Isn't there anything available for Linux that would provide the functionality of something like a self-extracting ZIP file on Windows?
If you don't mind downloading all 13 megs at once, there's a self-extracting/install tarball available from mozilla.org. Of course you might have to set it +x first, but really, how much more brain-dead does it need to be?
I'm running the exact same thing, you're right, it does look better than anything else I've used. Unfortunately the gdkxft patch which debian includes in their Mozilla builds probably isn't ever going to make it into the main mozilla tree, and moreover it mangles some characters unacceptably. Now, whenever Mozilla gets ported to GTK 2.0, that will be fun...
BUT useing the ac 97 codec??? i have never heard very good sound out of one of them, and i have always found it to be just that codec, if they would do it with a good audio chip, it would be much better.
just my thoughts...
Really, what kind of sound card do you have? If you are using your computer for high-end audio production or music composition and are talking about truly high-end sound cards, that statement has some merit, no commercial AC 97 codec can probably produce what you would consider "good sound".
Presuming this is not the case, its probable, unless you have in fact a very obsolete or low-quality sound card, that it in fact uses an AC 97 codec similar to those used by many onboard sound interfaces. AC 97 is just a generic standard defining an interface between the sound codec (which actually produces the sound) and the controller (which attaches it to the bus, and provides DSP and synthesis functionality is some cases). Even expensive consumer sound cards like the Creative ones and the Hercules Game Theater use codecs which are AC 97 compatible. Most of the criticism of motherboard audio either has to do with the lack of features (which given that even expensive consumer sound cards don't do hardware MIDI synthesis anymore, isn't terribly relevant except for video game players) or the poor sound quality (which doesn't have to do with the AC 97 standard per se, but low quality of individual codecs and poor electrical design. None of these things are universals, I have a notebook which uses the AC 97 codec interface of its motherboard chipset, but a Crystal codec (identical to the one used by most of the CS4630 cards like the Santa Cruz, Game Theater, etc.), and produces very nice output.
I thought the point of onboard memory was better performance...
The usual reason is lower production cost, followed by lower power consumption. And of course if its a low power chip, they might clock it lower also. Embedded RAM theoretically can have much wider bandwidth, but for the most part it hasn't been used that way.
As it says at: http://www.unitedlinux.com/en/faqs/index.html , there'll be no source code with the alpha and beta versions.
I seem to remember turbolinux trying that trick in the past (specifically it was some kind of time-delay thing where the release of the source was some time after they began selling binaries). I believe they got away with it. And who happens to be one of the partners in this operation...
Only if you distribute the binaries do you have to distribute the source _to the people that got the binaries_. Since you didn't pay for it, and hence didn't get the binaries, you have no legal right to the source code either.
Not exactly. They can restrict distribution of the source to paying customers only, but all of those customers also are allowed to distribute under the terms of the GPL. And all it would take is one person to throw it up on an ftp to render the whole the restriction quite moot. Which is probably why they are making it publicly available anyway.
If you assume that Moore's Law holds for what you want to push, and NOT for its competition
Its quite a reasonable inference actually. The reason that Moore's law holds is that smaller and smaller diameter fabrication processes are developed, so that an integrated circuit can be made smaller, and thus also cheaper, and furthermore reduce power consumption, heat production, and speed. Now, the MEMS projection chip does not have to be any particular size, so as process technology becomes more advanced, the cost to produce these will go down with everything else. But a conventional LCD, in order to be useful, has to be a certain size, and, for any given resolution, has to have a certain number of pixels. Of course, technology advances do help LCD's, but its no use to the user if 10 years from now you can get a 5mm desktop LCD display for $10 with the same resolution as the 15" display you want now.
I don't see why everything has to run on/off your cell phone.
I find them distasteful also. But I think it does makes sense from a marketing statement. Cell phones are basically commodity items, lots and lots of people buy them, for all I know they're more common than PC's now in rich countries, probably moreso elsewhere. And just to handle with the digital encoding that most of them use right now requires a certain amount of computing power. So, since they're capable of it anyway, these people think, lets tack lots of other applications (which people of course will pay for) onto this commodity item that everyone is buying for unrelated reasons. Mostly, in fact, stuff that has already failed as pay internet services, but surely the convenience of running it on your cell phone while having an insipid conversation (when of course you should be concentrated on the car which, in theory, you are driving, on a congested road at 60 miles per hour) will suddenly justify users actually paying money for it.
It will mean that the AT&T source will not be represented on Intel's new processor.
Doesn't HP-UX borrow from the AT&T source? That will still make it to IA-64 eventually, since HP is abandoning every other processor architecture (well, except for IA-32). Irix is still being ported too, but AIUI it was mostly written from the ground up by SGI (even if they might be paying royalties to call it "Unix" anyway).
Xenix which was an M$ bastardized offshoot was a bit unstable, but worked just fine.
Not quite. What became SCO developed Xenix along with Microsoft. Microsoft eventually lost interest (although into the early nineties there was a port of MS Word for SCO Unix) and the rights to the whole thing came to SCO, in exchange for some royalties of course. SCO Open Server (and Open Desktop, the deceased client version), the older and cruftier of SCO's Unices, is the direct descendant of Xenix. UnixWare (now Open Unix I guess) was originally developed by Novell, and is a more direct branch from the AT&T source.
They were acquired by BSDI, because of their support for FreeBSD. Then BSDI was acquired by Wind River Software, entirely for BSD/OS. Pretty much everything associated with them is dead now, AFAIK. Well, FreeBSD has survived, because its development was never dependent on commercial support. And slackware has been hurt by the loss of all of its paid developers, but its always just pretty much been Pat's distribution and despite the lack of support 8.1 looks to be coming along very nicely.
I just deleted the StarOffice 6 beta from my system. It doesn't work now anyway, and it was taking up lots of space. I don't get the feeling either OpenOffice or another version of StarOffice will be replacing it, either.
Theyr's Gone. HP dropped the last remnant of their calculator organization on November 9, 2001 [hpcalc.org].
In some ways, thats a distortion. The ACO, according to those worked there, was actually not involved in calculator design when they were killed off, but was working on some kind of handheld PDA-type device which was deemed redundant when they decided to cut back. It was noted at the time that HP had frozen new calculator design for a span of several years before. There's been no indication that production of current models will cease.
Oddly enough, most of these deranged violence-crazed kids also have no respect for private property, and don't buy video games retail anyway. I suppose it would be seen as legitimizing intellectual property theft if they required all sites offering pirated software for download to run adult-verification software.
There are a lot of reasons for people not to get all their music via download right now. Most people still only have dial-up access, and if you want to pirate more than a few tracks per day, you'll basically have to leave it on all the time. None of the lossy encoding out there has reached real CD quality (well I've heard that if you run the ogg encoder at the very highest quality setting, it turns all of the compression entirely off, but that doesn't count), and this is compounded by the fact that most of the files on P2P services are very poorly encoded, and this is the channel by which most people obtain their pirated music (some of them even have upper bitrate limits, so even if you have high-quality rips they won't be shared).
That being said, being on a college campus where very fast broadband access is universally available, I know of many people who listen to lots of music, and don't own a single legal, commercial CD. This of course is the future...broadband will become more prevalent, compression algorithms will improve, and little by little people WILL pirate what they can. Personally I do buy some CDs, but my reason is the exact opposite than what all these piracy advocates put forward...I buy not what I can find on the Internet, but what I CANNOT. This has to do mainly with my distinctly minority musical taste, most people really can find most of what they want to listen to through various channels.
I think that if piracy of copyrighted music continues it most certainly WILL lead to the downfall of the commercial music recording industry as we know it. This is quantitatively different than VCRs...nobody uses Gnutella or whatever to copy what they already have (if you own the CD or DVD, and you want a copy on your computer, you'll rip it yourself with your own preferred quality settings, after all). I personally support this, and would love it if commercial pop music were to disappear from the face of the earth, but judging by what most people prefer to pirate on the Internet, I would say many of you probably feel differently.
It turns out that its just this article, with "heterosexual" subistituted for "black", and "NAMBLA" substituted for "Ku Klux Klan". This also explains why the acronyms as displayed in this plagiary don't work.
The AOL and CompuServe clients are now basically the same software. Its a great way to test the water. Since they basically aren't promoting CompuServe anymore, and relatively few people actually use it, if users have major problems with integrated Gecko AOL can find out about it without alienting 50 million AOL users first. And if they still are trying to get a better deal from Microsoft to use IE, its a great way to show them that they can switch to Mozilla/Gecko any time they want to, without completely shutting the door on continuing the present arrangement. And when (if) the time comes to switch AOL proper to Gecko, they can do it very quickly and painlessly, having ironed out all of the problems with Compuserve first.
Who the hell uses ActiveX? I've gone to all kinds of sites(sans porn...ask me why:P) and some quite the microsoft-oriented POS(iframes, their DOM, etc.) and have yet to install an ActiveX control in at least six months. Seriously, who is really using ActivX controls?
I think Windows Update uses ActiveX. Who woulda thunk it?
Although I can't say for sure as I haven't booted into Windows for more than 15 minutes once in the last year or so.
The state computer technology mean that the factory equipment to do the equivalent of "soldering your own system together" is generally not within the cost range of any amateur.
I didn't say otherwise. Even with ancient technology its certainly beyond MY feeble means. But I think people who put their own systems together from OEM parts need to understand how little it is that we are really doing. Its not that different from buying a box from Dell or whoever (aside from saving money, that is).
Some folks at Extreme Tech [extremetech.com] also said that DIY computers will be dead [extremetech.com] with more or less the same reasons. Is this a trend or what?
They're dead already. Its just a matter of snapping together pre-built modules. Sure more stuff will get built onto the motherboard, but thats been happening for a while. Remember when you had to get a seperate IO card for serial/parallel ports, IDE, floppy, etc.?
Either way its a far cry from soldering your own system together.
How will the (no doubt) massive investment of government money involved in developing instruments of war like this improve human society? Even if you believe that wars and military power can improve the world, you must concede that the United States already has by far the most technologically advanced military in the world, and even without devices like this no other country can seriously challenge the United States in a conventional war (and no amount of technological superiority can ultimately stop fanatics armed with box cutters). And every cent that funds new high-tech killing instruments is one cent that doesn't go to fight very serious problems of disease, starvation, and poverty.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't mind downloading all 13 megs at once, there's a self-extracting/install tarball available from mozilla.org. Of course you might have to set it +x first, but really, how much more brain-dead does it need to be?
I'm running the exact same thing, you're right, it does look better than anything else I've used. Unfortunately the gdkxft patch which debian includes in their Mozilla builds probably isn't ever going to make it into the main mozilla tree, and moreover it mangles some characters unacceptably. Now, whenever Mozilla gets ported to GTK 2.0, that will be fun...
Really, what kind of sound card do you have? If you are using your computer for high-end audio production or music composition and are talking about truly high-end sound cards, that statement has some merit, no commercial AC 97 codec can probably produce what you would consider "good sound".
Presuming this is not the case, its probable, unless you have in fact a very obsolete or low-quality sound card, that it in fact uses an AC 97 codec similar to those used by many onboard sound interfaces. AC 97 is just a generic standard defining an interface between the sound codec (which actually produces the sound) and the controller (which attaches it to the bus, and provides DSP and synthesis functionality is some cases). Even expensive consumer sound cards like the Creative ones and the Hercules Game Theater use codecs which are AC 97 compatible. Most of the criticism of motherboard audio either has to do with the lack of features (which given that even expensive consumer sound cards don't do hardware MIDI synthesis anymore, isn't terribly relevant except for video game players) or the poor sound quality (which doesn't have to do with the AC 97 standard per se, but low quality of individual codecs and poor electrical design. None of these things are universals, I have a notebook which uses the AC 97 codec interface of its motherboard chipset, but a Crystal codec (identical to the one used by most of the CS4630 cards like the Santa Cruz, Game Theater, etc.), and produces very nice output.
The usual reason is lower production cost, followed by lower power consumption. And of course if its a low power chip, they might clock it lower also. Embedded RAM theoretically can have much wider bandwidth, but for the most part it hasn't been used that way.
I seem to remember turbolinux trying that trick in the past (specifically it was some kind of time-delay thing where the release of the source was some time after they began selling binaries). I believe they got away with it. And who happens to be one of the partners in this operation...
Not exactly. They can restrict distribution of the source to paying customers only, but all of those customers also are allowed to distribute under the terms of the GPL. And all it would take is one person to throw it up on an ftp to render the whole the restriction quite moot. Which is probably why they are making it publicly available anyway.
Its quite a reasonable inference actually. The reason that Moore's law holds is that smaller and smaller diameter fabrication processes are developed, so that an integrated circuit can be made smaller, and thus also cheaper, and furthermore reduce power consumption, heat production, and speed. Now, the MEMS projection chip does not have to be any particular size, so as process technology becomes more advanced, the cost to produce these will go down with everything else. But a conventional LCD, in order to be useful, has to be a certain size, and, for any given resolution, has to have a certain number of pixels. Of course, technology advances do help LCD's, but its no use to the user if 10 years from now you can get a 5mm desktop LCD display for $10 with the same resolution as the 15" display you want now.
I find them distasteful also. But I think it does makes sense from a marketing statement. Cell phones are basically commodity items, lots and lots of people buy them, for all I know they're more common than PC's now in rich countries, probably moreso elsewhere. And just to handle with the digital encoding that most of them use right now requires a certain amount of computing power. So, since they're capable of it anyway, these people think, lets tack lots of other applications (which people of course will pay for) onto this commodity item that everyone is buying for unrelated reasons. Mostly, in fact, stuff that has already failed as pay internet services, but surely the convenience of running it on your cell phone while having an insipid conversation (when of course you should be concentrated on the car which, in theory, you are driving, on a congested road at 60 miles per hour) will suddenly justify users actually paying money for it.
Doesn't HP-UX borrow from the AT&T source? That will still make it to IA-64 eventually, since HP is abandoning every other processor architecture (well, except for IA-32). Irix is still being ported too, but AIUI it was mostly written from the ground up by SGI (even if they might be paying royalties to call it "Unix" anyway).
Not quite. What became SCO developed Xenix along with Microsoft. Microsoft eventually lost interest (although into the early nineties there was a port of MS Word for SCO Unix) and the rights to the whole thing came to SCO, in exchange for some royalties of course. SCO Open Server (and Open Desktop, the deceased client version), the older and cruftier of SCO's Unices, is the direct descendant of Xenix. UnixWare (now Open Unix I guess) was originally developed by Novell, and is a more direct branch from the AT&T source.
Actually many colleges in urban areas give you bus passes for free. In that case, more of the other two.
Then you should switch to linux. The vi interface is extremely simple, and its all you need to configure XFree86.
They were acquired by BSDI, because of their support for FreeBSD. Then BSDI was acquired by Wind River Software, entirely for BSD/OS. Pretty much everything associated with them is dead now, AFAIK. Well, FreeBSD has survived, because its development was never dependent on commercial support. And slackware has been hurt by the loss of all of its paid developers, but its always just pretty much been Pat's distribution and despite the lack of support 8.1 looks to be coming along very nicely.
I just deleted the StarOffice 6 beta from my system. It doesn't work now anyway, and it was taking up lots of space. I don't get the feeling either OpenOffice or another version of StarOffice will be replacing it, either.
I think this is even better. Come to think of it, Galeon has supported tabbed browsing since before Mozilla too, and still does it better.
In some ways, thats a distortion. The ACO, according to those worked there, was actually not involved in calculator design when they were killed off, but was working on some kind of handheld PDA-type device which was deemed redundant when they decided to cut back. It was noted at the time that HP had frozen new calculator design for a span of several years before. There's been no indication that production of current models will cease.
Oddly enough, most of these deranged violence-crazed kids also have no respect for private property, and don't buy video games retail anyway. I suppose it would be seen as legitimizing intellectual property theft if they required all sites offering pirated software for download to run adult-verification software.
There are a lot of reasons for people not to get all their music via download right now. Most people still only have dial-up access, and if you want to pirate more than a few tracks per day, you'll basically have to leave it on all the time. None of the lossy encoding out there has reached real CD quality (well I've heard that if you run the ogg encoder at the very highest quality setting, it turns all of the compression entirely off, but that doesn't count), and this is compounded by the fact that most of the files on P2P services are very poorly encoded, and this is the channel by which most people obtain their pirated music (some of them even have upper bitrate limits, so even if you have high-quality rips they won't be shared).
That being said, being on a college campus where very fast broadband access is universally available, I know of many people who listen to lots of music, and don't own a single legal, commercial CD. This of course is the future...broadband will become more prevalent, compression algorithms will improve, and little by little people WILL pirate what they can. Personally I do buy some CDs, but my reason is the exact opposite than what all these piracy advocates put forward...I buy not what I can find on the Internet, but what I CANNOT. This has to do mainly with my distinctly minority musical taste, most people really can find most of what they want to listen to through various channels.
I think that if piracy of copyrighted music continues it most certainly WILL lead to the downfall of the commercial music recording industry as we know it. This is quantitatively different than VCRs...nobody uses Gnutella or whatever to copy what they already have (if you own the CD or DVD, and you want a copy on your computer, you'll rip it yourself with your own preferred quality settings, after all). I personally support this, and would love it if commercial pop music were to disappear from the face of the earth, but judging by what most people prefer to pirate on the Internet, I would say many of you probably feel differently.
This might have been a credible troll. But...
It turns out that its just this article, with "heterosexual" subistituted for "black", and "NAMBLA" substituted for "Ku Klux Klan". This also explains why the acronyms as displayed in this plagiary don't work.
Galeon is built against the Mozilla milestone releases, 1.2.0 uses exactly the same engine as Moz 0.9.9.
The AOL and CompuServe clients are now basically the same software. Its a great way to test the water. Since they basically aren't promoting CompuServe anymore, and relatively few people actually use it, if users have major problems with integrated Gecko AOL can find out about it without alienting 50 million AOL users first. And if they still are trying to get a better deal from Microsoft to use IE, its a great way to show them that they can switch to Mozilla/Gecko any time they want to, without completely shutting the door on continuing the present arrangement. And when (if) the time comes to switch AOL proper to Gecko, they can do it very quickly and painlessly, having ironed out all of the problems with Compuserve first.
I think Windows Update uses ActiveX. Who woulda thunk it?
Although I can't say for sure as I haven't booted into Windows for more than 15 minutes once in the last year or so.
I didn't say otherwise. Even with ancient technology its certainly beyond MY feeble means. But I think people who put their own systems together from OEM parts need to understand how little it is that we are really doing. Its not that different from buying a box from Dell or whoever (aside from saving money, that is).
They're dead already. Its just a matter of snapping together pre-built modules. Sure more stuff will get built onto the motherboard, but thats been happening for a while. Remember when you had to get a seperate IO card for serial/parallel ports, IDE, floppy, etc.?
Either way its a far cry from soldering your own system together.
How will the (no doubt) massive investment of government money involved in developing instruments of war like this improve human society? Even if you believe that wars and military power can improve the world, you must concede that the United States already has by far the most technologically advanced military in the world, and even without devices like this no other country can seriously challenge the United States in a conventional war (and no amount of technological superiority can ultimately stop fanatics armed with box cutters). And every cent that funds new high-tech killing instruments is one cent that doesn't go to fight very serious problems of disease, starvation, and poverty.