84994. I thought I submitted 3 images, but I only submitted one. Still, it makes the problem obvious enough...
When it got market as duplicate of a resolved bug again (I'd reported it once before), I e-mailed the maintainer, but got no reply.
*shrug*
Someone will get around to it eventually, I guess. Someone else has suggested that it might be the driver. That could well be the case, I'm using the icky closed NVidia driver because it gets me really good 3D gaming under Linux, but I'm sure that's a potential candidate since so many other things are broken about it (DPMS, for one...)
Still, I don't get scrolling/rendering bugs with any other browser! [Netscape/Konqueror]
The problem with horizontal artifacts in images, especially when scrolling, still hasn't been fixed. *sigh*
I really want to use Mozilla as my main browser now because it seems to work very well, but I'm a hopeless picky pedant and a bug like this that appears very prominently really keeps me away.
This time (between 0.9.1 and 0.9.2) I did submit it via Bugzilla, but it got marked (once again) as a duplicate of an already solved bug. I guess the people responsible for the graphics rendering are having trouble duplicating what I'm seeing...
Some readers are operating under lack of information.
If you see "OK...OK...OK...FAILED...OK" when you boot up or "Pass...Pass...Pass...FAILED..." when you boot up, then you're thinking of the wrong messages. To see the messages Linus is talking about (the endless copyrights and chit-chat of the kernel) type 'dmesg' as root after a fresh boot.
The status messages that give you an OK or a FAILED on a system-by-system basis are (in the most broad sense) init messages rather than kernel messages and are added by your distribution. These will not go away under the "new deal" Linus is proposing...
I can't imagine a better response to this concept!
Okay, so I don't necessarily buy the Loch Ness thing, but at the same time, I've had the same physics as everyone and I find the idea of that seismic activity produced some of these sightings (given how they were described) just a little bit counterintuitive.
Isn't there some less exotic "natural explanation" we can come up with?
It seems to me that we will never get to the point of realistic rendering in games because by the time one reaches pixar-level animation, there is so much art and detail going on before the rendering stage.
If we do get game companies trying to produce games with "realistically rendered" graphics, won't they need budgets of 100 million for each game to develop all of the data (detail, world, etc.) that the hardware will operate on? Then we'll be walking into the software store laying down $5,000 for a game instead of $50.
Plus there's almost no chance of a pad of paper getting stolen.
Interestingly enough, each of my first two years of university I had my clipboard and paper pad stolen, once from right under my seat (!) and another time in the library when I stood up to walk to the stacks -- about 10 feet away.
In 1999 I bought a Vadem Clio and started taking notes with it. It hasn't been stolen. My only theory is that while people were stealing my paper for cheating purposes before, they're not stealing my PDA because it would be a much worse offense to steal such an expensive item...
The crucial point, however, is that since money is the sole intermediary for all products in a capital economy, people are much more likely to hoard money and [this was the point of my post] do things like destroy real resources that could be used to feed others in order to protect the exchange value of their money, which in the end can't actually be used to feed anyone...
In the absence of capital, you won't find the broom maker keeping 1,000 brooms in his back room because it makes him feel "rich" nor are you as likely to find him burning 995 of them out back to protect the exchange value of his brooms and thus, his wealth.
Re:Anyone have a problem with Mozilla and GIF imag
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Mozilla 0.9.1 Out
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Linux 2.2.18, glibc 2.1.3, XFree86 4.0.3. I can't reproduce the problem in Win98. I have a cron job that builds the nightlies for me every day. I almost invariably see this problem at BBC News with the images down the right side. It's an intermittent problem -- some images are fine, but there are some images and pages that are just horrible.
I looked at the BugZilla entries, and they look like they may be the same thing, but I've never seen the problem with.JPG images and the distortion looks physically different from the attachment in #74358.
*sigh* I guess I should try filing a bug report again... Last time I did it, it didn't work out too well...
Perhaps you don't understand: I'm agreeing with you and not with the original poster. My intent was not to say that free product does not undermine capitalist economies (perhaps it does, perhaps not, there are a number of systemic subtleties), but my intent is to say that in my opinion the integrity of a capitalist economy is MOOT when compared to the value of helping others.
Oh, and by the way... 1996 is not an "internet oldster" by ANY stretch of the imagination.
My Internet experience predates the World Wide Web altogether, when it was all about comic strips (Archie? Veronica? Jughead?) or animals (Gopher?) or even HAM radio nerdiness (KA9Q?)... And even I'm not an "oldster" by any stretch of the imagination. When I went online with my beautiful Motorola 88k-based workstation (boy, was it cool), there were already "oldsters" everywhere around me.
So really you're missing exactly the same context that you accuse the new folks of missing. The fact is, the 'net is here to be helpful, and the original spirit of things (before banner ads and the dot-com economy) was that it was here to be helpful to everybody.
Okay, I have to take exception to a couple of things you've just said.
FIRST... Elitism: of course there are people less educated than you are, and of course they can sometimes be a problem because they just don't know how to behave or how to interface with the world. But instead of trying to hide uneducated or less fortunate people under a rock, how about we educate them instead? And of course, experience is one of the most effective forms of education!
Let me use a metaphor. You and I are educated folk, and we are standing in the world's largest library. Some less educated people who aren't familiar with the stacks, dewey decimal, or library etiquette come in and discuss loudly amongst themselves how difficult it is to find things in this library. You propose that we chase these people out because we find them distracting. I propose that we tell them how to behave in the library, how to use the stacks, and then let them learn to their hearts' content.
SECOND... Free goods undermining western economies: I can't believe you just made that argument. It was ugly in the Grapes of Wrath and it's ugly today in technology. I personally believe that everything should be free. If I'm a farmer, I distribute my grain free to everyone in your family and extended family, and in return, you as a tractor-maker give me a tractor for free. After all, my farm produces much more food than I can possibly eat, and you as a tractor maker actually have little use for a tractor once it's built... But that's just an idyllic dream, of course.
Now, I'm willing to concede that we live in a capital-based economy and thus, not everything can be free. However, your statement that free products undermine the economy implies that no products at all should be free. That is bullshit. If the people are hungry and there is food, feed them. Don't throw the food into the bin to preserve market price structures. With the internet we have the ability to distribute real knowledge to all people to an extent that has never been seen before in human history. We can raise everyone's consciousness and potential quite a lot bit for very little cost.
To use an example/semi-metaphor again, I personally would find it terribly offensive and horrible if Linux were to suddenly cost $$$ just for the sole purpose of helping out the U.S. economy, thereby depriving thousands of poor computer users around the world in developing or war-ravaged countries of their primary operating system!
You, sir, are borderline evil.
Anyone have a problem with Mozilla and GIF images?
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Mozilla 0.9.1 Out
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I have wanted to switch to Mozilla for some time now, but there's one bug that is keeping me tied to NS 4.77:
All GIF images have horizontal white lines one pixel wide through them at random positions. Scrolling the window makes this problem worse and may increase the density of the lines. It looks like a redraw problem of some kind...
I know, this is the wrong forum, but while I'm thinking about it, has anyone else experienced this problem? Is there a fix?
All you know-it-all, pole-in-ass types are so sure that you're morally superior, that every Napster or Gnutella user is out there stealing music. Well, there are LEGAL uses for Napster that DO involve downloading lots of music.
FOR EXAMPLE:
I own about 1,000 CDs. I own a tablet PC which I carry around with me nearly everywhere I go and which doubles as my memopad-sized MP3 walkman. Now I could spend hours encoding songs from CD to MP3 each morning so that I can carry around the music that I want, but that's not really time-effective. What do I do? I download the songs that someone else has already encoded. And what's more, sometimes in the middle of the day I find myself wanting that one particular song that I don't have loaded into the PC at the moment. What do I do? Pop on to one of the OpenNap servers and grab the song. If some of you had your way, I'd have to run home, find the CD, encode the track on my desktop PC, IR it to my tablet and run back to work -- or forego listening to it. Buy why should I have to forego listening to it if I've already BOUGHT the damn thing?
I've bought every CD that ever contained a song I liked. I can show you the matching CD from every song I've ever downloaded. I'm not stealing, and I resent the implication that just because I use the MP3 format or visit Napster/OpenNap sites I'm some sort of criminal.
And just to prove that I'm ON TOPIC, I've even burned a few MP3 CDs that I downloaded. How is this legal? Well, I've been through some albums (Black Crowes SHMC, Fiona Apple Tidal, etc.) 4+ times, buying the damn CD each time, because they've been scratched so much they start to skip. Now for the ones I really like, where quality is really important, I will always buy the CD again (paying royalties EACH time, even though I'm only one listener), but for some of them which aren't worth THAT much to me, I'll just grab the non-working tracks off the net and re-burn the entire CD with the skipping tracks replaced. Voila. FIXED CD. That I already paid for.
And aside from these black-and-white issues, I don't see ANY problem with grabbing an MP3 from a CD I own and sending it to a friend in e-mail with "Hey man, check this track out!" in the message body. I lend my CDs out. Sometimes friends copy them to tape, I'm sure. That doesn't give me any guilt pangs and neither do MP3s.
Wood... ho hum. What about stone?
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Hardwoodware
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I've seen about a hundred each wood and clear acrylic cases on various sites. Nothing new, and nothing that great, IMHO.
On the other hand, I'd kill (or pay $$$) for a STONE case. Any kind. Black marble or onyx or maybe granite or even just reinforced concrete. Something very heavy, very primitive and very ageless-looking. No LEDs showing, hidable drive bays... So that most of the time, it's just a stone cube, sitting in the corner, being heavy.
Oh, the romance...
I LIKE these updates, so there.
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XFree 4.1.0 Out
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Yeah, yeah, let me say it all for you:
"What is this, Freshmeat or Slashdot?"
"How is this news? This is just a point release."
"This isn't news, this is software."
"This is only for Linux users."
"Even Linux users don't care much about this."
Well, I for one THANK Slashdot for letting me know. I like to be informed when 2.4.next is out, and the same goes for XFree86 4.next. Some people may be bugged by it, but I think Slashdot strikes a nice (if tricky) balance between overcovering software releases and keeping a large portion of their readers (Linux users) up on the latest.
I don't like reading Freshmeat. Too much crap when all I care about is really Kernel and XFree86 most of the time. I check into Slashdot once a day or so, so I'm glad slashdot lets me know when new stuff is out. Saves me from having to wade through Freshmeat, monitor the kernel mailing list, continually check the XFree86 Web site, etc...
I also like the distribution release announcements that are here sometimes.
Slashdot readers can do an incredible amount of good in their own community, wherever they are from! Please understand:
Okay, there is some hardware that is unworkable in the Internet age. A 4.77 MHz PC/XT with dual floppies and a green-screen counts as "unworkable" and should be junked.
But a LOT of what is being junked these days are things like VLB 486 machines, low-end Pentiums. They should go to schools, community centers, and churches. I know, there are lots of arguments against this:
They are full of old parts and are likely to need lots of repair and maintenance.
They are too slow to be worth anything.
Much faster used machines (compared to, say, a 486SX/25) can be had very inexpensively.
The answer to all of these questions is YOUR VOLUNTEER TIME as a computer expert. I give my time locally to a number of small computer centers and networks which are not for profit. Here are my answers to the concerns above:
Regarding #1 (Repair and maintenance): Yes, a power supply fails every now and then in "my" networks, or a video card goes bad, or a monitor. But part of what we're talking about is the glut of older hardware. It's not a big deal for a Slashdot user to swap out a power supply, a video card, a monitor -- and older hardware of this type is in ample supply. Yes, a school will have trouble justifying $400 in repairs to get an old 486 PC fixed, but the average Slashdot user can cannibalize three old 486 PCs into one working one that will help 10-20 kids in a matter of 30 minutes or so without needing spare parts or incurring expense. It's a matter of having the correct knowledge to get this older stuff working.
Regarding #2 (Slow): A 486/25 may be too slow to run Internet Explorer 5.5 under Windows 98 for streaming media -- it's true. But put Windows 3.1 and Netscape 3 (you can still download it at Netscape.com) on a 486/25 with 8-16 megabytes of memory and it's about fast enough for WebMail. Stick it in a corner of the community center and write "For E-Mail Only" on the front of it. Donate or get somebody to donate a little of their time to help people learn to use WebMail. Then try telling a little Russian grandmother that's just made contact with her children in Russia for the first time in 15 years that the machine is too slow to be worth anything. She'll tell you that it was worth something to her to have this public e-mail machine there.
Regarding #3 (faster machines for cheap): Cheap is not the same as free. You can tell a school that they shouldn't bother with a stack of 486/66 machines because they can get Pentium II 233 systems for only $100-$200 each. Or you can donate a day and help them get 10 of those 486/66 machines running enough for kids to type a report or two and visit a few simple Web sites -- even if slowly -- costing the school nothing. If they don't have the cash, they don't have the cash. Telling them just how little cash they really need isn't all that helpful.
Here are some examples from my own experience:
A local church wanted to get three computers in a small network for their members to do Web, e-mail, family history and a few other things. They had someone in for an estimate and nearly died. So, they decided to try for just "a computer" (that's right, one) but decided they still couldn't afford it. Over the course of a weekend, I was able to get for them six PCs (mostly 486/66 machines) at $5.00 each from a local university who was basically tossing them. A bunch of 640x480 VGA greyscale monitors were free from the same place. "Useless" was written on top of each of them in black marker. At work, a pile of 10b2 ethernet cards and a bunch of coax had been laying around in a closet for a long time. I asked, and I got them. We booted up the machines, cleared out the cruft and just left Windows 95 behind. Installed the network cards, wired them all up, stuck a 56k modem and Linux and masquerading on the last one and 'ta-da' -- a six user network with basic Web, e-mail and applications. Slow? To me, dog slow. To them, a godsend. They didn't have anything else. One weekend.
Another anecdote: I got wind of the fact that a local government office was paying to have a moving company haul a bunch of 486 and low-end pentium machines out into the desert and smash them to bits because they had depreciated into oblivion. I contacted the agency and was able to get the machines and a bunch of color 640x480 and 800x600 monitors donated. Some of them needed work. Out of about 20 machines, about 11 good ones were assembled, mostly by swapping power supplies, drives, monitors, etc. Took the better part of an afternoon. A local surplus software company donated a bunch of Windows 3.1 and vintage 1995 "multimedia encyclopedias" and other early multimedia titles, including a few storybooks-on-a-CD. The systems went into a local school in a poor neighborhood who only had to foot the bill for a few sets of headphones for the kids. Those kids don't care that the machines won't run Office 2000, Netscape, or Quake II. They're happily using Compton's 1995 and Grolier's 1994 encyclopedias to write reports with Windows Write and print them to an old beat-up HP LaserJet II. All it took was knowledge and time to turn "old junk" magically into "classroom computers." My investment: a Saturday, a few blank floppies, a little sweat and nagging a couple of my friends to come and help out.
Yes, I've returned to both of these places once or twice to make repairs, but it's no problem. I have access to plenty of spare parts and each repair usually only takes an hour or two at the most -- if that long. True, there is no money in these budgets to repair older systems if they break down, but as long as someone with knowledge and old spare parts from our present glut is around, no money is needed when something goes wrong.
The point:
Part of what decides whether old hardware is useful or not is whether those with the knowledge to make it useful are willing to do so. Giving two Saturdays a month or just say the morning hours of every Saturday, you as a knowledgable Slashdot reader can make a lot of people happy by connecting them to the information age. This especially applies to those of you living in metropolitan areas where those on the "more ghetto" side of town often aren't fortunate to have access to computers or to have been the beneficiary of a made-for-TV Microsoft commercial about giving computers to poor folks.
Saturday LAN parties are great, but smiles are great too.
Just start asking around -- make it known that you're a computer professional and you're willing to give some of your time to your community to make technology happen for those who can't afford it. You'll be swamped with needs in no time -- needs that you can help to fill if you're willing to give a little time and to work on old hardware.
If users want to send Mandrake money, let them. Obviously this indicates that their product is liked. I've been blasted here on Slashdot for saying that I buy Loki games in addition to the Windows versions I own in order to help Loki to survive.
Well, I want them to survive, so I'll buy their product. I'd even consider sending them a donation or two. Maybe some other people want Mandrake to survive, so they send Mandrake money. What's wrong with that?
Yes, I know: "But they're a commercial organization... marketplace... should have a viable product... etc..." Bullshit. If (for example) Loki goes out of business, I won't be able to buy their games anymore. I don't care if their games are a viable "product" in any given "marketplace" -- I just want to be able to keep playing them. In order for this to happen, Loki must keep making them. In order for Loki to keep making them, they've got to have some cash. So, I'm going to help out with as much cash as I can so that [hopefully] I can continue to play new Linux games. I suspect that other people may feel very much the same way about Mandrake. There's nothing wrong with being willing to pay extra for a specific product in order to allow it to survive. If you can't deal with it any other way, just look it as a personal extension of the essential selfishness of capital-based economies.
If you don't want to send money, don't. But I certainly don't see how this should turn into some kind of argument because you explicitly don't want other people to send their money wherever they want to send it.
Again, for those who didn't get it the first time, if you don't like Mandrake, don't donate. If you like Mandrake but don't want to donate, don't donate. If you like Mandrake and you feel like you want to donate just because you like Mandrake so damn much, send them as much cash as you want. If somebody gives you a hard time about you sending your own money wherever you damn well want to send it, accidentally spill your drink in their lap and get back to what you were doing.
Yet another person complaining about modern games not running on non-modern hardware.
Non-modern? Your beautiful G400? Sorry, the product cycle in this industry is now [a well-discussed] six months. This game is not even close to six months old, meaning... current product cycle.
Even in Windows, you'll need a GeForce2 or a Voodoo5 to play Tribes2 with any degree of sincerity. Buy new hardware. If you don't want to buy new hardware, buy old games. If you won't do either, give up gaming. Don't post to Slashdot and complain about the game maker for making a great game and the game porter for making a great port.
This is just like the Myst III article the other day (a total joke) or all of the bitching from cheapskates about various recent 3D titles: "I'll be damned if the latest-greatest[TM] game doesn't crash a hell of a lot on my Voodoo Rush PCI card with 4 megabytes!"
This sounds like the bug in some versions of the VIA-half of your chipset which cause clock drift under heavy load. There was a patch for early 2.4 kernel releases, you'll have to search the Linux Kernel Mailing List archives for it.
I don't know whether or not the problem has been fixed in more recent 2.4 releases, but I certainly hope it has.
Hey, if you're running Slackware, it's your job to download XFree86 4.0.2 and the 4.0.3 "upgrade" from ftp.xfree86.org and install it yourself in place of the XFree86 3.3.6 included with Slackware 7.1.
I'm doing some Slackware 7.1 installs on non-personal systems right now, and it's like a 10 minute job at most. If that sort of thing is above your head, perhaps you should be trying an rpm-based distribution instead of Slackware, just to make things a little easier for you! No sense in beating your head against a wall and there's no shame in being not quite ready for Slackware yet.
Better yet, just give it a try. Download all of the files in the XFree86 4.0.2 distribution for i386 Linux Glibc 2.1 and read and follow the "Install" file, which will tell you how to proceed to install XFree86 4.0.2. Then, re-visit the XFree86 repository and grab the update to 4.0.3 and install it in similar fashion.
Man, Mosaic with TERM was the coolest thing... I basically soiled myself the first time I launched Mosaic with TERM and was able to load up InterLinks (which I used a lot then) at home. (I was only affording 2400 bps at that particular moment... Those 'The Cure' fan pages took forever to load)
I clung to Mosiac for the longest time... I nearly cried when they said that 2.7b5 [IIRC] would be the final release and that development was stopping. Then I went looking around at others, like Chimera and Mmosaic... I hated Netscape. *sigh*
I miss the days when the "amazing" factor was so high in Linux and computing in general. These days, we can do anything, so anything we do is mundane.
Conspicuously missing in this round-up are Caldera's eDesktop and eServer (i.e. OpenLinux) products, which are excellent Linux distributions. Caldera has been a fairly large contributor to the Linux world (NetWare support, the original version of RPM way back in the day, the GPLed graphical installer Lizard, their GPLed administration tool, COAS [compare to S.u.S.E.'s YaST, which is still proprietary...])
They also have a lot of big-name corporate deals involving Linux, a commercial version of embedded Linux (Lineo), and the code and customer list for SCO now. They were the first to ship with KDE as a graphical desktop (I believe with KDE Beta-3, before even KDE 1.0) and one of the first to ship with a full desktop of any kind (with Looking Glass, way back when). I think Caldera has always put out great distributions.
I use eDesktop 2.4 right now. I chose it after comparing it to a number of others. I have basically upgraded my distribution (not a fun task) after each generation of libraries -- first when the switch from a.out to elf was made (libc4 to libc5) and then when the switch from the linux-hacked GNU libc to the standard GNU libc was made (libc5 to libc6). My first distribution (a.out) was Slackware, but for both upgrades since then I've tried out a number of distributions, and both times I've ended up choosing Caldera's distributions over the likes of Red Hat and Debian. Why? The LISA tool (which you can choose instead of Lizard if you want) gives me Slackware-like flexibility during install, and once in, the compiler and library configurations always seem to compile more free source code "out of the box" without frustration, which is a big deal to me.
Game companies have to compete in a crowded marketplace. Waiting to release no longer works; the hardware market is so varied and moves so fast that a single team of developers and QA people can't possibly keep up. "Waiting" would simply be suicide. Whether you like it or not, releasing an initial version followed by "updates" is the way to current sofware market works, for games and for applications.
I don't know where you work, but where I work application software means MS Office 2000 and WordPerfect Office 2000, both of which need major "updates" from their respective companies' Web sites to fix minor and major bugs before we'll run them day-to-day. But we need the features. Perhaps WordPerfect 5.1 was more stable, and perhaps you can get away with running it where you work, but let's be serious here...
P.S. I bought King's Quest III when it was new and ended up downloading an "update" from Sierra's BBS for it which let it run properly on my Rodime SCSI hard drive. Don't let's get nostalgic and pretend that in the past all hardware/software combinations were compatible and all products were bug-free...
Slashdot Mirror
84994. I thought I submitted 3 images, but I only submitted one. Still, it makes the problem obvious enough...
When it got market as duplicate of a resolved bug again (I'd reported it once before), I e-mailed the maintainer, but got no reply.
*shrug*
Someone will get around to it eventually, I guess. Someone else has suggested that it might be the driver. That could well be the case, I'm using the icky closed NVidia driver because it gets me really good 3D gaming under Linux, but I'm sure that's a potential candidate since so many other things are broken about it (DPMS, for one...)
Still, I don't get scrolling/rendering bugs with any other browser! [Netscape/Konqueror]
I did attach a screen shot (three, I think). It still got marked as already solved...
The problem with horizontal artifacts in images, especially when scrolling, still hasn't been fixed. *sigh*
I really want to use Mozilla as my main browser now because it seems to work very well, but I'm a hopeless picky pedant and a bug like this that appears very prominently really keeps me away.
This time (between 0.9.1 and 0.9.2) I did submit it via Bugzilla, but it got marked (once again) as a duplicate of an already solved bug. I guess the people responsible for the graphics rendering are having trouble duplicating what I'm seeing...
Some readers are operating under lack of information.
If you see "OK...OK...OK...FAILED...OK" when you boot up or "Pass...Pass...Pass...FAILED..." when you boot up, then you're thinking of the wrong messages. To see the messages Linus is talking about (the endless copyrights and chit-chat of the kernel) type 'dmesg' as root after a fresh boot.
The status messages that give you an OK or a FAILED on a system-by-system basis are (in the most broad sense) init messages rather than kernel messages and are added by your distribution. These will not go away under the "new deal" Linus is proposing...
I can't imagine a better response to this concept!
Okay, so I don't necessarily buy the Loch Ness thing, but at the same time, I've had the same physics as everyone and I find the idea of that seismic activity produced some of these sightings (given how they were described) just a little bit counterintuitive.
Isn't there some less exotic "natural explanation" we can come up with?
But then that's just me.
It seems to me that we will never get to the point of realistic rendering in games because by the time one reaches pixar-level animation, there is so much art and detail going on before the rendering stage.
If we do get game companies trying to produce games with "realistically rendered" graphics, won't they need budgets of 100 million for each game to develop all of the data (detail, world, etc.) that the hardware will operate on? Then we'll be walking into the software store laying down $5,000 for a game instead of $50.
Interestingly enough, each of my first two years of university I had my clipboard and paper pad stolen, once from right under my seat (!) and another time in the library when I stood up to walk to the stacks -- about 10 feet away.
In 1999 I bought a Vadem Clio and started taking notes with it. It hasn't been stolen. My only theory is that while people were stealing my paper for cheating purposes before, they're not stealing my PDA because it would be a much worse offense to steal such an expensive item...
Does this work? Can anyone else confirm this? I have an AD-660 at region 0 (not easily switchable) and if the fix was this simple, it'd be nice...
The crucial point, however, is that since money is the sole intermediary for all products in a capital economy, people are much more likely to hoard money and [this was the point of my post] do things like destroy real resources that could be used to feed others in order to protect the exchange value of their money, which in the end can't actually be used to feed anyone...
In the absence of capital, you won't find the broom maker keeping 1,000 brooms in his back room because it makes him feel "rich" nor are you as likely to find him burning 995 of them out back to protect the exchange value of his brooms and thus, his wealth.
Linux 2.2.18, glibc 2.1.3, XFree86 4.0.3. I can't reproduce the problem in Win98. I have a cron job that builds the nightlies for me every day. I almost invariably see this problem at BBC News with the images down the right side. It's an intermittent problem -- some images are fine, but there are some images and pages that are just horrible.
.JPG images and the distortion looks physically different from the attachment in #74358.
I looked at the BugZilla entries, and they look like they may be the same thing, but I've never seen the problem with
*sigh* I guess I should try filing a bug report again... Last time I did it, it didn't work out too well...
Perhaps you don't understand: I'm agreeing with you and not with the original poster. My intent was not to say that free product does not undermine capitalist economies (perhaps it does, perhaps not, there are a number of systemic subtleties), but my intent is to say that in my opinion the integrity of a capitalist economy is MOOT when compared to the value of helping others.
Oh, and by the way... 1996 is not an "internet oldster" by ANY stretch of the imagination.
My Internet experience predates the World Wide Web altogether, when it was all about comic strips (Archie? Veronica? Jughead?) or animals (Gopher?) or even HAM radio nerdiness (KA9Q?)... And even I'm not an "oldster" by any stretch of the imagination. When I went online with my beautiful Motorola 88k-based workstation (boy, was it cool), there were already "oldsters" everywhere around me.
So really you're missing exactly the same context that you accuse the new folks of missing. The fact is, the 'net is here to be helpful, and the original spirit of things (before banner ads and the dot-com economy) was that it was here to be helpful to everybody.
FIRST... Elitism: of course there are people less educated than you are, and of course they can sometimes be a problem because they just don't know how to behave or how to interface with the world. But instead of trying to hide uneducated or less fortunate people under a rock, how about we educate them instead? And of course, experience is one of the most effective forms of education!
Let me use a metaphor. You and I are educated folk, and we are standing in the world's largest library. Some less educated people who aren't familiar with the stacks, dewey decimal, or library etiquette come in and discuss loudly amongst themselves how difficult it is to find things in this library. You propose that we chase these people out because we find them distracting. I propose that we tell them how to behave in the library, how to use the stacks, and then let them learn to their hearts' content.
SECOND... Free goods undermining western economies: I can't believe you just made that argument. It was ugly in the Grapes of Wrath and it's ugly today in technology. I personally believe that everything should be free. If I'm a farmer, I distribute my grain free to everyone in your family and extended family, and in return, you as a tractor-maker give me a tractor for free. After all, my farm produces much more food than I can possibly eat, and you as a tractor maker actually have little use for a tractor once it's built... But that's just an idyllic dream, of course.
Now, I'm willing to concede that we live in a capital-based economy and thus, not everything can be free. However, your statement that free products undermine the economy implies that no products at all should be free. That is bullshit. If the people are hungry and there is food, feed them. Don't throw the food into the bin to preserve market price structures. With the internet we have the ability to distribute real knowledge to all people to an extent that has never been seen before in human history. We can raise everyone's consciousness and potential quite a lot bit for very little cost.
To use an example/semi-metaphor again, I personally would find it terribly offensive and horrible if Linux were to suddenly cost $$$ just for the sole purpose of helping out the U.S. economy, thereby depriving thousands of poor computer users around the world in developing or war-ravaged countries of their primary operating system!
You, sir, are borderline evil.
I have wanted to switch to Mozilla for some time now, but there's one bug that is keeping me tied to NS 4.77:
All GIF images have horizontal white lines one pixel wide through them at random positions. Scrolling the window makes this problem worse and may increase the density of the lines. It looks like a redraw problem of some kind...
I know, this is the wrong forum, but while I'm thinking about it, has anyone else experienced this problem? Is there a fix?
All you know-it-all, pole-in-ass types are so sure that you're morally superior, that every Napster or Gnutella user is out there stealing music. Well, there are LEGAL uses for Napster that DO involve downloading lots of music.
FOR EXAMPLE:
I own about 1,000 CDs. I own a tablet PC which I carry around with me nearly everywhere I go and which doubles as my memopad-sized MP3 walkman. Now I could spend hours encoding songs from CD to MP3 each morning so that I can carry around the music that I want, but that's not really time-effective. What do I do? I download the songs that someone else has already encoded. And what's more, sometimes in the middle of the day I find myself wanting that one particular song that I don't have loaded into the PC at the moment. What do I do? Pop on to one of the OpenNap servers and grab the song. If some of you had your way, I'd have to run home, find the CD, encode the track on my desktop PC, IR it to my tablet and run back to work -- or forego listening to it. Buy why should I have to forego listening to it if I've already BOUGHT the damn thing?
I've bought every CD that ever contained a song I liked. I can show you the matching CD from every song I've ever downloaded. I'm not stealing, and I resent the implication that just because I use the MP3 format or visit Napster/OpenNap sites I'm some sort of criminal.
And just to prove that I'm ON TOPIC, I've even burned a few MP3 CDs that I downloaded. How is this legal? Well, I've been through some albums (Black Crowes SHMC, Fiona Apple Tidal, etc.) 4+ times, buying the damn CD each time, because they've been scratched so much they start to skip. Now for the ones I really like, where quality is really important, I will always buy the CD again (paying royalties EACH time, even though I'm only one listener), but for some of them which aren't worth THAT much to me, I'll just grab the non-working tracks off the net and re-burn the entire CD with the skipping tracks replaced. Voila. FIXED CD. That I already paid for.
And aside from these black-and-white issues, I don't see ANY problem with grabbing an MP3 from a CD I own and sending it to a friend in e-mail with "Hey man, check this track out!" in the message body. I lend my CDs out. Sometimes friends copy them to tape, I'm sure. That doesn't give me any guilt pangs and neither do MP3s.
I've seen about a hundred each wood and clear acrylic cases on various sites. Nothing new, and nothing that great, IMHO.
On the other hand, I'd kill (or pay $$$) for a STONE case. Any kind. Black marble or onyx or maybe granite or even just reinforced concrete. Something very heavy, very primitive and very ageless-looking. No LEDs showing, hidable drive bays... So that most of the time, it's just a stone cube, sitting in the corner, being heavy.
Oh, the romance...
Yeah, yeah, let me say it all for you:
"What is this, Freshmeat or Slashdot?"
"How is this news? This is just a point release."
"This isn't news, this is software."
"This is only for Linux users."
"Even Linux users don't care much about this."
Well, I for one THANK Slashdot for letting me know. I like to be informed when 2.4.next is out, and the same goes for XFree86 4.next. Some people may be bugged by it, but I think Slashdot strikes a nice (if tricky) balance between overcovering software releases and keeping a large portion of their readers (Linux users) up on the latest.
I don't like reading Freshmeat. Too much crap when all I care about is really Kernel and XFree86 most of the time. I check into Slashdot once a day or so, so I'm glad slashdot lets me know when new stuff is out. Saves me from having to wade through Freshmeat, monitor the kernel mailing list, continually check the XFree86 Web site, etc...
I also like the distribution release announcements that are here sometimes.
So nyaaaaaaaah!
Okay, there is some hardware that is unworkable in the Internet age. A 4.77 MHz PC/XT with dual floppies and a green-screen counts as "unworkable" and should be junked.
But a LOT of what is being junked these days are things like VLB 486 machines, low-end Pentiums. They should go to schools, community centers, and churches. I know, there are lots of arguments against this:
The answer to all of these questions is YOUR VOLUNTEER TIME as a computer expert. I give my time locally to a number of small computer centers and networks which are not for profit. Here are my answers to the concerns above:
Regarding #1 (Repair and maintenance): Yes, a power supply fails every now and then in "my" networks, or a video card goes bad, or a monitor. But part of what we're talking about is the glut of older hardware. It's not a big deal for a Slashdot user to swap out a power supply, a video card, a monitor -- and older hardware of this type is in ample supply. Yes, a school will have trouble justifying $400 in repairs to get an old 486 PC fixed, but the average Slashdot user can cannibalize three old 486 PCs into one working one that will help 10-20 kids in a matter of 30 minutes or so without needing spare parts or incurring expense. It's a matter of having the correct knowledge to get this older stuff working.
Regarding #2 (Slow): A 486/25 may be too slow to run Internet Explorer 5.5 under Windows 98 for streaming media -- it's true. But put Windows 3.1 and Netscape 3 (you can still download it at Netscape.com) on a 486/25 with 8-16 megabytes of memory and it's about fast enough for WebMail. Stick it in a corner of the community center and write "For E-Mail Only" on the front of it. Donate or get somebody to donate a little of their time to help people learn to use WebMail. Then try telling a little Russian grandmother that's just made contact with her children in Russia for the first time in 15 years that the machine is too slow to be worth anything. She'll tell you that it was worth something to her to have this public e-mail machine there.
Regarding #3 (faster machines for cheap): Cheap is not the same as free. You can tell a school that they shouldn't bother with a stack of 486/66 machines because they can get Pentium II 233 systems for only $100-$200 each. Or you can donate a day and help them get 10 of those 486/66 machines running enough for kids to type a report or two and visit a few simple Web sites -- even if slowly -- costing the school nothing. If they don't have the cash, they don't have the cash. Telling them just how little cash they really need isn't all that helpful.
Here are some examples from my own experience:
A local church wanted to get three computers in a small network for their members to do Web, e-mail, family history and a few other things. They had someone in for an estimate and nearly died. So, they decided to try for just "a computer" (that's right, one) but decided they still couldn't afford it. Over the course of a weekend, I was able to get for them six PCs (mostly 486/66 machines) at $5.00 each from a local university who was basically tossing them. A bunch of 640x480 VGA greyscale monitors were free from the same place. "Useless" was written on top of each of them in black marker. At work, a pile of 10b2 ethernet cards and a bunch of coax had been laying around in a closet for a long time. I asked, and I got them. We booted up the machines, cleared out the cruft and just left Windows 95 behind. Installed the network cards, wired them all up, stuck a 56k modem and Linux and masquerading on the last one and 'ta-da' -- a six user network with basic Web, e-mail and applications. Slow? To me, dog slow. To them, a godsend. They didn't have anything else. One weekend.
Another anecdote: I got wind of the fact that a local government office was paying to have a moving company haul a bunch of 486 and low-end pentium machines out into the desert and smash them to bits because they had depreciated into oblivion. I contacted the agency and was able to get the machines and a bunch of color 640x480 and 800x600 monitors donated. Some of them needed work. Out of about 20 machines, about 11 good ones were assembled, mostly by swapping power supplies, drives, monitors, etc. Took the better part of an afternoon. A local surplus software company donated a bunch of Windows 3.1 and vintage 1995 "multimedia encyclopedias" and other early multimedia titles, including a few storybooks-on-a-CD. The systems went into a local school in a poor neighborhood who only had to foot the bill for a few sets of headphones for the kids. Those kids don't care that the machines won't run Office 2000, Netscape, or Quake II. They're happily using Compton's 1995 and Grolier's 1994 encyclopedias to write reports with Windows Write and print them to an old beat-up HP LaserJet II. All it took was knowledge and time to turn "old junk" magically into "classroom computers." My investment: a Saturday, a few blank floppies, a little sweat and nagging a couple of my friends to come and help out.
Yes, I've returned to both of these places once or twice to make repairs, but it's no problem. I have access to plenty of spare parts and each repair usually only takes an hour or two at the most -- if that long. True, there is no money in these budgets to repair older systems if they break down, but as long as someone with knowledge and old spare parts from our present glut is around, no money is needed when something goes wrong.
The point:
Part of what decides whether old hardware is useful or not is whether those with the knowledge to make it useful are willing to do so. Giving two Saturdays a month or just say the morning hours of every Saturday, you as a knowledgable Slashdot reader can make a lot of people happy by connecting them to the information age. This especially applies to those of you living in metropolitan areas where those on the "more ghetto" side of town often aren't fortunate to have access to computers or to have been the beneficiary of a made-for-TV Microsoft commercial about giving computers to poor folks.
Saturday LAN parties are great, but smiles are great too.
Just start asking around -- make it known that you're a computer professional and you're willing to give some of your time to your community to make technology happen for those who can't afford it. You'll be swamped with needs in no time -- needs that you can help to fill if you're willing to give a little time and to work on old hardware.
If users want to send Mandrake money, let them. Obviously this indicates that their product is liked. I've been blasted here on Slashdot for saying that I buy Loki games in addition to the Windows versions I own in order to help Loki to survive.
Well, I want them to survive, so I'll buy their product. I'd even consider sending them a donation or two. Maybe some other people want Mandrake to survive, so they send Mandrake money. What's wrong with that?
Yes, I know: "But they're a commercial organization... marketplace... should have a viable product... etc..." Bullshit. If (for example) Loki goes out of business, I won't be able to buy their games anymore. I don't care if their games are a viable "product" in any given "marketplace" -- I just want to be able to keep playing them. In order for this to happen, Loki must keep making them. In order for Loki to keep making them, they've got to have some cash. So, I'm going to help out with as much cash as I can so that [hopefully] I can continue to play new Linux games. I suspect that other people may feel very much the same way about Mandrake. There's nothing wrong with being willing to pay extra for a specific product in order to allow it to survive. If you can't deal with it any other way, just look it as a personal extension of the essential selfishness of capital-based economies.
If you don't want to send money, don't. But I certainly don't see how this should turn into some kind of argument because you explicitly don't want other people to send their money wherever they want to send it.
Again, for those who didn't get it the first time, if you don't like Mandrake, don't donate. If you like Mandrake but don't want to donate, don't donate. If you like Mandrake and you feel like you want to donate just because you like Mandrake so damn much, send them as much cash as you want. If somebody gives you a hard time about you sending your own money wherever you damn well want to send it, accidentally spill your drink in their lap and get back to what you were doing.
Enough said.
Yet another person complaining about modern games not running on non-modern hardware.
Non-modern? Your beautiful G400? Sorry, the product cycle in this industry is now [a well-discussed] six months. This game is not even close to six months old, meaning... current product cycle.
Even in Windows, you'll need a GeForce2 or a Voodoo5 to play Tribes2 with any degree of sincerity. Buy new hardware. If you don't want to buy new hardware, buy old games. If you won't do either, give up gaming. Don't post to Slashdot and complain about the game maker for making a great game and the game porter for making a great port.
This is just like the Myst III article the other day (a total joke) or all of the bitching from cheapskates about various recent 3D titles: "I'll be damned if the latest-greatest[TM] game doesn't crash a hell of a lot on my Voodoo Rush PCI card with 4 megabytes!"
This sounds like the bug in some versions of the VIA-half of your chipset which cause clock drift under heavy load. There was a patch for early 2.4 kernel releases, you'll have to search the Linux Kernel Mailing List archives for it.
I don't know whether or not the problem has been fixed in more recent 2.4 releases, but I certainly hope it has.
Hey, if you're running Slackware, it's your job to download XFree86 4.0.2 and the 4.0.3 "upgrade" from ftp.xfree86.org and install it yourself in place of the XFree86 3.3.6 included with Slackware 7.1.
I'm doing some Slackware 7.1 installs on non-personal systems right now, and it's like a 10 minute job at most. If that sort of thing is above your head, perhaps you should be trying an rpm-based distribution instead of Slackware, just to make things a little easier for you! No sense in beating your head against a wall and there's no shame in being not quite ready for Slackware yet.
Better yet, just give it a try. Download all of the files in the XFree86 4.0.2 distribution for i386 Linux Glibc 2.1 and read and follow the "Install" file, which will tell you how to proceed to install XFree86 4.0.2. Then, re-visit the XFree86 repository and grab the update to 4.0.3 and install it in similar fashion.
Man, Mosaic with TERM was the coolest thing... I basically soiled myself the first time I launched Mosaic with TERM and was able to load up InterLinks (which I used a lot then) at home. (I was only affording 2400 bps at that particular moment... Those 'The Cure' fan pages took forever to load)
I clung to Mosiac for the longest time... I nearly cried when they said that 2.7b5 [IIRC] would be the final release and that development was stopping. Then I went looking around at others, like Chimera and Mmosaic... I hated Netscape. *sigh*
I miss the days when the "amazing" factor was so high in Linux and computing in general. These days, we can do anything, so anything we do is mundane.
Conspicuously missing in this round-up are Caldera's eDesktop and eServer (i.e. OpenLinux) products, which are excellent Linux distributions. Caldera has been a fairly large contributor to the Linux world (NetWare support, the original version of RPM way back in the day, the GPLed graphical installer Lizard, their GPLed administration tool, COAS [compare to S.u.S.E.'s YaST, which is still proprietary...])
They also have a lot of big-name corporate deals involving Linux, a commercial version of embedded Linux (Lineo), and the code and customer list for SCO now. They were the first to ship with KDE as a graphical desktop (I believe with KDE Beta-3, before even KDE 1.0) and one of the first to ship with a full desktop of any kind (with Looking Glass, way back when). I think Caldera has always put out great distributions.
I use eDesktop 2.4 right now. I chose it after comparing it to a number of others. I have basically upgraded my distribution (not a fun task) after each generation of libraries -- first when the switch from a.out to elf was made (libc4 to libc5) and then when the switch from the linux-hacked GNU libc to the standard GNU libc was made (libc5 to libc6). My first distribution (a.out) was Slackware, but for both upgrades since then I've tried out a number of distributions, and both times I've ended up choosing Caldera's distributions over the likes of Red Hat and Debian. Why? The LISA tool (which you can choose instead of Lizard if you want) gives me Slackware-like flexibility during install, and once in, the compiler and library configurations always seem to compile more free source code "out of the box" without frustration, which is a big deal to me.
Sorry, but you're wrong.
Game companies have to compete in a crowded marketplace. Waiting to release no longer works; the hardware market is so varied and moves so fast that a single team of developers and QA people can't possibly keep up. "Waiting" would simply be suicide. Whether you like it or not, releasing an initial version followed by "updates" is the way to current sofware market works, for games and for applications.
I don't know where you work, but where I work application software means MS Office 2000 and WordPerfect Office 2000, both of which need major "updates" from their respective companies' Web sites to fix minor and major bugs before we'll run them day-to-day. But we need the features. Perhaps WordPerfect 5.1 was more stable, and perhaps you can get away with running it where you work, but let's be serious here...
P.S. I bought King's Quest III when it was new and ended up downloading an "update" from Sierra's BBS for it which let it run properly on my Rodime SCSI hard drive. Don't let's get nostalgic and pretend that in the past all hardware/software combinations were compatible and all products were bug-free...