A Keiretsu is a loose grouping of companies working in disparate fields but keeping the same name. An example would be Mitsubishi or, in the West, Virgin Group. What the article talks about is just a normal business partnership between different companies, not a Keiretsu.
while the Gamespot article is indeed misleading, I didn't see anything about movies.
Translation of the pertinent section:
Continuing, he outlined one future technology prediction: the moving image display frame rate. Regarding the 50-60 fields per second current televisions use and the 72-90 frames of PCs, with the PS3, in conjuction with future advancement of the display interface norm, he has decided he wants to be able to deliver 120 frames per second, etc., and higher frame rate imagery. What he brought out in relation to frame rates was a combination of image input and high speed frame rate. For example, the development possibility of a sort of new computer entertainment in which a high speed camera is connected, the meaning of its images quickly analyzed, and the result inputted into games, he expects, is large.
So, Kutaragi did speak of games, but only EyeToy-style ones, and didn't suggest such a high frame rate would be used for regular games, as the Gamespot article implies. The point Kutaragi makes is really just that the PS3 will be able to output at 120 Hz. No reference to movies being played at that frame rate was made, and movies are shot at 24 fps anyway, so you seem very much mistaken.
On the other hand, my Japanese abilities are basic, so if there are any mistakes in my translation, correct me.
New Zealand refused to have the wool pulled over their eyes by Microsoft's sheared source initiative. And it wasn't a matter of knit-picking: closed source is baadly restrictive and, between ewe and me, good for mutton in the quality department. Butt enough rambling.
It started with a casual enquiry from a colleague - "I wonder how many Firefox users visit the BBC homepage?" - and before I knew it I was involved in a lengthy statistical analysis of the browsers and operating systems that request the BBC homepage at http://www.bbc.co.uk/
Our old stats reporting tool at the BBC gives a breakdown of requests from different user agent strings, which is where the browsers and operating systems people use to navigate around the web leave their digital fingerprints. It is about to be phased out in favour of a new solution, but I'm not sure that the new system gives the same granularity of data, so once I'd started, I thought I'd look at the figures in some detail before the old system gives up the ghost.
Now if you've never looked at user agent strings, they are rather dull and geeky, and full of lots of technical gubbins like these examples:
* Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-GB; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050717 Firefox/1.0.6
* Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5
* Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; America Online Browser 1.1; Windows NT 5.1; SV1;.NET CLR 1.1.4322)
* Mozilla/4.0 NETIKUS.NET GetHttp v1.0
* Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Hotbar 4.5.1.0)
* Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE)
* Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7
* Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; T312461; BT [build 60A])
There are of course some caveats around the figures I'm about to talk about.
User agent strings aren't an exact science. Or rather, they ought to be, but in the real world the come out a right mess. I've done my best to untangle them, but I still ended up with a significant number of user agents that I could not identify properly. And that is before we get started on the corporate networks that use the UA string to broadcast their corporate branding to the world whilst masking their operating system. Or requests claiming to come from both Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 5.5. Or that claim to be from a particular Linux distribution and Windows 98 at the same time. Or the plain weird like the inadvisably named KummClient from Hungary that proudly proclaims 'Linux rulez' to anyone like me dull enough to be delving through their logfiles.
User agent statistics on something as big as the BBC homepage could almost be the very definition of the long tail. The most popular user agent string - IE6 on Windows XP - clocked up nearly 6 million requests. I only counted user agents that had made more than 50 requests, but between 6 million and 50 requests there were nearly 11,000 different user agents to look at. Examining that number of requests accounted for 95% of the reported traffic, but only around 1/3 of the stats report. I initially suspected that counting the whole of the tail was likely to increase the market share I derived for the quirkier set-ups, but a random sample showed that a large proportion of the tail consisted of the most popular browsers and operating systems, but with different installed toolbars or corporate network messages that distinguished them as a unique string.
And I must stress again, these figures don't represent the breakdown of visitors to the BBC site as a whole, they are based on requests to the homepage alone, over the course of one week in September. Nevertheless I think they provide an interesting snapshot of web activity.
In total I've examined around 32 million requests to the BBC servers - although some of these have been discounted as 'unknowns' and some originate from crawlers and spiders.
The complete dominance of Windows XP and Internet Explor
Machinima is a genre of cinema made with video games. In the case of productions like Red vs Blue, this involves taking video feeds from a game (like Halo in multiplayer) in which "actors" control characters as per a script and subsequently, on a computer, editing the footage and adding an audio layer for dialogue; in other instances, it can mean scripting a game engine (like Half-Life 2's Source). What it always means is, as I said, films from games.
We really should be worried. The real test will be next year: if there are an enormous number of hurricanes then as well, we probably have a pattern. That's when the political shit really hits the fan (and gets swept up and distributed across the Gulf).
The link itself leads to an innocent-looking city paper site, but the story on "Quakerism" from that site is goatse. "Definately" [sic] not worth a look, I assure you.
I'm using it right now, and apart from a new splash screen that resembles the forums theme and the replacement of the GNOME foot with the Ubuntu logo in the top left corner, the most immediately obvious changes to the end user are the features introduced by GNOME 2.12. Namely, the menu editor, disks manager, clipboard daemon, Evince document viewer, drag-and-drop preview, type-ahead-find for Epiphany and GNOME's help browser, and so on. That stupid gedit focus bug is fixed. The switch from OpenOffice 1.1.3 to OpenOffice.org 2.0 (Beta 2) is a substantial one as well; xine 1.1 and AbiWord 1.1, unfortunately, were released too late Breezy's dev cycle and aren't included. Similarly, 5.10 has shipped with GStreamer 0.8, which is still unusable for video, so you'll want to install totem-xine over totem-gstreamer as soon as possible. Under the hood, Ubuntu is now using the 2.6.12 kernel, modular X.org and GCC 4.0.1. Ubuntu has also updated their ATI fglrx drivers to 8.16.20, which gives a significant performance boost (from crap to less crap) for those cursed with ATI cards.
Overall, my end user impressions are that this is a worthy and welcome upgrade to my distribution of choice, but apparently I'm only really scratching the surface. According to the release notes, the major features of 5.10 are advanced thin client integration, an OEM installer, the Edubuntu project for deploying Ubuntu in schools, and Launchpad integration ("Launchpad.net is the new infrastructure that Ubuntu and its derivatives use for translation, bug tracking, sharing code patches, fixes and technical support."). So, in short, I like what I'm seeing, but what I haven't seen looks even better.
Actually, that was a parody -- and a very funny one too. You can download it here. In actual fact, as Wikipedia says, "Oops!... I Did It Again was written and produced by constant suppliers Max Martin and Rami."
Perhaps my counting skilz are not as honed as yours. Really, though, DistroWatch visitors are notoriously fickle, and the rankings for the distributions in #2-4 usually depend on how long ago their last release was. Expect to see Mandriva's numbers soar shortly, and Fedora's to decline further, at least until FC5.
Office: OpenOffice.org 1.0 (SXW, SXC, SXI, and more), OpenOffice.org 2.0 (ODT, ODP and more), Microsoft Office (DOC, XLS, PPT), AbiWord (ABW), Rich Text Format (RTF)
Standard: PDF, HTML, Plain text
Documentation: Texinfo, Man pages, Docbook, Monodoc, Windows help files (CHM), Application launchers
Network: Evolution mail, calendar, and addressbook, Gaim IM and IRC logs, Firefox/Epiphany web pages (as you view them, through browser extensions), Blam and Liferea RSS feeds, Tomboy notes
You know like Windows Whistler, or Longhorn? I mean, Longhorn could be the name of a porn movie. I certainly wouldn't want my child using it, especially if Bill were in it. But it doesn't matter, because the actual release is called Vista. Similarly, Ubuntu codename "Breezy Badger" is, officially, Ubuntu 5.10; "Hoary Hedgehog" was Ubuntu 5.04; "Warty Warthog" was Ubuntu 4.10. As you so astutely notice, naming as a matter of "marketing"; how much marketing do you want them to put into the names of unreleased software? When the final releases are professionally, numerically named, what, exactly, are you complaining about?
I thought this was great news for those in the market for a new PC relic, but after a little searching look what I found! A crappy, old fragment costs $380,000! That's just a motherboard, really, and they used to cost about $100. The NewEgg site (which hasn't yet been updated to consider PCs' relicdom) puts your CPU at a little over $350, which means that, proportionally, they're now more than one million, three hundred and thirty thousand dollars!!1 If you got your PC for less than six million, by God, you've been blessed.
the majority of the world will first experience the Internet through their mobile phones
Reading web pages on a tiny phone screen about as appropriate and satisfying as using gravel as lubricant. And let's not even get into all the other things a computer can be used for that a phone's small screen and lack of a keyboard preclude: word processing, spreadsheeting, desktop publishing, database management and graphics, sound and video editing, to name just a few.
Sorry, but just because Sun doesn't have a meaningful stake in PCs doesn't mean having that stake is worthless.
From the changelog, and for anyone else interested:
gnome/*: Removed from -current, and turned over to community support and
distribution. I'm not going to rehash all the reasons behind this, but it's
been under consideration for more than four years. There are already good
projects in place to provide Slackware GNOME for those who want it, and
these are more complete than what Slackware has shipped in the past. So, if
you're looking for GNOME for Slackware -current, I would recommend looking at
these two projects for well-built packages that follow a policy of minimal
interference with the base Slackware system:
There is also Dropline, of course, which is quite popular. However, due to
their policy of adding PAM and replacing large system packages (like the
entire X11 system) with their own versions, I can't give quite the same sort
of nod to Dropline. Nevertheless, it remains another choice, and it's _your_
system, so I will also mention their project:
Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME
itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond
the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent
desktop choice. So are a lot of others, but Slackware does not need to ship
every choice. GNOME is and always has been a moving target (even the
"stable" releases usually aren't quite ready yet) that really does demand a
team to keep up on all the changes (many of which are not always well
documented). I fully expect that this move will improve the quality of both
Slackware itself, and the quality (and quantity) of the GNOME options
available for it.
Folks, this is how open source is supposed to work. Enjoy.:-)
I'll look into the alternatives, though it's still sad I won't be able to depend on their stability as I would the base system.
Let's all pull so-subjective-as-to-be-meaningless statements out of our butts in order to promote a "my distro is cooler than yours" dick-waving contest!
I'm confused by your metaphors. Are you saying you pulled a dick out of your butt?
Pat's done an excellent job keeping Slackware fast and stable, but it's a shame he didn't put an equal premium on flexibility. As someone that just feels most comfortable in GNOME, the unfortunate fact is that Slackware can't even be a consideration for my primary desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
A Keiretsu is a loose grouping of companies working in disparate fields but keeping the same name. An example would be Mitsubishi or, in the West, Virgin Group. What the article talks about is just a normal business partnership between different companies, not a Keiretsu.
As someone with a Radeon 9600 XT who plays UT 2004 on Linux at 60% the speed he does on Windows, I think you are.
Australians have been redirected to Net Authority by the site itself. Sorry to disappoint, but this is not the work of some shadowy government agency.
http://web.archive.org/web/20040813144851/http://w ww.jengajam.com/r/fat-woman-in-couch
while the Gamespot article is indeed misleading, I didn't see anything about movies.
Translation of the pertinent section:
Continuing, he outlined one future technology prediction: the moving image display frame rate. Regarding the 50-60 fields per second current televisions use and the 72-90 frames of PCs, with the PS3, in conjuction with future advancement of the display interface norm, he has decided he wants to be able to deliver 120 frames per second, etc., and higher frame rate imagery. What he brought out in relation to frame rates was a combination of image input and high speed frame rate. For example, the development possibility of a sort of new computer entertainment in which a high speed camera is connected, the meaning of its images quickly analyzed, and the result inputted into games, he expects, is large.
So, Kutaragi did speak of games, but only EyeToy-style ones, and didn't suggest such a high frame rate would be used for regular games, as the Gamespot article implies. The point Kutaragi makes is really just that the PS3 will be able to output at 120 Hz. No reference to movies being played at that frame rate was made, and movies are shot at 24 fps anyway, so you seem very much mistaken.
On the other hand, my Japanese abilities are basic, so if there are any mistakes in my translation, correct me.
New Zealand refused to have the wool pulled over their eyes by Microsoft's sheared source initiative. And it wasn't a matter of knit-picking: closed source is baadly restrictive and, between ewe and me, good for mutton in the quality department. Butt enough rambling.
It started with a casual enquiry from a colleague - "I wonder how many Firefox users visit the BBC homepage?" - and before I knew it I was involved in a lengthy statistical analysis of the browsers and operating systems that request the BBC homepage at http://www.bbc.co.uk/
.NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Our old stats reporting tool at the BBC gives a breakdown of requests from different user agent strings, which is where the browsers and operating systems people use to navigate around the web leave their digital fingerprints. It is about to be phased out in favour of a new solution, but I'm not sure that the new system gives the same granularity of data, so once I'd started, I thought I'd look at the figures in some detail before the old system gives up the ghost.
Now if you've never looked at user agent strings, they are rather dull and geeky, and full of lots of technical gubbins like these examples:
* Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-GB; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050717 Firefox/1.0.6
* Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5
* Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; America Online Browser 1.1; Windows NT 5.1; SV1;
* Mozilla/4.0 NETIKUS.NET GetHttp v1.0
* Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Hotbar 4.5.1.0)
* Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE)
* Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7
* Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; T312461; BT [build 60A])
There are of course some caveats around the figures I'm about to talk about.
User agent strings aren't an exact science. Or rather, they ought to be, but in the real world the come out a right mess. I've done my best to untangle them, but I still ended up with a significant number of user agents that I could not identify properly. And that is before we get started on the corporate networks that use the UA string to broadcast their corporate branding to the world whilst masking their operating system. Or requests claiming to come from both Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 5.5. Or that claim to be from a particular Linux distribution and Windows 98 at the same time. Or the plain weird like the inadvisably named KummClient from Hungary that proudly proclaims 'Linux rulez' to anyone like me dull enough to be delving through their logfiles.
User agent statistics on something as big as the BBC homepage could almost be the very definition of the long tail. The most popular user agent string - IE6 on Windows XP - clocked up nearly 6 million requests. I only counted user agents that had made more than 50 requests, but between 6 million and 50 requests there were nearly 11,000 different user agents to look at. Examining that number of requests accounted for 95% of the reported traffic, but only around 1/3 of the stats report. I initially suspected that counting the whole of the tail was likely to increase the market share I derived for the quirkier set-ups, but a random sample showed that a large proportion of the tail consisted of the most popular browsers and operating systems, but with different installed toolbars or corporate network messages that distinguished them as a unique string.
And I must stress again, these figures don't represent the breakdown of visitors to the BBC site as a whole, they are based on requests to the homepage alone, over the course of one week in September. Nevertheless I think they provide an interesting snapshot of web activity.
In total I've examined around 32 million requests to the BBC servers - although some of these have been discounted as 'unknowns' and some originate from crawlers and spiders.
The complete dominance of Windows XP and Internet Explor
Machinima is a genre of cinema made with video games. In the case of productions like Red vs Blue, this involves taking video feeds from a game (like Halo in multiplayer) in which "actors" control characters as per a script and subsequently, on a computer, editing the footage and adding an audio layer for dialogue; in other instances, it can mean scripting a game engine (like Half-Life 2's Source). What it always means is, as I said, films from games.
Some history here.
We really should be worried. The real test will be next year: if there are an enormous number of hurricanes then as well, we probably have a pattern. That's when the political shit really hits the fan (and gets swept up and distributed across the Gulf).
How about Tropical Storm A? What, we got sick of our alphabet so quickly?
The link itself leads to an innocent-looking city paper site, but the story on "Quakerism" from that site is goatse. "Definately" [sic] not worth a look, I assure you.
Open /etc/apt/sources.list and replace the instances of "hoary" with "breezy". Then run sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. A big download later, and viola!
I'm using it right now, and apart from a new splash screen that resembles the forums theme and the replacement of the GNOME foot with the Ubuntu logo in the top left corner, the most immediately obvious changes to the end user are the features introduced by GNOME 2.12. Namely, the menu editor, disks manager, clipboard daemon, Evince document viewer, drag-and-drop preview, type-ahead-find for Epiphany and GNOME's help browser, and so on. That stupid gedit focus bug is fixed. The switch from OpenOffice 1.1.3 to OpenOffice.org 2.0 (Beta 2) is a substantial one as well; xine 1.1 and AbiWord 1.1, unfortunately, were released too late Breezy's dev cycle and aren't included. Similarly, 5.10 has shipped with GStreamer 0.8, which is still unusable for video, so you'll want to install totem-xine over totem-gstreamer as soon as possible. Under the hood, Ubuntu is now using the 2.6.12 kernel, modular X.org and GCC 4.0.1. Ubuntu has also updated their ATI fglrx drivers to 8.16.20, which gives a significant performance boost (from crap to less crap) for those cursed with ATI cards.
Overall, my end user impressions are that this is a worthy and welcome upgrade to my distribution of choice, but apparently I'm only really scratching the surface. According to the release notes, the major features of 5.10 are advanced thin client integration, an OEM installer, the Edubuntu project for deploying Ubuntu in schools, and Launchpad integration ("Launchpad.net is the new infrastructure that Ubuntu and its derivatives use for translation, bug tracking, sharing code patches, fixes and technical support."). So, in short, I like what I'm seeing, but what I haven't seen looks even better.
Actually, that was a parody -- and a very funny one too. You can download it here. In actual fact, as Wikipedia says, "Oops!... I Did It Again was written and produced by constant suppliers Max Martin and Rami."
Actually, according to DistroWatch, the top ten distributions are:
1 Ubuntu 2724
2 Mandriva 1739
3 SUSE 1415
4 Fedora 1268
5 MEPIS 1115
6 KNOPPIX 931
7 Debian 888
8 Damn Small 679
9 Gentoo 612
10 Slackware 597
Perhaps my counting skilz are not as honed as yours. Really, though, DistroWatch visitors are notoriously fickle, and the rankings for the distributions in #2-4 usually depend on how long ago their last release was. Expect to see Mandriva's numbers soar shortly, and Fedora's to decline further, at least until FC5.
Beagle:
Office: OpenOffice.org 1.0 (SXW, SXC, SXI, and more), OpenOffice.org 2.0 (ODT, ODP and more), Microsoft Office (DOC, XLS, PPT), AbiWord (ABW), Rich Text Format (RTF)
Standard: PDF, HTML, Plain text
Documentation: Texinfo, Man pages, Docbook, Monodoc, Windows help files (CHM), Application launchers
Multimedia: Images (JPEG, PNG, SVG), Audio (MP3, OGG, FLAC)
Network: Evolution mail, calendar, and addressbook, Gaim IM and IRC logs, Firefox/Epiphany web pages (as you view them, through browser extensions), Blam and Liferea RSS feeds, Tomboy notes
Kat:
Office: OpenOffice.org 1.0 (SXW, SXI, SXC, SXM), OpenOffice.org 2.0 (ODT, ODP, ODS, ODF, ODS, ODC), Microsoft Office (DOC, XLS, PPT), Rich Text Format (RTF), Gnumeric, KOffice (KWD, KPR, KSP, KFO), Lyx, Tex, Device Independent Document (DVI)
Standard: PDF, PostScript, HTML, Plain text
Documentation: Man pages, Debian Package (DEB)
Other: BibTex Bibliographic database (BBL, BIB), Molecular Database Limited Molecule (MDL), DocBook Document (DBK)
You know like Windows Whistler, or Longhorn? I mean, Longhorn could be the name of a porn movie. I certainly wouldn't want my child using it, especially if Bill were in it. But it doesn't matter, because the actual release is called Vista. Similarly, Ubuntu codename "Breezy Badger" is, officially, Ubuntu 5.10; "Hoary Hedgehog" was Ubuntu 5.04; "Warty Warthog" was Ubuntu 4.10. As you so astutely notice, naming as a matter of "marketing"; how much marketing do you want them to put into the names of unreleased software? When the final releases are professionally, numerically named, what, exactly, are you complaining about?
That's because they spend so much money on their military, which numbers more than a million active service troops. It wasn't clear.
I thought this was great news for those in the market for a new PC relic, but after a little searching look what I found! A crappy, old fragment costs $380,000! That's just a motherboard, really, and they used to cost about $100. The NewEgg site (which hasn't yet been updated to consider PCs' relicdom) puts your CPU at a little over $350, which means that, proportionally, they're now more than one million, three hundred and thirty thousand dollars!!1 If you got your PC for less than six million, by God, you've been blessed.
the majority of the world will first experience the Internet through their mobile phones
Reading web pages on a tiny phone screen about as appropriate and satisfying as using gravel as lubricant. And let's not even get into all the other things a computer can be used for that a phone's small screen and lack of a keyboard preclude: word processing, spreadsheeting, desktop publishing, database management and graphics, sound and video editing, to name just a few.
Sorry, but just because Sun doesn't have a meaningful stake in PCs doesn't mean having that stake is worthless.
Thanks. I assume you mean this?
:-)
From the changelog, and for anyone else interested:
gnome/*: Removed from -current, and turned over to community support and distribution. I'm not going to rehash all the reasons behind this, but it's been under consideration for more than four years. There are already good projects in place to provide Slackware GNOME for those who want it, and these are more complete than what Slackware has shipped in the past. So, if you're looking for GNOME for Slackware -current, I would recommend looking at these two projects for well-built packages that follow a policy of minimal interference with the base Slackware system:
http://gsb.sf.net/ http://gware.sf.net/
There is also Dropline, of course, which is quite popular. However, due to their policy of adding PAM and replacing large system packages (like the entire X11 system) with their own versions, I can't give quite the same sort of nod to Dropline. Nevertheless, it remains another choice, and it's _your_ system, so I will also mention their project:
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/
Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent desktop choice. So are a lot of others, but Slackware does not need to ship every choice. GNOME is and always has been a moving target (even the "stable" releases usually aren't quite ready yet) that really does demand a team to keep up on all the changes (many of which are not always well documented). I fully expect that this move will improve the quality of both Slackware itself, and the quality (and quantity) of the GNOME options available for it.
Folks, this is how open source is supposed to work. Enjoy.
I'll look into the alternatives, though it's still sad I won't be able to depend on their stability as I would the base system.
Let's all pull so-subjective-as-to-be-meaningless statements out of our butts in order to promote a "my distro is cooler than yours" dick-waving contest!
I'm confused by your metaphors. Are you saying you pulled a dick out of your butt?
Pat's done an excellent job keeping Slackware fast and stable, but it's a shame he didn't put an equal premium on flexibility. As someone that just feels most comfortable in GNOME, the unfortunate fact is that Slackware can't even be a consideration for my primary desktop.
Or bray like Tony Branza! Whatever it'll be doing, it'll be doing it cooperatively.
Why should he? Shut up yourself.