You can also get an idea of who Michael is by doing a search for his name and seeing the articles he's posted -- Michael and Jamie both take time from their day jobs to sort, investigate and post news related to your rights online.
I thought this was basically a repackaged Athlon with a bit less onboard cache.
I don't generally hear the Athlon described as a P.o.S., so I'm curious why Duron would be so much worse than say, a Celeron.
The name sucks, but other that that all other reports have made this sound like a contender for the low / low-middle / middle-middle market. And since I am actively thinking about a machine that can actually play games;) but don't need a dual gighertz athlon with transporter room, I'd like to hear more details before writing off these new AMDs. I've been pleased as punch with my salvaged AMD K6, and would like to keep supporting non-Intel chips unless driven otherwise by good reasons.
RandRace also mentioned the Convection cooling in the DV iMacs - which is excellent;)
Another point about the iMac cases is that the "input" port area has improved dramatically since the early ones. More room there, though I think the USB ports are still too close together.
Here's what I want to see in a PC case:
(At least of the most-rectagular, boxy variety.)
The *** below indicates where I'd like a interface junction to be -- PS/2, firewire, USB, SCSI, whatever it is should come out in a place that is at least possibly accessible without moving a typical PC totally out of place, but without wires snaking around the front.
I will pay a finders fee of 10% to anyone who can point me to a case built like this which actually end up buying.
top -------------------- * / | * / | * / | f [where the usual / | r front-side stuff | | o like floppies | | n and CD-R live] r | | t e | (side) | a | | r |_______________________|
RandRace wrote: "I consider the G3/G4 translucent cases to be one of the finest designed cases of all time. Yank the power cord out, lift the handle, and every thing is right there. No unscrewing, no sliding panels, and best of all no cutting your hands to ribbons on sharp metal edges. Kicks my Enlite case all to hell and back... and I like my enlite. "
True. When I installed a Zip drive in a friend's G3 last year, I was stunned with admiration. Being me, I actually did manage to cut my finger on something, but that's why I always scored high on the "accident prone" section of the report card. Pop, swing, swivel, insert, click, swing, BAM. That was it, it worked.
That the software part was simple only added to the fun. Contrast this with a bastardized PC case a friend and I tried to upgrade recently and discovered that the CD drive rail screws were (how the hell I have no idea) *hidden behind a rail, itself immoveable*!! Seriously. You could see them, but not even a flex-tip screwdriver could get any play.
The first company that can offer a case with even 85% of that function has my money -- and a lot more than I'd pay for a typical PC case, too.
- I want it to be motherboard agnostic (who knows what the future holds? Make it a conservative thing that I can insert AT, ATX, MicroATX, CHRP, whatever motherboard I want in there... )
- Has to have a good power supply, for the hoped-for Athlon
- Must use thumbscrews or other toolless fasteners on everything possible. Bender on Futurama once said "Bodies are for hookers and fat people. All I need is a wad of cash with a head wrapped around it." I feel the same way about tiny screws in mazelike case interiors, sort of.
- Needs extra-adequate clearance so ribbons and cards aren't constantly at odds... the inside of my old digital Celebris XL 590 is like a kafka jungle gym.
My sentence there was incomplete; I meant to say "... and there are attempts at least, which I have not well investigated yet) of organizer apps, though I can't imagine doing it with the tiny qwerty keyboard."
It won't deliver web content while you're in Nome, but it wouldn't take too much (warning IANAProgrammer and this is sheer speculation) to make an internet connected PC and a spare unit broadcast any text you want to to a Cybiko, so long as it's in range. In a small office or something, it'd work.
For $130 bucks list, I am amazed. It's like a combination low, low-end PDA (you can keep a virtual "business card" on it, like on a Palm, and there are attempts at least, which I have not well investigated yet)
Is it a Palm or a threat to winCE? no, that's absurd. But I do shake my head in frustration that my Visor (a great to[y / ol]) labors along in isolation, while three cybiko units can talk with each other over up to 600 feet thanks to message propogation.
It's not a real wide area service like a Palm VII, or a minstrel modem, or even a $20 pager -- but for office environments, I'd like to see cybiko create a business / geek centric division making local low-power radio tranmsitters for Palms, Handsprings and other Palm OS devices. After all, there are few enough of these durn handpsring modules (Bluetooth? what's that?), and I'd like only one part of a $139 device, so under $60 seems fair...
timothy
Disclaimer: we have some for review right now, and you'll see the article on slashdot at some point;)
In fact, see Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do (in fact, all of McWilliams' books are available online for the reading) for a complete summary of the case against precisely this.
On the other hand, specific privisions against fraud are different from general "thou shalt not email" laws. Fraud is (at least)as bad to free marketeers as to anyone else, if nothing else because it's one thing [they / we]'re often accused of ignoring if not committing.
A killer game for Windows/could/ finance its own porting to Linux. The profits in that market are huge for the big winners.
But the other way is less certain... it would take cojones all right, but it might not even be a smart decision unless all the pieces were lined up... Loki, by porting successful games, removes the "consumer acceptance" shock and concentrates on the Operating System Switch shock instead. If a company creates a great game that's Linux only, the PC / Windows gamers who might otherwise rush for it are locked out (cause they can't play it at all).
It still looks to me like dual- or multi-platform devmt. is longer term more likely to help free software than developing only for free OSes. Remove the reason to/use/ the proprietary OSes, and the free ones suddenly look sorta cute.
include bluesnews, PC Gamer and Cnet. (Strangely, a quick search at ZDnet got no relevant links for "E3"... but then, I hate searching that site, so I didn't dig much.)
There really was a lot going on at E3. Free software is a pretty small part of it in some ways, but an important one not covered much elsewhere. Sort of like that bumpersticker that says "it'd be nice if one day the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy weapons and the local elementary school gets all the books it needs" (heavily paraphrased of course)... Free Oses make what I hope will eventually become the platform of choice for games. The best example of what I'd like to see is the elusive but rad-looking FlightGear... I want that, but for submarines:)
I posted the article. The spelling mistake was mine.
For me, like for most/. readers, it's been difficult to get to the site, to post or to correct stories. By the time this posted, I was unable to get to the site for some time afterward, and another/. author made the change, which I appreciated.
If there were a substantive change (we learn the story was fraudulent, or that really the lab in question was JPL, or that really it's the only alien technology lab in the country, not plutonium site), there would be ample and cited correction. You've probably seen this both in other stories and in the new recurring nightmare Slashback.
Does "proper journalism" dictate including a dislcaimer that the mistake was fixed? While nothing would be wrong with such a note (esp, like I said, for an error of fact, or perhaps for a spelling error which would actually cause confusion), I invite you to ask the New York Times or your local daily whether they would print an explicit correction pointing out that they had removed an extra space in a story, or added a space where an extra one was accidentally omitted, or in the case of an errant letter in one word. Newspapers routinely update stories, and so do wire services. If you want those all posted to the front page, it'd often be more of a change log than a useful story!
I sent notes of thanks to the two readers who kindly sent me e-mail pointing out the error. I apologize for any problems the correction caused readers who had pointed out the error and whose comments no longer apply.
Well, companies/have/ done this -- there are plenty of "Game OSes" which live inside the various console boxes...
But the chief characteristic that they have is that they are closed. Not that the code has to be closed, but that they have to be very conservative in changes, to preserve compatibility. The game designers whose games would have to work in such a system need assurance that libraries won't change tomorrow, that the same video drivers will work on any card (or a predictable, finite set of drivers all of which could be included), and that all the device inputs they'll need are all accounted for, or that there is a generalized input mechanism to account for new ones. (Which all could be taken into account in your proposed game OS, don't get me wrong!)
Joysticks, flight panels, driving-game pedals / shifters... the reason that people boot into Windows for games is support for direct video access which some games have atrophied themselves into requiring (snide, I know, you could say "intelligently take advantage of" too;) ) and support for cool input devices. Not to mention, low-level OS trickery aside, there simply aren't (nearly) as many games for Linux.
Maybe the Indrema will make a bigger splash than I picture it making... =) That would be cool. I'd like one.
On the other hand, for the reasons I named (compatibility, assurance of conservative change), might FreeBSD be a better choice than gnulinux?
Sincerely,
timothy
p.s. OK, I admit it -- I'm not much of a gamer, certainly no developer, and I don't boot into Windows to play games. I have no moral ground to stand on. This is all speculation. But is it right?
I live less than 30 miles from DC, have been there plenty. As has been pointed out, I was being sarcastic. Sheesh. Guess I'm catching it from both sides here.
Well, I really would like people to be happy with the aggregate of slashdot content -- but it is very hard to please everyone of course!
IMHO, the following are both true: KDE is great. Gnome is great.
On the other hand, software announcements are tricky in general -- we try to confine ourselves to really major version upgrades or software that people may otherwise have not heard about, or whose release is otherwise somehow more significant than a minor version upgrade. (If Netscape releases 4.73.9.3.01.a, do you really want to read about it here?!) What 'major' means depends on a) the project and b) how much you care about it!
That's not because the 8th release of the pre-2.4 kernel (and other stuff) isn't important, only that slashdot could easily be nothing but that kind of announcment. It would be something it's not. Frankly, it would be freshmeat.:)
However, even given the "slashdot is not freshmeat" rule, as another poster said, a lot of it still and truly comes down to the personal preferences / opinions of the authors...
KDE is about to become "KDE 2.0"; GNOME is about to become "GNOME 1.2" -- and we all know that version numbers are all there is in life, right?;)
Naturally, version numbers for free software come from a number of different motivations (after all, they're free to choose a numbering scheme that suits their philosophy, intent, calander, conceptions of "proper" version numbers, etc), so 2.0 and 1.2 are only numbers here. Both KDE and GNOME are robust and mature -- I've used KDE more, but really, hard to complain about either except in a speculative "wish it would" way. There's lots that I wish for from an end-user perspective, but overall, my hat is off to both teams.
Someone mentioned the debian fetish of the slashteam in general (I'm experimenting with debian on another box, but mostly use Mandrake. What a horrible person I am), but I don't see any dearth of coverage of particular WMs, Desktops, or Distros.
So, anyhow... I think I've used up my subject line now;)
Local calling is still 7 digits in most of the US. Not where I live, actually (all of MD requires 10 digits for every call) but most people in the US still give their number as 7-digits to those in the local calling area.
Seven is no better a choice than 10 (what I have to call to dial next door, dammit, even if that's silly), 11 (to call the same house from outside local area), or 14-20 (or more) from various international locations.
But I picked seven, since those others would be even harder to explain. Some finite number of digits which would specify an IP-connected phone is all I meant.:)
What I should have said (but shouldn't have said, 'cause it would have been far too awkward;) ) was "don't pay for two types of phone-company cables / service."
Bypass the phone company *as a long distance analog phone carrier*, that is. Redundant, overlapping IP networks are already spreading, since there are several strains -- ground-based wireless, cable modems, DSL, satellite options which keep peeking over the horizon -- competing with each other. Even with phone co deregulation, it's still the local de facto monopoly which typically wires and oversees service...
Yes, the phone company owns lots of cable / infrastructure. But as things are digitized and commoditized, they'll (I hope) become Just Another Bandwidth Broker.
The only issue here is will they try and patent the very principle and if not will systems from different vendors be interoperable. What we need here is a nice clean open standard so we can finally put the old phone system to rest along side the dodo, the dinosaurs and our freedom of speech.
Agreed!
The very worst thing that could happen is if companies decided that at either the phone or the network level that/their/ toys would work together, but not with toys from the other guys... like Sony, which I bet could make a very nice wireless IP-connected phone given three winks.
I was also surprized that these are pictured with cords. Why?! There's great, clean-sounding wireless all over the place, and even if you have to plug is an ethernet cable, no need to tie down the handset... oh well. In fact, no need for it to look so much like a phone at all!:)
This is one of the funniest (in a low key way) and smartest things I've ever read on Slashdot.
Thank you, LFS -- I thought the line "It's a sign of naivete (on the part of readers) and hubris (on the part of the aforementioned companies) to claim that this thin thread of chance constitutes some sort of fundamental right to not only make money, but to make money the way you're used to." alone should get you into some sort of poster's Hall of Fame.
Fat Lenny pointed out that "the difference looks to be [only] US $30 retail. What a waste of effort for a few bucks!"
Well, I don't know what the percentage difference is in Australia, but until the con artists are apprehended, we won't know exactly when these were made. When 700s first came out, the price difference was considerably higher than it is now. These could even have been marked 700 in anticipation of the chip at that speed's real release.
So the worth of the fakery here might have been much higher when it was done, and in Australian dollars, than it is now in US dollars.
I wanted to grab the actual numbers from cpureview.com, but it appears to be down right now. Maybe you'll have better luck by the time you read this.
Since this post is at 1, more people will see / will have seen it than the ones marked down as flamebait or trolls.
But since you raise the issue, I would like to make clear the sequence here: I saw this because of a submission to slashdot. I looked it up, and saw that it had been mentioned in the quickies before, but never explained in greater length. I arranged to receive a review copy because I like playing with new hardware (esp. keyboards, since I am a keyboard nut), and this just looked kind of wacky. The folks at Man & Machine hadn't even heard of slashdot, as far as I could tell.
I haven't heard from them and don't even know or particularly care whether they've read it, except for the fact that I hope they note my thanks to them at the bottom for letting me experiment with it.
But the suggestion that the makers have somehow compensated slashdot for the review, or even that they had a hand in it, is inaccurate. We don't even get to keep it!:)
I thought it was a neat product, but certainly not my ideal keyboard. Specialized product, limited audience, but neat.
the skateboarding / surfing / snowboarding move, which involves a sudden reversal in direction (sort of a whole-body whipping motion... if you know what tacking is on a boat, the concept is similar; I don't know how to sail, but I know that boats do this).
The "flashback" wordplay is a bonus.
Err, just to be clear on that, please check your notes, quiz next hour, sharpen those pencils and make sure your griptape is fresh...
pub domain sound archives could be useful for much more than desktop noises, though that's a perfectly good use:)
I'd like to see (and there may actually be, but I'm not familiar with any) a site dedicated to preserving the audio information that defines our culture, and the world...
I remember reading about some guy who was part of an international tape-swapping club who recorded the sounds of various New Zealand rivers... seems trivial or silly maybe, but I am a sound enthusiast, so I really like that idea. Not that you could really tell fine distinctions on a cassette, though;)
I sometimes like to walk around with my Sony recorder just listening to things, then playing it back and recalling the visual info along with the audio.
Format? I agree with the poster who said that AIFF was smart, since it is high quality and can be encoded easily, but it seems to me like a more intelligent approach would be to have some high-quality standard for the sounds available whenever possible, but also compressed versions, so visitors can have a choice between file sizes:
-------------------------------------
SOUNDFILE "Gunshot: Springfield.45 autopistol fires three times"
455509987as - 16-bit AIFF stereo
455509987bs - MP3 (256) stereo
455509987cm - MP3 (128) mono
455509987dm - 8-bit mono
-------------------------------------------
So long as there is a high-quality original always available to those who want to do their own tweaking, it would seem nice to have a script generate a range of other sizes, to minimize bandwidth requirements for the folks on both ends.
Also, what I'd like to see in such a sound archive is detailed info on the source and circumstances of the recording.
Nagora wrote: "If someone can use a product to do work then that product has been distributed.... I may be foolish but I can't see even the most out-of-touch judge supporting the idea that an item can be used by many people and yet not have been distributed to those people."
Without trying to discount this point of view, I don't think it's the only one. ASPs can be thought of somewhat like a remote library (of the book variety) which accepts requests from patrons to search their stacks, collate information, neatly format the results and send it out. ASPs are still obligated to have paid for the software whose use they provide --assuming it's commercial software -- whether it's on a single-fee, a per-use, or a per-active-copies basis, so that imaginary library has (say) only the same number of copies of Catcher In the Rye after a reader has gained the use (but not posession) of the book.
All analogies stretch and fail, but there's mine;)
Slashdot Mirror
It's not perfect, but ... nothing is.
You can also get an idea of who Michael is by doing a search for his name and seeing the articles he's posted -- Michael and Jamie both take time from their day jobs to sort, investigate and post news related to your rights online.
timothy
How do you mean "it's a piece of shit" exactly?
;) but don't need a dual gighertz athlon with transporter room, I'd like to hear more details before writing off these new AMDs. I've been pleased as punch with my salvaged AMD K6, and would like to keep supporting non-Intel chips unless driven otherwise by good reasons.
I thought this was basically a repackaged Athlon with a bit less onboard cache.
I don't generally hear the Athlon described as a P.o.S., so I'm curious why Duron would be so much worse than say, a Celeron.
The name sucks, but other that that all other reports have made this sound like a contender for the low / low-middle / middle-middle market. And since I am actively thinking about a machine that can actually play games
Any insight?
timothy
RandRace also mentioned the Convection cooling in the DV iMacs - which is excellent;)
Another point about the iMac cases is that the "input" port area has improved dramatically since the early ones. More room there, though I think the USB ports are still too close together.
Here's what I want to see in a PC case:
(At least of the most-rectagular, boxy variety.)
The *** below indicates where I'd like a interface junction to be -- PS/2, firewire, USB, SCSI, whatever it is should come out in a place that is at least possibly accessible without moving a typical PC totally out of place, but without wires snaking around the front.
I will pay a finders fee of 10% to anyone who can point me to a case built like this which actually end up buying.
top
--------------------
* / |
* / |
* / | f [where the usual
/ | r front-side stuff
| | o like floppies
| | n and CD-R live]
r | | t e | (side) |
a | |
r |_______________________|
just a thought,
timothy
RandRace wrote: "I consider the G3/G4 translucent cases to be one of the finest designed cases of all time. Yank the power cord out, lift the handle, and every thing is right there. No unscrewing, no sliding panels, and best of all no cutting your hands to ribbons on sharp metal edges. Kicks my Enlite case all to hell and back... and I like my enlite. "
... )
... the inside of my old digital Celebris XL 590 is like a kafka jungle gym.
True. When I installed a Zip drive in a friend's G3 last year, I was stunned with admiration. Being me, I actually did manage to cut my finger on something, but that's why I always scored high on the "accident prone" section of the report card. Pop, swing, swivel, insert, click, swing, BAM. That was it, it worked.
That the software part was simple only added to the fun. Contrast this with a bastardized PC case a friend and I tried to upgrade recently and discovered that the CD drive rail screws were (how the hell I have no idea) *hidden behind a rail, itself immoveable*!! Seriously. You could see them, but not even a flex-tip screwdriver could get any play.
The first company that can offer a case with even 85% of that function has my money -- and a lot more than I'd pay for a typical PC case, too.
- I want it to be motherboard agnostic (who knows what the future holds? Make it a conservative thing that I can insert AT, ATX, MicroATX, CHRP, whatever motherboard I want in there
- Has to have a good power supply, for the hoped-for Athlon
- Must use thumbscrews or other toolless fasteners on everything possible. Bender on Futurama once said "Bodies are for hookers and fat people. All I need is a wad of cash with a head wrapped around it." I feel the same way about tiny screws in mazelike case interiors, sort of.
- Needs extra-adequate clearance so ribbons and cards aren't constantly at odds
anyhow
timothy
My sentence there was incomplete; I meant to say " ... and there are attempts at least, which I have not well investigated yet) of organizer apps, though I can't imagine doing it with the tiny qwerty keyboard."
that's all;)
timothy
It won't deliver web content while you're in Nome, but it wouldn't take too much (warning IANAProgrammer and this is sheer speculation) to make an internet connected PC and a spare unit broadcast any text you want to to a Cybiko, so long as it's in range. In a small office or something, it'd work.
...
For $130 bucks list, I am amazed. It's like a combination low, low-end PDA (you can keep a virtual "business card" on it, like on a Palm, and there are attempts at least, which I have not well investigated yet)
Is it a Palm or a threat to winCE? no, that's absurd. But I do shake my head in frustration that my Visor (a great to[y / ol]) labors along in isolation, while three cybiko units can talk with each other over up to 600 feet thanks to message propogation.
It's not a real wide area service like a Palm VII, or a minstrel modem, or even a $20 pager -- but for office environments, I'd like to see cybiko create a business / geek centric division making local low-power radio tranmsitters for Palms, Handsprings and other Palm OS devices. After all, there are few enough of these durn handpsring modules (Bluetooth? what's that?), and I'd like only one part of a $139 device, so under $60 seems fair
timothy
Disclaimer: we have some for review right now, and you'll see the article on slashdot at some point;)
hear, hear, hear!
In fact, see Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do (in fact, all of McWilliams' books are available online for the reading) for a complete summary of the case against precisely this.
On the other hand, specific privisions against fraud are different from general "thou shalt not email" laws. Fraud is (at least)as bad to free marketeers as to anyone else, if nothing else because it's one thing [they / we]'re often accused of ignoring if not committing.
timothy
A killer game for Windows /could/ finance its own porting to Linux. The profits in that market are huge for the big winners.
... it would take cojones all right, but it might not even be a smart decision unless all the pieces were lined up ... Loki, by porting successful games, removes the "consumer acceptance" shock and concentrates on the Operating System Switch shock instead. If a company creates a great game that's Linux only, the PC / Windows gamers who might otherwise rush for it are locked out (cause they can't play it at all).
/use/ the proprietary OSes, and the free ones suddenly look sorta cute.
But the other way is less certain
It still looks to me like dual- or multi-platform devmt. is longer term more likely to help free software than developing only for free OSes. Remove the reason to
timothy
There really was a lot going on at E3. Free software is a pretty small part of it in some ways, but an important one not covered much elsewhere. Sort of like that bumpersticker that says "it'd be nice if one day the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy weapons and the local elementary school gets all the books it needs" (heavily paraphrased of course) ... Free Oses make what I hope will eventually become the platform of choice for games. The best example of what I'd like to see is the elusive but rad-looking FlightGear ... I want that, but for submarines:)
timothy
You're right. It ought to have been Gb and gigabit.
:)
Now I've corrected it and noted that in the story. Hopefully many more people get to read the corrected than the uncorrected version
timothy
an HP Visualize workstation, for sheer case appeal. They also don't have crazy, annoying, installation-hassling curves everywhere.
Grey beats purple in a decision.
timothy
I posted the article. The spelling mistake was mine.
/. readers, it's been difficult to get to the site, to post or to correct stories. By the time this posted, I was unable to get to the site for some time afterward, and another /. author made the change, which I appreciated.
For me, like for most
If there were a substantive change (we learn the story was fraudulent, or that really the lab in question was JPL, or that really it's the only alien technology lab in the country, not plutonium site), there would be ample and cited correction. You've probably seen this both in other stories and in the new recurring nightmare Slashback.
Does "proper journalism" dictate including a dislcaimer that the mistake was fixed? While nothing would be wrong with such a note (esp, like I said, for an error of fact, or perhaps for a spelling error which would actually cause confusion), I invite you to ask the New York Times or your local daily whether they would print an explicit correction pointing out that they had removed an extra space in a story, or added a space where an extra one was accidentally omitted, or in the case of an errant letter in one word. Newspapers routinely update stories, and so do wire services. If you want those all posted to the front page, it'd often be more of a change log than a useful story!
I sent notes of thanks to the two readers who kindly sent me e-mail pointing out the error. I apologize for any problems the correction caused readers who had pointed out the error and whose comments no longer apply.
Sincerely,
timothy
Well, companies /have/ done this -- there are plenty of "Game OSes" which live inside the various console boxes ...
... the reason that people boot into Windows for games is support for direct video access which some games have atrophied themselves into requiring (snide, I know, you could say "intelligently take advantage of" too;) ) and support for cool input devices. Not to mention, low-level OS trickery aside, there simply aren't (nearly) as many games for Linux.
... =) That would be cool. I'd like one.
But the chief characteristic that they have is that they are closed. Not that the code has to be closed, but that they have to be very conservative in changes, to preserve compatibility. The game designers whose games would have to work in such a system need assurance that libraries won't change tomorrow, that the same video drivers will work on any card (or a predictable, finite set of drivers all of which could be included), and that all the device inputs they'll need are all accounted for, or that there is a generalized input mechanism to account for new ones. (Which all could be taken into account in your proposed game OS, don't get me wrong!)
Joysticks, flight panels, driving-game pedals / shifters
Maybe the Indrema will make a bigger splash than I picture it making
On the other hand, for the reasons I named (compatibility, assurance of conservative change), might FreeBSD be a better choice than gnulinux?
Sincerely,
timothy
p.s. OK, I admit it -- I'm not much of a gamer, certainly no developer, and I don't boot into Windows to play games. I have no moral ground to stand on. This is all speculation. But is it right?
I live less than 30 miles from DC, have been there plenty. As has been pointed out, I was being sarcastic. Sheesh. Guess I'm catching it from both sides here.
... maybe. Still.
That, or I just fed a troll
timothy
Well, I really would like people to be happy with the aggregate of slashdot content -- but it is very hard to please everyone of course!
:)
...
... I think I've used up my subject line now;)
IMHO, the following are both true:
KDE is great.
Gnome is great.
On the other hand, software announcements are tricky in general -- we try to confine ourselves to really major version upgrades or software that people may otherwise have not heard about, or whose release is otherwise somehow more significant than a minor version upgrade. (If Netscape releases 4.73.9.3.01.a, do you really want to read about it here?!) What 'major' means depends on a) the project and b) how much you care about it!
That's not because the 8th release of the pre-2.4 kernel (and other stuff) isn't important, only that slashdot could easily be nothing but that kind of announcment. It would be something it's not. Frankly, it would be freshmeat.
However, even given the "slashdot is not freshmeat" rule, as another poster said, a lot of it still and truly comes down to the personal preferences / opinions of the authors
KDE is about to become "KDE 2.0"; GNOME is about to become "GNOME 1.2" -- and we all know that version numbers are all there is in life, right?;)
Naturally, version numbers for free software come from a number of different motivations (after all, they're free to choose a numbering scheme that suits their philosophy, intent, calander, conceptions of "proper" version numbers, etc), so 2.0 and 1.2 are only numbers here. Both KDE and GNOME are robust and mature -- I've used KDE more, but really, hard to complain about either except in a speculative "wish it would" way. There's lots that I wish for from an end-user perspective, but overall, my hat is off to both teams.
Someone mentioned the debian fetish of the slashteam in general (I'm experimenting with debian on another box, but mostly use Mandrake. What a horrible person I am), but I don't see any dearth of coverage of particular WMs, Desktops, or Distros.
So, anyhow
timothy
Local calling is still 7 digits in most of the US. Not where I live, actually (all of MD requires 10 digits for every call) but most people in the US still give their number as 7-digits to those in the local calling area.
:)
Seven is no better a choice than 10 (what I have to call to dial next door, dammit, even if that's silly), 11 (to call the same house from outside local area), or 14-20 (or more) from various international locations.
But I picked seven, since those others would be even harder to explain. Some finite number of digits which would specify an IP-connected phone is all I meant.
timothy
What I should have said (but shouldn't have said, 'cause it would have been far too awkward;) ) was "don't pay for two types of phone-company cables / service."
...
Bypass the phone company *as a long distance analog phone carrier*, that is. Redundant, overlapping IP networks are already spreading, since there are several strains -- ground-based wireless, cable modems, DSL, satellite options which keep peeking over the horizon -- competing with each other. Even with phone co deregulation, it's still the local de facto monopoly which typically wires and oversees service
Yes, the phone company owns lots of cable / infrastructure. But as things are digitized and commoditized, they'll (I hope) become Just Another Bandwidth Broker.
timothy
Agreed!
The very worst thing that could happen is if companies decided that at either the phone or the network level that
I was also surprized that these are pictured with cords. Why?! There's great, clean-sounding wireless all over the place, and even if you have to plug is an ethernet cable, no need to tie down the handset
timothy
This is one of the funniest (in a low key way) and smartest things I've ever read on Slashdot.
Thank you, LFS -- I thought the line "It's a sign of naivete (on the part of readers) and hubris (on the part of the aforementioned companies) to claim that this thin thread of chance constitutes some sort of fundamental right to not only make money, but to make money the way you're used to." alone should get you into some sort of poster's Hall of Fame.
timothy
Fat Lenny pointed out that "the difference looks to be [only] US $30 retail. What a waste of effort for a few bucks!"
Well, I don't know what the percentage difference is in Australia, but until the con artists are apprehended, we won't know exactly when these were made. When 700s first came out, the price difference was considerably higher than it is now. These could even have been marked 700 in anticipation of the chip at that speed's real release.
So the worth of the fakery here might have been much higher when it was done, and in Australian dollars, than it is now in US dollars.
I wanted to grab the actual numbers from cpureview.com, but it appears to be down right now. Maybe you'll have better luck by the time you read this.
timothy
Not a cent.
:)
Since this post is at 1, more people will see / will have seen it than the ones marked down as flamebait or trolls.
But since you raise the issue, I would like to make clear the sequence here: I saw this because of a submission to slashdot. I looked it up, and saw that it had been mentioned in the quickies before, but never explained in greater length. I arranged to receive a review copy because I like playing with new hardware (esp. keyboards, since I am a keyboard nut), and this just looked kind of wacky. The folks at Man & Machine hadn't even heard of slashdot, as far as I could tell.
I haven't heard from them and don't even know or particularly care whether they've read it, except for the fact that I hope they note my thanks to them at the bottom for letting me experiment with it.
But the suggestion that the makers have somehow compensated slashdot for the review, or even that they had a hand in it, is inaccurate. We don't even get to keep it!
I thought it was a neat product, but certainly not my ideal keyboard. Specialized product, limited audience, but neat.
That's all:)
timothy
the skateboarding / surfing / snowboarding move, which involves a sudden reversal in direction (sort of a whole-body whipping motion ... if you know what tacking is on a boat, the concept is similar; I don't know how to sail, but I know that boats do this).
...
The "flashback" wordplay is a bonus.
Err, just to be clear on that, please check your notes, quiz next hour, sharpen those pencils and make sure your griptape is fresh
timothy
pub domain sound archives could be useful for much more than desktop noises, though that's a perfectly good use:)
...
... seems trivial or silly maybe, but I am a sound enthusiast, so I really like that idea. Not that you could really tell fine distinctions on a cassette, though;)
.45 autopistol fires three times"
...
I'd like to see (and there may actually be, but I'm not familiar with any) a site dedicated to preserving the audio information that defines our culture, and the world
I remember reading about some guy who was part of an international tape-swapping club who recorded the sounds of various New Zealand rivers
I sometimes like to walk around with my Sony recorder just listening to things, then playing it back and recalling the visual info along with the audio.
Format? I agree with the poster who said that AIFF was smart, since it is high quality and can be encoded easily, but it seems to me like a more intelligent approach would be to have some high-quality standard for the sounds available whenever possible, but also compressed versions, so visitors can have a choice between file sizes:
-------------------------------------
SOUNDFILE "Gunshot: Springfield
455509987as - 16-bit AIFF stereo
455509987bs - MP3 (256) stereo
455509987cm - MP3 (128) mono
455509987dm - 8-bit mono
-------------------------------------------
So long as there is a high-quality original always available to those who want to do their own tweaking, it would seem nice to have a script generate a range of other sizes, to minimize bandwidth requirements for the folks on both ends.
Also, what I'd like to see in such a sound archive is detailed info on the source and circumstances of the recording.
Just a small textfile would be plenty
timothy
Nagora wrote: "If someone can use a product to do work then that product has been distributed. ... I may be foolish but I can't see even the most out-of-touch judge supporting the idea that an item can be used by many people and yet not have been distributed to those people."
Without trying to discount this point of view, I don't think it's the only one. ASPs can be thought of somewhat like a remote library (of the book variety) which accepts requests from patrons to search their stacks, collate information, neatly format the results and send it out. ASPs are still obligated to have paid for the software whose use they provide --assuming it's commercial software -- whether it's on a single-fee, a per-use, or a per-active-copies basis, so that imaginary library has (say) only the same number of copies of Catcher In the Rye after a reader has gained the use (but not posession) of the book.
All analogies stretch and fail, but there's mine;)
timothy
I'm just trying to make up for the (sniff) unfair metamoderation which has sullied my karma of late :)