I now run with an Asus WL-520gu using Tomato firmware, very nice.
The WL520GU is a great router even with the native firmware. I was going to put DD-WRT on it, but read that the processor speed would be limited. Have you had any issues with Tomato?
Hey! Don't knock Windows! I make a lot of money cleaning infections from MS products...
On the other hand, removing infections from Windows is kinda like disinfecting a toilet. It just won't last... The more interesting thing is that the German gov. is taking employment away from pc repairers.
I really don't see the difference to killing and eating a rat in front of the camera and buying meat from the market to eat in front of the camera. In both cases an animal died for food. It gets worse though. In Victoria (the state bordering NSW to the south) the bleeding heart animal wuvvers are trying to put through legislation to mandate walking a dog every day...
I guess it's just one of the signs of a wealthy society. People don't have to spend all their time working at the basics of existence anymore, so they start getting worried about rubbish like this.
I recently started using my 1965 radiogram again. Cat Stevens and Chicago LP's. Borrowing my Dad's old favourites. It' just awesome.
It can screw with your head a bit though. I listened to a lot of the great musical works on LP or even on 78's as a kid. Now whenever I hear, say Berlioz' Symphony Fantastique, I always feel I need to get up and turn the disc over halfway through the third movement.
Strange you say that about mplayer. I use it almost exclusively for DVDs. My mates are pretty much all into Hindi movies, but a lot of players won't play the disks you can get in the markets. Dragonplayer will usually read them well and do the menus/subtitles, but I don't really need the menus most of the time. Mplayer is best for the subtitles and the configuration is so powerful. For flash videos I use totem and for mp3's I use rhythmbox via X forwarding over SSH when playing music on my music/file server (yeah I still use alsamixer to up the volume when I'm across the other side of the house.)
The KDE development crowd are doing a lot of great things. Maybe I should give it another look sometime, but I still find Gnome the easiest to set up for those who are not so computer literate. For me personally, I just use whatever window manager or desktop environment suits what I want to do on that particular machine. Usually gnome, e16 or Xfce. KDE has always let me down no matter how much I admire parts of it.
The panel was the biggest issue by far, but the general 'exuberance' of the desktop environment put people off a bit. It even took me a while to figure out how to get the panel widgets back after they'd disappeared. It just didn't seem to want to do it and was amazingly frustrating. KDE apps like Dolphin, KPPP and others I have nothing by admiration for. Brilliant pieces of software. I used Dragonplayer myself on my Gnome desktop until I moved over to Mplayer (yes, command line. It's a bit old school, but it works so well.) The ideology behind the structure of KDE4 is very well thought through and quite impressive. The follow through leaves a bit to be desired though...
KDE3 was just too busy. To me it was like a manic depressive woman constantly on manic, or watching Bay Watch in fast motion, with everything bouncing around all the time. Personal preference there though. I found it just too distracting, too much going on. It'll be interesting to see how the crowd at KDE sort out this tabs idea. Hopefully the execution will be as good as the planning this time.
I've never found it stable enough to install on anyone's pc. It's just too easy to stuff up the taskbar etc and too busy/confusing for people who aren't very computer literate.
What exactly do you mean here by not stable? KDE 4.3 is stable as could be on my system. KDE 3.5 was too, although the earlier KDE 4 releases obviously had there problems.
By using 'stable' I mean more a stable user experience than straight code. Sure. Things crash. That's part of using software. On occasion things just don't work right, but with KDE I found that it was too easy for users to accidentally remove things from the task bar for example. Even if I had things locked down as much as I could, a simple sweep of the touchpad could have really strange consequences. I had to remove it from 3 or 4 computers after the users wanted to try it out, but found it too hard to use without things going wrong. Sure, none of these people were highly computer literate at all, but KDE is supposed to be easy to use.
Apart from building giveaway computers for disadvantaged students, I currently have pc's running Linux in three rooming houses for international students. I just can't risk putting KDE onto them without writing a script to replace the home folder with a clean default config every boot. Instead, I just configure wonderful, boring old Gnome to look as much like XP as possible, lock everything down so the students can't screw it up and do updates over the network once a fortnight. Half the time I don't even think they realise it's not XP until their pirate copies of Photoshop won't install. By contrast, when my mates had KDE on their pc's I was out every week fixing the stupid things.
As someone who argued strongly with the Nautilus team for tabs a couple of years ago, I love tabs in applications. gedit, nautilus, firefox, gnome-terminal etc all have tab capabilities and I find all of them quite useful for having several things running IN THE SAME APPLICATION at once. Tabs within a lot of apps make sense. I find it hard however to find grouping applications together such a useful feature. I like to size my app windows differently, depending on the window layout for instance. The only common use I can really think of is connecting an open file browser window to an app. Past that, laying things out in separate desktops would seem to be a far neater alternative. If I'm really busy, I just double my number of desktops.
This being KDE however, I can kinda understand where they are coming from. They seem to be pushing more and more to become a viable desktop environment alternative for Microsoft Windows as well as in Linux, so tabbing applications could make a lot more sense for MS Windows users who are only used to one desktop.
My real concern however is that while KDE has some absolutely fantastic apps, great code and brilliantly logical ideas behind how they design their desktop environment, I've never found it stable enough to install on anyone's pc. It's just too easy to stuff up the taskbar etc and too busy/confusing for people who aren't very computer literate. In fact I've seen KDE (both 3 and 4) turn those interested in trying Linux into people who really distrust any Linux desktop. It's a real shame as there is a lot of really great work done in KDE.
I think that the really interesting thing is how they've integrated Google Translate into the drop down language list. Absolutely beautiful. Very useful. Nice work.
In Australia people pretty much swear by street directories put out by Ausway. They produce the Melway (Melbourne), Sidway (Sydney) and Brisway (Brisbane) street directories. The directories are so good and so popular that the grid references (at least in Melbourne) have become a standard way of telling people where you live or where your shop, place of worship, location of special event etc is. Eg. most wedding invites I receive have a Melways reference on them. The books also include public transport information, touring maps for the rest of Australia etc.
On my recent trip to Sydney I almost bought a Sidway book, but instead my mate brought his NaviBitch. He now hates the Nav, but loves the idea of maps.
The thing that gets me is that I can buy a book of maps for about $40 (far less than the NaviBitch) that already has all of the information on roads I require, several search options and almost perfect accuracy. The maps are readily available. Why don't the NaviBitch creators use the same government/private sources as the street directory publishers?
As much as the map issues were annoying, the stupid tendency the machine had to take one around the block once, twice or even more while it decided where the hell it wanted to go was somewhat disconcerting. Also why does it seem to take twice as long to get somewhere using the NaviBitch? Why is it so pathetically phobic of main roads? I'm afraid it's maps for me.
Hopefully a lot of other things will be retired along with Gears. We can only hope that the webdevs of the world retire Javascript and the host of other stop-gaps that make our web and our browsers so heavy.
I recently used a GPS unit when visiting some mates in Sydney. Never again! Half the time the Navman (or NaviBitch as we called it) completely ignored streets being one way only, didn't recognise median strips etc. and street numbers? Sheesh. Most suburban streets only seemed to go up to 20 or 30 in the NaviBitch's distorted memory (especially those where our friends lived at 86 or so) requiring us to make long detours in Sydney's winding one-way streets to actually get to where we wanted (after turning the NaviBitch off). The crowning moment was on the Motorway when it told me to turn right. Ok. Strange enough. Stupid thing was telling me to turn right onto a bridge that went over the Motorway...
Here in Australia Murdoch prints the trashier newspapers anyway. If you want good news stories, these are not the newspapers to read. They are designed in general to appeal to the less educated with stacks of sex, sensationalism and sport. Quite frankly if they were cut out of google search responses it would make my searches for decent news reports faster and easier. Wherever I go in Australia, I don't read his newspapers anyway (but I'll pinch the cryptic crosswords if anyone else is reading them...)
One of the first questions I normally get from people looking at moving over to Linux, is "Can I run Photoshop?" Well, GIMP is actually pretty good, even if the user interface is not so great. With the Gimpshop package it seems to fill the gap ok. Fspot is useless (does not edit images at all in the viewer mode), gThumb is a brilliant little piece of software, does all that most people want and integrates well with Nautilus, but it seems that the Ubuntu developers don't think it's good enough. It's the closest thing to what's in a standard Windows install. What's their problem?
Seriously I do not personally know anyone who has deliberately planned to become a single parent. It generally happens by mistake or misfortune. In fact, my own mother was a single parent who finally got married again so her kids could have a Dad.
Single parent families do have problems. Female children without a father figure (in home) reach menarche much earlier for example. Boys also develop faster physically. This is dwarfed by the emotional development differences. PC be stuffed. The norm is male/female. We need both role models as we grow up.
Best thing is probably to decide a shortlist of CMS packages that fit what you want to do and install them on a spare server. Try each one out for a few hours, read some more reviews and guides as you go, and by the end of a week you'll know which one you want to use.
I'd use Drupal any day over Joomla! though. Apart from the annoying exclamation mark in their name, I just couldn't do what I wanted with Joomla!
Drupal seems more friendly (and lacks any arrogant and annoying exclamation marks in the name), but in the end I still write all my code by hand and gave up on using a CMS at all. Drupal should certainly be on your shortlist though.
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I now run with an Asus WL-520gu using Tomato firmware, very nice.
The WL520GU is a great router even with the native firmware. I was going to put DD-WRT on it, but read that the processor speed would be limited. Have you had any issues with Tomato?
Hey! Don't knock Windows! I make a lot of money cleaning infections from MS products...
On the other hand, removing infections from Windows is kinda like disinfecting a toilet. It just won't last... The more interesting thing is that the German gov. is taking employment away from pc repairers.
I really don't see the difference to killing and eating a rat in front of the camera and buying meat from the market to eat in front of the camera. In both cases an animal died for food. It gets worse though. In Victoria (the state bordering NSW to the south) the bleeding heart animal wuvvers are trying to put through legislation to mandate walking a dog every day...
I guess it's just one of the signs of a wealthy society. People don't have to spend all their time working at the basics of existence anymore, so they start getting worried about rubbish like this.
I recently started using my 1965 radiogram again. Cat Stevens and Chicago LP's. Borrowing my Dad's old favourites. It' just awesome.
It can screw with your head a bit though. I listened to a lot of the great musical works on LP or even on 78's as a kid. Now whenever I hear, say Berlioz' Symphony Fantastique, I always feel I need to get up and turn the disc over halfway through the third movement.
Strange you say that about mplayer. I use it almost exclusively for DVDs. My mates are pretty much all into Hindi movies, but a lot of players won't play the disks you can get in the markets. Dragonplayer will usually read them well and do the menus/subtitles, but I don't really need the menus most of the time. Mplayer is best for the subtitles and the configuration is so powerful. For flash videos I use totem and for mp3's I use rhythmbox via X forwarding over SSH when playing music on my music/file server (yeah I still use alsamixer to up the volume when I'm across the other side of the house.)
The KDE development crowd are doing a lot of great things. Maybe I should give it another look sometime, but I still find Gnome the easiest to set up for those who are not so computer literate. For me personally, I just use whatever window manager or desktop environment suits what I want to do on that particular machine. Usually gnome, e16 or Xfce. KDE has always let me down no matter how much I admire parts of it.
No, we leave things upside-down here, because we all hang upside down too. git...
The panel was the biggest issue by far, but the general 'exuberance' of the desktop environment put people off a bit. It even took me a while to figure out how to get the panel widgets back after they'd disappeared. It just didn't seem to want to do it and was amazingly frustrating. KDE apps like Dolphin, KPPP and others I have nothing by admiration for. Brilliant pieces of software. I used Dragonplayer myself on my Gnome desktop until I moved over to Mplayer (yes, command line. It's a bit old school, but it works so well.) The ideology behind the structure of KDE4 is very well thought through and quite impressive. The follow through leaves a bit to be desired though...
KDE3 was just too busy. To me it was like a manic depressive woman constantly on manic, or watching Bay Watch in fast motion, with everything bouncing around all the time. Personal preference there though. I found it just too distracting, too much going on. It'll be interesting to see how the crowd at KDE sort out this tabs idea. Hopefully the execution will be as good as the planning this time.
I've never found it stable enough to install on anyone's pc. It's just too easy to stuff up the taskbar etc and too busy/confusing for people who aren't very computer literate.
What exactly do you mean here by not stable? KDE 4.3 is stable as could be on my system. KDE 3.5 was too, although the earlier KDE 4 releases obviously had there problems.
By using 'stable' I mean more a stable user experience than straight code. Sure. Things crash. That's part of using software. On occasion things just don't work right, but with KDE I found that it was too easy for users to accidentally remove things from the task bar for example. Even if I had things locked down as much as I could, a simple sweep of the touchpad could have really strange consequences. I had to remove it from 3 or 4 computers after the users wanted to try it out, but found it too hard to use without things going wrong. Sure, none of these people were highly computer literate at all, but KDE is supposed to be easy to use.
Apart from building giveaway computers for disadvantaged students, I currently have pc's running Linux in three rooming houses for international students. I just can't risk putting KDE onto them without writing a script to replace the home folder with a clean default config every boot. Instead, I just configure wonderful, boring old Gnome to look as much like XP as possible, lock everything down so the students can't screw it up and do updates over the network once a fortnight. Half the time I don't even think they realise it's not XP until their pirate copies of Photoshop won't install. By contrast, when my mates had KDE on their pc's I was out every week fixing the stupid things.
As someone who argued strongly with the Nautilus team for tabs a couple of years ago, I love tabs in applications. gedit, nautilus, firefox, gnome-terminal etc all have tab capabilities and I find all of them quite useful for having several things running IN THE SAME APPLICATION at once. Tabs within a lot of apps make sense. I find it hard however to find grouping applications together such a useful feature. I like to size my app windows differently, depending on the window layout for instance. The only common use I can really think of is connecting an open file browser window to an app. Past that, laying things out in separate desktops would seem to be a far neater alternative. If I'm really busy, I just double my number of desktops.
This being KDE however, I can kinda understand where they are coming from. They seem to be pushing more and more to become a viable desktop environment alternative for Microsoft Windows as well as in Linux, so tabbing applications could make a lot more sense for MS Windows users who are only used to one desktop.
My real concern however is that while KDE has some absolutely fantastic apps, great code and brilliantly logical ideas behind how they design their desktop environment, I've never found it stable enough to install on anyone's pc. It's just too easy to stuff up the taskbar etc and too busy/confusing for people who aren't very computer literate. In fact I've seen KDE (both 3 and 4) turn those interested in trying Linux into people who really distrust any Linux desktop. It's a real shame as there is a lot of really great work done in KDE.
I think that the really interesting thing is how they've integrated Google Translate into the drop down language list. Absolutely beautiful. Very useful. Nice work.
In Australia people pretty much swear by street directories put out by Ausway. They produce the Melway (Melbourne), Sidway (Sydney) and Brisway (Brisbane) street directories. The directories are so good and so popular that the grid references (at least in Melbourne) have become a standard way of telling people where you live or where your shop, place of worship, location of special event etc is. Eg. most wedding invites I receive have a Melways reference on them. The books also include public transport information, touring maps for the rest of Australia etc.
On my recent trip to Sydney I almost bought a Sidway book, but instead my mate brought his NaviBitch. He now hates the Nav, but loves the idea of maps.
The thing that gets me is that I can buy a book of maps for about $40 (far less than the NaviBitch) that already has all of the information on roads I require, several search options and almost perfect accuracy. The maps are readily available. Why don't the NaviBitch creators use the same government/private sources as the street directory publishers? As much as the map issues were annoying, the stupid tendency the machine had to take one around the block once, twice or even more while it decided where the hell it wanted to go was somewhat disconcerting. Also why does it seem to take twice as long to get somewhere using the NaviBitch? Why is it so pathetically phobic of main roads? I'm afraid it's maps for me.
Hopefully a lot of other things will be retired along with Gears. We can only hope that the webdevs of the world retire Javascript and the host of other stop-gaps that make our web and our browsers so heavy.
I recently used a GPS unit when visiting some mates in Sydney. Never again! Half the time the Navman (or NaviBitch as we called it) completely ignored streets being one way only, didn't recognise median strips etc. and street numbers? Sheesh. Most suburban streets only seemed to go up to 20 or 30 in the NaviBitch's distorted memory (especially those where our friends lived at 86 or so) requiring us to make long detours in Sydney's winding one-way streets to actually get to where we wanted (after turning the NaviBitch off). The crowning moment was on the Motorway when it told me to turn right. Ok. Strange enough. Stupid thing was telling me to turn right onto a bridge that went over the Motorway...
I'm still stuck at catch 22
The two rules of government (and for that matter, pretty much everything else!)
Here in Australia Murdoch prints the trashier newspapers anyway. If you want good news stories, these are not the newspapers to read. They are designed in general to appeal to the less educated with stacks of sex, sensationalism and sport. Quite frankly if they were cut out of google search responses it would make my searches for decent news reports faster and easier. Wherever I go in Australia, I don't read his newspapers anyway (but I'll pinch the cryptic crosswords if anyone else is reading them...)
One of the first questions I normally get from people looking at moving over to Linux, is "Can I run Photoshop?" Well, GIMP is actually pretty good, even if the user interface is not so great. With the Gimpshop package it seems to fill the gap ok. Fspot is useless (does not edit images at all in the viewer mode), gThumb is a brilliant little piece of software, does all that most people want and integrates well with Nautilus, but it seems that the Ubuntu developers don't think it's good enough. It's the closest thing to what's in a standard Windows install. What's their problem?
I have some grave misgivings about single parent adoption as well. Perhaps IVF technology has made adoption less popular for couples.
Have you any citations or just opinions? Nice story that you've 'spun'.
Seriously I do not personally know anyone who has deliberately planned to become a single parent. It generally happens by mistake or misfortune. In fact, my own mother was a single parent who finally got married again so her kids could have a Dad.
...yeah... tell that to all of the single mothers (and single fathers) who have been abandoned by their child's father (mother).
I'm sure they know it all too well already. All the single parents I know do. It's tough.
Single parent families do have problems. Female children without a father figure (in home) reach menarche much earlier for example. Boys also develop faster physically. This is dwarfed by the emotional development differences. PC be stuffed. The norm is male/female. We need both role models as we grow up.
A male role-model perhaps? Psychologically important for both males and females. Basic psychology here...
Best thing is probably to decide a shortlist of CMS packages that fit what you want to do and install them on a spare server. Try each one out for a few hours, read some more reviews and guides as you go, and by the end of a week you'll know which one you want to use.
I'd use Drupal any day over Joomla! though. Apart from the annoying exclamation mark in their name, I just couldn't do what I wanted with Joomla! Drupal seems more friendly (and lacks any arrogant and annoying exclamation marks in the name), but in the end I still write all my code by hand and gave up on using a CMS at all. Drupal should certainly be on your shortlist though.