I hadn't heard about Eclipse enough at all. I mean, the last time someone told me about this, was... oh, yesterday. Right here on Slashdot. So like, uh, keep up the good work.
For those just joining the waking world, Eclipse is not referring to a chewing gum, a Japanese car, or a celestial event, but if you can remember at least twenty-four hours back, then you knew that.
you might want to consider that in corporate telecom we see virus laden machines all the time. We see five or six machines on a given account all getting the same one. And the number one effect of these viruses? Not wiping the boot sector. No, generating traffic. Sending spam to other people in the infected machines' address books, sending spam to Usenet, port scanning, acting as automated zombies, etc.
Consider how much less properly administered the average consumer broadband users' machines are. Cable networks are clogged with this sort of traffic constantly.
Then add in the large numbers of abusive file sharing people who despite being repeatedly made aware that they do not have unlimited usage at all hours will ignore it and not set any limits on their file share apps. Here's a clue: set your download cap on eMule to your maximum and the UPLOAD to no more than ONE THIRD of your upstream. Cap torrent, etc. Clogging the upstream on your node is as disrespectful to your fellow users as clogging a DSL backhaul.
Then add to this the clueless nature of most cable modem users. Despite there being several hundred thousand web pages world wide on the technology, despite cable techs doing their best to educate their customers, they still act like dimbulbs as soon as they got rocking on cable modem. I've seen people literally try splicing their cables with a knife and electrical tape to share service with a neighbor and then wonder why it doesn't work. Don't even get a former cable tech like me started on Rat Shack.
A little education and common sense goes a long long way. Nevertheless, I long ago lost count of the number of people who scream about rate capping for over utilization but on further inspection are found to have been transmitting both ways full speed 24/7 for months on end before the cable company finally couldn't turn a blind eye to it any longer.
For those who think getting DSL is superior, simply multiply three hundred users by a one half megabit per second and then imagine if they all behaved like they should have unlimited utilization when the backhaul is a single 44Mb DS3. ALL comminications systems are ultimately shared systems.
Like I said, a little education and common sense...
My sense of doom is tingling. What are the chances of this being taken to the logical idiot extreme and every site being given to fattening everything but doing the fattening on my side? Great, I save bandwidth in downloading, but I eat processor cycles translating and building on my side.
Just wondering what the future of Web Pages That Suck will be like in ten more years with all these "wonderful" systems and frameworks being promulgated all willy nilly without regard to the central focus being conveyance of information and not how to more efficiently clog one part of the system or another.
Modern nuclear weapons do it in vacuum tubes to generate neutrons during detonation to speed up fissile core decay and increase energy output, make it happen quicker and hotter. Of course, better not leave them where an audiophile can accidentally grab it...
but I'm too busy trying to stifle my laughter at the multi-layered irony of this legend taking, what, all of five minutes to break this. On top of it being for Windows. On top of it being based on VLC which is OSS. On top of that being yet again done by Google (why is the new demigod of the OSS world Google when Google is so relentlessly Windows-centric?). On top of what he did being trivial for most coders and more so for him. On top of the insane volume of squaking about it.
Want DRM? Write a closed souce undocumented codec from the ground up and closed source apps to play things recorded with it. Want to skate by on the cheap and use existing well known standards and even be so insane as to use OSS? Well...
No, it's definitely the way the UI is written. Badly written VB6 is faster than tightly coded Java on the same Windows box every time. C++ kicks Java's ass on Linux on the same box every time.
Write once, run anywhere is a nice idea and truly needed, but there's a long long way to go to get to it and the tradeoffs made in getting Java out the door from concept to (barely) useable pretty much rule the current incarnation out.
I'm going to see what I can do with the new beta of REALbasic 2005 on Linux and how well it ports then over to Windows.
Windows definitely has the head start with a huge number of speech synthesis and speech recognition apps availible, but no real "grabs my attention and makes me want to buy it" suite.
That being said, Linux might have the leg up when it comes to being open to wild experimentation.
One thing that has always annoyed me is that speaker independent recognition hasn't been married to the Internet age. If the well-trained recognition systems' data from thousands of different users was only shared over the net and a good synthesis constantly being refined using all that live data, we'd probably have it standard on every OS right now. "Mod that post down now!"
"Which post?"
One way to train a speech recognition system might be to create a better speech synthesis system and give it hours and hours of different scripts to speak, each one with a different voice, over and over. Instead of training it based on forty real people, feed it seven thousand virtual ones in one tenth of the time, electronically. If the tester designing the regression cases understands the speech to be conforming to the script, then tell the machine that this is what the script says and add that data to the database as permissible input and evolve the filters.
Instead, you open up Dragon or ViaVoice and have to read fairy tales and poetry to it until it understands that you said "hard drive" and not "hard on". I tried dictating a novel I was writing to both of these systems and after four hours of training both, I spent more time doing corrections than writing the book.
It's a breath freshening bubblegum, a natural celestial event causing awe and fear in primitive hominids of a backwater planet, and a brand of car from a small nation on the west side of a nice ocean on aforementioned backwater planet.
It's also some sort of Java IDE with better marketing description than stability according to what I keep reading.
Re:Is it just me, or couldn't posts about Dev thin
on
Eclipse 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Funny
From TFSite: Eclipse.org is the website of the Eclipse Foundation.
Eclipse is an open platform for tool integration built by an open community of tool providers. Operating under an open source paradigm, with a common public license that provides royalty free source code and world wide redistribution rights, the eclipse platform provides tool developers with ultimate flexibility and control over their software technology.
Eclipse has formed an independent open eco-system around royalty-free technology and a universal platform for tools integration. Eclipse based tools give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor environment. Eclipse provides a plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create, integrate and utilize software tools, saving time and money. By collaborating and exploiting core integration technology, tool producers can leverage platform reuse and concentrate on core competencies to create new development technology. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java language and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples. It has already been deployed on a range of development workstations including Linux, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, QNX, Mac OS X and Windows based systems. A full description of the Eclipse community and white papers documenting the design and use of the Eclipse Platform are available at http://www.eclipse.org./
The Eclipse Foundation is a non-profit corporation formed to advance the creation, evolution, promotion, and support of the Eclipse Platform and to cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products, capabilities, and services.
Seems simple enough to me. They're a non-profit market-speak-driven company that wants to be a cross-platform coding development environment company.
My money is on market-speak winning. I mean, anyone that can write "independent open eco-system around royalty-free technology and a universal platform for tools integration" is much better suited to that than Java. Maybe marketing Java...
Do it yourself, I'm guessing, eventually. But I really have no need or place to put a 341.1 system. Not unless someone invents wallpaper with transducers that are literally printed into it with circuit traces and so on. Monster Cable afficianados will predictably get quarter inch wires laid into theirs and sooner or later, a living room will look like a room in a Borg cube.
All so I can hear people whining on Survivor about how hard their challenge is as if I was right there with them.
...and ignoring that there may well be a big breach of contract here, ask yourself this, "would it be okay if a corporation used open source code in a product and released 75% of the source? Would that be enough?"
I think now you see that it is a matter of the contract, the fine print, etc., and not some inane knee-jerk response of "he got enough".
Check out the prices of the 800 series Opterons and you'll be praying for this to result in a price war. So for right now, a quad smp board is just a dream.
I want to see xcompmgr code stabilized first if they must do eye candy. It doesn't matter whether I use KDE or Gnome, transparency and shadows crash my managers and cause my system to go back to initial login and that's if I pare down the config file to minimal settings to get it working. Most of those commonly recommended to make it work cause the system to hang during startup of either KDE or Gnome.
Eye candy isn't as needed as solidifying the basics so that 3D graphics apps and games can be written which run stably and uniformly across distros. Then the eye candy can be gotten working. I know some people point at things like Object Desktop on Windows, but that is a third party, not Microsoft wasting time on eye candy. And it has been worked on for far longer than this stuff on Linux.
The Linux world needs to center on basics right now. A unified cross-Linux architecture for graphics would be nice.
I think you're ready for Debian linux. The current stable release spent 4 years getting ready to be released. Then they delayed the release by 6 months because 'it wasn't ready.'
That's nothing Microsoft is projecting the first stable release of Windows in 2018. Not to be outdone, 3D Realms said Duke Nukem Forever will be released sometime after that just to make sure that all the bugs are really gone.
However, they failed to clarify which software they were referring to.
Normal rack servers aren't really well designed for cooling no matter what they like to say, and are more like a self-heating pizza in a deliveryman's insulated carry case.
Telecom style systems where the boards are in vertical slots with fans above, below, or both run a lot cooler. Put an AC type of cooler in place of the fans and you're there.
However, you still need someplace to get rid of the heat. First from the equipment and second from the air conditioner. Best is to put the air conditioning outside with careful landscaping, maybe a manmade pond to throw a set of coils into, and pump cold compressed air into the building and straight to the equipment. Then its a matter of maintaining flow through.
"Keey your shorts on Michael, I'm recompiling the antidote analysis software as fast as I can!"
On second thought, no not really. More like...
"What the hell does it mean/dev/cdrom not mounted? I have to f*ck this thing? Why did you have to be such a geek and not buy Windows with Fortran pre-loaded from the science supply shop like your brother? Michael? Michael? Oh great, the one person who can walk me through this idiot box to design an antidote is out cold from toxic shock."
So between this and the Linspire does Windows games news, we're pretty much beating into the ground that Linux is being used to emulate Windows rather than innovate and be different and cool for its own reasons.
Wake me when they shave the kernel to something reasonable and do something truly awesome with it.
You can already save files in formats that *nix machines can read, from Excel, Word, etc. It is hardly Microsoft's fault that the USERS are too stupid to use formats that you want them to. I use DOC files because I have no need to send anything to the Linux side of my network as no one is doing anything over there in terms of office work. If someone was, I'd send it as pure ascii text and let them format it however they want.
Why? Because indie music frequently does suck. Some of you act like you're the only people with access to some special repository of knowledge and the common unwashed masses need to know about it. Well, much of the masses have experimented with non corporate music and they found it sucked. Legions of idiot teens have whined publicly about big music but in secret, knew every word to the pop tunes on the radio, because alt/emo/indy can suck.
Pure and simple if the Linux community is going to squak about Windows, bash Microsoft, and copy everything they do, then they might as well quit now. Innovation and providing the end users with what they want is where it is at. Microsoft does it, Linux doesn't. Simple.
TuxRacer proves that decent graphics and speed are possible natively on Linux. Linux based game design and publishing is needed, not using Windows games on Linux. As Linux is proven to be capable of running games of its own just fine, more publishers will port their games natively to Linux. Trying to co-opt Windows apps onto Linux is kludgy and ultimately screams "we're unoriginal me-too hacks". The Linux world needs to innovate, carve its own path, and create not copy. Until then, it isn't going to be getting where we want it to go, which is to be loved for being what it is and not used simply because we are angry with Microsoft.
With VLC's ability to play pretty much any codec under the sun
Not on Linux. It fails on MPEG-2 files encoded with odd settings on the original encoder, doesn't play RealMedia (as if I cared or anyone really used it that I cared about), sometimes handled Quicktime but more often than not doesn't. Unfortunately, no one has ported the partfile plugin to Linux to make partial files from aMule playable but it does a semi-decent job still.
On Windows, VLC does quite a good job. It's like WinAmp done the way it should have been. On Linux, it takes a back seat to Xine and a pack of codec.dlls.
Actually, you can't do that. The reason: Everyone who was rich enough would be tearing up the streets. That's why the cities give them (the cable companies) the monopolies: the streets are only torn up once (these days it's then they're laid down) and in return the cable companies gets to have a monopoly.
Patent nonsense. There are places in CT where as many as THREE cable systems are built on top of each other.
The SBC/SNET Americast system was overbuilt on top of the local cable systems and shortly thereafter shut down after SBC decided they were telecom primmadonnas and not "cable guys". Their infrastructure going to rot on the poles, competitors petitioned to open it to competition and the state regulators ruled against SBC, saying that the lines had to be either used or sold/leased to competitors. This is not incompatible with the SCOTUS ruling as they did not necessarily have to open up their system if they actually used it. They just weren't being allowed by regulators to squat on utility right of ways and let the system go to pot.
Another company overbuilt a good amount of West Hartford, CT and provides (provided?) high speed Internet access over that system.
The problem is that there is no money in overbuilding. Existing cable operators have made incremental ongoing investments in their systems for decades and putting in a brand new system from head end to local hubs to fiber and nodes to actives and passives, etc., can cost billions in just a few cities.
For those companies which have overbuilt like RCN and so forth, there's plenty of argument as to what their focus should be. For instance, so-called "deep fiber" is generally believed to be more of an endeavor for overbuilders than incumbents.
However, it is patently false to say there's a monopoly. You're definining it like people define Microsoft's. It isn't the cable company's fault that people look at the cost of doing in one shot what they've (the cable companies) taken decades to build up as being prohibitively expensive and decide not to do it. It's not Cox or Charter's fault that these ISPs haven't banded together to create their own corporation to overbuild and get into the game.
Also, the economics of cable service are brutal. The work force is large, the work is constant, the content providers are cutthroat and their stuff growing more expensive yearly, the profit margin thinner that people think, because they generally only see the cost of their bill and not what the cable company is paying to thousands of employees, material and equipment suppliers, local/state/federal taxes and fees, content provider fees, etc., ad nauseam.
In my book, these ISPs want all the bandwidth and none of the expense of keeping it up. If a cable company tallied up all the expenses that should be charged to an ISP using their lines, they'd find that they'd end up charging about the same as the cable company. And since my cable company has a better and bigger backhaul than any local ISP (OC-3s and OC-12s and more compared to at most a DS-3), never mind more resources for e-mail and so on, I have zero reason to want a competitor ISP on my cable company's lines.
It's a matter of economics and the people who want all that access over night don't have the money independently and won't make the effort collectively, to build a system that the cable company certainly didn't create overnight, nor do they show the money or inclination to be on the same level as the cable ISPs in terms of committing resources and effort and being in it for the long haul.
Slashdot Mirror
I hadn't heard about Eclipse enough at all. I mean, the last time someone told me about this, was... oh, yesterday. Right here on Slashdot. So like, uh, keep up the good work.
For those just joining the waking world, Eclipse is not referring to a chewing gum, a Japanese car, or a celestial event, but if you can remember at least twenty-four hours back, then you knew that.
you might want to consider that in corporate telecom we see virus laden machines all the time. We see five or six machines on a given account all getting the same one. And the number one effect of these viruses? Not wiping the boot sector. No, generating traffic. Sending spam to other people in the infected machines' address books, sending spam to Usenet, port scanning, acting as automated zombies, etc.
Consider how much less properly administered the average consumer broadband users' machines are. Cable networks are clogged with this sort of traffic constantly.
Then add in the large numbers of abusive file sharing people who despite being repeatedly made aware that they do not have unlimited usage at all hours will ignore it and not set any limits on their file share apps. Here's a clue: set your download cap on eMule to your maximum and the UPLOAD to no more than ONE THIRD of your upstream. Cap torrent, etc. Clogging the upstream on your node is as disrespectful to your fellow users as clogging a DSL backhaul.
Then add to this the clueless nature of most cable modem users. Despite there being several hundred thousand web pages world wide on the technology, despite cable techs doing their best to educate their customers, they still act like dimbulbs as soon as they got rocking on cable modem. I've seen people literally try splicing their cables with a knife and electrical tape to share service with a neighbor and then wonder why it doesn't work. Don't even get a former cable tech like me started on Rat Shack.
A little education and common sense goes a long long way. Nevertheless, I long ago lost count of the number of people who scream about rate capping for over utilization but on further inspection are found to have been transmitting both ways full speed 24/7 for months on end before the cable company finally couldn't turn a blind eye to it any longer.
For those who think getting DSL is superior, simply multiply three hundred users by a one half megabit per second and then imagine if they all behaved like they should have unlimited utilization when the backhaul is a single 44Mb DS3. ALL comminications systems are ultimately shared systems.
Like I said, a little education and common sense...
My sense of doom is tingling. What are the chances of this being taken to the logical idiot extreme and every site being given to fattening everything but doing the fattening on my side? Great, I save bandwidth in downloading, but I eat processor cycles translating and building on my side.
Just wondering what the future of Web Pages That Suck will be like in ten more years with all these "wonderful" systems and frameworks being promulgated all willy nilly without regard to the central focus being conveyance of information and not how to more efficiently clog one part of the system or another.
that this has the same name as Duckman's idiot son or merely foreshadowing?
Modern nuclear weapons do it in vacuum tubes to generate neutrons during detonation to speed up fissile core decay and increase energy output, make it happen quicker and hotter. Of course, better not leave them where an audiophile can accidentally grab it...
but I'm too busy trying to stifle my laughter at the multi-layered irony of this legend taking, what, all of five minutes to break this. On top of it being for Windows. On top of it being based on VLC which is OSS. On top of that being yet again done by Google (why is the new demigod of the OSS world Google when Google is so relentlessly Windows-centric?). On top of what he did being trivial for most coders and more so for him. On top of the insane volume of squaking about it.
Want DRM? Write a closed souce undocumented codec from the ground up and closed source apps to play things recorded with it. Want to skate by on the cheap and use existing well known standards and even be so insane as to use OSS? Well...
No, it's definitely the way the UI is written. Badly written VB6 is faster than tightly coded Java on the same Windows box every time. C++ kicks Java's ass on Linux on the same box every time.
Write once, run anywhere is a nice idea and truly needed, but there's a long long way to go to get to it and the tradeoffs made in getting Java out the door from concept to (barely) useable pretty much rule the current incarnation out.
I'm going to see what I can do with the new beta of REALbasic 2005 on Linux and how well it ports then over to Windows.
Windows definitely has the head start with a huge number of speech synthesis and speech recognition apps availible, but no real "grabs my attention and makes me want to buy it" suite.
That being said, Linux might have the leg up when it comes to being open to wild experimentation.
One thing that has always annoyed me is that speaker independent recognition hasn't been married to the Internet age. If the well-trained recognition systems' data from thousands of different users was only shared over the net and a good synthesis constantly being refined using all that live data, we'd probably have it standard on every OS right now. "Mod that post down now!"
"Which post?"
One way to train a speech recognition system might be to create a better speech synthesis system and give it hours and hours of different scripts to speak, each one with a different voice, over and over. Instead of training it based on forty real people, feed it seven thousand virtual ones in one tenth of the time, electronically. If the tester designing the regression cases understands the speech to be conforming to the script, then tell the machine that this is what the script says and add that data to the database as permissible input and evolve the filters.
Instead, you open up Dragon or ViaVoice and have to read fairy tales and poetry to it until it understands that you said "hard drive" and not "hard on". I tried dictating a novel I was writing to both of these systems and after four hours of training both, I spent more time doing corrections than writing the book.
It's a breath freshening bubblegum, a natural celestial event causing awe and fear in primitive hominids of a backwater planet, and a brand of car from a small nation on the west side of a nice ocean on aforementioned backwater planet.
It's also some sort of Java IDE with better marketing description than stability according to what I keep reading.
From TFSite:
Eclipse.org is the website of the Eclipse Foundation.
Eclipse is an open platform for tool integration built by an open community of tool providers. Operating under an open source paradigm, with a common public license that provides royalty free source code and world wide redistribution rights, the eclipse platform provides tool developers with ultimate flexibility and control over their software technology.
Eclipse has formed an independent open eco-system around royalty-free technology and a universal platform for tools integration. Eclipse based tools give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor environment. Eclipse provides a plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create, integrate and utilize software tools, saving time and money. By collaborating and exploiting core integration technology, tool producers can leverage platform reuse and concentrate on core competencies to create new development technology. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java language and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples. It has already been deployed on a range of development workstations including Linux, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, QNX, Mac OS X and Windows based systems. A full description of the Eclipse community and white papers documenting the design and use of the Eclipse Platform are available at http://www.eclipse.org./
The Eclipse Foundation is a non-profit corporation formed to advance the creation, evolution, promotion, and support of the Eclipse Platform and to cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products, capabilities, and services.
Seems simple enough to me. They're a non-profit market-speak-driven company that wants to be a cross-platform coding development environment company.
My money is on market-speak winning. I mean, anyone that can write "independent open eco-system around royalty-free technology and a universal platform for tools integration" is much better suited to that than Java. Maybe marketing Java...
Do it yourself, I'm guessing, eventually. But I really have no need or place to put a 341.1 system. Not unless someone invents wallpaper with transducers that are literally printed into it with circuit traces and so on. Monster Cable afficianados will predictably get quarter inch wires laid into theirs and sooner or later, a living room will look like a room in a Borg cube.
All so I can hear people whining on Survivor about how hard their challenge is as if I was right there with them.
...and ignoring that there may well be a big breach of contract here, ask yourself this, "would it be okay if a corporation used open source code in a product and released 75% of the source? Would that be enough?"
I think now you see that it is a matter of the contract, the fine print, etc., and not some inane knee-jerk response of "he got enough".
Check out the prices of the 800 series Opterons and you'll be praying for this to result in a price war. So for right now, a quad smp board is just a dream.
I want to see xcompmgr code stabilized first if they must do eye candy. It doesn't matter whether I use KDE or Gnome, transparency and shadows crash my managers and cause my system to go back to initial login and that's if I pare down the config file to minimal settings to get it working. Most of those commonly recommended to make it work cause the system to hang during startup of either KDE or Gnome.
Eye candy isn't as needed as solidifying the basics so that 3D graphics apps and games can be written which run stably and uniformly across distros. Then the eye candy can be gotten working. I know some people point at things like Object Desktop on Windows, but that is a third party, not Microsoft wasting time on eye candy. And it has been worked on for far longer than this stuff on Linux.
The Linux world needs to center on basics right now. A unified cross-Linux architecture for graphics would be nice.
Cool. That would make the old Star Wars into the Global Observation Navigation And Defense System.
I think you're ready for Debian linux. The current stable release spent 4 years getting ready to be released. Then they delayed the release by 6 months because 'it wasn't ready.'
That's nothing Microsoft is projecting the first stable release of Windows in 2018. Not to be outdone, 3D Realms said Duke Nukem Forever will be released sometime after that just to make sure that all the bugs are really gone.
However, they failed to clarify which software they were referring to.
Well, I'd say about three cords of dry lumber, two gallons of gasoline, one match. Works well, barbecued hackers can be served to stray animals.
Oh.
Not Linksys.
Normal rack servers aren't really well designed for cooling no matter what they like to say, and are more like a self-heating pizza in a deliveryman's insulated carry case.
Telecom style systems where the boards are in vertical slots with fans above, below, or both run a lot cooler. Put an AC type of cooler in place of the fans and you're there.
However, you still need someplace to get rid of the heat. First from the equipment and second from the air conditioner. Best is to put the air conditioning outside with careful landscaping, maybe a manmade pond to throw a set of coils into, and pump cold compressed air into the building and straight to the equipment. Then its a matter of maintaining flow through.
I can see this in America.
/dev/cdrom not mounted? I have to f*ck this thing? Why did you have to be such a geek and not buy Windows with Fortran pre-loaded from the science supply shop like your brother? Michael? Michael? Oh great, the one person who can walk me through this idiot box to design an antidote is out cold from toxic shock."
"Barbara, hurry up! I'm dying over here!"
"Keey your shorts on Michael, I'm recompiling the antidote analysis software as fast as I can!"
On second thought, no not really. More like...
"What the hell does it mean
Well, that's such a breakthrough.
So between this and the Linspire does Windows games news, we're pretty much beating into the ground that Linux is being used to emulate Windows rather than innovate and be different and cool for its own reasons.
Wake me when they shave the kernel to something reasonable and do something truly awesome with it.
You can already save files in formats that *nix machines can read, from Excel, Word, etc. It is hardly Microsoft's fault that the USERS are too stupid to use formats that you want them to. I use DOC files because I have no need to send anything to the Linux side of my network as no one is doing anything over there in terms of office work. If someone was, I'd send it as pure ascii text and let them format it however they want.
Why? Because indie music frequently does suck. Some of you act like you're the only people with access to some special repository of knowledge and the common unwashed masses need to know about it. Well, much of the masses have experimented with non corporate music and they found it sucked. Legions of idiot teens have whined publicly about big music but in secret, knew every word to the pop tunes on the radio, because alt/emo/indy can suck.
This is hardly corporate music's fault.
Pure and simple if the Linux community is going to squak about Windows, bash Microsoft, and copy everything they do, then they might as well quit now. Innovation and providing the end users with what they want is where it is at. Microsoft does it, Linux doesn't. Simple.
TuxRacer proves that decent graphics and speed are possible natively on Linux. Linux based game design and publishing is needed, not using Windows games on Linux. As Linux is proven to be capable of running games of its own just fine, more publishers will port their games natively to Linux. Trying to co-opt Windows apps onto Linux is kludgy and ultimately screams "we're unoriginal me-too hacks". The Linux world needs to innovate, carve its own path, and create not copy. Until then, it isn't going to be getting where we want it to go, which is to be loved for being what it is and not used simply because we are angry with Microsoft.
With VLC's ability to play pretty much any codec under the sun
.dlls.
Not on Linux. It fails on MPEG-2 files encoded with odd settings on the original encoder, doesn't play RealMedia (as if I cared or anyone really used it that I cared about), sometimes handled Quicktime but more often than not doesn't. Unfortunately, no one has ported the partfile plugin to Linux to make partial files from aMule playable but it does a semi-decent job still.
On Windows, VLC does quite a good job. It's like WinAmp done the way it should have been. On Linux, it takes a back seat to Xine and a pack of codec
Actually, you can't do that. The reason: Everyone who was rich enough would be tearing up the streets. That's why the cities give them (the cable companies) the monopolies: the streets are only torn up once (these days it's then they're laid down) and in return the cable companies gets to have a monopoly.
Patent nonsense. There are places in CT where as many as THREE cable systems are built on top of each other.
The SBC/SNET Americast system was overbuilt on top of the local cable systems and shortly thereafter shut down after SBC decided they were telecom primmadonnas and not "cable guys". Their infrastructure going to rot on the poles, competitors petitioned to open it to competition and the state regulators ruled against SBC, saying that the lines had to be either used or sold/leased to competitors. This is not incompatible with the SCOTUS ruling as they did not necessarily have to open up their system if they actually used it. They just weren't being allowed by regulators to squat on utility right of ways and let the system go to pot.
Another company overbuilt a good amount of West Hartford, CT and provides (provided?) high speed Internet access over that system.
The problem is that there is no money in overbuilding. Existing cable operators have made incremental ongoing investments in their systems for decades and putting in a brand new system from head end to local hubs to fiber and nodes to actives and passives, etc., can cost billions in just a few cities.
For those companies which have overbuilt like RCN and so forth, there's plenty of argument as to what their focus should be. For instance, so-called "deep fiber" is generally believed to be more of an endeavor for overbuilders than incumbents.
However, it is patently false to say there's a monopoly. You're definining it like people define Microsoft's. It isn't the cable company's fault that people look at the cost of doing in one shot what they've (the cable companies) taken decades to build up as being prohibitively expensive and decide not to do it. It's not Cox or Charter's fault that these ISPs haven't banded together to create their own corporation to overbuild and get into the game.
Also, the economics of cable service are brutal. The work force is large, the work is constant, the content providers are cutthroat and their stuff growing more expensive yearly, the profit margin thinner that people think, because they generally only see the cost of their bill and not what the cable company is paying to thousands of employees, material and equipment suppliers, local/state/federal taxes and fees, content provider fees, etc., ad nauseam.
In my book, these ISPs want all the bandwidth and none of the expense of keeping it up. If a cable company tallied up all the expenses that should be charged to an ISP using their lines, they'd find that they'd end up charging about the same as the cable company. And since my cable company has a better and bigger backhaul than any local ISP (OC-3s and OC-12s and more compared to at most a DS-3), never mind more resources for e-mail and so on, I have zero reason to want a competitor ISP on my cable company's lines.
It's a matter of economics and the people who want all that access over night don't have the money independently and won't make the effort collectively, to build a system that the cable company certainly didn't create overnight, nor do they show the money or inclination to be on the same level as the cable ISPs in terms of committing resources and effort and being in it for the long haul.