It's also the Linux and Apple answer... What those two systems have been using for years.
Well... Linux does have the option to compile the drivers directly into the kernel rather than having them as loaded modules, but most distributions use a microkernel with loadable modules/firmware.
It does more than reducing the footprint at boot time. It makes the system more resilient to driver crashes as it gives the system the option to unload a driver and reload it.
Prior art, at the hands of *many* vendors, notably Xerox and Apple. The idea is old enough that it's in the public domain and even these companies wouldn't be able to patent it.
But really, without knowing what network card you have, I can't help. I do know that with Zenwalk, every network driver is compiled as a module and can be enabled manually if it isn't detected.
Perhaps your problem is with Ubuntu and not with Linux.
802.11n is still a very new technology. So new that the format war is still going on... different vendors have different definitions of what goes into it, and we're at a point that there's no guarantee that a D-Link 802.11n card will work with a Cisco/Linksys 802.11n router. To say nothing of other vendors with other definitions.
What's that got to do with Linux? Well... Dell may be working on drivers, but Dell doesn't manufacture wireless cards. Dell chooses a wireless chipset and rebrands it. Because it's a new technology, there's a chance that the open source drivers haven't been written yet, and that you're going to have to wait.
It's worth pointing out that the default wireless card that's available with that notebook is an Intel PRO/Wireless 3945, which has very well developped and supported Linux drivers, released to the open source world and linux kernel by Intel itself. ( http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/ ) When I ordered my own laptop, I stuck with the Intel card for exactly that reason.
LILO copies a kernel image to its boot area. It doesn't matter if you change the kernel on the hard drive, because LILO's installed image won't change until you invoke the "lilo" command. I've actually seen LILO successfully boot a kernel and initrd (which panicked) after I had formatted a drive and removed all of the partitions, because I hadn't bothered to wipe the MBR.
With GRUB, however, it's live. If you make a change to your menu.lst file, that change will take effect immediately. And while admittedly, I don't use GRUB, I don't think there's actually a test utility that will tell you whether your menu.lst is properly configured without rebooting. Correct me if I'm wrong, as I frequently am. The recovery console is useful, but as I'm often tinkering with things, I prefer to have a bootloader that's static, and won't change until I explicitly tell it to. There's also the "lilo -v -t" command to test when I make a change to/etc/lilo.conf.
Slackware-based distros, for example, use runlevel 4 for X instead of RL 5. They also have *all* init scripts in/etc/rc.d, and the scripts are started on basis of whether they're executable. Anything runlevel-specific, like login managers and X servers are then loaded from/etc/rc.d/rcX.S where X is the runlevel.
that's to say nothing of distros that aren't even using SysV init, like the current version of Ubuntu and anything BSD-based.
It was pretty obvious that the author hasn't done his research, and that it's a pretty poor attempt at explaining stuff. I was rather hoping for an article where the author would actually parse the output of dmesg and explain, line for line, what everything meant. That would actually be informative. Instead, he gave information that was specific to RedHat Linux, a lot of which doesn't apply to other distros. I wouldn't even be complaining so much, except that he didn't even bother to write it specific to the most popular Linux distro. RedHat was the most popular when I started with Linux, over a decade ago. These days, that crown belongs to Ubuntu. If you're going to write something distro-specific, at least write it for the most popular one.
Obligatory disclaimer: The last version of RedHat that I used was RedHat 6.0. When 7.0 came out, I switched to Slackware. I now use Zenwalk (slack-based, formerly MiniSlack, http://www.zenwalk.org/), having switched at Zenwalk 2.4. I have tried other distros, including Ubuntu, and still prefer Slackware-based distributions, and I find that the Zenwalk community and package management tools are the best of that breed.
What, you don't have antiperspirants in your country already?
Most antiperspirants use either Aluminum Chloride, Aluminum Nitrate, or some other Aluminum-based salt to trick the body into not sweating. Some people, myself included, are allergic to Aluminmum, and applying a salt containing it to the skin will cause profuse sweating.
Now... a deodorant stick that uses this kind of property to trick the body into thinking it's cold and not sweating in the first place could be called an antiperspirant, but the kind you're talking about isn't an option for everybody.
Last laptop I bought from Compaq came with a copy of Windows XP Home edition (labelled as a recovery CD), and a second CD labelled as "application recovery CD" that had the Norton Antivirus, MS Works, etc. on it. It also came with a third CD, labelled as "driver recovery CD", that had all the drivers on it. If I wanted XP Home, I could quite easily have wiped the hard drive using the XP Home CD that came with it, and then used the driver CD to install the drivers. In fact, I have done exactly that a few times during the year it was under warranty, and I did exactly that over the weekend so I can resell it.
And I'm not sure you've looked on the website lately, but when you configure a Dell you have the option of choosing no ISP preinstalled. On the Dell.CA website, you do have to take either McAfee or Norton, but on the Dell.COM website, you can order a system without either.
Because Apple is a hardware vendor and not a software vendor. They happen to include an operating system with their computers, and they happen to sell upgrades to that operating system in stores, but you are paying them for the computer not for the OS. There's nothing to stop you from buying a new Apple and then formatting it and installing Linux or Windows.
This was answered in TFA... did you bother to read it?
Sure they can. They just need to know a related language. I can distinguish between Italian, Spanish, Latin, Romansch and French, even though I only speak Spanish, Latin, and French. I can distinguish between German, Dutch, English, etc. Even though I only speak English. I can distinguish between Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Korean, even though the only language from that part of the world I speak is Japanese.
You may not be able to distinguish the language, but all you really need is exposure to it, and an ear that's trained to hear the differences in the language. It isn't actually that hard.
Now ask me to read a language like Korean, and I'm as useless as you.
I call, bullshit, guys clothes are just as expensive as women's clothes if you compare like with like. If you are some no style nerd, obviously you're gunna pay less, but if you compare hot clothes, then guy's is often more, likewise, if you go into Primark, the £2 mountains are all chicks stuff, the equivalent guy's stuff is like £4-£5, and guy's clothes are all boring compared to chick's stuff anyway
A top-end womens' gown will set you back well over $2000. The last time I bought a top-end suit, it cost $800. It's a Boca. Like compared with like. Womens' clothes cost more.
Yeah. But nevertheless, essentially the only reason it costs more is that women will pay more.
Women don't want to pay more for goods/services. It's more a question of society dictating that they should pay more. A pretty stupid double standard, really.
It is changing, though. I know women who go shopping for mens' clothes, because they can get basically the same clothes for less. I've personally seen the *exact same* shirt on sale in the mens' department and the womens' department of a store, and the version in the mens' department was less than half the cost. It's changing.
nucular battery isn't rechargeable though. not without going out and buying some more fuel for it. It'd be great if my laptop had a lithium or other chemical battery that could power it for say 40 hours without a recharge, but I am not going to go down to my local store and buy some polonium or tritium or some other radioactive isotope to recharge the battery.
In that case, the battery needs to last the service life of the laptop. Need to find a happy medium... somebody out there is still using a 10-year old laptop, but you don't need to worry about them. 5 years is probably a reasonable medium, maybe 3 or 4 years. but any less, and you'd start cutting off too many people.
When an old scientist says something is possible, he is probably right. When an old scientist says something is impossible he is probably wrong. (I'll let you ponder the seeming paradox, but you'd have to know some old scientists to really get it.)
Nah... Don't really need to know an old scientist to get it. Just have to have enough of a background in science. A High School education should be enough to realize that science changes over time, but the people practicing it don't always. So somebody who studied 30 or 40 years ago may not be current with the state of things. Something that wasn't possible 40 years ago may not necessarily be impossible today.
If you'd told a computer scientist 40 years ago that today we'd have cellular phones that weigh 120 grams and have a 350MHz processor and 1GB of storage, and that it was able to operate for a week on a self-contained battery, or up to 5 or 6 hours of transmit time in a 2-way telephone conversation, they probably would have balked. That's a device with more processing power than the most powerful computer in the world 40 years ago, and I'm holding one in my hand right now. It cost me $50, 3 years ago.
Impossible is an illusion. Anything that's impossible today is only impossible because we haven't figured out how to do it yet.
Depending on where you posted them, and what purpose posting them has, then yes, they would be illegal. I doubt very much that anybody in those pictures is going to make a complaint, but Canadian privacy laws say that you need written consent from everybody who appears in images that you publish. They also say that if you don't get written consent from anybody, then you can't publish them.
It's up to the person whose privacy has been violated to make a complaint and prosecute though.
The thing that separates your website from something like Google StreetView is that in Google's service, a whole lot more people are going to see the images, and there's a whole lot more images, so it's a whole lot more likely that somebody who didn't give consent is going to see their picture. Now most people probably wouldn't have any privacy concerns about it, but what if they publish an embarrassing picture like they've done on the US side? I think we've all seen some collection or another of pictures on Google's service where somebody's caught leering at a pretty girl, or going for a pee on the side of a highway, or walking in front of their window in the nude. All it takes is for one person caught in a compromising situation to notice their picture on Google's service and to make a complaint in order to shut down the service. Depending on how far they're willing to take their privacy complaint, it could actually shut Google out of Canada in its entirety.
It's called "cover your ass". And by blurring license plates and faces, Google can make a claim that the people they're photographing are anonymous. The laws in Canada are there to protect the people, which I know is a foreign concept to Americans lately, but it's one you guys should really consider reexamining.
Can be read a few different ways: you could mean a computer that's ruggedized, you could mean a computer that's reliable, you could mean a combonation of the above...
If you want a ruggedized laptop, try the Dell Latitude ATG series. I've actually seen one be dropped from a height of about 4 feet, while running, without causing a hard drive crash or any appreciable damage to the thing. It didn't even crash/shut down.
As far as reliability goes, I can't complain about my Compaq R4000-series lappy. But it's 2 years old, so things may have changed... my next laptop is probably going to be one of the new Dells (not ruggedized, but the cheaper 1500 series Inspirons), but I haven't made up my mind yet. A pity it's so hard to get laptop parts and build your own these days. As far as reliability goes, my father is back on his old Dell Latitude again today, after his newer laptop fried itself again. He's never had any complaints with it, and it's certainly more reliable than the one he'd replaced it with, which has crapped out on him twice since he bought it a year ago. The first time was the screen, and this time it's the CPU fan, which caused the CPU itself to crater.
Right now all a trip to the Moon will get us is a bunch of guys walking around looking at stuff that Americans saw over 50 years ago. None of the things you're talking about are going to happen on the moon for at least 20 years (and I think that's a very conservative estimate), especially anything like manufacturing, so why go back now?
Because if we don't start going back now, and working out the kinks in travelling to the Moon, and figuring out the logistics of how to get a support base there, then it'll *always* be another 20 years away?
A moon base has been "20 years away" for as long as I've been alive. We have the technology to do it now, what we don't have is the impetus. And the main reason we don't have the impetus is because nobody's going there. All desire to build a moon base stopped in the 70's, when we stopped going there.
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studies link the drop in crime to people not breaking the law.
It's also the Linux and Apple answer... What those two systems have been using for years.
Well... Linux does have the option to compile the drivers directly into the kernel rather than having them as loaded modules, but most distributions use a microkernel with loadable modules/firmware.
It does more than reducing the footprint at boot time. It makes the system more resilient to driver crashes as it gives the system the option to unload a driver and reload it.
Prior art, at the hands of *many* vendors, notably Xerox and Apple. The idea is old enough that it's in the public domain and even these companies wouldn't be able to patent it.
oh, for mod points. +1 funny
they'd rather do that than have you return the computer. :)
You could try a different distro. I prefer Zenwalk... http://www.zenwalk.org/
But really, without knowing what network card you have, I can't help. I do know that with Zenwalk, every network driver is compiled as a module and can be enabled manually if it isn't detected.
Perhaps your problem is with Ubuntu and not with Linux.
802.11n is still a very new technology. So new that the format war is still going on... different vendors have different definitions of what goes into it, and we're at a point that there's no guarantee that a D-Link 802.11n card will work with a Cisco/Linksys 802.11n router. To say nothing of other vendors with other definitions.
What's that got to do with Linux? Well... Dell may be working on drivers, but Dell doesn't manufacture wireless cards. Dell chooses a wireless chipset and rebrands it. Because it's a new technology, there's a chance that the open source drivers haven't been written yet, and that you're going to have to wait.
It's worth pointing out that the default wireless card that's available with that notebook is an Intel PRO/Wireless 3945, which has very well developped and supported Linux drivers, released to the open source world and linux kernel by Intel itself. ( http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/ ) When I ordered my own laptop, I stuck with the Intel card for exactly that reason.
... You do know they sell versions of Windows without all the bells/whistles/bling for servers? Windows Server 2003, for example.
Part right, part wrong.
/etc/lilo.conf.
LILO copies a kernel image to its boot area. It doesn't matter if you change the kernel on the hard drive, because LILO's installed image won't change until you invoke the "lilo" command. I've actually seen LILO successfully boot a kernel and initrd (which panicked) after I had formatted a drive and removed all of the partitions, because I hadn't bothered to wipe the MBR.
With GRUB, however, it's live. If you make a change to your menu.lst file, that change will take effect immediately. And while admittedly, I don't use GRUB, I don't think there's actually a test utility that will tell you whether your menu.lst is properly configured without rebooting. Correct me if I'm wrong, as I frequently am. The recovery console is useful, but as I'm often tinkering with things, I prefer to have a bootloader that's static, and won't change until I explicitly tell it to. There's also the "lilo -v -t" command to test when I make a change to
Yeah, but that's very *very* distro-specific.
/etc/rc.d, and the scripts are started on basis of whether they're executable. Anything runlevel-specific, like login managers and X servers are then loaded from /etc/rc.d/rcX.S where X is the runlevel.
Slackware-based distros, for example, use runlevel 4 for X instead of RL 5. They also have *all* init scripts in
that's to say nothing of distros that aren't even using SysV init, like the current version of Ubuntu and anything BSD-based.
It was pretty obvious that the author hasn't done his research, and that it's a pretty poor attempt at explaining stuff. I was rather hoping for an article where the author would actually parse the output of dmesg and explain, line for line, what everything meant. That would actually be informative. Instead, he gave information that was specific to RedHat Linux, a lot of which doesn't apply to other distros. I wouldn't even be complaining so much, except that he didn't even bother to write it specific to the most popular Linux distro. RedHat was the most popular when I started with Linux, over a decade ago. These days, that crown belongs to Ubuntu. If you're going to write something distro-specific, at least write it for the most popular one.
Obligatory disclaimer: The last version of RedHat that I used was RedHat 6.0. When 7.0 came out, I switched to Slackware. I now use Zenwalk (slack-based, formerly MiniSlack, http://www.zenwalk.org/), having switched at Zenwalk 2.4. I have tried other distros, including Ubuntu, and still prefer Slackware-based distributions, and I find that the Zenwalk community and package management tools are the best of that breed.
Most antiperspirants use either Aluminum Chloride, Aluminum Nitrate, or some other Aluminum-based salt to trick the body into not sweating. Some people, myself included, are allergic to Aluminmum, and applying a salt containing it to the skin will cause profuse sweating.
Now... a deodorant stick that uses this kind of property to trick the body into thinking it's cold and not sweating in the first place could be called an antiperspirant, but the kind you're talking about isn't an option for everybody.
Supply and demand. It's $160 at my dentist for the same service, and that's in Canadian dollars, which are worth more than Yankee bucks.
Last laptop I bought from Compaq came with a copy of Windows XP Home edition (labelled as a recovery CD), and a second CD labelled as "application recovery CD" that had the Norton Antivirus, MS Works, etc. on it. It also came with a third CD, labelled as "driver recovery CD", that had all the drivers on it. If I wanted XP Home, I could quite easily have wiped the hard drive using the XP Home CD that came with it, and then used the driver CD to install the drivers. In fact, I have done exactly that a few times during the year it was under warranty, and I did exactly that over the weekend so I can resell it.
And I'm not sure you've looked on the website lately, but when you configure a Dell you have the option of choosing no ISP preinstalled. On the Dell.CA website, you do have to take either McAfee or Norton, but on the Dell.COM website, you can order a system without either.
Do your research before you spout off.
Because Apple is a hardware vendor and not a software vendor. They happen to include an operating system with their computers, and they happen to sell upgrades to that operating system in stores, but you are paying them for the computer not for the OS. There's nothing to stop you from buying a new Apple and then formatting it and installing Linux or Windows.
This was answered in TFA... did you bother to read it?
Sure they can. They just need to know a related language. I can distinguish between Italian, Spanish, Latin, Romansch and French, even though I only speak Spanish, Latin, and French. I can distinguish between German, Dutch, English, etc. Even though I only speak English. I can distinguish between Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Korean, even though the only language from that part of the world I speak is Japanese.
You may not be able to distinguish the language, but all you really need is exposure to it, and an ear that's trained to hear the differences in the language. It isn't actually that hard.
Now ask me to read a language like Korean, and I'm as useless as you.
Ahh... but you see, in Iran, you can get a sex change operation as a "cure" for homosexuality.
A top-end womens' gown will set you back well over $2000. The last time I bought a top-end suit, it cost $800. It's a Boca. Like compared with like. Womens' clothes cost more.
Women don't want to pay more for goods/services. It's more a question of society dictating that they should pay more. A pretty stupid double standard, really.
It is changing, though. I know women who go shopping for mens' clothes, because they can get basically the same clothes for less. I've personally seen the *exact same* shirt on sale in the mens' department and the womens' department of a store, and the version in the mens' department was less than half the cost. It's changing.
nucular battery isn't rechargeable though. not without going out and buying some more fuel for it. It'd be great if my laptop had a lithium or other chemical battery that could power it for say 40 hours without a recharge, but I am not going to go down to my local store and buy some polonium or tritium or some other radioactive isotope to recharge the battery.
In that case, the battery needs to last the service life of the laptop. Need to find a happy medium... somebody out there is still using a 10-year old laptop, but you don't need to worry about them. 5 years is probably a reasonable medium, maybe 3 or 4 years. but any less, and you'd start cutting off too many people.
Nah... Don't really need to know an old scientist to get it. Just have to have enough of a background in science. A High School education should be enough to realize that science changes over time, but the people practicing it don't always. So somebody who studied 30 or 40 years ago may not be current with the state of things. Something that wasn't possible 40 years ago may not necessarily be impossible today.
If you'd told a computer scientist 40 years ago that today we'd have cellular phones that weigh 120 grams and have a 350MHz processor and 1GB of storage, and that it was able to operate for a week on a self-contained battery, or up to 5 or 6 hours of transmit time in a 2-way telephone conversation, they probably would have balked. That's a device with more processing power than the most powerful computer in the world 40 years ago, and I'm holding one in my hand right now. It cost me $50, 3 years ago.
Impossible is an illusion. Anything that's impossible today is only impossible because we haven't figured out how to do it yet.
Depending on where you posted them, and what purpose posting them has, then yes, they would be illegal. I doubt very much that anybody in those pictures is going to make a complaint, but Canadian privacy laws say that you need written consent from everybody who appears in images that you publish. They also say that if you don't get written consent from anybody, then you can't publish them.
It's up to the person whose privacy has been violated to make a complaint and prosecute though.
The thing that separates your website from something like Google StreetView is that in Google's service, a whole lot more people are going to see the images, and there's a whole lot more images, so it's a whole lot more likely that somebody who didn't give consent is going to see their picture. Now most people probably wouldn't have any privacy concerns about it, but what if they publish an embarrassing picture like they've done on the US side? I think we've all seen some collection or another of pictures on Google's service where somebody's caught leering at a pretty girl, or going for a pee on the side of a highway, or walking in front of their window in the nude. All it takes is for one person caught in a compromising situation to notice their picture on Google's service and to make a complaint in order to shut down the service. Depending on how far they're willing to take their privacy complaint, it could actually shut Google out of Canada in its entirety.
It's called "cover your ass". And by blurring license plates and faces, Google can make a claim that the people they're photographing are anonymous. The laws in Canada are there to protect the people, which I know is a foreign concept to Americans lately, but it's one you guys should really consider reexamining.
Can be read a few different ways: you could mean a computer that's ruggedized, you could mean a computer that's reliable, you could mean a combonation of the above...
If you want a ruggedized laptop, try the Dell Latitude ATG series. I've actually seen one be dropped from a height of about 4 feet, while running, without causing a hard drive crash or any appreciable damage to the thing. It didn't even crash/shut down.
As far as reliability goes, I can't complain about my Compaq R4000-series lappy. But it's 2 years old, so things may have changed... my next laptop is probably going to be one of the new Dells (not ruggedized, but the cheaper 1500 series Inspirons), but I haven't made up my mind yet. A pity it's so hard to get laptop parts and build your own these days. As far as reliability goes, my father is back on his old Dell Latitude again today, after his newer laptop fried itself again. He's never had any complaints with it, and it's certainly more reliable than the one he'd replaced it with, which has crapped out on him twice since he bought it a year ago. The first time was the screen, and this time it's the CPU fan, which caused the CPU itself to crater.
And dangerously close to a Bath. Good god, man... you're a Geek. Show some pride.
Because if we don't start going back now, and working out the kinks in travelling to the Moon, and figuring out the logistics of how to get a support base there, then it'll *always* be another 20 years away?
A moon base has been "20 years away" for as long as I've been alive. We have the technology to do it now, what we don't have is the impetus. And the main reason we don't have the impetus is because nobody's going there. All desire to build a moon base stopped in the 70's, when we stopped going there.
To put it another way... As of 2005, the Canadian national debt was $499bn. The US National deficit was $508bn.
That is to say that the US national debt increases each year by a value greater than the total Canadian national debt, every year.
That might have something to do with why the US dollar is plummetting in value and the Canadian dollar is on the rise.