Even more fun is installing native code plugins, which requires the root password. I went hunting in Chromium's code recently, trying to work out what locations it would load Google's Talk/Hangouts plugin from, in an attempt to trim the list of locations the plugin's files have to be symlinked to when installing it.
Whereas the "old" NPAPI plugins have a bunch of allowed locations, but usually/usr/lib/nsbrowser/plugins is common to most browsers suporting them and Firefox even appears to allow them to be in in your user profile at ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/plugins/ (MDN docs), the path to the PPAPI plugins directory is hard-coded in the source for Chrome browsers, to <directory-containing-chrome-binary>/pepper/ (/usr/lib/chromium-browser/pepper,/opt/google/chrome/pepper, etc), AND the filenames of the (very short) list of supported plugins is similarly hard-coded.
There appears to be a command-line option to load plugins from arbitrary locations for development, whether that would work to load a "released" plugin like Hangouts I couldn't say.
I keep my/etc in a git repository now. Commit changes after each round of system updates and if I change anything major, keep a couple of copies of the repository on different machines. It has saved me from myself at least once when I kept the wrong copy of a config file after an upgrade.
You have to put up with a few apps (cups and wicd are good examples) that needlessly change files in response to hardware events, but in general the strategy has served me well.
People who modded this troll really need to stop and think about it - parent is just about spot on. The look and feel of the vast majority of GTK apps is frankly awful.
Some consistency in menuitem dimensions would be nice.
Now admittedly maybe this only manifests when you're using small interface fonts (I'm using 7pt here, for reference). Taking GIMP's menus as an example, menu items with images are significantly larger than ones without - a full 25% larger (20 vs 16 px). I don't have a huge number of gtk apps on my system to check this in, but inkscape and wireshark seem to have the same issue.
Fix the damn file picker.
This is a pet peeve of mine too. Bearing a striking resemblance to one I remember from Apple Mac systems pre colour monitors, the current design of the filepicker was in no way an improvement.
For some reason or another the "location" text field is hidden by default (and even when shown, is oddly not populated by default with the path to the current directory). What could have been useful breadcrumb-style navigation buttons were added, except all but the one representing the current directory is hidden until you click a different button (this is despite there being the entire width of the file picker for them to fill). The lack of switchable view modes in the file listing is mystifying, it seems to display "thumbnails" of images when browsing, but it doesn't seem to be possible to make those thumbnails any bigger than 16x16px.
That non-optional minimize effect is cringe worthy.
Also the effect that draws big bold black rectangles on your screen to indicate the borders of hidden windows while alt-tabbing. Something regrettably KDE copied. I don't need this, if I wanted to waste my time with annoying and ultimately useless visual effects I'd install compiz.
In reality, once it has become difficult or event impossible to make the system behave in a manner conducive to it actually being useful for anything, it's time to look elsewhere. As I often have to remind people, just because they are happy with the default settings doesn't mean everyone will be.
Had you considered Sandisk's (I believe there are other manufacturers with similar devices, but I can't remember which right now) Firewire CF reader?
There is something about the simplicity of the single-slot card reader and nice fast FireWire 800 interface, rather than some lambda-in-one usb monstrosity. My only complaint is it has no daisy-chaining port, the bus certainly has bandwidth to spare.
I have a certain curiosity about this card reader too, no sense in laptop users being left out of the fast card reader party (providing power to the Sandisk FireWire reader is the issue here - Apple's laptops are the only models I can think of with powered FireWire ports). I'd hope most operating systems these days wouldn't spit the dummy when presented with a hot-plug PCI-e device, but you never know.
I tried a couple of the betas of 10. Where flash 9 just locks up and/or crashes the browser occasionally, these versions of flash 10 crashed it every single time the plugin tried to load.
Until they have "released" something (I use the word release only because they do, you and I both know it isn't going to be production-quality, just like every version before it) I'm staying well away.
I have a comparatively ancient (6 years I think I've had them) set of 2.1 TDK speakers with NXT panels. They have to do it that way, the subwoofer (I use this term only because they do, 3 inch drivers don't really count) makes up for the lack of bass response in the speakers.
Overall they're adequate, not terribly loud but clear enough sound, at least in any case the satellites don't take up much desk space, and the sub/amp provides a decent heated footrest. (See http://dansdata.com/s150.htm for pictures)
Ask and ye shall receive... boredom really is an awful thing. (It's all in the jar files in chrome/ in case anyone cares, mozilla.dtd and mozilla.xhtml)
Yes, the DIGITAL OUTPUT from CCD/CMOS sensors might be 10/12/14 bits nowadays, but it pains me to have to explain that reading a 14 bit digital signal from an analogue device with ~9 bits worth of useful information doesn't actually provide any more dynamic range. Finer graduations yes (but since our eyes are more sensitive to variations in brightness than colour, isn't going to help a lot).
If you want single-exposure HDR, you need sensor site with varying light sensitivity on the same chip (IE the Fuji Super CCD SR). Foveon just doesn't do that.
In fact, most police radar units are +/- 3mph. A consumer GPS speed indicator is typically accurate to within.75 mph.
Actually even better nowadays. The now fairly common SiRF III GPS chipset is claimed accurate to 0.1m/s; 0.36km/h or 0.22mi/h.
Slashdot Mirror
Even more fun is installing native code plugins, which requires the root password. I went hunting in Chromium's code recently, trying to work out what locations it would load Google's Talk/Hangouts plugin from, in an attempt to trim the list of locations the plugin's files have to be symlinked to when installing it.
Whereas the "old" NPAPI plugins have a bunch of allowed locations, but usually /usr/lib/nsbrowser/plugins is common to most browsers suporting them and Firefox even appears to allow them to be in in your user profile at ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/plugins/ (MDN docs), the path to the PPAPI plugins directory is hard-coded in the source for Chrome browsers, to <directory-containing-chrome-binary>/pepper/ (/usr/lib/chromium-browser/pepper, /opt/google/chrome/pepper, etc), AND the filenames of the (very short) list of supported plugins is similarly hard-coded.
There appears to be a command-line option to load plugins from arbitrary locations for development, whether that would work to load a "released" plugin like Hangouts I couldn't say.
You have to put up with a few apps (cups and wicd are good examples) that needlessly change files in response to hardware events, but in general the strategy has served me well.
Now admittedly maybe this only manifests when you're using small interface fonts (I'm using 7pt here, for reference). Taking GIMP's menus as an example, menu items with images are significantly larger than ones without - a full 25% larger (20 vs 16 px). I don't have a huge number of gtk apps on my system to check this in, but inkscape and wireshark seem to have the same issue.
This is a pet peeve of mine too. Bearing a striking resemblance to one I remember from Apple Mac systems pre colour monitors, the current design of the filepicker was in no way an improvement.
For some reason or another the "location" text field is hidden by default (and even when shown, is oddly not populated by default with the path to the current directory). What could have been useful breadcrumb-style navigation buttons were added, except all but the one representing the current directory is hidden until you click a different button (this is despite there being the entire width of the file picker for them to fill). The lack of switchable view modes in the file listing is mystifying, it seems to display "thumbnails" of images when browsing, but it doesn't seem to be possible to make those thumbnails any bigger than 16x16px.
Also the effect that draws big bold black rectangles on your screen to indicate the borders of hidden windows while alt-tabbing. Something regrettably KDE copied. I don't need this, if I wanted to waste my time with annoying and ultimately useless visual effects I'd install compiz.
In reality, once it has become difficult or event impossible to make the system behave in a manner conducive to it actually being useful for anything, it's time to look elsewhere. As I often have to remind people, just because they are happy with the default settings doesn't mean everyone will be.
Mostly Harmless
Had you considered Sandisk's (I believe there are other manufacturers with similar devices, but I can't remember which right now) Firewire CF reader?
There is something about the simplicity of the single-slot card reader and nice fast FireWire 800 interface, rather than some lambda-in-one usb monstrosity. My only complaint is it has no daisy-chaining port, the bus certainly has bandwidth to spare.
I have a certain curiosity about this card reader too, no sense in laptop users being left out of the fast card reader party (providing power to the Sandisk FireWire reader is the issue here - Apple's laptops are the only models I can think of with powered FireWire ports). I'd hope most operating systems these days wouldn't spit the dummy when presented with a hot-plug PCI-e device, but you never know.
I tried a couple of the betas of 10. Where flash 9 just locks up and/or crashes the browser occasionally, these versions of flash 10 crashed it every single time the plugin tried to load.
Until they have "released" something (I use the word release only because they do, you and I both know it isn't going to be production-quality, just like every version before it) I'm staying well away.
I have a comparatively ancient (6 years I think I've had them) set of 2.1 TDK speakers with NXT panels. They have to do it that way, the subwoofer (I use this term only because they do, 3 inch drivers don't really count) makes up for the lack of bass response in the speakers. Overall they're adequate, not terribly loud but clear enough sound, at least in any case the satellites don't take up much desk space, and the sub/amp provides a decent heated footrest. (See http://dansdata.com/s150.htm for pictures)
Ask and ye shall receive... boredom really is an awful thing. (It's all in the jar files in chrome/ in case anyone cares, mozilla.dtd and mozilla.xhtml)
http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/1177/firefoxpe5.png/
2:1 seems fair to me. I was going to use today's date.
Come back when you have a better idea of what you're talking about.
The actual, real world, demonstrated sensitivity of modern cameras is around 8-9EV (see http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos40d/page20.asp).
Yes, the DIGITAL OUTPUT from CCD/CMOS sensors might be 10/12/14 bits nowadays, but it pains me to have to explain that reading a 14 bit digital signal from an analogue device with ~9 bits worth of useful information doesn't actually provide any more dynamic range. Finer graduations yes (but since our eyes are more sensitive to variations in brightness than colour, isn't going to help a lot).
If you want single-exposure HDR, you need sensor site with varying light sensitivity on the same chip (IE the Fuji Super CCD SR). Foveon just doesn't do that.
In fact, most police radar units are +/- 3mph. A consumer GPS speed indicator is typically accurate to within .75 mph.
Actually even better nowadays. The now fairly common SiRF III GPS chipset is claimed accurate to 0.1m/s; 0.36km/h or 0.22mi/h.