The problem with a karma-based system is that you get lots of basically uninformed bored people (like me, for example) who make enough more or less neutral-quality statements that eventually they collect enough mod points one by one that they get a karma bonus. I have a karma bonus, but that does not mean that I have anything to contribute that is better than computer_newbie102, it just means I have been making contributions for a longer period and tend to avoid trolling/vandalism. Which brings me to my next point: one of the really nice things about slashdot karma is that it keeps trolls and spam out, but if you remove the karma ceiling, you get uninformed bored people who rack up karma just to troll/sell spam contribs.
IMHO, people need to stop fretting over accuracy issues in wikipedia. It is an encyclopedia that anybody can edit. Treat it that way, and you'll get lots of useful information and you won't get burned.
They can't even pry my GMail password from my cold dead hands. I changed my gmail password about six months ago (following good security practices: two upper case, two lower case, two numbers, two special characters, not similar to previous passwords and with no hidden meaning... oops) and thanks to firefox's "remember password" feature, within a month I forgot it. Since I am pretty dependent on the account, I live in fear that the saved password might somehow disappear or expire (it was with the greatest of care with a full disk image backup in hand that I let etch upgrade to Iceweasel).
I thought that this was a 100% bad situation, but now I see that my email is phishing-proof: I could not give my password to them if I wanted to.
In fact, I think that I will patent this as an anti-phishing technique.
By the way, if anybody knows how to get the password out of firefox's config files, I would love to know.
Yeah, mouse gestures are so great. Nothing like some piece of crap software randomly interfering with what you are trying to do. My mom has severe arthritis in her hands. Clicking is painful. Drag and drop just doesn't work. She was an executive secretary for 20 years and could type gawd-awful fast, but these days it is painful enough that navigating the keyboard for shortcuts is pretty slow and frustrating. For her, mouse gestures are the best way to use her computer, but none of the existing software that we have found really fills her needs (drag and drop is pretty difficult). I can't get to the website (slashdotted?), but I have bookmarked this and I will look at it again in a couple days to see if this will help fill her needs
Just because you don't need it does not make it crapola or, as somebody else said, dumb.
The problem with the typical user-computer interface paradigm is that we have to use a mouse at all (save game playing and graphics design). Moving my hand from the home position every time I need the precision of a mouse pointer is a huge annoyance and waste of time and effort. More so than pushing my index finger down. Every DE I know of of allows for pretty fast keyboard maneuver around the screen. The fact that so few people bother to learn to use it speaks volumes in favor of the utility of a mouse, I think.
It is an ingrained thought process in humans to see, reach and grab. The mouse translates this to the computer interface: we see something we want, we "reach" to it with the pointer, and we "grab" by clicking on it. I think it works pretty well, except for those unfortunate enough to have a physical disability such as arthritis.
6.06 + 24 months = 8.06;) Except that 6.06 was supposed to be 6.04, it was just a couple months late getting out the door. They're back on schedule (release in April and October)
B) After the last upgrade fiasco, the Ubuntu devs are putting special care to make sure the update tool works this time
Great, can they fix what they broke during my last upgrade? I haven't been able to get to my/home directory in months. At least I recovered from the upgrade before that; with the help of a Unix guru. Considering that I've had major problems with Ubuntu upgrades (one from Breezy to Dapper, the other a minor upgrade), I don't trust them at all. I see your thread:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=36143 3
That is why I always suggest people not to upgrade unless they have a specific reason to; if what you have works the way you want it to, run with it.
My best recommendation would to do a new install. That would (obviously) be faster than trying to fix the set up as it is now. If I were you, I would put the entire OS including/home (maybe partition so that you have 9gig to/, 1 gig swap, 10 gig/home) on your first drive (20 gig should be more than enough), and then during the install/partitioning step just mount the other HD in/media/storage and keep all your big files (movies and such) there. I'm on the Ubuntuforums if I can help you more just drop me a private message. It might take me a couple days but I'll answer.
There has been nothing official announced AFAIK, but Mr. Shuttleworth has said that LTS releases will be a regular thing and people on the Ubuntuforums strongly suspect that LTS will settle into a 2 year release cycle, meaning the next one would be 8.04.
There will be cd's for 7.04 just like there are for 6.10 (not the LTS release, that's 6.06), but unlike the LTS release, shipping has to be paid for.
At least, that's how I understood it. I realized I should have clarified that after I hit the submit button: You won't get free CDs by ShipIt until the next LTS, but of course people will download the ISOs, stamp them and sell them (maybe even canonical does this themselves?)
I'm not a publisher, but I am skeptical that there exists a volume of sales could ever make a $1.99 book profitable, unless maybe you used the dollar value from 1985 or earlier. It just has to be a very short book on very low quality paper, like this one:
And I still haven't managed to give away all those 6.06 CDs I got from ShipIt! That's OK because
A) 6.06 is the long term support (LTS) release, meaning that it will be good for a couple years to come
B) After the last upgrade fiasco, the Ubuntu devs are putting special care to make sure the update tool works this time, so people can just install 6.06 and then use the update manager to update to 7.04 if they decide they want it.
C) They won't ship CDs of another release until the next LTS release, so there won't be any 7.04 CDs either.
I guess that in their cost benefit analysis and corporate negotiations with Cisco they found a way to make it pay off, but the iTV fight was not worth the price...
Yeah, but the British TV station has nothing to do with the trademark issues.
What makes these trademark shenanigans all the more peculiar is that at the same MacWorld show this week Apple introduced another product called Apple TV, which it first demonstrated last year under the name iTV.... Well, it turned out that Elgato Systems makes a product called EyeTV (pronounced "iTV" obviously), which is a line of Macintosh video capture devices -- some with tuners -- so Apple backed off and changed the product name to Apple TV.
Um, no, it is obviously a parody. It attacks Colbert for claiming to tell the truth, which in turn is his parody of organizations like fox news. Colbert is a joke, and this is a joke on that joke.
I am going to venture a guess that you have never actually seen the Colbert Report, or that you never watched the video. What some of his videos and then rewatch the parody. It makes a lot more sense.
Yeah, except that in French a subordinate clause right after a personal pronoun is not very grammatical. Quant à moi, je souhaite la bienvenue... would be more correct. Also, I think O.V.N.I. requires proper punctuation and can't be made plural.
Yeah, except that "quant à moi" is not a subordinate clause, which consists of a subject and a predicate. Also, in English, "grammatical" is an adjective, which usually requires a noun or a pronoun to modify. I do not know the grammatical rules for acronyms, but for what it is worth, the French wikipedia page does not include punctuation and has several instances of OVNI in the plural:
Personally, I would just go for "Pour ma part, je souhaite la bienvenue à nos nouveaux maîtres OVNIs", but I am not a native francophone and my English sucks too.
A couple years ago my credit card got rejected. I was shocked and checked my statement, and found that 3,000 dollars had been charged to a UHAUL in Columbus, GA, where I had been stationed previously. Since I had been moved to Germany a month previously and had never set foot in a UHAUL store anywhere, it was pretty easy to prove that I had not made the charges (don't know how my credit card number got out... I'm guessing at a restaurant). Anyway, MasterCard agreed with me and decided that UHAUL would have to foot the fraud bill since they did not verify the card holder identity or even actually physically see the card.
So, there you have it, bad karma has a way of coming back at you, even if you're a company.
Now in addition to tuition, sports, and *gasp* quality of education, students will select schools based on Internet availability.
I think that probably internet connectivity and and quality of education are related. I know that I work and learn best between 8:00PM and midnight, and the labs at school are usually nice and quiet on Friday and Saturday evenings. It would be a shame not to be able to take advantage of my work cycle.
Now, if they filtered slashdot, I would spend way more time learning...
Why is it that whenever a woman does anything noteworthy the first response here on slashdot is whether or not she is hot/doable/marryable, etc. What is wrong with you people? There is a post further down the page that says she looks like a man... and got modded funny! WTF? A couple days ago, a 17 year old girl won a 100,000 dollar science fair prize, and at least 1/3 of the comments were about whether she was hot or not. Most likely none of the readers here will ever see the woman in real life, so just what value do these comments have in the discussion?
Imagine how these women feel if they read slashdot. Here they are, busting their asses to do something cool/good, they finally get some recognition, and the response is a debate on how nice her hips look or don't.
If slashdot really does represent a cross section of the IT industry, I understand now why there are so few women in that industry.
It is ultimately up to the customer to decide where they want to spend money, and I would invest in any company that can give its customers what they want. There is a rather large market for people who are at least as concerned about the way their IT products look as how they perform. Just look at the case mod culture or how much attention apple pays to their product styles. There are also many people who have the money for both the best technology and a stylish case, just look at the market for jewel encrusted cell phones and iPods.
As for corporations interested in purchasing these cases, a lot of companies spend a lot of money ensuring that their front rooms, where they make contact with their customers, have a consistent style and look. What they are trying to communicate with this style varies by company, but it is essentially marketing and it works pretty well. Selecting computer cases that fit that style will help complete the "look" that they are trying to achieve, and potentially help make the sale. It isn't such a bad idea.
Sorry, I should have made myself more clear. It's very difficult to cut power in such a way that doesn't send us back to the stone ages. People in the 1600s didn't have fridges, but they also died of food poisoning a lot more often
Which is what I meant when I said that we need to find a way to reap the benefits of modern technology while using less energy. It is quite possible.
We could turn off street lights, but then more people will die in traffic accidents.
The country where I currently live (Belgium) has so many street lights (brought to you by nuclear power) that at night you can see our border from the International Space Station. This has not been demonstrated to have any positive impact on traffic safety. People here agree that it is a waste, but the government is so caught up in bureaucracy and lobbying that getting it to change is slow.
The expectation that Americans could go without cars if they had to is laughable.
I agree, which is why I never said that.
I live in San Francisco, which has one of the largest public transportation systems in the US, and I still don't use it. Not because I have a car fetish, but because it's impractical.
I went to the University of San Francisco. I understand your complaints about Muni. However, Muni is also a perfect example of what is wrong with public transport in the United States. It is poorly funded (or rather, its funding is squandered), poorly organized, inefficient, and as a result has very low uptake in usage and little environmental impact. It may even be detrimental. San Francisco is much denser than where I live right now, Brussels (and indeed most European cities), and yet with the Brussels subway and tram system, I can get anywhere in the city faster than by car. Why? People care here. When the public transport system has a failing, it becomes a major political issue. People in SF, for all their lip service to liberal causes, don't really seem to care. They just see that their transit system is messed up and assume that it can't work.
Light bulbs are not the single biggest user of energy. As the other guy posted, they're a small fraction. That's why I laughed when Al Gore said he'd be upgrading to CFDs -- his house uses in a day what the average household uses in a month. What, the CFDs will cut it down to a 29-day cost?
As I pointed out to the other guy who responded to me, the California Energy Commission says that 22% of a household's energy use goes to lighting. The next closest thing is refrigeration at 19%. Click on the link on my response to that post if you don't want to take my word for it. This applies more to you than to him since you actually live in California. So, cutting down on your lighting energy use makes a huge difference. I really don't care what Al Gore does.
Nuclear power is cheap and safe. Any environmentalist who is serious about reducing carbon emissions and lowering their country's dependence on oil, but is unwilling to switch to nuclear power, is a hypocrite.
I never said anything against nuclear power. However, since you bring it up again, I should point out that if we were to replace oil with nuclear power tomorrow, the worlds uranium reserves would last about 80 years. Switching to nuclear alone is not going to solve anything. The solution in my mind is to take a mixed approach that involves multiple sources of energy, from oil to clean coal technologies to wind and tidal and, yes, even nuclear, and at the same time reducing energy use.
Well, this is what I found:
http://www.fypower.org/res/energy.html
It says that lighting takes 22% of the average energy consumption in a California household, refrigeration takes second at 19%. They counted both interior and exterior lighting together, and the original source for their data is the California Energy Commission. I imagine that this number shifts based on where one is located. Australia, the country from which your statistics came, already has a very aggressive program to save energy wasted on lighting; they recently passed a law that will soon make it illegal entirely to use incandescent light bulbs at all. So, I think that your statistics, if anything, support the idea that trying to save energy on lights works.
I found that Ubuntu booted initially in +/- 50 seconds
so Ubuntu can reboot in -50 seconds? beat that ms!
To be fair to Microsoft, I have Ubuntu running on a quantum computer (a Beowulf cluster of quantum processors, more precisely), so it regularly performs tasks before I ask it to. The problem is that whenever I look at the screen the quantum state collapses, which is making it really hard to surf pr0n.
... he writes in response to an article saying that there is finally a distribution you don't have to tweak:)
That is funny and insightful.
I agree that the article is overzealous in its estimation of how easy Ubuntu is, but I think that that is because people in general are looking for an "easy button" that will prevent them from having to learn anything about their computers. I think a better statement would be that Linux now requires the same amount or less tweaking than Windows (which for some reason is the stick against which all is measured in home computing). Windows is no better as far as slowdown over time is concerned; did you see the discussion in this very same thread about this topic? Its here:
I would argue that Ubuntu's solution is clearly superior to the Windows solution, which appears to be to reinstall your operating system. Of course, I know how to find solutions to Linux problems and I don't know much about Windows, and people who know about Windows but not Linux probably have the opposite opinion.
However, I think that it bears noting that my tip is in no way required, the system functions fine without it, just slower. Just because you don't HAVE to tweak Ubuntu doesn't mean you should not be ABLE to tweak it.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, people need to stop fretting over accuracy issues in wikipedia. It is an encyclopedia that anybody can edit. Treat it that way, and you'll get lots of useful information and you won't get burned.
I thought that this was a 100% bad situation, but now I see that my email is phishing-proof: I could not give my password to them if I wanted to.
In fact, I think that I will patent this as an anti-phishing technique.
By the way, if anybody knows how to get the password out of firefox's config files, I would love to know.
Just because you don't need it does not make it crapola or, as somebody else said, dumb.
It is an ingrained thought process in humans to see, reach and grab. The mouse translates this to the computer interface: we see something we want, we "reach" to it with the pointer, and we "grab" by clicking on it. I think it works pretty well, except for those unfortunate enough to have a physical disability such as arthritis.
Great, can they fix what they broke during my last upgrade? I haven't been able to get to my
That is why I always suggest people not to upgrade unless they have a specific reason to; if what you have works the way you want it to, run with it.
My best recommendation would to do a new install. That would (obviously) be faster than trying to fix the set up as it is now. If I were you, I would put the entire OS including /home (maybe partition so that you have 9gig to /, 1 gig swap, 10 gig /home) on your first drive (20 gig should be more than enough), and then during the install/partitioning step just mount the other HD in /media/storage and keep all your big files (movies and such) there. I'm on the Ubuntuforums if I can help you more just drop me a private message. It might take me a couple days but I'll answer.
There has been nothing official announced AFAIK, but Mr. Shuttleworth has said that LTS releases will be a regular thing and people on the Ubuntuforums strongly suspect that LTS will settle into a 2 year release cycle, meaning the next one would be 8.04.
At least, that's how I understood it. I realized I should have clarified that after I hit the submit button: You won't get free CDs by ShipIt until the next LTS, but of course people will download the ISOs, stamp them and sell them (maybe even canonical does this themselves?)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0671041266/ref=sib _dp_pt/102-6841453-0822545#reader-link
A) 6.06 is the long term support (LTS) release, meaning that it will be good for a couple years to come
B) After the last upgrade fiasco, the Ubuntu devs are putting special care to make sure the update tool works this time, so people can just install 6.06 and then use the update manager to update to 7.04 if they decide they want it.
C) They won't ship CDs of another release until the next LTS release, so there won't be any 7.04 CDs either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphone#Trademark_dis
I guess that in their cost benefit analysis and corporate negotiations with Cisco they found a way to make it pay off, but the iTV fight was not worth the price...
Already trademarked as the eye TV, I understand. I believe that this is the product that holds that trademark: http://www.elgato.com/
I am going to venture a guess that you have never actually seen the Colbert Report, or that you never watched the video. What some of his videos and then rewatch the parody. It makes a lot more sense.
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jht ml?ml_video=&ml_collection=70004&ml_gateway=&ml_ga teway_id=&ml_comedian=&ml_runtime=&ml_context=show &ml_origin_url=%2Fmotherload%2F%3Fml_collection%3D 70004&ml_playlist=&lnk=&is_large=true
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVNI/
Personally, I would just go for "Pour ma part, je souhaite la bienvenue à nos nouveaux maîtres OVNIs", but I am not a native francophone and my English sucks too.
Take care,
-mat
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59/
Encyclopedia Britannica is one of those sites that will (or at least used to) let you look at member-only info if you set your agent to googlebot.
So, there you have it, bad karma has a way of coming back at you, even if you're a company.
Now, if they filtered slashdot, I would spend way more time learning...
Imagine how these women feel if they read slashdot. Here they are, busting their asses to do something cool/good, they finally get some recognition, and the response is a debate on how nice her hips look or don't.
If slashdot really does represent a cross section of the IT industry, I understand now why there are so few women in that industry.
As for corporations interested in purchasing these cases, a lot of companies spend a lot of money ensuring that their front rooms, where they make contact with their customers, have a consistent style and look. What they are trying to communicate with this style varies by company, but it is essentially marketing and it works pretty well. Selecting computer cases that fit that style will help complete the "look" that they are trying to achieve, and potentially help make the sale. It isn't such a bad idea.
Well, this is what I found: http://www.fypower.org/res/energy.html It says that lighting takes 22% of the average energy consumption in a California household, refrigeration takes second at 19%. They counted both interior and exterior lighting together, and the original source for their data is the California Energy Commission. I imagine that this number shifts based on where one is located. Australia, the country from which your statistics came, already has a very aggressive program to save energy wasted on lighting; they recently passed a law that will soon make it illegal entirely to use incandescent light bulbs at all. So, I think that your statistics, if anything, support the idea that trying to save energy on lights works.
I agree that the article is overzealous in its estimation of how easy Ubuntu is, but I think that that is because people in general are looking for an "easy button" that will prevent them from having to learn anything about their computers. I think a better statement would be that Linux now requires the same amount or less tweaking than Windows (which for some reason is the stick against which all is measured in home computing). Windows is no better as far as slowdown over time is concerned; did you see the discussion in this very same thread about this topic? Its here:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=226973&c id=18383893/
I would argue that Ubuntu's solution is clearly superior to the Windows solution, which appears to be to reinstall your operating system. Of course, I know how to find solutions to Linux problems and I don't know much about Windows, and people who know about Windows but not Linux probably have the opposite opinion.
However, I think that it bears noting that my tip is in no way required, the system functions fine without it, just slower. Just because you don't HAVE to tweak Ubuntu doesn't mean you should not be ABLE to tweak it.
Take care
-mat