And if those two cases are all you're using your computer for than Linux may be fine. The problem is that I think the average user does a bit more, like video editing (my uncle, a computer novice does this).
It's funny you should mention video editing, as that was one of the things that was keeping me tied somewhat to Windows. Early in the Linux transition, I got apps such as DVD Decrypter, TMPGEnc, and VirtualDub working under Wine. Now, though, I've found that native apps such as vobcopy, mencoder, and avidemux offer comparable (or even better) functionality. In particular, avidemux combines into one Linux app functionality (editing of both AVI and MPEG files, effects, compression in multiple formats) that would take multiple Windows apps to duplicate...and the Windows apps probably won't even be free-as-in-beer, let alone free-as-in-speech.
There will be a learning curve for the Linux video-editing apps, but there'll be a learning curve associated with most non-trivial apps on any platform. There was a learning curve associated with the Windows video-editing apps I used, and I've been working with computers in one way or another for 25 years now.
Your wife uses it because you are there to help her. Throw it at your grandfather and see how many calls you get. Especially when KMail makes your emails disappear because it fucking up the index file, yet again.
Firefox and Thunderbird work pretty much the same way under Linux (and Mac OS X, for that matter) as they do under Windows. The only differences that come to mind are the location of Options... (under Tools on Windows, View on Linux, and the program name on Mac OS X) and About [Firefox|Thunderbird] (under Help on Windows and Linux and under the program name on Mac OS X). Odds are they'll never go into those menu options once you get everything up and running.
OpenOffice also tends to mostly work the same way under Windows and Linux. (I've not tried running it (or NeoOffice) under Mac OS X yet.)
(I would've posted this yesterday, but/. was "down for database maintenance" for several hours, starting around the time I wrote this.)
Nor does Xen have anything to do with VMWare being free -- because it's not. Yes, VMWare Server is free, but VMWare workstation is still $189
Is there any reason why someone would fork over close to $200 for VMware Workstation when VMware Player (and, more recently, Server) are free-as-in-beer? I'll allow that setting up VMware Player from scratch requires a bit of digging around for tools to create the VM, but VMware Server has this capability built-in. Does VMware Workstation offer better hardware support (such as USB 2.0 controllers, which Player (at least) handles as USB 1.1 devices)? Does it offer more guest-OS choices? I've been running (x86) Win2K under VMware Player on AMD64 Linux for a while now, and it does most of what I want it to do (the only nit being that high-speed USB devices are stuck talking to the VM at 12 Mbps instead of 480).
OTOH, there is QEMU, which will run a whole slew of guest OSes on Linux or any other OS without modifications to either the host or the guest. Add in the (unfortunately) non-Free QEMU accelerator, and you've got an virtualized Windows (XP or 2000) that runs as well as it would with VMWare.
In theory. In practice, I've found that VMware is significantly faster and more responsive than QEMU, even with kqemu installed. Getting kqemu running is particularly tricky; I never got it working with a Win98 VM. It worked with a Win2K VM, but even seemingly simple stuff like a mouse-click would get lost if you clicked too quickly.
A Win2K or Win98 VM running under VMware, OTOH, is as responsive (AFAICT) to user input as it would be running natively. The mouse pointer freely moves between the VM and the host system (a nice touch for usability), and the VM desktop resizes itself when the window containing it is resized. If the window is maximized, the VM is resized to full-screen.
Network support, whether bridged or routed, is also much simpler to get running under VMware than QEMU. For QEMU, I had to chase down all sorts of weird tools and do unnatural things with Gentoo's network config files and init scripts to get bridged networking set up. With VMware, it only took one or two lines in the VM's config file.
VMware virtualizes Windows well enough that my notebook only boots into Linux now. I've set up a Win2K VM with Street Atlas USA Handheld, Palm Desktop, iTunes, and a couple of homebrewing apps (ProMash and HCCP, specifically). It'll sync maps and routes into my Treo and music into my iPod without any trouble (though USB 2.0 support would be nice). For everything else (web/mail, office stuff, video editing, coding), there's Linux. I had ProMash and HCCP running under QEMU, but I don't know if it would've been up to running the apps that need to talk to USB devices, so I had to dual-boot. (I also kept Windows bootable because my notebook's built-in WiFi wasn't supported by Linux until 2.6.17 was released.)
Did you actually read the Washington Post article I linked to?
Sorry, but I don't waste my time with non-credible news sources. You might consider doing the same. You might also want to check that your "reality" isn't being distorted by the left-wing noise machine before you put your foot in your mouth again.
or even from 2k to XP (better support for a lot of hardware).
Last I checked, the driver subsystem for windows 2000 and windows xp was identical. Ever wondered why all of the drivers you download for it say "2k/xp" instead of having different drivers for each?
True, but XP has more drivers bundled with it, which means you don't have to dig around for the driver CD or check the manufacturer's website for a driver nearly as often when you go to connect some random bit of new (to you) hardware. In some cases, if WinXP doesn't already have a driver for something, it can go get it (through Windows Update) and install it, again without you having to find & download the driver yourself. This, I suspect, is what the OP meant.
Canada provides the majority of America's imported oil. We're not exactly "shaky" or "unpredictable" or "building weapons of mass destruction" (unless you count moose).
I don't know why the average AOLer is so attached to a crummy username like "joeblow5473@aol.com." Something with a ton of numbers attached to it doesn't lend itself to being easily remembered. (I'm speaking from experience, as I had to hit Google Groups to find that my first email address was saa33413@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (must've been autogenerated by a script). Hell, that's probably even worse than your average AOL address. Needless to say, the addresses that I've had since then have been much simpler.)
The description at the GP's link says rotary, not radial. They probably should've said "Wankel rotary engine" if that's what they meant, though, because "rotary engine" in aviation usage refers to an obsolete engine type similar to a radial engine. In a radial engine, the crankcase is bolted to the airframe and the propeller is bolted to the crankshaft. In a rotary engine, OTOH, the crankshaft is bolted to the airframe and the propeller is bolted to the crankcase. Rotary engines mostly went away after WWI.
For example, it wouldn't be too hard to write a DirectX driver for a virtual display device that simply passes every frame it sees into a filter for recording.
DirectShow already has the Sample Grabber filter, which can be inserted nearly anywhere in a filter graph. Insert it before a renderer and you can capture whatever gets passed to the renderer.
(This assumes that you can construct a filter graph to play a DVD (or whatever) and then modify the graph. It's also not something you'll be able to do from within GraphEdit, as GraphEdit knows nothing about the ISampleGrabber interface.)
So we can speculate that Leopard might not only be fast but also encourage a partitioned Windows installation using boot camp so that it can reference everything within Windows and run Windows apps flawlessly without having to reboot or (more importantly) reverse engineer Windows.
Again, this is just speculation, I've been expecting them to put 'red box' functionality in a release of OS X soon.
I'm not so sure that'd be a smart move on Apple's part. It didn't work out too well for IBM when similar functionality was rolled into OS/2.
Continue reading the parenthetical...I only use real modems with my computers (on the one or two that still have modems at all at this late date).
use pppconfig(8)
Never heard of it, and punching it into a root prompt produces the following:
pppconfig: command not found
It is marked in Portage as an unstable package for AMD64, but there's no documentation (for Gentoo, anyway) that would've led me to it. It appears to have been ported from Debian, which I've never used.
How can you find slashdot and complete miss that dialup ISPs use PPP, and Linux distros almost always come with pppd?
They do, but actually getting it to work can be a pain in the ass. I've had an easier time setting up WiFi and Bluetooth than getting dial-up access working under Linux. Add in that most computers tend to come with winmodems that are anywhere from difficult to impossible to get working under Linux, and you have another wrinkle for the linux n00b to work through.
(Even with the external (RS232) and PC Card modems I've used, getting pppd to work is a bitch. Newer versions of KPPP seem to help somewhat, but that's not going to work too well on a box that has GNOME installed instead of KDE.)
When it comes to the disposition of private property, only the people who own it should get votes. After all, it sounds nice to take someone *else's* private property for your use, but not so nice to take *yours*.
Right. And since we'd need the unanimous consent of about 500 homeowners in order to build any freeway, we can count on never again building a municipal highway in America.
And yet, highways must be built.
Nothing in this executive order (or in state and local laws that are being enacted all over the place) would stop eminent domain for needful public works. If your community needs a new freeway, school, or firehouse, eminent domain is still an option (preferably the option of last resort). What is being stopped is the abuse of eminent domain, such as wiping out a residential neighborhood so that a strip mall can be built in its place that'll pay more in taxes.
Too bad they didn't set out to BUILD our interstate system with the same engineering and materials, to allow us to go at speeds (unlimited in places) safely on all our hwys like they can in Germany.
I thought that had more to do with puritan morality than engineering? Is/was the Autobahn built so differently?
The Autobahn is built differently. The biggest difference is that the road surface throughout the Autobahn system is somewhere around 27 inches thick. Most interstates, by comparison, are only 16-18 inches thick. The extra durability makes for a road that's consistently in better condition, which is why it's no big deal to do 100+ mph with a properly-maintained car over there. OTOH, they're more expensive to build. If the interstates were built to the same spec as the Autobahn, the system wouldn't be nearly as extensive as it is.
I think when this monster comes screaming in at several times the speed of sound, scattering thousands of pounds of explosives behind it in an orgy of death and destruction, "Silent" is probably not the adjective that the survivors (if any) will use to describe it.
It's supersonic. It's traveling faster than the sound it makes. If you're the target for today, by the time you hear it coming, you're already fscked.
Watching video on an iPod or PSP is tolerable at best. I still don't understand the appeal (besides the "BLING" factor) of watching videos on a phone.
The battery life is better than on your notebook, and it's not as much crap to haul out of the overhead storage bin. The tiny screen on your typical cellphone isn't all that great, but the bigger screen on a Treo or similar device is watchable enough.
Virtually all full sized GM pickups with side tanks had the tanks positioned OUTSIDE the frame rails until quite recently (86?). This means on a side impact the tanks can rupture/leak, causing people to potentially die a fiery death in relatively minor accidents. GM decided it was cheaper to pay the claims than issue a recall, since the fix would have been expensive to do. Since they're classed as trucks, they don't have to adhere to the same safety standards cars do (also true of minivans and suv FYI).
You're leaving out the bit where the producers of Dateline NBC, in a bit of creative "investigative journalism," taped some model-rocket engines to the gas tank of a Chevy truck, lit off the engines, and taped the resulting fireball. I suspect the "problem" isn't nearly as severe as you've been led to believe. If there's a liner inside the tank (I don't know if there is, but lack of such a liner was the root of the exploding-Pinto problem), most collisions with it aren't going to result in leaks and/or fires.
Safety advocates and plaintiffs' attorneys claim that 1973 to 1987 G.M. fullsize pickup trucks are "rolling firebombs" because their gas tanks are mounted between the frame and the exterior panels. The Nader-founded Center for Auto Safety wants the feds to force G.M. to recall these trucks, which could cost the company some $500 million.
In a Wall Street Journal column, litigation analyst Walter Olson compared the fatal-crash records of full-size G.M. pickups with those of other vehicles. He found that G.M. trucks were about 10-percent safer than the average passenger car, 50 percent safer than compact pickups, and almost identical in safety to their closest competitors, full- size Ford pickups.
In February, G.M. Iost a $105-million jury verdict in a case involving a fatal side crash. Yet the Georgia 17-year- old whose truck caught fire was hit by a drunk driving nearly 70 miles per hour. G.M. attorneys argued (to no avail) that the teenager probably died before any fire started.
[...]
NBC might as well have been the Nader Broadcasting Corporation on November 17. For its Dateline NBC segment on G.M. pickups, the network hired a trial lawyers' advocacy group to crash the trucks. Testers overfilled one truck's gas tank, used a nonstandard gas cap that popped off on impact, and strapped remote-controlled model-rocket engines to the truck's frame to guarantee a fire.
How did we learn this? Old-fashioned investigative reporting-the free press in action. Pete Pesterre, editor of Popular Hot Rodding, got a tip from a reader that the tests were rigged. Pesterre tracked down the firefighters who witnessed the tests, contacted G.M. attorneys, and helped the company piece together the deception NBC had foisted upon its viewers.
The supa-protect system adds noise signals to all output from your music player. Any recordings of this music will inevitably include this unbearable noise.
You're getting "noise" and "music" mixed up. Understandable, really, given the state of the "music" industry today.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny you should mention video editing, as that was one of the things that was keeping me tied somewhat to Windows. Early in the Linux transition, I got apps such as DVD Decrypter, TMPGEnc, and VirtualDub working under Wine. Now, though, I've found that native apps such as vobcopy, mencoder, and avidemux offer comparable (or even better) functionality. In particular, avidemux combines into one Linux app functionality (editing of both AVI and MPEG files, effects, compression in multiple formats) that would take multiple Windows apps to duplicate...and the Windows apps probably won't even be free-as-in-beer, let alone free-as-in-speech.
There will be a learning curve for the Linux video-editing apps, but there'll be a learning curve associated with most non-trivial apps on any platform. There was a learning curve associated with the Windows video-editing apps I used, and I've been working with computers in one way or another for 25 years now.
Anyone with an IQ above that of a cabbage, perhaps?
Firefox and Thunderbird work pretty much the same way under Linux (and Mac OS X, for that matter) as they do under Windows. The only differences that come to mind are the location of Options... (under Tools on Windows, View on Linux, and the program name on Mac OS X) and About [Firefox|Thunderbird] (under Help on Windows and Linux and under the program name on Mac OS X). Odds are they'll never go into those menu options once you get everything up and running.
OpenOffice also tends to mostly work the same way under Windows and Linux. (I've not tried running it (or NeoOffice) under Mac OS X yet.)
Is there any reason why someone would fork over close to $200 for VMware Workstation when VMware Player (and, more recently, Server) are free-as-in-beer? I'll allow that setting up VMware Player from scratch requires a bit of digging around for tools to create the VM, but VMware Server has this capability built-in. Does VMware Workstation offer better hardware support (such as USB 2.0 controllers, which Player (at least) handles as USB 1.1 devices)? Does it offer more guest-OS choices? I've been running (x86) Win2K under VMware Player on AMD64 Linux for a while now, and it does most of what I want it to do (the only nit being that high-speed USB devices are stuck talking to the VM at 12 Mbps instead of 480).
In theory. In practice, I've found that VMware is significantly faster and more responsive than QEMU, even with kqemu installed. Getting kqemu running is particularly tricky; I never got it working with a Win98 VM. It worked with a Win2K VM, but even seemingly simple stuff like a mouse-click would get lost if you clicked too quickly.
A Win2K or Win98 VM running under VMware, OTOH, is as responsive (AFAICT) to user input as it would be running natively. The mouse pointer freely moves between the VM and the host system (a nice touch for usability), and the VM desktop resizes itself when the window containing it is resized. If the window is maximized, the VM is resized to full-screen.
Network support, whether bridged or routed, is also much simpler to get running under VMware than QEMU. For QEMU, I had to chase down all sorts of weird tools and do unnatural things with Gentoo's network config files and init scripts to get bridged networking set up. With VMware, it only took one or two lines in the VM's config file.
VMware virtualizes Windows well enough that my notebook only boots into Linux now. I've set up a Win2K VM with Street Atlas USA Handheld, Palm Desktop, iTunes, and a couple of homebrewing apps (ProMash and HCCP, specifically). It'll sync maps and routes into my Treo and music into my iPod without any trouble (though USB 2.0 support would be nice). For everything else (web/mail, office stuff, video editing, coding), there's Linux. I had ProMash and HCCP running under QEMU, but I don't know if it would've been up to running the apps that need to talk to USB devices, so I had to dual-boot. (I also kept Windows bootable because my notebook's built-in WiFi wasn't supported by Linux until 2.6.17 was released.)
Sorry, but I don't waste my time with non-credible news sources. You might consider doing the same. You might also want to check that your "reality" isn't being distorted by the left-wing noise machine before you put your foot in your mouth again.
I corrected your opening sentence for you.
You're welcome.
True, but XP has more drivers bundled with it, which means you don't have to dig around for the driver CD or check the manufacturer's website for a driver nearly as often when you go to connect some random bit of new (to you) hardware. In some cases, if WinXP doesn't already have a driver for something, it can go get it (through Windows Update) and install it, again without you having to find & download the driver yourself. This, I suspect, is what the OP meant.
Mynd you, m00se bites kan be pretti nasti...
I don't know why the average AOLer is so attached to a crummy username like "joeblow5473@aol.com." Something with a ton of numbers attached to it doesn't lend itself to being easily remembered. (I'm speaking from experience, as I had to hit Google Groups to find that my first email address was saa33413@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (must've been autogenerated by a script). Hell, that's probably even worse than your average AOL address. Needless to say, the addresses that I've had since then have been much simpler.)
The description at the GP's link says rotary, not radial. They probably should've said "Wankel rotary engine" if that's what they meant, though, because "rotary engine" in aviation usage refers to an obsolete engine type similar to a radial engine. In a radial engine, the crankcase is bolted to the airframe and the propeller is bolted to the crankshaft. In a rotary engine, OTOH, the crankshaft is bolted to the airframe and the propeller is bolted to the crankcase. Rotary engines mostly went away after WWI.
DirectShow already has the Sample Grabber filter, which can be inserted nearly anywhere in a filter graph. Insert it before a renderer and you can capture whatever gets passed to the renderer.
(This assumes that you can construct a filter graph to play a DVD (or whatever) and then modify the graph. It's also not something you'll be able to do from within GraphEdit, as GraphEdit knows nothing about the ISampleGrabber interface.)
I'm not so sure that'd be a smart move on Apple's part. It didn't work out too well for IBM when similar functionality was rolled into OS/2.
Continue reading the parenthetical...I only use real modems with my computers (on the one or two that still have modems at all at this late date).
Never heard of it, and punching it into a root prompt produces the following:
pppconfig: command not found
It is marked in Portage as an unstable package for AMD64, but there's no documentation (for Gentoo, anyway) that would've led me to it. It appears to have been ported from Debian, which I've never used.
They do, but actually getting it to work can be a pain in the ass. I've had an easier time setting up WiFi and Bluetooth than getting dial-up access working under Linux. Add in that most computers tend to come with winmodems that are anywhere from difficult to impossible to get working under Linux, and you have another wrinkle for the linux n00b to work through.
(Even with the external (RS232) and PC Card modems I've used, getting pppd to work is a bitch. Newer versions of KPPP seem to help somewhat, but that's not going to work too well on a box that has GNOME installed instead of KDE.)
Nothing in this executive order (or in state and local laws that are being enacted all over the place) would stop eminent domain for needful public works. If your community needs a new freeway, school, or firehouse, eminent domain is still an option (preferably the option of last resort). What is being stopped is the abuse of eminent domain, such as wiping out a residential neighborhood so that a strip mall can be built in its place that'll pay more in taxes.
I'm 99.99% positive he's referring to this BSA.
(Insert snarky "what did you expect on an American website" comment here.)
The Autobahn is built differently. The biggest difference is that the road surface throughout the Autobahn system is somewhere around 27 inches thick. Most interstates, by comparison, are only 16-18 inches thick. The extra durability makes for a road that's consistently in better condition, which is why it's no big deal to do 100+ mph with a properly-maintained car over there. OTOH, they're more expensive to build. If the interstates were built to the same spec as the Autobahn, the system wouldn't be nearly as extensive as it is.
This page has some interesting Autobahn info.
It's supersonic. It's traveling faster than the sound it makes. If you're the target for today, by the time you hear it coming, you're already fscked.
The battery life is better than on your notebook, and it's not as much crap to haul out of the overhead storage bin. The tiny screen on your typical cellphone isn't all that great, but the bigger screen on a Treo or similar device is watchable enough.
You're leaving out the bit where the producers of Dateline NBC, in a bit of creative "investigative journalism," taped some model-rocket engines to the gas tank of a Chevy truck, lit off the engines, and taped the resulting fireball. I suspect the "problem" isn't nearly as severe as you've been led to believe. If there's a liner inside the tank (I don't know if there is, but lack of such a liner was the root of the exploding-Pinto problem), most collisions with it aren't going to result in leaks and/or fires.
You might be interested in this article:
Why does it have to play within a browser window? I'd rather have it just start another instance of mplayer (or whatever) and play in that.
You're getting "noise" and "music" mixed up. Understandable, really, given the state of the "music" industry today.
Quit posting under pseudonyms, Maureen.