I have been using Linux on the server for close to a decade now, but only recently did I switch to Linux exclusively on the desktop.
In October 2006, I bought a new laptop (Toshiba A100-TA6) , resized the partitions, installed Kubuntu Edgy (6.10) and never ever booted Windows XP on it. I had every device on it that I care about working with Linux (sound, mic, wireless, hibernate, ACPI,...etc.)
My old laptop (Dell Latitude CPxJ) was also installed with the same Kubuntu and passed on to my wife. It had a PCMCIA wireless LAN card in it based on Intersil, and it worked fine.
However, problems started when we upgraded to Kubuntu Feisty (7.04).
First, on the Toshiba, the analog modem (which I anticipated using when traveling abroad) stopped working.I only discovered that it is not working when I was out in a place that has only dialup for a few days. It turned out that ALSA broke the slmodem package for the Intel HDA chipset used on that card.
Second, on the Dell, the wireless card stopped working too (had to use an ethernet cable instead). Again, something that was working did break.
Now I bought another laptop to replace the old Dell (Toshiba A200-10V) and installed it with Gutsy (7.10). Everything seems to work except some quirks in the sound: the built-in mic does not work. Plugging in an external mic does work. The built in speakers work, but plugging in headphones does not work (sound comes up from the built in speakers regardless!) Also, hibernate/suspend causes sound to stop working after resume.
I am not sure where the exact problem lies: Is it kernel developers abandoning the x.y scheme (y=odd unstable, y=even stable) and deciding to continue developing on the 2.6? Or is it Canonical going after the latest and greatest packages (ALSA, drivers,...etc.) despite the risk of breakage?
I am tempted to try Debian for the desktop, but last I checked it, it was not as polished or as easy as Ubuntu.
I read this on the CBC earlier today. I had a neighbour from Cape Breton, Ken. One of the best I ever had. When I saw the headline on CBC, it said "Cape Breton", but the headline here on Slashdot says "Nova Scotia".
This reminded me when Ken always insisted that Cape Breton is not the same as Nova Scotia, despite being the same province. Maybe regional independence, or identity.
The 120 requests per second are not all PHP pages of course. They are at the Apache level, and include.js,.css, and graphics that form the page in aggregate.
Years ago, I tested static HTML vs. PHP by simply benchmarking a simple document (I used the GPL license). On the particular box, I was able to serve over 400 pages per second with static HTML but only about 12 pages per second with PHP. I was blown away. I went one step further and used PHP to fetch the data from Oracle (OCI8, IIRC) and that went down to 3 requests/sec. You can see that caching does help, but not a whole lot.
PHP by default can be slow, because it has to be parsed, tokenized and then executed. But with an op-code cache/accelerator it becomes really fast. eAccelerator, APC, and Xcache are free ones that you can use, provided you are on a dedicated host or VPS.
For the database parts, web applications can implement various caching mechanisms (e.g. caching to flat files, using memcached,..etc.) or use squid to cache pages transparently.
I know of sites that do 120 requests per second on peak times, running PHP with a MySQL backend (Drupal in fact).
AJAX, done properly, will solve the problem.
Bad policy: first you just excluded all the non-javascript browsers, and those who disable javascript. Second, the client side parsing can be intensive on the CPU of the machine, and hence the used can feel slowness. Third, you do not solve the database backend issue.
You may want to check AHAH, which is basically AJAX without the XML parsing part. Straight HTML to the browser.
Several years ago, I had a break in. The computer was stolen.
Luckily, I have been using a tape backup, and the robber did not take those. So, I was able to go back one month with everything intact.
In those days, everything I had fit in the 2.5GB tape. I then bought a 10GB tape, and it lasted for a few years. Backups were simply a cron job and an email to tell me that the backup is done and to change the tape. I kept one tape offsite as a precaution.
However, life changed. I got a digital camera and started taking a lot of pictures. Then I got another one with more megapixels and started taking more pictures which are larger in size. All of a sudden, tapes were not enough. The largest Travan tape is 20GB native capacity.
Getting tapes for a home setup is a real chore, specially with the rate the capacity of hard disks is growing. Tapes cannot keep up, specially at price points that home users can afford for both drives and media. Finding the media can be a challenge, let alone finding them at reasonable prices.
To this day, my page on Linux tape backup comes up first on Google, despite moving on from tapes.
Although drive enclosures can be theoretically kept offsite, they have to be unmounted, unplugged and are bulkier than tape. So it is inconvenient. Using 2.5" drives may make this more convenient, but their price vs. capacity still makes them more costly.
What are others using for a home setup for tape and offsite backup? DLT? DAT? What?
I think they may be preempting the net neutrality issue.
See, if the net does not become neutral (i.e. tiered access), they would be seriously affected and have to pay the ISPs so their sites are in the top tier (think servers where Adsense is served from).
If they now own the pipes, they can avoid this whole debate altogether.
Then again, the net neutrality issue is about the last mile (provider to end user), so that may not be it...
Well, I went to Walmart.com, and went to Music. It then had a link to "Music download". I clicked that using Firefox on Linux, and got this error:
We're sorry, your operating system is incompatible. To provide the best download experience, we can no longer support Windows 98, ME or NT. Please visit again after you upgrade to Windows 2000 or XP. Visit our Help section for complete system requirements information.
So, using Firefox agent switcher, I made it so I am MS IE on XP, but still got the same message.
Then, I fired qemu with a Windows 2000 instance and tried from a real MS IE browser, but then was greeted with a message saying that I need to upgrade Media Player.
This was still true for GMC cars from the 80s and early 90s as well.
I think the Pontiac Bonneville and Chevy Caprice had the same parts, such as waterpump, fuel pump,...etc, Oldsmobile 98 and Cadillac Deville/Brougham were the same,...etc. Even the exterior parts (headlights,...) were the same.
This caused the price of parts to be low and hence made them desirable for a large segment of users.
Once they switched to front wheel drive cars, things started to change.
The presently on the road Chevy Venture, Pontiac Montana and Oldsmobile whatever-her-name have interchangeable parts.
The Japanese were notorious for changing the design from year to year, yet they succeeded in the end...
I have two children in high school, although not in the USA (Ontario, Canada).
A couple of years ago, I had a long talk with the teacher because they are teaching an obscure language that has to be licensed (for a fee). If you care to know, it is called the Turing Language.
My view was : why not use one of the cross platform free languages, e.g. Python or even Java? So we don't have to use it on Windows. Arguing with the teacher was futile. He agreed with me, but said the decision is from the school board. I left messages to someone at the school board, then got a call a week later, and explained the situation, but nothing came out of it.
Then, a few months ago, the other kid was asked to do something in MS Power Point as part of learning that software. I called the teacher and explained that we don't run Windows, but rather Linux and that there are free alternatives, such as Open Office that are cross platform. She first recommended that the work be done in school on PCs that have Windows already, then said that doing them on Open Office is fine in the end.
Why do school boards spend taxpayer money on proprietary stuff like that: because they don't know that alternatives exist. One more area that can use open source/free software evangelism, and will influence generations to come.
I have eaten Mediterranean stingrays a long time ago. Do not recall the exact species, but it is the most common one there, brown in color. Those in the know soaked it in vinegar for a while to get over the ammonia. Tasted OK.
In Denmark, I have eaten stingrays in a high end restaurant. It is called devil fish or something like that. Can't remember if it was grilled or fried, but it was crisp and very nice to eat. Not sure if the chef did something special, or is it the species.
I once speared a blue spotted stingray in the Red Sea, but a friend ended up with it, so I don't know how it tasted.
On the other hand, skate, a closely related cartilaginous fish, from the same waters is not given the vinegar treatment at all. Neither in the Mediterranean, nor in North America.
Perhaps not all stingrays have ammonia, or not in all seas?
I think you are confusing her with Akhnaten, who indeed caused a religious revolution by decreeing that there is only one god (the sun disc Aten), and moved the capital of Egypt to Akhet-aten.
Meanwhile he neglected the borders, and things decayed.
Upon his death his policies were reversed with a vengeance.
His wife was Nefertiti who is famous in the west. Maybe that is the source of the confusion.
Hatshepsut is a very interesting historical figure.
She reigned during Egypt's New Kingdom, a little after Ahmose drove out the Asiatic Hyksos from the north, and unifying Egypt again under native rule, and bringing Egypt to it final age of glory in ancient times.
She was the Pharoah of Egypt, marrying her half brother, Thutmosis II (a common practice then), who had a son, Thutmosis III by a lesser wife, and co-ruled with her nephew.
The explorers who returned recorded their findings on the walls of her temple (El Deir El Bahari: modern name: the Northen Monastery, original "Djeser djeseru").
There are inscriptions of natives from Africa too in meticulous detail, as well as their dwellings (thatched huts). There is even an obese queen from Punt with some disfigurement.
You can see a replica of the inscriptions at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto (rather there was big room full of that when I was there a few years ago).
So, when Thutmosis III finally took over, he went through a campaign of removing her memory from history. Although being his aunt, she was also his step mother, and God knows what relationship they had when his father was alive.
Although other Pharoahs did this regularly, it was not targeted towards any particular one specifically, but rather an attempt to claim the monuments of predecessors as his own.
Her statues were toppled in wells (where they were discovered in the 19th century).
My phone sucks for typing SMS, and I am looking for a QWERTY phone. I am considering the Blackberry 8700 (no WiFi is the major drawback), and the HTC Wizard (aka Cingular 8125, running Windows CE is a drawback).
Slashdot Mirror
There, fixed it for you
I have been using Linux on the server for close to a decade now, but only recently did I switch to Linux exclusively on the desktop.
...etc.)
...etc.) despite the risk of breakage?
In October 2006, I bought a new laptop (Toshiba A100-TA6) , resized the partitions, installed Kubuntu Edgy (6.10) and never ever booted Windows XP on it. I had every device on it that I care about working with Linux (sound, mic, wireless, hibernate, ACPI,
My old laptop (Dell Latitude CPxJ) was also installed with the same Kubuntu and passed on to my wife. It had a PCMCIA wireless LAN card in it based on Intersil, and it worked fine.
However, problems started when we upgraded to Kubuntu Feisty (7.04).
First, on the Toshiba, the analog modem (which I anticipated using when traveling abroad) stopped working.I only discovered that it is not working when I was out in a place that has only dialup for a few days. It turned out that ALSA broke the slmodem package for the Intel HDA chipset used on that card.
Second, on the Dell, the wireless card stopped working too (had to use an ethernet cable instead). Again, something that was working did break.
Now I bought another laptop to replace the old Dell (Toshiba A200-10V) and installed it with Gutsy (7.10). Everything seems to work except some quirks in the sound: the built-in mic does not work. Plugging in an external mic does work. The built in speakers work, but plugging in headphones does not work (sound comes up from the built in speakers regardless!) Also, hibernate/suspend causes sound to stop working after resume.
I am not sure where the exact problem lies: Is it kernel developers abandoning the x.y scheme (y=odd unstable, y=even stable) and deciding to continue developing on the 2.6? Or is it Canonical going after the latest and greatest packages (ALSA, drivers,
I am tempted to try Debian for the desktop, but last I checked it, it was not as polished or as easy as Ubuntu.
Thoughts?
Sadly, he moved. He is now closer to where he is from (New Brunswick).
I will probably email him about it.
I read this on the CBC earlier today. I had a neighbour from Cape Breton, Ken. One of the best I ever had. When I saw the headline on CBC, it said "Cape Breton", but the headline here on Slashdot says "Nova Scotia".
This reminded me when Ken always insisted that Cape Breton is not the same as Nova Scotia, despite being the same province. Maybe regional independence, or identity.
Actually, Google bought two mobility sites: Jaiku and Zingku, not just one.
This may be in anticipation of the launch of the gPhone, rumored to be launched end of this year.
The 120 requests per second are not all PHP pages of course. They are at the Apache level, and include .js, .css, and graphics that form the page in aggregate.
PHP by default can be slow, because it has to be parsed, tokenized and then executed. But with an op-code cache/accelerator it becomes really fast. eAccelerator, APC, and Xcache are free ones that you can use, provided you are on a dedicated host or VPS.
For the database parts, web applications can implement various caching mechanisms (e.g. caching to flat files, using memcached,
I know of sites that do 120 requests per second on peak times, running PHP with a MySQL backend (Drupal in fact).
Bad policy: first you just excluded all the non-javascript browsers, and those who disable javascript. Second, the client side parsing can be intensive on the CPU of the machine, and hence the used can feel slowness. Third, you do not solve the database backend issue.
You may want to check AHAH, which is basically AJAX without the XML parsing part. Straight HTML to the browser.
Several years ago, I had a break in. The computer was stolen.
Luckily, I have been using a tape backup, and the robber did not take those. So, I was able to go back one month with everything intact.
In those days, everything I had fit in the 2.5GB tape. I then bought a 10GB tape, and it lasted for a few years. Backups were simply a cron job and an email to tell me that the backup is done and to change the tape. I kept one tape offsite as a precaution.
However, life changed. I got a digital camera and started taking a lot of pictures. Then I got another one with more megapixels and started taking more pictures which are larger in size. All of a sudden, tapes were not enough. The largest Travan tape is 20GB native capacity.
Getting tapes for a home setup is a real chore, specially with the rate the capacity of hard disks is growing. Tapes cannot keep up, specially at price points that home users can afford for both drives and media. Finding the media can be a challenge, let alone finding them at reasonable prices.
To this day, my page on Linux tape backup comes up first on Google, despite moving on from tapes.
Because tapes are no longer enough for the size of data that I have, I now use external disk drives in USB enclosures, two of them to be sure, and a cron job to do daily incremental dumps, and weekly full dumps. See setting up a hard disk USB 2.0 enclosure for backup under Linux and Ubuntu Linux backup of a laptop using a USB enclosure and the dump utility (I use a similar approach for the server).
Although drive enclosures can be theoretically kept offsite, they have to be unmounted, unplugged and are bulkier than tape. So it is inconvenient. Using 2.5" drives may make this more convenient, but their price vs. capacity still makes them more costly.
What are others using for a home setup for tape and offsite backup? DLT? DAT? What?
I think they may be preempting the net neutrality issue.
...
See, if the net does not become neutral (i.e. tiered access), they would be seriously affected and have to pay the ISPs so their sites are in the top tier (think servers where Adsense is served from).
If they now own the pipes, they can avoid this whole debate altogether.
Then again, the net neutrality issue is about the last mile (provider to end user), so that may not be it
Yes, indeed. The herbal weight loss pills are working!
Same here.
I used Mandrake for my server and the workstations until around they became Mandriva.
What made me switch to Kubuntu:
- Mandriva 10.something (was it LE 2005?) took ages to boot. It was painfully slow.
- apt/deb makes it easier to stay up to date.
Now everything from my laptop, kids' desktop, server, hosting run Ubuntu server or Kubuntu.
If Mandriva works for others, well and good. For me, I find in Kubuntu what I need. YMMV.
So, using Firefox agent switcher, I made it so I am MS IE on XP, but still got the same message.
Then, I fired qemu with a Windows 2000 instance and tried from a real MS IE browser, but then was greeted with a message saying that I need to upgrade Media Player.
So, no dice.
Sorry, won't use it.
How timely.
A friend blogged about SciVee which is intended to be Youtube for scientists.
And it runs on Drupal.
hmm ... ok ... /me visits luddite.org
...
...
Ummm, seems like it has no content, parked domain...
Joking aside
His Grandma is not tech savvy, nor in a position to learn tech stuff in that situation. So the path of least resistance is to use low tech
First, hope she gets well soon.
Why must hi-tech be the answer?
Why not use paper and pencil?
Are her hands free? She can gesture yes and no in a way that you can tell her to.
I don't think a principal has that much power, so there must have been other reasons.
Did you take the matter up with the school board and/or the teachers' union?
What was the response?
This was still true for GMC cars from the 80s and early 90s as well.
...etc, Oldsmobile 98 and Cadillac Deville/Brougham were the same, ...etc. Even the exterior parts (headlights, ...) were the same.
...
....
I think the Pontiac Bonneville and Chevy Caprice had the same parts, such as waterpump, fuel pump,
This caused the price of parts to be low and hence made them desirable for a large segment of users.
Once they switched to front wheel drive cars, things started to change.
The presently on the road Chevy Venture, Pontiac Montana and Oldsmobile whatever-her-name have interchangeable parts.
The Japanese were notorious for changing the design from year to year, yet they succeeded in the end
Sigh
I have two children in high school, although not in the USA (Ontario, Canada).
A couple of years ago, I had a long talk with the teacher because they are teaching an obscure language that has to be licensed (for a fee). If you care to know, it is called the Turing Language.
My view was : why not use one of the cross platform free languages, e.g. Python or even Java? So we don't have to use it on Windows. Arguing with the teacher was futile. He agreed with me, but said the decision is from the school board. I left messages to someone at the school board, then got a call a week later, and explained the situation, but nothing came out of it.
Then, a few months ago, the other kid was asked to do something in MS Power Point as part of learning that software. I called the teacher and explained that we don't run Windows, but rather Linux and that there are free alternatives, such as Open Office that are cross platform. She first recommended that the work be done in school on PCs that have Windows already, then said that doing them on Open Office is fine in the end.
Why do school boards spend taxpayer money on proprietary stuff like that: because they don't know that alternatives exist. One more area that can use open source/free software evangelism, and will influence generations to come.
I wrote about this a while ago:
Did J.K Rowling borrow heavily from JRR Tolkien?
I personally think that the themes and similarities are too many to ignore, but visitor comments are split down the middle.
I have eaten Mediterranean stingrays a long time ago. Do not recall the exact species, but it is the most common one there, brown in color. Those in the know soaked it in vinegar for a while to get over the ammonia. Tasted OK.
In Denmark, I have eaten stingrays in a high end restaurant. It is called devil fish or something like that. Can't remember if it was grilled or fried, but it was crisp and very nice to eat. Not sure if the chef did something special, or is it the species.
I once speared a blue spotted stingray in the Red Sea, but a friend ended up with it, so I don't know how it tasted.
This is what Wikipedia says about Stingray as food.
On the other hand, skate, a closely related cartilaginous fish, from the same waters is not given the vinegar treatment at all. Neither in the Mediterranean, nor in North America.
Perhaps not all stingrays have ammonia, or not in all seas?
Actually, many bottom dwelling fish have ammonia in them.
This includes the stingrays, which are known for their bad taste, unless soaked in vinegar to neutralize the ammonia.
Ammonia does not make them float. What I heard is that it helps coping with the pressure at great depths or something like that.
I think you are confusing her with Akhnaten, who indeed caused a religious revolution by decreeing that there is only one god (the sun disc Aten), and moved the capital of Egypt to Akhet-aten.
Meanwhile he neglected the borders, and things decayed.
Upon his death his policies were reversed with a vengeance.
His wife was Nefertiti who is famous in the west. Maybe that is the source of the confusion.
Hatshepsut is a very interesting historical figure.
She reigned during Egypt's New Kingdom, a little after Ahmose drove out the Asiatic Hyksos from the north, and unifying Egypt again under native rule, and bringing Egypt to it final age of glory in ancient times.
She was the Pharoah of Egypt, marrying her half brother, Thutmosis II (a common practice then), who had a son, Thutmosis III by a lesser wife, and co-ruled with her nephew.
She sent ships and explorers to the Land of Punt (thought to be Somalia).
The explorers who returned recorded their findings on the walls of her temple (El Deir El Bahari: modern name: the Northen Monastery, original "Djeser djeseru").
You can see amazing details of Red Sea fauna there, such as spiny lobster, squid and other creatures.
There are inscriptions of natives from Africa too in meticulous detail, as well as their dwellings (thatched huts). There is even an obese queen from Punt with some disfigurement.
You can see a replica of the inscriptions at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto (rather there was big room full of that when I was there a few years ago).
So, when Thutmosis III finally took over, he went through a campaign of removing her memory from history. Although being his aunt, she was also his step mother, and God knows what relationship they had when his father was alive.
Although other Pharoahs did this regularly, it was not targeted towards any particular one specifically, but rather an attempt to claim the monuments of predecessors as his own.
Her statues were toppled in wells (where they were discovered in the 19th century).
More detail here.
I have the same requirement: a keyboard!
My phone sucks for typing SMS, and I am looking for a QWERTY phone. I am considering the Blackberry 8700 (no WiFi is the major drawback), and the HTC Wizard (aka Cingular 8125, running Windows CE is a drawback).
Both have good keyboards for SMS and email.
We have had these on the roads in Canada for several years now.
They are suitable for single or couples, since they are for 2 passengers.
If you have kids, it is not for you. At least not as the only car.