The vital peice to the puzzle for an OSS/Free set top media box is digital surround sound. I don't think I've ever heard of any freespeech software driver that can output audio using Sony's Digital 5.1/7.1/9.1 format that everybody's reciever/amps use these days. You'd think that some sound card must support it under Linux unless there were patent issues. I wouldn't be surprised if there are patent issues.
As far as I know, Linux is stuck with Hi-Fi analog and that doesn't cut it for the audiophile. In fact, once the NWN Linux client is released, digital surround sound will be the only thing keeping me from booting back to M$.
Please, somebody, prove me wrong and post a link to some sound card that can send Digital (TM) 5.1 audio data to a Digital reciever/amp under Linux.
The other alternative would be to create an alternative open standard for digital surround sound interfaces between PCs, Reciever/Amps, DVD players, and the like. Such a thing would be a great triumph for geekdom over the likes of Sony and M$ in one crushing blow.
Umm, sleepiness in the winter comes from your reptilian brain noticing the reduced temperatures and pressures and telling you to go hide in a cave so the cold blood your ancestors had won't get too cold and kill you.
Does the idea of base 10 time seem a little shady to anyone but me? I mean, one of the reasons our time system with the days teh weeks, the months, teh years, etc. is to keep various natural phenomena such as teh rising and setting of the sun, the state of the moon, the seasons, and the position of Earth in its orbit all at expected recurring points in our system.
No matter how we define time, a day will still take the same amount of it and a year will still take 365.25 days.
Not that the current system is totally logical in all ways. In fact, it sucks. The division of minutes, seconds, and hours are downright illogical. So there must be some way to improve it.
I notice that all the important, natural time phenomena (the days, the years, the months, and the seasons) are essentially circular in nature. So why not just talk about their passage in terms of the fraction of the circle that has passed? We'd then just produce a set of standard conversion constants (let's face it, there's no way around them) to apply to our now fewer units of time all indiviually measured in radians.
Imagine your new watch with only one hand running anticlockwise (cuz that is, by convention, the positive direction; did that ever annoy you about clocks?) and you have four markings: 0, Pi/2, Pi, 3Pi/2, and 2Pi. Now you always have Pi for lunch!
If nothing else, it's at least a way to force people to be able to handle simple division.
I'm a CS major currently interning in MIS at my local town government. Last week I was assigned the task of installing a half a dozen CDROM drives on Police Department computers that had been originally built unequipped so that people would not be tempted to install outside software. This seemed like a silly idea to me as I thought "Can't we just dismiss people who abuse government machines?"
I guess I understood where my boss got this idea when I was looking over his shoulder as he clicked through his start menu today and I noticed he had, among other things, Kazaa and AIM!
It makes me wonder what the point is, I haven't felt the need to do any non non-work on my work computer, I didn't even have speakers until Ineeded to edit some video.
If you read/., there is a good chance you built your own computer or have built one in the past. Part model and serial numbers are great handy alphanumeric strings that no one would ever guess. If my root password is the alphanumeric part of my motherboard's model number, it's both easy to remember and impossible to guess unless the attacker actually opens my box or know what mobo I use.
Here is a part of a hardware review from Anandtech that compares geforce3 cards for, among other things, 2D image quality. A Radeon DDR, a Matrox G450 eTV, and a geforce2 MX card were used for a referencein the test. Apparently, the Radeon DDR and G450 set a high standard for video card basics like high quality VGA filtering. If you read the (subjective) scores, you'll find that it is a rare geforce3 card that can live up to the Radeon in 2D image quality and no geforce3 can match the G450.
Isn't it nice to see the non-nVidia brands redeemed?
Now is simply not the time to talk DOJ. We had trust busting 100 years ago with TR in the Whitehouse because the president has more or less direct say in anything that DOJ investigates. Well, today we have GWB, a standard, special-interest politician (I'm sure Bill owns a share or two) fairly elected by a five to four majority.....I think the DOJ will be ignoring MS for a while.
"With OSX running both MS Office, apple apps and all of my favorite unix tools, why would I upgrade to Win XP instead of throwing out my PC and getting a G4?" he says
I've hated Macs for years, only in this new day and age do I admit that OSX is kinda cool.....but I'm supposed to get a G4 for the Privilege of running MS Office and mp3 encoders that are lesser than LAME on it?
A Question out to any legal historians who might be in the slashdot crowd. What descision provides the precedent that satire and parody are not considered trademark violation?
Re:NSA is Helping Itself
on
NSA Inside?
·
· Score: 1
Yes you do need to compile source code.....but if you have source, YOU can compile it YOURSELF. You can even READ IT FIRST! In short, an distro from the NSA or anybody else for that matter cannot be anything it doesn't claim to be.
I definitely agree that the market is fairly small for companies to really profit from going into space but one consumer market is already perfectly obvious. As a recreational rollerblader, I'd kill to have access to ball bearings manufactured in Zero-G.
Wrong, buddy. I didn't pay a cent for my approx. 4.57*10^78463 AOL CDs that came with IE 5, not to mention a disc I got with my router that has IE 5, Netscape and some other junk on there. Plus, I am sure yu can head over to MS anytime you want and download either IE or Outlook Express as standalones for free with their blessing.
Useful ads? Useful ads? Maybe an ad is useful to you or me or Joe Blow when it contains relevant and reliable information about the product or service being sold. That information is freely available to marketers if they want it, all they have to do is call up the product people at the other end of the company. the only reason why they want marketing information from web bugs and such is to learn what you think you want so as to manipulate you into buying something whether it is useful to you or not.
Patrick, You couldn't be more wrong about linux gaming. But everyone else is too. Patrick here has a legitimate, on-topic opinion of the articla and, ludicrous as it is, it deserves to be heard. Patrick shouldn't be modded down just because everybody else disagrees with him. Modding down is to get rid of people posting strings of dirty words, links to porno videos, and posts that read "All your base are belong to us." Give the man a voice, mod him up.
Microsoft, as we all know is in the business of making money, not of making software. Today, yes, the Windows OS for the home user is one of their biggest markets but who knows what the future will bring? Some time ago, one of those Microsoft people said that "Free isn't much good to anybody except to the recipient." This, like most statements MS makes to the public was a blatant lie. They give us IE and Outlook Express for free becuase that makes it easy for us to use them....and not use any of the many different and superior browsers and email clients available. Perhaps the day will come when windows itself will be given away for free just so Microsoft can still claim and maintain the userbase, the name recognition, the media domination, and the monopoly that they have cheated so hard for so many years to achieve.
Yeah it probably is a waste of money to go buying these windowed cases when you could be buying RAM, etc, but one of my buddies decided to start cutting his case up. So far he has installed a neon light, a window, a grille in the front for an intake fan, and a red translucent die where the power switch used to be. This thing is amazingly cool So I say if its a waste of time, not money, I'm all for it.
Let's face it, everything we know about IT is entirely speculative. I've heard some speeches Dean has given as founder of the organization FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, http://www.usfirst.org). Every year, when describing that organization's robotic's competion, he speaks entirely in enigmas until the final unveiling of the rules. There is no value even attempting to speculate on the nature of It, but that is not my primary point.
I've been looking for a long time to link the world of Dean Kamen and FIRST with that of Slashdot, Linux, and the OSS Movement, so naturally, I am delighted to see him pop up in an article. I suggest every teenage slashdotter to look into the FIRST Robotics competition....if you're interested, and you should be (what slashdotter doesn't love an engineering challenge?), look into starting a team at your high school.
So that's my two cents.
-Zuchinis
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, Linux is stuck with Hi-Fi analog and that doesn't cut it for the audiophile. In fact, once the NWN Linux client is released, digital surround sound will be the only thing keeping me from booting back to M$.
Please, somebody, prove me wrong and post a link to some sound card that can send Digital (TM) 5.1 audio data to a Digital reciever/amp under Linux.
The other alternative would be to create an alternative open standard for digital surround sound interfaces between PCs, Reciever/Amps, DVD players, and the like. Such a thing would be a great triumph for geekdom over the likes of Sony and M$ in one crushing blow.
At least that's what I got out of High School Bio
No matter how we define time, a day will still take the same amount of it and a year will still take 365.25 days.
Not that the current system is totally logical in all ways. In fact, it sucks. The division of minutes, seconds, and hours are downright illogical. So there must be some way to improve it.
I notice that all the important, natural time phenomena (the days, the years, the months, and the seasons) are essentially circular in nature. So why not just talk about their passage in terms of the fraction of the circle that has passed? We'd then just produce a set of standard conversion constants (let's face it, there's no way around them) to apply to our now fewer units of time all indiviually measured in radians.
Imagine your new watch with only one hand running anticlockwise (cuz that is, by convention, the positive direction; did that ever annoy you about clocks?) and you have four markings: 0, Pi/2, Pi, 3Pi/2, and 2Pi. Now you always have Pi for lunch!
If nothing else, it's at least a way to force people to be able to handle simple division.
I guess I understood where my boss got this idea when I was looking over his shoulder as he clicked through his start menu today and I noticed he had, among other things, Kazaa and AIM!
It makes me wonder what the point is, I haven't felt the need to do any non non-work on my work computer, I didn't even have speakers until Ineeded to edit some video.
Actually, you can get the sourc for the nVidia drivers for the purpose of compiling it for your own machine. You're just not supposed to read it.
Um, Polaris is still a pretty good indicator, so it can be done without a compass or GPS, btu I agree, USGS topo map declinations need to be changed.
If you read /., there is a good chance you built your own computer or have built one in the past. Part model and serial numbers are great handy alphanumeric strings that no one would ever guess. If my root password is the alphanumeric part of my motherboard's model number, it's both easy to remember and impossible to guess unless the attacker actually opens my box or know what mobo I use.
Isn't it nice to see the non-nVidia brands redeemed?
Now is simply not the time to talk DOJ. We had trust busting 100 years ago with TR in the Whitehouse because the president has more or less direct say in anything that DOJ investigates. Well, today we have GWB, a standard, special-interest politician (I'm sure Bill owns a share or two) fairly elected by a five to four majority.....I think the DOJ will be ignoring MS for a while.
"With OSX running both MS Office, apple apps and all of my favorite unix tools, why would I upgrade to Win XP instead of throwing out my PC and getting a G4?" he says I've hated Macs for years, only in this new day and age do I admit that OSX is kinda cool.....but I'm supposed to get a G4 for the Privilege of running MS Office and mp3 encoders that are lesser than LAME on it?
A Question out to any legal historians who might be in the slashdot crowd. What descision provides the precedent that satire and parody are not considered trademark violation?
Yes you do need to compile source code.....but if you have source, YOU can compile it YOURSELF. You can even READ IT FIRST! In short, an distro from the NSA or anybody else for that matter cannot be anything it doesn't claim to be.
right on brother
I definitely agree that the market is fairly small for companies to really profit from going into space but one consumer market is already perfectly obvious. As a recreational rollerblader, I'd kill to have access to ball bearings manufactured in Zero-G.
Wrong, buddy. I didn't pay a cent for my approx. 4.57*10^78463 AOL CDs that came with IE 5, not to mention a disc I got with my router that has IE 5, Netscape and some other junk on there. Plus, I am sure yu can head over to MS anytime you want and download either IE or Outlook Express as standalones for free with their blessing.
Useful ads? Useful ads? Maybe an ad is useful to you or me or Joe Blow when it contains relevant and reliable information about the product or service being sold. That information is freely available to marketers if they want it, all they have to do is call up the product people at the other end of the company. the only reason why they want marketing information from web bugs and such is to learn what you think you want so as to manipulate you into buying something whether it is useful to you or not.
Patrick, You couldn't be more wrong about linux gaming. But everyone else is too. Patrick here has a legitimate, on-topic opinion of the articla and, ludicrous as it is, it deserves to be heard. Patrick shouldn't be modded down just because everybody else disagrees with him. Modding down is to get rid of people posting strings of dirty words, links to porno videos, and posts that read "All your base are belong to us." Give the man a voice, mod him up.
Microsoft, as we all know is in the business of making money, not of making software. Today, yes, the Windows OS for the home user is one of their biggest markets but who knows what the future will bring? Some time ago, one of those Microsoft people said that "Free isn't much good to anybody except to the recipient." This, like most statements MS makes to the public was a blatant lie. They give us IE and Outlook Express for free becuase that makes it easy for us to use them....and not use any of the many different and superior browsers and email clients available. Perhaps the day will come when windows itself will be given away for free just so Microsoft can still claim and maintain the userbase, the name recognition, the media domination, and the monopoly that they have cheated so hard for so many years to achieve.
Yeah it probably is a waste of money to go buying these windowed cases when you could be buying RAM, etc, but one of my buddies decided to start cutting his case up. So far he has installed a neon light, a window, a grille in the front for an intake fan, and a red translucent die where the power switch used to be. This thing is amazingly cool So I say if its a waste of time, not money, I'm all for it.
Let's face it, everything we know about IT is entirely speculative. I've heard some speeches Dean has given as founder of the organization FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, http://www.usfirst.org). Every year, when describing that organization's robotic's competion, he speaks entirely in enigmas until the final unveiling of the rules. There is no value even attempting to speculate on the nature of It, but that is not my primary point. I've been looking for a long time to link the world of Dean Kamen and FIRST with that of Slashdot, Linux, and the OSS Movement, so naturally, I am delighted to see him pop up in an article. I suggest every teenage slashdotter to look into the FIRST Robotics competition....if you're interested, and you should be (what slashdotter doesn't love an engineering challenge?), look into starting a team at your high school. So that's my two cents. -Zuchinis