I don't know why people view KDE as the easy to use linux desktop environment. Xfce has taken that spot on my list since I discovered Xfce4 over a year ago. I've always viewed KDE as the complete and fully featured desktop environment that has a fancy working gui for absolutely everything and a matching integrated(looking) application for all the major tasks.
This would have been much more interesting if they had tested the users on 4 or 5 different linux desktops. Maybe Gnome, KDE, Xfce4, then throw in ion or ratpoison for fun.
I'm still waiting for some sort of objective comparison of major X11 environments against OSX and Windows XP. But I don't think that sort of thing is possible in this day and age.
Personally, while I like and have found good things in just about every desktop ( and I've used them all ) I've pretty much fallen for fvwm2. Fvwm2 allows me to customize everything by forcing me to customize everything. Hell, I had to configure the focus policies by hand. Of course, now that I've done it and made several backups of the configuration so I never have to do it again, I have created what is the closest I have ever gotten to my ideal graphical environment. It also looks really cool too.
Yes, this is why online shopping is such a blessing. It's much easier to go to newegg where all the information is laid out than to go to the store. Retail people tend to have little or no knowledge of the goods they are selling, especially technical goods. Places like Home Depot and small stores like old record shops and comic shops are often the rule breakers, but other than that you're usually SOL. The solution is to increase the general level of informedness in the population. Easier said than done.
That's incorrect. If I was in MS shoes and I had the same goals and motivations I would do the same thing. However, my goals and motivations are not to make more money. My goals and motivations are making the world a better place even if it requires self sacrifice. Therefore if I was in charge of MS I would open source every bit of code I had. Then I would liquidate the entire company and find better uses for those hundreds of billions of dollars. Like feeding people with no food. Or curing deadly diseases. I think those things are more important than companies needing an office suite.
Of course, that will never ever happen. So there's no point in even discussing it. Really just a semantic thing.
Oh, and lobbying isn't capitalist. Its a side effect of greed/corruption and our election system it has nothing to do with capitalism. Adam Smith never thought that companies with more money would pay the government to protect their business. In fact he had this policy called laissez faire meaning that government should be seperate from business, just like it is/should be with religeon. Capitalism means that companies compete in terms of who can provide the correct quantities of the highest quality goods at the right price. They also compete for location, raw materials, etc. etc. Adam Smith never envisioned a world where companies with inferior products, infinite supply, and terrible price points would flourish due to the lack or presence of government regulation.
This is where lots of socialists go wrong. Our problem isn't that we have capitalism. The problem is we have a broken capitalism.
I really wonder what their counting method is. I imagine they just look in the web server logs and see how many people downloaded the different binary packages and add them together. But what about people like me who emerge -u firefox? Do we get counted?
1 million is great, and like every poster here has said. The count isn't close to accurate. So let us now aim for 2 million!
Actually that's wrong. One day XP will be so old that people will regard it the same way we currently regard systems like the Apple// OS and MS-DOS. In those days, it will be safe to use XP. Nobody will be trying to hurt you then.
Yes, that is because you are a wise person. However, most of the world is not as wise as you are. Some people, on both sides, believe religeon and science ARE mutually exclusive. There are people out there who think that their religeon is the truth of the world and that there was an Adam, an Eve, a great flood, a parted sea, etc. There are also some people who think that religeon is usless as a set of moral guidelines to live a better life because science is right, making religeon wrong.
I've never met him, but it appears to be that our current president is in the first category. That is the cause of much of the anger against him from the scientific community.
This is really nice on paper. However, wind power isn't all its cracked up to be. First off, you don't want power output to rely too heavily on weather conditions. I want my electricity to be stable. Not that what we have now is stable either...
Also, there are definite weather and atmospheric side effects of absorbing all that wind power into giant fans.
Hey, there's a lot of wind down south now. Why don't they run down there and setup some turbines tonight so tommorow we can get a bunch of free juice?
Take a Compact Flash card, put it in a very simple converter that allows it to be put directly into an IDE slot sans ribbon cable. Mount it, partition it, format it. Build custom linux system on it, possibly based on knoppix. Put a whole bunch of kernel in there with not a lot of userspace. Use dd to make a bunch more of these things.
The only difference is I don't think compact flash drives are solid state.
Um. You know, if you get a computer with two video cards, two keyboards, two mice and two monitors you can do with with X rather easily. Heck, if you don't mind the performance hit you can technically get a whole bunch of terminals hooked up to one machine like this. You're really not saving that much money though. Commodity PC hardware is so cheap these days that is just doesn't matter that much.
There is only one reason in my eyes for keeping the electoral college around. That reason is that on paper, the elctoral college is supposed to prevent fads and trends of the people messing up and selecting someone incompetent to be president. Like in California.
Because sending electors proportional to the vote of a state does not diminish this quality of the electora college I think this is a great idea. It makes votes matter a lot more than they currently do while making it so the leader of the country represents the people more.
Set your fonts in X. Use freetype. You have to set fonts in many many places. GTK theme. Qt theme. Xdefaults. Application specific font settings. You have to go through all these places to set the font. Some distros like Fedora Core 2 and the newer Mandrakes I know use a similar font consistently by default in all these places. But if you want consistent fonting your only real option is to go through all these places and change the fonts. It's just a fact of life. If you want the power to have different fonts in different places you have to go to all these places to change the font if you want it to be the same in all places.
I reccoment Bitstream Vera Sans. It is very nice and simple.
I was wary of buying an LCD a few months ago because of the ghosting issues. I finally caved and bought a Samsung 172x. It was expensive, but it was worth it. With the 12ms response time there are literally no ghosts. And sitting next to my old CRT with xinerama its like night and day. I'm waiting for the price to drop so I can buy one or two more and get rid of my CRT once and for all. If only my video card had two DVI instead of one DVI one VGA...
So yeah, I don't know why this is news. Sure, maybe they increases response times to be even better. But the ghosting problem was eliminated when they got it down to 12ms.
OK. I'm a dual booting guy. Obviously my linux, which I use mostly, has no problems. However, my windows install also has no problems. I only got a virus once ever because after a clean XP install a worm got to me before I got to windowsupdate.
The point is that you do NOT need anti-virus software. Anti-virus anti-spyware software should be used only to cleanup already busted systems. Your system cannot be infected if you take proper care to prevent it. Even if you are running windows on a cable modem all day.
1) NEVER download an e-mail attachment. 2) Use Firefox instead of IE. 3) Use Thunderbird instead of Outlook 4) Do NOT visit untrustworthy websites 5) Do NOT download any software from the internet and install it. Even if it looks trusty from tucows or download.com do a google search to see if it it spyware first. 6) Have a firewall like zone alarm or sygate, or better have another computer between you and the net with a firewall on it. Or have a hardware firewall. Proper network level security keeps the worms out almost guaranteed. 7) If you have wireless lock it down. You don't want a drive by person to start sending spam out your pipe. 8) DO get all the windows updates that are security fixes. The ones that aren't security fixes you can choose to get or not get at your own discretion.
If you do those things then there is almost no way you can get hit. It's really that simple. And if you DO get hit, its usually easier to re-install due to the degrading nature of windows. Any windows install, even a clean one, falls apart over time. The registry fills with more and more junk. Improperly uninstalled apps leave files behind here and there. Hidden variables change and are not changed back. Even the cleanest installs seem to last at most 18 to 24 months except in very controlled business environments.
Dont pay for anti-virus software, its a ripoff. Just re-install and then take proper preventative measures so it doesn't happen again.
A) You would be very surprised at what you have to do to bother me. You can't just imagine it because you aren't like me. You are bothered easily and cannot imagine anything else because being bothered is your reality. I don't pretend to ignore, or ignore. I literally don't give a shit either way, there are more important things to worry about.
B) I'm neither encouraging or discouraging the behaviour. I am not rewarding or punishing it.
I just like to point out the hilarious part where you say "Personall, I think you are lying". I think that's hilarious because its so true. You BELIEVE that I'm lying. But guess what, I'm not. In fact, I do not lie. Or to say it in a way in which there are no loopholes; I do not willingly communicate ideas or information which I know to be false except in the circumstance of sarcasm. And I can assure you, there is no sarcasm here.
While technically not a handtop, I'm definitely looking forward to a flybook. Definitely the most connected portable device out there. Perfect for setting up personal area networks.
No, and this is a major problem in this country. People are more afraid of consequences than for standing up for what they believe in. I'm more afraid of not standing up for what I believe in than the consequences.
Forgiveness is no good. But neither is revenge. It's like this. The kid spinning the book was trying to bother you. His happiness relied upon your misery.
You put up with his actions for a few minutes. That is what we call tolerance. Something is bothering you, but you don't do anything about it, you tolerate it. This doesn't work because even though you don't put out a reaction two other things happen. You are still unhappy, and the other person still gains joy. Also you bottle up whatever you would have let out.
Forgiveness is when someone does something and you say, even though you bothered me, that's ok. Instead of doing nothing you respond to the annoyance with a positive. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Usually its an acknowledgement of your displeasure and the annoying guy still has fun. And now that you are marked as a source of fun, you will be a future target.
The real way to avoid tolerance, forgiveness and revenge is apathy. So, he's spinning his book. WHo cares? So he ruins your drawing, who cares? Let it happen and carry on. It's not enough to just carry on though, you have to legitimately not care. People can sense it if you are getting frustrated and then you've lost. I legitimately don't care what other people think about me or what other people do. It's fantastic. Because of this I say and do whatever I want and most consequences evaporate. This doesn't necessarily mean I do evil things. Whatever I want usually means trying to help people and do good. But I don't let the actions or opinions of others guide my decisions or actions.
If this guy did to me what he did to you he would have a very tough time. First when he couldn't get a reaction he would try harder. Now he's not having fun because he's putting in more effort and not getting a return out of it. Two things can happen. Either he will give up because its too much effort, or he will hit me first. If he gives up, I win. If he hits first, it's all over. I get up and send him to the hospital. I never hit first, ever. I'm almost pacifist in that way. But if I get hit, nukes come out. And demonstrating this behavior tends to make it so that people don't bother you so much anymore. Both because of fear and lack of fun.
The price drops almost daily on this drive. The only thing holding me back from buying one is the face that the price keeps dropping daily, when it levels I'll place an order.
If Microsoft started open source projects, with "real" open source licenses I would be glad to work on them under two conditions. First, the project has to interest me. That's rather obvious that since open source work is volunteer that nobody is going to work on something that doesn't interest them. The second thing is it has to be software I can use. Since I don't run windows there are probably going to be very few MS OSS projects I would work on.
What MS SHOULD do is appeal to all the Windows developers out there. Yes, there are people out there who live in Visual Studio and love windows. They should get these people to fix all the bugs in windows and IE and such. There are people out there, willing and able to do work which the internal MS developers have failed to do multiple times over. Give someone else a try.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why people view KDE as the easy to use linux desktop environment. Xfce has taken that spot on my list since I discovered Xfce4 over a year ago. I've always viewed KDE as the complete and fully featured desktop environment that has a fancy working gui for absolutely everything and a matching integrated(looking) application for all the major tasks.
This would have been much more interesting if they had tested the users on 4 or 5 different linux desktops. Maybe Gnome, KDE, Xfce4, then throw in ion or ratpoison for fun.
I'm still waiting for some sort of objective comparison of major X11 environments against OSX and Windows XP. But I don't think that sort of thing is possible in this day and age.
Personally, while I like and have found good things in just about every desktop ( and I've used them all ) I've pretty much fallen for fvwm2. Fvwm2 allows me to customize everything by forcing me to customize everything. Hell, I had to configure the focus policies by hand. Of course, now that I've done it and made several backups of the configuration so I never have to do it again, I have created what is the closest I have ever gotten to my ideal graphical environment. It also looks really cool too.
I'd say the most interesting part is the Intel vs. AMD part. It might as well be 50/50 looking at those stats. Not what you might have expected.
/me applauds. Well said.
This will go down in history just like the top loading NES.
Yes, this is why online shopping is such a blessing. It's much easier to go to newegg where all the information is laid out than to go to the store. Retail people tend to have little or no knowledge of the goods they are selling, especially technical goods. Places like Home Depot and small stores like old record shops and comic shops are often the rule breakers, but other than that you're usually SOL. The solution is to increase the general level of informedness in the population. Easier said than done.
That's incorrect. If I was in MS shoes and I had the same goals and motivations I would do the same thing. However, my goals and motivations are not to make more money. My goals and motivations are making the world a better place even if it requires self sacrifice. Therefore if I was in charge of MS I would open source every bit of code I had. Then I would liquidate the entire company and find better uses for those hundreds of billions of dollars. Like feeding people with no food. Or curing deadly diseases. I think those things are more important than companies needing an office suite.
Of course, that will never ever happen. So there's no point in even discussing it. Really just a semantic thing.
Oh, and lobbying isn't capitalist. Its a side effect of greed/corruption and our election system it has nothing to do with capitalism. Adam Smith never thought that companies with more money would pay the government to protect their business. In fact he had this policy called laissez faire meaning that government should be seperate from business, just like it is/should be with religeon. Capitalism means that companies compete in terms of who can provide the correct quantities of the highest quality goods at the right price. They also compete for location, raw materials, etc. etc. Adam Smith never envisioned a world where companies with inferior products, infinite supply, and terrible price points would flourish due to the lack or presence of government regulation.
This is where lots of socialists go wrong. Our problem isn't that we have capitalism. The problem is we have a broken capitalism.
I really wonder what their counting method is. I imagine they just look in the web server logs and see how many people downloaded the different binary packages and add them together. But what about people like me who emerge -u firefox? Do we get counted?
1 million is great, and like every poster here has said. The count isn't close to accurate. So let us now aim for 2 million!
No, and it never will be.
// OS and MS-DOS. In those days, it will be safe to use XP. Nobody will be trying to hurt you then.
Actually that's wrong. One day XP will be so old that people will regard it the same way we currently regard systems like the Apple
Yes, that is because you are a wise person. However, most of the world is not as wise as you are. Some people, on both sides, believe religeon and science ARE mutually exclusive. There are people out there who think that their religeon is the truth of the world and that there was an Adam, an Eve, a great flood, a parted sea, etc. There are also some people who think that religeon is usless as a set of moral guidelines to live a better life because science is right, making religeon wrong.
I've never met him, but it appears to be that our current president is in the first category. That is the cause of much of the anger against him from the scientific community.
This is really nice on paper. However, wind power isn't all its cracked up to be. First off, you don't want power output to rely too heavily on weather conditions. I want my electricity to be stable. Not that what we have now is stable either...
Also, there are definite weather and atmospheric side effects of absorbing all that wind power into giant fans.
Hey, there's a lot of wind down south now. Why don't they run down there and setup some turbines tonight so tommorow we can get a bunch of free juice?
Take a Compact Flash card, put it in a very simple converter that allows it to be put directly into an IDE slot sans ribbon cable. Mount it, partition it, format it. Build custom linux system on it, possibly based on knoppix. Put a whole bunch of kernel in there with not a lot of userspace. Use dd to make a bunch more of these things.
The only difference is I don't think compact flash drives are solid state.
Um. You know, if you get a computer with two video cards, two keyboards, two mice and two monitors you can do with with X rather easily. Heck, if you don't mind the performance hit you can technically get a whole bunch of terminals hooked up to one machine like this. You're really not saving that much money though. Commodity PC hardware is so cheap these days that is just doesn't matter that much.
There is only one reason in my eyes for keeping the electoral college around. That reason is that on paper, the elctoral college is supposed to prevent fads and trends of the people messing up and selecting someone incompetent to be president. Like in California.
Because sending electors proportional to the vote of a state does not diminish this quality of the electora college I think this is a great idea. It makes votes matter a lot more than they currently do while making it so the leader of the country represents the people more.
Set your fonts in X. Use freetype. You have to set fonts in many many places. GTK theme. Qt theme. Xdefaults. Application specific font settings. You have to go through all these places to set the font. Some distros like Fedora Core 2 and the newer Mandrakes I know use a similar font consistently by default in all these places. But if you want consistent fonting your only real option is to go through all these places and change the fonts. It's just a fact of life. If you want the power to have different fonts in different places you have to go to all these places to change the font if you want it to be the same in all places.
I reccoment Bitstream Vera Sans. It is very nice and simple.
"...the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car: it'll hang around but never hold the same relevance in everyday life."
Kind of reminds me of the compact disc and the mp3. Seems like the music industry is headed the way of the pony express.
I was wary of buying an LCD a few months ago because of the ghosting issues. I finally caved and bought a Samsung 172x. It was expensive, but it was worth it. With the 12ms response time there are literally no ghosts. And sitting next to my old CRT with xinerama its like night and day. I'm waiting for the price to drop so I can buy one or two more and get rid of my CRT once and for all. If only my video card had two DVI instead of one DVI one VGA...
So yeah, I don't know why this is news. Sure, maybe they increases response times to be even better. But the ghosting problem was eliminated when they got it down to 12ms.
Firefox is an absolute must. It just pains me every time I go somewhere and my only choice is IE. Firefox can be run of a pen drive very easily.
OK. I'm a dual booting guy. Obviously my linux, which I use mostly, has no problems. However, my windows install also has no problems. I only got a virus once ever because after a clean XP install a worm got to me before I got to windowsupdate.
The point is that you do NOT need anti-virus software. Anti-virus anti-spyware software should be used only to cleanup already busted systems. Your system cannot be infected if you take proper care to prevent it. Even if you are running windows on a cable modem all day.
1) NEVER download an e-mail attachment.
2) Use Firefox instead of IE.
3) Use Thunderbird instead of Outlook
4) Do NOT visit untrustworthy websites
5) Do NOT download any software from the internet and install it. Even if it looks trusty from tucows or download.com do a google search to see if it it spyware first.
6) Have a firewall like zone alarm or sygate, or better have another computer between you and the net with a firewall on it. Or have a hardware firewall. Proper network level security keeps the worms out almost guaranteed.
7) If you have wireless lock it down. You don't want a drive by person to start sending spam out your pipe.
8) DO get all the windows updates that are security fixes. The ones that aren't security fixes you can choose to get or not get at your own discretion.
If you do those things then there is almost no way you can get hit. It's really that simple. And if you DO get hit, its usually easier to re-install due to the degrading nature of windows. Any windows install, even a clean one, falls apart over time. The registry fills with more and more junk. Improperly uninstalled apps leave files behind here and there. Hidden variables change and are not changed back. Even the cleanest installs seem to last at most 18 to 24 months except in very controlled business environments.
Dont pay for anti-virus software, its a ripoff. Just re-install and then take proper preventative measures so it doesn't happen again.
A) You would be very surprised at what you have to do to bother me. You can't just imagine it because you aren't like me. You are bothered easily and cannot imagine anything else because being bothered is your reality. I don't pretend to ignore, or ignore. I literally don't give a shit either way, there are more important things to worry about.
B) I'm neither encouraging or discouraging the behaviour. I am not rewarding or punishing it.
I just like to point out the hilarious part where you say "Personall, I think you are lying". I think that's hilarious because its so true. You BELIEVE that I'm lying. But guess what, I'm not. In fact, I do not lie. Or to say it in a way in which there are no loopholes; I do not willingly communicate ideas or information which I know to be false except in the circumstance of sarcasm. And I can assure you, there is no sarcasm here.
While technically not a handtop, I'm definitely looking forward to a flybook. Definitely the most connected portable device out there. Perfect for setting up personal area networks.
http://www.handtops.com/show/news/21
Thou shalt not ask slashdot a question which can be answered by searching the gentoo forums.
No, and this is a major problem in this country. People are more afraid of consequences than for standing up for what they believe in. I'm more afraid of not standing up for what I believe in than the consequences.
Forgiveness is no good. But neither is revenge. It's like this. The kid spinning the book was trying to bother you. His happiness relied upon your misery.
You put up with his actions for a few minutes. That is what we call tolerance. Something is bothering you, but you don't do anything about it, you tolerate it. This doesn't work because even though you don't put out a reaction two other things happen. You are still unhappy, and the other person still gains joy. Also you bottle up whatever you would have let out.
Forgiveness is when someone does something and you say, even though you bothered me, that's ok. Instead of doing nothing you respond to the annoyance with a positive. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Usually its an acknowledgement of your displeasure and the annoying guy still has fun. And now that you are marked as a source of fun, you will be a future target.
The real way to avoid tolerance, forgiveness and revenge is apathy. So, he's spinning his book. WHo cares? So he ruins your drawing, who cares? Let it happen and carry on. It's not enough to just carry on though, you have to legitimately not care. People can sense it if you are getting frustrated and then you've lost. I legitimately don't care what other people think about me or what other people do. It's fantastic. Because of this I say and do whatever I want and most consequences evaporate. This doesn't necessarily mean I do evil things. Whatever I want usually means trying to help people and do good. But I don't let the actions or opinions of others guide my decisions or actions.
If this guy did to me what he did to you he would have a very tough time. First when he couldn't get a reaction he would try harder. Now he's not having fun because he's putting in more effort and not getting a return out of it. Two things can happen. Either he will give up because its too much effort, or he will hit me first. If he gives up, I win. If he hits first, it's all over. I get up and send him to the hospital. I never hit first, ever. I'm almost pacifist in that way. But if I get hit, nukes come out. And demonstrating this behavior tends to make it so that people don't bother you so much anymore. Both because of fear and lack of fun.
The price drops almost daily on this drive. The only thing holding me back from buying one is the face that the price keeps dropping daily, when it levels I'll place an order.
If Microsoft started open source projects, with "real" open source licenses I would be glad to work on them under two conditions. First, the project has to interest me. That's rather obvious that since open source work is volunteer that nobody is going to work on something that doesn't interest them. The second thing is it has to be software I can use. Since I don't run windows there are probably going to be very few MS OSS projects I would work on.
What MS SHOULD do is appeal to all the Windows developers out there. Yes, there are people out there who live in Visual Studio and love windows. They should get these people to fix all the bugs in windows and IE and such. There are people out there, willing and able to do work which the internal MS developers have failed to do multiple times over. Give someone else a try.