A newbie's observations

[John Myshrall]

Grant Cullen wrote:

> Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 03:24:58PM -0500, Patrick wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> My interest has been in using Linux rather than making it work. As a 
>>> 70-plus member of the great unwashed public, so to speak, my 
>>> comments might be of interest. I installed SuSe 9.2 about six months 
>>> ago. I would never have made it where I am now without the valiant 
>>> efforts of my middle son. From that point of view SuSe is not for 
>>> the faint of heart. Maybe Red Hat is easier.
>>> That said, my expectations have been fulfilled 100%. I have a stable 
>>> system that I can rely on. KDE, supplemented by a program called 
>>> Kall, enables me to E-mail directly from my "Kontact" list of 
>>> contacts and to have the computer dial their number when I want to 
>>> phone them. That's a big help as one gets older and begins the 
>>> embarrassing habit of getting digits in the wrong order.
>>> I have just connected my new digital camera to the system and can 
>>> use Gimp to manipulate the results. I enjoy Open Office programs and 
>>> find browsing and picking up my E-mails fast and safe.
>>> However, one or two concerns remain. Can anybody shed any light on 
>>> them?
>>> 1. I have yet to find a radio station that will play music over my 
>>> speakers other than WBJC in Baltimore. Are there such animals 
>>> around, or is every station a captive to you know who?
>>> 2. I like to listen to investment webcasts. But, once again, the 
>>> companies concerned seem happy to limit themselves to Windows Media 
>>> or the Windows version of Real Player. Even my broker, who has quite 
>>> a good web site, has taken to telling me I must download the Acrobat 
>>> Reader (Windows version is implied) to read my statements when I 
>>> have a perfectly good Linux Acrobat reader that opens PDF files on 
>>> other pages of the same broker's site for me daily.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> On my system (running Debian 3.1 with addons from the Marillat
>> multimedia package archive) I can listen to realaudio and mediaplayer
>> broadcasts, although I often have to view the source of the web page to
>> find what the broken javascript they used was supposed to launch, go
>> to the correct page, view the source of that page, find the link to a
>> .mss or .asp or .ram or whatever media player file format they used,
>> download that and then launch that file with mplayer at which point it
>> works great.  It is an awful lot of work to go through for something
>> that should have been very simple if the page didn't have IE only
>> javascript and the link to the stream embedded in a silly file format.
>>
>> I know some of it could be solved if the fiel associations for those
>> special files were added to make it launch mplayer on them
>> automatically, but hte broken javascript can only be fixed by either
>> adding more support for IE extensions to browsers on linux, or people
>> writing proper code on their webpages in the first place.
>>
>> So it is technically possible to listen to those streams on Linux, it
>> just tends to be a real pain to get at the stream from Linux.
>>
>>  
>>
>>> Is there any way of persuading the great world out there that there 
>>> are other computer users than Windows or Mac users, and that we have 
>>> a right to be served in our own language? This is a real stumbling 
>>> block we yet have to overcome.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> That part may be hard given many website maintainers have no idea what
>> they are doing and are just clicking buttons in MS FrontPage or
>> Dreamweaver.  So even if the page could easily be made to work for all
>> users, it is simpler (for them) to just make it work with IE or Windows
>> in general.
>>
>> Lennart Sorensen
>>  
>>
> Well said Lennart, the other part of the problem is that both 
> Microsoft and Apple have large advertising and promotion budgets that 
> most people only see the big players even though there are better 
> alternatives.
>
> Patrick as to radio stations without hassles.  I regularly listen to a 
> couple of old time radio broadcasts, both play nicely on real player 
> Linux.  http://www.yesterdayusa.com (7x24)  
> http://www.radiospirits.com  (a couple of programs a day)
>
> Grant Cullen

Check out  http://www.live365.com/index.live
You may find what you are looking for.

John






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