We had a guy at work who was trying to run rm -rf * in a directory to remove our software prior to installing a new version. He didn't have permission to remove some of the subdirectories, so he did an su - and then ran rm -rf * again. Only problem was, the su - had moved him to the root directory. I'm sure you can guess what happened.
But being realistic, nobody uses Windows to do much at all. I probably would have done around 6 hours of Windows coding throughout my 4 year degree at UWA, and a lot of that was in VB (not a real language) for Graphics (not a real unit). Even in Chris' OS unit I don't remember doing much at all in Windows. Now that I think about it, I wouldn't have done more than 6 hours of Windows coding in my entire life.
you mean spending 10 minutes hitting every permutation of backspace, space and enter, trying to trick word's auto-make-things-look-right into doing what they actually want?
Back when I had never used Word, I would have thought this was a bit harsh. But now I know the truth. Just today I was trying to delete some text, pressing backspace as it happens. And what does Word do? It actually inserted some random text for me. I was shocked and dismayed.
Then there was the paragraph that lost its numbering every time I edited the following paragraph, while disabling the "Bullets and Numbering" menu. It does not make sense. There was no way to get the numbering back.
How do people put up with it? Am I just not using it correctly? I wish I could just write documentation in vim.
Most of the big brands aren't multi-regioned by default, you have to pay extra for them. A typical multi-region Pioneer will cost you $100 more than an otherwise identical R4 model.
I can choose between DVDs from different regions based upon technical merit. For example, the R1 Chasing Amy is far superior to the R4 version. And the R4 version of Trainspotting is censored, while the R2 version is not.
DVDs are cheaper. DVDs in Australia are far far cheaper than anywhere else. I am constantly surprised that American super-discount-sale prices still exceed our own recommended prices.
I've had applications fail in linux time
after time because of faulty support, while windows BSOD's occasionally. In my experience, very occasionally. I can't remember the last time windows crashed independant of my tinkering. (i.e., not windows' fault. Even macs crash more frequently when I do think I know I shouldn't)
So Linux applications crash all the time, while the Windows operating system crashes occasionally? It seems to me that you're applying double standards here. I suppose that you've never had applications crash or do something unexpected in Windows.
And furthermore, why is it that the Linux apps crash because of faulty support (whatever that means) but in Windows it's due to user error? That's crazy-talk - Linux apps crash for the same reason as Windows, namely that they haven't been tested as rigorously as they should have been.
At least in Linux applications it's generally possible to either fix the problem yourself (assuming that you have the technical ability to do so) or report the bug to the author of the program.
OpenBSD has a brilliant installer. For one thing you only need to download 50M to get all of the functionality you need (leaving out X). Starting from scratch, I can complete an install in half an hour including all the servers I want (eg DHCP, DNS, HTTP). I've been using Linux for years, but when I want to setup a Unix box quickly I'll choose OpenBSD every time because it's so quick and easy to install. However, I work on Solaris all day so compared to that anything's quick and easy.
A quick look at aunic shows that Australia already has.info.au. Other interesting Australian second level domains are.asn.au (for associations),.id.au (for individuals),.conf.au (for conferences), and.telememo.au (for X.400 entities, whatever that means).
Like many others, my Linux usage also started with Slackware (3.0 in my case). Then I tried RedHat 4.2/5.0/5.1 which was clearly a mistake. Then I moved on to Debian which I've been using ever since.
Unfortunately Debian is starting to annoy me with all its dependencies. In particular, I strongly dislike it wanting to install things like esd and gnome which I would always consider to be optional. Or how about cdrdao requiring gtk? That's just crazy. Debian's package management has gone too far.
After reading everyone's comments here, I am strongly considering moving over to Slackware. It sounds like exactly what I want. I wonder if it's possible to slowly migrate my system over without having to reinstall from scratch. That would be sweet.
--
Harsh But Fair: you know it makes sense
Of course, in Australia individuals are prohibited from owning.com.au/.net.au/.org.au domain names. If they wanted one of these domains, they'd have to register a business name to go with it. While this policy (as well as others) is brilliant at preventing cybersquatting, it does restrict individuals to unattractive domains like sven.dropbear.id.au. That's why I registered a.org instead of something under.au that I would have preferred.
--
Harsh But Fair: you know it makes sense
These Olympics have nothing to do with the rest of Australia apart from Sydney. They were the ones who bought the damn thing in the first place, they are the ones who keep screwing it up (eg tickets that don't fit ticket machines, medals with a Roman stadium on them, the ticketing debacle), and hopefully they are the ones who will pay for it.
They keep saying on TV that it's "our Olympics" when it's nothing of the sort - they belong to Sydney and we don't want to have anything to do with them.
Sven
Perth
--
Harsh But Fair: you know it makes sense
Another good reason not to use Seagate drives is that they are the most unreliable drives you can possibly find. You're lucky to get a year out of some of them. For cheap drives I've found Fujitsu to last longer, surprising as that sounds.
I don't understand. If he doesn't find UF funny, then why does he persist in reading it everyday like he says he does? It's just entertainment. A joke. Nobody is forcing you to read it.
I don't like American football. I find it boring and frustrating to watch. But lots of people feel a different way, they find it entertaining. I don't, so I don't watch it. Perhaps he should consider doing the same.
It's not only the processor and mobo prices too... as soon as 200MHz FSB comes along RAM prices will shoot up again.
This is an absolute bastard for those of us still on slower bus speeds. I have a Celeron with 66MHz FSB. I currently have 64M RAM; the single reason I haven't upgraded is the rediculous prices they're charging for RAM that is over-specced for this machine.
Why can't the RAM companies understand that not everyone wants the latest and greatest? There would be a significant number of people in the same boat as I am, if it wasn't for RAM companies' greediness we'd all be much better off, and I suspect they'd be making more money too.
1) What caused the climate of Mars to change? Is Earth in danger of a similar change, and can we be taking steps to prevent that?
Interesting. But would we actually do anything? Sure, all the environmentalists would come out and tell us what has to be done, and there would probably even be a few governmental meetings about it. All the governments would go in there and try to get away with doing as little as possible, much like the Kyoto conference. Nothing major would change. A 5% reduction here, a promise to keep emissions at 2000 levels there. They wouldn't be willing to do whatever it takes.
And this will continue to happen while people are greedy. I'm greedy. I'm sure most of you are too. People will always be greedy. It would only be when the majority of people recognise that something must be done that we might actually get actions of substance. And I'm not talking the majority of Americans, I'm talking the majority of people worldwide.
Really, what hope to we have? We're too smart for our own good.
It's unfortunate this wasn't posted earlier. By the time it appeared on Slashdot, I'd already missed it. I suppose it's my own fault for living in this timezone and not in America.
I've been playing with Debian for quite a while and I have had problems with the installation process on a couple of occasions.
THe main thing I dislike about the Debian install process is the dselect program. To me it just seems like a really chunky way of doing things. The keystrokes seem non-intuitive, and I thought it just made what should have been a simple step difficult. I refuse to use dselect now, I'll just install everything by hand with dpkg.
Also, on a couple of occasions the 2.1 installer has refused to work for me. That could have just been a dodgy CD, and I don't remember exactly what the problem was. Only way to get around it was to install 2.0 then upgrade.
At one place in Perth, Big Macs are $1 after 5pm, quite a bit more expensive before then (I'd guess $3 or more). Don't know what effect this has on your theory. Unfortunately it still tastes just as bad, but for $1 I don't care.
Like the $1 bottles of Schweppes Cola (normally $1.80 or more). Sometimes you just have to give up buying the better tasting product because the competition is priced so much better.
I started using Mutt a couple of weeks ago after Pine started moving my mail on the server without being told to. This kinda broke things when I went to download my mail from home.
Since then I've become quite attached to Mutt. I'm only just getting into it, but I got it working with gpg without much hassle. Trouble is none of the other mail readers will accept it because they don't obey the relevant RFC (2015 I think). The workaround works (hence the name) but is kludgey. It would be nice if more mail readers supported the standard of PGP sigs in attachments.
Using Mutt has also motivated me to install exim so that I can send mail from home. It's not quite working yet, but it can't be far away. Now I just have to learn how to use hooks.
Mutt really is an excellent mail reader. If you're feeling limited by Pine, perhaps you should try it.
This is just the sort of thing I'd like. Having owned only PC hardware all my life, I think it would be interesting to play with somthing like this. But where do you get them? I'm in Perth, Australia, and shipping is so expensive it makes it impractical to get it from interstate or overseas. Any ideas?
Slashdot Mirror
We had a guy at work who was trying to run rm -rf * in a directory to remove our software prior to installing a new version. He didn't have permission to remove some of the subdirectories, so he did an su - and then ran rm -rf * again. Only problem was, the su - had moved him to the root directory. I'm sure you can guess what happened.
But being realistic, nobody uses Windows to do much at all. I probably would have done around 6 hours of Windows coding throughout my 4 year degree at UWA, and a lot of that was in VB (not a real language) for Graphics (not a real unit). Even in Chris' OS unit I don't remember doing much at all in Windows. Now that I think about it, I wouldn't have done more than 6 hours of Windows coding in my entire life.
Back when I had never used Word, I would have thought this was a bit harsh. But now I know the truth. Just today I was trying to delete some text, pressing backspace as it happens. And what does Word do? It actually inserted some random text for me. I was shocked and dismayed. Then there was the paragraph that lost its numbering every time I edited the following paragraph, while disabling the "Bullets and Numbering" menu. It does not make sense. There was no way to get the numbering back.
How do people put up with it? Am I just not using it correctly? I wish I could just write documentation in vim.
S
Most of the big brands aren't multi-regioned by default, you have to pay extra for them. A typical multi-region Pioneer will cost you $100 more than an otherwise identical R4 model.
S
- I can choose between DVDs from different regions based upon technical merit. For example, the R1 Chasing Amy is far superior to the R4 version. And the R4 version of Trainspotting is censored, while the R2 version is not.
- DVDs are cheaper. DVDs in Australia are far far cheaper than anywhere else. I am constantly surprised that American super-discount-sale prices still exceed our own recommended prices.
So what is there not to like?S
And furthermore, why is it that the Linux apps crash because of faulty support (whatever that means) but in Windows it's due to user error? That's crazy-talk - Linux apps crash for the same reason as Windows, namely that they haven't been tested as rigorously as they should have been. At least in Linux applications it's generally possible to either fix the problem yourself (assuming that you have the technical ability to do so) or report the bug to the author of the program.
OpenBSD has a brilliant installer. For one thing you only need to download 50M to get all of the functionality you need (leaving out X). Starting from scratch, I can complete an install in half an hour including all the servers I want (eg DHCP, DNS, HTTP). I've been using Linux for years, but when I want to setup a Unix box quickly I'll choose OpenBSD every time because it's so quick and easy to install. However, I work on Solaris all day so compared to that anything's quick and easy.
A quick look at aunic shows that Australia already has .info.au. Other interesting Australian second level domains are .asn.au (for associations), .id.au (for individuals), .conf.au (for conferences), and .telememo.au (for X.400 entities, whatever that means).
Unfortunately Debian is starting to annoy me with all its dependencies. In particular, I strongly dislike it wanting to install things like esd and gnome which I would always consider to be optional. Or how about cdrdao requiring gtk? That's just crazy. Debian's package management has gone too far.
After reading everyone's comments here, I am strongly considering moving over to Slackware. It sounds like exactly what I want. I wonder if it's possible to slowly migrate my system over without having to reinstall from scratch. That would be sweet.
--
Harsh But Fair: you know it makes sense
Of course, in Australia individuals are prohibited from owning .com.au/.net.au/.org.au domain names. If they wanted one of these domains, they'd have to register a business name to go with it. While this policy (as well as others) is brilliant at preventing cybersquatting, it does restrict individuals to unattractive domains like sven.dropbear.id.au. That's why I registered a .org instead of something under .au that I would have preferred.
--
Harsh But Fair: you know it makes sense
They keep saying on TV that it's "our Olympics" when it's nothing of the sort - they belong to Sydney and we don't want to have anything to do with them.
Sven
Perth
--
Harsh But Fair: you know it makes sense
This is probably a stupid question, but I never understood it in Evangelion... what is fan service?
--
Harsh But Fair: you know it makes sense
Another good reason not to use Seagate drives is that they are the most unreliable drives you can possibly find. You're lucky to get a year out of some of them. For cheap drives I've found Fujitsu to last longer, surprising as that sounds.
Remember, Seagates can't be trusted.
In Perth at least, Triple J is already broadcasting on RDS I believe. My Mum's car radio picks it up.
I don't understand. If he doesn't find UF funny, then why does he persist in reading it everyday like he says he does? It's just entertainment. A joke. Nobody is forcing you to read it.
I don't like American football. I find it boring and frustrating to watch. But lots of people feel a different way, they find it entertaining. I don't, so I don't watch it. Perhaps he should consider doing the same.
Bah!
It's not only the processor and mobo prices too... as soon as 200MHz FSB comes along RAM prices will shoot up again.
This is an absolute bastard for those of us still on slower bus speeds. I have a Celeron with 66MHz FSB. I currently have 64M RAM; the single reason I haven't upgraded is the rediculous prices they're charging for RAM that is over-specced for this machine.
Why can't the RAM companies understand that not everyone wants the latest and greatest? There would be a significant number of people in the same boat as I am, if it wasn't for RAM companies' greediness we'd all be much better off, and I suspect they'd be making more money too.
Interesting. But would we actually do anything? Sure, all the environmentalists would come out and tell us what has to be done, and there would probably even be a few governmental meetings about it. All the governments would go in there and try to get away with doing as little as possible, much like the Kyoto conference. Nothing major would change. A 5% reduction here, a promise to keep emissions at 2000 levels there. They wouldn't be willing to do whatever it takes.
And this will continue to happen while people are greedy. I'm greedy. I'm sure most of you are too. People will always be greedy. It would only be when the majority of people recognise that something must be done that we might actually get actions of substance. And I'm not talking the majority of Americans, I'm talking the majority of people worldwide.
Really, what hope to we have? We're too smart for our own good.
A rather bleak view, but I think it's realistic.
It's unfortunate this wasn't posted earlier. By the time it appeared on Slashdot, I'd already missed it. I suppose it's my own fault for living in this timezone and not in America.
I've been playing with Debian for quite a while and I have had problems with the installation process on a couple of occasions.
THe main thing I dislike about the Debian install process is the dselect program. To me it just seems like a really chunky way of doing things. The keystrokes seem non-intuitive, and I thought it just made what should have been a simple step difficult. I refuse to use dselect now, I'll just install everything by hand with dpkg.
Also, on a couple of occasions the 2.1 installer has refused to work for me. That could have just been a dodgy CD, and I don't remember exactly what the problem was. Only way to get around it was to install 2.0 then upgrade.
At one place in Perth, Big Macs are $1 after 5pm, quite a bit more expensive before then (I'd guess $3 or more). Don't know what effect this has on your theory. Unfortunately it still tastes just as bad, but for $1 I don't care.
Like the $1 bottles of Schweppes Cola (normally $1.80 or more). Sometimes you just have to give up buying the better tasting product because the competition is priced so much better.
Steven
(all prices in Aussie Dollars)
I started using Mutt a couple of weeks ago after Pine started moving my mail on the server without being told to. This kinda broke things when I went to download my mail from home.
Since then I've become quite attached to Mutt. I'm only just getting into it, but I got it working with gpg without much hassle. Trouble is none of the other mail readers will accept it because they don't obey the relevant RFC (2015 I think). The workaround works (hence the name) but is kludgey. It would be nice if more mail readers supported the standard of PGP sigs in attachments.
Using Mutt has also motivated me to install exim so that I can send mail from home. It's not quite working yet, but it can't be far away. Now I just have to learn how to use hooks.
Mutt really is an excellent mail reader. If you're feeling limited by Pine, perhaps you should try it.
Sven
This is just the sort of thing I'd like. Having owned only PC hardware all my life, I think it would be interesting to play with somthing like this. But where do you get them? I'm in Perth, Australia, and shipping is so expensive it makes it impractical to get it from interstate or overseas. Any ideas?
I think I read somewhere that Cyrix were planning to put two FPUs on their next chip to get decent performance. Anyone else heard this?