Slashdot Mirror

I would attribute any real decrease in piracy to the fact that many Free software projects "matured" very recently. I walked into a meeting for the NDP riding executive in my area and heard half the room raving about how amazing OpenOffice.org is, and these people are not geeks. The other day AbiWord was raved about in Toronto Computes, a paper that usually focuses on proprietary software (and gives only a nod to Apple).

Microsoft has just started letting people use Office at home if their employer owns a copy. Free software is ready for business, and MS knows it.

I ended up reviewing this book for The Computer Paper, and my editor summed it up with the title: "Unix book doesn't explain why Mac users should learn it".

Okay, I know it is aimed at the beginner, but aside from teaching the basics, none of it really goes into learning any of this would be useful to the reader. Why teach someone about using the lynx browser for example, and not show them how to use grep for finding files, or the basics of shell programming to automate common tasks.

Best book of its type that I've seen so far on this specific topic is Mac OS X Unleashed. For the beginner, I'd recommend Mac OS X: The Missing Manual which probably has about as much info on the Unix end of things while having plenty of good general useful info on OS X.

I ended up reviewing this book for The Computer Paper, and my editor summed it up with the title: "Unix book doesn't explain why Mac users should learn it".

Okay, I know it is aimed at the beginner, but aside from teaching the basics, none of it really goes into learning any of this would be useful to the reader. Why teach someone about using the lynx browser for example, and not show them how to use grep for finding files, or the basics of shell programming to automate common tasks.

Best book of its type that I've seen so far on this specific topic is Mac OS X Unleashed. For the beginner, I'd recommend Mac OS X: The Missing Manual which probably has about as much info on the Unix end of things while having plenty of good general useful info on OS X.

I ended up reviewing this book for The Computer Paper, and my editor summed it up with the title: "Unix book doesn't explain why Mac users should learn it".

Okay, I know it is aimed at the beginner, but aside from teaching the basics, none of it really goes into learning any of this would be useful to the reader. Why teach someone about using the lynx browser for example, and not show them how to use grep for finding files, or the basics of shell programming to automate common tasks.

Best book of its type that I've seen so far on this specific topic is Mac OS X Unleashed. For the beginner, I'd recommend Mac OS X: The Missing Manual which probably has about as much info on the Unix end of things while having plenty of good general useful info on OS X.

Whereas it is true that there is quite a bit of competition in the DSL market, the two biggest broadband providers by far are the Local Phone Company (supplying DSL) and the Local Cable Company. The vast majority of Canadians are completely unaware of the independent DSL providers because they hardly advertise. I have only seen one TV commercial for an independent DSL provider, and that provider was Primus. True, other smaller fish place ads in pulications like The Computer Paper, but those have a very low readership.

Furthermore, while high speed Internet is cheaper in Canada in terms of raw figures, you have to take into account Canadians' lower average income. Once that difference is factored in, I believe that broadband access in Canada works out to the same percentage of one's income as broadband access in the US.

All these facts make the fairly wide gap between the levels of broadband (and even Internet) adoption in Canada and the US even more confounding.

You are probably right about it being worse in bigger cities. Here is a link to a story about how easy it was for a reporter to gain access to wireless networks in Toronto.

Nope, it's supposed to work the other way. You sell something fairly crappy for unbelivably cheap, and then when people come to buy the crap, you talk them into buying something better that you can actually make a profit on. Promotions like this are called "loss leaders". It's how I got my first computer. And it really was crap.

Speaking of Freenet (a nice piece of software indeed!), does anyone remember what Cult of the Dead Cow said they were working on at last Defcon? A nice rundown is here [canadacomputes.com] and even better was discussion started right here [slashdot.org].

They called it Peekabooty and it technically does what this new software from IBM does.

Anyone know if it's still vapourware?

First there IS NO standard Window manager in linux.

Correct. However, KDE is the de-facto standard. Of the major distributors: Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera and (now) Turbolinux use KDE as the default. Only RedHat uses GNOME as default. Debian has no distinction between the two (at least in the forthcoming Woody release) - and previous releases have used WindowMaker as the default.

I dont know any distro which comes with just KDE.

Caldera? Big name in 'business' Linux desktops. All the major distros ship both KDE and GNOME apart from Caldera, which only ships KDE.

Konq will never be an IE because it will never be standard because there is no standard Linux Browser.

If you keep saying it it might not happen. But look at the evidence: All but one of the major Linux distros use KDE by default. Konqueror is the default browser for all those KDE desktops. Isn't that how IE got popular? It was just the first browser that new users came across. Unless a seismic shift occurs in the Linux desktop world, Konqueror is going to be the first browser that most new users discover. Sorry. Perhaps the mozilla team could push the distros a bit harder to get included as the default? (KDE doesn't have to use Konqueror as the browser...)

Konq is not the fastest at rendering, Opera and MOzilla absolutely destroy it in terms of rendering speed, I tested myself.

Are you sure? Subjectively, Konq seems the fastest browser I've used, but I think that is mostly due to its incremental rendering of tables and the visible relayouting it does. Some people hate that. I really like it. It's particularly useful if you read a lot of slashdot over a modem link - no waiting for the whole page to load before it's rendered. :)

Konq is not powerful enough, its years behind Mozilla, and its on the level of say Opera.

In what way?
KHTML renders the vast majority of sites at least as well as Gecko - in some cases better, especially on brain-dead sites that rely on IE quirks to look right. Where's Gecko's anti-aliased font support on X11? Where's the UI to change User Agent? Ok, Konqui doesn't have a password manager. That would be nice to have. Please, be more specific on what is missing from Konqueror.

Because jack of all trades = master of none, A browser should be the best BROWSER

Then tell that Netscape, who decided Mozilla should be an email client, news client, IRC client, instant messenger and HTML editor as WELL as a browser. If that's not being a jack of all trades, then I don't know what is. Using that as an argument for Mozilla over Konqueror is total hypocrisy.

You mean something like this?

Okay, so it's not "pocket sized" according to the article, but I'm sure there are lots of possibilities out there. The fact that this one is so well equipped in the I/O department just caught my eye.

Kuro5hin.org, another fine community site, has a completely different tone. Ditto for smokedot.org, metamuscle.org, and countless other sites based on the same model.

The fact that Plastic has survived out of the group of three reinforces the strength of the slash-like model.

With the price of publication at near zero dollars, is it any wonder why conventional sites aren't working? The dot-bomb era has reduced commercial interest in web sites that rely on intellectual property for revenue. The pendulum has swung the other way, back towards a volunteer-run website model. The truth of the matter is that intellectual property is essentially free to distribute, but very expensive to produce.

One problem remains: What are Plastic, Slashdot and others going to link to once quality content producers such as Feed, Suck, and Salon dry up and become scarce?

[additional shameless self-promotion follows in .sig]

This device will really appeal to the AOL crowd - nothing to think about except how to claim it on the expense report.

I myself would not use anything like this. I'm not thrilled about leaving pages I've visited lying around in the cache on some AT&T administered computers harddisk. In an airport no less - nice way for someone to read my e-mail if they can hack the thing. With this cool little gadget in my laptop and proper airport facilities, I can use my VPN connection to have secure access. This article explains even more of what I'd be willing to pay for - bandwidth, nothing more.

Enjoy

Linux Today has a link to a story on canadacomputers.com called Linux on an ancient laptop You might want to find a notebook that has at least 32Meg of RAM. His story reads like some of my horror stories installing Linux!