The first thing I do on windows is change the settings to show tilename extensions.
You're off to a good start. I used to do that too. These days the first thing I do on windows is format the HDD and install an OS that doesn't assume I'm retarded.
To me that headline just says "Valve announces that they're still not working on Half-Life 3".
So when is this amazing new innovation which is absolutely definitely not just me-too-ism coming? I'd appreciate if somebody would clarify the anticipated release order for SteamVR/SteamController/SteamMachine/SteamOS/SteamTrain/HL3/armageddon.
There's also that little Illegal business practices matter. Not to mention the abysmal quality of their "technical support".
So I guess my real question is "why should I care?"
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds where things explode, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and watch while they explode. to boldly go where no man has gone before, and blow shit up.
There is one upside to the Michael-Bay-Trek movies though: they demonstrate conclusively that Jjabrams is very capable of making a Star Wars film. So there could be hope for episode 7.
Here's one thing - open your old Excel marco spreadsheets and have them work just the same as in Excel.
(smartass jab about spreadsheets named "marco" goes here)
Sorry, i don't have any left, I abandoned Excel about 10 years ago and never looked back. The only times I've worked with Excel since then are when people pay me ludicrous consulting rates. And then I end up spending ages pulling my hair out and wishing I'd asked for an even more ludicrous rate.
Can't do that ? Well then you've got to convert them, take cost of converting them vs. cost of Office licence - are you still saving anything ?
Well, I'm saving my sanity by not using that terrible interface and having features removed "just because", so yes, but I don't think that's what you mean...
How many times have you "upgraded" Excel over the last 10 years? How many times are you planning to "Upgrade" over the next 10 years? Let me guess - every year or two? So you're actually spending $299 (or whatever it is, I don't know or care) per year. Suddenly Excel licenses don't look so cheap compared to the cost of converting a couple of spreadsheets. In the long run, investing the time to switch to an open format devoid of licensing costs makes more financial sense, rendering your remaining points moot. Thanks for playing!
Or you parallel run, do new stuff in OO and use Excel for old ones, probably for several years
THE most expensive way you can possibly do it.
(7 or more at a guess if it's financial stuff)
If you're using Excel macros for financial stuff, you're doing it wrong.
To restate my original position: What you actually mean by all this is "I can't be bothered switching from VBA to OOBasic - Learning is hard."
They haven't removed macros from Excel yet? Strange, that's where the trend is headed. Don't worry, there's always next version.
there is no denying that Office is simply the best productivity suite
I deny it.
Specific tool, huh? You mean like the ability to customise toolbars programatically, allowing you to make an add-on that installs its own toolbar button? That feature that got removed with the awesome new ribbon interface?
Let me guess: I'm misjudging the poor ribbon - it's actually awesome, and I'm just too stupid to realise that - they did a bunch of usability tests with a bunch of non-technical people and came to the conclusion that it's better in 100% of cases. I'll come around after using it for a while. And that feature which was removed which I need? I didn't actually need it, I'm just misguided and too stupid to realise it.
Instead of writing a 'setup toolbar button' bit into the 'install' routine for my addon, I should distribute my add-on with a page-long set of instructions for how to set up a button in the "quick access toolbar". Because the stupid users who don't even know what they want are smart enough to do that.
Right?
I do macro work in Excel that can't be replicated in LibreOffice.
I've never come across anything I can do in excel with VBA that I can't do with OOBasic. In fact, the opposite is true. What you actually mean is "I can't be bothered switching from VBA to OOBasic - Learning is hard."
Ugh, self-reply, but there's another factor somewhat related to my second point: the idiotic, parasitic sales techniques which are now in vogue: I tried to buy Borderlands the pre-sequel, but there's no way to actually buy the whole game yet - I'd have to buy the game and then buy each piece of DLC one at a time, or wait a year or two until a "complete bundle" is released (which is what I'm doing), by which time my sale won't count on their ledgers. This could be easily fixed by simply having a "complete bundle" available at launch which automatically gives you every piece of DLC as they are released. But then you wouldn't be able to trick your users into paying $250 for a game.
To summarise the summary of the summary, it's easier to sell to a linux user if you're not a scumbag.
There's another factor - it also needs to be worthwhile.
We (Linux users) can help with this by supporting people who do port games, both morally and financially.
This means buying games that are released for linux, emailling developers of games you want and telling them that a port would be a guaranteed sale, and emailling devs who do port to say thanks. I now own over 100 nonfree games, it's been a great couple of years. Kerbal Space Program, Civilization V, and Borderlands 2 being standouts. I can't wait for Bioshock Infinite.
But this isn't all smooth sailing, there are 2 problems doing this:
1, the group of linux users who are on what amounts to a religious crusade against nonfree software and refuse to buy any software, period. There's not much you can do about this other than trying to convince them that there's a sane middle-ground between idealism and corporate evil. This is difficult because many of these people will ignore any rational argument you might make unless you're Richard Stallman (and then it doesn't matter whether you're rational or not). I can't find a source right now, but IIRC even Stallman doesn't disappove of nonfree content, he just thinks that the engines should be free. But the zealots don't seem to have picked up on this. (I can already hear the screams of "Ooh, them's fighting words!")
2, Valve's atrocious business practices make purchasing linux games difficult for those of us who know and defend our rights. For example, as an Australian I'm entitled to a refund for any game that doesn't work. Valve's business practices in this regard are dodgy to say the least. Which means that I can't buy anything via Steam, which makes it harder to support the porters. I buy everything via either the humble store, GOG, or direct from Aspyr these days. But it's harder and sometimes more expensive than simply hitting 'buy' in steam.
Yeah, I found the sequel (Echopraxia) too, and I'd love to read it, but after doing some searching it doesn't seem like it's possible to buy the ebook in a sane format I can read on a Linux machine. Pity.
There are lots of situations where sound is routed to something which isn't the usual ALSA driver: - (bluetooth) - (bluetooth)
Yes, lots of bluetooth-related reasons. But my bluetooth headset works perfectly well without pulse.
- recording the output of another program becomes much more trivial if there's a sound router handling the redirection, instead of needing some special support in software.
So, something like jack? The much-better-at-doing-what-pulse-does-plus-a-whole-lot-more sound server that has been around a lot longer than pulse?
Also, if you have good sound hardware, you have a 'monitor' port which allows you to record output without any special software at all (well, you'll need alsamixer or something to choose the recording channel)
Pulseaudio doesn't require any special support.
Except for a bunch of disk space to store the unnecessary binaries and a bunch of memory and CPU cycles to run the unnecessary daemon.
It can present an ALSA target to any ALSA-enabled software. Most current software don't even have a pulseaudio plugin, they just open the default ALSA device which happens to be one pulseaudio listends to and that just works.
This is its one saving grace - it's relatively easy to rip this monstrosity out without pain, since few apps know or care about it.
Why the fuck do you want to round a *sound mixer* inside your *kernel space* ?! Do you run your video decoder and webbrowser there too ? I prefer to run unnecessary things like sound as daemons in userspace. Thank you very much.
I don't want a sound mixer in kernel space, I want sound mixing to be done by the dedicated, super-cheap, 15-year old hardware I have which was built for exactly that purpose. But pulseaudio still tries to do software mixing for me. Because, you know, pulse is good!
And you're still free to disable pulseaudio
I did
use dmix instead, if you want.
I don't need it because I have actual audio hardware with multiple channels. But thanks.
Now indeed, for an init system, it's a bit more complicated
It's only more complicated because systemd tries to redefine the term 'init system' to also mean 'an init system plus a bunch of other stuff' and is completely disinterested in playing nice with all the other kids.
Instead of being vulgar, maybe you should ask yourself why so many distributions are switching to systemd.
Political pressure and underhanded tactics?
Maybe, part of the reason would be that systemd solves actual real world problems that these distributions need fixed.
Such as?
Maybe that's because systemd people and Lennart Poettering actually ship code
Yes, and we wish they would stop!
Maybe if you didn't spent all your energy on whinning about systemd, and actually tried to *DO* something, to *FIX* the problems, and write an actual good solution, maybe your solution would be the one picked up by distros.
But I have a perfectly functional init system which isn't systemd. Why should I write a new one?
I'm not able to ask this question on amazon because I've never bought anything from them, so maybe all the smart people at slashdot can help before I go ahead with my purchase:
I'll need to buy 2 of these directional cables to be able to play Duke Nukem 3D deathmatch, right? One for sending packets and another for recieving them? My understanding is that with deathmatch the communication has to go in both directions, so I can't see how just one of these cables would be good enough for my needs.
I guess that means I'll also need to get a second ethernet adaptor since my crappy ethernet adaptor only has one plug on it. Can one of you nerdy people who understands all this stuff please clarify?
It's a bit of an investment but I think it'll be worth it - with the reduced ping times these cables will give me I'll be able to totally pwn my housemate, mwuhahaha!
Does the GTA04 actually work? like, useable as a phone?
And when I say "useable" I don't mean "useable" in the same sense that openmoko did, i.e "it might work, as long as you're at home with it plugged in, and you don't want any actual features, because we can't be bothered making the power management work properly, so it has no battery life, or building good software to actually run the phone and give you features, or doing hardware revisions to sort out our horrible design flaws like a display that can't even do 30fps at full resolution. But we have got a few different, incompatible, mutually-exclusive and largely undocumented frameworks we've been working on which will give you themeable widgets and pretty animations (but obviously not at 30fps)..."
I did enquire about the GTA04, it did look promising, but I couldn't justify spending even more on my freerunner - it was already a very expensive paperweight, and I couldn't run the risk of turning it into a paperweight with a price comparable to a cheap car when what I wanted was a phone.
The Neo900 does look pretty interesting, assuming that it works. Like a phone.
This makes me think of "Foundation and Earth" by Isaac Asimov.
~30,000 years in the future, and they're looking for the mythical homeworld of humanity, known as "Earth".
But the legends about the huge moon and the gas giant with a huge ring system are obviously just legends, exaggerated over the milennia, and should not be taken seriously...
Now you are just cheerleading.:) You can't realistically say that your experience is "pretty bug-free" if X (in practice: whole desktop) crashes roughly weekly.
I am forced to agree with this.
But here's my experience: I can't remember the last time I restarted a machine or my window manager. I don't think it was this year. I just ran 'uptime' on all my machines, and I certainly haven't rebooted this year.
Linux is not the way to breathe life into an old computer anymore.
XFCE hasn't seen a new release in almost 3 years, the compositor tears (because it is based on XRender), and it does not have any desktop effects.
Um, just so we're clear, you're saying that you want desktop effects on an old machine - Linux is crap because it can't make your old computer do all the things that your new computer can do?
I feel your pain - I've been trying to get Call Of Duty running on my EGA 386SX25 with 4MB RAM for weeks now, and Microsoft wouldn't even assist me with installing windows 7. They keep talking about some "minimum requirements" crap. All I want to do is breathe new life into this old hardware, and they're completely unhelpful. I think it's a conspiracy to make me buy new hardware. Windows really is the worst OS ever.
I use XFCE on all my machines, including my beefy multi-core nvidia-powered gaming rig which could easily run your bells-and-whistles environment. It's fantastic on a high-end machine - so fast! I had tearing too on that machine (but not on my intel-powered laptop), for about 15 minutes. Did you try typing 'xfce [graphics card model] tearing' into a search engine?
I just had a really "out there" thought: maybe XFCE hasn't had a new release recently because it's not broken and therefore doesn't need fixing?
Slashdot Mirror
The first thing I do on windows is change the settings to show tilename extensions.
You're off to a good start. I used to do that too. These days the first thing I do on windows is format the HDD and install an OS that doesn't assume I'm retarded.
How would I know if it is a binary file vs. a script without looking into it.
type 'file /path/to/file'.
e.g:
/bin/bash
/bin/bash: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.24, BuildID[sha1]=bla, stripped
user@host:~ $ file
or:
user@host:~ $ file a_script.rb
a_script.rb: a ruby1.9.1 script, ASCII text executable
To me that headline just says "Valve announces that they're still not working on Half-Life 3".
So when is this amazing new innovation which is absolutely definitely not just me-too-ism coming? I'd appreciate if somebody would clarify the anticipated release order for SteamVR/SteamController/SteamMachine/SteamOS/SteamTrain/HL3/armageddon.
There's also that little Illegal business practices matter. Not to mention the abysmal quality of their "technical support".
So I guess my real question is "why should I care?"
Fuck Valve. I'd rather burn my money.
Jar Jar's Trek 2: Trek Darker
Gold!
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.
Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds where things explode,
to seek out new life and new civilizations, and watch while they explode.
to boldly go where no man has gone before, and blow shit up.
There is one upside to the Michael-Bay-Trek movies though: they demonstrate conclusively that Jjabrams is very capable of making a Star Wars film. So there could be hope for episode 7.
Here's one thing - open your old Excel marco spreadsheets and have them work just the same as in Excel.
(smartass jab about spreadsheets named "marco" goes here)
Sorry, i don't have any left, I abandoned Excel about 10 years ago and never looked back. The only times I've worked with Excel since then are when people pay me ludicrous consulting rates. And then I end up spending ages pulling my hair out and wishing I'd asked for an even more ludicrous rate.
Can't do that ? Well then you've got to convert them, take cost of converting them vs. cost of Office licence - are you still saving anything ?
Well, I'm saving my sanity by not using that terrible interface and having features removed "just because", so yes, but I don't think that's what you mean...
How many times have you "upgraded" Excel over the last 10 years? How many times are you planning to "Upgrade" over the next 10 years? Let me guess - every year or two? So you're actually spending $299 (or whatever it is, I don't know or care) per year. Suddenly Excel licenses don't look so cheap compared to the cost of converting a couple of spreadsheets. In the long run, investing the time to switch to an open format devoid of licensing costs makes more financial sense, rendering your remaining points moot. Thanks for playing!
Or you parallel run, do new stuff in OO and use Excel for old ones, probably for several years
THE most expensive way you can possibly do it.
(7 or more at a guess if it's financial stuff)
If you're using Excel macros for financial stuff, you're doing it wrong.
To restate my original position: What you actually mean by all this is "I can't be bothered switching from VBA to OOBasic - Learning is hard."
Dammit I even have mod points but I've already replied to the thread
Romulan Ale in mine. Strong stuff. Puts hair on your chest.
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARONIC OBSTRUCTIVE PULMONARY DISEASE!!!!!
[shakes fist at sky]
Best character in all of Trek. :'(
(Sorry, Bill, but he was)
I do macro work in Excel
They haven't removed macros from Excel yet? Strange, that's where the trend is headed. Don't worry, there's always next version.
there is no denying that Office is simply the best productivity suite
I deny it.
Specific tool, huh? You mean like the ability to customise toolbars programatically, allowing you to make an add-on that installs its own toolbar button? That feature that got removed with the awesome new ribbon interface?
Let me guess: I'm misjudging the poor ribbon - it's actually awesome, and I'm just too stupid to realise that - they did a bunch of usability tests with a bunch of non-technical people and came to the conclusion that it's better in 100% of cases. I'll come around after using it for a while. And that feature which was removed which I need? I didn't actually need it, I'm just misguided and too stupid to realise it.
Instead of writing a 'setup toolbar button' bit into the 'install' routine for my addon, I should distribute my add-on with a page-long set of instructions for how to set up a button in the "quick access toolbar". Because the stupid users who don't even know what they want are smart enough to do that.
Right?
I do macro work in Excel that can't be replicated in LibreOffice.
I've never come across anything I can do in excel with VBA that I can't do with OOBasic. In fact, the opposite is true.
What you actually mean is "I can't be bothered switching from VBA to OOBasic - Learning is hard."
Ugh, self-reply, but there's another factor somewhat related to my second point: the idiotic, parasitic sales techniques which are now in vogue: I tried to buy Borderlands the pre-sequel, but there's no way to actually buy the whole game yet - I'd have to buy the game and then buy each piece of DLC one at a time, or wait a year or two until a "complete bundle" is released (which is what I'm doing), by which time my sale won't count on their ledgers. This could be easily fixed by simply having a "complete bundle" available at launch which automatically gives you every piece of DLC as they are released. But then you wouldn't be able to trick your users into paying $250 for a game.
To summarise the summary of the summary, it's easier to sell to a linux user if you're not a scumbag.
For this to be successful it needs to be easy
There's another factor - it also needs to be worthwhile.
We (Linux users) can help with this by supporting people who do port games, both morally and financially.
This means buying games that are released for linux, emailling developers of games you want and telling them that a port would be a guaranteed sale, and emailling devs who do port to say thanks. I now own over 100 nonfree games, it's been a great couple of years. Kerbal Space Program, Civilization V, and Borderlands 2 being standouts. I can't wait for Bioshock Infinite.
But this isn't all smooth sailing, there are 2 problems doing this:
1, the group of linux users who are on what amounts to a religious crusade against nonfree software and refuse to buy any software, period. There's not much you can do about this other than trying to convince them that there's a sane middle-ground between idealism and corporate evil. This is difficult because many of these people will ignore any rational argument you might make unless you're Richard Stallman (and then it doesn't matter whether you're rational or not). I can't find a source right now, but IIRC even Stallman doesn't disappove of nonfree content, he just thinks that the engines should be free. But the zealots don't seem to have picked up on this. (I can already hear the screams of "Ooh, them's fighting words!")
2, Valve's atrocious business practices make purchasing linux games difficult for those of us who know and defend our rights. For example, as an Australian I'm entitled to a refund for any game that doesn't work. Valve's business practices in this regard are dodgy to say the least. Which means that I can't buy anything via Steam, which makes it harder to support the porters. I buy everything via either the humble store, GOG, or direct from Aspyr these days. But it's harder and sometimes more expensive than simply hitting 'buy' in steam.
Yeah, I found the sequel (Echopraxia) too, and I'd love to read it, but after doing some searching it doesn't seem like it's possible to buy the ebook in a sane format I can read on a Linux machine. Pity.
If I'm wrong, please tell me where I can buy it.
I swear, common sense is a lost art.
What are you doing on the intarwebs? I thought your kind had been banned!
It's bringing love! Don't let it get away! Break it's legs!
Well if a volcano jumped off a cliff would you do that too?
If I saw a volcano jump off a cliff I'd probably be so curious as to follow it to ask how and why. So yes.
local government will need to make a serious sacrifice.
Didn't realize that ink was that expensive these days
I assumed he meant sacrificing a golf game to actually do something productive.
Give the man some credit - at least he turned down Indy 4.
5) We're annoying the shit out of them. [rifters.com] (Great, chilling book. And free online!)
Awesome book! I couldn't put it down. Thanks for the link!
There are lots of situations where sound is routed to something which isn't the usual ALSA driver:
- (bluetooth)
- (bluetooth)
Yes, lots of bluetooth-related reasons. But my bluetooth headset works perfectly well without pulse.
- recording the output of another program becomes much more trivial if there's a sound router handling the redirection, instead of needing some special support in software.
So, something like jack? The much-better-at-doing-what-pulse-does-plus-a-whole-lot-more sound server that has been around a lot longer than pulse?
Also, if you have good sound hardware, you have a 'monitor' port which allows you to record output without any special software at all (well, you'll need alsamixer or something to choose the recording channel)
Pulseaudio doesn't require any special support.
Except for a bunch of disk space to store the unnecessary binaries and a bunch of memory and CPU cycles to run the unnecessary daemon.
It can present an ALSA target to any ALSA-enabled software. Most current software don't even have a pulseaudio plugin, they just open the default ALSA device which happens to be one pulseaudio listends to and that just works.
This is its one saving grace - it's relatively easy to rip this monstrosity out without pain, since few apps know or care about it.
Why the fuck do you want to round a *sound mixer* inside your *kernel space* ?! Do you run your video decoder and webbrowser there too ?
I prefer to run unnecessary things like sound as daemons in userspace. Thank you very much.
I don't want a sound mixer in kernel space, I want sound mixing to be done by the dedicated, super-cheap, 15-year old hardware I have which was built for exactly that purpose. But pulseaudio still tries to do software mixing for me. Because, you know, pulse is good!
And you're still free to disable pulseaudio
I did
use dmix instead, if you want.
I don't need it because I have actual audio hardware with multiple channels. But thanks.
Now indeed, for an init system, it's a bit more complicated
It's only more complicated because systemd tries to redefine the term 'init system' to also mean 'an init system plus a bunch of other stuff' and is completely disinterested in playing nice with all the other kids.
Instead of being vulgar, maybe you should ask yourself why so many distributions are switching to systemd.
Political pressure and underhanded tactics?
Maybe, part of the reason would be that systemd solves actual real world problems that these distributions need fixed.
Such as?
Maybe that's because systemd people and Lennart Poettering actually ship code
Yes, and we wish they would stop!
Maybe if you didn't spent all your energy on whinning about systemd, and actually tried to *DO* something, to *FIX* the problems, and write an actual good solution, maybe your solution would be the one picked up by distros.
But I have a perfectly functional init system which isn't systemd. Why should I write a new one?
I'm not able to ask this question on amazon because I've never bought anything from them, so maybe all the smart people at slashdot can help before I go ahead with my purchase:
I'll need to buy 2 of these directional cables to be able to play Duke Nukem 3D deathmatch, right? One for sending packets and another for recieving them? My understanding is that with deathmatch the communication has to go in both directions, so I can't see how just one of these cables would be good enough for my needs.
I guess that means I'll also need to get a second ethernet adaptor since my crappy ethernet adaptor only has one plug on it. Can one of you nerdy people who understands all this stuff please clarify?
It's a bit of an investment but I think it'll be worth it - with the reduced ping times these cables will give me I'll be able to totally pwn my housemate, mwuhahaha!
Oh, I get it, you were being sarcastic. Very funny!
Damn this intarweb and it's lack of intonation and body language.
Does the GTA04 actually work? like, useable as a phone?
And when I say "useable" I don't mean "useable" in the same sense that openmoko did, i.e "it might work, as long as you're at home with it plugged in, and you don't want any actual features, because we can't be bothered making the power management work properly, so it has no battery life, or building good software to actually run the phone and give you features, or doing hardware revisions to sort out our horrible design flaws like a display that can't even do 30fps at full resolution. But we have got a few different, incompatible, mutually-exclusive and largely undocumented frameworks we've been working on which will give you themeable widgets and pretty animations (but obviously not at 30fps)..."
I did enquire about the GTA04, it did look promising, but I couldn't justify spending even more on my freerunner - it was already a very expensive paperweight, and I couldn't run the risk of turning it into a paperweight with a price comparable to a cheap car when what I wanted was a phone.
The Neo900 does look pretty interesting, assuming that it works. Like a phone.
Indeed.
This makes me think of "Foundation and Earth" by Isaac Asimov.
~30,000 years in the future, and they're looking for the mythical homeworld of humanity, known as "Earth".
But the legends about the huge moon and the gas giant with a huge ring system are obviously just legends, exaggerated over the milennia, and should not be taken seriously...
Now you are just cheerleading. :) You can't realistically say that your experience is "pretty bug-free" if X (in practice: whole desktop) crashes roughly weekly.
I am forced to agree with this.
But here's my experience: I can't remember the last time I restarted a machine or my window manager. I don't think it was this year. I just ran 'uptime' on all my machines, and I certainly haven't rebooted this year.
Linux is not the way to breathe life into an old computer anymore.
XFCE hasn't seen a new release in almost 3 years, the compositor tears (because it is based on XRender), and it does not have any desktop effects.
Um, just so we're clear, you're saying that you want desktop effects on an old machine - Linux is crap because it can't make your old computer do all the things that your new computer can do?
I feel your pain - I've been trying to get Call Of Duty running on my EGA 386SX25 with 4MB RAM for weeks now, and Microsoft wouldn't even assist me with installing windows 7. They keep talking about some "minimum requirements" crap. All I want to do is breathe new life into this old hardware, and they're completely unhelpful. I think it's a conspiracy to make me buy new hardware. Windows really is the worst OS ever.
I use XFCE on all my machines, including my beefy multi-core nvidia-powered gaming rig which could easily run your bells-and-whistles environment. It's fantastic on a high-end machine - so fast! I had tearing too on that machine (but not on my intel-powered laptop), for about 15 minutes. Did you try typing 'xfce [graphics card model] tearing' into a search engine?
I just had a really "out there" thought: maybe XFCE hasn't had a new release recently because it's not broken and therefore doesn't need fixing?
Wow, a sensible person on the internet! Who woulda thunk it?