Thanks for the info. Automatix worked brilliantly for me a couple months ago with a new Dapper install. Since there were no issues, I didn't look at the forums.
I did hear that there were issues in upgrading from Dapper to Edgy (as opposed to installing Edgy cleanly) but wasn't aware that it had anything to do with Automatix.
I'm guessing you mean 'law' rather than 'market' in points 1 and 2 -- the market allows anything, it only dictates price. Check out your neighborhood bootleg DVD vendor to find out what value the market gives patently illegal goods.
(1) Does the [law] allow for the selling of an iPod and a separate DVD disc?
Sure. Best Buy, Circuit City, Microcenter, and a ton of other retailers sell both ipods and DVDs.
(2) Does the [law] allow for someone to buy a movie onto their iPod?
Absolutely. ITMS sells Disney movies, as well as TV shows from lots of producers.
(3) What is the difference between a movie on a DVD and a movie on an iPod? Are a distributor's rights changed?
Doubtful, but I don't think anyone's trying to make that point. Hollywood doesn't think, for example, that there is any difference in rights for a purchaser between a DVD and a VHS tape. You are allowed to watch it privately but not to exhibit it publicly. You are allowed to sell the tape/disc, but you are not allowed to copy it or distribute copies. If anything you have more rights with a DVD than with an ITMS-purchased movie since you can't resell the ipod version.
(4) Can a business do for users what they can do for themselves?
Obviously. Jiffylube will change my oil though I am capable of doing it myself. Any number of businesses will disinfect and defrag a Windows system, though those are trivial tasks. Heck you could pay someone to come to house every morning to tie your shoes if you really wanted to.
. . . For example, rip a DVD copy onto a viewing device?
Ah ha. There is another matter entirely, since the MPAA's opinion is that ripping a DVD is in itself illegal, regardless of who owns it or on whose behalf the ripping is being done. With the DMCA, the law would appear to be on their side.
On the other hand, if you were doing the ripping outside of the jurisdiction of the DMCA, I don't think they could attack using the DMCA (although they would probably answer that the ripped copy is still unauthorized and therefore illegal regardless of where it was made, and irrespective of the fact that there is only one owner of the original, the copy, and the playback device.
(5) Can a user pay someone, in any way, to copy their DVD onto any other device they own?
Same point as above -- MPAA would argue that the copying is illegal whether the purchaser does it, or their daughter, or their neighbor, or PutYourFilmsOnYourIpod.com.
I just downloaded SUSE and I'm getting ready to play around with installing a Linux distro on my pc. However, with the new MS deal, I'm debating using this distro. What would be the recommended distro by Slashdotters? Ubuntu? This will be my first Linux installation and I want to use it for 1) getting more familiar with Linux. 2) development machine for web applications.
Ubuntu is well worth a go. It's probably the easiest and quickest distro to install and get up and running. Also, get Automatix to install codecs and apps that aren't included in the Ubuntu base distribution.
Re:ok, I'm biting... about this illiteracy...
on
First of the OLPCs Built
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· Score: 3, Informative
Hear, hear.
Some figures:
Country, literacy rate in percent (world ranking)
So why not have the US Government buy laptops for underprivileged kids? They are in need of computers just as much as people in other countries, if not more, to stay on par with their peers.
Because the US government doesn't have the authority to procure education materials for local schools. Education and school systems are the responsibility of State governments and local school boards.
There are schools in the US that have begun providing students with laptops, but these were decisions made by individual school administrations.
First: It's not people buying them, it's governments.
Second: Not everyone outside of the US and Europe is starving in a mud hut. Both Libya and Brazil are modern, technical societies with substantial wealth. Both countries would certainly benefit from increased technical skills among their local populations.
Remeber that the OLPC is designed to replace textbooks in schools, and over the life of the machine will almost certainly provide a cost savings over printed books.
In addition, the project will foster local IT development as more and more people learn to use, repair, modify, and program for the machines. This will lead to free and/or locally produced software and a local IT service sector, keeping money in local economies rather than sending it to Redmond or to other Western software houses and consultancies.
From a development perspective, this is a cheap project with enormous potential -- it could eventually bring an even bigger fundamental change in developing societies than micro credit progams have.
Third, what's so wrong about paper? Why is the government so gung ho over mediocre to outright horrible electronic voting equipment over paper ballots?
It's because the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), specifically section 301, requires voting equipment allow disabled (vision impaired) voters cast a ballot without assistance. There's only one system currently in use that does this with paper ballots -- a machine with an audio interface that marks the paper ballot for the voter. The ballot is then counted by an optical scanner.
And what's so bad about receipts?
You cannot allow a voter to show how he or she voted. It would compromise the secret ballot and allow for vote buying, voter intimidation, and other election fraud.
In previous discussions of this topic, several people have wondered why Diebold's banking equipment (especially their ATM machines) seem to have pretty good security and auditability, while their voting machines don't.
While electronic voting machines and electronic banking machines may look similar, the operational and security requirements for each are very different.
An ATM requires physical security like encasing it in a concrete wall to prevent theft, must identify and authenticate a user with card and PIN, must be networked to the bank's mainframe to authenticate and pull down account data, must record transactions on the user's account, and must be capable of producing a receipt identifying the user, the transaction, and the transaction number.
A voting machine on the other hand must be portable, meaning a whole different set of physical security requirements; cannot be networked while accepting votes; cannot identify or authenticate individual voters in order to preserve anonymity; cannot produce a removable receipt in order to prevent vote-buying and other fraud; and cannot record data in a way that makes it possible to connect a ballot to a voter.
Unfortunately, the requirements of the secret ballot coupled with an electronic recording system create a very non-transparent system and do little to assuage doubts people have about the system's integrity.
What's worse is the notion that adding a VVPAT (voter-verifiable paper audit trail) will solve the integrity issues. In some states, eg Illinois, the paper trail is the ballot of record in case of recount or dispute.
However, many machines from different manufacturers have had problems reliably creating a paper trail -- the feed jams, the ink runs out, the paper runs out, paper is loaded improperly, the paper is damaged by the mechanism, etc. Such problems in a close election would make the legally mandated recount process impossible.
The fact is that all this new DRE hardware is trying to solve the problems of Florida, caused by bad ballot design. In other words, a cheap and easy problem to fix. Instead the solution we've been given is colossolly expensive, of questionable reliability, of dubious integrity, and has dramatically slowed the process of tabulating and reporting results.
For a bit of perspective, here's a piece from the December, 1940 issue of Popular Science on the new voting technology of the day. The results were tabulated by hand, reported by phone, and broadcast on the radio by 11:00 pm election night.
For the record, Diebold has only been in the election machine business since 2001. They only make direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines, and have never produced paper ballot readers or any other equipment other than electronic machines and electronic pollbooks. Here is a good historical overview of Diebold's election activities.
There are a number of points that are completely missed or misunderstood in the discussion of election hardware, and why so many jurisdictions have moved to such questionable devices. The story of what has happened is a case study in how the federal government creates a royal mess from good intentions.
After the debacle of Florida 2000 Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which was designed to prevent such a thing from happening again. Of course the problems in Florida were not caused by faulty election equipment but by poorly designed ballots.
Of all the parts to the eqatuation in FL 2000 (voting machines, ballots, election process, registration, administration, etc) it was the ballots that were at fault, and the administration of the resulting dispute that created the big issue. I still believe that if Al Gore had accepted (or insisted upon) a statewide recount of Florida rather than trying to game county-level results he would have won Florida, and the presidency.
Instead the POTUS (President of the US) was effectively elected by the Supreme Court. And that led rather directly to HAVA -- a federal law wherein the federal government assumes authoritah over the states on issues concerning election procedures, quite contrary to strict readings of the Constitution.
The Constitution clearly gives the states power to handle their own electoral affairs, but at the same time gives the federal government power to distribute funds, and to set requirements on the distribution. Through HAVA, Washington pledges a ton of money to each state and local jusrisdiction to upgrade their election hardware to something that is compliant with HAVA, but the requirements only apply to election for federal office -- ie President and Congress. But since it's too much trouble to maintain separate election system for fedreal and local offices, and too much money to ignore, all states are scrambling towards HAVA compliance.
Diebold comes in because of a rather ill-thought clause in HAVA -- Section 301. This requires that HAVA-compliant hardware meet the needs of blind voters in allowing them to 1) cast a ballot without assistance, and 2) to review and change ballot selections before casting the ballot.
As of 2000, blind voters cast ballots with the assistance of two election judges (in jurisdictions that did not require Braille ballots). HAVA requires that all blind voters have audio ballots. Which means many effective and accurate voting systems and procedures are no longer valid.
Once HAVA was passed, Diebold saw a business opportunity in US election systems (they had previously sold electyion hardware to Brazil). Diebold could certainly deliver counting machines with audio capability, and naturally they theough that security requirements for ATMs were analogous to those for election systems.
The points of this whole rant are 1) Diebold gets a lot of deserved blame for producing faulty hardware, and a lot of undeserved blame for commiting mass electoral fraud (remember that they didn't have any election hardware in 2000); 2) All DRE machines (with or without paper trail) are subject to problems and errors; and 3) the voting process is sound, even if the equipment has flaws.
Make sure you vote on November 7, make sure if you're using a DRE machine that your vote is properly recorded, and make sure you have some sympathy for the sorely undertrained and underpaid election judges at your precinct.
Let me say that if I could go into a store right now and buy a reasonably priced copy of OX X that would run on a plain PC, I would be running OS X at the moment (Yes, I understand that running on *any* hardware would make OS X less stable, but I would be willing to take the risk...and huge amounts of people would rather pay more for Apple's hardware and stability, and I wish Apple could see that and make us both happy).
But since that isn't going to happen, I'm really considering going to Ubuntu because I think MS is just going insane with Vista.
Actually, you can get OS X to run natively on a PC. You just need to ask yourself if its worth the trouble. I'd think you're better off just getting a Mac mini.
As the above mention, he doesn't think Ubuntu is too far behind OS X. I would be interested in hearing others thoughts on this?
There's no doubt that Mac is more polished and more user-friendly. But Ubuntu is a complete, polished, intuitive, full-featured environment. Provided you're not using non-standard hardware, pretty much everything works straight out of the box with very little tweaking.
In fact, Ubuntu on my laptop handles the various power-saving modes (sleep, hibernation) flawlessly and with no special configuration, whereas Windows XP would sometimes sleep, sometimes not, and refuse to come out of hibernation if and when it hibernated (which often had little bearing on how, or even if, it was configured to hibernate).
Much in contrast to a Windows install, the Ubuntu install is fast, easy, intuitive, contains all the software you'll need, doesn't require multiple reboots and separate installation (with more reboots) for installing software and device drivers, and doesn't require yet further instalalation and reboots for OS and software updates.
Last time I had to reinstall Windows after a drive failure it took over three hours and no fewer than 10 reboots to get the system installed (reboot), upgraded (reboot), upgraded to SP2 (reboot), updated again (reboot), install/update drivers (reboot), install Office XP (reboot), update to Office 2003 (reboot), security and other Office updates (reboot), more Windows updates since I now had Office installed (reboot), etc. Installing other necessary software required more reboots.
My last Ubuntu install (incidentally, my first) took all of 45 minutes start-to finish with OS and all software installed and upgraded. Much simpler than any other Linux I've installed (FC3, FC4, RHEL, Mandriva, SuSE) and in a completely different league than Microsoft.
But don't take my word. Try it out for yourself. Installation is even easier with Automatix for adding bits that aren't in the core Ubuntu distribution like all the multimedia codecs and various packages that don't meet Ubuntu's strict libre-only policy.
Arguments for local control of voting regulations. [...]
1 - The United States Of America was designed as a confederation of (mostly) independent states. Only the powers explicitly given to the federal government are not the jurisdiction of the states.
Actually a federation rather than a confederation. The difference is slight but important. Nonetheless, the 10th ammendment is very specific about the limits of powers of the federal government vs state governments.
Most of the expansion of federal authority has been carried out under the commerce clause of the Constitution -- that Washington has authority over matters of interstate trade, which has been used to enforce federal regulations from industrial emmissions to minimum wage to drug enforcement, etc. And it also comes into play when the Feds distribute federal HAVA (Help America Vote Act) funds to states. Though these only really apply to federal elections (i.e. Congress and President), no state is willing to maintain one election system for local and state elections and a second for federal elections.
The 14th ammendment guarantees equal access to the polls, but does not, and cannot dictate the mechanisms and procedures used on the state level, other than making sure that they are compatible with the 14th ammendment and the Voting Rights Act.
2 - The innovative power of the open market. The belief that by allowing a competition of ideas in how best to run elections (as long as they meet minimal standards) the best choice will be eventually reached.
The first point is far more applicable. Elections are the responsibility of the state, not the federal government. Each state has the power to determine its own election laws and practices, and laws vary widely. WA, for example, is moving towards all-mail voting. SD is exempt from HAVA provisions mandating state-wide voter databases since that state does not require voter registration.
Some states allow election day registration, others do not. Some states allow any voter to vote in all primary elections, some allow it for one primary election, and some states require that voters be registered in a given party to vote that party's primary ballot.
The benefits of open competition are positive, but a side effect.
And to the Anonymous Asshat who replied earlier: Diebold is not the leader in voting hardware. ES&S machines are used in roughly 50 percent of precincts and by roughly 50 percent of the US population. I believe, though am by no means sure, that Sequoia is the number two vendor by market share.
3 - Local boards of elections consist of an equal number of members of both parties. The belief is that Democrats won't allow Republicans to steal the election, and vise versa.
Again, this depends on the state. In some, like Ohio, the State Board of Elections is divided by state law between the two major parties. In some states the board is appointed while in others others Board seats are elected positions. While I'm not aware of any states that have election boards made up of members from only one party, there are many states that do not allocate board seats by party affiliation.
Youtube is often held up as an example of Web 2.0 (whatever the hell that means), but the strategy -- get an audience and bail -- is much more of a Web 1.0 (or 0.90) strategy.
Then again driving visits with user-generatated content, thought to be the hallmark of Web 2.0, is remarkably similar to Web 0.1 (codename BBS - atdt/gopher).
With Youtube, I have yet to see any coherent idea of how thay are planning to turn all those eyeballs into cash while mitigating the risks involved in hosting videos that depict clearly illegal activities or are clear violations of copyright or trademark. This ignores all the videos that are borderline copyright violations, which this suit is likely to be about and which Hollywood would be much better off ignoring.
But Hollywood tends to ignore things they shoudn't, like Office Space or Xvid, and makes a big deal of things they ought to ignore, like Napster(TM) or Gigli.
What everybody jumping on the bandwagon seems to fail to realize is that once the product everybody uses no longer does what they want, or the PITA factor gets to high, the market will turn in a moment. Hotmail was at one time the most popular web-based email app,
No cost means no commitment, and for something like Myspace or Youtube any cost at all for the user would mean death.
Youtube has been burning cash, and I'm not sure I see a way out. Rupert Murdoch seems to think he can make some money off of Myspace, and maybe he can. But places like Myspace and Flickr seem eerily similar to the basic concept of the internet circa 1994-95. There is precious little difference between Murdoch's new toy and the Cleveland Freenet other than the volume of current and potential users, the ability to include graphical content, and the exponentially increased potential for abuse.
At least I know that if Youtube falls (under its own weight or a corporate parent's), it will be replaced by another service that is faster, smarter, easier, and more pleasing to look at.
Does MythTV work with digital cable boxes? IE is it possible to record movies from premium channels??
Please ignore the comments of folks who don't know any better.
Yes, of course you can record movies from premium channels, just not in HD. Anything that your STB can send to your TV can also be sent to your Myth box.
Since there are no capture cards capable of capturing and recording an unencrypted HD signal (from component, DVI or HDMI ports), there is no way to get encrypted HD MPEG-2 streams to record in Myth. HD broadcasts from OTA sources (ATSC) or HD OTA channels from your cable company (QAMM) are recordable under Myth with the proper hardware, eg pcHDTV cards.
OK, awesome. Thanks for the clarification. I beleive it will be scrambled, and will need the outputs of the STB. I didn't know that Myth could select the right input automagically. Cool.
I don't have HD yet, but you won't be able to record HD coming out of the S-Video of the STB right? If it outputs DVI or HDMI and there were a tuner card that took that as an input, maybe it would work. Or can you get HD from the FireWire?
For something like the NHL package, you'll definitely need to use the STB. Also, not all (actually relatively few) digital channels are HD.
However, the S-video feed will give you a much cleaner signal than the coax (RF) feed will.
For firewire, you'll likely only get the OTA broadcast channels in HD over firewire -- others, like HBO-HD and ESPN-HD will be encrypted.
There are no tuner cards that accept component, DVI or HDMI inputs. Firewire works because the broadcast standard is compressed and basically dumps MPEG-2 data direct to your disk at about 7-8 GB per hour. HD data over DVI or HDMI is uncompressed and runs about 30+ GB an hour -- a rate that your system would be unable to cope with.
You can use MythTV to control your STB (change channels) through a serial or firewire connection (if you're lucky and the STB supports it), or by using an IR blaster.
A fairly typical setup for what you're describing would be two tuner cards -- one with a cable feed going straight into it and handling analog channels, the second connected with S-video and audio to the STB, which is controlled by IR blaster.
There are all kinds of instructions on how to do all these things on the MythTV wiki (not linking to it here because it's struggling under/. and digg effects, but google is your friend).
I'm sure someone will tell me if I'm wrong, but I thought the whole point of them buying a 767 was because 1) a used jumbo is cheaper to buy and outfit than a new business jet; 2) the operating range of a 767 is much farther than a business jet; and 3) that they can accomodate a whole lot more people in a whole lot more luxury on a pimped-out 767 than on a business jet.
Sorry if it seems extravagent, but these sound like the kind of people I'd like to have sending my team to conferences, rather than the folks who now send us in cattle class (even when the VP flies in first).
The mere fact that there is a category "usually [masculine, feminine, neutral]"
should tell you that there is no first principles way to determine the gender.
You're missing the point. The primary way of determining a noun's gender (in languages that use gender widely) is how the noun ends. It has nothing to do with the object itself, just the word that represents the object. This is why, for example, the moon is feminine in a Romance language like Italian (la luna), but masculine in a Slavic language like Slovak (ten mesiac).
Latin-derived grammars are usually a pain in the ass because of genders, irregular verbs, and noun cases.
No. For this very reason grammars in Latin and Slavic languages are actually much simpler -- there are far fewer irregularities in verb conjugation than English because there are logical systems in place to account for them. The vast majority of verbs fit into one of several patterns based on the construction of the verb -- e.g. in French, the -er, -ir, -re verbs. Every language has irregularities, but English, drawn as it is from so many linguistic sources, has irregular verbs out the wazoo. Check any English grammar reference you like -- the list of irregular verbs and participles will go on for several pages.
Of course those are just the verbs that are grammatically irregular. What really confuses non-native English speakers are our phrasal verbs, particularly the fact that the meaning of the phrases often has little to do with the meaning of the words. (This is of course not to mention confusion about which phrasal verbs must be separated by an object, which cannot be separated by an object, and which will mean completely different things depending on whether or not the object comes between -- "I'll get on it tomorrow", and "I'll get it on tomorrow".
To make English verbs even harder we have compound verbs, some of which require an infinitive (e.g. 'want'), some that require an -ing (e.g. enjoy), some that can use -ing and an infinitive interchangably (e.g. 'like'), and some that can use -ing or an infinitive with completely different meanings (e.g. 'I stopped to smoke', 'I stopped smoking')
As for noun declination, just becuase there are rules to learn doesn't make it a pain in the ass. Besides, modern Romance languages, with the exception (I believe) of Romanian, have abandoned declination to more or less the same degree as English has. We don't really think of it as such, but we do still decline, for example, personal and possessive pronouns. There is 'I' and 'My' (Nominative), and 'me' and 'mine' (Accusative, Dative, etc).
English has fewer irregularities (gerund; too many tenses, like the conditional tenses that few people use; rather arbitrary use of "a" vs. "the", etc).
No, no, no, no, a thousand times no. Firstly, there's nothing irregular at all about a gerund, nor is there anything irregular in our way of using it. Secondly, conditionals are not irregular either and take similar forms (with similar tense shifts) in other languages. If you rarely use conditionals, you must be rather boring to talk to. But then again, if you knew what a conditional was, you probably wouldn't have used it as an example of English irregularity.
Although articles are one of the most difficult things for a non-native speaker to learn, they are far from arbitrary. There are rules, and the rules make sense. But just as a Russian knows how to decline without necessarily understanding the grammar, most native English speakers use articles correctly without knowing why.
But English is far more irregular than most other languages -- in terms of verb conjugations, rules of word order, spelling and punctuation (which can vary widely depending on where you are in the world, and what field you are in), stress and pronunciation, etc, etc. This is not a bad thing. If anything it means that English is excedingly easy to speak badly, which is why it is spoken more or less badly more or less everywhere.
Now, I am a 100% Win fan. I love it; things just work.
(sarcasm) Then you haven't been properly following the Genuine Advantage Update (TM) process (/sarcasm)
But, I have made the switch to Linux (Fedora Core 5) at home, seeing as it does 99% of what I want. After a couple of months of constant, un-interupted use, my biggest issues with Linux are broadly thus:
1. No fecking media support! I get XMMS inform me on first attempt at playing an MP3 that it won't because of licensing conflict. Wtf? Codecs for avi's and DVDs were a simular story; all had to be downloaded via yum (bloody excellent tool!). Seriously; not good, but fixed in the end.
As I'm gussing you've discovered, media support in Linux is comprehensive but by no means intuitive, especially with a distro like Fedora. FC is more of a business distro -- the free cousin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and as such doesn't come with much media support standard. But install a few packages like mplayer and xine and you can play just about anything including media that won't play under WMP.
I can't remember what specific packages I installed on FC4, but mplayer and/or xine on my system will play anything, including proprietary MS formats like wmv and asf, commercial DVDs, quicktime formats, real formats, streaming formats, etc. I don't know about aac or other ITMS stuff -- never used it. Because of patent, licensing, and DMCA issues, this support doesn't come straight off the install disc but most certainly exists and is not that difficult to get working.
2. Why the hell do I have to install a new kernel? Why? I've never had to on Windows - why is Linux different? Is it so buggy? I installed with a factory version something ending 054. Now I have something ending 122 I believe. I did it ok, but that's not the point I'm making; were there really 68 cock-ups so great in the kernel build from release-time until that now they had to re-release 68 times? I'm guessing probablly not, but still.
You're the only one who can answer why you needed a new kernel. Maybe you needed it, maybe you didn't. Most likely you were trying to install the latest version of foo which requires a newer kernel than the one you were using. If you pulled foo down with a package manager like smart or yum, it resolved the dependencies and pulled down the updated kernel for you. If you let it continue with the install after being presented with the list of dependencies, then voila, you've got a new kernel.
You might have been able to get an older version of foo that was built for the kernel you were using. Maybe you could have compiled from source and not had to upgrade the kernel. Without knowing specifics, it's a bit difficult to tell.
Linux isn't Windows -- it's not 'release once, patch often'. The kernel is in constant development and newer revisions represent increased capabilities and improved operation rather than just bug-fixing. If you're system is stable and does what you want, there's no reason to upgrade.
When you do upgrade, there are tools like smart, yum, and apt that can help upgrade everything in one go, but the more experimental and bleeding edge drivers and modules you have, the more difficult this can be. (This comes up fairly frequently on the Mythtv-users list -- "My system was working perfectly for six months, then I did a apt-get dist upgrade and now nothing works." Answer: if it was working perfectly, then why do an upgrade?)
3. Point 2 also breaks my nvidia drivers. I don't want to re-compile new drivers everytime there's a new 'patch'. For the love of god, why?!
Now here you've got me a bit confused. The bog-standard nvidia driver is nv, and is in the kernel. Nothing to compile. The proprietary "nvidia" driver is binary-only. You couldn't compile it even if you wanted to. The answer, of course, is to switch to the nv driver while you're upgrading and then to install the nvidia binary for yo
* On the download page, there's no option to download the stable version 3 for Linux, even though system requirements are mentioned.
Nobody claimed that v3 was ported to Linux. Just that v4 beta is available.
* So, I just downloaded & installed beta version 4 on my FC4 Athlon64 system and while it runs OK, the actual map data is all scrambled. As I zoom in/out it is constantly 'twinkling' with the wrong images. City names are dropping characters as well, so you can't even tell where you're looking when you get in close.
Without knowing the details of your system, I cannot say what you're problem is, but you appear to be doing something wrong. It was a very simple install on my P4 FC4 system, and works exactly as it should -- including street names, interstates, etc. It also includes quite detailed street and highway data for locations outside the US.
Nice try. Hope it works better in the future.
Thanks to Google for producing Google Earth for our amusement, and for bringing it to the Linux Platform for no particular reason other than that they felt like it.
And thanks to the parent poster for playing. Please let us know when the free map toy that you create works better.
Pretty similar stuff. The fun is in the sponsored links.
MSN's sponsored link at the very top of the search results: Linux webhosting from webhosting.net. Google's sponsored link at the very top of the search results: www.microsoft.com/getthefacts.
They may be less humerous, but the sponsored results on the side are far more significant: Google has IBM, Loyola Computer Sciences, Ecora, linuxcertified, and other listings that are directly related to the search querry. MSN has shopping.msn, dealtime, samplepromotionsgroup, and shop.com.
In other words, MSN fails to deliver relevant sponsored links. That doesn't make very attractive to potential advertisers.
It's refreshing to see that Microsoft's legal strategy of 'displace and distend' is finally running out of gas. Stretching out and distorting legal proceedings through any and all means is exactly how they ended up convicted of but unpunished for abusing a monopoly position in the US. Europe, thankfully, is no such pushover.
It's also refreshing to see that US states (CA and MA) acknowledge that, not only do their state laws not apply to the EU, but that they as states are obliged to protect the legitimate interests of companies located in their states against corporate behaviour that has already been found to be criminal on both sides of the Atlantic.
Microsoft broke the law and has been twice convicted for it. They have, however, paid no price for doing so and have not changed their business habits whatsoever. They are still embracing and extending, they are still moving into new markets to undercut and squeeze out rivals with the help of their OS, and they are still treating market regulators as contemptible wretches who can be outlasted, outspent, and buried under the collective output of an extremely high-priced legal team.
Even as an MS employee I've always considered the MSN group to be pretty lame, and produce lame products. But I gotta tell you, they have a fire in them right now that is palpable. They suddenly have an influx of real talent, tons of research resources, and a determination to outshine Google. Some of the stuff they have on the pipeline is geniunely interesting. Anyway, take that for what it's worth. They may still come out with lame products and fail spectacularly. But MSN '05-'06 is definitely not classic MSN, which is good for everyone.
That may be, but for as long as I can remember (think MS-DOS 1.0), Microsoft has had a sudden "influx of real talent" and "stuff in the pipeline that is genuinely interesting".
Yet somehow all of these groundbreaking ideas are always six months away, even when competitors are already producing them.
Anybody remember the last time MS retooled MSN search? Has anyone noticed anything really groundbreaking about Live(TM)? (Nonsensical, redundant scrollbars are not groundbreaking) How about anything slightly groundbreaking?
Whatever you think about Google, when something leaks from them it really is a leak. When something 'leaks' from MS, it is a carefully orchestrated maneuvre (do you really think their new mini tablet would have gotten press for two weeks if it hadn't been 'leaked'?). This is because Google never tells you about what they will have in six months, they invite you to beta test it today.
No matter what Google (or Yahoo, or Netscape, or Oracle, or Apple, or . ..) is beta testing today, MS will always have something better in six months. Because they have some really talented people with fire in them working on it, and boy will it be something. And it will be ready any day now.
I've used this driver with a Netgear acx111 card on Mandriva, FC3, and FC4. It works, and it's better than ndiswrapper because you can use monitor mode for kismet etc.
But it doesn't work all that well. It craps out sometimes, and often has to be restarted from a script.
Avoid wireless if possible, or else consider an outboard wireless device that hooks to Linux through eth0. It saves a lot of headaches.
Yes, and if you don't care about TV tuning, merely wanting to organize your DVDs and music on one electronic mecha-machine, MyTH is a waste. Why do I have to configure a TV card and add channel listings to even use this program again?
With MythTV, you need to run the setup scripts for TV tuning initially and you need to run the filldatabase command for program listings, even if you have no tuners installed and no channels configured (NOTE: you do not need a capture device to run MythTV, only to record television). These steps are neccessary for properly setting up the MySQL database.
Once you've done it once, mythbackend will work, which means mythfrontend will work. Playing media is just a matter of pointing to the proper location from the interface's Setup menu and populating the database.
I ran MythTV for music and films for 8 months or so before I started using the PVR functions. It plays just about anything you can throw at it, although it does choke on some non-standard.wmvs and.asfs.
I haven't seen this $4300 Godzilla box at work, of course, but you could set up a whole house with MythTV for that budget and still have enough left over for nice projector.
As for this thing, I'd like to see Mr. Snapstream actually capturing over all 7 cards in that case (3x PVR-500, 4x HD card) with 6 HDDs. If he can keep them all running for 2 hours without causing serious problems to his hardware, heck even if he can keep his HDD temperatures below 50 C . . . well, I guess I'd buy him a beer.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the info. Automatix worked brilliantly for me a couple months ago with a new Dapper install. Since there were no issues, I didn't look at the forums.
I did hear that there were issues in upgrading from Dapper to Edgy (as opposed to installing Edgy cleanly) but wasn't aware that it had anything to do with Automatix.
Just trying to help, but thanks for the pointer.
I'm guessing you mean 'law' rather than 'market' in points 1 and 2 -- the market allows anything, it only dictates price. Check out your neighborhood bootleg DVD vendor to find out what value the market gives patently illegal goods.
Sure. Best Buy, Circuit City, Microcenter, and a ton of other retailers sell both ipods and DVDs.
Absolutely. ITMS sells Disney movies, as well as TV shows from lots of producers.
Doubtful, but I don't think anyone's trying to make that point. Hollywood doesn't think, for example, that there is any difference in rights for a purchaser between a DVD and a VHS tape. You are allowed to watch it privately but not to exhibit it publicly. You are allowed to sell the tape/disc, but you are not allowed to copy it or distribute copies. If anything you have more rights with a DVD than with an ITMS-purchased movie since you can't resell the ipod version.
Obviously. Jiffylube will change my oil though I am capable of doing it myself. Any number of businesses will disinfect and defrag a Windows system, though those are trivial tasks. Heck you could pay someone to come to house every morning to tie your shoes if you really wanted to.
Ah ha. There is another matter entirely, since the MPAA's opinion is that ripping a DVD is in itself illegal, regardless of who owns it or on whose behalf the ripping is being done. With the DMCA, the law would appear to be on their side.
On the other hand, if you were doing the ripping outside of the jurisdiction of the DMCA, I don't think they could attack using the DMCA (although they would probably answer that the ripped copy is still unauthorized and therefore illegal regardless of where it was made, and irrespective of the fact that there is only one owner of the original, the copy, and the playback device.
Same point as above -- MPAA would argue that the copying is illegal whether the purchaser does it, or their daughter, or their neighbor, or PutYourFilmsOnYourIpod.com.Ubuntu is well worth a go. It's probably the easiest and quickest distro to install and get up and running. Also, get Automatix to install codecs and apps that aren't included in the Ubuntu base distribution.
Hear, hear.
Some figures:
Country, literacy rate in percent (world ranking)
Kazakhstan, 99.5 (29)
Ukraine, 99.4 (32)
Tonga, 98.9 (36)
Mongolia, 97.8 (47)
Argentina, 97.2 (53)
United States, 97 (55)
Thailand, 92.6 (72)
Zimbabwe, 90 (85)
Brazil, 88.4 (90)
Namibia, 85 (103)
Libya, 81.7 (111)
Source
Discussion of Source accuracy
UNDP Human Development Index Report, 2005 [pdf]
Because the US government doesn't have the authority to procure education materials for local schools. Education and school systems are the responsibility of State governments and local school boards.
There are schools in the US that have begun providing students with laptops, but these were decisions made by individual school administrations.
First: It's not people buying them, it's governments.
Second: Not everyone outside of the US and Europe is starving in a mud hut. Both Libya and Brazil are modern, technical societies with substantial wealth. Both countries would certainly benefit from increased technical skills among their local populations.
Remeber that the OLPC is designed to replace textbooks in schools, and over the life of the machine will almost certainly provide a cost savings over printed books.
In addition, the project will foster local IT development as more and more people learn to use, repair, modify, and program for the machines. This will lead to free and/or locally produced software and a local IT service sector, keeping money in local economies rather than sending it to Redmond or to other Western software houses and consultancies.
From a development perspective, this is a cheap project with enormous potential -- it could eventually bring an even bigger fundamental change in developing societies than micro credit progams have.
It's because the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), specifically section 301, requires voting equipment allow disabled (vision impaired) voters cast a ballot without assistance. There's only one system currently in use that does this with paper ballots -- a machine with an audio interface that marks the paper ballot for the voter. The ballot is then counted by an optical scanner.
You cannot allow a voter to show how he or she voted. It would compromise the secret ballot and allow for vote buying, voter intimidation, and other election fraud.
While electronic voting machines and electronic banking machines may look similar, the operational and security requirements for each are very different.
An ATM requires physical security like encasing it in a concrete wall to prevent theft, must identify and authenticate a user with card and PIN, must be networked to the bank's mainframe to authenticate and pull down account data, must record transactions on the user's account, and must be capable of producing a receipt identifying the user, the transaction, and the transaction number.
A voting machine on the other hand must be portable, meaning a whole different set of physical security requirements; cannot be networked while accepting votes; cannot identify or authenticate individual voters in order to preserve anonymity; cannot produce a removable receipt in order to prevent vote-buying and other fraud; and cannot record data in a way that makes it possible to connect a ballot to a voter.
Unfortunately, the requirements of the secret ballot coupled with an electronic recording system create a very non-transparent system and do little to assuage doubts people have about the system's integrity.
What's worse is the notion that adding a VVPAT (voter-verifiable paper audit trail) will solve the integrity issues. In some states, eg Illinois, the paper trail is the ballot of record in case of recount or dispute.
However, many machines from different manufacturers have had problems reliably creating a paper trail -- the feed jams, the ink runs out, the paper runs out, paper is loaded improperly, the paper is damaged by the mechanism, etc. Such problems in a close election would make the legally mandated recount process impossible.
The fact is that all this new DRE hardware is trying to solve the problems of Florida, caused by bad ballot design. In other words, a cheap and easy problem to fix. Instead the solution we've been given is colossolly expensive, of questionable reliability, of dubious integrity, and has dramatically slowed the process of tabulating and reporting results.
For a bit of perspective, here's a piece from the December, 1940 issue of Popular Science on the new voting technology of the day. The results were tabulated by hand, reported by phone, and broadcast on the radio by 11:00 pm election night.
For the record, Diebold has only been in the election machine business since 2001. They only make direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines, and have never produced paper ballot readers or any other equipment other than electronic machines and electronic pollbooks. Here is a good historical overview of Diebold's election activities.
There are a number of points that are completely missed or misunderstood in the discussion of election hardware, and why so many jurisdictions have moved to such questionable devices. The story of what has happened is a case study in how the federal government creates a royal mess from good intentions.
After the debacle of Florida 2000 Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which was designed to prevent such a thing from happening again. Of course the problems in Florida were not caused by faulty election equipment but by poorly designed ballots.
Of all the parts to the eqatuation in FL 2000 (voting machines, ballots, election process, registration, administration, etc) it was the ballots that were at fault, and the administration of the resulting dispute that created the big issue. I still believe that if Al Gore had accepted (or insisted upon) a statewide recount of Florida rather than trying to game county-level results he would have won Florida, and the presidency.
Instead the POTUS (President of the US) was effectively elected by the Supreme Court. And that led rather directly to HAVA -- a federal law wherein the federal government assumes authoritah over the states on issues concerning election procedures, quite contrary to strict readings of the Constitution.
The Constitution clearly gives the states power to handle their own electoral affairs, but at the same time gives the federal government power to distribute funds, and to set requirements on the distribution. Through HAVA, Washington pledges a ton of money to each state and local jusrisdiction to upgrade their election hardware to something that is compliant with HAVA, but the requirements only apply to election for federal office -- ie President and Congress. But since it's too much trouble to maintain separate election system for fedreal and local offices, and too much money to ignore, all states are scrambling towards HAVA compliance.
Diebold comes in because of a rather ill-thought clause in HAVA -- Section 301. This requires that HAVA-compliant hardware meet the needs of blind voters in allowing them to 1) cast a ballot without assistance, and 2) to review and change ballot selections before casting the ballot.
As of 2000, blind voters cast ballots with the assistance of two election judges (in jurisdictions that did not require Braille ballots). HAVA requires that all blind voters have audio ballots. Which means many effective and accurate voting systems and procedures are no longer valid.
Once HAVA was passed, Diebold saw a business opportunity in US election systems (they had previously sold electyion hardware to Brazil). Diebold could certainly deliver counting machines with audio capability, and naturally they theough that security requirements for ATMs were analogous to those for election systems.
The points of this whole rant are 1) Diebold gets a lot of deserved blame for producing faulty hardware, and a lot of undeserved blame for commiting mass electoral fraud (remember that they didn't have any election hardware in 2000); 2) All DRE machines (with or without paper trail) are subject to problems and errors; and 3) the voting process is sound, even if the equipment has flaws.
Make sure you vote on November 7, make sure if you're using a DRE machine that your vote is properly recorded, and make sure you have some sympathy for the sorely undertrained and underpaid election judges at your precinct.
And don't complain if you don't vote.
Actually, you can get OS X to run natively on a PC. You just need to ask yourself if its worth the trouble. I'd think you're better off just getting a Mac mini.
There's no doubt that Mac is more polished and more user-friendly. But Ubuntu is a complete, polished, intuitive, full-featured environment. Provided you're not using non-standard hardware, pretty much everything works straight out of the box with very little tweaking.
In fact, Ubuntu on my laptop handles the various power-saving modes (sleep, hibernation) flawlessly and with no special configuration, whereas Windows XP would sometimes sleep, sometimes not, and refuse to come out of hibernation if and when it hibernated (which often had little bearing on how, or even if, it was configured to hibernate).
Much in contrast to a Windows install, the Ubuntu install is fast, easy, intuitive, contains all the software you'll need, doesn't require multiple reboots and separate installation (with more reboots) for installing software and device drivers, and doesn't require yet further instalalation and reboots for OS and software updates.
Last time I had to reinstall Windows after a drive failure it took over three hours and no fewer than 10 reboots to get the system installed (reboot), upgraded (reboot), upgraded to SP2 (reboot), updated again (reboot), install/update drivers (reboot), install Office XP (reboot), update to Office 2003 (reboot), security and other Office updates (reboot), more Windows updates since I now had Office installed (reboot), etc. Installing other necessary software required more reboots.
My last Ubuntu install (incidentally, my first) took all of 45 minutes start-to finish with OS and all software installed and upgraded. Much simpler than any other Linux I've installed (FC3, FC4, RHEL, Mandriva, SuSE) and in a completely different league than Microsoft.
But don't take my word. Try it out for yourself. Installation is even easier with Automatix for adding bits that aren't in the core Ubuntu distribution like all the multimedia codecs and various packages that don't meet Ubuntu's strict libre-only policy.
It's more a matter of population than area (though by no means a good comparison).
The Netherlands is over 16 million while the Chicago metro area (Chicagoland), is a hair under 10 million.
But that's beside the point of the OP, which is that it is neither practical nor constitutional for the US government to run elections.
Good post. Just to clarify some things:
Arguments for local control of voting regulations. [...]
1 - The United States Of America was designed as a confederation of (mostly) independent states. Only the powers explicitly given to the federal government are not the jurisdiction of the states.
Actually a federation rather than a confederation. The difference is slight but important. Nonetheless, the 10th ammendment is very specific about the limits of powers of the federal government vs state governments.
Most of the expansion of federal authority has been carried out under the commerce clause of the Constitution -- that Washington has authority over matters of interstate trade, which has been used to enforce federal regulations from industrial emmissions to minimum wage to drug enforcement, etc. And it also comes into play when the Feds distribute federal HAVA (Help America Vote Act) funds to states. Though these only really apply to federal elections (i.e. Congress and President), no state is willing to maintain one election system for local and state elections and a second for federal elections.
The 14th ammendment guarantees equal access to the polls, but does not, and cannot dictate the mechanisms and procedures used on the state level, other than making sure that they are compatible with the 14th ammendment and the Voting Rights Act.
2 - The innovative power of the open market. The belief that by allowing a competition of ideas in how best to run elections (as long as they meet minimal standards) the best choice will be eventually reached.
The first point is far more applicable. Elections are the responsibility of the state, not the federal government. Each state has the power to determine its own election laws and practices, and laws vary widely. WA, for example, is moving towards all-mail voting. SD is exempt from HAVA provisions mandating state-wide voter databases since that state does not require voter registration.
Some states allow election day registration, others do not. Some states allow any voter to vote in all primary elections, some allow it for one primary election, and some states require that voters be registered in a given party to vote that party's primary ballot.
The benefits of open competition are positive, but a side effect.
And to the Anonymous Asshat who replied earlier: Diebold is not the leader in voting hardware. ES&S machines are used in roughly 50 percent of precincts and by roughly 50 percent of the US population. I believe, though am by no means sure, that Sequoia is the number two vendor by market share.
3 - Local boards of elections consist of an equal number of members of both parties. The belief is that Democrats won't allow Republicans to steal the election, and vise versa.
Again, this depends on the state. In some, like Ohio, the State Board of Elections is divided by state law between the two major parties. In some states the board is appointed while in others others Board seats are elected positions. While I'm not aware of any states that have election boards made up of members from only one party, there are many states that do not allocate board seats by party affiliation.
Nice analysis.
Youtube is often held up as an example of Web 2.0 (whatever the hell that means), but the strategy -- get an audience and bail -- is much more of a Web 1.0 (or 0.90) strategy.
Then again driving visits with user-generatated content, thought to be the hallmark of Web 2.0, is remarkably similar to Web 0.1 (codename BBS - atdt/gopher).
With Youtube, I have yet to see any coherent idea of how thay are planning to turn all those eyeballs into cash while mitigating the risks involved in hosting videos that depict clearly illegal activities or are clear violations of copyright or trademark. This ignores all the videos that are borderline copyright violations, which this suit is likely to be about and which Hollywood would be much better off ignoring.
But Hollywood tends to ignore things they shoudn't, like Office Space or Xvid, and makes a big deal of things they ought to ignore, like Napster(TM) or Gigli.
What everybody jumping on the bandwagon seems to fail to realize is that once the product everybody uses no longer does what they want, or the PITA factor gets to high, the market will turn in a moment. Hotmail was at one time the most popular web-based email app,
No cost means no commitment, and for something like Myspace or Youtube any cost at all for the user would mean death.
Youtube has been burning cash, and I'm not sure I see a way out. Rupert Murdoch seems to think he can make some money off of Myspace, and maybe he can. But places like Myspace and Flickr seem eerily similar to the basic concept of the internet circa 1994-95. There is precious little difference between Murdoch's new toy and the Cleveland Freenet other than the volume of current and potential users, the ability to include graphical content, and the exponentially increased potential for abuse.
At least I know that if Youtube falls (under its own weight or a corporate parent's), it will be replaced by another service that is faster, smarter, easier, and more pleasing to look at.
Does MythTV work with digital cable boxes? IE is it possible to record movies from premium channels??
Please ignore the comments of folks who don't know any better.
Yes, of course you can record movies from premium channels, just not in HD. Anything that your STB can send to your TV can also be sent to your Myth box.
Since there are no capture cards capable of capturing and recording an unencrypted HD signal (from component, DVI or HDMI ports), there is no way to get encrypted HD MPEG-2 streams to record in Myth. HD broadcasts from OTA sources (ATSC) or HD OTA channels from your cable company (QAMM) are recordable under Myth with the proper hardware, eg pcHDTV cards.
OK, awesome. Thanks for the clarification. I beleive it will be scrambled, and will need the outputs of the STB. I didn't know that Myth could select the right input automagically. Cool.
I don't have HD yet, but you won't be able to record HD coming out of the S-Video of the STB right? If it outputs DVI or HDMI and there were a tuner card that took that as an input, maybe it would work. Or can you get HD from the FireWire?
For something like the NHL package, you'll definitely need to use the STB. Also, not all (actually relatively few) digital channels are HD.
However, the S-video feed will give you a much cleaner signal than the coax (RF) feed will.
For firewire, you'll likely only get the OTA broadcast channels in HD over firewire -- others, like HBO-HD and ESPN-HD will be encrypted.
There are no tuner cards that accept component, DVI or HDMI inputs. Firewire works because the broadcast standard is compressed and basically dumps MPEG-2 data direct to your disk at about 7-8 GB per hour. HD data over DVI or HDMI is uncompressed and runs about 30+ GB an hour -- a rate that your system would be unable to cope with.
You can use MythTV to control your STB (change channels) through a serial or firewire connection (if you're lucky and the STB supports it), or by using an IR blaster.
A fairly typical setup for what you're describing would be two tuner cards -- one with a cable feed going straight into it and handling analog channels, the second connected with S-video and audio to the STB, which is controlled by IR blaster.
There are all kinds of instructions on how to do all these things on the MythTV wiki (not linking to it here because it's struggling under /. and digg effects, but google is your friend).
Good luck
I'm sure someone will tell me if I'm wrong, but I thought the whole point of them buying a 767 was because 1) a used jumbo is cheaper to buy and outfit than a new business jet; 2) the operating range of a 767 is much farther than a business jet; and 3) that they can accomodate a whole lot more people in a whole lot more luxury on a pimped-out 767 than on a business jet.
Sorry if it seems extravagent, but these sound like the kind of people I'd like to have sending my team to conferences, rather than the folks who now send us in cattle class (even when the VP flies in first).
The mere fact that there is a category "usually [masculine, feminine, neutral]" should tell you that there is no first principles way to determine the gender.
You're missing the point. The primary way of determining a noun's gender (in languages that use gender widely) is how the noun ends. It has nothing to do with the object itself, just the word that represents the object. This is why, for example, the moon is feminine in a Romance language like Italian (la luna), but masculine in a Slavic language like Slovak (ten mesiac).
Latin-derived grammars are usually a pain in the ass because of genders, irregular verbs, and noun cases.
No. For this very reason grammars in Latin and Slavic languages are actually much simpler -- there are far fewer irregularities in verb conjugation than English because there are logical systems in place to account for them. The vast majority of verbs fit into one of several patterns based on the construction of the verb -- e.g. in French, the -er, -ir, -re verbs. Every language has irregularities, but English, drawn as it is from so many linguistic sources, has irregular verbs out the wazoo. Check any English grammar reference you like -- the list of irregular verbs and participles will go on for several pages.
Of course those are just the verbs that are grammatically irregular. What really confuses non-native English speakers are our phrasal verbs, particularly the fact that the meaning of the phrases often has little to do with the meaning of the words. (This is of course not to mention confusion about which phrasal verbs must be separated by an object, which cannot be separated by an object, and which will mean completely different things depending on whether or not the object comes between -- "I'll get on it tomorrow", and "I'll get it on tomorrow".
To make English verbs even harder we have compound verbs, some of which require an infinitive (e.g. 'want'), some that require an -ing (e.g. enjoy), some that can use -ing and an infinitive interchangably (e.g. 'like'), and some that can use -ing or an infinitive with completely different meanings (e.g. 'I stopped to smoke', 'I stopped smoking')
As for noun declination, just becuase there are rules to learn doesn't make it a pain in the ass. Besides, modern Romance languages, with the exception (I believe) of Romanian, have abandoned declination to more or less the same degree as English has. We don't really think of it as such, but we do still decline, for example, personal and possessive pronouns. There is 'I' and 'My' (Nominative), and 'me' and 'mine' (Accusative, Dative, etc).
English has fewer irregularities (gerund; too many tenses, like the conditional tenses that few people use; rather arbitrary use of "a" vs. "the", etc).
No, no, no, no, a thousand times no. Firstly, there's nothing irregular at all about a gerund, nor is there anything irregular in our way of using it. Secondly, conditionals are not irregular either and take similar forms (with similar tense shifts) in other languages. If you rarely use conditionals, you must be rather boring to talk to. But then again, if you knew what a conditional was, you probably wouldn't have used it as an example of English irregularity.
Although articles are one of the most difficult things for a non-native speaker to learn, they are far from arbitrary. There are rules, and the rules make sense. But just as a Russian knows how to decline without necessarily understanding the grammar, most native English speakers use articles correctly without knowing why.
But English is far more irregular than most other languages -- in terms of verb conjugations, rules of word order, spelling and punctuation (which can vary widely depending on where you are in the world, and what field you are in), stress and pronunciation, etc, etc. This is not a bad thing. If anything it means that English is excedingly easy to speak badly, which is why it is spoken more or less badly more or less everywhere.
Alright. I'll bite.
Now, I am a 100% Win fan. I love it; things just work.
(sarcasm) Then you haven't been properly following the Genuine Advantage Update (TM) process (/sarcasm)
But, I have made the switch to Linux (Fedora Core 5) at home, seeing as it does 99% of what I want. After a couple of months of constant, un-interupted use, my biggest issues with Linux are broadly thus:
1. No fecking media support! I get XMMS inform me on first attempt at playing an MP3 that it won't because of licensing conflict. Wtf? Codecs for avi's and DVDs were a simular story; all had to be downloaded via yum (bloody excellent tool!). Seriously; not good, but fixed in the end.
As I'm gussing you've discovered, media support in Linux is comprehensive but by no means intuitive, especially with a distro like Fedora. FC is more of a business distro -- the free cousin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and as such doesn't come with much media support standard. But install a few packages like mplayer and xine and you can play just about anything including media that won't play under WMP.
I can't remember what specific packages I installed on FC4, but mplayer and/or xine on my system will play anything, including proprietary MS formats like wmv and asf, commercial DVDs, quicktime formats, real formats, streaming formats, etc. I don't know about aac or other ITMS stuff -- never used it. Because of patent, licensing, and DMCA issues, this support doesn't come straight off the install disc but most certainly exists and is not that difficult to get working.
2. Why the hell do I have to install a new kernel? Why? I've never had to on Windows - why is Linux different? Is it so buggy? I installed with a factory version something ending 054. Now I have something ending 122 I believe. I did it ok, but that's not the point I'm making; were there really 68 cock-ups so great in the kernel build from release-time until that now they had to re-release 68 times? I'm guessing probablly not, but still.
You're the only one who can answer why you needed a new kernel. Maybe you needed it, maybe you didn't. Most likely you were trying to install the latest version of foo which requires a newer kernel than the one you were using. If you pulled foo down with a package manager like smart or yum, it resolved the dependencies and pulled down the updated kernel for you. If you let it continue with the install after being presented with the list of dependencies, then voila, you've got a new kernel.
You might have been able to get an older version of foo that was built for the kernel you were using. Maybe you could have compiled from source and not had to upgrade the kernel. Without knowing specifics, it's a bit difficult to tell.
Linux isn't Windows -- it's not 'release once, patch often'. The kernel is in constant development and newer revisions represent increased capabilities and improved operation rather than just bug-fixing. If you're system is stable and does what you want, there's no reason to upgrade.
When you do upgrade, there are tools like smart, yum, and apt that can help upgrade everything in one go, but the more experimental and bleeding edge drivers and modules you have, the more difficult this can be. (This comes up fairly frequently on the Mythtv-users list -- "My system was working perfectly for six months, then I did a apt-get dist upgrade and now nothing works." Answer: if it was working perfectly, then why do an upgrade?)
3. Point 2 also breaks my nvidia drivers. I don't want to re-compile new drivers everytime there's a new 'patch'. For the love of god, why?!
Now here you've got me a bit confused. The bog-standard nvidia driver is nv, and is in the kernel. Nothing to compile. The proprietary "nvidia" driver is binary-only. You couldn't compile it even if you wanted to. The answer, of course, is to switch to the nv driver while you're upgrading and then to install the nvidia binary for yo
* On the download page, there's no option to download the stable version 3 for Linux, even though system requirements are mentioned.
Nobody claimed that v3 was ported to Linux. Just that v4 beta is available.
* So, I just downloaded & installed beta version 4 on my FC4 Athlon64 system and while it runs OK, the actual map data is all scrambled. As I zoom in/out it is constantly 'twinkling' with the wrong images. City names are dropping characters as well, so you can't even tell where you're looking when you get in close.
Without knowing the details of your system, I cannot say what you're problem is, but you appear to be doing something wrong. It was a very simple install on my P4 FC4 system, and works exactly as it should -- including street names, interstates, etc. It also includes quite detailed street and highway data for locations outside the US.
Nice try. Hope it works better in the future.
Thanks to Google for producing Google Earth for our amusement, and for bringing it to the Linux Platform for no particular reason other than that they felt like it.
And thanks to the parent poster for playing. Please let us know when the free map toy that you create works better.
Pretty similar stuff. The fun is in the sponsored links.
MSN's sponsored link at the very top of the search results: Linux webhosting from webhosting.net. Google's sponsored link at the very top of the search results: www.microsoft.com/getthefacts.
They may be less humerous, but the sponsored results on the side are far more significant: Google has IBM, Loyola Computer Sciences, Ecora, linuxcertified, and other listings that are directly related to the search querry. MSN has shopping.msn, dealtime, samplepromotionsgroup, and shop.com.
In other words, MSN fails to deliver relevant sponsored links. That doesn't make very attractive to potential advertisers.
It's refreshing to see that Microsoft's legal strategy of 'displace and distend' is finally running out of gas. Stretching out and distorting legal proceedings through any and all means is exactly how they ended up convicted of but unpunished for abusing a monopoly position in the US. Europe, thankfully, is no such pushover.
It's also refreshing to see that US states (CA and MA) acknowledge that, not only do their state laws not apply to the EU, but that they as states are obliged to protect the legitimate interests of companies located in their states against corporate behaviour that has already been found to be criminal on both sides of the Atlantic.
Microsoft broke the law and has been twice convicted for it. They have, however, paid no price for doing so and have not changed their business habits whatsoever. They are still embracing and extending, they are still moving into new markets to undercut and squeeze out rivals with the help of their OS, and they are still treating market regulators as contemptible wretches who can be outlasted, outspent, and buried under the collective output of an extremely high-priced legal team.
Even as an MS employee I've always considered the MSN group to be pretty lame, and produce lame products. But I gotta tell you, they have a fire in them right now that is palpable. They suddenly have an influx of real talent, tons of research resources, and a determination to outshine Google. Some of the stuff they have on the pipeline is geniunely interesting. Anyway, take that for what it's worth. They may still come out with lame products and fail spectacularly. But MSN '05-'06 is definitely not classic MSN, which is good for everyone.
That may be, but for as long as I can remember (think MS-DOS 1.0), Microsoft has had a sudden "influx of real talent" and "stuff in the pipeline that is genuinely interesting".
Yet somehow all of these groundbreaking ideas are always six months away, even when competitors are already producing them.
Anybody remember the last time MS retooled MSN search? Has anyone noticed anything really groundbreaking about Live(TM)? (Nonsensical, redundant scrollbars are not groundbreaking) How about anything slightly groundbreaking?
Whatever you think about Google, when something leaks from them it really is a leak. When something 'leaks' from MS, it is a carefully orchestrated maneuvre (do you really think their new mini tablet would have gotten press for two weeks if it hadn't been 'leaked'?). This is because Google never tells you about what they will have in six months, they invite you to beta test it today.
No matter what Google (or Yahoo, or Netscape, or Oracle, or Apple, or . . .) is beta testing today, MS will always have something better in six months. Because they have some really talented people with fire in them working on it, and boy will it be something. And it will be ready any day now.
I've used this driver with a Netgear acx111 card on Mandriva, FC3, and FC4. It works, and it's better than ndiswrapper because you can use monitor mode for kismet etc.
But it doesn't work all that well. It craps out sometimes, and often has to be restarted from a script.
Avoid wireless if possible, or else consider an outboard wireless device that hooks to Linux through eth0. It saves a lot of headaches.
Yes, and if you don't care about TV tuning, merely wanting to organize your DVDs and music on one electronic mecha-machine, MyTH is a waste. Why do I have to configure a TV card and add channel listings to even use this program again?
With MythTV, you need to run the setup scripts for TV tuning initially and you need to run the filldatabase command for program listings, even if you have no tuners installed and no channels configured (NOTE: you do not need a capture device to run MythTV, only to record television). These steps are neccessary for properly setting up the MySQL database.
Once you've done it once, mythbackend will work, which means mythfrontend will work. Playing media is just a matter of pointing to the proper location from the interface's Setup menu and populating the database.
I ran MythTV for music and films for 8 months or so before I started using the PVR functions. It plays just about anything you can throw at it, although it does choke on some non-standard .wmvs and .asfs.
I haven't seen this $4300 Godzilla box at work, of course, but you could set up a whole house with MythTV for that budget and still have enough left over for nice projector.
As for this thing, I'd like to see Mr. Snapstream actually capturing over all 7 cards in that case (3x PVR-500, 4x HD card) with 6 HDDs. If he can keep them all running for 2 hours without causing serious problems to his hardware, heck even if he can keep his HDD temperatures below 50 C . . . well, I guess I'd buy him a beer.
Funny thing is that it's no problem to send a tar.gz, a bzip, or foo.sh.