I remember seeing a demonstration about 12 years ago where Prof Barnsley showed how his fractal compression method could take a low resolution image (in this case a parrot) and encode it as a fractal. He showed how simply zooming the original resulted in the usual blocky image but when you zoomed the encoded image it still appeared sharp(ish). He zoomed into the parrot's eye which in the original was made up of four pixels and the fractal image still showed a round pupil although it did look a bit out of focus.
Another demo I saw on the British show "Tomorrow's World" showed how you could zoom in on a photo that had a fence and the fractal image showed the fence details that were again not visible in the original.
There was of course talk of using this sort of tech to do video upsampling for projection. Given the performance I saw I see no reason why a standard DVD couldn't have been cranked up to twice the resolution and look substantially clearer. Of course, the downside of fractal compression was that it took huge (at the time) amounts of computing power to compress, and bugger all the uncompress. These days I expect it is trivial.
Seriously, Apple is adding features that were supposed to be in Longhorn into Tiger and it will be available early in 2005. Meanwhile MS is removing those same features just so they can hit a 2006 launch date. Huh?
The funniest bit was all my Windows collegues telling me about how fantastic Longhorn was going to be and how it would allow MS users to overtake the Mac.....
Nice FUD! What about all the press lately about defective powerbooks that apple refuses to fix? problems with ipods that apple refuses to acknowledge? Apple has just as many problems as Intel-based computers does.
For the record, I've got an IBM Thinkpad 350C that's over 10 years old that *just* stopped working, and I think it's the power cord. I'll take Big Blue and 10 years of productivity over *anything* else, regardless of os or manufacturer, anyday.
I don't see why it is FUD. I stated clearly that it was recent Intel based laptops that were a problem. I recently retired a 10 year old Toshiba that had finally reached the end of its possible uses but it still worked. But if you want something more modern than a P75 you need to look at the current state of play. Granted a laptop from IBM today is going to be better than the Toshiba Satellite Pro 3000 I bought but it is also more expensive and that was more expensive that my iBook. Also, granted there have been some problems with Apple Powerbooks and iBooks but at the end of the day all manufacturers have problems. Also, Apple has fixed the issues although I do agree they have been slow to respond.
It is a fact that my iBook is better made than the Toshiba I had before and it is clearly holding up to daily use better than the Toshiba. It is also a lot cheaper than an IBM. Oh, and OS X is much nicer than Linux on a laptop. That is a fact and I have been a Linux user since 1994 (before that I used SunOS).
I bought a Mac (iBook G4 14") because I was sick of the increasingly poor quality of Intel based laptops. My last Toshiba cost me £1500 and it didn't even last 18 month before it was dead. My iBook cost me £1000 and it is already 10 months old and still in great shape having been used just as much as the Toshiba was. By this point the Toshiba case was cracked and chipped, the paint had rubbed off where my palms rest and the screen was starting to flicker. Eventually the battery died and then the screen failed.
I never used Windows on my laptops, I always made sure they could run decently with Linux. The best bit with the Mac is it is Unix and everything works right out of the box.
I think it is good that Intel based laptops are appearing with Linux preinstalled but I still think a Mac is better value. This is my first Mac and it definitely won't be my last.
Nope. Can't find it. I'd look more, but the site is now slasdoted.
Yes, I was downloading the update at the same time as I posted the link and got to enjoy first hand the speed of a slashdotting. Wow! Two mins after I posted and the site was a smouldering ruin.
Anyway, the KDE3.3 rpms are in testing but to be honest I wouldn't try and install them. I did a pretty good job of mangling my test system.
It works with yum and also covers a range of redhat/fedora versions. You'll find KDE 3.3 in testing. You will also likely have to remove a number of packages to get it all working though.
I recently installed Fedora 2 on a dual Opteron 248 system (Sun V20Z) and was amazed at the sheer grunt of the thing. Why anyone would even consider buying a Xeon just amazes me. I ran one of my own integer and memory heavy benchmark programs (single threaded) against my Athlon XP 2200+ and a single Opteron processor was 3x faster than the XP for only 400Mhz higher clock speed. These things are amazing, Intel should be crapping themselves and I am sure they would be if it wasn't for the cozy deal with Dell and the number of sites that have a Dell only policy. In a true free market they would be toast.
The long and the short of it is that lines of resolution is the number of resolvable lines that can be seen in an analogue TV picture. While the resolution of a digital TV image for a PAL DVD is made up of 720x576 pixels, the actual lines of resolution is about 480-500. Go to the linked page, its pretty good and quite clear. There is also an impact on resolution due to interlace which is why projection TV systems often have deinterlacers. Interlace means that a pixel that only occurs in one field is going to flicker on and off. Deinterlacing and making the picture progressive scanned like a computer display will result in the pixel always being visible. The effect of deinterlacing is to increase the apparent resolution by about 30%.
LD uses frequency modulation to store an analogue signal on an optical disc. The lengths of the pits and lands correspond to the wavelength and by varying that length (modulating) you can store an analogue signal on an optical disc. LD was originally shown in the early 70's and commercially appeared in the late 70's. Originally it had a high quality analogue stereo sound track to go with the analogue video. Later a 16 bit 44.1Khz PCM sound track was added. On NTSC discs this could co-exist with the old analogue sound but for PAL discs the video signal takes up too much bandwidth to allow this and so the analogue audio was dropped in favour of the PCM audio. Quality wise, there wasn't that much in it, LD analogue audio is very good, much better than VHS Hifi sound. Discs also come in two flavours, Constant Linear Velocity (CLV) and Constant Angular Velocity (CAV). CLV discs play for roughly twice as long per side (about 1 hour) but lose the trick play features of CAV (slow motion and pause) unless there is a digital field buffer in the player. The trick play CLV digital effects are not as nice as a true CAV disc though.
Now, there has been talk of s-video being better to capture from the LD. Others have suggested RGB. Well, the answer is that neither is best. LD video is stored as composite video and any LD player with an s-video or RGB output is extracting that from the composite signal. Depending on the quality of the player you may be better just using the composite signal and using a high quality demodulator. The most modern LD players included advanced 3 line or 3D comb filters to separate the chroma and luma and give an s-video output that looked better than the quality of consumer TVs. Where digital field effects are available it may not be possible to get at the true composite video signal depending on the design of the player as some recombine the internal digital signal extracted from the disc for these effects back into analogue s-video and composite signals. Some players even offer the output as RGB but the picture quality is pretty poor.
Another problem with LDs is that they suffer from chroma noise. Generally the picture quality is very good, way better than SVHS. Resolution is 425 lines (NTSC) or 440 lines (PAL). Remember this has little to do with scanlines. Lines of resolution is a measure of how many lines you can resolve for example on a test card like those provided on Video Essentials. SVHS maxes out around 400 lines so is almost as good and VHS sits at 240 lines. DVD manages around 480 lines so looks a little clearer depending on the transfer. LD looks much better than VHS or SVHS because it has more bandwidth for the chroma (colour) portion of the signal than the VHS formats. The difference is apparent when you make an SVHS tape of an LD, it looks muddier and less colour rich. Betamax recordings look significantly better in this respect. However, some LDs were not great transfers and suffered noise in the colour signal and this appears particularly in the blues which sometimes flicker badly. The Aladdin CAV LD set for instance is very bad for this. Conversely the THX CAV LDs of the Star Wars Trilogy are amazingly clean. The noise levels will affect your ability to get a good digital transfer.
The highest quality LD players were notable for increasing detail through the use of high quality video processing to reduce chroma noise. The Pioneer Elite series LD players were very good in this respect and if you are going to do a transfer you need to get one of those. Budget LD players still look good but may be more noisy.
Ordinary computer capture cards (things like WinTV PCI) are poor at best for this. You may be better getting your hands on a stand-alone DVD recorder and going with that. Of course, you also have the issue of getting the audio. Some LDs contain Dolby Digital or DTS sound. DTS sound is available on the standard optical digitial audio out but DD sound comes from an RF modulated connection that you can't just stuff into a d
That is really the same issue, the Office format files are not a good solution as different versions of office can't reliably read each others files. I have Office 2K on my XP box and Office X on my Mac. The fact that I can't reliably share files between the two versions is a major issue. I recently wrote a document on my Mac and noticed when loaded into Office 2K that the text in a table was minced. I fixed it on the PC and saved the file again with no other changes. Once loaded into the Mac again the table still looked fine so I figured I was OK. It was only when I printed the 40 or so page doc that I noticed that Office on the PC had gone and changed every occurence of courier font to arial and wrecked the formatting. I would never see this sort of issue with OpenOffice and that is largely down to OOo file formats being well understood and documented. I doubt even MS knows exactly what their 'formats' are.
Since when does having a copy of MS Office guarantee 100% compatibility with other MS Office users? I have Office X on my Mac and it can't successfully share files with the PC version. Fonts and formatting get minced so I don't see any reason why a Linux version would be any different. I can run Office under Linux using Crossover and it is pretty good but none of the MS Office formats should be used if you want to preserve and share your documents, the 'format' just isn't good enough. OpenOffice files transfer much better between Windows, Linux and MacOS X.
I havent had an unintentional reboot since I started using Win XP. This is zealotry at its best.
You're lucky in that case. I have had XP crash plenty of times where Linux (currently running Fedora) has been much more stable on the same piece of hardware. Granted, it is better than the old Win9x but it is still a long way short of Linux.
I personally wish that people would quit with the "Windows must die for Linux to succeed" crap.
Agreed. Similarly, if MS would just stop trying to take over the world we could all live happily together and sing songs of peace and love. Not going to happen.
I like them both and they both have their purposes. I dont care how great Linux gets, I WILL NOT QUIT USING WINDOWS,
One day you will, it happens, deal with it. I used to use my old BBC Micro for everything, today I don't. Funny how I quit using it but things move on.
tney are tools to be used sometimes in conjunction together sometimes by themselves. Windows will never die,
I have to wonder if people who say things like this have spent any significant time in computing. When I started back in 1979 the big business system (apart from the CBM machines from Commodore) where CP/M. It was the industry standard and used the industry standard CPU (Z80). What happened? Dead. Things die. I don't expect Windows to be dead in the next 10 years but 20? Probably. How about Linux? Less sure. UNIX was here before CP/M and it is still here. Linux is enough like UNIX to count as a continuation of that line despite there being no genetic relationship (regardless of what SCO says).
Believe it oir not there are a lot of people that like Windows. The two major Operating Systems I see for the future are going to be Linux and Windows. Windows is here to stay, get used to it.
I think you are right for the near future, but further out I expect Windows use to shrivel and eventually it will be replaced by the more robust and portable platform. Besides which, we have no idea today what will happen to computing hardware in the next twenty years and that will have far more bearing on what computer platform we are using then than anything else. Just look at what has happened over the history of this industry. No-one stays on top for ever.
For once I agree with Gates. Who wants to muck about with discs? I am already making plans to build a large disc array to store my entire DVD collection.
On the other hand, as a delivery medium DVD is pretty cheap and efficient, I just think that DVDs should be like other software, you buy the disc and then install it on your movie server and put the disc away as your backup.
As for video on demand, TiVo certainly shows the possibilities and I think that going to a situation where we can select video material from an enormous library where we pay for each piece of material and don't have to sit through adverts and other crap, well, that would be heaven frankly
Bear in mind that the figures on Google are at least two months out of date now. I have seen other sites with more recent data that show the continuing movement in favour of Mozilla as a result of all the security scares. I'm very interested to see what the next google zeitgeist shows for Mozilla but as I said, if you look at the purple line it was steadily increasing but then recently the increase stepped up its pace. This looks like the precursor to what other sites are reporting. Some sites have reported an increase from 4% this time to last year to 20% this year which is an amazing jump. I prefer to wait and see what Google has to say though as some other sites are going to be less general and thus biased.
If you look at the line for Netscape 5+ you will see an appreciable uptick. Also, the figures from google are not recent enough to include the latest bunch of security related defections.
I got my mother to switch to Mozilla about 6 months back and she has been thrilled with it. She started using it for the spam filtering and stayed for the browser itself. The other day I phoned her to tell her to upgrade mozilla because of the shell:// problem and she had already done it! I think she may actually be getting it.
The stats I have seen show IE having at best 90% but more like 80% of the browser market. Some even show lower than that. Of course, it very much depends on the web sites demographic. The Google zeitgeist is pretty good and it certainly shows a significant uptick in Mozilla usage of late. I would trust Google more than any other site as it is a site that anyone on any platform will find useful so should be more reliable.
One of the major benefits of 1.1.2 over 1.0.3 is that the speed of the app has improved dramatically. With both 1.0.3 and NeoOffce/J the start up time on my 933 G4 was pushing a minute. With 1.1.2 I can be editing a document from clicking on the icon within about 10 seconds. This is now the same sort of speed as MS Office X on the same machine.
While I am also disappointed that we still don't have a proper aqua version of OpenOffice I understand their reasons and once 2.0 comes out for Windows and X11 they will be able to do the job properly. At that point, I expect MS will do the same as they did with Internet Exporer and drop Office for Mac as they will have real competition and we know how much they like that! Besides which, the supposed benefits of Office on the Mac is the compatibility with Office on the PC and frankly, that is simply not true. I had a doc that I created on the Mac and Office 2K on the PC had problems with a table so I fixed them, saved the file and loaded it back into the Mac to find that yes, the table was also OK but now all the courier font text had changed to arial! The funny thing was, the emulation of Office in OpenOffice was so good that it had exactly the same problem with the table even when I opened it using OpenOffice on the Mac!
I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple pitch in fully with OpenOffice 2.0 just to break the last link with MS.
My father-in-law is still using a dual 400Mhz Celeron BP6 based system. I set it up as his NFS/YP/SMB server recently as it had been gathering dust for a while. Turns out that it is really snappy (running RH8 with yum updates via fedora legacy). A pair of 400s in a server seems to be quite nice compared with a single 800Mhz processor.
I have a number of games that would be classified as very violent. GTAIII springs to mind, more recently I have been playing Mafia. What I enjoy about them is the escapism, and I really like the virtual world to interact with, more of that please! Not so bothered about the violent aspects although they can be fun if handled well as they were in GTA.
However, the game I have been spending most time playing lately, one might say that I am addicted to it, is Super Monkey Ball 2 on the GameCube. No killing (although they never show you what happens to the monkey when he falls off the course) but it is still great fun. I especially like Monkey Billiards (one of the party games) too. SMB2 is a completely non-offensive but very good game. But would Christians like it? There is no message as such, its just a puzzle game really, my feeling is that rather like Christian music (which is really quote horrible most of the time) these Christian games will be designed to push a Christian message and the gameplay will be secondary and for that reason I think they should fail.
Can you imagine some of the games these people could come up with? Guide Moses down the mountain while he carries the 20 (*crunch) no 15 commandments......
Personally, I'll keep playing Super Monkey Ball until San Andreas is out, then some Mother F***** is going to get it:-)
I was watching for this on BBC News 24 and they continued to show the leader of the opposition haranging Mr Blair about the EU Constitution. They did show a little "Breaking News" banner but I can't believe they didn't just cut away. I can't imaging this behaviour happening in the days of Project Mercury....
Nothing special about the Mac. I believe these discs are CD-Audio/Data hybrid discs. Windows sees the data part, autoruns the software in there which installs a new driver that forces the machine to only play the WMA version of the music and prevents ripping the CD-Audio tracks. Anything other than Windows won't do this, and in fact Windows can be pesuaded not to if autorun is turned off.
It is interesting that so many people use Windows because that is what everyone else uses. If you don't want to get caught up in all this crap it is better to use something different that does the same job.
My wife bought a copy protected CD and wanted to copy it to MD but the MD recorder refused. Under Windows if you played it you got some crufty 48Khz WMA file, never the full 16 bit PCM. On my Mac however, I was able to rip the disc to iTunes as straight WAV and then burn her an unprotected version of the CD. She then used this to record her MD. I have yet to see a disc that the Mac can't copy.
Today if you want an up to date version of Windows you are pretty much stuck. Yes, you can still run Windows 98 and you will be getting security patches but it is really unstable. You can also stick with Windows 2K but it lacks a lot of the features that make XP attractive. With Linux I can choose to have an all singing all dancing desktop (and I do) or for older hardware I can cut back to the bare essentials but both systems are equally up to date and supported. For example, it is simple to run a very basic Linux system using WindowMaker or XFCE as the desktop environment, both of which are quite pleasant to use even today, while having a very up to date system.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember seeing a demonstration about 12 years ago where Prof Barnsley showed how his fractal compression method could take a low resolution image (in this case a parrot) and encode it as a fractal. He showed how simply zooming the original resulted in the usual blocky image but when you zoomed the encoded image it still appeared sharp(ish). He zoomed into the parrot's eye which in the original was made up of four pixels and the fractal image still showed a round pupil although it did look a bit out of focus.
Another demo I saw on the British show "Tomorrow's World" showed how you could zoom in on a photo that had a fence and the fractal image showed the fence details that were again not visible in the original.
There was of course talk of using this sort of tech to do video upsampling for projection. Given the performance I saw I see no reason why a standard DVD couldn't have been cranked up to twice the resolution and look substantially clearer. Of course, the downside of fractal compression was that it took huge (at the time) amounts of computing power to compress, and bugger all the uncompress. These days I expect it is trivial.
Blood spurt gush!
Seriously, Apple is adding features that were supposed to be in Longhorn into Tiger and it will be available early in 2005. Meanwhile MS is removing those same features just so they can hit a 2006 launch date. Huh?
The funniest bit was all my Windows collegues telling me about how fantastic Longhorn was going to be and how it would allow MS users to overtake the Mac.....
Guess not!
I don't see why it is FUD. I stated clearly that it was recent Intel based laptops that were a problem. I recently retired a 10 year old Toshiba that had finally reached the end of its possible uses but it still worked. But if you want something more modern than a P75 you need to look at the current state of play. Granted a laptop from IBM today is going to be better than the Toshiba Satellite Pro 3000 I bought but it is also more expensive and that was more expensive that my iBook. Also, granted there have been some problems with Apple Powerbooks and iBooks but at the end of the day all manufacturers have problems. Also, Apple has fixed the issues although I do agree they have been slow to respond.
It is a fact that my iBook is better made than the Toshiba I had before and it is clearly holding up to daily use better than the Toshiba. It is also a lot cheaper than an IBM. Oh, and OS X is much nicer than Linux on a laptop. That is a fact and I have been a Linux user since 1994 (before that I used SunOS).
So, where's the FUD?
I bought a Mac (iBook G4 14") because I was sick of the increasingly poor quality of Intel based laptops. My last Toshiba cost me £1500 and it didn't even last 18 month before it was dead. My iBook cost me £1000 and it is already 10 months old and still in great shape having been used just as much as the Toshiba was. By this point the Toshiba case was cracked and chipped, the paint had rubbed off where my palms rest and the screen was starting to flicker. Eventually the battery died and then the screen failed.
I never used Windows on my laptops, I always made sure they could run decently with Linux. The best bit with the Mac is it is Unix and everything works right out of the box.
I think it is good that Intel based laptops are appearing with Linux preinstalled but I still think a Mac is better value. This is my first Mac and it definitely won't be my last.
Yes, I was downloading the update at the same time as I posted the link and got to enjoy first hand the speed of a slashdotting. Wow! Two mins after I posted and the site was a smouldering ruin.
Anyway, the KDE3.3 rpms are in testing but to be honest I wouldn't try and install them. I did a pretty good job of mangling my test system.
Have a look at ftp://apt.kde-redhat.org
It works with yum and also covers a range of redhat/fedora versions. You'll find KDE 3.3 in testing. You will also likely have to remove a number of packages to get it all working though.
I recently installed Fedora 2 on a dual Opteron 248 system (Sun V20Z) and was amazed at the sheer grunt of the thing. Why anyone would even consider buying a Xeon just amazes me. I ran one of my own integer and memory heavy benchmark programs (single threaded) against my Athlon XP 2200+ and a single Opteron processor was 3x faster than the XP for only 400Mhz higher clock speed. These things are amazing, Intel should be crapping themselves and I am sure they would be if it wasn't for the cozy deal with Dell and the number of sites that have a Dell only policy. In a true free market they would be toast.
Kaaaaaahhhhnnnnnn!
This looks like a good description:
http://jkor.com/peter/tvlines.html
The long and the short of it is that lines of resolution is the number of resolvable lines that can be seen in an analogue TV picture. While the resolution of a digital TV image for a PAL DVD is made up of 720x576 pixels, the actual lines of resolution is about 480-500. Go to the linked page, its pretty good and quite clear. There is also an impact on resolution due to interlace which is why projection TV systems often have deinterlacers. Interlace means that a pixel that only occurs in one field is going to flicker on and off. Deinterlacing and making the picture progressive scanned like a computer display will result in the pixel always being visible. The effect of deinterlacing is to increase the apparent resolution by about 30%.
LD uses frequency modulation to store an analogue signal on an optical disc. The lengths of the pits and lands correspond to the wavelength and by varying that length (modulating) you can store an analogue signal on an optical disc. LD was originally shown in the early 70's and commercially appeared in the late 70's. Originally it had a high quality analogue stereo sound track to go with the analogue video. Later a 16 bit 44.1Khz PCM sound track was added. On NTSC discs this could co-exist with the old analogue sound but for PAL discs the video signal takes up too much bandwidth to allow this and so the analogue audio was dropped in favour of the PCM audio. Quality wise, there wasn't that much in it, LD analogue audio is very good, much better than VHS Hifi sound. Discs also come in two flavours, Constant Linear Velocity (CLV) and Constant Angular Velocity (CAV). CLV discs play for roughly twice as long per side (about 1 hour) but lose the trick play features of CAV (slow motion and pause) unless there is a digital field buffer in the player. The trick play CLV digital effects are not as nice as a true CAV disc though.
Now, there has been talk of s-video being better to capture from the LD. Others have suggested RGB. Well, the answer is that neither is best. LD video is stored as composite video and any LD player with an s-video or RGB output is extracting that from the composite signal. Depending on the quality of the player you may be better just using the composite signal and using a high quality demodulator. The most modern LD players included advanced 3 line or 3D comb filters to separate the chroma and luma and give an s-video output that looked better than the quality of consumer TVs. Where digital field effects are available it may not be possible to get at the true composite video signal depending on the design of the player as some recombine the internal digital signal extracted from the disc for these effects back into analogue s-video and composite signals. Some players even offer the output as RGB but the picture quality is pretty poor.
Another problem with LDs is that they suffer from chroma noise. Generally the picture quality is very good, way better than SVHS. Resolution is 425 lines (NTSC) or 440 lines (PAL). Remember this has little to do with scanlines. Lines of resolution is a measure of how many lines you can resolve for example on a test card like those provided on Video Essentials. SVHS maxes out around 400 lines so is almost as good and VHS sits at 240 lines. DVD manages around 480 lines so looks a little clearer depending on the transfer. LD looks much better than VHS or SVHS because it has more bandwidth for the chroma (colour) portion of the signal than the VHS formats. The difference is apparent when you make an SVHS tape of an LD, it looks muddier and less colour rich. Betamax recordings look significantly better in this respect. However, some LDs were not great transfers and suffered noise in the colour signal and this appears particularly in the blues which sometimes flicker badly. The Aladdin CAV LD set for instance is very bad for this. Conversely the THX CAV LDs of the Star Wars Trilogy are amazingly clean. The noise levels will affect your ability to get a good digital transfer.
The highest quality LD players were notable for increasing detail through the use of high quality video processing to reduce chroma noise. The Pioneer Elite series LD players were very good in this respect and if you are going to do a transfer you need to get one of those. Budget LD players still look good but may be more noisy.
Ordinary computer capture cards (things like WinTV PCI) are poor at best for this. You may be better getting your hands on a stand-alone DVD recorder and going with that. Of course, you also have the issue of getting the audio. Some LDs contain Dolby Digital or DTS sound. DTS sound is available on the standard optical digitial audio out but DD sound comes from an RF modulated connection that you can't just stuff into a d
That is really the same issue, the Office format files are not a good solution as different versions of office can't reliably read each others files. I have Office 2K on my XP box and Office X on my Mac. The fact that I can't reliably share files between the two versions is a major issue. I recently wrote a document on my Mac and noticed when loaded into Office 2K that the text in a table was minced. I fixed it on the PC and saved the file again with no other changes. Once loaded into the Mac again the table still looked fine so I figured I was OK. It was only when I printed the 40 or so page doc that I noticed that Office on the PC had gone and changed every occurence of courier font to arial and wrecked the formatting. I would never see this sort of issue with OpenOffice and that is largely down to OOo file formats being well understood and documented. I doubt even MS knows exactly what their 'formats' are.
Since when does having a copy of MS Office guarantee 100% compatibility with other MS Office users? I have Office X on my Mac and it can't successfully share files with the PC version. Fonts and formatting get minced so I don't see any reason why a Linux version would be any different. I can run Office under Linux using Crossover and it is pretty good but none of the MS Office formats should be used if you want to preserve and share your documents, the 'format' just isn't good enough. OpenOffice files transfer much better between Windows, Linux and MacOS X.
For once I agree with Gates. Who wants to muck about with discs? I am already making plans to build a large disc array to store my entire DVD collection.
On the other hand, as a delivery medium DVD is pretty cheap and efficient, I just think that DVDs should be like other software, you buy the disc and then install it on your movie server and put the disc away as your backup.
As for video on demand, TiVo certainly shows the possibilities and I think that going to a situation where we can select video material from an enormous library where we pay for each piece of material and don't have to sit through adverts and other crap, well, that would be heaven frankly
Bear in mind that the figures on Google are at least two months out of date now. I have seen other sites with more recent data that show the continuing movement in favour of Mozilla as a result of all the security scares. I'm very interested to see what the next google zeitgeist shows for Mozilla but as I said, if you look at the purple line it was steadily increasing but then recently the increase stepped up its pace. This looks like the precursor to what other sites are reporting. Some sites have reported an increase from 4% this time to last year to 20% this year which is an amazing jump. I prefer to wait and see what Google has to say though as some other sites are going to be less general and thus biased.
If you look at the line for Netscape 5+ you will see an appreciable uptick. Also, the figures from google are not recent enough to include the latest bunch of security related defections.
I got my mother to switch to Mozilla about 6 months back and she has been thrilled with it. She started using it for the spam filtering and stayed for the browser itself. The other day I phoned her to tell her to upgrade mozilla because of the shell:// problem and she had already done it! I think she may actually be getting it.
The stats I have seen show IE having at best 90% but more like 80% of the browser market. Some even show lower than that. Of course, it very much depends on the web sites demographic. The Google zeitgeist is pretty good and it certainly shows a significant uptick in Mozilla usage of late. I would trust Google more than any other site as it is a site that anyone on any platform will find useful so should be more reliable.
One of the major benefits of 1.1.2 over 1.0.3 is that the speed of the app has improved dramatically. With both 1.0.3 and NeoOffce/J the start up time on my 933 G4 was pushing a minute. With 1.1.2 I can be editing a document from clicking on the icon within about 10 seconds. This is now the same sort of speed as MS Office X on the same machine. While I am also disappointed that we still don't have a proper aqua version of OpenOffice I understand their reasons and once 2.0 comes out for Windows and X11 they will be able to do the job properly. At that point, I expect MS will do the same as they did with Internet Exporer and drop Office for Mac as they will have real competition and we know how much they like that! Besides which, the supposed benefits of Office on the Mac is the compatibility with Office on the PC and frankly, that is simply not true. I had a doc that I created on the Mac and Office 2K on the PC had problems with a table so I fixed them, saved the file and loaded it back into the Mac to find that yes, the table was also OK but now all the courier font text had changed to arial! The funny thing was, the emulation of Office in OpenOffice was so good that it had exactly the same problem with the table even when I opened it using OpenOffice on the Mac! I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple pitch in fully with OpenOffice 2.0 just to break the last link with MS.
My father-in-law is still using a dual 400Mhz Celeron BP6 based system. I set it up as his NFS/YP/SMB server recently as it had been gathering dust for a while. Turns out that it is really snappy (running RH8 with yum updates via fedora legacy). A pair of 400s in a server seems to be quite nice compared with a single 800Mhz processor.
:-)
Ah, the BP6, those were the days
I too am not remotely religious.
:-)
I have a number of games that would be classified as very violent. GTAIII springs to mind, more recently I have been playing Mafia. What I enjoy about them is the escapism, and I really like the virtual world to interact with, more of that please! Not so bothered about the violent aspects although they can be fun if handled well as they were in GTA.
However, the game I have been spending most time playing lately, one might say that I am addicted to it, is Super Monkey Ball 2 on the GameCube. No killing (although they never show you what happens to the monkey when he falls off the course) but it is still great fun. I especially like Monkey Billiards (one of the party games) too. SMB2 is a completely non-offensive but very good game. But would Christians like it? There is no message as such, its just a puzzle game really, my feeling is that rather like Christian music (which is really quote horrible most of the time) these Christian games will be designed to push a Christian message and the gameplay will be secondary and for that reason I think they should fail.
Can you imagine some of the games these people could come up with? Guide Moses down the mountain while he carries the 20 (*crunch) no 15 commandments......
Personally, I'll keep playing Super Monkey Ball until San Andreas is out, then some Mother F***** is going to get it
I was watching for this on BBC News 24 and they continued to show the leader of the opposition haranging Mr Blair about the EU Constitution. They did show a little "Breaking News" banner but I can't believe they didn't just cut away. I can't imaging this behaviour happening in the days of Project Mercury....
Nothing special about the Mac. I believe these discs are CD-Audio/Data hybrid discs. Windows sees the data part, autoruns the software in there which installs a new driver that forces the machine to only play the WMA version of the music and prevents ripping the CD-Audio tracks. Anything other than Windows won't do this, and in fact Windows can be pesuaded not to if autorun is turned off.
It is interesting that so many people use Windows because that is what everyone else uses. If you don't want to get caught up in all this crap it is better to use something different that does the same job.
My wife bought a copy protected CD and wanted to copy it to MD but the MD recorder refused. Under Windows if you played it you got some crufty 48Khz WMA file, never the full 16 bit PCM. On my Mac however, I was able to rip the disc to iTunes as straight WAV and then burn her an unprotected version of the CD. She then used this to record her MD. I have yet to see a disc that the Mac can't copy.
Today if you want an up to date version of Windows you are pretty much stuck. Yes, you can still run Windows 98 and you will be getting security patches but it is really unstable. You can also stick with Windows 2K but it lacks a lot of the features that make XP attractive. With Linux I can choose to have an all singing all dancing desktop (and I do) or for older hardware I can cut back to the bare essentials but both systems are equally up to date and supported. For example, it is simple to run a very basic Linux system using WindowMaker or XFCE as the desktop environment, both of which are quite pleasant to use even today, while having a very up to date system.