On the commercial side we've seen some real innovation lately, but that list (which I hope is woefully out of date) shows OSS is less of a gaming platform than OS X.
As someone else said - why should we care that yet another FPS has arrived? What does it bring that's new, unique and interesting?
There's several reasons, even without challenging your hypothesis here. For one, there's the same reasons the Freespace devs gave for open-sourcing their Freespace games (which, if you haven't checked out, you definitely should, easily the best 3D spacefighter games ever), to give the next batch of programmers something to learn from, which apparently they wished they had when they started out.
Similarly, John Carmack does a great service to the public by releasing his engines afterwards, and that openness also brings some pretty interesting things (have you seen Non-Photorealistic Quake? Personally I love playing through the game as sketches or cartoons!). It also gives people the tech on which to build their new ideas; one of the reasons the gaming industry at large has been somewhat hard-pressed for innovation recently is that the cost of a modern gaming engine (in both time/effort and money) is enormous. The F/OSS scene raises the water level a fair bit, so that talented individuals can float more on their own.
Of course if you're just talking about Linux versus OSX in general, I know at least UT2004 had several times over more Linux players than OSX players, at least according to what Epic's master server browser saw. So in that way as well F/OSS is important, even if the game itself is commercial and neither free as in speech or as in beer; it provies a platform for commercial games, and it's no wonder that if given the choice people that play high-graphics FPSs would choose Linux. You spend so much time and effort making some kind of custom gaming rig . . . and then install something as rigid as Windows? Or even worse, have to choose from one-size-fits-all Macs? If given a shot, Linux rocks for the PC gaming tweakers out there.
Actually, I think someone over at "Leverage" is a
on
Daemon
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· Score: 1
real geek.
Have you ever been reading a book or watching a film and as the plot moves to involve some use of technology you begin to brace yourself, and the cringe as you are ripped out of the story by what is an obviously ignorant treatment of matters you know well?
Although it's a bit random, I seem to notice in the relatively new show Leverage that when you get a glimpse the bad guys (and random secretaries thereof) tend to be running Windows XP, whereas the tech-savvy good-guy (and a few of the tech-savvy antagonists) seem to be running KDE. That's KDE3.5, to be clear, so it's a bit of a statement itself;)
Right, I'll make sure to pay more attention to people in asylums too from now on . . . sheesh, grow up, not all sources are equal (or in other words, often ad hominem counterpoints are justified, especially when the source in question has a known bias or falsified worldview).
At least Windows has a mostly-working version -- XP. KDE has no working version.
Is kde 3.5 not mostly working?, or did I misread most of your rant?
Have you actually thought about trying any other distros that have kde 4 and see if they have those problems?
That's the thing, in Intrepid you can't chose KDE 3.5 . . . so no, it isn't working. He said, after all, "Maybe I'm just using the wrong distro? I was pretty appalled at Kubuntu's handling of Intrepid." And I entirely, 100% agree, since in Ubuntu/Kubuntu my desktop is almost entirely nonfunctional with KDE4 (and certainly is hugely regressed from Hardy with 3.5, which is why I've stuck with that and not upgraded my primary install).
To be fair, on certain hardware it's less of a problem, and much of it has to do with my usage of TwinView and the proprietary Nvidia binary blob. On my old computer, which I'm using as a test, Intrepid/KDE4 isn't as feature-rich, flexible, and stable as older Ubuntu versions with KDE3.5, but it isn't that far behind and it has some added interesting features. Still, the fact that it's a desktop environment implementation that only works in quite conventional setups, and falls apart quickly in anything atypical, is a pretty big downside. And all the test KDE4 versions I've used, regardless of distro, have been more or less unworkable on my main computer, so it isn't for me yet. Might not be for years now, even.
If she wanted a fat cock in her pussy, would she tell you? Yeah. Your anecdote excludes families that aren't into inbreeding.
Actually, she did tell him that, but in a typical fashion she said it in a round-about way, and he plain old didn't get it.
From his own post:
My sister says her favorite objects are [...] anatomy labs
Exactly what do you think is IN an "anatomy lab"? I'll give you a clue- the term "lab" doesn't necessarily mean a building & most likely is not an abbreviation of "Laboratory". If you conduct an "Anatomy Lab" it could mean doing anything related to examining, or performing experiments involving, anatomy.
"Lab" could also be an abbrevation for "Labia".
Dude, your sister is a Lesbian Slut.
Parent post is the best use of deductive reasoning in the history of mankind. Also the logic is unassailable.
Or he could go speedcontrol -x 2/dev/dvd to slow it down and speedcontrol -x 0/dev/dvd afterwards to let it run at full speed again (assuming he needed to copy something from it or whatever). Plus, seriously, what decent media player doesn't use libdvdcss2 these days?;)
When I was in high school the password for new accounts on the computer system (yes we actually had an IBM network in the library) was a persons birthday. The funny thing was, they had LED signs in the hallways that would show messages and the time. One of the messages was "Happy Birthday ". Hah. I had endless accounts, and it was also kind of fun send messages to people in the library as someone else, or store pornographic.gif files in someone elses account.
Err, not the storing of pornographic.gifs, but my school had a scheme which allowed me to pull from the "happy birthday, so-and-so!" part of the daily announcements. I went to a big school, too, so there were often around a half-dozen names in the morning announcements to cull from; I'd just walk up to a lab computer with a copy in my hand.
Funny thing is, I had to do this to use the computers, since some error with me setting my password too long or some such thing when I changed it from the default one (I never figured out quite what) ended up locking me out of my account (it was Novell Netware, I'm not that old) and the school's computer tech by this point already despised me. As such, I took it as my personal responsibility to use as many random accounts as possible and to cause as many harmless-but-mystifying computer problems for the guy as possible, and he'd keep trying to figure out for sure if it was me and how I was doing this:) (looking back on it, I'm surprised he didn't catch on, since he was easily suspicious enough of me).
Years later when my sister entered high school and also ended up locked out of the system after trying to change her default password, I started to figure maybe it wasn't the password itself or the wrath of the tech, it might have been the software itself; both her and I have last names which are rather long and involve non-alphanumeric characters (my user name ain't my real name, in other words) and her school used the same Novell setup as mine did. Which made it doubly useful that the security was so lax, since then that means that without lax security it would have been impossible for her or I to continue using the computers.
My younger sister found a similar loophole in her own school's instance. Apparently it was pretty funny when she'd go to a computer lab with a friend to work on a class project, since if they were paying attention they'd go "...hey wait, the login you just used couldn't have been yours, wtf?" My sister had learned well:)
had my abitur exams, my girlfriend just dumped me, i finally gave up on os/2 and started to become a fatty i am now.
and about your partitioning problems: back then partition magic was still great.
Ye gods, you're right! I've stayed away from that program like the plague for years now, and hey, GParted does everything Partition Magic did but more reliably than even those old versions were . . . but yes, Partition Magic used to get the job done like nothing else at the time could. Wow, it's been ages since I thought of that. PM went downhill while this bug sat unfixed? Yikes.
Actually, for the fun of it I remember exploiting this bug back when I lived in University Residence. I remember, among other things, mentioning to a floormate that kept having virus problems that he should probably at least add a password to his user account, since I knew it was a blank password. I quickly got a (probably undeserved, since this was script-kiddy stuff) reputation as the computer-hacker guy, heh.
If that ever became a problem, one could just have multiple repositories; after all, that's what they did for the Adobe software that ships with the Aspire One (it's a separate repo), and hey, Ubuntu already has things separated into categories (main, universe, multiverse, partner, backports...) so it'd hardly be much of a change if push came to shove.
And hey, who pays for all the massive bandwidth for Microsoft updates or the massive paper-and-plastic use of physical software?;)
I forgive you for getting it wrong, since there keep being stories about "Canadian DMCA about to pass!!!!1" but as it turns out we've had really weak governments for the past while and thus in fact a full equivalent of the DMCA has yet to pass (unless I've missed something in the past month?). Key word being "yet", but it has never been a priority of the recent minority governments, nor have they quite had the time.
In terms of oppressive new legislation and expansion of corporate rights, Canada tends to lag behind the States just a tad, enough that in Canada people feel smug, all "oh, silly Americans. We would never trample the citizens in *our* country like that". And of course a Canadian from 10 years ago transported to today without having experienced the slowly rising boil would be aghast. But to degrees it's like that in many countries as of late.
Psi has done it for years at least. When I first used it, back when my University first started blocking the MSN protocol (although it might just have been them being incompetent, since many things requiring SSL started being wonky one day) and I could actually find a decent free Jabber server with MSN and AIM transports (it has since shut down) I was quite happy and impressed.
"Cool!" I said, "this is very nice!"
About a week later it was already driving me insane. However, IIRC you could disable it.
I actually think usability IS largely dependant on allowing configurable options for everything. Many people interact with their computers in very different and particular ways in contrast to other people; you can't always aim for the lowest common denominator and create an interface equally usable and perfect for everyone. In fact, it's damn near impossible. I'm all for being tactical about which options you allow for the sake of being able to code the project without it being a nightmare, but having things that easily could be options instead rely on having to recompile the program not because it's technologically necessary but rather because something has been hard-coded "off" even though the code is still there or trivial to switch on . . . that's just egomania and blindness.
there would be no evil profit-killing generic drugs. Yay Closed Source!
No, seriously, Gates chose probably the worst analogy he could possibly make. I mean, comparing closed source software developers to the kinds of companies which gouge people in need as much as they can? The kinds of corporations directly responsible for things such as the lack of proper medications in the poorer countries in the world? (because although there's often enough money to manufacture the drugs they have patents and hence international monopolies, which means even if they give the drugs away for free there's a limited supply since no one else is allowed to make them)
Basically our esteemed William used the worst possible example of the dirty side of Capitalism to characterize Closed Source software. Oops!
Yeah umm as another poster has already commented, Konqueror does that naturally, just tap ctrl and every link gets a letter. And the eeePC already HAS Konqueror on it, even though it isn't listed anywhere; if you're in Basic mode, just hit ctrl-alt-t and type in "konqueror" in the terminal window that pops up; F11 to full-screen and browse away with your keyboard.
I thought the whole point of not allowing cell phones was that they cause interference. If wifi doesn't, and I can send VoIP over that wifi, how would that magically start causing interference?
Indeed, as far as I know the problem mainly is that one of the attributes of GSM is that does burst transmissions; that's how one of my friends always knows a second beforehand that she's about to get a call because her Clock Radio does a weird buzzing, the interference is in the audio stage of the electronics. Thus the pilots get annoying noises in the headphones if calls are coming in/out near them (proximity matters, although I don't know what the range tends to be).
This gets discussed from time to time on Off The Hook, I think they mention it in either the March 19th or March 26th episode because some of them were planning on flying out to Notacon on the private plane one of them has.
When I moved to my new place, Telus gave me a 2WIRE. I recoiled at the clunky, bloated thing. As luck would have it, there were physical problems with my hookup (yes, this was luck, trust me) and when the Telus guy came out to fix it and realized I knew what I was doing (which made his job a hell of a lot easier) as well as gawked at my dual-monitor setup ("My wife doesn't let me buy stuff like that anymore") I asked him if there was any way to fix the friggin' 2WIRE piece of crap.
He said "well hey, that's for our...well, normal customers. Obviously you don't need a firewall or a wireless router or all that." He gave me a tiny little Thompson SpeedTouch 516v6 and mentioned it even trained a lot faster than the 2WIRE thing too. I've been happy ever since.
The moral of the story, bug your ISP! Sometimes what they give you isn't actually the only option.
Checked in Konqueror; you are indeed correct, dear sir. I'm not sure whether I'd start to hate this style, I do find it somewhat interesting for the moment, but the squished comment box has to be dealt with.
Why not put Open Office on it? I work at a college, and papers submitted in MS Works are compatible with nothing, not even Word. You can get a translation file for Word, but it loses all the document formatting.
I think the whole thing with this one is to placate (1) Microsoft, and (2) people who get itchy using anything not corporate. Of course it'd be better off with OpenOffice, and you know IE should probably be disabled and replaced with Firefox, and you know MSN can only really talk with MSN so it'd be more useful to put Pidgin on there . . . and so on and so forth until you get to the point where you swap out XP for "version of Linux customized specifically for the eeePC". Honestly I find it strange that anyone in their right mind would choose the XP version over Linux, but if they are it won't generally be with concerns of "oh, but I'd rather be using OpenOffice you know..." In fact their target demographic is probably precisely the kinds of people that'd be more comfortable running MS Works than some crazy hippy nonsense.
ASUS doesn't need to make a smartly customized eeePC with a choice set of applications . . . that's called the eeePC. The XP version is for people who can't see past the lack of their comfort zone, or desperately require XP for some reason. Plus, for people who are in that interesting demographic that loves/needs XP but would prefer OpenOffice over works, well hey, it's "OpenOffice.org" for a reason:) So I think from a business and market-targeting perspective ASUS has entirely made the right call here, even if at first us geeks react with "whaaa? you have to use Works? Ick!"
Plus, have you gotten the impression (ie. do you remember the quotes) that ASUS was never too keen on XP in the first place? Hell, this Xandros-based distro on the eeePC is their baby, I'd suspect that at least some members of the company are sneering at running XP but realize there's a market for it, and their reaction to that reality amplifies the points I've made above.
My subject line says it all, but I'll repeat it again: yet another reason not to run flash. This is why on my 64-bit Kubuntu machine I don't have flash installed on anything other than a 32-bit version of Firefox which I only load when there's sites I absolutely have to use Flash for (like some manufacturer websites such as Linksys). Otherwise I browse with 64-bit, flashless Konqueror.
Yeah but at least a few users complain that it doesn't fit in with the style of their OS and they won't use it because of that.
About a month back when I momentarily swiped a friend's Macbook and installed the work-in-progress port of >KDE4 for OSX I was taken aback; Konqueror-KDE4, compiled for OSX, looks more like an OSX app, fits in better, than Safari does! Why, for tabs it even uses those rounded bubble thingys that Aqua likes to throw around as a motif, which instantly makes it look like more of a fit for 10.4/10.5 than Safari does, and this is just one example. So even for the pickiest of Apple users with obsessions of style, help is one the way:) Hell, Konqueror-KDE4 can (does?) even use WebKit, so if they're used to how Safari deals with websites then they don't have to be distressed.
Ha ha. I have some 10 year old PCs running Windows 98 (I think one is on NT). (Proprietary software - again sigh) Network? {blank stares from IT}
Hey man, even my old Win95 box had an ethernet card (and buying a cheap one and putting it in is trivial), so that's one place I have to strongly disagree with you. I recently had to use a DOS-based Windows machine of some kind since I had to get at some files on an ancient hard drive that was using DoubleSpace, and any open implementations of that . . . well, I found one that could theoretically compile on the Linux 2.4 kernel but ummm . . . yeah. So I had to dig out a Win98 box, but sharing the files over my home network afterwards was pretty easy. Then again I'm using nearly all modern Linux boxes and laptops here; XP was always sketchy connecting to Win98 shares, and I would flee in terror from having to network Win98 and Vista together. But, ethernet networking, it's been there since Win9x started out, and though Windows Sharing is proprietary it's non-proprietary hardware and these days both Linux and Macs and so many other OSes can easily use Samba to join in on the party (it's slow as hell compared to ssh/sftp though).
You could always use ClamAV installed on something like SLAX, that would be dead simple to set up and keep up to date; the reliable (ie. transparent, not "we tested them somehow, just trust us that it was a good test") malware scan tests I've seen tend to place ClamAV pretty high, somewhere between Kaspersky and Norton. I swear Avast made a live disk, some BartPE-based one I think, but yeah, it's a bit odd/suspicious that the major antivirus/antimalware companies don't make live disks . . . perhaps one could check to see which ones work well in WINE:)
1) Go "oh yeah, UT3 was supposed to run on Linux"
2) Be disappointed that it's been held up for vague legal reasons
3) Go buy Quake Wars from nearly any retail store instead.
4) Become obsessed.
Not that UT isn't a brilliant game, and countless hours of my life have been spent on it (and even on UT2004). But IMHO the best new FPS multiplayer game out there is ET:QW, and it runs marvelously on Linux (entirely native, no need for Wine).
Slashdot Mirror
On the commercial side we've seen some real innovation lately, but that list (which I hope is woefully out of date) shows OSS is less of a gaming platform than OS X.
As someone else said - why should we care that yet another FPS has arrived? What does it bring that's new, unique and interesting?
There's several reasons, even without challenging your hypothesis here. For one, there's the same reasons the Freespace devs gave for open-sourcing their Freespace games (which, if you haven't checked out, you definitely should, easily the best 3D spacefighter games ever), to give the next batch of programmers something to learn from, which apparently they wished they had when they started out.
Similarly, John Carmack does a great service to the public by releasing his engines afterwards, and that openness also brings some pretty interesting things (have you seen Non-Photorealistic Quake? Personally I love playing through the game as sketches or cartoons!). It also gives people the tech on which to build their new ideas; one of the reasons the gaming industry at large has been somewhat hard-pressed for innovation recently is that the cost of a modern gaming engine (in both time/effort and money) is enormous. The F/OSS scene raises the water level a fair bit, so that talented individuals can float more on their own.
Of course if you're just talking about Linux versus OSX in general, I know at least UT2004 had several times over more Linux players than OSX players, at least according to what Epic's master server browser saw. So in that way as well F/OSS is important, even if the game itself is commercial and neither free as in speech or as in beer; it provies a platform for commercial games, and it's no wonder that if given the choice people that play high-graphics FPSs would choose Linux. You spend so much time and effort making some kind of custom gaming rig . . . and then install something as rigid as Windows? Or even worse, have to choose from one-size-fits-all Macs? If given a shot, Linux rocks for the PC gaming tweakers out there.
Although it's a bit random, I seem to notice in the relatively new show Leverage that when you get a glimpse the bad guys (and random secretaries thereof) tend to be running Windows XP, whereas the tech-savvy good-guy (and a few of the tech-savvy antagonists) seem to be running KDE. That's KDE3.5, to be clear, so it's a bit of a statement itself ;)
Right, I'll make sure to pay more attention to people in asylums too from now on . . . sheesh, grow up, not all sources are equal (or in other words, often ad hominem counterpoints are justified, especially when the source in question has a known bias or falsified worldview).
At least Windows has a mostly-working version -- XP. KDE has no working version.
Is kde 3.5 not mostly working?, or did I misread most of your rant? Have you actually thought about trying any other distros that have kde 4 and see if they have those problems?
That's the thing, in Intrepid you can't chose KDE 3.5 . . . so no, it isn't working. He said, after all, "Maybe I'm just using the wrong distro? I was pretty appalled at Kubuntu's handling of Intrepid." And I entirely, 100% agree, since in Ubuntu/Kubuntu my desktop is almost entirely nonfunctional with KDE4 (and certainly is hugely regressed from Hardy with 3.5, which is why I've stuck with that and not upgraded my primary install).
To be fair, on certain hardware it's less of a problem, and much of it has to do with my usage of TwinView and the proprietary Nvidia binary blob. On my old computer, which I'm using as a test, Intrepid/KDE4 isn't as feature-rich, flexible, and stable as older Ubuntu versions with KDE3.5, but it isn't that far behind and it has some added interesting features. Still, the fact that it's a desktop environment implementation that only works in quite conventional setups, and falls apart quickly in anything atypical, is a pretty big downside. And all the test KDE4 versions I've used, regardless of distro, have been more or less unworkable on my main computer, so it isn't for me yet. Might not be for years now, even.
If she wanted a fat cock in her pussy, would she tell you? Yeah. Your anecdote excludes families that aren't into inbreeding.
Actually, she did tell him that, but in a typical fashion she said it in a round-about way, and he plain old didn't get it.
From his own post:
My sister says her favorite objects are [...] anatomy labs
Exactly what do you think is IN an "anatomy lab"? I'll give you a clue- the term "lab" doesn't necessarily mean a building & most likely is not an abbreviation of "Laboratory". If you conduct an "Anatomy Lab" it could mean doing anything related to examining, or performing experiments involving, anatomy.
"Lab" could also be an abbrevation for "Labia".
Dude, your sister is a Lesbian Slut.
Parent post is the best use of deductive reasoning in the history of mankind. Also the logic is unassailable.
Or he could go speedcontrol -x 2 /dev/dvd to slow it down and speedcontrol -x 0 /dev/dvd afterwards to let it run at full speed again (assuming he needed to copy something from it or whatever). Plus, seriously, what decent media player doesn't use libdvdcss2 these days? ;)
He's right.
When I was in high school the password for new accounts on the computer system (yes we actually had an IBM network in the library) was a persons birthday. The funny thing was, they had LED signs in the hallways that would show messages and the time. One of the messages was "Happy Birthday ". Hah. I had endless accounts, and it was also kind of fun send messages to people in the library as someone else, or store pornographic .gif files in someone elses account.
Err, not the storing of pornographic .gifs, but my school had a scheme which allowed me to pull from the "happy birthday, so-and-so!" part of the daily announcements. I went to a big school, too, so there were often around a half-dozen names in the morning announcements to cull from; I'd just walk up to a lab computer with a copy in my hand.
:) (looking back on it, I'm surprised he didn't catch on, since he was easily suspicious enough of me).
:)
Funny thing is, I had to do this to use the computers, since some error with me setting my password too long or some such thing when I changed it from the default one (I never figured out quite what) ended up locking me out of my account (it was Novell Netware, I'm not that old) and the school's computer tech by this point already despised me. As such, I took it as my personal responsibility to use as many random accounts as possible and to cause as many harmless-but-mystifying computer problems for the guy as possible, and he'd keep trying to figure out for sure if it was me and how I was doing this
Years later when my sister entered high school and also ended up locked out of the system after trying to change her default password, I started to figure maybe it wasn't the password itself or the wrath of the tech, it might have been the software itself; both her and I have last names which are rather long and involve non-alphanumeric characters (my user name ain't my real name, in other words) and her school used the same Novell setup as mine did. Which made it doubly useful that the security was so lax, since then that means that without lax security it would have been impossible for her or I to continue using the computers.
My younger sister found a similar loophole in her own school's instance. Apparently it was pretty funny when she'd go to a computer lab with a friend to work on a class project, since if they were paying attention they'd go "...hey wait, the login you just used couldn't have been yours, wtf?" My sister had learned well
yep, march 2001
had my abitur exams, my girlfriend just dumped me, i finally gave up on os/2 and started to become a fatty i am now.
and about your partitioning problems: back then partition magic was still great.
Ye gods, you're right! I've stayed away from that program like the plague for years now, and hey, GParted does everything Partition Magic did but more reliably than even those old versions were . . . but yes, Partition Magic used to get the job done like nothing else at the time could. Wow, it's been ages since I thought of that. PM went downhill while this bug sat unfixed? Yikes.
Actually, for the fun of it I remember exploiting this bug back when I lived in University Residence. I remember, among other things, mentioning to a floormate that kept having virus problems that he should probably at least add a password to his user account, since I knew it was a blank password. I quickly got a (probably undeserved, since this was script-kiddy stuff) reputation as the computer-hacker guy, heh.
If that ever became a problem, one could just have multiple repositories; after all, that's what they did for the Adobe software that ships with the Aspire One (it's a separate repo), and hey, Ubuntu already has things separated into categories (main, universe, multiverse, partner, backports...) so it'd hardly be much of a change if push came to shove. And hey, who pays for all the massive bandwidth for Microsoft updates or the massive paper-and-plastic use of physical software? ;)
You, good sir, are my hero.
I forgive you for getting it wrong, since there keep being stories about "Canadian DMCA about to pass!!!!1" but as it turns out we've had really weak governments for the past while and thus in fact a full equivalent of the DMCA has yet to pass (unless I've missed something in the past month?). Key word being "yet", but it has never been a priority of the recent minority governments, nor have they quite had the time.
In terms of oppressive new legislation and expansion of corporate rights, Canada tends to lag behind the States just a tad, enough that in Canada people feel smug, all "oh, silly Americans. We would never trample the citizens in *our* country like that". And of course a Canadian from 10 years ago transported to today without having experienced the slowly rising boil would be aghast. But to degrees it's like that in many countries as of late.
Psi has done it for years at least. When I first used it, back when my University first started blocking the MSN protocol (although it might just have been them being incompetent, since many things requiring SSL started being wonky one day) and I could actually find a decent free Jabber server with MSN and AIM transports (it has since shut down) I was quite happy and impressed.
;) )
"Cool!" I said, "this is very nice!"
About a week later it was already driving me insane. However, IIRC you could disable it.
I actually think usability IS largely dependant on allowing configurable options for everything. Many people interact with their computers in very different and particular ways in contrast to other people; you can't always aim for the lowest common denominator and create an interface equally usable and perfect for everyone. In fact, it's damn near impossible. I'm all for being tactical about which options you allow for the sake of being able to code the project without it being a nightmare, but having things that easily could be options instead rely on having to recompile the program not because it's technologically necessary but rather because something has been hard-coded "off" even though the code is still there or trivial to switch on . . . that's just egomania and blindness.
(Makes me kindof glad I use Kopete
there would be no evil profit-killing generic drugs. Yay Closed Source!
No, seriously, Gates chose probably the worst analogy he could possibly make. I mean, comparing closed source software developers to the kinds of companies which gouge people in need as much as they can? The kinds of corporations directly responsible for things such as the lack of proper medications in the poorer countries in the world? (because although there's often enough money to manufacture the drugs they have patents and hence international monopolies, which means even if they give the drugs away for free there's a limited supply since no one else is allowed to make them)
Basically our esteemed William used the worst possible example of the dirty side of Capitalism to characterize Closed Source software. Oops!
Yeah umm as another poster has already commented, Konqueror does that naturally, just tap ctrl and every link gets a letter. And the eeePC already HAS Konqueror on it, even though it isn't listed anywhere; if you're in Basic mode, just hit ctrl-alt-t and type in "konqueror" in the terminal window that pops up; F11 to full-screen and browse away with your keyboard.
This gets discussed from time to time on Off The Hook, I think they mention it in either the March 19th or March 26th episode because some of them were planning on flying out to Notacon on the private plane one of them has.
When I moved to my new place, Telus gave me a 2WIRE. I recoiled at the clunky, bloated thing. As luck would have it, there were physical problems with my hookup (yes, this was luck, trust me) and when the Telus guy came out to fix it and realized I knew what I was doing (which made his job a hell of a lot easier) as well as gawked at my dual-monitor setup ("My wife doesn't let me buy stuff like that anymore") I asked him if there was any way to fix the friggin' 2WIRE piece of crap.
He said "well hey, that's for our...well, normal customers. Obviously you don't need a firewall or a wireless router or all that." He gave me a tiny little Thompson SpeedTouch 516v6 and mentioned it even trained a lot faster than the 2WIRE thing too. I've been happy ever since.
The moral of the story, bug your ISP! Sometimes what they give you isn't actually the only option.
Checked in Konqueror; you are indeed correct, dear sir. I'm not sure whether I'd start to hate this style, I do find it somewhat interesting for the moment, but the squished comment box has to be dealt with.
ASUS doesn't need to make a smartly customized eeePC with a choice set of applications . . . that's called the eeePC. The XP version is for people who can't see past the lack of their comfort zone, or desperately require XP for some reason. Plus, for people who are in that interesting demographic that loves/needs XP but would prefer OpenOffice over works, well hey, it's "OpenOffice.org" for a reason
Plus, have you gotten the impression (ie. do you remember the quotes) that ASUS was never too keen on XP in the first place? Hell, this Xandros-based distro on the eeePC is their baby, I'd suspect that at least some members of the company are sneering at running XP but realize there's a market for it, and their reaction to that reality amplifies the points I've made above.
My subject line says it all, but I'll repeat it again: yet another reason not to run flash. This is why on my 64-bit Kubuntu machine I don't have flash installed on anything other than a 32-bit version of Firefox which I only load when there's sites I absolutely have to use Flash for (like some manufacturer websites such as Linksys). Otherwise I browse with 64-bit, flashless Konqueror.
Hey man, even my old Win95 box had an ethernet card (and buying a cheap one and putting it in is trivial), so that's one place I have to strongly disagree with you. I recently had to use a DOS-based Windows machine of some kind since I had to get at some files on an ancient hard drive that was using DoubleSpace, and any open implementations of that . . . well, I found one that could theoretically compile on the Linux 2.4 kernel but ummm . . . yeah. So I had to dig out a Win98 box, but sharing the files over my home network afterwards was pretty easy. Then again I'm using nearly all modern Linux boxes and laptops here; XP was always sketchy connecting to Win98 shares, and I would flee in terror from having to network Win98 and Vista together. But, ethernet networking, it's been there since Win9x started out, and though Windows Sharing is proprietary it's non-proprietary hardware and these days both Linux and Macs and so many other OSes can easily use Samba to join in on the party (it's slow as hell compared to ssh/sftp though).
You could always use ClamAV installed on something like SLAX, that would be dead simple to set up and keep up to date; the reliable (ie. transparent, not "we tested them somehow, just trust us that it was a good test") malware scan tests I've seen tend to place ClamAV pretty high, somewhere between Kaspersky and Norton. I swear Avast made a live disk, some BartPE-based one I think, but yeah, it's a bit odd/suspicious that the major antivirus/antimalware companies don't make live disks . . . perhaps one could check to see which ones work well in WINE :)
you should be modded up into the stratosphere.
I would amend the set of steps.
1) Go "oh yeah, UT3 was supposed to run on Linux"
2) Be disappointed that it's been held up for vague legal reasons
3) Go buy Quake Wars from nearly any retail store instead.
4) Become obsessed.
Not that UT isn't a brilliant game, and countless hours of my life have been spent on it (and even on UT2004). But IMHO the best new FPS multiplayer game out there is ET:QW, and it runs marvelously on Linux (entirely native, no need for Wine).
Obviously you've never heard of the Chewbacca Defence.