I can load the NDISWrapper module without loading any proprietary code. It wouldn't do much, but I could load it.
If there are any GPL WinXP wireless drivers, I could use it to load those, and still be 100% GPL.
This is basically saying that GPL code that allows users to load non-GPL drivers is not allowed, even though, as I understand it, the end user is supposed to be able to do ANYTHING THEY WANT with GPL code or binaries, and restrictions only come in when distributing. I should be able to use a GPL wrapper to load non-GPL code with full access to the Kernel if I want to, and at any rate, that wrapper is still 100% GPL, when distributed or even loaded on its own.
Not to mention how often the lists of cards that are "Linux compatible" are simply wrong.
My laptop's built-in card is supposed to work with the MadWifi drivers. There's even a specific and detailed entry for it on their site, noting that a modified module load order might be necessary. OK, so it doesn't work when I first install Ubuntu. That's to be expected. Try the modified load order... uh, still nothing. Ubuntu seems to detect that it needs that driver, but the driver doesn't actually do anything.
A couple hours later I give up, take the advice of one poster on the Ubuntu forums and just use NDISWrapper and the WinXP drivers. 5 minutes later, my card is working perfectly.
If this little dispute in any way breaks NDISWrapper, I hope my distribution just gives 'em the finger and patches around whatever breaks it, 'cuz from where I'm sitting, that looks like a bug.
Netflix+the local library+friends' music, movie, and TV collections (pirated or legitimate, doesn't matter) all combine to make it extremely inefficient for me to torrent 90% of the stuff that I might otherwise be inclined to.
All that's left are games, and about 50% of the time with those I'm pirating ones that I already own, but I've lost one or more of the discs or don't feel like finding them (especially with a well-seeded torrent of an older, single-CD game, I can have it in an hour or less with nearly no effort, while finding the CD might mean 15 minutes and a big mess). Sometimes it works in reverse, and I'll pirate the game when it's $60 (I *never* pay that much, even if I don't pirate the game; anything over $40 and I'll just wait, no matter how much I want it), play it once, delete it, then see it for $10 a year later, and buy it on a whim.
Am I the only one who felt like the writers were treading water for about 4-5 episodes before the Season 2 finale? I almost gave up on the show because of it, thinking that they'd hit a dead end, then was like, "OH, I see" when they threw in that "one year later" thing in the last episode.
Also, let's not forget that this is war. The cylons attempted genocide of the human species, and that's bound to produce some hard feelings on the receiving end. Dehumanizing your enemy is a time-tested strategy of war.
YES. I'm considered a pretty far-left liberal (here in the U.S., anyway), and my stance on war and our behaviour therein reflects that (though I prefer to think of that particular position as simply being a consistent version of the overall world-view of most Americans, Conservatives and Liberals alike, rather than something that is truly "liberal"). However, when it comes to hypothetical situations like that of the humans in BSG, I have no problem with all kinds of awful stuff being done to the enemy (the Cylons) and in the name of survival of the species. If the species doesn't survive, no civil society can ever exist, so being decidedly un-civil for the duration of the threat is fine by me. We've risen from barbarism before, and can do it again.
They killed billions of people and are trying to finish off humanity. Damned near anything is justified in that situation. Leaving behind the non-warp-capable ships was the right decision. Killing (or imprisoning indefinitely, if you need their genes to keep a healthy reproductive pool) anyone found to be helping a Cylon in any way whatsoever, assuming they KNOW it's a Cylon, is entirely justifiable. The torture of the Six on the Pegasus was fine by me; the problem was the psychological effects on the crew, NOT what was actually being done, and destroying the psyche of a Cylon in that way is actually a pretty good idea (though I don't think that was their goal). I think they should have killed that half-Cylon baby; the fact that its existence proved, by sheer luck, to be useful later does not change the fact that killing it would have been the right decision--if the Cylons want it to exist, the humans should NOT want it to exist. I cheered when the suicide bomber took out those damned collaborators, even if he didn't manage to get Baltar. I got pissed when Starbuck didn't shoot the guy protecting Sharon on Caprica (I don't remember his name--the dad of the half-cylon kid).
Orange Catholic Bible all the way: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind". Butlerian Jihad their toaster asses.
Agreed. ~10hrs sleep followed by 18-20 hours waking would be ideal for me. Since I was a teen, I've reverted to a schedule roughly like that any time I've got more than a couple days with nowhere that I have to be and no-one complaining about my staying awake (parents then, now my wife:) )
My friends from high school almost all have sleep issues. A couple of them have worse insomnia than I do (if that's what you'd call it, I think it's just that my internal sleep clock is fucked up; I can sleep on a schedule, just not a 24-hour one!) and another only seems to need 3-4 hours a night--a 6-hour night is sleeping in for him, and he only rarely wants or needs to sleep that long (lucky bastard, he gets so much done, and HIS weird sleep thing doesn't interfere with a "normal" schedule!).
I'm running the Hardy Heron alpha, featuring FF3 Beta 3.
I'm having terrible trouble with it. Bizarre image rendering issues (some render too high in their "frame", leaving a big black space at the bottom and the bottom half of the image rendered in the top half of the "frame", with the top of the image cut off, and other times images from WAY back in my browsing session will show up in odd places, like as a tiled background on another page), GMail hangs when I try to send e-mail every single time I try, and leaving it open too long has proven to be a great way to end up with an unstable mess.
Not refuting your post, just saying to anyone thinking about trying it, don't count on it being a great experience:)
It also seems slower to me (then again, so does the whole damned browser), and that was one of my biggest complaints about FF2: it took a *tiny* bit too long for those to pop up, so that if I hit "slash(DOWN)(ENTER)" too quickly, I'd end up browsing to the word "slash" rather than "slashdot.org". Throwing more processing power at the problem doesn't seem to fix it (if a dual-core 2.2Ghz won't fix a little problem like this, nothing will).
I've also got huge problems with image rendering (images that I browsed several pages ago showing up as a tiled background on the page I'm browsing now? WTF?), and Gmail is very, very broken (I can't send e-mail from it). I'm on Beta 3 in Ubuntu. Those are all bugs, though; the address bar thing seems to be a "feature", and I fear that the general UI unresponsiveness isn't going anywhere, either. Just give me back the address bar that used to be there, and make the suggestions pop up instantly. That's what I want, not slower with more "features" that I've never, ever wanted, and, after trying it out, still don't want.
What's wrong with gardening? Maintaining a varied garden with multiple bloom times is a tough thing to learn and takes quite a lot of skill and effort.
Yes... the skill and effort to find a compilation of garden plant data and feed it into a MySQL database, then create a website that generates a list of appropriate plants for a given span of bloom-time, with automatic adjustments for latitude and user-selected variance allowance, and then to build a wiki-ish element where users can submit layouts for whole gardens and for individual beds with their dimensions, so you can just find the ones with the highest user ratings, arrange them in your yard, print the website-generated list of required materials/plants, and plant a garden that has been democratically-selected as the optimal arrangement in whichever style you've chosen.
You are correct. Truly, gardening is a geek's art.
Notably, a very large proportion of this is backwards compatibility cruft. Do note that if you don't use old software, none of this will be loaded and really won't take up your RAM (if on the other hand you DO use old software, then it will use some tiny portion of this).
Wine is, what, MAYBE 20 MB installed? Granted, it doesn't run every Window program, but it does cover most of the API and run a huge number of them. Let's say it takes ten times that for horribly inefficient MS coders to do the same thing. 200MB.
Out of an 8.4GB windows folder.
XP was, what, 2.5GB, at most? AND it already included backwards compatibility with '98 and the rest of the MS family, but let's ignore that for the sake of argument. So we've accounted for 2.7GB. Now let's say Aero takes 500MB (WTF???). That's 3.2GB. Add 100MB for IE7 just for the hell of it. Another 500MB for IIS and other server software (which mine, with its 8.4GB windows folder, doesn't even have, I think, being "home professional" or whatever, not Ultimate, but let's say it's there, just disabled) and 1GB for Office and Office-related crap, even if it's not installed. Another 200MB for media and burning software (which is easily 3x the space that stuff has any right to use). 200MB for DRM (why not?).
So... we're up to 5.2GB, with INSANELY inflated numbers for everything (anything more than 1/5 the space I allotted for Aero and the new graphical interface would be a travesty, for example) and using inaccurate 1000MB gigabytes. 8.4GB is the target. Even throwing out totally crazy numbers, I can't manage to account for all that space. What in God's name have they done to use that much? Even if it doesn't matter because disk space is cheap (I disagree, BTW) I'd just love to know. It's just... so bizarre.
But WTF are they doing with that space!?? Ubuntu (Gnome environment+Firefox+OpenOffice+a bunch of media apps+Perl+Python+tons of other stuff) AND Kubuntu (KDE3+Koffice+Konqueror+dozens of other "K" apps) AND Xubuntu (XFCE4+a bunch of apps) AND the experimental KDE4 packages (basically KDE3 all over again, space-wise) COMBINED don't even hit 1/2 the disk usage of Vista.
I've got that (minus the XFCE4 part) and more (Apache2, Ruby on Rails, Postgresql, MySQL, Wine, a bunch of console emulators, tons of other junk) installed on the Ubuntu section of my laptop's HD, and the whole thing (excluding my/home, which is full of MP3s and such) is 3.7 GB. JUST THE WINDOWS FOLDER on my C: drive is 8.4GB, and the only extra app I've installed on there (in the grand total of maybe 1 hour that I've used it) is Firefox (and yes, I already cleaned out all the shit that HP "helpfully" installed for me). What in the holy hell have they done to use that much space????
It still eats ungodly amounts of disk space, though.
I would love to know how they managed to waste so many MB. Instead of an easter egg flight sim on the level of the one in Excel, did they put in all of MS Flight Simulator X?
Truecrypt (among other programs, but Truecrypt is free as in speech and as in beer) lets the user create an encrypted volume, then create a second one inside that, with a separate password. Without that second password, it is impossible to distinguish the embedded volume from empty space. You give out your password to the outer volume, and keep quiet about the existence of another.
A similar method could, I suppose, be used on practically any device with a significant amount of storage space.
I'd be more worried about the tech becoming common enough and easy enough to use that anyone with $100,000 and some spare time can make a super-virus, or a bacterium that is extremely hardy and destroys wheat or rice crops, or any number of other nasty things.
btw, the sliding applications menu was created because of the feelings one gets after having navigated some 3 or more levels down a pop-up menu (aka windows or "old" kde menu), only to accidentally click or move mouse over something incorrectly. F !
I'd have thought that the way it "overwrites" the previous menu would have made inexperienced users afraid to click anything on it, for fear that they wouldn't be able to get back. The one common thing I've noticed among novice users is that they seem terrified of either causing some kind of damage, or of committing to something and not being able to "undo" their action. A traditional applications menu (Gnome, KDE3, Windows) leaves the previous sections up, so going down a level in the menu feels more like flipping through options and less like committing to something.
That's why I'm so surprised that it tested well among users, and especially novice users. I just *know* that it would scare the crap out of my parents, for instance. Hell, it unnerved me a bit at first, and I'm hardly a novice!
now, with the applications menu my main complaint is the sliding, which is quite slow and jerky on machines where xorg doesn't have full support for a video adapter (too new...), so vesa video has to be used.
It was slow on mine, too, and I've got a well-supported and fairly powerful video card (Nvidia 8400). That was the other reason I didn't use it very long; even if I knew for certain which sub-menu I wanted, it was still taking me more time to get there than it does in Gnome. It's just hard to get much faster than a snappy, no-animation "click, hover, click", but without that animation, KDE4's menu would likely be very hard to follow, especially for inexperienced users.
OK, good, I haven't forgotten everything from the 1990s. Yet. It does at least make new frames for each level of the menu, rather than acting like it doesn't have the whole damn screen to sprawl around on.
But yeah, multiple menus on the bar is the way to go. Keeps my favorite folders and system config options well away from my applications menu.
On the other hand, that menu was made based on the results of actual data from surveys made by the opensuse guys, not just from people bitching on the internet:).
Surveys of whom? The people who think The Gimp does not have and has never had problems with its GUI? Surveys of people who exclusively use their phones for their tech-related needs, and have never seen a desktop or laptop computer?
I'm certain that if I suggested KDE4 to ANYONE that I know, and they gave it a shot, the first thing they'd ask (assuming they didn't figure it out on their own) is how to fix the applications menu. It's the worst menu of its type that I've ever seen, and, as I mentioned, Vista's is really bad, so that's saying something.
Honestly, I thought the old one was a mess, too, but for entirely different reasons. The Gnome Applications menu is the cleanest, most straightforward, and easiest-to-navigate menu I've ever seen, and I'll be expecting something that can meet or beat it in speed and ease of use. Something kind of XFCE-like, except in a traditional "start menu" format, might be cool--hover on a category to get the full app menu, or CLICK on a category to start the default program for it (e.g. Openoffice Writer for "office", or Firefox for "internet", all customizable of course). Or just copy any of the many menus that are better than either the old or the new KDE menu. There are only so many things you can do to the established main-menu concept, at this point, that will actually improve on it; most changes are going to make things worse.
Even the XP start menu is, IMO, a step up from the old KDE menu, which is, in turn, a GIANT step up from this new one, which was facepalm-inducingly bad. And I'm not really a big fan of the XP start menu.
Hopefully there will be a bunch of custom ones that work better, but it's still kind of off-putting that the default would be as bad as this.
Screw the bugs, I know they'll fix most or all of those.
I just hope to god this menu isn't final. I installed it to try it out, because it looks *so* pretty, drooled over the desktop for a bit, then clicked the applications menu (or the K menu, or wtf every they call it in KDE land) and was taken aback. "OK, so I click this to get to my programs, I guess... Oh, no new pane, it just used the same one to display the new menu and shoved the other one 'off screen'... huh, this one ALSO doesn't have my programs on it. Click again on that category, it looks like the one I want. Now on the program. Oh, shit, wrong menu, how do I go back?"
It's like navigating the menus on my fucking cell phone. Those menus are clunky because they have to be, since screen real estate is at a premium. I can forgive that. A desktop OS' menu should never be like that. It's actually WORSE than the Vista start menu, which is saying something.
I just read The Catcher in the Rye and found it to be a terrible example of literature that shouldn't be read by anyone
Try Nine Stories. It's Salinger's best stuff, IMO. Stay far, far away from Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction. BAD.
Also, I just finished World War Z by Max Brooks, and feel the need to pimp it a bit. It's 1000x better than it has any right to be. I expected mindless entertainment, and went away from it saying, "huh, that was actually... good." Go figure.
Mine was an Odyssey2 and an NES at my grandparents' house. I tracked down an emulator and some roms a few weeks back... man, memories. Several of the games were still pretty fun.
Then it was Pac Man (some weird version where you could hit your moves in advance. Man, did that ever ruin me for the normal ones) and, IIRC, Avoid the Noid on a Tandy at home.
I'll still probably come back to Rails at some point. I'll just need a month or so alone and a couple of hobby projects that I want to start, and that'll do it. I really do know that I'd love it if I took the time to learn it.
You might check out Python, if you haven't. IMO, it's a great "generic" language. Say, you want to learn to use the WXWindows GUI toolkit, but you don't know which language you might need to use it in in the future; grab the python packages for it and go to town. 99% of your code will be specific to the WX library, and Python will just stay the hell out of your way. That's how I picked up Django so quickly; the MVC framework concept isn't difficult, provided you either already understand its base language or you don't need to understand its base language. Rails seems to require the former, while Django is more like the latter, largely due to the cleanness, simplicity, and all-around orthodoxy of Python. Unlike, say, PHP, it's not specialized too much in any one area, and is good for anything from web-based apps to OpenGL games, which makes it even better as a stand-in when you need to learn a given library or technology.
Also, PHP5 is better than 4. It's also got some MVC frameworks, if that's your style (I like CakePHP) and tons of libraries for templating, which might help that code/display problem you were talking about. As with Perl, PHP can be clean and elegant, but it enforces practically no style of any kind, so its up to the coder to keep the code out of spaghettiville. Not saying you should go back to it from Ruby, of course, but some of the language's biggest problems DO have solutions now.
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I can load the NDISWrapper module without loading any proprietary code. It wouldn't do much, but I could load it.
If there are any GPL WinXP wireless drivers, I could use it to load those, and still be 100% GPL.
This is basically saying that GPL code that allows users to load non-GPL drivers is not allowed, even though, as I understand it, the end user is supposed to be able to do ANYTHING THEY WANT with GPL code or binaries, and restrictions only come in when distributing. I should be able to use a GPL wrapper to load non-GPL code with full access to the Kernel if I want to, and at any rate, that wrapper is still 100% GPL, when distributed or even loaded on its own.
Not to mention how often the lists of cards that are "Linux compatible" are simply wrong.
My laptop's built-in card is supposed to work with the MadWifi drivers. There's even a specific and detailed entry for it on their site, noting that a modified module load order might be necessary. OK, so it doesn't work when I first install Ubuntu. That's to be expected. Try the modified load order... uh, still nothing. Ubuntu seems to detect that it needs that driver, but the driver doesn't actually do anything.
A couple hours later I give up, take the advice of one poster on the Ubuntu forums and just use NDISWrapper and the WinXP drivers. 5 minutes later, my card is working perfectly.
If this little dispute in any way breaks NDISWrapper, I hope my distribution just gives 'em the finger and patches around whatever breaks it, 'cuz from where I'm sitting, that looks like a bug.
Netflix+the local library+friends' music, movie, and TV collections (pirated or legitimate, doesn't matter) all combine to make it extremely inefficient for me to torrent 90% of the stuff that I might otherwise be inclined to.
All that's left are games, and about 50% of the time with those I'm pirating ones that I already own, but I've lost one or more of the discs or don't feel like finding them (especially with a well-seeded torrent of an older, single-CD game, I can have it in an hour or less with nearly no effort, while finding the CD might mean 15 minutes and a big mess). Sometimes it works in reverse, and I'll pirate the game when it's $60 (I *never* pay that much, even if I don't pirate the game; anything over $40 and I'll just wait, no matter how much I want it), play it once, delete it, then see it for $10 a year later, and buy it on a whim.
Am I the only one who felt like the writers were treading water for about 4-5 episodes before the Season 2 finale? I almost gave up on the show because of it, thinking that they'd hit a dead end, then was like, "OH, I see" when they threw in that "one year later" thing in the last episode.
YES. I'm considered a pretty far-left liberal (here in the U.S., anyway), and my stance on war and our behaviour therein reflects that (though I prefer to think of that particular position as simply being a consistent version of the overall world-view of most Americans, Conservatives and Liberals alike, rather than something that is truly "liberal"). However, when it comes to hypothetical situations like that of the humans in BSG, I have no problem with all kinds of awful stuff being done to the enemy (the Cylons) and in the name of survival of the species. If the species doesn't survive, no civil society can ever exist, so being decidedly un-civil for the duration of the threat is fine by me. We've risen from barbarism before, and can do it again.
They killed billions of people and are trying to finish off humanity. Damned near anything is justified in that situation. Leaving behind the non-warp-capable ships was the right decision. Killing (or imprisoning indefinitely, if you need their genes to keep a healthy reproductive pool) anyone found to be helping a Cylon in any way whatsoever, assuming they KNOW it's a Cylon, is entirely justifiable. The torture of the Six on the Pegasus was fine by me; the problem was the psychological effects on the crew, NOT what was actually being done, and destroying the psyche of a Cylon in that way is actually a pretty good idea (though I don't think that was their goal). I think they should have killed that half-Cylon baby; the fact that its existence proved, by sheer luck, to be useful later does not change the fact that killing it would have been the right decision--if the Cylons want it to exist, the humans should NOT want it to exist. I cheered when the suicide bomber took out those damned collaborators, even if he didn't manage to get Baltar. I got pissed when Starbuck didn't shoot the guy protecting Sharon on Caprica (I don't remember his name--the dad of the half-cylon kid).
Orange Catholic Bible all the way: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind". Butlerian Jihad their toaster asses.
Agreed. ~10hrs sleep followed by 18-20 hours waking would be ideal for me. Since I was a teen, I've reverted to a schedule roughly like that any time I've got more than a couple days with nowhere that I have to be and no-one complaining about my staying awake (parents then, now my wife :) )
My friends from high school almost all have sleep issues. A couple of them have worse insomnia than I do (if that's what you'd call it, I think it's just that my internal sleep clock is fucked up; I can sleep on a schedule, just not a 24-hour one!) and another only seems to need 3-4 hours a night--a 6-hour night is sleeping in for him, and he only rarely wants or needs to sleep that long (lucky bastard, he gets so much done, and HIS weird sleep thing doesn't interfere with a "normal" schedule!).
I'm running the Hardy Heron alpha, featuring FF3 Beta 3.
:)
I'm having terrible trouble with it. Bizarre image rendering issues (some render too high in their "frame", leaving a big black space at the bottom and the bottom half of the image rendered in the top half of the "frame", with the top of the image cut off, and other times images from WAY back in my browsing session will show up in odd places, like as a tiled background on another page), GMail hangs when I try to send e-mail every single time I try, and leaving it open too long has proven to be a great way to end up with an unstable mess.
Not refuting your post, just saying to anyone thinking about trying it, don't count on it being a great experience
It also seems slower to me (then again, so does the whole damned browser), and that was one of my biggest complaints about FF2: it took a *tiny* bit too long for those to pop up, so that if I hit "slash(DOWN)(ENTER)" too quickly, I'd end up browsing to the word "slash" rather than "slashdot.org". Throwing more processing power at the problem doesn't seem to fix it (if a dual-core 2.2Ghz won't fix a little problem like this, nothing will).
I've also got huge problems with image rendering (images that I browsed several pages ago showing up as a tiled background on the page I'm browsing now? WTF?), and Gmail is very, very broken (I can't send e-mail from it). I'm on Beta 3 in Ubuntu. Those are all bugs, though; the address bar thing seems to be a "feature", and I fear that the general UI unresponsiveness isn't going anywhere, either. Just give me back the address bar that used to be there, and make the suggestions pop up instantly. That's what I want, not slower with more "features" that I've never, ever wanted, and, after trying it out, still don't want.
OMG my BLOCKQUOTE has gotten out of its cage!
Notably, a very large proportion of this is backwards compatibility cruft. Do note that if you don't use old software, none of this will be loaded and really won't take up your RAM (if on the other hand you DO use old software, then it will use some tiny portion of this).
Wine is, what, MAYBE 20 MB installed? Granted, it doesn't run every Window program, but it does cover most of the API and run a huge number of them. Let's say it takes ten times that for horribly inefficient MS coders to do the same thing. 200MB.
Out of an 8.4GB windows folder.
XP was, what, 2.5GB, at most? AND it already included backwards compatibility with '98 and the rest of the MS family, but let's ignore that for the sake of argument. So we've accounted for 2.7GB. Now let's say Aero takes 500MB (WTF???). That's 3.2GB. Add 100MB for IE7 just for the hell of it. Another 500MB for IIS and other server software (which mine, with its 8.4GB windows folder, doesn't even have, I think, being "home professional" or whatever, not Ultimate, but let's say it's there, just disabled) and 1GB for Office and Office-related crap, even if it's not installed. Another 200MB for media and burning software (which is easily 3x the space that stuff has any right to use). 200MB for DRM (why not?).
So... we're up to 5.2GB, with INSANELY inflated numbers for everything (anything more than 1/5 the space I allotted for Aero and the new graphical interface would be a travesty, for example) and using inaccurate 1000MB gigabytes. 8.4GB is the target. Even throwing out totally crazy numbers, I can't manage to account for all that space. What in God's name have they done to use that much? Even if it doesn't matter because disk space is cheap (I disagree, BTW) I'd just love to know. It's just... so bizarre.
But WTF are they doing with that space!?? Ubuntu (Gnome environment+Firefox+OpenOffice+a bunch of media apps+Perl+Python+tons of other stuff) AND Kubuntu (KDE3+Koffice+Konqueror+dozens of other "K" apps) AND Xubuntu (XFCE4+a bunch of apps) AND the experimental KDE4 packages (basically KDE3 all over again, space-wise) COMBINED don't even hit 1/2 the disk usage of Vista.
/home, which is full of MP3s and such) is 3.7 GB. JUST THE WINDOWS FOLDER on my C: drive is 8.4GB, and the only extra app I've installed on there (in the grand total of maybe 1 hour that I've used it) is Firefox (and yes, I already cleaned out all the shit that HP "helpfully" installed for me). What in the holy hell have they done to use that much space????
I've got that (minus the XFCE4 part) and more (Apache2, Ruby on Rails, Postgresql, MySQL, Wine, a bunch of console emulators, tons of other junk) installed on the Ubuntu section of my laptop's HD, and the whole thing (excluding my
It still eats ungodly amounts of disk space, though.
I would love to know how they managed to waste so many MB. Instead of an easter egg flight sim on the level of the one in Excel, did they put in all of MS Flight Simulator X?
Seems to me it's fine, so long as it's impossible for anyone else to know that there's a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth...) password.
Keeps you out of legal trouble, anyway, even if they decide that you have to give up passwords or face prison.
Truecrypt (among other programs, but Truecrypt is free as in speech and as in beer) lets the user create an encrypted volume, then create a second one inside that, with a separate password. Without that second password, it is impossible to distinguish the embedded volume from empty space. You give out your password to the outer volume, and keep quiet about the existence of another.
A similar method could, I suppose, be used on practically any device with a significant amount of storage space.
I'd be more worried about the tech becoming common enough and easy enough to use that anyone with $100,000 and some spare time can make a super-virus, or a bacterium that is extremely hardy and destroys wheat or rice crops, or any number of other nasty things.
btw, the sliding applications menu was created because of the feelings one gets after having navigated some 3 or more levels down a pop-up menu (aka windows or "old" kde menu), only to accidentally click or move mouse over something incorrectly. F !
I'd have thought that the way it "overwrites" the previous menu would have made inexperienced users afraid to click anything on it, for fear that they wouldn't be able to get back. The one common thing I've noticed among novice users is that they seem terrified of either causing some kind of damage, or of committing to something and not being able to "undo" their action. A traditional applications menu (Gnome, KDE3, Windows) leaves the previous sections up, so going down a level in the menu feels more like flipping through options and less like committing to something.
That's why I'm so surprised that it tested well among users, and especially novice users. I just *know* that it would scare the crap out of my parents, for instance. Hell, it unnerved me a bit at first, and I'm hardly a novice!
now, with the applications menu my main complaint is the sliding, which is quite slow and jerky on machines where xorg doesn't have full support for a video adapter (too new...), so vesa video has to be used.
It was slow on mine, too, and I've got a well-supported and fairly powerful video card (Nvidia 8400). That was the other reason I didn't use it very long; even if I knew for certain which sub-menu I wanted, it was still taking me more time to get there than it does in Gnome. It's just hard to get much faster than a snappy, no-animation "click, hover, click", but without that animation, KDE4's menu would likely be very hard to follow, especially for inexperienced users.
Was Win95 really like that?
*checks youtube*
OK, good, I haven't forgotten everything from the 1990s. Yet. It does at least make new frames for each level of the menu, rather than acting like it doesn't have the whole damn screen to sprawl around on.
But yeah, multiple menus on the bar is the way to go. Keeps my favorite folders and system config options well away from my applications menu.
On the other hand, that menu was made based on the results of actual data from surveys made by the opensuse guys, not just from people bitching on the internet :).
Surveys of whom? The people who think The Gimp does not have and has never had problems with its GUI? Surveys of people who exclusively use their phones for their tech-related needs, and have never seen a desktop or laptop computer?
I'm certain that if I suggested KDE4 to ANYONE that I know, and they gave it a shot, the first thing they'd ask (assuming they didn't figure it out on their own) is how to fix the applications menu. It's the worst menu of its type that I've ever seen, and, as I mentioned, Vista's is really bad, so that's saying something.
Honestly, I thought the old one was a mess, too, but for entirely different reasons. The Gnome Applications menu is the cleanest, most straightforward, and easiest-to-navigate menu I've ever seen, and I'll be expecting something that can meet or beat it in speed and ease of use. Something kind of XFCE-like, except in a traditional "start menu" format, might be cool--hover on a category to get the full app menu, or CLICK on a category to start the default program for it (e.g. Openoffice Writer for "office", or Firefox for "internet", all customizable of course). Or just copy any of the many menus that are better than either the old or the new KDE menu. There are only so many things you can do to the established main-menu concept, at this point, that will actually improve on it; most changes are going to make things worse.
Even the XP start menu is, IMO, a step up from the old KDE menu, which is, in turn, a GIANT step up from this new one, which was facepalm-inducingly bad. And I'm not really a big fan of the XP start menu.
Hopefully there will be a bunch of custom ones that work better, but it's still kind of off-putting that the default would be as bad as this.
Screw the bugs, I know they'll fix most or all of those.
I just hope to god this menu isn't final. I installed it to try it out, because it looks *so* pretty, drooled over the desktop for a bit, then clicked the applications menu (or the K menu, or wtf every they call it in KDE land) and was taken aback. "OK, so I click this to get to my programs, I guess... Oh, no new pane, it just used the same one to display the new menu and shoved the other one 'off screen'... huh, this one ALSO doesn't have my programs on it. Click again on that category, it looks like the one I want. Now on the program. Oh, shit, wrong menu, how do I go back?"
It's like navigating the menus on my fucking cell phone. Those menus are clunky because they have to be, since screen real estate is at a premium. I can forgive that. A desktop OS' menu should never be like that. It's actually WORSE than the Vista start menu, which is saying something.
I just read The Catcher in the Rye and found it to be a terrible example of literature that shouldn't be read by anyone
Try Nine Stories. It's Salinger's best stuff, IMO. Stay far, far away from Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction. BAD.
Also, I just finished World War Z by Max Brooks, and feel the need to pimp it a bit. It's 1000x better than it has any right to be. I expected mindless entertainment, and went away from it saying, "huh, that was actually... good." Go figure.
I just hope to god that the tank recognition shit is accurate.
If I'm ever confronted with the profile of a T-34 and mis-recognize it as a T-44, that'll RUIN my day, absolutely RUIN it, I tell you!
Mine was an Odyssey2 and an NES at my grandparents' house. I tracked down an emulator and some roms a few weeks back... man, memories. Several of the games were still pretty fun.
Then it was Pac Man (some weird version where you could hit your moves in advance. Man, did that ever ruin me for the normal ones) and, IIRC, Avoid the Noid on a Tandy at home.
I'll still probably come back to Rails at some point. I'll just need a month or so alone and a couple of hobby projects that I want to start, and that'll do it. I really do know that I'd love it if I took the time to learn it.
You might check out Python, if you haven't. IMO, it's a great "generic" language. Say, you want to learn to use the WXWindows GUI toolkit, but you don't know which language you might need to use it in in the future; grab the python packages for it and go to town. 99% of your code will be specific to the WX library, and Python will just stay the hell out of your way. That's how I picked up Django so quickly; the MVC framework concept isn't difficult, provided you either already understand its base language or you don't need to understand its base language. Rails seems to require the former, while Django is more like the latter, largely due to the cleanness, simplicity, and all-around orthodoxy of Python. Unlike, say, PHP, it's not specialized too much in any one area, and is good for anything from web-based apps to OpenGL games, which makes it even better as a stand-in when you need to learn a given library or technology.
Also, PHP5 is better than 4. It's also got some MVC frameworks, if that's your style (I like CakePHP) and tons of libraries for templating, which might help that code/display problem you were talking about. As with Perl, PHP can be clean and elegant, but it enforces practically no style of any kind, so its up to the coder to keep the code out of spaghettiville. Not saying you should go back to it from Ruby, of course, but some of the language's biggest problems DO have solutions now.