From what I could see the usual benefits of multi-head aren't there or intended. The intent is to have a larger screen yet fold into something the size of a small laptop. You cannot change the swivel of each display while in use, so acheiving the surround effect won't be happening. Each display on it's own is pretty small, so having multiple desktops would not be very useful. In fact, I'm not so sure that the video card would report these two displays as separate monitors, they may be transparently represented as one to the graphics card, an LCD which just happens to have a clean split down the middle.
What we have here is something that aims to have very small folded profile while having a large unfolded profile. The weight and power consumption (and price) make it a bad choice for an everyday portable. The end result is just a display with an ugly separation in the middle, not a flexible multi-head system.
Not to nitpick, but I think it would be more apt to say that Sega went the way of Atari, since Atari got out of the home console business well before the nails went into Dreamcast's coffin...
I do that with linux too, its called the swsusp patch, a google search can show the way, very convenient, especially for laptops without BIOS-managed suspend modes.
Well, the entire point that windows servers are expected to be protected entirely by a non-Windows system to be secure says something right there. They ship with bugs that result in security issues, which is ok since they offer patches, but the issue is the same one that most linux distros had until recently, leaving things too wide open by default, in the name of making it easier to use them, whether you want to or not. Windows Media Player does not necessarily belong on a Server or a restricted professional workstation, but there it is, happily ready to be exploited to allow a normal user to escalate privs.
Anyway, what you say about ease of use has a grain of truth in it, but the situation is not nearly so drastic. Connecting to a network is trivial under either OS, and takes about the same time, either through command line or gui utilities offered by Mandrake and RedHat. Installing binary software typically takes less time under package managed systems than it does under Windows, same for uninstall. I don't see how rpm -i is harder than setup, you can even click on an icon and install it, unlike downloading most zips from the internet where you unpack, then hunt down setup to run.
Now stuff like sharing files currently does take a bit longer typically (of course providing that the user installed File and Print Sharing, otherwise they get stumped under Windows too), since the file managers typically do not offer shortcuts to samba/nfs sharing configuration, but RedHat and Mandrake again provide 'wizards' to set this stuff up if you can't deal with/etc/exports, smb.conf, and/or swat. Admittedly not as easy as Windows, but still....
The bottom line is that thanks to projects like KDE and Gnome (though 2.0 seems to be a step backward in usability to me, it's like Sun's usability input screwed things up) and companies like Mandrake and RedHat, Linux distributions are becoming easier to use constantly, while distributions like gentoo and debian exist for the power users, and they all are mostly binary compatible, and completely source compatible, so it is a great deal more variety of choice than say 'Home', Professional, Server, etc... Which are all basically the same thing with a few extra things tossed in at every level, with nothing ever removed nor more power given over the system to more advanced users.
I personally think all 3D animation should revert to the days of Dire Straits' Music Video....
"I want my, I want my, I want my mtv..."
Now *there* is high tech animation.
Seriously though, the geometry nor resolution of even the most cutting edge graphics cards are anywhere near the level required to produce the high quality images, especially an image that wouldn't turn to crap on a typical movie screen. For the mainstream this just wouldn't cut it... Imagine the jaggedness and polygon count on your monitor scaled to a theater screen.... scary.
And for the people who would appreciate this sort of thing and would enjoy watching or seeing what they can do with a restriction on polygons and resolutions, there is always the demo scene dedicated to showing off what they can do at any level between all processor load to entire system in realtime. For movies I remember watching a couple of films written as Quake demos, I presume this is still happening somewhere on some level.
This appeals to some people, but those people are already served...
Ideally the government wouldn't have been involved at all, but instead have the parties settle it among themselves. However, I guess after having to deal with so many people trying this more drastic, newsworthy measures need be taken to let users know they mean business and not to try this for kicks. If the only punishment is a cancellation of service, a lot of people will try and get permanently banned, a fate which results ultimately in the ISP not getting money from that user who might have behaved himself if he thought he had more to lose than his account.
All this said, I'm not sure why this is FBI jurisdiction rather than local law enforcement agency. I suppose the main body of the ISP is proabably not in the same state, but you would think they would operate through their local presence. Of course, the FBI is more newsworthy than local police.
At this stage they say they have not charged anyone with anything, but confiscated systems for evidence. My bet is that the systems will be returned and charges never filed. This is more of a scare tactic. Really scare the perpetrators, and spread more awareness of the seriousness of the issue among the people. In the end they will let them off, making the company look better while acheiving the wider scare they wanted. They really have nothing to gain by punishing those individuals except bad publicity.
This whole scenario just goes to demonstrate that cable providers as a whole went into the ISP business unprepared with a lack of understanding of the problems an ISP faces. Routers should cap this stuff, not endstations, and their network infrastructure has proved in many cases to crumble under the stress, kind of like what happened when AOL first offered unlimited time plans. Now cable companies are more and more going to charge for extra bandwidth because they have been unable to figure out how to regulate network usage from a technical perspective without losing their peak rates. The Telco companies with DSL were not able to match the peak rate of cable modem, but now with the improvement of DSL technology and the saturation of both types of networks, DSL has proven to frequently provide more consistant, reliable service, even if peak DSL throughput is not equal to cable, the realistic throughput is on average better than Cable.
Now to see if cable companies can mature as ISPs, or if DSL will come to dominate in the coming years.
Gnome2, Mozilla 1.0, Neverwinter Nights..... Damn cold in hell, is amazon turning a profit? Duke Nukem Forever and Doom 3 just need to come out, and as a nice touch it would be cool if Star Control 2 would be re-released for Linux, Mac, and windows.... oh wait it is, hell is damn cold.
Now time to watch my karma go down the drain, but at least this time I was *less* offtopic.
Oh, this is news and SC2 isn't :)
on
GNOME 2.0 Released
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
I'll burn some karma here, but to those who want to know, Star Control 2 is being ported to Linux, Mac, and Windows at long last, see details at this url: http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/
It's official, SC2 is getting native ports to several platforms, see following URL: http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/
Looks like they'll be using SDL to pull it off, very cool.
If impatient, some good leads on buying the DOS version are here: http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/ge tsc/
Running the classic with sound, best bet if you do not have an ISA soundblaster card is dosemu. There are Dosemu sound patches at the following URL that improve the accuracy of the sound emulation with games like SC2 with DosEmu, while not perfect, can be a stop-gap until the ports are officially released. http://koti.mbnet.fi/lonnberg/DOSEmuSound.html
Re:Desktop MVS is dead too.
on
Is Linux Dead?
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· Score: 2
IM, no problem, licq, gaim, everybuddy, etc, pick one and go with it. AOL itself may not be there, but the IM portion for MSN, yahoo, ICQ, jabber, and AIM is there.
CD burning? What planet have you been on, tons of support and guis to do this exist now. I always prefer mkisofs+cdrecord/cdrdao command line depending on what I want to do, but there are projects like xcdroast, and other more modern ones, do a freshmeat search for more.
Popular entertainment titles. That is an iffy one, but through WineX you can play a large chunk of modern Windows games. Personally I'm not too much up on modern games, I like playing freeciv and games like lbreakout and stuff on my computer, the rest of my games are for a console because I like playing on the TV better anyway.
Home encyclopedias? People still use those much? The internet offers all the data of encyclopedias and more and updated frequently.
Supporting MS attachments I would think of as a bug, but if the distribution installs and configures things right, openoffice, abiword, koffice, evolution can all work to open most all office attachments.
The demoware in the mail thing I'm not sure of. If really desparate to run one of these things, wine or winex will likely handle it. Lindows, for example, is all about seamlessly integrated wine, for better or for worse.
And on broadband support, I have had no issues here, first broadband company I found worked fine. PPPoE or simple MAC authentication is the norm with broadband systems, and those work easily with linux. Now getting a techie to walk you through a linux configuration is unlikely, and that is valid, but support isn't as bad as you make it out to be....
I was not saying the core tecnology, the media format and codecs themselves weren't crap, but I was saying the interface design is better. Sure, the defaults throw a lot of advertising at you in real, but you can disable those, and under Windows with Real 8 the seekbar is too small, but with Real 8 under Linux and RealOne under both platforms, the seek thing is fixed, and especially the linux versions don't bother ever throwing in ads. But my complaint is for one, QuickTime refuses to do fullscreen. Additionally, QuickTime has *NO* keyboard controls, mouse only, while Real's shortcuts are sparse and clumsy, at least they exist. These two tie together into the philosophy behind the UI design, that the user is too stupid to use anything but the mouse and that controls can never be allowed to be hidden and must always appear in the same context no matter how the viewer views the movie. While this fits well with Apple's overall good UI design principles (except the lack of keyboard control), it does not befit a media player. If I want to watch and fully appreciate a video, I don't want anything else on the screen detracting from the experience. At the very least I would want all other applications hidden and the on screen controls smaller and unobtrusive (WMP comes close in the XP version, but too obtrusive). My preference is of course full screen with only keyboard control. Real's player sucks, but not as much as QuickTime player. WMP is better than both in terms of interface, but Xine has all beat in terms of interface from the flexibility and keyboard controls.
Whether or not it is available under Linux is not the point, Real's linux versions are bastard children that are horribly broken and hidden from view, that's not much better than QuickTime's support. The point is that the people at apple need to get their heads out of their asses and realize that media playback is different from other applications and do something different besides giving it a neato-skin and further messing it up by making it act like a handheld device rather than a computer application (i.e. the Volume control in QuicTime 4 which was fixed in 5)
Evidently they do use codecs decipherable by Xine, cool. I would have suspected the newer codec or an off the wall audio codec, but they have something that works with Xine... Cool.
When I run RealOne under linux or Windows now I never see a banner and there aren't many buttons. Video and Audio quality suck big time, but that isn't player design but rather core technology issues. Real8 Really sucked under windows (even after disabling all the cruft, the seekbar was a tiny little thing), but at least they had some decent keyboard controls and the option of fullscreen playback.
Offtopic question, is there any decent Windows video player out there with decent keyboard controls? WMP is neat, but doesn't have keyboard controls for things like rewind. It's like they all assume everyone just wants to use a mouse...
While the technology may be good in and of itself, the only player capable of playing back current files royally, *ROYALLY* sucks. I hate QuickTime player with a passion, even real has a better player design, even though their core technology sucks.
Anyway, you don't have to pay money just to play QuickTime under Linux using Apple's crappy player, wine supports everything from the installer to player itself just fine without commercial enhancements, though without browser enhancements. To avoid having the screen blacked over while using QuickTime, select "n" instead of native or builtin for "ddraw" in the wine config file. While I realize being this cheap may not be good for codeweavers, I think its important that people realize that playing back QuickTime files (free under windows), does not require money under Linux. Codeweaver's offers good browser integration and a viable platform for Office to run on, but they are not a requirement for running Apple's quicktime player decently.
Well, I've had my home robbed, and any cash laying around was gone, not exactly a mugging, but still a case where having large amounts of cash lying around would do more damage than a credit card. And oh how I wish *I* could say losing a couple hundred bucks would be no big deal, I don't think that many people would see it that way. The amount of information you have to give away when using a credit/debit/check card is relatively small if purchases are planned right, and what information you do give out isn't necessarily that detrimental.
4. I still strongly disagree here. I want encryption and use it for those recipients that accept it for all correspondence, but I have yet to pass any illicit material that way. Hell, I have a VPN configuration that has only served to protect FreeCiv games and trivial file transfers. And those who I want to hide things from are private individuals and organizations, who *cannot* read the mail, whether or not they have it flagged or not. As said before, *if* the NSA is trying to read my mail, they will get bored with it, and you can bet your ass that if you happen to mention some sensitive words in your unencrypted email that it will be *much* more likely to be read than any encrypted email, whether it be by private or government entities. If a password or billing information had to be emailed, it should be encrypted, otherwise a third party looking for keywords like "password" or "credit card" will stumble accross this stuff, while encrypted emails are useless to them..... Trying to hide stuff in plain sight just doesn't work when computers can sift through this stuff to identify likely candidates for human review. If a group has a set of emails flagged for keywords and encrypted, those keyword emails are much much more likely to be perused, where often the encrypted email will be left untouched.
Well, if you get a decent DVI monitor and an ATI or GeForce with DVI output then a great deal of the Matrox advantage becomes moot, their great RAMDAC. The 2D quality is almost entirely differentiated by the RAMDACs. Multi-Head is no longer a Matrox only game. The one good thing to be said about this new chip is that it doesn't suffer as huge a performance hit with AA as competitors do, but the baseline performance is so poor that the point becomes moot, as raw performance is roughly equal.
Now, I could see your argument work if Parhelia was priced and marketed as a budget card, but the price and marketing suggests a GeForce killer. A price maybe a little higher, but not much than a Radeon 8500 might be more reasonable, since it seems much closer to that sort of level than a GeForce 4...
I personally think ATIs are a better deal for Windows only gaming (based on price/performance ratio), but with Linux nVidia becomes the only viable cutting edge candidate (8500 still not 3d accelerated with DRI). I wonder how this new Parhelia card will be with Linux drivers...
That was the biggest bunch of corporate ass kissing I have seen in a long time. The journalist comes off sounding like a little teenage girl talking about the boy band of the day rather than a reporter. Ugh, that was such crap I couldn't read much, especially after the claims the Bill Gates always knows and shapes the entire industry, and portraying the anti-trust case debauchery in a positive light... But then again Fortune is a publication dedicated to corporate ass-kissing, but this seems to go overboard even for them..
Well, in any case, if Longhorn does do all this and do it successfully, it's good news for me. I mean, if so many people's personal information is made vulnerable in that way, then attacks against *my* personal information might go down. Kinda like Apache not getting as much attention because IIS is such a ripe target. That's not to say that Apache isn't more secure, but certainly the presence of IIS in the market draws dangerous attention from Apache:)
1) Ok, so wow, they don't know what you buy, but at any one point you have hundreds of dollars on your person at a given time, and if you either get robbed or drop your wallet, well, you are pretty well screwed. An alternative is to make your purchases at the most generic place you can when you buy something. For example, knowing you bought something at a general store is not very informative as opposed to a purchase at a games store.
2) Never signed up for a prepay cell phone, this may be a good strategy, again, paying in cash may not buy you much though.
3) Also a fine point for the paranoid, but I'm not sure all these huge companies are all trading personal information so that any email address can be tracked down to someone.
4) Now this is just damn stupid. This is like telling someone to send all important information on a post card instead of in an envelope. Sure, an encrypted email may raise a flag somewhere, but if you use good encryption and use it for as much of your email as possible, pretty much no one short of the NSA is going to decipher your mail and after the NSA wastes enough time deciphering "Hello, how have you been?" messages, they may decide they are not worth the trouble. And if you believe they will try to read each and every encrypted email even if history shows all to be benign in your case, they would probably be reading your plaintext mail, especially if it happened to contain a few keywords.
5) Alternatively I would say feed the personal information out with bogus data, better yet get your friends to do the same and swap cards ever so often. That way you save money and provide no personal information.
6) If a local grocer or market exists, then yes, this is a nice thing to do, for more reasons than just protecting personal information. In fact, if your sole goal is protection of private informaiton this is not a good strategy. The better strategy would be to cycle your shopping among different stores and have those stores be far away, just because you aren't being electronically tracked does not mean other people can't look and see what you buy. If you are going to be paranoid, might as well be extremely paranoid.
I'm not that protective of my information, I really don't have anything to hide from the NSA. Encrypted email may set off flags, but I don't give a damn, I don't trust post cards and so I don't trust email, and if the NSA knows I'm telling my friend he can come over this weekend, I don't care.
I like protecting what I can from common eyes, but do not obssess over whether executives at Food Lion know I bought beef last week, or even that my bank knows I bought something expensive from an electronics store a while back. Protecting privacy is all good, but there is a point where the inconveniences are just overboard to protect data that no one is really interested in anyway, or at least data that can't really be used against you.
Seems valid, but I wonder where that sits if it came to court. How is the "preferred form" defined? How is "normally distributed" defined, and it specifies "the" operating system on which the executable runs, but operating system could be vague too. For example, say Company X released a version of it's software for Company's X version of BSD with Linux Emulation. They say it is GPLed and release source but requires tools available only in their special version of BSD though the sources run under vanilla linux. They also withhold their version of BSD from external use. So now, there is source as modified by the company, and it just needs something normally distributed with the operating system on which it runs.
This is all too troublesome to actually happen, but I have to worry about the shaky ground of the GPL at times. Time to flush the karma down the drain for that last statement.
Acually, if you get the right system, it can be nearly that way. For example, this laptop I'm on barely flashes a logo for about a second for keypresses before diving into GRUB. A lot of Desktops do too lately. If you fine tune your BIOS, it doesn't take that much time to get to init anymore... Now the main problem with booting linux for me is the time taken for init to finish. I would like to see the possibility of starting multiple things in parallel rather than in series, for example if two scripts both begin with S45 then they both should run simultaneously. Also, some services are good to have, even for a workstation, but it would be nice to have a point where the gui comes up and services follow for those workstations where gui comes before network service functionality. For example, I want my desktop to run ssh and some other things, but interactive login is more important to have things up quickly. Does anyone know about work along these lines?
A bit offtopic, but I was wondering if something could be a loophole here. While the source should match the output, does the GPL make any requirements about the build process? I mean, would it be any less GPL because it includes Visual Studio Build information as opposed to automake/autoconf stuff? What about no build information at all and raw source? That last option could really make a codebase so not worth putting together that a customer would rather buy than try to piece it together. Of course, someone could release a GPLed builder of the product and that would go away. But on the other hand, what if the company devises and implements a really different and proprietary build system with which they build the product, that can't easily be reverse engineered and leave the source mostly unusable?
I guess the ultimate example of this would be a company developing a proprietary language for internal development. Release things in this language, but make no compilers or platform documentation available outside the company. This extreme example is not plausible (company would lose more than it gains), but it still raises an interesting question.
Also, where is the line drawn between source and binary? One could make the argument that binary is source, if you can just grok machine code. A simple translation from assembly code, and many gpl projects at least include assembly, and I guarantee you there is at least one entirely assembly based project under the GPL. In those circumstances, whether you have the source or the binary doesn't matter too much (well, depending on the linking). Same as having Java class files, Java class files easily decompile to readable, modifiable code.
Strictly speaking, this isn't true trasnlucency. It's still a translucency hack, but Xrender provides hardware support for the mathematical operations. The relevant piece of the desktop image is picked out and then some mechanism, rather it be software or Xrender accelerated, blends the static desktop image with the image to be overlayed with the weights assigned and generates a new static image based on the results. This is an improvement over the background-only translucency of the various terminals, and works for about 97% of the people who like it (as eyecandy), but it doesn't actually let you monitor dynamic content beneath the tranlucent section. Try opening a translucent menu over a scrolling page or animated gif or something and you'll see what I mean. I guess even with practical applications, the content being monitored is usually static, but we can't just proclaim, "look, true translucency, we can quit now this looks fine."
All this said, between XRender, Xft2, XVideo, DRI, and Xmovie extensions, really good things can be done on the desktop level with X, while keeping the networking core that is so useful so often...
I always home build all home systems, but there are tradeoffs.
Pluses of retail is that it doesn't require as much knowledge, research, considerartion, and you get support for your system so they'll fix it if it breaks...They warrant the whole system so they can't blame other compnents and claim no responisibilty....
Now I don't need the support, and when something breaks I can tell and have yet to be stonewalled for long by support claiming another compnent is at fault. Plus, you can fine tune the warranty depending on the component. With a standard PC, you often get about a year warranty, where with a home built it ins't too hard to get three years on most components.
Plus, you can hand select every little component. With retail PCs, you often find only the 'marketable' stats being hi. For example, a high end P4 with 128 Megs of RAM and crappy video card, and no-name motherboard. Of course this means you should research every little thing to get the best deal and this can take a bit of time.
Personally I have had good expereince with newegg.com in providing parts, but never rely on any positive reviews on their site, since those reviews are selected. The negative ones that are put through are usually worth reading, but it is important to find a less biased review site.
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From what I could see the usual benefits of multi-head aren't there or intended. The intent is to have a larger screen yet fold into something the size of a small laptop. You cannot change the swivel of each display while in use, so acheiving the surround effect won't be happening. Each display on it's own is pretty small, so having multiple desktops would not be very useful. In fact, I'm not so sure that the video card would report these two displays as separate monitors, they may be transparently represented as one to the graphics card, an LCD which just happens to have a clean split down the middle.
What we have here is something that aims to have very small folded profile while having a large unfolded profile. The weight and power consumption (and price) make it a bad choice for an everyday portable. The end result is just a display with an ugly separation in the middle, not a flexible multi-head system.
Not to nitpick, but I think it would be more apt to say that Sega went the way of Atari, since Atari got out of the home console business well before the nails went into Dreamcast's coffin...
I do that with linux too, its called the swsusp patch, a google search can show the way, very convenient, especially for laptops without BIOS-managed suspend modes.
Well, the entire point that windows servers are expected to be protected entirely by a non-Windows system to be secure says something right there. They ship with bugs that result in security issues, which is ok since they offer patches, but the issue is the same one that most linux distros had until recently, leaving things too wide open by default, in the name of making it easier to use them, whether you want to or not. Windows Media Player does not necessarily belong on a Server or a restricted professional workstation, but there it is, happily ready to be exploited to allow a normal user to escalate privs.
/etc/exports, smb.conf, and/or swat. Admittedly not as easy as Windows, but still....
Anyway, what you say about ease of use has a grain of truth in it, but the situation is not nearly so drastic. Connecting to a network is trivial under either OS, and takes about the same time, either through command line or gui utilities offered by Mandrake and RedHat. Installing binary software typically takes less time under package managed systems than it does under Windows, same for uninstall. I don't see how rpm -i is harder than setup, you can even click on an icon and install it, unlike downloading most zips from the internet where you unpack, then hunt down setup to run.
Now stuff like sharing files currently does take a bit longer typically (of course providing that the user installed File and Print Sharing, otherwise they get stumped under Windows too), since the file managers typically do not offer shortcuts to samba/nfs sharing configuration, but RedHat and Mandrake again provide 'wizards' to set this stuff up if you can't deal with
The bottom line is that thanks to projects like KDE and Gnome (though 2.0 seems to be a step backward in usability to me, it's like Sun's usability input screwed things up) and companies like Mandrake and RedHat, Linux distributions are becoming easier to use constantly, while distributions like gentoo and debian exist for the power users, and they all are mostly binary compatible, and completely source compatible, so it is a great deal more variety of choice than say 'Home', Professional, Server, etc... Which are all basically the same thing with a few extra things tossed in at every level, with nothing ever removed nor more power given over the system to more advanced users.
I personally think all 3D animation should revert to the days of Dire Straits' Music Video....
"I want my, I want my, I want my mtv..."
Now *there* is high tech animation.
Seriously though, the geometry nor resolution of even the most cutting edge graphics cards are anywhere near the level required to produce the high quality images, especially an image that wouldn't turn to crap on a typical movie screen. For the mainstream this just wouldn't cut it... Imagine the jaggedness and polygon count on your monitor scaled to a theater screen.... scary.
And for the people who would appreciate this sort of thing and would enjoy watching or seeing what they can do with a restriction on polygons and resolutions, there is always the demo scene dedicated to showing off what they can do at any level between all processor load to entire system in realtime. For movies I remember watching a couple of films written as Quake demos, I presume this is still happening somewhere on some level.
This appeals to some people, but those people are already served...
July 3rd is the official release, but it has been gold for a while. It was sarcasm :)
Ideally the government wouldn't have been involved at all, but instead have the parties settle it among themselves. However, I guess after having to deal with so many people trying this more drastic, newsworthy measures need be taken to let users know they mean business and not to try this for kicks. If the only punishment is a cancellation of service, a lot of people will try and get permanently banned, a fate which results ultimately in the ISP not getting money from that user who might have behaved himself if he thought he had more to lose than his account.
All this said, I'm not sure why this is FBI jurisdiction rather than local law enforcement agency. I suppose the main body of the ISP is proabably not in the same state, but you would think they would operate through their local presence. Of course, the FBI is more newsworthy than local police.
At this stage they say they have not charged anyone with anything, but confiscated systems for evidence. My bet is that the systems will be returned and charges never filed. This is more of a scare tactic. Really scare the perpetrators, and spread more awareness of the seriousness of the issue among the people. In the end they will let them off, making the company look better while acheiving the wider scare they wanted. They really have nothing to gain by punishing those individuals except bad publicity.
This whole scenario just goes to demonstrate that cable providers as a whole went into the ISP business unprepared with a lack of understanding of the problems an ISP faces. Routers should cap this stuff, not endstations, and their network infrastructure has proved in many cases to crumble under the stress, kind of like what happened when AOL first offered unlimited time plans. Now cable companies are more and more going to charge for extra bandwidth because they have been unable to figure out how to regulate network usage from a technical perspective without losing their peak rates. The Telco companies with DSL were not able to match the peak rate of cable modem, but now with the improvement of DSL technology and the saturation of both types of networks, DSL has proven to frequently provide more consistant, reliable service, even if peak DSL throughput is not equal to cable, the realistic throughput is on average better than Cable.
Now to see if cable companies can mature as ISPs, or if DSL will come to dominate in the coming years.
Next thing you know they'll do something crazy like release Warcraft III or something...
Gnome2, Mozilla 1.0, Neverwinter Nights..... Damn cold in hell, is amazon turning a profit?
Duke Nukem Forever and Doom 3 just need to come out, and as a nice touch it would be cool if Star Control 2 would be re-released for Linux, Mac, and windows.... oh wait it is, hell is damn cold.
Now time to watch my karma go down the drain, but at least this time I was *less* offtopic.
I'll burn some karma here, but to those who want to know, Star Control 2 is being ported to Linux, Mac, and Windows at long last, see details at this url:
http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/
It's official, SC2 is getting native ports to several platforms, see following URL:
e tsc/
http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/
Looks like they'll be using SDL to pull it off, very cool.
If impatient, some good leads on buying the DOS version are here:
http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/g
Running the classic with sound, best bet if you do not have an ISA soundblaster card is dosemu. There are Dosemu sound patches at the following URL that improve the accuracy of the sound emulation with games like SC2 with DosEmu, while not perfect, can be a stop-gap until the ports are officially released.
http://koti.mbnet.fi/lonnberg/DOSEmuSound.html
IM, no problem, licq, gaim, everybuddy, etc, pick one and go with it. AOL itself may not be there, but the IM portion for MSN, yahoo, ICQ, jabber, and AIM is there.
CD burning? What planet have you been on, tons of support and guis to do this exist now. I always prefer mkisofs+cdrecord/cdrdao command line depending on what I want to do, but there are projects like xcdroast, and other more modern ones, do a freshmeat search for more.
Popular entertainment titles. That is an iffy one, but through WineX you can play a large chunk of modern Windows games. Personally I'm not too much up on modern games, I like playing freeciv and games like lbreakout and stuff on my computer, the rest of my games are for a console because I like playing on the TV better anyway.
Home encyclopedias? People still use those much? The internet offers all the data of encyclopedias and more and updated frequently.
Supporting MS attachments I would think of as a bug, but if the distribution installs and configures things right, openoffice, abiword, koffice, evolution can all work to open most all office attachments.
The demoware in the mail thing I'm not sure of. If really desparate to run one of these things, wine or winex will likely handle it. Lindows, for example, is all about seamlessly integrated wine, for better or for worse.
And on broadband support, I have had no issues here, first broadband company I found worked fine. PPPoE or simple MAC authentication is the norm with broadband systems, and those work easily with linux.
Now getting a techie to walk you through a linux configuration is unlikely, and that is valid, but support isn't as bad as you make it out to be....
I was not saying the core tecnology, the media format and codecs themselves weren't crap, but I was saying the interface design is better. Sure, the defaults throw a lot of advertising at you in real, but you can disable those, and under Windows with Real 8 the seekbar is too small, but with Real 8 under Linux and RealOne under both platforms, the seek thing is fixed, and especially the linux versions don't bother ever throwing in ads. But my complaint is for one, QuickTime refuses to do fullscreen. Additionally, QuickTime has *NO* keyboard controls, mouse only, while Real's shortcuts are sparse and clumsy, at least they exist. These two tie together into the philosophy behind the UI design, that the user is too stupid to use anything but the mouse and that controls can never be allowed to be hidden and must always appear in the same context no matter how the viewer views the movie. While this fits well with Apple's overall good UI design principles (except the lack of keyboard control), it does not befit a media player. If I want to watch and fully appreciate a video, I don't want anything else on the screen detracting from the experience. At the very least I would want all other applications hidden and the on screen controls smaller and unobtrusive (WMP comes close in the XP version, but too obtrusive). My preference is of course full screen with only keyboard control. Real's player sucks, but not as much as QuickTime player. WMP is better than both in terms of interface, but Xine has all beat in terms of interface from the flexibility and keyboard controls.
Whether or not it is available under Linux is not the point, Real's linux versions are bastard children that are horribly broken and hidden from view, that's not much better than QuickTime's support. The point is that the people at apple need to get their heads out of their asses and realize that media playback is different from other applications and do something different besides giving it a neato-skin and further messing it up by making it act like a handheld device rather than a computer application (i.e. the Volume control in QuicTime 4 which was fixed in 5)
Evidently they do use codecs decipherable by Xine, cool. I would have suspected the newer codec or an off the wall audio codec, but they have something that works with Xine... Cool.
When I run RealOne under linux or Windows now I never see a banner and there aren't many buttons. Video and Audio quality suck big time, but that isn't player design but rather core technology issues. Real8 Really sucked under windows (even after disabling all the cruft, the seekbar was a tiny little thing), but at least they had some decent keyboard controls and the option of fullscreen playback.
Offtopic question, is there any decent Windows video player out there with decent keyboard controls? WMP is neat, but doesn't have keyboard controls for things like rewind.
It's like they all assume everyone just wants to use a mouse...
While the technology may be good in and of itself, the only player capable of playing back current files royally, *ROYALLY* sucks. I hate QuickTime player with a passion, even real has a better player design, even though their core technology sucks.
Anyway, you don't have to pay money just to play QuickTime under Linux using Apple's crappy player, wine supports everything from the installer to player itself just fine without commercial enhancements, though without browser enhancements. To avoid having the screen blacked over while using QuickTime, select "n" instead of native or builtin for "ddraw" in the wine config file.
While I realize being this cheap may not be good for codeweavers, I think its important that people realize that playing back QuickTime files (free under windows), does not require money under Linux. Codeweaver's offers good browser integration and a viable platform for Office to run on, but they are not a requirement for running Apple's quicktime player decently.
Well, I've had my home robbed, and any cash laying around was gone, not exactly a mugging, but still a case where having large amounts of cash lying around would do more damage than a credit card. And oh how I wish *I* could say losing a couple hundred bucks would be no big deal, I don't think that many people would see it that way. The amount of information you have to give away when using a credit/debit/check card is relatively small if purchases are planned right, and what information you do give out isn't necessarily that detrimental.
4. I still strongly disagree here. I want encryption and use it for those recipients that accept it for all correspondence, but I have yet to pass any illicit material that way. Hell, I have a VPN configuration that has only served to protect FreeCiv games and trivial file transfers. And those who I want to hide things from are private individuals and organizations, who *cannot* read the mail, whether or not they have it flagged or not. As said before, *if* the NSA is trying to read my mail, they will get bored with it, and you can bet your ass that if you happen to mention some sensitive words in your unencrypted email that it will be *much* more likely to be read than any encrypted email, whether it be by private or government entities. If a password or billing information had to be emailed, it should be encrypted, otherwise a third party looking for keywords like "password" or "credit card" will stumble accross this stuff, while encrypted emails are useless to them.....
Trying to hide stuff in plain sight just doesn't work when computers can sift through this stuff to identify likely candidates for human review. If a group has a set of emails flagged for keywords and encrypted, those keyword emails are much much more likely to be perused, where often the encrypted email will be left untouched.
Well, if you get a decent DVI monitor and an ATI or GeForce with DVI output then a great deal of the Matrox advantage becomes moot, their great RAMDAC. The 2D quality is almost entirely differentiated by the RAMDACs. Multi-Head is no longer a Matrox only game. The one good thing to be said about this new chip is that it doesn't suffer as huge a performance hit with AA as competitors do, but the baseline performance is so poor that the point becomes moot, as raw performance is roughly equal.
Now, I could see your argument work if Parhelia was priced and marketed as a budget card, but the price and marketing suggests a GeForce killer. A price maybe a little higher, but not much than a Radeon 8500 might be more reasonable, since it seems much closer to that sort of level than a GeForce 4...
I personally think ATIs are a better deal for Windows only gaming (based on price/performance ratio), but with Linux nVidia becomes the only viable cutting edge candidate (8500 still not 3d accelerated with DRI). I wonder how this new Parhelia card will be with Linux drivers...
That was the biggest bunch of corporate ass kissing I have seen in a long time. The journalist comes off sounding like a little teenage girl talking about the boy band of the day rather than a reporter. Ugh, that was such crap I couldn't read much, especially after the claims the Bill Gates always knows and shapes the entire industry, and portraying the anti-trust case debauchery in a positive light... But then again Fortune is a publication dedicated to corporate ass-kissing, but this seems to go overboard even for them..
:)
Well, in any case, if Longhorn does do all this and do it successfully, it's good news for me. I mean, if so many people's personal information is made vulnerable in that way, then attacks against *my* personal information might go down. Kinda like Apache not getting as much attention because IIS is such a ripe target. That's not to say that Apache isn't more secure, but certainly the presence of IIS in the market draws dangerous attention from Apache
1) Ok, so wow, they don't know what you buy, but at any one point you have hundreds of dollars on your person at a given time, and if you either get robbed or drop your wallet, well, you are pretty well screwed. An alternative is to make your purchases at the most generic place you can when you buy something. For example, knowing you bought something at a general store is not very informative as opposed to a purchase at a games store.
2) Never signed up for a prepay cell phone, this may be a good strategy, again, paying in cash may not buy you much though.
3) Also a fine point for the paranoid, but I'm not sure all these huge companies are all trading personal information so that any email address can be tracked down to someone.
4) Now this is just damn stupid. This is like telling someone to send all important information on a post card instead of in an envelope. Sure, an encrypted email may raise a flag somewhere, but if you use good encryption and use it for as much of your email as possible, pretty much no one short of the NSA is going to decipher your mail and after the NSA wastes enough time deciphering "Hello, how have you been?" messages, they may decide they are not worth the trouble. And if you believe they will try to read each and every encrypted email even if history shows all to be benign in your case, they would probably be reading your plaintext mail, especially if it happened to contain a few keywords.
5) Alternatively I would say feed the personal information out with bogus data, better yet get your friends to do the same and swap cards ever so often. That way you save money and provide no personal information.
6) If a local grocer or market exists, then yes, this is a nice thing to do, for more reasons than just protecting personal information. In fact, if your sole goal is protection of private informaiton this is not a good strategy. The better strategy would be to cycle your shopping among different stores and have those stores be far away, just because you aren't being electronically tracked does not mean other people can't look and see what you buy. If you are going to be paranoid, might as well be extremely paranoid.
I'm not that protective of my information, I really don't have anything to hide from the NSA. Encrypted email may set off flags, but I don't give a damn, I don't trust post cards and so I don't trust email, and if the NSA knows I'm telling my friend he can come over this weekend, I don't care.
I like protecting what I can from common eyes, but do not obssess over whether executives at Food Lion know I bought beef last week, or even that my bank knows I bought something expensive from an electronics store a while back. Protecting privacy is all good, but there is a point where the inconveniences are just overboard to protect data that no one is really interested in anyway, or at least data that can't really be used against you.
Seems valid, but I wonder where that sits if it came to court. How is the "preferred form" defined? How is "normally distributed" defined, and it specifies "the" operating system on which the executable runs, but operating system could be vague too. For example, say Company X released a version of it's software for Company's X version of BSD with Linux Emulation. They say it is GPLed and release source but requires tools available only in their special version of BSD though the sources run under vanilla linux. They also withhold their version of BSD from external use. So now, there is source as modified by the company, and it just needs something normally distributed with the operating system on which it runs.
This is all too troublesome to actually happen, but I have to worry about the shaky ground of the GPL at times. Time to flush the karma down the drain for that last statement.
Acually, if you get the right system, it can be nearly that way. For example, this laptop I'm on barely flashes a logo for about a second for keypresses before diving into GRUB. A lot of Desktops do too lately. If you fine tune your BIOS, it doesn't take that much time to get to init anymore... Now the main problem with booting linux for me is the time taken for init to finish. I would like to see the possibility of starting multiple things in parallel rather than in series, for example if two scripts both begin with S45 then they both should run simultaneously.
Also, some services are good to have, even for a workstation, but it would be nice to have a point where the gui comes up and services follow for those workstations where gui comes before network service functionality. For example, I want my desktop to run ssh and some other things, but interactive login is more important to have things up quickly. Does anyone know about work along these lines?
A bit offtopic, but I was wondering if something could be a loophole here. While the source should match the output, does the GPL make any requirements about the build process? I mean, would it be any less GPL because it includes Visual Studio Build information as opposed to automake/autoconf stuff? What about no build information at all and raw source? That last option could really make a codebase so not worth putting together that a customer would rather buy than try to piece it together. Of course, someone could release a GPLed builder of the product and that would go away. But on the other hand, what if the company devises and implements a really different and proprietary build system with which they build the product, that can't easily be reverse engineered and leave the source mostly unusable?
I guess the ultimate example of this would be a company developing a proprietary language for internal development. Release things in this language, but make no compilers or platform documentation available outside the company. This extreme example is not plausible (company would lose more than it gains), but it still raises an interesting question.
Also, where is the line drawn between source and binary? One could make the argument that binary is source, if you can just grok machine code. A simple translation from assembly code, and many gpl projects at least include assembly, and I guarantee you there is at least one entirely assembly based project under the GPL. In those circumstances, whether you have the source or the binary doesn't matter too much (well, depending on the linking). Same as having Java class files, Java class files easily decompile to readable, modifiable code.
Strictly speaking, this isn't true trasnlucency.
It's still a translucency hack, but Xrender provides hardware support for the mathematical operations. The relevant piece of the desktop image is picked out and then some mechanism, rather it be software or Xrender accelerated, blends the static desktop image with the image to be overlayed with the weights assigned and generates a new static image based on the results. This is an improvement over the background-only translucency of the various terminals, and works for about 97% of the people who like it (as eyecandy), but it doesn't actually let you monitor dynamic content beneath the tranlucent section. Try opening a translucent menu over a scrolling page or animated gif or something and you'll see what I mean. I guess even with practical applications, the content being monitored is usually static, but we can't just proclaim, "look, true translucency, we can quit now this looks fine."
All this said, between XRender, Xft2, XVideo, DRI, and Xmovie extensions, really good things can be done on the desktop level with X, while keeping the networking core that is so useful so often...
I always home build all home systems, but there are tradeoffs.
Pluses of retail is that it doesn't require as much knowledge, research, considerartion, and you get support for your system so they'll fix it if it breaks...They warrant the whole system so they can't blame other compnents and claim no responisibilty....
Now I don't need the support, and when something breaks I can tell and have yet to be stonewalled for long by support claiming another compnent is at fault. Plus, you can fine tune the warranty depending on the component. With a standard PC, you often get about a year warranty, where with a home built it ins't too hard to get three years on most components.
Plus, you can hand select every little component. With retail PCs, you often find only the 'marketable' stats being hi. For example, a high end P4 with 128 Megs of RAM and crappy video card, and no-name motherboard. Of course this means you should research every little thing to get the best deal and this can take a bit of time.
Personally I have had good expereince with newegg.com in providing parts, but never rely on any positive reviews on their site, since those reviews are selected. The negative ones that are put through are usually worth reading, but it is important to find a less biased review site.