Agreed. The thing about this OS as BIOS (or is it the other way around?) sounds like a good idea until you start thinking about distro hopping and realize you've got a 50/50 chance of bricking your computer as soon as you decide you want to give OpenSUSE a go. Might not be vendor lock in, but it's too close for my comfort.
This is why I watch Hulu. Not because I want to watch ads, but because I want help send the message to the studios that an ad-supported distribution model that isn't broken (ie. an on-demand model where the ratio of ads:progamming isn't approaching 1) can be successful.
I'm no fan of big media, but if can help signal to them that TV is dead, and long live short (40 min?) serial film (ie. TV like Sarah Connor) on the internet by watching 4, 30 second ad spots, I'll do it.
I felt the same way--I went and saw the movie last night because I was a fan of the show.
There was a lot of potential there, I think, for some serious tie-ins, some good cross-marketing that could have saved the show and really pushed the movie beyond mediocre pre-summer blockbuster status.
Unfortunately, the only connection between the movie and the TV show was that catchy "duh-duh dun duh duh" thing, which they pushed over the top in the movie and only used the open and ending.
The movie was a fun, blow-em type thing, typical Terminator fare, but didn't realize half the potential it had.
Despite all the naysayers here, I find twitter fun and moderately useful. Like IM in the good 'ole days.
To put it in perspective, I hate facebook and myspace.
In any case, I've been trying to moving to Identi.ca for a while--it's free (as in speech), mostly w/r/t getting the content I've created back out when I wan
t to (try that w/ Twitter. Good luck). Of course, my problem is that all my friends (most of whom hate freedom in the funny sense of the phrase) are on Twitter.
If these rumors ARE true (and I doubt it), I'll be jumping ship pretty dang quick, friends or no.
If people want an OS that does this stuff well, they'll buy a Mac.
I'm not saying Macs are great--they drive me crazy. But I dont' think making web stuff/peripherals/etc dead simple is the right tact either b/c I seriously doubt we'll ever be able to beat the Apple/Jobs reality distortion field.
Imho, networking is Linux's strong suit. Sure, samba is just now getting really stable, but we were doing Cisco-style thin-client application stuff a long, long time ago. Instead of trying to beat Windows at the game Apple already kicked their cans at, I think we've got to focus elsewhere.
My old laptop is on its way out now, too (like the OP, I've got a bad screen). I was thinking about replacing my home server with it--at 1.8GHZ, it's twice the computer the server is (thank you old hardware rescued from the dumpster).
The biggest problem I see is this: one of the server's primary functions is to play DVDs on our (again, old, but decent sized) TV. I'm not going to buy another $20 DVD player when I've got DVD drives aplenty in working machines I own. But I don't know how to turn a laptop's VGA out into the composite or coax in that my VCR/TV wants.
Is there a cheap adapter or something out there for this?
I got a direct message on twitter from a flesh-and-blood friend of mine who's trying to build his own professional coaching business asking about my audience when I twitter.
I resisted the temptation to lambaste him for suggesting that I would consider my twitter friends an audience and rambled off something about 'friends and family, real and internet.'
He was disappointed to learn that none of my friends were interested in his spamesque, coaching, pointy-hairisms.
I didn't tell him it was b/c we tend to recognize spam when we see it.
I think they must have tweaked osmething else, too.
Fonts, even w/ anti-aliasing, have always looked slightly off in Ubuntu, particularly in FF. The Jaunty defaults, however, are the best I've ever seen: antialiased, but sharp, substantially better than the antialiasing I was getting in Intrepid. A little blurry, but only in a Mac sort of way.
that's my beef w/ OS X-style icons. They look gorgeous if they're big. but when they scale down, all the distinguishing details disappear.
Eg. file icons for audio files that are picture of an music note with a little 'paper' label with the file extension on it. These are nearly worthless at 16x16 (which is where I need to keep my icons to see more than 8 files in a directory at once on my small laptop screen). Strike that. Change from "nearly worthless" to "mostly counterproductive".
It'd be substantially easier to use the same image but simply make the note different colors for different file types. It wouldn't be immediately apparent that red stands for mp3 and green for ogg, but then again, at the sizes I use, I can't read the labels anyway.
Apple might be doing swell in the United States, but on a worldwide scale, Cupertino still falls a bit to the wayside.
That's worth thinking about (there's a link in the article to another article about this very thing. I haven't read it yet, but it's worth reading before we start swallowing the numbers Apple publishes to its stockholders whole hog.
Wierd. I never thought of killing somebody's economy in AoE being a war crime, nor did it ever both me (except the extremely pitiful animation of the trade carts dying where the guy pitches forward face-first out of the cart).
Jet Set Radio on the other hand, bothered me a bit more...illegal graphiti and all that.
Better than OS X, sure--I can get that affect while reading a book if I smear bacon grease all over my glasses. But for whatever reason, on both my laptops (cheap Acers), I can never get Ubuntu to give me font rendering that looks great. I can get decent, but nothing like XP w/ cleartext turned up all the way.
Honestly, this, and the fact that font rendering looks like crap in FF (and several other programs, even w/ antialiasing turned up all the way) on my cheap home laptop, is my greatest frustration w/ Linux. And I love Linux. I love free (as in freedom).
But FF's crappy performance/speed/response on Linux just really really sucks.
I keep looking for a new browser, but Konq + multimedia = crashtastic, midori & kahazekhaze are too overall unstable, and Epiphany is just under-featured. Opera isn't FOSS (which slays me--I love Opera like a little girl loves ponies, but I've got a pretty strong ethical committment to FOSS).
I think it was less a brag and more a 'if you could ever get BeOS to run on modern hardware, your retinas would be burned by the jaggie fonts--the Haiku devs are faithful to a lot of things, but retina burning jaggies aren't one of them.'
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. The thing about this OS as BIOS (or is it the other way around?) sounds like a good idea until you start thinking about distro hopping and realize you've got a 50/50 chance of bricking your computer as soon as you decide you want to give OpenSUSE a go. Might not be vendor lock in, but it's too close for my comfort.
The question for those of us unfamiliar w/ hacking in this story is what 'appreciable length' is. Thanks for giving some insight into it.
I'm no fan of big media, but if can help signal to them that TV is dead, and long live short (40 min?) serial film (ie. TV like Sarah Connor) on the internet by watching 4, 30 second ad spots, I'll do it.
There was a lot of potential there, I think, for some serious tie-ins, some good cross-marketing that could have saved the show and really pushed the movie beyond mediocre pre-summer blockbuster status.
Unfortunately, the only connection between the movie and the TV show was that catchy "duh-duh dun duh duh" thing, which they pushed over the top in the movie and only used the open and ending.
The movie was a fun, blow-em type thing, typical Terminator fare, but didn't realize half the potential it had.
Mod parent up, +1 insightful
It was close, but fell down when it came to mail merging (write) and pivot charts (calc). The advanced features were important.
this is why we have the 'as in beer/freedom' distinction.
To put it in perspective, I hate facebook and myspace.
In any case, I've been trying to moving to Identi.ca for a while--it's free (as in speech), mostly w/r/t getting the content I've created back out when I wan
t to (try that w/ Twitter. Good luck). Of course, my problem is that all my friends (most of whom hate freedom in the funny sense of the phrase) are on Twitter.
If these rumors ARE true (and I doubt it), I'll be jumping ship pretty dang quick, friends or no.
I'm not saying Macs are great--they drive me crazy. But I dont' think making web stuff/peripherals/etc dead simple is the right tact either b/c I seriously doubt we'll ever be able to beat the Apple/Jobs reality distortion field.
Imho, networking is Linux's strong suit. Sure, samba is just now getting really stable, but we were doing Cisco-style thin-client application stuff a long, long time ago. Instead of trying to beat Windows at the game Apple already kicked their cans at, I think we've got to focus elsewhere.
Please send me no money. Monthly. There's a fifth of fake whiskey I'd like to buy.
mod parent up +1 Hysterical
The biggest problem I see is this: one of the server's primary functions is to play DVDs on our (again, old, but decent sized) TV. I'm not going to buy another $20 DVD player when I've got DVD drives aplenty in working machines I own. But I don't know how to turn a laptop's VGA out into the composite or coax in that my VCR/TV wants.
Is there a cheap adapter or something out there for this?
free as in popcorn or free as in entertainment?
I resisted the temptation to lambaste him for suggesting that I would consider my twitter friends an audience and rambled off something about 'friends and family, real and internet.'
He was disappointed to learn that none of my friends were interested in his spamesque, coaching, pointy-hairisms.
I didn't tell him it was b/c we tend to recognize spam when we see it.
He is my friend in real life, after all.
Or a save-as dialog that's easily navigable by the keyboard only?
Drives. me. crazy.
Fonts, even w/ anti-aliasing, have always looked slightly off in Ubuntu, particularly in FF. The Jaunty defaults, however, are the best I've ever seen: antialiased, but sharp, substantially better than the antialiasing I was getting in Intrepid. A little blurry, but only in a Mac sort of way.
Eg. file icons for audio files that are picture of an music note with a little 'paper' label with the file extension on it. These are nearly worthless at 16x16 (which is where I need to keep my icons to see more than 8 files in a directory at once on my small laptop screen). Strike that. Change from "nearly worthless" to "mostly counterproductive".
It'd be substantially easier to use the same image but simply make the note different colors for different file types. It wouldn't be immediately apparent that red stands for mp3 and green for ogg, but then again, at the sizes I use, I can't read the labels anyway.
That'd be easily distinguished at least..
That's worth thinking about (there's a link in the article to another article about this very thing. I haven't read it yet, but it's worth reading before we start swallowing the numbers Apple publishes to its stockholders whole hog.
And it's WAY too noisy to hide in my boss' house.
But $50-100, might be worth getting rid of all that power inefficency and bulk. In my boss' house.
Jet Set Radio on the other hand, bothered me a bit more...illegal graphiti and all that.
Weird how different people are.
Better than OS X, sure--I can get that affect while reading a book if I smear bacon grease all over my glasses. But for whatever reason, on both my laptops (cheap Acers), I can never get Ubuntu to give me font rendering that looks great. I can get decent, but nothing like XP w/ cleartext turned up all the way.
I haven't. But I'll give it a go. Thanks for the heads up.
But FF's crappy performance/speed/response on Linux just really really sucks.
I keep looking for a new browser, but Konq + multimedia = crashtastic, midori & kahazekhaze are too overall unstable, and Epiphany is just under-featured. Opera isn't FOSS (which slays me--I love Opera like a little girl loves ponies, but I've got a pretty strong ethical committment to FOSS).
There's always elinks ;).
You must be using a different Firefox on Linux than I am. Mine is neither fast nor stable.
Then again, you might be right ;)