My ears have never been able to hear the difference between CD-quality and the various super-audio formats, which I've always regarded as being appropriate for the editing stage rather than me as an end-listener. I'm not going to replace my CDs for quality reasons. For any future "upgrades" to my music collection why on earth would I not just rip my CDs into whatever digital format is most convenient at the time? This will suck for new music, but the "upgrade" problem seems over-played to me.
It's a shame, but remember that this is effectively a n.0 distribution, which are generally not the most stable of releases. Does no-one else remember Mandrake 9.0? More than that, given how drastically the development model has changed between Red Hat's last offering and Fedora this may as well be a 1.0 release, and we all know how stable they are...
Give the developers and community a bit of time to settle in to the new development model and work out the problems and I'm sure it'll be no worse than any other distribution. (But no better than debian;-))
I'd love to see a consistent interface but it will never, ever happen outside of a mac. Windows doesn't manage it - Quattro Pro's widgets look different to Microsoft Office's ones, etc. More to the point, everyone lays out their menus etc. differently (even assuming they aren't mangled by the stupid "frequent use" feature). To be brutally honest, while clashing themes may look a bit sucky consistency of layout and behaviour between applications is far more important.
It comes close only because in an office many people just use Microsoft programs, which admittedly do all look pretty much the same. You'll certainly never get consistency on anything like Linux, where there are so many different projects - you can get visual consistency from something like bluecurve or galaxy, and the gnome HIG is a step in the right direction, but they overdo it, with much fascism about how much you can change the look (separate from the feel) of the desktop.
Yes, because I imagine that so far they've just been sitting on their hands. The need to plan a good counterattack started ages ago - there have even been articles on here where Linus said as much, and I imagine RMS is itching to have his say (whether anyone else is listening or not;-)). The mere fact that they've been subpoenaed is nothing unexpected (it just means they're compelled to give evidence after all) and nothing that, in itself, requires any more of a "legal counterattack" than was required anyway.
I mean, you have to use Mozilla or a Mozilla-derivative for web browsing (Konqueror is nice and all, but the last time I tried it extensively it still felt toy-like, and Mozilla is the cross-platform standard I am used to and want to use). But that forces you to use Gtk - so forget about KDE, you need to use GNOME. But now you have to use the awful mismatched GNOME apps.
I'll have some of whatever you're smoking, please:-) I'll agree with you up to "Mozilla forces you to use gtk" (though konqueror ought to improve in the next KDE as apparently Apple have started to feed back changes they made to khtml). But why does using gtk force you to use gnome applications? I'm using mozilla here, but I also have open kedit and kmail (as well as a gkrellm and evidence (the enlightenment-17 filemanager, which uses yet another toolkit). It is simply untrue to say that use of one toolkit permanently binds you to using the desktop environment associated with that toolkit - toolkits are just libraries.
As it happens, my desktop (with all these disparate toolkits in use) looks fine - there is a good aqua theme for just about any themeable toolkit or application you care to name.
OK, so they provide DRMed files on the second session but they also provide normal audio on the first session so grip will work just fine to make oggs or mp3 or whatever. (Note, I have no problem with using the DRMed files per se, it's just that I guess they are wma, which I can't use.)
This seems quite good for Windows users (the music company will presumably at least make decent quality rips) but sucks for compilations as it means they will be able to fit less music on a CD - maybe 70 minutes instead of 80.
Er, click on the window you want (or scroll to it using cursor keys). You are then taken to the correct virtual desktop, it is unminimized if already minimized and brought to the front. You can also get to it through the middle mouse button, but for that you need some desktop to click on. As I said, it's not graphically lovely, but it seems just as efficient.
My next laptop will be an iBook, but I'm struggling to see this particular feature as revolutionary. I'm willing to be proved wrong but it sounds as though I'll have to wait to try it for myself:-)
Besides which, I bet a part of the reason it works so well is that Apple control the hardware they build iMacs from. Unlike x86 OSes it doesn't have to put up with being run on whatever hardware the local semi-competent PC building firm happen to throw together. Now I know some x86 OSes are better than others, but it just has to be easier writing an OS where you know exactly what hardware configurations it will be used on.
A friend of mine was raving about expose the other day, saying it was the next big thing in UI design, but can anyone explain to me how it's any better than pressing F11 in WindowMaker, to get the Window List? I know it can do the "minimize all open windows" thing too, but that can already be done in X anyway. I'm not knocking it (too much), I'm sure it looks very pretty, but I just can't see it as being that much of a breakthrough.
Yes, but it will take the other $75k per person to maintain the whole mess. He never said it would push the income up to $150k...
. o O Mmm, I smell crispy fries.... Heck, no, it's just Cincinatti. Harv... HARV! Fix that darned tracking system, willya? It's taking out cities again. O o .
Now if only they would put out some contracts on the big spammers, maybe we could all have some peace in our inboxes:) I think $1M per head (with or without the rest of the spammer!) should suffice...
You could never make money off of masturbating barn yard animals before.
But countless spammers seem to have discovered that you can make money telling people about sites featuring masturbating barn yard animals (more's the pity).
Just look what they did to emacs:-O
Seriously, while this probably has niche applications (previous posters have mentioned a few that sound plausible) I don't see that it offers much to the conventional desktop user (a keyboard and mouse require much less movement than the shenanigans Tom Cruise got up to in the movie and, other than keeping office workers fit, these interfaces will just lower productivity).
So what about wearable computers? Something you wear on your belt with a head-mounted display, designed to be used while walking along? Well, to me it doesn't make much sense in this context either: again, if you end up requiring much odd movement on the user's part it won't work. In my opinion the future is far more likely to look like a next-generation of Canon's eye-controlled (pupil-tracking) autofocus system to control a pointer on some head-mounted display coupled with (in the short term) an interface that minimizes the need for text input together with some kind of finger-based character input device[0] or (longer term) speech recognition of a standard where the software doesn't need training and can cope with background noise[1].
[0] There was one mentioned on slashdot ages ago that looked a bit like a gripmaster (key for each finger plus the thumb), and text was typed by entering chords.
[1] Incidentally, how much research has been done on using stereo input to speech recognition programs to reduce background noise? I would have thought that would help quite a lot, albeit at the expense of CPU time.
No, the internet was supposed to provide a decentralised way of sharing important military files. That, or a convenient medium for transferring particle physics data around CERN... My point is, the internet is just a medium. We have the same old people selling music, keeping the same cut as they did before, paying their artists in the same old way. Only the distribution medium has changed - buying from iTunes is no more "direct from the artist" than buying from HMV, or Walmart.
The thing that would put more money into artists' pockets is if they could sell without going through a record company, not without going through a physical retail store. The internet, and the increasing affordability of studio time in general, can help with this but it doesn't do so per se.
In short, if you want to help artists get more of the pie be a little open-minded: go and see the acts that play in your local {bar,jazz club,disco,whatever} and if they're any good, buy the CD straight from the band. (Often they get quite a lot to sell themselves and they keep their usual cut plus whatever margin the retailer would have made.)
I haven't heard anyone bitching out the first Matrix, it was widely held to be a superb film by slashdotters, critics (eventually) and audiences alike. It broke new ground technically and the plot was very cool.
I haven't seen the second one yet (I intend to soon) but perhaps the reason it got slagged off is because it sucked.
You say that LoTR "is what it is", and in a way you're right, but that's a feature not a bug. I'd be pretty pissed off if I went to see the film and it was totally different to the book, and the fact remains that if you want to make a film that is even representative of the book it will end up being about 9 hours long. Is the book itself good? I guess that's a question of personal taste, but it is an important book for several reasons. Firstly it is important simply because of its widespread popularity - it is a cultural point of reference for English based cultures.
Secondly, it sticks fairly closely to the traditional heroic epic. If you've read this, listened to Wagner's "Ring des Nibelungen", read any of the old Norse sagas etc. - hell, even if you've watched Star Wars - you'll recognise many points of similarity in structure and plot.
I would argue with your point that the plot of the Lord of the Rings [books] is obvious - it can be read on the shallow level you describe but if you go into the background material and think for a while I'm sure you'll find a bit more to it. I would also suggest that the Matrix and the Lord of the Rings have quite a lot in common - the Matrix can also be read as a version of the heroic epic.
Anyway, this post has got far too long and rambling so I'm going to go and make some tea.
I believe in free will. If it doesn't exist then nothing matters anyway and I'm just following my predestined path in believing in it. If it does exist, well what d'you know, I'm right!
> Bruce Dickinson said it best when he sang, "The sun that gave us life yesterday is now the sun that takes our lives away" on his Accident of Birth album.
Um, yeah. Let's hope omega zero day isn't just round the corner.;-) [Parent post quoted in full because I like the album, and consider that any post that quotes it doesn't deserve -1 moderation:-)]
A program implementing a true brute force attack would be really stupid, though, at least for [J. Random Muppet]'s account; lots of time would be wasted trying aaaa, aaab, aaac etc., when the password is far more likely to be "password" or "150367". Once you force people to use passcodes of a length sufficient that even dumb people are likely to enter more than one word, or a word with at least one number, you enforce a level of security unbreakable by most entities over the average duration of a user's session. OK, that isn't anywhere near perfect but it's a lot better than allowing "password", "banana" or "slashdot"....
Slashdot Mirror
My ears have never been able to hear the difference between CD-quality and the various super-audio formats, which I've always regarded as being appropriate for the editing stage rather than me as an end-listener. I'm not going to replace my CDs for quality reasons. For any future "upgrades" to my music collection why on earth would I not just rip my CDs into whatever digital format is most convenient at the time? This will suck for new music, but the "upgrade" problem seems over-played to me.
Er, no. I forgot about that ;-) (I never said macs definitely would get a consistent UI, just that nothing else had a snowball's chance...)
It's a shame, but remember that this is effectively a n.0 distribution, which are generally not the most stable of releases. Does no-one else remember Mandrake 9.0? More than that, given how drastically the development model has changed between Red Hat's last offering and Fedora this may as well be a 1.0 release, and we all know how stable they are...
;-))
Give the developers and community a bit of time to settle in to the new development model and work out the problems and I'm sure it'll be no worse than any other distribution. (But no better than debian
I'd love to see a consistent interface but it will never, ever happen outside of a mac. Windows doesn't manage it - Quattro Pro's widgets look different to Microsoft Office's ones, etc. More to the point, everyone lays out their menus etc. differently (even assuming they aren't mangled by the stupid "frequent use" feature). To be brutally honest, while clashing themes may look a bit sucky consistency of layout and behaviour between applications is far more important.
It comes close only because in an office many people just use Microsoft programs, which admittedly do all look pretty much the same. You'll certainly never get consistency on anything like Linux, where there are so many different projects - you can get visual consistency from something like bluecurve or galaxy, and the gnome HIG is a step in the right direction, but they overdo it, with much fascism about how much you can change the look (separate from the feel) of the desktop.
Yes, because I imagine that so far they've just been sitting on their hands. The need to plan a good counterattack started ages ago - there have even been articles on here where Linus said as much, and I imagine RMS is itching to have his say (whether anyone else is listening or not ;-)). The mere fact that they've been subpoenaed is nothing unexpected (it just means they're compelled to give evidence after all) and nothing that, in itself, requires any more of a "legal counterattack" than was required anyway.
I mean, you have to use Mozilla or a Mozilla-derivative for web browsing (Konqueror is nice and all, but the last time I tried it extensively it still felt toy-like, and Mozilla is the cross-platform standard I am used to and want to use). But that forces you to use Gtk - so forget about KDE, you need to use GNOME. But now you have to use the awful mismatched GNOME apps.
:-) I'll agree with you up to "Mozilla forces you to use gtk" (though konqueror ought to improve in the next KDE as apparently Apple have started to feed back changes they made to khtml). But why does using gtk force you to use gnome applications? I'm using mozilla here, but I also have open kedit and kmail (as well as a gkrellm and evidence (the enlightenment-17 filemanager, which uses yet another toolkit). It is simply untrue to say that use of one toolkit permanently binds you to using the desktop environment associated with that toolkit - toolkits are just libraries.
I'll have some of whatever you're smoking, please
As it happens, my desktop (with all these disparate toolkits in use) looks fine - there is a good aqua theme for just about any themeable toolkit or application you care to name.
Sorry, but you can't base the security of an OS on the demographics of its userbase. There's either a bug or there isn't.
OK, so they provide DRMed files on the second session but they also provide normal audio on the first session so grip will work just fine to make oggs or mp3 or whatever. (Note, I have no problem with using the DRMed files per se, it's just that I guess they are wma, which I can't use.)
This seems quite good for Windows users (the music company will presumably at least make decent quality rips) but sucks for compilations as it means they will be able to fit less music on a CD - maybe 70 minutes instead of 80.
Er, click on the window you want (or scroll to it using cursor keys). You are then taken to the correct virtual desktop, it is unminimized if already minimized and brought to the front. You can also get to it through the middle mouse button, but for that you need some desktop to click on. As I said, it's not graphically lovely, but it seems just as efficient. :-)
My next laptop will be an iBook, but I'm struggling to see this particular feature as revolutionary. I'm willing to be proved wrong but it sounds as though I'll have to wait to try it for myself
Besides which, I bet a part of the reason it works so well is that Apple control the hardware they build iMacs from. Unlike x86 OSes it doesn't have to put up with being run on whatever hardware the local semi-competent PC building firm happen to throw together. Now I know some x86 OSes are better than others, but it just has to be easier writing an OS where you know exactly what hardware configurations it will be used on.
A friend of mine was raving about expose the other day, saying it was the next big thing in UI design, but can anyone explain to me how it's any better than pressing F11 in WindowMaker, to get the Window List? I know it can do the "minimize all open windows" thing too, but that can already be done in X anyway.
I'm not knocking it (too much), I'm sure it looks very pretty, but I just can't see it as being that much of a breakthrough.
Yes, but it will take the other $75k per person to maintain the whole mess. He never said it would push the income up to $150k... . o O Mmm, I smell crispy fries.... Heck, no, it's just Cincinatti. Harv... HARV! Fix that darned tracking system, willya? It's taking out cities again. O o .
We cannot just block all of Earthlink's dynamic numbers because of ten insipid users.
:-)
Yes you can. Others would. You're just too nice
I'm sure I remember Trinity dropping her phone in the trash after arranging an "exit".
I'd like to see him come to England. The show sounds like it rocks.
Now if only they would put out some contracts on the big spammers, maybe we could all have some peace in our inboxes :) I think $1M per head (with or without the rest of the spammer!) should suffice...
You could never make money off of masturbating barn yard animals before.
But countless spammers seem to have discovered that you can make money telling people about sites featuring masturbating barn yard animals (more's the pity).
Just look what they did to emacs :-O
Seriously, while this probably has niche applications (previous posters have mentioned a few that sound plausible) I don't see that it offers much to the conventional desktop user (a keyboard and mouse require much less movement than the shenanigans Tom Cruise got up to in the movie and, other than keeping office workers fit, these interfaces will just lower productivity).
So what about wearable computers? Something you wear on your belt with a head-mounted display, designed to be used while walking along? Well, to me it doesn't make much sense in this context either: again, if you end up requiring much odd movement on the user's part it won't work. In my opinion the future is far more likely to look like a next-generation of Canon's eye-controlled (pupil-tracking) autofocus system to control a pointer on some head-mounted display coupled with (in the short term) an interface that minimizes the need for text input together with some kind of finger-based character input device[0] or (longer term) speech recognition of a standard where the software doesn't need training and can cope with background noise[1].
[0] There was one mentioned on slashdot ages ago that looked a bit like a gripmaster (key for each finger plus the thumb), and text was typed by entering chords.
[1] Incidentally, how much research has been done on using stereo input to speech recognition programs to reduce background noise? I would have thought that would help quite a lot, albeit at the expense of CPU time.
I can just picture Darl in a big dark helmet, having his head rams into the soles of his shoes as the SCO Legal Department jumps to Ludicrous Speed :)
to switch my server to OpenBSD ;-) Oh, wait...
No, the internet was supposed to provide a decentralised way of sharing important military files. That, or a convenient medium for transferring particle physics data around CERN... My point is, the internet is just a medium. We have the same old people selling music, keeping the same cut as they did before, paying their artists in the same old way. Only the distribution medium has changed - buying from iTunes is no more "direct from the artist" than buying from HMV, or Walmart.
The thing that would put more money into artists' pockets is if they could sell without going through a record company, not without going through a physical retail store. The internet, and the increasing affordability of studio time in general, can help with this but it doesn't do so per se.
In short, if you want to help artists get more of the pie be a little open-minded: go and see the acts that play in your local {bar,jazz club,disco,whatever} and if they're any good, buy the CD straight from the band. (Often they get quite a lot to sell themselves and they keep their usual cut plus whatever margin the retailer would have made.)
I haven't heard anyone bitching out the first Matrix, it was widely held to be a superb film by slashdotters, critics (eventually) and audiences alike. It broke new ground technically and the plot was very cool.
I haven't seen the second one yet (I intend to soon) but perhaps the reason it got slagged off is because it sucked.
You say that LoTR "is what it is", and in a way you're right, but that's a feature not a bug. I'd be pretty pissed off if I went to see the film and it was totally different to the book, and the fact remains that if you want to make a film that is even representative of the book it will end up being about 9 hours long. Is the book itself good? I guess that's a question of personal taste, but it is an important book for several reasons. Firstly it is important simply because of its widespread popularity - it is a cultural point of reference for English based cultures.
Secondly, it sticks fairly closely to the traditional heroic epic. If you've read this, listened to Wagner's "Ring des Nibelungen", read any of the old Norse sagas etc. - hell, even if you've watched Star Wars - you'll recognise many points of similarity in structure and plot.
I would argue with your point that the plot of the Lord of the Rings [books] is obvious - it can be read on the shallow level you describe but if you go into the background material and think for a while I'm sure you'll find a bit more to it. I would also suggest that the Matrix and the Lord of the Rings have quite a lot in common - the Matrix can also be read as a version of the heroic epic.
Anyway, this post has got far too long and rambling so I'm going to go and make some tea.
I believe in free will. If it doesn't exist then nothing matters anyway and I'm just following my predestined path in believing in it. If it does exist, well what d'you know, I'm right!
> Bruce Dickinson said it best when he sang, "The sun that gave us life yesterday is now the sun that takes our lives away" on his Accident of Birth album.
;-) :-)]
Um, yeah. Let's hope omega zero day isn't just round the corner.
[Parent post quoted in full because I like the album, and consider that any post that quotes it doesn't deserve -1 moderation
A program implementing a true brute force attack would be really stupid, though, at least for [J. Random Muppet]'s account; lots of time would be wasted trying aaaa, aaab, aaac etc., when the password is far more likely to be "password" or "150367". Once you force people to use passcodes of a length sufficient that even dumb people are likely to enter more than one word, or a word with at least one number, you enforce a level of security unbreakable by most entities over the average duration of a user's session. OK, that isn't anywhere near perfect but it's a lot better than allowing "password", "banana" or "slashdot"....