The truth of the matter is, you can easily write a "Linux" application that runs on pretty much all major Linux distributions.
That is only true if you want to publish the source, and let the user do the compiling. However, even that solution makes it hard to reach out to the masses (if we can call Linux users masses). Many modern distro, when installed as a "Workstation", does not even install a compiler by default. People without a compiler have no use for sources. And even then, in the presence of a compiler, I've seen my share of "./configure && make && make install" that failed. And if you don't want to provide the sources (and there are valid reasons for that), binary compatibility across distros is hard to achieve.
I love how I can simply type "slashdot" then hit Enter to have it turned into "http://www.slashdot.org" in opera.
I haven't used Opera in a while. Tell me, is that because www.slashdot.org is in your bookmarks and it automatically adds the right tld for single-word URLs, or is it because Opera appends ".com" every time, and slashdot.com redirects to slashdot.org? If slashdot.com was a different site than slashdot.org, would you still get to the right page every time? Does Opera have some sort of magical I-can-read-your-mind feature?
Ok... have you ever actually ran into a browser that you DON'T know how to use? Aren't they basically all the same?
They're all the same, except for what differentiate them. When you're used to keyboard shortcuts and added features that increase your productivity, using a browser that doesn't have them, even though it's still a browser and can still display web pages, will be a much slower and more frustrating experience.
I use Firefox constantly. I love the Ctrl+L shortcut that gives focus to the address bar. I love how I can simply type "slashdot" then hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter to have it turned into "http://www.slashdot.org". I love keyword bookmarks too. I know the Google search bar is right there, I haven't found the keyboard shortcut to access it though, but it doesn't matter because of keyword bookmarks. I wanna google the word "Safari"? Ctrl+L gg safari Enter. I wanna see the Wikipedia entry on Safari? Ctrl+L wiki safari Enter. I wanna see the definition of the word "Safari"? Ctrl+L dict safari Enter.
While the main functionality of all browsers is the same, it's those little added features that make a cross-platform browser even more enjoyable.
Military ammo usually lacks quality (b) because it's better to disable an enemy soldier than to kill him, both for the psychological effect at the enemy, who has to watch him suffer; and because his buddies will be busy rescuing him instead of fighting. Oh, and because the Geneva convention says so, they seem to think it's somehow more "humane" to cripple soldiers than to kill them.
God, I wish this dumb myth would die.
We tried to kill the myth, sergeant, but apparently our bullets could only cripple it.
That thing looks great. Too bad about the manual duplex. I'm a student and print, 40 page papers several times a week, duplex = half the bulk in my bag and half the bulk on the shelf.
Low-end models are for people who have low-end needs. Not everybody prints 40 page papers several times a week. You need to look for a printer that fits your needs and look at that, not look at a printer that doesn't and complain about it.
That's a rather short memory. The Conservatives/Reform were elected to replace the thoroughly corrupt Liberal party. Who were corrupted by being too established after we destroyed the previous Conservative party in reaction to the Mulroney extremism.
I'm not saying the Liberals were good, and I never liked Chretien's attitude, and much less Martin's. However, the Liberal's problems were on internal matters, and didn't much affect the image of Canada abroad. Nowadays, with the situation in Afghanistan, Harper's tendency to be Bush-like, the way he's screwing our relations with China, etc. Canada's image is being tarnished.
It's a damn mess. These days I mostly see mainstream political hope running down two drains: 1) that nobody gets a majority goverment, and we thus avoid the 'king for four years' mentality that plagues American politics, and 2) that somehow the Liberal party can be remade from within and become the fairly non-corrupt, fairly pro-social Canadian ideal. A lot of decent people are working to make the latter happen, but since there is no check mechanism within political parties, any progress they make will likely just errode after such a party came to majority power, as before.
That is ad advantage of our parliamentary system with multiple parties. Although there can be majority governments that makes a "king for four years" as you mention, however, when all parties are relatively strong (unlike un Chretien's reign when the conservatives and the NDP basically weren't there), the governing party doesn't want to upset the voters, since a slight shift in votes can change the government drastically.
Let's just hope the NDP and the Bloc don't go down the drain though. Last month's provincial election in Québec doesn't spell well for the Bloc.
Things have indeed gotten slightly out of hands since we elected the Conservatives, which seem to be a little too close to Bush for my tastes. Unfortunately, the people seem to like them, and there is only one matter that keeps the Conservatives from being able to be reelected as a majority government: Afghanistan. If Harper finds a way out of Afghanistan, he'll get the public support he needs to get reelected, and that's bad for all of us.
Look. Suck it up. Price cuts WILL happen at some point. If you want to wait for whenever that will be, then wait. If you don't, then don't. I agree that once the games start rolling this Summer and Fall things will start looking up, and I also wouldn't be surprised by a price drop before the holidays.
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But Sony has no reason at all to cut prices. After all, the demand for the 60GB model is so freakin' huge that they need to drop the 20GB model. When you have such a high demand, you don't cut prices. Heck, they should even raise the prices to cut down on the losses, people are praying for more of the goodness. Sony says so right here.
Due to the overwhelming demand for the 60GB model from both retailers and consumers, we have ceased offering the 20GB model here in North America.
plus DVD Decrypter and DVDShrink will rip all the ones I've seen. PGCEdit automates the use of these and strips out the dodgy Arccoss stuff...Takes me about 30 mins to rip a DVD and burn a new one.
Is there a DVD-Decrypter/DVDShrink equivalent for Linux? While those are nice tools, they seem to be Win only:-(
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 1
How long did it take for you to install extra patches, etc to get these features? What distro gives you all this "out of the box" with out a lot of fiddling? Can anyone else back this gentleman's claims?
For those who have lots of disk space and don't want to be fiddling, some (most?) distro installer have a stage where you select which packages you want to install, and they have a nice little button labeled something like "All of them". That cuts down on the fiddling and gets you most, if not all the tools you'll ever need for your day-to-day tasks. The scope of "All of them" varies from distro to distro, but most modern distros have a whole lot of stuff (I think Debian Etch has 3 DVD's worth of packages out of the box).
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this?
on
The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Ubuntu is nice, but not without issues. I spent 4 hours 'fixing' my computer after trying to install Ubuntu. It only took 10 mins to break my computer with the Ubuntu installer. As it where, I have a Dell XPS with 2 160GB HD's raided (stripping) and 1 250GB with nothing on it. I wanted to simply install Linux on the 250GB and leave windows on my Raid drive. However, allowing the Ubuntu auto installer from the LiveCD go, it screwed up my MBR, in which after installation and reboot you get a GRUB error 21 (unknown error) or "Could not load operating system" if I change the raid/standard hd drive over in my bios.
Installation, RAID, MBR and such problems are still mostly seen by the relatively geeky, since Joe Somebody usually doesn't install an OS, but simply uses it (although this might be changing). There are still some showstoppers in the use of Ubuntu, and that is far worse than installation problems. I moved my sister to Ubunbu Dapper a while ago, and all looked fine. The few times I tested her common peripherals (mostly the digital camera with a USB cable), all was fine. But she's been complaining lately that her digital camera doesn't work half the time. Sometimes she plugs it in, and gets a nice "Import pictures" dialog, some other times, nothing happens. She says it's about 50/50, and she manages to import her pictures with perseverance. However, failure of such a "basic" feature (by her standards) is unacceptable, and that's what triggers complaints to me, as I am responsible for her move to Ubuntu.
Hot plugging of USB devices still seem to be a problem on some Linux distros (I experience some problems with my USB and mp3 player on Fedora 6 too, but I'm not the type to complain, nor do I have anyone to complain to). USB has been the "hot new technology to have" for a while now, and the average user wants it. As long as USB support isn't 99.9999% perfect, it's gonna be a huge problem.
Mine arrived today and I can see why it's so popular, my only "problem" is it's difficult to see how "normal" games will work on a wii unless they use the gamecube pads.
It's quite simple actually... the Wii is not made for "normal" games. If you want to play "normal" games, get a PS2 or a PC.
I hadn't heard about that. That would be really cool if it were true. As it was posted on April 1st, I'm still a little skeptic, but do you have another reference where it would have been confirmed true?
The days of promising unlimited bandwidth are over, they all have very clear caps now. If these are actually enforced consistantly is another matter, but the point is on paper they all have these different levels for transfer limits and speeds.
They can still advertise "unlimited bandwitdh", but you're really paying for it now. Videotron offers an "Unlimited" plan, and they charge you $75 a month for it. At that price, they better not throttle anything.
Why not just pay directly for the bits themselves?
$1 per GB per month [say].
So that if you used 17.79 GB for that month, then your bill would be precisely $17.79.
Yeah, nice try. I suppose you'll want cell phone companies to provide you service for 10 cents per minute that you actually use, instead of charging you for 200 minutes a month that you'll never use all of them? Or pre-paid minutes that never expire? That's trying to tell a company to stop making free money, and that ain't gonna happen.
It's not at all clear to me why the free market [in the form of PRICING] can't take care of this stuff naturally.
Competition can only bring prices down when enough smaller players can get in the market. When it's all the big boys, they're all just too happy to keep their prices up and kill the real competition whenever it comes.
Wario Ware 83
Rayman 76
Trauma Center 80
Excite Truck 72
Madden 07 81
Elebits 75
Scores taken from metacritic. 3 low B's and 3 C's.
You really proved a point.
I'm enjoying WarioWare and know several people who do too. I'm enjoying Rayman and know several people who do too. I'm enjoying Elebits and know people who do too. Guess what? People still play and enjoy games even if they don't score 100% on some review site. Keep waiting for your 100% game though, and let your consoles gather dust in the meantime. Heaven forbid you would play a game that is not perfect.
Yes, it sells the Wii. But does it sell games? Out of all the people I know who own/play the Wii, very few have played anything other than Wii Sports. Most of them have spent many hours playing this particular game. I've seen people buy the Wii and not bother to buy any other games for months.
That's because, by selling to a different demographic, they are selling to people who are not used to hanging out in game stores, who are not used to buy one game every week or month. Given time, those "unusual gamers" will get curious enough to see what other games are available, and they'll find Rayman, WarioWare and other party games. People who were gamers before the Wii have probably bought way more games for it than people who weren't. Heck, I got a Wii at launch and already have 6 games for it (18 if I use eBayers' strategy of calling Wii Sports "5 games" and Wii Play "9 games").
We don't seem to be living in the same "real world". What you described is an ideal real-world, not the real-real-world.
1 GP's world: Having to investigate when every business opens "this" time of the year. Since there's no standard, each business can decide when or if they want to change their schedule. Your real world: Businesses keep reliable and memorizable hours. My real world: Even with DST, businesses have no global standard. Some open at 7am, some at 8am, some at 9am, some at 10am. Some stores close at 5pm, some at 6pm, some at 9pm. Some of them are even open 24 hours a day. Heck, stores in the same mall can have different hours.
2 GP's world: Having to deal with public transportation schedules that may or may not change the same time that your place of business decides to change its schedule. Your real world: Public transportation schedules vacillate rarely. My real world: Even with DST, fewer people work in the summer time. A lot of people are on vacation. Many public transportation schedules reflect this by having a different "summer schedule".
3 GP's world: Businesses having to maintain signage that says "Open 9am-11pm November-March, Open 8am-10pm April-October." Your real world: Businesses can keep their easy "Open 9am-11pm Every Day" signage. My real world: Even with DST, businesses already maintain signage that says "Open 10am-5pm Monday-Wednesday, Open 10am-9pm Thursday-Friday, Open 9am-5pm Saturday, Open 11am-5pm Sunday.
4 GP's world: Someone having to answer the phone constantly at your place of business asking "When are you open?" since they are less likely to memorize your business's flexible hours. (And don't think that an automated attendant that answers the phone with this information is going to prevent this question getting through to a human; it won't.) Your real world: Still have to answer the phone at work explaining your hours, but probably to fewer people since your hours aren't confusing and are a tad easier to memorize. My real world: (See 1 and 3)
Levying fines is a lot easier than the EU getting off their ass and actually, you know, rescuing those 15 EU citizens illegally captured by the Iranians. Or at least maybe talking about maybe doing something... maybe.
You're right. 15 EU citizens were captured by the Iranians, therefore we should all stop whatever we are doing right now and not do anything until they are freed. Shut down all the stores, have all the workers go home, and wait. There is no way in hell the EU would be allowed to do two things at the same time.
Customers who are "richer" (monetarily) have higher operating costs. That's the nature of the free market. The EU here is basically saying they don't want the free market to exist, instead they want a flat-across-the-board price even if it means poor people have to pay more and rich people less. I don't agree with that position and I don't see how anybody could.
You misunderstood the explanation. Say you run a brick&mortar store that sells CD's. A customer comes to the store, and wants to buy a CD. You ask him for ID because you need to know his nationality. If he's French, you charge $14.99. If he's German, you charge $17.99. If he's British, you charge $24.99. Now tell me how that's fair.
Heck, let's transpose the situation to the US. If the guy's Caucasian, the CD costs $14.99, if he's black, the CD costs $19.99. I'd like to see a single store try this trick.
That's exactly what the ITMS is doing: charging different prices for the exact same thing, based on the nationality of the customer.
Slashdot Mirror
That is only true if you want to publish the source, and let the user do the compiling. However, even that solution makes it hard to reach out to the masses (if we can call Linux users masses). Many modern distro, when installed as a "Workstation", does not even install a compiler by default. People without a compiler have no use for sources. And even then, in the presence of a compiler, I've seen my share of "./configure && make && make install" that failed. And if you don't want to provide the sources (and there are valid reasons for that), binary compatibility across distros is hard to achieve.
I haven't used Opera in a while. Tell me, is that because www.slashdot.org is in your bookmarks and it automatically adds the right tld for single-word URLs, or is it because Opera appends ".com" every time, and slashdot.com redirects to slashdot.org? If slashdot.com was a different site than slashdot.org, would you still get to the right page every time? Does Opera have some sort of magical I-can-read-your-mind feature?
They're all the same, except for what differentiate them. When you're used to keyboard shortcuts and added features that increase your productivity, using a browser that doesn't have them, even though it's still a browser and can still display web pages, will be a much slower and more frustrating experience.
I use Firefox constantly. I love the Ctrl+L shortcut that gives focus to the address bar. I love how I can simply type "slashdot" then hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter to have it turned into "http://www.slashdot.org". I love keyword bookmarks too. I know the Google search bar is right there, I haven't found the keyboard shortcut to access it though, but it doesn't matter because of keyword bookmarks. I wanna google the word "Safari"? Ctrl+L gg safari Enter. I wanna see the Wikipedia entry on Safari? Ctrl+L wiki safari Enter. I wanna see the definition of the word "Safari"? Ctrl+L dict safari Enter.
While the main functionality of all browsers is the same, it's those little added features that make a cross-platform browser even more enjoyable.
We tried to kill the myth, sergeant, but apparently our bullets could only cripple it.
Low-end models are for people who have low-end needs. Not everybody prints 40 page papers several times a week. You need to look for a printer that fits your needs and look at that, not look at a printer that doesn't and complain about it.
We're talking about money and matter here. Anit-matter costs anti-money, so it's a different problem...
I'm not saying the Liberals were good, and I never liked Chretien's attitude, and much less Martin's. However, the Liberal's problems were on internal matters, and didn't much affect the image of Canada abroad. Nowadays, with the situation in Afghanistan, Harper's tendency to be Bush-like, the way he's screwing our relations with China, etc. Canada's image is being tarnished.
That is ad advantage of our parliamentary system with multiple parties. Although there can be majority governments that makes a "king for four years" as you mention, however, when all parties are relatively strong (unlike un Chretien's reign when the conservatives and the NDP basically weren't there), the governing party doesn't want to upset the voters, since a slight shift in votes can change the government drastically.
Let's just hope the NDP and the Bloc don't go down the drain though. Last month's provincial election in Québec doesn't spell well for the Bloc.
Things have indeed gotten slightly out of hands since we elected the Conservatives, which seem to be a little too close to Bush for my tastes. Unfortunately, the people seem to like them, and there is only one matter that keeps the Conservatives from being able to be reelected as a majority government: Afghanistan. If Harper finds a way out of Afghanistan, he'll get the public support he needs to get reelected, and that's bad for all of us.
-----BEGIN SARCASM SIGNED MESSAGE-----
But Sony has no reason at all to cut prices. After all, the demand for the 60GB model is so freakin' huge that they need to drop the 20GB model. When you have such a high demand, you don't cut prices. Heck, they should even raise the prices to cut down on the losses, people are praying for more of the goodness. Sony says so right here.
-----BEGIN SARCASM SIGNATURE-----
Ha!
-----END SARCASM SIGNATURE-----
Is there a DVD-Decrypter/DVDShrink equivalent for Linux? While those are nice tools, they seem to be Win only :-(
For those who have lots of disk space and don't want to be fiddling, some (most?) distro installer have a stage where you select which packages you want to install, and they have a nice little button labeled something like "All of them". That cuts down on the fiddling and gets you most, if not all the tools you'll ever need for your day-to-day tasks. The scope of "All of them" varies from distro to distro, but most modern distros have a whole lot of stuff (I think Debian Etch has 3 DVD's worth of packages out of the box).
Installation, RAID, MBR and such problems are still mostly seen by the relatively geeky, since Joe Somebody usually doesn't install an OS, but simply uses it (although this might be changing). There are still some showstoppers in the use of Ubuntu, and that is far worse than installation problems. I moved my sister to Ubunbu Dapper a while ago, and all looked fine. The few times I tested her common peripherals (mostly the digital camera with a USB cable), all was fine. But she's been complaining lately that her digital camera doesn't work half the time. Sometimes she plugs it in, and gets a nice "Import pictures" dialog, some other times, nothing happens. She says it's about 50/50, and she manages to import her pictures with perseverance. However, failure of such a "basic" feature (by her standards) is unacceptable, and that's what triggers complaints to me, as I am responsible for her move to Ubuntu.
Hot plugging of USB devices still seem to be a problem on some Linux distros (I experience some problems with my USB and mp3 player on Fedora 6 too, but I'm not the type to complain, nor do I have anyone to complain to). USB has been the "hot new technology to have" for a while now, and the average user wants it. As long as USB support isn't 99.9999% perfect, it's gonna be a huge problem.
How ridiculous is this... on Walmart's canadian website, you search for "wii", and it returns a bunch of PS2 games
It's quite simple actually... the Wii is not made for "normal" games. If you want to play "normal" games, get a PS2 or a PC.
Just like they like to use "boxen" as the plural form of box. It's pure 1337ness, and I hate it.
I hadn't heard about that. That would be really cool if it were true. As it was posted on April 1st, I'm still a little skeptic, but do you have another reference where it would have been confirmed true?
They can still advertise "unlimited bandwitdh", but you're really paying for it now. Videotron offers an "Unlimited" plan, and they charge you $75 a month for it. At that price, they better not throttle anything.
Yeah, nice try. I suppose you'll want cell phone companies to provide you service for 10 cents per minute that you actually use, instead of charging you for 200 minutes a month that you'll never use all of them? Or pre-paid minutes that never expire? That's trying to tell a company to stop making free money, and that ain't gonna happen.
Competition can only bring prices down when enough smaller players can get in the market. When it's all the big boys, they're all just too happy to keep their prices up and kill the real competition whenever it comes.
I'm enjoying WarioWare and know several people who do too. I'm enjoying Rayman and know several people who do too. I'm enjoying Elebits and know people who do too. Guess what? People still play and enjoy games even if they don't score 100% on some review site. Keep waiting for your 100% game though, and let your consoles gather dust in the meantime. Heaven forbid you would play a game that is not perfect.
That's because, by selling to a different demographic, they are selling to people who are not used to hanging out in game stores, who are not used to buy one game every week or month. Given time, those "unusual gamers" will get curious enough to see what other games are available, and they'll find Rayman, WarioWare and other party games. People who were gamers before the Wii have probably bought way more games for it than people who weren't. Heck, I got a Wii at launch and already have 6 games for it (18 if I use eBayers' strategy of calling Wii Sports "5 games" and Wii Play "9 games").
People who are not awake at 8am are usually still at work at 5pm, under artificial lighting, using up energy. DST does nothing for them.
1
GP's world: Having to investigate when every business opens "this" time of the year. Since there's no standard, each business can decide when or if they want to change their schedule.
Your real world: Businesses keep reliable and memorizable hours.
My real world: Even with DST, businesses have no global standard. Some open at 7am, some at 8am, some at 9am, some at 10am. Some stores close at 5pm, some at 6pm, some at 9pm. Some of them are even open 24 hours a day. Heck, stores in the same mall can have different hours.
2
GP's world: Having to deal with public transportation schedules that may or may not change the same time that your place of business decides to change its schedule.
Your real world: Public transportation schedules vacillate rarely.
My real world: Even with DST, fewer people work in the summer time. A lot of people are on vacation. Many public transportation schedules reflect this by having a different "summer schedule".
3
GP's world: Businesses having to maintain signage that says "Open 9am-11pm November-March, Open 8am-10pm April-October."
Your real world: Businesses can keep their easy "Open 9am-11pm Every Day" signage.
My real world: Even with DST, businesses already maintain signage that says "Open 10am-5pm Monday-Wednesday, Open 10am-9pm Thursday-Friday, Open 9am-5pm Saturday, Open 11am-5pm Sunday.
4
GP's world: Someone having to answer the phone constantly at your place of business asking "When are you open?" since they are less likely to memorize your business's flexible hours. (And don't think that an automated attendant that answers the phone with this information is going to prevent this question getting through to a human; it won't.)
Your real world: Still have to answer the phone at work explaining your hours, but probably to fewer people since your hours aren't confusing and are a tad easier to memorize.
My real world: (See 1 and 3)
You're right. 15 EU citizens were captured by the Iranians, therefore we should all stop whatever we are doing right now and not do anything until they are freed. Shut down all the stores, have all the workers go home, and wait. There is no way in hell the EU would be allowed to do two things at the same time.
You misunderstood the explanation. Say you run a brick&mortar store that sells CD's. A customer comes to the store, and wants to buy a CD. You ask him for ID because you need to know his nationality. If he's French, you charge $14.99. If he's German, you charge $17.99. If he's British, you charge $24.99. Now tell me how that's fair.
Heck, let's transpose the situation to the US. If the guy's Caucasian, the CD costs $14.99, if he's black, the CD costs $19.99. I'd like to see a single store try this trick.
That's exactly what the ITMS is doing: charging different prices for the exact same thing, based on the nationality of the customer.
America is a continent. The United States of America is a country.