Something is wrong. I won't say my Ubuntu boxes have never crashed but they are few and far between. Both of my Ubuntu desktops last for at least several months worth of uptime and usually longer. If you have some local Linux talent available, throw the guy a beer to tshoot it for you. As with Windows, the culprit tends to be video drivers. If you're using ndiswrapper or some such then suspect the wireless driver as well.
I'll also note that I don't run the oh-so-trendy spinning cube desktop. At least not yet.
Another thing to consider is some faulty HW doesn't get noticed until boot time.
In the case of certain types of disc failure, that is a good reason not to power down a server unless forced to. Note that I say "power down" and not "reboot" as rebooting doesn't usually spin down the platters. I've had long running machines survive reboots fine but lose a disk or two if forcibly powered down. Ike remnants took us down for a week and I had quite the fun time rebuilding a raid array that failed one of members proper and the designated hotspare. Prior to the outage, that machine had been up for 6 months.
I'm not going to get into the habit of powering down servers just to see if the disks will spin back up or not. The moral of this little story is that the platters of a disk may well be fine but the mechanicals driving them may not do the correct things if they have to start from a cold state.
I that's Flash Gordon you're thinking of. I rather liked that the movie was 30s sci-fi cheese with decent special effects. Getta load of those tailfins!
There's some other registry tweaks that may apply and you can google for them. The above referenced MS article makes it sound as if all those DHCP servers are implemented incorrectly but then when Vista is the only client having trouble.........
That is a separate feature from being able to import PDFs into Draw. Still, that is handy in that anybody with a PDF reader can read those PDFs and anybody with OOO can edit it as well. It's my understanding that this can be done with Calc as well?
But if it really *can* import any PDF, allow basic editing and export, that could really be a boon. Other apps that allow that are either incredibly expensive, horrible to use or just too out-of-date. Does it support "encrypted" PDF's if you have the passwords, etc.? Does it allow image/text editing/extraction from a PDF? If so, then this update would be worth it for that alone.
It imports into Draw. Short edits to text and filling in forms is simple. If you're wanting to make extensive changes to the formatting and style of the document then it is more difficult but possible. The PDF is treated as a vector image with text layers and objects for graphics and table elements. Upcoming versions of the PDF Import Extension will import into writer which will make extensive edits easier but at the expense of fidelity.
Because Sun is very slow to accept features and bugfixes from outside contributors and have made that process very slow and bureaucratic. Furthermore, Novell is including additional worthwhile features that the authors aren't willing to assign copyright to Sun on. Others have commented on the Sun's indifferent stewardship of OOO and the following does more to answer your question.
NeoOffice bases itself from Novell's go-oo semi-fork so it inherits the extra features of that version. They are working on NeoOffice 3 which will employ the 3.0 codebase but it is unclear to me whether or not they are still going to use Java to implement the UI. In any case, losing the need for X11 isn't the only reason for NeoOffice. If you want the solver, various import filters that the Sun branch doesn't include, or bugfixes the NeoOffice team have had trouble getting Sun to include then NeoOffice will still be worth a look.
They have a nice set of packages that will light up your Ethernet and Wireless out of the box. LXDE and wicd to manage the wireless with a nice sane Debian Testing repository was hella nicer than trying to get newish stuff on that mutated Xandros they come with. The last time I checked they didn't supply a driver for the camera although the standard Debian repository has an automated build source package for it that wasn't too awful bad to get working. Other than that, everything works. The hotkeys for brightness and volume even worked although you don't get the popup on screen for them.
I have an iPod that has never even seen iTunes. Amarok saw that it was a new iPod and offered to initialize it. Loading it up albumart and all was dead easy. iTunes looks really COOL especially Coverflow but I find it a cluttered PITA to actually use. For instance, I replaced a lot of my albumart and had to fight an iTunes instance on a MacBook to get it seeing it all. iTunes for some reason doesn't even pick up the id3tags on some tracks or the art on other validly tagged files. Amarok on the other hand got most of it just by seeing a lot of tracks had changed. "Rescan Collection" got the rest of it. Amarok has some warts too. I sometimes have to forcibly eject bad art thumbnails but it is a lot closer to Just Working with MY collection than iTunes is.
Woz does have some aptitude for products that please technical types but are approachable for non-technical types. Now people may not want to "ssh into their home SlackWare server" but they might want to do things like "get that baby picture I have at home and forgot to put on the phone". Even the high and mighty all-consumer-friendly Apple doesn't think of everything and killing a few popular apps that competing phones get may serve to remind them of that. The geeks DO occasionally come up with something people like.
Simulations aren't useless. They can show that the models we're using are logically consistent (or not) or they can be used plump hirtherto unsuspected consequences of our models. A computer simulation is basically an automated version of the theoretical models scientists use everyday so you may as well say that scientists shouldn't conjecture when understanding is incomplete but then science wouldn't get done. Now if you were to say that conclusions drawn from a simulation should be confirmed by other means then I'd agree with you.
It is not a matter of ownership. Words have a particular meaning and this is a case of MS trying to throw its weight around to change the popular understanding of the meaning of "Open Source" to something that is favorable for them. Last time I checked, "Open Source" does NOT mean "something that is only legal to use on Windows".
I very much like the idea but the FOSS community and/or corporates interested in pushing such a thing needs to get cracking on a GOOD non-Adobe version of Flash and (crap!) a GOOD non-MS Silverlight.
Re:It's still essentially 8-bit.
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That post:
1. Was reasonable 2. Factual 3. Real-World 4. Concerned the GIMP
I'm checking out my window for winged porcine creatures now.
The problem with that is Apple will sometimes decide to address a market they weren't addressing before. When doing so, I'd fully expect them to quit issuing licenses to third-parties for any now covered categories assuming they can bring themselves to do any form of third party licensing.
Also, the larger models of the MacBook Pro can serve as Desktop Replacements IMHO. I have one that is issued to me at work and it is a throughly ridiculous piece of equipment though I like it's ability to store all of the restore images I'm carrying around.
OpenSolaris which has downloadable source code but I'm not sure if it is OSS
Most people agree the license on it meets the OSI definition. It isn't GPL compatible but that doesn't suffice to make something not FOSS. The real issue is that Sun runs OpenSolaris the way they run OpenOffice. That makes it difficult to build a community that has significant contributions from non-Sun employees.
Back when Woz was still a major management and engineering force (think pre-Macintosh), Apple was much more friendly to hackers. Apple II family machines were reasonably open in terms of both hardware and software and many offbeat and interesting things were done. It was with the Macintosh that the Jobs way became dominant and the Jobs way is to provide a good experience for (most) end users by being highly controlling of what can be done with the platform. I suspect they are pushing it too far with iPhone and are going for short term wins at the expense of the future. Ballmer may indeed be a sweaty monkey ass but alienating your developer base is rarely a good idea.
Still, there are things which require an insane amount of specific knowledge so you can handle them. Do you think those topics and fields should not be researched, any longer?
No, but the best possible attempts should be made to explain the gist of them to the public. "You need to study for years before you'll understand this but trust me the work is important and cannot go forward without the grant." just Won't Go Over. Some politicians like to make names for themselves by undercutting "The Eggheads". Refusing to even attempt comprehensible summaries of what the work could mean for our understanding in general and perhaps future technologies gives those politicians easy work.
'Can be understood by an interested layman' is definitely the wrong metric for measuring scientific advancement.
That is very short sighted. Most of the low-hanging fruit of science has been plucked. Much research requires support from the public to be done since the tools required are so costly. Europe has the Large Hadron Collider and we DON'T have the SSC because the funding to finish it was cut in the early nineties.
Many in science like to scorn explainers like Sagan. Asimov, and Gould. They loftily dismiss anyone hasn't put in the years of specialized study they have. For such intelligent people that is seriously stupid. Pure science increasingly needs public funding to get done. Corporations are only going to fund research that fattens their bottom lines in the short term. Since public funding is necessary then the public has to have some understanding and sympathy for the goals of science. That means better science education and not scorning those who try to explain what is going on to philistine laymen.
For that matter, boot a live cd and rip the tunes then reboot into Windows. Linux NTFS support is pretty good these days but if writing to one of your working drives makes you nervous then just use a flash drive.
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Something is wrong. I won't say my Ubuntu boxes have never crashed but they are few and far between. Both of my Ubuntu desktops last for at least several months worth of uptime and usually longer. If you have some local Linux talent available, throw the guy a beer to tshoot it for you. As with Windows, the culprit tends to be video drivers. If you're using ndiswrapper or some such then suspect the wireless driver as well.
I'll also note that I don't run the oh-so-trendy spinning cube desktop. At least not yet.
Another thing to consider is some faulty HW doesn't get noticed until boot time.
In the case of certain types of disc failure, that is a good reason not to power down a server unless forced to. Note that I say "power down" and not "reboot" as rebooting doesn't usually spin down the platters. I've had long running machines survive reboots fine but lose a disk or two if forcibly powered down. Ike remnants took us down for a week and I had quite the fun time rebuilding a raid array that failed one of members proper and the designated hotspare. Prior to the outage, that machine had been up for 6 months.
I'm not going to get into the habit of powering down servers just to see if the disks will spin back up or not. The moral of this little story is that the platters of a disk may well be fine but the mechanicals driving them may not do the correct things if they have to start from a cold state.
I that's Flash Gordon you're thinking of. I rather liked that the movie was 30s sci-fi cheese with decent special effects. Getta load of those tailfins!
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233
There's some other registry tweaks that may apply and you can google for them. The above referenced MS article makes it sound as if all those DHCP servers are implemented incorrectly but then when Vista is the only client having trouble.........
That is a separate feature from being able to import PDFs into Draw. Still, that is handy in that anybody with a PDF reader can read those PDFs and anybody with OOO can edit it as well. It's my understanding that this can be done with Calc as well?
But if it really *can* import any PDF, allow basic editing and export, that could really be a boon. Other apps that allow that are either incredibly expensive, horrible to use or just too out-of-date. Does it support "encrypted" PDF's if you have the passwords, etc.? Does it allow image/text editing/extraction from a PDF? If so, then this update would be worth it for that alone.
It imports into Draw. Short edits to text and filling in forms is simple. If you're wanting to make extensive changes to the formatting and style of the document then it is more difficult but possible. The PDF is treated as a vector image with text layers and objects for graphics and table elements. Upcoming versions of the PDF Import Extension will import into writer which will make extensive edits easier but at the expense of fidelity.
For some reason when I drove an old Crown Vic people would just start going slower when I approached. Just never could figure that one out ;-).
Because Sun is very slow to accept features and bugfixes from outside contributors and have made that process very slow and bureaucratic. Furthermore, Novell is including additional worthwhile features that the authors aren't willing to assign copyright to Sun on. Others have commented on the Sun's indifferent stewardship of OOO and the following does more to answer your question.
http://www.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ooo-commit-stats-2008.html
NeoOffice bases itself from Novell's go-oo semi-fork so it inherits the extra features of that version. They are working on NeoOffice 3 which will employ the 3.0 codebase but it is unclear to me whether or not they are still going to use Java to implement the UI. In any case, losing the need for X11 isn't the only reason for NeoOffice. If you want the solver, various import filters that the Sun branch doesn't include, or bugfixes the NeoOffice team have had trouble getting Sun to include then NeoOffice will still be worth a look.
That's a 69 with 2 fingers in yer ass.
I always say that once one gets in it invites several hundred of it's closest friends over and they have a keg party on your machine.
There is an EEE subproject in Debian that did a decent job with my EEE:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC
They have a nice set of packages that will light up your Ethernet and Wireless out of the box. LXDE and wicd to manage the wireless with a nice sane Debian Testing repository was hella nicer than trying to get newish stuff on that mutated Xandros they come with. The last time I checked they didn't supply a driver for the camera although the standard Debian repository has an automated build source package for it that wasn't too awful bad to get working. Other than that, everything works. The hotkeys for brightness and volume even worked although you don't get the popup on screen for them.
I have an iPod that has never even seen iTunes. Amarok saw that it was a new iPod and offered to initialize it. Loading it up albumart and all was dead easy. iTunes looks really COOL especially Coverflow but I find it a cluttered PITA to actually use. For instance, I replaced a lot of my albumart and had to fight an iTunes instance on a MacBook to get it seeing it all. iTunes for some reason doesn't even pick up the id3tags on some tracks or the art on other validly tagged files. Amarok on the other hand got most of it just by seeing a lot of tracks had changed. "Rescan Collection" got the rest of it. Amarok has some warts too. I sometimes have to forcibly eject bad art thumbnails but it is a lot closer to Just Working with MY collection than iTunes is.
Woz does have some aptitude for products that please technical types but are approachable for non-technical types. Now people may not want to "ssh into their home SlackWare server" but they might want to do things like "get that baby picture I have at home and forgot to put on the phone". Even the high and mighty all-consumer-friendly Apple doesn't think of everything and killing a few popular apps that competing phones get may serve to remind them of that. The geeks DO occasionally come up with something people like.
Simulations aren't useless. They can show that the models we're using are logically consistent (or not) or they can be used plump hirtherto unsuspected consequences of our models. A computer simulation is basically an automated version of the theoretical models scientists use everyday so you may as well say that scientists shouldn't conjecture when understanding is incomplete but then science wouldn't get done. Now if you were to say that conclusions drawn from a simulation should be confirmed by other means then I'd agree with you.
It is not a matter of ownership. Words have a particular meaning and this is a case of MS trying to throw its weight around to change the popular understanding of the meaning of "Open Source" to something that is favorable for them. Last time I checked, "Open Source" does NOT mean "something that is only legal to use on Windows".
I very much like the idea but the FOSS community and/or corporates interested in pushing such a thing needs to get cracking on a GOOD non-Adobe version of Flash and (crap!) a GOOD non-MS Silverlight.
That post:
1. Was reasonable
2. Factual
3. Real-World
4. Concerned the GIMP
I'm checking out my window for winged porcine creatures now.
The problem with that is Apple will sometimes decide to address a market they weren't addressing before. When doing so, I'd fully expect them to quit issuing licenses to third-parties for any now covered categories assuming they can bring themselves to do any form of third party licensing.
Also, the larger models of the MacBook Pro can serve as Desktop Replacements IMHO. I have one that is issued to me at work and it is a throughly ridiculous piece of equipment though I like it's ability to store all of the restore images I'm carrying around.
OpenSolaris which has downloadable source code but I'm not sure if it is OSS
Most people agree the license on it meets the OSI definition. It isn't GPL compatible but that doesn't suffice to make something not FOSS. The real issue is that Sun runs OpenSolaris the way they run OpenOffice. That makes it difficult to build a community that has significant contributions from non-Sun employees.
It is but with what you pay for hardware that supports it you may well have other good reasons to consider Solaris instead.
Back when Woz was still a major management and engineering force (think pre-Macintosh), Apple was much more friendly to hackers. Apple II family machines were reasonably open in terms of both hardware and software and many offbeat and interesting things were done. It was with the Macintosh that the Jobs way became dominant and the Jobs way is to provide a good experience for (most) end users by being highly controlling of what can be done with the platform. I suspect they are pushing it too far with iPhone and are going for short term wins at the expense of the future. Ballmer may indeed be a sweaty monkey ass but alienating your developer base is rarely a good idea.
Still, there are things which require an insane amount of specific knowledge so you can handle them. Do you think those topics and fields should not be researched, any longer?
No, but the best possible attempts should be made to explain the gist of them to the public. "You need to study for years before you'll understand this but trust me the work is important and cannot go forward without the grant." just Won't Go Over. Some politicians like to make names for themselves by undercutting "The Eggheads". Refusing to even attempt comprehensible summaries of what the work could mean for our understanding in general and perhaps future technologies gives those politicians easy work.
'Can be understood by an interested layman' is definitely the wrong metric for measuring scientific advancement.
That is very short sighted. Most of the low-hanging fruit of science has been plucked. Much research requires support from the public to be done since the tools required are so costly. Europe has the Large Hadron Collider and we DON'T have the SSC because the funding to finish it was cut in the early nineties.
Many in science like to scorn explainers like Sagan. Asimov, and Gould. They loftily dismiss anyone hasn't put in the years of specialized study they have. For such intelligent people that is seriously stupid. Pure science increasingly needs public funding to get done. Corporations are only going to fund research that fattens their bottom lines in the short term. Since public funding is necessary then the public has to have some understanding and sympathy for the goals of science. That means better science education and not scorning those who try to explain what is going on to philistine laymen.
For that matter, boot a live cd and rip the tunes then reboot into Windows. Linux NTFS support is pretty good these days but if writing to one of your working drives makes you nervous then just use a flash drive.