Remote X is not as widely used as it is endlessly hyped to be.
Excuse me? I use it all the time. And that's just at home. Using my laptop for something? Pop up a display from my main box on my laptop. Makes things like keeping email synced so much simpler. Just use the same installation of the same browser. Forward X over SSH. Do all sorts of crazy and wacky things windows users can only dream about. Yes, the networked aspect of X is important. VERY important I'd say. If it weren't, why would Microsoft be trying to catch up to it? (RDP, anyone?) Yes, X has some issues, but the remote feature is one thing that absolutely should NOT go away.
With no PR build-up, and no listing of new features on RedHat's website (can anyone else find any, because I certainly can't!) this release certainly looks like a bad joke, and if it's not an April Fools then it makes Red Hat look like a bad joke.
As someone else mentioned above, Slackware 9.0 just came out. And in all reality, people DO judge the "goodness" of distributions by their version number. This is what caused Pat V. to take Slackware from 4.x to 7.x back in the day. He was tired of "Why are you so outdated? Everyone else is using v.9462.342 and you're only at version 4.1". Well, actually I think everyone else was at v. 6.x or 7.x at the time, but same idea. Now RedHat's doing the same thing, albeit it's a much smaller version number difference. When you get right down to it, version numbers are a lot marketing anyways (at least on more commercial packages, and to some extent even on less commercial packages. You're still marketing them, just you're trying to gain marketshare instead of $$. Or in the case of a distribution, you're probably trying to gain or at lesat maintain some of each).
At one point (when the Slack forums were still up, before they were trolled to death), Pat and others were joking about choosing some insanely huge and rather random number for the next version, and seeing if the other players would follow suit. Also proposed ideas were binary version numbers, increment to v. 8.0 and then multiply the version number by 2 with each release, etc.
I'd still like to see it done with some software package sometime.
...and is missing many crucial ones that would be a godsend if they would just install and work without a plethora of patches (Get PoPToP working with MS-CHAP v2 auths, and see what I mean).
I've done PoPTop with MS-CHAPv2 on Slackware (8.1 and 9.0beta). It's really not that difficult. And it's absolutely, certainly NOT made up of crucial patches and packages. And I highly doubt that any but a specialised firewall/gateway/VPN server distribution would include PPP and PoPTop with all the needed patches. That's a very specialised app which I wouldn't expect any distro to come configured for unless it's targetted toward that niche market.
If you are CLI inclined then no matter what the distro is , it will take you hardly any time to figure which configuration goes in to which files.
This is NOT meant as a flame, but have you ever looked at Debian config files? Pure rubbish, half of it not needed. Confusing as hell. Then take a look at slackware scripts. Laid out nicely, easy to figure out, easy to make do what you want them to do. So there IS a big difference in learnability between distros.
I don't even know if battleships have fuel economy which is THAT bad.
Well now, it all depends... Is it a Car, or a GNU/Car? I hear GNU/Cars get better fuel economy than other Cars, while MS/Cars sit well behind the GNU/Battleship in terms of fuel efficiency. I was going to make a comparison to the BSD/Cars, but as everyone knows, they're dead.
P.S. This post is meant as humor highlighting the intricacies of/. culture. If you view it as flamebait, please go to the nearest terminal and issue the following command: `cat/proc/clue >/dev/wetware`
What about France? I hear Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys actually like gas clouds. Of course, it could be debated as to whether the French qualify as life... I suppose ion radiotion could explain some things about them though. Especially if it has bleaching properties... That could explain the white flags.
If you live in California & travel to Oregon to visity aunty Jill, you pay Oregan sales tax while there.
And yet, if you live in Oregon or Montana, and travel to Washington, you make a royal pain in the ass of yourself by trying to present your driver's license to every store you buy $2 worth of goods from, as a get-out-of-tax-free card. And then bitch about how long it takes the poor sales people to figure out how the fsck to write up a tax-free sale for your stupid ass. Disclaimer: I am a "customer service representitive" (aka min. wage retail slave) in the state of WA.
Heh... they finally added symlinks to their filesystem, now they just have to figure out the userland software for people to use. Third parties have created the software, but nothing yet ships with windows for creating symlinks. Even though it's one of the more highly requested features of windows, and has been a part of NTFS since win2k came out (NTFS 5, I believe). Go figure.
Hey now.... it wasn't THAT many years ago that *I* was a junior high school student. And I could've done MUCH better. No, this was written by someone truly lacking in humour. Most likely a frenchman.
I hate typing 'nano' to edit files. I'm stubborn that way, and believe RMS should go back and join the hippies with his self-loving GNU/this GNU/that clone-it-cause-it's-not-GNU-enough attitude. Therefore, when I got root to a debian box, the first thing I did was 'ln -s/usr/bin/nano/usr/bin/pico' Somewhat offtopic, I know, but whatever. Had to vent. RMS needs a serious dose of common sense.
Have you ever accidentally typed 'dig aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd' instead of 'dig -x aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd' ? This would be one case where a root server would get asked about an IP address. When you do a 'nslookup aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd', nslookup flips that around and looks up ddd.ccc.bbb.aaa.in-addr.arpa. Dig, on the other hand, actually passes aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd off to the nameserver as a FQDN to look up, unless you specify -x (which tells dig to do a reverse lookup). So, I can see pretty easily where a lot of these requests would come from.
Even on windows it's not 'hosts.txt'. It's still etc/hosts, only the / is a \, and etc is located in some bizarre location (windows\system32\ or somesuch). Check it out sometime. It's simply 'hosts'. Of course as someone already pointed out, DNS is NOT at all like a huge hosts file. It's much more a distributed database. The masters know nothing of the secondary, tertiary, etc. level domain names. Check out the great O'Reilly book "DNS and BIND" for more. Or the DNS-HOWTO on tldp.org.
Well, I guess I'll say it here, since this is where it's the least offtopic... I just got my fairly new Sprint phone hooked up to my laptop and working for the first time a few minutes ago. Still can't figure out what software to use to sync the dang thing, but I've got an awesome internet connection (considering it's mobile). The bandwidth test I just tried says it's 112.6 kbits/sec, which I can DEFINATELY live with. I'm making this post over it right now in fact.:) Latency is up around a half-second most of the time, but overall browsing is pretty snappy.
As far as transitioning between towers with CDMA, I've never had a problem doing that with my voice calls except where towers were far apart, and I don't anticipate having a problem with my data either. I'm sure I'll find out soon enouch.;).
Sorry, but what you say is only partly correct. Right now, you can do 10-digit dialing from anywhere in the country (well, anywhere I've been). If it needs a 1, it tells you. 7-digit dialing is not required anywhere that I know of. And if you use a cell phone (at least sprint), 10-digit dialing will get you anywhere in the country.
What? Not allowed to do karaoke? This might be a GOOD THING.
Umm... Sorry, don't we wish. But you see, if you buy a karaoke CD/tape, you are paying for certain rights, which include rights of public performance, etc. Probably not public performance for profit, but that doesn't kill karaoke. Nice try though.
Umm... I live in the US and happen to have email and SMS on my phone also. Can't say that I use them that much, since typing an email on my phone is a PITA whereas I can hook up my laptop through my phone and actually type out and send an email on a real keyboard. But people can send email to my phone, and I do occasionally use that (for example, I'll forward driving directions to a friend's place to my phone). And who pays 10 cents per SMS? Maybe in Europe or something. If someone's paying that in the US, they SERIOUSLY need to consider switching carriers. I've been with sprint for >4 years and for the most part been pretty happy with them.
My own story: I work retail. So, one day this guy comes in and buys a few things. Pulls out his credit card to pay. I have him sign the slip, and when I look at the signature, it looks for all the world like a smiling mushroom. I do a double-take and ask for his ID. He shows me his driver's license, with the name "mushroom [last name redacted]" on it, and again, the smiling mushroom for the signature. I had no reason to do otherwise at that point, so I accepted it. Turned out it was legit... never came back bad, and he came in a couple more times in the following months. I was truly amazed.
My head unit happens to be an mp3 player also, but I'm still thinking about getting the Sirius receiver. You see, while I may be able to put 8-12 hours of music on one CD using MP3s, and while they sound just fine and dandy, my music collection isn't infinite. It's not even close. Sirius has things such as an Indie music chanel which is probably music I've never even heard OF, much less heard. So if I can broaden my horizons a bit, listen to something I haven't been exposed to before, then it's a good thing.
Oh wait... that would be giving myself some culture.. we slashdotters can't have that now, can we?;)
Watching a TV screen probably isn't nearly so motion-sickness inducing.
You would be surprised... I actually tend to get more motion sick watching DVDs on my laptop in cars than I ever have reading a book. The worst though has to be reading a console on a laptop in a car, especially when compiling things and watching the text scroll by. Ugh. That'll make ya sick in a hurry. TV screens aren't quite so bad, but really the best way to keep yer stomach about ya in a car is to look outside so the motion matches what you're seeing. Anything else is asking for trouble if you do it for too long.
It's about time though that we had a good replacement for radio.
What, you mean like XM and Sirius, satellite radio w/o commercials? Something like 100 channels? Sirius just so happens to be 60 music channels, 40 weather/entertainment/news channels. And Kenwood happens to have a great deal for those interested, that works out to about $50 plus installation, starting Jan. 12. I was just looking at it tonight, and will probably do it. We don't need DirecTV to replace radio in cars. The replacements are already here, and there are two of them, both good, both relatively inexpensive, and available at your local car audio store TODAY. For more info, Sirius is backed by Kenwood and Jensen, while XM is backed by Sony, Pioneer, and whoever else I can't remember right now (Aiwa and Alpine maybe, not sure).
Ahh crap. I sound like a satellite radio commercial.
The lightbulbs they're referring to are more like LED's, the kind that light up when you press a button on the TV remote you just printed out.
An LED wouldn't be a lightbulb, now would it? Since it's not a bulb at all? So does it really matter if the story isn't read? If it calls it a lightbulb, it's incorrect. Which means the original poster who pointed out the issue of the vacuum issue still has a perfectly valid question. If the thing can print out a lightbulb, as the slashdot blurb says, can it create the vacuum too? If it's not a lightbulb, then either the original story, or the slashdot blurb, or both are incorrect.
Slashdot Mirror
Remote X is not as widely used as it is endlessly hyped to be.
Excuse me? I use it all the time. And that's just at home. Using my laptop for something? Pop up a display from my main box on my laptop. Makes things like keeping email synced so much simpler. Just use the same installation of the same browser. Forward X over SSH. Do all sorts of crazy and wacky things windows users can only dream about. Yes, the networked aspect of X is important. VERY important I'd say. If it weren't, why would Microsoft be trying to catch up to it? (RDP, anyone?) Yes, X has some issues, but the remote feature is one thing that absolutely should NOT go away.
With no PR build-up, and no listing of new features on RedHat's website (can anyone else find any, because I certainly can't!) this release certainly looks like a bad joke, and if it's not an April Fools then it makes Red Hat look like a bad joke.
As someone else mentioned above, Slackware 9.0 just came out. And in all reality, people DO judge the "goodness" of distributions by their version number. This is what caused Pat V. to take Slackware from 4.x to 7.x back in the day. He was tired of "Why are you so outdated? Everyone else is using v.9462.342 and you're only at version 4.1". Well, actually I think everyone else was at v. 6.x or 7.x at the time, but same idea. Now RedHat's doing the same thing, albeit it's a much smaller version number difference. When you get right down to it, version numbers are a lot marketing anyways (at least on more commercial packages, and to some extent even on less commercial packages. You're still marketing them, just you're trying to gain marketshare instead of $$. Or in the case of a distribution, you're probably trying to gain or at lesat maintain some of each).
At one point (when the Slack forums were still up, before they were trolled to death), Pat and others were joking about choosing some insanely huge and rather random number for the next version, and seeing if the other players would follow suit. Also proposed ideas were binary version numbers, increment to v. 8.0 and then multiply the version number by 2 with each release, etc.
I'd still like to see it done with some software package sometime.
Try O'Reilly. I read on their site they believed they were probably the first to use advertising on the actual internet at least.
...and is missing many crucial ones that would be a godsend if they would just install and work without a plethora of patches (Get PoPToP working with MS-CHAP v2 auths, and see what I mean).
I've done PoPTop with MS-CHAPv2 on Slackware (8.1 and 9.0beta). It's really not that difficult. And it's absolutely, certainly NOT made up of crucial patches and packages. And I highly doubt that any but a specialised firewall/gateway/VPN server distribution would include PPP and PoPTop with all the needed patches. That's a very specialised app which I wouldn't expect any distro to come configured for unless it's targetted toward that niche market.
If you are CLI inclined then no matter what the distro is , it will take you hardly any time to figure which configuration goes in to which files.
This is NOT meant as a flame, but have you ever looked at Debian config files? Pure rubbish, half of it not needed. Confusing as hell. Then take a look at slackware scripts. Laid out nicely, easy to figure out, easy to make do what you want them to do. So there IS a big difference in learnability between distros.
Oh yah... and a BIG BIG shout out from me, for adding Xinerama. :).
;)
What, thought I didn't notice?
I don't even know if battleships have fuel economy which is THAT bad.
/. culture. If you view it as flamebait, please go to the nearest terminal and issue the following command: `cat /proc/clue > /dev/wetware`
Well now, it all depends... Is it a Car, or a GNU/Car? I hear GNU/Cars get better fuel economy than other Cars, while MS/Cars sit well behind the GNU/Battleship in terms of fuel efficiency. I was going to make a comparison to the BSD/Cars, but as everyone knows, they're dead.
P.S. This post is meant as humor highlighting the intricacies of
The C3 also uses much less power and runs much cooler than any PIII/P4 For comparison purposes:
C3 1Ghz typical power consumption: 11.25 watts, max 15 watts.
Intel Celeron 1Ghz max power consumption: 27.5 watts (couldn't find typ. consumption).
For a lightweight sub-notebook, the C3 is a perfect choice. Low power consumption and low cost, means cheaper notebook with longer battery life.
What about France? I hear Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys actually like gas clouds. Of course, it could be debated as to whether the French qualify as life... I suppose ion radiotion could explain some things about them though. Especially if it has bleaching properties... That could explain the white flags.
If you live in California & travel to Oregon to visity aunty Jill, you pay Oregan sales tax while there.
And yet, if you live in Oregon or Montana, and travel to Washington, you make a royal pain in the ass of yourself by trying to present your driver's license to every store you buy $2 worth of goods from, as a get-out-of-tax-free card. And then bitch about how long it takes the poor sales people to figure out how the fsck to write up a tax-free sale for your stupid ass. Disclaimer: I am a "customer service representitive" (aka min. wage retail slave) in the state of WA.
Netscape 4.x and beyond have all supported resuming http file transfers. I'm pretty sure IE does too, though I'm not sure.
Heh... they finally added symlinks to their filesystem, now they just have to figure out the userland software for people to use. Third parties have created the software, but nothing yet ships with windows for creating symlinks. Even though it's one of the more highly requested features of windows, and has been a part of NTFS since win2k came out (NTFS 5, I believe). Go figure.
Hey now.... it wasn't THAT many years ago that *I* was a junior high school student. And I could've done MUCH better. No, this was written by someone truly lacking in humour. Most likely a frenchman.
I hate typing 'nano' to edit files. I'm stubborn that way, and believe RMS should go back and join the hippies with his self-loving GNU/this GNU/that clone-it-cause-it's-not-GNU-enough attitude. Therefore, when I got root to a debian box, the first thing I did was 'ln -s /usr/bin/nano /usr/bin/pico' Somewhat offtopic, I know, but whatever. Had to vent. RMS needs a serious dose of common sense.
Have you ever accidentally typed 'dig aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd' instead of 'dig -x aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd' ? This would be one case where a root server would get asked about an IP address. When you do a 'nslookup aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd', nslookup flips that around and looks up ddd.ccc.bbb.aaa.in-addr.arpa. Dig, on the other hand, actually passes aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd off to the nameserver as a FQDN to look up, unless you specify -x (which tells dig to do a reverse lookup). So, I can see pretty easily where a lot of these requests would come from.
Even on windows it's not 'hosts.txt'. It's still etc/hosts, only the / is a \, and etc is located in some bizarre location (windows\system32\ or somesuch). Check it out sometime. It's simply 'hosts'. Of course as someone already pointed out, DNS is NOT at all like a huge hosts file. It's much more a distributed database. The masters know nothing of the secondary, tertiary, etc. level domain names. Check out the great O'Reilly book "DNS and BIND" for more. Or the DNS-HOWTO on tldp.org.
Well, I guess I'll say it here, since this is where it's the least offtopic... I just got my fairly new Sprint phone hooked up to my laptop and working for the first time a few minutes ago. Still can't figure out what software to use to sync the dang thing, but I've got an awesome internet connection (considering it's mobile). The bandwidth test I just tried says it's 112.6 kbits/sec, which I can DEFINATELY live with. I'm making this post over it right now in fact. :) Latency is up around a half-second most of the time, but overall browsing is pretty snappy.
;).
As far as transitioning between towers with CDMA, I've never had a problem doing that with my voice calls except where towers were far apart, and I don't anticipate having a problem with my data either. I'm sure I'll find out soon enouch.
Sorry, but what you say is only partly correct. Right now, you can do 10-digit dialing from anywhere in the country (well, anywhere I've been). If it needs a 1, it tells you. 7-digit dialing is not required anywhere that I know of. And if you use a cell phone (at least sprint), 10-digit dialing will get you anywhere in the country.
What? Not allowed to do karaoke? This might be a GOOD THING.
Umm... Sorry, don't we wish. But you see, if you buy a karaoke CD/tape, you are paying for certain rights, which include rights of public performance, etc. Probably not public performance for profit, but that doesn't kill karaoke. Nice try though.
Umm... I live in the US and happen to have email and SMS on my phone also. Can't say that I use them that much, since typing an email on my phone is a PITA whereas I can hook up my laptop through my phone and actually type out and send an email on a real keyboard. But people can send email to my phone, and I do occasionally use that (for example, I'll forward driving directions to a friend's place to my phone). And who pays 10 cents per SMS? Maybe in Europe or something. If someone's paying that in the US, they SERIOUSLY need to consider switching carriers. I've been with sprint for >4 years and for the most part been pretty happy with them.
Ok... Big Daddy... big whoop...
My own story: I work retail. So, one day this guy comes in and buys a few things. Pulls out his credit card to pay. I have him sign the slip, and when I look at the signature, it looks for all the world like a smiling mushroom. I do a double-take and ask for his ID. He shows me his driver's license, with the name "mushroom [last name redacted]" on it, and again, the smiling mushroom for the signature. I had no reason to do otherwise at that point, so I accepted it. Turned out it was legit... never came back bad, and he came in a couple more times in the following months. I was truly amazed.
My head unit happens to be an mp3 player also, but I'm still thinking about getting the Sirius receiver. You see, while I may be able to put 8-12 hours of music on one CD using MP3s, and while they sound just fine and dandy, my music collection isn't infinite. It's not even close. Sirius has things such as an Indie music chanel which is probably music I've never even heard OF, much less heard. So if I can broaden my horizons a bit, listen to something I haven't been exposed to before, then it's a good thing.
;)
Oh wait... that would be giving myself some culture.. we slashdotters can't have that now, can we?
Watching a TV screen probably isn't nearly so motion-sickness inducing.
You would be surprised... I actually tend to get more motion sick watching DVDs on my laptop in cars than I ever have reading a book. The worst though has to be reading a console on a laptop in a car, especially when compiling things and watching the text scroll by. Ugh. That'll make ya sick in a hurry. TV screens aren't quite so bad, but really the best way to keep yer stomach about ya in a car is to look outside so the motion matches what you're seeing. Anything else is asking for trouble if you do it for too long.
It's about time though that we had a good replacement for radio.
What, you mean like XM and Sirius, satellite radio w/o commercials? Something like 100 channels? Sirius just so happens to be 60 music channels, 40 weather/entertainment/news channels. And Kenwood happens to have a great deal for those interested, that works out to about $50 plus installation, starting Jan. 12. I was just looking at it tonight, and will probably do it. We don't need DirecTV to replace radio in cars. The replacements are already here, and there are two of them, both good, both relatively inexpensive, and available at your local car audio store TODAY. For more info, Sirius is backed by Kenwood and Jensen, while XM is backed by Sony, Pioneer, and whoever else I can't remember right now (Aiwa and Alpine maybe, not sure).
Ahh crap. I sound like a satellite radio commercial.
The lightbulbs they're referring to are more like LED's, the kind that light up when you press a button on the TV remote you just printed out.
:)
An LED wouldn't be a lightbulb, now would it? Since it's not a bulb at all? So does it really matter if the story isn't read? If it calls it a lightbulb, it's incorrect. Which means the original poster who pointed out the issue of the vacuum issue still has a perfectly valid question. If the thing can print out a lightbulb, as the slashdot blurb says, can it create the vacuum too? If it's not a lightbulb, then either the original story, or the slashdot blurb, or both are incorrect.
Not to nitpick, mind you.