In my Canadian province we have a government funded public health nurse phone line line. It exists for people to phone in and speak to a nurse about whatever health problem they're having, and the nurse can give advice on over the counter medication or home treatments, but will always differ to "go see a doctor" as needed. They keep a record of your calls so you can follow up on advice given and changes in your condition. It's really a very good service.
It exists to alleviate line ups in walk-in clinics and emergency rooms by keeping some of the people with less serious problems from having to go down and see a doctor. This service looks like it will serve a similar purpose.
Audio software is like this. Requiring keys from all previous updates. Some even require a USB security dongle to be plugged in at all times or the app shuts down. Using cracked versions of these tools save hours of key management and the trouble of using up a USB port for no good reason, even if you've got all the boxes shrink wrapped on the shelf.
There are some websites that I still find will not work in a non-IE browser. I guess the difference is that if you're running Windows you can fall back on IE, but on Mac/Linux you don't have that option. You can try ie4linux or ie4osx but even that is hit and miss...
Luckily you can have KDE 3.5 and KDE4 installed side-by-side (and pick the one you want at login), so it's easy to keep it around and try it out every so often, without losing your KDE 3.5 environment. Ah! That's a sweet little bit of information. So would I install the standard KDE3 release of Kubuntu and then pull KDE4 from the repos?
Exactly. Firefox is beta, but is being released with Ubuntu LTS. How much worse is KDE4? Is it missing features, or just a bit unstable which is much more problematic for a window manager than for a web browser?
You don't have to talk slower, but you *do* get "All circuits are busy, please try later." If QoS was implemented, then VoIP (and live video) connections would have a "guarantee bandwidth" tag that would block the connection until sufficient bandwidth was available, and then reserve the bandwidth for the remainder of the connection. Bittorrent connections would have an "as available" tag to minimize cost. ... And this will work for days until someone cracks open the source to $TORRENT_CLIENT and gets it to mark all torrent traffic as "guarantee bandwidth" and the whole system grinds to a halt, there's no bandwidth for legitimate real time applications, and we're back to where we were.
It's a slippery slope. ISPs are not responsible for content. They allow you to transfer data from a given host to your machine. What that data is, how big it is, and by which terms you have come to pull it onto your computer through their network is no concern of theirs.
Not a perfect comparison, but it's similar to TV. You pay for your channels and you're also paying for the ads. It's an all or nothing kind of thing. You may not want them, but it's your choice to visit a site that has 3MB of ads on a page that's otherwise 200k.
At least with internet use you have more control. If you really are worried about the bandwidth for ads, get yourself a good AdBlock list and set it to not load ads rather than hide them.
In this case, whoever's doing the uploading pays instead of the BBC. So the ISPs still get paid (unless they do something stupid, like sell unlimited flat-rate access which they can't provide and then complain when the customer legitimately uses it). There, fixed...
And then the ISP can cut off customer access to the iPlayer, and THEN they can deal with the malestrom of calls from angry customers who want it back or they'll switch to another ISP. The ISPs won't cut customers off from the iPlayer, that would be far too obvious and you're right, customers would complain and switch. What they'll do in stead is use shaping and throttling to limit access to iPlayer or iPlayer-like traffic. When people only see "Buffering..." rather than their BBC program of choice, they'll complain to the BBC. The BBC will tell them it's not the fault of their application and blame the ISP. The ISP will say they don't troubleshoot individual websites, and tell the customer their connection is working fine.
Most customers don't have any idea how the internet works. And that's fine. It's a big complex system, and really they only need to know enough to get by. The problem is that ISPs can use that lack of understanding to abuse customers like this. It's what makes the net neutrality issue such a serious one.
True, but your bring your own bags are by far the most difficult for cashiers / baggers to load up, thus increasing the amount of time everyone is there. About the only thing worse are the jackasses that would ask for paper IN plastic. Ugh. So what you're saying is that I should stop bringing my own cloth bags because using the disposable plastic ones is more convenient? That's the train of thought that has gotten us into so many of our environmental problems.
Keep in mind that it's not just the plastic in the bags which are made from oil. Once you get your groceries home those bags just go into the trash since you'll never find enough reasons to re-use all of the bags you take home. Those thin bags ball up in trees and animals and hang around pretty much forever.
They use Windows Media Player to stream the radio stations. Their token ogg vorbis stream is unreliable and barely worth the trouble.
They aint no saint. They use WM, but there's a method to their madness. From their site "Why the CBC uses Windows Media Player":
In August 2004, CBC.ca moved to one standard media player for live streaming - Windows Media Player.
Windows Media player is currently the most commonly used format in the marketplace and using this format allows CBC.ca to deliver live radio streaming to the widest possible audience. Further, by supporting only one commonly used media player (Windows Media), we can direct more technical support and resources behind this standard format and use the efficiencies to offer more radio streams to more Canadians, both at home and abroad.
If you go here, they detail how to view/listen to their content on OS X/Linux/UNIX machines. They not only explain how to get access, but they clearly test and keep their documentation up to date.
I'm envious of people who can read on the bus. I get motion sick reading more than a couple sentences while in a moving vehicle. Audio books and an MP3 player give me something interesting and entertaining to do while commuting.
play video games with my fiance 25-30 hours a week Slightly OT, but I think that this is a defining mark of our generation. The adults who got our first NES new for christmas, give or take.
My common-law girlfriend and I don't subscribe to television. We watch a movie maybe once a week, or on occasion episode of The Office. But we almost daily play video games together. I play my share of single player Wii games, but for the most part we sit down after work, with dinner, with friends, or otherwise and play games. I don't find us very exceptional, but ten or so years ago I'd venture there were very few people in a similar situation.
You can argue over the definition, but the concept behind Cider is quite analogous to virtualization in the general sense. Exactly. It's not virtualized in the sense of fully virtualizing an OS inside another, but in the sense that DirectX is virtualized over OpenGL. Each time the game makes a call to what it thinks is the DirectX driver, it's actually calling Cider which in turn calls an analogous OpenGL function. You can argue over the semantics of the word, but either way it's turning what used to be one call into several.
I completely disagree. My Mac does everything I could ever ask a computer to do, aside from any serious gaming, and much more. Plus it allows me to get it done quickly and elegantly.
Buying a cheap PC is not an option. I have cheap PCs, and even if I loaded Windows onto them, they would not run games. Gaming hardware is expensive. My Mac is my fast computer with the good video card and I don't see why I shouldn't be able to run an occasional game on it when the game isn't released for my Wii or what have you. I by no means want the focus of Mac to change to a gaming desktop, but I'm arguing that an OS as powerful and well put together as OS X is more than able to do all of the above. It's just unfortunate that almost nobody develops for it natively.
If you wanted to play games you wouldn't have bought a Mac. Since when are computers highly specialized machines that are only designed to do a subset of computing tasks? I knew I wasn't buying a gaming machine, I do my gaming on consoles, but in the case of highly rated or anticipated games (such as Portal and Spore) I don't think it's unreasonable to hope that the makers would support more than just the single most popular OS.
Virtualization limits speed. Last I checked, virtualization didn't give you access to the GPU. The guest OS recognizes a driver provided by the environment with limited capabilities. It's fine for web browsing and cross platform testing, but in now way would let you do any kind of gaming. The corollary to this is that TransGaming/Cider is actually virtualization as well. But in this case, it's specialized to the graphical calls and is designed to be fast and efficient for this one task, though never as efficient as something compiled to run natively.
As for Boot Camp, if I wanted to buy a computer and buy a copy of Windows to run on it, I wouldn't have bought a Mac...
Cider leaves much to be desired. The poor performance imparted by this emulation layer causes it to play like it's on an old Pentium III machine, despite the fact that it's running on a quad-core Mac Pro. To top it off, the graphics quality, even when turned up all the way, is far lower than it should be. It seems as if the Cider emulation layer can't translate all of the DirectX APIs, so it only does some of the more basic ones, leaving advanced graphics effects out. Does anyone have some links/literature to substantiate this? I was scared this would be the case. I know that Wine Is Not supposed to be a Windows Emulator, but in my experience the performance is still awful. Even something like Picasa running under Wine on Linux brings my system crawling to a halt.
All these OS X "ports" are really just bundling the cost of a streamlined Windows emulation layer in with your Windows version of the game. It, in fact, discourages developers from learning the OS X toolkits because for games because they can just write one Windows version and slap Cider on it and sell it for OS X too.
Slashdot Mirror
Manitoba. Haven't been able to find the link though.
In my Canadian province we have a government funded public health nurse phone line line. It exists for people to phone in and speak to a nurse about whatever health problem they're having, and the nurse can give advice on over the counter medication or home treatments, but will always differ to "go see a doctor" as needed. They keep a record of your calls so you can follow up on advice given and changes in your condition. It's really a very good service.
It exists to alleviate line ups in walk-in clinics and emergency rooms by keeping some of the people with less serious problems from having to go down and see a doctor. This service looks like it will serve a similar purpose.
Even with AdBlock I had a hard time finding the content wrapped in all that other garbage.
It's their choice to put content on the net, and I feel no remorse from blocking ads.
"Your business model is not my problem."
Audio software is like this. Requiring keys from all previous updates. Some even require a USB security dongle to be plugged in at all times or the app shuts down. Using cracked versions of these tools save hours of key management and the trouble of using up a USB port for no good reason, even if you've got all the boxes shrink wrapped on the shelf.
There are some websites that I still find will not work in a non-IE browser. I guess the difference is that if you're running Windows you can fall back on IE, but on Mac/Linux you don't have that option. You can try ie4linux or ie4osx but even that is hit and miss...
Exactly. Firefox is beta, but is being released with Ubuntu LTS. How much worse is KDE4? Is it missing features, or just a bit unstable which is much more problematic for a window manager than for a web browser?
What are the risks or limitations of running KDE4?
What ISP is this? The Canadian city I live in has only two options of high speed, both of them bad.
It's a slippery slope. ISPs are not responsible for content. They allow you to transfer data from a given host to your machine. What that data is, how big it is, and by which terms you have come to pull it onto your computer through their network is no concern of theirs.
Not a perfect comparison, but it's similar to TV. You pay for your channels and you're also paying for the ads. It's an all or nothing kind of thing. You may not want them, but it's your choice to visit a site that has 3MB of ads on a page that's otherwise 200k.
At least with internet use you have more control. If you really are worried about the bandwidth for ads, get yourself a good AdBlock list and set it to not load ads rather than hide them.
Most customers don't have any idea how the internet works. And that's fine. It's a big complex system, and really they only need to know enough to get by. The problem is that ISPs can use that lack of understanding to abuse customers like this. It's what makes the net neutrality issue such a serious one.
Keep in mind that it's not just the plastic in the bags which are made from oil. Once you get your groceries home those bags just go into the trash since you'll never find enough reasons to re-use all of the bags you take home. Those thin bags ball up in trees and animals and hang around pretty much forever.
They aint no saint. They use WM, but there's a method to their madness. From their site "Why the CBC uses Windows Media Player":
In August 2004, CBC.ca moved to one standard media player for live streaming - Windows Media Player. Windows Media player is currently the most commonly used format in the marketplace and using this format allows CBC.ca to deliver live radio streaming to the widest possible audience. Further, by supporting only one commonly used media player (Windows Media), we can direct more technical support and resources behind this standard format and use the efficiencies to offer more radio streams to more Canadians, both at home and abroad.
If you go here, they detail how to view/listen to their content on OS X/Linux/UNIX machines. They not only explain how to get access, but they clearly test and keep their documentation up to date.
I love the CBC.
I'm envious of people who can read on the bus. I get motion sick reading more than a couple sentences while in a moving vehicle. Audio books and an MP3 player give me something interesting and entertaining to do while commuting.
It's French.
I've never heard this word used in English before, but he's correct that in French it's pronounced like canal with a B.
My common-law girlfriend and I don't subscribe to television. We watch a movie maybe once a week, or on occasion episode of The Office. But we almost daily play video games together. I play my share of single player Wii games, but for the most part we sit down after work, with dinner, with friends, or otherwise and play games. I don't find us very exceptional, but ten or so years ago I'd venture there were very few people in a similar situation.
I completely disagree. My Mac does everything I could ever ask a computer to do, aside from any serious gaming, and much more. Plus it allows me to get it done quickly and elegantly.
Buying a cheap PC is not an option. I have cheap PCs, and even if I loaded Windows onto them, they would not run games. Gaming hardware is expensive. My Mac is my fast computer with the good video card and I don't see why I shouldn't be able to run an occasional game on it when the game isn't released for my Wii or what have you. I by no means want the focus of Mac to change to a gaming desktop, but I'm arguing that an OS as powerful and well put together as OS X is more than able to do all of the above. It's just unfortunate that almost nobody develops for it natively.
No.
Virtualization limits speed. Last I checked, virtualization didn't give you access to the GPU. The guest OS recognizes a driver provided by the environment with limited capabilities. It's fine for web browsing and cross platform testing, but in now way would let you do any kind of gaming. The corollary to this is that TransGaming/Cider is actually virtualization as well. But in this case, it's specialized to the graphical calls and is designed to be fast and efficient for this one task, though never as efficient as something compiled to run natively.
As for Boot Camp, if I wanted to buy a computer and buy a copy of Windows to run on it, I wouldn't have bought a Mac...
All these OS X "ports" are really just bundling the cost of a streamlined Windows emulation layer in with your Windows version of the game. It, in fact, discourages developers from learning the OS X toolkits because for games because they can just write one Windows version and slap Cider on it and sell it for OS X too.