One, if you aren't tied to kindle books by DRM or can convert them to DRM free, check out moon+ reader on the tablet. It's a pretty decent app for reading, can be set up so a swipe on the left side of the screen will adjust brightness, and has a decen't library interface as well as being able to search through your SD card / internal memory by directory to find your books. It beats the pants off the nook app or kindle app.
Two, just root a LCD type reader into a full tablet. Nook color ( what I have ) runs Cyanogen mod 7 and works as good as a much more expensive tablet, even to running netflix. Total cost: $210USD, 200 for the device and 10 for the 16GB microSD card. I'm sure the kindle fire is probably hacked already too. The only real drawback is HW decoding h.264 video over 480P is crap, 720P xvid in software works out just fine though with only minimal size overhead for costs.
Every other day? I used the last batch up this morning before I went out for coffee with a friend. Came back to 5 more this after noon already... in the last 2-3 weeks or so I have gotten mod point almost as fast as i use them up.
Well, the main selling point for me personally ( used Debian since sarge went stable all those years ago ) is the 3 prong "pick your poison" software model they have. You can either have: stable - rock solid, very few bugs, what bugs there are are usually not anything major. Can now be kept a little bit more up to date with debian-backports. testing - except for the feature freeze just before a new stable is released it's basically a "rolling release" with at the very least minimal testing for bugs. Unstable has had no bug reports against packages that go into testing for 2+ weeks. Generally Testing is as stable as any other distributions stable branch while retaining relatively up to date software. Unstable / SID - bleading edge stuff, pretty much a true "rolling release", gets hardware support the quickest while still retaining full to near full system sanity. As the Debian devs say though, if sid breaks you get to keep the pieces. Breaks a lot of times are on big desktop updates like KDE 3.x > 4.x not having ALL depends uploaded yet , less likely for core components, so you have to watch what exactly is going on with your own system. Some people have had SID run for years with only minor problems.
That and APT, I have had much better luck with dependency tracking with APT than with yum / yast. The only thing that I have run with better depends tracking was portage... but that gets old real fast when you realize you forgot an important USE flag.
Funny to see the continued fantasy of the ipad/iphone haters. The ends you will go to convince yourself that the apple device's success is unwarranted resembles religious zealotry.
1. The ipad is cheap - Adjusted for inflation, 499 is a damn reasonable price. You would not blink at paying the 30-years-ago adjusted price for a set of encyclopedias, recreational sports equipment, tools, or on some form of non-trivial hobby.
2.It's a good, proven, value proposition. There is a rich app ecosystem and long term support. The hardware is solid and durable. (A cheap tablet has none of these)
Furthermore, fierce price competition is NOT a sign of your "informed capitalism" cheap, shoddy products that don't last are a bad long term value. Only uninformed consumers buy them.
Give up on the confused, embarrassing rants and consider that maybe, just maybe, Apple is on to something here.
1:Yeah, now if only I didn't already have 6 other encyclopedia sets, sport equips, and other hobby stuff. 2: CM7 has run on my NC for how long now? And since it is community driven it will l most likely outlast support for similarly aged devices that Apple deprecates support for. The apps are mostly free too, I'm not nickel-ed and dime-d for every little thing I want to install. The price point is WAY lower for the same or near the same functionality too $200 for the tablet, $10 for a microSD card and 10 minutes worth of my time gets me a BT / WIFI enabled tablet that can play XVID/DIVX up to 720P flawlessly, H.264 lowres ( and the H.264 decoder chip is still being worked on ), and even can run a FULL desktop OS ( Debian / Ubuntu in a chroot with VNC ). Or I can pay $700+ for a tablet that.... supposedly has a better screen? Wants you to pay for pretty much any app that may be useful? don't you still have to install iTunes to regester the POS?... no thanks just for that.
Uhhh, yeah, 3.11( for workgroups ) was 10x better than ME just for the simple fact that it wouldn't just randomly BSOD because it was "that_time_of_the_month/day/year/it_felt_like_it/you_turned_the_PC_on/you_where_halfway_done_watching_that_porno/bill_gates_farted/ballmer_threw_another_chair/you_looked_at_it_funny".
Don't get me wrong, 3.11 wasn't perfect but at least it didn't crash for no apparent reason, eat your data, spew shit all over your disk or any of the really fun crap winME did.
Have you looked at the fucking cover? The vining is an _EXACT_ copy, the titleing is close enough to be an _exact_ copy, the whole damn thing was cloned in 5 minutes in photoshop with clonestamp and the text tool.
And Apple was sooooo original with their designs right? Oh, wait the iPad looks quite a lot like my Wacom TABLET with a screen in place of the digitizer. And the form factor looks SO much different than my OG nook.... both of which came out long, long before the iPad did. Hmmmmm come to think of it it doesn't look so much different - other than not being pocket sized - than any of my iPaqs that I have owned ( and nice copy catting of the iPod / iPad name there boys ) that I owned since Y2K or so.
Ummm, yeah. ATI binary blob quite often kills suspend-to-RAM ( won't wake up properly - this HAS gotten better in the last years but isn't 100% yet), often ( in my experience ) hangs on logout - requiring you to set the option to kill and restart Xorg in the KDM / GDM config file, multi monitor ( plug and play ) on laptops is hit or miss... when it works it works, when it doesn't it is quite ugly. Not to mention ATI / AMD _could_ have just gone and used the VDPAU interface for shader decoding, but that is "EWWW NVidia supported" so lets go re-invent the wheel by adapting some obscure X extension ( making VA-API) instead of using the stable tested working API extensions that are already there...
The FOSS radeon driver is much improved I will admit. Not suitable for gaming quite yet, but it is generally stable and has enough oomph to run light to midweight 3D acceleration. I use it on my ATI carded laptops over the blob driver just because it has better sleep support.
So, you use old outdated drivers and complain when they don't work right? Makes sense.
They release newer drivers for a good reason, not only to add support for newer cards but also to fix issues that came up in real world situations. And in this case even if the drivers had been FOSS it wouldn't have made a difference.... the fix is in a newer driver version that you aren't running. You can't even argue that it would have been easier to upgrade the FOSS driver since there is no guarantee that your distro would have included the update.
Not saying Linus needs to make a stable video interface that doesn't change for the next 10 years, but at least make the interface stable for major revision numbers. E.G. Designing a driver for 3.1 shouldn't need anything changed from 3.1.0 all the way to 3.1.99999. If you do find you absolutely need to change the video interface on the kernel for some god awful (read: good reason, not just because you can) reason send out notices before your next release and move up the revision. There is no need to just randomly change the interface between 3.1.21 and 3.1.22 and let everybody scramble to get everything working again. This would even help the FOSS drivers since they could concentrate on adding new code instead of adapting the old code to the next random revision of the interface ( less kernel code to change, less bugs introduced)
Sent in a nice detailed bug report back when they had a "fix" for VDPAU tearing when compositing was enabled in Xorg that didn't work, and interacted directly with some of the driver devs with provided test drivers. The next release of the binary driver had the problems fixed.....
Yeah, because disarming everyone so some nutjobs could take over with fucking 1inch box cutters worked sooo well didn't it?
As to your second point > bullshit. Just England alone saw that ban guns = less gun violence but a directly proportional rise in stabbings / knife violence. Worked out really well there didn't it?
Who says any particular song I download I would have bought? Maybe I am just checking you out and decided you suck, good thing I didn't give you any money then because I wouldn't want to hear anything else you made. Not trying to be rude to anyone in particular, but that is just economic basics.
Who says I haven't already "bought" the song(s) and the shitty CDs/tapes stopped working? This has happened multiple times, with no scratches / spills anything physically wrong by any appearance on the CDs / DVDs. There is NO reason why I should pay multiple times for the same thing.
Who says your song is worth $1+ / $20 / CD? especially since almost all CD releases have one or 2 "good" songs and the rest is either mediocre or downright crap.
Who says I want DRM if I do decide to buy a song? I don't want to be tied to a specific device that may or may not stay working for the next day / month / year - see the paying multi time for the same thing. THIS is why it's easier to just go and download a ( generally shittier lower bitrate ) song. It's much easier to deal with lower quality than the hassle of DRM ridden crapware.
Fuck that. If I can't check forums / listen to Pandora / whatever else I feel like doing that isn't giving away company data in my free time / as I'm working, the company is a piece of shit and I would quit on the spot. That is no different than them trying to tell me what I can / can't eat on my lunch break ( or at home ), not gonna happen.
Even back in the Ye Olden Days when the plague was rampant there was strains / variations that where a lot more virulent. If you caught the strain that was the one that rapidly progressed to septicemic plague you where toast in hours to 1-2 days.
Since you said a Mic boom wasn't a deal breaker grab up a pair of the cheap Turtle Beach ones from wallmart. I think they cost about $40 or so.
They are a bit bassy but not horribly so and the noise isolation is pretty much on par with strong earplugs when you put them on. I had to bend the top arc out a bit on mine because they pinched a bit too hard ( I wear glasses ) but now I can wear them for hours without even noticing them.
Fucking better believe it! Then you don't have neighbors gossiping about how the police where there and blah blah blah, and rumors about WHY and who did WHAT ETC.
With video evidence proving that the suspicions had been unfounded, everyone would be like "hmm whatever, he didn't do anything wrong... nothing to add to the rumor mill today".
Fort the start menu: Right click on kicker and select " Switch to Classic menu style"
Konq: go to systemsettings > preffered applications and set konq for the file manager. You can change browser, terminal emulator and several other defaults too.
Dude can either stuff his dead cat in a box and throw dirt on it, then forget about it. OR
He can stuff the cat and make it into a crazy helicopter and have it look crazy flying around and doing weird goofy shit... and remeber all the weird goofy shit the cat did while still alive. Cats ALWAYS do weird goofy shit constantly.
Actually, with the wording as it is in the summary it COULD be better.
With the summary wording it means no prospective employer could do a background / credit / social network check because all of that information is on computers that the employee does NOT own.
And if anyone wants to look on my personal PC they are just going to see random crap, my landscape photos I take, and tons of encryption everywhere.... so good luck to them on finding anything other than my tinfoil hat.
1) Its got a control center. Find me an OS without one?
I haven't seen a single other Linux distro with a control center. At least not one of the scale and functionality of Mandriva's. My current distro (Arch) doesn't have one at all. Unless you count the KDE panel, which is pretty much useless by comparison. Can't set up printers (well, it claims you can, but it never works), you can't set up wifi, you can't set up system services, you can't even adjust the display to the same extent that you can in the Mandriva control center. Maybe they need to emphasize what it is a bit more -- because I've tried a dozen or so distros and never seen anything remotely close.
Never heard of YAST? SuSe had that for quite a long time already as well.
Well, you can boot a full Ubuntu ARM image alongside the Android kernel on a rooted (CM7) Nook Color ( 800Mhz base ARMv7, low 200MB or less RAM once Android is running ) and get acceptable ( barely... it is slow, think back to the P133 days or so... ) performance out of it. Some of the slowness is VNC overhead, but most of it is just plain lack of RAM and running 2 kernels.
TLDR: Linux on ARM can run fast enough for day to day crap, just don't expect it to be a speed demon unless it has specs like your average gaming rig.
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Couple things.
One, if you aren't tied to kindle books by DRM or can convert them to DRM free, check out moon+ reader on the tablet. It's a pretty decent app for reading, can be set up so a swipe on the left side of the screen will adjust brightness, and has a decen't library interface as well as being able to search through your SD card / internal memory by directory to find your books. It beats the pants off the nook app or kindle app.
Two, just root a LCD type reader into a full tablet. Nook color ( what I have ) runs Cyanogen mod 7 and works as good as a much more expensive tablet, even to running netflix. Total cost: $210USD, 200 for the device and 10 for the 16GB microSD card. I'm sure the kindle fire is probably hacked already too. The only real drawback is HW decoding h.264 video over 480P is crap, 720P xvid in software works out just fine though with only minimal size overhead for costs.
Every other day? I used the last batch up this morning before I went out for coffee with a friend. Came back to 5 more this after noon already... in the last 2-3 weeks or so I have gotten mod point almost as fast as i use them up.
Well, the main selling point for me personally ( used Debian since sarge went stable all those years ago ) is the 3 prong "pick your poison" software model they have. You can either have:
stable - rock solid, very few bugs, what bugs there are are usually not anything major. Can now be kept a little bit more up to date with debian-backports.
testing - except for the feature freeze just before a new stable is released it's basically a "rolling release" with at the very least minimal testing for bugs. Unstable has had no bug reports against packages that go into testing for 2+ weeks. Generally Testing is as stable as any other distributions stable branch while retaining relatively up to date software.
Unstable / SID - bleading edge stuff, pretty much a true "rolling release", gets hardware support the quickest while still retaining full to near full system sanity. As the Debian devs say though, if sid breaks you get to keep the pieces. Breaks a lot of times are on big desktop updates like KDE 3.x > 4.x not having ALL depends uploaded yet , less likely for core components, so you have to watch what exactly is going on with your own system. Some people have had SID run for years with only minor problems.
That and APT, I have had much better luck with dependency tracking with APT than with yum / yast. The only thing that I have run with better depends tracking was portage... but that gets old real fast when you realize you forgot an important USE flag.
Funny to see the continued fantasy of the ipad/iphone haters. The ends you will go to convince yourself that the apple device's success is unwarranted resembles religious zealotry.
1. The ipad is cheap - Adjusted for inflation, 499 is a damn reasonable price. You would not blink at paying the 30-years-ago adjusted price for a set of encyclopedias, recreational sports equipment, tools, or on some form of non-trivial hobby.
2.It's a good, proven, value proposition. There is a rich app ecosystem and long term support. The hardware is solid and durable. (A cheap tablet has none of these)
Furthermore, fierce price competition is NOT a sign of your "informed capitalism" cheap, shoddy products that don't last are a bad long term value. Only uninformed consumers buy them.
Give up on the confused, embarrassing rants and consider that maybe, just maybe, Apple is on to something here.
1:Yeah, now if only I didn't already have 6 other encyclopedia sets, sport equips, and other hobby stuff.
2: CM7 has run on my NC for how long now? And since it is community driven it will l most likely outlast support for similarly aged devices that Apple deprecates support for. The apps are mostly free too, I'm not nickel-ed and dime-d for every little thing I want to install. The price point is WAY lower for the same or near the same functionality too $200 for the tablet, $10 for a microSD card and 10 minutes worth of my time gets me a BT / WIFI enabled tablet that can play XVID/DIVX up to 720P flawlessly, H.264 lowres ( and the H.264 decoder chip is still being worked on ), and even can run a FULL desktop OS ( Debian / Ubuntu in a chroot with VNC ). Or I can pay $700+ for a tablet that.... supposedly has a better screen? Wants you to pay for pretty much any app that may be useful? don't you still have to install iTunes to regester the POS?... no thanks just for that.
Who the FUCK modded you Insightful?
Sonovabitch why to the retards ALWAYS come out the one day I don't have mod points?
Uhhh, yeah, 3.11( for workgroups ) was 10x better than ME just for the simple fact that it wouldn't just randomly BSOD because it was "that_time_of_the_month/day/year/it_felt_like_it/you_turned_the_PC_on/you_where_halfway_done_watching_that_porno/bill_gates_farted/ballmer_threw_another_chair/you_looked_at_it_funny".
Don't get me wrong, 3.11 wasn't perfect but at least it didn't crash for no apparent reason, eat your data, spew shit all over your disk or any of the really fun crap winME did.
Have you looked at the fucking cover? The vining is an _EXACT_ copy, the titleing is close enough to be an _exact_ copy, the whole damn thing was cloned in 5 minutes in photoshop with clonestamp and the text tool.
And Apple was sooooo original with their designs right? Oh, wait the iPad looks quite a lot like my Wacom TABLET with a screen in place of the digitizer. And the form factor looks SO much different than my OG nook.... both of which came out long, long before the iPad did.
Hmmmmm come to think of it it doesn't look so much different - other than not being pocket sized - than any of my iPaqs that I have owned ( and nice copy catting of the iPod / iPad name there boys ) that I owned since Y2K or so.
Ummm, yeah. ATI binary blob quite often kills suspend-to-RAM ( won't wake up properly - this HAS gotten better in the last years but isn't 100% yet), often ( in my experience ) hangs on logout - requiring you to set the option to kill and restart Xorg in the KDM / GDM config file, multi monitor ( plug and play ) on laptops is hit or miss... when it works it works, when it doesn't it is quite ugly. Not to mention ATI / AMD _could_ have just gone and used the VDPAU interface for shader decoding, but that is "EWWW NVidia supported" so lets go re-invent the wheel by adapting some obscure X extension ( making VA-API) instead of using the stable tested working API extensions that are already there...
The FOSS radeon driver is much improved I will admit. Not suitable for gaming quite yet, but it is generally stable and has enough oomph to run light to midweight 3D acceleration. I use it on my ATI carded laptops over the blob driver just because it has better sleep support.
So, you use old outdated drivers and complain when they don't work right? Makes sense.
They release newer drivers for a good reason, not only to add support for newer cards but also to fix issues that came up in real world situations. And in this case even if the drivers had been FOSS it wouldn't have made a difference.... the fix is in a newer driver version that you aren't running. You can't even argue that it would have been easier to upgrade the FOSS driver since there is no guarantee that your distro would have included the update.
This.
Not saying Linus needs to make a stable video interface that doesn't change for the next 10 years, but at least make the interface stable for major revision numbers. E.G. Designing a driver for 3.1 shouldn't need anything changed from 3.1.0 all the way to 3.1.99999. If you do find you absolutely need to change the video interface on the kernel for some god awful (read: good reason, not just because you can) reason send out notices before your next release and move up the revision. There is no need to just randomly change the interface between 3.1.21 and 3.1.22 and let everybody scramble to get everything working again. This would even help the FOSS drivers since they could concentrate on adding new code instead of adapting the old code to the next random revision of the interface ( less kernel code to change, less bugs introduced)
Funny, I had the opposite.
Sent in a nice detailed bug report back when they had a "fix" for VDPAU tearing when compositing was enabled in Xorg that didn't work, and interacted directly with some of the driver devs with provided test drivers. The next release of the binary driver had the problems fixed.....
1:Put module source in the DKMS tree
2: reboot into the new kernel so the module automatically gets rebuilt
3:????
4: profit
Is it really that hard nowadays?
Yeah, because disarming everyone so some nutjobs could take over with fucking 1inch box cutters worked sooo well didn't it?
As to your second point > bullshit. Just England alone saw that ban guns = less gun violence but a directly proportional rise in stabbings / knife violence. Worked out really well there didn't it?
Who says any particular song I download I would have bought? Maybe I am just checking you out and decided you suck, good thing I didn't give you any money then because I wouldn't want to hear anything else you made. Not trying to be rude to anyone in particular, but that is just economic basics.
Who says I haven't already "bought" the song(s) and the shitty CDs /tapes stopped working? This has happened multiple times, with no scratches / spills anything physically wrong by any appearance on the CDs / DVDs. There is NO reason why I should pay multiple times for the same thing.
Who says your song is worth $1+ / $20 / CD? especially since almost all CD releases have one or 2 "good" songs and the rest is either mediocre or downright crap.
Who says I want DRM if I do decide to buy a song? I don't want to be tied to a specific device that may or may not stay working for the next day / month / year - see the paying multi time for the same thing. THIS is why it's easier to just go and download a ( generally shittier lower bitrate ) song. It's much easier to deal with lower quality than the hassle of DRM ridden crapware.
Fuck that. If I can't check forums / listen to Pandora / whatever else I feel like doing that isn't giving away company data in my free time / as I'm working, the company is a piece of shit and I would quit on the spot. That is no different than them trying to tell me what I can / can't eat on my lunch break ( or at home ), not gonna happen.
Even back in the Ye Olden Days when the plague was rampant there was strains / variations that where a lot more virulent. If you caught the strain that was the one that rapidly progressed to septicemic plague you where toast in hours to 1-2 days.
Since you said a Mic boom wasn't a deal breaker grab up a pair of the cheap Turtle Beach ones from wallmart. I think they cost about $40 or so.
They are a bit bassy but not horribly so and the noise isolation is pretty much on par with strong earplugs when you put them on. I had to bend the top arc out a bit on mine because they pinched a bit too hard ( I wear glasses ) but now I can wear them for hours without even noticing them.
Fucking better believe it! Then you don't have neighbors gossiping about how the police where there and blah blah blah, and rumors about WHY and who did WHAT ETC.
With video evidence proving that the suspicions had been unfounded, everyone would be like "hmm whatever, he didn't do anything wrong... nothing to add to the rumor mill today".
Fort the start menu: Right click on kicker and select " Switch to Classic menu style"
Konq: go to systemsettings > preffered applications and set konq for the file manager. You can change browser, terminal emulator and several other defaults too.
Is it really that hard to right click on Kicker and select "Classic Style"?
Hows this any different?
Dude can either stuff his dead cat in a box and throw dirt on it, then forget about it. OR
He can stuff the cat and make it into a crazy helicopter and have it look crazy flying around and doing weird goofy shit... and remeber all the weird goofy shit the cat did while still alive. Cats ALWAYS do weird goofy shit constantly.
Actually, with the wording as it is in the summary it COULD be better.
With the summary wording it means no prospective employer could do a background / credit / social network check because all of that information is on computers that the employee does NOT own.
And if anyone wants to look on my personal PC they are just going to see random crap, my landscape photos I take, and tons of encryption everywhere.... so good luck to them on finding anything other than my tinfoil hat.
1) Its got a control center. Find me an OS without one?
I haven't seen a single other Linux distro with a control center. At least not one of the scale and functionality of Mandriva's. My current distro (Arch) doesn't have one at all. Unless you count the KDE panel, which is pretty much useless by comparison. Can't set up printers (well, it claims you can, but it never works), you can't set up wifi, you can't set up system services, you can't even adjust the display to the same extent that you can in the Mandriva control center. Maybe they need to emphasize what it is a bit more -- because I've tried a dozen or so distros and never seen anything remotely close.
Never heard of YAST? SuSe had that for quite a long time already as well.
Well, you can boot a full Ubuntu ARM image alongside the Android kernel on a rooted (CM7) Nook Color ( 800Mhz base ARMv7, low 200MB or less RAM once Android is running ) and get acceptable ( barely... it is slow, think back to the P133 days or so... ) performance out of it. Some of the slowness is VNC overhead, but most of it is just plain lack of RAM and running 2 kernels.
TLDR: Linux on ARM can run fast enough for day to day crap, just don't expect it to be a speed demon unless it has specs like your average gaming rig.