Please remember that the IRA that fought in the War of Independence is not the same organisation as the Provisional IRA that has conducted a terrorist campaign in Northern Ireland in recent years. So it's unfair to say that "the British government would have us think that your grandfather was a terrorist". Most people in the UK are fully aware of the appalling acts committed in our name in Ireland, and few (apart from a few rabid Unionists) would say that the Republican movement of the time didn't have a legitimate cause. The provos are an entirely different matter, and one shouldn't be confused with the other.
Sheppey, being in Kent, has been described as "the rotting cabbage in the garden of England." If there's any truth in that, then Sheerness can be similarly described as "the rotting arse in the cabbage of Sheppey."
1. Jettison the whole gconf/registry thing in favor of a tree of plain text config files in.gnome or something
If you're a system administrator, gconf is a godsend. You can "lock down" certain preferences so your users can't break things or waste time playing with useless preferences. Another win from using GConf is that it's "process transparent." This means that if I change a setting from one application, it instantly updates in all other applications that are interested in that setting. This technology is vital for the snazzy "instant apply" UI of GNOME, and vital for writing applications made up of multiple out-of-process components.
3. Give me a default window manager with the ability to select focus-follows-mouse mouse
GNOME Menu -> Preferences -> Windows, then select the "Select windows when the mouse moves over them".
5. Choose: either a) reincorporate gecko into Nautilus for Web browsing or b) go lightweight and jettison Nautilus for the old gmc
Nautilus isn't a web browser, use Epiphany for that. Nautilus's performance has come on leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, particular between 2.4 and 2.6.
6. Create a base distribution of official GNOME applications from a lot of the GTK stuff out there, based on which authors agree to follow a rigidly follow a GNOME style guide and use the GNOME API rather than just GTK, so that there is more desktop consistency
More and more of the GNOME API is moving into Gtk+ - the icon theme implementation, for example, and the new UI Manager system. But GNOME can't coerce other developers into following their guidelines, they can only encourage them.
You may also find that things like the GNOME Fifth Toe has what you want.
7. Add compatibility with KDE themes to GTK, since they seem superior (ability to change colors, not just widget styles, etc.)
Check out this project for a Gtk-Qt unifying theme.
8. Give me an "advanced mode" to turn on all kinds of extra GUI configuration bells and whistles like keybindings, autoraise, MIME types, etc.
I imagine that Alan might have something to do with it - the River Severn is the largest river in England and Wales and separates the two countries. It's also spanned by one of the most impressive bits of engineering in the UK.
One of the authors, VS Ramachandran, gave this year's Reith lectures on the subject of Neuroscience. You can read or listen to the lectures on the Beeb's website. Well worth taking a look at. Some of it is absolutely fascinating.
1) A cure for HIV that is cheap enough to be rolled out in Africa.
There are already several treatments for HIV and the symptoms of AIDS that are quite cheap - that is, cheap to produce. However most (but not all) of the western pharmaceutical companies refuse to license them at discounted rates because they're such a cash cow. Which means that tens of millions are facing death simply because drugs company execs are unwilling to sacrifice their bottom lines.
The license for the core fonts Microsoft released permitted them to be redistributed in an unmodified form. These packages basically download and install the fonts for you - but you can do it yourself using wget, ttmkfdir and chkfontpath without much extra work.
This sort of confirms something I've been thinking about for a while now - that spam is *NOT* growing because of clueless fools reading spam they've been sent, but clueless fools being conned into buying services from the spammers.
It's a very similar situation to recruitment - recruitment consultants spend a lot more time grooming existing clients and potential new business than they do looking after their candidates. They theory being that they can always get more candidates, but the clients are the ones who pay them money.
Spammers are salesmen ultimately - but they don't sell their client's product to their "customers" - they sell their "customers" to their clients.
You might want to know the following before you install...
The installer appears to be based on Ximian's Red Carpet. This is actually a pretty snazzy tool, but it can be unresponsive while it resolves dependencies. It will download any packages it needs into/var/cache/redcarpet and clobber the installer file in that directory, so backup if you think you're going to need it.
It wants to install a huge great pile of dependencies (115MB on my system), like Abiword and OpenSSL and many others, even some perl modules, even though most of them were already installed. So be warned that it may clobber (and possibly break) a lot of your existing software. My advice is to use a sacrificial machine if you want to try it out.
I've been reading SatireWire for a couple of years now, and this remains one of the funniest graphics I've seen on the net. Sometimes the humour can vary a bit but occasionally it's spot on. I'm slightly disappointed that the book seems to be a collection of old stories from the site, I was looking forward to something new.
A big problem that's had very little attention (at least here in the UK) is the habit of POS hardware manufacturers to print all the credit card data on the receipts produced by a transaction. Have a look in your wallet for a receipt from a card transaction - there's a good chance that it's got your full card number, your name, the expiry date - everything needed to make a transaction using that card account.
So, make sure you know what happens to your receipts - don't just throw them away, make sure they're destroyed. And hassle retailers that still print the full card details on those bits of paper. A lot of companies are beginning to work out how dumb it is, but POS hardware turnover is slow, and a lot of stores are still reckless with your personal information.
Past Times (which has stores in both the USA and the UK) sell some really neat build-your-own crystal radio sets. I've bought a couple for friends and family recently and they go down really well.
The rate of innovation of portable power sources is a lot slower than in the technologies that depend on them, for a number of reasons - mainly due to the fact that after a century or so of development we're reaching the theoretical limits of the current technology.
This issue was discussed recently following an article on CNN (that's disappeared, unfortunately).
"10. The bill demotivates the creativity of the peruvian software industry, which invoices 40 million US$/year, exports 4 million US$ (10th in ranking among non-traditional exports, more than handicrafts) and is a source of highly qualified employment. With a law that incentivates the use of open source, software programmers lose their intellectual property rights and their main source of payment.
"incentivates"? Is George W. Bush writing material for Microsoft now?
Re:For a free alternative
on
Tron 2.0 Game
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There's also glTron, another Free light cycle game. Runs on *nix, Win32 and MacOS X. It's perhaps not as feature-full as Armagetron, but if you want a pure light cycle game, it rocks:-)
it's a funny idea, but a "neutrino toaster" would be quite difficult to create...
At normal neutrino flux levels, it'd take several times the lifespan of the universe for neutrinos to deposit even the tiniest amount of energy into a slice of bread. Consider the fact that many billions have passed through your body in the time you've been reading this comment. It's unlikely a single one of them would actually collide with a particle in your body.
A neutrino toaster would probably need the total neutrino output of the sun to toast a slice of bread in a reasonable time period - and if you've got that, why not just stick your bread on a real long fork and toast it over the sun's corona:-)
One of the reasons the authorities in India use carrier pigeons for messaging is that when they need reliable communications the most (for example, during earthquakes, flooding, cyclones or any of the other natural disasters that part of the world is afflicted with), modern communications technology just can't hold up. In those situations, carrier pigeons are much more reliable.
I can't help thinking this is just change for change's sake, and that at some time in the future they'll regret it.
Slashdot Mirror
Please remember that the IRA that fought in the War of Independence is not the same organisation as the Provisional IRA that has conducted a terrorist campaign in Northern Ireland in recent years. So it's unfair to say that "the British government would have us think that your grandfather was a terrorist". Most people in the UK are fully aware of the appalling acts committed in our name in Ireland, and few (apart from a few rabid Unionists) would say that the Republican movement of the time didn't have a legitimate cause. The provos are an entirely different matter, and one shouldn't be confused with the other.
As for the "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, others have done a better job than I could of that.
If you're a system administrator, gconf is a godsend. You can "lock down" certain preferences so your users can't break things or waste time playing with useless preferences. Another win from using GConf is that it's "process transparent." This means that if I change a setting from one application, it instantly updates in all other applications that are interested in that setting. This technology is vital for the snazzy "instant apply" UI of GNOME, and vital for writing applications made up of multiple out-of-process components.
GNOME Menu -> Preferences -> Windows, then select the "Select windows when the mouse moves over them".
Nautilus isn't a web browser, use Epiphany for that. Nautilus's performance has come on leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, particular between 2.4 and 2.6.
More and more of the GNOME API is moving into Gtk+ - the icon theme implementation, for example, and the new UI Manager system. But GNOME can't coerce other developers into following their guidelines, they can only encourage them.
You may also find that things like the GNOME Fifth Toe has what you want.
Check out this project for a Gtk-Qt unifying theme.
gconf-editor and GNOME Hacks are your friend
I imagine that Alan might have something to do with it - the River Severn is the largest river in England and Wales and separates the two countries. It's also spanned by one of the most impressive bits of engineering in the UK.
I think I'd make myself much happier taking Lara Croft home, thanks all the same. I'd need a bit of privacy for what I have in mind.
One of the authors, VS Ramachandran, gave this year's Reith lectures on the subject of Neuroscience. You can read or listen to the lectures on the Beeb's website. Well worth taking a look at. Some of it is absolutely fascinating.
http://jodrell.net/files/mirrors/www.stud.uni-karl sruhe.de/
RMS was asked to speak at the conference but refused. Newsforge just published a statement from him explaining why. You can read it here.
1) A cure for HIV that is cheap enough to be rolled out in Africa.
There are already several treatments for HIV and the symptoms of AIDS that are quite cheap - that is, cheap to produce. However most (but not all) of the western pharmaceutical companies refuse to license them at discounted rates because they're such a cash cow. Which means that tens of millions are facing death simply because drugs company execs are unwilling to sacrifice their bottom lines.
Which is sickening.
Some links: South Africa fights Aids drug apartheid, and if you're in the UK and haven't, donate to Comic Relief who help HIV/AIDS sufferers in the UK and Africa.
Just in case, here's a mirror. No PDF but bzipped versions of the HTML and text versions.
- corefonts
- font-tool
- mstcorefonts
The license for the core fonts Microsoft released permitted them to be redistributed in an unmodified form. These packages basically download and install the fonts for you - but you can do it yourself using wget, ttmkfdir and chkfontpath without much extra work.Here's a screenshot of Phoenix (mirrored here), if you're interested (via Google).
This sort of confirms something I've been thinking about for a while now - that spam is *NOT* growing because of clueless fools reading spam they've been sent, but clueless fools being conned into buying services from the spammers.
It's a very similar situation to recruitment - recruitment consultants spend a lot more time grooming existing clients and potential new business than they do looking after their candidates. They theory being that they can always get more candidates, but the clients are the ones who pay them money.
Spammers are salesmen ultimately - but they don't sell their client's product to their "customers" - they sell their "customers" to their clients.
I've been reading SatireWire for a couple of years now, and this remains one of the funniest graphics I've seen on the net. Sometimes the humour can vary a bit but occasionally it's spot on. I'm slightly disappointed that the book seems to be a collection of old stories from the site, I was looking forward to something new.
:-)
I'm not planning on cancelling my order though
A big problem that's had very little attention (at least here in the UK) is the habit of POS hardware manufacturers to print all the credit card data on the receipts produced by a transaction. Have a look in your wallet for a receipt from a card transaction - there's a good chance that it's got your full card number, your name, the expiry date - everything needed to make a transaction using that card account.
So, make sure you know what happens to your receipts - don't just throw them away, make sure they're destroyed. And hassle retailers that still print the full card details on those bits of paper. A lot of companies are beginning to work out how dumb it is, but POS hardware turnover is slow, and a lot of stores are still reckless with your personal information.
here's a link to a wave file of Bloop, sped up 16 times. Fark had this earlier today.
Past Times (which has stores in both the USA and the UK) sell some really neat build-your-own crystal radio sets. I've bought a couple for friends and family recently and they go down really well.
The rate of innovation of portable power sources is a lot slower than in the technologies that depend on them, for a number of reasons - mainly due to the fact that after a century or so of development we're reaching the theoretical limits of the current technology.
This issue was discussed recently following an article on CNN (that's disappeared, unfortunately).
"incentivates"? Is George W. Bush writing material for Microsoft now?
There's also glTron, another Free light cycle game. Runs on *nix, Win32 and MacOS X. It's perhaps not as feature-full as Armagetron, but if you want a pure light cycle game, it rocks :-)
it's a funny idea, but a "neutrino toaster" would be quite difficult to create...
:-)
At normal neutrino flux levels, it'd take several times the lifespan of the universe for neutrinos to deposit even the tiniest amount of energy into a slice of bread. Consider the fact that many billions have passed through your body in the time you've been reading this comment. It's unlikely a single one of them would actually collide with a particle in your body.
A neutrino toaster would probably need the total neutrino output of the sun to toast a slice of bread in a reasonable time period - and if you've got that, why not just stick your bread on a real long fork and toast it over the sun's corona
I read this article a few days ago. It's no joke. The BBC doesn't have a sense of humour
One of the reasons the authorities in India use carrier pigeons for messaging is that when they need reliable communications the most (for example, during earthquakes, flooding, cyclones or any of the other natural disasters that part of the world is afflicted with), modern communications technology just can't hold up. In those situations, carrier pigeons are much more reliable.
I can't help thinking this is just change for change's sake, and that at some time in the future they'll regret it.