I just grabbed 0.9.8, and already I've noticed one nice improvement - you can actually change sidebar tabs with less than a half an hour wait.:) It always annoyed me how, on the Windows boxes on campus, Mozilla could do little interface things like that much faster than in Linux.
Everything in the GUI seems to be noticeably faster though, in 0.9.8. This alone makes it worth the upgrade.:)
I got PsiLinux's setup to boot on my Diamond Mako (just a USA-ized version of the Psion Revo), but unfortunately, it won't actually install as it wants a physical drive to install to. The Revos don't have the ability to use Flash media like the other (i.e. Series 5) machines do.
Does anybody know of a way to get a decent Linux setup running on the Revo?
Ad placement is a good thing. *munches on some McDonald's(tm) fries* It can add to realism *sips his Coca-Cola(r)* and make for a more compelling experience. Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to go for a drive in my Subaru Outback(tm), with its smooth handling and rugged durability.
Half-Life works very well on TransGaming's WineX, aside from some glitches with the starting menus (this problem has been fixed in TransGaming's internal builds, though, and will be incorporated into the upcoming WineX release). It's not perfect yet, but it rocks on my system.:)
To a degree, I have to agree with you. Aside from Tribes 2, I honestly could have lived without most of the games Loki ported. Did I enjoy them? Yes. Were they essential to my existence (again, with the exception of Tribes 2)? Nope.
Ironically, I have all this beefed-up hardware and what do I do with it? I play NetHack, SNES games, MacOS System 6/7 games, and low-frills (but high-quality) games like PySol and Uplink. Hell, I've played LBreakout 2.0 more than I ever played some of the Loki ports I bought.:)
For me, Loki's two biggest faults were: 1) Too slow to get games ported (a year for Deus-Ex, wtf) and 2) Most of the games weren't to-die-for. Sure, I love Railroad Tycoon 2, HOMM3, and Kohan. But Loki couldn't bring me, for example, Half-Life and Diablo II. They can't bring me older games, and they can't bring me games that the developers simply refuse to allow to be ported. I and others have had to turn to TransGaming's WineX for this, albeit grudgingly because of the license issues.
The only way Linux could "dominate" the game world would probably be if somebody started creating to-die-for games that were only available for it (or available for everything but Windows... say, Linux, BSD, and MacOS X:). And ideally, such games would be open source to make us penguiny fellows happy. Taking 6-18 months to port games that are merely great (with a couple of exceptions) and not excellent (Star Craft anyone?) is, as we see now, not the best business model in the world. Don't get me wrong, I love the Loki games I bought. But they didn't quench my thirst for certain gotta-have titles out there. Until Linux has its own gotta-haves, our best hope is something along the lines of Wine or Lindows (dunno about the latter, never really looked into it, but who knows...).
Just my 2 cents. Back to slaying ASCII characters I go.:)
That's very true. One reason I signed up for TransGaming some months ago was that very reason. Namely, while Loki ported some awesome games (Tribes 2, yeah baby), they couldn't bring me some things I wanted. Diablo II, Half-Life, and others.
They're "too old" or the developers wouldn't allow them to port the games. But with WineX, I can run them. I have my issues with their licensing policy, but honestly I can get past those for now. Yes, it'd be great if the code was fully open, but it allows me to play my games, and I'm happy with the product. That's all that matters to me at the moment. Anyway, off I go to slay some more demons in the depths of Hell.;)
Okay, whoever modded the parent "troll" is an idiot. It's an important point - DoS/cracking/whatever tools should not be illegal, but using them to attack someone (aside from instances where one has permission - say, for security stress-testing) should be.
Doing otherwise would be the same as saying we should make anything sharper than a butter knife illegal to make or possess, even if all you're going to do is slice bread with it.
I don't particularly want this purchase to succeed, for one simple reason - I don't like AOL/TW or its money. Some people seem to forget the games AOL played with its AIM protocol to screw over the open source clients, or the fact that Time Warner is part of the MPAA, which likes to screw over consumers with such wonderful technologies as digital rights denial^H^H^H^H^Hmanagement.
Sorry, but I'd rather Linux continue as it has so far, than become "mainstream" through a company like AOL. I don't like where that money comes from, and I can't blame Alan Cox for wanting no part of it (if that's why he's saying all this - I'm just guessing). Linux has served me well for the last 5 years without AOL. You call it hypocricy, but I call it integrity.
They finally fixed that annoying freeze/crasher in DRI when using a Radeon card. Of course, the download sites are slashdotted to hell and back, so I can't try it out yet - but according to the changelog, my biggest gripe with using my Radeon may be gone now.;)
I have a similar complaint. I'm not sure if this is a problem with GNOME/GTK+ or if it's a matter of bad coding, but a lot of GTK+ apps I've used have a really annoying flaw in file open/save dialogs. If I enter a path in the file text box (such as/tmp/ or ~/docs/), it tries to open that directory as if it were a regular file. Of course, it fails, and the resulting error/crash depends on the program.
It may seem trivial, but honestly, I don't want to point and click my way through multiple levels of directories in a file dialog box. It's much quicker for me to type ~/docs/ than to click around to/home, then to thochman, then to docs, and then double-click on a file.
Again, I don't know if this is a flaw in GTK+ or simply a matter of sloppy programming, but I still think it's pretty annoying. The GTK+ file dialog should be smart enough to simply change to a given directory when one is typed in, and not try to return it as a filename. Seemingly minor UI irritations like this can really add up, and make for a less than pleasant user experience.
Why is the US in such a weird situation? I mean, lots of people want the product, the law of demand/offer states that the prices should go DOWN not up!
I think it's partly because, in both your examples there, the government had something to do with it. You may know better than I do, but I recall something about the government in Canada starting an effort to have the entire country wired with broadband - and so far, 80% or so of Canada has it. That's pretty impressive.
The problem in the USA is that our government is pretty tech stupid. Witness the DMCA, the whole Sklyarov thing, etc. And so witness DSL and cable. If the government pushed for the spread of these technologies, and offered incentives for our lazy-ass telcos and cable monopolies to offer better service, it would probably happen. As it stands now, they have no real motivation to put a lot of effort into it.
As it is, though, we're stuck. In my part of the country, we're stuck with Qwest as our phone company. They want an outrageous price for ADSL that's barely better than ISDN speeds - and to get anywhere near what I get through my cable would cost a good $150-$250 per month under a "small business" plan.
Then of course, there is the cable monopoly. This is a Comcast area, and while I am very happy with my dealings with them (except for not telling me that I would have a week outage because of the @Home BS), the pricing could be better. $55 a month is what we get gouged for cable modem in this area. That's just cable modem and basic cable TV (which they make us pay for - otherwise it'd be a few dollars cheaper). Compared to your $22 a month, that's pretty sad.
On the upside, I have the equivelant of a T1 line for downloads. I average around 150-200k/sec on my downloads. But boy, do we pay the price for it. And if my cable starts to suck really bad, I'm basically screwed. Qwest isn't an option, since they're both expensive and provide horrible service. Sigh...
True, it is kinda sad, but whatever the future of space exploration is, I just don't see NASA as being a part of it. They're too slow and lumbering, too political (duh, government agency), and it doesn't help that their budget does keep getting cut.
I see the future of space travel going either (or both, maybe) of two directions: a bunch of private companies that do space 'tourism' and commercialism, and/or a multinational organization where space projects are funded (and manned) by multiple countries.
I'm not sure which I'd rather have - a bunch of commercialistic companies at each others' throats for my business, or a bunch of goverments bickering about who pays for this mission's supply of $10,000 space screw drivers.:)
Although, with the commercialized space future, there's the possibility of Microspace having a monopoly on interstellar travel. With the exception of Linus Torvalds' home-made shuttles of course.;)
LyX: I found this very non-intuitive and gave up on it quickly. As I recall, the tab key did not work as I expected it, and various things just weren't what I expected them to be.
I've been using LyX for a couple of years, and yes it does take some adjustment. The reason it's "non-intuitive" is because it tries to get you out of the "Word" mindset, which is that you have to do everything yourself. For writing papers and the like, you don't need the TAB key. Define the general layout of the document, and just type. That's the way it's supposed to work, and it works great for my purposes (school papers).
Firstly, I agree that Linux on a handheld seems like a rather dubious project for a business to jump into. I'm all for the community playing around with this stuff for fun, but high-profile business failures of this nature are no good for Linux. And considering the past Linux PDAs, I don't have much faith in the future of this one.
I use a PalmOS handheld, and I love it. Granted, I really hate shareware, but there's some great software out there, and I have no qualms about paying for it if it's good. Unlike with my PC, I don't have the motivation to dink with source for my handheld. I don't have the interest or the time. I just want to store my appointments, surf my web cache in between classes, and not worry about it.
However! As I said above, experimenting by the user community is a Good Thing(tm). You say there "isn't much point aside from the 'coolness' factor." Well, that is the point. I think it's pretty damn cool to run Quake on a handheld. I'm all for it when people port software to new/interesting platforms. PsiLinux anyone? QNX on an iPaq? Generally not particularly useful, but they are cool projects, and that's the source of their value (such as it is, depending on your point of view).
Perhaps I'm wrong on this, but this is a trojan, not a virus. Viruses reproduce and spread automatically, and from the article's description, this does not. Requiring users to run something at each point that it infects is NOT a virus, it is merely a trojan horse.
Well there's a problem - a lot of times, consoles do get put in places where there is "little room for air to circulate to cool it off." Under the TV/VCR, on the carpet on the floor, inside a "media center" cabinet, etc.
Also, as for X-Boxes not overheating or crashing in practical use, unfortunately it does happen. I have a number of friends who have X-Boxes, and they experience BSODs (actually, GSODs) occasionally. I've never heard of a or PS2 Nintendo system crashing under normal use, although I'm sure it's happened.
I've only ever had one Nintendo game crash, and it was Street Fighter 2 for the GBA. I don't know if it's just my cart or what, since none of my GBA-owning friends have a copy of SF2 just now. Once one of them does, we'll see if the crasher can be reproduced with cartridges other than my own.
As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no downside to this system, other than that the older companies selling software will get the shaft.
Unfortunately, even if that is the only downside, it is a biggie. How do you get a capitalistic society to adopt such a system as this? I'm all for it, and I hope that kind of thing happens within my lifetime. The problem is getting all/most people to buy into it and make it happen.
No, MPlayer + Quicktime = ehhhhhh. Lots of stuff in Linux supports Quicktime, but until MPlayer (or whatever else) supports the Sorenson codec, it's not really all that "schweet."
> Will there be a time when all computer users will talk about adding mibibytes of RAM, rather than a megabytes?
Not likely... The average person doesn't really care much what's correct with these sort of things, they'll stick to what's common. Like calling crackers "hackers."
Gestures, a la Opera. I really like these, and it's nice to not have to mouse up to a toolbar just to navigate my history or reload a page.
Anti-aliased fonts on Linux. I know this is pretty unlikely right now, since it'd be "interesting" to do without relying on something like Qt or some X hack for anti-aliasing the fonts. Still, after playing with Konqueror and Opera, I realize how much I missed those nice, smooth characters.:)
Just my 2. Otherwise, I gotta say Mozilla is shaping up pretty nice, and feels more solid with each release (on my system anyway). Keep up the great work, MozTeam!
Slashdot Mirror
I just grabbed 0.9.8, and already I've noticed one nice improvement - you can actually change sidebar tabs with less than a half an hour wait. :) It always annoyed me how, on the Windows boxes on campus, Mozilla could do little interface things like that much faster than in Linux.
:)
Everything in the GUI seems to be noticeably faster though, in 0.9.8. This alone makes it worth the upgrade.
I got PsiLinux's setup to boot on my Diamond Mako (just a USA-ized version of the Psion Revo), but unfortunately, it won't actually install as it wants a physical drive to install to. The Revos don't have the ability to use Flash media like the other (i.e. Series 5) machines do. Does anybody know of a way to get a decent Linux setup running on the Revo?
Ad placement is a good thing. *munches on some McDonald's(tm) fries* It can add to realism *sips his Coca-Cola(r)* and make for a more compelling experience. Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to go for a drive in my Subaru Outback(tm), with its smooth handling and rugged durability.
Halflife you've got me on too.
Half-Life works very well on TransGaming's WineX, aside from some glitches with the starting menus (this problem has been fixed in TransGaming's internal builds, though, and will be incorporated into the upcoming WineX release). It's not perfect yet, but it rocks on my system. :)
To a degree, I have to agree with you. Aside from Tribes 2, I honestly could have lived without most of the games Loki ported. Did I enjoy them? Yes. Were they essential to my existence (again, with the exception of Tribes 2)? Nope.
:)
:). And ideally, such games would be open source to make us penguiny fellows happy. Taking 6-18 months to port games that are merely great (with a couple of exceptions) and not excellent (Star Craft anyone?) is, as we see now, not the best business model in the world. Don't get me wrong, I love the Loki games I bought. But they didn't quench my thirst for certain gotta-have titles out there. Until Linux has its own gotta-haves, our best hope is something along the lines of Wine or Lindows (dunno about the latter, never really looked into it, but who knows...).
:)
Ironically, I have all this beefed-up hardware and what do I do with it? I play NetHack, SNES games, MacOS System 6/7 games, and low-frills (but high-quality) games like PySol and Uplink. Hell, I've played LBreakout 2.0 more than I ever played some of the Loki ports I bought.
For me, Loki's two biggest faults were: 1) Too slow to get games ported (a year for Deus-Ex, wtf) and 2) Most of the games weren't to-die-for. Sure, I love Railroad Tycoon 2, HOMM3, and Kohan. But Loki couldn't bring me, for example, Half-Life and Diablo II. They can't bring me older games, and they can't bring me games that the developers simply refuse to allow to be ported. I and others have had to turn to TransGaming's WineX for this, albeit grudgingly because of the license issues.
The only way Linux could "dominate" the game world would probably be if somebody started creating to-die-for games that were only available for it (or available for everything but Windows... say, Linux, BSD, and MacOS X
Just my 2 cents. Back to slaying ASCII characters I go.
That's very true. One reason I signed up for TransGaming some months ago was that very reason. Namely, while Loki ported some awesome games (Tribes 2, yeah baby), they couldn't bring me some things I wanted. Diablo II, Half-Life, and others.
They're "too old" or the developers wouldn't allow them to port the games. But with WineX, I can run them. I have my issues with their licensing policy, but honestly I can get past those for now. Yes, it'd be great if the code was fully open, but it allows me to play my games, and I'm happy with the product. That's all that matters to me at the moment. Anyway, off I go to slay some more demons in the depths of Hell. ;)
Okay, whoever modded the parent "troll" is an idiot. It's an important point - DoS/cracking/whatever tools should not be illegal, but using them to attack someone (aside from instances where one has permission - say, for security stress-testing) should be.
Doing otherwise would be the same as saying we should make anything sharper than a butter knife illegal to make or possess, even if all you're going to do is slice bread with it.
> I need to order newRubber for my Jack Bot sometime too.
Easy there, Taco. Young eyes view this site too, ya know. ;)
Wow that's so funny. Congrats on new levels of plagiarism.
I don't particularly want this purchase to succeed, for one simple reason - I don't like AOL/TW or its money. Some people seem to forget the games AOL played with its AIM protocol to screw over the open source clients, or the fact that Time Warner is part of the MPAA, which likes to screw over consumers with such wonderful technologies as digital rights denial^H^H^H^H^Hmanagement.
Sorry, but I'd rather Linux continue as it has so far, than become "mainstream" through a company like AOL. I don't like where that money comes from, and I can't blame Alan Cox for wanting no part of it (if that's why he's saying all this - I'm just guessing). Linux has served me well for the last 5 years without AOL. You call it hypocricy, but I call it integrity.
They finally fixed that annoying freeze/crasher in DRI when using a Radeon card. Of course, the download sites are slashdotted to hell and back, so I can't try it out yet - but according to the changelog, my biggest gripe with using my Radeon may be gone now. ;)
I have a similar complaint. I'm not sure if this is a problem with GNOME/GTK+ or if it's a matter of bad coding, but a lot of GTK+ apps I've used have a really annoying flaw in file open/save dialogs. If I enter a path in the file text box (such as /tmp/ or ~/docs/), it tries to open that directory as if it were a regular file. Of course, it fails, and the resulting error/crash depends on the program.
It may seem trivial, but honestly, I don't want to point and click my way through multiple levels of directories in a file dialog box. It's much quicker for me to type ~/docs/ than to click around to /home, then to thochman, then to docs, and then double-click on a file.
Again, I don't know if this is a flaw in GTK+ or simply a matter of sloppy programming, but I still think it's pretty annoying. The GTK+ file dialog should be smart enough to simply change to a given directory when one is typed in, and not try to return it as a filename. Seemingly minor UI irritations like this can really add up, and make for a less than pleasant user experience.
That's a shame. It's even more amazing, then, that so much of Canada has broadband. Whatever happened, somebody did something right. :)
Why is the US in such a weird situation? I mean, lots of people want the product, the law of demand/offer states that the prices should go DOWN not up!
I think it's partly because, in both your examples there, the government had something to do with it. You may know better than I do, but I recall something about the government in Canada starting an effort to have the entire country wired with broadband - and so far, 80% or so of Canada has it. That's pretty impressive.
The problem in the USA is that our government is pretty tech stupid. Witness the DMCA, the whole Sklyarov thing, etc. And so witness DSL and cable. If the government pushed for the spread of these technologies, and offered incentives for our lazy-ass telcos and cable monopolies to offer better service, it would probably happen. As it stands now, they have no real motivation to put a lot of effort into it.
As it is, though, we're stuck. In my part of the country, we're stuck with Qwest as our phone company. They want an outrageous price for ADSL that's barely better than ISDN speeds - and to get anywhere near what I get through my cable would cost a good $150-$250 per month under a "small business" plan.
Then of course, there is the cable monopoly. This is a Comcast area, and while I am very happy with my dealings with them (except for not telling me that I would have a week outage because of the @Home BS), the pricing could be better. $55 a month is what we get gouged for cable modem in this area. That's just cable modem and basic cable TV (which they make us pay for - otherwise it'd be a few dollars cheaper). Compared to your $22 a month, that's pretty sad.
On the upside, I have the equivelant of a T1 line for downloads. I average around 150-200k/sec on my downloads. But boy, do we pay the price for it. And if my cable starts to suck really bad, I'm basically screwed. Qwest isn't an option, since they're both expensive and provide horrible service. Sigh...
True, it is kinda sad, but whatever the future of space exploration is, I just don't see NASA as being a part of it. They're too slow and lumbering, too political (duh, government agency), and it doesn't help that their budget does keep getting cut.
I see the future of space travel going either (or both, maybe) of two directions: a bunch of private companies that do space 'tourism' and commercialism, and/or a multinational organization where space projects are funded (and manned) by multiple countries.
I'm not sure which I'd rather have - a bunch of commercialistic companies at each others' throats for my business, or a bunch of goverments bickering about who pays for this mission's supply of $10,000 space screw drivers. :)
Although, with the commercialized space future, there's the possibility of Microspace having a monopoly on interstellar travel. With the exception of Linus Torvalds' home-made shuttles of course. ;)
There's also WorldLingo, which I've used a fair amount. It seems to be quite good, from my usage so far.
LyX: I found this very non-intuitive and gave up on it quickly. As I recall, the tab key did not work as I expected it, and various things just weren't what I expected them to be.
I've been using LyX for a couple of years, and yes it does take some adjustment. The reason it's "non-intuitive" is because it tries to get you out of the "Word" mindset, which is that you have to do everything yourself. For writing papers and the like, you don't need the TAB key. Define the general layout of the document, and just type. That's the way it's supposed to work, and it works great for my purposes (school papers).
Firstly, I agree that Linux on a handheld seems like a rather dubious project for a business to jump into. I'm all for the community playing around with this stuff for fun, but high-profile business failures of this nature are no good for Linux. And considering the past Linux PDAs, I don't have much faith in the future of this one.
I use a PalmOS handheld, and I love it. Granted, I really hate shareware, but there's some great software out there, and I have no qualms about paying for it if it's good. Unlike with my PC, I don't have the motivation to dink with source for my handheld. I don't have the interest or the time. I just want to store my appointments, surf my web cache in between classes, and not worry about it.
However! As I said above, experimenting by the user community is a Good Thing(tm). You say there "isn't much point aside from the 'coolness' factor." Well, that is the point. I think it's pretty damn cool to run Quake on a handheld. I'm all for it when people port software to new/interesting platforms. PsiLinux anyone? QNX on an iPaq? Generally not particularly useful, but they are cool projects, and that's the source of their value (such as it is, depending on your point of view).
Perhaps I'm wrong on this, but this is a trojan, not a virus. Viruses reproduce and spread automatically, and from the article's description, this does not. Requiring users to run something at each point that it infects is NOT a virus, it is merely a trojan horse.
Well there's a problem - a lot of times, consoles do get put in places where there is "little room for air to circulate to cool it off." Under the TV/VCR, on the carpet on the floor, inside a "media center" cabinet, etc.
Also, as for X-Boxes not overheating or crashing in practical use, unfortunately it does happen. I have a number of friends who have X-Boxes, and they experience BSODs (actually, GSODs) occasionally. I've never heard of a or PS2 Nintendo system crashing under normal use, although I'm sure it's happened.
I've only ever had one Nintendo game crash, and it was Street Fighter 2 for the GBA. I don't know if it's just my cart or what, since none of my GBA-owning friends have a copy of SF2 just now. Once one of them does, we'll see if the crasher can be reproduced with cartridges other than my own.
As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no downside to this system, other than that the older companies selling software will get the shaft.
Unfortunately, even if that is the only downside, it is a biggie. How do you get a capitalistic society to adopt such a system as this? I'm all for it, and I hope that kind of thing happens within my lifetime. The problem is getting all/most people to buy into it and make it happen.
MPlayer + Quicktime = schweeetttt
No, MPlayer + Quicktime = ehhhhhh. Lots of stuff in Linux supports Quicktime, but until MPlayer (or whatever else) supports the Sorenson codec, it's not really all that "schweet."
It is only in .mov format so far
One word: CrossOver. :)
The free demo should be enough to view the movies.
> Will there be a time when all computer users will talk about adding mibibytes of RAM, rather than a megabytes?
Not likely... The average person doesn't really care much what's correct with these sort of things, they'll stick to what's common. Like calling crackers "hackers."
Two things I'd really like to see in Mozilla:
Just my 2. Otherwise, I gotta say Mozilla is shaping up pretty nice, and feels more solid with each release (on my system anyway). Keep up the great work, MozTeam!