I'll agree they have a good player core, but someone on that projects needs to learn a thing or two about UI design. Their UI (when it doesn't crash), is horribly designed. No dnd, some of the dialogs are more counter-intuitive than normal, etc. It's like the eye-candy matters more than functionality, and I know that often is the case in multimedia apps, but mplayer takes it to an extreme. But again I'll say a damn good core, best friggin asf/avi parser I've seen, MS's is crap compared to mplayers, of course, MS's parser is the worst of them all. I personally use PythonTheater because it integrates better with my enviornment, but if mplayer can get a good, consistent UI, I'll be first in line. Hell, I might write one for it when I get off my ass.
As long as we are on the subject of rabid laptop testimonials, I'll tell you about my laptop.
A Tadpole SparcBook 2, from 1993. A neat little thing I got from my company and it still works great, though I no longer have a working battery for it, it is neat to boot up for nostalgia's sake. Built in SCSI, AUI Ethernet, etc. Anyway, the funny thing is my home was robbed and the laptop stolen. I tried to call pawn shops to report it, and they all had the same question (so, is it a Mac, or a PC, I would say "saprc, running solaris, and they would ask "is that a DOS program? Does it say anything about intel on it? A latop *has* to be either PC or Mac, so you probably have an old 286 or 386 or something" Describing this thing to pawnshops was painful., eventually I just said if it is a laptop and you can't tell what the hell t is, it's probably mine). As it turns out, no one would buy it and they guy got caught two years later and couldn't even figure out how to turn it on, and I got it back intact. Still works great, though I'm looking for a cheap PC laptop replacement, since the SparcBook 2 is getting long in the tooth. Mac platform looks like they approach Sun quality on laptops, but is too expensive, oh well.
Strange, the eraser mouse I thought was a feature of the laptops. I *hate* those damn pads. My wrist will occassionally brush it while typing and cause the pointer to go some where I dind't want it to.. Now the eraser mice I find easy to control, but not easy to screw up.
But the issue is not so much whether they have paid for it or not, but that it is an ultimatum which may have a deadline too close for the administration to prepare for. Record keeping is notoriously bad in terms of keeping licensing info. Digging that info up is a non-trivial task, even if everything is legal...
At a job I had a while back I would spend tons of time playing znibbles with cowowrkers. On the day before everyone got off for 4th of july, a bunch of people played half life on the 5th and 6th floors. Great please to have fun, but unfortunately the site was closed down at the onset of the dot-com bubble burst. Guess it made since, not only were people playing way too many games, but we would buy a couple of 60,000 dollar tape jukeboxes so we could be lazier, and sun enterprise servers to do work that coul dbe done much cheaply on other systems.
I then killed a few months as a network admin for a industrail magnet research company. They primarily used office and autocad on their windows boxes, a cake walk of a job but they needed a relatively cheap administrator in case their server went down, so I killed quite a bit of time there with games. Of course, bein a cheap windows admin was only a holdover, so I quite and now work for a company where I don't ever play games. Get a lot more money, but still it is sad I don't get to cut back as much. of course the fun still comes in when servers go down. I think in the right context games can be very important in the geek work environment. Boost morale, build teams. It's worth sacrificing a little bit of productive time in order to reduce turnover and make people much more cooperative.
The reason those faster roads are safe are because they have ramps and are much more straight. The low speed limit roads involve a much slower time to get into the road and moving, and more curves and hence reduced visibility...
True story, a roommate of a friend of mine had a computer and had blankets wrapped around it. When asked why, she said she was afraid that the system would be damaged by the cold. (Keep in mind this is standard climate control room, kept above 60 degrees at all times...)
Re:Maybe I just don't get it..
on
WineX 2.0
·
· Score: 2
I prefer Linux, but some points are shaky at best, so I'll comment on them. Scripting is there, cmd can do scripting. The syntax is really arcane, not nearly as smooth as, say, bourne shell, but you can implement bourne shell level scripts in cmd, zsh, on the other hand offers some really cool features, but bourne shell seems to be the de facto standard. I don't *like* using cmd, but I am confident it is as functionally complete as bourne. Stability, with 2k I would say you have equal probability of decent stability as you do with linux. Funky hardware/drivers can bring Win2K down screaming a painful death, but the case is true in linux too. Now the difference to me is that under linux when this happens I can more easily ignore the things that cause the system to go down hard. Also, a graphics driver issue can crash your X session, but leave the system still working on the network (remotely log in and fix it is possible). This means little for desktop users (system may as well crash if they lose all their apps anyway), but in a professional network, particularly servers, this separatism is very important. Multiple desktops, no problem, the powertoys and tons of other apps offer this. I know you said by default, but powertoys are so readily available they might as well count. Virus security is correct, given the current climate. However, if linux had the same sort of users, it would be a problem (everyone logged in as root, and if a large platform, popular target for viruses). Now what I like about linux and other unix systems is that users (and even services) can pretty much do whatever they need to without dangerous privs, where in windows you *need* admin privs to do some of the most basic things, and therefore the platform is vulnerable in that way. Now the last two are valid points for not rebooting. Of course, witht he last one you might be tempted to close a lot of those windows to free up resources for the game:)
ROX-Filer is awesome, but is written in C. They provide development packages in Python for panel applets and Configuration management and a few useful extensions to pygtk, but the core of the filer is written in C. So it is both fast and offers python developers a friendly environment to develop in.
ROX-Filer is my favorite graphical filemanager. Nautilus, GMC, and Konqueror are all way too slow, dfm is ok, but doesn't look as good to me as ROX, and acts a bit strange at times, other file managers are probably well done, but work in file management paradigms I am less accustomed too (i.e. Norton Commander and NextStep style navigation as opposed to classic Mac/Windows icon/folders. Some things I would change if I had the time though, an optional lightweight tree panel on the side (a la explorer), ability to launch multiple files with their default viewers at once, and ability to associate multiple apps for mime types accessible through the context menu (so for images, both gimp and a viewer could be associated). Aside from those little annoyances, it is a much more responsive and clean looking interface than most out there. All these others add tons and tons of features (that no one needs) and use burdensome mechanisms that really slow things down, while ROX has stuck with the KISS principle in an age where most people aim to make things as complex as they can.
While it is the case here, and for many other companies, there are Anime's published by MPAA members. IIRC, columbia tristar, the publishers of the Metropolis DVD, is a MPAA member... Is there a good list of companies and their MPAA affiliation, and, optionally, DVD policies with regards to region coding and CSS?
Both! As many have pointed out, ADV is: a) not a member of MPAA b) usually does *not* CSS DVDs. c) usually does *not* region code discs. What does this mean? Well for one, people can have both viewponts and not be hypocrtical, and two, by supporting companies like this with your money rather than giving lobbying/campaign contribution money to the MPAA, you express your preference in non-bastard companies. I would like a site that lists major DVD distributors and their styles and MPAA affilation. It would be cool to explicitly select products only if they are good and by a pro fair use company.
Basically, strictly speaking this isn't preventing 'rebooting', it is enabling a system to boot really fast and load the state of the OS from non-volitile memory and have the state preserved. This just allows the boot process to skip the OS initilization bit (which is significant, but excludes BIOS startup).
This has been around (save-to-disk hibernation), though using non-volitile memory would increase the speed of the process could increase dramatically. It seems that they are proposing a non-volitile ram technology that claims comparable performance to the volitile memory we use today, so it would be always ready to restore from that state, even if the shutdown is unexpected (power outage, for example).
However, the annoying part of the boot process to me is the PC Bios. After it's part is done, I can tweak things to start fast, but BIOS, even after tweaking is unbearably slow. I presume on restart a computer may still go through BIOS before restoring state, and even then I presume it needs to offer the option of starting over (don't want a BSOD to be permament). I'm more interested in a BIOS that doesn't take forever to come up...
Ugh, tell me how Java as a *language* is not even a remote possibility for natve apps? As far as the others, Java is deployed widely in cro-ssplatform applets and client/server scripting, so that leaves the point about Java being a flawed language for native development. The inability to create native code has nothing to do with the language, so much as it does the current widespread implementations. Implementations started as bytecode only, now we see pretty common use of Just-In-Time compilers to compile code to native instructions on the fly for performance, and we see are seeing some products that do ahead of time compilation, just like C or C++ (gcj comes to mind, but there are commercial products...) So currently, Java is not an easy choice for native development thanks to current implementations, but as implementations become more advanced, Java could be used for native application development. As a general rule, if it can be interpreted, then it can be compiled, any language that can be ran on many platforms has the potential to have a native compiler developed for any of those platforms that can probably perform optimizations beyond what is possilbe in interpreted mode.
>I'm using a 1993 200MHz Pentium for my Java stuff....
Impressive, seeing as how the Pentium 60Mhz was released in 1994..... 200 MHz Pentium is a 1997 release, IIRC...
Re:Solution: XP behind a firewall?
on
XP, Phone Home
·
· Score: 2
You mean the corporate edition of XP. Hint to people with XP professional, but don't like the privacy issues of WPA, do a google search for corpfiles.zip and you can likely find a set of files that will make a standard, WPA enable XP pro distribution into a WPA disabled corp. edition. You would have to find a CD key somewhere to use it, but those are on the net, as are keygens that work.
Re:Solution: XP behind a firewall?
on
XP, Phone Home
·
· Score: 2
Sure you can, just block all traffic to microsoft's ip subnets, that is what I do.... (207.46.0.0/16) probably not all the IPs they have, but the ones I have seen phone home attempts have thus far all been on this subnet..
But judging from the information duplicated on slashdot, this is a big hoax. Dta transfer across devices? Umm... gee, that sounds new. All this garbage about using 3D acceleraters for 2D operations? Blatantly stupid, video cards can do 2D acceleration faster than 3D. The extraordinarily absurd description of how video content would reach the screen? And the little one slipped in about analog path for CD being eliminated, that just sounds like prodding people to believe they are doign this for DRM.
Ex post facto means someone cannot be punished for something that was legal at the time of action, but was made illegal by a later law, it makes no sense in your sentence...
Plus, guns are controlled. Not banned, but getting fully automated machine guns which can take chains of ammo is not legal, so your analogy is bad.
First off, WMA is audio only it is asf they offer. Second, there are linux players for asf, and there is a mac version of media player... The linux players are illegall (thanks to patent law...), but they are there. I can understand why they wouldn't use MPEG-1, that would be murder on the bandwidth, maybe a real format version for people who don't like MS, but MPEG-1 is not good for this sort of stuff..
Actually, my fridge spends most of the time off, and I'm pretty sure yours does too (unless you leave the door open all the time or something). The cooling in a fridge only kicks in as necessary (when you here it make a low buzzing sound as opposed to silent). A small fridge probably couldn't cool a computer fast enough to matter (particularly around the processor itself).
Slashdot Mirror
I'll agree they have a good player core, but someone on that projects needs to learn a thing or two about UI design. Their UI (when it doesn't crash), is horribly designed. No dnd, some of the dialogs are more counter-intuitive than normal, etc. It's like the eye-candy matters more than functionality, and I know that often is the case in multimedia apps, but mplayer takes it to an extreme.
But again I'll say a damn good core, best friggin asf/avi parser I've seen, MS's is crap compared to mplayers, of course, MS's parser is the worst of them all. I personally use PythonTheater because it integrates better with my enviornment, but if mplayer can get a good, consistent UI, I'll be first in line. Hell, I might write one for it when I get off my ass.
As long as we are on the subject of rabid laptop testimonials, I'll tell you about my laptop.
A Tadpole SparcBook 2, from 1993. A neat little thing I got from my company and it still works great, though I no longer have a working battery for it, it is neat to boot up for nostalgia's sake. Built in SCSI, AUI Ethernet, etc. Anyway, the funny thing is my home was robbed and the laptop stolen. I tried to call pawn shops to report it, and they all had the same question (so, is it a Mac, or a PC, I would say "saprc, running solaris, and they would ask "is that a DOS program? Does it say anything about intel on it? A latop *has* to be either PC or Mac, so you probably have an old 286 or 386 or something" Describing this thing to pawnshops was painful., eventually I just said if it is a laptop and you can't tell what the hell t is, it's probably mine). As it turns out, no one would buy it and they guy got caught two years later and couldn't even figure out how to turn it on, and I got it back intact. Still works great, though I'm looking for a cheap PC laptop replacement, since the SparcBook 2 is getting long in the tooth. Mac platform looks like they approach Sun quality on laptops, but is too expensive, oh well.
Strange, the eraser mouse I thought was a feature of the laptops. I *hate* those damn pads. My wrist will occassionally brush it while typing and cause the pointer to go some where I dind't want it to..
Now the eraser mice I find easy to control, but not easy to screw up.
But the issue is not so much whether they have paid for it or not, but that it is an ultimatum which may have a deadline too close for the administration to prepare for. Record keeping is notoriously bad in terms of keeping licensing info. Digging that info up is a non-trivial task, even if everything is legal...
Ah, I would have agreed, but when the company goes under because they spent too much money, then our jobs go away :)
At a job I had a while back I would spend tons of time playing znibbles with cowowrkers. On the day before everyone got off for 4th of july, a bunch of people played half life on the 5th and 6th floors. Great please to have fun, but unfortunately the site was closed down at the onset of the dot-com bubble burst. Guess it made since, not only were people playing way too many games, but we would buy a couple of 60,000 dollar tape jukeboxes so we could be lazier, and sun enterprise servers to do work that coul dbe done much cheaply on other systems.
I then killed a few months as a network admin for a industrail magnet research company. They primarily used office and autocad on their windows boxes, a cake walk of a job but they needed a relatively cheap administrator in case their server went down, so I killed quite a bit of time there with games. Of course, bein a cheap windows admin was only a holdover, so I quite and now work for a company where I don't ever play games. Get a lot more money, but still it is sad I don't get to cut back as much. of course the fun still comes in when servers go down. I think in the right context games can be very important in the geek work environment. Boost morale, build teams. It's worth sacrificing a little bit of productive time in order to reduce turnover and make people much more cooperative.
The reason those faster roads are safe are because they have ramps and are much more straight. The low speed limit roads involve a much slower time to get into the road and moving, and more curves and hence reduced visibility...
True story, a roommate of a friend of mine had a computer and had blankets wrapped around it. When asked why, she said she was afraid that the system would be damaged by the cold. (Keep in mind this is standard climate control room, kept above 60 degrees at all times...)
I prefer Linux, but some points are shaky at best, so I'll comment on them. :)
Scripting is there, cmd can do scripting. The syntax is really arcane, not nearly as smooth as, say, bourne shell, but you can implement bourne shell level scripts in cmd, zsh, on the other hand offers some really cool features, but bourne shell seems to be the de facto standard. I don't *like* using cmd, but I am confident it is as functionally complete as bourne.
Stability, with 2k I would say you have equal probability of decent stability as you do with linux. Funky hardware/drivers can bring Win2K down screaming a painful death, but the case is true in linux too. Now the difference to me is that under linux when this happens I can more easily ignore the things that cause the system to go down hard. Also, a graphics driver issue can crash your X session, but leave the system still working on the network (remotely log in and fix it is possible). This means little for desktop users (system may as well crash if they lose all their apps anyway), but in a professional network, particularly servers, this separatism is very important.
Multiple desktops, no problem, the powertoys and tons of other apps offer this. I know you said by default, but powertoys are so readily available they might as well count.
Virus security is correct, given the current climate. However, if linux had the same sort of users, it would be a problem (everyone logged in as root, and if a large platform, popular target for viruses). Now what I like about linux and other unix systems is that users (and even services) can pretty much do whatever they need to without dangerous privs, where in windows you *need* admin privs to do some of the most basic things, and therefore the platform is vulnerable in that way.
Now the last two are valid points for not rebooting. Of course, witht he last one you might be tempted to close a lot of those windows to free up resources for the game
Neat trick, thanks :) a bit awkward, but neat :)
ROX-Filer is awesome, but is written in C. They provide development packages in Python for panel applets and Configuration management and a few useful extensions to pygtk, but the core of the filer is written in C. So it is both fast and offers python developers a friendly environment to develop in.
ROX-Filer is my favorite graphical filemanager. Nautilus, GMC, and Konqueror are all way too slow, dfm is ok, but doesn't look as good to me as ROX, and acts a bit strange at times, other file managers are probably well done, but work in file management paradigms I am less accustomed too (i.e. Norton Commander and NextStep style navigation as opposed to classic Mac/Windows icon/folders. Some things I would change if I had the time though, an optional lightweight tree panel on the side (a la explorer), ability to launch multiple files with their default viewers at once, and ability to associate multiple apps for mime types accessible through the context menu (so for images, both gimp and a viewer could be associated). Aside from those little annoyances, it is a much more responsive and clean looking interface than most out there. All these others add tons and tons of features (that no one needs) and use burdensome mechanisms that really slow things down, while ROX has stuck with the KISS principle in an age where most people aim to make things as complex as they can.
While it is the case here, and for many other companies, there are Anime's published by MPAA members. IIRC, columbia tristar, the publishers of the Metropolis DVD, is a MPAA member... Is there a good list of companies and their MPAA affiliation, and, optionally, DVD policies with regards to region coding and CSS?
Both! As many have pointed out, ADV is:
a) not a member of MPAA
b) usually does *not* CSS DVDs.
c) usually does *not* region code discs.
What does this mean? Well for one, people can have both viewponts and not be hypocrtical, and two, by supporting companies like this with your money rather than giving lobbying/campaign contribution money to the MPAA, you express your preference in non-bastard companies. I would like a site that lists major DVD distributors and their styles and MPAA affilation. It would be cool to explicitly select products only if they are good and by a pro fair use company.
Basically, strictly speaking this isn't preventing 'rebooting', it is enabling a system to boot really fast and load the state of the OS from non-volitile memory and have the state preserved. This just allows the boot process to skip the OS initilization bit (which is significant, but excludes BIOS startup).
This has been around (save-to-disk hibernation), though using non-volitile memory would increase the speed of the process could increase dramatically. It seems that they are proposing a non-volitile ram technology that claims comparable performance to the volitile memory we use today, so it would be always ready to restore from that state, even if the shutdown is unexpected (power outage, for example).
However, the annoying part of the boot process to me is the PC Bios. After it's part is done, I can tweak things to start fast, but BIOS, even after tweaking is unbearably slow. I presume on restart a computer may still go through BIOS before restoring state, and even then I presume it needs to offer the option of starting over (don't want a BSOD to be permament). I'm more interested in a BIOS that doesn't take forever to come up...
That was my point, it wasn't as easy, but it is possible. That is the very point I was disagreeing with the parent post about.
Ugh, tell me how Java as a *language* is not even a remote possibility for natve apps? As far as the others, Java is deployed widely in cro-ssplatform applets and client/server scripting, so that leaves the point about Java being a flawed language for native development. The inability to create native code has nothing to do with the language, so much as it does the current widespread implementations. Implementations started as bytecode only, now we see pretty common use of Just-In-Time compilers to compile code to native instructions on the fly for performance, and we see are seeing some products that do ahead of time compilation, just like C or C++ (gcj comes to mind, but there are commercial products...) So currently, Java is not an easy choice for native development thanks to current implementations, but as implementations become more advanced, Java could be used for native application development. As a general rule, if it can be interpreted, then it can be compiled, any language that can be ran on many platforms has the potential to have a native compiler developed for any of those platforms that can probably perform optimizations beyond what is possilbe in interpreted mode.
>I'm using a 1993 200MHz Pentium for my Java stuff....
Impressive, seeing as how the Pentium 60Mhz was released in 1994..... 200 MHz Pentium is a 1997 release, IIRC...
You mean the corporate edition of XP. Hint to people with XP professional, but don't like the privacy issues of WPA, do a google search for corpfiles.zip and you can likely find a set of files that will make a standard, WPA enable XP pro distribution into a WPA disabled corp. edition. You would have to find a CD key somewhere to use it, but those are on the net, as are keygens that work.
Sure you can, just block all traffic to microsoft's ip subnets, that is what I do.... (207.46.0.0/16) probably not all the IPs they have, but the ones I have seen phone home attempts have thus far all been on this subnet..
But judging from the information duplicated on slashdot, this is a big hoax. Dta transfer across devices? Umm... gee, that sounds new. All this garbage about using 3D acceleraters for 2D operations? Blatantly stupid, video cards can do 2D acceleration faster than 3D. The extraordinarily absurd description of how video content would reach the screen? And the little one slipped in about analog path for CD being eliminated, that just sounds like prodding people to believe they are doign this for DRM.
Ex post facto means someone cannot be punished for something that was legal at the time of action, but was made illegal by a later law, it makes no sense in your sentence...
Plus, guns are controlled. Not banned, but getting fully automated machine guns which can take chains of ammo is not legal, so your analogy is bad.
First off, WMA is audio only it is asf they offer. Second, there are linux players for asf, and there is a mac version of media player... The linux players are illegall (thanks to patent law...), but they are there. I can understand why they wouldn't use MPEG-1, that would be murder on the bandwidth, maybe a real format version for people who don't like MS, but MPEG-1 is not good for this sort of stuff..
Big, clunky box to plug into a TV not good enough? Seems to work for XBox :)
Actually, with newewer ATI all in wonder cards, you get a remote. There is even a linux driver.
Actually, my fridge spends most of the time off, and I'm pretty sure yours does too (unless you leave the door open all the time or something). The cooling in a fridge only kicks in as necessary (when you here it make a low buzzing sound as opposed to silent). A small fridge probably couldn't cool a computer fast enough to matter (particularly around the processor itself).