I have several Beige G3 machines that Apple says are "supported" by OS X.
HOWEVER, OS X includes only non-accelerated drivers for the graphics hardware in Beige G3 machines, meaning that on a 366 MHz G3, simple things like resizing a window are damn near impossible not because of the operating system or CPU but because OS X uses opaque resizes and opaque window moves, which (as any old Unix or Linux user knows) are terribly painful with unaccelerated graphics hardware. Minimizing a window also seems to take a century.
If only Apple or ATI would simply write a driver for the ATI graphics hardware in Beige G3 machines, OS X could be very usable on a whole generation of hardware where it is currently not very useful.
You don't seem to understand that there are times when many, many people do not have jobs. It isn't a matter of you or I being less qualified than someone else; it is a matter of the jobs in this or that sector having gone way almost entirely because of the near-failure of the capital markets. This can and does and has happened, even in the US at times.
When this happens, you suggest that we should essentially let everyone starve because that's better for the pocketbooks of those who do still happen to be able to find work or those who happen to be independently wealthy. Of course, you're also thinking that this will always be you, because naturally you plan to keep your skills up.
Well good luck to you. (i.e. "What a simpleton!")
This kind of brutal capitalism may sound good on paper, but when your own children are the ones going without adequate nutrition, education or medical care in spite of the fact that you have kept your skills up, and nobody will hire you at any wage, you will feel differently, I promise you. Ask anyone who lived though the great depression. And if you don't feel differently -- if you say "well, damn it, let my children go without medical care, that's better for the market!" then you are simply beyond saving (and so, in all likelihood, are your children for that matter).
In short, you proved my point entirely: you are so sure that income is a simple matter of personal skill, deservedness and "a few unlucky souls here or there" that you'll suggest that those in trouble should be merely ignored or pitied rather than helped. This is because it hasn't yet been you or your family and friends suffering. This kind of thinking simply doesn't hold up well when the population of struggling people begins to reach into the tens of millions, as often happens during times of economic hardship.
Eventually, many people begin to find that the hardship hits close to home, you see... and then, as I implied before, they begin to vote differently...
Part of the problem is that all of the young hotshot twenty-somethings don't yet realize that they're on the block next.
These kids went to school, got headhunted, got a $40k salary and got stock options just like that without ever really having to think about anything. Sure, they think they're working hard, but there's just no comparison, for example, to the much more grim and realistic world experienced by kids graduating from college during the Carter years (to chose an epoch at random). The economic slide hasn't hit the current group of young adults hard enough yet; they still believe it's the nature of existence to have cash in hand and food on table and they basically consider anyone who doesn't to be a lazy bum or an idiot. They have no connection whatsoever to the concept that one can be qualified, willing, and actively searching for work and yet still end up starving.
Give it a few years. If this economic downturn starts to hit enough dotcom kids, you'll begin to hear Athese same anti-union love-Bush American kids begin to cry like babies and maybe even have some sympathy not only for laid off Americans but also for other peoples around the world, who even today in the first world are struggling much harder in many places.
Welcome to the real world, slick, in which Taiwan and Hungary are not 3rd world countries.
In fact, probably 80% of the electronic components you own were manufactured in Taiwan, which is at least as large a hi-tech center as Japan in the global electronics game.
Every single one is a pit bull. These "vicious dogs" have all come from extremely abusive backgrounds, yet all of them are nice and sweet.
Pit Bulls are beautiful and very social animals which don't deserve the bad rap they've been given by the people who train and mistreat them to behave badly. Some of my favorite dogs in the neighborhood are gentle, tail-wagging, very obedient (even to me, and I'm not the owner of any of them) pit bulls.
The same goes for dogs in general, I think. Because any number of breeds can be very large and powerful, dogs are huge targets for abusive training.
I had a girlfriend once who was terrified of dogs because she'd come from a background in which she'd encountered a number of dogs who had been trained to be killers and fighters by people who were less-than-upstanding members of society. She'd escaped her ugly upbringing and made herself into a pretty, functional college girl, but she hated dogs as long as I was with her and couldn't even be in the same room even with my parents' Beagles when we went to visit without ending up in nervous tears.
I'm with you. I have no real point beyond proposing that the world is really pretty unfair to dogs.
Take 'make menuconfig' and multiply it by 150 or so and you'll have dselect. It really is a pig. I tried using it about twice on Debian installs and then just gave up.
Hint to Debian developers: When it's quicker to just bypass the installer altogether and then install packages one by one by hand, you know your installer is not helping anyone.
I couldn't let this slide. I've been using Linux since 1993 -- longer than many, not as long as some others... and I was a SunOS guy before that.
I have always found the Slackware installer to be reasonably friendly, extremely well-thought out, both elegant and consistent.
ON the other hand, I avoid dselect like the plague. Even if you know what you're doing, dselect is a ponderously huge set of choices; just browsing through them to locate the ones you want while looking at the package name column and nothing else requires enough reading and keying to slow the process down to a crawl. Better to bypass dselect entirely... just install the base system and then use apt to get the stuff you want. It's not that I dislike Debian -- in fact, I use Debian/Sparc on a whole mess of Sparc 10 and Sparc 20 workstations that I administrate and it performs nicely.
But I can't imagine how new home PC users must feel when confronted with a huge, text-only interface with no obvious onscreen guide to keys and very counterintuitive behavior. For example, try running dselect on a 386 or a 68k mac (both supported platforms). Hit PgDn and five or six seconds later the screen finally updates. Bet new users hit it three or four times, wondering why it isn't working. Oops! Same goes for entering and leaving dependency resolution... Press Enter once your selections are made and watch... nothing happen for 30 seconds until the package list is finally displayed once more. Bet new users hit Enter 10 or 12 times. Maybe they even hit reset, thinking they've frozen!
The OpenBSD and NetBSD install systems and the Slackware install system are much, much better than dselect, which is an utter dog that has been completely overwhelmed by the growth of Linux and the sheer number of Debian packages available.
Cathy is the reason I watched the show. I always found her to be a very sexy and engaging woman and after these responses, doubly so. (But she does need to capitalize.)
I used to annotate my documents using digital ink editing marks and notes and digital ink diagrams as well as write some documents using natural handwriting recognition on my Fujitsu Stylistic using PenOffice. This particular model was more half a decade old -- it had a Pentium 100 CPU and an 800x600 display and ran Windows 95 + Office 95.
This is nothing new.
What happened to my Stylistic running Windows 95? I replaced it with an Apple Newton, yet another product which allows you to store digital in annotations and sketches for office documents and then recognize them later if you wish, but which is half the size of the Stylistic. The Newton 2000 was also released half more than half a decade ago. The Newton even has a cute "digital ink eraser" technique for editing your sketches and annotations.
Most of the technology Microsft is demonstrating right now has been licensed from existing products (like PenOffice and Calligrapher) that have been on the market for years already. It's not exactly a secret.
Yes, we read the article. But do you know what you're talking about?
Sheesh, Microsoft once again claims to have invented the wheel and everyone claps. Why is this?
Tablet PCs have been around for more than a decade at least. Fujitsu has the Stylistic and Point lines (some of them very current and very powerful), Casio has the Fiva, Panasonic and Sharp have models, and even the IBM ThinkPad line was originally given its name because the first models were tablet PCs with essentially the same form factor. A number of smaller manufactueres have also been making high-end tablet PCs. Just go to eBay and search for 'tablet pc' and you'll se models running the gamut.
Natural handwriting recognition that works has been around forever. The Newton line of PDAs (which admittedly had trouble in early revisions) had very accurate natural, full-speed handwriting recognition and the ability to annotate documents in ink on a largeish, screen by the mid-90's with the release of the 2000/2100 series. These things can open imported MS Office documents in NewtonWorks and you can mark them up to your heart's content. Meanwhile, Paragraph's Calligrapher (eventually to become Microsoft's Transcriber in a licensing deal) has been available for years for Windows CE tablet PCs (which aren't even mentioned among the models above) and also provided natural handwriting recognition and digital ink for annotating documents. The same Paragraph product for full-fledged tablet PC's was known as PenOffice and provided all of this functionality for users of Tablet PCs running full-fledged Windows. Even Microsoft has done this before (years before) with MS Pen Extensions.
Why is it that Microsoft can always get away with digging up, licensing and/or copying a bunch of old technology that everyone has been before, then throwing a party and calling it their own new invention? It saddens me to think that ten years from now people will believe that MS invented the tablet PC, just like they now believe that Microsoft invented multitasking, databases, graphics, the mouse, the concept of application windows, and the Internet.:(
the savagery of the multiparty system that plagued Europe during the Middle Ages through the 18th century and continues to plague it more today than ever
So what you're saying is that "those savages in Europe" haven't changed their governing methods at all since the Middle Ages? There is no democracy in England or France or Germany, merely a plague of some kind passing for democratic government? What exactly are you saying?
It seems like you're saying that it's a good thing if a sizable percentage of US voters have no direct voice in US government and that any system which offers a voice to the minorities among the populace is a savage and unwise one.
You know, everyone is always accusing Europeans of anti-Americanism. I think that Americans are at least as anti-European.
I completely agree with your points for the most part... But I'd like to offer you some hope on this one:
I question The Journalist, too. Freedom of the press extends to those that own a press, and if you want to work as a journalist, you almost have to work for some fat cat with a press. Said fat cat isn't going to let you print stories that criticize fat cats in any meaningful way.
Thankfully, there are alternativevoicesout there if you are willing to look. But do stay away from the American "name brands" of media; they are likely only to lead you into the pen with the other sheep.
Not that I can argue that any of the phrases or sentences in the link that you provided are clear and concise...
But neither can you or the creators of the page in question honestly argue that the phrases or sentences are "drivel" when they have clearly been taken out of context in this fashion. Supply some context or be content to look like fools.
Like it or not, 'postmodern' is the widely accepted name for the cold-war and media-essential era which falls after the 'modern' era of the World Wars. Simply tossing words like 'drivel' about and quoting long sentences out of context does not automatically render moot any argument that you disagree with, postmodern or otherwise.
Re:GNOME Hijacked to Make Way for Real Users^TM
on
The Captains of Nautilus
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Answer: use KDE3. (No, not the fscked up Red Hat 8 version.)
You obviously don't know what you're doing, have misconfigured, etc.
I have a set of boring-ass old PII/400 workstations with 128MB memory here running original GeForce256 cards using the NVidia driver. Everything in KDE -- window decorations, menus, anti-aliased text, scrolling content -- draws instantly, just as it does in Windows. There is none of the 'paint across the screen chunkily' problem you describe. Maybe it actually is the drivers. Did you ever think of that?
And on this same network, there are two headless Slackware 8 servers on which I often log in to KDE remotely. This is only a 10 megabit network and yet the KDE desktop works wonderfully; there are no real slowdowns whatsoever compared to the Citrix clients I've used elsewhere on the campus network.
Why do these "when will we replace X" trolls resurface every time there is an X story? And why do people keep modding them up?
So far, we have great 3D acceleration, direct video, anti-aliasing, and now dynamic sizing/resizing in X. And all with excellent performance that is equal to or better than the performance offered by Windows. And we retain the network-centric features and flexible, modular configuration that make X so powerful. And all of this while maintaining backward compatibility over a decade-and-a-half of software.
We'll replace X when it makes sense to do so and not before. Right now, there is no better (or even close to equal) solution.
The Shakespeare quotes article was humor, not fact. Or maybe wishful thinking...;)
But in any case, Deep Fritz is not clever enough (or blessed with a complex enough *ahem* 'chatter file') to actually use Shakespeare to such great effect... It did not really happen.
Here dad is helping figure out what "fatal error in krnl32.dll means". Say, isn't that a mac they're using?
Ha! It is indeed. It looks like an LC. The keyboard is an Apple Extended Keyboard. That's too funny... You'd think with a budget like Microsoft's, they could at least avoid promoting the competition in their ads...
It's because Linux is better suited to desktop PC's. I "grew up" on SunOS systems. At the time, they were super-cool to me... comparing my 286 DOS PC at home with the *nix systems in the labs was a humbling experience indeed.
But times have changed! The 386 processor made its way into personal computers, and with it... *nix!
But times haven't changed that much for BSD. *BSD ship as fairly vanilla-flavored, purist offerings. Great, if you like to feel like you're still running SunOS in 1991. Great, if you like to have to grab things from ports yourself.
But grab a Linux distribution and install it, and you've got nicely thought out dotfiles, GNU tools and a ton of other binaries out of the box to provide some basic level of user-friendliness (which is good, even for *nixheads) and you've got driver support for things like TV tuner cards and parallel port devices that are likely to occur on desktop PCs. Days of legwork are not required to get your system running like you like it.
By contrast, when using *BSD on x86, the user experience for me isn't much different from installing commercial Unixes like Solaris from media onto Sun hardware... I always spend a day swearing under my breath as I have to pound the 'net to download and in some cases compile all of my favorite tools and applications, rework a bunch of dotfiles/config files and so forth and so on, just to make the system behave as nicely as my Linux system did ten minutes after install. Some call preinstalling and preconfiguring applications like Linux distros often do "bloat" but I call it saving my time. I'd rather waste an extra 400MB (geez, what's that, like... a few quarters worth?) on my 120GB hard drive by installing software I might not use (but who knows, someday I might) than install a relatively bare operating system and then have to spend time selecting, browsing, downloading, compiling...
*BSD is great if you're running a headless server, but Linux has made *nix a viable out-of-the-box personal computing platform, as much as people like to bash Linux's desktop prowess when compared to Windows.
I guess the short answer is that I use Linux because I just don't want to spend the time after installing *BSD to make it work and act like... Linux!
I have still have both licenses and media for Windows 2.01 and 3.0 (the only version ever to run under DOSEMU), OS-9000 x86, OS/2 1.0 and OS/2 2.1, OS9/68k 2.3, TRS-DOS and some old version of SunOS, I don't even remember which, from a Sun 3 (now there was a beast). The SunOS is on a bootable QIC cartridge! I think I even have an Archive Viper 2150 somewhere that I could probably use to boot it, if I had a Sun 3. Oh, and I also have the original Mac Finder 'System' disk from a 128k Mac that cost about $3,000 back in the day. Come to think of it, I also have the Mac 128k somewhere, closeted away, though I doubt whether it runs now.
They're all just left hanging around from my own computers over the years. *shrug* That's sort of how it works, isn't it?!
This story has already been covered once or twice on Slashdot, and a lot of users have said "This is good, it makes GNOME and KDE consistent, and if a user wants real KDE, he/she can always edit the configuration back to use the default KDE applications, etc."
But I've been using Red Hat 8 betas and it's not at all clear just how many things been changed... only that many aspects of the KDE environment in Red Hat are not configured in the same way as the 'real' KDE 3.x environment downloaded from kde.org. Yes, I could try and edit the configuration back to what looks like the real default KDE environment, but it would be a pain (many, many things would have to be changed) and I've no doubt that some things would remain broken or 'disconnected' from the KDE environment and replaced by GNOME applications, etc., in interesting RedHat-ish ways.
I'll be switching to another distribution next upgrade, because I want the KDE environment on my computer, not just kicker and kwm with a lot of GNOME apps and Red Hat apps connected to them.
This camera will be better than film. As a pro writer/photographer who already shoots digital only at 4mp (EOS-1D), I can say that 35mm film is dead but for those quaint "vintage" photographers who are doing "art" stuff.
The amount of ignorance about digital and about photography in general here on Slashdot is shocking! These people may be geeks, but they understand little about optics, current sensor technology, film chemistry, or human perception of resolution and dynamic range.
The history of the pyramids is not very skechy, there is an entire library of literature about them going into great detail and there is much documentation that has been translated from ancient records as well; visit your local university library and try reading for a change instead of getting all of your data from TV aliens-are-everywhere specials.
The reason the Egyptian government is wary about letting any old Tom or Dick go digging about is because of the very long history of looting by nearly everyone who's come into contact with ancient treasures over the centuries -- the west being especially guilty of such things. There's also the worry that with today's travel/tourist mania, X-files pilgrims and crowds of pseudo-scientists, the ancient treasures could easily be ground into dust by foot traffic, or worse.
People with academic credentials and valid (i.e. not having to do with aliens, sorry) research interests can still get access when necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
I have several Beige G3 machines that Apple says are "supported" by OS X.
HOWEVER, OS X includes only non-accelerated drivers for the graphics hardware in Beige G3 machines, meaning that on a 366 MHz G3, simple things like resizing a window are damn near impossible not because of the operating system or CPU but because OS X uses opaque resizes and opaque window moves, which (as any old Unix or Linux user knows) are terribly painful with unaccelerated graphics hardware. Minimizing a window also seems to take a century.
If only Apple or ATI would simply write a driver for the ATI graphics hardware in Beige G3 machines, OS X could be very usable on a whole generation of hardware where it is currently not very useful.
You don't seem to understand that there are times when many, many people do not have jobs. It isn't a matter of you or I being less qualified than someone else; it is a matter of the jobs in this or that sector having gone way almost entirely because of the near-failure of the capital markets. This can and does and has happened, even in the US at times.
When this happens, you suggest that we should essentially let everyone starve because that's better for the pocketbooks of those who do still happen to be able to find work or those who happen to be independently wealthy. Of course, you're also thinking that this will always be you, because naturally you plan to keep your skills up.
Well good luck to you. (i.e. "What a simpleton!")
This kind of brutal capitalism may sound good on paper, but when your own children are the ones going without adequate nutrition, education or medical care in spite of the fact that you have kept your skills up, and nobody will hire you at any wage, you will feel differently, I promise you. Ask anyone who lived though the great depression. And if you don't feel differently -- if you say "well, damn it, let my children go without medical care, that's better for the market!" then you are simply beyond saving (and so, in all likelihood, are your children for that matter).
In short, you proved my point entirely: you are so sure that income is a simple matter of personal skill, deservedness and "a few unlucky souls here or there" that you'll suggest that those in trouble should be merely ignored or pitied rather than helped. This is because it hasn't yet been you or your family and friends suffering. This kind of thinking simply doesn't hold up well when the population of struggling people begins to reach into the tens of millions, as often happens during times of economic hardship.
Eventually, many people begin to find that the hardship hits close to home, you see... and then, as I implied before, they begin to vote differently...
Part of the problem is that all of the young hotshot twenty-somethings don't yet realize that they're on the block next.
These kids went to school, got headhunted, got a $40k salary and got stock options just like that without ever really having to think about anything. Sure, they think they're working hard, but there's just no comparison, for example, to the much more grim and realistic world experienced by kids graduating from college during the Carter years (to chose an epoch at random). The economic slide hasn't hit the current group of young adults hard enough yet; they still believe it's the nature of existence to have cash in hand and food on table and they basically consider anyone who doesn't to be a lazy bum or an idiot. They have no connection whatsoever to the concept that one can be qualified, willing, and actively searching for work and yet still end up starving.
Give it a few years. If this economic downturn starts to hit enough dotcom kids, you'll begin to hear Athese same anti-union love-Bush American kids begin to cry like babies and maybe even have some sympathy not only for laid off Americans but also for other peoples around the world, who even today in the first world are struggling much harder in many places.
Welcome to the real world, slick, in which Taiwan and Hungary are not 3rd world countries.
In fact, probably 80% of the electronic components you own were manufactured in Taiwan, which is at least as large a hi-tech center as Japan in the global electronics game.
Every single one is a pit bull. These "vicious dogs" have all come from extremely abusive backgrounds, yet all of them are nice and sweet.
Pit Bulls are beautiful and very social animals which don't deserve the bad rap they've been given by the people who train and mistreat them to behave badly. Some of my favorite dogs in the neighborhood are gentle, tail-wagging, very obedient (even to me, and I'm not the owner of any of them) pit bulls.
The same goes for dogs in general, I think. Because any number of breeds can be very large and powerful, dogs are huge targets for abusive training.
I had a girlfriend once who was terrified of dogs because she'd come from a background in which she'd encountered a number of dogs who had been trained to be killers and fighters by people who were less-than-upstanding members of society. She'd escaped her ugly upbringing and made herself into a pretty, functional college girl, but she hated dogs as long as I was with her and couldn't even be in the same room even with my parents' Beagles when we went to visit without ending up in nervous tears.
I'm with you. I have no real point beyond proposing that the world is really pretty unfair to dogs.
Why is this modded as funny? It's insightful and informative, if anything.
It's also so obvious as to be unseemly, even for Slashdot.
Take 'make menuconfig' and multiply it by 150 or so and you'll have dselect. It really is a pig. I tried using it about twice on Debian installs and then just gave up.
Hint to Debian developers: When it's quicker to just bypass the installer altogether and then install packages one by one by hand, you know your installer is not helping anyone.
Well, slackware's worse.
<rant type="stream of consciousness">
I couldn't let this slide. I've been using Linux since 1993 -- longer than many, not as long as some others... and I was a SunOS guy before that.
I have always found the Slackware installer to be reasonably friendly, extremely well-thought out, both elegant and consistent.
ON the other hand, I avoid dselect like the plague. Even if you know what you're doing, dselect is a ponderously huge set of choices; just browsing through them to locate the ones you want while looking at the package name column and nothing else requires enough reading and keying to slow the process down to a crawl. Better to bypass dselect entirely... just install the base system and then use apt to get the stuff you want. It's not that I dislike Debian -- in fact, I use Debian/Sparc on a whole mess of Sparc 10 and Sparc 20 workstations that I administrate and it performs nicely.
But I can't imagine how new home PC users must feel when confronted with a huge, text-only interface with no obvious onscreen guide to keys and very counterintuitive behavior. For example, try running dselect on a 386 or a 68k mac (both supported platforms). Hit PgDn and five or six seconds later the screen finally updates. Bet new users hit it three or four times, wondering why it isn't working. Oops! Same goes for entering and leaving dependency resolution... Press Enter once your selections are made and watch... nothing happen for 30 seconds until the package list is finally displayed once more. Bet new users hit Enter 10 or 12 times. Maybe they even hit reset, thinking they've frozen!
The OpenBSD and NetBSD install systems and the Slackware install system are much, much better than dselect, which is an utter dog that has been completely overwhelmed by the growth of Linux and the sheer number of Debian packages available.
</rant>
Cathy is the reason I watched the show. I always found her to be a very sexy and engaging woman and after these responses, doubly so. (But she does need to capitalize.)
Love her haircut on the show as well.
Don't spout about that which you don't know.
I used to annotate my documents using digital ink editing marks and notes and digital ink diagrams as well as write some documents using natural handwriting recognition on my Fujitsu Stylistic using PenOffice. This particular model was more half a decade old -- it had a Pentium 100 CPU and an 800x600 display and ran Windows 95 + Office 95.
This is nothing new.
What happened to my Stylistic running Windows 95? I replaced it with an Apple Newton, yet another product which allows you to store digital in annotations and sketches for office documents and then recognize them later if you wish, but which is half the size of the Stylistic. The Newton 2000 was also released half more than half a decade ago. The Newton even has a cute "digital ink eraser" technique for editing your sketches and annotations.
Most of the technology Microsft is demonstrating right now has been licensed from existing products (like PenOffice and Calligrapher) that have been on the market for years already. It's not exactly a secret.
Yes, we read the article. But do you know what you're talking about?
Sheesh, Microsoft once again claims to have invented the wheel and everyone claps. Why is this?
:(
Tablet PCs have been around for more than a decade at least. Fujitsu has the Stylistic and Point lines (some of them very current and very powerful), Casio has the Fiva, Panasonic and Sharp have models, and even the IBM ThinkPad line was originally given its name because the first models were tablet PCs with essentially the same form factor. A number of smaller manufactueres have also been making high-end tablet PCs. Just go to eBay and search for 'tablet pc' and you'll se models running the gamut.
Natural handwriting recognition that works has been around forever. The Newton line of PDAs (which admittedly had trouble in early revisions) had very accurate natural, full-speed handwriting recognition and the ability to annotate documents in ink on a largeish, screen by the mid-90's with the release of the 2000/2100 series. These things can open imported MS Office documents in NewtonWorks and you can mark them up to your heart's content. Meanwhile, Paragraph's Calligrapher (eventually to become Microsoft's Transcriber in a licensing deal) has been available for years for Windows CE tablet PCs (which aren't even mentioned among the models above) and also provided natural handwriting recognition and digital ink for annotating documents. The same Paragraph product for full-fledged tablet PC's was known as PenOffice and provided all of this functionality for users of Tablet PCs running full-fledged Windows. Even Microsoft has done this before (years before) with MS Pen Extensions.
Why is it that Microsoft can always get away with digging up, licensing and/or copying a bunch of old technology that everyone has been before, then throwing a party and calling it their own new invention? It saddens me to think that ten years from now people will believe that MS invented the tablet PC, just like they now believe that Microsoft invented multitasking, databases, graphics, the mouse, the concept of application windows, and the Internet.
This strikes me as truly a bizarre comment.
the savagery of the multiparty system that plagued Europe during the Middle Ages through the 18th century and continues to plague it more today than ever
So what you're saying is that "those savages in Europe" haven't changed their governing methods at all since the Middle Ages? There is no democracy in England or France or Germany, merely a plague of some kind passing for democratic government? What exactly are you saying?
It seems like you're saying that it's a good thing if a sizable percentage of US voters have no direct voice in US government and that any system which offers a voice to the minorities among the populace is a savage and unwise one.
You know, everyone is always accusing Europeans of anti-Americanism. I think that Americans are at least as anti-European.
I completely agree with your points for the most part... But I'd like to offer you some hope on this one:
I question The Journalist, too. Freedom of the press extends to those that own a press, and if you want to work as a journalist, you almost have to work for some fat cat with a press. Said fat cat isn't going to let you print stories that criticize fat cats in any meaningful way.
Thankfully, there are alternative voices out there if you are willing to look. But do stay away from the American "name brands" of media; they are likely only to lead you into the pen with the other sheep.
Not that I can argue that any of the phrases or sentences in the link that you provided are clear and concise...
But neither can you or the creators of the page in question honestly argue that the phrases or sentences are "drivel" when they have clearly been taken out of context in this fashion. Supply some context or be content to look like fools.
Like it or not, 'postmodern' is the widely accepted name for the cold-war and media-essential era which falls after the 'modern' era of the World Wars. Simply tossing words like 'drivel' about and quoting long sentences out of context does not automatically render moot any argument that you disagree with, postmodern or otherwise.
Answer: use KDE3. (No, not the fscked up Red Hat 8 version.)
Flame away.
You obviously don't know what you're doing, have misconfigured, etc.
I have a set of boring-ass old PII/400 workstations with 128MB memory here running original GeForce256 cards using the NVidia driver. Everything in KDE -- window decorations, menus, anti-aliased text, scrolling content -- draws instantly, just as it does in Windows. There is none of the 'paint across the screen chunkily' problem you describe. Maybe it actually is the drivers. Did you ever think of that?
And on this same network, there are two headless Slackware 8 servers on which I often log in to KDE remotely. This is only a 10 megabit network and yet the KDE desktop works wonderfully; there are no real slowdowns whatsoever compared to the Citrix clients I've used elsewhere on the campus network.
Something is clearly broken on your setup.
Why do these "when will we replace X" trolls resurface every time there is an X story? And why do people keep modding them up?
So far, we have great 3D acceleration, direct video, anti-aliasing, and now dynamic sizing/resizing in X. And all with excellent performance that is equal to or better than the performance offered by Windows. And we retain the network-centric features and flexible, modular configuration that make X so powerful. And all of this while maintaining backward compatibility over a decade-and-a-half of software.
We'll replace X when it makes sense to do so and not before. Right now, there is no better (or even close to equal) solution.
For those who don't seem to get it:
;)
The Shakespeare quotes article was humor, not fact. Or maybe wishful thinking...
But in any case, Deep Fritz is not clever enough (or blessed with a complex enough *ahem* 'chatter file') to actually use Shakespeare to such great effect... It did not really happen.
Sheesh.
Here dad is helping figure out what "fatal error in krnl32.dll means". Say, isn't that a mac they're using?
Ha! It is indeed. It looks like an LC. The keyboard is an Apple Extended Keyboard. That's too funny... You'd think with a budget like Microsoft's, they could at least avoid promoting the competition in their ads...
It's because Linux is better suited to desktop PC's. I "grew up" on SunOS systems. At the time, they were super-cool to me... comparing my 286 DOS PC at home with the *nix systems in the labs was a humbling experience indeed.
But times have changed! The 386 processor made its way into personal computers, and with it... *nix!
But times haven't changed that much for BSD. *BSD ship as fairly vanilla-flavored, purist offerings. Great, if you like to feel like you're still running SunOS in 1991. Great, if you like to have to grab things from ports yourself.
But grab a Linux distribution and install it, and you've got nicely thought out dotfiles, GNU tools and a ton of other binaries out of the box to provide some basic level of user-friendliness (which is good, even for *nixheads) and you've got driver support for things like TV tuner cards and parallel port devices that are likely to occur on desktop PCs. Days of legwork are not required to get your system running like you like it.
By contrast, when using *BSD on x86, the user experience for me isn't much different from installing commercial Unixes like Solaris from media onto Sun hardware... I always spend a day swearing under my breath as I have to pound the 'net to download and in some cases compile all of my favorite tools and applications, rework a bunch of dotfiles/config files and so forth and so on, just to make the system behave as nicely as my Linux system did ten minutes after install. Some call preinstalling and preconfiguring applications like Linux distros often do "bloat" but I call it saving my time. I'd rather waste an extra 400MB (geez, what's that, like... a few quarters worth?) on my 120GB hard drive by installing software I might not use (but who knows, someday I might) than install a relatively bare operating system and then have to spend time selecting, browsing, downloading, compiling...
*BSD is great if you're running a headless server, but Linux has made *nix a viable out-of-the-box personal computing platform, as much as people like to bash Linux's desktop prowess when compared to Windows.
I guess the short answer is that I use Linux because I just don't want to spend the time after installing *BSD to make it work and act like... Linux!
Didn't the Amstrad PC's that were incredibly popular for a few years ship with GEOS? That would make it not-so-very-rare-after-all...
I imagine "rare" would probably be Xenix on 8" floppy or something for some of those old monster Tandy systems...
I have still have both licenses and media for Windows 2.01 and 3.0 (the only version ever to run under DOSEMU), OS-9000 x86, OS/2 1.0 and OS/2 2.1, OS9/68k 2.3, TRS-DOS and some old version of SunOS, I don't even remember which, from a Sun 3 (now there was a beast). The SunOS is on a bootable QIC cartridge! I think I even have an Archive Viper 2150 somewhere that I could probably use to boot it, if I had a Sun 3. Oh, and I also have the original Mac Finder 'System' disk from a 128k Mac that cost about $3,000 back in the day. Come to think of it, I also have the Mac 128k somewhere, closeted away, though I doubt whether it runs now.
They're all just left hanging around from my own computers over the years. *shrug* That's sort of how it works, isn't it?!
This story has already been covered once or twice on Slashdot, and a lot of users have said "This is good, it makes GNOME and KDE consistent, and if a user wants real KDE, he/she can always edit the configuration back to use the default KDE applications, etc."
But I've been using Red Hat 8 betas and it's not at all clear just how many things been changed... only that many aspects of the KDE environment in Red Hat are not configured in the same way as the 'real' KDE 3.x environment downloaded from kde.org. Yes, I could try and edit the configuration back to what looks like the real default KDE environment, but it would be a pain (many, many things would have to be changed) and I've no doubt that some things would remain broken or 'disconnected' from the KDE environment and replaced by GNOME applications, etc., in interesting RedHat-ish ways.
I'll be switching to another distribution next upgrade, because I want the KDE environment on my computer, not just kicker and kwm with a lot of GNOME apps and Red Hat apps connected to them.
Also try this article.
This camera will be better than film. As a pro writer/photographer who already shoots digital only at 4mp (EOS-1D), I can say that 35mm film is dead but for those quaint "vintage" photographers who are doing "art" stuff.
The amount of ignorance about digital and about photography in general here on Slashdot is shocking! These people may be geeks, but they understand little about optics, current sensor technology, film chemistry, or human perception of resolution and dynamic range.
The history of the pyramids is not very skechy, there is an entire library of literature about them going into great detail and there is much documentation that has been translated from ancient records as well; visit your local university library and try reading for a change instead of getting all of your data from TV aliens-are-everywhere specials.
The reason the Egyptian government is wary about letting any old Tom or Dick go digging about is because of the very long history of looting by nearly everyone who's come into contact with ancient treasures over the centuries -- the west being especially guilty of such things. There's also the worry that with today's travel/tourist mania, X-files pilgrims and crowds of pseudo-scientists, the ancient treasures could easily be ground into dust by foot traffic, or worse.
People with academic credentials and valid (i.e. not having to do with aliens, sorry) research interests can still get access when necessary.