The codec is developed by a third party, so will never be officially blessed by Microsoft. I suspect this means an automated installer (as you might be accustomed to seeing for a Flash or Java plugin) probably will not work, thus reducing the number of systems the plugin will likely be installed on.
When I tried using each of the latest plugins, there were many problems with integration with WMP7/8/9, such as playlist support and file associations, however I do recall the basic codec worked.
Most people will probably be introduced to Ogg when they go to a streaming site, and it says "hey you need to get this player (or plugin) from here to listen, don't worry, it's free, click OK a few times"
This is not currently possible on a significant proportion of desktop machines, as there are not supported plugins for Windows Media Player, RealJukebox/RealOne, or QuickTime/iTunes.
On the upside, I understand Real is gradually moving to support Ogg on the server side, so you'd think their client software would eventually support it as well.
On the downside, with Microsoft pushing its own proprietary format, Windows Media Audio, hard, I won't expect to see a fully-functional Ogg plugin for Windows Media Player any time soon.
The default, preinstalled media playback software (Windows Media Player and iTunes) on two of the biggest desktop operating systems do not support Ogg Vorbis audio. The other major commercial competitor to these products, Real, also does not support Ogg Vorbis in its latest player.
There are third-party plugin projects for Windows Media and iTunes, but they are not yet finished, and are limited in functionality.
As odd as it might seem, not everybody uses Linux, not everybody bothers to download software when something seemingly equivalent is preinstalled, and indeed some people actually prefer Windows Media Player or iTunes, and are quite happy to continue using their MP3s.
There's also the matter of portable digital music players, car audio systems, and other appliances, which mostly support only MP3 and WMA.
I appreciate that support exists, and there are applications on most operating systems that will play.ogg files, but to claim "all major software mp3 players support ogg" is not correct.
My exchange is ADSL capable, and I'm within the prescribed distance, however my street was wired with pair-gain, so I'm waiting for Telstra to provide a real telephone line to my house. It's definately a good thing I'm not holding my breath.
I visit Whirlpool regularly, but most of the news is rather depressing, particularly when it concerns Senator Alston.
Try living in Australia where the dominant telco also owns all the important telecommunications infrastructure.
This happened because the main telco, Telstra, was previously owned by the government, and they (half) sold it. Now they want to guarantee maximum share value for those who bought the shares, regardless of what's good for Telstra's customers or the general population.
While Telstra owns the infrastructure and all competing telcos must use Telstra's infrastructure at the prices Telstra wants to charge, it's little wonder there's little effective competition.
The theory is that competitors will establish their own infrastructure to compete, but when Australia is such a large country (given its population is so low) and Telstra already has its own infrastructure, it's not viable to relie cables everywhere Telstra has them.
Even if these companies laid their own lines, Telstra owns the POTS (landline) exchanges, so Telstra has to install your *DSL service. You can imagine what kind of service they provide to other companies that want to get a *DSL service installed for their customers. I've been on the waiting list for over 12 months.
This is what our government (both present and past) calls deregulation. And now they want to sell the remaining half of Telstra (making it a fully private company) while Telstra still retains the entire (public) infrastructure that the government built with tax revenue!
Actually, the OEone download page states clearly that its OEone HomeBase Desktop product requires Red Hat Linux 7.1 or 7.2, and will only install on those versions. I tried to run the install script on a Red Hat 7.3 box and was told my operating system was currently unsupported.
The FAQ confirms same.
On my Red Hat Linux 7.3 box I also had to change my X server to use the local font server rather than local font paths. I did this by changing the "FontPath" entry in/etc/X11/XF86Config to "unix:-1".
To make remote hosts use the new fonts, you'll need to enable remote access to your X font server by following the steps here: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/XDMCP-HOWTO/procedure.ht ml
You can access the remote font server using XFree86/Cygwin by using a command such as this: X -query remotehost -fp "tcp/remotehost:7100".
Also, step 4 (installing the source RPM) didn't seem to work for me. I found it worked to extract the SRPM using a command such as: rpm2cpio msttcorefonts-1.2.1.src.rpm > corefonts.cpio cpio --extract corefonts.cpio
Except for these minor details for my setup, I'm amazed at how easy this procedure makes the installation of some decent TrueType fonts.
Yes, I've already passed this information on to the contact listed for the Corefonts project.:-)
Itanium does support IA-32 instructions
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
Admittedly, the Itanium does this using emulation, whereas the Opteron is supposed to handle 32-bit instructions natively, however the statement that 32-bit code will not work on Itanium is quite misleading.
I've been running the XFree86/Cygwin combination at work for over a month now to connect to my local Linux production box. Prior to this I was using VNC to achieve the same thing.
The one thing I miss is being able to close my VNC client window, shut my desktop machine down overnight, then come in the next day, power up my desktop, reconnect to my VNC X session and have my existing session waiting for me.
I gather X(Free86) can't do this, as by definition the server is running on my desktop machine, so as soon as I log out or power down my desktop machine, my session's gone.
After some further reading, it seems that IANA's policy is to only issue TLDs for countries listed in the ISO 3166 country list, so a new TLD would not be allowed.
On the same page, you can also see some other applications for redelegation such as.JP,.CA, and.AU.
Each country's top-level domain is supposed to correspond to ISO 3166 country codes. To issue a new TLD to a country other than the correct ISO code would break the current system.
This would have to be a minor limitation, tho, and your suggestion should still be possible.
I think if myself and the other residents on my street joined together and tried to seize control of our postal code (after all, it is how people send stuff to our street) we would be laughed at because it makes no sense.
To continue your postal analogy...
South Africa doesn't want to change its postal code. It just wants to be able to build whatever new streets it likes, and have mail still get there, just as your local council, shire, or district can currently.
I think the current concern is that they're not very good at building streets. It would also be a problem if the government didn't like you, and so wouldn't let you build a house.
This is a counter-incentive for developers of open source software attempting to sell support.
If your product is so simple to use or your documentation explains things clearly, there is less requirement for paid technical support, and so no revenue for many open source projects.
I asked myself the same question only a few weeks ago. I came to the conclusion that Kapital from theKompany was the best option. You'll probably need KDE and Linux or FreeBSD to run it.
Somewhat ironically, I'm using GnuCash until I can afford to buy it.:-/
Both Kapital and GnuCash claim to be able to import Quicken data files, which is a very handy feature.
I don't see how any of the game system manufacturers would approve of this.
From the original article...
My inbox is constantly full of e-mail from the participants in the experts groups just banging away on the specification because they understand its importance. So along with Sun, we have companies participating like Sony Computer Entertainment...
It sounds like Sony (developer of the PS2) is interested after all. Perhaps it's for their games consoles, perhaps it's for their cell phones, perhaps it's all hype, but they do seem interested.
If you're a Yahoo Mail customer within the US, Yahoo is currently running a customer survey. Just log in to Yahoo Mail, and look for the survey link on the main summary page.
I've been asking them for IMAP for years (seeing as it superseded POP3 several years ago), but they're not listening. Maybe a few hundred slashdot users can help them hear what we really need.
If you dislike MDI, try Opera. Its MDI is really useful on environments like Windows where there is only one desktop, so the taskbar gets crowded very quickly if you're browsing several sites. The way Opera does it, it's like you have a second taskbar just for Opera.
[Tabs] act as an "always-there window list", specifically for one app. Much better than trying to scrunch buttons for ten mozilla windows and ten konsole windows into a KDE taskbar. This is the killer benefit for me.
I would suggest that KDE is probably one of the few places where tabs are unimportant, because you have multiple virtual desktops (make one just for web browsing), as well as the BeOS-like feature to group similar tasks under the one cascading taskbar button (so the buttons don't get scrunched).
GUI still too basic, counter-intuitive
on
Mozilla 0.9.9 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Tabs are a nice idea, but they're still quite immature in Mozilla. For instance, they don't close in the correct order, so they're no substitute for real tabs or MDI, as found in Galeon or Opera.
I accept that Mozilla is still in development, but many good ideas that make the GUI work better (like this one) are actually being turned down.
I'm getting into many bad habits using Mozilla's interface, and when I go to use something that works properly I find myself doing what I would've done in Mozilla, and it doesn't work (and nor should it). It's a bit like people who double-click on web links.:-)
It seems to me that Mozilla's GUI is made to pacify Netscape 4 users, rather than making it as usable as it should be. I think this is bad for several reasons, not least because Netscape 6 still has a smaller market share than Netscape 4, so Netscape 4 users aren't migrating at all! To me this means that: a) some users are sticking with Netscape 4 b) some users are moving to Internet Explorer or something else, because they're better, regardless of the menus being somewhat different
Maybe this shows us that open-source projects really need to spend more time on proper GUI guidelines, because as much as I hate products made by certain other companies (that one that makes Windows in particular), I find their apps much easier to use (when they don't crash, etc.).
I think I'm going to end up using Galeon or SkipStone, because the Mozilla rendering engine seems quite good -- it's the GUI holding Mozilla back (regardless of how pretty the "Modern" theme is!).
I would also assume that various colleges/universities such as MIT and Berkeley had some degree of government funding, and projects such as Unix and X wouldn't quite be the same without them.
Let's face it, various problems have been allowed to continue due to a lack of government intervention. Think about how much spam is sent (regardless of whether you filter it -- it's still sent halfway around the world). Think about everybody (even non-companies) getting a.com domain without even trying, leading to the.biz nonsense.
On the other hand, recent moves by the current conservative government to place backdoors in cryptographic software, and the existence of the 3ch3l0n spy system could well be used to show negative government influence.
You can say what you like about government intervention (and no doubt the libertarians here will), but you can't deny that the US government has had a profound influence on the computing industry.
Slashdot Mirror
The codec is developed by a third party, so will never be officially blessed by Microsoft. I suspect this means an automated installer (as you might be accustomed to seeing for a Flash or Java plugin) probably will not work, thus reducing the number of systems the plugin will likely be installed on.
When I tried using each of the latest plugins, there were many problems with integration with WMP7/8/9, such as playlist support and file associations, however I do recall the basic codec worked.
Most people will probably be introduced to Ogg when they go to a streaming site, and it says "hey you need to get this player (or plugin) from here to listen, don't worry, it's free, click OK a few times"
This is not currently possible on a significant proportion of desktop machines, as there are not supported plugins for Windows Media Player, RealJukebox/RealOne, or QuickTime/iTunes.
On the upside, I understand Real is gradually moving to support Ogg on the server side, so you'd think their client software would eventually support it as well.
On the downside, with Microsoft pushing its own proprietary format, Windows Media Audio, hard, I won't expect to see a fully-functional Ogg plugin for Windows Media Player any time soon.
The default, preinstalled media playback software (Windows Media Player and iTunes) on two of the biggest desktop operating systems do not support Ogg Vorbis audio. The other major commercial competitor to these products, Real, also does not support Ogg Vorbis in its latest player.
.ogg files, but to claim "all major software mp3 players support ogg" is not correct.
There are third-party plugin projects for Windows Media and iTunes, but they are not yet finished, and are limited in functionality.
As odd as it might seem, not everybody uses Linux, not everybody bothers to download software when something seemingly equivalent is preinstalled, and indeed some people actually prefer Windows Media Player or iTunes, and are quite happy to continue using their MP3s.
There's also the matter of portable digital music players, car audio systems, and other appliances, which mostly support only MP3 and WMA.
I appreciate that support exists, and there are applications on most operating systems that will play
What does it take to get people using standard notation?
1 000 bits = 1 kb
1 000 000 bits = 1 Mb
Of course what you really meant was 64 kb/s and 1.544 Mb/s, as 64 kb is a capacity, not a data rate.
My exchange is ADSL capable, and I'm within the prescribed distance, however my street was wired with pair-gain, so I'm waiting for Telstra to provide a real telephone line to my house. It's definately a good thing I'm not holding my breath.
I visit Whirlpool regularly, but most of the news is rather depressing, particularly when it concerns Senator Alston.
Try living in Australia where the dominant telco also owns all the important telecommunications infrastructure.
This happened because the main telco, Telstra, was previously owned by the government, and they (half) sold it. Now they want to guarantee maximum share value for those who bought the shares, regardless of what's good for Telstra's customers or the general population.
While Telstra owns the infrastructure and all competing telcos must use Telstra's infrastructure at the prices Telstra wants to charge, it's little wonder there's little effective competition.
The theory is that competitors will establish their own infrastructure to compete, but when Australia is such a large country (given its population is so low) and Telstra already has its own infrastructure, it's not viable to relie cables everywhere Telstra has them.
Even if these companies laid their own lines, Telstra owns the POTS (landline) exchanges, so Telstra has to install your *DSL service. You can imagine what kind of service they provide to other companies that want to get a *DSL service installed for their customers. I've been on the waiting list for over 12 months.
This is what our government (both present and past) calls deregulation. And now they want to sell the remaining half of Telstra (making it a fully private company) while Telstra still retains the entire (public) infrastructure that the government built with tax revenue!
Maybe the situation in the US isn't so bad...
If you're going to ask the man a question about linguistics, at least get your grammar and punctuation correct!
Actually, the OEone download page states clearly that its OEone HomeBase Desktop product requires Red Hat Linux 7.1 or 7.2, and will only install on those versions. I tried to run the install script on a Red Hat 7.3 box and was told my operating system was currently unsupported. The FAQ confirms same.
On my Red Hat Linux 7.3 box I also had to change my X server to use the local font server rather than local font paths. /etc/X11/XF86Config to "unix:-1".
t ml
:-)
I did this by changing the "FontPath" entry in
To make remote hosts use the new fonts, you'll need to enable remote access to your X font server by following the steps here: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/XDMCP-HOWTO/procedure.h
You can access the remote font server using XFree86/Cygwin by using a command such as this:
X -query remotehost -fp "tcp/remotehost:7100".
Also, step 4 (installing the source RPM) didn't seem to work for me. I found it worked to extract the SRPM using a command such as:
rpm2cpio msttcorefonts-1.2.1.src.rpm > corefonts.cpio
cpio --extract corefonts.cpio
Except for these minor details for my setup, I'm amazed at how easy this procedure makes the installation of some decent TrueType fonts.
Yes, I've already passed this information on to the contact listed for the Corefonts project.
A quick web search shows Itanium is x86 compatible.
Admittedly, the Itanium does this using emulation, whereas the Opteron is supposed to handle 32-bit instructions natively, however the statement that 32-bit code will not work on Itanium is quite misleading.
The GNOME FAQ says it should be pronounced guh-nome (that is you say the "G").
I've been running the XFree86/Cygwin combination
at work for over a month now to connect to my
local Linux production box. Prior to this I was
using VNC to achieve the same thing.
The one thing I miss is being able to close my
VNC client window, shut my desktop machine down
overnight, then come in the next day, power up my
desktop, reconnect to my VNC X session and have
my existing session waiting for me.
I gather X(Free86) can't do this, as by
definition the server is running on my desktop
machine, so as soon as I log out or power down
my desktop machine, my session's gone.
Is there any way to do this with XFree86/Cygwin?
After some further reading, it seems that IANA's policy is to only issue TLDs for countries listed in the ISO 3166 country list, so a new TLD would not be allowed.
.JP, .CA, and .AU.
On the same page, you can also see some other applications for redelegation such as
Each country's top-level domain is supposed to correspond to ISO 3166 country codes. To issue a new TLD to a country other than the correct ISO code would break the current system.
This would have to be a minor limitation, tho, and your suggestion should still be possible.
To continue your postal analogy...
South Africa doesn't want to change its postal code. It just wants to be able to build whatever new streets it likes, and have mail still get there, just as your local council, shire, or district can currently.
I think the current concern is that they're not very good at building streets. It would also be a problem if the government didn't like you, and so wouldn't let you build a house.
This is a counter-incentive for developers of open source software attempting to sell support.
If your product is so simple to use or your documentation explains things clearly, there is less requirement for paid technical support, and so no revenue for many open source projects.
I asked myself the same question only a few weeks ago. I came to the conclusion that Kapital from theKompany was the best option. You'll probably need KDE and Linux or FreeBSD to run it.
:-/
Somewhat ironically, I'm using GnuCash until I can afford to buy it.
Both Kapital and GnuCash claim to be able to import Quicken data files, which is a very handy feature.
Kapital is reviewed here.
Freshmeat also has a brief review that compares many Linux/Unix financial products.
If none of these seems sufficient, maybe Quicken runs under WINE. Has anybody tried doing so?
Java might be a good cross-platform development language, but I haven't seen a JRE for IA-64 at this point.
Is there a JRE for IA-64? How can Java bytecode be executed/interpreted on Itanium systems at this stage?
Does the IA-32 emulation work with a IA-32 JRE? If so, wouldn't the dual layers of Java and IA-32 emulation make it too slow to be practical?
"9 exabytes" big, which is roughly 1,000,000 terabytes
Very roughly, perhaps. 9 exabytes is actually 9,000,000 terabytes.
For those that haven't got hard disks this big, here's a list of names for sizes beyond megabytes and gigabytes.
From the original article...
It sounds like Sony (developer of the PS2) is interested after all. Perhaps it's for their games consoles, perhaps it's for their cell phones, perhaps it's all hype, but they do seem interested.
If you're a Yahoo Mail customer within the US, Yahoo is currently running a customer survey. Just log in to Yahoo Mail, and look for the survey link on the main summary page.
I've been asking them for IMAP for years (seeing as it superseded POP3 several years ago), but they're not listening. Maybe a few hundred slashdot users can help them hear what we really need.
If you dislike MDI, try Opera. Its MDI is really useful on environments like Windows where there is only one desktop, so the taskbar gets crowded very quickly if you're browsing several sites. The way Opera does it, it's like you have a second taskbar just for Opera.
[Tabs] act as an "always-there window list", specifically for one app. Much better than trying to scrunch buttons for ten mozilla windows and ten konsole windows into a KDE taskbar. This is the killer benefit for me.
I would suggest that KDE is probably one of the few places where tabs are unimportant, because you have multiple virtual desktops (make one just for web browsing), as well as the BeOS-like feature to group similar tasks under the one cascading taskbar button (so the buttons don't get scrunched).
Tabs are a nice idea, but they're still quite immature in Mozilla. For instance, they don't close in the correct order, so they're no substitute for real tabs or MDI, as found in Galeon or Opera.
:-)
:-)
I accept that Mozilla is still in development, but many good ideas that make the GUI work better (like this one) are actually being turned down.
Something else that reminds me of this is there is no Apply button in the Themes Preferences dialog box.
I'm getting into many bad habits using Mozilla's interface, and when I go to use something that works properly I find myself doing what I would've done in Mozilla, and it doesn't work (and nor should it). It's a bit like people who double-click on web links.
It seems to me that Mozilla's GUI is made to pacify Netscape 4 users, rather than making it as usable as it should be. I think this is bad for several reasons, not least because Netscape 6 still has a smaller market share than Netscape 4, so Netscape 4 users aren't migrating at all! To me this means that:
a) some users are sticking with Netscape 4
b) some users are moving to Internet Explorer or something else, because they're better, regardless of the menus being somewhat different
Maybe this shows us that open-source projects really need to spend more time on proper GUI guidelines, because as much as I hate products made by certain other companies (that one that makes Windows in particular), I find their apps much easier to use (when they don't crash, etc.).
I think I'm going to end up using Galeon or SkipStone, because the Mozilla rendering engine seems quite good -- it's the GUI holding Mozilla back (regardless of how pretty the "Modern" theme is!).
Having said this, I'm still downloading 0.9.9
The US government has had nothing to do with computing?
What was that project called again? Arpanet?
I would also assume that various colleges/universities such as MIT and Berkeley had some degree of government funding, and projects such as Unix and X wouldn't quite be the same without them.
Let's face it, various problems have been allowed to continue due to a lack of government intervention. Think about how much spam is sent (regardless of whether you filter it -- it's still sent halfway around the world). Think about everybody (even non-companies) getting a
On the other hand, recent moves by the current conservative government to place backdoors in cryptographic software, and the existence of the 3ch3l0n spy system could well be used to show negative government influence.
You can say what you like about government intervention (and no doubt the libertarians here will), but you can't deny that the US government has had a profound influence on the computing industry.