scanners. i almost bought canon lide 500f, when i found out that sane has not support for it yet. most other 'big' brands also lag some time behind the release of the scanner, so i probably will buy some lesser known brand scanner. this has been pretty frustrating lately as i own canon powershot s series digital camera and would like to get some additional hardware from them - but having all kind of windows-only software shipped with cameras and scanners (and not supporting scanners at all) just drives me away. so far canon has lost some 3 digital photo and 3 scanner sales from me & my recommendations only because of their attitude towards linux. that is not counting possible word of mouth marketing they would get in the opposite case.
this could go to any comment out there - i hope people who really are interested in this thing will take notice even when the article isn't on the first page anymore:)
i have been examining available options for similar system and, from what i have seen, this seems to be the best choice : http://www.zoneminder.com/
"The extension of the patent system to software constitutes the first major attack to copyright law, to which the legislator had, after deep thinking, incorporated software. This assimilation was altogether natural because software, just like books, consist in the production of a textual original work (the source code of the program), resulting from the combination of elementary ideas. For an adventure novel, these elementary ideas can be: "love scene on a balcony", "twins being mistaken one for another", etc. For software, it can be: "alphabetical sorting in a list", "displaying a progress bar telling the user to have patience", etc.
Unlike copyright, which protects final works, software patents, which protect against the imitation of features, allows the protection of these elementary ideas, and thus prevent whoever to realize a program implementing a protected idea. This would amount, in the case of books, to be allowed to claim elementary ideas such as the balcony love scene, although the same idea can lead to very different implementations, such as the balcony love scenes of Romeo and Juliet and of Cyrano de Bergerac, which are not plagiarisms one of the other."
if you still plan to use the old box with larger disks, you can. just use first disk for the operating system and set the bigger drives to 'none' in bios. linux will happily find those disks, access partitions etc.
we have a couple of machines revived using this method. now, problems might arise if the older and smaller disk dies - you won't lose data on the bigger drive, but restoring the machine to life would require more than replacement disk...
"Resize selections, please. Not by adding or subtraction, but by dragging, like in All Other Apps(TM)."
ooooh-yeah. and this includes all tools that select regions. for example, why crop tool is resizeable only at upper left corner and lower right ? whenever i need to crop larger image to some detail that is at the middle of the border, that always is scroll/resize/scroll/check/scroll/resize...
i believe there are some improvements coming for this in 2.4 gimp, but it seems they are creating a new tool for that...
"The "Simple" Rectangle Selector marks a rectangular portion of the image, after which the boundaries of that rectangle can be moved and resized by hand without affecting the underlying image. It is a bit like having a "live mask," letting you work on portions of the image separately without re-selecting. Unlike the basic selection tools, selecting a portion of the image with this tool and adjusting that selection are difficult to mess up. I know it doesn't sound like a big deal, but for tasks like previewing and tweaking a crop this is a very nice enhancement."
"Personally I think KDE still suffers from bloat (particularly options bloat)"
personally i think configurability of kde is excellent. and especially the ability to do that through gui, because that way a lot more users will bother, novices will be pleased by it and i can tell over phone "oh, you want that bar look like you saw at my place ? just click there, there and there, woohoo !"
for option exterminators there always is gnome (though there is little left to extermine, so i have heard, so they are probably coming for kde now)
When will we get some REAL end-user education in this topic? Public schools have Sex Ed classes where they teach you how to reduce your risk of getting HIV and the Clap... how about Computer Safety classes where they teach you how to reduce your risk of getting viruses or spyware?
and what exactly would be the topics there ? what about exceptions ?
now, let's say jhonny uses linux at home and tommy's father has bough mac for everybody in the family. are they free to go from these classes (in which case everybody will claim to have something-else-but-windows that year) or maybe we should allow them to sit there and ridicule others (which, i must admit, might be pretty cool & effective way to deal with the problem;) )
of course, short, informative classes/lections that are very generic might be usable, but i just do not see how could this be done in sufficient way. additionally, this situation is changing very, very rapidly - unless a person is interested in these things, i just do not see how classes like these could help much.
for example, i haven't used windows for some 3+ years. it was around that time when spy/ad/whatever ware started to appear. i do not have an idea what to do with all those programs - spybot, adware and, i think ms had one, too - that i keep hearing about.
should i be sent to some class about them ? or, maybe, as another poster has reminded about 'license' thingie, maybe i should be prohibited connecting to internet unless i, um, somehow learn about all that stuff and somehow even install them ?;)
now, one thing i agree with you completely - education is important. but that should start with, let's say, journalists. computers have become pretty important part of our everyday life, so there is more and more information in mass media about things like virus outbreaks or big happenings in it - and pretty big part of them are very low quality.
now, what seemed funny to me... there was an ad in local supermarket. big letters said "GET RID OF VIRUSES - PERMANENTLY*". at the background some sort of designed, semi-transparent blue computer monitor was displayed.
small letters at the bottom said "there has been no single virus for mac"
so, probably customers are interested in security after all - maybe it will not be mass media or opensource backers who will change the things - marketing people might pick up this and other facts so the information will catch the eye and people will start examining the options available. hopefully.
they do not relicense anything. actually, you could take oo.org code, add something and sell it as ohmygodoffice right now. there are companies/individuals that are/were doing this.
actually, having all copyright dually assigned allowed sun to drop sissl (that is, dual licensing) at launch of oo.org 2.0 an thus oo.org is licensed as lgpl only now.
1.DRM. Allowing people inside could allow access to the secret key of the phone that is used to decrypt protected content.
so why bother with linux at all ? trying to ride da wave ?
2.Featureset. Motorola might want to sell a phone with in it. This camera & chip might be physically capable of recording video but Motorola might decide to disable the feature...
oh. i just hate companies that act like this. it seems like an advertisment for capitalism.
3.Carriers. For example, Verizon might want Motorola to disable the abillity to access camera pictures except by sending them in an (expensive for the customer) MMS
this is like 2nd, just slightly shifted...
4.Radio, phone functionality and FCC. There may be things that it is possible to do through linux that would have a negative impact on the phone/network/radio functionality of the phone or that could risk the FCC certification of the phone.
this seems to be the single one that is plausible and _seems_ reasonable, but come on. there are devices that run linux and other software that you can crank up power etc - it's the responsibility of the user as you can do that to most devices even if they ron absolutely proprietary software.
5.Viruses and the like.
ok, this probably was the funny part of the post =)
actually voice tagging already has - canon s series (and maybe other, too) have had voice tagging ability for at least 3 years (that is approx how long i own s45 which has this feature).
i knew about that program, but i was not sure why would you need it if you use amarok - but that's for their streams, right ?
i think somewhere on this same thread was also information about last.fm removing normal streams and perl script to listen to the music in normal players again;)
1. The last.fm player is horrible. Horrible usability, and often I just get nothing for music. Can't use it at work. Prior buggy version muted itself unless you gave it exclusive focus.
ugh. is there anybody using it at all ?;) given that amarok has builtin support... i never even took a look at that player
2. The audioscrobbler plug-in often refuses to handshake.
that is the part which sends the info ? well, can not comment on this one, as amarok... well... i hate to repeat, but having the support builtin rocks =)
3. The combination of both is a bit obfuscated.
oh...;))
4. You see just how badly tagged Mp3s across the world are. You often find the wrong tracks, or 20 similarly-named tracks of the same song for an artist. Not last.fm's fault, but it would be nice someday to fuzzy logic them together.
oh, this is true. as far as i know, there are plans for consolidating different "the" usages etc, though maybe somebody from last.fm should comment on this one:) maybe there will be some user-driven initiative to clean up records (like associating particular entries with single placeholder by volunteers etc)
5. A bit bureaucratic in getting artist images uploaded. If it's an unpopular artist, it will never get the # of votes needed to surface.
haven't tried this yet, but maybe you can suggest better mechanism at their forums ?
maybe i am missing something, but what was the app you had to download ? i am using amarok, too - and i did not have to download anything from last.fm website.
that's how i also understand last.fm, and i would prefer it to stay that way. though i probably am skewing slightly their information with listening to mike oldfield, followed by fear factory, then followed by operation ivy, then by neglected fields, then by kraftwerk, then by selecter... and that is not even the most bizarre combinations my amarok dynamic playlist comes up;)
yeah, let's get paranoid, ban most things, head for police state... oh, it's already almost done.
anyway, we had a joke (which probably was translated, so maybe it is available somewhere in original form) which i will try translating back :
------------- + if a man is walking down a street and suspiciously looking around - terrorist;
+ if a man is walking down a street and looking straight ahead - cold blooded terrorist;
+ if a man is walking down a street and looking in clouds - fanatical terrorist;
+ if a man is walking down a street and looking downwards - valetudinarian terrorist;
+ if a man is walking down a street with his eyes closed - noctambulant terrorist;
+ if a man is walking down a street - sick terrorist.
if you see a person like that, he must be taken into custody. if an attempt to escape is made, warning shot should be made and body must be delivered to morgue. -------------
if there exists an english text, i would be thankful if somebody could post a link to it:)
ugh. every 4 hours ? only explanation is - you did not mention the amount of fluid you consumed:)
i am usually "resistant" in this way, but in cases when i drink 4 and more liters of tea/juice/whatever a day (and this usually concentrates in ~6 hours), i have to visit toilet at least every hour or two. if i drink couple of liters in half an hour, i have to do that more often:)
now, this is somewhat different with beer which i need more to get "bathroom visitng need", but that might be connected to dehydration caused by alcohol and usually beer drinking accompanied by more physical activity, like, um, walking for a refill:)
most countries have these complexes. this is not restricted to software - we have clothes and furniture manufactured in latvia, then sent to other countries where it is re-labeled, re-imported and sold for ten times the original price. and there is a market for this.
now, opensource software has allowed a couple of software projects to raise their heads locally (www.zabbix.com, for example) and even companies have lately been more and more positive towards local software (this also has something to do with abroad companies screwing locals over and over...).
maybe oss could push the mindset in other direction, thus resulting in less expenses and better lide for everybody ?:) (except re-labelels;) )
Slashdot Mirror
scanners.
i almost bought canon lide 500f, when i found out that sane has not support for it yet.
most other 'big' brands also lag some time behind the release of the scanner, so i probably will buy some lesser known brand scanner.
this has been pretty frustrating lately as i own canon powershot s series digital camera and would like to get some additional hardware from them - but having all kind of windows-only software shipped with cameras and scanners (and not supporting scanners at all) just drives me away. so far canon has lost some 3 digital photo and 3 scanner sales from me & my recommendations only because of their attitude towards linux. that is not counting possible word of mouth marketing they would get in the opposite case.
this could go to any comment out there - i hope people who really are interested in this thing will take notice even when the article isn't on the first page anymore :)
r eshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&pid=14814298
i have been examining available options for similar system and, from what i have seen, this seems to be the best choice :
http://www.zoneminder.com/
note that it already is mentioned in this thread :
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178695&th
i would be glad to see anybody else with zoneminder experience speak up - are there any significant downsides ?
"The extension of the patent system to software constitutes the first major attack to copyright law, to which the legislator had, after deep thinking, incorporated software. This assimilation was altogether natural because software, just like books, consist in the production of a textual original work (the source code of the program), resulting from the combination of elementary ideas. For an adventure novel, these elementary ideas can be: "love scene on a balcony", "twins being mistaken one for another", etc. For software, it can be: "alphabetical sorting in a list", "displaying a progress bar telling the user to have patience", etc.
Unlike copyright, which protects final works, software patents, which protect against the imitation of features, allows the protection of these elementary ideas, and thus prevent whoever to realize a program implementing a protected idea. This would amount, in the case of books, to be allowed to claim elementary ideas such as the balcony love scene, although the same idea can lead to very different implementations, such as the balcony love scenes of Romeo and Juliet and of Cyrano de Bergerac, which are not plagiarisms one of the other."
http://www.abul.org/article191.html
if you still plan to use the old box with larger disks, you can.
just use first disk for the operating system and set the bigger drives to 'none' in bios.
linux will happily find those disks, access partitions etc.
we have a couple of machines revived using this method. now, problems might arise if the older and smaller disk dies - you won't lose data on the bigger drive, but restoring the machine to life would require more than replacement disk...
"Resize selections, please. Not by adding or subtraction, but by dragging, like in All Other Apps(TM)."
ooooh-yeah. and this includes all tools that select regions. for example, why crop tool is resizeable only at upper left corner and lower right ? whenever i need to crop larger image to some detail that is at the middle of the border, that always is scroll/resize/scroll/check/scroll/resize...
i believe there are some improvements coming for this in 2.4 gimp, but it seems they are creating a new tool for that...
"The "Simple" Rectangle Selector marks a rectangular portion of the image, after which the boundaries of that rectangle can be moved and resized by hand without affecting the underlying image. It is a bit like having a "live mask," letting you work on portions of the image separately without re-selecting. Unlike the basic selection tools, selecting a portion of the image with this tool and adjusting that selection are difficult to mess up. I know it doesn't sound like a big deal, but for tasks like previewing and tweaking a crop this is a very nice enhancement."
from http://www.iwdn.net/showthread.php?t=3170
so, having "windows_vista_final_screenshots.zip" that woul contain executable with some icon would a virus, too ?
what about "kde_4_screenshots.tgz" with similar payload as this one ?
(note that there is no way to run the executable automatically and, it seems that it is not self-propogating in any way)
"The game [that] involves battling the authorities to overthrow corrupt officials..." "...has been banned by authorities"
"Personally I think KDE still suffers from bloat (particularly options bloat)"
personally i think configurability of kde is excellent. and especially the ability to do that through gui, because that way a lot more users will bother, novices will be pleased by it and i can tell over phone "oh, you want that bar look like you saw at my place ? just click there, there and there, woohoo !"
for option exterminators there always is gnome (though there is little left to extermine, so i have heard, so they are probably coming for kde now)
skype could provide binaries optimised for particular intel cpus.
but this seems somewhat stupid from skype as there already are concerns about them being proprietary - and this shows that the concerns are valid...
When will we get some REAL end-user education in this topic? Public schools have Sex Ed classes where they teach you how to reduce your risk of getting HIV and the Clap... how about Computer Safety classes where they teach you how to reduce your risk of getting viruses or spyware?
;) )
;)
and what exactly would be the topics there ? what about exceptions ?
now, let's say jhonny uses linux at home and tommy's father has bough mac for everybody in the family. are they free to go from these classes (in which case everybody will claim to have something-else-but-windows that year) or maybe we should allow them to sit there and ridicule others (which, i must admit, might be pretty cool & effective way to deal with the problem
of course, short, informative classes/lections that are very generic might be usable, but i just do not see how could this be done in sufficient way. additionally, this situation is changing very, very rapidly - unless a person is interested in these things, i just do not see how classes like these could help much.
for example, i haven't used windows for some 3+ years. it was around that time when spy/ad/whatever ware started to appear. i do not have an idea what to do with all those programs - spybot, adware and, i think ms had one, too - that i keep hearing about.
should i be sent to some class about them ? or, maybe, as another poster has reminded about 'license' thingie, maybe i should be prohibited connecting to internet unless i, um, somehow learn about all that stuff and somehow even install them ?
now, one thing i agree with you completely - education is important. but that should start with, let's say, journalists. computers have become pretty important part of our everyday life, so there is more and more information in mass media about things like virus outbreaks or big happenings in it - and pretty big part of them are very low quality.
now, what seemed funny to me... there was an ad in local supermarket. big letters said "GET RID OF VIRUSES - PERMANENTLY*". at the background some sort of designed, semi-transparent blue computer monitor was displayed.
small letters at the bottom said "there has been no single virus for mac"
so, probably customers are interested in security after all - maybe it will not be mass media or opensource backers who will change the things - marketing people might pick up this and other facts so the information will catch the eye and people will start examining the options available. hopefully.
they do not relicense anything. actually, you could take oo.org code, add something and sell it as ohmygodoffice right now. there are companies/individuals that are/were doing this.
l
l
actually, having all copyright dually assigned allowed sun to drop sissl (that is, dual licensing) at launch of oo.org 2.0 an thus oo.org is licensed as lgpl only now.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3294924491.htm
there also is a faq linked from that article (and you probably could find a lot of info in oo.org mailing list archives / website and other places)
http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/license-change.htm
1.DRM. Allowing people inside could allow access to the secret key of the phone that is used to decrypt protected content.
so why bother with linux at all ? trying to ride da wave ?
2.Featureset. Motorola might want to sell a phone with in it. This camera & chip might be physically capable of recording video but Motorola might decide to disable the feature...
oh. i just hate companies that act like this. it seems like an advertisment for capitalism.
3.Carriers. For example, Verizon might want Motorola to disable the abillity to access camera pictures except by sending them in an (expensive for the customer) MMS
this is like 2nd, just slightly shifted...
4.Radio, phone functionality and FCC. There may be things that it is possible to do through linux that would have a negative impact on the phone/network/radio functionality of the phone or that could risk the FCC certification of the phone.
this seems to be the single one that is plausible and _seems_ reasonable, but come on. there are devices that run linux and other software that you can crank up power etc - it's the responsibility of the user as you can do that to most devices even if they ron absolutely proprietary software.
5.Viruses and the like.
ok, this probably was the funny part of the post =)
actually, that is the first thing i actually care about. if there is/will be none - i will avoid wasting my money on that.
at one moment we hear that it is sooo hard for users to migrate to linux because icons look different and it is soooo user-unfriendly.
at the other we hear that it is very easy to dig registry, change permissions and whatnot...
actually voice tagging already has - canon s series (and maybe other, too) have had voice tagging ability for at least 3 years (that is approx how long i own s45 which has this feature).
;)
i haven't used it much, though
i knew about that program, but i was not sure why would you need it if you use amarok - but that's for their streams, right ?
;)
i think somewhere on this same thread was also information about last.fm removing normal streams and perl script to listen to the music in normal players again
last.fm records everything their users play. and i am sure most of the music i am listening to is no way available from itunes or whataver service ;)
note, i am just a recent last.fm user :)
;)
;))
:)
1. The last.fm player is horrible. Horrible usability, and often I just get nothing for music. Can't use it at work. Prior buggy version muted itself unless you gave it exclusive focus.
ugh. is there anybody using it at all ?
given that amarok has builtin support... i never even took a look at that player
2. The audioscrobbler plug-in often refuses to handshake.
that is the part which sends the info ? well, can not comment on this one, as amarok... well... i hate to repeat, but having the support builtin rocks =)
3. The combination of both is a bit obfuscated.
oh...
4. You see just how badly tagged Mp3s across the world are. You often find the wrong tracks, or 20 similarly-named tracks of the same song for an artist. Not last.fm's fault, but it would be nice someday to fuzzy logic them together.
oh, this is true. as far as i know, there are plans for consolidating different "the" usages etc, though maybe somebody from last.fm should comment on this one
maybe there will be some user-driven initiative to clean up records (like associating particular entries with single placeholder by volunteers etc)
5. A bit bureaucratic in getting artist images uploaded. If it's an unpopular artist, it will never get the # of votes needed to surface.
haven't tried this yet, but maybe you can suggest better mechanism at their forums ?
maybe i am missing something, but what was the app you had to download ?
i am using amarok, too - and i did not have to download anything from last.fm website.
that's how i also understand last.fm, and i would prefer it to stay that way. ;)
though i probably am skewing slightly their information with listening to mike oldfield, followed by fear factory, then followed by operation ivy, then by neglected fields, then by kraftwerk, then by selecter... and that is not even the most bizarre combinations my amarok dynamic playlist comes up
check out this :
:)
http://www.last.fm/postsignup.php
as i recently moved from xmms to amarok, i do not have to worry about downloading anything - amarok has last.fm support built in
yeah, let's get paranoid, ban most things, head for police state... oh, it's already almost done.
:)
anyway, we had a joke (which probably was translated, so maybe it is available somewhere in original form) which i will try translating back :
-------------
+ if a man is walking down a street and suspiciously looking around - terrorist;
+ if a man is walking down a street and looking straight ahead - cold blooded terrorist;
+ if a man is walking down a street and looking in clouds - fanatical terrorist;
+ if a man is walking down a street and looking downwards - valetudinarian terrorist;
+ if a man is walking down a street with his eyes closed - noctambulant terrorist;
+ if a man is walking down a street - sick terrorist.
if you see a person like that, he must be taken into custody. if an attempt to escape is made, warning shot should be made and body must be delivered to morgue.
-------------
if there exists an english text, i would be thankful if somebody could post a link to it
ugh. every 4 hours ? :)
:)
:)
only explanation is - you did not mention the amount of fluid you consumed
i am usually "resistant" in this way, but in cases when i drink 4 and more liters of tea/juice/whatever a day (and this usually concentrates in ~6 hours), i have to visit toilet at least every hour or two. if i drink couple of liters in half an hour, i have to do that more often
now, this is somewhat different with beer which i need more to get "bathroom visitng need", but that might be connected to dehydration caused by alcohol and usually beer drinking accompanied by more physical activity, like, um, walking for a refill
and this is why ms fanboys should be BLOODY THANKFUL to opensource developers/users.
if not for them, ms would never upgrade ie, windows would have not gained on stability on security.
now, they should at last copy virtual desktops for windows chicken.
most countries have these complexes. this is not restricted to software - we have clothes and furniture manufactured in latvia, then sent to other countries where it is re-labeled, re-imported and sold for ten times the original price. and there is a market for this.
:) ;) )
now, opensource software has allowed a couple of software projects to raise their heads locally (www.zabbix.com, for example) and even companies have lately been more and more positive towards local software (this also has something to do with abroad companies screwing locals over and over...).
maybe oss could push the mindset in other direction, thus resulting in less expenses and better lide for everybody ?
(except re-labelels