Seems I may have spoken too soon - LiVES seems to offer what I want, basic cutting and pasting features, without silly restrictions. It also offers much more, effects and whatnot, that I haven't had a chance to play with, but thus far, I'm impressed - all I wanted was cutting and pasting, but now I may have to raise my expectations:)
It can also output to specific formats, like (s)vcd compliant mpeg files, so this may indeed be the a "virtualdub" like app for linux.
I'm a Linux user/lover, but the man has a point - the free tools just aren't up to their commercial cousins. There are many video processing tools around for linux, great for batch, non-interactive, operations. tovid is one of many that makes converting videos from one popular format to another very easy for example...
But if you want to do even SIMPLE cutting and pasting of video from a GUI, good luck! avidemux comes close, but has silly restrictions, mpeg files for example - some need to be manually multiplexed outside of the application.
Other projects like kino can only work on a subset of files, and are geared towards a specific purpose, like bringing in dv video. But what if I want to edit commercials out of a video that I just recorded from my DVR? Or,
intersplice a family videos with scenes from movies or something "art-see"?
You can usually accomplish anything in linux, but when it comes to video, it takes a bunch of tools, mostly built around the same basic back-end programs (ffmpeg, transcode, mencoder, etc.)
There are many tasks where the shell is more efficient, but editing video isn't one of them;) Don't get me wrong, I love how much of linux is based around the idea of front-ends to back-end shell applications, but in this case, nonone has succeeded in making a comprehensive and usable front-end yet.
On a final rant-note, I've never tried Cinerrela (sp?) - the last time I considered it I was shocked at the specs it required...
The string theory hypothesis is fabulously interesting stuff...but can we please not keep calling it a theory?
When I get into Creation VS. Evolution battles with people, I try and point out why creation isn't a theory, and how that word is missused...for the love of Vishnu, even scientists misuse that word!
I'm talking about personal experience. I just did a quick test - I searched for something old and something new.
Not that I'd want to download these illegal videos, but they are well known, so, I searched for Dirty Dancing and Sin City.
The donkey had MANY CD sized versions of both movies, but not DVD.
Gnutella had ONE hit for a Dirty Dancing avi, with not many sources (typically, the more sources for something, the faster it comes).
To my surprise, it actually found a decent number of hits for Sin City. However, no DVD sized material, and not many sources - most had just one source, one had 47. In my experience, 47 sources MIGHT just be enough to download something this large successfully.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to stand by my original opinion. Maybe gnutella is coming around for this kind of content - it would be a good thing, given its speed advantage over the donkey...
On the groups, I found DVDs for both movies. I didn't search bittorrent for this test, but I'm rather sure that I could find both in just about any format.
No, I understand it quite well. Upload speeds for most broadband services are not nearly the same as the download speeds.
My max upload speed is perhaps 30k/sec, while my download speed is around 500k/sec. Further, if I upload at 30k/sec, it uses my entire bandwidth. Think of a pipe hanging over a mountain - the water can go down much faster than it can go up, and if you pump too much up, you have no room for new water to come down.
This is a common issue for bittorrent users on broadband connections, btw.
While it is true that you share as you download, bittorrent forces no bit-for-bit upload harmony. You may quit after you download your content, even if you've only uploaded a fraction of what you've downloaded. This has consequences from the site hosting the tracker however.
This from the WikiPedia page on bittorrent - leaving your client open after the download is finished is part and parcel of the process in the real world:
Because BitTorrent relies on the upstream bandwidth of its users and the more users, the more aggregate bandwidth is available for sharing the files it is considered good etiquette to leave one's BitTorrent client open after downloading has completed so that others may continue to gain from the file that has been distributed.
It is not clear, however, how long one should leave their client open after downloading has finished. Many clients report the byte traffic upstream as well as down, so the user can see how much they have contributed back to the network. Some clients also report the "share ratio", a number relating the amount of data uploaded to the amount downloaded. It is generally considered good form to at least share back the equivalent amount of traffic as the original file size.
It is worth noting that the requirement of a "1.00" share ratio (uploading as much data as you have downloaded) is rather hotly contested given its relative impossibility to achieve for every person.
Typically, I aim for a 1 to 1 ratio. Perhaps apart from just reading the protocol spec, you should use a bittorrent client for a while?
This ain't your father's newsgroups - yEnc has been in wide, almost universal, use for years now - this from its WikiPedia page:
yEnc is an encoding for transferring binary files on the Usenet or via e-mail. It reduces the overhead by using an 8-bit transfer method. The overhead can be as little as 1-2% compared to the 33%-40% of other encodings like uuencode and Base64, although this is at the expense of transport reliability.
The reliability, both what you've mentioned and what WikiPedia mentiones about yEnc, is solved by good quality news feeds and the par system.
You would be hard pressed to find a post with out par files. par is a data recovery method that works insanely well.
Doing these many steps by hand was once a pain, yes, but now that automation, nzb files for example, or news services, which check these things out for you, exist, it's actually among the easier ways to get something. Easynews, for example, can open the par files on the server for you with a click and tell you what's up - downloading the par files is optional - if nothing is broken, you don't need them.
And even with the overhead introduced by the encoding and par files (usually 10% alone for par files, if you get them all), you can still download content faster this way, by far.
Since the news service caches content, downloading is often even faster than a direct download, say, from an ftp server. You can get a Linux LiveCD far faster from the groups these days than you can from an ftp server...
On the newsgroups, yes I am a leecher - and, they encourage that. They don't want n00bs wasting resources and messing stuff up for everyone by posting half-ass or screwing up the process. Btw, since I'm a paying customer to a news service, and since that news service caches all of the downloads on their server, I fail to see how leeching is bad in that context?
I have no problem seeding - I seed to 100%. I hate people that abuse the system. You are a zealot;) It is a disadvantage to keep a client running for sometimes days, and uses much space on the hard drive. The fact that lots of "good" people, like myself, seed as we should doesn't take away what I perceive to be a down-side to bittorrent. I don't dislike bittorrent - don't make this emotional, we are comparing and contrasting various methods for downloading media. Why not be honest?
Similarly for the donkey, don't be a zealot and not mention the God-forsaken SLOWness of the process! Again, ups and downs. And, hate to tell you, I do use it on occasion.
Finally, I also use gnutella quite often, and if someone is downloading from me, I tend to leave my client open a while when I'm done. I also have my upload folder pointing at lots of my stuff (legal, naturally).
Is your response negative because I pretty much described the various methods as they REALLY are? The newsgroups are the fastest way to get stuff these days - legal stuff, of course.
aMule is a nice linux client. The donkey is nice in that it has probably the biggest selection, but it's also S L O W.
IRC is also slow and a pain in the ass - too interactive (they frown at automation), too many different ways of doing things and you have to deal with a bunch of pricks that want you to be grateful that you part of their little circle of piracy - too juvenile. Does anyone really still think, "OOH! look at me, I'm a PIRATE!"??
Gnutella is very nice for MP3s and small files - the biggest you want here is a music video perhaps at 50megs or so, there doesn't seem to be much large content like movies. With the swarming ability that the clients have these days, downloading can be AMAZINGLY fast - why does eDonkey get more attention than Gnutella? Everyone should put large content files on Gnutella - do it, now!;) gtk-gnutella is a nice linux client. It's not as pretty as Limewire, but nicer on the ram, etc.
Bittorrent is the second fastest way that I've seen for downloading large content files, even DVD collections, say, of emulator games come rather quickly, usually approaching 60% of top download speed or more once it throttles up. The downside is the scrutiny at the moment, made worse by the fact that you must leave your download open - that is, you need to keep your client running even after you download the file to share with others - not doing so will get you "punished" in various ways by the sites offering this stuff, sometimes by not allowing you back. This also means that for a large DVD type download, you have 5 gigs of data on your drive much longer than you want - at least it's a problem for me. Further, unless you want to run the client forever, you need to set your upload rate pretty high. On my 1.2Ghz machine, bittorrent takes a toll in resources as well...
The fastest way to download something is via the newsgroups. Yup, the oldest way is still in some cases the best (it's not P2P, but it fits in my rant anyway). The downside here is for good news service, you have to pay, while the other methods are free.
Still, with a service like Easynews, you get 3 week retentions - meaning, a "post" stays alive for 3 weeks. Advances like par and nzb make this much easier and more reliable than it has been - it's almost too easy now. An nzb file points to specific articles in specific groups. For anyone familiar with this process, with nzb, you can avoid the old norms of subscribing to groups, downloading headers, searching for content, marking your choices, and telling it to download. Web pages such as binsearch.info allow you to use a web interface to select your content, and will then generate an nzb file for you.
With a broadband cable connection, you can download DVD sized content in about 2 and a half hours from the groups. Some ISPs still come with news feeds, but they usually aren't worth bothering with. My ISP has retentions lasting just a few hours, with a 1gig/month download limit.
So, IMHO, use gnutella for MP3s, short popular video clips/music videos and other smaller files (since there isn't much large content to be found). For anything larger, use the newsgroups if you have a good news feed. If not, try your luck with bittorrent.
Use the donkey only if you can't find it anywhere else and if speed isn't a problem. Oh, and avoid downloading from IRC...
Of course, I only download legal content:) Legal MP3 files, or copies of files I already own, or emulator ROMS of games I already own, or DVD collections of abandoned ROMs, Linux distributions, or tv shows that I already pay my Cable provider for, etc.
This is a rather silly view point. What would you have KDE do, have a "beginner" mode that hides features?
GNOME is primitive - sometimes, its Windows3.1 primitive. I can, for example, take a snapshot of the screen using ksnapshop and sometimes, I click on save again just to get a quick file list - from here, I can drag and drop the file, delete files, rename files, etc. In general, GNOME apps have a silly, simplistic and archaic file chooser that seems like taking 12 steps backwards to me...
Even if KDE did as many suggest and "hid" its infinite configuration abilities, it would still have thrice the features that GNOME has. Using GNOME is like working with your hands behind your back.
And, I'm not a GUI-needing n00b by any stretch - I always have a shell open.
Praise the Maker, so I'm not the only one? GAIM is having issues too...
It shocked me at first - I haven't been using Debian all that long compared to my total Linux life - the reason I switched was the nightmares associated with installing packages such as transcode in Red Hat (before they switched to apt), or even in Mandrake using urpmi (trust me, urpmi is no apt!) So when these things complained about installing, I felt like I stepped back in time several years, ready to pull out a pad and pencil and hunt down all of the silly depedencies...
Yeah, that's too bad - I used to follow this stuff much more than I do now, but it seems that any company that releases a system too far out of sync, sinks. The Dreamcast was too little, too late. Had they waited and released a better system in time with the PS2 and XBOX, with full backward compatibility, they might have had something...
They make good product from a technical standpoint, but make really bad business choices. The 32X was great - it really turbo charged the GENESIS, I know, I was one of three people to buy it. At $150, it was a pricy upgrade - cheaper would have been better. Timing, again, sucked, again, an "in between" system. With promises that the Saturn would be able to play 32X titles, it might have seemed like less of an in-between system, and therefore less of a risk to the consumer, and more like what it actually was - the SEGA's answer to the SuperFX chips and the last generation of SNES games, which were technically fabulous.
The SegaCD was another example - good hardware, bad everything else. SegaCD added graphics abilities as well as a cd-rom drive - abilities that more than matched the special mode 9 scaling and rotating abilites that the SNES had - did anyone know this? Their marketing department should be shot. A Saturn _should_ have been an updated SegaCD/32X system. Why would SEGA become their own competition, by having two systems relatively close in all but hype?? If they wanted to go the upgrade route, good for them! How wonderful to gradually increase the power of their system. If they wanted to make an entirely new system, then they should have just left the GENESIS alone and concentrated on the Saturn fully. They could have resold "new" units being the equivilent of a fully upgraded GENESIS and called it Saturn or something...
And what about the Nomad? Why don't I have a Nomad, that's 1/5th the weight and 1/3 the price of the original? If Nintendo can keep their portable gaming stuff going, why no one else? Why does SEGA drop the ball?! They had an incredibly powerful portable system, with a HUGE library! SEGA, where is your damn brain!?! Most people have never even heard of a Nomad!
Now, I'm all for Linux - I'm using it right now, I use it all the time, and I agree that games can get people to switch...I also agree that Frozen Bobble is a well-made game, but, uh, I had to laugh out loud - come on, you are seriously going to tell me that someone switched to Linux so they could play Frozen Bobble? LOL
Star Trek 1 was the best star trek movie, by far, and damn good scifi all around..
2 and 3 as a unit are the next best. The TNG movies are each glorified episodes, with the Borg flick being the best, but still, not great.
Star Trek6 had one too many idiotic bits, like constant references to the time that the movie was made, and ridiculous nonsense like looking up Klingon in a book along with making some type of seaking bomb just in the nick of time.
A bomb that can find another ship on it's own - imagine that! Why didn't Starfleet ever consider that?
When Uhura said, "well, it's gotta have a tail pipe" I went numb. How utterly utterly stupid.
Yes, I have an issue with the spell checker. I use Writer all the time, but am consistantly pissed by it's crap suggestions for mis-spelled words! I run it on Linux, and ironically, I often have to paste a word into GAIM to get the right spelling! GAIM, Evolution - every damn Linux app has well-working spell-checking, what the hell is wrong with OO?
Sorry - yeah, it irks me, but overall, I love OO. I almost never have issues opening files, but I do sometimes and that needs to be said. It's presentation app is just as nice as PowerPoint and quite compatible - the last presentation I did was done in both apps, switching back and forth depending on the PC I was at.
BBSes had pr0n, warez, and multiplayer games - basically everything the net is good for these days;)
My setup was an IBM XT Clone, with 640k of ram, dual 5 1/4 inch 360k floppies, 2400bps modem, CGA (Crap Graphics Adapter), and about DOS3.1 to 3.3 in my heyday. I lived in a large city, and we had many local high-quality BBSes around, I was even a co-sysop for one of them. At the time, most BBSes could only handle one caller at a time, and they were often busy. A BBS session consisted of the terminal software going through the various BBS numbers and dialing them all over and over again until it got through.
Once you got on, you would check and respond to your messages, take your turn at any multiplayer games, and then download and upload files. Most had ratios - so you had to contribute as well - this was stricly enforced, so even before BBSes got sophisticated and called each other at night to sync up, files spread like wildfire.
I remember some kind of phone-scam system as well, where you could dial into a special BBS and it would allow you to dial long distance for free - it connected the call for you. I used it just a few times to check it out, using it to call BBSes in LA, I think...
Most BBSes had time limits as well, and some even had time banks - if you signed off early, you could deposit your time in a bank, where it would accumulate interest, allowing you to manage your time wisely and stay on longer.
I started off using Procom+, but switched to Telix. Telix was DesqView-aware, meaning it could actually multitask well. Most DOS console apps wrote directly to the "screen" for speed, but this would wreck the more primitive multitasking tools such as DoubleDos. Alternatively, some featured a "BIOS call" option, meaning they played nice with the screen at the expense of severe slowness. Telix was able to do both - being aware of the environment it was running in, it was able to write directly to the screen, while being aware of DesqView - hence, no botched up display and near full speed.
In those single-user days, if you were on a BBS or trying to get onto one, your PC was totally busy. DesqView changed all that for me.
I could actually download files with Telix while I played graphical games, though DesqView did suspend graphical apps when you switched out of them, at least the primitive ancient version I had...
Come on, people...what I want are solutions to make a kick-ass system, on the cheap.
Reading various man-pages and HOWTOs, you discover cute clues such as setting up software RAID1 on two similar drives each on it's own controller == _much_ better speed, at some risk (if either drive goes, data is lost).
I've also read that putting a swap on two drives will make parallelize the swap system and increase speed...
But I see no benchmarks or comparisons anywhere! From the way the RAID documentation makes it sound, I would think that people would be screaming to make a system with 4, 20 GIG drives RAID1-ed together just for the "extreme" speed boost. It seems perfect for a Myth type setup - maybe even allowing software capture on older hardware...
Where are the stats and benchmarks for this stuff??
Slashdot Mirror
It can also output to specific formats, like (s)vcd compliant mpeg files, so this may indeed be the a "virtualdub" like app for linux.
But if you want to do even SIMPLE cutting and pasting of video from a GUI, good luck! avidemux comes close, but has silly restrictions, mpeg files for example - some need to be manually multiplexed outside of the application.
Other projects like kino can only work on a subset of files, and are geared towards a specific purpose, like bringing in dv video. But what if I want to edit commercials out of a video that I just recorded from my DVR? Or, intersplice a family videos with scenes from movies or something "art-see"?
You can usually accomplish anything in linux, but when it comes to video, it takes a bunch of tools, mostly built around the same basic back-end programs (ffmpeg, transcode, mencoder, etc.)
There are many tasks where the shell is more efficient, but editing video isn't one of them ;) Don't get me wrong, I love how much of linux is based around the idea of front-ends to back-end shell applications, but in this case, nonone has succeeded in making a comprehensive and usable front-end yet.
On a final rant-note, I've never tried Cinerrela (sp?) - the last time I considered it I was shocked at the specs it required...
1. Videos transfered from digital video camera
2. Video and music content inside of video games
3. Videos saved on a PVR - especially HD videos
As to losing data during a crash, well, if your 60meg drive crashed back in the day, that was a lot of data too, right?
Those fools should have just used two, 30meg, drives...
Vishnu agrees - don't believe he does? - just try and disprove it. ;)
When I get into Creation VS. Evolution battles with people, I try and point out why creation isn't a theory, and how that word is missused...for the love of Vishnu, even scientists misuse that word!
Not that I'd want to download these illegal videos, but they are well known, so, I searched for Dirty Dancing and Sin City.
The donkey had MANY CD sized versions of both movies, but not DVD.
Gnutella had ONE hit for a Dirty Dancing avi, with not many sources (typically, the more sources for something, the faster it comes).
To my surprise, it actually found a decent number of hits for Sin City. However, no DVD sized material, and not many sources - most had just one source, one had 47. In my experience, 47 sources MIGHT just be enough to download something this large successfully.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to stand by my original opinion. Maybe gnutella is coming around for this kind of content - it would be a good thing, given its speed advantage over the donkey...
On the groups, I found DVDs for both movies. I didn't search bittorrent for this test, but I'm rather sure that I could find both in just about any format.
My max upload speed is perhaps 30k/sec, while my download speed is around 500k/sec. Further, if I upload at 30k/sec, it uses my entire bandwidth. Think of a pipe hanging over a mountain - the water can go down much faster than it can go up, and if you pump too much up, you have no room for new water to come down.
This is a common issue for bittorrent users on broadband connections, btw.
While it is true that you share as you download, bittorrent forces no bit-for-bit upload harmony. You may quit after you download your content, even if you've only uploaded a fraction of what you've downloaded. This has consequences from the site hosting the tracker however.
This from the WikiPedia page on bittorrent - leaving your client open after the download is finished is part and parcel of the process in the real world:
Because BitTorrent relies on the upstream bandwidth of its users and the more users, the more aggregate bandwidth is available for sharing the files it is considered good etiquette to leave one's BitTorrent client open after downloading has completed so that others may continue to gain from the file that has been distributed.
It is not clear, however, how long one should leave their client open after downloading has finished. Many clients report the byte traffic upstream as well as down, so the user can see how much they have contributed back to the network. Some clients also report the "share ratio", a number relating the amount of data uploaded to the amount downloaded. It is generally considered good form to at least share back the equivalent amount of traffic as the original file size.
It is worth noting that the requirement of a "1.00" share ratio (uploading as much data as you have downloaded) is rather hotly contested given its relative impossibility to achieve for every person.
Typically, I aim for a 1 to 1 ratio. Perhaps apart from just reading the protocol spec, you should use a bittorrent client for a while?
I, for one, care not about karma and make sure my stuff is legal ;)
yEnc is an encoding for transferring binary files on the Usenet or via e-mail. It reduces the overhead by using an 8-bit transfer method. The overhead can be as little as 1-2% compared to the 33%-40% of other encodings like uuencode and Base64, although this is at the expense of transport reliability.
The reliability, both what you've mentioned and what WikiPedia mentiones about yEnc, is solved by good quality news feeds and the par system.
You would be hard pressed to find a post with out par files. par is a data recovery method that works insanely well.
Doing these many steps by hand was once a pain, yes, but now that automation, nzb files for example, or news services, which check these things out for you, exist, it's actually among the easier ways to get something. Easynews, for example, can open the par files on the server for you with a click and tell you what's up - downloading the par files is optional - if nothing is broken, you don't need them.
And even with the overhead introduced by the encoding and par files (usually 10% alone for par files, if you get them all), you can still download content faster this way, by far.
Since the news service caches content, downloading is often even faster than a direct download, say, from an ftp server. You can get a Linux LiveCD far faster from the groups these days than you can from an ftp server...
I have no problem seeding - I seed to 100%. I hate people that abuse the system. You are a zealot ;) It is a disadvantage to keep a client running for sometimes days, and uses much space on the hard drive. The fact that lots of "good" people, like myself, seed as we should doesn't take away what I perceive to be a down-side to bittorrent. I don't dislike bittorrent - don't make this emotional, we are comparing and contrasting various methods for downloading media. Why not be honest?
Similarly for the donkey, don't be a zealot and not mention the God-forsaken SLOWness of the process! Again, ups and downs. And, hate to tell you, I do use it on occasion.
Finally, I also use gnutella quite often, and if someone is downloading from me, I tend to leave my client open a while when I'm done. I also have my upload folder pointing at lots of my stuff (legal, naturally).
Is your response negative because I pretty much described the various methods as they REALLY are? The newsgroups are the fastest way to get stuff these days - legal stuff, of course.
IRC is also slow and a pain in the ass - too interactive (they frown at automation), too many different ways of doing things and you have to deal with a bunch of pricks that want you to be grateful that you part of their little circle of piracy - too juvenile. Does anyone really still think, "OOH! look at me, I'm a PIRATE!"??
Gnutella is very nice for MP3s and small files - the biggest you want here is a music video perhaps at 50megs or so, there doesn't seem to be much large content like movies. With the swarming ability that the clients have these days, downloading can be AMAZINGLY fast - why does eDonkey get more attention than Gnutella? Everyone should put large content files on Gnutella - do it, now! ;) gtk-gnutella is a nice linux client. It's not as pretty as Limewire, but nicer on the ram, etc.
Bittorrent is the second fastest way that I've seen for downloading large content files, even DVD collections, say, of emulator games come rather quickly, usually approaching 60% of top download speed or more once it throttles up. The downside is the scrutiny at the moment, made worse by the fact that you must leave your download open - that is, you need to keep your client running even after you download the file to share with others - not doing so will get you "punished" in various ways by the sites offering this stuff, sometimes by not allowing you back. This also means that for a large DVD type download, you have 5 gigs of data on your drive much longer than you want - at least it's a problem for me. Further, unless you want to run the client forever, you need to set your upload rate pretty high. On my 1.2Ghz machine, bittorrent takes a toll in resources as well...
The fastest way to download something is via the newsgroups. Yup, the oldest way is still in some cases the best (it's not P2P, but it fits in my rant anyway). The downside here is for good news service, you have to pay, while the other methods are free.
Still, with a service like Easynews, you get 3 week retentions - meaning, a "post" stays alive for 3 weeks. Advances like par and nzb make this much easier and more reliable than it has been - it's almost too easy now. An nzb file points to specific articles in specific groups. For anyone familiar with this process, with nzb, you can avoid the old norms of subscribing to groups, downloading headers, searching for content, marking your choices, and telling it to download. Web pages such as binsearch.info allow you to use a web interface to select your content, and will then generate an nzb file for you.
With a broadband cable connection, you can download DVD sized content in about 2 and a half hours from the groups. Some ISPs still come with news feeds, but they usually aren't worth bothering with. My ISP has retentions lasting just a few hours, with a 1gig/month download limit.
So, IMHO, use gnutella for MP3s, short popular video clips/music videos and other smaller files (since there isn't much large content to be found). For anything larger, use the newsgroups if you have a good news feed. If not, try your luck with bittorrent.
Use the donkey only if you can't find it anywhere else and if speed isn't a problem. Oh, and avoid downloading from IRC...
Of course, I only download legal content :) Legal MP3 files, or copies of files I already own, or emulator ROMS of games I already own, or DVD collections of abandoned ROMs, Linux distributions, or tv shows that I already pay my Cable provider for, etc.
GNOME is primitive - sometimes, its Windows3.1 primitive. I can, for example, take a snapshot of the screen using ksnapshop and sometimes, I click on save again just to get a quick file list - from here, I can drag and drop the file, delete files, rename files, etc. In general, GNOME apps have a silly, simplistic and archaic file chooser that seems like taking 12 steps backwards to me...
Even if KDE did as many suggest and "hid" its infinite configuration abilities, it would still have thrice the features that GNOME has. Using GNOME is like working with your hands behind your back.
And, I'm not a GUI-needing n00b by any stretch - I always have a shell open.
Every tv documentary I've seen on robots in, I don't even know long, shows that silly thing and Kismet too - I still don't get the big deal?
I don't get it...must be a scifi reference that escapes me?
Give the Republicans more time - they will screw that aspect of Americana up too, and leave us really weak long term.
It shocked me at first - I haven't been using Debian all that long compared to my total Linux life - the reason I switched was the nightmares associated with installing packages such as transcode in Red Hat (before they switched to apt), or even in Mandrake using urpmi (trust me, urpmi is no apt!) So when these things complained about installing, I felt like I stepped back in time several years, ready to pull out a pad and pencil and hunt down all of the silly depedencies...
dahlek
dahlek
They make good product from a technical standpoint, but make really bad business choices. The 32X was great - it really turbo charged the GENESIS, I know, I was one of three people to buy it. At $150, it was a pricy upgrade - cheaper would have been better. Timing, again, sucked, again, an "in between" system. With promises that the Saturn would be able to play 32X titles, it might have seemed like less of an in-between system, and therefore less of a risk to the consumer, and more like what it actually was - the SEGA's answer to the SuperFX chips and the last generation of SNES games, which were technically fabulous.
The SegaCD was another example - good hardware, bad everything else. SegaCD added graphics abilities as well as a cd-rom drive - abilities that more than matched the special mode 9 scaling and rotating abilites that the SNES had - did anyone know this? Their marketing department should be shot. A Saturn _should_ have been an updated SegaCD/32X system. Why would SEGA become their own competition, by having two systems relatively close in all but hype?? If they wanted to go the upgrade route, good for them! How wonderful to gradually increase the power of their system. If they wanted to make an entirely new system, then they should have just left the GENESIS alone and concentrated on the Saturn fully. They could have resold "new" units being the equivilent of a fully upgraded GENESIS and called it Saturn or something...
And what about the Nomad? Why don't I have a Nomad, that's 1/5th the weight and 1/3 the price of the original? If Nintendo can keep their portable gaming stuff going, why no one else? Why does SEGA drop the ball?! They had an incredibly powerful portable system, with a HUGE library! SEGA, where is your damn brain!?! Most people have never even heard of a Nomad!
Oh well...
dahlek
Agree with the premise or not, geting the joke is part of this "community".
You forgot Alone in the Dark - what a fabulous flick that was...
Now, I'm all for Linux - I'm using it right now, I use it all the time, and I agree that games can get people to switch...I also agree that Frozen Bobble is a well-made game, but, uh, I had to laugh out loud - come on, you are seriously going to tell me that someone switched to Linux so they could play Frozen Bobble? LOL
Uhm, nope, nope and no!
Star Trek 1 was the best star trek movie, by far, and damn good scifi all around..
2 and 3 as a unit are the next best. The TNG movies are each glorified episodes, with the Borg flick being the best, but still, not great.
Star Trek6 had one too many idiotic bits, like constant references to the time that the movie was made, and ridiculous nonsense like looking up Klingon in a book along with making some type of seaking bomb just in the nick of time.
A bomb that can find another ship on it's own - imagine that! Why didn't Starfleet ever consider that?
When Uhura said, "well, it's gotta have a tail pipe" I went numb. How utterly utterly stupid.
Sorry - yeah, it irks me, but overall, I love OO. I almost never have issues opening files, but I do sometimes and that needs to be said. It's presentation app is just as nice as PowerPoint and quite compatible - the last presentation I did was done in both apps, switching back and forth depending on the PC I was at.
My setup was an IBM XT Clone, with 640k of ram, dual 5 1/4 inch 360k floppies, 2400bps modem, CGA (Crap Graphics Adapter), and about DOS3.1 to 3.3 in my heyday. I lived in a large city, and we had many local high-quality BBSes around, I was even a co-sysop for one of them. At the time, most BBSes could only handle one caller at a time, and they were often busy. A BBS session consisted of the terminal software going through the various BBS numbers and dialing them all over and over again until it got through.
Once you got on, you would check and respond to your messages, take your turn at any multiplayer games, and then download and upload files. Most had ratios - so you had to contribute as well - this was stricly enforced, so even before BBSes got sophisticated and called each other at night to sync up, files spread like wildfire.
I remember some kind of phone-scam system as well, where you could dial into a special BBS and it would allow you to dial long distance for free - it connected the call for you. I used it just a few times to check it out, using it to call BBSes in LA, I think...
Most BBSes had time limits as well, and some even had time banks - if you signed off early, you could deposit your time in a bank, where it would accumulate interest, allowing you to manage your time wisely and stay on longer.
I started off using Procom+, but switched to Telix. Telix was DesqView-aware, meaning it could actually multitask well. Most DOS console apps wrote directly to the "screen" for speed, but this would wreck the more primitive multitasking tools such as DoubleDos. Alternatively, some featured a "BIOS call" option, meaning they played nice with the screen at the expense of severe slowness. Telix was able to do both - being aware of the environment it was running in, it was able to write directly to the screen, while being aware of DesqView - hence, no botched up display and near full speed.
In those single-user days, if you were on a BBS or trying to get onto one, your PC was totally busy. DesqView changed all that for me.
I could actually download files with Telix while I played graphical games, though DesqView did suspend graphical apps when you switched out of them, at least the primitive ancient version I had...
Reading various man-pages and HOWTOs, you discover cute clues such as setting up software RAID1 on two similar drives each on it's own controller == _much_ better speed, at some risk (if either drive goes, data is lost).
I've also read that putting a swap on two drives will make parallelize the swap system and increase speed...
But I see no benchmarks or comparisons anywhere! From the way the RAID documentation makes it sound, I would think that people would be screaming to make a system with 4, 20 GIG drives RAID1-ed together just for the "extreme" speed boost. It seems perfect for a Myth type setup - maybe even allowing software capture on older hardware...
Where are the stats and benchmarks for this stuff??