Yes, probably. By and large most of the people here are interested in open source software. If there's a choice between two comparable products we'll rave about the open source one. I'm sure Opera is a very competent browser, but I find it hard to get excited about because Firebird is also a very competent browser - but it's open source. Whether one or the other is "marginally better" doesn't really matter a hill of beans, they're both "good enough". By the way, Mozilla can be made faster if you turn on pipelining (off by default) and get rid of the 250ms delay before it bothers rendering anything (this helps on old computers but not on modern ones).
I always thought that shared libraries got lumped with "shared memory" rather than counting towards an application's footprint. Perhaps it reserves a large amount of memory for caching stuff? It does sound rather excessive though.
You'd think people would have read the FAQ on Firefox's website before making themselves look silly, wouldn't you? It quite clearly states that there's nothing else in a related field (which matters for trademarks, etc.) with the same name, and that basically this time they've consulted legal advice, searched widely and are as sure as they can be that none of the other products called Firefox (of which there are many more than just the film) matter as regards their right to use the name.
Not trying to be a zealot, but what doesn't it offer technically? It copes near-perfectly with every website I've thrown it at, certainly it's near-perfect on HTML and CSS 1 and 2; its encryption support is solid the only plugin I can think of that doesn't exist or have a workaround for Mozilla is Macromedia Director, and it's got all the nice user-interface extras of tabs, form content remembering, popup blocking etc.
Anybody with a clue programs to a web standard, not a browser. That generally measn HTML4 and CSS. Sure, you make sure it works with Internet Explorer, but designing a website to rely on the bugs in one particular browser is awful practice - what happens when the bugs get fixed (or at least changed for different ones) in the next release? The point is, you don't have to design websites for Mozilla: so long as they're written based on web standards then Mozilla will render them fine. Even the output of MS Office's "Save as HTML" is pretty compliant now.
The parent isn't interesting, it's a blatant troll reflecting the state of web development from three years ago when we were all stuck with IE 4 or Netscape 4.
KHTML being the other part. I realise most of the gnome browsers are gecko-based, but we also have a pretty good rendering engine in KHTML: good enough for Apple as well as KDE, it surely helps in this regard, not least just by increasing competition between gecko and KHTML developers. (For what it's worth I find Firebird[0] better than Konqueror, largely because of its extensions model, but also because the rendering seems better here. I also wish Konqueror could work with Macromedia's flash plugin.
Canon's EOS-1Ds has 12Mpixels: if you save an uncompressed image that's about 36MB per shot. Thus an 8GB flash card would provide space for 222 photos. That's not unreasonable for an expedition to the Khumbu or somewhere equally remote, where there might not be the possibility of transferring images to a computer. Of course, I'd still rather have 8 1GB cards (stored separately around my bags) just to minimise losses in case one got stolen.
It's quite an old concept in marketing, really. You make your customers happy by giving them a better experience of your product, and they will tend to spend more on it - in this case, buy more sandwiches in the food concessions, choose this airport over another nearby one etc. You might as well ask how it makes financial sense for an airport to provide customers with anything more than a wooden shack and a pit toilet. This makes sense in the same way that it makes sense for Island Outdoors[0] to give free coffee to everyone who comes in the shop. It sometimes seems that businessmen can't see far enough beyond wringing every last penny out of their customers today to realise that by doing so they're putting off their customers of the future. That's where the {RI,MP}AA went wrong and I'm pleased to see this airport avoiding those mistakes: being a bit more generous to provide customers with a happier experience and hopefully, in the long run, drum up more business.
[0] Sorry, no link: they're an excellent hiking/climbing/etc. shop in Portree, Isle of Skye, Scotland and well worth giving your business to if you're in the area. See, free stuff = happy customers => free plugs on slashdot in return;-)
He could always look for a used one at a reputable store: it would probably still be more than he wanted to spend, but having seen what's on offer he might be willing to go a little higher.
Depends on your usage. Sure, if you have the luxury of lots of time to faff changing lenses and are prepared to carry a flight-case full of change parts then go for a high-end camera and a set of prime lenses. But if you mainly want a camera to keep a record of special times then some kind of (optical) zoom is useful just to save having to change lenses but still to be able to get closer to (say) your kids on a trampoline at the beach, or to get a shot of a bird on your bird table. Though, as you point out, it's almost always better to zoom to the correct FOV before shooting: MTV-style zooming-in-and-out shots look horrid. As regards the wide angle problem, I guess the solution is to get a camera that will take a wide-angle adapter on the end; most of the decent ones will but most of the budget ones won't.
I'm not really talking about pure-source distros, portage seems to work fine for that. But it would be nice to have a tool that could turn a.tar.gz source package into a binary package that will work on your system - even if just to allow you to uninstall it easily if you decide it sucks. I could even live without the dependency checking - if the program builds on my system it'll work there, just create a package with "system-specific" prepended to the name if the dependency checking is too hard. But whether or not there's a lot of work involved it still seems to me to be a worthwhile long-term goal for autoconf, what with it having become a pretty widespread standard for building source projects now.
I'd like to see autoconf / automake extended to fit in with this, so that when you build a project from source using these tools they set up the Makefile to produce a package, either as RPM or DEB, of all the files to be installed. In theory autoconf does all the dependency checking for required libraries and headers anyway, so the dependencies shouldn't be a major problem: probably even the name and version of the package could be figured out automagically from the LSB description.
This would make it so much easier to integrate packages for which no RPM or DEB exists into your system: I don't like stow and it's unreasonable to expect everyone for whom this functionality would be useful to be able to write.spec files.
For everything except the kernel apt-get update;apt-get dist-upgrade should work fine. For the kernel you can use pre-built packages but you'll be better off to get the source for the version you want, untar it and cd into the source directory, optionally do a make menuconfig to set up all your options, then do make-kpkg binary. Then cd out of the source directory and dpkg -i the kernel-image and kernel-headers packages.
> After all, Nike, Inc. aren't the only ones to use the name of the popular Greek goddess for their company or organizations -- the US government even used it for a ground-to air missle program.
Yeah. It looked promising for a while, at least until the darned Russkies came up with the Reebok anti-missile chaff system...
I guess he's a columnist and therefore paid to think the unthinkable, but there are more productive ways of doing that than by making yourself a laughing stock whom nobody listens to. A simple search of this site would have given him an idea of the problems with "just replacing email with something better and spam-proof", and that's a tiny part of what he's suggesting. The way the internet is built may have aspects that suck pretty badly, but like it or not we're stuck with it. Perhaps if someone had made these suggestions in 1990 there'd be a chance of replacing it wholesale, but not now. Too much has been built on it. Besides which, he'll need to do a lot more to convince me that the internet is better in the hands of governments than bodies like ICANN than just say "because I say so". He glosses over issues like repressive regimes with little more than "well if the people don't like their government they can always kick them out". If this was a one-off piece I'd be prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt but you can read for yourselves his previous pieces on the BBC website - they're almost without exception inane, badly-researched drivel.
But (at least in Europe) a surprising number of museums will allow photography. You will probably have to do without flash (which tends to create unsightly reflections from oil paintings anyway) so bring a tripod and visit at a quiet time so you're not inconveniencing people, and the lighting won't be daylight-balanced so you'll need special film or a digital camera. If the painting is in a glass cabinet get the lens right up against the cabinet to prevent reflections and defocus any smudges etc. on the glass. Not all museums allow this, so it's best to ask in advance or at the entrance, but I've taken photos at the Rodin museum in Paris, the Louvre, various museums in the UK etc. Sometimes it can be awkward to get the centre of the lens in line with the centre of the picture so you end up with a bit of perspective distortion, but fortunately (if you're building a collection for the web) gimp comes to the rescue here.
I guess I was lucky. Keble College issued me with a copy of every textbook I needed for the core part of my Physics degree (they had lots of sets in the library which were handed down from year to year), with a couple of exceptions which were all in the library anyway. Many of the books were ten years or so old - I guess that doesn't matter so much in undergrad physics as it does in CS. Usually we got given photocopies of the questions for each week's tutorial anyway just in case there were new edition type clashes.
On the other hand, a friend of mine who read biochemistry specialising in genetics never had a textbook at all - he claimed that after the first year the stuff he was learning was too new to be in the textbooks yet, and when it was in them it would probably be outdated and nearly worthless.
But can't you just club together, buy one copy of each book between about four of you and then arrange to do your assignments on different nights (or do some cheeky photocopying)? (Or get a couple of older editions as well and use the current edition for referencing the questions to overcome tricks like the image size changing to force page renumbering.) Does the university actually check that each student has their own physical copy of the correct edition of each textbook?
Re:Manufacturers are doing what they're supposed t
on
KISS
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· Score: 1
Also, these stupid people drive prices down for the rest of us. I don't need a HDTV system but if the hordes of sheep all go out and buy them the price of HDTV systems will fall. Almost certainly the price of non-HDTV systems will fall even more, which is good news for me.
> I don't see why disposable DVDs are any more amenable to ripping than rentals.
Technically they aren't but I think there's a different mindset. When you rent something you know very clearly that it isn't yours, you're just borrowing it and it has to go back by 11pm tomorrow. If you buy something, on the other hand, it feels like it should be yours to keep even if there is built-in obsolescence; if you can get round the built-in obsolescence you're just adding value to "your" DVD. Even if the company's intent is the same it seems markedly different from the consumer's point of view.
Is that the feature that makes it not play in region-unlocked players? That seems particularly dumb in this case given that it's been released pretty much everywhere simultaneously anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, probably. By and large most of the people here are interested in open source software. If there's a choice between two comparable products we'll rave about the open source one.
I'm sure Opera is a very competent browser, but I find it hard to get excited about because Firebird is also a very competent browser - but it's open source. Whether one or the other is "marginally better" doesn't really matter a hill of beans, they're both "good enough".
By the way, Mozilla can be made faster if you turn on pipelining (off by default) and get rid of the 250ms delay before it bothers rendering anything (this helps on old computers but not on modern ones).
I always thought that shared libraries got lumped with "shared memory" rather than counting towards an application's footprint. Perhaps it reserves a large amount of memory for caching stuff? It does sound rather excessive though.
You'd think people would have read the FAQ on Firefox's website before making themselves look silly, wouldn't you? It quite clearly states that there's nothing else in a related field (which matters for trademarks, etc.) with the same name, and that basically this time they've consulted legal advice, searched widely and are as sure as they can be that none of the other products called Firefox (of which there are many more than just the film) matter as regards their right to use the name.
Not trying to be a zealot, but what doesn't it offer technically? It copes near-perfectly with every website I've thrown it at, certainly it's near-perfect on HTML and CSS 1 and 2; its encryption support is solid the only plugin I can think of that doesn't exist or have a workaround for Mozilla is Macromedia Director, and it's got all the nice user-interface extras of tabs, form content remembering, popup blocking etc.
Anybody with a clue programs to a web standard, not a browser. That generally measn HTML4 and CSS. Sure, you make sure it works with Internet Explorer, but designing a website to rely on the bugs in one particular browser is awful practice - what happens when the bugs get fixed (or at least changed for different ones) in the next release?
The point is, you don't have to design websites for Mozilla: so long as they're written based on web standards then Mozilla will render them fine. Even the output of MS Office's "Save as HTML" is pretty compliant now.
The parent isn't interesting, it's a blatant troll reflecting the state of web development from three years ago when we were all stuck with IE 4 or Netscape 4.
[0] Yes, I mean Firebird. I'm still using Firebird 0.7 as the Firefox 0.8 debs haven't made it into unstable yet.
KHTML being the other part. I realise most of the gnome browsers are gecko-based, but we also have a pretty good rendering engine in KHTML: good enough for Apple as well as KDE, it surely helps in this regard, not least just by increasing competition between gecko and KHTML developers. (For what it's worth I find Firebird[0] better than Konqueror, largely because of its extensions model, but also because the rendering seems better here. I also wish Konqueror could work with Macromedia's flash plugin.
Only 250 pictures - remember, 3 bytes per pixel... Still a lot, but not unreasonable for a pro travel photographer on a long remote expedition.
Canon's EOS-1Ds has 12Mpixels: if you save an uncompressed image that's about 36MB per shot. Thus an 8GB flash card would provide space for 222 photos. That's not unreasonable for an expedition to the Khumbu or somewhere equally remote, where there might not be the possibility of transferring images to a computer. Of course, I'd still rather have 8 1GB cards (stored separately around my bags) just to minimise losses in case one got stolen.
It's quite an old concept in marketing, really. You make your customers happy by giving them a better experience of your product, and they will tend to spend more on it - in this case, buy more sandwiches in the food concessions, choose this airport over another nearby one etc. You might as well ask how it makes financial sense for an airport to provide customers with anything more than a wooden shack and a pit toilet. This makes sense in the same way that it makes sense for Island Outdoors[0] to give free coffee to everyone who comes in the shop.
;-)
It sometimes seems that businessmen can't see far enough beyond wringing every last penny out of their customers today to realise that by doing so they're putting off their customers of the future. That's where the {RI,MP}AA went wrong and I'm pleased to see this airport avoiding those mistakes: being a bit more generous to provide customers with a happier experience and hopefully, in the long run, drum up more business.
[0] Sorry, no link: they're an excellent hiking/climbing/etc. shop in Portree, Isle of Skye, Scotland and well worth giving your business to if you're in the area. See, free stuff = happy customers => free plugs on slashdot in return
He could always look for a used one at a reputable store: it would probably still be more than he wanted to spend, but having seen what's on offer he might be willing to go a little higher.
Depends on your usage. Sure, if you have the luxury of lots of time to faff changing lenses and are prepared to carry a flight-case full of change parts then go for a high-end camera and a set of prime lenses. But if you mainly want a camera to keep a record of special times then some kind of (optical) zoom is useful just to save having to change lenses but still to be able to get closer to (say) your kids on a trampoline at the beach, or to get a shot of a bird on your bird table. Though, as you point out, it's almost always better to zoom to the correct FOV before shooting: MTV-style zooming-in-and-out shots look horrid.
As regards the wide angle problem, I guess the solution is to get a camera that will take a wide-angle adapter on the end; most of the decent ones will but most of the budget ones won't.
seems to have major penis envy. I mean, he's got a Ferrari latop, a Ferrari watch... I bet he drives a Yugo though ;-)
Not that I'd turn one of these down if offered, you understand!
I'm not really talking about pure-source distros, portage seems to work fine for that. But it would be nice to have a tool that could turn a .tar.gz source package into a binary package that will work on your system - even if just to allow you to uninstall it easily if you decide it sucks. I could even live without the dependency checking - if the program builds on my system it'll work there, just create a package with "system-specific" prepended to the name if the dependency checking is too hard.
But whether or not there's a lot of work involved it still seems to me to be a worthwhile long-term goal for autoconf, what with it having become a pretty widespread standard for building source projects now.
I'd like to see autoconf / automake extended to fit in with this, so that when you build a project from source using these tools they set up the Makefile to produce a package, either as RPM or DEB, of all the files to be installed. In theory autoconf does all the dependency checking for required libraries and headers anyway, so the dependencies shouldn't be a major problem: probably even the name and version of the package could be figured out automagically from the LSB description.
.spec files.
This would make it so much easier to integrate packages for which no RPM or DEB exists into your system: I don't like stow and it's unreasonable to expect everyone for whom this functionality would be useful to be able to write
For everything except the kernel apt-get update;apt-get dist-upgrade should work fine. For the kernel you can use pre-built packages but you'll be better off to get the source for the version you want, untar it and cd into the source directory, optionally do a make menuconfig to set up all your options, then do make-kpkg binary. Then cd out of the source directory and dpkg -i the kernel-image and kernel-headers packages.
> After all, Nike, Inc. aren't the only ones to use the name of the popular Greek goddess for their company or organizations -- the US government even used it for a ground-to air missle program.
Yeah. It looked promising for a while, at least until the darned Russkies came up with the Reebok anti-missile chaff system...
Bah. Even China's becoming pretty Americanised these days. Try Cuba - the government may still be out to get you but at least the cigars are good ;-)
I guess he's a columnist and therefore paid to think the unthinkable, but there are more productive ways of doing that than by making yourself a laughing stock whom nobody listens to. A simple search of this site would have given him an idea of the problems with "just replacing email with something better and spam-proof", and that's a tiny part of what he's suggesting. The way the internet is built may have aspects that suck pretty badly, but like it or not we're stuck with it. Perhaps if someone had made these suggestions in 1990 there'd be a chance of replacing it wholesale, but not now. Too much has been built on it.
Besides which, he'll need to do a lot more to convince me that the internet is better in the hands of governments than bodies like ICANN than just say "because I say so". He glosses over issues like repressive regimes with little more than "well if the people don't like their government they can always kick them out".
If this was a one-off piece I'd be prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt but you can read for yourselves his previous pieces on the BBC website - they're almost without exception inane, badly-researched drivel.
But (at least in Europe) a surprising number of museums will allow photography. You will probably have to do without flash (which tends to create unsightly reflections from oil paintings anyway) so bring a tripod and visit at a quiet time so you're not inconveniencing people, and the lighting won't be daylight-balanced so you'll need special film or a digital camera. If the painting is in a glass cabinet get the lens right up against the cabinet to prevent reflections and defocus any smudges etc. on the glass.
Not all museums allow this, so it's best to ask in advance or at the entrance, but I've taken photos at the Rodin museum in Paris, the Louvre, various museums in the UK etc.
Sometimes it can be awkward to get the centre of the lens in line with the centre of the picture so you end up with a bit of perspective distortion, but fortunately (if you're building a collection for the web) gimp comes to the rescue here.
I doubt slashdot agreed to the TOS, and probably the story poster didn't either, so the website has no comeback.
I guess I was lucky. Keble College issued me with a copy of every textbook I needed for the core part of my Physics degree (they had lots of sets in the library which were handed down from year to year), with a couple of exceptions which were all in the library anyway. Many of the books were ten years or so old - I guess that doesn't matter so much in undergrad physics as it does in CS. Usually we got given photocopies of the questions for each week's tutorial anyway just in case there were new edition type clashes.
On the other hand, a friend of mine who read biochemistry specialising in genetics never had a textbook at all - he claimed that after the first year the stuff he was learning was too new to be in the textbooks yet, and when it was in them it would probably be outdated and nearly worthless.
But can't you just club together, buy one copy of each book between about four of you and then arrange to do your assignments on different nights (or do some cheeky photocopying)? (Or get a couple of older editions as well and use the current edition for referencing the questions to overcome tricks like the image size changing to force page renumbering.)
Does the university actually check that each student has their own physical copy of the correct edition of each textbook?
Also, these stupid people drive prices down for the rest of us. I don't need a HDTV system but if the hordes of sheep all go out and buy them the price of HDTV systems will fall. Almost certainly the price of non-HDTV systems will fall even more, which is good news for me.
> I don't see why disposable DVDs are any more amenable to ripping than rentals.
Technically they aren't but I think there's a different mindset. When you rent something you know very clearly that it isn't yours, you're just borrowing it and it has to go back by 11pm tomorrow. If you buy something, on the other hand, it feels like it should be yours to keep even if there is built-in obsolescence; if you can get round the built-in obsolescence you're just adding value to "your" DVD.
Even if the company's intent is the same it seems markedly different from the consumer's point of view.
Is that the feature that makes it not play in region-unlocked players?
That seems particularly dumb in this case given that it's been released pretty much everywhere simultaneously anyway.