Depends on where one is looking. My personal favorite for this kind of thing is irate radio. While still pretty rough around the edges, I think it has great potential as a method of getting information to people about what kind of indie bands they might enjoy.
I really like Pan as well, except I've not seen it run well on my setup in quite some time. My system usually grinds to a halt after it's been running about a half hour or so. Which is rather a pity since I usually fall in love with it during that half hour.
Is trying to halt the move to PVR before it gains much momentum. Right now we live in a very TV related culture. Like it or not, it's the norm to come home from work and turn on the tv for the rest of the night - despite there not being that much above the 'meh' level of quality. Even one show someone actually 'likes' is enough to get most people watching for hours before and after it airs.
I think what the networks are terrified of is people no longer doing this. One of the most common statements I hear from people with DVRs is that they can't stand to watch live TV anymore. It's certainly something I've found to be true after picking up one of the older model ReplayTv units. I think what the networks should be most affraid of, and what might be one reason for these scheduling problems, is people realising just how much time they waste watching shows they don't even really enjoy.
Thanks for pointing that out, I've been going through the archives and nearly each one has been in fact the very definition of awesome awesomeness. So awesome that I'm going to be very tired tomorrow thanks to an inability to tear myself away from the strip.
Well, a cross platform skinnable lightweight UI package that sits on top of a JIT bytecode compiler, that gives you binary compatibility between MFC, GTK, qt and other libraries.... that is pretty cool.
Wait....qt? Did you just miswrite that, or did an swt implementation with qt support, official or unofficial, finally make it out somewhere in the wild?
Look, the truth is that not only is Java irrelevant on the desktop...
I would have agreed with you a year ago, but it's really made a comeback for desktop use. SWT, SwingWT, and the performance increases in 5 have changed things around enough that I'm considering it a viable development platform again after having discounted it for quite some time. Two of the programs I use most often are in fact written in Java, azureus and dvarchive. The latter even uses swing, and I'm still amazed by the fact that I don't mind that anymore.
I think many would be glad for that lack of update features. For whatever reason one of the applications I make the most use out of, DVarchive, will only run with Java 1.4.x. Aditionally it's closed source so a person can't just run out and recompile it to the latest version, or try to fix whatever is keeping it from working. If Java did autoupdate, anyone using that program for example would be out of luck unless they both noticed the command line option to overide the jvm check and that an older version of dvarchive will actually work with the latest version of java if that is used, while the current version of the program will not. Both of which would be unlikly for someone not too very into computers.
Thank you - well said! The same misinterpretation of the meaning of natural selection always seems to come up in these kinds of discussions. The perfect example I can think of are dogs. Many of their original behavoirs and appearences would have been detrimental to them while living with humans, and in their new environment these have been selected against. Being smaller, less aggresive on average, or more able to communicate with humans might not help, or even activly hurt them in the wild - but the breeds in question don't live in the wild anymore. I think humans get a bit overly arogent about exactly how much global effect we have over natural proceesses.
It's easy, stop being their customer. I'm all for utopian ideas of the MPAA letting people pay to view movies at home on the day of a theater release, but it's not going to happen any time soon. I can though, just stop going to their movies or buying their products - legally or illegally. Most of the movies coming out are aimed at such a low target that they're hardly worth watching even for free. I can't be alone in having become somewhat jaded on each new iteration of special effects, and without that, what is there really - hollywoods legendary talent for intelletual scripts? The worst pulp is usually magnatudes better than most movies. A gem slips through every now and again, but this is it. It's not worth sifting through all the other garbage hollywood puts out to find them, and even the best movie isn't worth having some poor shmuck get fined $300,000 by supporting the company doing it.
After all, the Incredibles still did big money (already profitable), because people really do want to sit in theaters.
Do they? There has to be a significant amount of people out there who can't stand theaters - I know most of my friends hate them. Ten to twenty minutes of comercials, surrounded by fat people loudly munching their food while I'm trying to watch the movie, and hoards of hyper children and even worse teens constantly checking their cellphones. I'd gladly pay twice the normal ticket price just to avoid subjecting myself to such a subpar viewing experience.
For whatever charges I may incur, I prefer being the master of my own healthcare.
Sadly, you're not going to be in most places in the world. Even in the US, there's pretty strong restrictions on what treatments you're going to be allowed to have. There's a variety of reasons behind it, but the bottom line is that even doctors don't have final say in what treatments are going to be used, let alone the person lowest on the rung - the patient.
ie, 200W is roughly the amount of power you use when walking, 150kW is roughly the power of an SUV
It often amazes me how little the idea of just walking somewhere will occur to people. I moved to a small, very centralised town about two years back and one of the best features is that I can walk anywhere. But, oddly, despite the fact that we have so many traffic lights that driving or walking to most places takes about the same time, almost nobody walks. Which is really a pity, as it's also one of the most obese towns I've seen.
I agree about the theaters. I can't think of a less enjoyable way to spend an hour. Dark enclosed space, inevitably with multiple people wheezing and hacking their contaminated air all over the place, annoying kids, even more annoying teenagers, people chomp chomping their junkfood and smacking their oil ridden lips, and cellphones lit up and going off the entire time. Movie industry, how about providing us a way of watching the occasional good movie without having to endure this kind of thing? You have goods, we have money to buy them with, it should be an easy solution!
I'm going to chime in for third parties as well. They don't have any chance of making it in, they might not even have much of a chance within my lifetime. But every percentage of voters who cast for them brings them just a bit closer to the point where the general public will start taking them seriously as a canidate. Or, at least that's the theory.
I should preface this by saying that I'm a fairly long time linux user, and love it. I'm not sure if I totally agree on everything you listed though. IM for example. It works great on linux if all the person needs is to send text, but anything more seems to come up with compatibility problems. For example if talking to someone using yahoo messenger, there'll be no file transfer, no avatar use, no IMVironments or audibles. The usefullness of these is debatable, but there's a large amount of people out there who would be annoyed at losing them. Video can be problematic too. I think because of automatic codec and player updates, linux is more userfriendly for open and somewhat open formats. But embedded video on webpages in either wmv or rm seems to be pretty hit or miss on whether it'll get picked up and played properly. Or at least it requires a significant amount of tweaking, either from a person making a package or from the people putting together a distro to accomplish it.
Believe me, using a Mac you have to develop a thick skin very quickly, as everyone who sees you using one will accuse you of being a crazy evangelist or snobby elitist.
I don't use a mac, but I've noticed this as well, especially online. No matter what the topic, if someone in any way even hints they're using a mac someone will inevitably either say that person sucks, or macs do.
For python, one of my favorites has always been Boa. It's starting to show it's age in Linux though, using a version of WxWidgets best compiled to use gtk1.
I'm not sure if that warning is quite appropriate in this context. The main reason being that eclipse/swt are able to be used with gcj. If one were to follow the authors advice at the end of your article, and only have a free implementation of java on his system, the 'Java trap' should be impossible to fall into.
From the code point of view it dosen't, but from the coding point of view it does. I do most of my coding on and for linux and the usual APIs, and am less than fond of coding for windows. And WindowsCE, the last time I worked with it, was even more annoying to write for. That was years ago so I'll give that this might have improved, but being able to easily write for my pda would be worth some extra cash to me.
As much as I love the dreamcast (and still write for it), I don't think it'll meet most peoples needs for movie playback. It's worked well for me simply because I do my own captures and so encoding to a size and bitrate which would go along well with the player. But the size and bitrate limitations come down pretty hard on a lot of what's out there right now, without re-encoding, if it's used with the DC player.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on where one is looking. My personal favorite for this kind of thing is irate radio. While still pretty rough around the edges, I think it has great potential as a method of getting information to people about what kind of indie bands they might enjoy.
I really like Pan as well, except I've not seen it run well on my setup in quite some time. My system usually grinds to a halt after it's been running about a half hour or so. Which is rather a pity since I usually fall in love with it during that half hour.
Is trying to halt the move to PVR before it gains much momentum. Right now we live in a very TV related culture. Like it or not, it's the norm to come home from work and turn on the tv for the rest of the night - despite there not being that much above the 'meh' level of quality. Even one show someone actually 'likes' is enough to get most people watching for hours before and after it airs.
I think what the networks are terrified of is people no longer doing this. One of the most common statements I hear from people with DVRs is that they can't stand to watch live TV anymore. It's certainly something I've found to be true after picking up one of the older model ReplayTv units. I think what the networks should be most affraid of, and what might be one reason for these scheduling problems, is people realising just how much time they waste watching shows they don't even really enjoy.
Thanks for pointing that out, I've been going through the archives and nearly each one has been in fact the very definition of awesome awesomeness. So awesome that I'm going to be very tired tomorrow thanks to an inability to tear myself away from the strip.
Well, a cross platform skinnable lightweight UI package that sits on top of a JIT bytecode compiler, that gives you binary compatibility between MFC, GTK, qt and other libraries.... that is pretty cool.
Wait....qt? Did you just miswrite that, or did an swt implementation with qt support, official or unofficial, finally make it out somewhere in the wild?
Look, the truth is that not only is Java irrelevant on the desktop...
I would have agreed with you a year ago, but it's really made a comeback for desktop use. SWT, SwingWT, and the performance increases in 5 have changed things around enough that I'm considering it a viable development platform again after having discounted it for quite some time. Two of the programs I use most often are in fact written in Java, azureus and dvarchive. The latter even uses swing, and I'm still amazed by the fact that I don't mind that anymore.
I think many would be glad for that lack of update features. For whatever reason one of the applications I make the most use out of, DVarchive, will only run with Java 1.4.x. Aditionally it's closed source so a person can't just run out and recompile it to the latest version, or try to fix whatever is keeping it from working. If Java did autoupdate, anyone using that program for example would be out of luck unless they both noticed the command line option to overide the jvm check and that an older version of dvarchive will actually work with the latest version of java if that is used, while the current version of the program will not. Both of which would be unlikly for someone not too very into computers.
Same here, I still get the overlap every now and again even with the extension installed.
Thank you - well said! The same misinterpretation of the meaning of natural selection always seems to come up in these kinds of discussions. The perfect example I can think of are dogs. Many of their original behavoirs and appearences would have been detrimental to them while living with humans, and in their new environment these have been selected against. Being smaller, less aggresive on average, or more able to communicate with humans might not help, or even activly hurt them in the wild - but the breeds in question don't live in the wild anymore. I think humans get a bit overly arogent about exactly how much global effect we have over natural proceesses.
"they" do!
xmms does not support what the original poster was talking about.
To be fair, there is/was a version of winamp for linux. A really bad version, but a version nonetheless.
It's easy, stop being their customer. I'm all for utopian ideas of the MPAA letting people pay to view movies at home on the day of a theater release, but it's not going to happen any time soon. I can though, just stop going to their movies or buying their products - legally or illegally. Most of the movies coming out are aimed at such a low target that they're hardly worth watching even for free. I can't be alone in having become somewhat jaded on each new iteration of special effects, and without that, what is there really - hollywoods legendary talent for intelletual scripts? The worst pulp is usually magnatudes better than most movies. A gem slips through every now and again, but this is it. It's not worth sifting through all the other garbage hollywood puts out to find them, and even the best movie isn't worth having some poor shmuck get fined $300,000 by supporting the company doing it.
After all, the Incredibles still did big money (already profitable), because people really do want to sit in theaters.
Do they? There has to be a significant amount of people out there who can't stand theaters - I know most of my friends hate them. Ten to twenty minutes of comercials, surrounded by fat people loudly munching their food while I'm trying to watch the movie, and hoards of hyper children and even worse teens constantly checking their cellphones. I'd gladly pay twice the normal ticket price just to avoid subjecting myself to such a subpar viewing experience.
For whatever charges I may incur, I prefer being the master of my own healthcare.
Sadly, you're not going to be in most places in the world. Even in the US, there's pretty strong restrictions on what treatments you're going to be allowed to have. There's a variety of reasons behind it, but the bottom line is that even doctors don't have final say in what treatments are going to be used, let alone the person lowest on the rung - the patient.
ie, 200W is roughly the amount of power you use when walking, 150kW is roughly the power of an SUV
It often amazes me how little the idea of just walking somewhere will occur to people. I moved to a small, very centralised town about two years back and one of the best features is that I can walk anywhere. But, oddly, despite the fact that we have so many traffic lights that driving or walking to most places takes about the same time, almost nobody walks. Which is really a pity, as it's also one of the most obese towns I've seen.
How is this not a double standard?
Because it was two different people saying it?
I agree about the theaters. I can't think of a less enjoyable way to spend an hour. Dark enclosed space, inevitably with multiple people wheezing and hacking their contaminated air all over the place, annoying kids, even more annoying teenagers, people chomp chomping their junkfood and smacking their oil ridden lips, and cellphones lit up and going off the entire time. Movie industry, how about providing us a way of watching the occasional good movie without having to endure this kind of thing? You have goods, we have money to buy them with, it should be an easy solution!
I'm going to chime in for third parties as well. They don't have any chance of making it in, they might not even have much of a chance within my lifetime. But every percentage of voters who cast for them brings them just a bit closer to the point where the general public will start taking them seriously as a canidate. Or, at least that's the theory.
I should preface this by saying that I'm a fairly long time linux user, and love it. I'm not sure if I totally agree on everything you listed though. IM for example. It works great on linux if all the person needs is to send text, but anything more seems to come up with compatibility problems. For example if talking to someone using yahoo messenger, there'll be no file transfer, no avatar use, no IMVironments or audibles. The usefullness of these is debatable, but there's a large amount of people out there who would be annoyed at losing them. Video can be problematic too. I think because of automatic codec and player updates, linux is more userfriendly for open and somewhat open formats. But embedded video on webpages in either wmv or rm seems to be pretty hit or miss on whether it'll get picked up and played properly. Or at least it requires a significant amount of tweaking, either from a person making a package or from the people putting together a distro to accomplish it.
Believe me, using a Mac you have to develop a thick skin very quickly, as everyone who sees you using one will accuse you of being a crazy evangelist or snobby elitist.
I don't use a mac, but I've noticed this as well, especially online. No matter what the topic, if someone in any way even hints they're using a mac someone will inevitably either say that person sucks, or macs do.
For python, one of my favorites has always been Boa. It's starting to show it's age in Linux though, using a version of WxWidgets best compiled to use gtk1.
I'm not sure if that warning is quite appropriate in this context. The main reason being that eclipse/swt are able to be used with gcj. If one were to follow the authors advice at the end of your article, and only have a free implementation of java on his system, the 'Java trap' should be impossible to fall into.
From the code point of view it dosen't, but from the coding point of view it does. I do most of my coding on and for linux and the usual APIs, and am less than fond of coding for windows. And WindowsCE, the last time I worked with it, was even more annoying to write for. That was years ago so I'll give that this might have improved, but being able to easily write for my pda would be worth some extra cash to me.
As much as I love the dreamcast (and still write for it), I don't think it'll meet most peoples needs for movie playback. It's worked well for me simply because I do my own captures and so encoding to a size and bitrate which would go along well with the player. But the size and bitrate limitations come down pretty hard on a lot of what's out there right now, without re-encoding, if it's used with the DC player.
He drew the most amazing dragon-ette (looks like a butterfly and dragon met at a bar one night...)
Would that be a fairy dragon perhaps? I always thought those were among the most inventive of the monsters in AD&D.