When I was a kid, TVs used ultra-sonics for remote control, not IR. I soon discovered that I could change the TV channel from another room by making a "kissing" sound with my lips.
I'd wait until my uncle came home from a drinking binge, and watch tv. Every time he sat down, I'd change the channel on him. He never had a clue, just kept cursing the television.
I wish that I had been foresighted enough, back in my C-64 days, to have invented Spam on the old Fidonet email network (remember Fidonet, boys and girls?)
(sigh)
I'd be a rich and hated man today, instead of just hated.
OK, I have a completely different solution for you. Other than ripping and burning, it doesn't involve using a computer at all. It's fast, easy to use, and has an interface they're already familiar with.
For less than $100 you can get a progressive scan DVD player. Many of these will play back MP3 files from a data DVD (a friend of mine got one at Sam's Club for about $49). Some will even show the MP3 tag info on the TV as each song is being played. You don't get playlists here, but if you're careful with what you put on each DVD, and use the player's randomize function, you prob. won't need it. 4.7 GB is a lot of jukebox.
Why bother a non-geek with a computer solution when a simpler answer is available.
I cannot find the link at this time, but the scientists who came up with the whole Global Warming research deliberately ignored years in the middle ages where the average temperature in Europe was a lot higher than it is today. Apparently, that data did not fit their theory, so they ignored it.
Another thing to keep in mind is that one of the more recent ice ages was caused by arctic ice melting into the Atlantic, the resulting rush of fresh water causing the warm waters of the Gulf Stream to sink. The glaciers started to move in after only 70 years (a short time in Geological terms).
So, it's possible that this whole warmup is natural, and we're actually heading for an ice age. Freeze or Broil, take you pick, everyone.
I wouldn't worry, though, we'll all be killed in the Nuclear War soon, anyway.
Much of the convergence we have today is certainly disruptive -- disruptive to the user, that is! Many cell phones have cameras on them, which means you aren't allowed to take them everywhere (e.g., some business ban them from the premesis). And, like I really want to surf the net, read email, or play games on that microscopic display screen! And don't get me started on Instant Messaging (and the inevitable SPIM). It's nothing more than a Profit Margin looking for a customer. It might be different if they weren't such lousy phones.
My next cell phone will be a phone, period, not some toy that's everything but a Veg-O-Matic. You can keep the rest of that...convergence.
No matter how well a C compiler is written to create optimal code, it just isn't the equal of someone experienced writing in Assembler from the get-go. The problem is, where do you find the sort of qualified Assembler programmers you need to write the sort of tight code required to increase speed and reduce memory footprint? Does anyone even know Assembler anymore? The big loss, of course, in using Assembler would be portability across different CPU's.
Mozila should default to a Fisher Price theme, so it fits in with the default look-and-feel of Windows XP.
Interesting that the smallest market share, OS X, should determine the default look-and-feel of Mozilla everywhere.
Suggestion: Ship Mo with several themes, and make sure the user knows how to change it. The default should match the user's OS, and not the one some developer or artist working on Mo is using.
Even if the recording industry succeeds in plugging both the digital and analog "holes" in today's CD's, they won't regain the sales that are supposedly "lost" to piracy.
At the risk of being marked a "troll", I'll tell you what the real reason for lost sales is: the new music being published today is largely crap, and folks aren't buying it.
Once upon a time, I bought a lot of new music each month. Many were albums I heard at a friend's house, while others were bands I was familiar with, and willing to take a chance on. Now, I can't find anything that interests me enough to spend the better part of $20 on something I may have heard only 1 song from. Now, on top of that loss, they expect me to buy CD's where I can't even turn the few songs I do like into MP3's for my portable player?
Sorry, no sale. Get back to me when you have a clue.
When are people going to learn that consumers don't care what language a program is written in?
I sort of disagree. The issue here is similar to shopping for a car or truck: do you need 8 cylinders, or are you satisfied with only 4? For something like an office suite, if it's written in Java, it's like buying a large truck with a 4 or 6 cylinder engine. Yeah, it'll work, but it won't do it as quickly as one with a bigger engine.
I think software buyers these days, if they're considering going outside of the M$ box, are going to be more aware of what's under the hood than will the unwashed masses (who will act just as you describe).
Stardock's GUI interface makeover applications (for Windows 98, 2000, and XP) have allowed various translucent window effects (like making a window translucent while dragging) for quite a while now, certainly before Apple filed the patent.
Yes, the article is not a review, but a rant. Yes, he makes a few valid points, but could have put them less confrontationally. The trouble is, all of you miss the point.
The point of the article is to make people read it (and view whatever ads are on the web page -- I block all web ads, so I haven't seen any myself). Given the flamewars that have broken out over the article here and elsewhere (not to mention the Slashdot Effect on the article), I'd say he succeeded in getting the attention he was after.
I do wish he had aimed to generate an honest discussion of Gnome, though, instead of a flame war. Open discussion is the sort of thing that helps make F/OSS software better.
Sun has to fight this suit, and not someone in the Open Source community. IANAL, but I wonder if their liability would be the same if they had GPL'd the code.
From looking at the patents, however, I'd imagine there's a lot of prior art. For example, would sharing data structures between programs or libraries using Inter Process Communication, and semaphores (handled by code serving as a manager of data objects) be in violation of the patents?
If Sun looses, however, it looks to me like C# and.NET would also violate Kodak's patents. Was this on Sun's mind when it signed that agreement with Microsoft? It might be to Microsoft's benefit to help Sun fight this one. It would be ironic, though, if Microsoft had to come to Java's rescue to save their own skin.
There is nothing worse than being constantly dragged into these massive online bitching sessions that explore every possible worst-case scenario from every possible angle.
But that's the only reason anyone comes to Slashdot in the first place, man!
Slashdot: News for the paranoid. Stuff to freak you out.
Not to pick nits, but while the Commodore 64 never had viruses to worry about, its external 1541 disk drive was another story. Unlike PC drives, the 64's was a computer in its own right, with a CPU, memory, and an operating system. They also got hot enough to keep your coffee warm! The viruses were few, but available.
I don't watch much television -- most of it is crap these days anyway -- and I'm not interested in watching sports of any kind -- so I have no interest in spending a lot of money on HDTV. If I want to watch a movie (not many good movies around, either, IMHO), I rent the DVD.
There's nothing wrong with the existing digital broadcasts of satellite or cable shows, particularly through something like TiVO. I strongly suspect that HDTV is being pushed on us (and legislated by Congress) to give content providers access to new DRM mechanisms designed to take choices away from us, in much the same way that Microsoft's "Littlebighorn" release will give us lots of pretty pictures to convince us to give up our Fair Use rights on the computer.
The way out of the trap is to avoid it in the first place. If few people buy this overpriced HDTV equipment, it sets the content providers back to square one. Oh, they'll screw us over eventually, but at least we won't give them the satisfaction of making it too easy for them.
I was able to install Oracle 9i on both Red Hat 9 and SuSe 9. Red Hat was a huge headache. You run the install until you get an error, fix the error, and continue. You do that several times. There are a lot of small changes you have to make to various script files before you get it installed, but you don't need anything special from Oracle. I even managed to get it to work with RHL 9 running on a laptop (with only 320MB of memory, yet). I was only doing development work, so the database was small, but had no problems.
I installed the same thing on SuSE 9, and had no trouble. Smooth install all the way. No extra files needed from Oracle, no repeated tweeking of scripts. Certainly not the relative nightmare that RHL9 was to use.
You just need to google the web for the appropriate instructions, that's all.
Slashdot Mirror
Gives new meaning to the Blue Screen of Death, now doesn't it?
I'd wait until my uncle came home from a drinking binge, and watch tv. Every time he sat down, I'd change the channel on him. He never had a clue, just kept cursing the television.
This new gizmo isn't nearly as much fun, IMHO.
I wish that I had been foresighted enough, back in my C-64 days, to have invented Spam on the old Fidonet email network (remember Fidonet, boys and girls?)
(sigh)
I'd be a rich and hated man today, instead of just hated.
For less than $100 you can get a progressive scan DVD player. Many of these will play back MP3 files from a data DVD (a friend of mine got one at Sam's Club for about $49). Some will even show the MP3 tag info on the TV as each song is being played. You don't get playlists here, but if you're careful with what you put on each DVD, and use the player's randomize function, you prob. won't need it. 4.7 GB is a lot of jukebox.
Why bother a non-geek with a computer solution when a simpler answer is available.
But this *was* my backup plan!
I cannot find the link at this time, but the scientists who came up with the whole Global Warming research deliberately ignored years in the middle ages where the average temperature in Europe was a lot higher than it is today. Apparently, that data did not fit their theory, so they ignored it.
Another thing to keep in mind is that one of the more recent ice ages was caused by arctic ice melting into the Atlantic, the resulting rush of fresh water causing the warm waters of the Gulf Stream to sink. The glaciers started to move in after only 70 years (a short time in Geological terms).
So, it's possible that this whole warmup is natural, and we're actually heading for an ice age. Freeze or Broil, take you pick, everyone.
I wouldn't worry, though, we'll all be killed in the Nuclear War soon, anyway.
My next cell phone will be a phone, period, not some toy that's everything but a Veg-O-Matic. You can keep the rest of that...convergence.
...is not to fear Binary Arithmetic. It's just like regular arithmetic -- if you're missing 9 fingers.
No matter how well a C compiler is written to create optimal code, it just isn't the equal of someone experienced writing in Assembler from the get-go. The problem is, where do you find the sort of qualified Assembler programmers you need to write the sort of tight code required to increase speed and reduce memory footprint? Does anyone even know Assembler anymore? The big loss, of course, in using Assembler would be portability across different CPU's.
Of course, I still don't understand why Comcast charges more if you hook-up more than one computer to their service.
When will they charge less? What planet are you from?
...for copyright violation. Lois Lane is planning to sue because the password is her phone number.
Interesting that the smallest market share, OS X, should determine the default look-and-feel of Mozilla everywhere.
Suggestion: Ship Mo with several themes, and make sure the user knows how to change it. The default should match the user's OS, and not the one some developer or artist working on Mo is using.
Problem solved.
As has been said elsewhere, this is Microsoft money supporting Linux. Not only don't I mind, I love the irony.
At the risk of being marked a "troll", I'll tell you what the real reason for lost sales is: the new music being published today is largely crap, and folks aren't buying it.
Once upon a time, I bought a lot of new music each month. Many were albums I heard at a friend's house, while others were bands I was familiar with, and willing to take a chance on. Now, I can't find anything that interests me enough to spend the better part of $20 on something I may have heard only 1 song from. Now, on top of that loss, they expect me to buy CD's where I can't even turn the few songs I do like into MP3's for my portable player?
Sorry, no sale. Get back to me when you have a clue.
I sort of disagree. The issue here is similar to shopping for a car or truck: do you need 8 cylinders, or are you satisfied with only 4? For something like an office suite, if it's written in Java, it's like buying a large truck with a 4 or 6 cylinder engine. Yeah, it'll work, but it won't do it as quickly as one with a bigger engine.
I think software buyers these days, if they're considering going outside of the M$ box, are going to be more aware of what's under the hood than will the unwashed masses (who will act just as you describe).
You get a free office suite with every Happy Meal.
Stardock's GUI interface makeover applications (for Windows 98, 2000, and XP) have allowed various translucent window effects (like making a window translucent while dragging) for quite a while now, certainly before Apple filed the patent.
The point of the article is to make people read it (and view whatever ads are on the web page -- I block all web ads, so I haven't seen any myself). Given the flamewars that have broken out over the article here and elsewhere (not to mention the Slashdot Effect on the article), I'd say he succeeded in getting the attention he was after.
I do wish he had aimed to generate an honest discussion of Gnome, though, instead of a flame war. Open discussion is the sort of thing that helps make F/OSS software better.
From looking at the patents, however, I'd imagine there's a lot of prior art. For example, would sharing data structures between programs or libraries using Inter Process Communication, and semaphores (handled by code serving as a manager of data objects) be in violation of the patents?
If Sun looses, however, it looks to me like C# and .NET would also violate Kodak's patents. Was this on Sun's mind when it signed that agreement with Microsoft? It might be to Microsoft's benefit to help Sun fight this one. It would be ironic, though, if Microsoft had to come to Java's rescue to save their own skin.
But that's the only reason anyone comes to Slashdot in the first place, man!
Slashdot: News for the paranoid. Stuff to freak you out.
Not to pick nits, but while the Commodore 64 never had viruses to worry about, its external 1541 disk drive was another story. Unlike PC drives, the 64's was a computer in its own right, with a CPU, memory, and an operating system. They also got hot enough to keep your coffee warm! The viruses were few, but available.
...if I die and you need a password. If I'm not available, just leave a message at the sound of the heavenly choir, and I'll get back to you.
And don't get me started about their broadband service.
I don't watch much television -- most of it is crap these days anyway -- and I'm not interested in watching sports of any kind -- so I have no interest in spending a lot of money on HDTV. If I want to watch a movie (not many good movies around, either, IMHO), I rent the DVD.
There's nothing wrong with the existing digital broadcasts of satellite or cable shows, particularly through something like TiVO. I strongly suspect that HDTV is being pushed on us (and legislated by Congress) to give content providers access to new DRM mechanisms designed to take choices away from us, in much the same way that Microsoft's "Littlebighorn" release will give us lots of pretty pictures to convince us to give up our Fair Use rights on the computer.
The way out of the trap is to avoid it in the first place. If few people buy this overpriced HDTV equipment, it sets the content providers back to square one. Oh, they'll screw us over eventually, but at least we won't give them the satisfaction of making it too easy for them.
I installed the same thing on SuSE 9, and had no trouble. Smooth install all the way. No extra files needed from Oracle, no repeated tweeking of scripts. Certainly not the relative nightmare that RHL9 was to use.
You just need to google the web for the appropriate instructions, that's all.