... which is exactly what I did with DVD. Had I jumped early and got a digital video player I may have been talked into Divx by the pushy salesman.
Same held true for a DVD burner...
How are these the same?
FACT: If you bought Divx discs for a Divx player -- you would be left out in the cold. Those disc do not work anymore.
If you bought a DVD recorder 2 years ago (I did), you would today be out in the cold? How?? The only way I see is if you got blank media as a GIFT and it was the wrong format AND you could not return them. Otherwise, what's the problem?
Arguably -R has a higher compatability with the installation base than +R, so although my new burner does both formats, I still buy -R.
Why? Easy: 1) -R is more compatible with "what's out there" 2) +R media costs more
I'm just amazed how many people succumbed to FUD spread by the +RW group, over format "compatability". The issue doesn't exist.
For SW states, most of the rain comes during short severe thunderstorms when maybe several inches can fall in an hour. For northwest, they can have the same inches spread across several days of drizzle.
There's also the issue of absorption. Dry, baked clay for soil is terrible for soaking up water quickly. Water accumulates on the surface, resulting in a flash flood. When arid regions get a heavy rainfall, watch out! There's also no plant root system to hold the soil together.
Other
Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ
on
A Dual Monitor Experiment
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· Score: 3, Insightful
But don't try to pass it off as anything except self-promotion, as if all of us are idiots who won't catch on.
Someone obviously fits your description of not catching on.. the article was posted...
YES! Funny, I've had the same discussion here with some folks. Everything about his acting could be, well, 100% acting (and he doesn't believe a word he says).. but it's really hard to carry that off all the time. You have to feel for what you act sometimes (especially for improv), so you get a sense he's not some dogma-ridden liberal. He even packages his views in the form of comedy, because we all know conservatives have a monopoly on unbiased "news";-)
For the first term, I think it would be better to have Jon Stewart as running mate to... George Carlin!
They'd get my vote. We may as well have our kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.
This may come sooner than you think. Key Republicans are discussing changing the Constitution to allow people not born in the USA to run for President. This has nothing to do with filthy campaign money being filtered into our country by certain countries of course (like they'd repeal it after Arnie is elected??).
Frankly, seriously proposing this kind of change smells of borderline treason. Funny how the far-right used to be nationalistic, and now they advocate "global" ideas, as all the American companies become more global (and LESS American)
Users of the Google Desktop Search software beware -- it indexes your files across all users on your PC, bypassing user protections.
This is just too misleading to be accidental. Talk about bias.
So dioscaido, you are suggesting Google defeats NTFS users/groups directory permissions and encryption?
No?
Oh.
Yeah, that's what I thought. Completely irresponsible journalism at work folks.
Basically this utility works NO DIFFERENT than "Start-->Search-->Search IN files", except that noobs don't know how to use Search properly, and Google search is "prettier". Oh, and MS's brain dead Search can't peek inside compressed files. Whoopie-do.
If I were more cynical, I'd chalk this fear-mongering up to someone with a lot of Yahoo stock, or someone afraid their wife/husband will find email evidence of an extra-marital affair. By default in Windows, ALL USERS CAN READ EACH OTHER'S FILES.
To improve traffic, we need to continue putting the emphasis on low-fuel consumption and on quality mass-transit.
Damn! What a great idea.. I bet some modernized public transportation would be CHEAPER too!
Unfortunately, we'll never have a great alternative to the car. Not because people value the "freedom" of a car so much -- better public transportation != taking away your keys. It's just right now there's so much profit potential in consumption, and the government heeds lobbyists more than "planning for the future" (which some dare call communism).
I really fear for my country when gas DOES hit $5 a gallon. Everything is so spread out as to make public transport almost impossible.
You might, but why not run a super-low-noise fan just for sanity's sake?
The Mobile Athlons are unlocked, so you could run one at a lower MHz, which will let it run cooler. You can try lowering the voltage some, which will make a bigger difference still!
If you try fanless, I would at LEAST put a duct over the cpu in such a way that the power supply or case fan is pulling air over the CPU.
Would you consider Shrek or the Pixar films to be "over-engineered," because they rely on 3D computer-generated animation?
No. I don't see the comparison being exact because:
These stories hold up on their own
They do not contain (in my opinion) glaring artifacts from an attempt at mimicing life... because they don't try to immitate life! Despite using the latest technology, they are (IMO) closer to the "old games" of 2D days.. the way they are done.
In other words, it's believable we could have seen Toy Story as a hand-drawn animation; if the idea existed but the technology did not, someone still would have made it. The 3D rendering is icing on the cake.. it's not trying to be the cake.
3D is standard for games today, but a lot of them still have not worked out AI, movements, etc.
OK I am 34 and it is fair to say I don't buy a lot of games anymore, but then again I never did. I always preferred games that lasted forever, like the original Civilization. When Doom came along that changed things and I enjoyed it because it's much more fun hunting each other.
Here's my point: Older games LOOK like games. Suspension of disbelief was not necessary or even possible when dealing with flat-shaded 2D characters. I think back then gameplay testing was more important.. because there wasn't anything else to sweat over! There were no cameras, polygons, or anything just simple fun.
A lot of the games I see today are over-engineered.
Look at this way. Animation technology has come a LONG way, but does the anime industry rely exclusively on 3D computer generated images? Nope. Sure, 2D shaders are applied to some 3D objects then blended in with the 2D animation. And most 2D animation is done on a computer now. BUT it still *feels* like what came before it.
I don't really want a computer simulation of the outside world. I'd rather be out, in it.
Ah, yes, the lovely irony of a security company outsourcing their own product's security.
Nothing like trusting your future to some shady fly-by-night low-bidder who's not an employee. Whoever at Netgear argued this process saves money, I almost pity you. Almost.
Although in this case, you can't argue that specs called FOR a backdoor... but maybe there were no specs at all.
I don't blame them for this "quick fix".. as a longtime Software QA engineer I can tell you it takes more than 1 day to test something, unless you're willing to accept the risk that the fix could be worse. I'm willing to bet the OEM developer is probably just a one or two man shop, has no QA and might not even have source code control.
off-topic: I run m0n0wall, a BSD distribution just for firewalls & routers. It doesn't need a hard drive so it's quiet.
I even yanked the CPU fan off the AMD K6/450 it is running on. CAUTION: passive cooling a CPU risks burning out the processor. To prevent this I fitted a stock AMD CPU sink from an Athlon 1800, and made a small duct for the power supply to draw air over the CPU (this was an OLD old ATX case with the PS directly above the CPU so it was easy).
Works great!
Too bad you can't upload monowall into consumer routers. I think this is the next step. Some vendor will start making it very easy to do such a thing (discoveries like the Linksys WRT54G hacking do not count).
Anyone else misled by the headline "Windows Users Fear Korgo Virus"?
At first I thought, "Oh, this must be some law that penalizes people who get infected, because their PC is promiscious." Or it was some kind of educational campaign to get people to buy a firewall or router.
I mean, Windows users fearing a virus?? Isn't that a sea change.
Most people who fear viruses and worms are the techies and help desk folks... who have to clean up after the fear-less.
Every so often, I hear about the Free State Project, and chuckle. It's right up there with those Texans that argue about the legality of annexing Texas from Mexico, therefore they are independent. Or the "don't pay your IRS taxes the IRS isn't really legal" crowd. [/me plays the Twilight Zone theme...]
Forgive me for not reading all of the rhetoric, but do any of these people actually LIVE in New Hampshire?? Or even visited the state?
I don't see what 20,000 "free" people would do to the legal, cultural or political makeup of New Hampshire. I'm sure they get TWICE that many "Mass liberals" moving up to shirk mass taxes. Most people in NH are Mass exiles living between the Mass border and Manchester NH. I know because I've lived around both sides of the NH border for 34 years (and remember 31 or so:)
I wouldn't be surprised if 40% of NH residents worked in Mass, because they actually have schools, and in turn, better jobs. No one wants a career in a retail mall.
Um, the USPS is actually a model government service.
Their costs are low considering they're legally bound to providing universal service. A private company could "save" costs by not delivering to unprofitable districts, but we'd probably lose something as a nation. I don't know what executive pay is in the USPS, but I'd wager it isn't as off-kilter as Enron was. The USPS is quite accountable for its expenses.
Amtrak is another bad example. Even the people who cheerleaded the privitization roadmap for Amtrak did not intend to see Amtrak get where it is. Amtrak is so underfunded it is dropping routes, and skipping maintanance on expensive parts which means higher costs later. Poorly maintained train tracks means it's not safe to run over 60MPH so there's a speed penalty taking them... no one takes them unless they have to.
The current Amtrak will never get us 100+ mph routes, at which point it becomes competitive with driving.
A much better example of ineptitude would have been the IRS.
I've seen some articles quote that 40% of federal income tax revenue is lost on pure overhead. Plus there is no backup collection method if the 40 year old master database crashes (possible, and no one understands the damn thing). It will never get fixed.
I always thought, liberal or conservative, it made more sense to AUTOMATE the federal tax by eliminating the paperwork and going to a sales tax model (excepting food and medicine of course), and if the overhead was 5-10% instead of 40% that's quite an improvement.
And if you are going to add new features, try intergrating bit torrent into mozilla since it seems to be the new default download format why the hell are you upgrading FTP?
Because it is the second most common protocol link found in web pages?
BitTorrent is complex, and, as I found out when getting Fedora CD's... most GUI Bit Torrent clients suck. The model for a BT client is much more difficult to express, and no one's done it (case in point: autodetection of your upload cap, and smarter traffic shaping).
You might as well ask Mozilla to embed a media player.
Now, it would be NICE if things were different in the world, and they could move on to SFTP & SCP instead. Thanks to Microsoft's lax attitude towards security, no Windows OS ships with a SSH client, and gets lots of folks relying on Telnet and Ftp.
Anyways, it's hard to take your post seriously when your login handle name marks you as a total asshole.
I hate to rain on people's parades, but if you're making a system dual-boot with Windows, the conservative/safe thing to do is NOT install a bootloader.
Just use the one that comes with NT/XP. Of course it is limited in features (esp. compared to GRUB) but it works.
It's not a ton of work either: Write a LILO bootloader to a partition, use 'dd' to copy that to a file (floppy helps), copy the "file" to Windows, and edit boot.ini to point to it.
Sure, it's not automated, but we're talking just a few steps, and then your're 100% confident that the next upgrade of Windows will not choke.
It would be nice if the PC industry could get "all OS vendors" to agree to universal bootloader, and maybe even get it in the BIOS, but the situation is what it is. You've got to be very careful when dual booting, especially with BETA software.
Sounds like the GRUB and kernel people need to work closer together. I don't know about GRUB, but the kernel has some pretty good testsuites so I am surprised this was not caught by the Linux Test Project (LTP). I'm hearing it's actually a 2.6 kernel problem, and since not a lot of people have upgraded to 2.6 we're hearing about it now.
>Build a house using wood and shingles? Good lord no, we like to use bricks, slate and mortar over here in Blighty.
So you have lots of 500 year old homes eh?
Good. Now tell me, when they were build exactly what percentage were BUILT by what we call the middle class?
Oh yeah. There was no middle class, and the middle/poor had straw roofs. Where are their homes now?
Building a home out of wood is not foolish -- the best building material in ANY land is what is most commonly available.
You don't HAVE any choice in the matter -- on your island, wooden structures rot & expire before the owner does. I've been to Sherwood Forest, and there's enough trees to not build a doghouse.
Here, a wooden house lasts a "mere" 100-200 years and at that time it's past due date. Who cares?
We take pride in the fact that 60% of our society actually OWN their home, rather than living in a run down flat. Stone is arguably a nicer material, but it's not practical on larger scales.
Sometimes when you're looking down your nose at others you might realize only a minority of your population is the king of their own castle...
Why dedicate time (and presumably money) to continue the lock-in Microsoft Office and similar apps have in the workplace, rather than dedicating that time to make existing F/OSS software better, thereby removing the lock?
Because F/OSS community does not write vertical applications. They also have no idea what "in-house" applications your company has developed. Maybe it's even little niche applications the F/OSS community disparage as "shareware" (yet no one writes on Linux... at least not yet!)
Those things lock you down to Windows. Running Office is just a formality now that OpenOffice is rockin da house, at $0...
Windows is about as solid as jello as a release platform. Many applications introduce their own DLL upgrades which makes it difficult to say that this is a pure XP SP1 or that was Win2K SP4
I don't find that to be so true anymore. Microsoft has fixed much of the DLL madness in XP, 2K (and a small bit in ME). Applications install their own DLL's -- but not as often, and the DLL's are versioned.
It still sucks having to test applications against Windows 95/98/2000/XP/ME/NT4, but the newer platforms I find are more stable.
And in SQA, you're really qualifying against a base MS OS, updated, plus a few popular applications like PC Anywhere.
Many WINE users customize their installs with native DLLs or newer WINE... even qualifying basic RedHat 8 or 9 is a quagmire. Then there's the WINE dependencies, fonts, etc. If the rendering is off, then things like dialogs have clipped text.
WINE's great stuff, and I'm always thrilled to see something I didn't expect, work for me. The problem is the end-user experience is out of the WINE developer's hands.
This experience, of course, is part of the CodeWeaver's (and other WINE packagers) mission. Maybe in the future, we'll be able to qualify a packaged commercial release of WINE. Of course, things would still work in regular WINE, but just with less support from vendors (hey lots of us WANT to support Linux, but testing costs us money)
Is there any talk with Rational, Segue, or another automated test tools vendor about recording/playback automated test using WINE as a target platform?
Windows vendors want delivery targets - not "date releases" of runtime platforms. I work in Software QA... you tell me you want the app certified on Windows XP SP1, Windows NT4 SP6a, and Windows 2000... I'll do it. Same with Windows 98, ME, and 95.
But you start talking about Linux, and then I have to ask which base distribution and which release of Wine.
The only way to know your application works in Linux + WINE is lots and lots of grueling, manual test effort.
Multiply this by the number of Linux distributions, versions, and that Wine is often distributed by "date releases" not "versions", and it is impossible to support.
The same can be said about Microsoft's systems... wierd things that crash on 98 but work on XP... BUT there are automated test tools. Record, edit, cleanup and you have an automated test library that can be run against every 32-bit Intel version of Windows.
There's no such support for WINE, and there's no developer incentive into manually auditing such a liquid platform.*
*(And that's not an insult.. I happen to think most of the innovation is happening on Linux, but my job's hard enough without putting extra hours testing a platform that won't make or break sales. Without real SQA certification tools, any sensible Technical Support manager won't touch WINE either.)
I see that process as more likely to work the other way round, and I'm sure I've seen cases of this reported on Slashdot and elsewhere - OpenOffice (sorry, OSOffice) running under Windows is the first step towards change
I think your statement is more true if the only step to conversion, is Office.
You're right that Office is not the "dealbreaker" anymore... OpenOffice is great. Not perfect, but great.:-)
Plenty of environments will want to stay with Office if they already paid for it. At least until the next round of major upgrading. This still means WINE.
More likely still, companies often have in-house applications created in Visual Basic, etc. probably developed by consultants who kept rights to the sourcecode. Recycling those binaries under WINE is key.
Office was probably a bad example by the parent poster.
Now, a MS Windows *theme converter* would probably win legions of Windows converts.:-)
>Why do you say that JPEG is the best image format for photographs?
Quick - which is "better", popping in a DVD movie and watching about 2 hours worth of allegedly inferior, "lossy" video... OR... watching uncompressed DVD video for about, oh, 150 seconds?
Going on a limb here... but I'll wager the parent poster meant JPG is the best format for *client/server transmission of photographic data*.
JPG is a delivery format -- especially on the web -- and patents on delivery are what spooks most people.
JPG is only used for acquisition on digital cameras. Your point about storage technology making uncompressed capture more feasable IS true, but that only is relevent if image size remains static. Storage demands will continue to outpace storage technology for a looong time...
The local CompUSA is trying to hawk a 500 MHz icebook for $1000... It's a loaded machine, too. 10 GB Hard Drive. CD Rom, 128 Megabytes of memory. And it runs 9.2.2 like a dream.
Ouch. What a rip.
I've got that exact model.. I think we paid that much for it EIGHTEEN MONTHS ago.
While the video chip is fluid and the OS IS very smooth... it's unsuitable for games, video, and probably Photoshop. Reboots do take forever, but those are rarely needed.
Development, web, email, and OpenOffice (X11 version) all run fine in OS X 10.2. I've yet to have the OS crash on me.
Slashdot Mirror
... which is exactly what I did with DVD. Had I jumped early and got a digital video player I may have been talked into Divx by the pushy salesman.
Same held true for a DVD burner...
How are these the same?
FACT:
If you bought Divx discs for a Divx player -- you would be left out in the cold. Those disc do not work anymore.
If you bought a DVD recorder 2 years ago (I did), you would today be out in the cold? How?? The only way I see is if you got blank media as a GIFT and it was the wrong format AND you could not return them. Otherwise, what's the problem?
Arguably -R has a higher compatability with the installation base than +R, so although my new burner does both formats, I still buy -R.
Why? Easy:
1) -R is more compatible with "what's out there"
2) +R media costs more
I'm just amazed how many people succumbed to FUD spread by the +RW group, over format "compatability". The issue doesn't exist.
For SW states, most of the rain comes during short severe thunderstorms when maybe several inches can fall in an hour. For northwest, they can have the same inches spread across several days of drizzle.
There's also the issue of absorption. Dry, baked clay for soil is terrible for soaking up water quickly. Water accumulates on the surface, resulting in a flash flood. When arid regions get a heavy rainfall, watch out! There's also no plant root system to hold the soil together.
Other
But don't try to pass it off as anything except self-promotion, as if all of us are idiots who won't catch on.
Someone obviously fits your description of not catching on.. the article was posted...
His running mate? Lewis Black
;-)
YES! Funny, I've had the same discussion here with some folks. Everything about his acting could be, well, 100% acting (and he doesn't believe a word he says).. but it's really hard to carry that off all the time. You have to feel for what you act sometimes (especially for improv), so you get a sense he's not some dogma-ridden liberal. He even packages his views in the form of comedy, because we all know conservatives have a monopoly on unbiased "news"
For the first term, I think it would be better to have Jon Stewart as running mate to... George Carlin!
They'd get my vote. We may as well have our kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.
This may come sooner than you think. Key Republicans are discussing changing the Constitution to allow people not born in the USA to run for President. This has nothing to do with filthy campaign money being filtered into our country by certain countries of course (like they'd repeal it after Arnie is elected??).
Frankly, seriously proposing this kind of change smells of borderline treason. Funny how the far-right used to be nationalistic, and now they advocate "global" ideas, as all the American companies become more global (and LESS American)
Users of the Google Desktop Search software beware -- it indexes your files across all users on your PC, bypassing user protections.
This is just too misleading to be accidental. Talk about bias.
So dioscaido, you are suggesting Google defeats NTFS users/groups directory permissions and encryption?
No?
Oh.
Yeah, that's what I thought. Completely irresponsible journalism at work folks.
Basically this utility works NO DIFFERENT than "Start-->Search-->Search IN files", except that noobs don't know how to use Search properly, and Google search is "prettier". Oh, and MS's brain dead Search can't peek inside compressed files. Whoopie-do.
If I were more cynical, I'd chalk this fear-mongering up to someone with a lot of Yahoo stock, or someone afraid their wife/husband will find email evidence of an extra-marital affair. By default in Windows, ALL USERS CAN READ EACH OTHER'S FILES.
Nothing to see here, move along..
DISCLAIMER: I own no Google or Yahoo stock.
Somehow this whole thread leaves me feeling so inferior.
At least you still have your wife.
Damn! What a great idea.. I bet some modernized public transportation would be CHEAPER too!
Unfortunately, we'll never have a great alternative to the car. Not because people value the "freedom" of a car so much -- better public transportation != taking away your keys. It's just right now there's so much profit potential in consumption, and the government heeds lobbyists more than "planning for the future" (which some dare call communism).
I really fear for my country when gas DOES hit $5 a gallon. Everything is so spread out as to make public transport almost impossible.
You might, but why not run a super-low-noise fan just for sanity's sake?
The Mobile Athlons are unlocked, so you could run one at a lower MHz, which will let it run cooler. You can try lowering the voltage some, which will make a bigger difference still!
If you try fanless, I would at LEAST put a duct over the cpu in such a way that the power supply or case fan is pulling air over the CPU.
I'm still wondering if I should wait for dual layer or just go ahead and buy a single layer writer now.
Why would you wonder???
If you price these around, you'll notice there's about a $15 difference between SL and DL DVD recorders.
It's pretty much a no brainer, unless you only shop at Best Buy where they probably dont even have the DL drives.
Get the DL drive, use it for SL until the price of media drops. Simple.
Hopefully MSN will pick up where Google left off and provide free unbiased stats
Are you implying MSN is not Fair and Balanced?
No. I don't see the comparison being exact because:
In other words, it's believable we could have seen Toy Story as a hand-drawn animation; if the idea existed but the technology did not, someone still would have made it. The 3D rendering is icing on the cake.. it's not trying to be the cake.
3D is standard for games today, but a lot of them still have not worked out AI, movements, etc.
OK I am 34 and it is fair to say I don't buy a lot of games anymore, but then again I never did. I always preferred games that lasted forever, like the original Civilization. When Doom came along that changed things and I enjoyed it because it's much more fun hunting each other.
Here's my point:
Older games LOOK like games. Suspension of disbelief was not necessary or even possible when dealing with flat-shaded 2D characters. I think back then gameplay testing was more important.. because there wasn't anything else to sweat over! There were no cameras, polygons, or anything just simple fun.
A lot of the games I see today are over-engineered.
Look at this way. Animation technology has come a LONG way, but does the anime industry rely exclusively on 3D computer generated images? Nope. Sure, 2D shaders are applied to some 3D objects then blended in with the 2D animation. And most 2D animation is done on a computer now. BUT it still *feels* like what came before it.
I don't really want a computer simulation of the outside world. I'd rather be out, in it.
Ah, yes, the lovely irony of a security company outsourcing their own product's security.
Nothing like trusting your future to some shady fly-by-night low-bidder who's not an employee. Whoever at Netgear argued this process saves money, I almost pity you. Almost.
Although in this case, you can't argue that specs called FOR a backdoor... but maybe there were no specs at all.
I don't blame them for this "quick fix".. as a longtime Software QA engineer I can tell you it takes more than 1 day to test something, unless you're willing to accept the risk that the fix could be worse. I'm willing to bet the OEM developer is probably just a one or two man shop, has no QA and might not even have source code control.
off-topic:
I run m0n0wall, a BSD distribution just for firewalls & routers. It doesn't need a hard drive so it's quiet.
I even yanked the CPU fan off the AMD K6/450 it is running on. CAUTION: passive cooling a CPU risks burning out the processor. To prevent this I fitted a stock AMD CPU sink from an Athlon 1800, and made a small duct for the power supply to draw air over the CPU (this was an OLD old ATX case with the PS directly above the CPU so it was easy).
Works great!
Too bad you can't upload monowall into consumer routers. I think this is the next step. Some vendor will start making it very easy to do such a thing (discoveries like the Linksys WRT54G hacking do not count).
Anyone else misled by the headline "Windows Users Fear Korgo Virus"?
At first I thought, "Oh, this must be some law that penalizes people who get infected, because their PC is promiscious." Or it was some kind of educational campaign to get people to buy a firewall or router.
I mean, Windows users fearing a virus?? Isn't that a sea change.
Most people who fear viruses and worms are the techies and help desk folks... who have to clean up after the fear-less.
Every so often, I hear about the Free State Project, and chuckle. It's right up there with those Texans that argue about the legality of annexing Texas from Mexico, therefore they are independent. Or the "don't pay your IRS taxes the IRS isn't really legal" crowd. [/me plays the Twilight Zone theme...]
:)
Forgive me for not reading all of the rhetoric, but do any of these people actually LIVE in New Hampshire?? Or even visited the state?
I don't see what 20,000 "free" people would do to the legal, cultural or political makeup of New Hampshire. I'm sure they get TWICE that many "Mass liberals" moving up to shirk mass taxes. Most people in NH are Mass exiles living between the Mass border and Manchester NH. I know because I've lived around both sides of the NH border for 34 years (and remember 31 or so
I wouldn't be surprised if 40% of NH residents worked in Mass, because they actually have schools, and in turn, better jobs. No one wants a career in a retail mall.
Um, the USPS is actually a model government service.
Their costs are low considering they're legally bound to providing universal service. A private company could "save" costs by not delivering to unprofitable districts, but we'd probably lose something as a nation. I don't know what executive pay is in the USPS, but I'd wager it isn't as off-kilter as Enron was. The USPS is quite accountable for its expenses.
Amtrak is another bad example. Even the people who cheerleaded the privitization roadmap for Amtrak did not intend to see Amtrak get where it is. Amtrak is so underfunded it is dropping routes, and skipping maintanance on expensive parts which means higher costs later. Poorly maintained train tracks means it's not safe to run over 60MPH so there's a speed penalty taking them... no one takes them unless they have to.
The current Amtrak will never get us 100+ mph routes, at which point it becomes competitive with driving.
A much better example of ineptitude would have been the IRS.
I've seen some articles quote that 40% of federal income tax revenue is lost on pure overhead. Plus there is no backup collection method if the 40 year old master database crashes (possible, and no one understands the damn thing). It will never get fixed.
I always thought, liberal or conservative, it made more sense to AUTOMATE the federal tax by eliminating the paperwork and going to a sales tax model (excepting food and medicine of course), and if the overhead was 5-10% instead of 40% that's quite an improvement.
And if you are going to add new features, try intergrating bit torrent into mozilla since it seems to be the new default download format why the hell are you upgrading FTP?
Because it is the second most common protocol link found in web pages?
BitTorrent is complex, and, as I found out when getting Fedora CD's... most GUI Bit Torrent clients suck. The model for a BT client is much more difficult to express, and no one's done it (case in point: autodetection of your upload cap, and smarter traffic shaping).
You might as well ask Mozilla to embed a media player.
Now, it would be NICE if things were different in the world, and they could move on to SFTP & SCP instead. Thanks to Microsoft's lax attitude towards security, no Windows OS ships with a SSH client, and gets lots of folks relying on Telnet and Ftp.
Anyways, it's hard to take your post seriously when your login handle name marks you as a total asshole.
I hate to rain on people's parades, but if you're making a system dual-boot with Windows, the conservative/safe thing to do is NOT install a bootloader.
Just use the one that comes with NT/XP. Of course it is limited in features (esp. compared to GRUB) but it works.
It's not a ton of work either:
Write a LILO bootloader to a partition, use 'dd' to copy that to a file (floppy helps), copy the "file" to Windows, and edit boot.ini to point to it.
Sure, it's not automated, but we're talking just a few steps, and then your're 100% confident that the next upgrade of Windows will not choke.
It would be nice if the PC industry could get "all OS vendors" to agree to universal bootloader, and maybe even get it in the BIOS, but the situation is what it is. You've got to be very careful when dual booting, especially with BETA software.
Sounds like the GRUB and kernel people need to work closer together. I don't know about GRUB, but the kernel has some pretty good testsuites so I am surprised this was not caught by the Linux Test Project (LTP). I'm hearing it's actually a 2.6 kernel problem, and since not a lot of people have upgraded to 2.6 we're hearing about it now.
>Build a house using wood and shingles? Good lord no, we like to use bricks, slate and mortar over here in Blighty.
So you have lots of 500 year old homes eh?
Good. Now tell me, when they were build exactly what percentage were BUILT by what we call the middle class?
Oh yeah. There was no middle class, and the middle/poor had straw roofs. Where are their homes now?
Building a home out of wood is not foolish -- the best building material in ANY land is what is most commonly available.
You don't HAVE any choice in the matter -- on your island, wooden structures rot & expire before the owner does. I've been to Sherwood Forest, and there's enough trees to not build a doghouse.
Here, a wooden house lasts a "mere" 100-200 years and at that time it's past due date. Who cares?
We take pride in the fact that 60% of our society actually OWN their home, rather than living in a run down flat. Stone is arguably a nicer material, but it's not practical on larger scales.
Sometimes when you're looking down your nose at others you might realize only a minority of your population is the king of their own castle...
Why dedicate time (and presumably money) to continue the lock-in Microsoft Office and similar apps have in the workplace, rather than dedicating that time to make existing F/OSS software better, thereby removing the lock?
Because F/OSS community does not write vertical applications. They also have no idea what "in-house" applications your company has developed. Maybe it's even little niche applications the F/OSS community disparage as "shareware" (yet no one writes on Linux... at least not yet!)
Those things lock you down to Windows. Running Office is just a formality now that OpenOffice is rockin da house, at $0...
Windows is about as solid as jello as a release platform. Many applications introduce their own DLL upgrades which makes it difficult to say that this is a pure XP SP1 or that was Win2K SP4
I don't find that to be so true anymore. Microsoft has fixed much of the DLL madness in XP, 2K (and a small bit in ME). Applications install their own DLL's -- but not as often, and the DLL's are versioned.
It still sucks having to test applications against Windows 95/98/2000/XP/ME/NT4, but the newer platforms I find are more stable.
And in SQA, you're really qualifying against a base MS OS, updated, plus a few popular applications like PC Anywhere.
Many WINE users customize their installs with native DLLs or newer WINE... even qualifying basic RedHat 8 or 9 is a quagmire. Then there's the WINE dependencies, fonts, etc. If the rendering is off, then things like dialogs have clipped text.
WINE's great stuff, and I'm always thrilled to see something I didn't expect, work for me. The problem is the end-user experience is out of the WINE developer's hands.
This experience, of course, is part of the CodeWeaver's (and other WINE packagers) mission. Maybe in the future, we'll be able to qualify a packaged commercial release of WINE. Of course, things would still work in regular WINE, but just with less support from vendors (hey lots of us WANT to support Linux, but testing costs us money)
Cheers.
Is there any talk with Rational, Segue, or another automated test tools vendor about recording/playback automated test using WINE as a target platform?
Windows vendors want delivery targets - not "date releases" of runtime platforms. I work in Software QA... you tell me you want the app certified on Windows XP SP1, Windows NT4 SP6a, and Windows 2000... I'll do it. Same with Windows 98, ME, and 95.
But you start talking about Linux, and then I have to ask which base distribution and which release of Wine.
The only way to know your application works in Linux + WINE is lots and lots of grueling, manual test effort.
Multiply this by the number of Linux distributions, versions, and that Wine is often distributed by "date releases" not "versions", and it is impossible to support.
The same can be said about Microsoft's systems... wierd things that crash on 98 but work on XP... BUT there are automated test tools. Record, edit, cleanup and you have an automated test library that can be run against every 32-bit Intel version of Windows.
There's no such support for WINE, and there's no developer incentive into manually auditing such a liquid platform.*
*(And that's not an insult.. I happen to think most of the innovation is happening on Linux, but my job's hard enough without putting extra hours testing a platform that won't make or break sales. Without real SQA certification tools, any sensible Technical Support manager won't touch WINE either.)
I see that process as more likely to work the other way round, and I'm sure I've seen cases of this reported on Slashdot and elsewhere - OpenOffice (sorry, OSOffice) running under Windows is the first step towards change
:-)
:-)
I think your statement is more true if the only step to conversion, is Office.
You're right that Office is not the "dealbreaker" anymore... OpenOffice is great. Not perfect, but great.
Plenty of environments will want to stay with Office if they already paid for it. At least until the next round of major upgrading. This still means WINE.
More likely still, companies often have in-house applications created in Visual Basic, etc. probably developed by consultants who kept rights to the sourcecode. Recycling those binaries under WINE is key.
Office was probably a bad example by the parent poster.
Now, a MS Windows *theme converter* would probably win legions of Windows converts.
>Why do you say that JPEG is the best image format for photographs?
Quick - which is "better", popping in a DVD movie and watching about 2 hours worth of allegedly inferior, "lossy" video... OR... watching uncompressed DVD video for about, oh, 150 seconds?
Going on a limb here... but I'll wager the parent poster meant JPG is the best format for *client/server transmission of photographic data*.
JPG is a delivery format -- especially on the web -- and patents on delivery are what spooks most people.
JPG is only used for acquisition on digital cameras. Your point about storage technology making uncompressed capture more feasable IS true, but that only is relevent if image size remains static. Storage demands will continue to outpace storage technology for a looong time...
The local CompUSA is trying to hawk a 500 MHz icebook for $1000... It's a loaded machine, too. 10 GB Hard Drive. CD Rom, 128 Megabytes of memory. And it runs 9.2.2 like a dream.
Ouch. What a rip.
I've got that exact model.. I think we paid that much for it EIGHTEEN MONTHS ago.
While the video chip is fluid and the OS IS very smooth... it's unsuitable for games, video, and probably Photoshop. Reboots do take forever, but those are rarely needed.
Development, web, email, and OpenOffice (X11 version) all run fine in OS X 10.2. I've yet to have the OS crash on me.