Try TvTorrents. They've got Battlestar Gallactica episodes several weeks ahead of the Scifi channel. (Just make sure to look for "Battlestar Gallactica (2004)" to avoid confusion with the old series.) Good stuff.
At least in 0.9.3, you can use CTRL + and CTRL - to resize the fonts on the fly. Comes in very handy for pages like those.
If you have an account on kuro5hin, you can go into user preferences to change the font face and size. I did that first thing. Makes reading much easier.
While everything else I've played from Loki has been awesome, this one was a disappointment. Did they even bother to do any Q/A on non-Nvidia hardware? Judging by how it plays on my Athlon 750 with 128 MB RAM, Matrox G400 system, I suspect not.
If all they're going to support is Nvidia, that's fine, but they should SAY SO on the system requirements page. The only thing it says is OpenGL card with 4 Meg video memory. Even though I meet these requirements easily, I don't consider the game playable.
On my hardware configuration described above, the framerate sometimes drops inexplicably from (subjective guess) 15 down to 2 fps for several seconds at a time at random moments during the game. That's no fun when you're in the middle of a battle.
On the default quality settings, the graphics themselves are nothing to rave about either. Chunky polygons reminiscent of pre-3d accelerated flight simulators. Abrupt and unnatural changes in shading. It reminds me of old DOS VGA games from the 386 era. (Sometimes even the immediately surrounding terrain flickers when I turn my head around. Not cool.) The graphics are that bad, yet it STILL can't hit even a fraction of the framerate of Quake3? Pathetic.
Based on what I've heard, it does run great if you have an Nvidia. Maybe one of these days, I'll go out and buy one for myself. (Based on what little I _have_ been able to do, the Tribes 2 gameplay does seem very cool.) Until then, it's just taking up space on my hard drive though.
So, to summarize, a Warning to non-Nvidia users: Unless you plan to switch video cards, don't bother with this one. Try Heavy Gear 2, or any of Loki's other cool titles instead.
This being the first I had heard of this film, I was intrigued by Katz's review, so I went to search Yahoo to find out when it was playing. I figured that if Carrie-Anne Moss was in it, the film couldn't be too obscure.
Not a single one of the nearby multiplexes is running it. WTF? A more extensive search revealed that it is in fact playing the art house downtown, as well as one in one of the smaller theatres in an adjacent suburb.
<rampant over-zealous conspiracy theory>
Could this be yet another attempt by the corporate power elite to keep the really good stuff away from the American masses? Every other review I looked at said it was great, yet they seem to be intent on hiding it away. Oh well. I guess I should have expected such.
</rampant over-zealous conspiracy theory>
Personally, I think I'll make the drive out to watch it.
Judging by the comments here, it looks like there are a lot who have had similar experiences.
Having been in a similar situation myself, I think the reason for the frustration goes beyond simple convenience (although that certainly would play a role).
I'm guessing that if a lot of Linux users are like me, most of us did use DOS/Windows/[insert inferior platform of your choice] earlier in our hobby computing experience. Then, when we found something that was so much better, we thought, "Why haven't I been using this all along? It's so much better, does all the stuff I need it to do, all the source is available, AND it's FREE!" (as in beer, because upon initial introduction, we probably haven't quite yet learned the concept of free as in speech.)
Then (speaking from personal experience here), one walks into an educational institution with the mindset of having discovered these great tools which cost nothing and blow the $100/copy commercial-ware out of the water (in some areas, but maybe not all). We soon discover that many in the organization -- especially the ones making the crucial decisions -- are simply NOT INTERESTED, despite all the advantages. This can be quite befuddling.
After all, we managed to switch to what we think is a far superior solution. We took the time and effort to repartition our hard drives, read the HOWTOs, tweak the modelines in our XF86Config, recompile our kernel, and twiddle with the rc files to get everything perfect. And we are very pleased with the result! Therefore, we wonder why they seem too stupid and short-sighted to do the same?
This is especially true if you believe that open source/free software is the way of the future. Who wants to be stuck learning how to train dinosaurs, when the dinosaurs will all be extinct in ten years?
That said, I do believe that I personally learned more about writing portable code as a result of having been forced to make all my stuff also work under VC++. As one of the other commenters also mentioned, I also discovered to an even greater degree why I find it so much more pleasant to work under Linux.;)
That's great for window manager settings, but the tough part is applications. The icons under Netscape 4.x would become hideously small, as would text on a lot of these sites that hard code font size (heck, it even gets hard to read on "normal" monitors when you jack up the resolution).
Maybe if you're only using gtk/qt based apps, someone could throw together a theme to size up their widgets. Anyone know if the theme support is flexible enough to allow an easy scaling up of all apps that use these toolkits?
I am in full agreement with you. Ultimately, the way to get the message through to these people is with the almighty dollar.
The main problem I see here is that so many people, including my geek friends, including myself for that matter, have made movies such an integral part of our lives that breaking that habit is a real challenge. I mean, going to the theatre has become a primary source of entertainment. Current movies are very often the topic of casual social conversation. It's like abandoning an entire cultural element. Not easy.
When people are getting arrested, and their homes raided, it's certainly time to do something though. Boycotting seems to me to be the best way ordinary folks can get the message across, even if it means making sacrifices.
How many of us are going to discontinue, or at least decrease our movie viewing because of these actions. If we are, perhaps it would be a good idea to tell somebody about it.
I normally post a movielog on my web page, detailing every theatrical release I see. After these recent events, I've decided to start an Anti-Movielog, in which I will record all the movies I don't see, but otherwise would have if these outrages had not occured.
I just got to thinking, why not implement it on a massive scale? How many people who normally go to movies are actually planning to boycott? If there's an appreciable number, wouldn't it be cool to have a web page where people could go and tell everyone exactly which movies they're not seeing on what dates. Then we could keep a running total to show the movie industry exactly how much money they're costing themselves.
Of course, keeping it honest could be a potential problem. We wouldn't want the hypothetical database to be Slashdotted and the polls stuffed by repeat voters, or people who wouldn't have seen the movies anyway. Still, it's an idea to think about. I'd like to know anyone else has ideas about this. If there's enough interest, I'd be willing to help out on such a project.
He has the power of veto and pardon. [emphasis mine]
Say, do you think he would pardon all the people rotting in jails on drug charges? That, in and of itself, could shake things up quite a bit. Interesting...
You would not have the right to alter and redistribute Office itself. But you do have the right to create software which can read the Word file format (which has been done with varying degrees of success, despite Microsoft's attempts to obfuscate it).
I think that's closer to what the DVD hackers are attempting to do. AFAIK, they're not copying or altering licensed Windows players; they're creating their own from scratch, using decryption keys obtained by other people who looked at the Xing player for Windows.
I think the problem with most corporate big media sites is that they use flashy graphics, javascript, shockwave, etc, to compensate for a lack of real content.
Having just spent a few minutes browsing around the now accessible fox.com, I'm glad they decided to let users of non-monopoly platforms in, but find the site woefully lacking in information that's worth reading. Certainly not anything I want to wade through 10 minutes of frame-ridden, bandwidth hogging animations to get to.
If I want to read about The X Files, there are dozens of fan sites with better information delivered in a more efficient manner. Image galleries, episode summaries, audio and video clips, cast and crew bios, and guess what? Users aren't required to traverse through piles of junk to get to it.
Javascript is fine in limited doses, when used well, but the glut of it at sites such as fox.com makes me want to leave and never come back.
I suspect the real reason Fox continues to harrass their biggest supporters is that they are jealous of fan sites getting more traffic than they do. Maybe instead of trying to suppress people, they should look at why amateurs are more popular than they are, and try to learn something from it. Don't put down others; improve yourself! They'd be better off if they did.
Well, at least their web designers are trying, and I can't fault them for that. Their lawyers, on the other hand... grrr.
Then just have everybody get a web browser that automatically recognizes urls even if they aren't within an anchor tag, and Bingo! The lawyers' attempts at curtailing free speech are effectively nullified.
Of course, that just goes to show how idiotic the whole issue is. If only more people in the legal/judiciary professions had half a clue...
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Looking at the comments, especially near the top, there's a whole bunch of ACs repeatedly misrepresenting the issue as one of piracy, not compatibility or fair use.
The paranoid side of me tends to think there might be some astroturfing going on here, but then again, it's probably just the usual parade of trolls with too much time on their hands.
This is only going to get worse if we can't get these nasty laws to stop getting passed, and repeal the already existing bad ones. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
What's next? A ban on disseminating knowledge about the internals of the Real protocol? Oh, and while we're at it, we better make sure nobody knows how TCP/IP works, cause then they could use a packet sniffer to capture copyrighted data.
Question for lawyers: If this nonsense stands, does that mean VCRs could also be made illegal? By the same rational, tv stations could sue Magnavox for enabling copyright infringers. Maybe it's just as well VCRs were invented when they were, so they could become established before the copyright Nazis took over.
I was curious as to how it was coming, so I downloaded it and took it for a spin (this brings the total of different browsers currently executing on my system to three). Slashdot loaded ok, and so did a few other sites I checked on that I typically visit, so I'd say it's coming along.
Here were my general impressions, based on an admittedly brief and superficial examination.
Plusses:
Loading was very quick
The interface was clean. Good use of QT widgets.
Small download. No hassles.
The stylesheet examples I tried worked. Can't say so much for Netscape 4.X
Negatives:
Several features were missing. When I tried to change the zoom, or tile windows, nothing happened.
No png support.:( I noticed this immediately, because my web page makes heavy use of them.
Closed source. Unfortunately, I don't expect this to be remedied anytime soon.
Overall, it looks like Opera will become a viable option, and Mozilla is gonna have some competition, which is good.. The browser future on Linux looks bright.:)
Posted with M12, cause Opera's CGI submit didn't seem to want to work.
P.S. I doubt cnn.com is a pinnacle of standards compliant authoring. Most of these commercial news sites put out horribley bungled html. A pity.
Slashdot Mirror
At least they have the best online music store in the world. That's got to count for something.
Try TvTorrents. They've got Battlestar Gallactica episodes several weeks ahead of the Scifi channel. (Just make sure to look for "Battlestar Gallactica (2004)" to avoid confusion with the old series.) Good stuff.
Sounds like you might want to drop out too. Welcome to the club. There are more of us appearing every day.
Actually, a lot of the songs iRate gets come from mp3.com.au, which is unaffiliated with mp3.com. Those won't be disappearing. Try adding this:
cat trackdatabase.xml | perl -pe 's/></>\n</g' | fgrep mp3.com | grep -v mp3.com.au | wc -lI find this whole thread quite hilarious. Let's watch that karma burn, baby....
At least in 0.9.3, you can use CTRL + and CTRL - to resize the fonts on the fly. Comes in very handy for pages like those.
If you have an account on kuro5hin, you can go into user preferences to change the font face and size. I did that first thing. Makes reading much easier.
How 'bout stopping the microscopically unreadable fonts? It's websites like that which aim to give the world population a nasty case of eyestrain.
In a perfect world, site authors would be kind enough to respect their readers' eyes. For now, thank goodness for Mozilla's CTRL + feature. Sheesh.
If all they're going to support is Nvidia, that's fine, but they should SAY SO on the system requirements page. The only thing it says is OpenGL card with 4 Meg video memory. Even though I meet these requirements easily, I don't consider the game playable.
On my hardware configuration described above, the framerate sometimes drops inexplicably from (subjective guess) 15 down to 2 fps for several seconds at a time at random moments during the game. That's no fun when you're in the middle of a battle.
On the default quality settings, the graphics themselves are nothing to rave about either. Chunky polygons reminiscent of pre-3d accelerated flight simulators. Abrupt and unnatural changes in shading. It reminds me of old DOS VGA games from the 386 era. (Sometimes even the immediately surrounding terrain flickers when I turn my head around. Not cool.) The graphics are that bad, yet it STILL can't hit even a fraction of the framerate of Quake3? Pathetic.
Based on what I've heard, it does run great if you have an Nvidia. Maybe one of these days, I'll go out and buy one for myself. (Based on what little I _have_ been able to do, the Tribes 2 gameplay does seem very cool.) Until then, it's just taking up space on my hard drive though.
So, to summarize, a Warning to non-Nvidia users: Unless you plan to switch video cards, don't bother with this one. Try Heavy Gear 2, or any of Loki's other cool titles instead.
Not a single one of the nearby multiplexes is running it. WTF? A more extensive search revealed that it is in fact playing the art house downtown, as well as one in one of the smaller theatres in an adjacent suburb.
<rampant over-zealous conspiracy theory>
Could this be yet another attempt by the corporate power elite to keep the really good stuff away from the American masses? Every other review I looked at said it was great, yet they seem to be intent on hiding it away. Oh well. I guess I should have expected such.
</rampant over-zealous conspiracy theory>
Personally, I think I'll make the drive out to watch it.
How is this a troll? It is relevant. It is on-topic. It is a good reply to the parent comment. Somebody give the moderators a clue.
Judging by the comments here, it looks like there are a lot who have had similar experiences.
Having been in a similar situation myself, I think the reason for the frustration goes beyond simple convenience (although that certainly would play a role).
I'm guessing that if a lot of Linux users are like me, most of us did use DOS/Windows/[insert inferior platform of your choice] earlier in our hobby computing experience. Then, when we found something that was so much better, we thought, "Why haven't I been using this all along? It's so much better, does all the stuff I need it to do, all the source is available, AND it's FREE!" (as in beer, because upon initial introduction, we probably haven't quite yet learned the concept of free as in speech.)
Then (speaking from personal experience here), one walks into an educational institution with the mindset of having discovered these great tools which cost nothing and blow the $100/copy commercial-ware out of the water (in some areas, but maybe not all). We soon discover that many in the organization -- especially the ones making the crucial decisions -- are simply NOT INTERESTED, despite all the advantages. This can be quite befuddling.
After all, we managed to switch to what we think is a far superior solution. We took the time and effort to repartition our hard drives, read the HOWTOs, tweak the modelines in our XF86Config, recompile our kernel, and twiddle with the rc files to get everything perfect. And we are very pleased with the result! Therefore, we wonder why they seem too stupid and short-sighted to do the same?
This is especially true if you believe that open source/free software is the way of the future. Who wants to be stuck learning how to train dinosaurs, when the dinosaurs will all be extinct in ten years?
That said, I do believe that I personally learned more about writing portable code as a result of having been forced to make all my stuff also work under VC++. As one of the other commenters also mentioned, I also discovered to an even greater degree why I find it so much more pleasant to work under Linux. ;)
Maybe if you're only using gtk/qt based apps, someone could throw together a theme to size up their widgets. Anyone know if the theme support is flexible enough to allow an easy scaling up of all apps that use these toolkits?
The main problem I see here is that so many people, including my geek friends, including myself for that matter, have made movies such an integral part of our lives that breaking that habit is a real challenge. I mean, going to the theatre has become a primary source of entertainment. Current movies are very often the topic of casual social conversation. It's like abandoning an entire cultural element. Not easy.
When people are getting arrested, and their homes raided, it's certainly time to do something though. Boycotting seems to me to be the best way ordinary folks can get the message across, even if it means making sacrifices.
I normally post a movielog on my web page, detailing every theatrical release I see. After these recent events, I've decided to start an Anti-Movielog, in which I will record all the movies I don't see, but otherwise would have if these outrages had not occured.
I just got to thinking, why not implement it on a massive scale? How many people who normally go to movies are actually planning to boycott? If there's an appreciable number, wouldn't it be cool to have a web page where people could go and tell everyone exactly which movies they're not seeing on what dates. Then we could keep a running total to show the movie industry exactly how much money they're costing themselves.
Of course, keeping it honest could be a potential problem. We wouldn't want the hypothetical database to be Slashdotted and the polls stuffed by repeat voters, or people who wouldn't have seen the movies anyway. Still, it's an idea to think about. I'd like to know anyone else has ideas about this. If there's enough interest, I'd be willing to help out on such a project.
I think that's closer to what the DVD hackers are attempting to do. AFAIK, they're not copying or altering licensed Windows players; they're creating their own from scratch, using decryption keys obtained by other people who looked at the Xing player for Windows.
Having just spent a few minutes browsing around the now accessible fox.com, I'm glad they decided to let users of non-monopoly platforms in, but find the site woefully lacking in information that's worth reading. Certainly not anything I want to wade through 10 minutes of frame-ridden, bandwidth hogging animations to get to.
If I want to read about The X Files, there are dozens of fan sites with better information delivered in a more efficient manner. Image galleries, episode summaries, audio and video clips, cast and crew bios, and guess what? Users aren't required to traverse through piles of junk to get to it.
Javascript is fine in limited doses, when used well, but the glut of it at sites such as fox.com makes me want to leave and never come back.
I suspect the real reason Fox continues to harrass their biggest supporters is that they are jealous of fan sites getting more traffic than they do. Maybe instead of trying to suppress people, they should look at why amateurs are more popular than they are, and try to learn something from it. Don't put down others; improve yourself! They'd be better off if they did.
Well, at least their web designers are trying, and I can't fault them for that. Their lawyers, on the other hand... grrr.
Please turn off the so-called MS ?smart quotes?. They?re very annoying to read, if you get my drift.
Of course, that just goes to show how idiotic the whole issue is. If only more people in the legal/judiciary professions had half a clue...
The paranoid side of me tends to think there might be some astroturfing going on here, but then again, it's probably just the usual parade of trolls with too much time on their hands.
Don't you ever get the urge to tell the license lawyers to stop shouting? ;)
Festivus! A happy Festivus to all! May you survive the feats of strength and emerge victorious.
What's next? A ban on disseminating knowledge about the internals of the Real protocol? Oh, and while we're at it, we better make sure nobody knows how TCP/IP works, cause then they could use a packet sniffer to capture copyrighted data.
Question for lawyers: If this nonsense stands, does that mean VCRs could also be made illegal? By the same rational, tv stations could sue Magnavox for enabling copyright infringers. Maybe it's just as well VCRs were invented when they were, so they could become established before the copyright Nazis took over.
Actually, most congressmen are lawyers by trade.
Here were my general impressions, based on an admittedly brief and superficial examination.
Plusses:
- Loading was very quick
- The interface was clean. Good use of QT widgets.
- Small download. No hassles.
- The stylesheet examples I tried worked. Can't say so much for Netscape 4.X
Negatives:Overall, it looks like Opera will become a viable option, and Mozilla is gonna have some competition, which is good.. The browser future on Linux looks bright. :)
Posted with M12, cause Opera's CGI submit didn't seem to want to work.
P.S. I doubt cnn.com is a pinnacle of standards compliant authoring. Most of these commercial news sites put out horribley bungled html. A pity.