As an IT consultant working in the software industry I read/. to do research on the "freeware" community as exemplified by the Linux operating system. My opinion on this new package is mixed, and I'll share my thoughts on the matter.
translates to:
I have put all my eggs in the Microsoft basket. Free software worries me, and makes me defensive. Rather than broaden my options I will now spread some anonymous FUD in hopes that Linux will go away.
and
While this is a nice marketing move for Slackware and Speakup, obviously motivated by getting them "kudos" in the Linux-savvy crowd, I wonder if they've thought out some of the implications of this. I mean, if a blind Linux user running this package makes a mistake and formats their C drive, then who will they sue for damages? Slackware of course. The company could find itself on the end of a series of civil lawsuits by the visually impaired who were assured that this would be their "gateway" to the world of Linux.
translates to
I don't know that Linux doesn't have a C drive but that won't stop me from spreading FUD that applies equally well to MacOS or Windows.
and
I wish Slackware success in the marketplace
translates to
I will sleep better now, after having done my part for MotherSoft.
These people could just use headphones. I doubt this would be even necessary, because they could just choose different voices. (Say male versus female).
Actually, a text based OS makes a lot more sense than a GUI.
A GUI can be tweaked (with big fonts) for low vision people but is completely useless for the blind. The G in GUI refers to graphical. For blind people, the desktop is a step backwards. A text screen, on the other hand, can be scanned with a voice synthesizer.
I imagine this distro includes Emacspeak, and emacs lets you do an amazing number of things, such as shells and file management. When properly set up, you don't have to fiddle with the notoriously cryptic Linux operating system.
I mostly agree with your assessment, and I think I know why the US seems relatively behind on electronic money. The reason that Canada seems far ahead is that it has five or so big banks that everyone banks at. The USA has a lot more banks, and comparatively few people bank with big national banks. It's harder for thousands of banks to come up with economies of scale (e.g. like Interac POS).
When I am in Canada, I bank online for C$4 per month and all my payments are instantaneous. When I am in the US I bank at a little trust company whose outsourced internet banking costs US$8 per month and which, amazingly, consists of them snail-mailing checks for me!!! Needless to say, I wasn't too impressed with that service, so in the USA I mail checks or use my Visa check card.
Re:Natural bacteria can clean up even nasty chlori
on
Ecological Engineering
·
· Score: 1
Neat website (http://cl-solutions.com), but...
I'm a little suspicious about any one-choice-fits-all approach though: this seems to be an aerobic species, which introduces limitations on applicability (specifically, you may need to add oxygen). Not every place in the world has lots of dissolved oxygen, indeed the nastiest sites are often anaerobic.
Far more interesting (but I have a bias here) is the anaerobic dechlorinator Dehalococcoides ethenogenes, which operates in the absence of oxygen.
IIRC, Iridium satellites are noisy on the electromagnetic spectrum and impede radio astronomy. There are something like 60-odd of them and they're not geostationary so they swoop by on a regular basis. (They were parked in LEO to save money.) This means that most radio telescopes worldwide have to plan around the timing of the overhead Iridium passes. Lots of people were displeased by this commercially-devised obstacle to scientific inquiry.
I am not an astronomer or a physicist: corrections, amplifications are welcome. I forget which part of the EM spectrum, in particular.
I agree that you can't often trust a positive movie review.
Those reviews you can never trust? Press junkets. A press junket is where they invite people from newpapers all over, who have these crappy underpaid jobs, to some nice and luxurious place. They get nice food, maybe get to go swimming and sunbathe, and meet some movie stars for 5 to 15 minutes, and it looks good for your local paper. It's an invite-only thing, so if you give a bad review, you might not be invited back for Toy Story 4 or whatever.
I had all these neat-o DOS 4 (and 4DOS) scripts that would do a search and replace for the text "STUDENT EDITION OF LOTUS 1-2-3" and pipe the output to the printer, which was a noisy panasonic 8 pin dot matrix. This being my post VAX and pre-UNIX days, I thought this was a clever hack.
When DOS 5 came out, and they got rid of edlin, I was a little annoyed. Sure, it sucked as a user interface, but it was about the only scriptable tool that came with DOS! (Which was only slightly scriptable to begin with; still - it was neat what you could do with a.com file, an interrupt, and if errorlevel)
Octave is *big* and can take a while to compile from source. for most *nices, it should build out of the box though.
I have used octave too, and actually prefer it to matlab in certain areas. We have an expiring licence for matlab on some old AIX boxes at my school, so I tried compiling octave on that legacy hardware. I learned there are some caveats about building -- you need gmake and g++ 2.7.2 and not-too-badly-screwed-up headers. There are precompiled binaries on ftp.gnu.org if you don't have c++ or gmake installed and you don't want to rebuild the whole toolchain.
All in all, I love making executable octave scripts with a shebang start, like this:
I haven't used spinner but I have xmms working with some streaming mp3 sites under netscape 4.7 and without using xswallow (which I use for xanim). I looked at spinner.com; it's realplayer only. XMMS will not work on it. You might want to avoid associating.rpm with realplayer just to make spinner.com work (.rpm files being common on several distros).
This is what I know about getting xmms to stream mp3s:
To get my.mp3.com to work I had to create a new mimetype entry ("applications" under preferences).
I use xmms.sh (a wrapper script) to pipe the stderr messages from xmms to/dev/null (otherwise, something about "no libmkmod" comes up in a pop up window every time you use xmms). This is all it does (you'll need to chmod +x and put it somewhere on your path, or specify the full path name).
This is a troll. Somebody obviously does not like VA Linux, and is doing a kind of proxy smear campaign to make it look like they VA is a crass bunch of suits devoid of any clues.
What busy people should read is the Coles Notes version of Section 6, the Canons of Conduct:
As a representative of the Linux community, participate in mailing list and newsgroup discussions in a professional manner. Refrain from name-calling and use of vulgar language. Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer. Your words will either enhance or degrade the image the reader has of the Linux community.
and
Always remember that if you insult or are disrespectful to someone, their negative experience may be shared with many others. If you do offend someone, please try to make amends.
After the revolution, the pigs take charge. Then the pigs basically turn out to be as bad as the farmer was. The quote Bob is referring to is this memorable line
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
What you say about greenpeace may be true, I have no idea. I have no love for Greenpeace. I take exception with the idea that it was only greenpeace that was against french nuke testing. That's a fallacy of composition designed to get France off the hook, because Greenpeace is a flaky organization lots of people love to hate. It's not just greenpeace that was upset about the French in the South Pacific. Nobody wanted the French down there.
Some background:
France is in Europe. It was setting off bombs on the other side of the world. Imagine the outcry if China wanted to set off nukes in the French countryside. The French just didn't care that this part of the world might not like having nukes set off. There is no need for empathy, we are French.
So, how does France deal with this touchy situation?
French agents went in and blew up a civilian ship in New Zealand. Saying it was Greenpeace, and the Americans, and they deserved it for messing with France does not make it okay.
As to Greenpeace not sending protesters into the interior of communist China prior to secret nuclear tests... do you see why that might be difficult to organize?
Please moderate this down. It is a troll, but not a particularly funny one. If you're curious, check the user info to see this thread getting tired already.
Re:welcome to the new slashdot!
on
Furry Cow Cases
·
· Score: 1
These are trolls. Somebody wants to make trouble for VA Linux, so he's doing this.
I am liking this program. Linux version works fine; I installed it and went through a stack of CD's with repetitions of the command
beamit -e userid -p mypass ; eject
It's a lot easier than ripping a stack of CD's, that's for sure. As to what it does... you can download some of the source and have a look. There is a binary-only shared library, no code for that, but the beam-it user program, says:
In addition to code written in-house, Beam-it uses code from the following software packages:
o cdparanoia, by Monty http://xiph.org/paranoia/index.html o Grip, by Mike Oliphant http://www.nostatic.org/grip o libcdaudio, by Tony Arcieri
It appears that usually "beaming" works really quickly, and occasionally it's really slow with lots of net activity. I wondered if it's doing some kind of distributed cd ripping activity when it finds an unidentified CD. But maybe cdparanoia is just working hard on one sector of my scratchy CD's.
A quick look at the shared library shows some interesting things
nm/usr/lib/libmsp.so /usr/lib/libmsp.so: no symbols
Are you self-aware at all? Can you prove it to another person?
The most enjoyable Computer Science course I took at Cornell asked questions like this. It was a "fun" class with a survey of programming in lots of different environments. Every day the professor would put up a maxim for discussion, basically an interesting theory. They were usually quite provocative. One of my favourites goes like this:
19. Eventually mankind will solve the problem of consciousness by deciding that we are not conscious after all, nor ever were.
An expanded list of Professor Trefethen's maxims is at SIAM in case anybody's interested.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the legions of visually impaired Linux hackers would wear the headphones. They're the ones with the talking computers.
translates to:
and
translates to
and
translates to
These people could just use headphones. I doubt this would be even necessary, because they could just choose different voices. (Say male versus female).
Actually, a text based OS makes a lot more sense than a GUI.
A GUI can be tweaked (with big fonts) for low vision people but is completely useless for the blind. The G in GUI refers to graphical. For blind people, the desktop is a step backwards. A text screen, on the other hand, can be scanned with a voice synthesizer.
I imagine this distro includes Emacspeak, and emacs lets you do an amazing number of things, such as shells and file management. When properly set up, you don't have to fiddle with the notoriously cryptic Linux operating system.
I mostly agree with your assessment, and I think I know why the US seems relatively behind on electronic money. The reason that Canada seems far ahead is that it has five or so big banks that everyone banks at. The USA has a lot more banks, and comparatively few people bank with big national banks. It's harder for thousands of banks to come up with economies of scale (e.g. like Interac POS).
When I am in Canada, I bank online for C$4 per month and all my payments are instantaneous. When I am in the US I bank at a little trust company whose outsourced internet banking costs US$8 per month and which, amazingly, consists of them snail-mailing checks for me!!! Needless to say, I wasn't too impressed with that service, so in the USA I mail checks or use my Visa check card.
Neat website (http://cl-solutions.com), but...
I'm a little suspicious about any one-choice-fits-all approach though: this seems to be an aerobic species, which introduces limitations on applicability (specifically, you may need to add oxygen). Not every place in the world has lots of dissolved oxygen, indeed the nastiest sites are often anaerobic.
Far more interesting (but I have a bias here) is the anaerobic dechlorinator Dehalococcoides ethenogenes, which operates in the absence of oxygen.
IIRC, Iridium satellites are noisy on the electromagnetic spectrum and impede radio astronomy. There are something like 60-odd of them and they're not geostationary so they swoop by on a regular basis. (They were parked in LEO to save money.) This means that most radio telescopes worldwide have to plan around the timing of the overhead Iridium passes. Lots of people were displeased by this commercially-devised obstacle to scientific inquiry.
I am not an astronomer or a physicist: corrections, amplifications are welcome. I forget which part of the EM spectrum, in particular.
She is Romanian. This information, and more, is in the article.
I agree that you can't often trust a positive movie review.
Those reviews you can never trust? Press junkets. A press junket is where they invite people from newpapers all over, who have these crappy underpaid jobs, to some nice and luxurious place. They get nice food, maybe get to go swimming and sunbathe, and meet some movie stars for 5 to 15 minutes, and it looks good for your local paper. It's an invite-only thing, so if you give a bad review, you might not be invited back for Toy Story 4 or whatever.
... with his new bride, Hillary Rodham Limbaugh, by his side...
And edlin was scriptable.
.com file, an interrupt, and if errorlevel)
I had all these neat-o DOS 4 (and 4DOS) scripts that would do a search and replace for the text "STUDENT EDITION OF LOTUS 1-2-3" and pipe the output to the printer, which was a noisy panasonic 8 pin dot matrix. This being my post VAX and pre-UNIX days, I thought this was a clever hack.
When DOS 5 came out, and they got rid of edlin, I was a little annoyed. Sure, it sucked as a user interface, but it was about the only scriptable tool that came with DOS! (Which was only slightly scriptable to begin with; still - it was neat what you could do with a
Octave is *big* and can take a while to compile from source. for most *nices, it should build out of the box though.
I have used octave too, and actually prefer it to matlab in certain areas. We have an expiring licence for matlab on some old AIX boxes at my school, so I tried compiling octave on that legacy hardware. I learned there are some caveats about building -- you need gmake and g++ 2.7.2 and not-too-badly-screwed-up headers. There are precompiled binaries on ftp.gnu.org if you don't have c++ or gmake installed and you don't want to rebuild the whole toolchain.
All in all, I love making executable octave scripts with a shebang start, like this:
#!/usr/local/bin/octave -q
I haven't used spinner but I have xmms working with some streaming mp3 sites under netscape 4.7 and without using xswallow (which I use for xanim). I looked at spinner.com; it's realplayer only. XMMS will not work on it. You might want to avoid associating .rpm with realplayer just to make spinner.com work (.rpm files being common on several distros).
/dev/null (otherwise, something about "no libmkmod" comes up in a pop up window every time you use xmms). This is all it does (you'll need to chmod +x and put it somewhere on your path, or specify the full path name).
/dev/null
This is what I know about getting xmms to stream mp3s:
To get my.mp3.com to work I had to create a new mimetype entry ("applications" under preferences).
Description: Playlist
MIMEtype: audio/x-mpegurl
Suffixes: m3u, mp3
Application: xmms.sh %s
To get shoutcast to work I had to create a new mimetype:
Description: Shoutcast
MIMEtype: audio/x-scpls
Suffixes: pls
Application: xmms.sh %s
I use xmms.sh (a wrapper script) to pipe the stderr messages from xmms to
#!/bin/sh
#this is xmms.sh
xmms $1 >&
This is a troll. Somebody obviously does not like VA Linux, and is doing a kind of proxy smear campaign to make it look like they VA is a crass bunch of suits devoid of any clues.
Linux Advocacy Mini-HOWTO
http://linux.com/howto/mini/Advocacy.html
What busy people should read is the Coles Notes version of Section 6, the Canons of Conduct:
As a representative of the Linux community, participate in mailing list and newsgroup discussions in a professional manner. Refrain from name-calling and use of vulgar language. Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer. Your words will either enhance or degrade the image the reader has of the Linux community.
and
Always remember that if you insult or are disrespectful to someone, their negative experience may be shared with many others. If you do offend someone, please try to make amends.
As a jealous Torontonian, I wonder why it is that Ottawa seems to have a disproportionately cooler Linux scene. I mean, Corel, HCC, Puffin, etc.
obRoadtrip: these dates are now in my palm pilot.
What you say about greenpeace may be true, I have no idea. I have no love for Greenpeace. I take exception with the idea that it was only greenpeace that was against french nuke testing. That's a fallacy of composition designed to get France off the hook, because Greenpeace is a flaky organization lots of people love to hate. It's not just greenpeace that was upset about the French in the South Pacific. Nobody wanted the French down there.
... do you see why that might be difficult to organize?
Some background:
France is in Europe. It was setting off bombs on the other side of the world. Imagine the outcry if China wanted to set off nukes in the French countryside. The French just didn't care that this part of the world might not like having nukes set off. There is no need for empathy, we are French.
So, how does France deal with this touchy situation?
French agents went in and blew up a civilian ship in New Zealand. Saying it was Greenpeace, and the Americans, and they deserved it for messing with France does not make it okay.
As to Greenpeace not sending protesters into the interior of communist China prior to secret nuclear tests
Please moderate this down. It is a troll, but not a particularly funny one. If you're curious, check the user info to see this thread getting tired already.
These are trolls. Somebody wants to make trouble for VA Linux, so he's doing this.
beamit -e userid -p mypass ; eject
It's a lot easier than ripping a stack of CD's, that's for sure. As to what it does... you can download some of the source and have a look. There is a binary-only shared library, no code for that, but the beam-it user program, says:
It appears that usually "beaming" works really quickly, and occasionally it's really slow with lots of net activity. I wondered if it's doing some kind of distributed cd ripping activity when it finds an unidentified CD. But maybe cdparanoia is just working hard on one sector of my scratchy CD's.
A quick look at the shared library shows some interesting things
nm
/usr/lib/libmsp.so: no symbols
strings
...
msppGetAttributeValue
msppEncryptMD5
MD5Init
MD5Update
MD5Final
...
Software has expired, please update
...
Go here for a list of UCITA-disapproving attorneys-general.
Are you self-aware at all? Can you prove it to another person?
The most enjoyable Computer Science course I took at Cornell asked questions like this. It was a "fun" class with a survey of programming in lots of different environments. Every day the professor would put up a maxim for discussion, basically an interesting theory. They were usually quite provocative. One of my favourites goes like this:
19. Eventually mankind will solve the problem of consciousness by deciding that we are not conscious after all, nor ever were.
An expanded list of Professor Trefethen's maxims is at SIAM in case anybody's interested.
The lucite palm (just like those phones you can see inside)
But such a thing already exists!
Word Perfect for linux comes with a grammar checker, Grammatik, licensed from Novell.