Inherently addictions are to things that are enjoyable... I don't see how using a terribly stripped down version of windows is going to foster their "microsoft habit". If anything, I think it's going to drive them away from MS into the arms of something else. (most probably pirated copies of windows).
That is precisely the reason why XP Starter Edition would be helpful for MS. It will be bundled legally with computers instead the full version of XP, so competing operating systems (i.e. Linux) are more likely to left out. The users of the crippled windows will be more likely to stick with it, or switch to the full version (either legit or copied), increasing Microsoft's market share. Then, they get the lucrative corporate/government contracts, and linux is left out of the picture.
I'm a bit curious about how this is completely in-house code... see, my college's website at Rice university has the exact same looking portal system: http://www.brown.rice.edu
How is it that both sites are nearly identical in design, yet one of them is completely "in-house"?
I've been a longtime thunderbird user, but I've had issues before with the spam filters. Basically, even after training with several hundred messages, the filter was very ineffective, letting the majority of the spam through. I decided to use popfile instead, and had great success there in terms of filtering, but usability was not as good, and configuration was a pain.
Has anything in thunderbird's filtering changed significantly? I haven't used built-in filtering since around.6, but I thought it would be best to ask here for other's experiences before going through the training process again. I really would like the effectiveness of popfile with the usability of TB's interface.
Only one is needed for a breach to occur. When security is concerned, majority does not rule. Numbers play differently.
Only one breach may be needed, but, unlike what happens when just running windows unprotected on the internet, my computer will not become a zombie spam relay when I receive a "malicious" IM in gaim.
Gaim is NOT integrated into the OS. The damage is limited.
Sure, they can tax the big players, but what are they going to do about those of us who build our own voip networks via asterisk and the like?
And if they do managed to tax the big players, who's to say they don't go offshore somewhere?
Obviously, the federal government will be able to implement a great firewall to shield the citizens of our freedom-loving nation from those communist tax-avoiders who wish to tear apart the open-natured moral fabric of our society. </sarcasm>
I feel that I should express my personal experiences with various "easy to use" distros. My mother, who is quite unskilled with computers (what a surprise), kept on complaining how her computer wouldn't work properly. It was always down to spyware, or other background programs eating up resources, etc. I decided that enough was enough, that I didn't want to spend several hours per week cleaning the same crud off her drive.
I tried installing Xandros on her system. It installed fine, configured everything, and in general worked great out of the box. BUT, it was rather painfully slow, on a duron 1.6ghz + 256MB ddr box. There was not too much I could do in terms of optimization, without breaking the packaging system, and after several months of using this, I *did* manage to break it beyond reasonable repair. IIRC, it was something to do with trying the actual debian kde packages, and finding that reversing the situation was more trouble than it was worth.
I took the opportunity to try whatever else I heard was looking good, and installed yoper. It ended up working fine, quite a bit faster (probably due to the 2.6 kernel), but still had strange issues which seemed to appear out of nowhere: using the accelerated nvidia driver caused random lockups, and before long, trying to apt-get dist-upgrade would freeze up with no error messages, and would continue to do so in different places in subsequent runs.
I wiped it, thought "enough is enough," and installed slackware. It installed perfectly. I honestly don't think that the installation is significantly more difficult than the "easy" distros, unless you choose to make it so (eg. selecting to install all packages rather than individual selecting). I installed the 2.6 kernel from testing/, ran swaret to update all the packages, downloaded the nvidia driver, and it just *works*. No random lockups, VERY FAST performance, easy administration, and my mother has now moved on to complaining how the connection to hotmail is too slow.
After ranting for so long, I think the point I'm trying to make is that maybe these new distros are making things too complicated in their quest to make it more easy. To me, that's ultimately the wrong way to do things. You'll end up with "only one way to do it", unless you want to risk breaking whatever system the distro designers decided to prop the system up with.
With the slackware style, I seem to get more simple, *more transparent* packaging and set-up, while at the same time getting updates within the packaging system reasonably quickly (unlike with Xandros, which was often hopelessly out of date). Shouldn't it just be that simpler==better?
The joke doesnt really make sense unless it is a hydrogen atom, which has one proton and one electron.
Well, it doesn't really matter if it is a hydrogen atom or not. If any elemental atom loses an electron, would it not become positive? For example, a sodium atom has 11 protons, and 11 electrons. If it loses just one electron, it becomes Na+, a sodium ion.
Does this whole space ownership thing remind anyone else of the story of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry?
It's amazing how this story written for children ages ago has such a wonderful treatment of the subject:
"Millions of what?"
The businessman suddenly realized that there was no hope of being left in peace until he answered this question.
"Millions of those little objects," he said, "which one sometimes sees in the sky."
"Flies?"
"Oh, no. Little glittering objects."
"Bees?"
"Oh, no. Little golden objects that set lazy men to idle dreaming. As for me, I am concerned with matters of consequence. There is no time for idle dreaming in my life."
"Ah! You mean the stars?"
"Yes, that's it. The stars."
"And what do you do with five-hundred millions of stars?"
"Five-hundred-and-one million, six-hundred-twenty-two thousand, seven-hundred-thirty-one. I am concerned with matters of consequence: I am accurate."
Well, the mountain commonly referring to as "Ararat" actually has two peaks. Ergo, it is possible that the Bible is referring to the same geological structure, simply referring to each of the peaks as its own mountain.
If you want some backup, here is a picture I took myself. Notice the dual peaks:
A linux box for Christmas is all great until little Johnny wants to play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City that he got from his ill-informed mom.
Strange, I *just* played GTA: Vice City on my slackware box, with zero problems. The entire process involved an "installpkg winex.tgz", running "winex3 setup.exe", and navigating to the game in the kde menu. If Little Johnny wants to play Vice City, he should be able to figure out at least this much.
Wise up and smell the coffee. Anyone who tries to argue that the MAJORITY of CD-Rs they use are for data backup are either telling less-than-half-truths, seriously non-informed about what you can put on a CD (can you say DivX?), or legitimate business users. Like always, it'll only be legitimate business users that get shafted, not Joe public.
Apparently, I'd be telling a "less-than-half-truth" if I told the truth. I go through dozens of cd's every month, and I'd say maybe 1 of them max is for burning mp3 files. The rest? Try these: backing up my personal files (including artwork, papers, programs, music recorded by myself), burning linux distros (many discs right there), and burning (freely downloadable) programs for my friends still on dial-up. I'm not saying that their are no people who really are as you describe them, but I think you are very wrong for making such sweeping generalizations.
I honestly don't see any strengths in these pro-taxation arguments anyways. For example, before I purchased an iPod, I carried around a cd player almost everywhere I went. There is no way that I would be carrying my original discs with me, as they get scratched, bent, warped, etc. So I'd make a backup of my cd, and carry that around instead. Why should the recording industry get more money off of that? It's plain theft! No one should be taxed for carrying around their music in a different format, be it carrying them on an iPod or burning a cd. On the other hand, if in the US they actually legalized copying audio due to the levy similar to Canada, it's a bit more justifiable than if they do it just to recover their "losses".
Re:how to make linux desktop good for masses
on
Ark Linux
·
· Score: 1
MS has the desktop market tied in knots. How are secretaries and professionals going to convert to Linux? There is no Linux version of Word or Excel. Yeah, I use Abiword and Gnumeric instead, but my boss would never consider it.
What about Crossover Office? It seems to run ms-word and excel, the two most popular apps in the office suite, almost perfectly. Other components such as Powerpoint also work fine. There are some rough edges, but crashes occur very rarely for me, and when they do, they do so consistently, so I'm sure most bugs will be easy to squash for the Codeweavers team.
But then, there is the awful licensing issue to deal with...
One second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of microwave light absorbed or emitted by the hyperfine transition of cesium-133 atoms in their ground state undisturbed by external fields.
Actually, as far as current supercomputers go, the Cray T3E isn't near the top of the line. Going on what I was told by the systems admin at the ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company (basically a building filled with rooms and rooms of supercomputers), the Cray T3E isn't any longer very useful to them with the scope of what kind of processing they were doing. They even had a redhat beowulf cluster running on those dell corporate pc's that outperformed it in tests (fewer than 256 of them, which they had originally, as they had to give a large number of them back).
He said they were currently looking for a buyer, and that all it was currently doing was sitting in the room impressing people who don't know better. I sure as heck was impressed, and if I had a few million sitting around, would have probably made an offer, though...
where students beam around a virus from Palm to Palm and then figure out how it propagated
Back in seventh grade life science, we did this exact same thing, but without pdas. Basically, the teacher gave each person a small jar with either plain water, or water spiked with some chemical. Then we went around "squirting" water into each other's jars, according to certain rules. Then, with an indicator, we found out who had the "virus", and we traced the origin down to two people: the teacher and me. It turned out to be the teacher.
It's not just a question of emailing mom, dad, friends, that sort of thing. It's about economic opportunities--the one thing someone in a box on the street doesn't have. Access to the internet is a means to many ends; in the case of a homeless person, it could be the means to getting back on his or her feet once again.
This reminded me of one time I was at the Central Library in downtown Houston. I was at one of the computer terminals, and four or five homeless people were using the terminals next to me. I recall seeing one person slowly typing into a search engine: "jobs". I don't think that would have actually gotten very far in finding him a job, but it indicates that the concept is viable, and if worked on could be very successful.
Somehow, I think the main reason that Loki didn't do as well as they should have was the way their products were marketed. For example: Tribes 2 for windows can be found at any decent computer store, and at CompUSA and Fry's, it has been on sale almost constantly for $19.99. Tribes 2 for linux, on the other hand, can be found in no retail store that I've been to. The only option I have is to buy it online, for around $50 (plus S&H). Now which version would most people go for? The only reason that I didn't spend $20 on the windows version is because I don't run windows on any of my machines, but most people aren't in that situation. I think if it was possible to get some more games into stores (at more competitive prices!), they could have done much better. The one or two copies of quake III that each store has don't count ($50 apiece).
Even if this Ford car was named "Kontour" (it's named "Contour"), Ford would have absolutely no legal grounds to sue the KDE team. Killustrator and Adobe Illustrator are two different products in the same market, which is where trademark law is applied. Cars and software should be able to have the same or similar names without threat of legal action. Of course, this is all in theory, and IANAL. -mdek.net
Oh well... anyone up for some non-copyrighted Mozart?
One problem... although the music itself is not copyrighted anymore, the same copyright laws apply to classical music as other types of music. The recording itself is still copyrighted, and I'm sure that any of the music labels would get just as pissed off if your traded classical albums. The only freedom that you have by listening to classical is that you can make your own recordings and not have to pay any licensing fees to the author.
Remember, you can't trade the store bought albums.
Just so you know, the karma kap of 50 isn't "built in" to the code. If you take a look through the code, you will see that there is an option to set the cap, or remove it completely. So Taco isn't leaving the cap in because he's too lazy to take it out, but he must have some good reason to leave it in. Who knows what it is:) -mdek.net
The only reason MC is so big is because they set up about 30 servers. Almost all inexperienced users would instinctively connect to something like that, without looking at the other options. If they get shut down, probably DJNap or Opennap would become just as popular. It doesn't take too much to attract a bunch of users onto a server. I used to run one, and after just an hour, I would have a few hundred users, and that would sometimes grow, until someone would pull out my ethernet cable or something like that:)
Unfortunately, I no longer run it because the RIAA sent my ISP that infamous letter. 4 days without my 1.5 mbps DSL was more than I could stand. I just can't get over the fact that they had convinced my ISP that I was actually running an mp3 server, providing my own mp3 files to download! -mdek.net
I heard that Xfree86 doesn't have support for more than 4 (or 5) buttons. The scroll wheel counts as three buttons (up and down and click), plus the right and left button, reaching the limit. However, if there is a way to overcome this, I'd like to hear of it, as being able to use those extra thumb buttons would be great!
Slashdot Mirror
But the question is: Did McGuyver pay his mp3 patent licensing fees?
Inherently addictions are to things that are enjoyable... I don't see how using a terribly stripped down version of windows is going to foster their "microsoft habit". If anything, I think it's going to drive them away from MS into the arms of something else. (most probably pirated copies of windows).
That is precisely the reason why XP Starter Edition would be helpful for MS. It will be bundled legally with computers instead the full version of XP, so competing operating systems (i.e. Linux) are more likely to left out. The users of the crippled windows will be more likely to stick with it, or switch to the full version (either legit or copied), increasing Microsoft's market share. Then, they get the lucrative corporate/government contracts, and linux is left out of the picture.
I'm a bit curious about how this is completely in-house code... see, my college's website at Rice university has the exact same looking portal system: http://www.brown.rice.edu
How is it that both sites are nearly identical in design, yet one of them is completely "in-house"?
I've been a longtime thunderbird user, but I've had issues before with the spam filters. Basically, even after training with several hundred messages, the filter was very ineffective, letting the majority of the spam through. I decided to use popfile instead, and had great success there in terms of filtering, but usability was not as good, and configuration was a pain.
.6, but I thought it would be best to ask here for other's experiences before going through the training process again. I really would like the effectiveness of popfile with the usability of TB's interface.
Has anything in thunderbird's filtering changed significantly? I haven't used built-in filtering since around
Only one is needed for a breach to occur. When security is concerned, majority does not rule. Numbers play differently.
Only one breach may be needed, but, unlike what happens when just running windows unprotected on the internet, my computer will not become a zombie spam relay when I receive a "malicious" IM in gaim.
Gaim is NOT integrated into the OS. The damage is limited.
Sure, they can tax the big players, but what are they going to do about those of us who build our own voip networks via asterisk and the like?
And if they do managed to tax the big players, who's to say they don't go offshore somewhere?
Obviously, the federal government will be able to implement a great firewall to shield the citizens of our freedom-loving nation from those communist tax-avoiders who wish to tear apart the open-natured moral fabric of our society.
</sarcasm>
I feel that I should express my personal experiences with various "easy to use" distros. My mother, who is quite unskilled with computers (what a surprise), kept on complaining how her computer wouldn't work properly. It was always down to spyware, or other background programs eating up resources, etc. I decided that enough was enough, that I didn't want to spend several hours per week cleaning the same crud off her drive.
I tried installing Xandros on her system. It installed fine, configured everything, and in general worked great out of the box. BUT, it was rather painfully slow, on a duron 1.6ghz + 256MB ddr box. There was not too much I could do in terms of optimization, without breaking the packaging system, and after several months of using this, I *did* manage to break it beyond reasonable repair. IIRC, it was something to do with trying the actual debian kde packages, and finding that reversing the situation was more trouble than it was worth.
I took the opportunity to try whatever else I heard was looking good, and installed yoper. It ended up working fine, quite a bit faster (probably due to the 2.6 kernel), but still had strange issues which seemed to appear out of nowhere: using the accelerated nvidia driver caused random lockups, and before long, trying to apt-get dist-upgrade would freeze up with no error messages, and would continue to do so in different places in subsequent runs.
I wiped it, thought "enough is enough," and installed slackware. It installed perfectly. I honestly don't think that the installation is significantly more difficult than the "easy" distros, unless you choose to make it so (eg. selecting to install all packages rather than individual selecting). I installed the 2.6 kernel from testing/, ran swaret to update all the packages, downloaded the nvidia driver, and it just *works*. No random lockups, VERY FAST performance, easy administration, and my mother has now moved on to complaining how the connection to hotmail is too slow.
After ranting for so long, I think the point I'm trying to make is that maybe these new distros are making things too complicated in their quest to make it more easy. To me, that's ultimately the wrong way to do things. You'll end up with "only one way to do it", unless you want to risk breaking whatever system the distro designers decided to prop the system up with.
With the slackware style, I seem to get more simple, *more transparent* packaging and set-up, while at the same time getting updates within the packaging system reasonably quickly (unlike with Xandros, which was often hopelessly out of date). Shouldn't it just be that simpler==better?
The joke doesnt really make sense unless it is a hydrogen atom, which has one proton and one electron.
Well, it doesn't really matter if it is a hydrogen atom or not. If any elemental atom loses an electron, would it not become positive? For example, a sodium atom has 11 protons, and 11 electrons. If it loses just one electron, it becomes Na+, a sodium ion.
It's amazing how this story written for children ages ago has such a wonderful treatment of the subject:
Well, the mountain commonly referring to as "Ararat" actually has two peaks. Ergo, it is possible that the Bible is referring to the same geological structure, simply referring to each of the peaks as its own mountain.
If you want some backup, here is a picture I took myself. Notice the dual peaks:
http://charon.sjs.org/~mdek/ararat.jpg
A linux box for Christmas is all great until little Johnny wants to play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City that he got from his ill-informed mom.
Strange, I *just* played GTA: Vice City on my slackware box, with zero problems. The entire process involved an "installpkg winex.tgz", running "winex3 setup.exe", and navigating to the game in the kde menu. If Little Johnny wants to play Vice City, he should be able to figure out at least this much.
Wise up and smell the coffee. Anyone who tries to argue that the MAJORITY of CD-Rs they use are for data backup are either telling less-than-half-truths, seriously non-informed about what you can put on a CD (can you say DivX?), or legitimate business users. Like always, it'll only be legitimate business users that get shafted, not Joe public.
Apparently, I'd be telling a "less-than-half-truth" if I told the truth. I go through dozens of cd's every month, and I'd say maybe 1 of them max is for burning mp3 files. The rest? Try these: backing up my personal files (including artwork, papers, programs, music recorded by myself), burning linux distros (many discs right there), and burning (freely downloadable) programs for my friends still on dial-up. I'm not saying that their are no people who really are as you describe them, but I think you are very wrong for making such sweeping generalizations.
I honestly don't see any strengths in these pro-taxation arguments anyways. For example, before I purchased an iPod, I carried around a cd player almost everywhere I went. There is no way that I would be carrying my original discs with me, as they get scratched, bent, warped, etc. So I'd make a backup of my cd, and carry that around instead. Why should the recording industry get more money off of that? It's plain theft! No one should be taxed for carrying around their music in a different format, be it carrying them on an iPod or burning a cd. On the other hand, if in the US they actually legalized copying audio due to the levy similar to Canada, it's a bit more justifiable than if they do it just to recover their "losses".
MS has the desktop market tied in knots. How are secretaries and professionals going to convert to Linux? There is no Linux version of Word or Excel. Yeah, I use Abiword and Gnumeric instead, but my boss would never consider it.
What about Crossover Office? It seems to run ms-word and excel, the two most popular apps in the office suite, almost perfectly. Other components such as Powerpoint also work fine. There are some rough edges, but crashes occur very rarely for me, and when they do, they do so consistently, so I'm sure most bugs will be easy to squash for the Codeweavers team.
But then, there is the awful licensing issue to deal with...
One second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of microwave light absorbed or emitted by the hyperfine transition of cesium-133 atoms in their ground state undisturbed by external fields.
Actually, as far as current supercomputers go, the Cray T3E isn't near the top of the line. Going on what I was told by the systems admin at the ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company (basically a building filled with rooms and rooms of supercomputers), the Cray T3E isn't any longer very useful to them with the scope of what kind of processing they were doing. They even had a redhat beowulf cluster running on those dell corporate pc's that outperformed it in tests (fewer than 256 of them, which they had originally, as they had to give a large number of them back).
He said they were currently looking for a buyer, and that all it was currently doing was sitting in the room impressing people who don't know better. I sure as heck was impressed, and if I had a few million sitting around, would have probably made an offer, though...
where students beam around a virus from Palm to Palm and then figure out how it propagated
Back in seventh grade life science, we did this exact same thing, but without pdas. Basically, the teacher gave each person a small jar with either plain water, or water spiked with some chemical. Then we went around "squirting" water into each other's jars, according to certain rules. Then, with an indicator, we found out who had the "virus", and we traced the origin down to two people: the teacher and me. It turned out to be the teacher.
It's not just a question of emailing mom, dad, friends, that sort of thing. It's about economic opportunities--the one thing someone in a box on the street doesn't have. Access to the internet is a means to many ends; in the case of a homeless person, it could be the means to getting back on his or her feet once again.
This reminded me of one time I was at the Central Library in downtown Houston. I was at one of the computer terminals, and four or five homeless people were using the terminals next to me. I recall seeing one person slowly typing into a search engine: "jobs". I don't think that would have actually gotten very far in finding him a job, but it indicates that the concept is viable, and if worked on could be very successful.
Somehow, I think the main reason that Loki didn't do as well as they should have was the way their products were marketed. For example: Tribes 2 for windows can be found at any decent computer store, and at CompUSA and Fry's, it has been on sale almost constantly for $19.99. Tribes 2 for linux, on the other hand, can be found in no retail store that I've been to. The only option I have is to buy it online, for around $50 (plus S&H). Now which version would most people go for? The only reason that I didn't spend $20 on the windows version is because I don't run windows on any of my machines, but most people aren't in that situation. I think if it was possible to get some more games into stores (at more competitive prices!), they could have done much better. The one or two copies of quake III that each store has don't count ($50 apiece).
Even if this Ford car was named "Kontour" (it's named "Contour"), Ford would have absolutely no legal grounds to sue the KDE team. Killustrator and Adobe Illustrator are two different products in the same market, which is where trademark law is applied. Cars and software should be able to have the same or similar names without threat of legal action. Of course, this is all in theory, and IANAL.
-mdek.net
Oh well... anyone up for some non-copyrighted Mozart?
One problem... although the music itself is not copyrighted anymore, the same copyright laws apply to classical music as other types of music. The recording itself is still copyrighted, and I'm sure that any of the music labels would get just as pissed off if your traded classical albums. The only freedom that you have by listening to classical is that you can make your own recordings and not have to pay any licensing fees to the author.
Remember, you can't trade the store bought albums.
-mdek.net
Just so you know, the karma kap of 50 isn't "built in" to the code. If you take a look through the code, you will see that there is an option to set the cap, or remove it completely. So Taco isn't leaving the cap in because he's too lazy to take it out, but he must have some good reason to leave it in. Who knows what it is :)
-mdek.net
The foreign DNA encodes a fluorescent protein from a jellyfish.
Now, which patient gets the first neon green heart transplant?!
-mdek.net
The only reason MC is so big is because they set up about 30 servers. Almost all inexperienced users would instinctively connect to something like that, without looking at the other options. If they get shut down, probably DJNap or Opennap would become just as popular. It doesn't take too much to attract a bunch of users onto a server. I used to run one, and after just an hour, I would have a few hundred users, and that would sometimes grow, until someone would pull out my ethernet cable or something like that :)
Unfortunately, I no longer run it because the RIAA sent my ISP that infamous letter. 4 days without my 1.5 mbps DSL was more than I could stand. I just can't get over the fact that they had convinced my ISP that I was actually running an mp3 server, providing my own mp3 files to download!
-mdek.net
I heard that Xfree86 doesn't have support for more than 4 (or 5) buttons. The scroll wheel counts as three buttons (up and down and click), plus the right and left button, reaching the limit. However, if there is a way to overcome this, I'd like to hear of it, as being able to use those extra thumb buttons would be great!
-mdek.net
Yes, under: Section "InputDevice"
put this:
Option "Protocol" "imps/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
For some reason, I've also only had success with the mouse in general by also putting this in the secion:
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
instead of "/dev/mouse". Probably just a missing symlink, but I'm too lazy to make one.
-mdek.net