According to another post in this topic, the Java basically just calls a Windows DLL. You'd think if they were going to make it Java-based they'd at least really make it Java-based. Sigh.
Write once, run anywhere!
Anyways, after writing that long post, I feel a bit silly for getting so worked up about it. But hey, I still haven't watched the teaser..
Okay. I'm one of those people who reads slashdot regularly, runs linux on his computer, and has NOT watched the show Firefly and did NOT go see the movie the week it opened. However, I do love sci-fi, I just never took the opportunity to get hooked on this show. (I have enough vices already!)
In any case, look: Advertising, after a movie has been released, is to encourage those who have not seen the movie or may not have been following it so closely but who _might_ be interested, to fork out the $10 and go check it out. I admit, the trailer was sort of interesting but nothing that really grabbed my attention. Mostly it's the hype I've read on this website that has kept me interested, and is what is making me want to go see it. I have no idea about the Firefly story, but since everyone seems to think it's so amazing I might be pursuaded to go see it, especially with a little enticement like showing me the first few minutes of the movie.
Now. I run linux. So I can't watch this "teaser". Let me repeat: I AM PRECISELY THE TARGET AUDIENCE for this advertisement, and yet the message I get when I actually make the effort of clicking on the link and going to the website to check it out is: You can't watch this, your operating system is not supported. This is not something that happens by accident. They are ACTIVELY dissuading linux users from watching the teaser. I had to click "view source" just to find the file, and I'm downloading it, but I realize it's very unlikely I'll be able to watch it. They are publishing in some stupid non-standard format. And for what reason? I can't think of a single one. They are giving it away for FREE, why would they be worried about copyright? At the VERY least, if you don't want to get into weird IP battles by using "frowned upon" formats like DivX (though I don't see the problem with OSS formats like Xvid), publish it in straight MPEG, even if it's low resolution, but my goodness, don't DENY your target audience the ability to watch it.
Whoever is in charge of marketing has no clue. As it is, I still don't know if I'll bother going to see it, especially considering how expensive the theaters are these days and how little time I have. If only I could watch the teaser...
It finished downloading by the time I typed this out. And look, mplayer and VLC are both out of luck.
Sadly the main reason I couldn't convince people to use it at work (and they were seriously interested) was because I couldn't easily tell them how to customize it. They wanted a tracking system they could use for not just software, but documentation and electronics drawings too. I figured it would be pretty easy to customize for that, but they wanted to make many changes, and I just didn't have enough experience with it to say, "yes, that'll be easy!" So they went with a commercial product. Sigh.
Well, at least I told the truth -- not that it wouldn't work for what they wanted, but that I didn't have the time or experience to go and start modifying the php. It would have been worse if they'd gone with it and then I'd be stuck PHP programming instead of developing product-related software. So I guess I think that bugzilla is really cool but I don't know why they stopped at making it a software-only related solution instead of going all the way.
Not that it can't function as a more general solution, but it takes too much work to customize it. From what I can tell with my quick once-over. I'm sure it's not that hard, actually, but I just couldn't say for sure without actually trying, and I didn't have the time to really get into it.
I agree, I've always thought there was something a little odd and way oversimplified about afirmative action. You don't stop something by doing it backwards. You stop something by STOPPING. In other words, to stop racism, don't start promoting people based on race, just stop considering race, period.
It irks me every time I fill out some kind of government form and have to skip over the "visible minority" checkbox..
For the record, I happen to know it also equally irks my girlfriend who happens to be a visible minority.
So in conclusion, afirmative action pisses everyone off. Let's please stop doing it.
Generally I really don't mind the Gimp interface, and actually I use it all the time for little jobs, mostly under Linux but sometimes under Windows.
The main thing that I would change if I ever, you know... got around to taking the time to actually try it, is I would make the tool window "stick" to the side of the active image window. Or at least have it "always on top". I find it annoying when the tool window drops behind the image I'm working on. Other than that, no complaints.
Dunno if this kind of "sticky" behaviour is really feasible with current window managers.. I guess I'm thinking of something along the lines of a docking window, something that docks to the side of the the image window instead of being a seperate window. Hey why not even have one for each image window, make it collapsable so it doesn't always get in the way.
Very cool that they have a new release out, I'll be downloading it soon. But I'm a little dissapointed it looks like the built-in SVG support isn't in there. Guess it's still alpha? (Haven't been following the Deer Park releases) I'm really looking forward to the day where I can actually do a site in SVG and be able to expect more than 2 or 3 people to be able to see it... And wow am I ever tired of struggling with the Flash IDE.
strange, i am in fact a 20-something and i can only seem to enjoy these types of games. (along with Tetris of course)
Just can't get into the 3D shooters that are popular these days. The last one I played in any sort of way more serious than a quick glance was Doom II, which was fun, but didn't really keep my attention for more than a few days. And I was.. hm.. 16, I think.
Guess I'm more busy programming than gaming lately, but when I do it's usually something of the oldschool "arcade" variety, or SNES-style platform or rpg games.
Then again being 25, I seem to vividly recall playing Burger Time on Atari at the neighbour's house and thinking it was amazing, so I guess I caught the tail end of the pre-NES era.
I have to admit that the physics simulations taking place in 3D games these days is really intriguing, but only in an intellectual way. I never really seem to get addicted to particular games these days.
Had to think about this one for a second. I believe that when I'm speaking english it's really one or the other. Mostly the second. When I'm speaking french, always the first. But I'm fairly sure there are times when I'm speaking english and I say it the first way..
perhaps its time that companies stopped selling routers that allow WEP to be turned off. Make it a requirement that users secure their own networks. This can be made very easy by just asking users to supply a password when they're setting up, you know, by reading the instruction manual. It isn't more difficult than programming a VCR, for example. If it was a required step, then all this talk of "if you leave your network open you should expect people to use it" would be moot.
I've noticed that a lot of commercial software for Linux tends to require a particular distribution, usually a Red Hat one. This, I guess, is because in order to provide a "guarantee" that it'll work on a particular system, which is a requirement in the commercial world, it's far easier to work within a "known" environment. It's really just a way of getting around having to test on multiple distributions, but that's okay I guess. I can live with it. They tend to use RPM distributions because it's less of a 'closed system' that you described than something like an apt-get repository.
OSS will always, by definition, be more cross-platform compatible because there'll always be someone willing to port applications to their favorite platform. In the commercial world, since the application is closed source, everyone relies on the company itself to do the porting, so the cost of supporting multiple platforms is entirely on their shoulders.
Because this will entail an extra cost, commercial Linux software will likely always have a "required distribution", rather than depending on packagers for various distributions to do the packaging work for them.
It's unfortunate but not the end of the world, I guess. i.e., better than nothing.
This is of course why there is only corporate push behind the Linux Standards Base. Admittedly it would be easier for a company to put a requirement of LSB-compliance on their software than requiring specifically Red Hat 9 or whatever. It would allow them to more easily keep up with the latest distros.
Realistically though, as long as software is developed with cross-platform compatibility in mind, everything carefully abstracted, there's no technical reason they can't just as easily get it working on Linux as they can on OS X and Windows. It'll always be political and economic reasons that really get in the way.
This reminds me of when I bought a new MIDI controller with USB, and plugged it into my Windows 2000 machine and it just simply BSOD'd...
I couldn't believe it, just like that, BANG reset. Found it was a "known problem", so I followed the instructions on the M-Audio website, to the letter. Tried it again, still BSOD'd. To this day I can't use my USB MIDI controller in Windows 2000. Fortunately I use it mostly in Linux, where it works just fine.
If something like this were to be implemented in X, would it more correctly be done in the Window Manager or in the Compositing Engine (like shadows and transparency)?
Currently I use my old desktop computer to sit in my appartment running Azeurus while I'm at work with my laptop. It hosts my 120GB harddrive. So basically I use it for a file server and a "downloader".
It's about 8 years old, running Windows 2000 (and sometimes Linux), Pentium II 300 Mhz. It was *really* bad with 64 megs of ram, but a few years ago I upgraded it to 256, and it runs along just fine... does exactly what I need it to, perfect for batch processing too.
I've used it for converting movies from DVD to DivX, it takes a day and a night, but it does it, and I can forget about the job without slowly down my "main" computer.
Ha, true..;-) But I'm actually a big fan of tasteful use of solid black & white shading. This is really pleasing to my eyes, almost enough to make me switch back from Gnome..;-) It's something about the simplicity... maybe this'll be available simply as an icon theme at some point. I'd love to use it in XFCE too.
I expect that ultimately customers will decide that DRM and related tech will fail. There will always be new companies and new products that can break into a market that is underperforming for people's needs and wants.
I expect, however, that the major content providers will be signing exclusive deals with DRM-enabled solutions, as they always tend to be easily convinced that DRM is the only way to go.
So the only way for a new company to come in and undercut them with a better, less annoying, non-DRM solution, will likely be to actually come up with new content. Will this mean that if we want to avoid DRM we'll be stuck watching low-budget, home-grown films??
Unless a major content provider suddenly grows a conscience and shows some interest in preventing the headaches that will come with hardware-enabled DRM, you can bet that it won't be a simple thing for a new company to come up with a more popular solution.
You know, I wonder if, someday in the future, we might have "office service" companies. People telecommute an increasing amount, as it lets them live independently of the constraints of who they work with, but we're still struggling with the problem of providing a different "psychological environment" for work to help get you into a "work mode". Some people have a home office, but really, there's a legitimate argument for certain services that are only worthwhile to provide to an office -- redundant Internet connections, commercial shredding, various forms of physical security, IT services, people to socialize with at lunch, etc. But I could see an "office company" that simply provides people with work environments near their houses, and specializes in excellent telecommuting and remote access services.
If you have never read Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, please do so! Yes, it was written waaaay back in the 80's, but man is it a great book. Anyways, one thing he predicts is something similar to what you just described. Something inbetween home-office and downtown-office, something more like a "community work environment".
It's true, I could never get a lot of work done from home, but why should I travel so damn far (it's an hour and a half for me) to get to work when I just sit in front of a computer most of the time. I'd rather have a decent work environment, outside of my home, but far enough away that I'm "at work". If you know what I mean..
I would be more interested in this if i weren't already downloading all the television i'm interesting in via bittorrent and watching it when i actually have time instead of when it happens to be on.
What's the point of something fancy like IPTV when I can do this already?
I am loathe to try to explain to them that I have walked all the way across the building to use a Linux station on a particular database or directory tree because in so doing I can save two days' work of data processing just by spending ten minutes with bash+perl+tools.
Next time try using SSH instead.;-)
(Actually I started this just to write that snide comment, but it actually encapsulates a HUGE advantage of Linux/*nix that I've really come to appreciate in the last year or so: You can get a hell of a lot more done remotely in a Unix environment than you can with Windows. I can work on 3 or 4 computers simultaneously without moving from my desk. Which I do quite often, actually. Programming, compiling, testing under various environments, etc, even remotely operating equipment for testing purposes. With Windows I use VNC, which is hardly the best use of the network bandwidth. Meanwhile my co-workers are still running up and down the stairs... Okay so it's not an advantage in terms of exercise and health, but that's a whole other story. I know I must be lucky that they put up with me and my vices in our Windows-oriented environment at work, I don't have to deal with this "pristine" problem you have. Thank goodness.)
Slashdot Mirror
In Mario the violence is presented almost whimsically. All fun, no blood, no consequences.
Tell that to Mario.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28338
According to another post in this topic, the Java basically just calls a Windows DLL.
You'd think if they were going to make it Java-based they'd at least really make it Java-based.
Sigh.
Write once, run anywhere!
Anyways, after writing that long post, I feel a bit silly for getting so worked up about it. But hey, I still haven't watched the teaser..
Isn't bugzilla written in Perl? Yup, sorry. It's been a few months since I looked at it..
Okay.
I'm one of those people who reads slashdot regularly, runs linux on his computer, and has NOT watched the show Firefly and did NOT go see the movie the week it opened.
However, I do love sci-fi, I just never took the opportunity to get hooked on this show. (I have enough vices already!)
In any case, look: Advertising, after a movie has been released, is to encourage those who have not seen the movie or may not have been following it so closely but who _might_ be interested, to fork out the $10 and go check it out. I admit, the trailer was sort of interesting but nothing that really grabbed my attention. Mostly it's the hype I've read on this website that has kept me interested, and is what is making me want to go see it. I have no idea about the Firefly story, but since everyone seems to think it's so amazing I might be pursuaded to go see it, especially with a little enticement like showing me the first few minutes of the movie.
Now. I run linux. So I can't watch this "teaser". Let me repeat: I AM PRECISELY THE TARGET AUDIENCE for this advertisement, and yet the message I get when I actually make the effort of clicking on the link and going to the website to check it out is: You can't watch this, your operating system is not supported. This is not something that happens by accident. They are ACTIVELY dissuading linux users from watching the teaser. I had to click "view source" just to find the file, and I'm downloading it, but I realize it's very unlikely I'll be able to watch it. They are publishing in some stupid non-standard format. And for what reason? I can't think of a single one. They are giving it away for FREE, why would they be worried about copyright? At the VERY least, if you don't want to get into weird IP battles by using "frowned upon" formats like DivX (though I don't see the problem with OSS formats like Xvid), publish it in straight MPEG, even if it's low resolution, but my goodness, don't DENY your target audience the ability to watch it.
Whoever is in charge of marketing has no clue.
As it is, I still don't know if I'll bother going to see it, especially considering how expensive the theaters are these days and how little time I have.
If only I could watch the teaser...
It finished downloading by the time I typed this out. And look, mplayer and VLC are both out of luck.
Sadly the main reason I couldn't convince people to use it at work (and they were seriously interested) was because I couldn't easily tell them how to customize it. They wanted a tracking system they could use for not just software, but documentation and electronics drawings too. I figured it would be pretty easy to customize for that, but they wanted to make many changes, and I just didn't have enough experience with it to say, "yes, that'll be easy!" So they went with a commercial product. Sigh.
Well, at least I told the truth -- not that it wouldn't work for what they wanted, but that I didn't have the time or experience to go and start modifying the php. It would have been worse if they'd gone with it and then I'd be stuck PHP programming instead of developing product-related software. So I guess I think that bugzilla is really cool but I don't know why they stopped at making it a software-only related solution instead of going all the way.
Not that it can't function as a more general solution, but it takes too much work to customize it. From what I can tell with my quick once-over. I'm sure it's not that hard, actually, but I just couldn't say for sure without actually trying, and I didn't have the time to really get into it.
Andrew?
It irks me every time I fill out some kind of government form and have to skip over the "visible minority" checkbox..
For the record, I happen to know it also equally irks my girlfriend who happens to be a visible minority.
So in conclusion, afirmative action pisses everyone off. Let's please stop doing it.
Generally I really don't mind the Gimp interface, and actually I use it all the time for little jobs, mostly under Linux but sometimes under Windows.
The main thing that I would change if I ever, you know... got around to taking the time to actually try it, is I would make the tool window "stick" to the side of the active image window. Or at least have it "always on top". I find it annoying when the tool window drops behind the image I'm working on. Other than that, no complaints.
Dunno if this kind of "sticky" behaviour is really feasible with current window managers.. I guess I'm thinking of something along the lines of a docking window, something that docks to the side of the the image window instead of being a seperate window. Hey why not even have one for each image window, make it collapsable so it doesn't always get in the way.
Very cool that they have a new release out, I'll be downloading it soon.
But I'm a little dissapointed it looks like the built-in SVG support isn't in there. Guess it's still alpha? (Haven't been following the Deer Park releases)
I'm really looking forward to the day where I can actually do a site in SVG and be able to expect more than 2 or 3 people to be able to see it...
And wow am I ever tired of struggling with the Flash IDE.
Mediocrity only knows itself. It doesn't understand and is intrinsically afraid of excellence.
Posts like this make me wish there was a button on the screen called "Add to list of Favorite Posts"
Thanks.
strange, i am in fact a 20-something and i can only seem to enjoy these types of games. (along with Tetris of course)
.. hm.. 16, I think.
Just can't get into the 3D shooters that are popular these days. The last one I played in any sort of way more serious than a quick glance was Doom II, which was fun, but didn't really keep my attention for more than a few days. And I was
Guess I'm more busy programming than gaming lately, but when I do it's usually something of the oldschool "arcade" variety, or SNES-style platform or rpg games.
Then again being 25, I seem to vividly recall playing Burger Time on Atari at the neighbour's house and thinking it was amazing, so I guess I caught the tail end of the pre-NES era.
I have to admit that the physics simulations taking place in 3D games these days is really intriguing, but only in an intellectual way. I never really seem to get addicted to particular games these days.
It's getting there... slowly but surely my friend, slowly but surely.
Had to think about this one for a second. I believe that when I'm speaking english it's really one or the other. Mostly the second. When I'm speaking french, always the first. But I'm fairly sure there are times when I'm speaking english and I say it the first way..
(I'm in Montreal btw, just for context.)
perhaps its time that companies stopped selling routers that allow WEP to be turned off. Make it a requirement that users secure their own networks. This can be made very easy by just asking users to supply a password when they're setting up, you know, by reading the instruction manual. It isn't more difficult than programming a VCR, for example. If it was a required step, then all this talk of "if you leave your network open you should expect people to use it" would be moot.
I've noticed that a lot of commercial software for Linux tends to require a particular distribution, usually a Red Hat one. This, I guess, is because in order to provide a "guarantee" that it'll work on a particular system, which is a requirement in the commercial world, it's far easier to work within a "known" environment. It's really just a way of getting around having to test on multiple distributions, but that's okay I guess. I can live with it. They tend to use RPM distributions because it's less of a 'closed system' that you described than something like an apt-get repository.
OSS will always, by definition, be more cross-platform compatible because there'll always be someone willing to port applications to their favorite platform. In the commercial world, since the application is closed source, everyone relies on the company itself to do the porting, so the cost of supporting multiple platforms is entirely on their shoulders.
Because this will entail an extra cost, commercial Linux software will likely always have a "required distribution", rather than depending on packagers for various distributions to do the packaging work for them.
It's unfortunate but not the end of the world, I guess. i.e., better than nothing.
This is of course why there is only corporate push behind the Linux Standards Base. Admittedly it would be easier for a company to put a requirement of LSB-compliance on their software than requiring specifically Red Hat 9 or whatever. It would allow them to more easily keep up with the latest distros.
Realistically though, as long as software is developed with cross-platform compatibility in mind, everything carefully abstracted, there's no technical reason they can't just as easily get it working on Linux as they can on OS X and Windows. It'll always be political and economic reasons that really get in the way.
That's possible, I imagine it was more difficult before someone built a proper Windows installer. Try it again.. ;-)
And as for graphics specifically, I'd love to run GIMP on Windows, if it weren't such a pain in the ass to install.
You're kidding, right?
Just run GTK installer and then Gimp installer. How could it be easier?
This reminds me of when I bought a new MIDI controller with USB, and plugged it into my Windows 2000 machine and it just simply BSOD'd...
I couldn't believe it, just like that, BANG reset. Found it was a "known problem", so I followed the instructions on the M-Audio website, to the letter. Tried it again, still BSOD'd. To this day I can't use my USB MIDI controller in Windows 2000. Fortunately I use it mostly in Linux, where it works just fine.
(For the record, it does work under Windows XP)
If something like this were to be implemented in X, would it more correctly be done in the Window Manager or in the Compositing Engine (like shadows and transparency)?
Just curious...
Currently I use my old desktop computer to sit in my appartment running Azeurus while I'm at work with my laptop. It hosts my 120GB harddrive. So basically I use it for a file server and a "downloader".
It's about 8 years old, running Windows 2000 (and sometimes Linux), Pentium II 300 Mhz. It was *really* bad with 64 megs of ram, but a few years ago I upgraded it to 256, and it runs along just fine... does exactly what I need it to, perfect for batch processing too.
I've used it for converting movies from DVD to DivX, it takes a day and a night, but it does it, and I can forget about the job without slowly down my "main" computer.
Ha, true.. ;-) ;-)
But I'm actually a big fan of tasteful use of solid black & white shading. This is really pleasing to my eyes, almost enough to make me switch back from Gnome..
It's something about the simplicity... maybe this'll be available simply as an icon theme at some point. I'd love to use it in XFCE too.
I expect that ultimately customers will decide that DRM and related tech will fail. There will always be new companies and new products that can break into a market that is underperforming for people's needs and wants.
I expect, however, that the major content providers will be signing exclusive deals with DRM-enabled solutions, as they always tend to be easily convinced that DRM is the only way to go.
So the only way for a new company to come in and undercut them with a better, less annoying, non-DRM solution, will likely be to actually come up with new content. Will this mean that if we want to avoid DRM we'll be stuck watching low-budget, home-grown films??
Unless a major content provider suddenly grows a conscience and shows some interest in preventing the headaches that will come with hardware-enabled DRM, you can bet that it won't be a simple thing for a new company to come up with a more popular solution.
You know, I wonder if, someday in the future, we might have "office service" companies. People telecommute an increasing amount, as it lets them live independently of the constraints of who they work with, but we're still struggling with the problem of providing a different "psychological environment" for work to help get you into a "work mode". Some people have a home office, but really, there's a legitimate argument for certain services that are only worthwhile to provide to an office -- redundant Internet connections, commercial shredding, various forms of physical security, IT services, people to socialize with at lunch, etc. But I could see an "office company" that simply provides people with work environments near their houses, and specializes in excellent telecommuting and remote access services. If you have never read Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, please do so! Yes, it was written waaaay back in the 80's, but man is it a great book. Anyways, one thing he predicts is something similar to what you just described. Something inbetween home-office and downtown-office, something more like a "community work environment". It's true, I could never get a lot of work done from home, but why should I travel so damn far (it's an hour and a half for me) to get to work when I just sit in front of a computer most of the time. I'd rather have a decent work environment, outside of my home, but far enough away that I'm "at work". If you know what I mean..
I would be more interested in this if i weren't already downloading all the television i'm interesting in via bittorrent and watching it when i actually have time instead of when it happens to be on.
What's the point of something fancy like IPTV when I can do this already?
I am loathe to try to explain to them that I have walked all the way across the building to use a Linux station on a particular database or directory tree because in so doing I can save two days' work of data processing just by spending ten minutes with bash+perl+tools.
;-)
Next time try using SSH instead.
(Actually I started this just to write that snide comment, but it actually encapsulates a HUGE advantage of Linux/*nix that I've really come to appreciate in the last year or so: You can get a hell of a lot more done remotely in a Unix environment than you can with Windows. I can work on 3 or 4 computers simultaneously without moving from my desk. Which I do quite often, actually. Programming, compiling, testing under various environments, etc, even remotely operating equipment for testing purposes. With Windows I use VNC, which is hardly the best use of the network bandwidth. Meanwhile my co-workers are still running up and down the stairs... Okay so it's not an advantage in terms of exercise and health, but that's a whole other story. I know I must be lucky that they put up with me and my vices in our Windows-oriented environment at work, I don't have to deal with this "pristine" problem you have. Thank goodness.)