Blue Yonder are fine if you're in a Telewest
cabled area,
but useless if you're not of course. If you're
after ADSL in the UK, check out
ADSL Guide and their quite active message boards.
The general consensus is that Nildram and Pipex are
probably currently the two best ADSL ISPs in the UK - Nildram
are offering 22.99 pounds a month at the moment.
Those Swiss folks obviously didn't search for
e-voting info in the UK, because 13 towns in the UK
had
e-voting
for the local council elections in May 2002. So the Swiss initiative certainly isn't a "worldwide first".
GRE is basically what you're talking about -
see the bugzilla.mozilla.org track bug 186291, aka
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=186291
(sorry, slashdot links aren't allowed to that
site...).
Also look at the proposal for creating a gecko
[aka "GRE"] RPM in bug 103291 at
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103291
The only reason a home user should have
Windows installed on their machine is to play games. Pretty well everything else can now be
done in Linux and almost all of it at no cost
without involving piracy.
I got my PC this year with XP Home Edition
pre-installed - whilst the OS itself was stable,
I soon found that about half my PC games (yes,
originals !) did not work in Windows XP
(and, yes, some of them, like TOCA 2, even claimed
they worked in XP on the sleeve, but didn't in
reality).
Solution: I downgraded via a horrendously painful
journey to Windows 98 SE (how I actually got that
onto the machine instead of XP is almost worth
a Slashdot article in its own right - the Win 98
SE install process is a total disgrace). Guess
what - all my games now work on Windows
98 SE.
Of course, I did some re-partitioning while I
was at it and now have two Red Hat releases and
the latest Mandrake on the machine - my primary
OS is currently Red Hat...I only boot into
Windows to do the one thing it's actually good
at...playing games of course.
Why not just burn your files to CD-R or CD-RW?
on
Moving to Mac Made Easy
·
· Score: -1, Redundant
Unless the Move2Mac software does some very
clever things (like convert file formats,
registry settings etc.), I don't see why you
can't just burn some CD-R[W]'s on a PC in a
Mac-readable format (Rock Ridge, ISO9660 or
whatever) and then read them back on the Mac.
Or am I missing something deadly obvious here ?
I just sat last night and played through the 7
games so far using Crafty 19.0 for analysis.
Some of
Deep Fritz's moves were just plain poor - my
favourite being the one where it brings its
bishop out, can castle king's side for what seems
like 3 or 4 moves [but utterly refuses to, despite
being an obvious move] and then slams its bishop
embarrassingly back on f8 (its original square).
Needless to say, Deep Fritz lost that game.
Interestingly, all the "!" (good) moves noted by
the analysis team on the match site made by
Deep Fritz were easily found by Crafty within a
few seconds, so you've got to wonder if an 8-CPU
Compaq running Crafty on Linux might have played
just as well as Deep Fritz (remember that Crafty
has SMP capability just as good as Deep Fritz's).
I have an 80GB hard drive - one of its
partitions was 38GB and had
Win XP Home Edition on it, which I decided to
split into 2 partitions - 19GB for Win 98 SE
(which I installed after much struggling - it's
quite tricky to go from an NTFS Win XP to
FAT32 Win 98 SE, believe you me) and 19GB for Mandrake 9.0.
Mandrake 9.0's installer detected that the later
partitions needed renumbering (e.g./dev/hda5
goes to/dev/hda6 and so on) - it decided to
re-write the MBR to update this info. Fair enough
(meant some grub.conf hacking for other Linux
distros in those partitions, but no big deal),
but after I installed Mandrake 9.0, Win 98 SE
refused to boot (and no Win 98 SE boot floppies
would work either !).
Luckily, I used cfdisk to toggle off booting
on the Win 98 SE partition and then toggle it
back on again - Win 98 SE then sparked into
life and booted OK, putting the blame squarely
on Mandrakes rewriting of the boot partition
numbering. A lovely bug for an end-user to
encounter or what ?
play.com are now
selling both Super Audio CD's and
DVD Audio CD's,
but have seen the price of them ?!
17.99 pounds ($27) for SACD's and 12.99 pounds ($19) for DVD-A's, whereas if I go to CD WOW!, I can buy pretty well any normal audio CD for 8.99 pounds ($13). I guess I know where my money's heading then.
Unless the price of SACD's comes down extremely rapidly, they will simply fail - you can't play them on normal CD players, they cost twice as much at the moment, they have some sort of DRM included and the range is very limited (looks like more back catalogue stuff than new stuff to me).
It's like the pre-recorded Mini Disc (which still aren't cheaper than CD's !) debacle all over again...
It must be fun to live in the US and be a DVD
consumer:
Cheaper DVDs.
Released 3-6 months before the rest of the world.
Less censorship (UK has a habit both for
theatrical and DVD releases of censoring movies
to lower their rating and hence sell to a
wider audience).
Often more/better features than other DVD
regions.
Luckily, thanks to the Internet and most DVD
player manufacturers, savvy UK customers can:
Unlock a particular region (or make it "any"
region) via a remote control hack - see somewhere
like DVD Reviewer.
Buy US or Canadian DVDs on the Internet. I recommend
DVD Pricecheck - select regions 1 and 2 [sometimes it is actually cheaper to buy region 2 !], type in the title and search for it. CD WOW! has most new DVDs at 14.99 pounds or less and play.com has a wider selection, although prices aren't quite as good as CD WOW!
Boycott UK stores that sell new releases for 18-20 pounds...
One thing that's interesting is that UK stores such as HMV, W.H Smith, Virgin etc. do not stock Region 1 disks in their UK outlets. No doubt it's because they would be released earlier, cost less, have better content. etc. etc.
BTW, I've never been charged VAT or import duty on any Region 1 DVDs I've bought online and had shipped to the UK - heck, I've just pre-ordered Monsters Inc. 2-disc set from Canada via DVD Soon at a silly price of something around 11 pounds (including postage) - any bets that will be retailing at 20-22 pounds in UK stores ?
I kept complaining to Stephen Shankland of
news.com that almost every Linux article he
wrote included the phrase "the Linux upstart OS".
I think he eventually bought a clue stick and stopped using the term...
Unfortunately, Alice didn't sell too well [in the
UK anyway] - I picked
it up in the bargain bins a couple of months ago
for 3.99 pounds ($6). A shame really, cos it's not
a bad little game and even has its own official
Web site.
I haven't finished the Alice game (got bogged down
with the excellent GTA3:-) ), but the general
consensus on the Net is that the ending "sucks"
(not much happens when you complete it).
Ziggy's reissue actually fell to earth on 8th
July, in the UK anyway - see:
here for info - Slashdot is over a week late with the story:-(
There was a good interview Bowie did with Jonathan Ross a few weeks ago on BBC 1, BTW, but it wasn't
all promoting the Ziggy reissue.
In case you didn't know, the only HP Itanimum
workstation available is the i2000, which HP
are actually no longer shipping with Red Hat Linux
(ironic !). Yes, it comes with both HP-UX 11.20
(shortly to be 11.22) and XP 64-bit edition "for free" (i.e. cost is bundled in), but
no Red Hat Linux for Itanium.
Have a look
here if you don't believe me - this means you have to
fork out $495 (yes, you read that right) for
Red Hat Linux on an HP Itanium box compared to
nothing extra for XP, HP-UX or indeed other
Linuxes (Mandrake, Debian and SuSE all seem
to have ISOs for Itanium available).
Surely HP must now resume shipping Red Hat
Linux with their Itanium boxes [they did used to ship RH with the boxes until quite recently] ? Or is $495
considered peanuts compared to the cost of
the boxes ?
The New Yorker article
says that Farnsworth finally got his TV "invention"
working on 7th September 1927.
This Canadian article says that Scotsman John Logie Baird officially
demonstrated working TV on 26th January 1926 (and actually had it working 4 months earlier than that).
Nice to see that Americans like to believe they invented TV - it was actually the Scots ! This makes the entire "Myth of the Lone Inventor" stuff
rather tainted - Farnsworth did *not* invent TV !
Shamefully, most of America has been brought up on this lie - I visited a Science Museum in the US and was shocked to see no mention of Baird in its "inventor of TV" section.
I watched Tron in the movies as a kid and all I
can say is thank goodness for DVD sites like
play.com who
sell Region 1 DVDs at good prices to UK users
(15.99 pounds for Tron - I ordered it 2 months
before its US release and actually got the DVDs
on the Saturday *before* the US release).
I don't see any sign at all of these Tron DVDs
for Region 2 - this is extremely poor indeed, there's
no excuse I can think of for a 20th Anniversary
DVD set to come out at different times in the US
vs. UK (Tron didn't get a theatre re-release or
anything, so regional differences should be
irrelevant).
As for the discs themselves, it's a good 2-DVD
set - not quite on a par with the US Terminator
2 Ultimate DVD edition (hey, but that's set a
DVD benchmark in extras, sound, branching and
picture quality that no-one's beaten yet, IMHO,
plus it's a great action movie of course).
The subscription to the Red Hat Network buys you
access to RHN at any time - free users are locked
out during periods of heavy load.
Maybe this explains why Red Hat Network released a
bucketload of new RPMs for RH 7.2 last week
(it was KDE 2.2.2 + Xfree86 + a new kernel - more
than 50 in a day) ?
This
duly overloaded RHN for free users and, voila,
I get an e-mail from RHN a day or two later saying
"pay us and you'll not be locked out". Hmmm....
Note that use of up2date for a single registered
machine is free (it's only multiple machine
configs that you have to pay for), so what's to
stop someone downloading the RPMs that update
the one (master) machine, putting them on an
NFS disk and then installing them on the other
machines on their network for nothing ?
Slashdot Mirror
The general consensus is that Nildram and Pipex are probably currently the two best ADSL ISPs in the UK - Nildram are offering 22.99 pounds a month at the moment.
Those Swiss folks obviously didn't search for e-voting info in the UK, because 13 towns in the UK had e-voting for the local council elections in May 2002. So the Swiss initiative certainly isn't a "worldwide first".
Also look at the proposal for creating a gecko [aka "GRE"] RPM in bug 103291 at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103291
I got my PC this year with XP Home Edition pre-installed - whilst the OS itself was stable, I soon found that about half my PC games (yes, originals !) did not work in Windows XP (and, yes, some of them, like TOCA 2, even claimed they worked in XP on the sleeve, but didn't in reality).
Solution: I downgraded via a horrendously painful journey to Windows 98 SE (how I actually got that onto the machine instead of XP is almost worth a Slashdot article in its own right - the Win 98 SE install process is a total disgrace). Guess what - all my games now work on Windows 98 SE.
Of course, I did some re-partitioning while I was at it and now have two Red Hat releases and the latest Mandrake on the machine - my primary OS is currently Red Hat...I only boot into Windows to do the one thing it's actually good at...playing games of course.
Unless the Move2Mac software does some very clever things (like convert file formats, registry settings etc.), I don't see why you can't just burn some CD-R[W]'s on a PC in a Mac-readable format (Rock Ridge, ISO9660 or whatever) and then read them back on the Mac. Or am I missing something deadly obvious here ?
Interestingly, all the "!" (good) moves noted by the analysis team on the match site made by Deep Fritz were easily found by Crafty within a few seconds, so you've got to wonder if an 8-CPU Compaq running Crafty on Linux might have played just as well as Deep Fritz (remember that Crafty has SMP capability just as good as Deep Fritz's).
Mandrake 9.0's installer detected that the later partitions needed renumbering (e.g. /dev/hda5
goes to /dev/hda6 and so on) - it decided to
re-write the MBR to update this info. Fair enough
(meant some grub.conf hacking for other Linux
distros in those partitions, but no big deal),
but after I installed Mandrake 9.0, Win 98 SE
refused to boot (and no Win 98 SE boot floppies
would work either !).
Luckily, I used cfdisk to toggle off booting on the Win 98 SE partition and then toggle it back on again - Win 98 SE then sparked into life and booted OK, putting the blame squarely on Mandrakes rewriting of the boot partition numbering. A lovely bug for an end-user to encounter or what ?
Unless the price of SACD's comes down extremely rapidly, they will simply fail - you can't play them on normal CD players, they cost twice as much at the moment, they have some sort of DRM included and the range is very limited (looks like more back catalogue stuff than new stuff to me). It's like the pre-recorded Mini Disc (which still aren't cheaper than CD's !) debacle all over again...
Luckily, thanks to the Internet and most DVD player manufacturers, savvy UK customers can:
One thing that's interesting is that UK stores such as HMV, W.H Smith, Virgin etc. do not stock Region 1 disks in their UK outlets. No doubt it's because they would be released earlier, cost less, have better content. etc. etc.
BTW, I've never been charged VAT or import duty on any Region 1 DVDs I've bought online and had shipped to the UK - heck, I've just pre-ordered Monsters Inc. 2-disc set from Canada via DVD Soon at a silly price of something around 11 pounds (including postage) - any bets that will be retailing at 20-22 pounds in UK stores ?
I kept complaining to Stephen Shankland of news.com that almost every Linux article he wrote included the phrase "the Linux upstart OS". I think he eventually bought a clue stick and stopped using the term...
I haven't finished the Alice game (got bogged down with the excellent GTA3 :-) ), but the general
consensus on the Net is that the ending "sucks"
(not much happens when you complete it).
Ziggy's reissue actually fell to earth on 8th July, in the UK anyway - see: here for info - Slashdot is over a week late with the story :-(
There was a good interview Bowie did with Jonathan Ross a few weeks ago on BBC 1, BTW, but it wasn't
all promoting the Ziggy reissue.
Have a look here if you don't believe me - this means you have to fork out $495 (yes, you read that right) for Red Hat Linux on an HP Itanium box compared to nothing extra for XP, HP-UX or indeed other Linuxes (Mandrake, Debian and SuSE all seem to have ISOs for Itanium available).
Surely HP must now resume shipping Red Hat Linux with their Itanium boxes [they did used to ship RH with the boxes until quite recently] ? Or is $495 considered peanuts compared to the cost of the boxes ?
The New Yorker article says that Farnsworth finally got his TV "invention" working on 7th September 1927.
This Canadian article says that Scotsman John Logie Baird officially demonstrated working TV on 26th January 1926 (and actually had it working 4 months earlier than that).
Nice to see that Americans like to believe they invented TV - it was actually the Scots ! This makes the entire "Myth of the Lone Inventor" stuff rather tainted - Farnsworth did *not* invent TV ! Shamefully, most of America has been brought up on this lie - I visited a Science Museum in the US and was shocked to see no mention of Baird in its "inventor of TV" section.
I don't see any sign at all of these Tron DVDs for Region 2 - this is extremely poor indeed, there's no excuse I can think of for a 20th Anniversary DVD set to come out at different times in the US vs. UK (Tron didn't get a theatre re-release or anything, so regional differences should be irrelevant).
As for the discs themselves, it's a good 2-DVD set - not quite on a par with the US Terminator 2 Ultimate DVD edition (hey, but that's set a DVD benchmark in extras, sound, branching and picture quality that no-one's beaten yet, IMHO, plus it's a great action movie of course).
Maybe this explains why Red Hat Network released a bucketload of new RPMs for RH 7.2 last week (it was KDE 2.2.2 + Xfree86 + a new kernel - more than 50 in a day) ?
This duly overloaded RHN for free users and, voila, I get an e-mail from RHN a day or two later saying "pay us and you'll not be locked out". Hmmm....
Note that use of up2date for a single registered machine is free (it's only multiple machine configs that you have to pay for), so what's to stop someone downloading the RPMs that update the one (master) machine, putting them on an NFS disk and then installing them on the other machines on their network for nothing ?