realise Eugenia is a moron, the world will be a better place.
I really would like to know what, if any, qualifications Eugenia has. Why do people pay any attention to her? What makes her reviews so much more important than someone elses?
... yeah, because Macs never become obsolete... oh no. Never.
Unless... there really is a world outside the USA...
KDE has done the hour-glass thing since version 2.
Apple stole the "Dock" from CDE/KDE in the first place. They just made it only take up 2/3 of the screen, and centered it. Wow. THEY STOLE FROM KDE!
How original can a GUI get before people say "This is too different, no way I'm using this!"...
Hey, if you have suggestions, why not email the KDE UI people?
HREF="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downl oads/powertoys.asp">WinXP Powertoys come with a VDM and lots of other neat UNIX-like goodies.
X had ClearType before Microsoft had ClearType.
Except they call it something else.
See http://jmason.org/howto/subpixel.html
It's called Sub-Pixel Font Rendering, and Apple came up with it first.
http://grc.com/ctwho.htm
Meh. IE wishes it was as good as Mozilla. And I'm talking about W32 Mozilla. Use 1.1a1 and you'll know what I mean. Brilliant.
Also, I've always wondered... Who reads the contents of a window while dragging it? Can't you wait the extra half a second it'd take to drop the window into a new position?
Apart from the obvious (can comment it out, yada, yada), most people already see enough advertising everywhere they look.
Anyway, this also goes against all the ideology associated with OSS (for me, at least.) I'd rather donate directly to the developers. At least you know were your money is going.
You do business on the web? Whoa. There's a new concept.
...
IE should not be the standard, because it's broken. Every IE release has different bugs, so you have to write stupid workarounds for every version/service pack/hotfix/etc. It's a nightmare, and anyone who has to support their website will attest to it. We get at least 10 calls a day because some client has a different IE on a different Windows version and theres some obscure thing that it does that none of the other configurations do. VMware comes in handy here, but it can still take hours to replicate the error, and come up with a fix.
We have not had a single problem with any mozilla release since 0.9.7. "Rendering bugs" is ambiguous. What rendering bugs?
To sum it up: Mozilla is great. It's standards compliant (yes, W3C is the standards body. It has been for years... there's nothing arbitary about it,) and is a great platform for web development.
Also, I've been using it as my one and only browser on my Windows box for about 6 months now, and I have yet to see it crash, nor render a website thats worth caring about incorrectly. It does flash perfectly. It even embeds Acrobat reader in there just like IE does.
Meh.
Let me speculate a little here...
These 3 companies have large market share in different regions of the world:
SuSE == Europe (Sans France => Mandrake)
TurboLinux == Asia (Well, more SE)
Conectiva == South America
I don't know where Caldera fits into the equation... maybe their IP is worth something or they have lots of support/consultancy staff with Linux expertise...
IBM have enough presence in North America, and also Australia (which probably services New Zealand as well...)
So... lets say IBM is behind this "merging" of distros... which in reality is a conglomorate of Linux services/consultancy companies which spans the majority of the world (Sans Africa/Middle East -- there's probably enough IBM staff there to cover the demand, although maybe SuSE services this region as well...)
Genius? I think so.
I would not be surprised if these companies were receiving funding from IBM... or if they were bought out by IBM in the future...
Time to invest in IBM, I think.
Whilst "If only they were using Open Source Software in the aviation industry..." is stupidity beyond belief, ... there are actually a few open source air traffic control programs available....
OpenATC
Hmmm... no, I can configure sendmail with the best of 'em! :-)
;-)
But you fail to state anything worthwhile.
Firstly, there's no logical connection between me saying it has a non-productive configuration syntax and me not being able to configure the thing properly. It's just a relative comparison to the configuration of exim postfix, and qmail.
Secondly, it's a valid point. Why use something that's complex when a simpler alternative exists? (which is superior anyway!)
I don't like the colour red.
I don't own a car, a bicycle or a scooter.
And... keep my mum out of this!
Sendmail? People still use that trash?
Insecure bloatware with obscure, totally non-productive configuration syntax.
It's not like Exim, Postfix and Qmail don't exist. And they're all superior.