That's fairly lame. I mean, even Microsoft provides the Windows Update service for free...even to people who pirate Windows.
The technology for auto-updaters is there and the source is available, so it's not like there aren't a million examples to refer to when implementing your own.
This just seems like a way to squeeze more money out of the consumer and nothing more. I would rather pay $50 for a boxed software set and be able to receive free updates online.
Anyone have any ideas on what this drive will (does) cost? For a floppy drive to succeed, it needs to be dirt cheap. When you throw together a 9000 MHz Celeron system, how much do you pay for a floppy drive for it (assuming you don't have any on the shelf?)...it's usually like $20 or $25.
The Iomega Zip drive is nice because it offers quite a bit of space for a small price. But then it has the usefulness factor. You can't easily boot from a Zip drive in all machines, unless it's SCSI. They don't manufacture those anymore, and even if they did, you'd need a SCSI controller, which would up your price again since that's not a standard PeeCee component.
In addition to the drive being cheap, the media will have to be affordable. Look at the Jaz drive. It's like $300 or $350 for the drive, and $120 for EACH cartridge. Come on. A hard drive with 5 times the capacity is cheaper than that.
Anyone remember the "Floptical" drive? I had one of these until it finally keeled over. When they were new, they cost $400 and required a SCSI controller. Reads and writes and boots from regular 1.44MB floppies, as well as 21MB floptical disks. Nice drive, but way too expensive.
...Looking back over my post here, I realize I don't really have much of a point, just a question.:)
Well, I've only used that CVS server a couple of times and it worked just fine. The FTP server (download.sourceforge.net) is one of the best mirror sites around, IMHO. And since opinions are the only things that really matter, I'll leave it at that.
The only "advantage" that Hemos mentioned that FreeBSD has over Linux is that it's more stable and faster. Of course, the only backing he can give to that is that it's his personal opinion.
If FreeBSD is so technically superior to Linux, then why does Sourceforge run Linux? I'm surprised it's not constantly falling over since it's running Linux and all.
This seems to be more of a "I'm bored, what can I install and play with for the next hour" type post rather than a well-informed post.
Does anyone know of any CVS mirrors for the Mozilla source? All I seem to see on their CVS page is cvs-mirror.mozilla.org. Perhaps it just has too much traffic at the moment.
My guess is that too many people said they were hoping for a free downloadable copy of FrameMaker. Commercial software companies not only have the development costs, but production costs and tech support costs.
True, I agree that PDF is the original "big, bad idea", but unfortunately everyone's favorite overclockable motherboard manufacturer and companies like that will continue to release documentation in PDF format (even though the PDFs contain slightly skewed and grainy scanned in images of the actual printed manual). For the few times you actually have to deal with it, it's not all that bad.
Plus, there are several alternatives to Acrobat Reader. xpdf, and that KDE one come to mind.
The FreeDOWS project was started a while back to do the same thing. As far as I know, the FreeDOWS project died, but I could be wrong.
(1) The name choice was not the best in the world, Sun Microsystems created "OpenWindows" for their SunOS operating system. They may want to change it.
The FAQ on http://www.ultralinux.org gives a lot of info about Linux on SPARC and UltraSPARC hardware. SunOS emulation is provided through the iBCS2 package and there have been people to run the SunOS Netscape through this. You still need Solaris libraries for the programs to work, but that shouldn't be a problem.
I don't think you have to get so defensive. Yeah, we can all open the quicktime file and grab the info. The file format is open, big deal. But they contain information that is decoded by the codec. So without access to the proper codecs, the file is useless...so what's the point in running around saying "Hey! I can open this file because I know the file format!"? It's useless without all the parts, so people just collectively agree that QuickTime 4 sucks.
I've always thought that QuickTime was of the better computer movie formats. Given a choice between a QuickTime or AVI, I'd always pick the QuickTime. Now with those open file format QuickTime files containing information I can't decode, I go for the MPEGs now. AVIs still suck.
I hope that Apple and all the other codec people will lighten up and say we can all use their codecs for making movie players. They can still charge out the ass for the authoring software.
So what's your point? You didn't say anything either. "if you read it straight through you'll see he says nothing, but if you read it carefully you'll see he says nothing."
Is it just me or did anyone else notice that Miguel managed to say NOTHING in about a two page essay? He seems like a nice guy...but dammit, he needs to have a point to his essays.
Hmmm....nice and all. Too bad RPM doesn't work. That whole dependency checking loop screws everyone up.
But rpm doesn't suck nearly as much as Debian's packaging system.
I like rpm because I can convert it to a tarball with Slackware's rpm2targz utility. Then I can work with it. I don't trust rpm to safely install anything.
Slashdot Mirror
That's fairly lame. I mean, even Microsoft provides the Windows Update service for free...even to people who pirate Windows.
The technology for auto-updaters is there and the source is available, so it's not like there aren't a million examples to refer to when implementing your own.
This just seems like a way to squeeze more money out of the consumer and nothing more. I would rather pay $50 for a boxed software set and be able to receive free updates online.
-David
Anyone have any ideas on what this drive will (does) cost? For a floppy drive to succeed, it needs to be dirt cheap. When you throw together a 9000 MHz Celeron system, how much do you pay for a floppy drive for it (assuming you don't have any on the shelf?)...it's usually like $20 or $25.
:)
The Iomega Zip drive is nice because it offers quite a bit of space for a small price. But then it has the usefulness factor. You can't easily boot from a Zip drive in all machines, unless it's SCSI. They don't manufacture those anymore, and even if they did, you'd need a SCSI controller, which would up your price again since that's not a standard PeeCee component.
In addition to the drive being cheap, the media will have to be affordable. Look at the Jaz drive. It's like $300 or $350 for the drive, and $120 for EACH cartridge. Come on. A hard drive with 5 times the capacity is cheaper than that.
Anyone remember the "Floptical" drive? I had one of these until it finally keeled over. When they were new, they cost $400 and required a SCSI controller. Reads and writes and boots from regular 1.44MB floppies, as well as 21MB floptical disks. Nice drive, but way too expensive.
...Looking back over my post here, I realize I don't really have much of a point, just a question.
-David
Well, I've only used that CVS server a couple of times and it worked just fine. The FTP server (download.sourceforge.net) is one of the best mirror sites around, IMHO. And since opinions are the only things that really matter, I'll leave it at that.
-David
The only "advantage" that Hemos mentioned that FreeBSD has over Linux is that it's more stable and faster. Of course, the only backing he can give to that is that it's his personal opinion.
If FreeBSD is so technically superior to Linux, then why does Sourceforge run Linux? I'm surprised it's not constantly falling over since it's running Linux and all.
This seems to be more of a "I'm bored, what can I install and play with for the next hour" type post rather than a well-informed post.
-David
Does anyone know of any CVS mirrors for the Mozilla source? All I seem to see on their CVS page is cvs-mirror.mozilla.org. Perhaps it just has too much traffic at the moment.
My guess is that too many people said they were hoping for a free downloadable copy of FrameMaker. Commercial software companies not only have the development costs, but production costs and tech support costs.
-David
True, I agree that PDF is the original "big, bad idea", but unfortunately everyone's favorite overclockable motherboard manufacturer and companies like that will continue to release documentation in PDF format (even though the PDFs contain slightly skewed and grainy scanned in images of the actual printed manual). For the few times you actually have to deal with it, it's not all that bad.
Plus, there are several alternatives to Acrobat Reader. xpdf, and that KDE one come to mind.
-David
Don't you mean you couldn't care less?
Yeah, Samba and the penguin logo, that pretty much accounts for everything. :)
-David
But NEXTSTEP used the GNU tools too (gcc, and so on). Read your NEXTSTEP license agreement before posting. :)
-David
Two things to say:
-David
The FAQ on http://www.ultralinux.org gives a lot of info about Linux on SPARC and UltraSPARC hardware. SunOS emulation is provided through the iBCS2 package and there have been people to run the SunOS Netscape through this. You still need Solaris libraries for the programs to work, but that shouldn't be a problem.
I don't think you have to get so defensive. Yeah, we can all open the quicktime file and grab the info. The file format is open, big deal. But they contain information that is decoded by the codec. So without access to the proper codecs, the file is useless...so what's the point in running around saying "Hey! I can open this file because I know the file format!"? It's useless without all the parts, so people just collectively agree that QuickTime 4 sucks.
I've always thought that QuickTime was of the better computer movie formats. Given a choice between a QuickTime or AVI, I'd always pick the QuickTime. Now with those open file format QuickTime files containing information I can't decode, I go for the MPEGs now. AVIs still suck.
I hope that Apple and all the other codec people will lighten up and say we can all use their codecs for making movie players. They can still charge out the ass for the authoring software.
Oh well.
-David
So what's your point? You didn't say anything either. "if you read it straight through you'll see he says nothing, but if you read it carefully you'll see he says nothing."
:)
-David
Is it just me or did anyone else notice that Miguel managed to say NOTHING in about a two page essay? He seems like a nice guy...but dammit, he needs to have a point to his essays.
Just my opinion.
-David
Distributors are not allowed to dump things in /usr/local. There's that whole Linux File System Standard thing.
-David
Hmmm....nice and all. Too bad RPM doesn't work. That whole dependency checking loop screws everyone up.
But rpm doesn't suck nearly as much as Debian's packaging system.
I like rpm because I can convert it to a tarball with Slackware's rpm2targz utility. Then I can work with it. I don't trust rpm to safely install anything.
-David