Freedom of Speech actually doesn't exist in Australia. The government sold censorship control to the private sector under the thing we call 'defamation law'. If you have enough money, feel free to sue us into becoming China.
Linux *still* has spotty support for 802.11a/b/g PCI and PCMCIA cards
Definitely. Maybe if your essid is default and your network is wide open, its easy to use.
Linux wireless gets shot down by the simplicity of XP SP2's config interface, and other things (xsupplicant STILL DOES NOT WORK WITH A PEAP/MSCHAP NETWORK I HAVE TO USE, so I had to buy the Aegis client from Meetinghouse). I hear cries from the KDE crowd about KWirelessSomething (don't remember). That utility is crud.
Its approaching 2006 and my Prism2.5 card STILL doesn't do scanning. I only found out about my neighbours wireless network by booting into Windows. Pathetic. In fact, to add insult to injury, the laptop I'm using to type this is approaching its 3 year EOL.
Prism series chipsets seem to have the best reputation, using a Prism2.5 card right now. Prism54 cards, however, seem to be getting really hard to obtain, and now there is a new breed without Linux drivers (for the moment) too. Pity Intersil sold that thing.
Uhh, Pretty sure NVIDIA has given Microsoft the finger and stopped producing the NV2A GPU... no true hardware emulation there. I'm guessing NVIDIA lawyers have already been annoying M$ lawyers on how they intend to emulate any proprietary GPU features in the NV2A.
Intel would've killed the custom P3 CPU they were using if M$ couldn't get the GPU's for the boxes, so they'd need to stick in a real x86 CPU. All I see from Intel is "LETS COOK EGGS UNTIL MID WAY THIS YEAR". AMD, pfft, can't supply enough right now, VIA, you must be kidding.
Plus, Microsoft is loosing money on each original Xbox. Why would they want to double their losses?
Actually diagnosed. It only took 12 years until some speech therapist (I have had stuttering problems) rang bells and the rest is history.
English is one of the subjects I've jumped up a year in and I'm not doing too badly. English teacher thinks being a Journalist would be idea for me. Suddenly images of Today Tonight reporters holding up their journalism degrees next to fake ones prop up and well....
I'm not too bothered about what I'd end up with at the end of Year 12, and English is actually a weak point for me - I get shot down when it comes to non fiction* (apparently non existant in mainstream VCE english due to the politics of it), and I've been told to do Literature instead of mainstream english to avoid doing so many oral presentations.
* How many people can read Lord of the Flies and other novels right until the end and have no idea on what the whole story is about? ME! In comparison, Animal Farm was dirt easy for me to work out.
The following is a rant which is completely uninformed, not factual in any way shape or form and the author can't figure out when is the right time to hit 'Submit'
I'm in high school myself (in Vic, Australia not America), and being a total nerd, I've gone up a year in some subjects deliberately.
I'm having the ride of my life. No seriously, I actually enjoy school now.
Maybe its because I'll just end up smarter, the education system being designed to push people in University when they don't need it, or the education system being broken anyway, or society AND the education system having rapidly decreasing expectations. Maybe despair.com was right with their slogan "Increasing performance by decreasing expectations".
* The quality of some final year high school exams here is laughable. Yet I'm meeting resistance from teachers because their agenda is to have someone graduate within the top 0.00001% in the state without taking risks. I had to have my parents battle the supreme authorities because I knew I'd get kicked out of someones office just for asking. I'll suprise a LOT of people when I go to write my resume.
An avi or mkv container with an mpeg-4 codec (xvid, divx, etc.) and aac or mp3 for sound should work perfectly in Videolan and you wouldn't have to worry about having trouble playing it in the future.
The good thing is that you can use ogg in matroska (mkv), which you can't in avi. Which will save you a lot of bandwidth in the audio department.
Matroska is a pretty flexible container format. Myself, I use the 3ivx mpeg4 encoder (for videos which need to be played on lower end hardware, i.e palmos handhelds) or ffmpeg H264 and an Ogg sound track.
(little hint: The quantinizer setting is king for ffmpeg H264. If you can master it you won't get a constant bitrate file for streaming, but the movie won't be too far above your desired rate at any time. Forget constant bitrate with ffmpeg/x264 H264. It sucks. Big. You'll regret trying to use constant bitrate)
If I want I can throw subtitles (and other text data, YEnc'ed gentoo isos, kitchen sink, ascii goatse blah blah blah) in too with little pain, or another video stream, another audio stream, whatever. Later on I'm going to try and encode TV into MPEG4 (h264 would be good but encoder requirements for real time are too high), encode audio into ogg and stream TV. DVB-T quality on 802.11b? Possible in my opinion.
VideoLAN plays it just fine, On windows "The Core Media Player" is slightly better, being made by the guys at CoreCodec who defined Matroska. Mplayer on any platform is the best, I'm a little unhappy with the Mplayer front ends on windoze though.
P.S Forget MPEG2. You owe the MPEG LA big money to use it. Quicktime wants your money if you want to play it, regardless of the fact that support is in the OS.
You can create a Calendar room accessible by everyone (or acl'ed as you wish) and people can edit as they wish, as a plus it can handle your mail, among other things. If you want to have a play with WebCit, log onto Uncensored BBS or one of theothers.
Disclaimer: I'm to blame for the upcoming NNTP implementation in Citadel, along with a patch to use Bogofilter, and the token Australian node on the "IGnet".
You are only going to hit red tape, as everyone else who has tried to volunteer has found out.
Maybe since its a few weeks from now you'll have more luck but if I were to decide I'd just forget about it and donate to a reputable charity.
Sun screwed it with their crappy and bloated VM...
Microsoft JVM feels much faster than Sun VM. I remember one game by Jagex which made my 1.9GHz system (Sun VM) feel worse than M$ JVM on my Cyrix MII PR233 of years gone by.
I used JamVM for my website instead of Sun too, because Sun was 37% slower of what just amounted to a blog with a MySQL backend! It was also harder to downsize since it wasn't built for footprint unlike JamVM.
A whole heap of nerds on Slashdot wouldn't have helped him. He paid to get support for what he bought. He isn't going to go onto #redhat on irc.freenode.net and wait while his question disappears into the IRC logs.
He failed to cooperate with his vendor (RedHat) and RedHat then failed him, along with all the other vendors chickening out.
On the other hand, M$ and co had it up running quickly.
As much as people don't like to admit, a lot of things are still much easier to do on Windows.
If people really want to help, go take up a support position at <insert Linux vendor here>.
Citadel has been around for years (isn't/wasn't vapour) and is trivial to setup, and supports basically every mail protocol in use (add NNTP to the list once I'm finished developing the code for it) and a full GroupDAV implementation (last time I checked no one else has that yet).
Citadel is driven more towards online communities than small workgroups though, but it works. Apart from maintaining a patch to use bogofilter instead of spamassassin, I rarely touch the install now.
Disclaimer: Very happy Citadel user. And amateur code hacker.
Actually, local data arguably costs more if your're not in anti-compeditive agreements with your buddies (*cough* Telstra Optus AAPT MCI *cought*). In fact, some consumer ISPs are [apparently] bigger than one of that group (AAPT) but they are still forking out lots of money per month because the "Group Of Four" (as its known in the industry) is only interested in locking out the superior competition.
Some smaller ISPs absorb the high per megabyte costs of pushing data down Telstra ADSL ports to unmeter traffic going through peering exchanges such as PIPE Networks or WAIX because it simply costs them less (and gets customers).
In fact, three major ISPs (beside the four) - Internode, Comindico and Primus already have a backbone on the west coast of the U.S and Internode and Primus are already talking about video (and Internode just needs that for a full triple-play service) to the home completely over their backbones. (If International bandwidth was such an issue they probably wouldn't be talking about that).
disclaimer: Happy Internode customer stuck on Telstra Wholesale 512/128k port. Thank you Ziggy and Alston for screwing Australia over. Thank you Sol for stating the bloddy obvious, that being Ziggy and Alston should've spent $3bn in the past few years. See the 56 page admission of guilt and other stupid things
P.S Unlike the U.S Australia is not covered all over in HFC/Cable networks for DOCSIS - two telcos discovered in the mid-1990s that no one watches subscription TV and stopped rolling out new cable.
Can someone explain why this exists? I thought Firefox/Thunderbird/Sunbird[/Nvu] were basically better versions of what existed in the original Mozilla platform? Why is this continuing to be developed? Who is their target audience here?
I'm still a user of the suite and see no point to move other than TBird extensions like SyncKolab. Yes I have tried Firefox. I have it installed on other boxes here. I don't want to use it for day to day use. Ever. Personally if I were to migrate, it wouldn't be to FF or TB.
FF was cool when SeaMonkey was slow as a wounded donkey but not anymore for me.
I don't seem to mind Camino on the Mac though, despite the fact its pretty simular to FF (minus extensions plus better intergration with the rest of the OS due to being built with Cocoa)
OS 6/Cobalt and PalmOS Linux have a native ARM API.
No one wants to release a device based on them though.
I hear rumors of new hardware running f'ing GARNET. (5.4). Erm, isn't that 5 year old tech? I've lost count of how long Cobalt has been in the hands of licencees but I believe its getting close to two years now. (I'm guessing they have all chickened out on adding the necessary RAM to handle it)
Mind you, the upside of keeping 68k is that Palm and others are still making money out of organizers sold years ago. Most people appreciate it.
Goddammit, someone release a mass production Cobalt device already. PalmOS/Linux may still be coming but thats more transparent to most developers and users being a kernel swap of Cobalt [apparently]
No one in their right mind would put hotswap drives on USB for heavy use, because everyone knows USB sucks, bandwidth, power and CPU wise.
I've had a look at this issue myself and after seeing performance of USB2.0 and Firewire i've decided to use SCSI (with IDE->SCSI and SATA->SCSI adaptors) for external storage.
Absolutely. I'm no fan of Windows, but Apache 2 runs fine on 2k and XP.
Why did they need Windows+Apache2 in the first place anyway?
Like MacOS Classic - OS X?
on
The End of PalmOS?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Before we start rumors of Palm moving to Windows Mobile, remind yourself of the Apple migration from Classic to OS X.
Would Palm risk loosing customers trained in PalmOS with loads of applications to keep and migrate to Windows Mobile/CE?
I doubt it.
There was a post on some palm news blog recently (Palm Addict afaik) where Palm was trying to recruit Linux guys. Logically they would be going for the Palm Linux port, but who knows, does POSE come to mind? Loads of apps still run on OS 4 and even the original OS 3! (and maybe OS 3.3 since that was free)
Re:Will their tools stay free?
on
TrollTech to IPO?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As long as Trolltech continues to make a developer kit so that us less financially inclined can just complile and test software on their platform for free, I will be happy.
On this topic, I'm sure KDE has the right to take the current QT version and call it their's if Trolltech go bankrupt or go 12 months without a QT release, and release it under a BSD-style license. (Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm too lazy to reread the agreement doc)
GeForce 5200 (iMac), Radeon 9200 (Mac Mini), or have crappy ATi laptop cards (iBook/PB)
Thats still better than what, 80% of the PC market.
Intel Macs are scary. Now Apple can relegate Macs back to the world of below-decent graphics for gaming. Of course, for the "I use Word and AIM all day long" crowd, this doesn't matter.
Did anyone mention that they only talked about offering retail and wholesale DSL speeds above 1.5mbps when smaller compeditors started investing in DSLAMs?
"Oh, if you installed X you should be abel to configure Y easily".
"Stop whinging about X and fix the bloody thing!"(hint: JWZ and ALSA comes to mind. Not his fault that ALSA is a piece of sh!t to configure)
"Just login at the terminal and run tar -jxvf reallysimplesoftware-0.54.tar.bz2 and edit the makefile to make sure installing reallysimplesoftware won't prevent you from using HalfDecentWordProcessor1.0".
No wonder we don't have Open Source Desktop. I don't care if open source environment X is running on BSD, Linux, Windows, whatever, no one seems to be able to think about poor old grandma. Did I mention poor old grandma is on the other side of the planet?
I'd rather tell people to buy a lousy Dell with preconfigured software and a recovery CD than tell people to do any of the above.
Slashdot Mirror
freedom of speech
Freedom of Speech actually doesn't exist in Australia. The government sold censorship control to the private sector under the thing we call 'defamation law'. If you have enough money, feel free to sue us into becoming China.
Linux *still* has spotty support for 802.11a/b/g PCI and PCMCIA cards
Definitely. Maybe if your essid is default and your network is wide open, its easy to use.
Linux wireless gets shot down by the simplicity of XP SP2's config interface, and other things (xsupplicant STILL DOES NOT WORK WITH A PEAP/MSCHAP NETWORK I HAVE TO USE, so I had to buy the Aegis client from Meetinghouse). I hear cries from the KDE crowd about KWirelessSomething (don't remember). That utility is crud.
Its approaching 2006 and my Prism2.5 card STILL doesn't do scanning. I only found out about my neighbours wireless network by booting into Windows. Pathetic. In fact, to add insult to injury, the laptop I'm using to type this is approaching its 3 year EOL.
Prism series chipsets seem to have the best reputation, using a Prism2.5 card right now. Prism54 cards, however, seem to be getting really hard to obtain, and now there is a new breed without Linux drivers (for the moment) too. Pity Intersil sold that thing.
Uhh, Pretty sure NVIDIA has given Microsoft the finger and stopped producing the NV2A GPU... no true hardware emulation there. I'm guessing NVIDIA lawyers have already been annoying M$ lawyers on how they intend to emulate any proprietary GPU features in the NV2A.
Intel would've killed the custom P3 CPU they were using if M$ couldn't get the GPU's for the boxes, so they'd need to stick in a real x86 CPU. All I see from Intel is "LETS COOK EGGS UNTIL MID WAY THIS YEAR". AMD, pfft, can't supply enough right now, VIA, you must be kidding.
Plus, Microsoft is loosing money on each original Xbox. Why would they want to double their losses?
Actually diagnosed. It only took 12 years until some speech therapist (I have had stuttering problems) rang bells and the rest is history.
English is one of the subjects I've jumped up a year in and I'm not doing too badly. English teacher thinks being a Journalist would be idea for me. Suddenly images of Today Tonight reporters holding up their journalism degrees next to fake ones prop up and well....
I'm not too bothered about what I'd end up with at the end of Year 12, and English is actually a weak point for me - I get shot down when it comes to non fiction* (apparently non existant in mainstream VCE english due to the politics of it), and I've been told to do Literature instead of mainstream english to avoid doing so many oral presentations.
* How many people can read Lord of the Flies and other novels right until the end and have no idea on what the whole story is about? ME! In comparison, Animal Farm was dirt easy for me to work out.
The following is a rant which is completely uninformed, not factual in any way shape or form and the author can't figure out when is the right time to hit 'Submit'
I'm in high school myself (in Vic, Australia not America), and being a total nerd, I've gone up a year in some subjects deliberately.
I'm having the ride of my life. No seriously, I actually enjoy school now.
Maybe its because I'll just end up smarter, the education system being designed to push people in University when they don't need it, or the education system being broken anyway, or society AND the education system having rapidly decreasing expectations. Maybe despair.com was right with their slogan "Increasing performance by decreasing expectations".
* The quality of some final year high school exams here is laughable. Yet I'm meeting resistance from teachers because their agenda is to have someone graduate within the top 0.00001% in the state without taking risks. I had to have my parents battle the supreme authorities because I knew I'd get kicked out of someones office just for asking. I'll suprise a LOT of people when I go to write my resume.
An avi or mkv container with an mpeg-4 codec (xvid, divx, etc.) and aac or mp3 for sound should work perfectly in Videolan and you wouldn't have to worry about having trouble playing it in the future.
The good thing is that you can use ogg in matroska (mkv), which you can't in avi. Which will save you a lot of bandwidth in the audio department.
Matroska is a pretty flexible container format. Myself, I use the 3ivx mpeg4 encoder (for videos which need to be played on lower end hardware, i.e palmos handhelds) or ffmpeg H264 and an Ogg sound track.
(little hint: The quantinizer setting is king for ffmpeg H264. If you can master it you won't get a constant bitrate file for streaming, but the movie won't be too far above your desired rate at any time. Forget constant bitrate with ffmpeg/x264 H264. It sucks. Big. You'll regret trying to use constant bitrate)
If I want I can throw subtitles (and other text data, YEnc'ed gentoo isos, kitchen sink, ascii goatse blah blah blah) in too with little pain, or another video stream, another audio stream, whatever. Later on I'm going to try and encode TV into MPEG4 (h264 would be good but encoder requirements for real time are too high), encode audio into ogg and stream TV. DVB-T quality on 802.11b? Possible in my opinion.
VideoLAN plays it just fine, On windows "The Core Media Player" is slightly better, being made by the guys at CoreCodec who defined Matroska. Mplayer on any platform is the best, I'm a little unhappy with the Mplayer front ends on windoze though.
P.S Forget MPEG2. You owe the MPEG LA big money to use it. Quicktime wants your money if you want to play it, regardless of the fact that support is in the OS.
Citadel + WebCit, Aethera or some other clients.
You can create a Calendar room accessible by everyone (or acl'ed as you wish) and people can edit as they wish, as a plus it can handle your mail, among other things. If you want to have a play with WebCit, log onto Uncensored BBS or one of the others.
Disclaimer: I'm to blame for the upcoming NNTP implementation in Citadel, along with a patch to use Bogofilter, and the token Australian node on the "IGnet".
It's deliberately biased against mitnick for financial reasons. There are sites (apparently) pro-Mitnick in some way around too.
Don't think one biased-to-hell source will get you over the line.
... and after I went from dialup to ADSL I stopped bothering. If anything ads seem to be getting less intrusive now.
You are only going to hit red tape, as everyone else who has tried to volunteer has found out. Maybe since its a few weeks from now you'll have more luck but if I were to decide I'd just forget about it and donate to a reputable charity.
Sun screwed it with their crappy and bloated VM...
Microsoft JVM feels much faster than Sun VM. I remember one game by Jagex which made my 1.9GHz system (Sun VM) feel worse than M$ JVM on my Cyrix MII PR233 of years gone by.
I used JamVM for my website instead of Sun too, because Sun was 37% slower of what just amounted to a blog with a MySQL backend! It was also harder to downsize since it wasn't built for footprint unlike JamVM.
A whole heap of nerds on Slashdot wouldn't have helped him. He paid to get support for what he bought. He isn't going to go onto #redhat on irc.freenode.net and wait while his question disappears into the IRC logs.
He failed to cooperate with his vendor (RedHat) and RedHat then failed him, along with all the other vendors chickening out.
On the other hand, M$ and co had it up running quickly.
As much as people don't like to admit, a lot of things are still much easier to do on Windows.
If people really want to help, go take up a support position at <insert Linux vendor here>.
Citadel has been around for years (isn't/wasn't vapour) and is trivial to setup, and supports basically every mail protocol in use (add NNTP to the list once I'm finished developing the code for it) and a full GroupDAV implementation (last time I checked no one else has that yet).
Citadel is driven more towards online communities than small workgroups though, but it works. Apart from maintaining a patch to use bogofilter instead of spamassassin, I rarely touch the install now.
Disclaimer: Very happy Citadel user. And amateur code hacker.
Actually, local data arguably costs more if your're not in anti-compeditive agreements with your buddies (*cough* Telstra Optus AAPT MCI *cought*). In fact, some consumer ISPs are [apparently] bigger than one of that group (AAPT) but they are still forking out lots of money per month because the "Group Of Four" (as its known in the industry) is only interested in locking out the superior competition.
Some smaller ISPs absorb the high per megabyte costs of pushing data down Telstra ADSL ports to unmeter traffic going through peering exchanges such as PIPE Networks or WAIX because it simply costs them less (and gets customers).
In fact, three major ISPs (beside the four) - Internode, Comindico and Primus already have a backbone on the west coast of the U.S and Internode and Primus are already talking about video (and Internode just needs that for a full triple-play service) to the home completely over their backbones. (If International bandwidth was such an issue they probably wouldn't be talking about that).
disclaimer: Happy Internode customer stuck on Telstra Wholesale 512/128k port. Thank you Ziggy and Alston for screwing Australia over. Thank you Sol for stating the bloddy obvious, that being Ziggy and Alston should've spent $3bn in the past few years. See the 56 page admission of guilt and other stupid things
P.S Unlike the U.S Australia is not covered all over in HFC/Cable networks for DOCSIS - two telcos discovered in the mid-1990s that no one watches subscription TV and stopped rolling out new cable.
Can someone explain why this exists? I thought Firefox/Thunderbird/Sunbird[/Nvu] were basically better versions of what existed in the original Mozilla platform? Why is this continuing to be developed? Who is their target audience here?
I'm still a user of the suite and see no point to move other than TBird extensions like SyncKolab. Yes I have tried Firefox. I have it installed on other boxes here. I don't want to use it for day to day use. Ever. Personally if I were to migrate, it wouldn't be to FF or TB.
FF was cool when SeaMonkey was slow as a wounded donkey but not anymore for me.
I don't seem to mind Camino on the Mac though, despite the fact its pretty simular to FF (minus extensions plus better intergration with the rest of the OS due to being built with Cocoa)
OS 6/Cobalt and PalmOS Linux have a native ARM API.
No one wants to release a device based on them though.
I hear rumors of new hardware running f'ing GARNET. (5.4). Erm, isn't that 5 year old tech? I've lost count of how long Cobalt has been in the hands of licencees but I believe its getting close to two years now. (I'm guessing they have all chickened out on adding the necessary RAM to handle it)
Mind you, the upside of keeping 68k is that Palm and others are still making money out of organizers sold years ago. Most people appreciate it.
Goddammit, someone release a mass production Cobalt device already. PalmOS/Linux may still be coming but thats more transparent to most developers and users being a kernel swap of Cobalt [apparently]
No one in their right mind would put hotswap drives on USB for heavy use, because everyone knows USB sucks, bandwidth, power and CPU wise.
I've had a look at this issue myself and after seeing performance of USB2.0 and Firewire i've decided to use SCSI (with IDE->SCSI and SATA->SCSI adaptors) for external storage.
Absolutely. I'm no fan of Windows, but Apache 2 runs fine on 2k and XP. Why did they need Windows+Apache2 in the first place anyway?
Before we start rumors of Palm moving to Windows Mobile, remind yourself of the Apple migration from Classic to OS X.
s .html.
Would Palm risk loosing customers trained in PalmOS with loads of applications to keep and migrate to Windows Mobile/CE?
I doubt it.
There was a post on some palm news blog recently (Palm Addict afaik) where Palm was trying to recruit Linux guys. Logically they would be going for the Palm Linux port, but who knows, does POSE come to mind? Loads of apps still run on OS 4 and even the original OS 3! (and maybe OS 3.3 since that was free)
PalmSource press release: http://www.palmsource.com/press/2005/090905_acces
As long as Trolltech continues to make a developer kit so that us less financially inclined can just complile and test software on their platform for free, I will be happy.
On this topic, I'm sure KDE has the right to take the current QT version and call it their's if Trolltech go bankrupt or go 12 months without a QT release, and release it under a BSD-style license. (Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm too lazy to reread the agreement doc)
Some details here
GeForce 5200 (iMac), Radeon 9200 (Mac Mini), or have crappy ATi laptop cards (iBook/PB) Thats still better than what, 80% of the PC market. Intel Macs are scary. Now Apple can relegate Macs back to the world of below-decent graphics for gaming. Of course, for the "I use Word and AIM all day long" crowd, this doesn't matter.
Did anyone mention that they only talked about offering retail and wholesale DSL speeds above 1.5mbps when smaller compeditors started investing in DSLAMs?
The Olympics is just a glorified commercial event now. I had no motivation to watch them last year.
I wonder if Australian police are as (radar gun) trigger happy as they are in certain parts of the U.S.
Yes.
And I'd rather have a fine and a few points on my license than a murder conviction for running over a pedestrian at 90km/h in a 60km/h zone
"Oh, if you installed X you should be abel to configure Y easily".
"Stop whinging about X and fix the bloody thing!"(hint: JWZ and ALSA comes to mind. Not his fault that ALSA is a piece of sh!t to configure)
"Just login at the terminal and run tar -jxvf reallysimplesoftware-0.54.tar.bz2 and edit the makefile to make sure installing reallysimplesoftware won't prevent you from using HalfDecentWordProcessor1.0".
No wonder we don't have Open Source Desktop. I don't care if open source environment X is running on BSD, Linux, Windows, whatever, no one seems to be able to think about poor old grandma. Did I mention poor old grandma is on the other side of the planet?
I'd rather tell people to buy a lousy Dell with preconfigured software and a recovery CD than tell people to do any of the above.