yes you can swap. if you have both gnome and kde installed, there will be a menu item on the login screen where you can select the section type (kde or gnome).
be adived that if you change the session type this way, your profile's scripts (i.e..profile,.bash_rc, etc) may not be executed.
the workaround is to create a file in your $HOME directory called.Xsession and put in there the command that starts your desired environment. for KDE it's "starkde". have no idea which command starts gnome.
i did my taxes on linux thanks to a nice java application created by those nice federal employees in brasilia... nice to live in a country where the govt supports open source.
i balance my checkbook in a spreadsheet. i tried many "finance managers" and hated all of them. OOo serves me well for that.
ipod ? definetly. have been using mine with amarok for a year and a half. buy MP3s ? fine. firefox + amazon MP3 store. they even have a version of their download manager for linux. then you use amarok to load them on the ipod.
legacy ? hmmmm. ok, i'm geek enough to admit you have a point. support for legacy windows apps with wine is sketchy and hard to configure, but things are improving, and FAST. i just got sid meyer's civilization IV working on wine, but if even a geek like me had problem, joe sixpack is pretty much SOL on this area.
all things considered, is my opinion that linux is as viable as a windows alternative as mac os X. i've used all three (plus OS/2 many years ago) and believe me, in all the major areas, the playing field is level.
i managed to have the internal display of my laptop and my tv set working simultaneously on ubuntu in a couple of minutes using nvidia's confuguration app.
the only problem i had was with random lockups because of shitty implementation by HP of some hardware on the motherboard. next time, i'll buy dell, but it doesnt change the fact that configuring multiple monitors in linux is not that hard anymore.
other stuff ? sure. but problems with shitty hardware/drivers it's not a linux exclusive. see the problems vista users had with creative sound cards.
Re:What the hell were they thinking?
on
ISO Releases OOXML FAQ
·
· Score: 2, Informative
you're doing it wrong. first you need to compare your mass to a reference using a balance scale, THEN you use a spring scale to measure the weight force (in newtons) your body produces. with the two values at hand, you divide your weight by your mass, and the result should be 9.8
using only a spring scale in your bathroom simply won't tell you anything, unless you calibrate it everyday with copy of the international prototype kilogram (IPK).
man, this is the second time in less than a week that i post something absolutelly pedantic... should i start to worry ?
Re:panzer tank ???
on
The DIY Tank
·
· Score: 2, Funny
they also speak french in Switzerland. but i understand why they used the german word instead of the term the french usually use when they see a tank: "J'abandonne!!!" (I surrender!!!)
Re:In English, Panzer doesn't mean tank
on
The DIY Tank
·
· Score: 1
who said i was trying to be "insightful" ?
from slashdot's FAQ:
"If You Can't Be Deep, Be Funny: If you don't have something truly developing to the topic, some humor is welcome."
Re:panzer tank ???
on
The DIY Tank
·
· Score: 4, Funny
austria's official language is also german. so a panzer made in austria would be an "austrian panzer"...
i know, i know. this reply was too pedantic, even for me. but hey!! i'm a geek... "pedantic geek" is as reduntat as "panzer tank", right ?
panzer tank ???
on
The DIY Tank
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"panzer tank" ??? where did this come from ? the redundant department of redundancy ? panzer already is german for "tank".
you either say "german tank" or "german panzer", but "panzer tank"??? sheesh.
it's a self-contained system, easily made resilient by increasing over-enginnering.
compare with a drive-by-wire:
- steering wheel - electronic sensors (either potentiometers or optical sensors) - assorted wires and connectors - a computer to interpret the data - a power interface for the computer - electrical actuators - wheel mounted sensors to give feedback to the computer
and all the above must be duplicated (for redundancy) and relies on these external systems:
now, imagine a 15 year old car, whith a shorted battery causing random failures on peripheral systems such as voltage regulators, diodes and triodes, usually mounted on the alternator's chassis... well, that car was my own crap-mobille, until last month when an electrician finally found that the battery was the cause of my problems. oh, and it was not shoddy maintenance from my part. the shorted battery was less than a year old. it was a factory defect on that piece of shit.
in a drive-by-wire car, i would have crashed the car several times.
car makers could've removed the axle, cranck and pinion a long time ago when hydraulic power steering first apeared. they remained there because in a (rare) moment of sanity, the engineers decided it'd be safer to keep a backup mechanical system in paralel with the hydraulics.
it's a short, one page arcticle, drop the excuses and RTFA!
most of the arcticle is about the old detroit electric and the company that used to make it. the only paragraph of interest is this:
"To promote itself, Detroit Electric--a new joint venture between Zap and China's Youngman Automotive Group--plan to release a limited number of cars based around the Detroit Electric, an electric car produced by the Anderson Electric Car Co. in the early part of the 20th century."
my guess is that it's gonna be something like the P/T cruiser, prowler or new beetle. a modern design inspired by a (very) old one.
just because it's not open source, doesn't mean they can't use the "release early, release often" method.
for MS, CA, oracle, etc. to release a major version of their products, it's a pain. pressing CDs/DVDs, shipping them, retraing tech support, etc. now, for google, it's as easy as FTPing the new code to a server, that's why "release early, release often" works for GOOG, and not for the others.
and since it's in perpetual beta, they don't even have to bother with support. they're not obligated to give support for something that's essentially a prototype.
SCP is new stuff, tunneled over ssh. i think you mean RCP, dontcha ? the old school non-encrypted stuff that could be configured to work without password using.rhosts on the destination host.
that's why we disable it in all unix boxes here at work.
if a million americans reduce their power usage in half, this means maybe 2 or 3 million people in sub-devoleped nations will be able to turn their light and refigerators on without adding any environmental impact.
here i brasil i know places where people have only one or two 60 watts light bulbs and a small refrigerator in their homes (and not by choice. it's imposed by poverty). compare such households with the enourmous waste of power that's las vegas, and you see that those people is the US installing LED bulbs and solar pannel are making out for the people being connected to the grid.
it might not help solve anything, but helps delay any impact by sub-developed countries that increasing their power output.
i publish my CPF everytime i write a check, fill a form in a brasilian website, give my data to someone transfer money to my bank account. my CPF is probably around in some crooks databse right now. so what ?
that's the number on my registration card. it was issued when i registered and had my fingerprints taken in the public security office here in sao paulo.
and you know what ? IS NOT A BIG DEAL.
get over it, USians. the govt already know who you are. how many databases you're registered on ? DMV, social security, schools permanent records, with the military, and so on.
if the govt is not abusing all that info, then a national ID will be just a formality without adding any risk.
now, if they ARE using all the info they already have against the population, a new database won't make any difference. and you people should seriously start considering a revolution.
so, then what's neccessary to stop saudi arabia, china and pakistan to stop being vicious dictatorships and actually respect its citizens'human rights ?
oh, wait. silly me. cuba doesn't have nukes like china and pakistan nor oil like saudi arabia. sorry.
last time i flew was when i returned from recife (northeast) to sao paulo. at the gate, after going through security, they asked people with seats in front of the plane to form one line, people in the back to form another and pregnant women, elders and people with children in front of everyone.
Can't they figure out how to water proof the phone lines and boxes and other stuff?
i worked for sometime for a brasilian POTS operator. being just a few kilometers north of the tropic of capricorn, sao paulo suffers a lot with rains and floods. one of the technologies the local POTS utility uses to ensure the cables don't short out when the tunnels flood is pressurized cables.
the cables in which the twisted-pair copper wires run are sealed, air compressors at the ends pumps air into the cable and keeps the pressure inside above the external pressure, this way even if the cable is ruptured, the water can't get in to short the wires.
a friend of mine implanted a system that (among other things) measured the pressure on several places along the cable, so a rupture would be detected and a repair crew dispatched to the correct place. i implanted another system that could test lines for (among other parameters) the capacitance and resistivity of the individual twisted pairs, so a short circuit could be detected, and at which distance from the switching board.
but this is sao paulo, in rio de janeiro they suffer(ed, don't know if they fixed the system there) from the same probles as you do, maybe worse, because they also have to deal with salt from the sea corroding the wires.
point is, there _are_ ways to keep the phone system working, even under the mother of all storms (like the one last week here).
it's not because their products suck. is because their product is a unix for x86 platform, so it have to compete with "good enough" products that are pretty much free (as both in freedom and beer) like linux, xBSD, solaris x86.
and in the higher end, even on open patforms like sparc, it's tough to beat HP/IBM/Sun.
since the days of old SCO (now tarantella), they always operated on a niche. now this niche disapeared, or was taken by the newcomers. old SCO realized that, got rid of the unix business and wen't on selling applications until they were bought by Sun.
if the new SCO (former caldera) had did the same, using their unix business to finance the development of other kinds of software, phase out the unix business, maybe they wouldn't be in this situation.
Slashdot Mirror
yes you can swap. if you have both gnome and kde installed, there will be a menu item on the login screen where you can select the section type (kde or gnome).
.profile, .bash_rc, etc) may not be executed.
.Xsession and put in there the command that starts your desired environment. for KDE it's "starkde". have no idea which command starts gnome.
/i don't believe in gnomes. i run over them.
be adived that if you change the session type this way, your profile's scripts (i.e.
the workaround is to create a file in your $HOME directory called
your country may have to fight saudi arabia or iran sooner or later (sooner if a bush-like candidate like mccain gets elected).
saudi arabia is full of US made m1 abrams, iran is producing their own main battle tanks...
if it doesn't work tove may end up killing linus... and since she's 5 time finnish karate champion, that'll be pretty damn easy for her.
like he said: youtube no workee, wife no happy.
i did my taxes on linux thanks to a nice java application created by those nice federal employees in brasilia... nice to live in a country where the govt supports open source.
i balance my checkbook in a spreadsheet. i tried many "finance managers" and hated all of them. OOo serves me well for that.
ipod ? definetly. have been using mine with amarok for a year and a half. buy MP3s ? fine. firefox + amazon MP3 store. they even have a version of their download manager for linux. then you use amarok to load them on the ipod.
legacy ? hmmmm. ok, i'm geek enough to admit you have a point. support for legacy windows apps with wine is sketchy and hard to configure, but things are improving, and FAST. i just got sid meyer's civilization IV working on wine, but if even a geek like me had problem, joe sixpack is pretty much SOL on this area.
all things considered, is my opinion that linux is as viable as a windows alternative as mac os X. i've used all three (plus OS/2 many years ago) and believe me, in all the major areas, the playing field is level.
i managed to have the internal display of my laptop and my tv set working simultaneously on ubuntu in a couple of minutes using nvidia's confuguration app.
the only problem i had was with random lockups because of shitty implementation by HP of some hardware on the motherboard. next time, i'll buy dell, but it doesnt change the fact that configuring multiple monitors in linux is not that hard anymore.
other stuff ? sure. but problems with shitty hardware/drivers it's not a linux exclusive. see the problems vista users had with creative sound cards.
you're doing it wrong. first you need to compare your mass to a reference using a balance scale, THEN you use a spring scale to measure the weight force (in newtons) your body produces. with the two values at hand, you divide your weight by your mass, and the result should be 9.8
using only a spring scale in your bathroom simply won't tell you anything, unless you calibrate it everyday with copy of the international prototype kilogram (IPK).
man, this is the second time in less than a week that i post something absolutelly pedantic... should i start to worry ?
they also speak french in Switzerland. but i understand why they used the german word instead of the term the french usually use when they see a tank: "J'abandonne!!!" (I surrender!!!)
who said i was trying to be "insightful" ?
from slashdot's FAQ:
"If You Can't Be Deep, Be Funny: If you don't have something truly developing to the topic, some humor is welcome."
austria's official language is also german. so a panzer made in austria would be an "austrian panzer"...
i know, i know. this reply was too pedantic, even for me. but hey!! i'm a geek... "pedantic geek" is as reduntat as "panzer tank", right ?
"panzer tank" ??? where did this come from ? the redundant department of redundancy ? panzer already is german for "tank".
you either say "german tank" or "german panzer", but "panzer tank"??? sheesh.
the same way there's still vinyl record factories around.
they didn't disapear in full, but became niche professions.
cassete...
half an hour to load a 32 kB game (that's 32 thousand bytes, kids) if the cassete player didn't trash the tape...
good days. good days indeed...
problem here is the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle.
in it's most basic form, a mechanical steering contains:
- steering wheel
- connecting axle
- rack and pinion
- connecting rods
it's a self-contained system, easily made resilient by increasing over-enginnering.
compare with a drive-by-wire:
- steering wheel
- electronic sensors (either potentiometers or optical sensors)
- assorted wires and connectors
- a computer to interpret the data
- a power interface for the computer
- electrical actuators
- wheel mounted sensors to give feedback to the computer
and all the above must be duplicated (for redundancy) and relies on these external systems:
- battery
- alternator
- voltage regulators
- fuse box
- car's ECU
now, imagine a 15 year old car, whith a shorted battery causing random failures on peripheral systems such as voltage regulators, diodes and triodes, usually mounted on the alternator's chassis... well, that car was my own crap-mobille, until last month when an electrician finally found that the battery was the cause of my problems. oh, and it was not shoddy maintenance from my part. the shorted battery was less than a year old. it was a factory defect on that piece of shit.
in a drive-by-wire car, i would have crashed the car several times.
car makers could've removed the axle, cranck and pinion a long time ago when hydraulic power steering first apeared. they remained there because in a (rare) moment of sanity, the engineers decided it'd be safer to keep a backup mechanical system in paralel with the hydraulics.
it's a short, one page arcticle, drop the excuses and RTFA!
most of the arcticle is about the old detroit electric and the company that used to make it. the only paragraph of interest is this:
"To promote itself, Detroit Electric--a new joint venture between Zap and China's Youngman Automotive Group--plan to release a limited number of cars based around the Detroit Electric, an electric car produced by the Anderson Electric Car Co. in the early part of the 20th century."
my guess is that it's gonna be something like the P/T cruiser, prowler or new beetle. a modern design inspired by a (very) old one.
just because it's not open source, doesn't mean they can't use the "release early, release often" method.
for MS, CA, oracle, etc. to release a major version of their products, it's a pain. pressing CDs/DVDs, shipping them, retraing tech support, etc. now, for google, it's as easy as FTPing the new code to a server, that's why "release early, release often" works for GOOG, and not for the others.
and since it's in perpetual beta, they don't even have to bother with support. they're not obligated to give support for something that's essentially a prototype.
SCP is new stuff, tunneled over ssh. i think you mean RCP, dontcha ? the old school non-encrypted stuff that could be configured to work without password using .rhosts on the destination host.
that's why we disable it in all unix boxes here at work.
if a million americans reduce their power usage in half, this means maybe 2 or 3 million people in sub-devoleped nations will be able to turn their light and refigerators on without adding any environmental impact.
here i brasil i know places where people have only one or two 60 watts light bulbs and a small refrigerator in their homes (and not by choice. it's imposed by poverty). compare such households with the enourmous waste of power that's las vegas, and you see that those people is the US installing LED bulbs and solar pannel are making out for the people being connected to the grid.
it might not help solve anything, but helps delay any impact by sub-developed countries that increasing their power output.
and is no longer a planet.
also, if pluto remains in their maps, shouldn't astrology also include ceres and eris on them?
i publish my CPF everytime i write a check, fill a form in a brasilian website, give my data to someone transfer money to my bank account.
my CPF is probably around in some crooks databse right now. so what ?
that's the number on my registration card. it was issued when i registered and had my fingerprints taken in the public security office here in sao paulo.
and you know what ? IS NOT A BIG DEAL.
get over it, USians. the govt already know who you are. how many databases you're registered on ? DMV, social security, schools permanent records, with the military, and so on.
if the govt is not abusing all that info, then a national ID will be just a formality without adding any risk.
now, if they ARE using all the info they already have against the population, a new database won't make any difference. and you people should seriously start considering a revolution.
then they buy a unit at any wall-mart, take it back to china, read the production firmware using a jtag cable, and they're back in the business
so, then what's neccessary to stop saudi arabia, china and pakistan to stop being vicious dictatorships and actually respect its citizens'human rights ?
oh, wait. silly me. cuba doesn't have nukes like china and pakistan nor oil like saudi arabia. sorry.
last time i flew was when i returned from recife (northeast) to sao paulo. at the gate, after going through security, they asked people with seats in front of the plane to form one line, people in the back to form another and pregnant women, elders and people with children in front of everyone.
worked like a charm.
Can't they figure out how to water proof the phone lines and boxes and other stuff?
i worked for sometime for a brasilian POTS operator. being just a few kilometers north of the tropic of capricorn, sao paulo suffers a lot with rains and floods. one of the technologies the local POTS utility uses to ensure the cables don't short out when the tunnels flood is pressurized cables.
the cables in which the twisted-pair copper wires run are sealed, air compressors at the ends pumps air into the cable and keeps the pressure inside above the external pressure, this way even if the cable is ruptured, the water can't get in to short the wires.
a friend of mine implanted a system that (among other things) measured the pressure on several places along the cable, so a rupture would be detected and a repair crew dispatched to the correct place. i implanted another system that could test lines for (among other parameters) the capacitance and resistivity of the individual twisted pairs, so a short circuit could be detected, and at which distance from the switching board.
but this is sao paulo, in rio de janeiro they suffer(ed, don't know if they fixed the system there) from the same probles as you do, maybe worse, because they also have to deal with salt from the sea corroding the wires.
point is, there _are_ ways to keep the phone system working, even under the mother of all storms (like the one last week here).
it's not because their products suck. is because their product is a unix for x86 platform, so it have to compete with "good enough" products that are pretty much free (as both in freedom and beer) like linux, xBSD, solaris x86.
and in the higher end, even on open patforms like sparc, it's tough to beat HP/IBM/Sun.
since the days of old SCO (now tarantella), they always operated on a niche. now this niche disapeared, or was taken by the newcomers. old SCO realized that, got rid of the unix business and wen't on selling applications until they were bought by Sun.
if the new SCO (former caldera) had did the same, using their unix business to finance the development of other kinds of software, phase out the unix business, maybe they wouldn't be in this situation.