> and for a large segment of us the noise generated is the dominant feature.
This is indeed a dominant feature of conventional hard drives. Audible alert of system trashing.
is quite common in China. However, as for UOF, this is not totally due to the Chinese standardization body. When the idea of the UOF standard was forming in 2002, ODF had not been on its standardization track yet. It turned out that the development of UOF was slower and ODF got ahead.
Another example of this kind of NIH is the standards for Chinese character encoding. There are a series of "GBxxxxx" standards (GB is for Guo-Biao, acronym for national standard in Chinese) which are totally incompatible with Unicode, but both GB and Unicode are widely used China, causing a great deal of pain and trouble. Some Web developers, unaware of the character encoding problem, screw up the Web pages by sending the wrong header or using the wrong XML declaration. Some email programs automatically fuck up your email's encoding. This also made distributed development more difficult.
Usually the "invented-here" standards are not technically better than the others. Some of them are too restricted in scope (e.g. the GB encodings can handle English, Chinese, Japanese kana and the Cyrillic alphabet, but few others). But now it may be too late to make a change.
xiaonei.com (WARNING: Chinese language, with Fl*sh and animated GIF, a bit slow to load).
Xiaonei.com was designed to mimic both the look-and-feel and the function of Facebook.
> 7zip is screwed up in Linux. I installed a wine version, AND a native version, only the wine version will start and it flickers and won't let me select a package to extract. Making it unusable.
You may wish to read the 7zip manual (man 7za). 7zip works fine for me (native version, WINE not tested). The usage is somewhat counterintuitive and there are known limitations (described also in the man page).
> Random crashes. I mean, probably as many or more as I get regularly in Windows, with the added inconvenience of ctrl+alt+bckspce not being near as good as ctrl+alt+delete, which brings up a handy task menu for me to clean up (usually).
If your machine *regularly* crash in Windows *and* Linux I guess this is quite a serious problem, likely hardware malfunction. Probably you can blame neither Windows or Linux for this. What the ctrl-alt-backspace key combo does (by default) is to kill the X server, thus kicking out all connected client programs and sending you back to the X login screen --- normally this is not very helpful for debugging. If an app appears to be "dead" and you don't wish to wait, you can use "top" to display a list of processes and kill the offending one (press "k", the pid, and CR). One thing I really like about Linux is this --- if an app crashes really hard and garbles the X screen, I can always get a text terminal by pressing ctrl-alt-F[123456] and login, then ps for the super bad app and kill him. I don't think it is possible to "hot-switch" between graphic and text modes in Windows.
> No two sound things going at once
I guess this is because of the incompatible sound libraries that is used by different applications. Maybe the music app is using pulseaudio/ALSA while the game app is using its own static library or some of the special sound libraries for games only (sorry I couldn't remember the names). Generally you can't have two different processes simultaneously acquiring the same sound hardware --- the "mix" must be done at software level via the sound libraries. If the sound libraries conflict with each other, software "mix" may not work.
> I like how Windows arranges it's GUI, start button, quicklaunch, then task list, then systray and clock. Less real estate, all the same functionality, but without a top AND bottom bar.
You can change this with most window managers. For example I use XFCE4 with both bars (or "panels") set to hidden. In this way I get the most working space out of the desktop. I did add some shortcut icons to the panel but I seldom use them (When I want a GUI program, e.g. firefox to start, I press alt-F2 to bring up a tiny "run program" box and type the name --- usually the first 2~3 letters are enough).
I'm concerned that the parent is modded Funny.
This is a serious security problem --- trusting 3rd party binary blob and testing/patching your system with it.
Anyone who gets in between me and my morning coffee should be
insecure.
Unmoderated access to unprotected coffee pots from Internet users
might lead to several kinds of "denial of coffee service" attacks.
The improper use of filtration devices might admit trojan grounds.
Filtration is not a good virus protection method.
Putting coffee grounds into Internet plumbing may result in clogged
plumbing, which would entail the services of an Internet Plumber
[PLUMB], who would, in turn, require an Internet Plumber's Helper.
Access authentication will be discussed in a separate memo.
... only old people use RedOffice.
Well seriously, although RedOffice is rarely used even in China (most of us use OO or MS Office), it's worth a try. As far as I know, the RedOffice is part of the Red Flag OS, a Redhat-based Linux desktop OS aimed at the business desktop market. One thing I don't like about the Red Flag, apart from the name, is their tradition of copying MS's UI design. It's desktop environment (GNOME if I remembered correctly) looks notoriously like Windows XP.
Several years ago Red Flag lost to MS in the bid of providing desktop OS for the Chinese government. Not surprisingly, since you know there's nothing MS can't corrupt AND the government IS corrupt. Since then I thought Red Flag was dead. It's somehow a little surprising to see they made a Slashdot front-page story.
One thing good about Red Flag, though, is the Chinese language support.
BTW If I had time I'd write a new OO UI that closely mimics EMACS. No toolbar/menu/ribbon/tape/etc. Use C-n and so on to navigate through the doc. All EMACS key bindings works in the expected way. Dialogue windows are invoked by M-x.;)
I'm a Chinese and I can tell you Orwell is not banned here. I have a Chinese translation of "1984" bought from a local bookstore, as well a biography of him. Other works such as "Animal Farm" are also available in Chinese. Also I can read the English text on the Web which is not filtered by the Great Firewall. In fact, George Orwell is quite popular here because of his theme of anti-totalitarianism.
In modern Chinese language, especially in Chinese Internet culture, there are equivalents of "big brother", "Room 101" and "crimethink" in Chinese.
Back to the topic: of course I hate the Party guys and I wish I could fsck them to death, but in China every Yang has its Yin. Ever heard of the Stockholm syndrome ? That's what quite a few of my fellow Chinese have got. Long days of suppression has formed a malicious intimacy between the Party and the people, even if the evidence of human right abuse is everywhere to see. The current president Hu, once conducted genocide in Tibet, is even respected by some for just that.
Last Friday I met Richard Stallman in Beijing with an audience of programmers and FOSS users. In his speech RMS briefly mentioned the Tibet issue (in comparison with Bush's invasion of Iraq) and the human right issues, and he got protest (but in general he was welcomed by the audience, anyway). In China if a foreigner make critical comments about the Chinese regime, he would find himself surrounded by flames and sheer insults, no matter his idea is reasonable or not.
I guess there will be comments like this from a Chinese (read: Chinese Joe Smith, not the govn't): "This perfectly demonstrates our growing power in economy and technology, as well as our increasing ability to defend our nation. You American slashdotters don't know a thing."
Slashdot Mirror
Those machines are probably Windows only, locked down, and subjected to the Great Firewall, and there are only six.
I wonder all your guys made these by wetware/hand or you just wrote clever lexers/pattern recognition programs to do that...
are two different things. You can't expect finding much about issue tracking in a version control tool's documentation.
So what about:
* Bugzilla
* Trac
* Mantis
* Roundup
* RT
* ???
* Oh, never mind
Yep. There you could finally feel the bullet running into your head and love the Big Brother.
after ten minutes the uptime wraps to zero, crashing the system.
don't know what hardware is used by Dell but this list may help.
I guess One Windows Per Child must be very confusing to the kids who are learning English.
1) Running a free website. Being bullied by trolls.
2) Posting to AskSlashdot for solution.
3) ???
4) Profit!
> and for a large segment of us the noise generated is the dominant feature. This is indeed a dominant feature of conventional hard drives. Audible alert of system trashing.
Yes. See my sig. Don't know whether the CherryPal spin of Firefox supports extensions, though.
is quite common in China. However, as for UOF, this is not totally due to the Chinese standardization body. When the idea of the UOF standard was forming in 2002, ODF had not been on its standardization track yet. It turned out that the development of UOF was slower and ODF got ahead.
Another example of this kind of NIH is the standards for Chinese character encoding. There are a series of "GBxxxxx" standards (GB is for Guo-Biao, acronym for national standard in Chinese) which are totally incompatible with Unicode, but both GB and Unicode are widely used China, causing a great deal of pain and trouble. Some Web developers, unaware of the character encoding problem, screw up the Web pages by sending the wrong header or using the wrong XML declaration. Some email programs automatically fuck up your email's encoding. This also made distributed development more difficult.
Usually the "invented-here" standards are not technically better than the others. Some of them are too restricted in scope (e.g. the GB encodings can handle English, Chinese, Japanese kana and the Cyrillic alphabet, but few others). But now it may be too late to make a change.
xiaonei.com (WARNING: Chinese language, with Fl*sh and animated GIF, a bit slow to load).
Xiaonei.com was designed to mimic both the look-and-feel and the function of Facebook.
> 7zip is screwed up in Linux. I installed a wine version, AND a native version, only the wine version will start and it flickers and won't let me select a package to extract. Making it unusable.
You may wish to read the 7zip manual (man 7za). 7zip works fine for me (native version, WINE not tested). The usage is somewhat counterintuitive and there are known limitations (described also in the man page).
> Random crashes. I mean, probably as many or more as I get regularly in Windows, with the added inconvenience of ctrl+alt+bckspce not being near as good as ctrl+alt+delete, which brings up a handy task menu for me to clean up (usually).
If your machine *regularly* crash in Windows *and* Linux I guess this is quite a serious problem, likely hardware malfunction. Probably you can blame neither Windows or Linux for this. What the ctrl-alt-backspace key combo does (by default) is to kill the X server, thus kicking out all connected client programs and sending you back to the X login screen --- normally this is not very helpful for debugging. If an app appears to be "dead" and you don't wish to wait, you can use "top" to display a list of processes and kill the offending one (press "k", the pid, and CR). One thing I really like about Linux is this --- if an app crashes really hard and garbles the X screen, I can always get a text terminal by pressing ctrl-alt-F[123456] and login, then ps for the super bad app and kill him. I don't think it is possible to "hot-switch" between graphic and text modes in Windows.
> No two sound things going at once
I guess this is because of the incompatible sound libraries that is used by different applications. Maybe the music app is using pulseaudio/ALSA while the game app is using its own static library or some of the special sound libraries for games only (sorry I couldn't remember the names). Generally you can't have two different processes simultaneously acquiring the same sound hardware --- the "mix" must be done at software level via the sound libraries. If the sound libraries conflict with each other, software "mix" may not work.
> I like how Windows arranges it's GUI, start button, quicklaunch, then task list, then systray and clock. Less real estate, all the same functionality, but without a top AND bottom bar.
You can change this with most window managers. For example I use XFCE4 with both bars (or "panels") set to hidden. In this way I get the most working space out of the desktop. I did add some shortcut icons to the panel but I seldom use them (When I want a GUI program, e.g. firefox to start, I press alt-F2 to bring up a tiny "run program" box and type the name --- usually the first 2~3 letters are enough).
Text editors for morons.
sh with dd is enough for everyone.
Grote Reber
I'm concerned that the parent is modded Funny.
This is a serious security problem --- trusting 3rd party binary blob and testing/patching your system with it.
Your laptops must be very special. Most of us are not that lucky --- we use the ``Mass-Production'' models.
7. Security Considerations
Anyone who gets in between me and my morning coffee should be
insecure.
Unmoderated access to unprotected coffee pots from Internet users
might lead to several kinds of "denial of coffee service" attacks.
The improper use of filtration devices might admit trojan grounds.
Filtration is not a good virus protection method.
Putting coffee grounds into Internet plumbing may result in clogged
plumbing, which would entail the services of an Internet Plumber
[PLUMB], who would, in turn, require an Internet Plumber's Helper.
Access authentication will be discussed in a separate memo.
Hey, you must be freaking out at the tab-completion feature of bash?
... only old people use RedOffice. Well seriously, although RedOffice is rarely used even in China (most of us use OO or MS Office), it's worth a try. As far as I know, the RedOffice is part of the Red Flag OS, a Redhat-based Linux desktop OS aimed at the business desktop market. One thing I don't like about the Red Flag, apart from the name, is their tradition of copying MS's UI design. It's desktop environment (GNOME if I remembered correctly) looks notoriously like Windows XP. Several years ago Red Flag lost to MS in the bid of providing desktop OS for the Chinese government. Not surprisingly, since you know there's nothing MS can't corrupt AND the government IS corrupt. Since then I thought Red Flag was dead. It's somehow a little surprising to see they made a Slashdot front-page story. One thing good about Red Flag, though, is the Chinese language support. BTW If I had time I'd write a new OO UI that closely mimics EMACS. No toolbar/menu/ribbon/tape/etc. Use C-n and so on to navigate through the doc. All EMACS key bindings works in the expected way. Dialogue windows are invoked by M-x. ;)
I'm a Chinese and I can tell you Orwell is not banned here. I have a Chinese translation of "1984" bought from a local bookstore, as well a biography of him. Other works such as "Animal Farm" are also available in Chinese. Also I can read the English text on the Web which is not filtered by the Great Firewall. In fact, George Orwell is quite popular here because of his theme of anti-totalitarianism.
In modern Chinese language, especially in Chinese Internet culture, there are equivalents of "big brother", "Room 101" and "crimethink" in Chinese.
Back to the topic: of course I hate the Party guys and I wish I could fsck them to death, but in China every Yang has its Yin. Ever heard of the Stockholm syndrome ? That's what quite a few of my fellow Chinese have got. Long days of suppression has formed a malicious intimacy between the Party and the people, even if the evidence of human right abuse is everywhere to see. The current president Hu, once conducted genocide in Tibet, is even respected by some for just that.
Last Friday I met Richard Stallman in Beijing with an audience of programmers and FOSS users. In his speech RMS briefly mentioned the Tibet issue (in comparison with Bush's invasion of Iraq) and the human right issues, and he got protest (but in general he was welcomed by the audience, anyway). In China if a foreigner make critical comments about the Chinese regime, he would find himself surrounded by flames and sheer insults, no matter his idea is reasonable or not.
I guess there will be comments like this from a Chinese (read: Chinese Joe Smith, not the govn't): "This perfectly demonstrates our growing power in economy and technology, as well as our increasing ability to defend our nation. You American slashdotters don't know a thing."
TFA's last picture is a shot of hand-drawing with MS Paint.
Can anyone with psychoanalysis knowledge explain the impulse hidden in that piece of drawing?
Too bad. A buffer overflow in the main toilet. I can smell core-dumps.
Since the toilet is such an important part of the system, why not build a redundant one? Redundant Array of Inexpensive Toilets?
BTW. According to TFA there's still a toilet available in the Soyuz spaceship attached to the station. However that one was not as easy to use.
So what?
I don't know what this is up to, but ...
> print hello+comma+space+world
This is performance killer. You should instead write:
print "%s%s%s%s" % (hello, comma, space, world)