This must be a world record?
on
Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 2, Insightful
He installed KDE 3.2 earlier today and already have a review ready? How is it possible to get an impression of such a big piece of software as that so fast, and still have time to write a review?
A piece of advice for future reviewers: Being fastest isn't the point with reviews -- thouroughness and being informative on behalf of the customers is.
Yes, Flash video is great. Almost every Internet user on the planet has one version or another of the Flash plugin installed, so it's as ubiquitous as Windows Media Player. Flash is cross platform as well. The movie part of Flash uses the Sorenson 3 codec, and the quality is stunning -- at least when you can encode movies for lines better than double ISDN.
But as you say, it's early days for Macromedia. The three main shortcomings with flash (in my opinion) are:
There's no way to encode variable bitrate files for Flash. Flash video is transported by http only, and have no dedicated server software, so there's no "one file fits all lines" solution when you're encoding files for Flash.
A second shortcoming is that there's no way to do live streaming with Flash.
Third: When it comes to streaming (if you're picky: it isn't really streaming) Flash is geared towards video, not sound. So I guess Flash won't be a logical solution in NPR's case.
iTunes on my Mac uses WebCore, which is Apple's version of KHTML. [Perhaps KHTML already does this but I ask the question anyway:] Does anyone here know if iTunes for Windows means that Apple has modified KHTML to compile and run on Windows, and whether the modifed code is available anywhere?
I guess Rob can't be a very inquisitive person when he didn't manage to achieve simple things such as dragging and dropping icons onto the quick launch bar.
But I don't think Rob's an idiot even though he didn't manage to do these things. If an experienced computer user like Rob has these kinds of problems when trying to switch, imagine what problems regular computer users faces when they try to switch to Linux. Rob has made an excellent point as to why people don't migrate to Linux in flocks. It just isn't what they're accustomed to.
Then they deserve all the spam they get. I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for people that are unwilling to learn how to use anti-spam tools.
How elitist can you get? The problem isn't that people are unwilling to learn anti-spam tools, the problem is that they need them in the first place.
Anti-spam tools also does not prevent one of the most annoying things with spam, especially when on a narrow line: You have to spend time and money downloading the spam before it can be identified as spam.
You're probably right about how Scull(e)y should be spelled, but you seem to forget a simple fact:
The majority of immigrants from Europe probably didn't know how to read or write. Many came from very poor conditions, where trying to survive was more important than education.
So I guess it's just as probable that Scully's ancestor didn't know the spelling themselves, as it is that they "didn't bother to explain the proper spelling".
I first ran Windows 3.1 on an XT. It was a 10MHz 8088 with a Hercules card. It was responsive enough to be useful. I upgraded to a 286 after awhile (I think it was a 12 MHz.) Eventually I upgraded to a 386, because then I could (cooperatively) multitask.
I think you've mixed up your version numbers here: You couldn't run Windows 3.1 on an XT, since the minimum processor requirement were an 80286. Windows 3.0, however, could be run in the so called "real mode" (without virtual memory) on 8088 and 8086. With enough RAM, a graphics card and a hard drive you could in theory run Windows 3.0 on the original IBM PC.
I guess this signing idea is good, but I still don't think it'd be an end-all solution to the spam problem.
Lately I've thought about this: I didn't start using Instant Messaging until six months ago. What I found interesting was that not only did I have to add my friends to my address book, but they had to accept my doing so, before any communication could take place at all.
If a technique like this had been implemented as a standard in mail transfer protocols, a lot of the spam problem would go away.
Of course, you'd have to sacrifice the option that strangers could send you mail, and corporation or private person who don't mind getting mail from strangers, should be able to say that "my inbox is open for all".
How does this differ from mono? It seems to me as the two projects are trying to achieve the same things. If that's the case, why have two projects at all? Why not merge the two efforts? I guess somebody here knows why.
...speaking of MD5 hashes and MP3 files, have any of you heard of a tool that matches "fingerprints" of sound files without ID3 tags and downloads these from the Internet and tag the ID3-less files?
I mean I once read about something like that here on Slashdot.
It should be doable: The latest Linux Magazine had an article by Randall Schwarz, describing how to break down large images into small 16x16 normalized version, and how these could be used to determine which images on his hard drive were identical or near-identical.
Some (not all) CPAN modules are hard to install. The hardest are always those who involves some C code, that depens on third party libraries.
Try installing the mysql DBD drivers without having installed the mySQL header files first, for instance. It's not obvious that you need those to get some perl drivers installed.
Try installing PerlMagick; even with a working ImageMagick installation on your system, it's not straightforward to get PerlMagick up and running.
There's a whole bunch of modules that always gives me headaches. That's why I've grown fond of Debian, that has a lot of Perl modules I can install with apt-get or dselect.
Other co-workers with Eudora are less fortunate, since they spend better than an hour clearing out all those emails.
If this is the case, then I strongly suggest that your co-workers upgrade to Eudora 6.0, even though it's still a beta. It got a powerful bayesian junk function, similar to Apple's Mail.app and Mozilla 1.4 Mail. It works beautifully and I've stopped using SpamAssassin since I installed 6.0 beta. The best part is that the beta version is rock solid. It hasn't crashed on me once.
Well, according to an article I read yesterday the MSBlast theory of the power blackout in the US and Canada isn't dead just yet. They don't think MSBlast was the reason of the blackout anymore, but that the worm slowed down and crashed monitoring systems. In that way the worm worsened the problem and didn't stop it where it could have been stopped.
If this theory is right I guess 50 million americans without power cares whether incompetent admins can't keep their networks up.
Here in Norway it seems as "everyone" has got SoBig.F or is getting annoyed with fake emails from someone who has it.
This virus is just a little variation of an older virus, but it differed enough from the older iterations so that anti virus software didn't detect it.
The virus provider Norman reckons that a big organization in Norway has been hit early and that this caused the big numbers here: Norway stands for 36% of the outbreaks of this virus in the world, which is exceptional when you know that only 4 million people live here.
I'm reading the parent post in IE 6 on Windows XP, and the URL seems to be formatted wrong. The part from 2003/04/0414_030314 gets a space, and reads 2003/04/04 14_030314. Is this IE's fault, or does Slashcode mess up the formatting?
This National Geographic article got much better pictures of the new (?) species than CNN. Also it seems as if this story isn't so new at all (it started in 1908), and that the mystery species most probably is a chimpanzee, according to DNA tests.
I seriously believe being a perl programmer is a little like being a smoker: After smoking a while you don't remember why you started anymore. All you know is that it's easier to continue than to break the habit. That's the case for me, anyway.
Update: 08/05 18:24 GMT by M: After October 15, SCO says they'll want $1399. Better buy now!
Let's hope Michael was ironic when he wrote this, or else this is one of the worst pieces of advice ever from a site which is built on open source. The obvious advice would be "don't buy this license no matter how cheap it gets".
(Of course, if the SCO case ends with SCO actually managing to prove that their claims are correct, Michael's advice's probably good)
But releasing books under that title will *not* attract the type of people this book is aimed at. [snip] They are working purely on brand recognition, but in this case, I think that's a bad idea. How about "Beginner's Guide to Solaris" instead?
I think you're too hard on the Dummies series. Remember that you shall not judge a book by it's cover (a cheap pun, I know, but it was intended). Maybe the title will, as you say, alienate some potential readers, but my personal experience with the book series is that even though they're meant for dummies, the books themselves aren't always dumb.
My best Dummies book is "Java programming for Dummies". I learnt enough from it to understand object orientation and threading basics, and quickly got me up to speed on programming applets with the (at that time small and manageable version 1.0.2) JDK API.
It did by no means make the best Java programmer in the world - I'm probably not even a "good" Java programmer today, six or seven years later - but then the book never pretended that it *could* make me that. But it gave me a useful start on a subject and enough knowledge to continue more serious studies of the subject.
Not many introductory books can say that about themselves... the Teach yourself X in 24 hours, for instance, have titles that indicates that you actually can teach yourself a subject in a short time, even though the title probably should be "Give yourself a taste of X in 24 hours".
The Dummies... books are at least honest about what they're pretending to be and help you achieve.
These two (and the economy) are keeping me away from APS-sized sensor SLRs like the Canon EOS-10D at US$1.5K, 6 megapixels. Instead I'm going to get an Elan and start building a lens collection for when the full-frame cameras are less than $3k.
Perhaps you shouldn't do that until you actually see that full frame CCD's are coming to budget priced cameras. I recently read (and of course I don't remember where anymore) that good quality full frame CCD's are harder to produce than the smaller ones.
I don't know the details of this, but it has something to do with the distance from the lens to the CCD, and the angle the light hits the CCD. With wide angle lenses in particular, you will get colour shifts - mostly around the edges and the corners.
Slashdot Mirror
He installed KDE 3.2 earlier today and already have a review ready? How is it possible to get an impression of such a big piece of software as that so fast, and still have time to write a review?
A piece of advice for future reviewers: Being fastest isn't the point with reviews -- thouroughness and being informative on behalf of the customers is.
Yes, Flash video is great. Almost every Internet user on the planet has one version or another of the Flash plugin installed, so it's as ubiquitous as Windows Media Player. Flash is cross platform as well. The movie part of Flash uses the Sorenson 3 codec, and the quality is stunning -- at least when you can encode movies for lines better than double ISDN.
But as you say, it's early days for Macromedia. The three main shortcomings with flash (in my opinion) are:
There's no way to encode variable bitrate files for Flash. Flash video is transported by http only, and have no dedicated server software, so there's no "one file fits all lines" solution when you're encoding files for Flash.
A second shortcoming is that there's no way to do live streaming with Flash.
Third: When it comes to streaming (if you're picky: it isn't really streaming) Flash is geared towards video, not sound. So I guess Flash won't be a logical solution in NPR's case.
Isn't this the default behavior of MSN Messenger? I never received a "spim" on Messenger, but I get dozens on ICQ every week.
iTunes on my Mac uses WebCore, which is Apple's version of KHTML. [Perhaps KHTML already does this but I ask the question anyway:] Does anyone here know if iTunes for Windows means that Apple has modified KHTML to compile and run on Windows, and whether the modifed code is available anywhere?
I guess Rob can't be a very inquisitive person when he didn't manage to achieve simple things such as dragging and dropping icons onto the quick launch bar.
But I don't think Rob's an idiot even though he didn't manage to do these things. If an experienced computer user like Rob has these kinds of problems when trying to switch, imagine what problems regular computer users faces when they try to switch to Linux. Rob has made an excellent point as to why people don't migrate to Linux in flocks. It just isn't what they're accustomed to.
Anti-spam tools also does not prevent one of the most annoying things with spam, especially when on a narrow line: You have to spend time and money downloading the spam before it can be identified as spam.
You're probably right about how Scull(e)y should be spelled, but you seem to forget a simple fact:
The majority of immigrants from Europe probably didn't know how to read or write. Many came from very poor conditions, where trying to survive was more important than education.
So I guess it's just as probable that Scully's ancestor didn't know the spelling themselves, as it is that they "didn't bother to explain the proper spelling".
I think you've mixed up your version numbers here: You couldn't run Windows 3.1 on an XT, since the minimum processor requirement were an 80286. Windows 3.0, however, could be run in the so called "real mode" (without virtual memory) on 8088 and 8086. With enough RAM, a graphics card and a hard drive you could in theory run Windows 3.0 on the original IBM PC.
I guess this signing idea is good, but I still don't think it'd be an end-all solution to the spam problem.
Lately I've thought about this: I didn't start using Instant Messaging until six months ago. What I found interesting was that not only did I have to add my friends to my address book, but they had to accept my doing so, before any communication could take place at all.
If a technique like this had been implemented as a standard in mail transfer protocols, a lot of the spam problem would go away.
Of course, you'd have to sacrifice the option that strangers could send you mail, and corporation or private person who don't mind getting mail from strangers, should be able to say that "my inbox is open for all".
Would this be doable, or is the idea idiotic?
How does this differ from mono? It seems to me as the two projects are trying to achieve the same things. If that's the case, why have two projects at all? Why not merge the two efforts? I guess somebody here knows why.
...speaking of MD5 hashes and MP3 files, have any of you heard of a tool that matches "fingerprints" of sound files without ID3 tags and downloads these from the Internet and tag the ID3-less files?
I mean I once read about something like that here on Slashdot.
It should be doable: The latest Linux Magazine had an article by Randall Schwarz, describing how to break down large images into small 16x16 normalized version, and how these could be used to determine which images on his hard drive were identical or near-identical.
Some (not all) CPAN modules are hard to install. The hardest are always those who involves some C code, that depens on third party libraries.
Try installing the mysql DBD drivers without having installed the mySQL header files first, for instance. It's not obvious that you need those to get some perl drivers installed.
Try installing PerlMagick; even with a working ImageMagick installation on your system, it's not straightforward to get PerlMagick up and running.
There's a whole bunch of modules that always gives me headaches. That's why I've grown fond of Debian, that has a lot of Perl modules I can install with apt-get or dselect.
If this is the case, then I strongly suggest that your co-workers upgrade to Eudora 6.0, even though it's still a beta. It got a powerful bayesian junk function, similar to Apple's Mail.app and Mozilla 1.4 Mail. It works beautifully and I've stopped using SpamAssassin since I installed 6.0 beta. The best part is that the beta version is rock solid. It hasn't crashed on me once.
I didn't link to the article because it's in Norwegian. But if you can read Norwegian, here it is.
This article is based upon another article from the danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, but I'm unable to locate the article on their web site.
Who cares?
Well, according to an article I read yesterday the MSBlast theory of the power blackout in the US and Canada isn't dead just yet. They don't think MSBlast was the reason of the blackout anymore, but that the worm slowed down and crashed monitoring systems. In that way the worm worsened the problem and didn't stop it where it could have been stopped.
If this theory is right I guess 50 million americans without power cares whether incompetent admins can't keep their networks up.
What a ridicilous proposition! How can surfin' with Opera prevent users from opening attachments they receive by email?
Just wondering... Why are viruses programmed to deactivate?
I should have mentioned this in my last post... if you've got the SoBig.F virus, FSecure has posted a free fix here.
x e
ftp://ftp.f-secure.com/anti-virus/tools/f-sobig.e
Here in Norway it seems as "everyone" has got SoBig.F or is getting annoyed with fake emails from someone who has it.
This virus is just a little variation of an older virus, but it differed enough from the older iterations so that anti virus software didn't detect it.
The virus provider Norman reckons that a big organization in Norway has been hit early and that this caused the big numbers here: Norway stands for 36% of the outbreaks of this virus in the world, which is exceptional when you know that only 4 million people live here.
I'm reading the parent post in IE 6 on Windows XP, and the URL seems to be formatted wrong. The part from 2003/04/0414_030314 gets a space, and reads 2003/04/04 14_030314. Is this IE's fault, or does Slashcode mess up the formatting?
4 14_030314_strangeape.html.
Anyway, here's a link you can click just in case you experience the same rubbish as me: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/0
This National Geographic article got much better pictures of the new (?) species than CNN. Also it seems as if this story isn't so new at all (it started in 1908), and that the mystery species most probably is a chimpanzee, according to DNA tests.
Nevertheless it's an interesting story!
I seriously believe being a perl programmer is a little like being a smoker: After smoking a while you don't remember why you started anymore. All you know is that it's easier to continue than to break the habit. That's the case for me, anyway.
(Of course, if the SCO case ends with SCO actually managing to prove that their claims are correct, Michael's advice's probably good)
My best Dummies book is "Java programming for Dummies". I learnt enough from it to understand object orientation and threading basics, and quickly got me up to speed on programming applets with the (at that time small and manageable version 1.0.2) JDK API.
It did by no means make the best Java programmer in the world - I'm probably not even a "good" Java programmer today, six or seven years later - but then the book never pretended that it *could* make me that. But it gave me a useful start on a subject and enough knowledge to continue more serious studies of the subject.
Not many introductory books can say that about themselves... the Teach yourself X in 24 hours, for instance, have titles that indicates that you actually can teach yourself a subject in a short time, even though the title probably should be "Give yourself a taste of X in 24 hours".
The Dummies... books are at least honest about what they're pretending to be and help you achieve.
I don't know the details of this, but it has something to do with the distance from the lens to the CCD, and the angle the light hits the CCD. With wide angle lenses in particular, you will get colour shifts - mostly around the edges and the corners.
Does somebody here know more about this problem?
You'd rather support NS 4.7? That's nonsense and you know it. The half hearted CSS and DOM support alone makes NS 4.x a nightmare to develop for.