Interesting, I work in downtown SF and live in the East Bay and have no problem getting a full day out of a charge on my Tbolt. I picked up the phone around launch, and on the original stock firmware, battery life was pretty abysmal. I'm currently running a custom rom (Liquid Thunderbread 2.6), and now easily get a day on normal use (including roughly an hour of continuous browsing on BART each workday). My wife has the same phone and can get a couple days (she works in the East Bay and uses the Internet much less than I). She also uses a custom rom (Liquid Smooth 3.2), so that may be the difference (I believe both our phones use the "SMARTASS" governor and a clemsyn kernel).
I've been running various flavors of Linux as my primary OS on laptops for roughly a decade, and I highly recommend the Thinkpad line of laptops (originally by IBM, now by Lenovo). Thinkpads tend to use mostly Intel parts, and Intel has great support for open drivers (see intellinuxgraphics.org or intellinuxwireless.org). There's also a great community at ThinkWiki (http://www.thinkwiki.org) which focuses on Linux on Thinkpads. My current personal laptop is a T400, and everything works (suspend to RAM, hibernate, sound, video, WiFi, etc.). My wife also has a Thinkpad, a SL400, and likewise has no problems running Linux (it actually runs much better than Vista which it came with). I was actually able to get my T400 from Lenovo's Outlet without Windows installed (it came with FreeDOS), so I even got out of having to pay the Windows tax. The Thinkpad is Lenovo's business line, and the build quality (on their T & W series in particular) is fantastic, and personally I can't live without their Trackpoint.
I have found that if you don't mind doing your homework ahead of time (mainly checking parts on the "customize your machine" section of OEM sites), it's fairly trivial to find a machine that fully supports Linux. With that said, Thinkpads are still my top recommendation (followed by Dell's Latitude line which also has a Trackpoint). I have no connection with Lenovo; I'm just a happy customer. For the record, I run Gentoo on my T400 and my wife's SL400 (she previously ran Ubuntu on it).
I too am very satisfied with my gTab which I picked up for around $280 from Woot in March. However one thing to note though is that Viewsonic is almost certainly not going to provide an official Honeycomb build. This is an issue because we need some binary drivers to get hardware acceleration working in third party HC based ROM's. Personally I've stuck with the Gingerbread based VEGAn-TAB ROM mentioned by the OP (and overall I'm happy), but if I were purchasing a new tablet today I would opt for one with an official HC build by the vendor.
Well the actual quote was, "I really think from an end-user perspective and a third-party-developer perspective GNOME and KDE are different operating systems. As much as MeeGo is a different operating system," and to an extent I can see his point from a end-user perspective. Obviously the underpinnings are the same, but for non-technical users who only use the GUI and never see/care what's below,l it's a significantly different experience. Especially with how Gnome and KDE these days even handle interacting with hardware slightly differently (e.g. GVFS v.s. KIO).
For example my wife currently runs Gnome 2.32 on Gentoo (which I maintain). Switching her to KDE would be a much more significant change than say switching to a different disto running Gnome 2.32. I know this to be the case because I originally had her running Ubuntu before we were married, and the switch to Gentoo (but maintaining Gnome) was painless for her.
For folks who've never heard of Zediva, they apparently let customers stream newly released movies. Their business model was that the customers rent the DVD and DVD player which are both located at their facility, and the customers access them over the Internet. Clever approach, but this shutdown should be of no surprise.
More importantly, Android applications are all designed with a touch based user interface in mind. One of the major issues with previous generations of tablets was that they relied on traditional applications which could work with a touch interface, but they were never designed for it. This made using the device for non-basic functions a headache. I remember the Oqo quite well, and as a geek I wanted one (or a Sharp Zarus...). However as an engineer and end user, I knew it was never practical and would be primarily an expensive toy.
I'm very glad to see programs like this. One of the reasons I chose a Nook over the Kindle was because my local library supported eBook lending. However I wish there was a way to donate eBooks I've purchased to the library (similar to how we can donate physical books). Do any online book sellers provide such an option (allow you to transfer the license)?
While I applaud this effort, I have to wonder if enough folks with the requisite skills to do kernel/driver development will be motivated to assist. It was an excellent product with some cool features (ZFS, Zones, Dtrace, Crossbow, etc.), but it was very clear that the vast majority of the development came from paid Sun engineers. The OpenSolaris community was never anywhere near the size of the Linux community, and even with Linux a significant portion comes from corporations (see "The Myth of the Isolated Kernel Hacker" from last year: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/08/20/1342223). I really do hope OpenSolaris continues (or Oracle changes the license to be GPL compatible), but at this point I wouldn't be basing any new projects on the platform.
Actually, I stick by my statement, "as long as it takes," because:
a) It's an open source effort and if I want to use it, even though they haven't officially released it, I can do it any time I want. In fact I have already tried it using the Gentoo Gnome overlay, and I do agree it's not ready.
b) They're continuing to work on Gnome 2.XX which is actually my primary desktop. This is very different than the KDE4 situation which basically caused the excellent KDE 3.X DE to be unsupported.
Now I do agree that repeated product delays are not a good sign (although I wouldn't go so far as to necessarily call it a, "sign of ineptness or a demonstration of gross incompetence"). Fortunately with open source software, I can determine for myself when a product is ready for my use regardless of an official release. There may be consequences with that choice (e.g. a redesign causes a significant break or lack support), but it's still my choice.
I truly hope the Gnome folks observed the KDE4 fiasco and learned some good lessons. They really need to make sure the product they release is stable and doesn't include significant feature regressions (although knowing Gnome, they'll probably call them usability enhancements...). There's certain types of software that can be unstable, and a desktop environment isn't one of them. I'm very much in favor of them holding off as long as it takes.
I'm hoping for Skies to come out as well if only for it to get more exposure (and possibly draw support for a sequel). Skies is one of my favorite RPG's out there (up there with the Genesis version of Shadowrun), and I'd love to see a sequel. The story & environment was fairly original, the plot was interesting and gameplay mechanics fun -- it was really a solid title. I think there's a little hope because the SoA designers have done small things like having the main characters make a cameo in Valkyria Chronicles.
If they do bring it back, I'm curious if they'll make a way to play that little minigame that you played on the Dreamcast VMU. You needed a reward from that to get the final form of a particular "weapon" in the game.
For the last several releases, Ubuntu has dealt very poorly with Intel video cards. Now to be fair, this isn't entirely their fault; they were impacted by the switch to DRI2, GEM, Modesetting, etc. However they haven't handled it gracefully. I have three systems -- HTPC (Dell Studio Hybrid), laptop (Lenovo SL400), and a netbook (Acer Aspire One) -- that use the i915 driver, and both 9.04 and 9.10 were horrible (no 3D acceleration, poor 2D performance, etc.). In fact 9.10 (and possibly 9.04) required me to pass a kernel parameter to disable modesetting (i915.modeset=0) to even get to a GUI to install.
I realize there were workarounds and hacks, to get reasonable performance from the Intel cards with the previous two releases, but nothing I found seemed simple or fully addressed the issue. This was largely due to some of the fixes requiring newer kernels and since Ubuntu isn't a rolling release distro, that would make fixing things much more difficult. My personal laptop (T400, also with a i915 video card) runs Gentoo, and I had fixed all the Intel video issues several months earlier.
Fortunately 10.04 seems to have gotten everything back to working well again, and hopefully all the changes will be worth it in the future.
Well, the "article" is a bit of disappointment, however I've been in the same situation and here is how I approach the problem (way more music then will fit on my 8GB touch or smartphone): I have a linux server (Dell Studio Hybrid running Gentoo) that I always leave on which has a copy of my music repository. On it I run Music Player Daemon (MPD) with Icecast as one of the outputs. I connect to MPD via a simple web client (there are several: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients) from my touch, build my playlist, then point Safari to my Icecast server's IP/port which opens the media player and I can listen to MPD anywhere I have WiFi. I'm not sure what the minimum bandwidth required is, but even my smartphones (previously Samsung Saga on WM 6.1, now Droid Eris running 2.1) work with this system. For the record I used TCPMP on WM 6.1 (Windows Media Player mobile worked too, but that app is horrible) and now use I use A Online Radio for the Droid (oddly enough, the built in media player on Android doesn't do streams and it's touch to find an Android streaming client that let's you specify any address/port you want).
I'm sorry, but one person typing a short message, is not going to tell us anything significant. Furthermore we don't know his background (e.g. what types of phones/PDA's he's used in the past), or how "fat" his fingers are. At best all we know is what phone he's best at right now. The performance of the same person when they first used the phone compared to that same person after owning that type of phone for a year will differ significantly.
If someone plans to type on their phone enough for the difference of a few seconds to matter, then they really need to compare the phones in person themselves. A significantly larger sample of people ideally who have never used a phone with a full keyboard may give some idea of which styles tend to work better on average, but that's about the most information you'll get. Whether it works best (and is comfortable) for you is something you need to try yourself.
There's actually a RPM in the Linux forums(which I moderate) for Fedora 12, and compiling it yourself isn't too complex. You need a lot of the -devel packages, but if you take a look at the RPM's spec, that should give you a good idea of what you need.
Previously the web site had a great intro video that actually explained it fairly well. I'm not quite sure when that was changed, but since I've been running the alpha for roughly a year now, I can try taking a stab at it.
Boxee's goal is to be a "social media player" where you can watch media from various sources, see what your friends are watching, and let your friends know what you're watching. By "media" it's referring to TV, movies, music, and pictures. The source of most of the content comes from the Internet (although it definitely supports offline and local network content). Boxee provides a framework to create native applications that allow aggregating and viewing of the online media (basically XBMC plugins if you're familiar with that app), for example there's apps for Hulu, Pandora, Flickr, etc. Boxee automatically monitors what you and your friends watch, and allows you to browse the history of it as well. Boxee also offers other cool features like grabbing metadata for local content. E.g. if it detects a ripped copy of Season 1 of The Office, it will grab screen shots and descriptions of each episode from IMDB.
Personally I've found Boxee's primary benefit is for aggregating media. With the new version, I can search a TV show title and it comes up with all the episodes I can stream regardless of the source (e.g. episodes from Hulu, nbc.com, etc.). I'm not a big fan of the social aspect, but it's not a deal breaker (I just ignore it). So far I've been very impressed with both the alpha and beta releases and would definitely recommend giving the software a go.
I'm glad to see they've finally started offering a native 64 bit version for Linux. Previously, I had been providing patches/scripts to allow folks to compile it themselves on their forums (I'm a moderator on their Linux forum). There's currently a RPM on the Linux forum for Fedora 12, but as I don't run Fedora any more, I can't vouch for it. I have personally compiled the latest Beta on Gentoo ~amd64 and it works fine with some minor tweaks (I plan to submit an ebuild to Gentoo Bug 258082). One thing to note if you do compile from source is that their XULRunner included in the flashplayer portion of their source is missing 64 bit shared objects (this causes flash to break). I've submitted a bug to get the XULRunner updated, but haven't heard anything.
I've ran the closed Beta for the last month and so far it's very promising. I just wish Boxee's development process was more open.
The biggest benefit I see of the Ion is for small form factor desktops to support VDPAU (an API for hardware offloading of video decoding). Majority of the recent small form factor systems (e.g. Dell Studio Hybrid) I've looked into use the Intel 4500 which does support XvMC, but at least in Linux VDPAU is much more usable (larger list of supported codecs, etc.). I moderate the Boxee Linux forum, and I'm seeing a lot of posters using Ion based HTPC's.
I agree, and from the article (I know...), it seems like there's already some effects. She's quoted as say, "They were so nice to me," which implies the cops were being decent (nice to hear), and the judge released her on a personal recognizance bond (so she didn't have to pay bail or a bail bondsman, assuming she shows at court). She did get two days of jail, but I definitely hope this gets some good media exposure as I believe most folks are going to side with her even if it's not the letter of the law. I'd be interested to see if anyone more familiar with this law could shed some light on its details. Best case would be if she could get off on a technicality (e.g. the amount filmed was too short to count for the felony), but even then she still has to live with being arrested.
Actually I've found last.fm's recommendation system works extremely well; so well in fact that I constantly have a tab open to it when I'm browsing music stores like eMusic (eventually I want to write a little app for this purpose using last.fm's API, but I digress). For those unaware, last.fm users submit what they're listening to through automated plugins (and the supported apps list is huge and very platform independent, I personally use both Amarok 1.4 and MPD); one of the things last.fm does with this music is identifies your "neighbors" (people with similar lastes, i.e. 8 of our top 10 artists are identical). I've found that one of the best ways to find new music is by browsing what my neighbors are listening to and checking out any of their top bands that I'm not familiar with. They also list related artists by correlating this information (e.g. the majority of users who have Band A as a favorite artist also like Band B). Another useful feature is being able to check what an artists most played songs are (great for when it's an artist you never heard of). With that said, I'm definitely interested in seeing what recommendations come from this UCSD team (and not just because I'm an alumnae) as I'm always interested in finding new artists, especially smaller and local ones.
I agree, and after reading the article (I know...) I doubt Mr. Stross has even seen the show. Some of his issues are the lack of story arcs or lasting impact to the universe, yet the show had both. The series had major story arcs with actions from the first and second season directly impacting what occurs in the final one. You definitely got the feeling that the major points of the series had been planned years in advance. Likewise the fate of several races varied tremendously with major effects to the surrounding galaxy (effectively the universe for the races in the show). Babylon 5 also took an interesting approach in not making humanity some überpowerful utopian society, in fact it was much closer to the opposite (earth wasn't even close to a powerhouse in the galaxy, and its political climate approached dictatorship through the series). I get the feeling that he has a bit too much prejudice against non-hard science fiction to fairly evaluate several of the shows.
Coincidentally, the Ask Slashdot regarding SciFi works for students lead me to Isaac Asimov's cool short story "The Last Question" (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html which has an interesting perspective on this...
Yeah, that through me off as well, but the Yahoo article linked in the summary clarifies, "The Arm processor is a secondary CPU that sits alongside an Intel low-voltage," so it sounds similar to the "Instant-On" provided by SplashTop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SplashTop on some Asus machines (e.g. Eee Box).
I have to agree, although personally I don't think we need to throw 3D all the way out. Something along the lines of what Capcom did with Street Fighter IV would be pretty awesome. I've said it before, and will say it again. I wish these classic series would start sticking to their roots. When will companies realize it's not in their best interest to reinvent the wheel when it comes to classic series? I'm dying for modern remakes of several classic titles (Raiden, Gunstar Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, etc.), and I'm confident that doing them 2D is not only the cheaper approach, but will lead to the superior product.
This is an excellent point and probably generally the case these days. I would presume most colleges are fine with Linux under the condition that you don't expect support from them. Some colleges explicitly support certain Linux flavors. For example my younger brother is a freshmen at CalTech and was attending a summer program which he brought his laptop running Ubuntu 8.10 down for. There were instructions for XP, Vista, OS X, and Ubuntu (I'm not sure about others, but at least Ubuntu was there).
I attended UCSD from '01-'05, and switched to running Linux full time on my laptop somewhere around the end of my sophomore year. I was an engineering major, and I didn't find Linux significantly impeded me. Campus WiFi worked fine, and they even offered a Linux VPN client. For the rare case I needed Windows, I'd just go to one of the dozens of campus libraries or labs. I'd be a little concerned if it was a small liberal arts college, but these days finding a Windows PC on the rare case you need something Windows only isn't much of an issue.
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Interesting, I work in downtown SF and live in the East Bay and have no problem getting a full day out of a charge on my Tbolt. I picked up the phone around launch, and on the original stock firmware, battery life was pretty abysmal. I'm currently running a custom rom (Liquid Thunderbread 2.6), and now easily get a day on normal use (including roughly an hour of continuous browsing on BART each workday). My wife has the same phone and can get a couple days (she works in the East Bay and uses the Internet much less than I). She also uses a custom rom (Liquid Smooth 3.2), so that may be the difference (I believe both our phones use the "SMARTASS" governor and a clemsyn kernel).
I've been running various flavors of Linux as my primary OS on laptops for roughly a decade, and I highly recommend the Thinkpad line of laptops (originally by IBM, now by Lenovo). Thinkpads tend to use mostly Intel parts, and Intel has great support for open drivers (see intellinuxgraphics.org or intellinuxwireless.org). There's also a great community at ThinkWiki (http://www.thinkwiki.org) which focuses on Linux on Thinkpads. My current personal laptop is a T400, and everything works (suspend to RAM, hibernate, sound, video, WiFi, etc.). My wife also has a Thinkpad, a SL400, and likewise has no problems running Linux (it actually runs much better than Vista which it came with). I was actually able to get my T400 from Lenovo's Outlet without Windows installed (it came with FreeDOS), so I even got out of having to pay the Windows tax. The Thinkpad is Lenovo's business line, and the build quality (on their T & W series in particular) is fantastic, and personally I can't live without their Trackpoint.
I have found that if you don't mind doing your homework ahead of time (mainly checking parts on the "customize your machine" section of OEM sites), it's fairly trivial to find a machine that fully supports Linux. With that said, Thinkpads are still my top recommendation (followed by Dell's Latitude line which also has a Trackpoint). I have no connection with Lenovo; I'm just a happy customer. For the record, I run Gentoo on my T400 and my wife's SL400 (she previously ran Ubuntu on it).
I too am very satisfied with my gTab which I picked up for around $280 from Woot in March. However one thing to note though is that Viewsonic is almost certainly not going to provide an official Honeycomb build. This is an issue because we need some binary drivers to get hardware acceleration working in third party HC based ROM's. Personally I've stuck with the Gingerbread based VEGAn-TAB ROM mentioned by the OP (and overall I'm happy), but if I were purchasing a new tablet today I would opt for one with an official HC build by the vendor.
Well the actual quote was, "I really think from an end-user perspective and a third-party-developer perspective GNOME and KDE are different operating systems. As much as MeeGo is a different operating system," and to an extent I can see his point from a end-user perspective. Obviously the underpinnings are the same, but for non-technical users who only use the GUI and never see/care what's below,l it's a significantly different experience. Especially with how Gnome and KDE these days even handle interacting with hardware slightly differently (e.g. GVFS v.s. KIO).
For example my wife currently runs Gnome 2.32 on Gentoo (which I maintain). Switching her to KDE would be a much more significant change than say switching to a different disto running Gnome 2.32. I know this to be the case because I originally had her running Ubuntu before we were married, and the switch to Gentoo (but maintaining Gnome) was painless for her.
For folks who've never heard of Zediva, they apparently let customers stream newly released movies. Their business model was that the customers rent the DVD and DVD player which are both located at their facility, and the customers access them over the Internet. Clever approach, but this shutdown should be of no surprise.
More importantly, Android applications are all designed with a touch based user interface in mind. One of the major issues with previous generations of tablets was that they relied on traditional applications which could work with a touch interface, but they were never designed for it. This made using the device for non-basic functions a headache. I remember the Oqo quite well, and as a geek I wanted one (or a Sharp Zarus...). However as an engineer and end user, I knew it was never practical and would be primarily an expensive toy.
I'm very glad to see programs like this. One of the reasons I chose a Nook over the Kindle was because my local library supported eBook lending. However I wish there was a way to donate eBooks I've purchased to the library (similar to how we can donate physical books). Do any online book sellers provide such an option (allow you to transfer the license)?
While I applaud this effort, I have to wonder if enough folks with the requisite skills to do kernel/driver development will be motivated to assist. It was an excellent product with some cool features (ZFS, Zones, Dtrace, Crossbow, etc.), but it was very clear that the vast majority of the development came from paid Sun engineers. The OpenSolaris community was never anywhere near the size of the Linux community, and even with Linux a significant portion comes from corporations (see "The Myth of the Isolated Kernel Hacker" from last year: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/08/20/1342223). I really do hope OpenSolaris continues (or Oracle changes the license to be GPL compatible), but at this point I wouldn't be basing any new projects on the platform.
Actually, I stick by my statement, "as long as it takes," because:
a) It's an open source effort and if I want to use it, even though they haven't officially released it, I can do it any time I want. In fact I have already tried it using the Gentoo Gnome overlay, and I do agree it's not ready.
b) They're continuing to work on Gnome 2.XX which is actually my primary desktop. This is very different than the KDE4 situation which basically caused the excellent KDE 3.X DE to be unsupported.
Now I do agree that repeated product delays are not a good sign (although I wouldn't go so far as to necessarily call it a, "sign of ineptness or a demonstration of gross incompetence"). Fortunately with open source software, I can determine for myself when a product is ready for my use regardless of an official release. There may be consequences with that choice (e.g. a redesign causes a significant break or lack support), but it's still my choice.
I truly hope the Gnome folks observed the KDE4 fiasco and learned some good lessons. They really need to make sure the product they release is stable and doesn't include significant feature regressions (although knowing Gnome, they'll probably call them usability enhancements...). There's certain types of software that can be unstable, and a desktop environment isn't one of them. I'm very much in favor of them holding off as long as it takes.
I'm hoping for Skies to come out as well if only for it to get more exposure (and possibly draw support for a sequel). Skies is one of my favorite RPG's out there (up there with the Genesis version of Shadowrun), and I'd love to see a sequel. The story & environment was fairly original, the plot was interesting and gameplay mechanics fun -- it was really a solid title. I think there's a little hope because the SoA designers have done small things like having the main characters make a cameo in Valkyria Chronicles.
If they do bring it back, I'm curious if they'll make a way to play that little minigame that you played on the Dreamcast VMU. You needed a reward from that to get the final form of a particular "weapon" in the game.
For the last several releases, Ubuntu has dealt very poorly with Intel video cards. Now to be fair, this isn't entirely their fault; they were impacted by the switch to DRI2, GEM, Modesetting, etc. However they haven't handled it gracefully. I have three systems -- HTPC (Dell Studio Hybrid), laptop (Lenovo SL400), and a netbook (Acer Aspire One) -- that use the i915 driver, and both 9.04 and 9.10 were horrible (no 3D acceleration, poor 2D performance, etc.). In fact 9.10 (and possibly 9.04) required me to pass a kernel parameter to disable modesetting (i915.modeset=0) to even get to a GUI to install.
I realize there were workarounds and hacks, to get reasonable performance from the Intel cards with the previous two releases, but nothing I found seemed simple or fully addressed the issue. This was largely due to some of the fixes requiring newer kernels and since Ubuntu isn't a rolling release distro, that would make fixing things much more difficult. My personal laptop (T400, also with a i915 video card) runs Gentoo, and I had fixed all the Intel video issues several months earlier.
Fortunately 10.04 seems to have gotten everything back to working well again, and hopefully all the changes will be worth it in the future.
Well, the "article" is a bit of disappointment, however I've been in the same situation and here is how I approach the problem (way more music then will fit on my 8GB touch or smartphone): I have a linux server (Dell Studio Hybrid running Gentoo) that I always leave on which has a copy of my music repository. On it I run Music Player Daemon (MPD) with Icecast as one of the outputs. I connect to MPD via a simple web client (there are several: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients) from my touch, build my playlist, then point Safari to my Icecast server's IP/port which opens the media player and I can listen to MPD anywhere I have WiFi. I'm not sure what the minimum bandwidth required is, but even my smartphones (previously Samsung Saga on WM 6.1, now Droid Eris running 2.1) work with this system. For the record I used TCPMP on WM 6.1 (Windows Media Player mobile worked too, but that app is horrible) and now use I use A Online Radio for the Droid (oddly enough, the built in media player on Android doesn't do streams and it's touch to find an Android streaming client that let's you specify any address/port you want).
I'm sorry, but one person typing a short message, is not going to tell us anything significant. Furthermore we don't know his background (e.g. what types of phones/PDA's he's used in the past), or how "fat" his fingers are. At best all we know is what phone he's best at right now. The performance of the same person when they first used the phone compared to that same person after owning that type of phone for a year will differ significantly.
If someone plans to type on their phone enough for the difference of a few seconds to matter, then they really need to compare the phones in person themselves. A significantly larger sample of people ideally who have never used a phone with a full keyboard may give some idea of which styles tend to work better on average, but that's about the most information you'll get. Whether it works best (and is comfortable) for you is something you need to try yourself.
There's actually a RPM in the Linux forums(which I moderate) for Fedora 12, and compiling it yourself isn't too complex. You need a lot of the -devel packages, but if you take a look at the RPM's spec, that should give you a good idea of what you need.
Previously the web site had a great intro video that actually explained it fairly well. I'm not quite sure when that was changed, but since I've been running the alpha for roughly a year now, I can try taking a stab at it.
Boxee's goal is to be a "social media player" where you can watch media from various sources, see what your friends are watching, and let your friends know what you're watching. By "media" it's referring to TV, movies, music, and pictures. The source of most of the content comes from the Internet (although it definitely supports offline and local network content). Boxee provides a framework to create native applications that allow aggregating and viewing of the online media (basically XBMC plugins if you're familiar with that app), for example there's apps for Hulu, Pandora, Flickr, etc. Boxee automatically monitors what you and your friends watch, and allows you to browse the history of it as well. Boxee also offers other cool features like grabbing metadata for local content. E.g. if it detects a ripped copy of Season 1 of The Office, it will grab screen shots and descriptions of each episode from IMDB.
Personally I've found Boxee's primary benefit is for aggregating media. With the new version, I can search a TV show title and it comes up with all the episodes I can stream regardless of the source (e.g. episodes from Hulu, nbc.com, etc.). I'm not a big fan of the social aspect, but it's not a deal breaker (I just ignore it). So far I've been very impressed with both the alpha and beta releases and would definitely recommend giving the software a go.
I'm glad to see they've finally started offering a native 64 bit version for Linux. Previously, I had been providing patches/scripts to allow folks to compile it themselves on their forums (I'm a moderator on their Linux forum). There's currently a RPM on the Linux forum for Fedora 12, but as I don't run Fedora any more, I can't vouch for it. I have personally compiled the latest Beta on Gentoo ~amd64 and it works fine with some minor tweaks (I plan to submit an ebuild to Gentoo Bug 258082). One thing to note if you do compile from source is that their XULRunner included in the flashplayer portion of their source is missing 64 bit shared objects (this causes flash to break). I've submitted a bug to get the XULRunner updated, but haven't heard anything.
I've ran the closed Beta for the last month and so far it's very promising. I just wish Boxee's development process was more open.
The biggest benefit I see of the Ion is for small form factor desktops to support VDPAU (an API for hardware offloading of video decoding). Majority of the recent small form factor systems (e.g. Dell Studio Hybrid) I've looked into use the Intel 4500 which does support XvMC, but at least in Linux VDPAU is much more usable (larger list of supported codecs, etc.). I moderate the Boxee Linux forum, and I'm seeing a lot of posters using Ion based HTPC's.
I agree, and from the article (I know...), it seems like there's already some effects. She's quoted as say, "They were so nice to me," which implies the cops were being decent (nice to hear), and the judge released her on a personal recognizance bond (so she didn't have to pay bail or a bail bondsman, assuming she shows at court). She did get two days of jail, but I definitely hope this gets some good media exposure as I believe most folks are going to side with her even if it's not the letter of the law. I'd be interested to see if anyone more familiar with this law could shed some light on its details. Best case would be if she could get off on a technicality (e.g. the amount filmed was too short to count for the felony), but even then she still has to live with being arrested.
Actually I've found last.fm's recommendation system works extremely well; so well in fact that I constantly have a tab open to it when I'm browsing music stores like eMusic (eventually I want to write a little app for this purpose using last.fm's API, but I digress). For those unaware, last.fm users submit what they're listening to through automated plugins (and the supported apps list is huge and very platform independent, I personally use both Amarok 1.4 and MPD); one of the things last.fm does with this music is identifies your "neighbors" (people with similar lastes, i.e. 8 of our top 10 artists are identical). I've found that one of the best ways to find new music is by browsing what my neighbors are listening to and checking out any of their top bands that I'm not familiar with. They also list related artists by correlating this information (e.g. the majority of users who have Band A as a favorite artist also like Band B). Another useful feature is being able to check what an artists most played songs are (great for when it's an artist you never heard of). With that said, I'm definitely interested in seeing what recommendations come from this UCSD team (and not just because I'm an alumnae) as I'm always interested in finding new artists, especially smaller and local ones.
I agree, and after reading the article (I know...) I doubt Mr. Stross has even seen the show. Some of his issues are the lack of story arcs or lasting impact to the universe, yet the show had both. The series had major story arcs with actions from the first and second season directly impacting what occurs in the final one. You definitely got the feeling that the major points of the series had been planned years in advance. Likewise the fate of several races varied tremendously with major effects to the surrounding galaxy (effectively the universe for the races in the show). Babylon 5 also took an interesting approach in not making humanity some überpowerful utopian society, in fact it was much closer to the opposite (earth wasn't even close to a powerhouse in the galaxy, and its political climate approached dictatorship through the series). I get the feeling that he has a bit too much prejudice against non-hard science fiction to fairly evaluate several of the shows.
Coincidentally, the Ask Slashdot regarding SciFi works for students lead me to Isaac Asimov's cool short story "The Last Question" (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html which has an interesting perspective on this...
Yeah, that through me off as well, but the Yahoo article linked in the summary clarifies, "The Arm processor is a secondary CPU that sits alongside an Intel low-voltage," so it sounds similar to the "Instant-On" provided by SplashTop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SplashTop on some Asus machines (e.g. Eee Box).
I have to agree, although personally I don't think we need to throw 3D all the way out. Something along the lines of what Capcom did with Street Fighter IV would be pretty awesome. I've said it before, and will say it again. I wish these classic series would start sticking to their roots. When will companies realize it's not in their best interest to reinvent the wheel when it comes to classic series? I'm dying for modern remakes of several classic titles (Raiden, Gunstar Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, etc.), and I'm confident that doing them 2D is not only the cheaper approach, but will lead to the superior product.
This is an excellent point and probably generally the case these days. I would presume most colleges are fine with Linux under the condition that you don't expect support from them. Some colleges explicitly support certain Linux flavors. For example my younger brother is a freshmen at CalTech and was attending a summer program which he brought his laptop running Ubuntu 8.10 down for. There were instructions for XP, Vista, OS X, and Ubuntu (I'm not sure about others, but at least Ubuntu was there).
I attended UCSD from '01-'05, and switched to running Linux full time on my laptop somewhere around the end of my sophomore year. I was an engineering major, and I didn't find Linux significantly impeded me. Campus WiFi worked fine, and they even offered a Linux VPN client. For the rare case I needed Windows, I'd just go to one of the dozens of campus libraries or labs. I'd be a little concerned if it was a small liberal arts college, but these days finding a Windows PC on the rare case you need something Windows only isn't much of an issue.