Recent research determined that 695,000 consumers owned either a Blu-ray or HD DVD player, but most of those are tied to a console -- 400,000 of the 425,000 Blu-ray players sold by the end of 2007 were PlayStation 3s and 150,000 of the 270,000 HD DVD players were Xbox 360 add-ons.' So, it's 2008 right now?
Two years ago I built 100 in two days. All are currently running Ubuntu. It wasn't that bad. The only problem I've run into with them has been the shitty power supplies the cases came with. That's what I get for choosing a $30 case... Still, it's better than the Dells I had fail. The replacement ATX power supplies are about $50, while the only one that will fit in the Dells are $100 (I've had to replace a third of those as well).
Do many Linux users actually buy assembled computers? I build my own as do all my Linux and BSD using friends. The only assembled computer I've bought in the last 10 years was a PowerBook last year. The main reason I went with that was I couldn't find a reasonably prices laptop without Windows on it. So I figured if I'm going to pay for an os, might as well give OS X a try.
Unix user/group setups can do what you need. For example, say I have three applications. App1, App2, and App3. User1 needs access to App1 and App3, but not App2. User 2 needs access to App1 and App2 but not App3. User3 needs access to App3 but not App1 or App2.
Create three groups. Say, app1, app2, app3. Change the group for each app to it's group and set the execute permissions to only allow owner and group (750). Add user1 into the groups app1 and app3. Add user2 into app1 and app2. Add user3 into app3.
A single user can be in multiple groups.
Same can be done with data files. I do this all the time at work with samba shares.
Also, all modern Linux distros support full ACLs. At least on ext3, xfs, and jfs.
I use it at work with the saupdates.openprotect.com SARE channel, along with DCC, Razor, Pyzor, and some tuning. Most spam is caught. No reported false positives.
I haven't had any myself and I check the spam folder daily. I usually get about 500-700 spams per day on my work acount with <50 actual emails. I usually have a dozen or so spams a day slip though and nearly all are the damn image spam. I thought about setting up OCR, but that wouldn't help as nearly all I get are CAPTCHA'd now.
Novell is implementing the new formats for OpenOffice:
Microsoft and Novell have announced that Novell will be providing support for the Office Open XML format--the default file format for Microsoft Office 2007--in its Novell-branded version of the open-source OpenOffice.org productivity suite. Novell will release a translator that will provide support for Microsoft Word by the end of January 2007, with translators for Excel and PowerPoint to follow.
The translators will be bidirectional: OpenOffice.org users will be able to read from and save to Office Open XML documents. At first, the translators will be made available as plug-ins for Novell's branded OpenOffice.org, but the Linux vendor says it will release the source code and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org product.
Whats real funny is that when there is a story about how parents use tools to monitor what there children do online, everyone on \. cries foul about the breach of privacy. IMHO, spying on your children is not the answer. Educating* them to not be a dumbass is. My parents always warned me about strangers and not giving out information to random people.
Many people just don't want to bother with actually being a parent. They want the schools and government to do the work for them.
* Yes I'm aware of #5 in The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. But educating a child to not give away personal information or meet up with random people is necessary both online and in real life.
Many WMVs I've seen look like shit. It's not the fault of the codec, it's just many idiots feel the need to re-encode videos over and over again. Same problem with Google Video and YouTube. So many things there have been re-encoded so many times all you can really see are blury objects behind the encoding artifacts.
The FFMPEG devs have always done an excellent job at bringing Free video support to Linux. Thanks to them most video can be played on Linux without propreitary codecs. There is a downside, though: patents. FFMPEG isn't licensed, so it's not legal for distributions to distribute FFMPEG in countries dumb enough to allow software patents (USA, Japan, others?).
The Fluendo stuff could be a good thing if distros would ship with it. Then video would finally work "out of the box". For those like myself who avoid binary blobs and try to only use things that are truely Free will still have the option of using FFMPEG.
Or just use OpenVPN. I use this on my laptop. Set it as the default route, use the internal DNS and your good to go. I also use an internal proxy server. So when I'm at a coffee shop or hotel doing some work, the only thing they get to see is encrypted traffic to port 1194 (udp).
Over that connection I can do anything. Instant messaging, email, SSH, http, ftp, BitTorrent, etc.
I'm going to download the source to Media Player Classic. I'll make some changes to it, give it a new name, and sell a binary. Only the binary. My new video player is closed source. Yes there is no copyright on it, but it's still closed source. How are you going to get the C++ source to my changes?
Open source depends on copyright. Without it the source will completely ripped of by the scummers and nothing could be done about it. Some developers are fine with that, others are not.
Copyright is necessary, though I do feel it should expire with time. In the past I said 20 years plus an optional 20 year renewal. Some in this thread suggested something similar but with 30 years. Both are a good idea.
Re:With the introduction of AppleTV...
on
The Home Server Cometh
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Convert your Divx to MPEG-4. Big fucking deal. Big fucking quality loss. That's the deal. Downloaded videos are low enough quality as it is, another re-encode is not a good thing.
Still, DivX is MPEG4. With XviD, at least, all you have to do is change the fourcc and Quicktime can play it. AppleTV might need it to be in a quicktime container, though. I have no idea.
On PCs, I try to find drivers from the underlying OEM rather than depend on the PC vendor, as usually the PC vendor's drivers tend to be outdated, except for motherboard/system board/IO planar flash. Not to mention crippled. A few months ago my boss bought himself a new Dell laptop. With the preloaded video drivers it wasn't possible to do a mirror display. This was a few hours before he had to do a powerpoint presentation. The Dell driver wouldn't uninstall either, just kept reappearing. What I ended up doing was backing up the data, doing a clean reinstall and installing the video drivers directly from nVidia's site. Mirror display then worked perfectly.
Make sure there is a blank line at the end of the file. There also shouldn't be any spaces in "CurrentVersion", so fix that (lameness filter). Save it, and double click on the file. Problem fixed.
This is one thing that always annoys me with Windows apps. They want to install desktop icons and tray icons.
If you reject email based on a blacklist, that's putting an awful amount of trust in the maintainers of the lists. Rejecting email based on a blacklist is always a dumb idea.
Blacklists do have a use, however. Use them with something like SpamAssassin. Rather than reject mail based on the list, just add points to the score.
You shouldn't be using the default Windows install anyway. You should be using an image. Default Windows installs sometimes have viruses and spyware (no, really, they do). IMHO, imaging sucks. It's really only a decent idea if every system you deal with gets the same exact configuration.
Give Unattended a try. Once you get over the learning curve and get the installation and configuration of all your apps scripted, this approach is extremely easy. It took me about a month to get it set up, but now I do little more than update the scripts occasionally. Instead of maintaining about a dozen different images (different computers need different apps), I just have profile scripts that inherit from each other. Every other week I just go to all the computers, hit F3 after the POST then every system rebuilds itself. Works great and beyond the initial time investment it saves a significant amount of work.
Quoting the Unattended project:
Whether you use Unattended, RIS, or some other system for Windows deployment, one technique which you should absolutely avoid is disk imaging.
Also called "cloning", disk imaging means taking a snapshot of the hard drive of one machine and restoring it onto the hard drive of another. Microsoft provides tools like Sysprep and RIPrep to help you with this task, and it is a very popular way to deploy systems.
But it is usually a bad idea. Never mind that imaging provides poor support for non-uniform hardware; the big problem is that it creates a maintenance nightmare.
For example, suppose you have several system configurations, including salesperson laptops, developer workstations, automated build servers, and financial systems. In addition, suppose you are in the process of migrating your organization from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, so you need to be able to install both.
Even for this simple example, you will need to create and store eight different images, one for each combination of OS and application suite. To update a common application, you will have to modify and re-create all eight images. Add some diverse hardware like fancy laptops into the picture, and the nightmare becomes clear.
If you are cranking out thousands of identical workstations with completely identical hardware and software, imaging is a fine approach. But if your organization is like most, with heterogenous hardware and software, true unattended installation will give you better reliability and much easier maintenance.
For things that have driver issues (wireless, modems, video cards, etc) it's best to either buy online or find a Linux-friendly vendor (good luck on that). If you're online, just google the model number and add something like "linux", "ubuntu" or "gentoo" to the query. Ubuntu and Gentoo usually have forum topics or howtos for every peice of hardware I consider buying. Also, often on Newegg if you look through the comments someone will say if it works on Linux or not.
If you use Cortado as the player. It's a java applet that will play Theora+Vorbis files in a way similar to YouTube/Google Video/etc. All the client needs is Java.
Going straight Theora+Vorbis wouldn't work that well, since the user would have the install the codecs first and Vorbis/Theora support is severely lacking on OS X.
Quoting the site:
In order to make your streams as widely available as possible, we provide the Cortado Java applet as free software under the GPL. By embedding this applet in your website, you can give viewers access to streams from either the Flumotion streaming server or play a local file from your server without the need for a locally installed media player supporting the correct formats on the visitori's computer.
Cortado currently include Java decoders for Ogg Theora, Ogg Vorbis, Mulaw audio, MJPEG and our own Smoke codec. You can find examples of Cortado in use on the Fluendo demo site.
Slashdot Mirror
You could always install the Windows 2003->XP Conversion Pack. It's supposed to make the 2003 install behave more like XP.
The Vista Transformation Pack does a decent job (some visual glitches) of making XP look and act like Vista.
Blackdown provides 1.4.2 with a 64-bit plugin, so what's really keeping Sun from doing the same with 1.5 or 1.6?
Two years ago I built 100 in two days. All are currently running Ubuntu. It wasn't that bad. The only problem I've run into with them has been the shitty power supplies the cases came with. That's what I get for choosing a $30 case... Still, it's better than the Dells I had fail. The replacement ATX power supplies are about $50, while the only one that will fit in the Dells are $100 (I've had to replace a third of those as well).
I agree it needs to be pre-installed, but these Dells come with no OS. Still wouldn't be exactly easy for a non-geek.
Do many Linux users actually buy assembled computers? I build my own as do all my Linux and BSD using friends. The only assembled computer I've bought in the last 10 years was a PowerBook last year. The main reason I went with that was I couldn't find a reasonably prices laptop without Windows on it. So I figured if I'm going to pay for an os, might as well give OS X a try.
QTFairuse6.
Unix user/group setups can do what you need. For example, say I have three applications. App1, App2, and App3. User1 needs access to App1 and App3, but not App2. User 2 needs access to App1 and App2 but not App3. User3 needs access to App3 but not App1 or App2.
Create three groups. Say, app1, app2, app3. Change the group for each app to it's group and set the execute permissions to only allow owner and group (750). Add user1 into the groups app1 and app3. Add user2 into app1 and app2. Add user3 into app3.
A single user can be in multiple groups.
Same can be done with data files. I do this all the time at work with samba shares.
Also, all modern Linux distros support full ACLs. At least on ext3, xfs, and jfs.
I use it at work with the saupdates.openprotect.com SARE channel, along with DCC, Razor, Pyzor, and some tuning. Most spam is caught. No reported false positives.
I haven't had any myself and I check the spam folder daily. I usually get about 500-700 spams per day on my work acount with <50 actual emails. I usually have a dozen or so spams a day slip though and nearly all are the damn image spam. I thought about setting up OCR, but that wouldn't help as nearly all I get are CAPTCHA'd now.
Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061204-835
Many people just don't want to bother with actually being a parent. They want the schools and government to do the work for them.
* Yes I'm aware of #5 in The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. But educating a child to not give away personal information or meet up with random people is necessary both online and in real life.
eMusic? CDs? It's not like iTMS and Sony are the only options...
Many WMVs I've seen look like shit. It's not the fault of the codec, it's just many idiots feel the need to re-encode videos over and over again. Same problem with Google Video and YouTube. So many things there have been re-encoded so many times all you can really see are blury objects behind the encoding artifacts.
The FFMPEG devs have always done an excellent job at bringing Free video support to Linux. Thanks to them most video can be played on Linux without propreitary codecs. There is a downside, though: patents. FFMPEG isn't licensed, so it's not legal for distributions to distribute FFMPEG in countries dumb enough to allow software patents (USA, Japan, others?).
The Fluendo stuff could be a good thing if distros would ship with it. Then video would finally work "out of the box". For those like myself who avoid binary blobs and try to only use things that are truely Free will still have the option of using FFMPEG.
Any textbook that mentions gravity must now include a warning that it's just a theroy. Videos that discuss gravity must also have a warning.
Any student that does not believe in gravity must be allowed to float out of the classroom.
Or just use OpenVPN. I use this on my laptop. Set it as the default route, use the internal DNS and your good to go. I also use an internal proxy server. So when I'm at a coffee shop or hotel doing some work, the only thing they get to see is encrypted traffic to port 1194 (udp).
Over that connection I can do anything. Instant messaging, email, SSH, http, ftp, BitTorrent, etc.
I'm going to download the source to Media Player Classic. I'll make some changes to it, give it a new name, and sell a binary. Only the binary. My new video player is closed source. Yes there is no copyright on it, but it's still closed source. How are you going to get the C++ source to my changes?
Open source depends on copyright. Without it the source will completely ripped of by the scummers and nothing could be done about it. Some developers are fine with that, others are not.
Copyright is necessary, though I do feel it should expire with time. In the past I said 20 years plus an optional 20 year renewal. Some in this thread suggested something similar but with 30 years. Both are a good idea.
Still, DivX is MPEG4. With XviD, at least, all you have to do is change the fourcc and Quicktime can play it. AppleTV might need it to be in a quicktime container, though. I have no idea.
Put this into a text file named SoftwareShouldNeverAutoStartItself.reg (name is optional, as long as it has the .reg).
r rentVersion\Run]
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Cu
"QuickTime Task"=-
"iTunesHelper"=-
Make sure there is a blank line at the end of the file. There also shouldn't be any spaces in "CurrentVersion", so fix that (lameness filter). Save it, and double click on the file. Problem fixed.
This is one thing that always annoys me with Windows apps. They want to install desktop icons and tray icons.
If you reject email based on a blacklist, that's putting an awful amount of trust in the maintainers of the lists. Rejecting email based on a blacklist is always a dumb idea.
Blacklists do have a use, however. Use them with something like SpamAssassin. Rather than reject mail based on the list, just add points to the score.
Give Unattended a try. Once you get over the learning curve and get the installation and configuration of all your apps scripted, this approach is extremely easy. It took me about a month to get it set up, but now I do little more than update the scripts occasionally. Instead of maintaining about a dozen different images (different computers need different apps), I just have profile scripts that inherit from each other. Every other week I just go to all the computers, hit F3 after the POST then every system rebuilds itself. Works great and beyond the initial time investment it saves a significant amount of work.
Quoting the Unattended project:
For things that have driver issues (wireless, modems, video cards, etc) it's best to either buy online or find a Linux-friendly vendor (good luck on that). If you're online, just google the model number and add something like "linux", "ubuntu" or "gentoo" to the query. Ubuntu and Gentoo usually have forum topics or howtos for every peice of hardware I consider buying. Also, often on Newegg if you look through the comments someone will say if it works on Linux or not.
Also, anything with an Atheros chipset also works very well with the MadWifi drivers.
Going straight Theora+Vorbis wouldn't work that well, since the user would have the install the codecs first and Vorbis/Theora support is severely lacking on OS X.
Quoting the site: