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>> Skype is getting real-time captions and subtitles, and PowerPoint will have these features

Hilarity ensues. Can't wait for the first international conflict caused or massive business deal lost by a printed misinterpretation of garbled speech.

I'm pretty sure the software is better than it used to be, but this still kind of sums up my thoughts on the matter: http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

http://www.userfriendly.org/ca...

Yep. http://www.userfriendly.org/ca...

The EU does an enormous amount of harm, and the sooner it is dissolved - like the USSR - the better for everyone except the bloated bureaucrats feasting on its incredible gravy train.

As for the technical (in)capacity of the Eurocrats, these cartoons are very relevant:

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...
http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

The EU does an enormous amount of harm, and the sooner it is dissolved - like the USSR - the better for everyone except the bloated bureaucrats feasting on its incredible gravy train.

As for the technical (in)capacity of the Eurocrats, these cartoons are very relevant:

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...
http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

just like the "supposed" rm -rf / last year ...

Something similar happened at Columbia Internet a while ago...

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

xkcd is not an more obligatory than UserFriendly. We're all fucking sick of people posting it.

I'll raise you three Userfriendlies

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...
http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

I'll raise you three Userfriendlies

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...
http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

I'll raise you three Userfriendlies

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...
http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

User Friendly was my favorite back in the day, before it went into a permanent loop.

http://userfriendly.org/

Same here. I've never heard of Pokey the Penguin but I always enjoyed the User Friendly comic strip.

User Friendly was my favorite back in the day, before it went into a permanent loop.

http://userfriendly.org/

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

The pat-down that started the Makarena?

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

Some things age well, such as this: http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

Just like being force fed fewer bricks: http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

What I don't get is why having a different desktop environment requires a whole different distribution.

[sigh] It's Ewebuntu. Means "Debian is too hard" - for those that believe being "sysadmin" (of one box) means "I press Enter. A lot.". Baaa. Mint is better - mob of sheep break away. No! Unity is evil - another mob of sheep break away. Baaa. Cinnamon is better - another mob of sheep break away. Baaa. XFCE is better - another mob of sheep break away.

Non-sheep use Debian and build anything they want. Of course - Debian requires, um, reading skills, so until Youtube catches up to the needs of sheep Ewebuntu variants will keep attracting the sheeples with the attention span of speed crazed goldfish in a disco.

Ironically those mobs of sheep "choose" Ewebuntu/Mint/whatever because they want the freedom that MS/Apple denies them (apparently) - but to them freedom means a limited number of choices. As everyone's needs/wants are different no mob of sheep is ever happy with the limited choices the Debian derivatives give them. Most will remain on the derivative hopping bus switching their fan boi allegiances regularly in their annual insanity of "[insert derivative name here] is the bomb, last years derivative is shit (and I still won't think before I buy hardware). At some point it becomes undeniably obvious that all those 'buntu sheep don't actually use computers - they just play out sysadmin fantasies by constantly installing until it breaks, wailing, then jumping ship. Why? Because Linux is for clever people (according to sheeple) - and Debian derivatives with limited package choices allow them to follow the fantasy while pressing the Enter key (choice is not really what they want, and literacy and attention span is not what they have).

My advice, which will probably fall on deaf ears... pick a derivative that closest approximates your needs. Install it. Open a terminal and type dpkg --get-selections > selections.txt. Then grab the netiso for the Debian release you want (oldstable if you want rock solid, stable if you want solid, etc) and install just the base packages (no DE), then use selections.txt to add the packages you want. Now fix what doesn't work and you'll have the equivalent of the derivative, with more choices, and greater stability. If you find Debian doesn't allow you enough control, rinse and repeat the process with Slack/Gentoo/Arch.

for i in unstable testing stable oldstable;do ./package_count $i;done
Number of packages in unstable:
    main: 25222
    contrib: 160
    non-free: 297
Number of packages in testing:
    main: 23371
    contrib: 140
    non-free: 264
Number of packages in stable:
    main: 20626
    contrib: 134
    non-free: 280
Number of packages in oldstable:
    main: 17165
    contrib: 132
    non-free: 268

No, real men edit inodes, by hand, with a magnet.

(Obligatory Userfriendly.org reference) http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

Magnets, schmagnets. Butterflies... or emacs... :-)

And Yes... there was such a time as Before Google Maps, hard as it may seem to imagine.

Ah, someone else who remembers Mapquest. ;-P

I still wish they'd use 127.0.0.1...

It's fun to violate the D M C A.

I remember a friend showing me the Mac built-in speech command stuff back around 1997. It wasn't a great demo: it seemed to interpret everything that he said as 'shut down the computer'. A few years later, this userfriendly comic showed a good reason why voice command is a bad idea.

(+6, Hastur, Hastur, Has

Mushroom mushroom.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20011121

Obligatory Userfriendly

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

The white box is a, rather sarcastic, AI inside an SGI O2 computer box.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

Yeah, I think that was the joke.

Leave it to a Great Old One to figure out a way to completely befuddle the password policy enforcer.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

This is what you want. :P

I followed your link, and then clicked random comic, and got this... http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca... Also, appropriate

Coffee needs no flavoring. It has a flavor already. Its flavor is called COFFEE.

Is that you, Sid?

You could also set up some kind of DMZ where you use a router with firewalling capabilities between broadband and your home network. This gives you some security now while you are still experimenting. Also it is a good idea to not trust your router and set up your own firewall in addition to it. Beyond that you may also protect us from your experiments that way.

You can also try to scan/hack your internal firewall with tools like nmap to see how it is holding up. Here is a list of a few links:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc791...
http://www.netfilter.org/index...
http://nmap.org/
http://www.wireshark.org/

Also there is user friendly in case you have been missing it so far, http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

Compare that to User Friendly. Aside from its "moderately-promising 14-year-old still showing too much influence from the Teach-Yourself-Cartooning book" drawing style, User Friendly has always relied on its geek-friendly subject matter and viewpoints to flatter the audience and obscure the fact that it's neither creative nor funny.

Here's a good example:-
http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

There's nothing creative about this. The "news" was a real-life item reported in many tech outlets about a year back. The strip itself is just a lazy excuse to let the audience laugh again at that story- it adds nothing to it except an audience-pandering but uncreative aside.

xkcd has a long way to go before it gets *that* lazy.

(*) XKCD isn't exactly detailed in the artwork stakes either, but that comes across as an intentional style, whereas User Friendly just looks like a wannabe of better-looking cartoons.
(**) This is before it was (allegedly) cool to be a geek.

Don't wear out the IIS servers... http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

I offer you a candidate. Doesn't miss the spec by more than the normal distance.

Reminds me of that strip

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20031130

Oblig. User Friendly.

Of course the media companies are singing to different lyrics.

Now get off my lawn.

Ob. User Friendly

is that you? http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/sid/

This.
If you're here for help on this, you're doing it wrong. Get someone on board that can take you through these decisions (because there are going to be more involved than just this), someone who can do the groundwork analysis for you.

We sometimes have upwards of 1,000 people browsing the site at the same time, so my sense is that we shouldn't need massive amounts of power or bandwidth

That is vague at best, and certainly not enough basis to make an informed decision on, or recommendation. Do yourself a huge favor and just hire someone for it, the 90s were the time for nephew art, not so much nowadays.

Obligatory UF, somehow relevant again.

(Do user-choosable errors even count as problems?)

Of course they do. There's even a specific category for that.

You'll need to get this chair to make it work.

>Eat kitten

Yeah, baby!

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20111003

I've got an Epson LQ-2090 and bi-color paper, for when I just want to curl up with some good code to review.