Do yourself a favor and pick up the Apt installer from ATrpms. Download the Synaptic graphical interface for it once you've got it all set up and configured properly. That should be the last annoying install of almost any package I could imagine you running. These two applications together have solved the dependency/installation issue for me completely, and it was my biggest Linux annoyance too.
Now what he did was planning to act against his country in a violent way. An action that cannot be allowed to continue and must be repremanded in some way. He also planned to help the Telebahn who were a monsterous bunch of tyrants. But surely was a very brave man to be willing to fight for what he believed in, against the country he dispises in a land so far from his own and should be respected accordingly.
Every time a thread like this comes up I end up burning holes through my karma until it resembles a wheel of swiss cheese, but I can't let this pass.
This guy was a naturalized US citizen. Do you know what that means? Do you know the various things you need to do, to say, to prove in order to become a US citizen? My wife (who is Japanese) is going through this process right now, so I have some experience with it despite my being a citizen by birth. You swear an oath to the allegiance of the United States, among many other things. That's one of the conditions of becoming a citizen.
Now, swearing your allegiance (and all the other stuff you have to go through - the interviews, the criminal background checks, etc.) does not mean you can never disagree with the US government, or that you can't love and respect other cultures anymore. Nobody asked this guy to give up being a Muslim or to never visit Afghanistan. But swearing an allegiance does mean you will not under any circumstances fight against this country. In this country, killing another citizen in battle is equivalent to murder with a little treason thrown on top. It is not excusable, and simply planning it (without having the chance to carry out the plan) is not really much better. (And before anyone chimes in with the "but how do they know he was really planning it and not just joking!" defense, I'll just point out that conspiracy to commit various crimes are crimes in themselves in this country and have been for a long, long time.)
This guy does not deserve any respect. He is not brave. He is a liar and a traitor; he took an oath and for taking that oath he was rewarded with citizenship. He then proceeded to break that oath and rather than go out and protest peacefully or use his vote like every other respectable person in this country, he decided to plot the means to kill his own fellow citizens. I am sorry, but that is not worthy of my respect.
All that said, there's nothing for it but to accept the plea as presented until such a time as Mike recants it. And if he'd been successful, and caught on the field of battle, he would deserve having a book thrown at him as much as John Walker Lindh. But having failed at that, I think it's outrageous that he was facing the same or greater sentence than Lindh himself (20 years).
Completely ass-backwards. John Walker-Lindh decided his higher purpose in life was to become the best Muslim he could be. If you read the Time Magazine article about him, he comes off as more a misguided kid with too-liberal parents who refused to take the reigns than anything else. However stupid and wrong-headed he was, his goal was not the destruction of the United States, and he never fired a shot in battle. His goal was the life of a devout Muslim, and he decided for whatever dumb reason that it was the Taliban and the Taliban alone who were the only group practicing "pure" Islam in the world at the time.
This guy, on the other hand, was simply angry at the United States and actively plotted to join the battle against his countrymen (he is a US citizen, whatever his country of birth). Worse, he did so with others - which, by definition, is conspiracy.
Whether or not he actually succeeded is by and large irrelevant (though there would have been more charges filed if he'd have been caught gun in hand on a battlefield as Lindh was). Our laws in this country are based just as much (if not moreso) on intent as on action. And quite honestly, that was just as true before we were concerned with terrorism as it is now. You kill someone, it matters why you did it - the charge will be different depending on whether or not it was deliberate, and whether or not you planned it in advance. The same is true of many other crimes, and you've never had to be guilty of actual murder to be guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, the basic equivalent to what this guy pleaded guilty to.
In many countries (supposed "free" ones, even) it is perfectly legal to hold someone in jail without charge for long periods of time, or simply on "suspicion" of committing a crime (without actually being charged with that crime). Our "material witness" status provides basically the same thing. Suspects in crimes are often labeled as "material witnesses" when the government knows that person had something to do with the crime committed but does not have enough evidence to level a formal charge. In the case of someone plotting to kill US servicemen and women, I think it is perfectly appropriate that that person be detained as long as necessary to ensure they do not flee the country, giving them even more impetus to actually carry out the plan for which they are being detained.
I'm all for liberty and freedom and blah blah blah. But it's one thing to be a libertarian, quite another to be stupid and self-destructive in your beliefs. The fact is there are people out there who want to kill you - maybe not you specifically, but you in general, and there's no reason to coddle those people. It was several weeks, as I recall, before John Malvo was formally charged with anything directly related to his little shooting spree (he was also held as a "material witness"), and I don't remember a big uproar around here about that. The fact is we were all sure he had done the crime, and even though he was a minor, and even though he's supposedly innocent until proven guilty, so what if he's being kept in jail without charge? What I'm saying is you can't have it both ways. Either you accept that the government has to have some amount of leeway in protecting the public, or you don't. In either case you take your chances, but I'd personally rather take my chances at being thrown in jail for a couple weeks for something I didn't do (the chances of which seem pretty remote to me) than being shot at by a known sniper or blown up by a known terrorist (the chances of which seemed pretty good to me as I watched the WTC burn outside my w
Forgive me if this is up here somewhere already, but I ran a search through the replies and didn't see it. This is SCO's amusing response, lifted off Yahoo's biz section - I would imagine this would actually be admissible as evidence of some of Red Hat's claims! (Particularly regarding the last two sentences.)
Matthew J. Szulik CEO RED HAT, INC. 1801 Varsity Drive Raleigh, NC 27606
Dear Matthew,
Attached is the letter I discussed with you during our July 31, 2003 telephone conversation. Instead of actually sending the letter, I thought it was best to telephone you and speak in person to see if we could resolve the issues between our companies short of litigation. We left the conversation with a preliminary agreement to meet and continue our discussions further.
To my surprise, I just discovered that your company filed legal action against The SCO Group earlier today. You, of course, mentioned nothing of this during our telephone conversation. I am disappointed that you were not more forthcoming about your intentions. I am also disappointed that you have chosen litigation rather than good faith discussions with SCO about the problems inherent in Linux.
Of course, we will prepare our legal response as required by your complaint. Be advised that our response will likely include counterclaims for copyright infringement and conspiracy.
I must say that your decision to file legal action does not seem conducive to the long-term survivability of Linux.
I don't get it -- the "mainline geek culture" picture is a syringe attached to what? (Oh, it's an Ethernet cable, right? OK, I do get it. Still, it's a bit excessively stylized.)
It's also probably the only one of these (the winners) that I'd buy, so to each his own. How can you go wrong mixing geek culture with drug culture? It's a perfect marriage.
I do sorta like the "soothing green light" one also, but probably not enough to buy one.
Cellular service in this country is a mess, and urban areas can be just as bad off as rural. Case in point: New York City. I've been with Sprint now for about 6 or 7 years, not because their service is so great but because everybody else is even worse. I live in Queens (though not in the boonies of Queens) and commute to Manhattan - I get 1 bar of signal strength in either place, occasionally going up to 2. A good 50% of my calls are either dropped or just go through to voicemail. This is not just on one model of phone, either - as I said, I've been with Sprint for a while and have used a good 4-5 phones over the duration, all with external antennas, and all have been equally bad. It's the service, not the phones.
Fed up, I tried Verizon for 2 weeks about a year ago, based on their reputation (a reputation confirmed at the linked article). Every single call I made reverted to analog mode despite showing 4 bars of digital strength prior to placing the call. Accessing any data services was useless for this reason, and call quality was atrocious. Dropped Verizon within my 15 day trial period (which I believe is mandated by law around here).
During all this time, Sprint's rates have shot up dramatically, and for my family plan I am now paying a minimum of $95 per month including taxes (taxes are much higher here than anywhere else - YMMV). That's the cheapest plan available with 2 lines.
Just this weekend my wife and I signed up with Cingular, mostly due to their lower rates ($50 plus 17.1% total tax for 2 lines and a reasonable amount of minutes). Was instantly complaining that I was going to cancel the service again after I couldn't even complete a call to my wife's phone in our own apartment. Now that I've had a bit more time to play with the phones I'm starting to think the service is not particularly worse than Sprint (1 bar of strength at home, 1 bar at work, 2-3 bars everywhere in between, some calls dropped, some go through), so at the reduced rates I may as well stick with them. But I'm still not particularly happy.
If any other product on the market (and cellular service is a product like any other) only worked 50% of the time it would be considered defective. Imagine picking up your home phone and wondering whether or not your call will go through. This is the beginning of the 21st century, not the 20th. The top priority of all of these companies needs to be to fix their service. And I mean fix, not "improve". The service as it is is broken.
I have not tried cellular service in Europe but I can't imagine it is this bad. I have, on the other hand, tried it in Japan and was absolutely astonished. Now, granted, I only tried one company's service (DoCoMo) and only in one area (Tokyo metro) but it was full signal strength at all times, even in rural areas (yes, there are rural areas around Tokyo), with absolutely crystal clear call quality. I cannot understand how cellular service in the US could be so much worse.
"'Live' broadcasts can also be recorded." - Why's that mentioned? I think any PVR can do that.
Nope. See the earlier reply about the Pinnacle DC-10, and my Winfast TV2000 Deluxe doesn't do it automatically with the included software. Some Panasonic DVR's with built-in DVD-RAM or DVD-R drives also do not record live TV at all (though others do). It's not a feature you can just take for granted. Most P/DVR's do do it, but not all.
"It looks like this is being marketed to Russian cable companies as an all-in-one portal, since they also include electronic ordering capabilities and "near video on demand";"
Any PVR has that functionality when combined with a proper/integrated tuner and PPV channels.
That's like saying "any car can haul a boat behind it, as long as it has a powerful enough engine and a tow bar". The fact is most don't. So yes, it's another feature that deserves mention; it's not one you take for granted. I can't do this with my TiVo, for example (do video on demand; not haul a boat... though I can't do that either!).
I think this unit gives up more than it gains in functionality by only having one tuner. I don't see anything in their product description about recording one show on 'live' tv while watching another 'live' show.
Uh, standard TiVo models can't do this either. Not sure about Replay. I can watch live TV and record it (the same show), or I can watch a recorded show while recording live TV. I cannot, without a kludge, watch one live show while recording another - that would require two tuners (and two cable boxes).
It is possible for me to split the cable before it gets to the box, put the TiVo on standby mode and use my TV's tuner as the second tuner if I really want to watch something else on live TV other than what I'm recording. But as I said, that's a kludge, not a feature of the product. I'm sure you could do the same thing with this Ricor box.
I don't mean to sound rude here, but beyond Russia getting a PVR I don't see how any part of this is news,
Why wouldn't that be news in itself? There are a lot of Russians out there - this isn't a site just for Americans or Britons (or westerners in general). If I was Russian, I'd be ecstatic at this news, and it'd be exactly the kind of thing I'd come here to read.
I don't see how Time Warner distributing DVR's to New York City residents was bigger news on Friday than this is today.
Also, where's the component video connectors for HDTV? Is that dvd player progressive scan?
Uh, is Russia really a large HDTV market right now? You say this after just spending an entire paragraph talking about unnecessary ports that no one will use driving up the cost of the unit. I doubt many Russians will take advantage of HDTV support. And for the record, TiVo does not support HDTV either, and my DVD player (purchased not too long ago) does not have component outputs either. I am in the US. These are still not universal features, and definitely not in DVR's, and definitely not in Russia.
while stand alone tivos, replays, and if they exist stand alone ultimate-tvs all do compress the anlaog signal they receive, direcTiVos and DirecTV UltimateTV receivers simply decrypt the digital stream from DirecTV, and re-encrypt it before storing the digital stream onto the hard drives.
Ok, perhaps I should have been clearer - forgive me for being a bit hung over tonight (work party). I can understand DirecTiVo units simply storing the DirecTV MPEG-2 stream on the hard drive. What I was specifically asking about was non-recompressed digital cable signals on a DVR. I don't believe any DVR does this and for me, it's important because while I loved DirecTV when I had it, my current apartment building landlord will not allow a dish.
So maybe it's not as "revolutionary" as I said it was, but for me, if a non-compressed signal is what this thing does, it's still a major plus over all of the available alternatives - including building my own HTPC as I've been in the process of for a while (I'm running a TiVo in the meantime).
Standard TiVo does recompress and there is a noticeable drop in quality even at the highest quality setting (which is also the setting used for live TV, so it's basically all the time). It's not a huge drop, but I am a big stickler for image quality and was not particularly happy with the quality of digital cable even before installing my TiVo, let alone after (when it got worse).
I absolutely hate the idea of giving more money to Time Warner and there are some distinctive features TiVo has that I don't think I'd want to give up (suggestions, wish lists, etc.), not to mention Lord knows what kinds of access controls TWC would put on this thing. But this might be just enough to get me to ditch my TiVo in favor of a combo of the Explorer 8000 and my HTPC (which I could still run off either a split cable or through the regular A/V outputs to capture shows I'd want to keep without dealing with access controls).
I'm not sure I believe there's no recompression done to the cable signal. Are you really telling me that this is taking the digital signal, leaving it digital, and simply storing an MPEG-2 stream (or whatever it is) as it comes in through the cable on the hard drive? If so, I would like to read more in-depth about this box (not just a Flash demo) - anybody got a better link?
Knowing how ass-backwards Time Warner usually is and how technology like this is often trailing-edge rather than leading-edge, I would have thought the box is recompressing the signal after converting it to analog just like every other DVR on the market. The fact that it looks so good could be for any number of reasons - a higher bit-rate or better compression algorithm (MPEG-4?) or whatever. If not, this is really a revolutionary device.
Does anyone have any more information on this? And what sort of record times do you get with it? With highest quality on TiVo you get about 20 hours on an 80GB hard drive; that's MPEG-2 decoding (you'd get more if it was MPEG-4).
Last month when I was building my new computer I was able to get a GeForce 4 (4xAGP, 64MB DDR) for $20 after rebate from Tiger Direct. Granted, it's not the greatest card in the world, and I've never been much of a gamer, but it should be enough for all but the most hardcore of gamers.
Why was this reply modded down to 0:Troll? The parent asked for cheap graphics cards; this guy explained where to get one. A question was asked and answered. How is that a troll?
I also bought a GeForce 4 MX from Newegg.com for my HTPC for $44 just about a week ago. No, this is not going to give you Radeon 9800 performance, but you get what you pay for. The nice thing about the graphics card market is that there's something out there for everybody right now. No, the cheap cards don't get the headlines but that's to be expected. The good news is there are highly capable graphics cards out there that will be perfectly satisfying to almost anyone all up and down the line at every price point. You can literally buy an older, slower graphics card for $20-$30 that will give you solid 2D performance and even let you play most 3D games at lower resolutions happily. Or, if you've got the cash, you can shell out for one of the hot new Radeons or GeForce FX's.
What I usually do is wait until I can double my current performance for around $100. In my main PC I have a GeForce 4 Ti4200, which cost me $108 about a year ago (upgrading from a GeForce 2, which is still a perfectly good card and now lives in a PC I built for my mother). This was one of the fastest cards available at the time and it's still among the fastest today. No complaints here, and I think it'll be a while until I upgrade again - probably not until games really start requiring DirectX 9 capability to work.
The RIAA doesn't care if this is bad PR, or if the media turns these guys/girls into "martyrs" or any of that. Don't you see? The RIAA exists to be the bad cop in the music industry's good cop/bad cop routine. Here you've got companies like Sony whose bread and butter is home electronics, including a sizable interest in the MP3 player market. They're also, of course, a member of the RIAA. Which face do you think they put on when they go after file traders? They'd never do that under the Sony brand name - they'll let the RIAA take the brunt of the backlash.
10 years ago few people had even heard of the RIAA. Sometime in the last decade the industry decided to start utilizing the organization as their hired muscle; the guys they let loose to do the dirty work none of the individual companies want to be associated with. But let's not forget who the RIAA really is. It's as much Andrew Lack and Tommy Mottola as it is Hilary Rosen.
The RIAA is sitting back and reading all this and saying "bring it on". They're happy if they get bad PR, because that's bad PR deflected away from the real names behind the RIAA.
Of course, I'm not arguing that the RIAA's strategy is sound in the long run, I'm just saying I understand it. Many of the things they're doing will still turn people off buying CD's even without people associating those actions with Sony or BMG or EMI or Universal. What the RIAA is doing is still stupid, but it's at least a better thought-out strategy than most of us here seem to give them credit for - and our tactics in trying to belittle them in whatever small ways we do here seem to miss the point completely. The RIAA knows exactly what they're doing and the reaction they'll get to it, and they don't care.
I also find it interesting there are no digital televisions. There are lots of HDTV and DTV monitors, but just try to find a television (Not NTSC but DTV). My 14 year old TV is awaiting a replacement, but none are to be found. I don't want a home theatre system. I want a TV that will work in a motorhome. Am I stuck with NTSC or a DISH subscription? I just want clear 11:00 news.
It sounds like what you want is a smaller-sized CRT set with a built-in HDTV tuner, correct? I don't think this is completely unreasonable but there are a couple of reasons why I think it's unfeasible (or at least impractical) at the moment:
1. The smaller the TV, the less perceived resolution you're going to get. You will not notice much, if any, difference between 1080i and 480i on a 13" TV, for example. That makes putting an HDTV tuner - or even making a TV HDTV-capable - pretty much a waste if the TV is smaller than 27" or so.
2. HDTV tuner technology is still relatively expensive, whereas small TV's are not. A small TV with built-in HDTV tuner would probably cost twice as much as NTSC sets, again with little perceived picture quality benefit at the smaller sizes.
3. HDTV tuner technology still requires a relatively large amount of space - it hasn't been fully miniaturized yet. Most of the TV's I see with built-in HDTV tuners are very large, because the circuitry for the tuner itself is fairly large. I haven't opened up one of these separate tuners to see what's inside but, for example, my company just purchased a plasma HDTV that came with a separate tuner box as part of the package, and the tuner box itself is about as big as my Sony audio receiver. It's big.
I think the last two points are why you see so many "monitors" at the smaller sizes ("smaller" in this case meaning circa 27") and the first point is why you don't see even that at sizes much smaller than 25". Eventually as HDTV takes over, the technology improves and miniaturizes, and costs come down, you will probably start to see HDTV tuners in smaller sets. Until then, just put the tuner in your TV cabinet, or on a shelf somewhere nearby. I realize your space is at a premium, but there's gotta be somewhere you can hide it away.
I've got one of the "first run" Apex 2600's, and it has RGB composite outputs, as well as that wonderful "you should not be here" hidden menu that got it pulled off the shelves just after mine came home with me. (can turn off microvision and set region to everyone's favorite: "bypass") The only issue with this one is it has coaxial digital audio out, and it wasn't exactly trivial to find a receiver that had a coaxial digital audio-in port.
I had one of these models as well - the picture quality was horrible compared to any other DVD player I've used (including my PlayStation 2!). I gave it up for that reason, got myself a Daewoo model that does the region-free and macrovision-free thing just as well, with a picture that looks 100X better and a price of $99.99 at Amazon (yes, I did have to hack it, but that's something you only need to do once).
I'm not sure if anybody's hacked any of these DVI-capable players to be region-free yet, but if they have, and it's a sub-$200 player, I'd buy one. Macrovision has gotten to be of lesser and lesser concern as DVD burner prices have dropped - I rarely ever have call to copy a purchased DVD for any reason but if I really ever wanted to, I'd just buy a DVD burner and do it on my PC (I plan to get one eventually regardless, and have just been waiting for a trigger). It's not like it's difficult to remove the digital encryption. But region-free, that's something I will always look for - my wife's from Japan and we're both interested in Japanese music (videos), films and anime, so it's always seemed pretty ridiculous that we should need two DVD players lying around to watch what we want. Three if we want any Europe-only releases, of which I have a couple.
Of course, lots of people have brought up the PC as a DVI-capable, region-free DVD player... personally, while the idea seems a good one on the surface, there's just something about being able to click a power button, pop the tray button, and start watching. Plus, there's no fan noise on a standalone player. I may still go the PC route eventually (I'm actually in the process of building a HTPC, but not sure how far I'll go with it), but having a DVD player that really does it all for a reasonable price is pretty intriguing too. I'm just not sure if any of the players mentioned here so far are that player yet.
Oh, and as for the coax digital out thing, why was it so hard to find a receiver for it? My Sony STRDA30ES has coax and optical and automatically detects whichever one is in use. This is like a 7 year old receiver too. I would think all receivers have coax in these days, don't they? (My recently-produced Daewoo DVD player also uses coax out, so I know it's not just a dated connection type.) It's not like optical sounds any better - maybe it's just more "high-tech" and sexy, marketing-wise.
It's stuff like this that make me wonder why some folks are not using Macs? They simply.....work. And with VirtualPC, (yes, I know unfortunately it is now a MS product) one can have as many boot environments as you want. Linux (pick your flavor), and Windows (again, pick your flavor) all on one machine. Of course I have since dropped even VirtualPC since OS X meets all of my needs now (including running all of my *nix code from my SGI's).
First of all, -1 Troll.
Second of all, we don't all use Macs because we don't want to. It's that simple and I wish you Mac zealots would get that through your thick heads at some point and quit bludgeoning us with your evangelism. It's just never going to work. As for this particular issue, you can use Virtual PC on this Toshiba laptop just as well as you can on a Mac (it's a Mac and Windows product, you know), but the point is this is a three-figure piece of software you're talking about as an add-on. Why should you need to spend extra money just to be able to dual-boot your computer?
Anyway, there are any number of reasons why someone would want to dual boot on a PC and very few of them have anything to do with our PC's not "just working" or secretly wishing we could run OSX. I dual boot because I happen to like both Windows XP and Linux for different reasons. I like having more than one OS on my machine, though I don't have to use either one for any particular reason (I could do everything I really want to under either Linux or Windows and simply wipe the other - however, I choose not to).
But the story posted here seems to be nothing new. Few PC's I've seen lately come with regular old Windows install disks like you can get in a store. Most of them come with "restore" disks that simply put the drive back in the condition it was when you bought the machine. Of course, this is of no help if you somehow type "rd windows" at a DOS prompt by mistake or something and don't need or even want to actually format the drive.
Still, I confess that I don't quite understand how this actually prevents you from setting up a dual boot. Nothing in the article suggests that you can't install the Windows image from the included DVD, then install Linux and set up the dual boot that way. Every distro of Linux that I've used recently has been able to set up a dual boot without requiring a Windows setup disk (why would you need this?). Yes, if you ever do have to reinstall Windows it will probably break your dual boot, but then it'll probably break everything else on your PC too - that's just the way these restore disks work. It's one of the reasons my old Packard Bell 486 was the last pre-built PC I ever bought (I had more than my share of restore disk experiences with that PC, that's for sure).
At any rate, these are some awe-inspiring machines (Nimitz-class ships were #3 (IIRC) on TLC's Top 10 Military Machines of all time earlier this week). This makes 10, right?
10 aircraft carriers? There will be 12 in active service once the Reagan is out there and the Constellation is retired (there are 12 now). There are also several in reserve for quick activation if need be. See here.
Re:Linux is still waiting in the wings
on
Linux on the Desktop
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"they expect adoption of desktop Linux to increase over the next few years"
That's what they said a few years ago. And that's probably what they'll be saying a few years from now. Don't get me wrong, I like Linux. But it's just not for mom and pop and I doubt it ever will be given who is working on it and what they've been doing.
You've nailed it here. It's not that Linux can't compete with Windows in areas like ease of use and prettiness. It's that the people doing the grunt work on the OS don't care (or at least haven't cared until recently) about those things. This has been a real problem.
Fortunately (for me, if nobody else), I am a bit more optimistic than you are. Even 3 years ago I would have never even considered running Linux on my home machine - I would have literally laughed if you'd suggested it. Not because I thought Linux was a bad OS, but because I saw it as kludgy, crotchety, cranky, geeky, difficult to use, difficult to look at, impossible to set up, and a bear to run. Today, I am running that same Linux on two PC's in my home and I am looking forward to the day that I can ditch Windows completely.
Linux has come a long way in the past few years in the desktop area. Yes, I still had to buy my Linux for Dummies to get everything working right, and I've read more than my share of how-to's, usenet postings and other helpful articles around the net to get me out of jams. This is very different from Windows XP, which more or less works right and looks nice out of the box for 99% of people, with no configuration whatsoever. But it's at least at the point now that I can do it, which, as someone with very little technical knowledge (software-wise) and an attention span of a gnat, is a major milestone to me. It will only continue to get better, especially now that the focus is clearly shifting to desktop users (the server stuff seems pretty well in hand).
Install apt-get (which is an application whose importance I don't think has been fully realized yet) and Linux is nearly as easy to use as Windows. In fact, with apt-get in some ways it's easier - download and setup wrapped into one, no worries about missing dependencies, and if you want an app you just pick it from the list (in Synaptic, if you have it installed) and apt-get goes out and gets everything you need. apt-get with the Synaptic graphical interface really needs to be installed and configured by default in every Linux distro. This is the kind of thing desktop users need and expect, and it's the kind of thing Linux developers are finally picking up on.
Aesthetically, I think you pick your poison, really, and at this point it's up to the distro makers how aesthetically pleasing they can/want to make their interface. Red Hat, I think, is doing a really good job of it - everything in RH9 looks consistent and professional, at least to the level of Windows 2000. No, it's not at the eye candy level of XP or the insane Mac OSX (which I honestly find distracting after an hour or so of use - it's too much), but it's fine, and it's not far behind. Other distro makers are making a go of it, but I haven't seen anyone else really integrate the look as well as Red Hat yet. They will all get there eventually, though.
I'm not worried, and in fact I'm confident that with all this attention now being paid to desktop Linux, it'll catch up fast. The developers just need to give desktop ease of use and interface issues some attention, and they are.
What Linux does need is more professional graphic designers and interface designers donating their time - development is still dominated by programmers and programmers alone are not going to build a desktop OS to truly compete with Windows. Real attention is going to need to be paid to integrating the interface both functionally and visually, and it's going to need to be paid by those that know what they're doing in those areas. But we're getting there... KDE and Gnome have both come a long way recently along with Linux itself, and hairy but important issues like font rendering are in the process of being worked out as well. All of these are things that need to be done to attract desktop users, and they are now finally getting done.
We're rapidly approaching the point where consoles are pointless. Commodity hardware is cheaper, computers offer a far superior gaming experience, and the current leader in the field got its legs dominating the PC market.
Except for that last part (which is 100% false to begin with), people have been saying this for at least 20 years. There's always been a leapfrog thing going on between consoles and PC's. You look at the PS2 now and say "a cheap PC can do those graphics better" - then when PS3 is unveiled, you'll wonder if PC graphics will ever catch up again. 4 years later, the cycle will repeat. Just the way it is.
You could argue just as easily that consoles have become commidities. Practically everybody has one, and they're cheap enough now that almost anyone that can afford a TV can afford a game console (adjusted for inflation, my Intellivision cost $900 in today's dollars in 1980, compared to $180 for a PlayStation 2 or Xbox or $149 for a GameCube). Plus, the economics of the industry are such that there's no way dedicated consoles are ever going away - all consoles really are are mini-PC's with their own DRM, and it's always been that way going back to the Atari 2600 (which used off-the-shelf computer parts - the reason why Activision was able to successfully argue in court that they did not need a license to produce third-party games for the system). Back in the cartridge days the DRM was physical - it was exceedingly expensive to produce your own cartridges and required a lot of technological knowhow. Sure, we didn't call it DRM back then, but that's what it was, and nobody ever complained about it on game consoles. Today, the DRM is software-based, but the concept is the same - you can only play these games on one specific device, and you can't easily copy them. It's the DRM, the stable, predictable hardware platform and the co-branding that attracts developers and publishers, and Infinium understands maybe 2/3 of that. What they don't understand is that without a big name and lots of money to promote both the system and individual games (including third-party games), there's not a compelling reason for a publisher to want to associate themselves with the Phantom.
As to your last statement, I would gather from your comment that you assume Microsoft is the "current leader" in the game console arena. MS is a very distant second to Sony - very distant, and further distant than they were a year ago (MS's sales have dropped year to year, while Sony's have risen). I'm talking a 4 to 1 difference. And they're losing buckets of money on the system. Experience in the PC arena is certainly no guarantee of success in the console arena - they're two different markets, and if you don't understand that difference you will get trounced by the rest of the game industry. Infinium seems to "get" part of it, but I don't see that they have either the will or the way to really get big-name publishers on board with this system, and I don't think they necessarily understand exactly what consumers want, either (the whole broadband download thing).
Real Translation: 0.4% slower, at 75% of the clock speed.
Ok, so show me the benchmarks for a 2.66ghz G5. Oh, that's right, you can't - because 2.66ghz G5's don't exist, and won't for a while. This is a pretty obvious but crucial point that a lot of geeks miss. Nobody cares how efficient a CPU is. They care about how fast it is and how much it costs. That's all that matters, that's the only reason you even run benchmarks, to either try to determine the fastest CPU on the market that's suitable for the task you need to do, or to try to find the best price/performance ratio. You have no reason to even think or talk about CPU efficiency unless you work for a chipmaking firm. It means nothing to anyone actually using a particular CPU; it only means something to the companies that make them because it allows them to get greater speed at lower production cost and higher yields. Again, it's a means to an end, not an end in itself.
In fact, I'd say Intel (and AMD, for that matter) enjoys a further advantage here, because NASA was testing the fastest G5's currently planned for market against what is now a mid-end P4. NASA admitted that the G5 performance would be further off from a 3.2ghz P4, and they didn't even test the fastest Opteron (or even a mid-range Opteron, for that matter).
The fact is in single-CPU tests the fastest P4 beats the pants off the fastest G5 and it still costs less doing it. If you want to talk dual-CPU performance, fine, but then show me some independent dual-CPU benchmarks. I haven't seen any yet.
Me, I'm content in knowing my 2.08ghz Athlon XP 2600+ is probably faster than the fastest G5 chip slated for production and I paid less than $100 for it. Don't talk to me about processor efficiency - us AMD users have been more legitimately fighting the Mhz myth over the past couple years than Apple has.
Windows 2000: Install it. Takes like 45-60 minutes. And I am presented with a 640x480 screen with 16 colors, no sound, no network. Couple of hours later, countless reboots. Drivers in. Now Windows update. Many 100's of MB later, and dozens of reboots later, that's done.
Ok, reboots are one thing, but just FYI, on my last install of Mandrake 9.1 several days ago I was presented with nearly 300MB of updates and bug fixes after install. This is on a release only a couple months old, mind you - Win2000 has several years worth of updates built up. This is not a selling point for Linux.
I also have a Red Hat demo account (installed RH on another machine) and hardly a day goes by that I don't get some sort of "errata" report from them in my inbox.
I wouldn't be so hopeful. I know any number of people who, despite the fact that they know that excellent alternatives are available, will just automatically insist on having Windows installed on their next computer purchase.
On their next computer purchase, probably. But the one after that? Or the one after that? There's no denying that momentum is building, and it may take a while but you're seeing the future right now.
Hell, I'd insist on having Windows installed on my next PC, and I've become a big fan of Linux. I don't think Linux is quite ready to replace Windows on the desktop but it is getting there and is a suitable replacement for a growing subset of users (I'm just not one of them yet). It's not going to happen overnight. But if current trends are maintained (public awareness and acceptance continues to grow and the OS itself continues to mature and become more user-friendly), it will happen eventually.
Well, I started with a C-64. That's right children, 64k.
Well, we're all just a bunch of grumpy old men here, aren't we?
I started on an Apple II but so what? You can't get any real useful work done on one now and yes, even the 400mhz and 733mhz CPU's people are talking about in here are getting pretty long in the tooth for business use.
I mean look - I don't know what kind of business work you people are talking about. There's more to running a business then sending email and using Word, which are the only examples I ever see brought up in this kind of argument. My job is producing internet content for a large company; I need to use a motley suite of apps. ranging from Photoshop to Word to Dreamweaver to Flash to Excel and I generally have 10-12 tabs open in Firebird and 4-5 IE windows at once as well. I do such varying tasks as project management, scheduling, light design work, even the occasional DVD authoring. I have to multitask, as has become fairly typical for the American worker these days.
I do all these things on a Dell Dimension 8300 with a 2.6Ghz P4 and 1024MB of RAM. This PC is sufficient for all that I need to do, keeping in mind the multitasking with various memory-intensive apps. And I am not even a designer. Up until about 2 months ago I was stuck on a 733mhz P3 with 512MB of RAM and let me tell you, it was absolutely painful.
There are only a few white-collar jobs I can think of where all you need to do is send email and use Word. Data entry, receptionist, office assistant... that's really about it. Yes, for those people a low-powered machine will suffice - and those are the people in my office who always end up with the hand-me-down computers. Nobody buys a computer with a 733mhz CPU new these days, so it would be pointless to sell them when every company has old ones lying around. To get any real work done, though, you do need a more powerful machine than that, and I would not be a happy camper doing my job on a 2.0Ghz Celeron.
Yeah, I can't find it either. The earliest I found definate refference to it was in 1986.
Note what the quote you're reading in 1986 actually says, though... "Bill Gates couldn't imagine why anyone would need more than 640k with MS-Dos", which is pretty much true. I doubt he even said that, but if he did, it wasn't such a dumb thing to say - and may have even been said in the context of promoting a next-generation graphical interface that would require more memory.
On the other hand, all this does is illustrate that you can't prove a negative. Lots of people around here saying things like "he can claim he didn't say it, doesn't mean it's true!" Well, I can say your claim to have not killed JFK isn't true either, but I would probably look pretty ridiculous doing it. Of course, you probably couldn't prove you didn't kill JFK, but that doesn't give me the right to say you did.
Statements like the one you found in 1986 are how rumors get started, and rumors turn to urban legends simply based on the fact that it's often impossible to prove a negative, to prove something didn't happen. If nobody here can provide proof (and not the "I heard it was on some Apple CD in 1981" nonsense), then it fits the definition of folklore.
"It's one of the few strategies left," Radcliffe said.
The question I have then is, what's the RIAA going to do when this doesn't work? What do they have left? And how long before they realize that this strategy, like all their others, is a massive failure?
Track down an Apex AD600A...there's nothing that's unskippable on one of those.
Unfortunately, the picture quality on this model is awful. It was among the earliest models that used standard off-the-shelf PC DVD drives along with an on-board decoder (as opposed to a custom-made design in most big-name DVD players). There is a noticeable difference in picture quality when playing almost any DVD on this player vs. another player - this is the reason I sold mine.
However, there are plenty of other hackable players that let you fast forward through the junk. Most of these are cheap Chinese players like the Apex AD600A, but not all, and even the cheap players these days are perfectly acceptable. My Daewoo DVG3000N (a Chinese player sold under a Korean brand name) lets me skip through everything after replacing the firmware chip, and its picture quality is far superior to the AD600A. Look around for a player made for sale in Hong Kong (just do a Google search for "region free DVD") - these don't need to be hacked, have no region-protection and generally no macrovision, and the vast majority of them will let you skip through anything as well.
One more oddity about the AD600A, though, which is back on-topic - its hidden menu let you strip CSS. I have no idea what you could use this for as there didn't seem to be any way to actually hook up a PC to the machine, but the option was there, strangely enough. I haven't seen this feature in another home DVD player.
Slashdot Mirror
Do yourself a favor and pick up the Apt installer from ATrpms. Download the Synaptic graphical interface for it once you've got it all set up and configured properly. That should be the last annoying install of almost any package I could imagine you running. These two applications together have solved the dependency/installation issue for me completely, and it was my biggest Linux annoyance too.
Now what he did was planning to act against his country in a violent way. An action that cannot be allowed to continue and must be repremanded in some way. He also planned to help the Telebahn who were a monsterous bunch of tyrants. But surely was a very brave man to be willing to fight for what he believed in, against the country he dispises in a land so far from his own and should be respected accordingly.
Every time a thread like this comes up I end up burning holes through my karma until it resembles a wheel of swiss cheese, but I can't let this pass.
This guy was a naturalized US citizen. Do you know what that means? Do you know the various things you need to do, to say, to prove in order to become a US citizen? My wife (who is Japanese) is going through this process right now, so I have some experience with it despite my being a citizen by birth. You swear an oath to the allegiance of the United States, among many other things. That's one of the conditions of becoming a citizen.
Now, swearing your allegiance (and all the other stuff you have to go through - the interviews, the criminal background checks, etc.) does not mean you can never disagree with the US government, or that you can't love and respect other cultures anymore. Nobody asked this guy to give up being a Muslim or to never visit Afghanistan. But swearing an allegiance does mean you will not under any circumstances fight against this country. In this country, killing another citizen in battle is equivalent to murder with a little treason thrown on top. It is not excusable, and simply planning it (without having the chance to carry out the plan) is not really much better. (And before anyone chimes in with the "but how do they know he was really planning it and not just joking!" defense, I'll just point out that conspiracy to commit various crimes are crimes in themselves in this country and have been for a long, long time.)
This guy does not deserve any respect. He is not brave. He is a liar and a traitor; he took an oath and for taking that oath he was rewarded with citizenship. He then proceeded to break that oath and rather than go out and protest peacefully or use his vote like every other respectable person in this country, he decided to plot the means to kill his own fellow citizens. I am sorry, but that is not worthy of my respect.
All that said, there's nothing for it but to accept the plea as presented until such a time as Mike recants it. And if he'd been successful, and caught on the field of battle, he would deserve having a book thrown at him as much as John Walker Lindh. But having failed at that, I think it's outrageous that he was facing the same or greater sentence than Lindh himself (20 years).
Completely ass-backwards. John Walker-Lindh decided his higher purpose in life was to become the best Muslim he could be. If you read the Time Magazine article about him, he comes off as more a misguided kid with too-liberal parents who refused to take the reigns than anything else. However stupid and wrong-headed he was, his goal was not the destruction of the United States, and he never fired a shot in battle. His goal was the life of a devout Muslim, and he decided for whatever dumb reason that it was the Taliban and the Taliban alone who were the only group practicing "pure" Islam in the world at the time.
This guy, on the other hand, was simply angry at the United States and actively plotted to join the battle against his countrymen (he is a US citizen, whatever his country of birth). Worse, he did so with others - which, by definition, is conspiracy.
Whether or not he actually succeeded is by and large irrelevant (though there would have been more charges filed if he'd have been caught gun in hand on a battlefield as Lindh was). Our laws in this country are based just as much (if not moreso) on intent as on action. And quite honestly, that was just as true before we were concerned with terrorism as it is now. You kill someone, it matters why you did it - the charge will be different depending on whether or not it was deliberate, and whether or not you planned it in advance. The same is true of many other crimes, and you've never had to be guilty of actual murder to be guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, the basic equivalent to what this guy pleaded guilty to.
In many countries (supposed "free" ones, even) it is perfectly legal to hold someone in jail without charge for long periods of time, or simply on "suspicion" of committing a crime (without actually being charged with that crime). Our "material witness" status provides basically the same thing. Suspects in crimes are often labeled as "material witnesses" when the government knows that person had something to do with the crime committed but does not have enough evidence to level a formal charge. In the case of someone plotting to kill US servicemen and women, I think it is perfectly appropriate that that person be detained as long as necessary to ensure they do not flee the country, giving them even more impetus to actually carry out the plan for which they are being detained.
I'm all for liberty and freedom and blah blah blah. But it's one thing to be a libertarian, quite another to be stupid and self-destructive in your beliefs. The fact is there are people out there who want to kill you - maybe not you specifically, but you in general, and there's no reason to coddle those people. It was several weeks, as I recall, before John Malvo was formally charged with anything directly related to his little shooting spree (he was also held as a "material witness"), and I don't remember a big uproar around here about that. The fact is we were all sure he had done the crime, and even though he was a minor, and even though he's supposedly innocent until proven guilty, so what if he's being kept in jail without charge? What I'm saying is you can't have it both ways. Either you accept that the government has to have some amount of leeway in protecting the public, or you don't. In either case you take your chances, but I'd personally rather take my chances at being thrown in jail for a couple weeks for something I didn't do (the chances of which seem pretty remote to me) than being shot at by a known sniper or blown up by a known terrorist (the chances of which seemed pretty good to me as I watched the WTC burn outside my w
Forgive me if this is up here somewhere already, but I ran a search through the replies and didn't see it. This is SCO's amusing response, lifted off Yahoo's biz section - I would imagine this would actually be admissible as evidence of some of Red Hat's claims! (Particularly regarding the last two sentences.)
Matthew J. Szulik
CEO
RED HAT, INC.
1801 Varsity Drive
Raleigh, NC 27606
Dear Matthew,
Attached is the letter I discussed with you during our July 31, 2003 telephone conversation. Instead of actually sending the letter, I thought it was best to telephone you and speak in person to see if we could resolve the issues between our companies short of litigation. We left the conversation with a preliminary agreement to meet and continue our discussions further.
To my surprise, I just discovered that your company filed legal action against The SCO Group earlier today. You, of course, mentioned nothing of this during our telephone conversation. I am disappointed that you were not more forthcoming about your intentions. I am also disappointed that you have chosen litigation rather than good faith discussions with SCO about the problems inherent in Linux.
Of course, we will prepare our legal response as required by your complaint. Be advised that our response will likely include counterclaims for copyright infringement and conspiracy.
I must say that your decision to file legal action does not seem conducive to the long-term survivability of Linux.
Yours truly
Darl C. McBride
President & CEO
I don't get it -- the "mainline geek culture" picture is a syringe attached to what? (Oh, it's an Ethernet cable, right? OK, I do get it. Still, it's a bit excessively stylized.)
It's also probably the only one of these (the winners) that I'd buy, so to each his own. How can you go wrong mixing geek culture with drug culture? It's a perfect marriage.
I do sorta like the "soothing green light" one also, but probably not enough to buy one.
Cellular service in this country is a mess, and urban areas can be just as bad off as rural. Case in point: New York City. I've been with Sprint now for about 6 or 7 years, not because their service is so great but because everybody else is even worse. I live in Queens (though not in the boonies of Queens) and commute to Manhattan - I get 1 bar of signal strength in either place, occasionally going up to 2. A good 50% of my calls are either dropped or just go through to voicemail. This is not just on one model of phone, either - as I said, I've been with Sprint for a while and have used a good 4-5 phones over the duration, all with external antennas, and all have been equally bad. It's the service, not the phones.
Fed up, I tried Verizon for 2 weeks about a year ago, based on their reputation (a reputation confirmed at the linked article). Every single call I made reverted to analog mode despite showing 4 bars of digital strength prior to placing the call. Accessing any data services was useless for this reason, and call quality was atrocious. Dropped Verizon within my 15 day trial period (which I believe is mandated by law around here).
During all this time, Sprint's rates have shot up dramatically, and for my family plan I am now paying a minimum of $95 per month including taxes (taxes are much higher here than anywhere else - YMMV). That's the cheapest plan available with 2 lines.
Just this weekend my wife and I signed up with Cingular, mostly due to their lower rates ($50 plus 17.1% total tax for 2 lines and a reasonable amount of minutes). Was instantly complaining that I was going to cancel the service again after I couldn't even complete a call to my wife's phone in our own apartment. Now that I've had a bit more time to play with the phones I'm starting to think the service is not particularly worse than Sprint (1 bar of strength at home, 1 bar at work, 2-3 bars everywhere in between, some calls dropped, some go through), so at the reduced rates I may as well stick with them. But I'm still not particularly happy.
If any other product on the market (and cellular service is a product like any other) only worked 50% of the time it would be considered defective. Imagine picking up your home phone and wondering whether or not your call will go through. This is the beginning of the 21st century, not the 20th. The top priority of all of these companies needs to be to fix their service. And I mean fix, not "improve". The service as it is is broken.
I have not tried cellular service in Europe but I can't imagine it is this bad. I have, on the other hand, tried it in Japan and was absolutely astonished. Now, granted, I only tried one company's service (DoCoMo) and only in one area (Tokyo metro) but it was full signal strength at all times, even in rural areas (yes, there are rural areas around Tokyo), with absolutely crystal clear call quality. I cannot understand how cellular service in the US could be so much worse.
"'Live' broadcasts can also be recorded." - Why's that mentioned? I think any PVR can do that.
Nope. See the earlier reply about the Pinnacle DC-10, and my Winfast TV2000 Deluxe doesn't do it automatically with the included software. Some Panasonic DVR's with built-in DVD-RAM or DVD-R drives also do not record live TV at all (though others do). It's not a feature you can just take for granted. Most P/DVR's do do it, but not all.
"It looks like this is being marketed to Russian cable companies as an all-in-one portal, since they also include electronic ordering capabilities and "near video on demand";"
Any PVR has that functionality when combined with a proper/integrated tuner and PPV channels.
That's like saying "any car can haul a boat behind it, as long as it has a powerful enough engine and a tow bar". The fact is most don't. So yes, it's another feature that deserves mention; it's not one you take for granted. I can't do this with my TiVo, for example (do video on demand; not haul a boat... though I can't do that either!).
I think this unit gives up more than it gains in functionality by only having one tuner. I don't see anything in their product description about recording one show on 'live' tv while watching another 'live' show.
Uh, standard TiVo models can't do this either. Not sure about Replay. I can watch live TV and record it (the same show), or I can watch a recorded show while recording live TV. I cannot, without a kludge, watch one live show while recording another - that would require two tuners (and two cable boxes).
It is possible for me to split the cable before it gets to the box, put the TiVo on standby mode and use my TV's tuner as the second tuner if I really want to watch something else on live TV other than what I'm recording. But as I said, that's a kludge, not a feature of the product. I'm sure you could do the same thing with this Ricor box.
I don't mean to sound rude here, but beyond Russia getting a PVR I don't see how any part of this is news,
Why wouldn't that be news in itself? There are a lot of Russians out there - this isn't a site just for Americans or Britons (or westerners in general). If I was Russian, I'd be ecstatic at this news, and it'd be exactly the kind of thing I'd come here to read.
I don't see how Time Warner distributing DVR's to New York City residents was bigger news on Friday than this is today.
Also, where's the component video connectors for HDTV? Is that dvd player progressive scan?
Uh, is Russia really a large HDTV market right now? You say this after just spending an entire paragraph talking about unnecessary ports that no one will use driving up the cost of the unit. I doubt many Russians will take advantage of HDTV support. And for the record, TiVo does not support HDTV either, and my DVD player (purchased not too long ago) does not have component outputs either. I am in the US. These are still not universal features, and definitely not in DVR's, and definitely not in Russia.
while stand alone tivos, replays, and if they exist stand alone ultimate-tvs all do compress the anlaog signal they receive, direcTiVos and DirecTV UltimateTV receivers simply decrypt the digital stream from DirecTV, and re-encrypt it before storing the digital stream onto the hard drives.
Ok, perhaps I should have been clearer - forgive me for being a bit hung over tonight (work party). I can understand DirecTiVo units simply storing the DirecTV MPEG-2 stream on the hard drive. What I was specifically asking about was non-recompressed digital cable signals on a DVR. I don't believe any DVR does this and for me, it's important because while I loved DirecTV when I had it, my current apartment building landlord will not allow a dish.
So maybe it's not as "revolutionary" as I said it was, but for me, if a non-compressed signal is what this thing does, it's still a major plus over all of the available alternatives - including building my own HTPC as I've been in the process of for a while (I'm running a TiVo in the meantime).
Standard TiVo does recompress and there is a noticeable drop in quality even at the highest quality setting (which is also the setting used for live TV, so it's basically all the time). It's not a huge drop, but I am a big stickler for image quality and was not particularly happy with the quality of digital cable even before installing my TiVo, let alone after (when it got worse).
I absolutely hate the idea of giving more money to Time Warner and there are some distinctive features TiVo has that I don't think I'd want to give up (suggestions, wish lists, etc.), not to mention Lord knows what kinds of access controls TWC would put on this thing. But this might be just enough to get me to ditch my TiVo in favor of a combo of the Explorer 8000 and my HTPC (which I could still run off either a split cable or through the regular A/V outputs to capture shows I'd want to keep without dealing with access controls).
I'm not sure I believe there's no recompression done to the cable signal. Are you really telling me that this is taking the digital signal, leaving it digital, and simply storing an MPEG-2 stream (or whatever it is) as it comes in through the cable on the hard drive? If so, I would like to read more in-depth about this box (not just a Flash demo) - anybody got a better link?
Knowing how ass-backwards Time Warner usually is and how technology like this is often trailing-edge rather than leading-edge, I would have thought the box is recompressing the signal after converting it to analog just like every other DVR on the market. The fact that it looks so good could be for any number of reasons - a higher bit-rate or better compression algorithm (MPEG-4?) or whatever. If not, this is really a revolutionary device.
Does anyone have any more information on this? And what sort of record times do you get with it? With highest quality on TiVo you get about 20 hours on an 80GB hard drive; that's MPEG-2 decoding (you'd get more if it was MPEG-4).
Last month when I was building my new computer I was able to get a GeForce 4 (4xAGP, 64MB DDR) for $20 after rebate from Tiger Direct. Granted, it's not the greatest card in the world, and I've never been much of a gamer, but it should be enough for all but the most hardcore of gamers.
Why was this reply modded down to 0:Troll? The parent asked for cheap graphics cards; this guy explained where to get one. A question was asked and answered. How is that a troll?
I also bought a GeForce 4 MX from Newegg.com for my HTPC for $44 just about a week ago. No, this is not going to give you Radeon 9800 performance, but you get what you pay for. The nice thing about the graphics card market is that there's something out there for everybody right now. No, the cheap cards don't get the headlines but that's to be expected. The good news is there are highly capable graphics cards out there that will be perfectly satisfying to almost anyone all up and down the line at every price point. You can literally buy an older, slower graphics card for $20-$30 that will give you solid 2D performance and even let you play most 3D games at lower resolutions happily. Or, if you've got the cash, you can shell out for one of the hot new Radeons or GeForce FX's.
What I usually do is wait until I can double my current performance for around $100. In my main PC I have a GeForce 4 Ti4200, which cost me $108 about a year ago (upgrading from a GeForce 2, which is still a perfectly good card and now lives in a PC I built for my mother). This was one of the fastest cards available at the time and it's still among the fastest today. No complaints here, and I think it'll be a while until I upgrade again - probably not until games really start requiring DirectX 9 capability to work.
The RIAA doesn't care if this is bad PR, or if the media turns these guys/girls into "martyrs" or any of that. Don't you see? The RIAA exists to be the bad cop in the music industry's good cop/bad cop routine. Here you've got companies like Sony whose bread and butter is home electronics, including a sizable interest in the MP3 player market. They're also, of course, a member of the RIAA. Which face do you think they put on when they go after file traders? They'd never do that under the Sony brand name - they'll let the RIAA take the brunt of the backlash.
10 years ago few people had even heard of the RIAA. Sometime in the last decade the industry decided to start utilizing the organization as their hired muscle; the guys they let loose to do the dirty work none of the individual companies want to be associated with. But let's not forget who the RIAA really is. It's as much Andrew Lack and Tommy Mottola as it is Hilary Rosen.
The RIAA is sitting back and reading all this and saying "bring it on". They're happy if they get bad PR, because that's bad PR deflected away from the real names behind the RIAA.
Of course, I'm not arguing that the RIAA's strategy is sound in the long run, I'm just saying I understand it. Many of the things they're doing will still turn people off buying CD's even without people associating those actions with Sony or BMG or EMI or Universal. What the RIAA is doing is still stupid, but it's at least a better thought-out strategy than most of us here seem to give them credit for - and our tactics in trying to belittle them in whatever small ways we do here seem to miss the point completely. The RIAA knows exactly what they're doing and the reaction they'll get to it, and they don't care.
I also find it interesting there are no digital televisions. There are lots of HDTV and DTV monitors, but just try to find a television (Not NTSC but DTV). My 14 year old TV is awaiting a replacement, but none are to be found. I don't want a home theatre system. I want a TV that will work in a motorhome. Am I stuck with NTSC or a DISH subscription? I just want clear 11:00 news.
It sounds like what you want is a smaller-sized CRT set with a built-in HDTV tuner, correct? I don't think this is completely unreasonable but there are a couple of reasons why I think it's unfeasible (or at least impractical) at the moment:
1. The smaller the TV, the less perceived resolution you're going to get. You will not notice much, if any, difference between 1080i and 480i on a 13" TV, for example. That makes putting an HDTV tuner - or even making a TV HDTV-capable - pretty much a waste if the TV is smaller than 27" or so.
2. HDTV tuner technology is still relatively expensive, whereas small TV's are not. A small TV with built-in HDTV tuner would probably cost twice as much as NTSC sets, again with little perceived picture quality benefit at the smaller sizes.
3. HDTV tuner technology still requires a relatively large amount of space - it hasn't been fully miniaturized yet. Most of the TV's I see with built-in HDTV tuners are very large, because the circuitry for the tuner itself is fairly large. I haven't opened up one of these separate tuners to see what's inside but, for example, my company just purchased a plasma HDTV that came with a separate tuner box as part of the package, and the tuner box itself is about as big as my Sony audio receiver. It's big.
I think the last two points are why you see so many "monitors" at the smaller sizes ("smaller" in this case meaning circa 27") and the first point is why you don't see even that at sizes much smaller than 25". Eventually as HDTV takes over, the technology improves and miniaturizes, and costs come down, you will probably start to see HDTV tuners in smaller sets. Until then, just put the tuner in your TV cabinet, or on a shelf somewhere nearby. I realize your space is at a premium, but there's gotta be somewhere you can hide it away.
I've got one of the "first run" Apex 2600's, and it has RGB composite outputs, as well as that wonderful "you should not be here" hidden menu that got it pulled off the shelves just after mine came home with me. (can turn off microvision and set region to everyone's favorite: "bypass") The only issue with this one is it has coaxial digital audio out, and it wasn't exactly trivial to find a receiver that had a coaxial digital audio-in port.
I had one of these models as well - the picture quality was horrible compared to any other DVD player I've used (including my PlayStation 2!). I gave it up for that reason, got myself a Daewoo model that does the region-free and macrovision-free thing just as well, with a picture that looks 100X better and a price of $99.99 at Amazon (yes, I did have to hack it, but that's something you only need to do once).
I'm not sure if anybody's hacked any of these DVI-capable players to be region-free yet, but if they have, and it's a sub-$200 player, I'd buy one. Macrovision has gotten to be of lesser and lesser concern as DVD burner prices have dropped - I rarely ever have call to copy a purchased DVD for any reason but if I really ever wanted to, I'd just buy a DVD burner and do it on my PC (I plan to get one eventually regardless, and have just been waiting for a trigger). It's not like it's difficult to remove the digital encryption. But region-free, that's something I will always look for - my wife's from Japan and we're both interested in Japanese music (videos), films and anime, so it's always seemed pretty ridiculous that we should need two DVD players lying around to watch what we want. Three if we want any Europe-only releases, of which I have a couple.
Of course, lots of people have brought up the PC as a DVI-capable, region-free DVD player... personally, while the idea seems a good one on the surface, there's just something about being able to click a power button, pop the tray button, and start watching. Plus, there's no fan noise on a standalone player. I may still go the PC route eventually (I'm actually in the process of building a HTPC, but not sure how far I'll go with it), but having a DVD player that really does it all for a reasonable price is pretty intriguing too. I'm just not sure if any of the players mentioned here so far are that player yet.
Oh, and as for the coax digital out thing, why was it so hard to find a receiver for it? My Sony STRDA30ES has coax and optical and automatically detects whichever one is in use. This is like a 7 year old receiver too. I would think all receivers have coax in these days, don't they? (My recently-produced Daewoo DVD player also uses coax out, so I know it's not just a dated connection type.) It's not like optical sounds any better - maybe it's just more "high-tech" and sexy, marketing-wise.
It's stuff like this that make me wonder why some folks are not using Macs? They simply.....work. And with VirtualPC, (yes, I know unfortunately it is now a MS product) one can have as many boot environments as you want. Linux (pick your flavor), and Windows (again, pick your flavor) all on one machine. Of course I have since dropped even VirtualPC since OS X meets all of my needs now (including running all of my *nix code from my SGI's).
First of all, -1 Troll.
Second of all, we don't all use Macs because we don't want to. It's that simple and I wish you Mac zealots would get that through your thick heads at some point and quit bludgeoning us with your evangelism. It's just never going to work. As for this particular issue, you can use Virtual PC on this Toshiba laptop just as well as you can on a Mac (it's a Mac and Windows product, you know), but the point is this is a three-figure piece of software you're talking about as an add-on. Why should you need to spend extra money just to be able to dual-boot your computer?
Anyway, there are any number of reasons why someone would want to dual boot on a PC and very few of them have anything to do with our PC's not "just working" or secretly wishing we could run OSX. I dual boot because I happen to like both Windows XP and Linux for different reasons. I like having more than one OS on my machine, though I don't have to use either one for any particular reason (I could do everything I really want to under either Linux or Windows and simply wipe the other - however, I choose not to).
But the story posted here seems to be nothing new. Few PC's I've seen lately come with regular old Windows install disks like you can get in a store. Most of them come with "restore" disks that simply put the drive back in the condition it was when you bought the machine. Of course, this is of no help if you somehow type "rd windows" at a DOS prompt by mistake or something and don't need or even want to actually format the drive.
Still, I confess that I don't quite understand how this actually prevents you from setting up a dual boot. Nothing in the article suggests that you can't install the Windows image from the included DVD, then install Linux and set up the dual boot that way. Every distro of Linux that I've used recently has been able to set up a dual boot without requiring a Windows setup disk (why would you need this?). Yes, if you ever do have to reinstall Windows it will probably break your dual boot, but then it'll probably break everything else on your PC too - that's just the way these restore disks work. It's one of the reasons my old Packard Bell 486 was the last pre-built PC I ever bought (I had more than my share of restore disk experiences with that PC, that's for sure).
At any rate, these are some awe-inspiring machines (Nimitz-class ships were #3 (IIRC) on TLC's Top 10 Military Machines of all time earlier this week). This makes 10, right?
10 aircraft carriers? There will be 12 in active service once the Reagan is out there and the Constellation is retired (there are 12 now). There are also several in reserve for quick activation if need be. See here.
"they expect adoption of desktop Linux to increase over the next few years"
That's what they said a few years ago. And that's probably what they'll be saying a few years from now. Don't get me wrong, I like Linux. But it's just not for mom and pop and I doubt it ever will be given who is working on it and what they've been doing.
You've nailed it here. It's not that Linux can't compete with Windows in areas like ease of use and prettiness. It's that the people doing the grunt work on the OS don't care (or at least haven't cared until recently) about those things. This has been a real problem.
Fortunately (for me, if nobody else), I am a bit more optimistic than you are. Even 3 years ago I would have never even considered running Linux on my home machine - I would have literally laughed if you'd suggested it. Not because I thought Linux was a bad OS, but because I saw it as kludgy, crotchety, cranky, geeky, difficult to use, difficult to look at, impossible to set up, and a bear to run. Today, I am running that same Linux on two PC's in my home and I am looking forward to the day that I can ditch Windows completely.
Linux has come a long way in the past few years in the desktop area. Yes, I still had to buy my Linux for Dummies to get everything working right, and I've read more than my share of how-to's, usenet postings and other helpful articles around the net to get me out of jams. This is very different from Windows XP, which more or less works right and looks nice out of the box for 99% of people, with no configuration whatsoever. But it's at least at the point now that I can do it, which, as someone with very little technical knowledge (software-wise) and an attention span of a gnat, is a major milestone to me. It will only continue to get better, especially now that the focus is clearly shifting to desktop users (the server stuff seems pretty well in hand).
Install apt-get (which is an application whose importance I don't think has been fully realized yet) and Linux is nearly as easy to use as Windows. In fact, with apt-get in some ways it's easier - download and setup wrapped into one, no worries about missing dependencies, and if you want an app you just pick it from the list (in Synaptic, if you have it installed) and apt-get goes out and gets everything you need. apt-get with the Synaptic graphical interface really needs to be installed and configured by default in every Linux distro. This is the kind of thing desktop users need and expect, and it's the kind of thing Linux developers are finally picking up on.
Aesthetically, I think you pick your poison, really, and at this point it's up to the distro makers how aesthetically pleasing they can/want to make their interface. Red Hat, I think, is doing a really good job of it - everything in RH9 looks consistent and professional, at least to the level of Windows 2000. No, it's not at the eye candy level of XP or the insane Mac OSX (which I honestly find distracting after an hour or so of use - it's too much), but it's fine, and it's not far behind. Other distro makers are making a go of it, but I haven't seen anyone else really integrate the look as well as Red Hat yet. They will all get there eventually, though.
I'm not worried, and in fact I'm confident that with all this attention now being paid to desktop Linux, it'll catch up fast. The developers just need to give desktop ease of use and interface issues some attention, and they are.
What Linux does need is more professional graphic designers and interface designers donating their time - development is still dominated by programmers and programmers alone are not going to build a desktop OS to truly compete with Windows. Real attention is going to need to be paid to integrating the interface both functionally and visually, and it's going to need to be paid by those that know what they're doing in those areas. But we're getting there... KDE and Gnome have both come a long way recently along with Linux itself, and hairy but important issues like font rendering are in the process of being worked out as well. All of these are things that need to be done to attract desktop users, and they are now finally getting done.
We're rapidly approaching the point where consoles are pointless. Commodity hardware is cheaper, computers offer a far superior gaming experience, and the current leader in the field got its legs dominating the PC market.
Except for that last part (which is 100% false to begin with), people have been saying this for at least 20 years. There's always been a leapfrog thing going on between consoles and PC's. You look at the PS2 now and say "a cheap PC can do those graphics better" - then when PS3 is unveiled, you'll wonder if PC graphics will ever catch up again. 4 years later, the cycle will repeat. Just the way it is.
You could argue just as easily that consoles have become commidities. Practically everybody has one, and they're cheap enough now that almost anyone that can afford a TV can afford a game console (adjusted for inflation, my Intellivision cost $900 in today's dollars in 1980, compared to $180 for a PlayStation 2 or Xbox or $149 for a GameCube). Plus, the economics of the industry are such that there's no way dedicated consoles are ever going away - all consoles really are are mini-PC's with their own DRM, and it's always been that way going back to the Atari 2600 (which used off-the-shelf computer parts - the reason why Activision was able to successfully argue in court that they did not need a license to produce third-party games for the system). Back in the cartridge days the DRM was physical - it was exceedingly expensive to produce your own cartridges and required a lot of technological knowhow. Sure, we didn't call it DRM back then, but that's what it was, and nobody ever complained about it on game consoles. Today, the DRM is software-based, but the concept is the same - you can only play these games on one specific device, and you can't easily copy them. It's the DRM, the stable, predictable hardware platform and the co-branding that attracts developers and publishers, and Infinium understands maybe 2/3 of that. What they don't understand is that without a big name and lots of money to promote both the system and individual games (including third-party games), there's not a compelling reason for a publisher to want to associate themselves with the Phantom.
As to your last statement, I would gather from your comment that you assume Microsoft is the "current leader" in the game console arena. MS is a very distant second to Sony - very distant, and further distant than they were a year ago (MS's sales have dropped year to year, while Sony's have risen). I'm talking a 4 to 1 difference. And they're losing buckets of money on the system. Experience in the PC arena is certainly no guarantee of success in the console arena - they're two different markets, and if you don't understand that difference you will get trounced by the rest of the game industry. Infinium seems to "get" part of it, but I don't see that they have either the will or the way to really get big-name publishers on board with this system, and I don't think they necessarily understand exactly what consumers want, either (the whole broadband download thing).
Real Translation: 0.4% slower, at 75% of the clock speed.
Ok, so show me the benchmarks for a 2.66ghz G5. Oh, that's right, you can't - because 2.66ghz G5's don't exist, and won't for a while. This is a pretty obvious but crucial point that a lot of geeks miss. Nobody cares how efficient a CPU is. They care about how fast it is and how much it costs. That's all that matters, that's the only reason you even run benchmarks, to either try to determine the fastest CPU on the market that's suitable for the task you need to do, or to try to find the best price/performance ratio. You have no reason to even think or talk about CPU efficiency unless you work for a chipmaking firm. It means nothing to anyone actually using a particular CPU; it only means something to the companies that make them because it allows them to get greater speed at lower production cost and higher yields. Again, it's a means to an end, not an end in itself.
In fact, I'd say Intel (and AMD, for that matter) enjoys a further advantage here, because NASA was testing the fastest G5's currently planned for market against what is now a mid-end P4. NASA admitted that the G5 performance would be further off from a 3.2ghz P4, and they didn't even test the fastest Opteron (or even a mid-range Opteron, for that matter).
The fact is in single-CPU tests the fastest P4 beats the pants off the fastest G5 and it still costs less doing it. If you want to talk dual-CPU performance, fine, but then show me some independent dual-CPU benchmarks. I haven't seen any yet.
Me, I'm content in knowing my 2.08ghz Athlon XP 2600+ is probably faster than the fastest G5 chip slated for production and I paid less than $100 for it. Don't talk to me about processor efficiency - us AMD users have been more legitimately fighting the Mhz myth over the past couple years than Apple has.
Windows 2000: Install it. Takes like 45-60 minutes. And I am presented with a 640x480 screen with 16 colors, no sound, no network. Couple of hours later, countless reboots. Drivers in. Now Windows update. Many 100's of MB later, and dozens of reboots later, that's done.
Ok, reboots are one thing, but just FYI, on my last install of Mandrake 9.1 several days ago I was presented with nearly 300MB of updates and bug fixes after install. This is on a release only a couple months old, mind you - Win2000 has several years worth of updates built up. This is not a selling point for Linux.
I also have a Red Hat demo account (installed RH on another machine) and hardly a day goes by that I don't get some sort of "errata" report from them in my inbox.
I wouldn't be so hopeful. I know any number of people who, despite the fact that they know that excellent alternatives are available, will just automatically insist on having Windows installed on their next computer purchase.
On their next computer purchase, probably. But the one after that? Or the one after that? There's no denying that momentum is building, and it may take a while but you're seeing the future right now.
Hell, I'd insist on having Windows installed on my next PC, and I've become a big fan of Linux. I don't think Linux is quite ready to replace Windows on the desktop but it is getting there and is a suitable replacement for a growing subset of users (I'm just not one of them yet). It's not going to happen overnight. But if current trends are maintained (public awareness and acceptance continues to grow and the OS itself continues to mature and become more user-friendly), it will happen eventually.
Well, I started with a C-64. That's right children, 64k.
Well, we're all just a bunch of grumpy old men here, aren't we?
I started on an Apple II but so what? You can't get any real useful work done on one now and yes, even the 400mhz and 733mhz CPU's people are talking about in here are getting pretty long in the tooth for business use.
I mean look - I don't know what kind of business work you people are talking about. There's more to running a business then sending email and using Word, which are the only examples I ever see brought up in this kind of argument. My job is producing internet content for a large company; I need to use a motley suite of apps. ranging from Photoshop to Word to Dreamweaver to Flash to Excel and I generally have 10-12 tabs open in Firebird and 4-5 IE windows at once as well. I do such varying tasks as project management, scheduling, light design work, even the occasional DVD authoring. I have to multitask, as has become fairly typical for the American worker these days.
I do all these things on a Dell Dimension 8300 with a 2.6Ghz P4 and 1024MB of RAM. This PC is sufficient for all that I need to do, keeping in mind the multitasking with various memory-intensive apps. And I am not even a designer. Up until about 2 months ago I was stuck on a 733mhz P3 with 512MB of RAM and let me tell you, it was absolutely painful.
There are only a few white-collar jobs I can think of where all you need to do is send email and use Word. Data entry, receptionist, office assistant... that's really about it. Yes, for those people a low-powered machine will suffice - and those are the people in my office who always end up with the hand-me-down computers. Nobody buys a computer with a 733mhz CPU new these days, so it would be pointless to sell them when every company has old ones lying around. To get any real work done, though, you do need a more powerful machine than that, and I would not be a happy camper doing my job on a 2.0Ghz Celeron.
You can have my IBM Model M when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Yeah, I can't find it either. The earliest I found definate refference to it was in 1986.
Note what the quote you're reading in 1986 actually says, though... "Bill Gates couldn't imagine why anyone would need more than 640k with MS-Dos", which is pretty much true. I doubt he even said that, but if he did, it wasn't such a dumb thing to say - and may have even been said in the context of promoting a next-generation graphical interface that would require more memory.
On the other hand, all this does is illustrate that you can't prove a negative. Lots of people around here saying things like "he can claim he didn't say it, doesn't mean it's true!" Well, I can say your claim to have not killed JFK isn't true either, but I would probably look pretty ridiculous doing it. Of course, you probably couldn't prove you didn't kill JFK, but that doesn't give me the right to say you did.
Statements like the one you found in 1986 are how rumors get started, and rumors turn to urban legends simply based on the fact that it's often impossible to prove a negative, to prove something didn't happen. If nobody here can provide proof (and not the "I heard it was on some Apple CD in 1981" nonsense), then it fits the definition of folklore.
Saw this quote on News.com...
"It's one of the few strategies left," Radcliffe said.
The question I have then is, what's the RIAA going to do when this doesn't work? What do they have left? And how long before they realize that this strategy, like all their others, is a massive failure?
Track down an Apex AD600A...there's nothing that's unskippable on one of those.
Unfortunately, the picture quality on this model is awful. It was among the earliest models that used standard off-the-shelf PC DVD drives along with an on-board decoder (as opposed to a custom-made design in most big-name DVD players). There is a noticeable difference in picture quality when playing almost any DVD on this player vs. another player - this is the reason I sold mine.
However, there are plenty of other hackable players that let you fast forward through the junk. Most of these are cheap Chinese players like the Apex AD600A, but not all, and even the cheap players these days are perfectly acceptable. My Daewoo DVG3000N (a Chinese player sold under a Korean brand name) lets me skip through everything after replacing the firmware chip, and its picture quality is far superior to the AD600A. Look around for a player made for sale in Hong Kong (just do a Google search for "region free DVD") - these don't need to be hacked, have no region-protection and generally no macrovision, and the vast majority of them will let you skip through anything as well.
One more oddity about the AD600A, though, which is back on-topic - its hidden menu let you strip CSS. I have no idea what you could use this for as there didn't seem to be any way to actually hook up a PC to the machine, but the option was there, strangely enough. I haven't seen this feature in another home DVD player.