...we're paying metered phone line costs, so the whole concept of VoD is just too funny for words. Now, remember that there are almost 400 million people in the EU now, so those are a lot of DVDs that you can sell...
If there is any book I'd like to see filmed, it would be
"Veils of Azlaroc" by Fred Saberhagen -- geometric landscapes, various groups of settlers divided by the weight of veils, rendering them more and more transparent to each new generation, spectacular effects of a neutron star...now that would be cool. Give me Liv Tyler as the not-really-dead beauty reanimated by the spores she was exposed to, and I'll even buy my own popcorn for once.
...and then read about what really happened in the history books. This doesn't always work -- the Japanese are still claiming that they just had to attack the U.S. out of self-defense -- but it is a lot better than the current "fog of reporting" that we will have for the next weeks.
Somebody already mentioned Japan -- you might want to check out the German building code, too, though do it while standing over something soft, because the red tape factor will bowl you over.
Part of the difference is simply in attitude. Germans build their houses to stand decades, and because this is a small country with a high population density, land is far more expensive than, say, in the U.S. or Canada. A house is a major investment and is treated that way: In fact, building a house in Germany gives the same sort of return stocks do (uh, make that "did"). The whole concept of using houses as an investment form is rather rudimentary in the U.S., but then, renting a flat is the normal state of affairs in Germany.
One of the main differences is that you use stone and brick instead of wood. If this is done well, you can rip everyting out of the stone shell (the German word is entkernen, "to rip out the core") decades later and put new "soft" stuff like insulation, wires, and pipes back in. There are lots of beautiful pre-WWII houses where that has been done in Berlin: Redo the interior, repaint the exterior, and it is simply glorious.
This all, however, is rather expensive, and might not apply to you. First, there are no earthquakes or tornados in Germany: Occasionally there is some flooding in some parts, but that is it. Second, trying to find an American contractor who can seriously build in stone and rock is going to be a problem, and the last time I was at Home Depot in the States, they didn't have the kind of brick-and-mortar section every hardware store has here (just how is a guy supposted to build a Gothic cathedral in the States? Out of wood? And where are all the peasants?).
The differences go right down to the tools: The standard German hammer has a square head, a wedge-shaped reverse side (for smashing mortar off bricks) and a sturdy wooden handle. American claw-hammers with their leather grips and thin steel-tubed handles wouldn't last long in this environment -- and the German hammer is just not very good for wood work.
I was wondering if this was going to happen, and I'm actually wondering why it took SuSE so long. What I had expected is for the United Linux people to throw out SCO, not for SuSE to drop out. Wonder what they have been saying to each other on the phone the last couple of days...
It would be nice to have a very clear statement from SuSE on what they think of SCO's Banzai Charge...
...is probably because you've gotten yourself a "Magnat Civilization" and they'll start popping up all over the place. In one case, my Rhea were building new colonies every few rounds. This is okay if you're Geodic and grow like, er, a rock, but it doesn't really make sense.
There is a longer thread on this on the MOO3 website somewhere.
With all due respect for the editor's gushing, wait for at least of the first round of patches before you go buy MOO3. It could turn out to be a great game, but at the moment too many things simply don't work right (colony ships, parts of diplomacy), are unbalanced (AIs overbuilding troop transports), or simply cryptic (the docs are a joke). And don't get any ideas just because you like MOO2: Space combat and research have become mere abstractions of their former selves, though diplomancy and spying are a lot better. To quote one poster on Infogrames' website:
When everything is said and done
MOO2 was just more fun
Quicksilver might still snatch great out of the jaws of good, and are some fantastic ideas here (once you get used to the interface) but currently, MOO3 is what we in open source would call a "Release Candidate". I am amazed that Infogrames actually let this one out of the door at this stage.
...because I submitted the exact same story two days ago, based on the original "Daily Telegraph" article from the 22nd of February, and including the cool Reuters
headline "End of the World Is Nigh, Says Long-Dead Scientist", which they repeated on Monday in a re-written form.
I know that you guys at Slashdot can't be perfect and that half of the time one quarter of you don't have a frigging clue what the other two eights are doing, but if you figure out later you made a mistake in rejecting a story, just fucking say so, don't lie to those of us who go the trouble of submitting the stories that pay for whatever passes for food with you people. It was "just in" two days ago, and you threw it away, and now somebody has given you a second chance. Okay, I can live just fine with that, as long as you can admit when you went wrong.
Stuff like this is seriously offensive and is one of the reasons why people are turning their backs on this site and are moving over to Kuro5hin.
You're an abusive troll, but then I've got some time on my hands while waiting for the snow plow...
1. The Chinese have done more than "planning", as the BBC article quoted pointed out. The last time people said they were "only planning" something was the 16th of October 1964, when China detonated its first atom bomb. These people are neither primitives nor stupid, and have a really big chip on their shoulder.
2. Kim is the leader of North Korea, which is not China the way Canada is not the United -- uh, the way Sweden is not Italy. Since we're about to go to war against North Korea (again), you might want to read up on this. China has nukes, North Korea might have nukes. Big difference.
...when the Chinese are getting ready to send their first "taikonaut" into space, are talking about a moon landing, and a whole bunch of
other things. I'm sure they'd be glad to take over the ISS for those poor old Americans, Europeans, and Russians, who just don't have the right socialist spirit (or any sprit, for that matter). Bitch all you want about national prestige, the Communists still believe in that stuff, and there is no way Congress is going to sit around while a bunch of Reds turn cartwheels over our heads.
So, als long as there are Communists, manned space flight is safe...
...have been very good so far (up and to Kino 6.1), my experiences with Cinellera have been horrible.
Kino is still missing the (in layman's terms) "parallel track" view of more than one video track that will let you to move stuff from one track to the other with the flick of the mouse; the problem is trying to do an "L"-cut (sound from frame A continues into frame B for a while) with Kino. Once that is taken care of, you will be able to do the most basic forms of editing with no problem.
This is still no match for the stupidest Windows programs out there -- video just isn't there yet on Linux -- but given that Cinellera crashes about once every ten minutes, Kino looks like our best hope so far to at least get something done.
Ah, mein Freund, you forgot to mention a few important details:
1. Censorship in Germany is on the federal level -- all states have to respect the decisions of the BPJS (now BPJM, by the way). When Bavaria says "this is evil", Hamburg follows. The blockage in the U.S. is on a communal level. When Dumbass, Texas bans something, San Francisco says "up yours".
2. Since the laws were changed this year, the BPJM can decide whom to ban on their very own, and there is basically no more recourse unless you want to spend a very long time in court. This is a change you might want to check out.
3. Censorship is an intregal part of the German constitution, as the first article is the protection of human dignity ("Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar"), and beats the article about "no censorship". The U.S. constitution puts freedom of speech before everthing else. German Courts can and do decide to ban the possession of certain materials because it "violates human dignity".
4. Roughly four of five German speakers are Germans. If something is banned in Germany, it basically ceases to exist in German, because it is not worth publishing it for Austria and the Swiss alone. If something is banned in your community in the U.S., you can still get it in Great Britian, Australia, India, New Zeeland, etc. As the writer's group PEN has pointed out, the "Indizierung" in Germany is usually the kiss of death.
Yes, four out of five Americans bragging about the U.S. make fools out of themselves, especially when it comes to privacy, the legal system, and other places where the U.S. is stuck back in the 18th Century. But with censorship, the Land der Dichter und Denker has long since turned to the Land der Scheren im Kopf. The blood turns blue over here before the law even forces it to.
Schöne Grüße from Berlin.
AA is worth it just to watch censors squirm...
on
America's Army on Linux
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
...in places like Germany, where they have banned games such as "Quake 2" for for violence, and forced "Tomb Raider" to have blue-blooded animals, and changed the translation in "Command and Conquor" so that the soldiers are all robots. But they haven't touched AA yet -- image the diplomatic fun if Germany banned a game that the U.S. government produced.
Ah, censorship. It will make you look like an Dummkopf every time...
I use Linux for absolutely everything except for games and video software -- this is one last area where the Penguin really sucks fish cold and hard.
You can try Kino which is all DV and is making great strides to change this (even better, if you can program, help them): Only a few features so far, but those are rock solid and well done.
Avoid Cinelerra -- it crashes like it was written by Microsoft. At first, I thought it was my system, but after asking around a bit, I found out that this is a problem so common as to be a feature. Also, the documentation is a joke; the people writing it obviously are too full of themselves (as in: this is only for professionals, kids, if you don't understand it, you're stupid and should go away) to stoop down to our level.
Again, this is an area where Apple and even Microsoft wipe the floor with Linux.
Now that they are putting out a new, fantastic, unbelievable, etc. version, how about open sourcing the old versions? If the new program is any good, then they don't have to fear cannibalism (open sourcing "Doom" didn't hurt "Quake" one bit), they're not going to do a Linux version of MOO3 anyway (I asked), and the publicity would give MOO3 a place in the press like they could never pay for.
Of course, they would have to be really, really confident in the quality of th new version...
While it does have neat abilities, like being able to access workstations across a network, end users don't care about those.
Wanna bet?
Because of X, I get away with having one (1) good, fast computer that I keep reasonably updated -- the "mainframe". I have two other computers, and I don't do squat on them: They just function as X terminals, so that my wife and I can sit upstairs, downstairs, or in the garden with the laptop, and do email, surf, or whatever on the big machine (well, there is the rare LAN game on Win98 that is fun, too). Your "solution" would force me to fully maintain three computers. If that is progress, please count me out.
Also, if even half of the people here who keep bitching about X would spend even half of their time doing something about even half of the problems they keep talking about, X would either be far more advanced or Fresco would already be up and running. Obviously, X does enough of what most people want: If the X complainers were in real pain, you would have put your keyboard where your postings are a long time ago.
To put Linux on the desktop, we're asking them to give up the comfort, familiarity and applications of Windows.
Windows "comfort"? What Windows "comfort"?
Every time I have installed a Microsoft operating system, I have had to start a mad search through my whole room, look under my bed, behind books, in the bread box for those stupid device driver CDs that the hardware makers ship for Windows, because Windows won't support the hardware out of the box. All I get is "new hardware found" and have to screw around with installing it by hand. And if I happen to have thrown out that CD by some stroke of bad luck, then I have to spend hours on the Internet to find a site that will let me download the driver without having to a) register or b) pay or c) both. Is this what you call comfort?
With SuSE at least (can't speak for the other distributions), I put the DVD in the machine, boot it, and -- presto! -- it just installs stuff (big and annoying exception: nVidia drivers, because the company is too elite to let SuSE include them. Guess why I switched to ATI). No extra CDs, no getting out the Windows CD again, and no reboots. Now, you could say that reinstalling the OS is a rare thing, except that Microsoft's new plan is to force me to keep upgrading and upgrading and upgrading every few years -- again, is this what you call "comfort"?
The idea that Linux is harder to install than Windows has reached the status of an urban legend (or Microsoft FUD) -- this is 2003, not 1997.
Stop bitching 'cause you don't understand the business and think you should be given everything.
Actually, as a Linux user, I am being given everything -- for free. Yes, kino is a still a long, long way away from getting close to that i-whatever tool for video the Apples are using, but we know how those things go, don't we: In two, three years, I'll have 90% of the functions for no cost at all. And you guys will still be paying.
Given that Apple is only still alive because (the way I see it) Mr. Gates needed a straw man for the anti-trust trial, or he wanted to see Mr. Jobs humiliate himself thanking Microsoft on his knees for keeping the company alive, I may be forgiven for wondering who doesn't understand the business here. Apple users are of above average intelligence and education, and every time the company pisses them off like this, that is another potential Open Source user -- a vocal, intelligent, and highly educated Open Source user, I might add. This doesn't seem too clever to me on the long run. But then "the long run" was never Apple's strength, was it. -- Microsoft's reputation is already ruined, and as long as companies are buying Windows and forcing their employees to use it, they don't have to care about pissing off users by asking for those few bucks more. Apple can't really afford to alienate its people this way.
But then a company that serves the God of Shareholder Value doesn't have much choice but to follow that creed into death itself, does it?
After reading all of these posts, the question that remains in my mind is simply: Who gives a flying fouque about TV anyway?
Yes, I know that there are millions and millions of zombies out there who spend their lives in front of "Survivor" or whatever crap they are being told to watch by the network marketing droids. This only proves my point: TV is what people do who are too dumb to use a computer.
Seriously. What is there to watch? News? Get your news off of the Internet (Fellow Americans: Try the BBC for a serious eye-opener about what CNN, Fox, and Time Warner don't think you should be interested in). Sitcoms? The only thing that even comes close to being entertaining for people with an IQ over 60 is "Buffy", and you're better off waiting for the DVD version anyway, unless you're into watching ads every five minutes. Information? Yeah, the "Discovery Channel" is nice, but it can't compete with this cool technology call "books". Films? Get the DVD, they don't have the commercials and they don't have half of the stuff hacked out to make the censorship people happy. With the money you've been paying those cable people, you could have had surround sound years ago.
Anybody who is willing to pay a company to let themselves be bombarded with commercials is getting what he or she deserves. Screw TV in analog or digital: You have a computer, or else you wouldn't be reading this; all you need now is a DVD player and a bookshop. If you are a TV zombie, you shouldn't be on Slashdot anyway.
Thanks for taking the time for a long answer. I took a look at Fresco and tho everything is a bit confusing because you seem to be in the middle of redoing the website (I still haven't understood the difference between Fresco and Berlin, even tho I work in Berlin, Germany myself), but what I understood does look very impressive. There are two things that really struck me:
Python interface, also via COBRA (if I understood the docs). Given the speed with which you can code in Python, that should be a major plus - and get a lot of people coding.
"True" transparency. Okay, this is a gimick, but it is really, really cool gimick.
Once Fresco gets to a beta status, I'll certainly give it a try.
...against well-intentioned but ill-advised attempts to replace it:
We have three computers in our house on three levels (Duron, K6, Laptop). With X, I can log in to any of the computers from any of the other ones and start working just as if I was sitting right in front of it (my wife, who was a Microsoft consumer only before she met me, had a Dickens of a time understanding that concept). I need network transparency.
I also use two desktops, depending on the load my applications are going to put on the machine and if I feel like eye candy (KDE and Blackbox). With Blackbox (for non-Unix people: lightweight, minimal window manager), I can do amazing stuff on my K6 because the GUI is not sucking up all the resources (aka "Morbus microsoft", now also known as "Morbis apple"). I need multiple window managers because of different resource needs.
Now I'm sure you could probably include these in picoGUI, but then all you have done is made a new version of X without the decades of testing that has gone into the real X. Come back when your software has a track record of more than ten years, and I might look at it for a core system: I want proven stability. The last time my X crashed it was because of Nvidia's shitty closed source drivers; since I switched to ATI, it is solid like a rock.
Oh, and what about those old graphics cards I have sitting around here? Are you going to backport every single driver, so I can still use my Oak VGA card with 512 KByte RAM? That might not sound like much, but with X Window and that card and a PI or even a 486, I can still build an X terminal and hook it up to anything. I want maximum hardware support.
No thanks. Enjoy yourselves writing picoGUI, it's a free Internet and and new software is always a good thing, but don't expect to replace X. If it works, don't fix it.
...after coming home from a one week vacation. We had turned off the computer for that week - it had been running for months and months continiously before then - and it ran for about half of hour before it just died. I couldn't even get it to spin up that evening, though the next day it working for about 15 minutes before it went down again. Those 15 minutes were enough to move my data over to a different disk (yes, I had a backup, but it was from mid-October). After a few hours of resting, it worked again for a short time, during which I grabbed the rest of the important data.
That's 20 Gigabytes down the drain; the date on the HD was 2000-12. I replaced it with a 80 Gigabyte drive - but not from Fujitsu.This, by the way, was the second HD to fail ever in my life: The last one as a full sized HD, about 40 Megabytes (!) if I remember. That should tell you how long ago that was.
The U.S. tends to do stuff a lot differently than other republics, and this
is one of the cases where it really shows. The two important points in this
case are a) the distinction between "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the
press", and b) the legal system. I'm going to use Germany as an example
because it is the European country I know best, but it should basically
apply to the other parliamentary democracies like Sweden and Denmark as
well.
As some of the posters here have shown quite clearly, Americans tend to
confuse an individual's freedom of speech (me and my soapbox) and the
freedom of the press (what CNN is allowed to do). This is understandable,
since (to simplify it) they have the same legal grounding the Constitution.
However, this is not the way most other democracies do things. Germany, for
instance, learned about the power of the press the hard way under the Nazi
propaganda machine, and therefore distinguishes between
Meinungsfreiheit (freedom of speech) and Pressefreiheit
(freedom of the press). The press in Germany is considered the "fourth
estate" and as such is integrated into the system of checks and balances
with special rights and obligations (!). German law also tries to take into
account that the media is a multi-million-dollar industry that sometimes
tends to try make money first and hunt for the truth later.
So the American posters here who are going "yeah, but you're not allowed to
say there wasn't a Holocaust in Germany" are perfectly right, but they are also completely missing the point. That is a question of freedom of speech, not freedom of the press, which is what this study was about. The German press reports all the time about people running around saying there was no
Holocaust, and there is not a damn thing anybody can do about it.
This system also gets rid of most of the gripes about the trashy press in
the U.S. presented here: The German press has duties as well as rights. For example, you can be sued for Verletzung der journalistischen
Sorgfaltspflicht, which could be translated as "journalistic
negligence". If you say A did X, you have to prove you really, really tried
to get A's own version. Then there are a whole host of privacy laws that are considered a basic
right in Europe and are designed to protect the public from the
press, a very alien concept to Americans, who are told that the press is
protecting democracy when it is broadcasting the photo, place of residence
and full name of a four-year-old rape victim.
The second part is that the rest of the democratic world considers the
freedom of the press such a very basic and important right that is dealt
with at a federal level in federal laws that apply to everybody in
the country. So when some American judge in Somewhere, Ohio decides that a
journalist has to give up his sources in a murder trial, while a different
judge in Somewhere Else, New York in a similar case says he doesn't, this
shocks Europeans who have this humanistic belief that the law should treat
all people equally, especially when we're talking about basic freedoms.
Americans, on the other hand, don't have a federal law book, and are
furthermore stuck with a legal system that never made it past the 18th
Century. Trial-by-jury is something that the rest of the free world thinks is
only a minor improvement on using a lottery or chicken guts to decide who
is guilty. It does not bother Americans that a court in one state or even
town will interpret your basic rights differently than another judge a few
miles down the road, since they have been told that this is the way it has
to be. To the rest of the democratic world, this is as unbelievable as,
say, not being able to count your ballots correctly in a federal
election.
So basically the study is only examining the different degrees of freedom
of the press in different countries, nothing more and nothing less. And by that measure, the U.S. in fact
does not deserve a top spot, because the enemies of the press (who at times
include the press itself) can and do use the legal uncertainty inherent in
the American system against journalists. The question of banning "The
Story of O" in Germany or IRA literature in Britain does not enter into it,
as valid as these questions would be in discussion of freedom of speech.
Slashdot Mirror
...we're paying metered phone line costs, so the whole concept of VoD is just too funny for words. Now, remember that there are almost 400 million people in the EU now, so those are a lot of DVDs that you can sell...
If there is any book I'd like to see filmed, it would be "Veils of Azlaroc" by Fred Saberhagen -- geometric landscapes, various groups of settlers divided by the weight of veils, rendering them more and more transparent to each new generation, spectacular effects of a neutron star...now that would be cool. Give me Liv Tyler as the not-really-dead beauty reanimated by the spores she was exposed to, and I'll even buy my own popcorn for once.
...and then read about what really happened in the history books. This doesn't always work -- the Japanese are still claiming that they just had to attack the U.S. out of self-defense -- but it is a lot better than the current "fog of reporting" that we will have for the next weeks.
Part of the difference is simply in attitude. Germans build their houses to stand decades, and because this is a small country with a high population density, land is far more expensive than, say, in the U.S. or Canada. A house is a major investment and is treated that way: In fact, building a house in Germany gives the same sort of return stocks do (uh, make that "did"). The whole concept of using houses as an investment form is rather rudimentary in the U.S., but then, renting a flat is the normal state of affairs in Germany.
One of the main differences is that you use stone and brick instead of wood. If this is done well, you can rip everyting out of the stone shell (the German word is entkernen, "to rip out the core") decades later and put new "soft" stuff like insulation, wires, and pipes back in. There are lots of beautiful pre-WWII houses where that has been done in Berlin: Redo the interior, repaint the exterior, and it is simply glorious.
This all, however, is rather expensive, and might not apply to you. First, there are no earthquakes or tornados in Germany: Occasionally there is some flooding in some parts, but that is it. Second, trying to find an American contractor who can seriously build in stone and rock is going to be a problem, and the last time I was at Home Depot in the States, they didn't have the kind of brick-and-mortar section every hardware store has here (just how is a guy supposted to build a Gothic cathedral in the States? Out of wood? And where are all the peasants?).
The differences go right down to the tools: The standard German hammer has a square head, a wedge-shaped reverse side (for smashing mortar off bricks) and a sturdy wooden handle. American claw-hammers with their leather grips and thin steel-tubed handles wouldn't last long in this environment -- and the German hammer is just not very good for wood work.
...and it would have been really nice if I had read the right article before I made that posting. Argh...sorry about that last line.
It would be nice to have a very clear statement from SuSE on what they think of SCO's Banzai Charge...
...is probably because you've gotten yourself a "Magnat Civilization" and they'll start popping up all over the place. In one case, my Rhea were building new colonies every few rounds. This is okay if you're Geodic and grow like, er, a rock, but it doesn't really make sense. There is a longer thread on this on the MOO3 website somewhere.
When everything is said and done
MOO2 was just more fun
Quicksilver might still snatch great out of the jaws of good, and are some fantastic ideas here (once you get used to the interface) but currently, MOO3 is what we in open source would call a "Release Candidate". I am amazed that Infogrames actually let this one out of the door at this stage.
I know that you guys at Slashdot can't be perfect and that half of the time one quarter of you don't have a frigging clue what the other two eights are doing, but if you figure out later you made a mistake in rejecting a story, just fucking say so, don't lie to those of us who go the trouble of submitting the stories that pay for whatever passes for food with you people. It was "just in" two days ago, and you threw it away, and now somebody has given you a second chance. Okay, I can live just fine with that, as long as you can admit when you went wrong.
Stuff like this is seriously offensive and is one of the reasons why people are turning their backs on this site and are moving over to Kuro5hin.
1. The Chinese have done more than "planning", as the BBC article quoted pointed out. The last time people said they were "only planning" something was the 16th of October 1964, when China detonated its first atom bomb. These people are neither primitives nor stupid, and have a really big chip on their shoulder.
2. Kim is the leader of North Korea, which is not China the way Canada is not the United -- uh, the way Sweden is not Italy. Since we're about to go to war against North Korea (again), you might want to read up on this. China has nukes, North Korea might have nukes. Big difference.
3. I'm married.
So, als long as there are Communists, manned space flight is safe...
Kino is still missing the (in layman's terms) "parallel track" view of more than one video track that will let you to move stuff from one track to the other with the flick of the mouse; the problem is trying to do an "L"-cut (sound from frame A continues into frame B for a while) with Kino. Once that is taken care of, you will be able to do the most basic forms of editing with no problem.
This is still no match for the stupidest Windows programs out there -- video just isn't there yet on Linux -- but given that Cinellera crashes about once every ten minutes, Kino looks like our best hope so far to at least get something done.
1. Censorship in Germany is on the federal level -- all states have to respect the decisions of the BPJS (now BPJM, by the way). When Bavaria says "this is evil", Hamburg follows. The blockage in the U.S. is on a communal level. When Dumbass, Texas bans something, San Francisco says "up yours".
2. Since the laws were changed this year, the BPJM can decide whom to ban on their very own, and there is basically no more recourse unless you want to spend a very long time in court. This is a change you might want to check out.
3. Censorship is an intregal part of the German constitution, as the first article is the protection of human dignity ("Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar"), and beats the article about "no censorship". The U.S. constitution puts freedom of speech before everthing else. German Courts can and do decide to ban the possession of certain materials because it "violates human dignity".
4. Roughly four of five German speakers are Germans. If something is banned in Germany, it basically ceases to exist in German, because it is not worth publishing it for Austria and the Swiss alone. If something is banned in your community in the U.S., you can still get it in Great Britian, Australia, India, New Zeeland, etc. As the writer's group PEN has pointed out, the "Indizierung" in Germany is usually the kiss of death.
Yes, four out of five Americans bragging about the U.S. make fools out of themselves, especially when it comes to privacy, the legal system, and other places where the U.S. is stuck back in the 18th Century. But with censorship, the Land der Dichter und Denker has long since turned to the Land der Scheren im Kopf. The blood turns blue over here before the law even forces it to.
Schöne Grüße from Berlin.
Ah, censorship. It will make you look like an Dummkopf every time...
Goodbye, RIAA, goodbye, Rosen, we won't miss you.
You can try Kino which is all DV and is making great strides to change this (even better, if you can program, help them): Only a few features so far, but those are rock solid and well done.
Avoid Cinelerra -- it crashes like it was written by Microsoft. At first, I thought it was my system, but after asking around a bit, I found out that this is a problem so common as to be a feature. Also, the documentation is a joke; the people writing it obviously are too full of themselves (as in: this is only for professionals, kids, if you don't understand it, you're stupid and should go away) to stoop down to our level.
Again, this is an area where Apple and even Microsoft wipe the floor with Linux.
Of course, they would have to be really, really confident in the quality of th new version...
Wanna bet?
Because of X, I get away with having one (1) good, fast computer that I keep reasonably updated -- the "mainframe". I have two other computers, and I don't do squat on them: They just function as X terminals, so that my wife and I can sit upstairs, downstairs, or in the garden with the laptop, and do email, surf, or whatever on the big machine (well, there is the rare LAN game on Win98 that is fun, too). Your "solution" would force me to fully maintain three computers. If that is progress, please count me out.
Also, if even half of the people here who keep bitching about X would spend even half of their time doing something about even half of the problems they keep talking about, X would either be far more advanced or Fresco would already be up and running. Obviously, X does enough of what most people want: If the X complainers were in real pain, you would have put your keyboard where your postings are a long time ago.
Windows "comfort"? What Windows "comfort"?
Every time I have installed a Microsoft operating system, I have had to start a mad search through my whole room, look under my bed, behind books, in the bread box for those stupid device driver CDs that the hardware makers ship for Windows, because Windows won't support the hardware out of the box. All I get is "new hardware found" and have to screw around with installing it by hand. And if I happen to have thrown out that CD by some stroke of bad luck, then I have to spend hours on the Internet to find a site that will let me download the driver without having to a) register or b) pay or c) both. Is this what you call comfort?
With SuSE at least (can't speak for the other distributions), I put the DVD in the machine, boot it, and -- presto! -- it just installs stuff (big and annoying exception: nVidia drivers, because the company is too elite to let SuSE include them. Guess why I switched to ATI). No extra CDs, no getting out the Windows CD again, and no reboots. Now, you could say that reinstalling the OS is a rare thing, except that Microsoft's new plan is to force me to keep upgrading and upgrading and upgrading every few years -- again, is this what you call "comfort"?
The idea that Linux is harder to install than Windows has reached the status of an urban legend (or Microsoft FUD) -- this is 2003, not 1997.
Actually, as a Linux user, I am being given everything -- for free. Yes, kino is a still a long, long way away from getting close to that i-whatever tool for video the Apples are using, but we know how those things go, don't we: In two, three years, I'll have 90% of the functions for no cost at all. And you guys will still be paying.
Given that Apple is only still alive because (the way I see it) Mr. Gates needed a straw man for the anti-trust trial, or he wanted to see Mr. Jobs humiliate himself thanking Microsoft on his knees for keeping the company alive, I may be forgiven for wondering who doesn't understand the business here. Apple users are of above average intelligence and education, and every time the company pisses them off like this, that is another potential Open Source user -- a vocal, intelligent, and highly educated Open Source user, I might add. This doesn't seem too clever to me on the long run. But then "the long run" was never Apple's strength, was it. -- Microsoft's reputation is already ruined, and as long as companies are buying Windows and forcing their employees to use it, they don't have to care about pissing off users by asking for those few bucks more. Apple can't really afford to alienate its people this way.
But then a company that serves the God of Shareholder Value doesn't have much choice but to follow that creed into death itself, does it?
Yes, I know that there are millions and millions of zombies out there who spend their lives in front of "Survivor" or whatever crap they are being told to watch by the network marketing droids. This only proves my point: TV is what people do who are too dumb to use a computer.
Seriously. What is there to watch? News? Get your news off of the Internet (Fellow Americans: Try the BBC for a serious eye-opener about what CNN, Fox, and Time Warner don't think you should be interested in). Sitcoms? The only thing that even comes close to being entertaining for people with an IQ over 60 is "Buffy", and you're better off waiting for the DVD version anyway, unless you're into watching ads every five minutes. Information? Yeah, the "Discovery Channel" is nice, but it can't compete with this cool technology call "books". Films? Get the DVD, they don't have the commercials and they don't have half of the stuff hacked out to make the censorship people happy. With the money you've been paying those cable people, you could have had surround sound years ago.
Anybody who is willing to pay a company to let themselves be bombarded with commercials is getting what he or she deserves. Screw TV in analog or digital: You have a computer, or else you wouldn't be reading this; all you need now is a DVD player and a bookshop. If you are a TV zombie, you shouldn't be on Slashdot anyway.
Python interface, also via COBRA (if I understood the docs). Given the speed with which you can code in Python, that should be a major plus - and get a lot of people coding.
"True" transparency. Okay, this is a gimick, but it is really, really cool gimick.
Once Fresco gets to a beta status, I'll certainly give it a try.
We have three computers in our house on three levels (Duron, K6, Laptop). With X, I can log in to any of the computers from any of the other ones and start working just as if I was sitting right in front of it (my wife, who was a Microsoft consumer only before she met me, had a Dickens of a time understanding that concept). I need network transparency.
I also use two desktops, depending on the load my applications are going to put on the machine and if I feel like eye candy (KDE and Blackbox). With Blackbox (for non-Unix people: lightweight, minimal window manager), I can do amazing stuff on my K6 because the GUI is not sucking up all the resources (aka "Morbus microsoft", now also known as "Morbis apple"). I need multiple window managers because of different resource needs.
Now I'm sure you could probably include these in picoGUI, but then all you have done is made a new version of X without the decades of testing that has gone into the real X. Come back when your software has a track record of more than ten years, and I might look at it for a core system: I want proven stability. The last time my X crashed it was because of Nvidia's shitty closed source drivers; since I switched to ATI, it is solid like a rock.
Oh, and what about those old graphics cards I have sitting around here? Are you going to backport every single driver, so I can still use my Oak VGA card with 512 KByte RAM? That might not sound like much, but with X Window and that card and a PI or even a 486, I can still build an X terminal and hook it up to anything. I want maximum hardware support.
No thanks. Enjoy yourselves writing picoGUI, it's a free Internet and and new software is always a good thing, but don't expect to replace X. If it works, don't fix it.
That's 20 Gigabytes down the drain; the date on the HD was 2000-12. I replaced it with a 80 Gigabyte drive - but not from Fujitsu.This, by the way, was the second HD to fail ever in my life: The last one as a full sized HD, about 40 Megabytes (!) if I remember. That should tell you how long ago that was.
As some of the posters here have shown quite clearly, Americans tend to confuse an individual's freedom of speech (me and my soapbox) and the freedom of the press (what CNN is allowed to do). This is understandable, since (to simplify it) they have the same legal grounding the Constitution. However, this is not the way most other democracies do things. Germany, for instance, learned about the power of the press the hard way under the Nazi propaganda machine, and therefore distinguishes between Meinungsfreiheit (freedom of speech) and Pressefreiheit (freedom of the press). The press in Germany is considered the "fourth estate" and as such is integrated into the system of checks and balances with special rights and obligations (!). German law also tries to take into account that the media is a multi-million-dollar industry that sometimes tends to try make money first and hunt for the truth later.
So the American posters here who are going "yeah, but you're not allowed to say there wasn't a Holocaust in Germany" are perfectly right, but they are also completely missing the point. That is a question of freedom of speech, not freedom of the press, which is what this study was about. The German press reports all the time about people running around saying there was no Holocaust, and there is not a damn thing anybody can do about it.
This system also gets rid of most of the gripes about the trashy press in the U.S. presented here: The German press has duties as well as rights. For example, you can be sued for Verletzung der journalistischen Sorgfaltspflicht, which could be translated as "journalistic negligence". If you say A did X, you have to prove you really, really tried to get A's own version. Then there are a whole host of privacy laws that are considered a basic right in Europe and are designed to protect the public from the press, a very alien concept to Americans, who are told that the press is protecting democracy when it is broadcasting the photo, place of residence and full name of a four-year-old rape victim.
The second part is that the rest of the democratic world considers the freedom of the press such a very basic and important right that is dealt with at a federal level in federal laws that apply to everybody in the country. So when some American judge in Somewhere, Ohio decides that a journalist has to give up his sources in a murder trial, while a different judge in Somewhere Else, New York in a similar case says he doesn't, this shocks Europeans who have this humanistic belief that the law should treat all people equally, especially when we're talking about basic freedoms.
Americans, on the other hand, don't have a federal law book, and are furthermore stuck with a legal system that never made it past the 18th Century. Trial-by-jury is something that the rest of the free world thinks is only a minor improvement on using a lottery or chicken guts to decide who is guilty. It does not bother Americans that a court in one state or even town will interpret your basic rights differently than another judge a few miles down the road, since they have been told that this is the way it has to be. To the rest of the democratic world, this is as unbelievable as, say, not being able to count your ballots correctly in a federal election.
So basically the study is only examining the different degrees of freedom of the press in different countries, nothing more and nothing less. And by that measure, the U.S. in fact does not deserve a top spot, because the enemies of the press (who at times include the press itself) can and do use the legal uncertainty inherent in the American system against journalists. The question of banning "The Story of O" in Germany or IRA literature in Britain does not enter into it, as valid as these questions would be in discussion of freedom of speech.