I'm not sure about that but it does seem hella popular.
Ok. I read that in the past Apple was sued over battery issues, but found that now you can get it replaced for $99 and mailing in the iPod, and found some links for replacement batteries:
I got an original iPod within days of it's arrival at retail stores... I was using it until Christmas 2003, just fine. I've dropped it in a puddle in San Francisco, taken it across the world, played thousands of hours of music with it.... and the battery didn't ever degrade noticeably. I'm not saying there's no merit to the claims, but I really hate this news. Apple made an incredible product, so far ahead of it's time that the original iPod from 2001 still bests all other digital players today.... the battery technology that exists on the planet today is inherently flawed, because charge after charge, they lose their ability to hold a charge. That's the way life is. 18 months is the time people seem to be tossing around as the "death date", although I haven't seen much user feedback on this aside from the news from that whacko in New York. Apple now offers a $99 plan for replacing the battery, and you can purchase a replacement on your own from other places for cheaper.
That is interesting, however it's kindof ironic how all the sites that use the most annoying popup ads are also the ones that cause you to get 50,000 spam msgs a day when you signup.
and most sites want to force you to sign up so you can see they're content (Gamespy, Gamespot, Fileplanet, etc.)..
If these sites didn't launch massive spam/spyware/etc. attacks on my system I'd be more inclined to pay for them, but that aside.
I would MUCH rather pay for a membership to a website than put up with ads. I'd pay for Slashdot.;) heh.
We all used to pay for subscriptions to magazines of our liking back in the day before we got on the net, yea they had ads, but the ads didn't spontaniosuly spawn new ads that were near impossible to close without using the Task Manager.
On the note fo whether this is innnovative (fullpage ads) I don't see how it is.. Unless of course you mean, they don't actually RESIZE the browser window to the full size of the screen, which is the most annoying thing ever.
but since those do exist, i don't see how this is anything new.. except if they make it last a certain amount of time and make it so you can't turn it off before that time, like the annoying fbi warnings on DVDs.
Does this use SSH to scramble the audio data for the phone calls?
Otherwise I wonder if we are about to enter a new age of phone tapping, and with systems out there like Carnivore does it make it easier for "them" to listen on your phone calls without a court order?
I'd be tempted when I got this service to write a sniffer that can eavesdrop on conversations;) Just for the hell of it.
I currently have DSL through Speakeasy, which is a covad service. So I have to pay $28 for an extra telephone line, because Covad doesn't support the voice/data DSL lines.
So I'm stuck paying for 2 telephone lines right now. i'd be MUCH better off with this;)
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Cur re ntVersion\Run
and in a similar branch in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE as well.
Yeah.. I HATE IT when apps do that.. it's even worse.. when they detect if you removed the line from the registry.. and then PUT IT BACK (ie. real player, yahoo msger, msn msger).. and the only way to get rid of it is to go into the app's list of 50,000 useless options and get rid of it.. Like as if the user going through ALL THE TROUBLE to remove it from the registry doesn't say "get the funk off my startup".
I say fuck off and die too to Real, and also to RealOne.. STOP COPYING APPLE GOD DAMN IT.. ALL OF YOU.. ok i'm done =)
The first time I installed Audiogalaxy and saw BonziBuddy in my startmenu I had to have triple-bypass surgery.. but audiogalaxy is a nice tool.
I wonder if I can compile the Linux version on cygwin.. i have XFree86 4.0 runnin on it.
oh.. on a side note.. Am I the only one who thinks Yahoo is secretly owned by Microsoft? It just seems too much of a damn coinsidence that the software from both places are riddled with just as many bugs, don't care about fixing them, and are huge as fuck..
too much readin dom references of "opera 5" for compatibility.
The majority of the Opera UI features are unneeded fluff, most of them being to make it feel like more traditional browsers, without the tabbed windows, etc..
The option to disable popup windows may seem nice at first, but what it actually does is disables he window.open() method (maybe more?) which is used by probably half of the avant garde websites out there, including websites which use window.open() to provide you with device drivers and support information. It would be nice if you could maintain a list of sites for which window.open() is either allowed or disallowed, but it does not give you that option, thus making it a kill 'em all or kill 'em none situation. I would forgive this from a freeware/open source browser, but not from one they expect you to pay money for.
hm.. a browser which stops popup ads, and yet inside the browser shows ads.. irony at its best;)
Anyway.. The feature to identify itself as other browsers such as MSIE4, MSIE5.5, Netscape, etc. is completely and utterly useless because it still has the "Opera/6.0" string in the user agent. While that is there, pages will be able to detect that its Opera no matter what you have it set to identify as. Furthermore, when you set Opera to identify as say, MSIE5.5, it does _NOT_ emulate MSIE5.5.. Thus breaking branching code, as if the page's browser detection isn't written to check for the "Opera" string, it will try to execute IE5.5 specific code and fail most likely.
I will admit the Transfers window is a nice idea. but there you have it pretty much.. opera's 'features' defluffed and shown for what they truly are.
The thing about Opera is it's UI and the way it feels, ie. the transfer windows. I guess ppl could use it coz they like that about it, as a nice alternative to IE coz they boycott MS products or something.
Of all the browsers out there (read: IE, Netscape4, Opera, and itself), it is true that Netscape 6 is the best browser that comes closest to standing up to IE.
There are a few issues that need to be solved besides the obvious speed ones:
* Lack of support for communication between Flash and JavaScript (it doesn't have swLiveConnect)
* Flash animations within positioned (non-positioned?) DIV layers are not supported.
* IE4 (and IE5.5 and up) have DirectX transitions and filters which I believe will not ever be allowed by Microsoft into other browsers unless they are forced into it by a lawsuit or something.
* You cannot retrieve a tag's content with innerHTML (I am only 87% sure of this)
The biggest problem is the horrendous slowness of the rendering engine, however for it to truly compete and win it needs to support everything IE does, barring the DirectX transitions because it's not entirely neccesary (though they are nice)
Opera 5 is very fast but falls a bit short in that it doesn't support innerHTML *AT ALL*, which is a serious problem for pages with client-side dynamically generated content.
Personally I think Mozilla/NS6 is the better choice since Opera costs money and Moz supports more, but it is a LOT slower than IE, Netscape4 AND Opera.
I've never heard Ogg, but mp3's at equal bitrates can sound excellent on one encoder and sound like crap on another.
It all depends on the encoder yer usin.. What bitrate to use also depends on the use of the track. For casual listening I always use 320kbps to encode, just to be safe. I've actually been able to hear some instances of where some harmonics are gone when encoding at 128kbps.
but I believe there is quality loss even at 320kbps. When it comes to mastering tracks, I always use the raw wav and never mp3's.
Comcast @Home is pretty decent if you don't mind the following:
* Capped upstream
* Periodic portscanning of your system by THEM
* Constant buggering from them to SMB port
* Any mention that you run Linux and yer dead in the water, and not able to get any further information except that "Linux" is the reason why it doesn't work.
At least that's what it's like in my area (Baltimore, MD).
Now if you don't care about the above things at all, I reckon their service is great:D Lightning speed, etc.. I've heard of lots of downtime but 90% of the time it has to do with storms and being in the suburbs (which usually seems to have the highest degree of power outages around here)
I must say though I have never had any downtime for more than 3 hours from my Speakeasy DSL account (I've been with them for a year), and they're 100% linux/server/practically/anything friendly:)
Also if you are a customer of Speakeasy you know at least of one ISP whose tech support is not just a bunch of people who know nothing about anything. They'll answer questions about anything ranging from reverse dns(!) entries to how to not-get-cracked (if you talk with the security guys). Sorry, it's a wee bit offtopic rant, but, it's related to ISP customer support at least:)
I think all of you should remember that Nautilus is in mere infancy.
I agree that it is somewhat bloated and buggy. I also agree that they jumped the gun at releasing v1.0.. That shouldn't have happened for a long time.
However, those who are just bashing it saying that it's a bloated buggy and crappy file manager and that X filemanager which has been around for ages is better. That's a bit short-sighted if you ask me.
Look at Mozilla. I started using it at Milestone 5. It was complete crap back then, I used it for like two seconds and had to switch back to Netscape because I couldn't use it as my main browser.. From then I would download each new Mozilla version, and each time I would go back to Netscape, because Mozilla was slow and buggy, it would trash web forms, and it was unstable.
This trend continued up until the new version 0.9, that's right! Mozilla 0.9 is actually the first time that I'm pretty sure I can say goodbye to Netscape once and for all. Mozilla 0.8 was close, but it was too slow. The speed increase in 0.9 shows promise, but it's still not perfect. With this in mind, I must say I've never seen anyone bashing Mozilla on here. Maybe the Mozilla developers will have to go bankrupt before that happens.
Big Projects take a large amount of time to become stable, and also to become mature.
To compare something like Nautilus to KDE's Konqueror is obsurd, and unfair.
I agree that some of Eazel's ideas about doing things are way off-base. If the rumour is true, I can only hope that Nautilus is continued by either Ximian or the Gnome people (which they are basically the same people anyway); I have confidence that eventually it will lead Nautilus into success.
I use Nautilus because I hate GMC. Basically I think Nautilus is a good product.. They just need to speed it up, just like they [still (IMO)] need to do with Mozilla, and they also need to get rid of that silly-ass backgorund management, but I have confidence in Gnome developers.
It's funny how everyone's always trashing Gnome, usually with references that KDE is better. Gnome hasn't been around as long sa KDE, but Gnome suits my needs... although my gnome-session is pretty tweaked out, with just a small panel and Blackbox. It does the job for me.
I thought his responces were quite nice, but they also were riddled with misunderstanding of the philosophy that Linux is built upon.
Linux is free software. It is also open-source, but open-source is not free software. Therefore the claims that Sun giving away source is the same as Linux is a completely invalid point. Now, as for BSD. Some would say the same thing, but I won't go there, coz I avoid BSD vs. Linux issues at all costs, and I really don't care:)
As for his responce saying that Microsoft gives solutions for people who need Windows support for Unix standards like NFS. I challenge any of you readers to find an NFS solution for Windows that doesn't cost you your arm and possibly a leg to implement. Charging for software is one thing. Overcharging to the point of robbery is another.
Yes, Microsoft offers interoperability with open standards, but this interoperability comes as a blatant disregard for everything those open standards stand for, and also at a hefty price tag I will say. After examining the NFS solutions out there for MS, I decided I will stick with Samba, because I do not feel it is worth paying that much just so I can map an NFS share on Windows.
I don't have a problem with paying for software if it is worth paying for and the cost is not a robbery. No, I will not pay upwards of $500 for software because I feel that the software is not worth nearly that much. This is the result of the software companies wanting to squeaze every possible dime out of us, and remember that $500 is just for a one-user license. Companies really reap the gold in when they charge multiple thousands of dollars for some inane business application that isn't really too complex in the first place.
I am a happy owner of two legitimately bought copies of Quake 3: Arena (the Linux version and the Windows version) and I am also a happy Open Sound System customer, and have been for years. I have even paid AGAIN to get the SBLive module when I got my SBLive!. I have also bought official Slackware CD-ROM's and would gladly do it again, even though I can download them from slackware.com.
UCITA and the corporate supporters of it are both proof of the proprietary software companies' fear that if people find out they can get the same functionality in software for free, they will be out of business. If they would only not over-charge for their software, and their software was in fact better than the alternatives, people would buy it.
It's true that there are people who say "I will never pay for software." just as, in the Napster case, you will have people who will say "I will never buy CDs if Napster is around." but those are simply differences in the morality of different people. I believe the majority would pay for software if it was worth it and not obviously a rip off. I believe the w4r3z community is a minority, not a majority.
About Windows XP, there is no real revolution there either. I saw very few things that I thought were hawked from Mac OS X, but I did see a whole lot of stuff basically hawked from the idea of theming that comes with using any X Window Manager.
With this in mind, it is kind of hypocritical for him to criticize Gnome, KDE and the Window Managers for their ability to look like Macs or anything else, when the new Microsoft OS implements that as one of its main features.
I will, however, not blatantly accuse them of copying. I will simply say when multiple people look at something and say "I have seen that before", regardless of whether it came from OS X or anywhere else, something is not right.
You have a valid point saying becaues Windows is preinstalled that Linux should be easier to install, my point is that majority of users don't even know how to install Windows. Because of this they will be reluctant to install any operating system no matter how easy people say it is. I tell all my friends Windows is so easy to install, they say "well, you know computers! of course it's easy for you, but I'm a dummy when it comes to them."
Majority of end users who just casually use a computer here and there want to go out and buy something that works out of the box. No installing an OS, they don't even want to be encumbered by having to know what an OS is.
For Linux to be a viable desktop this has to happen: It needs to be prepackaged with computers.
If my mom were to use a machine running Windows, nothing would change. I would still have to be the one who installs Windows, and does all the settings and configuration:)
I don't think Linux is 100% ready to replace Windows on the desktop, due to many small issues which have to be seen through the eyes of an end user. It's not just the installation process, but, also the configuration process.
I used Linuxconf (no flames please) to configure a user account on my server, and it fouled up/'s permissions, making the system unusable to anyone but root, and also messed up the permissions of everyone. also "when kernel compile goes wrong because of <insert very abstract problem here>".. Also due to the fact that the kernel even needs recompiling.
The majority of these issues, and other hardware problems with Linux are very easy for us techies to fix, but very difficult for people that don't even know what an OS is. I've had as much of a hard time, if even more of a hard time getting hardware to work under Linux than under Windows, sometimes the hardware even worked in Linux but failed in Windows, but if the computer comes from the store working right and configured properly for all the hardware, then it's no problem.
Then the user could cause all kinds of stuff to go wrong, but the same is true in Windows. As a PC Tech, I'm constantly fixing problems caused by end users.
I don't believe any end users that aren't at least 5% techie will ever install an operating system. It's just not gonna happen.
One of the biggest misconceptions going around about Linux is that it needs to be easy to install for people to use it. As stated below, the majority of end users aren't even aware that their OS is installed like any other program. More realistically, they believe that elves descended from the magical kingdom of Euripides and installed Windows on their machine:)
As a dummy myself I know I couldn't install Linux without help from techie friends. It needs to be simple, just point and click.
I have found Windows to be much more difficult to install than Linux, furthermore most people who want to e-mail a photo of their cat to a relative have never installed Windows before in their life. They simply had it preinstalled for them at the factory where the computer was built, or the store from which they bought it.
It also has to be at least as pretty as Windows, because when you don't know anything about something, you tend to choose the most "professional" looking thing.
Linux can be as pretty as and even more pretty than Windows (Checked themes.org recently?) and a majority of the themes cater to the Windows-style button layout, which means people used to Windows can effectively navigate it.
Also, if all people want to do is use e-mail, then Linux is a perfect solution. I have a Linux box set up for my mother who is totally ignorant when it comes to computers, but she knows how to use apps like Word and such.
She has a Slackware box running a Windows-like theme for Icewm, and uses Netscape, Netscape Mail and WordPerfect without any problems what-so-ever, and without having to come and ask me questions about the interface or about Linux in general. When Evolution is finally released, this gap will be bridged even more so.
I really hate to have to agree with a comment from someone dissing Linux, but.. here goes.
First off, I will say that Mozilla is heaps better than IE in just about everything except for speed. It is far too slow IMO for people who are used to the instant-loading of IE5, and when using IE5, webpages don't take a year to come up.
If you ask me, they should get rid of that cross-platform GUI and make something that's F-A-S-T.. but anyway..
Browser alternatives for Linux:
Konqueror suffers from the same.. In fact, when I used it, it was even *slower* than Mozilla. but at least it doesn't take forever to load.
Galeon: I couldn't even get it to install (from source or RPM (due to RPM saying moz is not installed when it was (by rpm)))
Netscape: This is probably the best over-all solution for right now unfortunately, unless you are not bothered by the shortcomings of Opera (see below).. It is fast, has good, but not extraordinary plugin support, but has broken if any CSS support, crashes often, and has been left behind by the Netscape developers, and it takes forever to load.
Opera: This is what I'm using right now to type this comment. It's what I use whenever I'm viewing pages that don't require Flash, Java, or other plugins, because the Linux version of this browser has absolutely no Java or Plugin support (yet), however, it is lightning fast, rock-solid stable, and conforms to standards, eg. pushing for a world where "best viewed with XXXX browser" is not ever seen.. a n y w h e r e:) The downsides to Opera then? Well.. The user interface is quite different from the majority of browsers, including some things I flat out don't like, and you can't change them, like it opens new windows inside its main window, and you can't have it do otherwise, but at least it loads pretty quickly and is SUPER FAST. and for those who care maybe another downside is that it's not GPL'd.
Unfortunately the truth is that there is no browser solution that is equivalent to the ones offered in the Windows environment.
There's been numerous articles in Freshmeat about us losing the browser war. I don't think we're losing it, we're just playing catch up, like we do with certain other things like usb support.
Now, I believe the future of Linux browsing is Mozilla, IF they can speed it up to where it runs as fast as browsers in Windows and doesn't take an eternity to load. Mozilla has excellent HTML and CSS implementations, better than IE5. Mozilla also has plugins for Java and Flash among other things.
Me personally I prefer Linux. The only thing I use Windows for is games and music production. I do everything else (programming, graphics, Net, etc.) on Linux coz I prefer to actually be able to *use* my machine on a non-stop basis instead of having to *wait* to use it.
I will comment on Nautilus, although since v1.0 is finally out, and I was unable to install as of yet (because it requires control-center 1.3 (wtf?)), this might be a little unfair, so keep in mind the latest version I've used is PR3 !
Nautilus uses the libmozembed library to use Mozilla as the base of its web browser, similar to the way Konqueror and Galeon do, and similar to the way the WinAmp browser embeds IE5 in Windows. However, Nautilus took up to 30 seconds to fully load on my Athlon 850 w/128MB of RAM. While for those using Nautilus as a file manager (starting it from Gnome's session management) this may not be a serious problem, those who would use it strictly as a browser will find it is a serious issue. Now again, I was using PR3 and there's been a lot of development in Bonobo and all the other libs, including Nautilus itself since then, and I haven't used 1.0, so.. I can't comment on its current status. When upgrading the Bonobo, OAF, and other libs earlier, Nautilus actually appeared to be faster, which is a good sign.
Almost nobody here is talking about 3D hardware acceleration. Thiss is all about 2D. Contrary to popular belief OpenGL does 2D as well as 3D.
Correct, but I mean 2D acceleration as in the 2D graphics accelleration of the hardware, just plain old gfx acceleration.. it seems the only way to
get it in X is to get a card that has an accelerated X server with it (?? I have not really used one of these accelerated servers too much)
In Windows you don't need a 3D card and Open GL to get HW acceleration.. I was just wondering why this hasn't been asked/answered/thought about/etc.. I may be wrong but I've never read anything about it, except that of coz some cards require use of the "accelerated" X servers.
The :\ only-for-geeks groaning
on
Antitrust
·
· Score: 1
Someone here said that they groaned a lot from the reference to the:\ keys being used mostly by geeks..
and scoffed at it (please, i'm just making a statement here, i mean no one harm:).. because of the obvious c:\ (m$ filesystem) stuff.
don't forget about perl, epic, c, and many of the other languages which use \ as a way of escaping characters, and also Perl uses:: to identify modules!:)
As far as WM's go, IceWM and BlackBox all the way! I currently run IceWM, and it's awesome.. very beautiful, fast and effecient in every way, BlackBox is the same, although you may have to get used to it's "no bitmap" policy.
as far as terminals go, it's Rxvt all the way, there's no other terminal that comes up as fast. I will trade that kind of speed for the obvious slowdown of using a hacked transparent terminal which ugly-ly blinks white everytime you click on it.
But on another, slightly off-topic note.. everyone here is talking about 3D hardware acceleration. What ever happened to 2D hardware acceleration and how to it's not supported in X or seemingly trying to be supported?
Slashdot Mirror
you took the words right out of my mouth...
;)
Not only choose the format but the bitrate as well..
iTunes is really great and all but if the quality of what they sell (128kbps aac) is rather dodgy.. it's not really worth paying for.
They should use lame
good point.
n =P ROD&Product_Code=ipodbat&Category_Code=pt
:
I'm not sure about that but it does seem hella popular.
Ok. I read that in the past Apple was sued over battery issues, but found that now you can get it replaced for $99 and mailing in the iPod, and found some links for replacement batteries:
http://mac-pro.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Scree
Quote from this site http://ipod.davyfields.com/
I got an original iPod within days of it's arrival at retail stores... I was using it until Christmas 2003, just fine. I've dropped it in a puddle in San Francisco, taken it across the world, played thousands of hours of music with it.... and the battery didn't ever degrade noticeably. I'm not saying there's no merit to the claims, but I really hate this news. Apple made an incredible product, so far ahead of it's time that the original iPod from 2001 still bests all other digital players today.... the battery technology that exists on the planet today is inherently flawed, because charge after charge, they lose their ability to hold a charge. That's the way life is. 18 months is the time people seem to be tossing around as the "death date", although I haven't seen much user feedback on this aside from the news from that whacko in New York. Apple now offers a $99 plan for replacing the battery, and you can purchase a replacement on your own from other places for cheaper.
and there's an iPod battery faq:
http://www.ipodbatteryfaq.com/
I am thankful that they didn't mess with it or change it.. It's great the way it is..
Most of HP's hardware is royally f*cked.. their PC's suck. pretty much the only thing they make that doesn't suck is their printers.
My first response to this at a glance was "OH NO!! They didn't sell the rights for iPod to HP PLEASE NO!"
The HP iPod could have gone the way of Netscape, Winamp, 3dfx, etc. all being completely ruined when they got bought out.
RIAA.org .. MPAA.org ?!?!?!?!?!?
What's next, microsoft.org?
That is interesting, however it's kindof ironic how all the sites that use the most annoying popup ads are also the ones that cause you to get 50,000 spam msgs a day when you signup.
;) heh.
:)
and most sites want to force you to sign up so you can see they're content (Gamespy, Gamespot, Fileplanet, etc.)..
If these sites didn't launch massive spam/spyware/etc. attacks on my system I'd be more inclined to pay for them, but that aside.
I would MUCH rather pay for a membership to a website than put up with ads. I'd pay for Slashdot.
We all used to pay for subscriptions to magazines of our liking back in the day before we got on the net, yea they had ads, but the ads didn't spontaniosuly spawn new ads that were near impossible to close without using the Task Manager.
On the note fo whether this is innnovative (fullpage ads) I don't see how it is.. Unless of course you mean, they don't actually RESIZE the browser window to the full size of the screen, which is the most annoying thing ever.
but since those do exist, i don't see how this is anything new.. except if they make it last a certain amount of time and make it so you can't turn it off before that time, like the annoying fbi warnings on DVDs.
Ads SUCK.
Does this use SSH to scramble the audio data for the phone calls?
;) Just for the hell of it.
Otherwise I wonder if we are about to enter a new age of phone tapping, and with systems out there like Carnivore does it make it easier for "them" to listen on your phone calls without a court order?
I'd be tempted when I got this service to write a sniffer that can eavesdrop on conversations
I currently have DSL through Speakeasy, which is a covad service. So I have to pay $28 for an extra telephone line, because Covad doesn't support the voice/data DSL lines.
;)
So I'm stuck paying for 2 telephone lines right now. i'd be MUCH better off with this
wha??!
The Nokia Communicator 9xxx is prolly WAY WAY WAY better than this thing..
That's what I want in the states.. not another Palm clone.
All those things are basically in here:
r re ntVersion\Run
.. I HATE IT when apps do that .. it's even worse.. when they detect if you removed the line from the registry .. and then PUT IT BACK (ie. real player, yahoo msger, msn msger).. and the only way to get rid of it is to go into the app's list of 50,000 useless options and get rid of it.. Like as if the user going through ALL THE TROUBLE to remove it from the registry doesn't say "get the funk off my startup".
.. but audiogalaxy is a nice tool.
.. i have XFree86 4.0 runnin on it.
.. on a side note.. Am I the only one who thinks Yahoo is secretly owned by Microsoft? It just seems too much of a damn coinsidence that the software from both places are riddled with just as many bugs, don't care about fixing them, and are huge as fuck..
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Cu
and in a similar branch in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE as well.
Yeah
I say fuck off and die too to Real, and also to RealOne.. STOP COPYING APPLE GOD DAMN IT.. ALL OF YOU.. ok i'm done =)
The first time I installed Audiogalaxy and saw BonziBuddy in my startmenu I had to have triple-bypass surgery
I wonder if I can compile the Linux version on cygwin
oh
ya know what! it was Opera 6 I was talkin about.
;)
too much readin dom references of "opera 5" for compatibility.
The majority of the Opera UI features are unneeded fluff, most of them being to make it feel like more traditional browsers, without the tabbed windows, etc..
The option to disable popup windows may seem nice at first, but what it actually does is disables he window.open() method (maybe more?) which is used by probably half of the avant garde websites out there, including websites which use window.open() to provide you with device drivers and support information. It would be nice if you could maintain a list of sites for which window.open() is either allowed or disallowed, but it does not give you that option, thus making it a kill 'em all or kill 'em none situation. I would forgive this from a freeware/open source browser, but not from one they expect you to pay money for.
hm.. a browser which stops popup ads, and yet inside the browser shows ads.. irony at its best
Anyway.. The feature to identify itself as other browsers such as MSIE4, MSIE5.5, Netscape, etc. is completely and utterly useless because it still has the "Opera/6.0" string in the user agent. While that is there, pages will be able to detect that its Opera no matter what you have it set to identify as. Furthermore, when you set Opera to identify as say, MSIE5.5, it does _NOT_ emulate MSIE5.5.. Thus breaking branching code, as if the page's browser detection isn't written to check for the "Opera" string, it will try to execute IE5.5 specific code and fail most likely.
I will admit the Transfers window is a nice idea. but there you have it pretty much.. opera's 'features' defluffed and shown for what they truly are.
The thing about Opera is it's UI and the way it feels, ie. the transfer windows. I guess ppl could use it coz they like that about it, as a nice alternative to IE coz they boycott MS products or something.
Of all the browsers out there (read: IE, Netscape4, Opera, and itself), it is true that Netscape 6 is the best browser that comes closest to standing up to IE.
There are a few issues that need to be solved besides the obvious speed ones:
* Lack of support for communication between Flash and JavaScript (it doesn't have swLiveConnect)
* Flash animations within positioned (non-positioned?) DIV layers are not supported.
* IE4 (and IE5.5 and up) have DirectX transitions and filters which I believe will not ever be allowed by Microsoft into other browsers unless they are forced into it by a lawsuit or something.
* You cannot retrieve a tag's content with innerHTML (I am only 87% sure of this)
The biggest problem is the horrendous slowness of the rendering engine, however for it to truly compete and win it needs to support everything IE does, barring the DirectX transitions because it's not entirely neccesary (though they are nice)
Opera 5 is very fast but falls a bit short in that it doesn't support innerHTML *AT ALL*, which is a serious problem for pages with client-side dynamically generated content.
Personally I think Mozilla/NS6 is the better choice since Opera costs money and Moz supports more, but it is a LOT slower than IE, Netscape4 AND Opera.
I've never heard Ogg, but mp3's at equal bitrates can sound excellent on one encoder and sound like crap on another.
It all depends on the encoder yer usin.. What bitrate to use also depends on the use of the track. For casual listening I always use 320kbps to encode, just to be safe. I've actually been able to hear some instances of where some harmonics are gone when encoding at 128kbps.
but I believe there is quality loss even at 320kbps. When it comes to mastering tracks, I always use the raw wav and never mp3's.
The Derrick Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can't Read Good (among other things)
How can the kids expect to learn if the building can't even support their weight?
Comcast @Home is pretty decent if you don't mind the following:
:D Lightning speed, etc.. I've heard of lots of downtime but 90% of the time it has to do with storms and being in the suburbs (which usually seems to have the highest degree of power outages around here)
:)
:)
* Capped upstream
* Periodic portscanning of your system by THEM
* Constant buggering from them to SMB port
* Any mention that you run Linux and yer dead in the water, and not able to get any further information except that "Linux" is the reason why it doesn't work.
At least that's what it's like in my area (Baltimore, MD).
Now if you don't care about the above things at all, I reckon their service is great
I must say though I have never had any downtime for more than 3 hours from my Speakeasy DSL account (I've been with them for a year), and they're 100% linux/server/practically/anything friendly
Also if you are a customer of Speakeasy you know at least of one ISP whose tech support is not just a bunch of people who know nothing about anything. They'll answer questions about anything ranging from reverse dns(!) entries to how to not-get-cracked (if you talk with the security guys). Sorry, it's a wee bit offtopic rant, but, it's related to ISP customer support at least
I think all of you should remember that Nautilus is in mere infancy.
.. That shouldn't have happened for a long time.
I agree that it is somewhat bloated and buggy. I also agree that they jumped the gun at releasing v1.0
However, those who are just bashing it saying that it's a bloated buggy and crappy file manager and that X filemanager which has been around for ages is better. That's a bit short-sighted if you ask me.
Look at Mozilla. I started using it at Milestone 5. It was complete crap back then, I used it for like two seconds and had to switch back to Netscape because I couldn't use it as my main browser.. From then I would download each new Mozilla version, and each time I would go back to Netscape, because Mozilla was slow and buggy, it would trash web forms, and it was unstable.
This trend continued up until the new version 0.9, that's right! Mozilla 0.9 is actually the first time that I'm pretty sure I can say goodbye to Netscape once and for all. Mozilla 0.8 was close, but it was too slow. The speed increase in 0.9 shows promise, but it's still not perfect. With this in mind, I must say I've never seen anyone bashing Mozilla on here. Maybe the Mozilla developers will have to go bankrupt before that happens.
Big Projects take a large amount of time to become stable, and also to become mature.
To compare something like Nautilus to KDE's Konqueror is obsurd, and unfair.
I agree that some of Eazel's ideas about doing things are way off-base. If the rumour is true, I can only hope that Nautilus is continued by either Ximian or the Gnome people (which they are basically the same people anyway); I have confidence that eventually it will lead Nautilus into success.
I use Nautilus because I hate GMC. Basically I think Nautilus is a good product.. They just need to speed it up, just like they [still (IMO)] need to do with Mozilla, and they also need to get rid of that silly-ass backgorund management, but I have confidence in Gnome developers.
It's funny how everyone's always trashing Gnome, usually with references that KDE is better. Gnome hasn't been around as long sa KDE, but Gnome suits my needs... although my gnome-session is pretty tweaked out, with just a small panel and Blackbox. It does the job for me.
Nope, no typo in the subject :)
:)
I thought his responces were quite nice, but they also were riddled with misunderstanding of the philosophy that Linux is built upon.
Linux is free software. It is also open-source, but open-source is not free software. Therefore the claims that Sun giving away source is the same as Linux is a completely invalid point. Now, as for BSD. Some would say the same thing, but I won't go there, coz I avoid BSD vs. Linux issues at all costs, and I really don't care
As for his responce saying that Microsoft gives solutions for people who need Windows support for Unix standards like NFS. I challenge any of you readers to find an NFS solution for Windows that doesn't cost you your arm and possibly a leg to implement. Charging for software is one thing. Overcharging to the point of robbery is another.
Yes, Microsoft offers interoperability with open standards, but this interoperability comes as a blatant disregard for everything those open standards stand for, and also at a hefty price tag I will say. After examining the NFS solutions out there for MS, I decided I will stick with Samba, because I do not feel it is worth paying that much just so I can map an NFS share on Windows.
I don't have a problem with paying for software if it is worth paying for and the cost is not a robbery. No, I will not pay upwards of $500 for software because I feel that the software is not worth nearly that much. This is the result of the software companies wanting to squeaze every possible dime out of us, and remember that $500 is just for a one-user license. Companies really reap the gold in when they charge multiple thousands of dollars for some inane business application that isn't really too complex in the first place.
I am a happy owner of two legitimately bought copies of Quake 3: Arena (the Linux version and the Windows version) and I am also a happy Open Sound System customer, and have been for years. I have even paid AGAIN to get the SBLive module when I got my SBLive!. I have also bought official Slackware CD-ROM's and would gladly do it again, even though I can download them from slackware.com.
UCITA and the corporate supporters of it are both proof of the proprietary software companies' fear that if people find out they can get the same functionality in software for free, they will be out of business. If they would only not over-charge for their software, and their software was in fact better than the alternatives, people would buy it.
It's true that there are people who say "I will never pay for software." just as, in the Napster case, you will have people who will say "I will never buy CDs if Napster is around." but those are simply differences in the morality of different people. I believe the majority would pay for software if it was worth it and not obviously a rip off. I believe the w4r3z community is a minority, not a majority.
About Windows XP, there is no real revolution there either. I saw very few things that I thought were hawked from Mac OS X, but I did see a whole lot of stuff basically hawked from the idea of theming that comes with using any X Window Manager.
With this in mind, it is kind of hypocritical for him to criticize Gnome, KDE and the Window Managers for their ability to look like Macs or anything else, when the new Microsoft OS implements that as one of its main features.
I will, however, not blatantly accuse them of copying. I will simply say when multiple people look at something and say "I have seen that before", regardless of whether it came from OS X or anywhere else, something is not right.
You have a valid point saying becaues Windows is preinstalled that Linux should be easier to install, my point is that majority of users don't even know how to install Windows. Because of this they will be reluctant to install any operating system no matter how easy people say it is. I tell all my friends Windows is so easy to install, they say "well, you know computers! of course it's easy for you, but I'm a dummy when it comes to them."
:)
/'s permissions, making the system unusable to anyone but root, and also messed up the permissions of everyone. also "when kernel compile goes wrong because of <insert very abstract problem here>" .. Also due to the fact that the kernel even needs recompiling.
Majority of end users who just casually use a computer here and there want to go out and buy something that works out of the box. No installing an OS, they don't even want to be encumbered by having to know what an OS is.
For Linux to be a viable desktop this has to happen: It needs to be prepackaged with computers.
If my mom were to use a machine running Windows, nothing would change. I would still have to be the one who installs Windows, and does all the settings and configuration
I don't think Linux is 100% ready to replace Windows on the desktop, due to many small issues which have to be seen through the eyes of an end user. It's not just the installation process, but, also the configuration process.
I used Linuxconf (no flames please) to configure a user account on my server, and it fouled up
The majority of these issues, and other hardware problems with Linux are very easy for us techies to fix, but very difficult for people that don't even know what an OS is. I've had as much of a hard time, if even more of a hard time getting hardware to work under Linux than under Windows, sometimes the hardware even worked in Linux but failed in Windows, but if the computer comes from the store working right and configured properly for all the hardware, then it's no problem.
Then the user could cause all kinds of stuff to go wrong, but the same is true in Windows. As a PC Tech, I'm constantly fixing problems caused by end users.
I don't believe any end users that aren't at least 5% techie will ever install an operating system. It's just not gonna happen.
One of the biggest misconceptions going around about Linux is that it needs to be easy to install for people to use it. As stated below, the majority of end users aren't even aware that their OS is installed like any other program. More realistically, they believe that elves descended from the magical kingdom of Euripides and installed Windows on their machine
As a dummy myself I know I couldn't install Linux without help from techie friends. It needs to be simple, just point and click.
I have found Windows to be much more difficult to install than Linux, furthermore most people who want to e-mail a photo of their cat to a relative have never installed Windows before in their life. They simply had it preinstalled for them at the factory where the computer was built, or the store from which they bought it.
It also has to be at least as pretty as Windows, because when you don't know anything about something, you tend to choose the most "professional" looking thing.
Linux can be as pretty as and even more pretty than Windows (Checked themes.org recently?) and a majority of the themes cater to the Windows-style button layout, which means people used to Windows can effectively navigate it.
Also, if all people want to do is use e-mail, then Linux is a perfect solution. I have a Linux box set up for my mother who is totally ignorant when it comes to computers, but she knows how to use apps like Word and such.
She has a Slackware box running a Windows-like theme for Icewm, and uses Netscape, Netscape Mail and WordPerfect without any problems what-so-ever, and without having to come and ask me questions about the interface or about Linux in general. When Evolution is finally released, this gap will be bridged even more so.
I really hate to have to agree with a comment from someone dissing Linux, but.. here goes.
.. a n y w h e r e :) The downsides to Opera then? Well.. The user interface is quite different from the majority of browsers, including some things I flat out don't like, and you can't change them, like it opens new windows inside its main window, and you can't have it do otherwise, but at least it loads pretty quickly and is SUPER FAST. and for those who care maybe another downside is that it's not GPL'd.
First off, I will say that Mozilla is heaps better than IE in just about everything except for speed. It is far too slow IMO for people who are used to the instant-loading of IE5, and when using IE5, webpages don't take a year to come up.
If you ask me, they should get rid of that cross-platform GUI and make something that's F-A-S-T.. but anyway..
Browser alternatives for Linux:
Konqueror suffers from the same.. In fact, when I used it, it was even *slower* than Mozilla. but at least it doesn't take forever to load.
Galeon: I couldn't even get it to install (from source or RPM (due to RPM saying moz is not installed when it was (by rpm)))
Netscape: This is probably the best over-all solution for right now unfortunately, unless you are not bothered by the shortcomings of Opera (see below).. It is fast, has good, but not extraordinary plugin support, but has broken if any CSS support, crashes often, and has been left behind by the Netscape developers, and it takes forever to load.
Opera: This is what I'm using right now to type this comment. It's what I use whenever I'm viewing pages that don't require Flash, Java, or other plugins, because the Linux version of this browser has absolutely no Java or Plugin support (yet), however, it is lightning fast, rock-solid stable, and conforms to standards, eg. pushing for a world where "best viewed with XXXX browser" is not ever seen
Unfortunately the truth is that there is no browser solution that is equivalent to the ones offered in the Windows environment.
There's been numerous articles in Freshmeat about us losing the browser war. I don't think we're losing it, we're just playing catch up, like we do with certain other things like usb support.
Now, I believe the future of Linux browsing is Mozilla, IF they can speed it up to where it runs as fast as browsers in Windows and doesn't take an eternity to load. Mozilla has excellent HTML and CSS implementations, better than IE5. Mozilla also has plugins for Java and Flash among other things.
Me personally I prefer Linux. The only thing I use Windows for is games and music production. I do everything else (programming, graphics, Net, etc.) on Linux coz I prefer to actually be able to *use* my machine on a non-stop basis instead of having to *wait* to use it.
I will comment on Nautilus, although since v1.0 is finally out, and I was unable to install as of yet (because it requires control-center 1.3 (wtf?)), this might be a little unfair, so keep in mind the latest version I've used is PR3 !
Nautilus uses the libmozembed library to use Mozilla as the base of its web browser, similar to the way Konqueror and Galeon do, and similar to the way the WinAmp browser embeds IE5 in Windows. However, Nautilus took up to 30 seconds to fully load on my Athlon 850 w/128MB of RAM. While for those using Nautilus as a file manager (starting it from Gnome's session management) this may not be a serious problem, those who would use it strictly as a browser will find it is a serious issue. Now again, I was using PR3 and there's been a lot of development in Bonobo and all the other libs, including Nautilus itself since then, and I haven't used 1.0, so.. I can't comment on its current status. When upgrading the Bonobo, OAF, and other libs earlier, Nautilus actually appeared to be faster, which is a good sign.
It sounds interesting. I've never really read
anything about Google before to this regard.
Almost nobody here is talking about 3D hardware acceleration. Thiss is all about 2D. Contrary to popular belief OpenGL does 2D as well as 3D.
Correct, but I mean 2D acceleration as in the 2D graphics accelleration of the hardware, just plain old gfx acceleration.. it seems the only way to get it in X is to get a card that has an accelerated X server with it (?? I have not really used one of these accelerated servers too much)
In Windows you don't need a 3D card and Open GL to get HW acceleration.. I was just wondering why this hasn't been asked/answered/thought about/etc.. I may be wrong but I've never read anything about it, except that of coz some cards require use of the "accelerated" X servers.
Someone here said that they groaned a lot from the reference to the :\ keys being used mostly by geeks..
:) .. because of the obvious c:\ (m$ filesystem) stuff.
:: to identify modules! :)
and scoffed at it (please, i'm just making a statement here, i mean no one harm
don't forget about perl, epic, c, and many of the other languages which use \ as a way of escaping characters, and also Perl uses
As far as WM's go, IceWM and BlackBox all the way! I currently run IceWM, and it's awesome.. very beautiful, fast and effecient in every way, BlackBox is the same, although you may have to get used to it's "no bitmap" policy.
as far as terminals go, it's Rxvt all the way, there's no other terminal that comes up as fast. I will trade that kind of speed for the obvious slowdown of using a hacked transparent terminal which ugly-ly blinks white everytime you click on it.
But on another, slightly off-topic note.. everyone here is talking about 3D hardware acceleration. What ever happened to 2D hardware acceleration and how to it's not supported in X or seemingly trying to be supported?
It would only be complete if they could transform into a vehicle like the ones in Transformers the Movie.