Three main differences that I know. 1. OS - Inspirons come with WinMe, Latitudes come with Win2K. 2. BIOS - I'll rant about this in a second. 3. Service - Dell only seems to care about Latitude owners, because they are generally a business not an individual. All problems I have had their solution has been "Put WinME back on". I have an Inspiron 8000. The BIOS is designed for computer illiterates. You can set the clock, turn energy saving stuff on and off, and a couple other weenie things. I know someone who has a latitude (not sure what model), and he was able to download a so called advanced BIOS ROM for his and he can force IRQs for things and all sorts of options you might want. Not available for Inspirons. My laptop has been a total pain in the ass. *All* the devices are on the same IRQ. Before I installed Win2K (for school purposes) to make it a dual boot system all devices save one were on the same IRQ. I cannot make the 3d acceleration work in X because of this. Windows somehow can work with it, but Linux gets very cranky when the video card doesn't get an exclusive IRQ. Maybe things will improve when I reinstall Linux with a newer distro.
For some good insight into how SuSE does business, go out and buy (or stand in a bookstore and read) the August 2001 Linux Magazine article on pp 36-40. It is an interview with Dirk Hohndel, and he discusses where SuSE is and isn't profitable. He says that for the most part they have been profitable, but during the Linux hype in the stock market they spent a little too much, and now have to work on tightening up a bit.
I also have a flyer I got in the mail from SuSE (because I registered my 7.1) urging me to buy 7.2, and listing some of their other products. They have a $2500 Lotus Domino + SuSE package they sell (amongst other expensive products) and I imagine that if they can sell plenty of these to corporate customers then they probably won't be hurting too bad.
Many of the posts have been "Imminent Death of SuSE predicted!" posts. I think it is very silly to suggest that they are going to go under or have to merge. I think they have a very strong user base and I bet they'll come out fine.
I haven't upgraded yet, because I have a Dell Inspiron 8000 which has a funky PCMCIA chipset (or maybe it's the BIOS; I never have gotten the damn thing to work right.) and you have to compile PCMCIA with "PnP BIOS Resource Checking" which does not work with 2.4 (and the documentation says this "shouldn't be a problem for anyone", but hey. ).
My desktop computer has a Geforce2 and I was pretty sure that the older drivers from nVidia only had kernel modules for 2.2.x so I played it safe, but now I'm just too lazy.
I believe that he is refering to the Fox special about the moon landings being a hoax that there was an article about a couple of weeks ago. check out this article on badastronomy.com.
I go to a 2 year community college (for about 6 more weeks, and then I transfer to a real college) here in Columbus (Columbus State Community College) and they have cscc.edu. I wonder how that slipped by their 4 year college rule. Actually I'm not really going to lose sleep over it, but the article piqued my attention for a few seconds:)
Actually, 2 Loki games are kind of "hybrid". I installed Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year edition on Tuesday, and what I had to do was buy the windows game, and then download the installer from Loki with the Linux binary and libraries. Pretty kewl. Works beautifully. In fact I only hopped on slashdot for a sec. I logged on to play UT:) Loki also has instructions for how to install Quake 3 Arena if you have the windows version (They'd rather that you buy theirs, but it's nice that they realize that ppl don't want to buy games twice.) Plus, remember that id is releasing Doom 3 for Win, Mac, and Linux at the same time.
How are the Loki games poorly ported? I have a half dozen on my computer right now and only one has any problem whatsoever ( Heavy Gear 2 seg faults when switching from 3d to 2d context on some nVidia cards) In fact the quality of some of their ports is amazing. I bought Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year, which Loki has as a beta release ( plain Unreal Tourny is supposed to be release quality) and it works at least as well as it does on my friends windows machine.
As for video cards, I have a Geforce2 GTS, and to get it to work perfectly all I had to do was download two rpms from nVidia's page and install them and Boom! I went from 3fps to 190fps with ssystem -bench. It is only tough to get drivers for video cards because not all the video card manufacturers find it worth their time to make a driver for Linux. If there were a demand, and not people saying "gaming will never work, why bother?" then perhaps they would work on getting Linux drivers out with the windows drivers, not just whenever or not at all.
That being said; sound is a big Linux problem. Even the pay OSS sound card drivers can't support all the features on new nice surround sound cards, e.g. sound blaster live platinum 5.1
I use Linux every day for all my computing needs, and I try to keep a "not yet" not a "never" point of view. We need to cross a threshold of use before Linux can be viewed as a serious enough contender in any field to warrant writing drivers in the eyes of the hardware companies.
I know nothing of the movie, but I did read the book by tsutomu shimomura (the guy who led the FBI to him). It seemed to be pretty factual. I don't know enough of the details outside what shimomura said, but he seemed to know his unix backwards and forwards, and explained with the right amount of detail that the average schlub could get the point, but the geek had enough to follow at a higher level. I'm not sure what the actual TRUTH (the caps and bold for snide irony:) is, but if shimomura is to be believed then mitnick really was not much more that a glorified script kiddie and pretty immature. (e.g. leaving harrassing messages on shimomura's answering machine)
Feel lucky. I live in Ohio and buy a lot off the net. They didn't tell us about this stupid tax until early December. I was counting on using my Ohio return to buy a new muffler for my car. Now I'm going to be scraping up money to pay the state tax on my online purchases. I would be (somewhat) OK with it if they started collecting sales tax online when I bought things, but the way they sprung the use tax on us was pretty uncool.
The problem with that is that they would have to put both the American and Japanese episodes on the DVD seperatly. Robotech frequently reordered scenes and episodes (especially in Southern Cross) so. I don't know if you have the Perfect tapes (I do), but if you do watch them some time. Southern Cross tape one is the best example if I remember correctly (I haven't watched Southern Cross in a couple of years though; dull as toast) If you want the Japanese for Macross, preorder it from Animeigo
I'm not sure what they are doing on the DVDs, but the tapes with 6 episodes each are edited even from the TV version (assuming that you are refering to the FHE version). They took on average 5 minutes per episode out so that 6 episodes would be 90 mins long. I was one of the first people to sign up for animeigo's subbed macross and will most likely buy the Robotech DVDs too, because I grew up with them. I loved the concept of the "Robotech Perfect Collection" that they did a few years ago with 2 episodes in Japanese and then 2 in English. Interesting to compare. The Japanese episodes were always better by several orders of magnitude. Better voice actors, more sensible plot, etc. Unfortunatly they only released 8 tapes of SDF Macross, and 7 tapes each of SDC Southern Cross, and GC Mospeada before the company went belly up. I wonder if anyone will ever release Southern Cross (which in Japan was cancelled for sucking so bad) or Mospeada in Japanese. Animeigo preferably, but they have that whole geologic release timescale problem. (Macross was supposed to be out almost a year ago, and who knows if it will really come out in summer 01)
I've never used the feature myself, but I know that VIM has support for right-left languages. Get VIM and type ":help hebrew" to get instructions on how to get Hebrew support. Recompiling many be required. Many distros (e.g. RH and SuSE) don't compile in many features that a minority of users would want. I had to add "--enable-multibyte" for Japanese support.
I too have been striving to get japanese support working on my computers. The best luck I have had is with BeOS. I bought the "Pro Edition" and at install time I selected the japanese input system which works brilliantly. I have also gotten it to work with FreeBSD. One of the CDs in FreeBSD has *tons* of japanese programs, inluding a half dozen different input systems. I had the best luck using WNN as the server and kinput2 as the client in kterms. I don't have the URL handy, but Craig Oda has a great page about how to get japanese to work with linux. I have had no luck so far (on SuSE 6.4). X, or something seems not to be compiled with japanese support, so when I start GNOME in japanese, I get ascii garbage instead. And, I 've never gotten any server to work (and generally, not even compile). I've heard that TurboLinux, and Kondra have the best Japanese support.
To input CJK chars, you don't just poke in alt codes until you get it. Asians would go insane if that was how you had to type. If you have to type in CJK characters there is a frontend that converts them (I use kinput2 with wnn on *nix, and the built in frontend in BeOS.), and I'm sure that if the idea to have multinational chars succeeds, then some input method will be written to put them in unicode (as BeOS does by default). If you were going to a site that used CJK chars, then presumably you know the language, and know how to input them, and I bet that that assumption is built into their plan.
I've taken a year of Japanese and plan to take many more. Japanese can be as vague or clear as you want. In normal polite conversation, yes, you tend to use somewhat vague, nonassertive language. I'm sure that in battle a commander could make a clear statement. Remember that WWII wasn't their first war. They were quite fond of fighting the Russians and Chinese before, and won frequently.
But, as several people have pointed out, porting to FreeBSD is essentially a trivial task. They are both ELF binaries, and with the "emulation" (it isn't really emulating at all) Linux binaries run as well as native. They just need to tweak a few things to insure that it _will_ work, not probably works.
Transformers is Japanese. In the fan subs or Rurouni Kenshin that I watched there were ads for the, then new, Beast Wars, before it showed on US TV.
The Smurfs are German. At least so I've been told by several people. I hear that it is really "Die Schlumpfe"
There is plenty of crap, agreed.But, most of the posts knocking anime thus far seem to work on the logic "I've seen one or two anime shows/movies that were stupid/essentialy pr0n/have too much physical humor thus all anime is like that, and bad" There are good shows out there too. Part of what can make them bad is US companies like ADV that take good shows (well, and some bad too) and hire the worst voice actors possible and make them hokey, and then put them on DVDs with the lowest possible bit rate. Sorry for the rant and run on there. My point actually is, lots of anime fans, myself included don't like all anime indescriminatly, but can be quite selective. Personally, I have yet to hear a good reason for liking Dragon Ball. That seems to be the biggest "It's anime, and therefore good" show. I'll stop before I become more unfocused.
There is a quote from Ken Thomson in the article... "I've looked at the source, and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not... My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse." (IEEE Computer, 32, 5, May 1999, page 61.) Does anyone know what context this was in, or if he said anything nice about Linux later? Or maybe qualified the statement with examples of what is bad?
As someone pointed out in another post, you could even accidently bypass the EULA. In his case he used unrar, and didn't even know that there was a EULA until reading about it later.
2MB of RAM isn't always enough, depending on what you use it for. For example, there are some Chinese and Japanese dictionaries that are around 2MB themselves, not including the frontend program.
I am third generation car nut, and definitly a geek. Unfortunatly being a college student has made me too broke to be able to afford a classic car myself. I'd love a '73 Porsche 914 2.0(perhaps the most underated sports car europe ever made). I currently own an '86 Audi 4000 Quattro, which if I had the money to fix it up could be one hell of a car (the european coupe version w/ a turbo is a potential "car of the century"). My grandfather just sold his late '50s Ferrari (sorry for the spelling) a few years ago. Out in the garage at home is a '47 MG TC. I could go on and on when it comes to me and my family and cars. Our only problem is that they're too cheap to do much and I'm too poor.
I haven't gotten my Visor yet (another 2-4 weeks theoreticly), but I'd wager that as it claims to be "100% PalmOS compatible" on Handspring's page it should act no different than a PalmPilot. I ordered the optional serial cradle, because I don't even want to try to fight the USB port to get it to work with hotsync. I think that all they mean is the same thing 3Com means; they won't help you nor do they have any software for Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
actually, it is not...
Buran in Gorky Park.
That is one of the test models. It was not a space flight capable one.
Three main differences that I know. 1. OS - Inspirons come with WinMe, Latitudes come with Win2K. 2. BIOS - I'll rant about this in a second. 3. Service - Dell only seems to care about Latitude owners, because they are generally a business not an individual. All problems I have had their solution has been "Put WinME back on". I have an Inspiron 8000. The BIOS is designed for computer illiterates. You can set the clock, turn energy saving stuff on and off, and a couple other weenie things. I know someone who has a latitude (not sure what model), and he was able to download a so called advanced BIOS ROM for his and he can force IRQs for things and all sorts of options you might want. Not available for Inspirons. My laptop has been a total pain in the ass. *All* the devices are on the same IRQ. Before I installed Win2K (for school purposes) to make it a dual boot system all devices save one were on the same IRQ. I cannot make the 3d acceleration work in X because of this. Windows somehow can work with it, but Linux gets very cranky when the video card doesn't get an exclusive IRQ. Maybe things will improve when I reinstall Linux with a newer distro.
For some good insight into how SuSE does business, go out and buy (or stand in a bookstore and read) the August 2001 Linux Magazine article on pp 36-40. It is an interview with Dirk Hohndel, and he discusses where SuSE is and isn't profitable. He says that for the most part they have been profitable, but during the Linux hype in the stock market they spent a little too much, and now have to work on tightening up a bit.
I also have a flyer I got in the mail from SuSE (because I registered my 7.1) urging me to buy 7.2, and listing some of their other products. They have a $2500 Lotus Domino + SuSE package they sell (amongst other expensive products) and I imagine that if they can sell plenty of these to corporate customers then they probably won't be hurting too bad.
Many of the posts have been "Imminent Death of SuSE predicted!" posts. I think it is very silly to suggest that they are going to go under or have to merge. I think they have a very strong user base and I bet they'll come out fine.
Well, not exactly. Maybe if it had commercial SSH. I'm running SuSE 7.1 Pro, and it came with OpenSSH 2.9, which would be in the safe catagory.
I haven't upgraded yet, because I have a Dell Inspiron 8000 which has a funky PCMCIA chipset (or maybe it's the BIOS; I never have gotten the damn thing to work right.) and you have to compile PCMCIA with "PnP BIOS Resource Checking" which does not work with 2.4 (and the documentation says this "shouldn't be a problem for anyone", but hey. ).
My desktop computer has a Geforce2 and I was pretty sure that the older drivers from nVidia only had kernel modules for 2.2.x so I played it safe, but now I'm just too lazy.
I believe that he is refering to the Fox special about the moon landings being a hoax that there was an article about a couple of weeks ago.
check out this article on badastronomy.com.
I go to a 2 year community college (for about 6 more weeks, and then I transfer to a real college) here in Columbus (Columbus State Community College) and they have cscc.edu. I wonder how that slipped by their 4 year college rule. Actually I'm not really going to lose sleep over it, but the article piqued my attention for a few seconds :)
Actually, 2 Loki games are kind of "hybrid". I installed Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year edition on Tuesday, and what I had to do was buy the windows game, and then download the installer from Loki with the Linux binary and libraries. Pretty kewl. Works beautifully. In fact I only hopped on slashdot for a sec. I logged on to play UT :) Loki also has instructions for how to install Quake 3 Arena if you have the windows version (They'd rather that you buy theirs, but it's nice that they realize that ppl don't want to buy games twice.) Plus, remember that id is releasing Doom 3 for Win, Mac, and Linux at the same time.
How are the Loki games poorly ported? I have a half dozen on my computer right now and only one has any problem whatsoever ( Heavy Gear 2 seg faults when switching from 3d to 2d context on some nVidia cards) In fact the quality of some of their ports is amazing. I bought Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year, which Loki has as a beta release ( plain Unreal Tourny is supposed to be release quality) and it works at least as well as it does on my friends windows machine.
As for video cards, I have a Geforce2 GTS, and to get it to work perfectly all I had to do was download two rpms from nVidia's page and install them and Boom! I went from 3fps to 190fps with ssystem -bench. It is only tough to get drivers for video cards because not all the video card manufacturers find it worth their time to make a driver for Linux. If there were a demand, and not people saying "gaming will never work, why bother?" then perhaps they would work on getting Linux drivers out with the windows drivers, not just whenever or not at all.
That being said; sound is a big Linux problem. Even the pay OSS sound card drivers can't support all the features on new nice surround sound cards, e.g. sound blaster live platinum 5.1
I use Linux every day for all my computing needs, and I try to keep a "not yet" not a "never" point of view. We need to cross a threshold of use before Linux can be viewed as a serious enough contender in any field to warrant writing drivers in the eyes of the hardware companies.
I know nothing of the movie, but I did read the book by tsutomu shimomura (the guy who led the FBI to him). It seemed to be pretty factual. I don't know enough of the details outside what shimomura said, but he seemed to know his unix backwards and forwards, and explained with the right amount of detail that the average schlub could get the point, but the geek had enough to follow at a higher level. I'm not sure what the actual TRUTH (the caps and bold for snide irony :) is, but if shimomura is to be believed then mitnick really was not much more that a glorified script kiddie and pretty immature. (e.g. leaving harrassing messages on shimomura's answering machine)
Feel lucky. I live in Ohio and buy a lot off the net. They didn't tell us about this stupid tax until early December. I was counting on using my Ohio return to buy a new muffler for my car. Now I'm going to be scraping up money to pay the state tax on my online purchases. I would be (somewhat) OK with it if they started collecting sales tax online when I bought things, but the way they sprung the use tax on us was pretty uncool.
The problem with that is that they would have to put both the American and Japanese episodes on the DVD seperatly. Robotech frequently reordered scenes and episodes (especially in Southern Cross) so. I don't know if you have the Perfect tapes (I do), but if you do watch them some time. Southern Cross tape one is the best example if I remember correctly (I haven't watched Southern Cross in a couple of years though; dull as toast) If you want the Japanese for Macross, preorder it from Animeigo
I'm not sure what they are doing on the DVDs, but the tapes with 6 episodes each are edited even from the TV version (assuming that you are refering to the FHE version). They took on average 5 minutes per episode out so that 6 episodes would be 90 mins long. I was one of the first people to sign up for animeigo's subbed macross and will most likely buy the Robotech DVDs too, because I grew up with them. I loved the concept of the "Robotech Perfect Collection" that they did a few years ago with 2 episodes in Japanese and then 2 in English. Interesting to compare. The Japanese episodes were always better by several orders of magnitude. Better voice actors, more sensible plot, etc. Unfortunatly they only released 8 tapes of SDF Macross, and 7 tapes each of SDC Southern Cross, and GC Mospeada before the company went belly up. I wonder if anyone will ever release Southern Cross (which in Japan was cancelled for sucking so bad) or Mospeada in Japanese. Animeigo preferably, but they have that whole geologic release timescale problem. (Macross was supposed to be out almost a year ago, and who knows if it will really come out in summer 01)
I've never used the feature myself, but I know that VIM has support for right-left languages. Get VIM and type ":help hebrew" to get instructions on how to get Hebrew support. Recompiling many be required. Many distros (e.g. RH and SuSE) don't compile in many features that a minority of users would want. I had to add "--enable-multibyte" for Japanese support.
I too have been striving to get japanese support working on my computers. The best luck I have had is with BeOS. I bought the "Pro Edition" and at install time I selected the japanese input system which works brilliantly. I have also gotten it to work with FreeBSD. One of the CDs in FreeBSD has *tons* of japanese programs, inluding a half dozen different input systems. I had the best luck using WNN as the server and kinput2 as the client in kterms. I don't have the URL handy, but Craig Oda has a great page about how to get japanese to work with linux. I have had no luck so far (on SuSE 6.4). X, or something seems not to be compiled with japanese support, so when I start GNOME in japanese, I get ascii garbage instead. And, I 've never gotten any server to work (and generally, not even compile). I've heard that TurboLinux, and Kondra have the best Japanese support.
To input CJK chars, you don't just poke in alt codes until you get it. Asians would go insane if that was how you had to type. If you have to type in CJK characters there is a frontend that converts them (I use kinput2 with wnn on *nix, and the built in frontend in BeOS.), and I'm sure that if the idea to have multinational chars succeeds, then some input method will be written to put them in unicode (as BeOS does by default). If you were going to a site that used CJK chars, then presumably you know the language, and know how to input them, and I bet that that assumption is built into their plan.
I've taken a year of Japanese and plan to take many more. Japanese can be as vague or clear as you want. In normal polite conversation, yes, you tend to use somewhat vague, nonassertive language. I'm sure that in battle a commander could make a clear statement. Remember that WWII wasn't their first war. They were quite fond of fighting the Russians and Chinese before, and won frequently.
But, as several people have pointed out, porting to FreeBSD is essentially a trivial task. They are both ELF binaries, and with the "emulation" (it isn't really emulating at all) Linux binaries run as well as native. They just need to tweak a few things to insure that it _will_ work, not probably works.
Transformers is Japanese. In the fan subs or Rurouni Kenshin that I watched there were ads for the, then new, Beast Wars, before it showed on US TV.
The Smurfs are German. At least so I've been told by several people. I hear that it is really "Die Schlumpfe"
There is plenty of crap, agreed.But, most of the posts knocking anime thus far seem to work on the logic "I've seen one or two anime shows/movies that were stupid/essentialy pr0n/have too much physical humor thus all anime is like that, and bad" There are good shows out there too. Part of what can make them bad is US companies like ADV that take good shows (well, and some bad too) and hire the worst voice actors possible and make them hokey, and then put them on DVDs with the lowest possible bit rate. Sorry for the rant and run on there. My point actually is, lots of anime fans, myself included don't like all anime indescriminatly, but can be quite selective. Personally, I have yet to hear a good reason for liking Dragon Ball. That seems to be the biggest "It's anime, and therefore good" show. I'll stop before I become more unfocused.
There is a quote from Ken Thomson in the article... "I've looked at the source, and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not ... My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse." (IEEE Computer, 32, 5, May 1999, page 61.) Does anyone know what context this was in, or if he said anything nice about Linux later? Or maybe qualified the statement with examples of what is bad?
As someone pointed out in another post, you could even accidently bypass the EULA. In his case he used unrar, and didn't even know that there was a EULA until reading about it later.
2MB of RAM isn't always enough, depending on what you use it for. For example, there are some Chinese and Japanese dictionaries that are around 2MB themselves, not including the frontend program.
I am third generation car nut, and definitly a geek. Unfortunatly being a college student has made me too broke to be able to afford a classic car myself. I'd love a '73 Porsche 914 2.0(perhaps the most underated sports car europe ever made). I currently own an '86 Audi 4000 Quattro, which if I had the money to fix it up could be one hell of a car (the european coupe version w/ a turbo is a potential "car of the century"). My grandfather just sold his late '50s Ferrari (sorry for the spelling) a few years ago. Out in the garage at home is a '47 MG TC. I could go on and on when it comes to me and my family and cars. Our only problem is that they're too cheap to do much and I'm too poor.
I haven't gotten my Visor yet (another 2-4 weeks theoreticly), but I'd wager that as it claims to be "100% PalmOS compatible" on Handspring's page it should act no different than a PalmPilot. I ordered the optional serial cradle, because I don't even want to try to fight the USB port to get it to work with hotsync. I think that all they mean is the same thing 3Com means; they won't help you nor do they have any software for Linux.