Check out MythTV, from the author of Freeamp. It uses Linux, Qt, and a TV tuner card to provide an entire solution for dropping a box next to your TV. Here are a few features:
CD ripping and music playback (mp3, ogg, etc.)
Grabbing TV program information off the web
IR remote control support
Other things such as support for various emulators are on the todo list. The frontend is rather pretty as well.
I'm not sure about the first problem, since it would work out fine with one monk with red eyes, further cases of course present problems.
The second I think you're right. The only other alternative (besides "I don't know") is "six feet under," but if you do a little math, your answer seems correct:
M_a = C_a + 21 M_a + 6 = (C_a + 6) * 5
Do the math (where M_a is the mother's age, and C_a is the child's age, of course), and the child comes out to be -3/4 of a year old. Which indicates you're probably right.
Exactly. She didn't do it, you did. And until that changes, the why doesn't my mom run linux argument won't change either.
You assume that she would be using a computer at all if I hadn't set one up for her. She only uses it because I made it do exactly what she wants, and she has someone to complain to when it stops doing what she wants. If I'm the one setting it up anyway, why should I use anything else? I'm sure that goes for lots of people here.
I know plenty of families who also go out, buy a computer, and use it as an expensive paperweight, simply because they don't really know how to use it or make it work for them. If I set up Linux for these people, does it "not count" because they didn't set it up?
Can you say that the majority of moms out there have tech savvy children? Probably not, and 's the issue.
OK, first the issue was that I was tech-savvy, now the issue is that lots of people aren't?
In any case, people should be tech savvy. Hello, you're all living in a technological world, and it's just going to keep getting more technological (barring natural disaster or war). Ignorance is not OK, folks. Just because you don't know how do use a computer doesn't mean you can't learn. It especially does not mean that you shouldn't have to learn.
I set up a box for my mom to use. She's a teacher, she types papers, prints them out; occasionally browses the web; and checks email about once a week (now that she can). The box runs Linux.
For awhile, I had her running KDE, but the box was as Celery 400 or so with 128MB of RAM, and KDE 2.x is a dog for performance. So I switched her over to ROX (RiscOS On X) and sawfish with a pretty theme (much like one I use).
She has icons for printing, trash, logging in, and OpenOffice, in addition to folders for her documents and public_html (which I explained to her was the place to put documents she wanted to share, so my Windows-using dad had a way to get at them). It works great. She loves it. I can modify it remotely. It doesn't break. It runs Linux.
Um..I don't know about you, but I have yet to find a desktop that can correctly cut and paste text correctly 100% of the time. At best it's a 60% success rate.
I'd sure like to know what you're using and how you're trying to cut and paste, because (at least in X), 99% of everything responds to the standard select-copy and middle-button-paste. That is, hilight the selection and it's automatically copied. Click the middle mouse button someplace to paste. (I think StarOffice is about the only exception to this I've ever run into.)
Maybe this isn't "intuitive" to a windows user, but you know, so what? C-x,c,v aren't intuitive to me... why should I have to press extra buttons? In the end, it all comes down to a little learning about and investigation into your software environemnt. When exactly did ignorance become OK?
Funny, we were just talking about this as it related to another post I just made. The thing is, there is no such thing as user friendly, at least the conventional meaning of the phrase. It all boils down to two factors:
Ease of use
Ease of learning
The phrase "user friendly" comes about by confusing the two: somehow assuming that by being easy to sit down and learn with no work, something is easier to use. Then it's "user friendly."
Unfortunately, this isn't how it works in the real world, at least usually. A tool can be built that is easy to use---powerful, flexible, suited toward the job; or it can be easy to learn---no training required. Usually the tradeoff for the latter is that functionality is limited, so the user isn't overwhelmed. A balance of sorts must be achieved. Most of the best tools lean toward easy to use, and rightly so: you're only a newbie for a very short time. You may be using the tool for the rest of your life.
However, these aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, either. It is possible, in theory, to build an interface that is both easy to use and easy to learn, as long as one does not equate the two, or think that one somehow implies the other. Doing this is rather tricky though. A good example of such interfaces are those for simple tools which can be applied to a wide variety of uses (a hammer,/bin/ls, etc.). Another example is that some games tend to use: the dynamic interface, which starts with a few key options, and gradually adds more.
Thus, "user friendly" doesn't really exist in the conventional sense, which equates this sense of immediate ease of learning with continued ease of use. Rather, ease-of-learning and ease-of-use must be balanced, and attaining something truly user friendly requires a lot more than having icons and a mouse, or fewer menu entries.
Re:Reasonable Interface?! Have you used Blender?
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Blender Goes Open Source
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· Score: 4, Informative
It would seem to me that "the learning curve is steep" and "the interface is extremely intuitive" are two very contradictory remarks.
Perhaps, but what I think the original author meant was "easy to use" not "intuitive." This makes much more sense, since "easy to use" and "hard to learn" are definitely not mutually exclusive, and often go hand-in-hand.
(To prove this to yourself, consider MS Windows Notepad. Very easy to learn, right? Try to use it for something serious: development, complex text transformations, etc. Very hard to use. Consider now vim or emacs. Pretty steep learning curve, but once you're there, it's really easy to do almost anything.)
Now, a case could be made for "intuitive" too, since once you know what you're doing and have some decent familiarity, figuring out how to do something else could be very intuitive. I tend to think this isn't what the original author meant, but a case could be made anyway.
Time to trot out Chapter Two in the Book of Proclamations written by The Gord. This is the insight of someone actually in the industry. You may wish to check out some of his other writings about the XBOX to see the accuracy of other predictions he has made. Quite interesting, and great fun to read.
In short, while it may "make sense" to use consoles as a loss leader, this isn't how things are usually done in the industry. When the Gord wrote the article above, both Nintendo and Sony were already making profits on their consoles. This was last year sometime. Today, Microsoft still isn't making a profit.
Recently I watched a presentation by a biometrics group, so this is a bit familiar to me. By far the biggest problem, the question unanswered, is what to do when your information is compromised.
See, you can change your credit card number, or your email address. You can even move someplace else. But you can't change your biometrics.
Hopefully movies like Minority Report will provide some Good FUD about biometrics, so people realize that this information should be kept as private and closely-guarded as their own life.
It's funny how people seem more willing to give out their fingerprint or retina than they are a number on their credit card. It may be hard to hack. It may be very hard to hack. It may be almost impossible to use. But as those in the security business know, nothing is impossible. And with biometrics, once you're compromised, that's it.
Content that would not exist in a world without copyrights.
This is just crap. Ever hear of Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven? They're these old dead guys who used to write some tunes. A lot of them, in fact. They even got paid for it. And they didn't have copyrights.
so, in a nutshell, Nader is saying that the government should make an effort to influence the marketplace in a certain direction, rather than letting natural market forces dictate what heppens
Uh, the government is already influencing the marketplace in a major influence at that. Nader appears to be asking for the government to influencing it less or at least differently, as to not support a convicted criminal.
It's starting to seem like all the "services" that can be profitably charged for can eventually be automated. Once these services become programs, suddenly it's no longer OK to charge for them.
Er, no one has a problem with charging for them. The problem is when they're not Free(tm) Software. If the FSF had a problem with just charging, they wouldn't want to see commercial distros at all.
Actually, while you're right... everyone (besides MS) does make money off their consoles... they also make a lot of money off something else: licensing. In fact, while you can make a pretty penny off your console, the main draw is that you get an even larger percentage from the license royalties off every game your console sells. You only sell one console per person. You sell lots of games.
Naturally, if everyone could write code for a console and burn their own CDs or DVDs, large game houses would have little reason to buy licensed development kits and publishing contracts with their respective console manufacturer, and thus you lose a lot of your revenue.
Interestingly enough, though, in the old days, unlicensed games happened every so often. I recall that Taito reverse-engineered the NES cartridge and put out their own games...
And besides, suppose there is one planet capable of supporting life per galaxy, taking this researchers findings to the extreme. It is believed there are billions of galaxies. Billions of planets full of life doesn't sound too "alone" to me.
In other words, "here is a number, and it sounds big to me, so that's a high frequency."
There are about 400 billion stars and planets in our galaxy alone. Say the average is about 300 billion per galaxy, and 2 billion galaxies, so 600 billion billion stars and planets in the universe (probably a conservative estimate). At 2 billion earth-like planets, that's pretty alone. It's a big universe out there.
Ah, but Apple is not the same as the Linux community. They targetted education solely. We target everything. If Linux can't run on your refrigerator and you can't spread Linux on your toast, someone else out there is working to make it so you can. Pusing Linux into another front (education) is just another victory in the ongoing war.
Yeah, yeah, troll and all, but I'll try and refute this oversimplification in an amusing manner.
It's named "Playstation 2".
Big head start.
I defy anyone to refute that.
Now I'm hardly arguing these did not play an important role in Sony's success. But of course to be called the sole cause of success is a gross oversimplification. For example, given these are the only two causes for Sony's successful console, consider the following scenarios:
Microsoft releases a console dubbed the "Playstation 2" in 1999. This fulfills both requirements, yet somehow it seems unlikely that this would be a successful venture.
My grandma releases a console called the "Playstation 2" in 1965, composed of old sewing machine parts. This is also an unlikely venture.
Sony releases a console called the "Playstation 2" in 2000 for $199 whose sole functionality is dispensing gumballs.
From this we can see the likelihood that it is not, in fact, just these two factors that produced a successful console, although they did nonetheless play a definite role. However, we can theorize that other things such as "a successful predecessor," "good business relationships," "listening to your developers," and "offering leading, custom technology" also came into play, many of which a certain competitor of Sony's has yet to accomplish.
First of all: you guys rule, the HTTP 1.0 thing worked great. I'll have to see if I can make Junkbuster HTTP-1.1-aware sometime.
Second: free-riding. Well, it goes like this. I've always ad-filtered since I discovered Junkbuster (and will soon try Privoxy, because I've wanted HTML-filtering for awhile too), because ads are annoying and are the largest consumer of my meager 2k/s bandwidth. So screw ads. Web pages look lots prettier without them.
That said, I have nothing against supporting sites I like, especially this one. I support IGN but subscribing to IGN Insider. for over $20 a year. You know what? It was the best $20 subscription I've ever bought. IGN has lots of content, up-to-date stories, the IGN Unplugged PDF magazine (free for insiders). $20 a year for daily updates is great.
What's the difference? IGN's subscription is value-added. I pay to get stuff I didn't have before. Slashdot's subscription is stupid: I pay to not get something I had. In fact, since there's junkbuster (the geek solution; isn't this a geek site?) I'm paying for not getting something I already didn't have. Kinda silly.
When slashdot starts offering exclusive pay-only features with enough value-added pay-only content, you will see me being the first to pay $20 a year to subscribe. Spellchecked and slightly edited stories would be kinda nice too.
Think of it like this. If the RIAA started giving away CDs (ok, implausible, but follow me here;-)) that had ads between tracks, and offered ad-free versions for $20, would you pay or just rip and skip those tracks?
Add value, ask money for it, I'm there. Otherwise, something strikes a sour note in my geek side for paying for not getting something I could avoid anyway.
Mozilla is good, mozilla is great. The only thing keeping me from using it over Konqueror right now is the fact it seems to ignore my proxy setting. I use The Internet Junkbuster to remove unwanted (read: all) ads and other things. Mozilla up to RC1 seems to overlook this and I see ads all over the place. It may be due to JavaScript url fetching not going through the proxy, but I'm not sure
And don't tell me to use moz's built-in ad blocking, because I've already got a huge blockfile, I want to block for all browsers across the network, and it usually screws up rendering to use the builtin stuff anyway.
This is a great web browser; it's really faster than other GUI browsers I've used, renders nicely, and has all the features. But until it respects proxies (I use Squid to cache stuff too, helps a lot when all you've got is a modem), I can't use it.:-(
I had this hope, you know, that the people here who said "the states are just holding out for money" were wrong; that the states actually cared. I saw this demo and thought "yes, this may be the final straw." Clearly I was naive and overly optimistic.
I'd like to know what a lawyer has to say about whether Microsoft would indeed be given "indefinite time" for its response or would rather the Judge would tell them they're screwed. The fact the states gave up their most damning presentation just because Microsoft basically said they had no defense is to me unforgivable. Is there no hope? Do people not care anymore?
Hmm. It occured to me that maybe we are misinterpreting the fight that MS is putting up. They keep whining about the crippling effect the relatively benign settlement would bring about. They keep telling us how it'll hurt them, so badly, and please don't do this.
To me this seems like a great way to avoid a proper, harsh remedy. (Many others have suggested far better remedies that would cause much more pain and be much more appropriate; I don't need to go into those here.) If they yell it loud enough and long enough, maybe people will believe this is a harsh remedy, and apply it, because after all, MS does deserve punishment, and why not use this one, since it's pretty harsh, after all MS said so?
Eventually, Amazon and Half.com are going to really hurt the publishing industry too. We need to find some balanced, middle ground. I wish someone could suggest something.
I disagree. I think this will, in fact, help the industry.
First, let's clear something up. If someone is buying a book used (or even selling a book used), then the author already got money for the book sale. Beyond that, they don't deserve anything.
Second, if someone is buying a book used (or, again, selling), that means someone else bought the book and for some reason found it not to be worth keeping. They then make this book available to others at a cheaper price, who in turn may or may not feel that it is worth it, until:
Someone finds the book worth keeping, and keeps it.
It sits on the shelf of a used book section, and no one ever buys it.
In any case, each time the book is bought used, it devalues the overall worth of the book to the author.
This is a good thing. It means that if they wrote a crap book, then the market compensates then at the rate for crap books.
This means that yes, we may see less books. Authors who write books may see less money. The qualifier is that these authors are the ones who are writing crap books, and the should be making less money.
Books have been passed on and sold used for centuries. I don't think we have any fewer books today because of it.
Err, your "PS2" game list is full of third party software, including software from Sega.
This and the rest of your post is pretty much my point; it wasn't meant to be a pro-Sony or anti-Nintendo (or even anti-XBOX) post. The original poster asserted that "Nintendo and Sega are the only true game companies left," and I wished to demonstrate that, no, Nintendo and Sega were not the only "true game companies" left.
I think it's great we see cross-platform games; it means I have more of a chance of seeing a game on my platform of choice (whether that choice is because I like the manufacturer or just because I can only afford one platform is irrelevant). I don't have any great love for Sony. I like the PS2, but only because it has some great games. (Many of which are exclusive; in that list there are actually a decent number of first-party titles, like GT3, Ico, Frequency, and some others, plus Square is there, which is the reason I bought Sony.)
Anyway, this is just another "XYZ is dead!" proclamation, of which we've heard many and seen little actual change. That was my point.
Like I said, I want a GCN. Zelda looks cool, Metroid will hopefully be cool, it has great graphics, it looks cool, I've already got a GBA, and I'm hoping for a nice robust list of RPGs. When they start releasing a steady stream of good stuff (and my pocketbook can handle it), I'm there.:-)
The last true game companies are Sega and Nintendo.
If you mean the "last true game companies" that make first-party games for their systems with recognizable mascots to sell them, then yes, except Sega isn't making hardware anymore. Otherwise, I'd like to know how you define a "true game company," and I'm sure Konami, Namco, Capcom, Square, Sony, Rockstar, UbiSoft, Naughty Dog, THQ, LucasArts, Midway, and hundreds of others would like to know (were they not busy making triple-A titles).
Sega was bullied out of business by the richer and more powerful Sony
OK, this just sounds like fanboyism. Sega is out of the market because their marketting was full of crap, and their products were sub-par. (I'm sure there are slashdot readers here who would be happy to comment on how many defective units they've seen returned.) I'm not talking about games here; DreamCast, Genesis, Master System, even the Master Gear had some triple-A titles, but think of those systems: Sega has a really, really poor track record with promotion. (These are the people that brought us the Saturn, I mean, geez, look what they did with that.)
Nintendo is the only system left which still makes games and not graphical shows/interactive movies.
Nintendo fanboy now? Or just rabid anti-Sony/MS/Square? Now, one might consider some Square games to be "interactive movies" (although generally the people who say this are the ones who play about 5 hours of FFX and never really get into the game), but I've got a few PS2 games that are more than interactive movies:
Fatal Frame
Virtua Fighter 4
Frequency
Rez
Drakan
Final Fantasy X (no, this is not an interactive movie. Finish the game, then we'll talk.)
Kinetica
State of Emergency
Grandia 2
Klonoa 2
Jak and Daxter
Ico
Gran Turismo 3
Silent Hill 2
Okage
Evergrace
Summoner
Monkey Island 4
Grand Theft Auto 3
Metal Gear Solid 2
Devil May Cry
Gauntlet: Dark Legacy
Twisted Metal: Black
The ones that I hilighted are probably the more recognizable titles of the system. None of these are "interactive movies," and they're all great games.
Now, I'm not anti-Nintendo by any means; I'm going to get a GCN sometime this summer most likely. They make great games; I want the latest Mario and Zelda, too. But remember they're not the only ones who make games for their system. Take the Gameboy Advance. Would you consider Golden Sun, Advance Wars, and Castlevania: Circle of the Moon "real" games? These weren't made by Nintendo (or at least not solely). What about the latest GBC Zeldas (Oracle of Ages and Seasons)? Dual Nintendo/Capcom branding. Nintendo is good, but they're not it.
If i buy any system it will be a gamecube, but i dont think i'll buy it for a few years, maybe i'll buy it for Zelda.
Well, there are a lot of good titles lined up for the GameCube, so it's a good choice if you can only get one system. Fortunately Nintendo is going to make sure there are a decent lineup of RPGs for this system, too, after the N64.
Xbox and PS2 however are just generic systems to me, they are PCish, and battle to see which one has the best graphics and looks more real.
To you, perhaps. Perhaps because they don't have recognizable mascots, they're "generic", but (at least with the PS2) there is, as I demonstrated above, a long list of games that makes the system worth purchasing. (I'm not an XBOX fan. I don't like MS. I couldn't name any games that are real system-sellers, either, nor am I going to pick my brain for any, either;-).) The PS2 architecturally is about as far-removed from the PC as you can get, but you seem to mean branding and mascots. Actually this is an interesting point, because Sony seems to be the first company to have an enormously successful, market-leading system without such marketting necessities. This should imply to you that there's something else there that must be selling the system. (The games, perhaps?)
For now, I'll stick with the PC and games like diablo2.
That's your call. You're the one playing the games. If you don't find any interesting on a platform, then you shouldn't buy it, because it's a waste of your money. If you need validation for your purchasing decisions, you'd better look elsewhere, though. I'm very happy with my "generic" PS2 and its "interactive movies", thank you.;-)
The Bill of Rights and Constitution protect individual liberties from the government, not the "right" to steal music, so even considering constitutional arguments with regard to copying music makes no sense.
Most people would consider it an individual liberty to be able to use what they paid for in any way the choose, whether it be ripping a CD to mp3, ripping a DVD and encoding to some other format (requiring DeCSS), or just owning a computer that has an unrestricted memcpy(). It's considered a basic right to bear arms, so are you telling me it's not, to own something that can copy bits?
Reasonable people agree that the creator of a work should compensated for his efforts, hence copyright - but it has no basis in the constitution.
First, who exactly decides what "reasonable people" are? Second, copyright was originally more "reasonable" at a 7 year term, then more "reasonable people" came along and now look where we're at. Finally, "it has no basis in the constitution" is just wrong, because the Constitution is the sole source of authority for the Federal Government to make laws. If copyright didn't come from the Constitution, then it is an illegal law.
MegaCorp Inc. wants everything regulated, which is never going to happen.
Hellooo, DMCA, SSSCA. We said the former was "never going to happen", and it did. The latter... won't pass this year, maybe. The future is not a very bright one, though.
Slashdot types want everything free as in beer, which doesn't encourage creation.
Uh, hello, first off "Slashdot types" (of which I believe I qualify) likely want more: everything free as in liberty; free as in beer is just a nice extra. This "doesn't encourage creation"? What do you call these:
The Debian, RedHat, and multitudes of other distributions, some of which make money, some of which are purely nonprofit.
All the other free software not mentioned here.
All the music written and art created (and on record) for thousands of years done for whatever reason besides making a buck. (Hint: being an artist for a living was traditionally very hard, and few made it.) I personally know a number of people who write music purely because they enjoy doing it. If this isn't creativity, what is?
So until someone finds a decent way of paying artists aside from CDs, books, etc. people are going to keep stealing digital things because it is a better way to distribute.
Or maybe that business model just isn't going to work anymore, so they better get a different job or find a different way to make money. There is no guaranteed individual right to make money on a given venture. The reason we originally had the copyright was to further society, not line corporate pockets. Artists can control their work, possibly making money for a short period of time, then work is returned to the public domain. That's not how it works anymore.
As usual, the extremes on either side of the argument need to be tempered to find a workable solution. And it isn't going to be found in the Constitution.
No. The end has already been determined. Like a Myrddraal, MegaCorp Inc. has already been killed, but they're too dumb to realize it, and it doesn't mean they're not still dangerous (see DMCA and SSSCA).
The PS2 uses a CPU that runs at 300 MHz. Would you scoff at an ad in the paper that is selling a "very fast" x86 machine at 300 HMz these days? I would.
Yes, as well you should. However, this is a straw man argument and has absolutely no bearing on your following statement, since a 300MHz x86 is hardly the same as a 300MHz emotion engine.
Console CPUs at lower speeds than PCs used to have higher performance because they were customised for gaming.
Repeate after me: All MHz are not the same. I have a 200MHz StrongARM in my Gameboy Advance. The SNES had a 3MHz processor. The GBA is a bit more powerful than the SNES, but not by the same delta as a 4MHz 8086 and a 200MHz Pentium! All MHz are not the same! In fact, MHz are about as useful for gauging performance these days as BogoMIPS, which is to say not at all.
That's becoming less and less true as newer consoles come out that are closer relatives to PCs.
Gross overgeneralization. The XBOX is the only thing that's a repackaged PC. The PS2, which currently dominates the market by a huge margin, is quite far from a PC architecturally. The GameCube, while using something resembling a PPC, is otherwise architecturally quite remote from a PC. The XBOX may take all its RAM from the same pool (which as has been discussed isn't really a good thing), but that's not much different from what we do now (I've seen cheap SiS motherboards with onboard video that use system RAM for video RAM. Big deal, XBOX.)
Now the hardware to handle graphics runs quite a bit faster. And we can expect the PS3 CPU to be "very fast".
Again, "very fast" is completely relative. The XBOX may have a 700MHz Celery (which is kinda slow anyway, but an OK general-purpose CPU), but take away its graphics accelerator and you'll be lucky to rival a SNES or PSX. The PS2's core is rather tied together, but even though it's 300MHz, it can push a decent amount of polys. Lesson for today: All MHz are not the same!
Oh, and to be somewhat on topic, anything Sony says about the PS3 is likely complete hype at this point. I like Sony (well, no I don't, but I like the PS2;-)), but I know just as well as the next guy how the marketting deal works.
But is a 300 MHz PS2 processor really all that amazing as compared to a 200 MHz Dreamcast processor?
All MHz are not the same! All MHz are not the same! All MHz are not the same!
Slashdot Mirror
Check out MythTV, from the author of Freeamp. It uses Linux, Qt, and a TV tuner card to provide an entire solution for dropping a box next to your TV. Here are a few features:
Other things such as support for various emulators are on the todo list. The frontend is rather pretty as well.
I'm not sure about the first problem, since it would work out fine with one monk with red eyes, further cases of course present problems.
The second I think you're right. The only other alternative (besides "I don't know") is "six feet under," but if you do a little math, your answer seems correct:
Do the math (where M_a is the mother's age, and C_a is the child's age, of course), and the child comes out to be -3/4 of a year old. Which indicates you're probably right.
You assume that she would be using a computer at all if I hadn't set one up for her. She only uses it because I made it do exactly what she wants, and she has someone to complain to when it stops doing what she wants. If I'm the one setting it up anyway, why should I use anything else? I'm sure that goes for lots of people here.
I know plenty of families who also go out, buy a computer, and use it as an expensive paperweight, simply because they don't really know how to use it or make it work for them. If I set up Linux for these people, does it "not count" because they didn't set it up?
OK, first the issue was that I was tech-savvy, now the issue is that lots of people aren't?
In any case, people should be tech savvy. Hello, you're all living in a technological world, and it's just going to keep getting more technological (barring natural disaster or war). Ignorance is not OK, folks. Just because you don't know how do use a computer doesn't mean you can't learn. It especially does not mean that you shouldn't have to learn.
I set up a box for my mom to use. She's a teacher, she types papers, prints them out; occasionally browses the web; and checks email about once a week (now that she can). The box runs Linux.
For awhile, I had her running KDE, but the box was as Celery 400 or so with 128MB of RAM, and KDE 2.x is a dog for performance. So I switched her over to ROX (RiscOS On X) and sawfish with a pretty theme (much like one I use).
She has icons for printing, trash, logging in, and OpenOffice, in addition to folders for her documents and public_html (which I explained to her was the place to put documents she wanted to share, so my Windows-using dad had a way to get at them). It works great. She loves it. I can modify it remotely. It doesn't break. It runs Linux.
I'd sure like to know what you're using and how you're trying to cut and paste, because (at least in X), 99% of everything responds to the standard select-copy and middle-button-paste. That is, hilight the selection and it's automatically copied. Click the middle mouse button someplace to paste. (I think StarOffice is about the only exception to this I've ever run into.)
Maybe this isn't "intuitive" to a windows user, but you know, so what? C-x,c,v aren't intuitive to me... why should I have to press extra buttons? In the end, it all comes down to a little learning about and investigation into your software environemnt. When exactly did ignorance become OK?
Funny, we were just talking about this as it related to another post I just made. The thing is, there is no such thing as user friendly, at least the conventional meaning of the phrase. It all boils down to two factors:
The phrase "user friendly" comes about by confusing the two: somehow assuming that by being easy to sit down and learn with no work, something is easier to use. Then it's "user friendly."
Unfortunately, this isn't how it works in the real world, at least usually. A tool can be built that is easy to use---powerful, flexible, suited toward the job; or it can be easy to learn---no training required. Usually the tradeoff for the latter is that functionality is limited, so the user isn't overwhelmed. A balance of sorts must be achieved. Most of the best tools lean toward easy to use, and rightly so: you're only a newbie for a very short time. You may be using the tool for the rest of your life.
However, these aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, either. It is possible, in theory, to build an interface that is both easy to use and easy to learn, as long as one does not equate the two, or think that one somehow implies the other. Doing this is rather tricky though. A good example of such interfaces are those for simple tools which can be applied to a wide variety of uses (a hammer, /bin/ls, etc.). Another example is that some games tend to use: the dynamic interface, which starts with a few key options, and gradually adds more.
Thus, "user friendly" doesn't really exist in the conventional sense, which equates this sense of immediate ease of learning with continued ease of use. Rather, ease-of-learning and ease-of-use must be balanced, and attaining something truly user friendly requires a lot more than having icons and a mouse, or fewer menu entries.
Perhaps, but what I think the original author meant was "easy to use" not "intuitive." This makes much more sense, since "easy to use" and "hard to learn" are definitely not mutually exclusive, and often go hand-in-hand.
(To prove this to yourself, consider MS Windows Notepad. Very easy to learn, right? Try to use it for something serious: development, complex text transformations, etc. Very hard to use. Consider now vim or emacs. Pretty steep learning curve, but once you're there, it's really easy to do almost anything.)
Now, a case could be made for "intuitive" too, since once you know what you're doing and have some decent familiarity, figuring out how to do something else could be very intuitive. I tend to think this isn't what the original author meant, but a case could be made anyway.
Time to trot out Chapter Two in the Book of Proclamations written by The Gord. This is the insight of someone actually in the industry. You may wish to check out some of his other writings about the XBOX to see the accuracy of other predictions he has made. Quite interesting, and great fun to read.
In short, while it may "make sense" to use consoles as a loss leader, this isn't how things are usually done in the industry. When the Gord wrote the article above, both Nintendo and Sony were already making profits on their consoles. This was last year sometime. Today, Microsoft still isn't making a profit.
Recently I watched a presentation by a biometrics group, so this is a bit familiar to me. By far the biggest problem, the question unanswered, is what to do when your information is compromised.
See, you can change your credit card number, or your email address. You can even move someplace else. But you can't change your biometrics. Hopefully movies like Minority Report will provide some Good FUD about biometrics, so people realize that this information should be kept as private and closely-guarded as their own life.
It's funny how people seem more willing to give out their fingerprint or retina than they are a number on their credit card. It may be hard to hack. It may be very hard to hack. It may be almost impossible to use. But as those in the security business know, nothing is impossible. And with biometrics, once you're compromised, that's it.
This is just crap. Ever hear of Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven? They're these old dead guys who used to write some tunes. A lot of them, in fact. They even got paid for it. And they didn't have copyrights.
Uh, the government is already influencing the marketplace in a major influence at that. Nader appears to be asking for the government to influencing it less or at least differently, as to not support a convicted criminal.
Er, no one has a problem with charging for them. The problem is when they're not Free(tm) Software. If the FSF had a problem with just charging, they wouldn't want to see commercial distros at all.
Actually, while you're right... everyone (besides MS) does make money off their consoles... they also make a lot of money off something else: licensing. In fact, while you can make a pretty penny off your console, the main draw is that you get an even larger percentage from the license royalties off every game your console sells. You only sell one console per person. You sell lots of games.
Naturally, if everyone could write code for a console and burn their own CDs or DVDs, large game houses would have little reason to buy licensed development kits and publishing contracts with their respective console manufacturer, and thus you lose a lot of your revenue.
Interestingly enough, though, in the old days, unlicensed games happened every so often. I recall that Taito reverse-engineered the NES cartridge and put out their own games...
...because this has to be a joke:
In other words, "here is a number, and it sounds big to me, so that's a high frequency."
There are about 400 billion stars and planets in our galaxy alone. Say the average is about 300 billion per galaxy, and 2 billion galaxies, so 600 billion billion stars and planets in the universe (probably a conservative estimate). At 2 billion earth-like planets, that's pretty alone. It's a big universe out there.
Ah, but Apple is not the same as the Linux community. They targetted education solely. We target everything. If Linux can't run on your refrigerator and you can't spread Linux on your toast, someone else out there is working to make it so you can. Pusing Linux into another front (education) is just another victory in the ongoing war.
Yeah, yeah, troll and all, but I'll try and refute this oversimplification in an amusing manner.
Now I'm hardly arguing these did not play an important role in Sony's success. But of course to be called the sole cause of success is a gross oversimplification. For example, given these are the only two causes for Sony's successful console, consider the following scenarios:
From this we can see the likelihood that it is not, in fact, just these two factors that produced a successful console, although they did nonetheless play a definite role. However, we can theorize that other things such as "a successful predecessor," "good business relationships," "listening to your developers," and "offering leading, custom technology" also came into play, many of which a certain competitor of Sony's has yet to accomplish.
First of all: you guys rule, the HTTP 1.0 thing worked great. I'll have to see if I can make Junkbuster HTTP-1.1-aware sometime.
Second: free-riding. Well, it goes like this. I've always ad-filtered since I discovered Junkbuster (and will soon try Privoxy, because I've wanted HTML-filtering for awhile too), because ads are annoying and are the largest consumer of my meager 2k/s bandwidth. So screw ads. Web pages look lots prettier without them.
That said, I have nothing against supporting sites I like, especially this one. I support IGN but subscribing to IGN Insider. for over $20 a year. You know what? It was the best $20 subscription I've ever bought. IGN has lots of content, up-to-date stories, the IGN Unplugged PDF magazine (free for insiders). $20 a year for daily updates is great.
What's the difference? IGN's subscription is value-added. I pay to get stuff I didn't have before. Slashdot's subscription is stupid: I pay to not get something I had. In fact, since there's junkbuster (the geek solution; isn't this a geek site?) I'm paying for not getting something I already didn't have. Kinda silly.
When slashdot starts offering exclusive pay-only features with enough value-added pay-only content, you will see me being the first to pay $20 a year to subscribe. Spellchecked and slightly edited stories would be kinda nice too.
Think of it like this. If the RIAA started giving away CDs (ok, implausible, but follow me here ;-)) that had ads between tracks, and offered ad-free versions for $20, would you pay or just rip and skip those tracks?
Add value, ask money for it, I'm there. Otherwise, something strikes a sour note in my geek side for paying for not getting something I could avoid anyway.
Mozilla is good, mozilla is great. The only thing keeping me from using it over Konqueror right now is the fact it seems to ignore my proxy setting. I use The Internet Junkbuster to remove unwanted (read: all) ads and other things. Mozilla up to RC1 seems to overlook this and I see ads all over the place. It may be due to JavaScript url fetching not going through the proxy, but I'm not sure
And don't tell me to use moz's built-in ad blocking, because I've already got a huge blockfile, I want to block for all browsers across the network, and it usually screws up rendering to use the builtin stuff anyway.
This is a great web browser; it's really faster than other GUI browsers I've used, renders nicely, and has all the features. But until it respects proxies (I use Squid to cache stuff too, helps a lot when all you've got is a modem), I can't use it. :-(
I had this hope, you know, that the people here who said "the states are just holding out for money" were wrong; that the states actually cared. I saw this demo and thought "yes, this may be the final straw." Clearly I was naive and overly optimistic.
I'd like to know what a lawyer has to say about whether Microsoft would indeed be given "indefinite time" for its response or would rather the Judge would tell them they're screwed. The fact the states gave up their most damning presentation just because Microsoft basically said they had no defense is to me unforgivable. Is there no hope? Do people not care anymore?
Hmm. It occured to me that maybe we are misinterpreting the fight that MS is putting up. They keep whining about the crippling effect the relatively benign settlement would bring about. They keep telling us how it'll hurt them, so badly, and please don't do this.
To me this seems like a great way to avoid a proper, harsh remedy. (Many others have suggested far better remedies that would cause much more pain and be much more appropriate; I don't need to go into those here.) If they yell it loud enough and long enough, maybe people will believe this is a harsh remedy, and apply it, because after all, MS does deserve punishment, and why not use this one, since it's pretty harsh, after all MS said so?
Food for thought.
I disagree. I think this will, in fact, help the industry.
First, let's clear something up. If someone is buying a book used (or even selling a book used), then the author already got money for the book sale. Beyond that, they don't deserve anything.
Second, if someone is buying a book used (or, again, selling), that means someone else bought the book and for some reason found it not to be worth keeping. They then make this book available to others at a cheaper price, who in turn may or may not feel that it is worth it, until:
- Someone finds the book worth keeping, and keeps it.
- It sits on the shelf of a used book section, and no one ever buys it.
In any case, each time the book is bought used, it devalues the overall worth of the book to the author. This is a good thing. It means that if they wrote a crap book, then the market compensates then at the rate for crap books.This means that yes, we may see less books. Authors who write books may see less money. The qualifier is that these authors are the ones who are writing crap books, and the should be making less money.
Books have been passed on and sold used for centuries. I don't think we have any fewer books today because of it.
This and the rest of your post is pretty much my point; it wasn't meant to be a pro-Sony or anti-Nintendo (or even anti-XBOX) post. The original poster asserted that "Nintendo and Sega are the only true game companies left," and I wished to demonstrate that, no, Nintendo and Sega were not the only "true game companies" left.
I think it's great we see cross-platform games; it means I have more of a chance of seeing a game on my platform of choice (whether that choice is because I like the manufacturer or just because I can only afford one platform is irrelevant). I don't have any great love for Sony. I like the PS2, but only because it has some great games. (Many of which are exclusive; in that list there are actually a decent number of first-party titles, like GT3, Ico, Frequency, and some others, plus Square is there, which is the reason I bought Sony.)
Anyway, this is just another "XYZ is dead!" proclamation, of which we've heard many and seen little actual change. That was my point.
Like I said, I want a GCN. Zelda looks cool, Metroid will hopefully be cool, it has great graphics, it looks cool, I've already got a GBA, and I'm hoping for a nice robust list of RPGs. When they start releasing a steady stream of good stuff (and my pocketbook can handle it), I'm there. :-)
If you mean the "last true game companies" that make first-party games for their systems with recognizable mascots to sell them, then yes, except Sega isn't making hardware anymore. Otherwise, I'd like to know how you define a "true game company," and I'm sure Konami, Namco, Capcom, Square, Sony, Rockstar, UbiSoft, Naughty Dog, THQ, LucasArts, Midway, and hundreds of others would like to know (were they not busy making triple-A titles).
OK, this just sounds like fanboyism. Sega is out of the market because their marketting was full of crap, and their products were sub-par. (I'm sure there are slashdot readers here who would be happy to comment on how many defective units they've seen returned.) I'm not talking about games here; DreamCast, Genesis, Master System, even the Master Gear had some triple-A titles, but think of those systems: Sega has a really, really poor track record with promotion. (These are the people that brought us the Saturn, I mean, geez, look what they did with that.)
Nintendo fanboy now? Or just rabid anti-Sony/MS/Square? Now, one might consider some Square games to be "interactive movies" (although generally the people who say this are the ones who play about 5 hours of FFX and never really get into the game), but I've got a few PS2 games that are more than interactive movies:
The ones that I hilighted are probably the more recognizable titles of the system. None of these are "interactive movies," and they're all great games.
Now, I'm not anti-Nintendo by any means; I'm going to get a GCN sometime this summer most likely. They make great games; I want the latest Mario and Zelda, too. But remember they're not the only ones who make games for their system. Take the Gameboy Advance. Would you consider Golden Sun, Advance Wars, and Castlevania: Circle of the Moon "real" games? These weren't made by Nintendo (or at least not solely). What about the latest GBC Zeldas (Oracle of Ages and Seasons)? Dual Nintendo/Capcom branding. Nintendo is good, but they're not it.
Well, there are a lot of good titles lined up for the GameCube, so it's a good choice if you can only get one system. Fortunately Nintendo is going to make sure there are a decent lineup of RPGs for this system, too, after the N64.
To you, perhaps. Perhaps because they don't have recognizable mascots, they're "generic", but (at least with the PS2) there is, as I demonstrated above, a long list of games that makes the system worth purchasing. (I'm not an XBOX fan. I don't like MS. I couldn't name any games that are real system-sellers, either, nor am I going to pick my brain for any, either ;-).) The PS2 architecturally is about as far-removed from the PC as you can get, but you seem to mean branding and mascots. Actually this is an interesting point, because Sony seems to be the first company to have an enormously successful, market-leading system without such marketting necessities. This should imply to you that there's something else there that must be selling the system. (The games, perhaps?)
That's your call. You're the one playing the games. If you don't find any interesting on a platform, then you shouldn't buy it, because it's a waste of your money. If you need validation for your purchasing decisions, you'd better look elsewhere, though. I'm very happy with my "generic" PS2 and its "interactive movies", thank you. ;-)
Most people would consider it an individual liberty to be able to use what they paid for in any way the choose, whether it be ripping a CD to mp3, ripping a DVD and encoding to some other format (requiring DeCSS), or just owning a computer that has an unrestricted memcpy() . It's considered a basic right to bear arms, so are you telling me it's not, to own something that can copy bits?
First, who exactly decides what "reasonable people" are? Second, copyright was originally more "reasonable" at a 7 year term, then more "reasonable people" came along and now look where we're at. Finally, "it has no basis in the constitution" is just wrong, because the Constitution is the sole source of authority for the Federal Government to make laws. If copyright didn't come from the Constitution, then it is an illegal law.
Hellooo, DMCA, SSSCA. We said the former was "never going to happen", and it did. The latter... won't pass this year, maybe. The future is not a very bright one, though.
Uh, hello, first off "Slashdot types" (of which I believe I qualify) likely want more: everything free as in liberty; free as in beer is just a nice extra. This "doesn't encourage creation"? What do you call these:
Or maybe that business model just isn't going to work anymore, so they better get a different job or find a different way to make money. There is no guaranteed individual right to make money on a given venture. The reason we originally had the copyright was to further society, not line corporate pockets. Artists can control their work, possibly making money for a short period of time, then work is returned to the public domain. That's not how it works anymore.
No. The end has already been determined. Like a Myrddraal, MegaCorp Inc. has already been killed, but they're too dumb to realize it, and it doesn't mean they're not still dangerous (see DMCA and SSSCA).
Yes, as well you should. However, this is a straw man argument and has absolutely no bearing on your following statement, since a 300MHz x86 is hardly the same as a 300MHz emotion engine.
Repeate after me: All MHz are not the same. I have a 200MHz StrongARM in my Gameboy Advance. The SNES had a 3MHz processor. The GBA is a bit more powerful than the SNES, but not by the same delta as a 4MHz 8086 and a 200MHz Pentium! All MHz are not the same! In fact, MHz are about as useful for gauging performance these days as BogoMIPS, which is to say not at all.
Gross overgeneralization. The XBOX is the only thing that's a repackaged PC. The PS2, which currently dominates the market by a huge margin, is quite far from a PC architecturally. The GameCube, while using something resembling a PPC, is otherwise architecturally quite remote from a PC. The XBOX may take all its RAM from the same pool (which as has been discussed isn't really a good thing), but that's not much different from what we do now (I've seen cheap SiS motherboards with onboard video that use system RAM for video RAM. Big deal, XBOX.)
Again, "very fast" is completely relative. The XBOX may have a 700MHz Celery (which is kinda slow anyway, but an OK general-purpose CPU), but take away its graphics accelerator and you'll be lucky to rival a SNES or PSX. The PS2's core is rather tied together, but even though it's 300MHz, it can push a decent amount of polys. Lesson for today: All MHz are not the same!
Oh, and to be somewhat on topic, anything Sony says about the PS3 is likely complete hype at this point. I like Sony (well, no I don't, but I like the PS2 ;-)), but I know just as well as the next guy how the marketting deal works.
All MHz are not the same! All MHz are not the same! All MHz are not the same!