Slashdot Mirror


User: tsa

tsa's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
4,377
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 4,377

  1. Stars on Global Positioning Without GPS · · Score: 2, Funny

    I read somewhere that you can use the stars as well for global positioning at night. That's an interesting and novel idea. Maybe they should do some more research on that.

  2. Re:Volumes not areas? on The Math of Text Readability · · Score: 1

    In a two-dimensional world, everything has one dimension less than in a 3D world. So a volume in the two-d world has only two dimensions. Because we live in a 3D world we can look at the 2D world 'from the top', so we can see area, but the 2D people have no concept of that.

  3. Re:I'm sick of Linux on Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring Released · · Score: 1

    Thanks for the info. You're not the first who recommended xfce to me. I should really look into it, since I'm not a big fan of KDE.

    OT: Lulu is quite OK. It's easy to get your book published there. The only pity is that the shipping price to Europe makes my books so expensive. Mail me if you want some advice from an experienced Lulu publisher :-) It's easier to mail back and forth than to use this forum and lose karma because we get modded OT all the time :-)

  4. Re:I'm sick of Linux on Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring Released · · Score: 1

    1300 MHz Duron, 512 MB, GeForce 5600 FX videocard. It should be fast enough, but it's sluggish, especially booting it takes a long time. The machine works good as a file server so I'm not in a hurry to tweak it or reinstall it. It's just annoying that Windows on the same box feels nimbler. I don't like windows but I need it for games.

  5. Re:I'm sick of Linux on Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring Released · · Score: 1

    Well, if you use your "main machine" only as a file server, then it isn't really your main machine anymore, is it? :)

    Nope, you're right. Besides, the MacBook Pro is by far the fastest computer I've ever had. Much faster than the game machine / fileserver. But before the MBP I used the iMac G3 I had to type my stories and books in. Giving away that thing was a bad mistake. I'm now working on my next book, on the MBP. Typing on a laptop sucks even more than I had imagined. I could of course use my Ubuntu machine, but the room it sits in is almost always cold, and for some reason vim keeps crashing on that machine. I guess I will have to move the machine and put Slackware back on it. Problems problems :-)

  6. Re:I'm sick of Linux on Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring Released · · Score: 1

    That's interesting, you have the same Linux 'career' as I have. For me the bash prompt was also a selling point for OS X. I bought an old iMac G3 and put OS 10.3 (I guess it was) on it. After some fiddling around with that thing I bought an iBook. If you could easily upgrade the videocard in an iMac I would have bought one last year. I play a lot of adventure games, and although they're not really heavy on the graphics card they get more demanding all the time. Now I have a windows/Linux box that I use as a game machine / fileserver.

  7. Re:I'm sick of Linux on Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring Released · · Score: 1

    All the things you mention I have on the Mac. Plus, no spyware, malware etc thanks to a fantastic OS that is not defective by design.

  8. I'm sick of Linux on Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring Released · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've been using Linux for ten years now and I get more and more disappointed by it. Ten years ago there weren't many user-friendly distros out and I started with Slackware. I'm still very happy my friend dragged me into using that because I am now a savvy *nix amateur. But! During the last ten years I kept hearing that, yes, Linux is now really almost ready for the desktop, and world domination is just around the corner. I tried some other distros over the years (Suse, Redhat), but I kept coming back to Slackware. About a year ago I changed to Ubuntu because I didn't like all the configuration I had to do after every Slackware upgrade anymore. 'Ubuntu works out of the box!' the website assured me. After install I spent hours getting X to work right. It only wanted to run in 1024x768 @ 60 Hz. Thanks to my experience with Slackware and my backups I could edit xorg.conf to fix that. Now I have a working install, but Ubuntu is so slow that it's a pain to use. And I haven't been able to watch a movie on it yet. Configuring Gnome was a pain, and there isn't much documentation on how to start on the Ubuntu website either. I find the whole Ubuntu experience very disappointing. The only thing that keeps me from changing to a Mac completely (I have a MacBook Pro which I love) is the lack of choice in hardware. Changing to Windows is of course no option; I never understood why that OS is used so much. So I keep using Linux, but I almost never use my main machine as anything other than a file server anymore. Linux is very good at that, no matter which distro you use.

  9. Re:boundaries on Net Radio Appeal On Royalties Rejected · · Score: 1

    A lot of people will lose their jobs. That's reason to panic.

  10. Re:Pandora on Net Radio Appeal On Royalties Rejected · · Score: 1

    If they accuse you of playing 'their' music, shouldn't they prove it?

  11. Definition on Females Outnumber Males Online · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Before I believe any of that I want to see what they define as 'female' and 'online'.

  12. Re:Microwave on Can CDs Be Recycled? · · Score: 3, Informative

    It sure makes your home stink like a hellhole. We tried toasting CD's in this way in the research group's kitchen once. The experiment worked out beautifully but you could still smell it a week later.

  13. Re:They make great coasters on Can CDs Be Recycled? · · Score: 1

    I always use them as coasters, but I use dry glasses, that only get condensed water on them. I can imagine that they don't perform well with glasses that are wet to begin with (glasses of beer from the tap for example).

  14. Re:Choice on Microsoft Opposing California Open Doc Bill · · Score: 1

    I didn't say that MS doesn't want their customers to have a choice. But isn't it logicl that the gouvernment would want ONE standard, and not two? And the fact that this standard is not MS's Open XML should not matter to MS. They just incorporate ODF and continue business as usual. If Open XML was a truly open standard MS shouldn't whine about this legislation. The fact that they do is at least suspicious.

  15. Choice on Microsoft Opposing California Open Doc Bill · · Score: 1

    In the letter Microsoft talks about the importance of their customers having a choice. But apparently they don't want their consumers to have the choice between using Open XML or ODF in their product. Besides, using standards always implies lack of choice, and in the case of standards that is in principle a good thing. I don't really care wther Open XML or ODF prevails als THE open standard, but please let ir be really open so I can use whatever Office suite I want!

  16. Other OSes on Vista Protected Processes Bypassed · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Is it possible to do this in other operating systems?

  17. Re:Mod Parent Sideways on Paul Graham Claims "Microsoft is Dead" · · Score: 1

    Sorry about the spelling.

  18. Phenix on Paul Graham Claims "Microsoft is Dead" · · Score: 1

    From the article:
    The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OSX, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s.

    I'm still surprised when I see a computer that doesn't run Windows. But what also surprises me is that at universities and other 'poor' places, people still stick to Microsoft, despite the reasonably good, and much cheaper alternatives. MS has the psychological advantage that people are reluctant to change from what they know to something else, even if that something else is better. But on the other hand, the lukewarm respose Vista has gotten until now shows that MS is indeed dying. I know a few avid MS fans, and even they are pondering wether to invest in a new machine to be able to run Vista, or to stick with XP. However, as many succesful start-ups have shown in the last few years, it takes just one good idea to get to the top fast. MS has so much money that once they start 'thinking outside the box' (management speak for being original) they will be back to the top very soon. By then, people will have forgotten how bad they were, and we will be having the same troubles all over again. I hope I'm not right in this...

  19. Location of files vs GUI on How Long Does it Take You to Tweak a New Box? · · Score: 1

    I used to tweak the UI until I was completely satisfied with the way it worked, but I find that nowadays I don't bother so much with it anymore. If I can find my files easily I am satisfied. So I make sure I make shortcuts to easily find and/or mount network drives, make the 'right' subdirectories in my home directory, and I make sure that I know what gets backed up. I hate the way Windows has a My Documents folder that you can move to another drive, but the settings keep getting written in obscure dirs everywhere on the harddrive, depending on the program. In that way you always lose settings during a crash.

  20. Re:New prices on Steve Jobs Announces (some) DRM-free iTunes · · Score: 1

    Luckily for Steve Jobs, only a very tiny fraction of his customers are /.-ers.

  21. Download the website's soundtrack on Architect Claims to Solve Pyramid Secret · · Score: 1

    On the website that explains it all, http://khufu.3ds.com/introduction/, there is a link to download the website's soundtrack. I'm sorry but I can't take them seriously anymore if they pull off crap like that.

  22. Re:NNnnnnngggg!!!!! on OpenOffice 2.2 Released · · Score: 1

    I found it out myself, at least on the Mac. OO makes a directory ~/Library/Application support/OpenOffice x.y for each version. Copy the directory user/ that you find in there to the new OpenOffice directory. And Bob's yer uncle!

  23. NNnnnnngggg!!!!! on OpenOffice 2.2 Released · · Score: 1

    Why o why do I ALWAYS have to learn OO all my settings again if there is a new version? This drives me utterly mad. Can somebody help me with this?

  24. Two things I want in my new phone on Samsung's UpStage Looks To Trump iPhone · · Score: 3, Insightful

    WiFi and Skype. If it can't do that, I won't buy it. I'm only interested in calling cheap. That what a phone is for. Skype is the cheapest way I know to call people, provided they also have a Skype account.

  25. Re:Wow on Novell/Linux Parody on Apple's Mac vs PC Ads · · Score: 1

    Twentieth. Long ago.