OK, so it's difficult to know how to Google for this one without knowing its name first, but it might be XULRunner that you're ranting about w.r.t. a single runtime engine to fire up apps like Firefox etc.
I believe this is indeed the replacement name for what used to be known as "GRE" (Gecko Runtime Environment) and can be used for *any* XUL-based application, not just stuff coming out of the Moz development team. What's not clear to me yet is exactly when this will be complete enough to be used by Firefox etc. - maybe for 2.0, maybe not.
Although Dell already allow you to customise your PowerEdge server to have Windows, Linux, Netware or no OS, I think they do this because server purchasers tend to be more "clued up" and generate far less support calls (for OS/software issues) than home desktop/laptop users do.
However, how about this revolutionary idea - in the customise screen for Dell desktops/laptops, the OS section could have "Home", "Pro" or "No OS" options. If "No OS" is selected, then a big red warning is shown: "DELL WILL NOT SUPPORT ANY OPERATING SYSTEM OR SOFTWARE INSTALLED ON THIS HARDWARE - DO NOT CONTACT US WITH ANY OS/SOFTWARE PROBLEMS AFTER PURCHASE". And of course the price should be lower (one wonders if seeing the price diff is another concern for Dell because then we'd know exactly what Windows+pre-installed trial guff costs for Dell!), but I wouldn't bank on it.
The "No OS" option with no OS/software support gets around the problem of having to support 2 operating systems, plus the customer gets to start from a clean machine and decide exactly how to set it up (yes, some of those customers will use pirated Windows and indeed try to phone Dell support to moan about their install). It's quite likely that people buying a Dell with no OS pre-installed will be tech-savvy, so they probably wouldn't contact Dell support anyway.
I think Dell will *always* have to offer the Windows option in the foreseeable future, simply because for Joe Bloggs out there, it's the thing he and his computer-illiterate friends know and they offer more games than any other OS of course. If Dell can work out a way to have no OS installed and have it cost slightly less (heck, $20-$30 would be good enough), then you might see Microsoft's Windows market share (well, pre-installed share anyway) start to slip.
As for Linux, I'd actually like to see Dell "certify" certain distros as being installable and having all their hardware work with Linux, but not actually provide any support (i.e. you buy the "no OS" version and then install the certified distro yourself). Yes, that could mean Dell switching components to "Linux-friendly" ones, but that's no bad thing if they get a rep for Linux working out of the box straight after installation - it would surely gain them several percentage points market share without having to do too much (yes, they'd need a certification team and a change in hardware [or provide OSS GPL'ed drivers for their current hardware if they don't want to change], but I don't see that being too costly).
Not in stock right now, but I recently bought a 20cm SATA data cable for 33 pence here in the UK from Ebuyer - they have other cables (longer ones usually) at, oooh, 60 pence or more. SATA cables are *everywhere* (and very cheap) now, hardly surprising considering that all new desktop drives seem to be SATA.
I think mail-in rebates (along with not including tax in the sticker price - that is a *ludicrous* US practice!) are one of the biggest cons for US purchasers ever. In the UK, customers simply wouldn't put up with it, asking the logical question "why isn't the rebate taken off when I buy the goods?".
The answer is indeed that vendors are hoping that the hassle of having to send back rebate coupons via snail mail would put off enough customers for them to claw back some money - there can be no other reason for mail-in rebates surely?
Even online stores seem to follow this practice when selling to US customers - I believe Dell US has mail-in rebates, but I've never seen Dell UK's site do it. Why don't US consumers complain about mail-in rebates to the appropriate authorities and get some sort of bill to ban them? It seems that without some sort of legal enforcement, US companies are going to continue this somewhat shady and unethical practice.
Seemingly unnoticed by any of the UK press, the original Xbox - now a totally un-newsworthy item of course - has dropped to 79.99 pounds with free postage from two major online sites - play.com and Amazon UK.
Let me see:
Original Xbox - 80 quid, no overheating problems, over 1,000 games available, game prices around 30 quid and many games in bargain bins at 10-15 quid, "modifiable", can run Linux after "modification", in stock everywhere.
Xbox 360 - 280 quid, some overheating issues, a few dozen games available, game prices around 45-50 quid and no discounted games yet, not modifiable, can't run Linux at all, not really in stock unless you queue for hours and pre-order months in advance.
Is it just me or are you better off buying an original Xbox now and getting an Xbox 360 in Xmas 2006? Or is that just common sense talking?
My experience trying to setup *wired* networking and sound with retail Windows XP Professional was brutal. Nothing I needed was in the initial install. With no net connection in Windows XP Professional I had to keep booting into my Linux partition to search for any help at all on how to set things up and then download what I needed. And then go back into Windows to toil and then fail. And then repeat the process. Eventually I got my network card and sound working, but when I activated them, the whole machine got slower over time. So I gave up on Windows XP Professional.
FYI, the machine was an Acer T140 (Athlon 64 3200+) with a (rebadged) Nvidia NForce 4 motherboard inside. Yes, you read that right - the *very popular* Nforce 4's onboard networking and sound are *not* supported by retail Windows XP Professional out-of-the-box (even with Service Pack 2). You can close that gaping jaw now (yes, Acer shipped a pre-loaded XP Home with the drivers in, but no CD of drivers if you wanted to fully re-install Windows). And, yes, Linux worked with everything in the T140 without me needing to do anything extra.
A shame you didn't actually bother going to the
Dell site and looking up their PowerEdge server range - when customising, you can pick no OS, Windows 2003 Server, RHEL 3 or 4 and even Novell Netware. I'm sure they've been doing this for at least 3-4 years now - we've never bought a Linux-destined PowerEdge with Windows pre-installed.
Also, the claim that workstations were their "first step in Linux" isn't true - I'm pretty certain that their well-hidden Linux desktops (yes, can you find a Dell desktop that runs Linux?! They do actually sell them, but it's almost impossible to find them on their site) came out years after they starting shipping Linux on their PowerEdges.
With the UK analogue TV switch-off coming in 2008-2012 (very poor that the Slashdot story doesn't make it clear that it's a 4-year phased switch-off starting *before* the US switch off their analogue TV!), I find it quite amazing that:
1. UK electrical retailers are still selling analogue-only TV sets - these will require a separate set-top box to be usable beyond the analogue switch-off and even then, you'll be playing the horrible "2-remote control juggle" that you currently have to (heck, neither of my 2 different digital terrestrial set-top boxes let me change the volume level using the boxes remote control !! Madness !).
2. TV sets with built-in terrestrial digital tuners (known as "IDTV"s here in the UK) still seem to be fairly scarce (and far more expensive than buying an analogue TV set and a separate set-top box instead).
And don't forget that the UK still hasn't introduced HDTV yet - it'll be coming to Sky Digital satellite next year, but there's been no announcement about it for terrestrial digital at all. The horrible thing is that we could be talking about a repeat performance a few years down the road after analogue is switched-off - people start replacing their TV sets and recorders with digital versions, only to find out that they won't work fully when HDTV is introduced.
On a slightly different vein, I think the BBC have been very clever at promoting the "buy a cheap digital set-top box for under 50 pounds" adverts (yes, they're ads really) they've been running for the past 2 years or so. It effectively enforces the licence fee because those cheap boxes do *not* have a smart card capability, so the only effective non-ad/sponsorship alternative to the licence fee (encrypted subscription, which is how I think the BBC should be funded, since you can't dodge the subs assuming the encryption isn't broken) is now virtually dead in the water thanks to the millions of non-smart card Freeview boxes in UK homes now.
I just ordered the Maxtor Maxline III 300GB from Ebuyer - 91 pounds with a 5-year warranty (I see a load of people bitching about Maxtor's 1-year warranties, but this baby has a full 5 years on it). Yes, it's got a 16MB cache (Ebuyer's one-liner for the product is wrong - they get right lower down the page). Don't forget to buy a SATA data cable of course.
And, no, it'll be used to rip my entire CD collection to MP3's before you ask...
There is indeed nothing worse than seeing a nifty Open Source application on Windows...and then gritting your teeth when you find out it's on Windows *only*. Hence, to get respect of the non-Microsoft community is pretty straightforward - make your application cross-platform (preferably plan to do this from the start, otherwise you may have a big rewrite on your hands).
There are cross-platform toolkits out there to help you (e.g. wxWindows) and remember that the more cross-platform Open Source apps we get, the easier it is to wean someone off Windows and onto another platform (think OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird etc.).
The original submitter doesn't make it clear that the show is only on BBC 2 Scotland, so the only way most non-UK people outside Scotland can see it is if they've got Sky Digital satellite and tune to channel 960...but how many people will do that?! Never mind, that only a minority of UK people have Sky Digital anyway...
I'm not sure a local Scottish TV programme not on the two "main" terrestrial channels (BBC 1 or ITV 1) warrants a Slashdot story! Hey, we'll be seeing stories about UK Channel 5's "The Gadget Show" next (which I guess is just about the only UK national terrestrial TV show regularly covering anything remotely technical [and, yes, it's mostly just boys toys on it, not much about computing]). And, yes, I know about "Click Online", but that's tucked away on BBC News 24, so barely gets an audience.
Old news...in the UK at least
on
TiVo Buries the VCR
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· Score: 2, Insightful
As usual, this posting is heavily US-biased - for example, in the UK, Tivo no longer exists (they pulled out a couple of years ago) and DirectTV never existed. The largest electrical retailer in the UK, Dixons, pulled VCRs from its shelves over 9 months ago.
The bigger story is how mutiple brands of hard disk recorders (whether Sky+ bought with your digital satellite service or standalone units) and, to a lesser extent, DVD recorders are rapidly replacing VHS. I've found that DVD recorders offer little more than VHS recorders really - whilst you tend to have a higher quality picture and random access, it's also slower to actually start recording on a DVD recorder and the media is, ironically, less reliable than VHS (very susceptible to scratches for instance).
Whilst Tivo is right that hard disk recorders are ushering in the death of VHS, they've got a lot of competition, particularly outside the US, where Tivo seems to have no presence at all now. Also, don't forget Net downloading, which doesn't require an overpriced "Windows Media PC" to do it either.
...but even so, to answer one of your criticisms, a colour version is indeed available (yes, linked to near the bottom of the original article!). Like OLEDs, it's going to be several years before these get cheap enough to consider using as an e-book (or whatever). I'm interested, also, whether this e-paper technology would scale up really large - e.g. could it eventually be used as a TV screen like they're eventually proposing for OLEDs?
This list is poorly constructed - surely any show that isn't a science fiction show must be disqualified. So that's "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." (spy comedy), "Batman" (camp action), "The Avengers" (action), "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" (comedy/horror), "Tales From The Crypt" (comedy/horror) and "Xena: Warrior Princess" (fantasy action) all removed from the list.
Then you've got omissions like "Farscape", "Blake's 7", "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy", "Star Cops", "The Tomorrow People", "Smallville", "UFO", "Crusade", "Captain Scarlet" (old or new version), "The Incredible Hulk", "The Invaders", "Lexx", "Red Dwarf" amd "VR.5". Are seriously telling me that "Batman", "Lost In Space", "The Jetsons" and "Logan's Run" are better than all of those?
It's a pathetic list if you think about it - cooked up by someone with no knowledge of TV science-fiction (woefully lacking in non-US shows as well - I count only 3, yes three, from the UK). Even the most novice list compiler would check another list on another site as a reference point - for example, why didn't they go to tv.com's large alphabetical list of "all science-fiction shows" (no, it's not all of them, but it's a reasonable starting point)
I believe (though trying to find it on www.eu.int looks tricky !) that the EU has statutory maximum volume limits on audio devices where headphones can be attached (but I could be wrong on this). Mind you, I just bought a new MP3 player that is "comfortable" volume in the 15-25 range, but it can go to ear-bleeding "40", which I suspect is way above the EU limits. Strange, though, because I have another player that the same site sells and that's got a much lower maximum volume.
I'm wondering if we're going to get coverage of non-US TV shows (TV Tome used to do so and tv.com doesn't seem to [or if it does, it's barely any])? For example, on the home page of the Wiki it says "Catch every episode of the longest-running sci-fi show on television on Sci-Fi". Nope, we're not talking about Doctor Who (which is the world record holder), but apparently Stargate SG-1!
If you're going to slag off Fedora, get it right..
on
An Early Taste of OpenSUSE
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The worst thing is that they cut off updates for each release when the new one comes out every six months.
Nothing like a big lie in there? Oh sorry, it's actually two lies in one sentence! Firstly, the minor lie is that Fedora's releases have actually had 7 or 8 months between them (FC5 will be out 8 months after FC4...and possibly even longer than that if it gets pushed back).
The bigger lie though is the claim that there's no updates for any of the previous releases as soon as the latest Fedora is released. In fact, the previous release remains under the Fedora Project banner - complete with updates - until about the Test 2 of the FC release two versions on - which typically would be about 12 months. And even then, updates are moved to the Fedora Project and would continue to receive updates for probably about another 12 months (Fedora Core 1 is still getting updates for example). So that's two years of updates, not 6 months like this poster claimed - not bad for a free distro if you ask me.
You have to do a fresh install every six months!
Yep, he compounds the earlier fibs with another one. Firstly, even if you insist on doing a fresh install when the updates stop, we're still talking 2 years, not 6 months. And, if you're willing to put a bit of effort into it, you can extend older Fedora Core releases yourself beyond the 2 year mark e.g. by building your own kernel from kernel.org's newer releases or trying out a later Fedora Core's RPM (source or binary) on the FC you're maintaining (for example, I've managed to get FC3's Firefox/Thunderbird RPMs working on FC2, although it does require you to upgrade several dependencies with FC3 versions).
Now if you really want to slag Fedora off, complain about how Anaconda's Disk Druid is quite tricky to use and amazingly isn't available as a standalone app (yep, it's only part of the install process). Or about how Fedora starts way too many services by default, especially for a desktop configuration. But attacking updates when I think the Fedora Project/Legacy teams do a good job is just poor.
I had no problem installing Inkscape 0.41 on Fedora Core 2 using their i686 "static" RPM. However, with 0.42, the RPM is now linked against libgc.so.1, which is not shipped with Fedora Core (any release, 1 to 4). So I trundled off to Dag Wieers repository, downloaded the Fedora Core 2 libgc RPM, installed it and now I'm getting "undefined symbol: g_option_error_quark". Lovely stuff - looks like I'm going to have to compile from source <sigh>. I think the Inkscape folks need to rebuild their RPMs...
This is utter bunkum because there are hundreds and hundreds of UK channels - 5 analogue terrestrial, about another 25 on digital terrestrial and about another 300 (!!) on digital satellite. Yes, with 5 analogue or digital tuners, they could record BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5, but let's face it, most of that's now rubbish and the better stuff is on digital satellite (which they will *not* be able to record massively in parallel - Sky who run it currently only have a twin tuner for example and that needs a dual LNB on your dish too !).
I'd rather see some effort made to allow broadband users to download TV shows (even a small fee for this would be acceptable - a few pounds a month) from the time they are aired on normal TV for, say, up to 2 months afterwards. Now this would be *far* more useful, especially now that 2Mbit/s is starting to become the normal for UK broadband.
Unfortunately, all your points are invalid because the UK equivalent tax site is and always has been cross-platform (I used Linux and Mozilla or Firefox without a problem) and shows that, basically, the Aussie government were utterly incompetent when initially setting up the site.
If it's anything like what happened with the official UK lottery site (which banned almost all non-IE *and* non-Windows users from its online games until earlier this year), it'll take about 3 years before the Aussies bother to do another site redesign cycle and suddenly realise what a snafu they originally made.
Funny, because we installed RHEL 3 on a bunch of RX600's without much fuss. Never did work out how to program the LCD front panel they've got though (the utilities that were supposed to do it didn't seem to work for me). To be honest, the Fujitsu server hardware isn't that much different from Dell's (often the same RAID controller, network cards etc.) and Linux seems to have no problem with it. BTW, we weren't impressed with the Fujitsu racks though - the Dell ones are much better.
Fedora Core 4 still runs too many services that are not required, particularly in a PC desktop environment (e.g. software RAID monitor, at daemon, PCMCIA support, ACPI, cpuspeed), but they can be turned off fairly easily.
Ironically, the one disappointing feature of FC4 is that the DVD distro has actually been *cut down* compared to FC3's DVD - many packages (some of which are wildly popular like abiword, xmms or tuxracer) have been surprisingly moved off of even the DVD and shunted into Fedora Extras as an optional download instead. I think this was a knee-jerk response to people complaining that FC3 took up 4 CD's - fair enough, but why not keep the "bloat" for the FC4 DVD then and leave those packages off the CD version?
BTW, it always pays to wait a few weeks for initial bugs to be ironed out in Fedora releases - FC4's Firefox couldn't use the Sun Java plug-in with SELinux enabled until they released a policy patch to sort this out for instance. Mind you, I think the Anaconda installer should optionally allow you to download updates before it completes its installation - SuSE's YaST does, so why not not Anaconda?
Actually the official UK lottery site has allowed Firefox/Mozilla into its online registration/play for a few months now, but this is after *years* of only supporting a weird set of browsers (IE, AOL and, er, Netscape 7?), despite numerous phone call and e-mail complaints from me and other users. Luckily, their latest design has finally allowed the Bugzilla bug (226258) on this issue to be closed.
Ho hum, this is a bit of a "non-story" isn't it? The DVD set has been out in the US for 18 months (and in the UK for over a year) - containing the full set of episodes - and yet it's considered newsworthy that ages later, a TV channel decides to repeat the episodes?
Never mind that the Sci-Fi Channel in the UK has *already* done at least 2 repeat runs of Firefly in its entirety, a fact totally ignored by this article of course.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe this is indeed the replacement name for what used to be known as "GRE" (Gecko Runtime Environment) and can be used for *any* XUL-based application, not just stuff coming out of the Moz development team. What's not clear to me yet is exactly when this will be complete enough to be used by Firefox etc. - maybe for 2.0, maybe not.
Although Dell already allow you to customise your PowerEdge server to have Windows, Linux, Netware or no OS, I think they do this because server purchasers tend to be more "clued up" and generate far less support calls (for OS/software issues) than home desktop/laptop users do.
However, how about this revolutionary idea - in the customise screen for Dell desktops/laptops, the OS section could have "Home", "Pro" or "No OS" options. If "No OS" is selected, then a big red warning is shown: "DELL WILL NOT SUPPORT ANY OPERATING SYSTEM OR SOFTWARE INSTALLED ON THIS HARDWARE - DO NOT CONTACT US WITH ANY OS/SOFTWARE PROBLEMS AFTER PURCHASE". And of course the price should be lower (one wonders if seeing the price diff is another concern for Dell because then we'd know exactly what Windows+pre-installed trial guff costs for Dell!), but I wouldn't bank on it.
The "No OS" option with no OS/software support gets around the problem of having to support 2 operating systems, plus the customer gets to start from a clean machine and decide exactly how to set it up (yes, some of those customers will use pirated Windows and indeed try to phone Dell support to moan about their install). It's quite likely that people buying a Dell with no OS pre-installed will be tech-savvy, so they probably wouldn't contact Dell support anyway.
I think Dell will *always* have to offer the Windows option in the foreseeable future, simply because for Joe Bloggs out there, it's the thing he and his computer-illiterate friends know and they offer more games than any other OS of course. If Dell can work out a way to have no OS installed and have it cost slightly less (heck, $20-$30 would be good enough), then you might see Microsoft's Windows market share (well, pre-installed share anyway) start to slip.
As for Linux, I'd actually like to see Dell "certify" certain distros as being installable and having all their hardware work with Linux, but not actually provide any support (i.e. you buy the "no OS" version and then install the certified distro yourself). Yes, that could mean Dell switching components to "Linux-friendly" ones, but that's no bad thing if they get a rep for Linux working out of the box straight after installation - it would surely gain them several percentage points market share without having to do too much (yes, they'd need a certification team and a change in hardware [or provide OSS GPL'ed drivers for their current hardware if they don't want to change], but I don't see that being too costly).
Not in stock right now, but I recently bought a 20cm SATA data cable for 33 pence here in the UK from Ebuyer - they have other cables (longer ones usually) at, oooh, 60 pence or more. SATA cables are *everywhere* (and very cheap) now, hardly surprising considering that all new desktop drives seem to be SATA.
I think mail-in rebates (along with not including tax in the sticker price - that is a *ludicrous* US practice!) are one of the biggest cons for US purchasers ever. In the UK, customers simply wouldn't put up with it, asking the logical question "why isn't the rebate taken off when I buy the goods?".
The answer is indeed that vendors are hoping that the hassle of having to send back rebate coupons via snail mail would put off enough customers for them to claw back some money - there can be no other reason for mail-in rebates surely?
Even online stores seem to follow this practice when selling to US customers - I believe Dell US has mail-in rebates, but I've never seen Dell UK's site do it. Why don't US consumers complain about mail-in rebates to the appropriate authorities and get some sort of bill to ban them? It seems that without some sort of legal enforcement, US companies are going to continue this somewhat shady and unethical practice.
Let me see:
Original Xbox - 80 quid, no overheating problems, over 1,000 games available, game prices around 30 quid and many games in bargain bins at 10-15 quid, "modifiable", can run Linux after "modification", in stock everywhere.
Xbox 360 - 280 quid, some overheating issues, a few dozen games available, game prices around 45-50 quid and no discounted games yet, not modifiable, can't run Linux at all, not really in stock unless you queue for hours and pre-order months in advance.
Is it just me or are you better off buying an original Xbox now and getting an Xbox 360 in Xmas 2006? Or is that just common sense talking?
My experience trying to setup *wired* networking and sound with retail Windows XP Professional was brutal. Nothing I needed was in the initial install. With no net connection in Windows XP Professional I had to keep booting into my Linux partition to search for any help at all on how to set things up and then download what I needed. And then go back into Windows to toil and then fail. And then repeat the process. Eventually I got my network card and sound working, but when I activated them, the whole machine got slower over time. So I gave up on Windows XP Professional.
FYI, the machine was an Acer T140 (Athlon 64 3200+) with a (rebadged) Nvidia NForce 4 motherboard inside. Yes, you read that right - the *very popular* Nforce 4's onboard networking and sound are *not* supported by retail Windows XP Professional out-of-the-box (even with Service Pack 2). You can close that gaping jaw now (yes, Acer shipped a pre-loaded XP Home with the drivers in, but no CD of drivers if you wanted to fully re-install Windows). And, yes, Linux worked with everything in the T140 without me needing to do anything extra.
Also, the claim that workstations were their "first step in Linux" isn't true - I'm pretty certain that their well-hidden Linux desktops (yes, can you find a Dell desktop that runs Linux?! They do actually sell them, but it's almost impossible to find them on their site) came out years after they starting shipping Linux on their PowerEdges.
1. UK electrical retailers are still selling analogue-only TV sets - these will require a separate set-top box to be usable beyond the analogue switch-off and even then, you'll be playing the horrible "2-remote control juggle" that you currently have to (heck, neither of my 2 different digital terrestrial set-top boxes let me change the volume level using the boxes remote control !! Madness !).
2. TV sets with built-in terrestrial digital tuners (known as "IDTV"s here in the UK) still seem to be fairly scarce (and far more expensive than buying an analogue TV set and a separate set-top box instead).
And don't forget that the UK still hasn't introduced HDTV yet - it'll be coming to Sky Digital satellite next year, but there's been no announcement about it for terrestrial digital at all. The horrible thing is that we could be talking about a repeat performance a few years down the road after analogue is switched-off - people start replacing their TV sets and recorders with digital versions, only to find out that they won't work fully when HDTV is introduced.
On a slightly different vein, I think the BBC have been very clever at promoting the "buy a cheap digital set-top box for under 50 pounds" adverts (yes, they're ads really) they've been running for the past 2 years or so. It effectively enforces the licence fee because those cheap boxes do *not* have a smart card capability, so the only effective non-ad/sponsorship alternative to the licence fee (encrypted subscription, which is how I think the BBC should be funded, since you can't dodge the subs assuming the encryption isn't broken) is now virtually dead in the water thanks to the millions of non-smart card Freeview boxes in UK homes now.
And, no, it'll be used to rip my entire CD collection to MP3's before you ask...
There is indeed nothing worse than seeing a nifty Open Source application on Windows...and then gritting your teeth when you find out it's on Windows *only*. Hence, to get respect of the non-Microsoft community is pretty straightforward - make your application cross-platform (preferably plan to do this from the start, otherwise you may have a big rewrite on your hands).
There are cross-platform toolkits out there to help you (e.g. wxWindows) and remember that the more cross-platform Open Source apps we get, the easier it is to wean someone off Windows and onto another platform (think OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird etc.).
The original submitter doesn't make it clear that the show is only on BBC 2 Scotland, so the only way most non-UK people outside Scotland can see it is if they've got Sky Digital satellite and tune to channel 960...but how many people will do that?! Never mind, that only a minority of UK people have Sky Digital anyway...
I'm not sure a local Scottish TV programme not on the two "main" terrestrial channels (BBC 1 or ITV 1) warrants a Slashdot story! Hey, we'll be seeing stories about UK Channel 5's "The Gadget Show" next (which I guess is just about the only UK national terrestrial TV show regularly covering anything remotely technical [and, yes, it's mostly just boys toys on it, not much about computing]). And, yes, I know about "Click Online", but that's tucked away on BBC News 24, so barely gets an audience.
The bigger story is how mutiple brands of hard disk recorders (whether Sky+ bought with your digital satellite service or standalone units) and, to a lesser extent, DVD recorders are rapidly replacing VHS. I've found that DVD recorders offer little more than VHS recorders really - whilst you tend to have a higher quality picture and random access, it's also slower to actually start recording on a DVD recorder and the media is, ironically, less reliable than VHS (very susceptible to scratches for instance).
Whilst Tivo is right that hard disk recorders are ushering in the death of VHS, they've got a lot of competition, particularly outside the US, where Tivo seems to have no presence at all now. Also, don't forget Net downloading, which doesn't require an overpriced "Windows Media PC" to do it either.
...but even so, to answer one of your criticisms, a colour version is indeed available (yes, linked to near the bottom of the original article!). Like OLEDs, it's going to be several years before these get cheap enough to consider using as an e-book (or whatever). I'm interested, also, whether this e-paper technology would scale up really large - e.g. could it eventually be used as a TV screen like they're eventually proposing for OLEDs?
Then you've got omissions like "Farscape", "Blake's 7", "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy", "Star Cops", "The Tomorrow People", "Smallville", "UFO", "Crusade", "Captain Scarlet" (old or new version), "The Incredible Hulk", "The Invaders", "Lexx", "Red Dwarf" amd "VR.5". Are seriously telling me that "Batman", "Lost In Space", "The Jetsons" and "Logan's Run" are better than all of those?
It's a pathetic list if you think about it - cooked up by someone with no knowledge of TV science-fiction (woefully lacking in non-US shows as well - I count only 3, yes three, from the UK). Even the most novice list compiler would check another list on another site as a reference point - for example, why didn't they go to tv.com's large alphabetical list of "all science-fiction shows" (no, it's not all of them, but it's a reasonable starting point)
I believe (though trying to find it on www.eu.int looks tricky !) that the EU has statutory maximum volume limits on audio devices where headphones can be attached (but I could be wrong on this). Mind you, I just bought a new MP3 player that is "comfortable" volume in the 15-25 range, but it can go to ear-bleeding "40", which I suspect is way above the EU limits. Strange, though, because I have another player that the same site sells and that's got a much lower maximum volume.
I'm wondering if we're going to get coverage of non-US TV shows (TV Tome used to do so and tv.com doesn't seem to [or if it does, it's barely any])? For example, on the home page of the Wiki it says "Catch every episode of the longest-running sci-fi show on television on Sci-Fi". Nope, we're not talking about Doctor Who (which is the world record holder), but apparently Stargate SG-1!
Nothing like a big lie in there? Oh sorry, it's actually two lies in one sentence! Firstly, the minor lie is that Fedora's releases have actually had 7 or 8 months between them (FC5 will be out 8 months after FC4...and possibly even longer than that if it gets pushed back).
The bigger lie though is the claim that there's no updates for any of the previous releases as soon as the latest Fedora is released. In fact, the previous release remains under the Fedora Project banner - complete with updates - until about the Test 2 of the FC release two versions on - which typically would be about 12 months. And even then, updates are moved to the Fedora Project and would continue to receive updates for probably about another 12 months (Fedora Core 1 is still getting updates for example). So that's two years of updates, not 6 months like this poster claimed - not bad for a free distro if you ask me.
You have to do a fresh install every six months!
Yep, he compounds the earlier fibs with another one. Firstly, even if you insist on doing a fresh install when the updates stop, we're still talking 2 years, not 6 months. And, if you're willing to put a bit of effort into it, you can extend older Fedora Core releases yourself beyond the 2 year mark e.g. by building your own kernel from kernel.org's newer releases or trying out a later Fedora Core's RPM (source or binary) on the FC you're maintaining (for example, I've managed to get FC3's Firefox/Thunderbird RPMs working on FC2, although it does require you to upgrade several dependencies with FC3 versions). Now if you really want to slag Fedora off, complain about how Anaconda's Disk Druid is quite tricky to use and amazingly isn't available as a standalone app (yep, it's only part of the install process). Or about how Fedora starts way too many services by default, especially for a desktop configuration. But attacking updates when I think the Fedora Project/Legacy teams do a good job is just poor.
I had no problem installing Inkscape 0.41 on Fedora Core 2 using their i686 "static" RPM. However, with 0.42, the RPM is now linked against libgc.so.1, which is not shipped with Fedora Core (any release, 1 to 4). So I trundled off to Dag Wieers repository, downloaded the Fedora Core 2 libgc RPM, installed it and now I'm getting "undefined symbol: g_option_error_quark". Lovely stuff - looks like I'm going to have to compile from source <sigh>. I think the Inkscape folks need to rebuild their RPMs...
This is utter bunkum because there are hundreds and hundreds of UK channels - 5 analogue terrestrial, about another 25 on digital terrestrial and about another 300 (!!) on digital satellite. Yes, with 5 analogue or digital tuners, they could record BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5, but let's face it, most of that's now rubbish and the better stuff is on digital satellite (which they will *not* be able to record massively in parallel - Sky who run it currently only have a twin tuner for example and that needs a dual LNB on your dish too !).
I'd rather see some effort made to allow broadband users to download TV shows (even a small fee for this would be acceptable - a few pounds a month) from the time they are aired on normal TV for, say, up to 2 months afterwards. Now this would be *far* more useful, especially now that 2Mbit/s is starting to become the normal for UK broadband.
If it's anything like what happened with the official UK lottery site (which banned almost all non-IE *and* non-Windows users from its online games until earlier this year), it'll take about 3 years before the Aussies bother to do another site redesign cycle and suddenly realise what a snafu they originally made.
Funny, because we installed RHEL 3 on a bunch of RX600's without much fuss. Never did work out how to program the LCD front panel they've got though (the utilities that were supposed to do it didn't seem to work for me). To be honest, the Fujitsu server hardware isn't that much different from Dell's (often the same RAID controller, network cards etc.) and Linux seems to have no problem with it. BTW, we weren't impressed with the Fujitsu racks though - the Dell ones are much better.
Ironically, the one disappointing feature of FC4 is that the DVD distro has actually been *cut down* compared to FC3's DVD - many packages (some of which are wildly popular like abiword, xmms or tuxracer) have been surprisingly moved off of even the DVD and shunted into Fedora Extras as an optional download instead. I think this was a knee-jerk response to people complaining that FC3 took up 4 CD's - fair enough, but why not keep the "bloat" for the FC4 DVD then and leave those packages off the CD version?
BTW, it always pays to wait a few weeks for initial bugs to be ironed out in Fedora releases - FC4's Firefox couldn't use the Sun Java plug-in with SELinux enabled until they released a policy patch to sort this out for instance. Mind you, I think the Anaconda installer should optionally allow you to download updates before it completes its installation - SuSE's YaST does, so why not not Anaconda?
Actually the official UK lottery site has allowed Firefox/Mozilla into its online registration/play for a few months now, but this is after *years* of only supporting a weird set of browsers (IE, AOL and, er, Netscape 7?), despite numerous phone call and e-mail complaints from me and other users. Luckily, their latest design has finally allowed the Bugzilla bug (226258) on this issue to be closed.
Ho hum, this is a bit of a "non-story" isn't it? The DVD set has been out in the US for 18 months (and in the UK for over a year) - containing the full set of episodes - and yet it's considered newsworthy that ages later, a TV channel decides to repeat the episodes? Never mind that the Sci-Fi Channel in the UK has *already* done at least 2 repeat runs of Firefly in its entirety, a fact totally ignored by this article of course.
Keep an eye on the RPMs that are part of the Linux NTFS Sourceforge project - they're usually fairly fast at putting up RPMs for new kernel releases.