The B5 DVDs are great - the only down side is the full series won't be out for a while. The second season is due out April 2003 and the third the following November. Like a good book, the DVDs are hard to put down.
Thanks to the fact it's a flowing plot line I've seen all of season 1 over the past three days. Now I'm stuck. I *need* to see season 2 but I have to wait.
*argh* I hate seeing only half a movie - and that's what like seeing only one season of B5 is like.
I'm not sure if the CD-R software would work but I've have a lot of success with win4lin when I need a piece of windows software run.
There are two big disadvantages. First, this software doesn't help run directx (or any 3d) games but that's what I use winex for. Secondly, it requries a windows license. Chances are that you have one - regardless of if you want to or not.
I think the biggest problem with a system like this would be maintenance. I'd imagine keeping a vacuum would be difficult with natural degradation and punk teens.
I don't think that a per-e-mail limit is useful. At the place I work there is a 20 mb limit on e-mail boxes (you can overflow it to 30 mb but the admins don't like it and you get a lot of nasty e-mails).
All e-mails that I get are instantly downloaded from the exchange server onto my local machine as soon as I connect to the network. Of course, when someone sends an 11mb file it is a little annoying downloading that files over a slow VPN connection but even that inconvience doesn't outway the convience of being able to send a document when I want.
The public drive is broken up into groups. It would be difficult to share a file with someone in another group if we could not use the mail system for that due to permission issues. (An external ftp server would be unacceptable)
If the file is any larger than 20mb than the best approach in my opinion is to burn the data to a cd and mail it to them (internal mail system is quite good for this).
In the past 12 months my local mail file is at 600mb. That's 600mb of important info that's kept organised. I'd estimate that only %3-%5 of any e-mail I've recieved have been larger 5mb.
It's not just on DVD, lots of things are priced the same way.
For instance the complete first season of Babylon 5 is about $76 CDN from Amazon.ca. It's $74 US from Amazon.com. That's about $26 US cheaper for the same product (and I assume it'll be shipped from the US). I imagine Amazon alters a lot of their prices bases on the region they are selling to.
A lot of the time items that are sold in both the US and Canada will not be at comparable prices.
As for the Next Step Online Movie Delivery, I doubt that it'll catch on. I'll actually be surprised if it does. At $4 US per movie, that's $6.50 CDN to watch a movie once. I often buy used DVDs (guaranteed skip free) for $9-$10, a new one costing between $19-$25.
Good luck to the folks trying to get it off the ground though.
Which ibook do you have? Shortly before the release of OS X 10.1 (might have been sooner, I didn't notice) Apple upgraded it's ibook line. Before then it had a 8mb ATI Rage video card. Now it has an 16mb ATI Radeon card. This allows the OS X to run Quartz Extreme. This would affect the performance of 2d apps.
The day I bought a Voodoo 5 was the same day they were bought out by Nvidia. The story was posted on slashdot while I was out. A week later the 3dfx linux site was down and Nvidia had said that they would not support any of the 3dfx cards. This made it really difficult to get it running well in Linux.
A week after I bought my laptop (Dell) they dropped the price by $150.
I'm considering buying a Geforce4Go around January. They should be obsolete shortly afterwards.
Firefly is on Global tonight. Global is free. It's broadcast over the air, all you need is an antenna (bunny ears as some people call them).
In fact....in Canada at least EVERYONE will get Firefly even if they don't want to. They'll push the show right through your body.
If you prefer you can watch it on American stations as well. In most areas some version of Fox is available in the basic TV pack.
Smallville was 1 season behind but now being shown on CityTV (a Toronto station). (They picked up the first season half way through on some stations)
CityTV airs Enterprise on Wednesdays - Space airs the same episode Sundays. I don't think this is 7 years late?
I'd just hate for people to get the idea that Canadians are all a bunch of drunks sitting in their igloos watching shows for the first time that aired in the mid 80s in the US.
Not the best solution but a solution never the less would be two partitions on the disk. One parition set up as HFS+ for the DVD mastering since you require support for large files and another as a FAT32 for sharing of files between the Mac and Linux systems.
Since you didn't mention DVD mastering on the Linux box I'll assume you don't do that. HFS+ read support is support under linux (write support has a warning of being dangerous the last time I compiled a kernel). If required you could still back up the large files from the DVD mastering partition to the Linux machine - you just couldn't safely write them back (you could use something like sftp, or rsync to copy them over an network connection if required later on).
Not if a free shell provider (the subject of this article; pay shell providers are possibly -1, Offtopic) limits you to 5 MB.
You're right. many do restrict you to 5mb. Not all though - not some university accounts. I have friends that use their university accounts to store files that they are working on. They can access them from anywhere or even compile them on the servers themselves. They can use a 386 laptop to log into a remote machine and compile the software on a state of the art machine. Much faster and can be done from anywhere with a phone or internet connection. not only that but they can get their university mail as well. No need to set up an e-mail client on the local machine - good news if it isn't your machine.
Unfortunately the university I go to does not have such a system.
You keep mentioning logging into your computer at home from work through SSH and X11 forwarding. Is what you're talking about practical on my dial-up connection?
No it's not practical on a dial-up connection. back in the day when I had a dial-up connection I didn't do graphics editing remotely - or even locally for that matter. I can't ever recall using a graphic editing program before I had a SVGA card.
As for streaming graphical games - missle command - that's about it. Over dial-up....never (besides BBS games).
I'll admit - dial up is slow. It can be useful though if all you need is a text interface (graphics are not possible).
The other thing that remote account let me do was learn a Unix system. Back when I only ran Win 3.11 and DOS my ISP gave a free shell account. It let me mess around a little before I ever had a linux system at home. it was a great tool.
Also, when I was on 14.4kbps modem and wanted several articles (totally maybe 4mb) on a page to look at I'd login to the remote shell account, wget the pages quickly, zip them up really same (text compresses really well after all) and then download them from my service provider. Not a feature I really needed but it was quite welcome.
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
To what? To other people's shell accounts? Transferring big.jpg files using a shell account doesn't get them to my screen any faster.
To a central location. Got a 20mb file that you want a couple friends to check out. Can't send it through e-mail. Two friends use MSN, another ICQ and other Yahoo chat - can be hard to organize to send to each one. Much easier to say "Head over to ftp://foobar.com/checkthis"
read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
I assume you're just talking about logging into a remote machine to maintain a CVS repository such as on OSDN's own service [sourceforge.net]. Otherwise, doesn't a fellow who develops software want a fast connection from the box where the application runs to the box where the application's display runs? That's likely to be a lot faster on localhost than on dial-up. In addition, using a programmer's text editor such as GNU Emacs or Vim over a network connection with a 200+ ms ping is a pain in the donkey.
I've had no problems remotely developing software (albeit not as complex as what it sounds like you are doing). At least in the past most servers on the Net were considerably faster than what people had at home or was a different operating system. I grabbed a free Vax account from Compaq a couple years ago to do some development/testing on their Vaxes since I didn't happen to have one at home. In the past I would compile my programs on a remote server since it was A LOT faster.
As for doing graphics editting. I have done that remotely but it's not something that is really useful. I don't have gimp at work nor is it a support application that they want on my work laptop. I'll just load up a X11 session over a SSH connection to my server at home - do a couple edits and save. Yeah, it's slower - not something I'd want to be using all day but the ability to do so when I need is nice.
Another thing I use now is I run the Console UI for Licq on my server at home (over SSH). This allows me to use the same ICQ client anywhere (even at work). I can also stream the GUI if I want (quite usable).
I also play boggle remotely. Don't want to be installing games at work or on other people's computers.
Yes, but didn't OS X come out just a year ago. I can't see why I should pay $200 (Cdn) every year to use the latest Mac OS. I just what support for printing to a CUPS printer....not really worth $200.
What if the main link in the story went to the web server. If it could handle the load then it'd get all the hits.
Then, under the "Read more" on the Slashdot story a link to the SlashCache version would be available in case the server was slashdotted. Naturally most people (95%?) would go to the first link first.
This would allow the client to still get their banner funds and for the rest of us who aren't lucky enough to be among the first five slashdotters to read the story.
You'd think it would be pretty easy to avoid these kind of dupes... just automatically check if a certain url has been posted. How hard could this be to arrange?
I'd guess it would be about as hard as checking grammer and spelling. I wouldn't expect any of these to change in the near future.
> It's not comparable. If you want to compare, add Microsoft Office (StarOffice 6.0), IIS (Apache), SQL server (MySQL, PostgreSQL...), Photoshop (Gimp), Money (GnuCash)... etc.
Yes, it's comparable for the end user but it's not a fair comparison from the perspective of Wal-Mart. They are making a lot more money from selling the Mandrake system since all the apps you mention cost them nothing - they basically sell all those for the price of XP.
The unfortunate part of this is that it is only available at the online store. Most people ordering things online already have a computer.
It would be nice if these were available in store. That way people going to buy their first computer would look around, see the pretty Mandrake graphics - buy that system and be Linux people forever.
You do make a very good point...you set up a system and it works - does all the stuff they need. That's great. I could set up a Vax system for my parents to use but that doesn't really mean it's ready for the desktop. The biggest problem with linux is making it easy for new people. Mandrake is starting to do a good job of this but is still far from it.
Linux will have to get to the point where someone who has used a computer before on a limited basis can go to the store, buy EasyLinux 1.0, put it in the cd drive, install it and start using it all by only using the prompts from the install process and possibly a short manual (XP install manual is only a couple pages).
The best non-Microsoft OSes I've seen that are of the type "put cd in and use" are Mac OS X (of course) and BeOS. I tihnk my parents could have installed either OS and set it up. I hope that maybe in a year or two they will be able to pick up a linux distro and do the same.
Of course I do hope things like Gentoo linux are still out there for those who wish to have more control and let them fool around more.
One last note - if Mandrake had a ports like system (ala gentoo and bsd) for easy updating via a gui that may help things out a lot more.
Slashdot Mirror
The B5 DVDs are great - the only down side is the full series won't be out for a while. The second season is due out April 2003 and the third the following November. Like a good book, the DVDs are hard to put down.
Thanks to the fact it's a flowing plot line I've seen all of season 1 over the past three days. Now I'm stuck. I *need* to see season 2 but I have to wait.
*argh* I hate seeing only half a movie - and that's what like seeing only one season of B5 is like.
When I was an active pilot flying...The rhythm (random?) of the static was hypnotic
Is this a good idea?
I'm not sure if the CD-R software would work but I've have a lot of success with win4lin when I need a piece of windows software run.
There are two big disadvantages. First, this software doesn't help run directx (or any 3d) games but that's what I use winex for. Secondly, it requries a windows license. Chances are that you have one - regardless of if you want to or not.
A good marketing technique would be getting your company's product posted to the front page of slashdot...
*shudder*
I think the biggest problem with a system like this would be maintenance. I'd imagine keeping a vacuum would be difficult with natural degradation and punk teens.
I don't think that a per-e-mail limit is useful. At the place I work there is a 20 mb limit on e-mail boxes (you can overflow it to 30 mb but the admins don't like it and you get a lot of nasty e-mails).
All e-mails that I get are instantly downloaded from the exchange server onto my local machine as soon as I connect to the network. Of course, when someone sends an 11mb file it is a little annoying downloading that files over a slow VPN connection but even that inconvience doesn't outway the convience of being able to send a document when I want.
The public drive is broken up into groups. It would be difficult to share a file with someone in another group if we could not use the mail system for that due to permission issues. (An external ftp server would be unacceptable)
If the file is any larger than 20mb than the best approach in my opinion is to burn the data to a cd and mail it to them (internal mail system is quite good for this).
In the past 12 months my local mail file is at 600mb. That's 600mb of important info that's kept organised. I'd estimate that only %3-%5 of any e-mail I've recieved have been larger 5mb.
That's just my opinion....
It's not just on DVD, lots of things are priced the same way.
For instance the complete first season of Babylon 5 is about $76 CDN from Amazon.ca. It's $74 US from Amazon.com. That's about $26 US cheaper for the same product (and I assume it'll be shipped from the US). I imagine Amazon alters a lot of their prices bases on the region they are selling to.
A lot of the time items that are sold in both the US and Canada will not be at comparable prices.
As for the Next Step Online Movie Delivery, I doubt that it'll catch on. I'll actually be surprised if it does. At $4 US per movie, that's $6.50 CDN to watch a movie once. I often buy used DVDs (guaranteed skip free) for $9-$10, a new one costing between $19-$25.
Good luck to the folks trying to get it off the ground though.
Personally, I wouldn't have named my product nSync....
Knowing the slashdot crowd the person is likely 30 and finally being kick out by his mother....
You should check out Xine. I've been using it for almost 6 months now for watching DVDs, DivX, mpegs and a whole bunch of things.
Which ibook do you have? Shortly before the release of OS X 10.1 (might have been sooner, I didn't notice) Apple upgraded it's ibook line. Before then it had a 8mb ATI Rage video card. Now it has an 16mb ATI Radeon card. This allows the OS X to run Quartz Extreme. This would affect the performance of 2d apps.
The day I bought a Voodoo 5 was the same day they were bought out by Nvidia. The story was posted on slashdot while I was out. A week later the 3dfx linux site was down and Nvidia had said that they would not support any of the 3dfx cards. This made it really difficult to get it running well in Linux.
A week after I bought my laptop (Dell) they dropped the price by $150.
I'm considering buying a Geforce4Go around January. They should be obsolete shortly afterwards.
Anyone else having problems with Mozilla (1.1) on the Google News site? Twice now I have had to reboot my Win98 machine after...
:-)
No, but I have had a lot of problems with Win98.
Firefly is on Global tonight. Global is free. It's broadcast over the air, all you need is an antenna (bunny ears as some people call them).
In fact....in Canada at least EVERYONE will get Firefly even if they don't want to. They'll push the show right through your body.
If you prefer you can watch it on American stations as well. In most areas some version of Fox is available in the basic TV pack.
Smallville was 1 season behind but now being shown on CityTV (a Toronto station). (They picked up the first season half way through on some stations)
CityTV airs Enterprise on Wednesdays - Space airs the same episode Sundays. I don't think this is 7 years late?
I'd just hate for people to get the idea that Canadians are all a bunch of drunks sitting in their igloos watching shows for the first time that aired in the mid 80s in the US.
Not the best solution but a solution never the less would be two partitions on the disk. One parition set up as HFS+ for the DVD mastering since you require support for large files and another as a FAT32 for sharing of files between the Mac and Linux systems.
Since you didn't mention DVD mastering on the Linux box I'll assume you don't do that. HFS+ read support is support under linux (write support has a warning of being dangerous the last time I compiled a kernel). If required you could still back up the large files from the DVD mastering partition to the Linux machine - you just couldn't safely write them back (you could use something like sftp, or rsync to copy them over an network connection if required later on).
Not if a free shell provider (the subject of this article; pay shell providers are possibly -1, Offtopic) limits you to 5 MB.
You're right. many do restrict you to 5mb. Not all though - not some university accounts. I have friends that use their university accounts to store files that they are working on. They can access them from anywhere or even compile them on the servers themselves. They can use a 386 laptop to log into a remote machine and compile the software on a state of the art machine. Much faster and can be done from anywhere with a phone or internet connection. not only that but they can get their university mail as well. No need to set up an e-mail client on the local machine - good news if it isn't your machine.
Unfortunately the university I go to does not have such a system.
You keep mentioning logging into your computer at home from work through SSH and X11 forwarding. Is what you're talking about practical on my dial-up connection?
No it's not practical on a dial-up connection. back in the day when I had a dial-up connection I didn't do graphics editing remotely - or even locally for that matter. I can't ever recall using a graphic editing program before I had a SVGA card.
As for streaming graphical games - missle command - that's about it. Over dial-up....never (besides BBS games).
I'll admit - dial up is slow. It can be useful though if all you need is a text interface (graphics are not possible).
The other thing that remote account let me do was learn a Unix system. Back when I only ran Win 3.11 and DOS my ISP gave a free shell account. It let me mess around a little before I ever had a linux system at home. it was a great tool.
Also, when I was on 14.4kbps modem and wanted several articles (totally maybe 4mb) on a page to look at I'd login to the remote shell account, wget the pages quickly, zip them up really same (text compresses really well after all) and then download them from my service provider. Not a feature I really needed but it was quite welcome.
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
.jpg files using a shell account doesn't get them to my screen any faster.
To what? To other people's shell accounts? Transferring big
To a central location. Got a 20mb file that you want a couple friends to check out. Can't send it through e-mail. Two friends use MSN, another ICQ and other Yahoo chat - can be hard to organize to send to each one. Much easier to say "Head over to ftp://foobar.com/checkthis"
read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
I assume you're just talking about logging into a remote machine to maintain a CVS repository such as on OSDN's own service [sourceforge.net]. Otherwise, doesn't a fellow who develops software want a fast connection from the box where the application runs to the box where the application's display runs? That's likely to be a lot faster on localhost than on dial-up. In addition, using a programmer's text editor such as GNU Emacs or Vim over a network connection with a 200+ ms ping is a pain in the donkey.
I've had no problems remotely developing software (albeit not as complex as what it sounds like you are doing). At least in the past most servers on the Net were considerably faster than what people had at home or was a different operating system. I grabbed a free Vax account from Compaq a couple years ago to do some development/testing on their Vaxes since I didn't happen to have one at home. In the past I would compile my programs on a remote server since it was A LOT faster.
As for doing graphics editting. I have done that remotely but it's not something that is really useful. I don't have gimp at work nor is it a support application that they want on my work laptop. I'll just load up a X11 session over a SSH connection to my server at home - do a couple edits and save. Yeah, it's slower - not something I'd want to be using all day but the ability to do so when I need is nice.
Another thing I use now is I run the Console UI for Licq on my server at home (over SSH). This allows me to use the same ICQ client anywhere (even at work). I can also stream the GUI if I want (quite usable).
I also play boggle remotely. Don't want to be installing games at work or on other people's computers.
Yes, but didn't OS X come out just a year ago. I can't see why I should pay $200 (Cdn) every year to use the latest Mac OS. I just what support for printing to a CUPS printer....not really worth $200.
> (it was a small school, about 100 people per class)
How big were the classes of a normal size school? Here in Ontario there was a big fuss when class sizes ballooned up to an average of 37.
What if the main link in the story went to the web server. If it could handle the load then it'd get all the hits.
Then, under the "Read more" on the Slashdot story a link to the SlashCache version would be available in case the server was slashdotted. Naturally most people (95%?) would go to the first link first.
This would allow the client to still get their banner funds and for the rest of us who aren't lucky enough to be among the first five slashdotters to read the story.
> It's not comparable. If you want to compare, add Microsoft Office (StarOffice 6.0), IIS (Apache), SQL server (MySQL, PostgreSQL...), Photoshop (Gimp), Money (GnuCash)... etc.
Yes, it's comparable for the end user but it's not a fair comparison from the perspective of Wal-Mart. They are making a lot more money from selling the Mandrake system since all the apps you mention cost them nothing - they basically sell all those for the price of XP.
The unfortunate part of this is that it is only available at the online store. Most people ordering things online already have a computer.
It would be nice if these were available in store. That way people going to buy their first computer would look around, see the pretty Mandrake graphics - buy that system and be Linux people forever.
You do make a very good point...you set up a system and it works - does all the stuff they need. That's great. I could set up a Vax system for my parents to use but that doesn't really mean it's ready for the desktop. The biggest problem with linux is making it easy for new people. Mandrake is starting to do a good job of this but is still far from it.
Linux will have to get to the point where someone who has used a computer before on a limited basis can go to the store, buy EasyLinux 1.0, put it in the cd drive, install it and start using it all by only using the prompts from the install process and possibly a short manual (XP install manual is only a couple pages).
The best non-Microsoft OSes I've seen that are of the type "put cd in and use" are Mac OS X (of course) and BeOS. I tihnk my parents could have installed either OS and set it up. I hope that maybe in a year or two they will be able to pick up a linux distro and do the same.
Of course I do hope things like Gentoo linux are still out there for those who wish to have more control and let them fool around more.
One last note - if Mandrake had a ports like system (ala gentoo and bsd) for easy updating via a gui that may help things out a lot more.