There is a painting you can buy in the Sims2 whose description is something along the lines of "shows the conflict of Red vs Blue".. Not a bad painting, but not as usefull as the pink flamingo's from the original.
Combe Inc - makers of "Personal Care" products (read: vagisil, odor-eaters, and denture adhesive) switched from Linux to Windows because:
Combe believed the only database to use for their web applications was Oracle.
They contacted a provider to set them up with an oracle server, which was only available on Linux.
The vendor then went out of business, and instead of finding a vendor with Linux/Oracle experience they went with a "Microsoft Certified Partner" who for some reason told them that the "only" solution was to migrate to Windows 2k3/IIS6 and SQL Server 2k.
Windows server 2k3 has worked out great for them for the last two years, especially since it appears they have only been running it on their e-commerce site since September 14th according to netcraft. (Unless I'm reading the chart incorrectly, which I might be. The "last changed" column is slightly misleading).
So, our favorite supplier of vagisil chose a ISV who went out of business, switched to another ISV who didn't know how to support their old software, and is a model of how to run a business with Microsoft software.
Our second (and final) example of all the swarms of companies running away from Linux comes from Mountain High Ski Resort.
The people at Mountain High are a prime example of people who really should be using Microsoft Software. Some of the more classic examples include:
"The decision to go with Linux was a cost-based one," Michele Roy, the resort's chief financial officer, told eWEEK. "We had not budgeted the e-commerce system setup in that year's business plan."
"The Linux system could not handle the layers of information needed for internal control of the resort."
Roy also had concerns about the security and reliability of the system [that had no budget for setup].
"There was a limit set up within the program that said you can only order 'x' amount of products within one transaction," Roy said. "When one of our guests went over the limit, it crashed the whole store. We then had to manually identify the erroneous credit card charges."
Now, that last item is the kicker. I don't care if you are running your site on $500,000 IBM servers-of-doom running NASA tested software that is Guaranteed 100% bug-free. If you design any kind of commerce site which not only crashes when someone orders too many products, but brings down the rest of the server AND makes erroneous credit card charges to multiple accounts.... You need to behead your programming team.
And now, one final bit of the article put here just for humor:
The biggest challenges are those customers moving from Unix to Linux, who "don't want to rewrite their applications, and most of their staff only know Java.
Hello potential prize winner! Consider using your time to create an entry in this year's Slashdot Super Code Bowl. Prizes will be awarded to anyone who proves their worth by submitting code that fits any of these categories:
Rewriting CTSS in under 1k lines of Perl.
Porting Perl to CTSS.
Successfully submitting a patch to the original author(s) and having it included in an updated release.
Creating a 'Proof of Concept' virus, trojan, or worm designed to infect CTSS AND be able to spread to other CTSS machines.
Locating SCO IP within CTSS.
Adding necessary functions and support to CTSS to allow it to successfully emulate itself.
Running CTSS on any appliance that does not normally include a real operating system (Toasters, non-gui remote controls, Gateway PC's)
Other categories may be added, and bonus prizes for most original, most useless, and most useful code will also be awarded.
SCO is just begging to be bought out now. Take a look at this gem from the end of the news.com.com article:
SCO also announced its board has approved a revised shareholder rights plan designed to make a hostile takeover harder, though no such attempts are under way, McBride said.
"Where the share prices are at now, we are concerned about somebody who would be opportunistic. What's to keep IBM or somebody else from coming in and taking (SCO) out at a much lower price than the claims you have on the table?" he asked.
Ahh... the joys of watching scumbag companies dangle in the wind. I almost feel sorry for their shareholders.
Now, how is this going to work? First off, when I do a search on google there are dozens if not hundreds of PC's involved in various aspects of the search. I get my results in under a second. My computer - although fairly decent itself - is only a mid-tower. There is no way I can support even one PC to assist in searching.
Aside from the logistics problems, where the heck am I going to get the pigeons anyway?
Robotic combat has always been about rulesets. Even battle bots had a no-projectiles no-flames no-EMP type ruleset. Otherwise, robotic combat in a small enclosed space would be a contest as to whom could fire their 30-mm recoilless rifle first when the contest started
Well, I agree on the small enclosed space there. But I don't think we should necessarally stick with rulesets. I would LOVE to see 80m tall robots batteling it out no-holds-barred. Just think of the innovation!
I mean, granted they would start off with machine guns and some kind of high-powered laser. But I could see very quickly how people would change designs around, add some armor, and come up with some great new weaponry.
Just think.. missles with guidance capabilities. Heck, grab some of that starwars tech and launch multiple independant warheads at a target. Increase the frequency of your lasers to the upper EM band to allow them to travel greater distances. Heck, I bet you could make a long range projectable EM pulse by detonating a proton plasma shell!
And of course, there would have to be some sneaky tatics as well. Why else do you watch a no-holds-barred fight?:)? Chunk a stream of napalm at your opponent to prevent them from using their weaponry. Heck, strap a couple of jet engines on your back and land on him. 60 metric tons coming down at 200mph right on your enemy? You may lose your legs but there is no way on earth he'll survive!
So I say, lets go for it! Screw these arenas! Grab a deserted desert island somewhere, setup a few hundred cameras and lets see which robot wins!
Oh, and there might be some minor millitary advantages to this as well.
Hey moderators, this is NOT FUNNY! I've been wresteling with this problem off and on for nearly 3 months now. (I've come up with several varried solutions, but none of them are the way I want it to be done)
Mr. Debugger, I'm running a multithreaded perl app using perl 5.8.3's ithreads. I am using DBD::mysql to talk to a local mysql database. At the program start I spawn a child thread that waits for a thread::queue to be filled with data. Once the child thread receives data it spawns several children of its own to process the data. Each grandchild forms its own dbd connection and successfully processes the data, then gracefully closes the connection and waits to be joined.
The problem arises when the controlling child thread begins to join the grandchildren. Despite the mention of global destruction, the entire program is not exiting - just the grandchildren are being joined. When the grandchildren join, perl dies with the following error:
Attempt to dereference null pointer during global destruction.
When performing the same style operation without using DBD (and thus not actually doing anything useful) the error does not occur. Initially, this appears to be a thread-safety issue with DBD however when isolating the child and grandchildren in their own test program (so the controlling child is the main program and the grandchildren are spawned worker children) the error does not appear.
Help me O great plain English debugger. You are my only hope!
Seriously.. Rebel! Grab yourself a Knoppix CD and outperform everyone else. Now, you have to be smart about this. It'll probably involve some after-school time practicing and making sure you can do absolutely everything your particular course requires without problems. Knoppix by itself is a very eye-appealing distro but you can do some things to spruce it up (i.e. School logo's where appropriate. Set proper homepages. Setup any printers and other networking quirks.) Having the one computer in the class that looks the nicest will quickly draw the attention of your fellow stu^H^H^Hrebels.
Now, Your teachers depending on their level of expertise will probably either ask you to remove that theme or actually wonder what the heck is going on. This can be a good thing if your teachers are smart - getting them to join the rebellion will help you in your fight.
Now, this being a technical school of sorts, you probably have other enlightened persons hanging around. Polish your CD up a bit, make a funky logo to print on it and start handing it out to your fellow rebels. Having 3-4 people in a class running something different will immediately draw the attention of everyone else in the classroom (the innate nature of teenagers to all be different in roughly the same way:). The fact that it is something you "shouldn't" be doing will only help you here.
Now, you have a few possible endgame scenarios. First off, the administration can come down hard on you for violating their acceptable use policy. Not much you can do in this case without ending up as a martyr.
Secondly, you could get the teachers more or less on your side. As long as you get your work done, they shouldn't have much of a problem. The more converts you get, the more points you score:) Just don't ask them for support when your sound stops working.
Finally you could achieve total victory against the software monopolist throughout the galaxy (or at least your classroom). This is when every student carries around his/her own Knoppix CD or you get a Linux-based installation on a few computers. This is a tough one, but you can always shoot for it.
So my advice is don't try and convince anyone. Show them that you can do the same job faster, cheaper, better, and somehow learn more out of it. Administrators like the first three benefits, and teachers especially like that last bit!
My Dad has a webbrowser that my sister and I used to use for our homework assignments. One night, I was browsing a website on it, when all of a sudden it went berserk, the screen started flashing, and some really weird pictures just appeared. Lots of them. And I was at a good website! I had to reboot and find it again really quickly. Needless to say, my rushed webbrowsing wasn't nearly as good, and I blame IE for the trouble I got into when my Dad checked the cache.
I'm happy to report that my sister and I now share Mozilla Firefox. It's a lot nicer to work on than my dad's webbrowser was, it hasn't let me down once, and my cache has been really clean.
There are a few rules when it comes to the Stargate. I thought everyone understood them; however it appears that not everyone got the memo. So, please follow this simple list of things not to do with the Stargate:
Do not attempt to travel through the path of a solar flare.
Error messages are there for a reason. Do not override them.
Do not hit golf balls through the Stargate.
Do not contact the Guinness book of world records about your 45-lightyear drive afterwards.
Do not place stuffed aliens on the MALP.
Do not invite the goa'uld over for 'tea.'
Do not place a fifth finger slot in the handprint scanner.
Even if you are the last person through, do not spit while in the wormhole.
Absolutely under no circumstances should you ever slashdot the Stargate.
One of the more unique aspects of the Wikipedia (aside from the entire concept of a community edited reference) is its license. The current license for content seems to fit rather well with the goals of the project, but seems to cause a few hurdles as well (i.e. publishing a print version of the Wikipedia). So I guess my question is, what other license models did you consider when starting out with the project and what made you go with the current one? Also, looking back would you have done anything different with the licensing?
So how will they make this fit with the Classic Trek episode Balance of Terror, in which we learned that no human ever saw the face of a Romulan during the Romulan Wars?
My guess? Knowing what creative wonder Berman and pals are capable of, I bet it will end up being cheap face masks.
The theory is fairly simple. You have a planet with little or no magnetic field to deflect the solar wind. Add to that a relatively weak gravatational field to keep the gasses stuck to the planet and you have this situation..
Water vapor ends up in the upper atmosphere. High speed solar wind strikes the atmosphere and carries it away. This results in lower atmospheric pressure leading to an increased amount of liquid water turing to vapor and being carried away as well.
As far as where it would go, its generally carried "out" in the direction of the solar wind.
Open-source software -- uncopyrighted software which has no license cost -- like Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Apache, MySQL and Evolution -- was "very credible," Dutreil said.
Well, there is a license cost, and it most definately is copywrighted. But monitarialy they are correct. Now, the very cool thing they said was:
"This will also help us sell our solutions to other governments," he said, adding that he believed the German, Israeli and Malasian governments also envisaged shifting to open-source software.
BINGO! We have a winner! Evil country A develops software for a fraction of the cost it would normally take in the closed-source land, sells it to Good Countries B through T and V through Z, and makes more money than they would have been able to otherwise.
Now that is what the GPL is about. Saving money&time in development, making money in sales & support (of course I probably wouldn't want France supporting my KMissle Launch Control System), and giving back to the world an improvement on what they borrowed.
Seriously. Raid is all about risk. Figure out how much risk is acceptable to you. If you have a stack of 6 drives and you only believe 1 is ever going to fail at any one time, then go with raid 5.
If you have a stack of 6 drives and believe not a single one is ever going to fail, go for level 0.
If you are a government contractor and are required to handle simultaneous failures of 75% of your drives, either mirror them all or go with 5+1 or a raid 10 setup.
All in all, its a poor question to ask slashdot. You need to let us know what you consider an acceptable failure, and by the time you have that figured out determining what raid level you need is easy.
Reading the posts, it seems that people are missing a major use for Theora and even Vorbis.
You know all those games you have that use MP3 for music? They had to pay a fee to do so. You know all those games you have that use bink video for cutscenes? They had to pay a fee to do so.
Now they don't. If there is a free alternative of comperable quality, the developers will use it instead of paying a $25k technology licensing fee. And the companies that don't will end up priced out of the market.
No, seriously. Earlier this year the hdd controler took a dump to the point where windows wouldn't run. I've tried: 98SE, ME, 2k and XP. Not a single version runs. I end up with "Hardware failure: contact your vendor for support" or something similar. On safe startups it dies immediately after MUP.SYS. I've been through new ram, video cards, hard disks, bios flashes, network cards, and HDD low level formats.
Anyway, I had a gentoo partition on it for a while, and I run mandrake/debian/redhat on various servers so I'm not quite jumping in the deep end here. The reason I was running windows was really for games and the 'it just works' factor. I know if I get a device somewhere, or a game, or some app I know it runs on windows.
Now, I know the arguments against all the above... if you want to game, get a console. Buy only hardware from linux-friendly manufacturers.. and I agree although the reality is that it doesn't always work that way.
Now, to get my computer functional, I installed several distros (all of which seem to work flawlessly despite windows claims of hardware inadequacy). I didn't feel like installing gentoo all week (I'm not knocking gentoo! I ran it for a year or so and liked it), and fedora lasted almost half an hour before me getting mad at it, so I went back to my old standby... Mandrake 10. I booted knoppix and saved the community iso to my ramdrive, burned it, and installed from the ftp official sources. An hour later I had a copy of Mandrake and it was my new desktop - permenantly. Albeit by force.
Now, I tried to go back to windows a few times on another partition with no success (and yes I mapped the partitions around with grub to be windows-friendly).. And it failed.
So I had a choice.. stick with linux (by force) and learn to love it in a desktop environment or shell out for a new motherboard.
Setting up the system was simple. Sound, mice, usb printers, nvidia graphics drivers etc... All that went well. The next task was clear - getting games to work.
Now, I have a collection of several hundred cd's and numerous floppies dating back to the days of the original Mechwarrior and Starflt (and I still have the code wheel). After a weekend of wine and compiling the winex cvs several different ways, I ended up with a grand total of 0 working games. This was very disappointing.
I struggled for about another two weeks with some mmorpg's I played and had just about finished with the withdrawl pains since I was unable to play them. Still no luck.
I was hard-set against paying $15 for a transgaming subscription, mostly because of the lack of it being free (in either sence of the word).
At one weak point I threw out my cc# and ended up with a nice little minty-fresh RPM. The installation was easy.. no config files needed to be setup (although I tweaked them later) and it made all the directories I needed. The interesting part was... most of my games actually worked. I've been going through KOTOR for the last week on linux, and aside from some mouse irritations it mostly works.
Now, I'm not an advocate for Transgaming, and I recommend using wine/x if at all possible, but for anyone thrown into the deep end it can ease some of the pains.
And now, my home system is linux and its staying that way.
Whats more interesting is that sometimes what control+v pastes is different from what the middle-click pastes. I'm sure there is a reason, and I'm also sure its my fault for not knowing it... but its still annoying..
What I've come to do is to copy a link via control+c or highlighting then opening a new tab in firefox. I have firefox to open new tabs to blank URL's and then I just middle click or control+v the URL.
Its a partial and flawed solution to a small part of your problem. Of course, this is Slashdot;)
I never had a problem with Intel's processor ID. Every networked computer already has a unique MAC address. What is the difference?
The big problem that many people had with the processor ID's initially was that you couldn't turn them off. Any program running localy could query your PID and send it off to god knows where. It wasn't until later that they released bios updates that allowed you to turn the feature off.
So, it wasn't the fact that the computer had a uniquely identifiable number (ip address/mac address/whatever), its the fact that you didn't have control over the use of that number.
I can deny you access to my ip address (I just don't connect to your server/use a proxy). I can also deny you access to my mac address (spoofing/proxies/whatnot). The rebellion people had was they couldn't deny programs access to your PID. Now, there wasn't any particular reason to deny programs access to a PID yet but it isn't too hard to think of a few.
Anyway, enough rambling. It was the removal of choice that set people off. We didn't have a choice to not use the feature - Assuming we stuck with Intel processors.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a painting you can buy in the Sims2 whose description is something along the lines of "shows the conflict of Red vs Blue".. Not a bad painting, but not as usefull as the pink flamingo's from the original.
You can find more information about google's news problems here:
news.google.com:google+news+beta
So, our favorite supplier of vagisil chose a ISV who went out of business, switched to another ISV who didn't know how to support their old software, and is a model of how to run a business with Microsoft software.
Our second (and final) example of all the swarms of companies running away from Linux comes from Mountain High Ski Resort.
The people at Mountain High are a prime example of people who really should be using Microsoft Software. Some of the more classic examples include:
- "The Linux system could not handle the layers of information needed for internal control of the resort."
- Roy also had concerns about the security and reliability of the system [that had no budget for setup].
- "There was a limit set up within the program that said you can only order 'x' amount of products within one transaction," Roy said. "When one of our guests went over the limit, it crashed the whole store. We then had to manually identify the erroneous credit card charges."
Now, that last item is the kicker. I don't care if you are running your site on $500,000 IBM servers-of-doom running NASA tested software that is Guaranteed 100% bug-free. If you design any kind of commerce site which not only crashes when someone orders too many products, but brings down the rest of the server AND makes erroneous credit card charges to multiple accounts.... You need to behead your programming team.And now, one final bit of the article put here just for humor:
Hello potential prize winner! Consider using your time to create an entry in this year's Slashdot Super Code Bowl. Prizes will be awarded to anyone who proves their worth by submitting code that fits any of these categories:
Other categories may be added, and bonus prizes for most original, most useless, and most useful code will also be awarded.
With that much denial in one news report, you know it has to be a cover-up
Now, how is this going to work? First off, when I do a search on google there are dozens if not hundreds of PC's involved in various aspects of the search. I get my results in under a second. My computer - although fairly decent itself - is only a mid-tower. There is no way I can support even one PC to assist in searching.
Aside from the logistics problems, where the heck am I going to get the pigeons anyway?
I mean, granted they would start off with machine guns and some kind of high-powered laser. But I could see very quickly how people would change designs around, add some armor, and come up with some great new weaponry.
Just think.. missles with guidance capabilities. Heck, grab some of that starwars tech and launch multiple independant warheads at a target. Increase the frequency of your lasers to the upper EM band to allow them to travel greater distances. Heck, I bet you could make a long range projectable EM pulse by detonating a proton plasma shell!
And of course, there would have to be some sneaky tatics as well. Why else do you watch a no-holds-barred fight?
So I say, lets go for it! Screw these arenas! Grab a deserted desert island somewhere, setup a few hundred cameras and lets see which robot wins!
Oh, and there might be some minor millitary advantages to this as well.
Hey moderators, this is NOT FUNNY! I've been wresteling with this problem off and on for nearly 3 months now. (I've come up with several varried solutions, but none of them are the way I want it to be done)
Mr. Debugger, I'm running a multithreaded perl app using perl 5.8.3's ithreads. I am using DBD::mysql to talk to a local mysql database. At the program start I spawn a child thread that waits for a thread::queue to be filled with data. Once the child thread receives data it spawns several children of its own to process the data. Each grandchild forms its own dbd connection and successfully processes the data, then gracefully closes the connection and waits to be joined.
The problem arises when the controlling child thread begins to join the grandchildren. Despite the mention of global destruction, the entire program is not exiting - just the grandchildren are being joined. When the grandchildren join, perl dies with the following error:
Attempt to dereference null pointer during global destruction.
When performing the same style operation without using DBD (and thus not actually doing anything useful) the error does not occur. Initially, this appears to be a thread-safety issue with DBD however when isolating the child and grandchildren in their own test program (so the controlling child is the main program and the grandchildren are spawned worker children) the error does not appear.
Help me O great plain English debugger. You are my only hope!
Seriously.. Rebel! Grab yourself a Knoppix CD and outperform everyone else. Now, you have to be smart about this. It'll probably involve some after-school time practicing and making sure you can do absolutely everything your particular course requires without problems. Knoppix by itself is a very eye-appealing distro but you can do some things to spruce it up (i.e. School logo's where appropriate. Set proper homepages. Setup any printers and other networking quirks.) Having the one computer in the class that looks the nicest will quickly draw the attention of your fellow stu^H^H^Hrebels.
:). The fact that it is something you "shouldn't" be doing will only help you here.
:) Just don't ask them for support when your sound stops working.
Now, Your teachers depending on their level of expertise will probably either ask you to remove that theme or actually wonder what the heck is going on. This can be a good thing if your teachers are smart - getting them to join the rebellion will help you in your fight.
Now, this being a technical school of sorts, you probably have other enlightened persons hanging around. Polish your CD up a bit, make a funky logo to print on it and start handing it out to your fellow rebels. Having 3-4 people in a class running something different will immediately draw the attention of everyone else in the classroom (the innate nature of teenagers to all be different in roughly the same way
Now, you have a few possible endgame scenarios. First off, the administration can come down hard on you for violating their acceptable use policy. Not much you can do in this case without ending up as a martyr.
Secondly, you could get the teachers more or less on your side. As long as you get your work done, they shouldn't have much of a problem. The more converts you get, the more points you score
Finally you could achieve total victory against the software monopolist throughout the galaxy (or at least your classroom). This is when every student carries around his/her own Knoppix CD or you get a Linux-based installation on a few computers. This is a tough one, but you can always shoot for it.
So my advice is don't try and convince anyone. Show them that you can do the same job faster, cheaper, better, and somehow learn more out of it. Administrators like the first three benefits, and teachers especially like that last bit!
Wow... this is almost but not quite exactly like this story!
I'm writing to share a tragic little story.
My Dad has a webbrowser that my sister and I used to use for our homework assignments. One night, I was browsing a website on it, when all of a sudden it went berserk, the screen started flashing, and some really weird pictures just appeared. Lots of them. And I was at a good website! I had to reboot and find it again really quickly. Needless to say, my rushed webbrowsing wasn't nearly as good, and I blame IE for the trouble I got into when my Dad checked the cache.
I'm happy to report that my sister and I now share Mozilla Firefox. It's a lot nicer to work on than my dad's webbrowser was, it hasn't let me down once, and my cache has been really clean.
Thanks, Mozilla.
One of the more unique aspects of the Wikipedia (aside from the entire concept of a community edited reference) is its license. The current license for content seems to fit rather well with the goals of the project, but seems to cause a few hurdles as well (i.e. publishing a print version of the Wikipedia). So I guess my question is, what other license models did you consider when starting out with the project and what made you go with the current one? Also, looking back would you have done anything different with the licensing?
The theory is fairly simple. You have a planet with little or no magnetic field to deflect the solar wind. Add to that a relatively weak gravatational field to keep the gasses stuck to the planet and you have this situation..
Water vapor ends up in the upper atmosphere. High speed solar wind strikes the atmosphere and carries it away. This results in lower atmospheric pressure leading to an increased amount of liquid water turing to vapor and being carried away as well.
As far as where it would go, its generally carried "out" in the direction of the solar wind.
Something tells me that the tv's will have mysterious failures of both the red and green guns after they have been deployed.
Now that is what the GPL is about. Saving money&time in development, making money in sales & support (of course I probably wouldn't want France supporting my KMissle Launch Control System), and giving back to the world an improvement on what they borrowed.
10 bonus karma points for the first person to write a worm that exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft's AV software!
Seriously. Raid is all about risk. Figure out how much risk is acceptable to you. If you have a stack of 6 drives and you only believe 1 is ever going to fail at any one time, then go with raid 5.
If you have a stack of 6 drives and believe not a single one is ever going to fail, go for level 0.
If you are a government contractor and are required to handle simultaneous failures of 75% of your drives, either mirror them all or go with 5+1 or a raid 10 setup.
All in all, its a poor question to ask slashdot. You need to let us know what you consider an acceptable failure, and by the time you have that figured out determining what raid level you need is easy.
Reading the posts, it seems that people are missing a major use for Theora and even Vorbis.
You know all those games you have that use MP3 for music? They had to pay a fee to do so. You know all those games you have that use bink video for cutscenes? They had to pay a fee to do so.
Now they don't. If there is a free alternative of comperable quality, the developers will use it instead of paying a $25k technology licensing fee. And the companies that don't will end up priced out of the market.
My motherboard!
No, seriously. Earlier this year the hdd controler took a dump to the point where windows wouldn't run. I've tried: 98SE, ME, 2k and XP. Not a single version runs. I end up with "Hardware failure: contact your vendor for support" or something similar. On safe startups it dies immediately after MUP.SYS. I've been through new ram, video cards, hard disks, bios flashes, network cards, and HDD low level formats.
Anyway, I had a gentoo partition on it for a while, and I run mandrake/debian/redhat on various servers so I'm not quite jumping in the deep end here. The reason I was running windows was really for games and the 'it just works' factor. I know if I get a device somewhere, or a game, or some app I know it runs on windows.
Now, I know the arguments against all the above... if you want to game, get a console. Buy only hardware from linux-friendly manufacturers.. and I agree although the reality is that it doesn't always work that way.
Now, to get my computer functional, I installed several distros (all of which seem to work flawlessly despite windows claims of hardware inadequacy). I didn't feel like installing gentoo all week (I'm not knocking gentoo! I ran it for a year or so and liked it), and fedora lasted almost half an hour before me getting mad at it, so I went back to my old standby... Mandrake 10. I booted knoppix and saved the community iso to my ramdrive, burned it, and installed from the ftp official sources. An hour later I had a copy of Mandrake and it was my new desktop - permenantly. Albeit by force.
Now, I tried to go back to windows a few times on another partition with no success (and yes I mapped the partitions around with grub to be windows-friendly).. And it failed.
So I had a choice.. stick with linux (by force) and learn to love it in a desktop environment or shell out for a new motherboard.
Setting up the system was simple. Sound, mice, usb printers, nvidia graphics drivers etc... All that went well. The next task was clear - getting games to work.
Now, I have a collection of several hundred cd's and numerous floppies dating back to the days of the original Mechwarrior and Starflt (and I still have the code wheel). After a weekend of wine and compiling the winex cvs several different ways, I ended up with a grand total of 0 working games. This was very disappointing.
I struggled for about another two weeks with some mmorpg's I played and had just about finished with the withdrawl pains since I was unable to play them. Still no luck.
I was hard-set against paying $15 for a transgaming subscription, mostly because of the lack of it being free (in either sence of the word).
At one weak point I threw out my cc# and ended up with a nice little minty-fresh RPM. The installation was easy.. no config files needed to be setup (although I tweaked them later) and it made all the directories I needed. The interesting part was... most of my games actually worked. I've been going through KOTOR for the last week on linux, and aside from some mouse irritations it mostly works.
Now, I'm not an advocate for Transgaming, and I recommend using wine/x if at all possible, but for anyone thrown into the deep end it can ease some of the pains.
And now, my home system is linux and its staying that way.
..but I don't have a solution either :)
;)
What annoys me the most is when copying/pasteing URL's. I'll highlight© a url somewhere then I go and paste it into firefox. Out of habbit I'll go and highlight the current URL and control+v what I assume I'm pasteing... and end up with the same URL that I started with.
Whats more interesting is that sometimes what control+v pastes is different from what the middle-click pastes. I'm sure there is a reason, and I'm also sure its my fault for not knowing it... but its still annoying..
What I've come to do is to copy a link via control+c or highlighting then opening a new tab in firefox. I have firefox to open new tabs to blank URL's and then I just middle click or control+v the URL.
Its a partial and flawed solution to a small part of your problem. Of course, this is Slashdot
So, it wasn't the fact that the computer had a uniquely identifiable number (ip address/mac address/whatever), its the fact that you didn't have control over the use of that number.
I can deny you access to my ip address (I just don't connect to your server/use a proxy). I can also deny you access to my mac address (spoofing/proxies/whatnot). The rebellion people had was they couldn't deny programs access to your PID. Now, there wasn't any particular reason to deny programs access to a PID yet but it isn't too hard to think of a few.
Anyway, enough rambling. It was the removal of choice that set people off. We didn't have a choice to not use the feature - Assuming we stuck with Intel processors.