Yeah, but mplayer is far superior to windows media player.
Often times some of my windows using friends will complain about download some crappy movie off of a p2p network and how the audio wasn't synched properly.
I'm always like... "don't you just use auto-sync? Or just hit the buttons that allow you to positive or negative delay the audio manually?"
And they're like, "Man what player do you use? That sounds awesome!"
And when I tell them they just say "Hmmpf, never heard of it."
Oh, and there's also VLC, which is quite good too. Although why you would ever want to watch a video clip while it's being distorted so it looks like it's a flag blowing in the wind, I don't know... but it's plug-in archtitecture is fabulous.
First time I used it I was watched one of those nasty HDTV clips ripped from an 1080i stream, so it was interlaced. I looked through the menus and found a de-interlacing plugin. Cool stuff, works great.
Just so you know, if you have a modern sound card (ie any SoundBlaster >= Live) you can do much better than this without any troubles at all. You see your sound card allows you direct access to what it's about to output to the speakers in completely digital format, without any loss.
Here's an easy way to do it (with a SoundBlaster emu10k1 based card in linux, using ALSA):
arecord -f dat -D hw:0,2 > stolen_music.wav
This, of course, assumes that you have alsa-utils installed (which you most likely do).
The other assumption made is that your sound cards stream multiplexer interface is located at hardware location 0,2 (which is the default for emu10k1 based cards). To find this out simply type:
arecord -l
That should do the trick. For SoundBlaster (emu10k1) owners, the device is listed as EFX.
Say bye-bye to DRM. No need to worry!
Re:Trillian is nice, but gaim has cross platform s
on
Trillian 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Gaim has encryption support which is far superior to trillians. Of course it does standard RSA (512-4096 bit) encryption, and in addition there's a new Off the Record plugin which allows for plausible deniability as well.
If you want security, gaim is definitely the way to go.
Re:They're improving the file dialogs...
on
GTK 2.6.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Just so people don't get the wrong idea about Composite or Xorg, on my relatively modern (but by no means uber) computer xorg + composite + translucency + drop shadows doesn't slow it down one bit. In fact with all the effects on the windows actually appear to slide around smoother than they did before, although I'm sure this some kind of psychological effect.
Also of note is that I have one graphics card driving two monitors, and it's still not an issue.
Don't be afraid to try Composite on Xorg! And if you run into problems submit bug reports! Xorg has great promise. Let's all help to make it as good as it could be (and no I'm in no way related to the Xorg project. I just think eye-candy is where its at).
It seems to me that if they allow internet access (assuming it's latency free enough) you could easily use some sort of VoIP type of technology in order to get around the cell-phone ban.
They'll have to either allow cell-phone's (and profit even more), or stick to the measily insane fee's they'll be charging for their in-flight internet.
No no no... to do those fun graphical things they don't load an X server! They simply use the linux console in frame buffer mode.
This is why the resolution change (even if the res is the same) is necessary. This will likely never be changed. The X server then loads up, and puts the graphics card in its desired hardware accelerated mode (as opposed to the vesa frame buffer mode).
One solution to this would be to run DirectFB, and their hardware accelerated frame buffer x server! (apprently they even have 3d accel working on some cards, plus true transparency etc). However this is less than desirable.
If you're interested in learning more about frame buffer console check out the SVGALib project... or cruise the source code to say... mplayer, AdvanceMAME, elinks, or any other project that makes use of the frame buffer for some advanced applications.
In case you're wondering, you can actually play movies in a linux console (without any flavor of X running) with mplayer! Make sure you compile it with the right options though.
What good would a VoIP service be if you couldn't use a regular phone?
Every single one of the providers listed in the parents post allow this.
I was going to ask you about some information regarding webcall, ie how does their service compare to that of others, but apparently you've no experience in this area.
Also, this webcall service sucks really huge. 29.95 for 400 minutes with no 911, and no phone number porting! Not only is that MORE EXPENSIVE than a regular POTS line with a winback pricing plan here in Alberta, but even if it was cheaper it would still suck!
Sadly I've just lost all respect for SaskTel, who used to be a pioneer and innovator in communications technology world wide. What are they thinking?
BabyTel is cheap, Sprint is 19.95 like the rest. Currently I am with Primus because they have both the best price and 911 service, no contract, and you don't have to buy some stupid piece of hardware.
I look forward to switching to Vonage as soon as they get 911, as their price is better, and all the reviews indicate that their quality of service is top notch.
To be fair, he did say... and I quote: "to be replaced with Linux or Windows".
It does make sense to put FreeDOS on it, if you what you want is something really really cheap. Even in terms of just setting up the initial disk image for all the machines you intend to produce. Instead of the half an hour it might take to set up GNU/Linux, you can slap FreeDOS on there in like 45 seconds. Who cares. The idea is cheap... so that once again:
it can be "replaced with Linux or Windows".
Give the guy a break. You're the one who came off sounding like zealot.
There's a lot of stuff being said here about enlightenment, and people need to really understand was Raster is trying to do with E17.
First of all I use E16.7.1 as my WM of choice. I've been using E since I first found it several years ago.
A lot of people don't understand that, why would I use E when there's Gnome or KDE? Well, personally I can't understand why people use Gnome or KDE when there's E, but that's just personal preference.
I'm one of those people who like minimal functionality, uber-flexibility, combined with easy of use, and demands aesthetics above all. E is for me, but I can see why it's not for everyone.
People are scoffing at the poster who said E17 is beautiful and fast by suggesting that without functionality of course it's going to be fast.
Some people are laughing at Enlightenment for being around for 5 years and still not having virtual desktops, pagers, etc.
E16.7.1, the latest stable release, has everything you could ever want from a WM. It has THE greatest pager ever. It even updates the mini window images in real time! The virtual desktop support is second to none. You can even have different layers of virtual screen accessed by using the scroll wheel on the desktop.
E also has the best Xinerama support I've ever seen in a WM, for those of you who are into dual monitors like me.
Now let me address some of things people have been saying about E17. Apparently the poster forgot that this is slashdot and most of the posts will come from people who have never actually used Enlightenment, or who don't know anything about it.
Like many others have said, E17 is a complete re-write, and it's not anywhere near finished. The post is simply an acknowledgment that the window manager code for E17 has finally been put back into the CVS repo. So if you're wondering why it has such limited functionality, it's because it hasn't even been available to be worked on by anyone other than Raster yet!
Some people said that this is not news because it has always been in the repo. Not true. It was in the repo a while back before major rewrites to the foundation libraries, but it got taken out because the changes were too great. Raster had to start again on the WM code.
And finally... why should we care about E17? It is going to be cool... seriously cool. Raster and his team are excellent coders. The reason why it's taking so long is because they're doing it right this time.
The supporting libraries have an OpenGL rendering back-end. Think about that. A WM finally rendered in OpenGL. And think about the possibilities it will bring.
E17 will be worth waiting for. It will be feature-packed. It will be beautiful. And it will be fast.
Apparently all the moderators forgot to actually check the links you posted, since they totally suck. Obviously you saw the results, and noted how crappy they are, were you just trying to get first post and sound knowledgeable at the same time, or were you simply trying to make fun of a guy with a legitimate problem?
It seems pretty clear the guy has already exhausted alternative measures, and ask slashdot was one of his last options. What he wants is some first hand experience on this matter, which the slashdot crowd may very well have!
Next time you try to get first post, at least be a man and say something to the effect of "fr0st p1s+". Making a person feel silly for having such a valid question, and doing it by posting such a silly response... well that's just wrong.
Nice. That is better! I had no idea TARPIT existed previously. Thanks.
As for the robots.txt. I looked at mine and had specified user-agent as MSNBot. Perhaps the case makes a difference? Either way... I think TARPIT is the best solution:)
Actually it says it pays attention to robots.txt, however my test results show that it does not behave as expected. After noting the amount of bandwidth it was consuming, I created a robots.txt based from the examples on their web site, since I noticed it wasn't following the rules I had already specified that other crawlers obey nicely.
This is after the modifications of the robots.txt file, and this is only for a 2 week period in October. MSN bot was drawing nearly 1 gigaBYTE of upstream per month, just from my lowly site! No thank you... I prompty did this:
What are you talking about? No one incorporated any new ideas into C#! It's a direct rip off of java!
These "ideas" you speak of that come from Object Pascal... where are they? Can you name _any_ of them?
As for proof that C# is a rip off of Java... well all you have to do is learn both... or rather, learn one, and you can see how similar they are. And then all you need to do is ask yourself "which one came first?" and you can see who's the ripper, and who's the ripee.
And for all you C# fanatics who are going to cry "But they're clearly different, you can't just learn one and know both, the API is totally different!"
Sorry, but renaming Vector to ArrayList does not change the fact that it is a rip-off.
We really shouldn't be surprised though. This is the norm of Microsoft Business Ethics (tm). And there's nothing explicitly wrong with it. If they can do it, and do it better, more power to them!
Just don't go on about their innovation. Puhhleeze.
Bah... you're totally side stepping the issue. My point was really that given a choice, you'd prefer not to reboot... especially since from a design standpoint, there's no real reason why a reboot should be required.
It's really the little things that show how much care and attention have gone into design. With OS X there's no "Apply" buttons... everything happens in real time... which is a very nice and appealing feeling. With Linux you can completely restart the entire networking core if you so desire, including fully unloading the drivers and reloading them... all without a reboot. I was shocked when I first discovered this, and then it dawned on me "Yeah... why shouldn't I be able to do that."
You're right... rebooting one or twice a week isn't really a big deal. But suggesting that not wanting to have to reboot your computer is some form of psychological disorder is a little frightening. I have to admit to being a computer scientist, so I care about design more on principal than most people... but I think if more people were exposed to a better designed system (even if it was just a version of windows that didn't require rebooting) they would certainly like it much better.
And just to address your troubles with linux drivers:
If you used a decent distribution you wouldn't have such configuration issues, or compilation issues. On Gentoo installing ALSA is as simple as selecting a sound card driver and typing "emerge alsa-driver" followed by "/etc/init.d/alsasound start" all of which is covered in great detail in the Gentoo ALSA tutorial. Not that you need it, but it's nice to have such resources available. Maybe if you knew where to look you wouldn't need to spend so much time mucking around with stuff.
No really... rebooting for a mere driver upgrade is rediculous. So is rebooting after an application installs itself! I can't think of a shoddier design than one that requires the entire computer to restart itself just for an application install.
And I've never, in my entire GNU/Linux using history, had to "crap around in/etc for thirty minutes" after compiling a driver.
People balk at having to compile drivers too... but in reality most driver compilations take less than a minute (even on older hardware) which is significantly less than the average download time of most bloaty windows drivers.
You suggest that not wanting to reboot a PC once in a while is some form of psychological disorder, but I guarantee you if you took a poll gave people a choice: would you rather reboot, or not reboot. 99% of the people will choose `not reboot', likely including yourself... and the other 1% are the psychologically damaged ones you spoke of.
Once you get used to an operating system that doesn't require so many reboots, trust me, if you had to go back you would experience more than just mild frustration.
Re:Time to be a troll
on
RT Linux Patches
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Sorry to say but, you don't really understand the concept of real time.
First of all, an OS being RT has nothing to do with its size. It could be 18 terabytes, or 4 kilobytes and still qualify as real time, as long as it did a few things within certain thresholds.
To be a simplistic about it as possible, the only thing a real time operating system needs to do is to emphatically guarantee that it will respond to interrupts within a pre-determined amount of time. Even this time isn't exactly important, obviously it should be small, but as long as the time constant is known and guaranteed it qualifies as a real time operating system.
Real time linux is NOT "a true RTOS running linux as its lowest priority thread." That doesn't even make sense! You've obviously never done any kernel programming, or bothered to do any basic knowledge gathering on operating system design at all.
Note that several companies/vendors/instutions have provided incarnations of real time linux in the past (and currently). They do this by modifying the kernel source to make sure program ISR's get called within a set threshold. For example FSMLab's RTLinux has a worst case response rate of 12 microseconds.
Real time operating systems are not for everyone. Your system will be slower, but will feel more responsive. Strict server operating systems such as FreeBSD, and the Windows Server class OS's have a much higher ISR response rate. Windows Server is as high as 120 ms. This is done on purpose! They do it to get every bit of performance out of the server they can. Remember, more ISR calls means more interruptions in the CPU pipeline, and more instructions executed per second. On a pentium 4 with its huge pipeline, interrupts are disasterous to execution speed.
Personally I welcome a real time freely available linux kernel. I wouldn't mind sacrificing a little speed for real time operation. If you've ever used a real time operating system, you know what I mean. It's a great experience. But having said that, most people probably won't want that. And that's fine... but having the option is great.
Anyway... before you spout your mouth off and try to sound like you know what you're talking about... learn something first!
Uhh, what's the matter with you? You can use Mozilla and FireFox in exactly the same way if you wish. Just turn off tabbed browsing! You can even map the middle button to open a new window, or "session" as you incorrectly call it. Which btw is still better than IE, in which you have to right click and select Open in New Window.
Very true... take for example gentoo users. Almost every gentoo user (probably a firefox user) will get the update from a portage mirror rather than mozilla.org.
I'm sure a lot of other distributions work this way too... debian and debian variants. Basically any package management based distro, which likely covers mandrake, and suse too.
It would be interesting to note the number of downloads for the windows version versus the number of downloads for unix.
Of course you'd have many more Screens, but that's easy. Then in your "ServerFlags" section, simply turn Xinerama on:
Option "Xinerama" "on"
And there you go... now next time your run mplayer what you'll have to do is mplayer -fs -screenw [xres] -screenh [yres].
The reason for this is mplayer will default to going fullscreen on one of the heads, but if you explicitly give it geometry it'll do what you want.
There is one other minor problem I found when testing this out... mplayer appears to have a check built in that gives max resolution as 4096x4096. Since you said on your page that the total desktop resolution was only 3072x2048 it seems that'll work fine!
Even if you do go for higher res, you might be able to simply go through the mplayer code and comment out that check? (or who knows it could actually be there for a reason!?) You might also be able to send a message to the developers. I can't see anyone not wanting to help out a project this cool!
Slashdot Mirror
Finally some sense. If I had mod points I'd do it myself. But then I'm just an anonymous coward. What the hell do I know.
Yeah, but mplayer is far superior to windows media player.
Often times some of my windows using friends will complain about download some crappy movie off of a p2p network and how the audio wasn't synched properly.
I'm always like... "don't you just use auto-sync? Or just hit the buttons that allow you to positive or negative delay the audio manually?"
And they're like, "Man what player do you use? That sounds awesome!"
And when I tell them they just say "Hmmpf, never heard of it."
Oh, and there's also VLC, which is quite good too. Although why you would ever want to watch a video clip while it's being distorted so it looks like it's a flag blowing in the wind, I don't know... but it's plug-in archtitecture is fabulous.
First time I used it I was watched one of those nasty HDTV clips ripped from an 1080i stream, so it was interlaced. I looked through the menus and found a de-interlacing plugin. Cool stuff, works great.
All much better than WMP and free!
Just so you know, if you have a modern sound card (ie any SoundBlaster >= Live) you can do much better than this without any troubles at all. You see your sound card allows you direct access to what it's about to output to the speakers in completely digital format, without any loss.
Here's an easy way to do it (with a SoundBlaster emu10k1 based card in linux, using ALSA):
arecord -f dat -D hw:0,2 > stolen_music.wav This, of course, assumes that you have alsa-utils installed (which you most likely do).
The other assumption made is that your sound cards stream multiplexer interface is located at hardware location 0,2 (which is the default for emu10k1 based cards). To find this out simply type:
arecord -l
That should do the trick. For SoundBlaster (emu10k1) owners, the device is listed as EFX.
Say bye-bye to DRM. No need to worry!
Gaim has encryption support which is far superior to trillians. Of course it does standard RSA (512-4096 bit) encryption, and in addition there's a new Off the Record plugin which allows for plausible deniability as well.
If you want security, gaim is definitely the way to go.
Just so people don't get the wrong idea about Composite or Xorg, on my relatively modern (but by no means uber) computer xorg + composite + translucency + drop shadows doesn't slow it down one bit. In fact with all the effects on the windows actually appear to slide around smoother than they did before, although I'm sure this some kind of psychological effect.
Also of note is that I have one graphics card driving two monitors, and it's still not an issue.
Don't be afraid to try Composite on Xorg! And if you run into problems submit bug reports! Xorg has great promise. Let's all help to make it as good as it could be (and no I'm in no way related to the Xorg project. I just think eye-candy is where its at).
It seems to me that if they allow internet access (assuming it's latency free enough) you could easily use some sort of VoIP type of technology in order to get around the cell-phone ban.
They'll have to either allow cell-phone's (and profit even more), or stick to the measily insane fee's they'll be charging for their in-flight internet.
No no no... to do those fun graphical things they don't load an X server! They simply use the linux console in frame buffer mode.
This is why the resolution change (even if the res is the same) is necessary. This will likely never be changed. The X server then loads up, and puts the graphics card in its desired hardware accelerated mode (as opposed to the vesa frame buffer mode).
One solution to this would be to run DirectFB, and their hardware accelerated frame buffer x server! (apprently they even have 3d accel working on some cards, plus true transparency etc). However this is less than desirable.
If you're interested in learning more about frame buffer console check out the SVGALib project... or cruise the source code to say... mplayer, AdvanceMAME, elinks, or any other project that makes use of the frame buffer for some advanced applications.
In case you're wondering, you can actually play movies in a linux console (without any flavor of X running) with mplayer! Make sure you compile it with the right options though.
What good would a VoIP service be if you couldn't use a regular phone?
Every single one of the providers listed in the parents post allow this.
I was going to ask you about some information regarding webcall, ie how does their service compare to that of others, but apparently you've no experience in this area.
Also, this webcall service sucks really huge. 29.95 for 400 minutes with no 911, and no phone number porting! Not only is that MORE EXPENSIVE than a regular POTS line with a winback pricing plan here in Alberta, but even if it was cheaper it would still suck!
Sadly I've just lost all respect for SaskTel, who used to be a pioneer and innovator in communications technology world wide. What are they thinking?
They don't offer local termination in Canada. Sure I could get an american phone number and call people in Canada, but what good is that?
So far right now the Canadian competition is:
Primus TalkBroadband (19.95 for free local calls and 300 minutes to Can and US, 911 available everywhere).
Yak Communications (1000 mins to can, us, china, hong kong, free local calls, for 19.95 USD + 31 set up fee + 1 year contract! BOOOO!)
Vonage Communications (500 mins to Can and US, every calling feature they have, but no 911 yet)
There are also offerings from other companies that don't cover all of Canada yet such as:
BabyTel
Sprint Canada
BabyTel is cheap, Sprint is 19.95 like the rest. Currently I am with Primus because they have both the best price and 911 service, no contract, and you don't have to buy some stupid piece of hardware.
I look forward to switching to Vonage as soon as they get 911, as their price is better, and all the reviews indicate that their quality of service is top notch.
To be fair, he did say... and I quote: "to be replaced with Linux or Windows ".
It does make sense to put FreeDOS on it, if you what you want is something really really cheap. Even in terms of just setting up the initial disk image for all the machines you intend to produce. Instead of the half an hour it might take to set up GNU/Linux, you can slap FreeDOS on there in like 45 seconds. Who cares. The idea is cheap... so that once again:
it can be "replaced with Linux or Windows".
Give the guy a break. You're the one who came off sounding like zealot.
There's a lot of stuff being said here about enlightenment, and people need to really understand was Raster is trying to do with E17.
First of all I use E16.7.1 as my WM of choice. I've been using E since I first found it several years ago.
A lot of people don't understand that, why would I use E when there's Gnome or KDE? Well, personally I can't understand why people use Gnome or KDE when there's E, but that's just personal preference.
I'm one of those people who like minimal functionality, uber-flexibility, combined with easy of use, and demands aesthetics above all. E is for me, but I can see why it's not for everyone.
People are scoffing at the poster who said E17 is beautiful and fast by suggesting that without functionality of course it's going to be fast.
Some people are laughing at Enlightenment for being around for 5 years and still not having virtual desktops, pagers, etc.
E16.7.1, the latest stable release, has everything you could ever want from a WM. It has THE greatest pager ever. It even updates the mini window images in real time! The virtual desktop support is second to none. You can even have different layers of virtual screen accessed by using the scroll wheel on the desktop.
E also has the best Xinerama support I've ever seen in a WM, for those of you who are into dual monitors like me.
Now let me address some of things people have been saying about E17. Apparently the poster forgot that this is slashdot and most of the posts will come from people who have never actually used Enlightenment, or who don't know anything about it.
Like many others have said, E17 is a complete re-write, and it's not anywhere near finished. The post is simply an acknowledgment that the window manager code for E17 has finally been put back into the CVS repo. So if you're wondering why it has such limited functionality, it's because it hasn't even been available to be worked on by anyone other than Raster yet!
Some people said that this is not news because it has always been in the repo. Not true. It was in the repo a while back before major rewrites to the foundation libraries, but it got taken out because the changes were too great. Raster had to start again on the WM code.
And finally... why should we care about E17? It is going to be cool... seriously cool. Raster and his team are excellent coders. The reason why it's taking so long is because they're doing it right this time.
The supporting libraries have an OpenGL rendering back-end. Think about that. A WM finally rendered in OpenGL. And think about the possibilities it will bring.
E17 will be worth waiting for. It will be feature-packed. It will be beautiful. And it will be fast.
They just need to team up with these guys.
Another thing to be aware of is that there's a known incompatibility between all browsers, and flash with Xorg and the COMPOSITE extension.
I know that's a mouthful, but that's actually quite a common set-up these days.
I understand that the latest official flash plugin is not affected by this.
But having said all of that, this is likely an incompatibility between the flash ads on those sites, and your system, not the browser itself.
Apparently all the moderators forgot to actually check the links you posted, since they totally suck. Obviously you saw the results, and noted how crappy they are, were you just trying to get first post and sound knowledgeable at the same time, or were you simply trying to make fun of a guy with a legitimate problem?
It seems pretty clear the guy has already exhausted alternative measures, and ask slashdot was one of his last options. What he wants is some first hand experience on this matter, which the slashdot crowd may very well have!
Next time you try to get first post, at least be a man and say something to the effect of "fr0st p1s+". Making a person feel silly for having such a valid question, and doing it by posting such a silly response... well that's just wrong.
Nice. That is better! I had no idea TARPIT existed previously. Thanks.
:)
As for the robots.txt. I looked at mine and had specified user-agent as MSNBot. Perhaps the case makes a difference? Either way... I think TARPIT is the best solution
Actually it says it pays attention to robots.txt, however my test results show that it does not behave as expected. After noting the amount of bandwidth it was consuming, I created a robots.txt based from the examples on their web site, since I noticed it wasn't following the rules I had already specified that other crawlers obey nicely.
Unconvinced... here's some stats from my logs:
MSNBot hits: 10217+77 bandwidth: 441.67 MB
Googlebot hits: 116+90 bandwidth: 16.13 MB
This is after the modifications of the robots.txt file, and this is only for a 2 week period in October. MSN bot was drawing nearly 1 gigaBYTE of upstream per month, just from my lowly site! No thank you... I prompty did this:
iptables -A INPUT -p all -s 65.54.0.0/16 -j DROP
I encourage all other webmasters to do the same.
It's too bad some C# fanboy got to my post before anyone else. Seems like moderators very rarely mod a post up once it has been modded down.
At any rate... you're right, very right.
What are you talking about? No one incorporated any new ideas into C#! It's a direct rip off of java!
These "ideas" you speak of that come from Object Pascal... where are they? Can you name _any_ of them?
As for proof that C# is a rip off of Java... well all you have to do is learn both... or rather, learn one, and you can see how similar they are. And then all you need to do is ask yourself "which one came first?" and you can see who's the ripper, and who's the ripee.
And for all you C# fanatics who are going to cry "But they're clearly different, you can't just learn one and know both, the API is totally different!"
Sorry, but renaming Vector to ArrayList does not change the fact that it is a rip-off.
We really shouldn't be surprised though. This is the norm of Microsoft Business Ethics (tm). And there's nothing explicitly wrong with it. If they can do it, and do it better, more power to them!
Just don't go on about their innovation. Puhhleeze.
Bah... you're totally side stepping the issue. My point was really that given a choice, you'd prefer not to reboot... especially since from a design standpoint, there's no real reason why a reboot should be required.
It's really the little things that show how much care and attention have gone into design. With OS X there's no "Apply" buttons... everything happens in real time... which is a very nice and appealing feeling. With Linux you can completely restart the entire networking core if you so desire, including fully unloading the drivers and reloading them... all without a reboot. I was shocked when I first discovered this, and then it dawned on me "Yeah... why shouldn't I be able to do that."
You're right... rebooting one or twice a week isn't really a big deal. But suggesting that not wanting to have to reboot your computer is some form of psychological disorder is a little frightening. I have to admit to being a computer scientist, so I care about design more on principal than most people... but I think if more people were exposed to a better designed system (even if it was just a version of windows that didn't require rebooting) they would certainly like it much better.
And just to address your troubles with linux drivers:
If you used a decent distribution you wouldn't have such configuration issues, or compilation issues. On Gentoo installing ALSA is as simple as selecting a sound card driver and typing "emerge alsa-driver" followed by "/etc/init.d/alsasound start" all of which is covered in great detail in the Gentoo ALSA tutorial. Not that you need it, but it's nice to have such resources available. Maybe if you knew where to look you wouldn't need to spend so much time mucking around with stuff.
No really... rebooting for a mere driver upgrade is rediculous. So is rebooting after an application installs itself! I can't think of a shoddier design than one that requires the entire computer to restart itself just for an application install.
/etc for thirty minutes" after compiling a driver.
And I've never, in my entire GNU/Linux using history, had to "crap around in
People balk at having to compile drivers too... but in reality most driver compilations take less than a minute (even on older hardware) which is significantly less than the average download time of most bloaty windows drivers.
You suggest that not wanting to reboot a PC once in a while is some form of psychological disorder, but I guarantee you if you took a poll gave people a choice: would you rather reboot, or not reboot. 99% of the people will choose `not reboot', likely including yourself... and the other 1% are the psychologically damaged ones you spoke of.
Once you get used to an operating system that doesn't require so many reboots, trust me, if you had to go back you would experience more than just mild frustration.
Sorry to say but, you don't really understand the concept of real time.
First of all, an OS being RT has nothing to do with its size. It could be 18 terabytes, or 4 kilobytes and still qualify as real time, as long as it did a few things within certain thresholds.
To be a simplistic about it as possible, the only thing a real time operating system needs to do is to emphatically guarantee that it will respond to interrupts within a pre-determined amount of time. Even this time isn't exactly important, obviously it should be small, but as long as the time constant is known and guaranteed it qualifies as a real time operating system.
Real time linux is NOT "a true RTOS running linux as its lowest priority thread." That doesn't even make sense! You've obviously never done any kernel programming, or bothered to do any basic knowledge gathering on operating system design at all.
Note that several companies/vendors/instutions have provided incarnations of real time linux in the past (and currently). They do this by modifying the kernel source to make sure program ISR's get called within a set threshold. For example FSMLab's RTLinux has a worst case response rate of 12 microseconds.
Real time operating systems are not for everyone. Your system will be slower, but will feel more responsive. Strict server operating systems such as FreeBSD, and the Windows Server class OS's have a much higher ISR response rate. Windows Server is as high as 120 ms. This is done on purpose! They do it to get every bit of performance out of the server they can. Remember, more ISR calls means more interruptions in the CPU pipeline, and more instructions executed per second. On a pentium 4 with its huge pipeline, interrupts are disasterous to execution speed.
Personally I welcome a real time freely available linux kernel. I wouldn't mind sacrificing a little speed for real time operation. If you've ever used a real time operating system, you know what I mean. It's a great experience. But having said that, most people probably won't want that. And that's fine... but having the option is great.
Anyway... before you spout your mouth off and try to sound like you know what you're talking about... learn something first!
If there was a way you could get -2 I would mod you down again. Since I can't do that I'll settle for having to use my mod points on another story.
Uhh, what's the matter with you? You can use Mozilla and FireFox in exactly the same way if you wish. Just turn off tabbed browsing! You can even map the middle button to open a new window, or "session" as you incorrectly call it. Which btw is still better than IE, in which you have to right click and select Open in New Window.
Very true... take for example gentoo users. Almost every gentoo user (probably a firefox user) will get the update from a portage mirror rather than mozilla.org.
I'm sure a lot of other distributions work this way too... debian and debian variants. Basically any package management based distro, which likely covers mandrake, and suse too.
It would be interesting to note the number of downloads for the windows version versus the number of downloads for unix.
Simply configure your X server for a multihead configuration -- Ie something like this (this is from my xorg.conf):
Of course you'd have many more Screens, but that's easy. Then in your "ServerFlags" section, simply turn Xinerama on:
And there you go... now next time your run mplayer what you'll have to do is mplayer -fs -screenw [xres] -screenh [yres].
The reason for this is mplayer will default to going fullscreen on one of the heads, but if you explicitly give it geometry it'll do what you want.
There is one other minor problem I found when testing this out... mplayer appears to have a check built in that gives max resolution as 4096x4096. Since you said on your page that the total desktop resolution was only 3072x2048 it seems that'll work fine!
Even if you do go for higher res, you might be able to simply go through the mplayer code and comment out that check? (or who knows it could actually be there for a reason!?) You might also be able to send a message to the developers. I can't see anyone not wanting to help out a project this cool!
Best of luck!