Speaking as a Gentoo/PPC user, there is definite benefit in source based distributions.
The 'two major CPU manufacurers' are not the only ones that matter, for one. They hardly make a difference between each other. There is Sparc, Mips, PPC, Alpha, and other architectures. Mostly source based distributions who don't rely on paying to support what they allow can more easily adapt to many different platforms, not just 'AMD or Intel'.
Secondly, it isn't merely about getting things installed on your system or squeezing every last optimization in, it is about installing it the way you want it. Binary packages are compiled with certain #defines and linked against libraries of other packages which you may not care about. For example, mozilla compiled against gtk or gtk2. xchat with or without Gnome support, gaim with or without gnome support. Freetype with or without the patent infringing bytecode interpreter. With binary distributions, they are forced to make decisions about what the best way to proceed is, and most often the answer is to compile with support for everything and require everything as a prerequisite, even if the source only optionally supports another piece of software. With Gentoo, I define USE flags and emerge, and it figures out dependencies on the fly and passes the right options to configure and applies the right patches to get the featureset I want, with as little of the optional cruft as possible.
Related to the previous point, the performance boost is not as negligible as you would think. First off, the compiler optimizations and omitting debug code (useful for support and development, so often included) do help significantly on their own. Add to this that packages aren't carrying baggage from other unwanted and unused packages unnecessarily. This also saves on drive space and, more importantly, memory.
Sure, installing goes from being measured in minutes/hours to hours/days depending on what you need, but the process requires little intervention and once started, you can walk away and do other things. The time spent running these compiles is the price to pay for very good benefits.
Of course, your post has troll written all over it, but it in part reflects some real concerns people have about source based distributions, so I think it is worthy of a response..
Got burned by Sorcerer Linux before this offshoot started. Hope they improved on the system, but I'm a gentoo user now, and don't really see what could be missing...
If they are compiling in Ramfs still (Like Sorcerer used too), it is a horrible waste, the benefits are negligible compared to the pains in the ass it can cause and the limitations it must have to deal with under the circumstances. I thought RamFS would be cool, but there is not much of a difference on an operation the user rarely performs and one that isn't baby-sat. If you are already on the install-from-source mindset, you have given up the speed of, say, binary apt installs to gain what is needed in terms of speed at runtime (and customization).
Re:Midnight Commander - still?
on
Red Hat 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I would bet it would be excluded since RedHat 8 is Gnome2-centric, and, AFAIK, gmc was not ported to Gnome2. I think they even go so far as to compile mozilla with Gtk2, which, at this point in development, is a bad idea.
Before you damn Nautilus to hell, try the version in Redhat 8.0 (i.e. the Gnome2 version). Nautilus was unusable in Gnome 1.4.x, but the 2.x versions are unbelievably faster. I used to always go to the nice speed of rox, but now I run nautilus most of the time....
Though I have not used 8.0, I would venture to say this time it may not be the case. 5.0, 6.0, and 7.0 each included some core component that was still considered in pre-release state by their respective developers. When they shipped with pre-release glibc and/or gcc, they caused a lot of problems, in the name of not worrying about it later. gcc-2.96 (the 7.0 fiasco) was meant to make use of the long overdue enhancements in the gcc3 tree and provide a good base to grow on. Instead, it was a buggy piece of crap (even ignoring the 'bad code' it wouldn't compile). Same when they tried the same stunt with glibc. This time, no critical components seem to be released before their time. Glibc, gcc, and most everything is actually at an official 'stable' level according to their developers. If my experience with Gentoo 1.4rc tells me anything, it is that the versions RedHat are using could be up to snuff.
Of course, now they ventured into patching Qt/GTK/KDE/GNOME for a consistant *feel*, and even a theme that only changes looks (which they also provide) can cause crashes in the toolkit when implemented in code, so maybe on a Desktop level there may still be worries.
I might try RedHat 8.0 on my desktop system, or Mandrake 9.0, or switch to Gentoo (my iBook has been a very convincing case for Gentoo...). No matter the way, it looks like the releases are much more timely this go around...
All this stuff is general, but I doubt there is any redhat-specific issues, unless they disabled freetype in their build, which would be very stupid in this day and age...
Regarding the cut/paste mozilla issue... I have not run RedHat 8.0, I only run gentoo now. When I compiled mozilla using gtk2, I had the same issue and also had a lot of plugin issues. Does anyone know if this version shipped by redhat is compiled against gtk2 or something?
I recompiled against gtk1 for plugins, copy/paste, and stable galeon embedding, so I no longer have those problems.
You by chance using a Savage chipset? I have had to disable key features of xine on Savage to keep it from falling on its ass on Startup. Every other system but Savage Video cards I have had no troubles with...
Video: xine (and totem, by extension) and mplayer help a great deal. Even on my non-x86 laptop I can play nearly anything with xine... MPlayer is a tricky proposition, on some systems it works beautifully, and on others it is a resource hog more than anything else...
I think that having totem set up by default on linux desktops would go far to dispel the 'no good media player on linux' myth...
It is a possibility, and one Gould would stand behind, the theory of punctuated equilibrium states that drastic changes did occur suddenly as the environment had sudden changes, or even if it didn't. If a really wacked out change gives a great advantage, it would propogate wildly. Mutations need not be subtle...
I find it hard to believe that any evolutinist would be shaken in the least bit or be sheepish about this argument in the least bit. So much of evolution is fundamentally based on allowing for flukes that are extremely rare, yet extremely useful. If by some slim chance a beetle is born with this highly unlikely combination, that beetle would kick some serious ass and mate, and thus the progression.
Sure it is an unlikely fluke to happen, but so much about every species consists of unlikely flukes. I'm sure every species has a lot of traits which if not developed at the same time would either not make sense or be lethal. To say the inhibitor, for example, could not develop first, simply because it doesn't make sense, is stupid. If it isn't lethal or otherwise impacts selection, then it is a moot trait and would be ignored. Lethal dominant traits are rapidly filtered out, and Lethal recessive traits will persist pretty much indefinitely under nature.
There are many different ways the beetle could arrive at it's final form. Could have all happened spontaneously, it is a valid chance. It could have the inhibitor first for no good reason. If the energy required to produce the inhibitor is low enough to not impact selection, there is no reason why the inhibitor could exist before anything else. Same goes for the delivery system. And as others point out, it could be a gradual progression in amounts, or utilized in different ways before the agent could be released (blowing up and hurting predators helps the species survive, altruism is not too uncommon, especially among insect species).
I don't see why some people think religion and evolution are exclusive propositions. Why wouldn't God start off with a very basic setup and put in rules to let it change and let it go to see what happens, or even shape and work through the system to arrive at the desired vision. The bible may say a week is the period of creation, but also says that time in God's terms and people's terms is entirely different, so perhaps Creationists are more blasphemous for having the audacity to think they are on a level with God in terms of their interaction with time?
Well, for one, I think 7 and 8 set the precedent that it wasn't that valuable of a franchise for porting to PC as single player games (at least, not after the PS versions are out for months before PC, same problem as Loki). Now, two factors are diffent. One, this is MMORPG, a genre that has proven itself to have worked best on the PC platform in the past. Sure, there have been console MMORPG's like PSO, but nothing so widely successful as Everquest, for example. Also, as an MMORPG, it is absolutely critical for its sucess to have as rapid growth of users as possible. With standalone games, the overall sales are not affected so much by how many people get it as soon as possible, but the quality of a MMORPG is dependent on a large user base, so if it starts slow, it would hamper later sales badly.
Secondly, this will be a simultaneous release. Unlke the PC ports, people can immediately pick their favorite, most convenient platform without suffering a time penalty, so the sales figures will more accurately and fairly reflect the viability of Square games on the PC versus Playstation. This may be important to show that PC ports are not a waste and bring efforts to port FFXII immediately.
Of course, in my opinion, FFXI has a high probability of failure. Even if executed perfectly on technical terms, the Final Fantasy series fanbase is not necessarily big on MMORPG. I know I like standalone games better, because playing MMORPGs put certain pressures on me that I don't want to deal with. I don't feel like I can play at my own pace, sometimes for the best affect I have to coordinate my playtime with other, and I like a cohesive story that comes to some sort of definitive close. Those differences between traditional FF and MMORPG may cause FFXI to fail, if MMORPG and standalone are sufficiently exclusive communities. I know several people who plan to skip XI because they have no love of MMORPG, and also know several MMORPG players who aren't impressed in the least bit by the name 'Final Fantasy'. Of course, this is only among the people I know, so I have no idea what the true picture is..
While you have some interesting points, I'd like to point out that the fundamental base part of your argument is based on incorrect knowledge. Square is not Sony or part of Sony, they merely have produced FF7-10 for Playstation systems (7&8 were released for PC as well by Eidos and EA, repsectively). I think they are somehow merged with Electronic Arts, but not Sony.
Mostly a me too post, but I think there is some more meat here..
I'll leave the avi/mov descriptions alone, they are a bit incorrect, but your point that remains true is that the extensions of.mov,.mpg, and.avi all imply video streams by convention, even though not technically required by the applicable standards in any one of them. Thanks to this convention, file managers hold the reasonable expectation that a program like xmms would likely not be able to handle those formats.
But with regard to mime-typing, the audio/ogg vs. video/ogg is handled by some systems as just saying application/ogg, which is supposed to be neutral but in actuality seems more wrong than either one. A media/ogg or something might be more fitting. The intent from the beginning was to have a truely flexible media format and some programs have recognized this. However, the extreme delay in production of 'endorsed' codecs (Theora and Tarkin) has created the convention that.ogg=audio only. And this has created a problem. Even under OSX and *nix in addition to windows now, Mime-typing based on extensions governs file manager behavior. Now with people who have winamp or xmms set up to open up extensions they have come to expect to be audio (.mp3,.ogg, etc...), Theora presents a problem. Even if both xmms and winamp are capable of playing back video, the interface is clearly not designed for video playback. Additionally, xmms video plugins have to cheat and manage their own video output, so video in xmms is even more of a hack, saving the developer only the trouble of UI design and audio output. Because of this, I suspect that the encroaching.ogm will indeed become the video extension by convention. It is sad because at least to me,.ogg as a unified media format sounds nice, and even though entirely superficial, somehow different naming seems to hurt that image.
But this just goes to show that sometimes a beautiful vision just can't work with practical usage. It would take one hell of a UI for a player to truly deal appropriately with a format that could be a very simple audio file to something with DVD-level complexity. No single UI can be fit to all of them. WMP tries and fails miserably.... I guess the answer is a single app that radically modifies its UI based on content.... Until that is here, you are right,.ogm is a necessary divergence from the vision..
That was just such a crock. The GNU work has the least impact and perhaps could be the most easily substituted without impacting end users, except for glibc. Linus made GNU what it is today with his kernel. Saying the shortest proper name should be 'GNU', completely omitting the key piece it needed to become whole is so self serving. Also, saying that the bare minimum threshold is GNU/Linux over anything such as XFree86, KDE, etc is really ludicrous, X has a much larger impact than the GNU tools.
This FAQ defines 'OS' to conveniently envelope work that is usually GNU, ommiting X, which I think has at least as much claim to being 'OS' as GNU.
Anyone who could care about FSF at all already understands the scenario in place. However, those people can also be turned off by the silly demands being made..
Dead platform: Actually, buying a PC for gaming may not be a dead *platform*, but that platform is guaranteed to leave your system behind very quickly relative to the console world. Take the Playstation, for example. It was designed about '94 or 95. About that time, the Pentium 60-100 Mhz was king. Guess which one plays more games now? PSOne still has some new titles coming out, though a dying platform, it is one that lived far longer than a PC. Cost less to boot.
Controllers: This is more of a social issue. You could impose the same requirement on console players, but it wouldn't make sense. Applying the console 'social' rules, hosting a LAN party at your house means you buy computers for everyone. More costly I would say.
The BBA for dreamcast is a bad example. They would have gone down, but the Dreamcast was dammed as a platform an thus the BBA became a rarity. Same with the X-Box dvd capability. Look at the PS2, built in DVD, and the ethernet will be much cheaper. Even combining the cost of all of it together you come out cheaper than a PC. Especially for playing on a large screen economically (yes, you can use s-video out on some video cards, but PC games are not designed to look good that way).
As far as supporting legacy hardware, again, look to Sony. They support fully hardware from their Playstation 1 and will probably continue the trend. Memory storage is of course, an issue, however....
The mods thing is of course not practical, so that is a point.
My view is that PC and Consoles each have their points. If you are going to invite a bunch of friends over to your place, console gaming is a lot easier to get going than a LAN party. If you are alone and want to join in on a game of something with a bunch of strangers online, then the PC platform will always be king. They are separate entities, each with strengths and weaknesses.
So as the 'new wave' of 5 GHz devices come out, the next phones will again mess with wireless. You get rid of the microwave, but not phone. Personally, I have not experienced problems with 802.11b and interference.
Range will, however, be hurt. Wireless becomes pointless as the range diminishes. Range matters in some ways more than excessive bandwidth. Beyond 11 Megabit, it certainly doesn't matter much. For 95% of the applications out there, the extra bandwidth is unnecessary. I am able to stream extremely high quality video content through that to a handful of users on a single access point. Accessing things through network shares are still a pain in the ass at 100 megabit, so the added pain of 11 megabit most of the time isn't enough to make the sacrifice. As they say, 802.11g looks more promising, but in any event I can for about a hundred bucks set up a wireless system and client with 802.11b that suites all my needs. Why bother?
Same here. I had not written anything (aside from my signatrue) in about 3 months when suddenly I was asked to jot down some notes for a meeting on a piece of paper. So you saw a cursive y next to a backwards 3, capital L and lowercase is. Hell, I even drew vertical lines before start of certain words. The second piece of paper I tried to be more careful about, but still the letters looked like graffiti. I let it slide at that, happy I didn't dot before every punctuation and draw up before every capital letter. It was just some jotted notes for them anyway.
Well, take that analogy to its conclusion. It only justifies sniffing traffic leaking out. By using that wireless network for internet access (or any use infact) you are throwing stuff into their premises and consuming their bandwidth without permission. It is stealing, plain and simple.
Just as leaving your door unlocked doesn't make it ok to come in, not protecting the network doesn't mean it's ok to exploit it. Administrators should secure wireless networks with extra care, but it is not the responsibilty of warchalkers to exploit that.
All that being said, Warchalking is a hell of a lot more innocuous way of finding out that you are wide open than, say, corporate espionage. I came in for an interview at a company that operating in a single suite on the third floor of a building. I noticed a warchalking mark outside the premises and thought 'some company's administrator needs to get it together'. I get the job and find out they have an access point wide open. They had it carefully positioned in the middle of their small suite so they would get best reception. I mentioned what measures I thought should be taken and they said they didn't want to deal with the hastle on employee laptops and that they *knew* the wireless wouldn't extend beyond their walls. Some months later I was able to show them that I could connect from the ground outside the building, and then they let me enable 40-bit WEP. about as secure as a wet tissue, but better than nothing.
Well, I guess network transparency doesn't matter to consumers by and large, but I like it, dammit. And there is no real benefit to throwing out X and starting over, just a huge waste of time and effort.
The perceived 'problems' with X are non-issues or more easily solved through extensions. Toolkits (ala qt and gtk) as well as things like SDL take care of any API strangess that could scare developers.
Already, desktop environments are pretty complete, except when it comes to configuring the X server itself on the fly. Now I know there is or is in the works an extension to configure displays on the fly, and desktop environments incorporating config tools that utilize this would help greatly. Although this is becoming less and less important. When was the last time you had to change color depth/resolution for your windows desktop (note that switching resolutions is more comonly done by games, and linux games also change resolutions).
X is a solid, proven, good system. By the time the supposed 'X replacements' develop the functionality they found lacking in X, X gets an extension before the project is done..
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as a Gentoo/PPC user, there is definite benefit in source based distributions.
The 'two major CPU manufacurers' are not the only ones that matter, for one. They hardly make a difference between each other. There is Sparc, Mips, PPC, Alpha, and other architectures. Mostly source based distributions who don't rely on paying to support what they allow can more easily adapt to many different platforms, not just 'AMD or Intel'.
Secondly, it isn't merely about getting things installed on your system or squeezing every last optimization in, it is about installing it the way you want it. Binary packages are compiled with certain #defines and linked against libraries of other packages which you may not care about. For example, mozilla compiled against gtk or gtk2. xchat with or without Gnome support, gaim with or without gnome support. Freetype with or without the patent infringing bytecode interpreter. With binary distributions, they are forced to make decisions about what the best way to proceed is, and most often the answer is to compile with support for everything and require everything as a prerequisite, even if the source only optionally supports another piece of software. With Gentoo, I define USE flags and emerge, and it figures out dependencies on the fly and passes the right options to configure and applies the right patches to get the featureset I want, with as little of the optional cruft as possible.
Related to the previous point, the performance boost is not as negligible as you would think. First off, the compiler optimizations and omitting debug code (useful for support and development, so often included) do help significantly on their own. Add to this that packages aren't carrying baggage from other unwanted and unused packages unnecessarily. This also saves on drive space and, more importantly, memory.
Sure, installing goes from being measured in minutes/hours to hours/days depending on what you need, but the process requires little intervention and once started, you can walk away and do other things. The time spent running these compiles is the price to pay for very good benefits.
Of course, your post has troll written all over it, but it in part reflects some real concerns people have about source based distributions, so I think it is worthy of a response..
Got burned by Sorcerer Linux before this offshoot started. Hope they improved on the system, but I'm a gentoo user now, and don't really see what could be missing...
If they are compiling in Ramfs still (Like Sorcerer used too), it is a horrible waste, the benefits are negligible compared to the pains in the ass it can cause and the limitations it must have to deal with under the circumstances. I thought RamFS would be cool, but there is not much of a difference on an operation the user rarely performs and one that isn't baby-sat. If you are already on the install-from-source mindset, you have given up the speed of, say, binary apt installs to gain what is needed in terms of speed at runtime (and customization).
I would bet it would be excluded since RedHat 8 is Gnome2-centric, and, AFAIK, gmc was not ported to Gnome2. I think they even go so far as to compile mozilla with Gtk2, which, at this point in development, is a bad idea.
Before you damn Nautilus to hell, try the version in Redhat 8.0 (i.e. the Gnome2 version). Nautilus was unusable in Gnome 1.4.x, but the 2.x versions are unbelievably faster. I used to always go to the nice speed of rox, but now I run nautilus most of the time....
Though I have not used 8.0, I would venture to say this time it may not be the case. 5.0, 6.0, and 7.0 each included some core component that was still considered in pre-release state by their respective developers. When they shipped with pre-release glibc and/or gcc, they caused a lot of problems, in the name of not worrying about it later. gcc-2.96 (the 7.0 fiasco) was meant to make use of the long overdue enhancements in the gcc3 tree and provide a good base to grow on. Instead, it was a buggy piece of crap (even ignoring the 'bad code' it wouldn't compile). Same when they tried the same stunt with glibc. This time, no critical components seem to be released before their time. Glibc, gcc, and most everything is actually at an official 'stable' level according to their developers. If my experience with Gentoo 1.4rc tells me anything, it is that the versions RedHat are using could be up to snuff.
Of course, now they ventured into patching Qt/GTK/KDE/GNOME for a consistant *feel*, and even a theme that only changes looks (which they also provide) can cause crashes in the toolkit when implemented in code, so maybe on a Desktop level there may still be worries.
I might try RedHat 8.0 on my desktop system, or Mandrake 9.0, or switch to Gentoo (my iBook has been a very convincing case for Gentoo...). No matter the way, it looks like the releases are much more timely this go around...
The guide I use relevant to mozilla.
Fonts that look nice.
All this stuff is general, but I doubt there is any redhat-specific issues, unless they disabled freetype in their build, which would be very stupid in this day and age...
Regarding the cut/paste mozilla issue... I have not run RedHat 8.0, I only run gentoo now. When I compiled mozilla using gtk2, I had the same issue and also had a lot of plugin issues. Does anyone know if this version shipped by redhat is compiled against gtk2 or something?
I recompiled against gtk1 for plugins, copy/paste, and stable galeon embedding, so I no longer have those problems.
You by chance using a Savage chipset? I have had to disable key features of xine on Savage to keep it from falling on its ass on Startup. Every other system but Savage Video cards I have had no troubles with...
Video: xine (and totem, by extension) and mplayer help a great deal. Even on my non-x86 laptop I can play nearly anything with xine... MPlayer is a tricky proposition, on some systems it works beautifully, and on others it is a resource hog more than anything else...
I think that having totem set up by default on linux desktops would go far to dispel the 'no good media player on linux' myth...
It is a possibility, and one Gould would stand behind, the theory of punctuated equilibrium states that drastic changes did occur suddenly as the environment had sudden changes, or even if it didn't. If a really wacked out change gives a great advantage, it would propogate wildly. Mutations need not be subtle...
I find it hard to believe that any evolutinist would be shaken in the least bit or be sheepish about this argument in the least bit. So much of evolution is fundamentally based on allowing for flukes that are extremely rare, yet extremely useful. If by some slim chance a beetle is born with this highly unlikely combination, that beetle would kick some serious ass and mate, and thus the progression.
Sure it is an unlikely fluke to happen, but so much about every species consists of unlikely flukes. I'm sure every species has a lot of traits which if not developed at the same time would either not make sense or be lethal. To say the inhibitor, for example, could not develop first, simply because it doesn't make sense, is stupid. If it isn't lethal or otherwise impacts selection, then it is a moot trait and would be ignored. Lethal dominant traits are rapidly filtered out, and Lethal recessive traits will persist pretty much indefinitely under nature.
There are many different ways the beetle could arrive at it's final form. Could have all happened spontaneously, it is a valid chance. It could have the inhibitor first for no good reason. If the energy required to produce the inhibitor is low enough to not impact selection, there is no reason why the inhibitor could exist before anything else. Same goes for the delivery system. And as others point out, it could be a gradual progression in amounts, or utilized in different ways before the agent could be released (blowing up and hurting predators helps the species survive, altruism is not too uncommon, especially among insect species).
I don't see why some people think religion and evolution are exclusive propositions. Why wouldn't God start off with a very basic setup and put in rules to let it change and let it go to see what happens, or even shape and work through the system to arrive at the desired vision. The bible may say a week is the period of creation, but also says that time in God's terms and people's terms is entirely different, so perhaps Creationists are more blasphemous for having the audacity to think they are on a level with God in terms of their interaction with time?
Well, for one, I think 7 and 8 set the precedent that it wasn't that valuable of a franchise for porting to PC as single player games (at least, not after the PS versions are out for months before PC, same problem as Loki).
Now, two factors are diffent. One, this is MMORPG, a genre that has proven itself to have worked best on the PC platform in the past. Sure, there have been console MMORPG's like PSO, but nothing so widely successful as Everquest, for example. Also, as an MMORPG, it is absolutely critical for its sucess to have as rapid growth of users as possible. With standalone games, the overall sales are not affected so much by how many people get it as soon as possible, but the quality of a MMORPG is dependent on a large user base, so if it starts slow, it would hamper later sales badly.
Secondly, this will be a simultaneous release. Unlke the PC ports, people can immediately pick their favorite, most convenient platform without suffering a time penalty, so the sales figures will more accurately and fairly reflect the viability of Square games on the PC versus Playstation. This may be important to show that PC ports are not a waste and bring efforts to port FFXII immediately.
Of course, in my opinion, FFXI has a high probability of failure. Even if executed perfectly on technical terms, the Final Fantasy series fanbase is not necessarily big on MMORPG. I know I like standalone games better, because playing MMORPGs put certain pressures on me that I don't want to deal with. I don't feel like I can play at my own pace, sometimes for the best affect I have to coordinate my playtime with other, and I like a cohesive story that comes to some sort of definitive close. Those differences between traditional FF and MMORPG may cause FFXI to fail, if MMORPG and standalone are sufficiently exclusive communities. I know several people who plan to skip XI because they have no love of MMORPG, and also know several MMORPG players who aren't impressed in the least bit by the name 'Final Fantasy'. Of course, this is only among the people I know, so I have no idea what the true picture is..
While you have some interesting points, I'd like to point out that the fundamental base part of your argument is based on incorrect knowledge. Square is not Sony or part of Sony, they merely have produced FF7-10 for Playstation systems (7&8 were released for PC as well by Eidos and EA, repsectively). I think they are somehow merged with Electronic Arts, but not Sony.
Mostly a me too post, but I think there is some more meat here..
.mov, .mpg, and .avi all imply video streams by convention, even though not technically required by the applicable standards in any one of them. Thanks to this convention, file managers hold the reasonable expectation that a program like xmms would likely not be able to handle those formats.
.ogg=audio only. And this has created a problem. Even under OSX and *nix in addition to windows now, Mime-typing based on extensions governs file manager behavior. Now with people who have winamp or xmms set up to open up extensions they have come to expect to be audio (.mp3, .ogg, etc...), Theora presents a problem. Even if both xmms and winamp are capable of playing back video, the interface is clearly not designed for video playback. Additionally, xmms video plugins have to cheat and manage their own video output, so video in xmms is even more of a hack, saving the developer only the trouble of UI design and audio output. Because of this, I suspect that the encroaching .ogm will indeed become the video extension by convention. It is sad because at least to me, .ogg as a unified media format sounds nice, and even though entirely superficial, somehow different naming seems to hurt that image.
.ogm is a necessary divergence from the vision..
I'll leave the avi/mov descriptions alone, they are a bit incorrect, but your point that remains true is that the extensions of
But with regard to mime-typing, the audio/ogg vs. video/ogg is handled by some systems as just saying application/ogg, which is supposed to be neutral but in actuality seems more wrong than either one. A media/ogg or something might be more fitting. The intent from the beginning was to have a truely flexible media format and some programs have recognized this. However, the extreme delay in production of 'endorsed' codecs (Theora and Tarkin) has created the convention that
But this just goes to show that sometimes a beautiful vision just can't work with practical usage. It would take one hell of a UI for a player to truly deal appropriately with a format that could be a very simple audio file to something with DVD-level complexity. No single UI can be fit to all of them. WMP tries and fails miserably.... I guess the answer is a single app that radically modifies its UI based on content.... Until that is here, you are right,
I know that at least in 10.2, I've been able to have separate Battery/AC power configurations.
http://manu.agat.net/ReallySlickLinux/
Not very far, but a start.
That was just such a crock. The GNU work has the least impact and perhaps could be the most easily substituted without impacting end users, except for glibc. Linus made GNU what it is today with his kernel. Saying the shortest proper name should be 'GNU', completely omitting the key piece it needed to become whole is so self serving. Also, saying that the bare minimum threshold is GNU/Linux over anything such as XFree86, KDE, etc is really ludicrous, X has a much larger impact than the GNU tools.
This FAQ defines 'OS' to conveniently envelope work that is usually GNU, ommiting X, which I think has at least as much claim to being 'OS' as GNU.
Anyone who could care about FSF at all already understands the scenario in place. However, those people can also be turned off by the silly demands being made..
Dead platform:
Actually, buying a PC for gaming may not be a dead *platform*, but that platform is guaranteed to leave your system behind very quickly relative to the console world. Take the Playstation, for example. It was designed about '94 or 95. About that time, the Pentium 60-100 Mhz was king. Guess which one plays more games now? PSOne still has some new titles coming out, though a dying platform, it is one that lived far longer than a PC. Cost less to boot.
Controllers: This is more of a social issue. You could impose the same requirement on console players, but it wouldn't make sense. Applying the console 'social' rules, hosting a LAN party at your house means you buy computers for everyone. More costly I would say.
The BBA for dreamcast is a bad example. They would have gone down, but the Dreamcast was dammed as a platform an thus the BBA became a rarity. Same with the X-Box dvd capability. Look at the PS2, built in DVD, and the ethernet will be much cheaper. Even combining the cost of all of it together you come out cheaper than a PC. Especially for playing on a large screen economically (yes, you can use s-video out on some video cards, but PC games are not designed to look good that way).
As far as supporting legacy hardware, again, look to Sony. They support fully hardware from their Playstation 1 and will probably continue the trend. Memory storage is of course, an issue, however....
The mods thing is of course not practical, so that is a point.
My view is that PC and Consoles each have their points. If you are going to invite a bunch of friends over to your place, console gaming is a lot easier to get going than a LAN party. If you are alone and want to join in on a game of something with a bunch of strangers online, then the PC platform will always be king. They are separate entities, each with strengths and weaknesses.
Well if he is in need of a defibrillator, I somehow doubt he has the capacity to refuse anything until after the fact....
So as the 'new wave' of 5 GHz devices come out, the next phones will again mess with wireless. You get rid of the microwave, but not phone. Personally, I have not experienced problems with 802.11b and interference.
Range will, however, be hurt. Wireless becomes pointless as the range diminishes. Range matters in some ways more than excessive bandwidth. Beyond 11 Megabit, it certainly doesn't matter much. For 95% of the applications out there, the extra bandwidth is unnecessary. I am able to stream extremely high quality video content through that to a handful of users on a single access point. Accessing things through network shares are still a pain in the ass at 100 megabit, so the added pain of 11 megabit most of the time isn't enough to make the sacrifice. As they say, 802.11g looks more promising, but in any event I can for about a hundred bucks set up a wireless system and client with 802.11b that suites all my needs. Why bother?
and by the same token, clockseed does not necessarily have a linear correlation to performance :)
Same here. I had not written anything (aside from my signatrue) in about 3 months when suddenly I was asked to jot down some notes for a meeting on a piece of paper. So you saw a cursive y next to a backwards 3, capital L and lowercase is. Hell, I even drew vertical lines before start of certain words. The second piece of paper I tried to be more careful about, but still the letters looked like graffiti. I let it slide at that, happy I didn't dot before every punctuation and draw up before every capital letter. It was just some jotted notes for them anyway.
Well, take that analogy to its conclusion. It only justifies sniffing traffic leaking out. By using that wireless network for internet access (or any use infact) you are throwing stuff into their premises and consuming their bandwidth without permission. It is stealing, plain and simple.
Just as leaving your door unlocked doesn't make it ok to come in, not protecting the network doesn't mean it's ok to exploit it. Administrators should secure wireless networks with extra care, but it is not the responsibilty of warchalkers to exploit that.
All that being said, Warchalking is a hell of a lot more innocuous way of finding out that you are wide open than, say, corporate espionage. I came in for an interview at a company that operating in a single suite on the third floor of a building. I noticed a warchalking mark outside the premises and thought 'some company's administrator needs to get it together'. I get the job and find out they have an access point wide open. They had it carefully positioned in the middle of their small suite so they would get best reception. I mentioned what measures I thought should be taken and they said they didn't want to deal with the hastle on employee laptops and that they *knew* the wireless wouldn't extend beyond their walls. Some months later I was able to show them that I could connect from the ground outside the building, and then they let me enable 40-bit WEP. about as secure as a wet tissue, but better than nothing.
Well, I guess network transparency doesn't matter to consumers by and large, but I like it, dammit. And there is no real benefit to throwing out X and starting over, just a huge waste of time and effort.
The perceived 'problems' with X are non-issues or more easily solved through extensions. Toolkits (ala qt and gtk) as well as things like SDL take care of any API strangess that could scare developers.
Already, desktop environments are pretty complete, except when it comes to configuring the X server itself on the fly. Now I know there is or is in the works an extension to configure displays on the fly, and desktop environments incorporating config tools that utilize this would help greatly. Although this is becoming less and less important. When was the last time you had to change color depth/resolution for your windows desktop (note that switching resolutions is more comonly done by games, and linux games also change resolutions).
X is a solid, proven, good system. By the time the supposed 'X replacements' develop the functionality they found lacking in X, X gets an extension before the project is done..
Wrong/illegal, at least if you use Gator as a precident...