Because OpenXML is a ridiculous spec that should have never been made. It's thousands of pages of a dirty, ugly hackery, with specifiers like "duplicates the spacing bug of MS Office '97."
Most laptops already have IRDA built in. I'm not sure why exactly, but it seems almost ubiquitous. There are USB TV tuners that are supported by linux. These usually do MP4 encoding on device to keep the USB bandwidth down, so should be excellent for MythTV, even if the laptop isn't the most powerful.
I was looking at a trip to St. Louis recently. $120 round trip Greyhound, takes about 23 hours each direction. Flight was $310 for cheapest tickets, $400 was more normal. Amtrak was $220 for coach seats, $284 to do the whole trip in business class. Even if there were two of us traveling, upgrading just the 13h trains to roomettes is quite prohibitively expensive ($275/room/train).
It seems Amtrak is relatively competitive compared to Greyhound. You can get up, walk around, buy food and drinks, maybe even watch TV in the lounge. And the seats recline a tad more than buses/planes and there's load more leg room. It's not really competitive compared to flying.
Our trains only travel 60mph, though cars can go 75-80 on many interstates with little risk of getting ticketed, as legal limits are generally 70-75mph and in some areas (Chicago...) even the cops speed by 10mph.
The train from Chicago to St. Louis, however, is only 5.5 hours. Google rates that trip by car at 4.8 hours. I'm not sure why he's quoting 9 hours.
There's 1 Autotrain from DC to the Orlando area. The car adds between $150 and $200 to the price of your ticket ($90 without car). They could add more lines with car carriers. Ideally your destination would have decent public transit, though. For short trips like he's talking about, though, that's still too expensive.
gconf is pretty terrible, but... it's not a database. It's made of flat text files in a folder hierarchy. You can use echo and cat to read and write values to gconf. You can search it using "find ~/.gconf -name term", grep, fgrep, etc.
One of the major problems with the Windows registry is that it's a proprietary binary format that easily corrupts. Were it flat files, like gconf is, then only those files that were being changed could be lost.
The problem mentioned in the article is DHTML floaters, ie a clickable image floating over the website within the existing browser window/tab. Basic popup blocking within Firefox gets 99% of all unwanted popup ads. I have never been to a website within the past couple of years that was able to open popups all over my computer.
I have a feeling you haven't browsed the web without noscript in quite a while. I have found I need nothing other than adblock to clean up my browsing experience, as that will usually get the DHTML floaters as well. adblock is almost completely non-intrusive, as it's a managed blacklist; I don't have to do anything and it works great. Noscript requires I manage my own blacklist, which is much less desirable, as I need to interact with it on nearly every website, not just the couple that adblock misses/false positives on.
Regardless, Firefox on it's own prevents windows from opening, no noscript needed.
Indeed. Once can add mount flags such as data=journal and noatime to bring performance very close to and occasionally exceeding Reiser3. IBM had an article about this years ago but more recent benchmarks and performance tuning guides do exist.
Wifi chipsets are somewhat tricky, though. If there isn't support for your chipset in the kernel, one could usually use Windows drivers on top of ndiswrapper. Since Windows drivers themselves are either x86 or x86-64, those are the only architectures supported by ndiswrapper. You can't recompile the Windows driver.
This means users of the cheap laptop will need to select their "802.11g WiFi dongle" carefully if their isn't one provided by the manufacturer. If you get one with a wireless chipset not supported by the kernel, you're hosed. (Even madwifi isn't always architecture independent. My wireless card just became supported on x86-64 and still isn't on non-x86 architectures. Binary blobs suck.)
Disappointing that there's no networking at all built in. I wonder how much extra they charge for the "optional 802.11g WiFi dongle" or if you're on your own to find a WiFi dongle that is supported by the OS. That's going to be pretty huge since this runs on MIPS rather than x86, so choice of distributions will be limited somewhat and you won't be able to do an ndiswrapper stop-gap installation.
You'll never get a criminal lawsuit to pass because the FISA court deals in top secret documents. Without clearance to read any of these documents, no judge would ever say there's enough evidence to warrant a criminal trial.
Precious tools? That's BS. FISA already provided all of the surveillance they needed. Not once has a FISA warrant ever been turned down.
Sometimes you have to tell law enforcement, "You already have the tools you need. Deal with it." If they had their way, they wouldn't have any checks and would be able to install cameras in our homes, interrogate use for no reason, etc.
When I look at all of the shareware PDF creation tools that behave exactly like CutePDF (which is free and installs GhostScript to do the PDF conversion) I wonder how many of these shareware apps aren't supposed to be free. Are there really be 400+ independent implementations in addition to GhostScript?
I said "most EU countries". Israel is not part of the European Union. But you are right about Australia. Someone pointed out they just reformed their copyright laws in the past year or two making them better, not worse. The EU still has the EUCD which most European Union nations have implemented and is in some ways worse than the DMCA.
I didn't say most countries, I said most EU countries, Australia, and Canada. Canada I guess I was wrong about. They have managed to stave it off. As far as the EU, I guess I saw a bunch of articles like this and this a few years back. Additionally, I seem to remember at least Switzerland, the UK, and Germany passing stricter regulation.
If you could clarify the situation for me, I and other readers here would be grateful, I'm sure.
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Did they really change enough to warrant something like this? What is Win7 lacking that prevents older applications from running?
I still keep a windows box for writing documents and doing presentations in office.
Doesn't Office work in CrossOver?
If they're making anything other than basic PDFs, they'll still need Adobe. Things like PDF form fields can't be done any other way.
Because OpenXML is a ridiculous spec that should have never been made. It's thousands of pages of a dirty, ugly hackery, with specifiers like "duplicates the spacing bug of MS Office '97."
Most laptops already have IRDA built in. I'm not sure why exactly, but it seems almost ubiquitous. There are USB TV tuners that are supported by linux. These usually do MP4 encoding on device to keep the USB bandwidth down, so should be excellent for MythTV, even if the laptop isn't the most powerful.
I was looking at a trip to St. Louis recently. $120 round trip Greyhound, takes about 23 hours each direction. Flight was $310 for cheapest tickets, $400 was more normal. Amtrak was $220 for coach seats, $284 to do the whole trip in business class. Even if there were two of us traveling, upgrading just the 13h trains to roomettes is quite prohibitively expensive ($275/room/train).
It seems Amtrak is relatively competitive compared to Greyhound. You can get up, walk around, buy food and drinks, maybe even watch TV in the lounge. And the seats recline a tad more than buses/planes and there's load more leg room. It's not really competitive compared to flying.
Our trains only travel 60mph, though cars can go 75-80 on many interstates with little risk of getting ticketed, as legal limits are generally 70-75mph and in some areas (Chicago...) even the cops speed by 10mph.
The train from Chicago to St. Louis, however, is only 5.5 hours. Google rates that trip by car at 4.8 hours. I'm not sure why he's quoting 9 hours.
There's 1 Autotrain from DC to the Orlando area. The car adds between $150 and $200 to the price of your ticket ($90 without car). They could add more lines with car carriers. Ideally your destination would have decent public transit, though. For short trips like he's talking about, though, that's still too expensive.
Chicago to St Louis is 5.5hours by rail. Was 9 your cumulative total?
gconf is pretty terrible, but... it's not a database. It's made of flat text files in a folder hierarchy. You can use echo and cat to read and write values to gconf. You can search it using "find ~/.gconf -name term", grep, fgrep, etc.
One of the major problems with the Windows registry is that it's a proprietary binary format that easily corrupts. Were it flat files, like gconf is, then only those files that were being changed could be lost.
The problem mentioned in the article is DHTML floaters, ie a clickable image floating over the website within the existing browser window/tab. Basic popup blocking within Firefox gets 99% of all unwanted popup ads. I have never been to a website within the past couple of years that was able to open popups all over my computer.
I have a feeling you haven't browsed the web without noscript in quite a while. I have found I need nothing other than adblock to clean up my browsing experience, as that will usually get the DHTML floaters as well. adblock is almost completely non-intrusive, as it's a managed blacklist; I don't have to do anything and it works great. Noscript requires I manage my own blacklist, which is much less desirable, as I need to interact with it on nearly every website, not just the couple that adblock misses/false positives on.
Regardless, Firefox on it's own prevents windows from opening, no noscript needed.
...that you still need the hardware to cut the key blank.
Ext3 is shrinkable, just not when the file system is mounted. One can, however, grow the file system even while it's mounted.
Please see man resize2fs
Indeed. Once can add mount flags such as data=journal and noatime to bring performance very close to and occasionally exceeding Reiser3. IBM had an article about this years ago but more recent benchmarks and performance tuning guides do exist.
Wooosh!
Wifi chipsets are somewhat tricky, though. If there isn't support for your chipset in the kernel, one could usually use Windows drivers on top of ndiswrapper. Since Windows drivers themselves are either x86 or x86-64, those are the only architectures supported by ndiswrapper. You can't recompile the Windows driver.
This means users of the cheap laptop will need to select their "802.11g WiFi dongle" carefully if their isn't one provided by the manufacturer. If you get one with a wireless chipset not supported by the kernel, you're hosed. (Even madwifi isn't always architecture independent. My wireless card just became supported on x86-64 and still isn't on non-x86 architectures. Binary blobs suck.)
Disappointing that there's no networking at all built in. I wonder how much extra they charge for the "optional 802.11g WiFi dongle" or if you're on your own to find a WiFi dongle that is supported by the OS. That's going to be pretty huge since this runs on MIPS rather than x86, so choice of distributions will be limited somewhat and you won't be able to do an ndiswrapper stop-gap installation.
My Beowulf cluster is my friend. Does that count?
You'll never get a criminal lawsuit to pass because the FISA court deals in top secret documents. Without clearance to read any of these documents, no judge would ever say there's enough evidence to warrant a criminal trial.
Civil suits aren't as stringent.
Precious tools? That's BS. FISA already provided all of the surveillance they needed. Not once has a FISA warrant ever been turned down.
Sometimes you have to tell law enforcement, "You already have the tools you need. Deal with it." If they had their way, they wouldn't have any checks and would be able to install cameras in our homes, interrogate use for no reason, etc.
When I look at all of the shareware PDF creation tools that behave exactly like CutePDF (which is free and installs GhostScript to do the PDF conversion) I wonder how many of these shareware apps aren't supposed to be free. Are there really be 400+ independent implementations in addition to GhostScript?
I said "most EU countries". Israel is not part of the European Union. But you are right about Australia. Someone pointed out they just reformed their copyright laws in the past year or two making them better, not worse. The EU still has the EUCD which most European Union nations have implemented and is in some ways worse than the DMCA.
Lucky bastards.
I didn't say most countries, I said most EU countries, Australia, and Canada. Canada I guess I was wrong about. They have managed to stave it off. As far as the EU, I guess I saw a bunch of articles like this and this a few years back. Additionally, I seem to remember at least Switzerland, the UK, and Germany passing stricter regulation.
If you could clarify the situation for me, I and other readers here would be grateful, I'm sure.