Ahh a classic troll... maybe this guy doesn't have education, skills, and interest in curing cancer. Maybe he does, OTOH, have what it takes to pull off an amusing "case mod". Sheesh... lighten up already... it's pretty funny, and that made it worth *my* time.:)
> Who says they will have Floppies or even a Floppy Controller. My computers don't have floppy drives.
Mine do, and they're cheap enough, but if they (Phoenix and/or Samsung) wanted to really do it "right", couldn't they disable floppy drives in the BIOS itself? Since many BIOS reflash utilities seem to need to boot off a plain-jane DOS floppy, not being able to install your own floppy drive and controller and have it recognized by the Evil BIOS could be a problem installing a Good BIOS over the top of it.
> How many companies these days are willing to drop money into some technology that may not turn a profit for many years?"
Aerospace, for one. Working at one of the companies that makes commercial (and military) aircraft engines, it is jokingly quoted that: "A decision to launch a new engine program is a calculated risk to go into the hole for about 20 years" (Meaning it takes about that long to "turn profit" off all the years of design, development, testing, and certication processes.) Imagine how many times the market flops around responding to other market pressures in that length of time.
As an interesting aside for many of you, aircraft engines have historically been sold on the razor/blades business model, so its an interesting business balance between a quality engine that airline customers will buy and the need to sell spares to eventually make money on FAR down the road.
I dunno if the "wiki" part is anything newer than what I saw a month ago, but after jumping through several account creation / e-mail verification / etc hoops to try to post a detailed, working answer to someone else's problem (the problem and distro which happened to be the same as mine -- and for which no "good" answer had yet been provided), I kept getting denied any ability to actually post a reply to the thread. Tried for several days and gave up. I'm hoping it was a fluke... I know I need answers all the time for things, but the one time I CAN HELP and try to do so, DENIED. Blah.
> Before executing any code, ask the user if it's okay.
I agree the user deserves a courtesy here, but really for the Vast Majority (tm) out there, this won't really alleviate the problem, just in and of itself. Most people (at least on windows) are conditioned to agree to whatever prompt is on the screen. Consider:
To install this software, you must agree to these possibly heinous and restrictive licensing terms... (blah blah blah:scroll down: ). Agree and install? [OK]
Due to poor skill or apathy by the developer, to continue here, we'll need to blow away work you've done before so you can continue. Delete lots of work? [OK]
Warning: The attachment you have clicked on is trying to start an application. Continue? [OK]
>... and IE said it had -8342563246 seconds to go!
I love bashing IE much as the next/.'er, but I've actually had Galeon's download dialog tell me that a couple times. (fairly recent version as per MDK9.2). Odd thing to watch the seconds still count down (more negative) until the last two figures hit about...95 or so and then they reverted back to...36 on the next second, but without changing the rest of the "time left".
From other comments in the thread, it doesn't sound like this will magically make bad code no longer break, barf, and die upon overflowing... rather, sounds like it would be used prevent accidental or malicious execution of arbitrary code due to overflowing/overwriting the data areas into the instruction areas of the chip's buffer(s). Piss-poor code that breaks still will. (Something like that... I'm hardly a "chip" guy.)
Also this whole Mozilla/Netscape/Firebird thing is really confusing me - and perhaps others. Why doesn't the Mozilla team commit a bit more resource towards polish and user experience and produce a single primary browser with some more bells and whistles and sell/give that away. I believe that Netscape is supposed to be this, I think, but after my experiences with older versions of Netscape I really wouldn't install that.
These are all personal opinions, but Netscape is all-but-dead as an end-product; only the brand-name lives on now. Mozilla replaced NS Communicator for an integrated browser/e-mail/news client. But people aren't happy enough and want a browser-only configuration. That's well and good, and thus started the phoenix/firebird/firefox line, but these should be considered mainly in-development code names not necessarily intended for public consumption (i.e., "for mom"). Personally, I'm hoping that when they get enough back-end kinks worked out in the engine and protocol support items, these codename browsers will roll back over to something like "Mozilla Browser" where useability items will be addressed; this is really what you and I are watching the mozilla team work towards, IMO. We (well, they) aren't there yet, and while it gets exciting to see what new widgets get added to a codename build, I think we can ultimately (and accidentally) do a disservice to push firefox (etc.) as a "for mom" solution for just the gripes you listed. Those of us here on/. with the ability to muddle through some install and/or upgrade pain to try the newest build out is, of course, another matter.
Seriously, since at this point the whole naming scheme is fscked anyway, I wonder why they couldn't go back to the old netscape naming conventions: Mozilla Navigator (browser only) Mozilla Communicator (including Mozilla Mail, etc.)
Heck, even my family and/or co-workers would be able to know what is going on then, as this would build upon what we finally got them trained on years ago.
What ever happend to REAL sci-fi that required the viewer/reader to actualy THINK
I think it left about the same time that ST:TNG did. (Not that I'm a major trekkie by anyone's standards, it is just a general correlation, IMO.) The money grabs otherwise known as DS9, voyager, and enterprise seem to have set the current low-ball standards that it seems the new BSG is aiming itself towards. (More prominent tits and cliched characters... not that I mind prominent tits, but there are other channels than sci-fi to get that with.)
> At the risk of drawing the fire of the distro zealots, this is the precise reason why I switched to Mandrake at about the same time as RHAT's IPO.
You beat me to the change to MDK; I've only done it recently now that the whole focus change is appropriately official, and hobbyist versions are being EOL'ed Real Soon Now. I staved off the need to change by not wanting to really learn new quirks in a new distro. (what the conf file is called, where it is at, how the libraries are named/located, what nifty add-ons the distro makes available, what nifty must-haves weren't included, etc.). Thanks to the official-ness of the EOL's and change of focus, I had no reason left to stick around. (And for what it's worth to the distro zealots, MDK is a Good Thing.:)
> and Red Hat Enterprise edition is going to die soon after that because the Red Hat people won't have any testers and people writing code for free for them.
...unless (and this is the gambit being tried) RH gets enough money from corporate customers who need (at least the appearance of) a company standing behind the product that they can afford to do the remaining work themselves. I wish them all the luck in the world, as Linux needs some company with respect and credibility filling this role, and RH is probably the all-around best choice at the moment. Personally, my home desktops have migrated off RH as I've been waiting for this to happen for the past year, but that doesn't mean I can't wish them well. The trick, of course, is being able to continue making a solid product moreso on their own now, given it seems the volunteer test base has largely migrated elsewhere. RH is apparently betting they can... the rest is left for history to sort out. (Good luck, guys.)
I'm with ya... at least in the sense that I've been with RH since 5.2. I just let my "demo account" with RH lapse, being official as of today. Personally, while I can probably manage to hack, beat, and sweat my way through most any distro, I've got far more important things to do, and I've fallen in love with Mandrake. (yeah, 9.2 has more gotchas than people ever expected out of MDK, and I got bit by a few things during- and post-installation, but it is/was still *way* better than any experience I had with RH.) If you don't want to be uber-geek, give it some thought. I heard someone summarize thusly: "Redhat is like the Microsoft of Linux... Mandrake is like the Mac of Linux", and my opinions thus far bear this out as rather accurate. Just one data point for you to ponder, even though you enumerated your choices as only debian or suse. *shrug*
Saw a commercial for that lately myself. What bothers me is they seem to be pitching the device along the angle of "you don't have to go look for your cell" in a coat pocket since it rings your landline phones... except it has to be in the device cradle to work, so that being the case, don't you know where it is? (yeah, hole in marketing pitch, who'd have thought? and yeah, I know there are other reasons, but they need better commercials.)
(Did I drop a hyphen?) Try "update-menus". Use "-v" for verbose output. Provided by menu-2.1.5-123mdk. My system(s) seem to have this w/out me knowing I needed to install it. Hopefully you'll have it as well.
I simiarly got bit by the mandrakeupdate bug that screws the user menus... both with a KDE install and a Gnome install. (Separately.) A solution that seems to work is to have root run "updatemenus -v" (if desperate, use the old ctrl-alt-F1 to get a text login or something)... but it was annoying to have to dig around google and/or IRC to find someone to tell me that, given the user menu's are so fully depopulated as to be useless at that point.
Also, seems that an installation of 9.2 (the first one, anyway;) doesn't correctly configure an ATI Rage 128 (pro?) card. Yeah, I still have one in a system. Of course, the card works okay with the right config. I managed to muck about with XF86Config-4 until X had no valid Screen's... at which point mandrake was nice enough to detect a problem and prompted for root to run through a curses-based (?) X configuration utility... that got it working just fine, and the problem detection was a nice touch. (Oddly, the vid card works fine in the installer "test" as well, so something must get hosed when it writes the config file out of the installer.)
Additionally, I admit I might've goofed this somehow, but my CD writer didn't work immediately after the install either. (cdrecord -scanbus turned up "/dev/pg* not found" errors. common hit on google.) For those new to Mandrake with a different system -- who don't let it write it's own copy of GRUB somewhere (like I did) -- note that the hdc=ide-scsi kernel boot parameter needs passing, as the modules seem to be (?) compiled directly into the kernel. (At least, follow the CD-Writing HOWTO for this case.) Also, it didn't seem to make a/dev/cdrom->/dev/scd0 link, so the CD player might get confused lacking this.
So I've had quite a bit of annoyance for this, my first, mandrake installation, but I have managed to get everything working.
Yes, John was in fact nice enough to reply about the matter and mentioned he'd work on a way to 'login' link (using the login/password assigned after the purchase) on the main page to get tracks that way in the future. This profesionalism on his part was what really won me over. The odd other half of the problem that (sort of) bit me was that I did not receive the confirmation e-mail with the click-back link to the track download page. (Well, there's a chance I fudged my own e-mail address, granted, but I usually check it pretty carefully.) May have been a rare occurance of moon phase and dead chickens or something. Anyway, having the "streamed" version of the m3u file, I did manage to finagle my way to getting the other half of the tracks via wget. Made me feel like a leet hacker for a minute or two.;-)
People who missed the article about a week or so ago should check out magnatune.com. I'm _not_ affiliated or anything, and it is a new-ish service (read: needs artists, but needs customers, but needs artists...), but as the artists retain copyright and share profits 50/50 with magnatune itself, and as you can pretty much name your own album price (well, $5 and up), it seems like it solves a lot of problems many/.'ers complain about w.r.t. digital music pay/download sites. I believe Wired has/had an article mentioning them a couple days ago or so, too.
As the site is somewhat newish, it does have one big kink that I've already reported; specifically, when I bought an album last week and accidentally closed the browser partway through d/l'ing the tracks, there wasn't any way to get back to that page w/o paying again. I got my songs anyway, but probably not in the way magnatune wanted me to. That aside, the site works well and feels rather clean... very refreshing.
If you ask people who drink bottled water, they think they are getting better quality water with a better taste than they can get from the tap (even though they aren't getting better quality, they think they are).
While you may in a general sense be correct, I'll point out this interesting little fact: when I was still back in school, "tap" water (e.g., city processed water) would give me absolutely killer headaches. (Took a couple years to finally make the association.) Oddly enough, heavily filtered water (e.g., through *two* Brita/Pur devices) or just bottled water didn't do that. So, yeah, while I was still pursuing a degree, bottled water did in fact give me a better quality. (quality of water, quality of life.)
... well, for gnome2 there is. Personal problem at the moment, granted, but I'm still on gnome1 b/c I'm still on RH7.3 b/c I really have lost favor with the seeming commercial-side leanings of RH's dealings*/and/ don't want to upgrade into RH9. Hence, for me, and others who are still on gnome1, the newer fancier apps aren't available. (And it isn't that I don't lust after some of them either; I'm looking at jumping over to mandrake 9.2, but it is only *just* out just yet, and would take me a couple months tweaking its configs back to my current painstaking setup where three boxes finally, at long last, have achieved unified harmony... well, I can't really play video files, apparently. Knowing gnome2 is all about interface guidelines (for a change), I'll be a much happier camper when I get it running. Until then, I'm 30 tomorrow and grumpy, so I'm gonna piss and moan a bit.;-)
* RH has done well by me, and I think RH's commercial-side leanings do have merit in getting Linux adopted by a wider audience, but IMO the distribution is really starting to be less appealing for the home personal user/hobbyist, so it no longer works for me. Even the "demo account" survey I have no problem filling out to get up2date to keep working is so slanted towards commercial use that I end up saying "N/A" everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh a classic troll... maybe this guy doesn't have education, skills, and interest in curing cancer. Maybe he does, OTOH, have what it takes to pull off an amusing "case mod". Sheesh... lighten up already... it's pretty funny, and that made it worth *my* time. :)
> Who says they will have Floppies or even a Floppy Controller. My computers don't have floppy drives.
Mine do, and they're cheap enough, but if they (Phoenix and/or Samsung) wanted to really do it "right", couldn't they disable floppy drives in the BIOS itself? Since many BIOS reflash utilities seem to need to boot off a plain-jane DOS floppy, not being able to install your own floppy drive and controller and have it recognized by the Evil BIOS could be a problem installing a Good BIOS over the top of it.
> How many companies these days are willing to drop money into some technology that may not turn a profit for many years?"
Aerospace, for one. Working at one of the companies that makes commercial (and military) aircraft engines, it is jokingly quoted that: "A decision to launch a new engine program is a calculated risk to go into the hole for about 20 years" (Meaning it takes about that long to "turn profit" off all the years of design, development, testing, and certication processes.) Imagine how many times the market flops around responding to other market pressures in that length of time.
As an interesting aside for many of you, aircraft engines have historically been sold on the razor/blades business model, so its an interesting business balance between a quality engine that airline customers will buy and the need to sell spares to eventually make money on FAR down the road.
I dunno if the "wiki" part is anything newer than what I saw a month ago, but after jumping through several account creation / e-mail verification / etc hoops to try to post a detailed, working answer to someone else's problem (the problem and distro which happened to be the same as mine -- and for which no "good" answer had yet been provided), I kept getting denied any ability to actually post a reply to the thread. Tried for several days and gave up. I'm hoping it was a fluke... I know I need answers all the time for things, but the one time I CAN HELP and try to do so, DENIED. Blah.
> Before executing any code, ask the user if it's okay.
:scroll down: ). Agree and install? [OK]
I agree the user deserves a courtesy here, but really for the Vast Majority (tm) out there, this won't really alleviate the problem, just in and of itself. Most people (at least on windows) are conditioned to agree to whatever prompt is on the screen. Consider:
To install this software, you must agree to these possibly heinous and restrictive licensing terms... (blah blah blah
Due to poor skill or apathy by the developer, to continue here, we'll need to blow away work you've done before so you can continue. Delete lots of work? [OK]
Warning: The attachment you have clicked on is trying to start an application. Continue? [OK]
Our company installation has it... (thanks, btw!)
> ver
Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
> which fc
C:/WINNT/SYSTEM32/fc.EXE
> ... and IE said it had -8342563246 seconds to go!
/.'er, but I've actually had Galeon's download dialog tell me that a couple times. (fairly recent version as per MDK9.2). Odd thing to watch the seconds still count down (more negative) until the last two figures hit about ...95 or so and then they reverted back to ...36 on the next second, but without changing the rest of the "time left".
I love bashing IE much as the next
From other comments in the thread, it doesn't sound like this will magically make bad code no longer break, barf, and die upon overflowing... rather, sounds like it would be used prevent accidental or malicious execution of arbitrary code due to overflowing/overwriting the data areas into the instruction areas of the chip's buffer(s). Piss-poor code that breaks still will. (Something like that... I'm hardly a "chip" guy.)
These are all personal opinions, but Netscape is all-but-dead as an end-product; only the brand-name lives on now. Mozilla replaced NS Communicator for an integrated browser/e-mail/news client. But people aren't happy enough and want a browser-only configuration. That's well and good, and thus started the phoenix/firebird/firefox line, but these should be considered mainly in-development code names not necessarily intended for public consumption (i.e., "for mom"). Personally, I'm hoping that when they get enough back-end kinks worked out in the engine and protocol support items, these codename browsers will roll back over to something like "Mozilla Browser" where useability items will be addressed; this is really what you and I are watching the mozilla team work towards, IMO. We (well, they) aren't there yet, and while it gets exciting to see what new widgets get added to a codename build, I think we can ultimately (and accidentally) do a disservice to push firefox (etc.) as a "for mom" solution for just the gripes you listed. Those of us here on
>> to make sure a virus/trojan didnt find its way on to my wifes
;-)
> Learn how to use the apostrophe key. Else you might get misunderstood.
Since there's an SCO conspiracy link in every good story, maybe he just lives in Utah. Think about it...
> Wait for it...
>
>Internet Navigator
Seriously, since at this point the whole naming scheme is fscked anyway, I wonder why they couldn't go back to the old netscape naming conventions:
Mozilla Navigator (browser only)
Mozilla Communicator (including Mozilla Mail, etc.)
Heck, even my family and/or co-workers would be able to know what is going on then, as this would build upon what we finally got them trained on years ago.
What ever happend to REAL sci-fi that required the viewer/reader to actualy THINK
I think it left about the same time that ST:TNG did. (Not that I'm a major trekkie by anyone's standards, it is just a general correlation, IMO.) The money grabs otherwise known as DS9, voyager, and enterprise seem to have set the current low-ball standards that it seems the new BSG is aiming itself towards. (More prominent tits and cliched characters... not that I mind prominent tits, but there are other channels than sci-fi to get that with.)
Maybe something a bit more subtle in the name...
r
MICROsized_SOFTware_WORD_and_DOCument_translato
You beat me to the change to MDK; I've only done it recently now that the whole focus change is appropriately official, and hobbyist versions are being EOL'ed Real Soon Now. I staved off the need to change by not wanting to really learn new quirks in a new distro. (what the conf file is called, where it is at, how the libraries are named/located, what nifty add-ons the distro makes available, what nifty must-haves weren't included, etc.). Thanks to the official-ness of the EOL's and change of focus, I had no reason left to stick around. (And for what it's worth to the distro zealots, MDK is a Good Thing. :)
I'm with ya... at least in the sense that I've been with RH since 5.2. I just let my "demo account" with RH lapse, being official as of today. Personally, while I can probably manage to hack, beat, and sweat my way through most any distro, I've got far more important things to do, and I've fallen in love with Mandrake. (yeah, 9.2 has more gotchas than people ever expected out of MDK, and I got bit by a few things during- and post-installation, but it is/was still *way* better than any experience I had with RH.) If you don't want to be uber-geek, give it some thought. I heard someone summarize thusly: "Redhat is like the Microsoft of Linux ... Mandrake is like the Mac of Linux", and my opinions thus far bear this out as rather accurate. Just one data point for you to ponder, even though you enumerated your choices as only debian or suse. *shrug*
Saw a commercial for that lately myself. What bothers me is they seem to be pitching the device along the angle of "you don't have to go look for your cell" in a coat pocket since it rings your landline phones... except it has to be in the device cradle to work, so that being the case, don't you know where it is? (yeah, hole in marketing pitch, who'd have thought? and yeah, I know there are other reasons, but they need better commercials.)
Twin 1: "Shape of... cease and desist letter!"
Twin 2: "Form of... BSA Auditor!"
(Did I drop a hyphen?) Try "update-menus". Use "-v" for verbose output. Provided by menu-2.1.5-123mdk.
My system(s) seem to have this w/out me knowing I needed to install it. Hopefully you'll have it as well.
I simiarly got bit by the mandrakeupdate bug that screws the user menus... both with a KDE install and a Gnome install. (Separately.) A solution that seems to work is to have root run "updatemenus -v" (if desperate, use the old ctrl-alt-F1 to get a text login or something) ... but it was annoying to have to dig around google and/or IRC to find someone to tell me that, given the user menu's are so fully depopulated as to be useless at that point.
;) doesn't correctly configure an ATI Rage 128 (pro?) card. Yeah, I still have one in a system. Of course, the card works okay with the right config. I managed to muck about with XF86Config-4 until X had no valid Screen's... at which point mandrake was nice enough to detect a problem and prompted for root to run through a curses-based (?) X configuration utility ... that got it working just fine, and the problem detection was a nice touch. (Oddly, the vid card works fine in the installer "test" as well, so something must get hosed when it writes the config file out of the installer.)
/dev/cdrom->/dev/scd0 link, so the CD player might get confused lacking this.
Also, seems that an installation of 9.2 (the first one, anyway
Additionally, I admit I might've goofed this somehow, but my CD writer didn't work immediately after the install either. (cdrecord -scanbus turned up "/dev/pg* not found" errors. common hit on google.) For those new to Mandrake with a different system -- who don't let it write it's own copy of GRUB somewhere (like I did) -- note that the hdc=ide-scsi kernel boot parameter needs passing, as the modules seem to be (?) compiled directly into the kernel. (At least, follow the CD-Writing HOWTO for this case.) Also, it didn't seem to make a
So I've had quite a bit of annoyance for this, my first, mandrake installation, but I have managed to get everything working.
Yes, John was in fact nice enough to reply about the matter and mentioned he'd work on a way to 'login' link (using the login/password assigned after the purchase) on the main page to get tracks that way in the future. This profesionalism on his part was what really won me over. The odd other half of the problem that (sort of) bit me was that I did not receive the confirmation e-mail with the click-back link to the track download page. (Well, there's a chance I fudged my own e-mail address, granted, but I usually check it pretty carefully.) May have been a rare occurance of moon phase and dead chickens or something. Anyway, having the "streamed" version of the m3u file, I did manage to finagle my way to getting the other half of the tracks via wget. Made me feel like a leet hacker for a minute or two. ;-)
People who missed the article about a week or so ago should check out magnatune.com. I'm _not_ affiliated or anything, and it is a new-ish service (read: needs artists, but needs customers, but needs artists...), but as the artists retain copyright and share profits 50/50 with magnatune itself, and as you can pretty much name your own album price (well, $5 and up), it seems like it solves a lot of problems many /.'ers complain about w.r.t. digital music pay/download sites. I believe Wired has/had an article mentioning them a couple days ago or so, too.
As the site is somewhat newish, it does have one big kink that I've already reported; specifically, when I bought an album last week and accidentally closed the browser partway through d/l'ing the tracks, there wasn't any way to get back to that page w/o paying again. I got my songs anyway, but probably not in the way magnatune wanted me to. That aside, the site works well and feels rather clean... very refreshing.
Englishman1: *sips tea*... I say, your mother is so fat, she jumped up in the air and got stuck. Terrible thing, that.
Englishman2: *sips tea* Yes, quite. However, I hear your mother is so fat...
* RH has done well by me, and I think RH's commercial-side leanings do have merit in getting Linux adopted by a wider audience, but IMO the distribution is really starting to be less appealing for the home personal user/hobbyist, so it no longer works for me. Even the "demo account" survey I have no problem filling out to get up2date to keep working is so slanted towards commercial use that I end up saying "N/A" everywhere.