The problems you mentioned are fixable (and by that I mean working out of the box in some current Linux distributions, available now, and running on my machines).
Changing resolutions works with xrandr now.
As for XDM being brain-dead, I recently broke my XF86Config on a RedHat 8.0 system, and then had the brilliant idea to try and log out. Sure enough, XDM did its "X didn't start - must have been cosmic radiation. Let's try again!" thing, but after a couple of times of that, SOMETHING in the system decided to put a stop to this, dropped me to the command line with an error explaining what happened, and some helpful hints how to proceed.
I've read and hacked X server code. It's ugly, but it isn't the bloatfest people seem to think it is. Moving to glibc 2.3 did more for desktop responsiveness on my machine than any amount of twiddling with X could have done. It isn't X that's slowing things down.
It doesn't. Or hardly doesn't, at least. Ardour is a full featured professional recording application, designed to tackle any audio recording task you can throw at it. Have two studio quality sound cards, giving you a total of 20 cannels in/out, at 96Khz/24bit? Want to record a rock show, with live drums, backing vocals, and enough microphone cables to make AOL's server room look tidy? Ardour can handle it, and then some.
Want to take that 20 track show, and overdub the guitars in the studio, while the whole mess is mixed in real time? It can do that, too.
Ardour is the open source equivalent of Pro Tools (mentioned on slashodot a few days ago). Audacity isn't.
Now, if you're not interested in any of these things, Ardour is probably overkill for you.
And if anyone deserves the marketing here, it's Paul. Ardour is a massive piece of code, that took years of uncompensated full time work to get to its current state. It's well designed and well coded. No corners were cut in the making of this piece of software. Go get it, and pay for it.
I once saw somebody using Windows 95 accidentally move his C:\Windows directory into another top level directory in explorer. He panicked, and rebooted. Bye bye Windows. His hand just slipped - mice are funny like that, and the icons are small, especially on a hi-res display.
Restricting access to dangerous places to root, and granting access to dangerous operations to suid root wizards that are less likely to make stupid mistakes is the way to go, but it's easier to just make root the default account.
And just for kicks, the list of movies I will never see from Netflix: Solaris (Original 1970's version), Trees Lounge, Raging Bull, 24 Disc 1, Sopranos Disc 1. Has anyone gotten these?
I've been waiting for Solaris for a couple months now. I think they only have one copy, and this old lady in Maine put it in her toaster and is too embarrassed to admit it.
M-Audio (very nice quality/price ratio prosumer hardware) have excellent support on Linux already.
I would hardly call my M-Audio Delta 1010 a "prosumer" part. I don't think I'd call anything with a 19" rack mountable component a prosumer part...
Their sound quality is indeed very good for the price, and the ALSA support for it is excellent. The box even had a little penguin on it, next to the Windows logo.
Yes! The DVD's audio commentary is worth listening checking out. The movie also has one of the most touching romantic scenes I've ever seen. Great acting.
Now y'all must be wondering what I've been smoking...
I see a problem with the way the Americans expect the Iraqis to rush to surrender to the allied forces, and take the opportunity to overthrow Hussein while they're at it. They fail to take into consideration just how proud and boneheaded people can be when their patriotism is tickled by the prospects of war, let alone by an advancing invasion army.
The principle being neglected here is that a country's business is its own business. If the Iraqis are willing to put up with Saddam Hussein, that's really their problem. When Iraq attacks its neighbors, that's cause for war. But when it doesn't, and no connection can be shown between Saddam and Bin Laden (that would have been a cause for war), because none exists, there' s a problem.
The foreign policy behind this war is scary. It stipulates that the US has the right to prevent the proliferation of certain weapons, even if they're not being used, based on the US's best judgment about what's good for the world's safety. It assumes that if something is good for the US, it's good for the rest of the world. I happen to mostly agree with this last point, but I can understand why other countries might not like seeing the US take this position.
I would like to see evidence that Saddam Hussein is responsible for attacks on America. There's evidence that he supports Hammas and Islamic Jihad suicide bombers, but I haven't seen anything that ties him to attacks on American interests. I'd appreciate any pointers.
Can you imagine a world with a peaceful Middle East? Our President can.
So did the Israelis at some point. After the 6 day war, they thought that an "enlightened occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza would work. That just by making the Palestinans better off than under Jordanian or Egyptian rule would keep them happy and quiet. Despite better economic conditions in the occupied territories, compared with conditions in neighboring countries, the Palestinians weren't too thrilled about living under occupation. It's hard to predict how people will react to being freed at gunpoint. And yes, I know that the analogy here stinks, and that the Americans aren't going to "occupy" Iraq as such, but do the Iraqis know that?
I'm guessing it's supposed to be an RF Notch filter which will block the return channel. But think for a second. How can it selectively pass the request to actually order the PPV channel, while blocking billing from taking place.
It just blocks all the upstream communications. This works because PPV purchases are handled and authorized by the box, and then stored for later retrieval by the headend. What this thing does is block the retrieval process, not the purchase. You could try to periodically destroy the non volatile RAM content to delete your purchases, but that won't be easy to do without breaking other things, or running your own code on the box (damn hard to do, even for authorized firmware developers).
A proper digital cable hack would be a man in the middle attack - insert a fake headend between the box on the wall socket, and have it poll the box autonomously, causing it to delete the PPV purchases. Have it pass all other control messages from the real headend. This will be a big, expensive, and incriminating piece of hardware.
I disagree on a couple of points: All music, except purely vocal music, relies on fancy crap to sound good. For some reason I get really pissed off when people suggest that acoustic music, for example, is somehow a more "pure" form of expression than rock music (with electric guitars, electric bass guitars etc.)
The way I see technology and music, it took 10000 of technological innovation to get to the classical guitar, and then a mere 50 to go from there to a Fender Strat, another 30 or so to MIDI guitars, and 20 years later we have a digital system that can make musicians' lives easier in many ways, while making them sound better under the conditions that most working musicians have to deal with in order to get their music to audiences. The big leap, as I see it, was getting to the acoustic instrument. The guitar of 100 years ago was a technological marvel that required countless bits and pieces of machinary and knowledge to make, not to mention the social structures that would give people the time and the incentive to deal with making instruments and music in the first place.
A lot of real musicians understand their gear, and put it to good use. Don't knock the delicate interplay between the sound a musician produces and the inspiration she can get from it. Sure, Jimi Hendrix could play a beat up $5 accoustic guitar, but at least some of his uniqueness came from the exploitation of technology, and putting the "limitations" of that technology (feedback, clipping) at the service of his music.
The second point I disagree on is that music is getting worse. It isn't. Granted, commercial radio is at an all time low, but that's a process that's driven by the way the music business is structured, and it has nothing to do with the technology at the disposal of musicians today. If anything, today's cheap recording technology can make it possible for musicians on a budget to create a product that's on par or better than the big labels' multi million dollar productions. If anyone tells you otherwise, they're selling something. Probably studio time.
You obviously care about music. You wouldn't bitch about it otherwise. There's good music out there, but you have to do some digging. A lot of bands try to get the word out about their music by using the web. Look them up. There are so many of them out there, that I find it hard to believe that you won't be able to find at least a couple of artists that you'll like.
One last point: You suggest that people throw out their synthesizers, and get down to the "real deal". For some people, the real deal is simply out of reach, as in 50 piece orchestra out of reach. Synthesizers are just instruments, and damn fine instruments, at that. For some people, they're the only means of getting their art to be heard by people who can't read an orchestral score.
The guitarist was never able to pan strings arbitrarily and separately in the mix. If nothing else, this should make some pretty weird mixes possible. I think it was Adrian Legg [*] who said that mono is like a handshake, but stereo is like a hug.
Every time I read those stories, I have to wonder. Why didn't my high school have this sharp class division? The only reasons I can think of are:
1. We didn't have cheerleaders, because 2. We didn't have a football team, because 3. A school's task is not to foster a class of heroes-for-a-day, ruining their academic prospects in the process.
They admitted to it. Their hardware abstraction layer is derived from Linux's PCI code, and is linked against the OS. They're willing to give you the code to the HAL, but that wouldn't get them out of legal trouble - the OS itself can be argued to be a derived work of code released under the GPL, and therefore they must either stop distributing the OS with the GPL components, or release the whole thing under the GPL.
Since their product is distributed as a monolithic PROM image, it would appear that they're linking GPL code into proprietary code, creating a work that's clearly derived from GPL code. They can go to court to try to prove otherwise, but they probably can't afford to. They're hosed.
Slashdot Mirror
using their FSF clout to force Redhat to hemogenize the redhat/linux desktop;
Huh? When did the GNOME project did that?
The problems you mentioned are fixable (and by that I mean working out of the box in some current Linux distributions, available now, and running on my machines).
Changing resolutions works with xrandr now.
As for XDM being brain-dead, I recently broke my XF86Config on a RedHat 8.0 system, and then had the brilliant idea to try and log out. Sure enough, XDM did its "X didn't start - must have been cosmic radiation. Let's try again!" thing, but after a couple of times of that, SOMETHING in the system decided to put a stop to this, dropped me to the command line with an error explaining what happened, and some helpful hints how to proceed.
I've read and hacked X server code. It's ugly, but it isn't the bloatfest people seem to think it is. Moving to glibc 2.3 did more for desktop responsiveness on my machine than any amount of twiddling with X could have done. It isn't X that's slowing things down.
How does this software compare to Audacity?
It doesn't. Or hardly doesn't, at least. Ardour is a full featured professional recording application, designed to tackle any audio recording task you can throw at it. Have two studio quality sound cards, giving you a total of 20 cannels in/out, at 96Khz/24bit? Want to record a rock show, with live drums, backing vocals, and enough microphone cables to make AOL's server room look tidy? Ardour can handle it, and then some.
Want to take that 20 track show, and overdub the guitars in the studio, while the whole mess is mixed in real time? It can do that, too.
Ardour is the open source equivalent of Pro Tools (mentioned on slashodot a few days ago). Audacity isn't.
Now, if you're not interested in any of these things, Ardour is probably overkill for you.
And if anyone deserves the marketing here, it's Paul. Ardour is a massive piece of code, that took years of uncompensated full time work to get to its current state. It's well designed and well coded. No corners were cut in the making of this piece of software. Go get it, and pay for it.
I once saw somebody using Windows 95 accidentally move his C:\Windows directory into another top level directory in explorer. He panicked, and rebooted. Bye bye Windows. His hand just slipped - mice are funny like that, and the icons are small, especially on a hi-res display.
Restricting access to dangerous places to root, and granting access to dangerous operations to suid root wizards that are less likely to make stupid mistakes is the way to go, but it's easier to just make root the default account.
isn't it convenient that MS was the butt of this bounty and not the Playstation 2?
Or is it because of this?
Hey, I think you're on to something:
iTunes, Music For People Who Don't Like Music.
they are only profitable on accounts which rent 5 or less movies a month.
Free, Useless Advice alert!
Dear Netflix:
Put two DVDs in an envelope. That'll cut your shipping costs by half.
And just for kicks, the list of movies I will never see from Netflix: Solaris (Original 1970's version), Trees Lounge, Raging Bull, 24 Disc 1, Sopranos Disc 1. Has anyone gotten these?
I've been waiting for Solaris for a couple months now. I think they only have one copy, and this old lady in Maine put it in her toaster and is too embarrassed to admit it.
It should work with CrossOver Plugin. It's not horribly expansive, and CodeWeavers is a big supporter of the open source version of Wine.
He's moving.
M-Audio (very nice quality/price ratio prosumer hardware) have excellent support on Linux already.
I would hardly call my M-Audio Delta 1010 a "prosumer" part. I don't think I'd call anything with a 19" rack mountable component a prosumer part...
Their sound quality is indeed very good for the price, and the ALSA support for it is excellent. The box even had a little penguin on it, next to the Windows logo.
Moulin Rouge. But only if I can then change my mind and not watch it.
I'm pretty sure Mr. Picardo would love to forget it, too.
I loved Tim Curry in it, though.
Yes! The DVD's audio commentary is worth listening checking out. The movie also has one of the most touching romantic scenes I've ever seen. Great acting.
Now y'all must be wondering what I've been smoking...
I see a problem with the way the Americans expect the Iraqis to rush to surrender to the allied forces, and take the opportunity to overthrow Hussein while they're at it. They fail to take into consideration just how proud and boneheaded people can be when their patriotism is tickled by the prospects of war, let alone by an advancing invasion army.
The principle being neglected here is that a country's business is its own business. If the Iraqis are willing to put up with Saddam Hussein, that's really their problem. When Iraq attacks its neighbors, that's cause for war. But when it doesn't, and no connection can be shown between Saddam and Bin Laden (that would have been a cause for war), because none exists, there' s a problem.
The foreign policy behind this war is scary. It stipulates that the US has the right to prevent the proliferation of certain weapons, even if they're not being used, based on the US's best judgment about what's good for the world's safety. It assumes that if something is good for the US, it's good for the rest of the world. I happen to mostly agree with this last point, but I can understand why other countries might not like seeing the US take this position.
I would like to see evidence that Saddam Hussein is responsible for attacks on America. There's evidence that he supports Hammas and Islamic Jihad suicide bombers, but I haven't seen anything that ties him to attacks on American interests. I'd appreciate any pointers.
Can you imagine a world with a peaceful Middle East? Our President can.
So did the Israelis at some point. After the 6 day war, they thought that an "enlightened occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza would work. That just by making the Palestinans better off than under Jordanian or Egyptian rule would keep them happy and quiet. Despite better economic conditions in the occupied territories, compared with conditions in neighboring countries, the Palestinians weren't too thrilled about living under occupation. It's hard to predict how people will react to being freed at gunpoint. And yes, I know that the analogy here stinks, and that the Americans aren't going to "occupy" Iraq as such, but do the Iraqis know that?
I'm guessing it's supposed to be an RF Notch filter which will block the return channel. But think for a second. How can it selectively pass the request to actually order the PPV channel, while blocking billing from taking place.
It just blocks all the upstream communications. This works because PPV purchases are handled and authorized by the box, and then stored for later retrieval by the headend. What this thing does is block the retrieval process, not the purchase. You could try to periodically destroy the non volatile RAM content to delete your purchases, but that won't be easy to do without breaking other things, or running your own code on the box (damn hard to do, even for authorized firmware developers).
A proper digital cable hack would be a man in the middle attack - insert a fake headend between the box on the wall socket, and have it poll the box autonomously, causing it to delete the PPV purchases. Have it pass all other control messages from the real headend. This will be a big, expensive, and incriminating piece of hardware.
Unless they make you run X by entering:
# insmod X
I would say probably not.
I disagree on a couple of points: All music, except purely vocal music, relies on fancy crap to sound good. For some reason I get really pissed off when people suggest that acoustic music, for example, is somehow a more "pure" form of expression than rock music (with electric guitars, electric bass guitars etc.)
The way I see technology and music, it took 10000 of technological innovation to get to the classical guitar, and then a mere 50 to go from there to a Fender Strat, another 30 or so to MIDI guitars, and 20 years later we have a digital system that can make musicians' lives easier in many ways, while making them sound better under the conditions that most working musicians have to deal with in order to get their music to audiences. The big leap, as I see it, was getting to the acoustic instrument. The guitar of 100 years ago was a technological marvel that required countless bits and pieces of machinary and knowledge to make, not to mention the social structures that would give people the time and the incentive to deal with making instruments and music in the first place.
A lot of real musicians understand their gear, and put it to good use. Don't knock the delicate interplay between the sound a musician produces and the inspiration she can get from it. Sure, Jimi Hendrix could play a beat up $5 accoustic guitar, but at least some of his uniqueness came from the exploitation of technology, and putting the "limitations" of that technology (feedback, clipping) at the service of his music.
The second point I disagree on is that music is getting worse. It isn't. Granted, commercial radio is at an all time low, but that's a process that's driven by the way the music business is structured, and it has nothing to do with the technology at the disposal of musicians today. If anything, today's cheap recording technology can make it possible for musicians on a budget to create a product that's on par or better than the big labels' multi million dollar productions. If anyone tells you otherwise, they're selling something. Probably studio time.
You obviously care about music. You wouldn't bitch about it otherwise. There's good music out there, but you have to do some digging. A lot of bands try to get the word out about their music by using the web. Look them up. There are so many of them out there, that I find it hard to believe that you won't be able to find at least a couple of artists that you'll like.
One last point: You suggest that people throw out their synthesizers, and get down to the "real deal". For some people, the real deal is simply out of reach, as in 50 piece orchestra out of reach. Synthesizers are just instruments, and damn fine instruments, at that. For some people, they're the only means of getting their art to be heard by people who can't read an orchestral score.
The guitarist was never able to pan strings arbitrarily and separately in the mix. If nothing else, this should make some pretty weird mixes possible. I think it was Adrian Legg [*] who said that mono is like a handshake, but stereo is like a hug.
...who doesn't suck.
[*]
Your right of course. NOBODY in bands you hear today plays guitar like they really mean it.
http://keneally.com
Some MP3s from fan-recorded shows are here:
http://mktrading.org
Every time I read those stories, I have to wonder. Why didn't my high school have this sharp class division? The only reasons I can think of are:
1. We didn't have cheerleaders, because
2. We didn't have a football team, because
3. A school's task is not to foster a class of heroes-for-a-day, ruining their academic prospects in the process.
Like Bill Shatner's responses
Hey, get the name right - it's Billiam, not Bill.
I used to code to the PowerTV API
I'm sincerely sorry to hear that. If I ever see preprocessor macro based exception handling again, I'm going to strangle something. Probably a kitten.
They admitted to it. Their hardware abstraction layer is derived from Linux's PCI code, and is linked against the OS. They're willing to give you the code to the HAL, but that wouldn't get them out of legal trouble - the OS itself can be argued to be a derived work of code released under the GPL, and therefore they must either stop distributing the OS with the GPL components, or release the whole thing under the GPL.
Since their product is distributed as a monolithic PROM image, it would appear that they're linking GPL code into proprietary code, creating a work that's clearly derived from GPL code. They can go to court to try to prove otherwise, but they probably can't afford to. They're hosed.
Maybe they worry about damaging Mr. Dillon's reputation? I assume that he might still want to be able to find a job in the future.
And, no, I have no idea why his commit bit was taken.