No one has yet mentioned the greatest jewel of the BBC: BBC radio. Whether you are considering Radio 4 (news), Radio 3 (culture), or the World Service (international), these are all funded as part of the TV license fee.
Also, I think that it is important that the BBC (especially radio) remains free to access. Personally, I'd like to see the BBC adopt a model such as Mandrake use, i.e. people who like it pay, in order to keep it free for everyone to use.
Yes, but why carry the data? If you have ssh running on your home machine, just log in to that. Using ssh and {CLI,vnc,nomachine}, you can have almost all you might want. After all, assuming that there is available power, there should be available networking.
Personally, may I recommend a keyboard such as the IBM ultranav.
It has the integrated trackpoint, which is brilliant, since I never need to take a hand off the keyboard to use the mouse. (Yes, I have an external mouse for graphics, but I rarely use it otherwise). The result is that it is dramatically faster to use.
I found the trackpoint so wonderful on my thinkpad that I bought an external keyboard with one for my desktop!
However, I *hate* the inbuilt touchpad, and the fact that the trackpoint doesn't come with a scrollwheel. Well, with a bit of hackery, it does now. Effectively, I have a 3-button mouse, with a scroll wheel implemented via a 4th button, and XF86's "emulate wheel" option. The 4th button is constructed from a chopped up 5 button + wheel usb-mouse, and a 4066 analog switch. Circuit diagram on request.
VNC is actually quite fast - if you have the correcto configuration (look carefully at the options for encoding, and in Windows, turn off any animations). It's also cross platform.
I find tightvnc very useful to have remote access to Win98 (old versions of windows don't support rdesktop).
x11vnc is wonderful on Linux, since you can remotely view your own destkop, rather than starting a new xsession.
Of course, now there's NX (nomachine) to add in.
Here's a bit more about Qemu. I've now used it quite a bit, and am impressed by it!
Qemu can essentially run any guest OS (Linux,Windows,MacOS,BSD,menuetOS...) under any other. This normally incurs approximately a 4x slowdown, which is pretty good. I've personally installed XP on Linux this way. It's also a great way to test out the latest knoppix.
The KQEmu (accelerator) is a kernel module which allows near-native speeds, if both the guest and host architecture are x86.
Qemu is Free (speech and beer); the accelerator is free (beer), but not, at least for now, open source.
In the specific case of needing to run windows apps on Linux, we have now several options:
API emulation: Wine PC emulation: Qemu (free)/VMWare (expensive) VNC: (and just move the display)
For something like this, why go to the trouble of using a Basic Stamp? Some easier ways:
1)Just use the parallel port. It's easy to write logic levels to it.
2)Use a usb->parallel adapter such as the DLP-245M ($25).
3)Use a PIC properly. Something like a PIC 16F84 or 16F871 will do it. A PIC + programmer will cost less than the Basic Stamp, (the PICs themselves are about $2), and really easy to program. They include many things like an ADC, PWM, Serial UART on chip, and run raw assembler.
Having seen the Stamp module, I dislike them intensely. They make the devices harder, rather than easier to use (essentially by programming a BASIC compatibility layer on top of PIC ASM), much more expensive (slower, less ports), and less functional (less internal functions available). Furthermore, the PIC Assembler is much easier than x86 or z80, or even, dare I say, Basic!
Speaking of which, has anyone written a howto for SIP on Linux? I spent ages trying to get it working, and in the end, succeeded
(the results are here:
http://richardneill.org/voip.html ), but my setup has since broken and I don't know why. I also can't get it working properly from behind NAT.
Why is only about 70% of the lid used by the screen? It's such a huge waste, both top, and bottom. [left,right in landscape mode]. Especially since the most serious limiting factor with a PDA is screen space.
Are you using KDE or Gnome? I think this particular problem may arise from the Mandrake packages, but the root cause is that neither FF nor TB actually have a pref for the URL/mailto handlers. They both use the gnome-wide preference which is wrong (since I use KDE) and wrong again (since my gnome install is never used and is broken) and wrong again (since it isn't documented).
Richard
Personally, I think that firefox is great (except for the decision to force the google search into its own toolbar). But, I'm personally still using the mozilla suite instead of the separate apps. Here's why:
No integration: there's no way to tell firefox "when I click on a mailto: link, open it with thunderbird"; likewise thunderbird can't handle URLs. In both cases, they insist upon using the prefs defined in gnome-control-panel, but guess what? I use KDE (and the gnome panel is broken).
Broken fonts: Gnome uses pervasive antialiasing, but the suite is still built to use the 100dpi fonts (which are much easier to read than the ttf ones).
Missing Ctrl-1,2,5 shortcuts (these would just be useful).
Extensions - must be installed using xpi and are not packaged up with urpmi - this makes them a nuisance.
Why do I want to move to the separate programs? Each of them runs in its own space, and can be quit without killing the other. So, for example, when a java applet crashes, it would be nice to only quit the browser, not the whole lot. (it would be even better to just be able to kill the java vm)
Good point. Much as I hate the whole marketing-speak tendency of re-branding, and much as I like the software, people do find the name far weirder than some of the other strangely named linux apps. Why not just change it to GnuIMP ?
Then people can shorten it to GIMP, or extend it to
GNU I.M.P.
This seems to me, as a long time Thinkpad owner to be sad. IBM always used to produce the best products by a large margin, but the quality seems to be falling already.
For example, they've lost the confidence to ship their best trackpoint configuration - one is compelled to purchase a laptop including the ghastful touchpad, and with the buttons in a row rather than 2+1 (therefore making it impossible to have both emulated 3rd button + emulated scroll wheel).
To be fair, I just did this with a Mandrake 10.0 system, moving the HDD from a (broken) dual P3 motherboard to a new P4 motherboard. Apart from some graphics card weirdness, it also worked straight off.
Personally, I think KDE is way better than XP as a desktop environment. And anything you don't like, you can configure. For instance:
Multiple desktops, Klipper, Select & Middle-click paste, and if you drag/drop a file, you get a very helpful tool-tip asking whether you want to copy, move, or link it, which is far better than the MS way of:
if (different disks){
copy, by default }else{
move, by default } BUT if (shift){
do the opposite }
Incidentally, there is nothing so dreadful about the Linux copy-paste system. Just get used to the fact that there are really 2 clipboards. It can sometimes be really useful to utilise this behaviour!
Also, once Linux is installed, no-one needs to ever use the Shell (my Aunt certainly doesn't!). But it's great that bash is still there - I for one find it can be extremely useful!
I don;t think my idea is quite how you described it, nor quite as Cringely suggested. I see it as much more akin to the current method of swapping files, where this discs are not so much streamed as moved. Except that in this case, the files are really "swapped" rather than copied. The legal caveat is: "May a person sell a digital copy of a CD after destroying the original". [The DRM bit might be a nice hack, but its only benefit would be to reduce bandwidth of repeated transfers. The current system could work entirely on trust.]
If I buy a CD, I have the right ("first sale") to sell it again, or give it away. [provided that I don't keep a copy] I also have several hundred discs, but I can only listen to one at a time.
How about a system for buying and selling discs in realtime? Two questions need to be addressed:
1)If I physically destroy the original CD, am I allowed to sell the backup? Does this apply to an electronic copy if, as soon as I pass it on, I destroy my original?
2)In order to save bandwidth, is it necessary to destroy the orignal, or is it sufficient to render it unplayable? Obviously, I'd want to re-purchase it at some time, and a 650MB download is a pain. Would some form of cryptographic token suffice?
As far as I can tell, such a system would work effectively if everyone has at least say 10 CDs that they own at any time, so that the requested track would almost always be available from someone. I know it would be legal if I were to pass on the physical disc, but that requires a personal meeting. Is it possible to automate this?
I often wonder this - why is it that the websites of phishing scams remain up for so long. You'd think that RHat would have been able to deal with
this by getting the site taken down ASAP.
Likewise with many banking scams. If this had been executed more correctly, many people might have fallen for it - it always surprises me how stupid many of these scammers are.
The issue of "Hate speech" is a vexed one. On the one hand, we (most decent humans) don't want vicious racist comments to be made. On the other hand:
1)Free speech is far too important a principle to censor. 2)Who gets to determine precisely what is offensive? 3)Who guards the guards ("quis custodet custodes ipsos") 4)Most importantly, if we engage in dialog with racists, we will win, and demonstrate the flaws in their arguments. If we do not engage, they can rant unopposed. If we drive them out of politics, then instead of political activism, a radical fringe emerges, becoming terrorists.
Lastly, if this were really the issue, why the gag order?
A really useful way to run a legacy Windows app is VNC (eg tightvnc.com) - run a windows system headless, and install vnc server on it. If you're on a LAN, you won't notice that it isn't local. If you put the windows box on a private network, you can even forget about windows updates (which is really useful when WindowsUpdate crashes every time you want to run it!)
Tips: do play with vnc settings, eg disable windows wallpaper, choose 256 colours if that's OK, disable compression if the windows system is slow, and turn off any animations (eg animate window resizing) in the windows GUI.
We've done that with Market Eye and an old W98 system, since it won't quite run under Wine.
Slashdot Mirror
No one has yet mentioned the greatest jewel of the BBC: BBC radio. Whether you are considering Radio 4 (news), Radio 3 (culture), or the World Service (international), these are all funded as part of the TV license fee.
Also, I think that it is important that the BBC (especially radio) remains free to access. Personally, I'd like to see the BBC adopt a model such as Mandrake use, i.e. people who like it pay, in order to keep it free for everyone to use.
Yes, but why carry the data? If you have ssh running on your home machine, just log in to that. Using ssh and {CLI,vnc,nomachine}, you can have almost all you might want. After all, assuming that there is available power, there should be available networking.
Also, have you tried out TiMidity ? It does all the MIDI playback that you could want.
Personally, may I recommend a keyboard such as the IBM ultranav. It has the integrated trackpoint, which is brilliant, since I never need to take a hand off the keyboard to use the mouse. (Yes, I have an external mouse for graphics, but I rarely use it otherwise). The result is that it is dramatically faster to use.
I found the trackpoint so wonderful on my thinkpad that I bought an external keyboard with one for my desktop!
However, I *hate* the inbuilt touchpad, and the fact that the trackpoint doesn't come with a scrollwheel. Well, with a bit of hackery, it does now. Effectively, I have a 3-button mouse, with a scroll wheel implemented via a 4th button, and XF86's "emulate wheel" option. The 4th button is constructed from a chopped up 5 button + wheel usb-mouse, and a 4066 analog switch. Circuit diagram on request.
VNC is actually quite fast - if you have the correcto configuration (look carefully at the options for encoding, and in Windows, turn off any animations). It's also cross platform. I find tightvnc very useful to have remote access to Win98 (old versions of windows don't support rdesktop). x11vnc is wonderful on Linux, since you can remotely view your own destkop, rather than starting a new xsession. Of course, now there's NX (nomachine) to add in.
Sadly, not yet. But it would be a killer feature if it were added. I should think it's probably not *that* hard to do...
I principle, yes. In practice, not quite yet... See: http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ossupport.html
Here's a bit more about Qemu. I've now used it quite a bit, and am impressed by it!
Qemu can essentially run any guest OS (Linux,Windows,MacOS,BSD,menuetOS...) under any other. This normally incurs approximately a 4x slowdown, which is pretty good. I've personally installed XP on Linux this way. It's also a great way to test out the latest knoppix.
The KQEmu (accelerator) is a kernel module which allows near-native speeds, if both the guest and host architecture are x86.
Qemu is Free (speech and beer); the accelerator is free (beer), but not, at least for now, open source.
In the specific case of needing to run windows apps on Linux, we have now several options:
API emulation: Wine
PC emulation: Qemu (free)/VMWare (expensive)
VNC: (and just move the display)
For something like this, why go to the trouble of using a Basic Stamp? Some easier ways:
1)Just use the parallel port. It's easy to write logic levels to it.
2)Use a usb->parallel adapter such as the DLP-245M ($25).
3)Use a PIC properly. Something like a PIC 16F84 or 16F871 will do it. A PIC + programmer will cost less than the Basic Stamp, (the PICs themselves are about $2), and really easy to program. They include many things like an ADC, PWM, Serial UART on chip, and run raw assembler.
Having seen the Stamp module, I dislike them intensely. They make the devices harder, rather than easier to use (essentially by programming a BASIC compatibility layer on top of PIC ASM), much more expensive (slower, less ports), and less functional (less internal functions available). Furthermore, the PIC Assembler is much easier than x86 or z80, or even, dare I say, Basic!
Why not just use SIP? It works, and it's free! Try linphone or kphone. (both open source).
Speaking of which, has anyone written a howto for SIP on Linux? I spent ages trying to get it working, and in the end, succeeded (the results are here: http://richardneill.org/voip.html ), but my setup has since broken and I don't know why. I also can't get it working properly from behind NAT.
Why is only about 70% of the lid used by the screen? It's such a huge waste, both top, and bottom. [left,right in landscape mode]. Especially since the most serious limiting factor with a PDA is screen space.
Qemu is pretty good for this. It's free, amd (relatively) fast. http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/
Are you using KDE or Gnome? I think this particular problem may arise from the Mandrake packages, but the root cause is that neither FF nor TB actually have a pref for the URL/mailto handlers. They both use the gnome-wide preference which is wrong (since I use KDE) and wrong again (since my gnome install is never used and is broken) and wrong again (since it isn't documented). Richard
Personally, I think that firefox is great (except for the decision to force the google search into its own toolbar). But, I'm personally still using the mozilla suite instead of the separate apps. Here's why:
No integration: there's no way to tell firefox "when I click on a mailto: link, open it with thunderbird"; likewise thunderbird can't handle URLs. In both cases, they insist upon using the prefs defined in gnome-control-panel, but guess what? I use KDE (and the gnome panel is broken).
Broken fonts: Gnome uses pervasive antialiasing, but the suite is still built to use the 100dpi fonts (which are much easier to read than the ttf ones).
Missing Ctrl-1,2,5 shortcuts (these would just be useful).
Extensions - must be installed using xpi and are not packaged up with urpmi - this makes them a nuisance.
Why do I want to move to the separate programs? Each of them runs in its own space, and can be quit without killing the other. So, for example, when a java applet crashes, it would be nice to only quit the browser, not the whole lot. (it would be even better to just be able to kill the java vm)
More usefully: f -> firefox
Good point. Much as I hate the whole marketing-speak tendency of re-branding, and much as I like the software, people do find the name far weirder than some of the other strangely named linux apps. Why not just change it to GnuIMP ? Then people can shorten it to GIMP, or extend it to GNU I.M.P.
This seems to me, as a long time Thinkpad owner to be sad. IBM always used to produce the best products by a large margin, but the quality seems to be falling already. For example, they've lost the confidence to ship their best trackpoint configuration - one is compelled to purchase a laptop including the ghastful touchpad, and with the buttons in a row rather than 2+1 (therefore making it impossible to have both emulated 3rd button + emulated scroll wheel).
To be fair, I just did this with a Mandrake 10.0 system, moving the HDD from a (broken) dual P3 motherboard to a new P4 motherboard. Apart from some graphics card weirdness, it also worked straight off.
Personally, I think KDE is way better than XP as a desktop environment. And anything you don't like, you can configure. For instance:
Multiple desktops, Klipper, Select & Middle-click paste, and if you drag/drop a file, you get a very helpful tool-tip asking whether you want to copy, move, or link it, which is far better than the MS way of:
if (different disks){
copy, by default
}else{
move, by default
}
BUT if (shift){
do the opposite
}
Incidentally, there is nothing so dreadful about the Linux copy-paste system. Just get used to the fact that there are really 2 clipboards. It can sometimes be really useful to utilise this behaviour!
Also, once Linux is installed, no-one needs to ever use the Shell (my Aunt certainly doesn't!). But it's great that bash is still there - I for one find it can be extremely useful!
I don;t think my idea is quite how you described it, nor quite as Cringely suggested. I see it as much more akin to the current method of swapping files, where this discs are not so much streamed as moved. Except that in this case, the files are really "swapped" rather than copied. The legal caveat is: "May a person sell a digital copy of a CD after destroying the original". [The DRM bit might be a nice hack, but its only benefit would be to reduce bandwidth of repeated transfers. The current system could work entirely on trust.]
Something which occurs to me:
If I buy a CD, I have the right ("first sale") to sell it again, or give it away. [provided that I don't keep a copy] I also have several hundred discs, but I can only listen to one at a time.
How about a system for buying and selling discs in realtime? Two questions need to be addressed:
1)If I physically destroy the original CD, am I allowed to sell the backup? Does this apply to an electronic copy if, as soon as I pass it on, I destroy my original?
2)In order to save bandwidth, is it necessary to destroy the orignal, or is it sufficient to render it unplayable? Obviously, I'd want to re-purchase it at some time, and a 650MB download is a pain. Would some form of cryptographic token suffice?
As far as I can tell, such a system would work effectively if everyone has at least say 10 CDs that they own at any time, so that the requested track would almost always be available from someone. I know it would be legal if I were to pass on the physical disc, but that requires a personal meeting. Is it possible to automate this?
I often wonder this - why is it that the websites of phishing scams remain up for so long. You'd think that RHat would have been able to deal with this by getting the site taken down ASAP. Likewise with many banking scams. If this had been executed more correctly, many people might have fallen for it - it always surprises me how stupid many of these scammers are.
The issue of "Hate speech" is a vexed one. On the one hand, we (most decent humans) don't want vicious racist comments to be made. On the other hand:
1)Free speech is far too important a principle to censor.
2)Who gets to determine precisely what is offensive?
3)Who guards the guards ("quis custodet custodes ipsos")
4)Most importantly, if we engage in dialog with racists, we will win, and demonstrate the flaws in their arguments. If we do not engage, they can rant unopposed. If we drive them out of politics, then instead of political activism, a radical fringe emerges, becoming terrorists.
Lastly, if this were really the issue, why the gag order?
A really useful way to run a legacy Windows app is VNC (eg tightvnc.com) - run a windows system headless, and install vnc server on it. If you're on a LAN, you won't notice that it isn't local. If you put the windows box on a private network, you can even forget about windows updates (which is really useful when WindowsUpdate crashes every time you want to run it!)
Tips: do play with vnc settings, eg disable windows wallpaper, choose 256 colours if that's OK, disable compression if the windows system is slow, and turn off any animations (eg animate window resizing) in the windows GUI.
We've done that with Market Eye and an old W98 system, since it won't quite run under Wine.