Just this weekend, I walked into a Fred Meyer (with which I have prior experience with the oversensitive detectors going off...) with my backpack full of DVDs and burned media (most of which was over 3 years old) and set the alarm off. I got a passing glance from an employee who was nearby.
Yeah, I made damn sure she saw me when I left, because I knew it would go off again.
Figured out it was an old DVD that I bought in another state, at another chain, and never opened... 3 years ago.
Damn Hastings and the EAS tags they never deactivate! (By policy! You can't walk into or out of any store after going to Hastings without some alarm going off.)
...So I kept shopping until I found an MP3 player that met all of my needs, including Ogg Vorbis support. (A Samsung Yepp YP-F1X, if you're curious - I had cash, I was at the mall, and I wandered into Radio Shack. You do the math.) I actively refuse to buy products or use services which do not provide the support I demand. Simple as that.:D
Having just finished watching seasons 1-13 and half of season 14, (still not having seen anything later) I completely miss any Simpson's reference.
Re:GL on current linux distros [-1 Offtopic]
on
OpenGL Distilled
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· Score: 1
There is a devel package for mesa that provides basic OpenGL bindings (since Mesa is a software OpenGL-compatible library) and headers. It provides a (roughly) complete OpenGL 1.3 implementation (I'm pretty sure it's 1.3 with extensions), and while not explicitly licensed, is widely considered a standard implementation. It's everything you need to develop OpenGL apps.
Of course, nVidia and ATi drivers provide their OWN OpenGL libs and headers, nVidia's implementation being a full-blown version 2.0, and it includes headers and libs for development.
DRI, as I understand it, is part of the driver interface for X that supports hardware acceleration of OpenGL.
GLX is the X11-specific bindings that handle creating windows and contexts for GL output. GLX is to X11 what WGL is to Windows.
If you install mesa-devel (or whatever your distro calls it - on Gentoo, it's part of the full deal), you'll have everything you need to start hacking yesterday.
As I understand it, the RIPEMD family pad only the final block with zeroes to end the message on a block boundary, and this is where the "extra bytes" are added. I agree with the GP on this, since it's much harder to collide a hash if that hash includes the raw message length as a component - then the final padding becomes a known quantity. (For example, such an algorithm, if comparing a message to a hash, could pre-pad the final block with a known quantity of zeroes before checking the real message length. The result would be that the size is verified before hashing is attempted. It would certainly decrease the chance of collision in that specific case.(
reinforced cement sheetrock is actually quite common.
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
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· Score: 1
if all the moaning flash blockers that appear on slashdot were lined up on a road i would be doing the web (and probably the world) a great kindness to plough on through. you are such a minority it probably wouldn't even dent the bonnet of my car that much.
Allow me to clarify my stance: I feel precisely the same way about flash as I do about cars.
Flash does have its uses. It can get some things done that you simply can't do in a sane way with other, lesser technologies. Likewise, cars are very good at getting to point B from point A quickly. However, cars are horribly overused: some people drive 3 blocks to the store! Similarly, some people use flash for the most inane and pointless tasks.
Flash is fine for Youtube and Google Video, but Yahoo! Maps beta is a fine example of using flash to do something that JavaScript/AJAX does far more reliably (IME).
Just because you can use flash doesn't mean it's at all appropriate. Likewise, there's a huge difference between driving a car 3 blocks and 3 miles, as the latter makes more sense, and for the former, walking or riding a bike makes far more sense.
Car drivers get too careless (having narrow misses with bicyclists and pedestrians, sometimes killing people in the process), and flash developers get too careless (making a little pointless animation in the top corner of a web page that embeds a poorly-selected MP3 that annoys people and scares off potential viewers).
I defy the mods. I'm not off-topic. Bastards.
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
In fact, I quite vocally advocate limiting the use of cars. HIghways are far too clogged, and I can't even ride my bike to work without having a few close calls per day.
People drive far too dangerously and far too often. It's contributing to the slothful nature of people, it's encouraging obesity, and it's overcrowding small roads.
Pedestrians and bicyclists are people too! Don't hit us!
You have just proven one of the points of the article. There exist proprietary software today (Final Cut Pro, iMovie) which have only "in development" status, not "ready for prime time" status. If you can't get it working, then it isn't really useful to you. Cinelerra may be the greatest piece of software when it's done, but if you can't get it working (show me a Mac that can run OSX but can't run Final Cut Pro with ease), then what good is it?
The reason I couldn't get Cinelerra working is because fo rmy distribution (Gentoo), Cinelerra is only available as a CVS ebuild. that is, CVS snapshots are used. I believe other distributions have pre-packaged binaries. YMMV.
As for LIVES and Kdenlive, they are very competitive pieces of software. But you wouldn't know that, since you clearly haven't actually tried them. I readily admitted that Kdenlive isn't 100% feature-complete, but it works, it works well, and it does everything I've heard iMovie can do. Who knows, if you actually bothered to try this software instead of blowing it off because it's not version 1.0, you just might find it to be that killer app that is "ready for prime time" that you keep whining doesn't exist.
For example, I use Windows for WinUAE, Gens and other Emulators, because the Linux versions are pure crap compared to the Windows ones. The Windows ones run better even when started with Wine. Also, the Linux ones seem to be abandoned long ago. Photoshop exists for Windows only (and no, GIMP is no replacement, mainly not for technical, but for know-how reasons), 3D studio max is Windows only (Maya targets a different audience, 3DSmax is more aimed towards game development), many bookkeeping applications are Windows only,... etc.
E-UAE is a backport of WinUAE's code back to Linux, so it has a lot of the same features and performance of WinUAE. I'll admit that the rest of the base for emulators is rather poor, but that seems more due to a lack of demand than a lack of talent. But there are a lot of them out there (including VisualBoyAdvance, ZSNES, Snes9x, etc.) that work exactly like their Windows counterparts.
I won't pretend that the Gimp is better than Photoshop, but, really, who needs Photoshop's features besides graphics pros? (I'm talking about the guys that'd probably spring for ZBrush if they really need it, not Joe Schmoe who wants to make neat pics for his Intarweb site.)
3D Studio Max is supplanted by SoftImage|XSI and others depending on the guys using it, be it because 3DS is too expensive or whatever. I do know for a fact that game design guys use everything from Maya to SoftImage and everything in-between, depending on who owns what licenses. Maya and others also have Linux ports, which, I hear, are identical to the Windows version. If you have one of those licenses, tell then you want a Linux version. It's not that hard. But in the mean time, there's always Blender, Aoi, and K3d....
For bookkeeping, there's always Gnucash, or you can use a simple spreadsheet with a few macros.
Hah! Often enough this is simply not an option, especially among the pragmatic Joe Sixpack users.
Then again, if you want Linux to stay among the self-proclaimed pseudo-elitist "hackers" (most of them being more like script kiddies), then go on.
Moving to another way of doing things is always a compromise. If you or Joe Sixpack isn't willing to compromise on anything, then stay where you're at and don't say a goddamned word.
1. I proposed killer apps with no Linux equivalent already.
No you didn't. You listed a bunch of stuff for which there are numerous choices, but your unwillingness to try anything "different" is causing you to judge Linux and its users unfairly. People have shown you the options. Don't like it? Roll your own. You seem smart enough. Go write a Photoshop replacement that isn't GIMP. Oh, too hard? Not for you? Then stay on Windows. You've been given options. Look into them or go away.
(Yes, I realize this negative attitude turns some users away. But riddle me this: Why am I angry about your stance? Could it be because you seem unwilling to hear what we have to say?)
2. Unless its in a.deb/.rpm, it is not an option. Compiling it manually is out of the question unless you are a programmer (and even then it is highly annoying if it doesnt compile because of yet another issue with different distros - do you really expect Joe Sixpack to fix this?)
Most of the things I've listed show up in Gentoo Portage in a very quick search. I'm certain that.deb or.rpm packages exist for most if not all of them. If only source is available, then start packaging it and provide that for other users! Push for your packages to be added to major repositories!
Stop whining about a problem that doesn't really exist.
Indeed, but I often remember games with excessive fondness... especially if I enjoyed them at all. (Although I have yet to see the other Homeworld games.)
No, I had not heard about this. I knew about the Descent: Freespace port (which, while slightly buggy, works!), but this is wonderful. Thanks for pointing me to it!
(See? There's lots of stuff on Linux if you take the time to lok for it!)
While the concepts of OSS and GPLv2 are great and worthwhile and make me supportive in general, in actual usage there isn't anything that comes close to being a "killer app".
For me, that has been amaroK and GNU screen. (I'm easily impressed.)
My perception (which I am sure a few people are about to tell me is wholly wrong) is that there isn't any exciting development in the end user application space. Where is the application that beats the pants off of Final Cut Pro, or even iMovie?
I've heard LIVES and Cinelerra are quite good (though I couldn't get Cinelerra working at all). But I recently discovered Kdenlive, which seems nearly feature-complete. (Its media import library seems to be missing a few things, but that's ok, it's not version 1 yet.) They're probably not iMovie, but they're the best NLV editors I know of.
I'm not seeing it yet. I think that someday I will, but not yet. In some ways, this parallels the situation with PC Gamers not interested in moving to OS X. Where are the compelling games? If they come out for OS X at all, it's usually months after the PC release (with some exceptions). The difference is that I think it's likelier that I'll eventually come across an application that eventually overcomes my resistance to Linux. Someday Torvalds will replace Jobs as my deity. =)
Yeah, and unfortunately, we have to depend on Wine and Cedega for our gaming fix most of the time. (Although things like Tuxracer, Chromium, or even Singularity can be a good distraction.)
I'm not saying that it will be easy for such a project to materialize and mature. It's going to mean an awfully lot of hard work, probably without the same opportunities for financial rewards.
Chances are, what you want is under development now. You'll just have to dig for it and help them out.
Maybe I'm wrong to be looking for a desktop application to win me over. Maybe it won't be that sort of beast. Aside from desktop usage, I use Google constantly throughout the day, not to mention many other linux based sites and services. In that loose sense, perhaps I am already a linux user and those "boring" pieces of software you use underly my everyday experience.
Then maybe, you're ready to make the move now. It wasn't until I dropped Windows entirely for 3 months that I realized nothing truthfully was holding me back. Yeah, I kinda miss playing Tron 2.0 and Final Fantasy XI.... Even Homeworld. But I could easily leave those behind for Linux. I actually can't think of anything on Windows I need any more. Even at work, where I use Windows, the first things I installed were Cygwin and GVim.
As a Free- and OpenBSD user, this made me feel incredibly smug since, unlike Linux, the OpenBSD driver (now ported to FreeBSD) for Atheros cards is entirely blob-free
quick, someone port it so us Linux users can be smug, too!
like a passive thermoelectric pile? active piles exist, and it's trivial to adapt them. the only problem is of heat dissipation: what do you do with the heat the pile doesn't absorb?
reverse-engineer and replace kqemu and the nvidia driver and i *will* stop using them. the problem is the sub-par drivers that no one works on, not that the binary drivers are being used. (and don't you dare tell me to work on them. i have neither the time nor the experience to write a video card driver.)
no matter how good a programmer you are, Java client side apps will always suck, it is inherant to the design of the platform.
Nonsense! My Java IDE is 100% pure Java and performs to a level that I am completely satisfied with. If it did not, I would not pay the license fee. I have personally written applications in Swing that perform. It takes a little more than Sun might have you believe and you need a little experience of the platform but do not assume that just because you cannot do it, that it cannot be done.
When I tried Eclipse for the first time (fairly recently, shortly after Eclipse 3.0's release), I found it to be too slow on my system (Athlon XP 2100+, 512MB RAM at the time) and dropped it in favor of other, more responsive IDEs. (...I've since dropped IDEs entirely and have resigned myself to Vim.) I was completely disillusioned by everything I had heard about Eclipse. By all rights, I expected it to be the best IDE out there.
Now, I admit that I did like the featureset (despite my misgivings about the GUI). And, despite my difficulty in getting the C/C++ plugins working (import errors galore), I honestly did think it was the best IDE I'd ever seen. It's certainly superior to Visual Studio, IMO. However, I was constantly frustrated by the slow response (~1 second for a keystroke response) and the apallingly slow load/save.
Now, because of my horrible experience with Eclipse and Azureus (both rather large codebases), I have completely written Java off for any client-side development. JVM startup, IMO, makes it useless for small tools, and I have yet to see a reasonable CLI utility written in Java.
If Java really does have a niche where it actually fits, I'd like to see it.
Slashdot Mirror
i just build a new computer, using new off-the-shelf parts, and immediately installed linux.
Quake 4 and UT2004 worked "out of the box" on this 64-bit system.
RTFA. They're comparing the socket AM2 Athlon 64 X2 with the Core2 Duo.
i still have my 25th anniversary Star Trek fan membership card and fondly remember the 25th anniversary NES game.
God, i feel old. and i'm only 24.
My boot hard drive died.
My raction?
I bought a brand-spanking-new AM2 motherboard/CPU, PCI-E video card, and new sticks of DDR2.
Oh, and a new hard drive.
Just this weekend, I walked into a Fred Meyer (with which I have prior experience with the oversensitive detectors going off...) with my backpack full of DVDs and burned media (most of which was over 3 years old) and set the alarm off. I got a passing glance from an employee who was nearby.
Yeah, I made damn sure she saw me when I left, because I knew it would go off again.
Figured out it was an old DVD that I bought in another state, at another chain, and never opened... 3 years ago.
Damn Hastings and the EAS tags they never deactivate! (By policy! You can't walk into or out of any store after going to Hastings without some alarm going off.)
...So I kept shopping until I found an MP3 player that met all of my needs, including Ogg Vorbis support. (A Samsung Yepp YP-F1X, if you're curious - I had cash, I was at the mall, and I wandered into Radio Shack. You do the math.) I actively refuse to buy products or use services which do not provide the support I demand. Simple as that. :D
When they release a flashing utility for Linux, then I'll rejoice in fervent jubilation.
Until then, I still have to fiddle with FreeDOS on my 32MB USB stick to do the dirty work.
Having just finished watching seasons 1-13 and half of season 14, (still not having seen anything later) I completely miss any Simpson's reference.
There is a devel package for mesa that provides basic OpenGL bindings (since Mesa is a software OpenGL-compatible library) and headers. It provides a (roughly) complete OpenGL 1.3 implementation (I'm pretty sure it's 1.3 with extensions), and while not explicitly licensed, is widely considered a standard implementation. It's everything you need to develop OpenGL apps.
Of course, nVidia and ATi drivers provide their OWN OpenGL libs and headers, nVidia's implementation being a full-blown version 2.0, and it includes headers and libs for development.
DRI, as I understand it, is part of the driver interface for X that supports hardware acceleration of OpenGL.
GLX is the X11-specific bindings that handle creating windows and contexts for GL output. GLX is to X11 what WGL is to Windows.
If you install mesa-devel (or whatever your distro calls it - on Gentoo, it's part of the full deal), you'll have everything you need to start hacking yesterday.
As I understand it, the RIPEMD family pad only the final block with zeroes to end the message on a block boundary, and this is where the "extra bytes" are added. I agree with the GP on this, since it's much harder to collide a hash if that hash includes the raw message length as a component - then the final padding becomes a known quantity. (For example, such an algorithm, if comparing a message to a hash, could pre-pad the final block with a known quantity of zeroes before checking the real message length. The result would be that the size is verified before hashing is attempted. It would certainly decrease the chance of collision in that specific case.(
reinforced cement sheetrock is actually quite common.
Allow me to clarify my stance: I feel precisely the same way about flash as I do about cars.
Flash does have its uses. It can get some things done that you simply can't do in a sane way with other, lesser technologies. Likewise, cars are very good at getting to point B from point A quickly. However, cars are horribly overused: some people drive 3 blocks to the store! Similarly, some people use flash for the most inane and pointless tasks.
Flash is fine for Youtube and Google Video, but Yahoo! Maps beta is a fine example of using flash to do something that JavaScript/AJAX does far more reliably (IME).
Just because you can use flash doesn't mean it's at all appropriate. Likewise, there's a huge difference between driving a car 3 blocks and 3 miles, as the latter makes more sense, and for the former, walking or riding a bike makes far more sense.
Car drivers get too careless (having narrow misses with bicyclists and pedestrians, sometimes killing people in the process), and flash developers get too careless (making a little pointless animation in the top corner of a web page that embeds a poorly-selected MP3 that annoys people and scares off potential viewers).
I defy the mods. I'm not off-topic. Bastards.
In fact, I quite vocally advocate limiting the use of cars. HIghways are far too clogged, and I can't even ride my bike to work without having a few close calls per day.
People drive far too dangerously and far too often. It's contributing to the slothful nature of people, it's encouraging obesity, and it's overcrowding small roads.
Pedestrians and bicyclists are people too! Don't hit us!
The reason I couldn't get Cinelerra working is because fo rmy distribution (Gentoo), Cinelerra is only available as a CVS ebuild. that is, CVS snapshots are used. I believe other distributions have pre-packaged binaries. YMMV.
As for LIVES and Kdenlive, they are very competitive pieces of software. But you wouldn't know that, since you clearly haven't actually tried them. I readily admitted that Kdenlive isn't 100% feature-complete, but it works, it works well, and it does everything I've heard iMovie can do. Who knows, if you actually bothered to try this software instead of blowing it off because it's not version 1.0, you just might find it to be that killer app that is "ready for prime time" that you keep whining doesn't exist.
E-UAE is a backport of WinUAE's code back to Linux, so it has a lot of the same features and performance of WinUAE. I'll admit that the rest of the base for emulators is rather poor, but that seems more due to a lack of demand than a lack of talent. But there are a lot of them out there (including VisualBoyAdvance, ZSNES, Snes9x, etc.) that work exactly like their Windows counterparts.
I won't pretend that the Gimp is better than Photoshop, but, really, who needs Photoshop's features besides graphics pros? (I'm talking about the guys that'd probably spring for ZBrush if they really need it, not Joe Schmoe who wants to make neat pics for his Intarweb site.)
3D Studio Max is supplanted by SoftImage|XSI and others depending on the guys using it, be it because 3DS is too expensive or whatever. I do know for a fact that game design guys use everything from Maya to SoftImage and everything in-between, depending on who owns what licenses. Maya and others also have Linux ports, which, I hear, are identical to the Windows version. If you have one of those licenses, tell then you want a Linux version. It's not that hard. But in the mean time, there's always Blender, Aoi, and K3d....
For bookkeeping, there's always Gnucash, or you can use a simple spreadsheet with a few macros.
Moving to another way of doing things is always a compromise. If you or Joe Sixpack isn't willing to compromise on anything, then stay where you're at and don't say a goddamned word.
No you didn't. You listed a bunch of stuff for which there are numerous choices, but your unwillingness to try anything "different" is causing you to judge Linux and its users unfairly. People have shown you the options. Don't like it? Roll your own. You seem smart enough. Go write a Photoshop replacement that isn't GIMP. Oh, too hard? Not for you? Then stay on Windows. You've been given options. Look into them or go away.
(Yes, I realize this negative attitude turns some users away. But riddle me this: Why am I angry about your stance? Could it be because you seem unwilling to hear what we have to say?)
Most of the things I've listed show up in Gentoo Portage in a very quick search. I'm certain that .deb or .rpm packages exist for most if not all of them. If only source is available, then start packaging it and provide that for other users! Push for your packages to be added to major repositories!
Stop whining about a problem that doesn't really exist.
Indeed, but I often remember games with excessive fondness... especially if I enjoyed them at all. (Although I have yet to see the other Homeworld games.)
No, I had not heard about this. I knew about the Descent: Freespace port (which, while slightly buggy, works!), but this is wonderful. Thanks for pointing me to it!
(See? There's lots of stuff on Linux if you take the time to lok for it!)
Seattle and Bellingham come to mind if you don't think you'll mind the stench of the hippies.
For me, that has been amaroK and GNU screen. (I'm easily impressed.)
I've heard LIVES and Cinelerra are quite good (though I couldn't get Cinelerra working at all). But I recently discovered Kdenlive, which seems nearly feature-complete. (Its media import library seems to be missing a few things, but that's ok, it's not version 1 yet.) They're probably not iMovie, but they're the best NLV editors I know of.
Yeah, and unfortunately, we have to depend on Wine and Cedega for our gaming fix most of the time. (Although things like Tuxracer, Chromium, or even Singularity can be a good distraction.)
Chances are, what you want is under development now. You'll just have to dig for it and help them out.
Then maybe, you're ready to make the move now. It wasn't until I dropped Windows entirely for 3 months that I realized nothing truthfully was holding me back. Yeah, I kinda miss playing Tron 2.0 and Final Fantasy XI.... Even Homeworld. But I could easily leave those behind for Linux. I actually can't think of anything on Windows I need any more. Even at work, where I use Windows, the first things I installed were Cygwin and GVim.
and here i left Idaho for exactly this reason. what're you telling me, to go back to that hellhole?
quick, someone port it so us Linux users can be smug, too!
like a passive thermoelectric pile? active piles exist, and it's trivial to adapt them. the only problem is of heat dissipation: what do you do with the heat the pile doesn't absorb?
reverse-engineer and replace kqemu and the nvidia driver and i *will* stop using them. the problem is the sub-par drivers that no one works on, not that the binary drivers are being used. (and don't you dare tell me to work on them. i have neither the time nor the experience to write a video card driver.)
...XP being the nomenclature for this particular Thoroughbred-B processor, not the name of the operating system (or distro) in question: Gentoo Linux.
When I tried Eclipse for the first time (fairly recently, shortly after Eclipse 3.0's release), I found it to be too slow on my system (Athlon XP 2100+, 512MB RAM at the time) and dropped it in favor of other, more responsive IDEs. (...I've since dropped IDEs entirely and have resigned myself to Vim.) I was completely disillusioned by everything I had heard about Eclipse. By all rights, I expected it to be the best IDE out there.
Now, I admit that I did like the featureset (despite my misgivings about the GUI). And, despite my difficulty in getting the C/C++ plugins working (import errors galore), I honestly did think it was the best IDE I'd ever seen. It's certainly superior to Visual Studio, IMO. However, I was constantly frustrated by the slow response (~1 second for a keystroke response) and the apallingly slow load/save.
Now, because of my horrible experience with Eclipse and Azureus (both rather large codebases), I have completely written Java off for any client-side development. JVM startup, IMO, makes it useless for small tools, and I have yet to see a reasonable CLI utility written in Java.
If Java really does have a niche where it actually fits, I'd like to see it.