I don't know how many people know this, but on most of the cheapie nvidia cards I've bought recently, the TVout is enabled automatically if there is no monitor connected, so you get TVout from the BIOS with zero configuration, you don't even have to tell X that it's on a TV, just run it at 800x600 and set a bigger font.
mplayer. if necessary, hidden behind something like freevo. maybe even totem if it's not a weird file. I have a cheap mini-ITX PC running Debian that can browse network shares, USB devices, CDs, DVDs and if I actually had any of it, Firewire; With onboard TV-out. That covers pretty much all of the formats you'll encounter outside the crazy DRM world, but I accept that a lot of people want that content, in which case I'd stick Windows on it and use MPC and the various proprietary things. It's not going to ever have a single, unified, spangly interface on any system really; Not while the various codec people work in very different ways. A wireless keyboard and mouse setup is a good idea;)
Sony have an advantage over Apple in that they can sell you a complete set of electronics (mumble digital lifestyle mumble buzzwordnonsense) that's all styled and behaves consistently. I've also noticed that Sony TV/VCR/DVD machines transparently integrate quite well already; As they and the other asian manufacturers put smart networking in these things Sony ought to be doing some pretty special things in these stores in years to come. They may well not, of course, but I like Sony, so I'm rooting for them to do it;)
...the first graphics card vendor to release stable, open drivers for their top product lines is going to sell a shit load of cards to all of us that are annoyed by the current state of drivers;) I would resent buying another card this soon (I shelled out a few hundred quid on a GF3Ti500 a while back), but I'd spend a few hundred more for a card that was fast and worked flawlessly and I suspect many others would too. Hell I've even been considering giving up UT2004 and going back to an old Matrox card that is fully supported. Having said that, I am grateful that nVidia have any support at all and being able to run native 64bit drivers on my amd64 rig is excellent and the nVidia installer generally does a pretty good job, but it would be so so much better if support was as much a part of the OS as for all my other hardware.
Let's not forget that commercially grown hemp is not cannabis and does not contain the active ingredients that make cannabis a drug.
There is a very strange, almost puritan/victorian revulsion to hemp because it happens to have one narcotic sister species. Before the days of plastic, cotton and so on, hemp was the mainstay of our fabric needs, making everything from clothing and sacking to sails and ropes. The stuff also happens to be about the most efficient producer of bioethanol per hectare, so it would make an excellent contribution to replacing oil without getting too far from oil (since we're obviously not going to have a worldwide hydrogen network or something similar in time for oil running out).
Whether you think cannabis should be legal or not, hemp should be used a lot more than it is. For all our advances in materials science, imo we've left important things behind.
I would say that definitely sounds like either your browser or your X server is confused, because that really should work. It certainly works as expected in epiphany and mozilla here.
Is similar behaviour displayed in other things? If you Ctrl-C some text in a text editor, select some other text and then Ctrl-V, does it paste what you copied or what you subsequently selected?
You can Ctrl-C a URL and paste it into an address bar without undoing the copy.
Highlight the URL you want to copy and press Ctrl-C, highlight the URL you want to replace and press Ctrl-V.
Seriously, everyone who is in any doubt about X's two clipboard strategy needs* to read this article by Jamie Zawinski. If you understand the X clipboards and use them properly it's far more efficient than the windows clipboard (although Windows still has the edge on moving complex data between heterogeneous applications, which is quite poor of us since X has a very flexible mime type system in the clipboard).
The one thing that always confuses me is that if you don't tell someone about the middle mouse button, the clipboard works exactly the same as Windows, so why is it that the little nugget about mmb paste gets through to people, but not the fact that it's seperate to the ctrl-c/ctrl-v clipboard?;)
I've been using RH since just before version 5 and as a desktop platform since '98, including FC1 and now FC2. When I first tried out linux I was swapping between RH and Slackware and I couldn't really find too much of a difference, but this rpm thing looked like it had more potential in it than slack, so I settled on RH. To begin with the distro was simple, the installer was pretty basic and the desktop was unutterably bad (I was escaping win98 after a disappointing abandonment of the ageing Amiga 1200) and I rarely used it outside of work servers. Things were markedly improved by the arrival of the first Gnome desktop in RH, even though it was pretty rough and largely useless. I like that a lot of the ideas they were having about desktops back then are still in Gnome, but operating far far better now;) I well remember the RPM dependency hell and getting to a point of being able to work around it for most things, the pain of glibc transitions, the 2.2-2.4 jump, rpm binaries that deadlock wildly and all the other little niggles that people jump on RH for. It is by no means perfect. However, over the period of time I have been using it, RH has become significantly more useful and capable. It is still my platform of choice for server machines, even though I do find the RHEL/Fedora split quite frustrating as a sysadmin on a budget that wants something a little more reliable than a autorebuilt srpm, but without the 24x7 onsite hugging price tag. To be honest I'm half wondering if Bruce Perens' latest efforts at an Enterprise Debian might not be the long term best solution, but we will see. For now RH9+Progeny and RHEL3 are working well together for me and are both supported for a few years to come, so it's not too bad. Anyway, to Fedora, specifically to Fedora Core 2. I was really quite excited by the plans RH announced for Fedora, it sounded like it was going to end up taking the massive advantage that Debian has, apt, and taking it on community project style. It would free the world from dependency hell by using the weight of the RH legacy and the various excellent third party RPM sites (fedora.us, livna, freshrpms, dag, etc.) to produce a RH like distro with a package list to rival Debian. I am disappointed they haven't really achieved that in any noticeable way, but I understand that changing Fedora from RH's internal Red Hat Linux efforts to a large, distributed development team has got to be hard. I hope they can get there, preferably before the third party sites tear each other apart (you guys! stop fucking with each others packages!). I've been using FC2 since it was released, both as an upgrade from FC1 and as a fresh reinstall on a box previously running FC1. I like it. I really like it, I am very happy with the direction the Gnome/Freedesktop/XOrg types are pushing things, stuff like hotplug/fam/hal/dbus that is making the machine vastly more aware of itself, which I expect to see spreading beyond the desktop. There are things gone from gnome since the 1.x and 2.2/2.4 days that I miss and would like back, but there are way more things I'm glad to see gone. Spatial nautilus? Love it, I don't like that it opens a bazillion windows, but since they are very easy to kill, two thumbs up. The fact that everything stays exactly where you put it is even better. This *must* be implemented for metacity such that it handles windows with similar aplomb. I know people don't like the spatial concept, but they can turn it off and stop whining;) It's nice to see distros making the 2.6 plunge, it's been a very easy transition from 2.4 I think, way easier than some of the previous major changes;) So, given that RH Linux and now Fedora have been the platform for my work for the last 6 years, I think it's fair to say that I'm pretty happy with them, even though I did have to defect to Debian at home for the masses of software (but I'd skip back to a Fedora install if it could offer a similar bulk).
Keep going Fedora people, if you build it, they will come;)
Making it easier to use doesn't directly make it less secure in my opinion. Other than software bugs (which are common in open source stuff too, let's be fair), it is possible to make Windows fairly secure from a network point of view. The problem is that making it easier to use lowers the barrier of entry, so you have people who aren't clued up to security best practices setting up mission critical machines. THAT makes them less secure, not the interface to the same software. imo natch.
Given the number of companies that base products on Samba, I would imagine a lot of due diligence work has been done on it, plus they have a very well structured process for reverse engineering the protocol. I am not familiar enough with the ntfs driver project to know if the same is true there.
It is entirely possible that running any kernel code could cause corruption in other parts of the kernel. I haven't heard of readonly ntfs code doing it, but it's entirely possible in the unprotected kernel memory.
I guess you just asked the wrong people at RH (ie people too far removed from engineering;)
Maybe they just don't want to pay to do all the due diligance required to make sure they are legally covered from Microsoft turning round and sueing.
The stability problems related mostly to write support, you could read NTFS partitions ok, but the writing code was unusable for a long time. This isn't some secret conspiracy nobody will tell you about, it's just bloody complicated filesystem code, it's not easy at the best of times, and when you're reverse engineering something it's a whole bunch harder. Cut them some slack.
If you want to know why it's not suitable for shipping, maybe ask the people who make it, they will most likely be highly intimate with a) the quality and stability of the codebase, b) the legal implications of their work.
IANAL, so I pass on the FAT question, I had wondered that myself when the licensing was announced. I didn't read into it enough to see what was in/excluded though. Research is left as an exercise for the reader;)
I know that's probably not what a lot of posts are saying here, but since I'm not at home and am thus on a modem, I really don't want to sit here and pay to read all the comments, so here's my $0.02 for free;)
I have a Hauppauge WinTV PCI card, it's based on the bt878 chipset and it is perfectly adequate for watching TV on the not very good reception I get in my room. I have connected it to my PS2 before and, even in fullscreen (perhaps especially in fullscreen), the quality is disappointing compared to a "proper" TV. However, all is not lost. While I have not used one myself, I know a number of people with the newer DVB cards, which capture the TV onboard and encode it to MPEG2, before streaming it with UDP to the host computer over the PCI bus. This obviously requires more resources from the PC to decode/display than a bttv (the driver used for bt8x8 chips) card writing directly to video RAM over bus mastering, however, the quality should be significantly superior, especially on a high quality local video source such as a PS2. So there.
I literally just got around to compiling test11 an hour ago, and only because test8 oopsed on me yesterday. I'm about to reboot, quick glance at some news and 2.6.0 is out! grrr;)
Well that's not quite as bad, but it's still pretty fucking awful. Why in the hell does each ATM not have some kind of firewall? I guess it's not as easy to have a few lines of iptables as it is to click your way around the utterly utterly utterly abysmal Windows port filtering rubbish.
How did they get infected? They're not on the Internet, surely?! Please, please someone tell me that we don't have ATMs on the net. Suddenly I have an urge to keep my money in a matress;)
Unfortunately gaim doesn't seem to have proper bindings for copy/paste - for most stuff I use the Copy/Paste menu entries do have proper keyboard bindings. Might be worth filing as a usability bug against gaim?
It's got nothing to do with options, the fact that you have to read that article is a) because nobody bothers to document how it works, b) a lot of programmers have no idea how it works and don't make their code work properly. Gnome I know works fine, I believe KDE does too, I think it's mostly OOo and mozilla where they have a cross platform codebase being worked on by people who may not be familiar with the ins and outs of X. It'll get fixed though, and hopefully quickly.
Umm, X's clipboard does work in a universal alt-c/alt-p type way (although some programs do have different bindings, e.g. ctrl-c/ctrl-p). You are aware that the selection/middle-mouse buffer is not the clipboard at all, right? There is a completely seperate and proper clipboard, which is why most programs have Edit->Copy/Paste menu entries. People do tend to get confused and think the selection buffer is the same as the clipboard. IT IS NOT.
Personally I think this kind of thing is a bit silly and pointless, but it seems people want to be entertained by their menus, so I guess we're stuck with more of it;)
The damage and compositing extensions being worked on will allow all windows to be stored off-screen and their image operated on, there are screenshots available of them rendering gtk menus translucently over the underlying windows and with a drop shadow, all of which is composited offscreen (and could be hardware accelerated with driver support) and then blitted onto the actual display. Why do we need to completely replace X to get something a couple of extensions can do?
Slashdot Mirror
Gentoo users enjoy the pain ;)
I don't know how many people know this, but on most of the cheapie nvidia cards I've bought recently, the TVout is enabled automatically if there is no monitor connected, so you get TVout from the BIOS with zero configuration, you don't even have to tell X that it's on a TV, just run it at 800x600 and set a bigger font.
what about an extigy? means you can run its cable a fair way, so it could make hiding it away easy.
mplayer. if necessary, hidden behind something like freevo. maybe even totem if it's not a weird file. I have a cheap mini-ITX PC running Debian that can browse network shares, USB devices, CDs, DVDs and if I actually had any of it, Firewire; With onboard TV-out. That covers pretty much all of the formats you'll encounter outside the crazy DRM world, but I accept that a lot of people want that content, in which case I'd stick Windows on it and use MPC and the various proprietary things. It's not going to ever have a single, unified, spangly interface on any system really; Not while the various codec people work in very different ways. A wireless keyboard and mouse setup is a good idea ;)
Sony have an advantage over Apple in that they can sell you a complete set of electronics (mumble digital lifestyle mumble buzzwordnonsense) that's all styled and behaves consistently. I've also noticed that Sony TV/VCR/DVD machines transparently integrate quite well already; As they and the other asian manufacturers put smart networking in these things Sony ought to be doing some pretty special things in these stores in years to come. ;)
They may well not, of course, but I like Sony, so I'm rooting for them to do it
Regarding safety stats, the results of the European tests are here
Do I have to turn myself in because I wrote some ARexx once upon a time? ;)
...the first graphics card vendor to release stable, open drivers for their top product lines is going to sell a shit load of cards to all of us that are annoyed by the current state of drivers ;)
I would resent buying another card this soon (I shelled out a few hundred quid on a GF3Ti500 a while back), but I'd spend a few hundred more for a card that was fast and worked flawlessly and I suspect many others would too. Hell I've even been considering giving up UT2004 and going back to an old Matrox card that is fully supported.
Having said that, I am grateful that nVidia have any support at all and being able to run native 64bit drivers on my amd64 rig is excellent and the nVidia installer generally does a pretty good job, but it would be so so much better if support was as much a part of the OS as for all my other hardware.
So, graphics card companies, take a chance!
Let's not forget that commercially grown hemp is not cannabis and does not contain the active ingredients that make cannabis a drug.
There is a very strange, almost puritan/victorian revulsion to hemp because it happens to have one narcotic sister species. Before the days of plastic, cotton and so on, hemp was the mainstay of our fabric needs, making everything from clothing and sacking to sails and ropes. The stuff also happens to be about the most efficient producer of bioethanol per hectare, so it would make an excellent contribution to replacing oil without getting too far from oil (since we're obviously not going to have a worldwide hydrogen network or something similar in time for oil running out).
Whether you think cannabis should be legal or not, hemp should be used a lot more than it is. For all our advances in materials science, imo we've left important things behind.
I would say that definitely sounds like either your browser or your X server is confused, because that really should work. It certainly works as expected in epiphany and mozilla here.
Is similar behaviour displayed in other things? If you Ctrl-C some text in a text editor, select some other text and then Ctrl-V, does it paste what you copied or what you subsequently selected?
You can Ctrl-C a URL and paste it into an address bar without undoing the copy.
;)
Highlight the URL you want to copy and press Ctrl-C, highlight the URL you want to replace and press Ctrl-V.
Seriously, everyone who is in any doubt about X's two clipboard strategy needs* to read this article by Jamie Zawinski. If you understand the X clipboards and use them properly it's far more efficient than the windows clipboard (although Windows still has the edge on moving complex data between heterogeneous applications, which is quite poor of us since X has a very flexible mime type system in the clipboard).
The one thing that always confuses me is that if you don't tell someone about the middle mouse button, the clipboard works exactly the same as Windows, so why is it that the little nugget about mmb paste gets through to people, but not the fact that it's seperate to the ctrl-c/ctrl-v clipboard?
I've been using RH since just before version 5 and as a desktop platform since '98, including FC1 and now FC2. ;) ;) ;)
;)
When I first tried out linux I was swapping between RH and Slackware and I couldn't really find too much of a difference, but this rpm thing looked like it had more potential in it than slack, so I settled on RH.
To begin with the distro was simple, the installer was pretty basic and the desktop was unutterably bad (I was escaping win98 after a disappointing abandonment of the ageing Amiga 1200) and I rarely used it outside of work servers.
Things were markedly improved by the arrival of the first Gnome desktop in RH, even though it was pretty rough and largely useless. I like that a lot of the ideas they were having about desktops back then are still in Gnome, but operating far far better now
I well remember the RPM dependency hell and getting to a point of being able to work around it for most things, the pain of glibc transitions, the 2.2-2.4 jump, rpm binaries that deadlock wildly and all the other little niggles that people jump on RH for. It is by no means perfect.
However, over the period of time I have been using it, RH has become significantly more useful and capable. It is still my platform of choice for server machines, even though I do find the RHEL/Fedora split quite frustrating as a sysadmin on a budget that wants something a little more reliable than a autorebuilt srpm, but without the 24x7 onsite hugging price tag. To be honest I'm half wondering if Bruce Perens' latest efforts at an Enterprise Debian might not be the long term best solution, but we will see. For now RH9+Progeny and RHEL3 are working well together for me and are both supported for a few years to come, so it's not too bad.
Anyway, to Fedora, specifically to Fedora Core 2. I was really quite excited by the plans RH announced for Fedora, it sounded like it was going to end up taking the massive advantage that Debian has, apt, and taking it on community project style. It would free the world from dependency hell by using the weight of the RH legacy and the various excellent third party RPM sites (fedora.us, livna, freshrpms, dag, etc.) to produce a RH like distro with a package list to rival Debian. I am disappointed they haven't really achieved that in any noticeable way, but I understand that changing Fedora from RH's internal Red Hat Linux efforts to a large, distributed development team has got to be hard. I hope they can get there, preferably before the third party sites tear each other apart (you guys! stop fucking with each others packages!).
I've been using FC2 since it was released, both as an upgrade from FC1 and as a fresh reinstall on a box previously running FC1. I like it. I really like it, I am very happy with the direction the Gnome/Freedesktop/XOrg types are pushing things, stuff like hotplug/fam/hal/dbus that is making the machine vastly more aware of itself, which I expect to see spreading beyond the desktop. There are things gone from gnome since the 1.x and 2.2/2.4 days that I miss and would like back, but there are way more things I'm glad to see gone. Spatial nautilus? Love it, I don't like that it opens a bazillion windows, but since they are very easy to kill, two thumbs up. The fact that everything stays exactly where you put it is even better. This *must* be implemented for metacity such that it handles windows with similar aplomb. I know people don't like the spatial concept, but they can turn it off and stop whining
It's nice to see distros making the 2.6 plunge, it's been a very easy transition from 2.4 I think, way easier than some of the previous major changes
So, given that RH Linux and now Fedora have been the platform for my work for the last 6 years, I think it's fair to say that I'm pretty happy with them, even though I did have to defect to Debian at home for the masses of software (but I'd skip back to a Fedora install if it could offer a similar bulk).
Keep going Fedora people, if you build it, they will come
Cheers,
Making it easier to use doesn't directly make it less secure in my opinion. Other than software bugs (which are common in open source stuff too, let's be fair), it is possible to make Windows fairly secure from a network point of view.
The problem is that making it easier to use lowers the barrier of entry, so you have people who aren't clued up to security best practices setting up mission critical machines. THAT makes them less secure, not the interface to the same software. imo natch.
Given the number of companies that base products on Samba, I would imagine a lot of due diligence work has been done on it, plus they have a very well structured process for reverse engineering the protocol. I am not familiar enough with the ntfs driver project to know if the same is true there.
;)
It is entirely possible that running any kernel code could cause corruption in other parts of the kernel. I haven't heard of readonly ntfs code doing it, but it's entirely possible in the unprotected kernel memory.
I guess you just asked the wrong people at RH (ie people too far removed from engineering
Maybe they just don't want to pay to do all the due diligance required to make sure they are legally covered from Microsoft turning round and sueing.
;)
The stability problems related mostly to write support, you could read NTFS partitions ok, but the writing code was unusable for a long time. This isn't some secret conspiracy nobody will tell you about, it's just bloody complicated filesystem code, it's not easy at the best of times, and when you're reverse engineering something it's a whole bunch harder. Cut them some slack.
If you want to know why it's not suitable for shipping, maybe ask the people who make it, they will most likely be highly intimate with a) the quality and stability of the codebase, b) the legal implications of their work.
IANAL, so I pass on the FAT question, I had wondered that myself when the licensing was announced. I didn't read into it enough to see what was in/excluded though. Research is left as an exercise for the reader
I know that's probably not what a lot of posts are saying here, but since I'm not at home and am thus on a modem, I really don't want to sit here and pay to read all the comments, so here's my $0.02 for free ;)
I have a Hauppauge WinTV PCI card, it's based on the bt878 chipset and it is perfectly adequate for watching TV on the not very good reception I get in my room. I have connected it to my PS2 before and, even in fullscreen (perhaps especially in fullscreen), the quality is disappointing compared to a "proper" TV. However, all is not lost.
While I have not used one myself, I know a number of people with the newer DVB cards, which capture the TV onboard and encode it to MPEG2, before streaming it with UDP to the host computer over the PCI bus. This obviously requires more resources from the PC to decode/display than a bttv (the driver used for bt8x8 chips) card writing directly to video RAM over bus mastering, however, the quality should be significantly superior, especially on a high quality local video source such as a PS2. So there.
Cheers,
I literally just got around to compiling test11 an hour ago, and only because test8 oopsed on me yesterday. I'm about to reboot, quick glance at some news and 2.6.0 is out! grrr ;)
Well that's not quite as bad, but it's still pretty fucking awful.
Why in the hell does each ATM not have some kind of firewall? I guess it's not as easy to have a few lines of iptables as it is to click your way around the utterly utterly utterly abysmal Windows port filtering rubbish.
How did they get infected? They're not on the Internet, surely?! Please, please someone tell me that we don't have ATMs on the net. ;)
Suddenly I have an urge to keep my money in a matress
Unfortunately gaim doesn't seem to have proper bindings for copy/paste - for most stuff I use the Copy/Paste menu entries do have proper keyboard bindings. Might be worth filing as a usability bug against gaim?
It's got nothing to do with options, the fact that you have to read that article is a) because nobody bothers to document how it works, b) a lot of programmers have no idea how it works and don't make their code work properly. Gnome I know works fine, I believe KDE does too, I think it's mostly OOo and mozilla where they have a cross platform codebase being worked on by people who may not be familiar with the ins and outs of X. It'll get fixed though, and hopefully quickly.
For a fuller explanation of how the selection buffer and clipboard work, see this
Umm, X's clipboard does work in a universal alt-c/alt-p type way (although some programs do have different bindings, e.g. ctrl-c/ctrl-p).
You are aware that the selection/middle-mouse buffer is not the clipboard at all, right? There is a completely seperate and proper clipboard, which is why most programs have Edit->Copy/Paste menu entries. People do tend to get confused and think the selection buffer is the same as the clipboard. IT IS NOT.
For reference, the screen shot is here.
;)
Personally I think this kind of thing is a bit silly and pointless, but it seems people want to be entertained by their menus, so I guess we're stuck with more of it
The damage and compositing extensions being worked on will allow all windows to be stored off-screen and their image operated on, there are screenshots available of them rendering gtk menus translucently over the underlying windows and with a drop shadow, all of which is composited offscreen (and could be hardware accelerated with driver support) and then blitted onto the actual display.
Why do we need to completely replace X to get something a couple of extensions can do?