Yes. IBM's done this on several of their laptops for some time now. Not having owned or used one for an extended period of time, I can't comment on how useful it is, but I always thought that it seemed utterly useless, as the light's going to be blocked by your hands unless you're the worst hunt-and-peck typist in the world (most at least let their hands hover above the keyboard). This is especially true, as the IBM laptops use the pointint-stick device for the mouse (many now ship with trackpads as well).
The pointing stick is, in my opinion, the superior pointing device. I had it on my 486 IBM laptop, and never really shook off the habit. I still perfer my logitech trackball to any other mouse. As an added bonus, the thing's indestructible. It's7 or 8 years old, and has been dropped, drenched, and more. Once a year, I take it apart to clean the gunk off of the optical sensors (yes -- trackballs were optical LONG before mice ever were).
Not to make up excuses, but I will say that you are right about iTunes being slow to load. I may also want to point out that winamp has been under development for several years exculsively on the windows/x86 platform. They've had a lot of time to make optimizations -- iTunes has been out less than a year. Plus, when winamp was first developed, a lot of machines back then were quite slower -- same concept with iTunes. The next big media player 5 years down the road will be larger, more complicated, and slower. Remember winamp 3? That was MUCH slower than iTunes, and didn't provide nearly as much functionality. iTunes runs just fine on anything over 1ghz -- which is a lot for just a media player, but is pretty much standard for their target audience. (That being said, Winamp remains my lightweight player of choice on win32.)
As for 3rd party format support, I'm not sure how iTunes is built on the PC, but on the mac, it directly links against Quicktime. In other words, any file that can be played by quicktime can (should) play in iTunes. If you install the Ogg/Vorbis codec for quicktime, you can play ogg files in iTunes.
I'll also agree that QuickTime for windows sucks. Hopefully the widespread popularity of iTunes on windows will cause apple to port their software more efficently. They HAVE produced good windows software -- the AirPort admin utilities under Windows are as good as if not better than the ones for OS X, though this may be attributed to the fact that they use Microsoft's windowing controls as opposed to their own as in QT and iTunes.
Doesn't it seem like the program was no more than a form of extortion? It seemed illegal on so many fronts. "Sign this agreement or we'll sue you for more money than you'll ever have". Things like this are illegal to prevent organized crime which is exactly what the record industry is turning into (not killing people -- but merely restricting personal rights and controlling the government.
That being said, I think the artists do need some sort of union to prevent widespread piracy. It's just that the RIAA has stepped far beyond its boundaries. Methinks labor unions shouldn't be exempt from antitrust laws.
I don't like to be a troll, but your point is invalid. If the sound card works in every other operating system, there's no reason it shouldn't work in linux -- that being said, there should be some sort of project started which allows users to EASILY run non-supported hardware with the help of WINE (as was done with the NTFS driver)
It seems worth mentioning that apple also updated Final Cut Express to a new patch. The patch corrects several severe issues with the program, specifically the 'blank frame' issue which has plagued virtually every user of the program. It also corrects problems with dropped frames and timecode breaks.
Now that these problems are fixed, I can safely say that Final Cut Express is the perfect entry-level video editing solution. At $299, it's a steal compared to the competition (Final Cut Pro is already a steal!). Plus, if you decide to upgrade to pro, Apple only charges the difference in the price, meaning you lose no money.
Talk about a company that's nice to their customers. Apple definitely sees the pro market as an area to capitalize - it has always been their strong point in the past. You can tell that apple's trying to capitalize on their strong points as they attempt to regain the Education market with the $799 1.25ghz eMac. The pro markets are faithful to apple, and can easily afford their hardware and software - compared to the 'real' pro-level stuff, Apple's a bargin (SGI workstations used to cost upward of $10k without software)
It looks like some GNU developer has already disassembled it and integrated some of the code into GCC.
I just went to compile vi, and an ASCII paper clip popped up onto my terminal:
"It looks like you're trying to compile EMACS. Would you like me to launch the EMACS wizard now. Because you are stupid, I will launch it anyway"
This is simply not true. In the past decade, Microsoft has released versions of windows which run on PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, and Itanium (not to mention Opteron). The first hardware NT actually ran on was MIPS - it was originally intended for the intel i860 which never made it to mass-production. (Source
Sure, I wish everyone used RTF. Fact is, they don't. Deal with it. If they sent it in HTML, you'd be complaining about how word mauls the HTML code.
OpenOffice opens.doc. Wordpad opens.doc. Microsoft provides a free viewer for word documents - I think it runs in WINE. OS X's TextEdit opens.doc as well. If that's not universally accepted, I don't know what is.
I'd REALLY like to see PDF universally supported, but it just hasn't happened - until windows ships with native pdf support built-in - both viewing and creating, it will remain a format unusable to AOL users and computer-wielding grandmothers
Now, if you want to complain about people sending out 25mb powerpoint attachments, I definitely understand. But this is just silly and doesn't help push forward the OSS movement. If just makes you look like a jerk.
In cases like this, it pays to find a PROFESSIONAL who knows what they're talking about.
This sort of thing has to be done quite often, and I'm sure a pro should be able to point you in the right direction. This isn't exactly the type of project you can just hack together and expect it to work -- not to discourage you, but this is not something you want to use in a real 'production' enviornment. Get it working on your own, then try to implement it in a real setting. Saturating your university's ethernet backbone will not go over well with the IT guys (not to mention that you can't exactly depend upon the bandwidth being there. If backbone usage rises above 50%, you could have a problem)
That being said, I surely hope that you have some sort of professional advice in building this video lab. Slashdot nerds tend to be way too overconfident in their abilities and have somewhat of an 'I can do anything' attitude.
I wish you the best of luck with your project, and I too want to know how to go about doing this. It seems so logical that there must be a way of doing it, as it's done all the time. Ask somebody who would know. Slashdot nerds are probably not going to know of a tried and true solution. (I guarruntee you that there will be about 10 replies with "emacs has done this for years" and "build a simple 1000-node beowulf cluster" in them)
AOL users may actually have LESS spyware. You see, several pieces of spyware get incredibly confused by AOL's network topology (the AOL adapter thingy it pretends to connect through). As such, they cause the AOL client to grind to a halt and cease to work.
I've seen this in a few cases, though I never figured out which spyware did this... all I know was that spybot removed it
Low-cost mars mission..... Low-cost technology..... Unproven Russian technology.... plus a reality show...
Could we plllleeeease send Donald Trump... and Ryan Seacrest and have the first 'good' space disaster*?
*The only exception being Appolo 13 which was a "good disaster". Tons of stuff went wrong and the mission was a failure. However, nobody got hurt, and the whole ordeal proved twice-over the quality of American engineering and ingenuity.
In my opinion, after spending 2 hours removing spyware from a friend's computer, Gator's products are no more than viruses.
Which leads me to my point.... why doesn't Symantec (Norton) classify Gator as a virus. It has all the hallmarks of a virus (hell... Blaster was LESS destructive. It just rebooted your machine), and no legitimate use. How isn't it a virus?? Just because the company's legit at the moment, does it really make it okay?
If you're using Apple's hardware (which is pretty nice, and VERY cost-efffective, especially when compared to PC/Sun hardware), you get a free copy of OS X Server for an unlimited number of users -- free. So, $3,000 gets you a quality-made kick-ass 64-bit server on par with the higher-end stuff from the big PC vendors, and you don't have to pay for software.
What's more, you don't have to pay for software, but you also don't have to pay for someone to administer them. Regardless of weather or not they need a GUI, the GUIs Apple has designed for the server apps are top-notch. While I only had a little bit of time to play with them, I walked away being VERY impressed, especially that you can remotely administer a server through the standard GUI interface without any sort of remote-desktop interface, making managing multiple servers a breeze.
Ok. Enough for the advocacy. It's pretty obvious that i'm a big fan of the Xserves. But, if you're not using Mac hardware on your server, which is perfectly acceptable, and even required in some industries, you might as well use some sort of BSD or Linux. Using darwin gives you no major advantage. It's obscurity is a defintie DISADVANTAGE. If you're having trouble running a self-compiled MySQL on top of X86-darwin, there aren't going to be lots of people out there that can help you.
I've got no clue what the new Xfree license entails... But nonetheless, I think the community is overreacting. By dropping Xfree, we no longer have any long-term alternatives (yeah, there are forks, but they haven't been around long enough to prove their stability or their worth).
Of course, I firmly believe that X needs to be replaced. Just not for political reasons. Whomever's in charge of X needs to form a panel of industry experts and draft an X12 protocol. In my mind, the panel should include network engineers, usability experts, etc. It must include representatives from both open and semi-open companies - Red Hat, the KDE and Gnome teams, present X developers, Apple, IBM, Sun, and possibly even Microsoft.
If we can create a modern standardized windowing protocol (which is what X11 essentially is, only broken and outdated), we can maxamize portability between platforms and radically simplify software development. Even Microsoft would jump on the bandwagon.
Let's not run ourselves up a river without a paddle. We need to maintain some sort of X11 system for the time being while we draft a new protocol. The current forks just don't seem stable enough, and seek to accomplish far too much and form their own proprietary standards. We need a completely new protocol so that everyone can work together and maintain compatibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. IBM's done this on several of their laptops for some time now. Not having owned or used one for an extended period of time, I can't comment on how useful it is, but I always thought that it seemed utterly useless, as the light's going to be blocked by your hands unless you're the worst hunt-and-peck typist in the world (most at least let their hands hover above the keyboard). This is especially true, as the IBM laptops use the pointint-stick device for the mouse (many now ship with trackpads as well).
The pointing stick is, in my opinion, the superior pointing device. I had it on my 486 IBM laptop, and never really shook off the habit. I still perfer my logitech trackball to any other mouse. As an added bonus, the thing's indestructible. It's7 or 8 years old, and has been dropped, drenched, and more. Once a year, I take it apart to clean the gunk off of the optical sensors (yes -- trackballs were optical LONG before mice ever were).
Isn't it scary that according to these figures, Google's datacenter should theoretically be able to DDOS the entire Internet?
Someone mentioned that they have enough bandwidth/processing power to saturate a T1000 line. Scary...
Hah! Basic. Real men use a real programming language
(yes, this is a joke)
Not to make up excuses, but I will say that you are right about iTunes being slow to load. I may also want to point out that winamp has been under development for several years exculsively on the windows/x86 platform. They've had a lot of time to make optimizations -- iTunes has been out less than a year. Plus, when winamp was first developed, a lot of machines back then were quite slower -- same concept with iTunes. The next big media player 5 years down the road will be larger, more complicated, and slower. Remember winamp 3? That was MUCH slower than iTunes, and didn't provide nearly as much functionality. iTunes runs just fine on anything over 1ghz -- which is a lot for just a media player, but is pretty much standard for their target audience. (That being said, Winamp remains my lightweight player of choice on win32.)
As for 3rd party format support, I'm not sure how iTunes is built on the PC, but on the mac, it directly links against Quicktime. In other words, any file that can be played by quicktime can (should) play in iTunes. If you install the Ogg/Vorbis codec for quicktime, you can play ogg files in iTunes.
I'll also agree that QuickTime for windows sucks. Hopefully the widespread popularity of iTunes on windows will cause apple to port their software more efficently. They HAVE produced good windows software -- the AirPort admin utilities under Windows are as good as if not better than the ones for OS X, though this may be attributed to the fact that they use Microsoft's windowing controls as opposed to their own as in QT and iTunes.
Okay. so this is all great and well...
But how do the breaks work?
I don't know....Is it wise to choose a bird which circles aimlessly above landfills?
Somehow, clippy looks attractive in comparison. The bird looks half-drunk! (cute, but drunk nonetheless)
Thought the headline read "DeRMS".
I'm sure most of the people up at MIT would love a DeRMS program.
Doesn't it seem like the program was no more than a form of extortion? It seemed illegal on so many fronts. "Sign this agreement or we'll sue you for more money than you'll ever have". Things like this are illegal to prevent organized crime which is exactly what the record industry is turning into (not killing people -- but merely restricting personal rights and controlling the government.
That being said, I think the artists do need some sort of union to prevent widespread piracy. It's just that the RIAA has stepped far beyond its boundaries. Methinks labor unions shouldn't be exempt from antitrust laws.
Then why do they work in Windows XP?
I don't like to be a troll, but your point is invalid. If the sound card works in every other operating system, there's no reason it shouldn't work in linux -- that being said, there should be some sort of project started which allows users to EASILY run non-supported hardware with the help of WINE (as was done with the NTFS driver)
It seems worth mentioning that apple also updated Final Cut Express to a new patch. The patch corrects several severe issues with the program, specifically the 'blank frame' issue which has plagued virtually every user of the program. It also corrects problems with dropped frames and timecode breaks.
Now that these problems are fixed, I can safely say that Final Cut Express is the perfect entry-level video editing solution. At $299, it's a steal compared to the competition (Final Cut Pro is already a steal!). Plus, if you decide to upgrade to pro, Apple only charges the difference in the price, meaning you lose no money.
Talk about a company that's nice to their customers. Apple definitely sees the pro market as an area to capitalize - it has always been their strong point in the past. You can tell that apple's trying to capitalize on their strong points as they attempt to regain the Education market with the $799 1.25ghz eMac. The pro markets are faithful to apple, and can easily afford their hardware and software - compared to the 'real' pro-level stuff, Apple's a bargin (SGI workstations used to cost upward of $10k without software)
It looks like some GNU developer has already disassembled it and integrated some of the code into GCC.
I just went to compile vi, and an ASCII paper clip popped up onto my terminal:
"It looks like you're trying to compile EMACS. Would you like me to launch the EMACS wizard now. Because you are stupid, I will launch it anyway"
NOT TRUE
This is simply not true. In the past decade, Microsoft has released versions of windows which run on PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, and Itanium (not to mention Opteron). The first hardware NT actually ran on was MIPS - it was originally intended for the intel i860 which never made it to mass-production. (Source
Doesn't this sound a bit rude?
.doc. Wordpad opens .doc. Microsoft provides a free viewer for word documents - I think it runs in WINE. OS X's TextEdit opens .doc as well. If that's not universally accepted, I don't know what is.
Sure, I wish everyone used RTF. Fact is, they don't. Deal with it. If they sent it in HTML, you'd be complaining about how word mauls the HTML code.
OpenOffice opens
I'd REALLY like to see PDF universally supported, but it just hasn't happened - until windows ships with native pdf support built-in - both viewing and creating, it will remain a format unusable to AOL users and computer-wielding grandmothers
Now, if you want to complain about people sending out 25mb powerpoint attachments, I definitely understand. But this is just silly and doesn't help push forward the OSS movement. If just makes you look like a jerk.
In cases like this, it pays to find a PROFESSIONAL who knows what they're talking about.
This sort of thing has to be done quite often, and I'm sure a pro should be able to point you in the right direction. This isn't exactly the type of project you can just hack together and expect it to work -- not to discourage you, but this is not something you want to use in a real 'production' enviornment. Get it working on your own, then try to implement it in a real setting. Saturating your university's ethernet backbone will not go over well with the IT guys (not to mention that you can't exactly depend upon the bandwidth being there. If backbone usage rises above 50%, you could have a problem)
That being said, I surely hope that you have some sort of professional advice in building this video lab. Slashdot nerds tend to be way too overconfident in their abilities and have somewhat of an 'I can do anything' attitude.
I wish you the best of luck with your project, and I too want to know how to go about doing this. It seems so logical that there must be a way of doing it, as it's done all the time. Ask somebody who would know. Slashdot nerds are probably not going to know of a tried and true solution. (I guarruntee you that there will be about 10 replies with "emacs has done this for years" and "build a simple 1000-node beowulf cluster" in them)
Let me guess... it's some variation on the "Jump To Conclusions" mat that shocks the user in midair if he is en-route to a dangerous conclusion.
Funny you should mention this.
AOL users may actually have LESS spyware. You see, several pieces of spyware get incredibly confused by AOL's network topology (the AOL adapter thingy it pretends to connect through). As such, they cause the AOL client to grind to a halt and cease to work.
I've seen this in a few cases, though I never figured out which spyware did this... all I know was that spybot removed it
Low-cost mars mission.....
Low-cost technology.....
Unproven Russian technology....
plus a reality show...
Could we plllleeeease send Donald Trump... and Ryan Seacrest and have the first 'good' space disaster*?
*The only exception being Appolo 13 which was a "good disaster". Tons of stuff went wrong and the mission was a failure. However, nobody got hurt, and the whole ordeal proved twice-over the quality of American engineering and ingenuity.
You forgot the last two
6. ???
7. Profit!
In my opinion, after spending 2 hours removing spyware from a friend's computer, Gator's products are no more than viruses.
Which leads me to my point.... why doesn't Symantec (Norton) classify Gator as a virus. It has all the hallmarks of a virus (hell... Blaster was LESS destructive. It just rebooted your machine), and no legitimate use. How isn't it a virus?? Just because the company's legit at the moment, does it really make it okay?
Can anyone answer me?
No. I've never had such urges. Seek help.
No. It's really insignificant.
If you're using Apple's hardware (which is pretty nice, and VERY cost-efffective, especially when compared to PC/Sun hardware), you get a free copy of OS X Server for an unlimited number of users -- free. So, $3,000 gets you a quality-made kick-ass 64-bit server on par with the higher-end stuff from the big PC vendors, and you don't have to pay for software.
What's more, you don't have to pay for software, but you also don't have to pay for someone to administer them. Regardless of weather or not they need a GUI, the GUIs Apple has designed for the server apps are top-notch. While I only had a little bit of time to play with them, I walked away being VERY impressed, especially that you can remotely administer a server through the standard GUI interface without any sort of remote-desktop interface, making managing multiple servers a breeze.
Ok. Enough for the advocacy. It's pretty obvious that i'm a big fan of the Xserves. But, if you're not using Mac hardware on your server, which is perfectly acceptable, and even required in some industries, you might as well use some sort of BSD or Linux. Using darwin gives you no major advantage. It's obscurity is a defintie DISADVANTAGE. If you're having trouble running a self-compiled MySQL on top of X86-darwin, there aren't going to be lots of people out there that can help you.
It seems that politics are killing X11
I've got no clue what the new Xfree license entails... But nonetheless, I think the community is overreacting. By dropping Xfree, we no longer have any long-term alternatives (yeah, there are forks, but they haven't been around long enough to prove their stability or their worth).
Of course, I firmly believe that X needs to be replaced. Just not for political reasons. Whomever's in charge of X needs to form a panel of industry experts and draft an X12 protocol. In my mind, the panel should include network engineers, usability experts, etc. It must include representatives from both open and semi-open companies - Red Hat, the KDE and Gnome teams, present X developers, Apple, IBM, Sun, and possibly even Microsoft.
If we can create a modern standardized windowing protocol (which is what X11 essentially is, only broken and outdated), we can maxamize portability between platforms and radically simplify software development. Even Microsoft would jump on the bandwagon.
Let's not run ourselves up a river without a paddle. We need to maintain some sort of X11 system for the time being while we draft a new protocol. The current forks just don't seem stable enough, and seek to accomplish far too much and form their own proprietary standards. We need a completely new protocol so that everyone can work together and maintain compatibility.
Let me reiterate this for the last time.
On an MP3 player, the ability to run EMACS is not a feature. The lack of music-playing ability also seems like a pitfall.
Not sure about AOL. There is an option in the setup to send anonymous usage data to AOL. Maybe you've got that enabled.
As for Microsoft, I'd wager that it's simply because Winamp links against the windows media DLLs so that it can play WMA content.
Either way, it's a hell of a lot better than real, musicmatch and the likes. As for me, I use iTunes. It just can't be beat.
Just don't light a cigar. You might trigger the halon.