Outlook I have to say is one of Microsoft's best products and as much as you flame microsoft, they do do some decent hings for your average desktop.
excuse me? while i do agree with you on the second half of the statement statement (switched from linux to win2k on the desktop almost a year ago) outlook has always been a huge pile of flaming excrement. perhaps they have made some vast improvements in office xp, which i have not yet tried, previous incarnations of outlook have been nothing short of an abomination. i have always wondered how it was that microsoft did such a (comparitiavely) good job on outlook express while so totally missing the boat with outlook. yes outlook express does have it's problems, but for the most part it is a simple, straightforward email application. outlook has always been nothing short of painfulo to use.
Human beings have neither the aural nor the psychological capacity to withstand the awesome power of God's true voice. Were you to hear it, you're mind would cave in and your heart would explode within your chest. We went through five Adams before we figured that out....
Metatron acts as the voice of God. Any documented occasion when some yahoo claims God has spoken to them, they're speaking to [Metatron]. Or they're speaking to themselves.
yes, i looked at the page, and if that is the best example somebody can come up with of a useful application in flash, it confirms what i have always believed.
flash is an expensive toy (expensive for the developer, not the end user) i have never seen anything useful done in flash that could not have been done easily in javascript or a java applet (another toy imo, although a free one, at least)
everyone here is saying that this could be the first real legal challenge of the gpl.
which makes me wonder: what ever happened with carmack and the guy (slade?) that was trying to redistribute quake binaries? for all the ranting that went on here about that i never did hear about how that ended up. anybody here know?
actually, you can 'type in his IP and not go through some stupid "online service"'
there are two ways to play diablo ii online. you can connect to battle.net, or you can host/join a standard tcp/ip game (some of the older games, e.g. the original diablo, you might only be able to play ipx games, but i think diablo added tcp/ip play in a patch)
i dont know if there is much of a difference in playing the rts games on battle.net as opposed to over tcp/ip (i never played starcraft on bnet) but there is a difference in diablo ii (and iirc there was the same difference with the original diablo). in diablo, your character is persistent, and if you play on battle.net, your character is stored on the bnet server and can only be used in bnet games. if you join a standard tcp/ip internet game, you can only play characters stored on your local hard drive. while there are some (dis)advantages to either situation, the most notable thing here is that it is very easy to hack characters stored on your local machine, and therefore playing on bnet offers you some protection from playing with/against hacked characters (although the hackers are getting more adept at hacking their bnet characters it seems)
when i graduated college (a year ago) i worked for a company that was focused on providing wireless and converged applications. it didn't take long to realize that the technoloy for creating the types of applications was readily available and not to difficult to use.
the primary shortcoming in developing these type of applications is access to the equipment needed. we used voxeo for voice applications, and simplewire for sms services. (we had a couple of other suppliers for various other services, but those are the two that i remember.) the applications themselves are very simple to write. voxeo (and i think most of their competitors) all use voiceXML. any competent html author can learn how to write an interactive voice application without too much trouble- if they have an agreement with voxeo or somebody else (tellMe and beVocal come to mind) most of these have free developer programs, but to actually deploy an application on them for commercial use costs money.
in the end we got out of the application development because the engineers spent all of our time writing one-off demos that never got used, and our sales guy spent all of his time setting up "strategic partners" (translated: we do work for them so we can say we have clients, but they dont give us any money) and trying to sell to other companies that were as broke as we were. we changed our focus to create a platform to develop the applications we were spending all of our time writing. we developed a visual studio-like ide for converged applications, with wizards, template applications, tutorials, etc. more importantly, we made access to all of our secondary providers transparent. in one environment you could send sms messages through simplewire, run voice applications through voxeo, deliver wap and pqa applications, and have them all pass information from one to another more or less transparently.
for a while we were giving out free logins for people to sign up and write applications and give us feedback on the system. we almost posted it here on slashdot once upon a time, but at the time, we weren't sure our system would handle that much traffic (or that voxeo wouldn't start charging us more for that much traffic) that and there were a few security concerns in our system that we weren't ready to expose (you could embed php, perl, or c code in your application inline. very handy to have for trusted developers, but certainly not someting you want to hand out to everyone...)
unfortunately at this point our sales person still hadn't sold anything, despite the fact that everyone who saw our environment was drooling over it. we fired him when he (literally) told our ceo "i couldn't give this away". plus we were almost out of money, and (i'll still never understand why) he was the highest paid person in our company. on top of this, we were unable to get any further invstment because (1) we didnt have any paying clients and (2) our ceo never actually demonstrated any of our working technology to the investors, and was too busy talking about how zondigo (our company) leveraged adMonitor technology -adMonitor was written by our ceo, frank addante, the former ceo of l90 (check out l90 on fuckedcompany for a good laugh). half of our seed round of funding went towards a licence to use admonitor technology. of course the only thing we ever used it for was tracking hits to our corporate website. and even that was at the insistence of frank, as that didn't tell us anything we couldn't have found from the server logs.
anyway, around june, the company ran out of cash and shutdown. all of our technology was purchased by a company named voxicom that is using it to develop a voice recognition baed email service (similar to the wildfire somebody else mentioned somewhere)
anyway, the point of this gargantuan post is that
1) the technology to create these applications is readily available, and usable by anyone competent at writing html
2) the technology to create these applications has been readily available for at least a year now
3) the technology to create these applications is only available through a few select vendors due to backend hardware and software requirements
have to agree with you on the dell. my inspiron runs fanless most of the time (my last major project was browser based, so all i ever had open was a bunch of internet explorer windows. kind of a waste of a 750MHz processor) but as soon as i started playing quake iii or started a major compile, the fan would kick in like a small plane taking off....
i think the 4281 is the same sound chipset that i had on my old ibm a20. i couldn't get it working very well back then, but alsa had not yet finished support for that chipset. according to their page of supported chipsets, it is supported now.
i started using alsa some time ago with some other sound card (i forget which) that wasn't well supported by free oss, and i've never gone back. it supports more cards than the oss modules in the stock kernel and works much better.
is it a desktop enhancement or replacement?
on
Which Laptop To Buy?
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· Score: 1
my first laptop was used as an extension to my desktop. all of my real work i did on my desktop, and i carried a laptop around with me so i could pop up a few text editors in my downtime on campus, taking public transportation to work, etc. if this is how you plan to use your laptop, probably the biggest feature to look for is weight (or more specifically, lack of it) and price. you're probably best of finding a small (~4lb) thinkpad on ebay for something like this. i got a thinkpad 560 off ebay when it was a little over a year old, and i loved it.
now, at my last two jobs, i have used a laptop as my primary computer, instead of a desktop. in this case, you are going to have to bite the bullet on size and weight and get something a lot more full featured. my first job got me an ibm a20. it was an ok machine, but i never liked it much.
since then i have had a dell i8000. i cant say how happy i have been with the dell. when i first got it, it was a little hard to get linux installed because of the pcmcia controller (the pcmcia-cs package at the time would cause a kernel panic, so i had to boot w/o pcmcia support and upgrade to a newer pcmcia-cs) that issue should be resolved if you use anything more recent than redhat 7.0. aside from that, all of the hardware is well supported in linux (haven't tried the new nVidia chip yet - i'm getting one of those next week, but the ati rage mobility works great) and the large display's are beautiful (my biggest requirement for a laptop that is supposed to replace a desktop. i prefer 1600x1200, and i cant stand anything less than 1280x1024 on my primary work machine) even the price of the 8000's isn't too bad: about $2500 for a nearly loaded machine (800MHz, 256MB RAM, UXGA display, 20GB drive) they're only shortcoming is their weight. the 8000's are bricks.... but, as i said before, if you're looking to fully replace your desktop pc with a laptop, you're probably going to have to scrifice small size for a more fully featured machine.
i mean i know their money must come from somewhere, but i was under the impression that nobody actually buys photoshop. every computer guy i knew in college had a pirated copy of photoshop. it was even more common than ms office....
When you buy a copyrighted thing, you are granted fair use rights. This is simply an attempt to underminde fair use.
it is, as you say, perfectly legal to rip your cd's to mp3 as you say. however, it is also perfectly legal for the record company to try to prevent you from doing this. (and unfortunately, now, thanks to dcma, it is illegal for you to try to circumvent that. but that's another issue)
as much as people here like to talk about it, there is not, and never has been any legal right of fair use. while the concept of fair use has been held up many times in court to prevent making vcr's, cd-r's, and other such things with legitimate uses illegal, there is no law that states what is and is not fair use. moreover, there is no law that requires companies to give consumers those rights.
in short, you can not be accused of illegal copyright infringement if the courts consider what you are doing to be within the guidelines of fair use. however, it is completely legal for companies to use technical measures (but not legal measures) to try to prevent you from doing those things. this btw, is precisely why dmca is so dangerous: it turns any technical protection measure into a legal one as well.
well, i wasn't sure of the specifics. my point was that, whether it is actually trademarked or not, there is legal precendence that trademarking a common word or phrase, especially one that is describing the thing being sold, is a weak trademark, and not very defensible.
while i applaud (to some extent) adobe for not being as heavy handed as they might have been, it seems to me that they don't have much of a case here.
i suppose next, we'll be seeing letters from microsoft saying that they need to change the names of koffice and kword because they are too similar to ms office and ms word? no we won't because microsoft knows they can't win that case (although they might be bullies if they feel too threatened). they know this because they have used this very thing to their advantage in the past: internet explorer was the name of another web browser at the time it was first released, but a judge said that it was ok for microsoft to use the name because common english words can't be trademarked.
one last note: this actually is a very different issue from the gaim case, because AIM is a defensible trademark, while Illustrator is not. in this case, they could have called the program KDE Illustrator, and not done anything wrong. (At least in the US. Trademark law may be different elsewhere)
great idea, except for one thing. in my experience, both KDE and gnome have a tendency to screw up a configuration that has already been set. call me elitist, but as nice as it would be to have a newbie friendly way to configure X built into gnome, i don't want it if it's going to mess with my already finely tuned X configuration.
a couple of examples:
on my laptop for work, i had X 4.0 configured to accept mouse events both from the little eraser head on the keyboard and from my external mouse. when i used kde 2.0, it decided that it didn't want to acknowledge that i had two mice. it didn't actually change my configuration, because when i started gnome, it worked fine, but whenever i used kde, only one mouse would work.
every once in a while gnome will screw up the keyboard settings, and it wont repeat anymore. the only way to get it to work right again is to completely restart X.
my point is, if kde and gnome are ever going to evolve so that they can configure your entire system, somebody better figure out how to get them to not interfere with a pre-existing configuration, or they will piss off a lot of their more advanced users.
I'm sure if I access to guns I'd be more likely to thing about shooting these people
Comments like that illustrate exactly why we should make guns harder to obtain.
not even close. comments like that only illustrate the problem with making them so hard to obtain. no one who had ever used a gun in a controlled environment would say anything like that unless they were completely off their rocker already.
according to the statement in the headline (no i didn't read the article. shame on me...) this only applies to sellers in texas. so this would suck for little vendors in TX, but it would have no affect on the little vendors in other states. also, i would imagine this bill would affect all computers manufactured by TX companies, not just machines for sale to texans. therefore, this measure would seriously hurt dell's business among clued consumers in other states.
in all reality this bill is bad for dell, because it puts extra restrictions on them that do not apply to the vast majority of dell's smaller competitors, and may help these smaller competitor to step out of dell's shadow, at least outside of the TX marketplace.
not until you can customise it.
on
KDE 2.1 Is Out
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· Score: 2
there is still one area where gnome is leaps and bounds ahead of kde.
every time kde comes out with a new release (and usually several times between releases) i will download it, compile it and mess areound with it for a while. on a technical basis, i agree that the kde project is astounding. it is miles ahead of gnome. but yet, every time, i end up (somewhat regretfully) going back to gnome. and it has nothing to do with how kde looks. the fact of the matter is that i just can't do what i want with kde. i would gladly use a less attractive system, if it would allow me to get my work done better. but so far kde has only hindered my work, and i have yet to find a kde setup where i can be as productive as with gnome.
so here is a list of reasons why i still use gnome (and if the kde developers are listening, if you could change just a few of these, i would love to switch to kde.)
1) there's no way around it. the window manager sucks ass. it's almost completely unconfigurable. what if i want a double click to lower the window instead of shading it? what if i want to bind window manger commands to the windows key? (that's what it's there for, isn't it? the start menu is useless, and wasting a keyboard key to activate it is even more pointless...) and half of the commands i use aren't even available to be bound... vertical maximize, anyone?
im told that there is a kde windowmanager interoperability spec that several windowmanagers have pledged support for, but last i tried, no other window manger worked well with kde. maybe this is better now, but im not getting my hopes up.
2) root menus. root menus are not a part of the window manager, they are a part of the 'desktop'. which i suppose conceptually makes sense somewhat, but practically, it's quite annoying. it means that if i want to use the kde file manager desktop, i also have to use the almost completely unconfigurable kde root menus. yes i realize there is a menu editor, but even ms realised in time for windows 98 that just putting files in a directory was no way to build a menu. in kde there is no way to sort items in a menu other than by the order the files appear in a directory, which means all submenu entries are in front of all application entries, and each set is sroted alphabetically. now you can kinda hack your way around the alphabetic thing by putting numbers in front of your menu items, but there's now way around the submenu thing. you see, 95% of the time i open the root menu, it's to start a terminal. which means it should only be logical that the first thing on my menu would be a terminal. the only way to do this in kde is to name the file 0_terminal, and not have any submenu 's in my root menu (which isn't really possible anyway, because kde always puts the system menus in there even if you get rid of all of your own.
3) since i mentioned it, the whole desktop thing. what's wrong with just painting the file manager icons on the root window? why do they have to make their own desktop? this makes it almost impossible to use another window manager. as if it wasn;t hard enough already....
4) when i select an entire line in the konsole and paste it into another konssole (or other app), why doesn;t it paste the newline? i wouldn't select the entire line if i didn't want to paste the entire line.
5) the themes suck, they're all tacky. it's quite possible to make attractive themes without pixmaps. there are a number of very nice theme engines for gtk+ which are every bit as technically advanced as the kde theming mechanism, and they look ten times nicer. (note this isn't as big a deal. as i said, i would gladly use an ugly environment if it made me more productive)
6) there is almost nothing i dislike about konqueror. i loved using it even after i stopped using kde in general. except that gnome's session manager would constantly give me errors. i dont know if the problem was with gnome or konqueror, but i thought the session management between the two systems was supposed to be compatible.
but for all my complaints i think the kde developers are doing a great job. keep up the good work, and i look forward to trying out the new release.
didn't even notice it at first. the right click popup menus actually work right in linux now (meaning they work the same way as every other x11 app). this has been their most reprted bug since at least m13. the fix got pushed back from milestone to milestone, and was eventually closed. i had pretty much given up on ever having a browser again other than ns4 where the right click popups behaved properly.
yay! thank you mozilla team, and whoever finally fixed this!!!
check your window manager preferences. sawfish has an option that says something like: "minimizing window also minimizes {pulldown menu}"
the default stting of this pulldown (i forget what. 'group' perhaps?) caused the same minimizing behaivior for me. i changed it, and now i have three mozilla windows open, and two of them minimized...
i have a laptop at work with win2k on it that i installed myself (the guy who had it before me blew out the original install) and i'd like to have a dvd player. the laptop has an ati rage mobility video card.
i have a driver cd for an ati all-in-wonder 128 that has dvd software included. are the cards similar enough that i can try to install that software on my laptop. i poked around on ati's site, and they wont provide any support for laptop video chipsets, saying that these chipsets are usually tuned by the oem to the particular laptop that they are being installed on.
(btw, the laptop is a dell i8000, and once i got the pcmcia drivers not to panic it runs linux like a dream)
"How do you stop glibc hell on Linux? I thought I'd long lost the ever familiar DLL hell on Windows, but with Linux it breaks the applications so bad its not funny."
this is actually quite simple to fix. you see, dll hell in windows refers to the fact that the.dll files have no version associated with them. so if app x requires foo.dll version 1.2 and app y requires foo.dll version 1.5, they will both try to install their own foo.dll and break the other app. that is what.dll hell is.
this "glibc hell" that you are referring to is of your own creation. you are trying to run a program that is linked against (for example) libc-2.1.3.so with your library libc-2.2.0.so. the problem is not that libc-2.1.3.so and libc-2.2.0.so are incompatible. the problem is that you are attempting to run a program that is linked against libc-2.1.3.so and you don't have libc-2.1.3.so installed. that's the problem. install libc-2.1.3.so, and your problem will go away.
this is true like 99% of the time. if your application vendor had any sense when they compiled the program, which they better if they dont want to make source available, then they will link against the appropriate versions of the library. and if you have that library for it to run against, then you can run it, even if the primary libc on your system is a different version.
the one case i've found to truly be a problem is if you have something linked against one version of a library that dynamically loads something linked against another version of a library. i had a problem once with trying to get the realplayer (i think) plugin working with a version of netscape that was compiled against a different libc. but in a case like that im not sure if there really is a good solution....
Slashdot Mirror
Outlook I have to say is one of Microsoft's best products and as much as you flame microsoft, they do do some decent hings for your average desktop.
excuse me? while i do agree with you on the second half of the statement statement (switched from linux to win2k on the desktop almost a year ago) outlook has always been a huge pile of flaming excrement. perhaps they have made some vast improvements in office xp, which i have not yet tried, previous incarnations of outlook have been nothing short of an abomination. i have always wondered how it was that microsoft did such a (comparitiavely) good job on outlook express while so totally missing the boat with outlook. yes outlook express does have it's problems, but for the most part it is a simple, straightforward email application. outlook has always been nothing short of painfulo to use.
actaully, as everyone should know:
Human beings have neither the aural nor the psychological capacity to withstand the awesome power of God's true voice. Were you to hear it, you're mind would cave in and your heart would explode within your chest. We went through five Adams before we figured that out....
Metatron acts as the voice of God. Any documented occasion when some yahoo claims God has spoken to them, they're speaking to [Metatron]. Or they're speaking to themselves.
(from Dogma for those who missed it)
sleepwalking fusion?
yes, i looked at the page, and if that is the best example somebody can come up with of a useful application in flash, it confirms what i have always believed.
flash is an expensive toy (expensive for the developer, not the end user) i have never seen anything useful done in flash that could not have been done easily in javascript or a java applet (another toy imo, although a free one, at least)
this is sort of a picking nits, but what you describe is still a GUI interface.
its a gui implemented in text mode, rather than whiz-bang vga graphics, but it is a gui.
a command line data entry app would really not be very desirable:
enter first name: John<Enter>
enter last name: Smith<Enter>
enter date: _
everyone here is saying that this could be the first real legal challenge of the gpl.
which makes me wonder: what ever happened with carmack and the guy (slade?) that was trying to redistribute quake binaries? for all the ranting that went on here about that i never did hear about how that ended up. anybody here know?
actually, you can 'type in his IP and not go through some stupid "online service"'
there are two ways to play diablo ii online. you can connect to battle.net, or you can host/join a standard tcp/ip game (some of the older games, e.g. the original diablo, you might only be able to play ipx games, but i think diablo added tcp/ip play in a patch)
i dont know if there is much of a difference in playing the rts games on battle.net as opposed to over tcp/ip (i never played starcraft on bnet) but there is a difference in diablo ii (and iirc there was the same difference with the original diablo). in diablo, your character is persistent, and if you play on battle.net, your character is stored on the bnet server and can only be used in bnet games. if you join a standard tcp/ip internet game, you can only play characters stored on your local hard drive. while there are some (dis)advantages to either situation, the most notable thing here is that it is very easy to hack characters stored on your local machine, and therefore playing on bnet offers you some protection from playing with/against hacked characters (although the hackers are getting more adept at hacking their bnet characters it seems)
when i graduated college (a year ago) i worked for a company that was focused on providing wireless and converged applications. it didn't take long to realize that the technoloy for creating the types of applications was readily available and not to difficult to use.
the primary shortcoming in developing these type of applications is access to the equipment needed. we used voxeo for voice applications, and simplewire for sms services. (we had a couple of other suppliers for various other services, but those are the two that i remember.) the applications themselves are very simple to write. voxeo (and i think most of their competitors) all use voiceXML. any competent html author can learn how to write an interactive voice application without too much trouble- if they have an agreement with voxeo or somebody else (tellMe and beVocal come to mind) most of these have free developer programs, but to actually deploy an application on them for commercial use costs money.
in the end we got out of the application development because the engineers spent all of our time writing one-off demos that never got used, and our sales guy spent all of his time setting up "strategic partners" (translated: we do work for them so we can say we have clients, but they dont give us any money) and trying to sell to other companies that were as broke as we were. we changed our focus to create a platform to develop the applications we were spending all of our time writing. we developed a visual studio-like ide for converged applications, with wizards, template applications, tutorials, etc. more importantly, we made access to all of our secondary providers transparent. in one environment you could send sms messages through simplewire, run voice applications through voxeo, deliver wap and pqa applications, and have them all pass information from one to another more or less transparently.
for a while we were giving out free logins for people to sign up and write applications and give us feedback on the system. we almost posted it here on slashdot once upon a time, but at the time, we weren't sure our system would handle that much traffic (or that voxeo wouldn't start charging us more for that much traffic) that and there were a few security concerns in our system that we weren't ready to expose (you could embed php, perl, or c code in your application inline. very handy to have for trusted developers, but certainly not someting you want to hand out to everyone...)
unfortunately at this point our sales person still hadn't sold anything, despite the fact that everyone who saw our environment was drooling over it. we fired him when he (literally) told our ceo "i couldn't give this away". plus we were almost out of money, and (i'll still never understand why) he was the highest paid person in our company. on top of this, we were unable to get any further invstment because (1) we didnt have any paying clients and (2) our ceo never actually demonstrated any of our working technology to the investors, and was too busy talking about how zondigo (our company) leveraged adMonitor technology -adMonitor was written by our ceo, frank addante, the former ceo of l90 (check out l90 on fuckedcompany for a good laugh). half of our seed round of funding went towards a licence to use admonitor technology. of course the only thing we ever used it for was tracking hits to our corporate website. and even that was at the insistence of frank, as that didn't tell us anything we couldn't have found from the server logs.
anyway, around june, the company ran out of cash and shutdown. all of our technology was purchased by a company named voxicom that is using it to develop a voice recognition baed email service (similar to the wildfire somebody else mentioned somewhere)
anyway, the point of this gargantuan post is that
1) the technology to create these applications is readily available, and usable by anyone competent at writing html
2) the technology to create these applications has been readily available for at least a year now
3) the technology to create these applications is only available through a few select vendors due to backend hardware and software requirements
4) my old ceo and head of sales are both idiots.
obviously it's classified as medium damage because it can only infect iis servers.
big whoop....
have to agree with you on the dell. my inspiron runs fanless most of the time (my last major project was browser based, so all i ever had open was a bunch of internet explorer windows. kind of a waste of a 750MHz processor) but as soon as i started playing quake iii or started a major compile, the fan would kick in like a small plane taking off....
have you tried using alsa? (www.alsa-project.org)
i think the 4281 is the same sound chipset that i had on my old ibm a20. i couldn't get it working very well back then, but alsa had not yet finished support for that chipset. according to their page of supported chipsets, it is supported now.
i started using alsa some time ago with some other sound card (i forget which) that wasn't well supported by free oss, and i've never gone back. it supports more cards than the oss modules in the stock kernel and works much better.
my first laptop was used as an extension to my desktop. all of my real work i did on my desktop, and i carried a laptop around with me so i could pop up a few text editors in my downtime on campus, taking public transportation to work, etc. if this is how you plan to use your laptop, probably the biggest feature to look for is weight (or more specifically, lack of it) and price. you're probably best of finding a small (~4lb) thinkpad on ebay for something like this. i got a thinkpad 560 off ebay when it was a little over a year old, and i loved it.
now, at my last two jobs, i have used a laptop as my primary computer, instead of a desktop. in this case, you are going to have to bite the bullet on size and weight and get something a lot more full featured. my first job got me an ibm a20. it was an ok machine, but i never liked it much.
since then i have had a dell i8000. i cant say how happy i have been with the dell. when i first got it, it was a little hard to get linux installed because of the pcmcia controller (the pcmcia-cs package at the time would cause a kernel panic, so i had to boot w/o pcmcia support and upgrade to a newer pcmcia-cs) that issue should be resolved if you use anything more recent than redhat 7.0. aside from that, all of the hardware is well supported in linux (haven't tried the new nVidia chip yet - i'm getting one of those next week, but the ati rage mobility works great) and the large display's are beautiful (my biggest requirement for a laptop that is supposed to replace a desktop. i prefer 1600x1200, and i cant stand anything less than 1280x1024 on my primary work machine) even the price of the 8000's isn't too bad: about $2500 for a nearly loaded machine (800MHz, 256MB RAM, UXGA display, 20GB drive) they're only shortcoming is their weight. the 8000's are bricks.... but, as i said before, if you're looking to fully replace your desktop pc with a laptop, you're probably going to have to scrifice small size for a more fully featured machine.
what's your favorite CPU-intensive activity?
(with all due respect to raster and mandrake)
enlightenment and gtk+ pixmap themes....
i mean i know their money must come from somewhere, but i was under the impression that nobody actually buys photoshop. every computer guy i knew in college had a pirated copy of photoshop. it was even more common than ms office....
When you buy a copyrighted thing, you are granted fair use rights. This is simply an attempt to underminde fair use.
it is, as you say, perfectly legal to rip your cd's to mp3 as you say. however, it is also perfectly legal for the record company to try to prevent you from doing this. (and unfortunately, now, thanks to dcma, it is illegal for you to try to circumvent that. but that's another issue)
as much as people here like to talk about it, there is not, and never has been any legal right of fair use. while the concept of fair use has been held up many times in court to prevent making vcr's, cd-r's, and other such things with legitimate uses illegal, there is no law that states what is and is not fair use. moreover, there is no law that requires companies to give consumers those rights.
in short, you can not be accused of illegal copyright infringement if the courts consider what you are doing to be within the guidelines of fair use. however, it is completely legal for companies to use technical measures (but not legal measures) to try to prevent you from doing those things. this btw, is precisely why dmca is so dangerous: it turns any technical protection measure into a legal one as well.
well, i wasn't sure of the specifics. my point was that, whether it is actually trademarked or not, there is legal precendence that trademarking a common word or phrase, especially one that is describing the thing being sold, is a weak trademark, and not very defensible.
while i applaud (to some extent) adobe for not being as heavy handed as they might have been, it seems to me that they don't have much of a case here.
i suppose next, we'll be seeing letters from microsoft saying that they need to change the names of koffice and kword because they are too similar to ms office and ms word? no we won't because microsoft knows they can't win that case (although they might be bullies if they feel too threatened). they know this because they have used this very thing to their advantage in the past: internet explorer was the name of another web browser at the time it was first released, but a judge said that it was ok for microsoft to use the name because common english words can't be trademarked.
one last note: this actually is a very different issue from the gaim case, because AIM is a defensible trademark, while Illustrator is not. in this case, they could have called the program KDE Illustrator, and not done anything wrong. (At least in the US. Trademark law may be different elsewhere)
great idea, except for one thing. in my experience, both KDE and gnome have a tendency to screw up a configuration that has already been set. call me elitist, but as nice as it would be to have a newbie friendly way to configure X built into gnome, i don't want it if it's going to mess with my already finely tuned X configuration.
a couple of examples:
on my laptop for work, i had X 4.0 configured to accept mouse events both from the little eraser head on the keyboard and from my external mouse. when i used kde 2.0, it decided that it didn't want to acknowledge that i had two mice. it didn't actually change my configuration, because when i started gnome, it worked fine, but whenever i used kde, only one mouse would work.
every once in a while gnome will screw up the keyboard settings, and it wont repeat anymore. the only way to get it to work right again is to completely restart X.
my point is, if kde and gnome are ever going to evolve so that they can configure your entire system, somebody better figure out how to get them to not interfere with a pre-existing configuration, or they will piss off a lot of their more advanced users.
I'm sure if I access to guns I'd be more likely to thing about shooting these people
Comments like that illustrate exactly why we should make guns harder to obtain.
not even close. comments like that only illustrate the problem with making them so hard to obtain. no one who had ever used a gun in a controlled environment would say anything like that unless they were completely off their rocker already.
according to the statement in the headline (no i didn't read the article. shame on me...) this only applies to sellers in texas. so this would suck for little vendors in TX, but it would have no affect on the little vendors in other states. also, i would imagine this bill would affect all computers manufactured by TX companies, not just machines for sale to texans. therefore, this measure would seriously hurt dell's business among clued consumers in other states.
in all reality this bill is bad for dell, because it puts extra restrictions on them that do not apply to the vast majority of dell's smaller competitors, and may help these smaller competitor to step out of dell's shadow, at least outside of the TX marketplace.
there is still one area where gnome is leaps and bounds ahead of kde.
every time kde comes out with a new release (and usually several times between releases) i will download it, compile it and mess areound with it for a while. on a technical basis, i agree that the kde project is astounding. it is miles ahead of gnome. but yet, every time, i end up (somewhat regretfully) going back to gnome. and it has nothing to do with how kde looks. the fact of the matter is that i just can't do what i want with kde. i would gladly use a less attractive system, if it would allow me to get my work done better. but so far kde has only hindered my work, and i have yet to find a kde setup where i can be as productive as with gnome. so here is a list of reasons why i still use gnome (and if the kde developers are listening, if you could change just a few of these, i would love to switch to kde.)
1) there's no way around it. the window manager sucks ass. it's almost completely unconfigurable. what if i want a double click to lower the window instead of shading it? what if i want to bind window manger commands to the windows key? (that's what it's there for, isn't it? the start menu is useless, and wasting a keyboard key to activate it is even more pointless...) and half of the commands i use aren't even available to be bound... vertical maximize, anyone?
im told that there is a kde windowmanager interoperability spec that several windowmanagers have pledged support for, but last i tried, no other window manger worked well with kde. maybe this is better now, but im not getting my hopes up.
2) root menus. root menus are not a part of the window manager, they are a part of the 'desktop'. which i suppose conceptually makes sense somewhat, but practically, it's quite annoying. it means that if i want to use the kde file manager desktop, i also have to use the almost completely unconfigurable kde root menus. yes i realize there is a menu editor, but even ms realised in time for windows 98 that just putting files in a directory was no way to build a menu. in kde there is no way to sort items in a menu other than by the order the files appear in a directory, which means all submenu entries are in front of all application entries, and each set is sroted alphabetically. now you can kinda hack your way around the alphabetic thing by putting numbers in front of your menu items, but there's now way around the submenu thing. you see, 95% of the time i open the root menu, it's to start a terminal. which means it should only be logical that the first thing on my menu would be a terminal. the only way to do this in kde is to name the file 0_terminal, and not have any submenu 's in my root menu (which isn't really possible anyway, because kde always puts the system menus in there even if you get rid of all of your own.
3) since i mentioned it, the whole desktop thing. what's wrong with just painting the file manager icons on the root window? why do they have to make their own desktop? this makes it almost impossible to use another window manager. as if it wasn;t hard enough already....
4) when i select an entire line in the konsole and paste it into another konssole (or other app), why doesn;t it paste the newline? i wouldn't select the entire line if i didn't want to paste the entire line.
5) the themes suck, they're all tacky. it's quite possible to make attractive themes without pixmaps. there are a number of very nice theme engines for gtk+ which are every bit as technically advanced as the kde theming mechanism, and they look ten times nicer. (note this isn't as big a deal. as i said, i would gladly use an ugly environment if it made me more productive)
6) there is almost nothing i dislike about konqueror. i loved using it even after i stopped using kde in general. except that gnome's session manager would constantly give me errors. i dont know if the problem was with gnome or konqueror, but i thought the session management between the two systems was supposed to be compatible.
but for all my complaints i think the kde developers are doing a great job. keep up the good work, and i look forward to trying out the new release.
the coolest thing about the new version.
didn't even notice it at first. the right click popup menus actually work right in linux now (meaning they work the same way as every other x11 app). this has been their most reprted bug since at least m13. the fix got pushed back from milestone to milestone, and was eventually closed. i had pretty much given up on ever having a browser again other than ns4 where the right click popups behaved properly.
yay! thank you mozilla team, and whoever finally fixed this!!!
check your window manager preferences. sawfish has an option that says something like:
"minimizing window also minimizes {pulldown menu}"
the default stting of this pulldown (i forget what. 'group' perhaps?) caused the same minimizing behaivior for me. i changed it, and now i have three mozilla windows open, and two of them minimized...
is that downloadable?
i have a laptop at work with win2k on it that i installed myself (the guy who had it before me blew out the original install) and i'd like to have a dvd player. the laptop has an ati rage mobility video card.
i have a driver cd for an ati all-in-wonder 128 that has dvd software included. are the cards similar enough that i can try to install that software on my laptop. i poked around on ati's site, and they wont provide any support for laptop video chipsets, saying that these chipsets are usually tuned by the oem to the particular laptop that they are being installed on.
(btw, the laptop is a dell i8000, and once i got the pcmcia drivers not to panic it runs linux like a dream)
"How do you stop glibc hell on Linux? I thought I'd long lost the ever familiar DLL hell on Windows, but with Linux it breaks the applications so bad its not funny."
.dll files have no version associated with them. so if app x requires foo.dll version 1.2 and app y requires foo.dll version 1.5, they will both try to install their own foo.dll and break the other app. that is what .dll hell is.
this is actually quite simple to fix. you see, dll hell in windows refers to the fact that the
this "glibc hell" that you are referring to is of your own creation. you are trying to run a program that is linked against (for example) libc-2.1.3.so with your library libc-2.2.0.so. the problem is not that libc-2.1.3.so and libc-2.2.0.so are incompatible. the problem is that you are attempting to run a program that is linked against libc-2.1.3.so and you don't have libc-2.1.3.so installed. that's the problem. install libc-2.1.3.so, and your problem will go away.
this is true like 99% of the time. if your application vendor had any sense when they compiled the program, which they better if they dont want to make source available, then they will link against the appropriate versions of the library. and if you have that library for it to run against, then you can run it, even if the primary libc on your system is a different version.
the one case i've found to truly be a problem is if you have something linked against one version of a library that dynamically loads something linked against another version of a library. i had a problem once with trying to get the realplayer (i think) plugin working with a version of netscape that was compiled against a different libc. but in a case like that im not sure if there really is a good solution....