I really don't like that Flash PDF reader and it's quite poor of an "Open Source" mag to use a closed source reader !
As for where the original PDF is, if you trace through the connections using Firefox and Live HTTP Headers, it turns out that the repository should be there (there's a URL in the XML) but it isn't yet! If it does turn up, it'll be at this address for the first issue (at the moment, it just redirects to a not found PDF) - you'd need to adjust the date part of the URL to get to later issues.
Crumbly chocolate like a Cadbury's Flake bar is obvious, but surely another food that causes crumbs in volumes is crisps (aka potato chips to American readers)? Also, the fact that a lot more people eat crisps over their keyboard than "Rice Bubbles" (Rice Krispies to anyone other than an Aussie), sunflower seeds and the horribly-named angel hair pasta (doesn't that give you visions of choking on follicles and feathers?) combined means that the omissions of crisps leaves this article some way short of the mark...
I've put up some instructions for Fedora Core 2 users on how to get the Fedora Core 3 RPMs (currently 1.0.2/1.7.6 versions - I'll adjust the versions for 1.0.3/1.7.7 when the RPMs turn up) to work on FC2. This puts a "Firefox Web Browser" option in your Internet FC2 menu and you can then "Add to Panel..." to get the Firefox icon on your panel as well (this is NOT difficult - right click on panel background, select "Add to Panel...", double-click on the first "Application Launcher.." option, open up the Internet sub-options (click on triangle) and then double-click on Firefox).
Note that FC3 users can simply just use "yum update" to pick up recent versions and these integrate correctly with the users' FC3 desktop (though you may have to add a panel icon like above if you haven't already).
The Battlestar Galactica 2-part pilot aired in the UK in mid-2004 if I remember correctly (I never saw it because they stupidly put it exclusively on a premium movie subscription channel [Sky Movies] here in the UK and I don't subscribe to that).
However, Sky conveniently remembered to show the 2-part pilot on Sky One (still a pay channel on UK satellite and cable, but one that a lot more people can see) at 9.00pm on Thursday 14th October 2004 and 9.00pm Friday 15th October 2004.
The new series proper aired on at 8.00pm Monday 18th October 2004 on Sky One and may well have been a world premiere (definitely a UK premiere of course). The first 9 episodes then aired on consecutive Mondays until and including Monday 13th December 2004. Inexplicably, Sky One then replaced BG with some dross called "Prince Charming" (one-off comedy drama about kissing a computer-generated frog, for goodness' sake!) on Monday 20th December 2004.
BG also skipped Monday 27th December 2004 (but I don't have a record of what was on Sky One at that time, but I bet it was rubbish since I didn't record whatever it was) and returned at 8.00pm on Monday 3rd January 2005 for consecutive weekly episodes, making next Monday 17th January 2005's episode #12 if you've been keeping count, which makes the UK about 11 weeks ahead. I think Sky pumped some money into this project in return for what may be world premiere viewing rights. It's *definitely* not the norm for most US sci-fi series aired in the UK, that's for sure.
Oh, my opinion of the show? Definitely worth a watch - mostly pretty good storylines and certainly far better than anything the frankly awful "Enterprise" has ever managed come up with. And, yes, I've seen the original BG and this new one is far superior - in fact, just forget about the old one, they're chalk and cheese really.
I think the mistake Red Hat are making here is that you can't just buy RHEL without support. I'd like to do that and maybe pay for downloadable ISO/RPM updates ($100 per server per year say). They have a free-for-anyone Bugzilla system to report issues on (or to see if someone else has the same problem and has posted workarounds), so I really don't see the need for paid support for small/medium businesses at all.
An example of why paid support gets you nowhere is the current disastrous RHEL 3 kernel for anyone who has an Adaptec hardware RAID controller that uses the aacraid driver - RHEL 3 will actually crash on an "insmod aacraid" during boot most of the time ! The Bugzilla entry shows that a fix was posted in mid-September, the bug was marked Priority: High, Severity: High and yet the latest RHEL3 kernel that was released on 2nd December did not roll in this crucial fix.
I phoned up Red Hat Support and the guy really didn't offer anything "extra" above what Bugzilla did (in fact, the workarounds are all mentioned in the Bugzilla bug listing) and even suggested I ran a beta kernel on a production server, which I politely declined. With Bugzilla open to the public, I really cannot see the reason anyone would pay for phone support !
Isn't this quite a narrow advertising effort - for a start, do the dead-tree ads appear on the NYT website (unlikely) and also, isn't this limited to only people who buy the dead-tree NYT (yes, I know that's not just New Yorkers)? It seems quite a US-centric advertising effort - who outside the US would bother contributing to it?
Of course, if you don't live in the US, you'll find that many US movies can take months and months to air in your country's cinemas. A recent example was the Jennifer Garner vehicle "13 Going On 30" - the Region 1 DVD was actually out a few days before the UK cinema release and also came with a load of deleted scenes and extras (including Jennifer in some lingerie, but let's not dwell on that too long...).
Add to this the free international postage many Region 1 DVD sites have (I used DVD Soon on this occasion) and it's a total no-brainer - Region 1 DVDs are the way to go for UK folks.
I run a lottery site at lottery.merseyworld.com that doesn't do anything platform-specific and isn't just for techy people. I have put a link to Mozilla/Firefox at the bottom of every page (that only appears if you're not using a Gecko-based browser, BTW) as my modest effort to evangelise.
Sure enough, the Gecko-using browsers have crept up in recent months, but nothing earth-shattering - what started off as around 2.1% 6 months ago is now 3.2%. Perhaps more interesting is to note that home users are taking up Gecko browsers in a big way (now seeing almost 5% Gecko at the weekends), but on workdays, that slips to back down to under 3%.
Conclusion: Gecko browser usage is increasing on the average site, but only by about 0.2% a month (will take 3 years to reach 10%, which sounds about right).
Over 8 months to port the Flash 7 plug-in isn't impressive in anyone's books (Windows official release date of the Flash 7 plug-in was 10th September 2003), no Shockwave Player at all for Linux as the original posting said and a half-baked announcement that they'll try to get their apps working under Linux WINE (er, is that with or without a Windows partition and all its native DLLs?).
Macromedia still don't care about Linux in any meaningful fashion - wake me up when Flash 8 comes out simultaneously on Windows and Linux (Mozilla can do it with a Web browser that's 1,000 times more complex, so why not a browser plug-in?), when Shockwave Player finally appears on Linux and when Macromedia's entire Windows product range is available natively on Linux. Only then can you finally say Macromedia is taking Linux seriously - Oracle switched (albeit from Solaris)...c'mon Macromedia, make the same move...
Reviewer doesn't explain why FC2 is missing stuff
on
Fedora Core 2 Review
·
· Score: 1
It's sad to see Fedora Core reviewers complain that it's missing desktop stuff without explaining that there's serious legal issues about MP3/DVD/Java/Flash/Real/Quicktime/Windows Media support for any distro that doesn't want to break US patent laws and be sued.
What I think the Fedora team should be looking at is some sort of whizz-bang "add missing things in at your own peril" installer package that could plug into the main command line/GUI installer (yum/apt/synaptic/whatever). This installer would actually go to the original site and do a download of the software, unpack, install it and configure any clients that needs that new software. This would stop the moaners whilst still keeping the shipped FC distro "open source, free and unencumbered from patents". Either that or simply point the shipped/etc/yum.conf at an (non-US-based) "Extras" repository and put all the missing goodies there (they can't be shipped with the CDs/DVD unfortunately) - this won't work for any software that is prohibited from being repackaged/redistributed though (Java?).
Let me see - 2 or 3 tracks for 3.99 pounds ($7) on a UK CD single. Oh, sorry, 2 or 3 discs per single, so that's anything up to 12 pounds ($20) for a UK CD single ! Any wonder why UK CD singles sales are down ? In the early 90's, you could get an 8 track UK CD single for 99p ($1.80) - 10 years later and the price has multiplied by a factor of 12 !
The BBC Micro of the 80's (made by Acorn) had a "Mode 7" teletext mode which would give you not only a chunky colour TRS-80-style block graphics, but only used 1K (40 column by 25 lines) of memory mapped characters (at hex 7C00 if my "memory" serves me right). This meant you could refresh the entire screen of text in 6502 assembly code in a few milliseconds (it had a 2Mhz 6502 processor) and the scrolling speed was also phenomenal (I called it "the fruit machine effect"!) - probably still faster than any other machine out there I've seen to date.
Hang on, if you bring a $2099 laptop back through customs, won't you have to declare it (the "red channel") or are you just planning to smuggle it back to the UK? If you do declare it, that's a few percent import duty and, here's the killer, 17.5% VAT please (why should you have to pay UK VAT on goods bought outside the UK - I really don't agree with that !) - so that $900 you "saved" now becomes about $500, which may not have paid for your flights...
If I said "what product brand is Penguin" to almost anyone in the UK, they would say "a
chocolate biscuit" (they used to have a massive ad campaign with the slogan "P-P-Pick up a Penguin"). I think very few people would name the book publisher, if only because Penguin Books don't advertise nearly as much as McVities/United Biscuits do.
I briefly caught a glimpse of "Stargate: Infinity" one day on "Sky One Mix" here in the UK (usually just a channel for repeats of what's on "Sky One", which is where the main "Stargate: SG1" series gets its UK premiere). It was pretty bad - the only similarity between it and the main live action series was the noise of the Zat gun as far as I could tell:-)
It's amusing to note that the Gateworld site is very careful to avoid mentioning the Infinity spin-off when it's discussing the Atlantis spin-off - they obviously don't want the train-wreck of the cartoon to jinx things...
If you are looking for a CD storage rack for your music CDs, almost all of them appear to stack the CDs one above the other (i.e. the CDs lie horizontally), which clearly helps to save space. However, now we're told "do not store discs horizontally for a long time (years)" ! So have almost all the CD storage rack manufacturers got it 100% wrong for two decades then?
I set up yum recently on Red Hat 8.0 and pointed it to the appropriate repositories - a free way to get backported security fixes for 8.0. A shame that Red Hat never mentioned this as an option in their e-mail to all the RHN subscribers...
Better link, plus Apache %age share *fell*
on
2003: Year of Apache
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm surprised that the January 2004 survey wasn't linked to, because it gives exact figures as well as the latest graphs. It turns out that Apache lost 0.13% of market share of active sites during December 2003, whereas Microsoft gained 0.52%. It could be due to yet another registrar shifting their parking facilities, but sadly Netcraft - like with many of their previous recent monthly surveys - can't be bothered commenting on it:-(
It puts a bit of a dampener on the "celebration" of Apache's otherwise successful year w.r.t. market share.
It looks like this DVD set is a Region 1-only release - hardly surprising it's not available in the UK since only the little-watched Sci-Fi Channel aired it here (and directly up against various clashing progs I watch on other satellite channels plus having the dubious Sci-Fi logo in the corner of course).
Still, I've ordered it from DVD Soon (20 pounds, which isn't bad for a 4-disc set shipped from Canada to the UK) and just got the confirmation e-mail that it has indeed just been dispatched...
In the UK, broadband-over-powerlines hasn't quite been abandoned yet - see the effort being trialled by Scottish Hydro-Electric. 30 quid a month for 1Mbit/s symmetric is a fairly competitive price compared to UK cable/ADSL prices, but one wonders if they have indeed solved all the interference issues.
BTW, despite the pages looking like it's a done deal, they've only trialled it in two towns to date and have no availability checker on their Web site, so I'm not expecting this to be rolled out to a wider UK audience for quite some time yet.
Oh, and the very obvious reason why this seeming dead duck is still being touted around is that rural UK users have neither cable nor ADSL. With satellite Internet being ludicrously expensive, this powerlines gubbins [if it works properly] might be the only way that those in the "country" can get broadband at a sensible price...
Just a note that it's actually 1 minute of ads every 20 minutes if you read their FAQ. It's bizarre that whilst they insist you have an active Net connection, they don't download the ads from the Net (you'd have thought that might have been an option for broadband users at least). Instead they ship you a CD once a month [that's going to be expensive - I make that 7.2m CDs shipped during the 3-year lifespan of the machines] - I wonder if you have to copy the entire CD to hard drive when you get it (otherwise bang goes the use of the CD drive...).
As other people have said, I wouldn't be surprised if someone tries to reverse engineer the "phone home" software - we need a Linux version of that too of course:-) As someone else said, perhaps virtual desktop software for XP might be another useful trick, so that the ads appear in desktop 1, whilst you do all your stuff in desktop 2 and never see the ads.
Note that they won't deliver the PC directly to your home either - it ends up (sometime in Feb/March next year) at a courier depot and you have to pick it up yourself! My best guess is that this company won't even last 3 years and you'll end up owning the PC at the end of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't like that Flash PDF reader and it's quite poor of an "Open Source" mag to use a closed source reader ! As for where the original PDF is, if you trace through the connections using Firefox and Live HTTP Headers, it turns out that the repository should be there (there's a URL in the XML) but it isn't yet! If it does turn up, it'll be at this address for the first issue (at the moment, it just redirects to a not found PDF) - you'd need to adjust the date part of the URL to get to later issues.
Crumbly chocolate like a Cadbury's Flake bar is obvious, but surely another food that causes crumbs in volumes is crisps (aka potato chips to American readers)? Also, the fact that a lot more people eat crisps over their keyboard than "Rice Bubbles" (Rice Krispies to anyone other than an Aussie), sunflower seeds and the horribly-named angel hair pasta (doesn't that give you visions of choking on follicles and feathers?) combined means that the omissions of crisps leaves this article some way short of the mark...
Funny, but its current home page doesn't exactly give me warm and fuzzy "safe" feelings. Methinks you chose a bad example there :-)
I've put up some instructions for Fedora Core 2 users on how to get the Fedora Core 3 RPMs (currently 1.0.2/1.7.6 versions - I'll adjust the versions for 1.0.3/1.7.7 when the RPMs turn up) to work on FC2. This puts a "Firefox Web Browser" option in your Internet FC2 menu and you can then "Add to Panel..." to get the Firefox icon on your panel as well (this is NOT difficult - right click on panel background, select "Add to Panel...", double-click on the first "Application Launcher.." option, open up the Internet sub-options (click on triangle) and then double-click on Firefox). Note that FC3 users can simply just use "yum update" to pick up recent versions and these integrate correctly with the users' FC3 desktop (though you may have to add a panel icon like above if you haven't already).
The Battlestar Galactica 2-part pilot aired in the UK in mid-2004 if I remember correctly (I never saw it because they stupidly put it exclusively on a premium movie subscription channel [Sky Movies] here in the UK and I don't subscribe to that).
However, Sky conveniently remembered to show the 2-part pilot on Sky One (still a pay channel on UK satellite and cable, but one that a lot more people can see) at 9.00pm on Thursday 14th October 2004 and 9.00pm Friday 15th October 2004.
The new series proper aired on at 8.00pm Monday 18th October 2004 on Sky One and may well have been a world premiere (definitely a UK premiere of course). The first 9 episodes then aired on consecutive Mondays until and including Monday 13th December 2004. Inexplicably, Sky One then replaced BG with some dross called "Prince Charming" (one-off comedy drama about kissing a computer-generated frog, for goodness' sake!) on Monday 20th December 2004.
BG also skipped Monday 27th December 2004 (but I don't have a record of what was on Sky One at that time, but I bet it was rubbish since I didn't record whatever it was) and returned at 8.00pm on Monday 3rd January 2005 for consecutive weekly episodes, making next Monday 17th January 2005's episode #12 if you've been keeping count, which makes the UK about 11 weeks ahead. I think Sky pumped some money into this project in return for what may be world premiere viewing rights. It's *definitely* not the norm for most US sci-fi series aired in the UK, that's for sure.
Oh, my opinion of the show? Definitely worth a watch - mostly pretty good storylines and certainly far better than anything the frankly awful "Enterprise" has ever managed come up with. And, yes, I've seen the original BG and this new one is far superior - in fact, just forget about the old one, they're chalk and cheese really.
An example of why paid support gets you nowhere is the current disastrous RHEL 3 kernel for anyone who has an Adaptec hardware RAID controller that uses the aacraid driver - RHEL 3 will actually crash on an "insmod aacraid" during boot most of the time ! The Bugzilla entry shows that a fix was posted in mid-September, the bug was marked Priority: High, Severity: High and yet the latest RHEL3 kernel that was released on 2nd December did not roll in this crucial fix.
I phoned up Red Hat Support and the guy really didn't offer anything "extra" above what Bugzilla did (in fact, the workarounds are all mentioned in the Bugzilla bug listing) and even suggested I ran a beta kernel on a production server, which I politely declined. With Bugzilla open to the public, I really cannot see the reason anyone would pay for phone support !
Isn't this quite a narrow advertising effort - for a start, do the dead-tree ads appear on the NYT website (unlikely) and also, isn't this limited to only people who buy the dead-tree NYT (yes, I know that's not just New Yorkers)? It seems quite a US-centric advertising effort - who outside the US would bother contributing to it?
Add to this the free international postage many Region 1 DVD sites have (I used DVD Soon on this occasion) and it's a total no-brainer - Region 1 DVDs are the way to go for UK folks.
Sure enough, the Gecko-using browsers have crept up in recent months, but nothing earth-shattering - what started off as around 2.1% 6 months ago is now 3.2%. Perhaps more interesting is to note that home users are taking up Gecko browsers in a big way (now seeing almost 5% Gecko at the weekends), but on workdays, that slips to back down to under 3%.
Conclusion: Gecko browser usage is increasing on the average site, but only by about 0.2% a month (will take 3 years to reach 10%, which sounds about right).
Just a note that HP-UX 11.2X for the Itanium uses ELF-format executables, it's only PA-RISC HP-UX (e.g. 11.11) that doesn't.
Macromedia still don't care about Linux in any meaningful fashion - wake me up when Flash 8 comes out simultaneously on Windows and Linux (Mozilla can do it with a Web browser that's 1,000 times more complex, so why not a browser plug-in?), when Shockwave Player finally appears on Linux and when Macromedia's entire Windows product range is available natively on Linux. Only then can you finally say Macromedia is taking Linux seriously - Oracle switched (albeit from Solaris)...c'mon Macromedia, make the same move...
It's sad to see Fedora Core reviewers complain that it's missing desktop stuff without explaining that there's serious legal issues about MP3/DVD/Java/Flash/Real/Quicktime/Windows Media support for any distro that doesn't want to break US patent laws and be sued.
/etc/yum.conf at an (non-US-based) "Extras" repository and put all the missing goodies there (they can't be shipped with the CDs/DVD unfortunately) - this won't work for any software that is prohibited from being repackaged/redistributed though (Java?).
What I think the Fedora team should be looking at is some sort of whizz-bang "add missing things in at your own peril" installer package that could plug into the main command line/GUI installer (yum/apt/synaptic/whatever). This installer would actually go to the original site and do a download of the software, unpack, install it and configure any clients that needs that new software. This would stop the moaners whilst still keeping the shipped FC distro "open source, free and unencumbered from patents". Either that or simply point the shipped
Let me see - 2 or 3 tracks for 3.99 pounds ($7) on a UK CD single. Oh, sorry, 2 or 3 discs per single, so that's anything up to 12 pounds ($20) for a UK CD single ! Any wonder why UK CD singles sales are down ? In the early 90's, you could get an 8 track UK CD single for 99p ($1.80) - 10 years later and the price has multiplied by a factor of 12 !
The BBC Micro of the 80's (made by Acorn) had a "Mode 7" teletext mode which would give you not only a chunky colour TRS-80-style block graphics, but only used 1K (40 column by 25 lines) of memory mapped characters (at hex 7C00 if my "memory" serves me right). This meant you could refresh the entire screen of text in 6502 assembly code in a few milliseconds (it had a 2Mhz 6502 processor) and the scrolling speed was also phenomenal (I called it "the fruit machine effect"!) - probably still faster than any other machine out there I've seen to date.
Hang on, if you bring a $2099 laptop back through customs, won't you have to declare it (the "red channel") or are you just planning to smuggle it back to the UK? If you do declare it, that's a few percent import duty and, here's the killer, 17.5% VAT please (why should you have to pay UK VAT on goods bought outside the UK - I really don't agree with that !) - so that $900 you "saved" now becomes about $500, which may not have paid for your flights...
If I said "what product brand is Penguin" to almost anyone in the UK, they would say "a chocolate biscuit" (they used to have a massive ad campaign with the slogan "P-P-Pick up a Penguin"). I think very few people would name the book publisher, if only because Penguin Books don't advertise nearly as much as McVities/United Biscuits do.
I briefly caught a glimpse of "Stargate: Infinity" one day on "Sky One Mix" here in the UK (usually just a channel for repeats of what's on "Sky One", which is where the main "Stargate: SG1" series gets its UK premiere). It was pretty bad - the only similarity between it and the main live action series was the noise of the Zat gun as far as I could tell :-)
It's amusing to note that the Gateworld site is very careful to avoid mentioning the Infinity spin-off when it's discussing the Atlantis spin-off - they obviously don't want the train-wreck of the cartoon to jinx things...
If you are looking for a CD storage rack for your music CDs, almost all of them appear to stack the CDs one above the other (i.e. the CDs lie horizontally), which clearly helps to save space. However, now we're told "do not store discs horizontally for a long time (years)" ! So have almost all the CD storage rack manufacturers got it 100% wrong for two decades then?
I set up yum recently on Red Hat 8.0 and pointed it to the appropriate repositories - a free way to get backported security fixes for 8.0. A shame that Red Hat never mentioned this as an option in their e-mail to all the RHN subscribers...
It puts a bit of a dampener on the "celebration" of Apache's otherwise successful year w.r.t. market share.
The BBC in the UK already made TV series of four of the Narnia books and have just released a 3-disc Chronicles of Narnia DVD box set as well...
It looks like this DVD set is a Region 1-only release - hardly surprising it's not available in the UK since only the little-watched Sci-Fi Channel aired it here (and directly up against various clashing progs I watch on other satellite channels plus having the dubious Sci-Fi logo in the corner of course). Still, I've ordered it from DVD Soon (20 pounds, which isn't bad for a 4-disc set shipped from Canada to the UK) and just got the confirmation e-mail that it has indeed just been dispatched...
Just a note for folks who haven't checked their UK Christmas TV mags - Belleville Rendez-Vous is on BBC 2 on Christmas Day.
BTW, despite the pages looking like it's a done deal, they've only trialled it in two towns to date and have no availability checker on their Web site, so I'm not expecting this to be rolled out to a wider UK audience for quite some time yet.
Oh, and the very obvious reason why this seeming dead duck is still being touted around is that rural UK users have neither cable nor ADSL. With satellite Internet being ludicrously expensive, this powerlines gubbins [if it works properly] might be the only way that those in the "country" can get broadband at a sensible price...
As other people have said, I wouldn't be surprised if someone tries to reverse engineer the "phone home" software - we need a Linux version of that too of course :-) As someone else said, perhaps virtual desktop software for XP might be another useful trick, so that the ads appear in desktop 1, whilst you do all your stuff in desktop 2 and never see the ads.
Note that they won't deliver the PC directly to your home either - it ends up (sometime in Feb/March next year) at a courier depot and you have to pick it up yourself! My best guess is that this company won't even last 3 years and you'll end up owning the PC at the end of it.