Maybe the attitude has changed by now, but MPlayer still got a black eye because manually trying to install it an exercise in frustration.
I remember trying to build MPlayer (and it's deps) from source a few years ago, it certainly wasn't an easy experience. That being said, in recent years I've been building it on LFS/BLFS systems following their instructions and found it works perfectly. I've also used those instructions (with some modifications) to build it on distros where I wasn't happy with the packaged MPlayer.
I've got an unbalanced up/down as well with 1500/256. While it's not as fast as your link, I have no trouble maxxing out my connection without getting into the more esoteric options.
Transfer/Max connections per torrent: Apart from setting your ports up properly, setting up/down speed correctly and choosing a torrent with a good seeds/peers ratio this seems to be the most important thing. I set this to 200 as opposed to the default 70 or 80. While I haven't tested it, I'd imagine that higher connection numbers would increase resource drain on your system.
I've installed Azureus on LFS, Slackware, PCLinuxOS, Kubuntu, Windows XP and I've yet to encounter a problem. While it has it's fair share of complaints (mem+cpu mostly), it's a pretty polished OSS application. Unless you're talking about Macs (which I've never tried it on), I'd say it's quite possible that you're either trolling or creating the problem yourself.
I'm hoping you've at least checked the Wiki thoroughly.
I've never managed to find a MUD that had any other human players in them. I mean, I'm sure some humans are present in some of them, but divide that number by the number of rooms and it seems to explain why it's such a quiet experience.
mud.arctic.org port 2700
I'm pretty sure the mud I played on and off for the last 8 years had human players or at least some NPCs who were surprisingly fluent in Finnish and enjoyed running a 12 man group after you.
It's a dragonlance-based dikumud with a heavily-modified codebase (10 years worth) and an average of 60-80 people online, a few of whom may not kill you on sight.
There are still muds out there with 200+ people logged on regularly, though they tend to be roleplay-encouraged or enforced.
Also, all MUDS seem to require that you use telnet or some wretched dos box or whatever.
How is it justified to have any religious holidays be official national holidays when it means that most religions don't get an official national day like that?
Fight the battles you can win, Christmas is too deeply enmeshed in the cultural psyche of Western countries. That aside, while it may not be fair that other religions don't recieve similar public holidays for their religious observances, does anyone have a day off for Christmas in countries where Christians aren't the majority?
I'd also dispute the fact that modern Christmas is, in fact, a religious holiday. It seems to be more of a marketing exercise and chance for families to spend time together (in.au as most other places, this involves drinking heavily until harsh words are exchanged).
As another poster stated, I'm an atheist but I don't choose to take umbrage at other people's holidays. Frankly, anything that gets me a day off work is a good thing.
It's also good of Google to offer the simple ability to tell them not to be your nanny.
Compared to Googles' image search it's not quite as simple for the cookie-blockers amongst us. Instead of allowing a single cookie at a precise address 'images.google.com.au' (in my case), using Google Base without the filter requires you to allow 'google.com' and all the cookies that entails.
So what? What are the changes you keep going back to a book you already finished anyway? You should give away books after you finish them,.. somebody else might enjoy it.
I've always found my books have a much higher 'repeat' value than any DVD (which many people obssessively collect). While I cleanse the collection of the trash periodically there's no way I'd part with most of them.
I don't know if Firefox is really much more secure in terms of virus/spyware than Internet Explorer or not.
I think you'll find that IE's reliance on ActiveX plays a major part in the difference. Personally I'm running Firefox with the NoScript extension for that extra bit of protection (blocks javascript by default with easy right-click access granting for trusted sites). While I presume you can block JS in IE, I doubt the functionality exists to quickly enable it on a case by case basis.
Of course I'm not really especially concerned with virus/spyware infecting my OS but I won't rehash that tired old argument.
I commented on the article cause he says that RPM handles deps, but it doesn't; yum does. right?
Mandriva have got urpmi that handles rpm dependencies, there's also another few solutions floating around out there (of varying effectiveness... rpm dependency hell still exists). That being said, I've never tried porting urpmi to a another distribution so I'm not sure how much work is involved.
Personally I still like the old pkgtools system (there's a lot to be said for lack of complexity) although I use Paco for most of my stuff.
I'm sure there are plenty of other creative suggestions that could be posted at http://www.popejohn.org/
Personally I'd like to see them protect the students from the tasteless web design they've showcased with the large, flashing 'John Paul XXXXIIIIetc' banner on their homepage. Makes a mockery of their decision to outlaw Livejournal, the spiritual home of annoying flashing graphics.
Linux especially? You don't provide details on your distribution (load times vary widely between them) but on all the hardware I've got, both Slackware and my LFS-based systems are loaded in half the time of Windows.
Neither of these systems are especially minimalistic, both are loading MySQL, Apache, Samba and vsFTPD. Even typing my password into KDM's login, I'm into a responsive system long before Windows has recovered from loading (non-intensive) firewall and anti-virus software.
With Dr. Derek Smart illuminating the path for those lesser lights out there, how can there be any doubt?
I realise there may be a handful of malcontents and nay-sayers out there, who claim he's not an indie developer (or a developer for that matter) but with the upcoming 30th revision of BC3K/BCM (tentatively titled Battlestar DDR) scheduled for 2008, we can all rest easy.
Re:Let's face it: IE and Firefox are very similar
on
Firefox Momentum Slows
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree with certain of your points, there are obviously a lot of similarities between Firefox and IE. That comparison could be applied to virtually every browser out there, as few large differences exist between any of them. However I think you've missed the single point that differentiates the two browsers the most, extensibility.
For the geek, Mozilla offer documentation on how to develop your own Firefox extensions. The average user then has the option to pick and choose from the cream of other peoples work. UI enhancements, tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking and to a lesser extent, security improvements can, and have, been picked up by IE.
The fact remains that Microsoft have never demonstrated a culture that would be supportive of end-user 'hacks' to the browser, hence I think it would be a long, cold wait before we see true extensibility in IE.
Re:FYI: Different situation in Europe
on
Firefox Momentum Slows
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
To my mind the difference in adoption rates between Europe and the United States (which I'm presuming is the inferred basis of comparison) boils down to the respective mind-sets of their populations.
Many European countries have a reputation for fast adoption of new technologies in the last century. While America remains the most powerful consumer nation, I believe there's a profound difference in the way technology is used. Putting aside the geek community, many more of the Europeans I've dealt with seem to view internet usage as a social/recreational experience. Comparatively the non-technical Americans I've known, seem less inclined to 'play under the hood'.
Disclaimer: I'm Australian so if you think I've got a facile understanding of these cultures, feel free to call me on it.
While I'm a happy Firefox user, I tend to think it was a naive presumption that Firefox would ever directly battle IE for market-share dominance. People who thought it was a serious contender in this regard fail to understand the nature of the average internet user.
I believe firmly in the technical superiority of Firefox. The developers have shown they take security seriously and the open-source model is continually proving itself with this application, not to mention the lack of integration into the OS which solves a number of IE woes. The extensibility of Firefox is another strength, allowing an element of customization to the non-technical user.
Where I disagree with many, is claiming that Firefox will become dominant. Gone are the days when the internet was primarily composed of scientific/technical people. We're now a continually shrinking percentage of the population, which, as much as I decry certain aspects of the 'dumbing down', is as it should be. Mass adoption has brought down connection prices, broadened the services offered to us and released a flood of new information and technology.
Firefox will continue to go from strength to strength, however the majority of new users and non-technical existing users will follow the Microsoft bandwagon. While the choice of a competing and IMHO superior browser is important to many of us, to the vast majority it's completely irrelevant. They have web access implemented in their operating system hence they see no need to even research browser alternatives.
The real benefit of Firefox for the masses, is the adoption of it's strengths (tabbed browsing, etc.) into IE. For the rest of us, we can sit comfortably and support our own preferred browser.
I realise I'm displaying my ignorance here but it should hopefully prove a point. I've used OpenSSH for years and until now I had no idea they didn't develop the protocol or that a commercial variant existed.
Couple that with the sheer number of servers and distributions using OpenSSH and the statements by Byron Rashed seem to have the ring of sour grapes.
I'm aware of the difference, I was referring to some of the popular security solutions not claiming they were similar. At the moment I'm playing with RSBAC on a Hardened LFS build (glibc, haven't tried uclibc yet) and having fun trying to figure out the policies.
There are already a number of quality server distributions out there with security tools like SELinux, GRSecurity and PaX, but it will be interesting to see Redhat contribute to the mix. Personally, I use a number of modified Redhat patches while building HLFS-based systems.
While this is undoubtedly off-topic, what I really want to see (and continually try to create) is a desktop system with some of these advanced security concepts enabled. The problem seems to be finding the right balance between security and ease-of-use, it's a lot easier to create a server with non-standard access control than an xorg/KDE desktop.
Contributing to this problem (at least in my experience) are the documentation problems. These can occur in many opensource projects but seem to be magnified in security projects. Even with a fair working knowledge of relevant areas, incomplete and esoteric documentation provides a stumbling block for a lot of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the attitude has changed by now, but MPlayer still got a black eye because manually trying to install it an exercise in frustration.
I remember trying to build MPlayer (and it's deps) from source a few years ago, it certainly wasn't an easy experience. That being said, in recent years I've been building it on LFS/BLFS systems following their instructions and found it works perfectly. I've also used those instructions (with some modifications) to build it on distros where I wasn't happy with the packaged MPlayer.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/mulI've got an unbalanced up/down as well with 1500/256. While it's not as fast as your link, I have no trouble maxxing out my connection without getting into the more esoteric options.
Transfer/Max connections per torrent: Apart from setting your ports up properly, setting up/down speed correctly and choosing a torrent with a good seeds/peers ratio this seems to be the most important thing. I set this to 200 as opposed to the default 70 or 80. While I haven't tested it, I'd imagine that higher connection numbers would increase resource drain on your system.
I've installed Azureus on LFS, Slackware, PCLinuxOS, Kubuntu, Windows XP and I've yet to encounter a problem. While it has it's fair share of complaints (mem+cpu mostly), it's a pretty polished OSS application. Unless you're talking about Macs (which I've never tried it on), I'd say it's quite possible that you're either trolling or creating the problem yourself.
I'm hoping you've at least checked the Wiki thoroughly.
http://azureus.aelitis.com/wiki/index.php/Main_PaI've never managed to find a MUD that had any other human players in them. I mean, I'm sure some humans are present in some of them, but divide that number by the number of rooms and it seems to explain why it's such a quiet experience.
mud.arctic.org port 2700
I'm pretty sure the mud I played on and off for the last 8 years had human players or at least some NPCs who were surprisingly fluent in Finnish and enjoyed running a 12 man group after you.
It's a dragonlance-based dikumud with a heavily-modified codebase (10 years worth) and an average of 60-80 people online, a few of whom may not kill you on sight.
There are still muds out there with 200+ people logged on regularly, though they tend to be roleplay-encouraged or enforced.
Also, all MUDS seem to require that you use telnet or some wretched dos box or whatever.
http://tintin.sourceforge.net/
Modern variant of the old tintin codebase, runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
"Dauh, I thought I voted for the other guy when I clicked his picture in the e-mail reminding me to vote!"
Bush will do everything in his power to block Congress from passing that bill. You've just described the average Bush voter perfectly.
That's presuming of course, that they don't attempt to set the computers on fire for trying to steal their souls.
Yeah, but no, but yeah, but no... I'm so totally not obligurated to answer that question, like?
Considering his email address, there's something I'm more shocked by in that subject line.
How is it justified to have any religious holidays be official national holidays when it means that most religions don't get an official national day like that?
Fight the battles you can win, Christmas is too deeply enmeshed in the cultural psyche of Western countries. That aside, while it may not be fair that other religions don't recieve similar public holidays for their religious observances, does anyone have a day off for Christmas in countries where Christians aren't the majority?
I'd also dispute the fact that modern Christmas is, in fact, a religious holiday. It seems to be more of a marketing exercise and chance for families to spend time together (in .au as most other places, this involves drinking heavily until harsh words are exchanged).
As another poster stated, I'm an atheist but I don't choose to take umbrage at other people's holidays. Frankly, anything that gets me a day off work is a good thing.
Politician says something moronic about the internet... I'm shocked and horrified.
It's also good of Google to offer the simple ability to tell them not to be your nanny.
Compared to Googles' image search it's not quite as simple for the cookie-blockers amongst us. Instead of allowing a single cookie at a precise address 'images.google.com.au' (in my case), using Google Base without the filter requires you to allow 'google.com' and all the cookies that entails.
I am aware that I'm somewhat of a paranoid freak.
So what? What are the changes you keep going back to a book you already finished anyway? You should give away books after you finish them,.. somebody else might enjoy it.
I've always found my books have a much higher 'repeat' value than any DVD (which many people obssessively collect). While I cleanse the collection of the trash periodically there's no way I'd part with most of them.
I don't know if Firefox is really much more secure in terms of virus/spyware than Internet Explorer or not.
I think you'll find that IE's reliance on ActiveX plays a major part in the difference. Personally I'm running Firefox with the NoScript extension for that extra bit of protection (blocks javascript by default with easy right-click access granting for trusted sites). While I presume you can block JS in IE, I doubt the functionality exists to quickly enable it on a case by case basis.
Of course I'm not really especially concerned with virus/spyware infecting my OS but I won't rehash that tired old argument.
This is why I wear my WinZip shirt to the gym, and not for a night out on the town.
I'll shortly be releasing a Bzip2 t-shirt complete with slogan: 'even geeks beat me up'. Can I count on your pre-order?
I commented on the article cause he says that RPM handles deps, but it doesn't; yum does. right?
Mandriva have got urpmi that handles rpm dependencies, there's also another few solutions floating around out there (of varying effectiveness... rpm dependency hell still exists). That being said, I've never tried porting urpmi to a another distribution so I'm not sure how much work is involved.
Personally I still like the old pkgtools system (there's a lot to be said for lack of complexity) although I use Paco for most of my stuff.
I'm sure there are plenty of other creative suggestions that could be posted at http://www.popejohn.org/
Personally I'd like to see them protect the students from the tasteless web design they've showcased with the large, flashing 'John Paul XXXXIIIIetc' banner on their homepage. Makes a mockery of their decision to outlaw Livejournal, the spiritual home of annoying flashing graphics.
I can't wait until they come up with a test that can determine the severity of a man's impotency by merely testing a few flakes of penis skin.
An interesting idea although I worry for the test monkeys who'll be forced to watch the Bea Arthur sex tape (complete with Clockwork eye clamps).
I for one, welcome our bacterial overlords.
Ditto, hopefully they'll introduce some tired old catchphrases that I'm not familiar with yet.
Now all we need is intelligent machines, a war, and a Neo.
If you can't outwit Keanu Reeves, you don't qualify for the tag 'intelligent machine'.
Linux especially? You don't provide details on your distribution (load times vary widely between them) but on all the hardware I've got, both Slackware and my LFS-based systems are loaded in half the time of Windows.
Neither of these systems are especially minimalistic, both are loading MySQL, Apache, Samba and vsFTPD. Even typing my password into KDM's login, I'm into a responsive system long before Windows has recovered from loading (non-intensive) firewall and anti-virus software.
With Dr. Derek Smart illuminating the path for those lesser lights out there, how can there be any doubt?
I realise there may be a handful of malcontents and nay-sayers out there, who claim he's not an indie developer (or a developer for that matter) but with the upcoming 30th revision of BC3K/BCM (tentatively titled Battlestar DDR) scheduled for 2008, we can all rest easy.
I agree with certain of your points, there are obviously a lot of similarities between Firefox and IE. That comparison could be applied to virtually every browser out there, as few large differences exist between any of them. However I think you've missed the single point that differentiates the two browsers the most, extensibility.
For the geek, Mozilla offer documentation on how to develop your own Firefox extensions. The average user then has the option to pick and choose from the cream of other peoples work. UI enhancements, tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking and to a lesser extent, security improvements can, and have, been picked up by IE.
The fact remains that Microsoft have never demonstrated a culture that would be supportive of end-user 'hacks' to the browser, hence I think it would be a long, cold wait before we see true extensibility in IE.
To my mind the difference in adoption rates between Europe and the United States (which I'm presuming is the inferred basis of comparison) boils down to the respective mind-sets of their populations.
Many European countries have a reputation for fast adoption of new technologies in the last century. While America remains the most powerful consumer nation, I believe there's a profound difference in the way technology is used. Putting aside the geek community, many more of the Europeans I've dealt with seem to view internet usage as a social/recreational experience. Comparatively the non-technical Americans I've known, seem less inclined to 'play under the hood'.
Disclaimer: I'm Australian so if you think I've got a facile understanding of these cultures, feel free to call me on it.
While I'm a happy Firefox user, I tend to think it was a naive presumption that Firefox would ever directly battle IE for market-share dominance. People who thought it was a serious contender in this regard fail to understand the nature of the average internet user.
I believe firmly in the technical superiority of Firefox. The developers have shown they take security seriously and the open-source model is continually proving itself with this application, not to mention the lack of integration into the OS which solves a number of IE woes. The extensibility of Firefox is another strength, allowing an element of customization to the non-technical user.
Where I disagree with many, is claiming that Firefox will become dominant. Gone are the days when the internet was primarily composed of scientific/technical people. We're now a continually shrinking percentage of the population, which, as much as I decry certain aspects of the 'dumbing down', is as it should be. Mass adoption has brought down connection prices, broadened the services offered to us and released a flood of new information and technology.
Firefox will continue to go from strength to strength, however the majority of new users and non-technical existing users will follow the Microsoft bandwagon. While the choice of a competing and IMHO superior browser is important to many of us, to the vast majority it's completely irrelevant. They have web access implemented in their operating system hence they see no need to even research browser alternatives.
The real benefit of Firefox for the masses, is the adoption of it's strengths (tabbed browsing, etc.) into IE. For the rest of us, we can sit comfortably and support our own preferred browser.
I realise I'm displaying my ignorance here but it should hopefully prove a point. I've used OpenSSH for years and until now I had no idea they didn't develop the protocol or that a commercial variant existed.
Couple that with the sheer number of servers and distributions using OpenSSH and the statements by Byron Rashed seem to have the ring of sour grapes.
I'm aware of the difference, I was referring to some of the popular security solutions not claiming they were similar. At the moment I'm playing with RSBAC on a Hardened LFS build (glibc, haven't tried uclibc yet) and having fun trying to figure out the policies.
There are already a number of quality server distributions out there with security tools like SELinux, GRSecurity and PaX, but it will be interesting to see Redhat contribute to the mix. Personally, I use a number of modified Redhat patches while building HLFS-based systems.
While this is undoubtedly off-topic, what I really want to see (and continually try to create) is a desktop system with some of these advanced security concepts enabled. The problem seems to be finding the right balance between security and ease-of-use, it's a lot easier to create a server with non-standard access control than an xorg/KDE desktop.
Contributing to this problem (at least in my experience) are the documentation problems. These can occur in many opensource projects but seem to be magnified in security projects. Even with a fair working knowledge of relevant areas, incomplete and esoteric documentation provides a stumbling block for a lot of us.