I looked at Slashdot today and after taking >20seconds to render the page, Konqueror opened a new window, prompting me to install Shockwave Flash. I don't want to use another browser and I don't want to install Flash. If Slashdot is going to stay like this then I think I'll be going somewhere else. I refuse to wait *that* long just because of an advertisment.
And what's worse... it's a doubleclick.net advert.
Anyone else noticed this or found it to be problem?
I know plerty of people who drive cars with manual transmission, but I don't know anyone who uses automatic transmission. I live in the UK, by the way.
Also, I did a presentation at University on Monday. I could have chosen to use Powerpoint, but I chose to use KPresenter, because the only comments I've heard people making about powerpoint were in relation to it being "confusing", not working properly, or crashing. My chosen alternative was intuitive to use and caused no problems.
Having not had much experience of any presentation software up until now, I did give both Powerpoint and KPresenter equal consideration and based my choice purely on efficiency.
Is this a UK thing? Why would you not choose the most efficient way of doing something? Surely any extra learning is not a problem if the result is increased efficiency. And in the case of software, it's something else to add to your resume.
Script Kiddie One: Now we can get root Script Kiddie Two: No, It's Daniel Loebl's box. We'll have to desktop it instead.
Doesn't quite have the same effect.
Anyway, my desktop is a directory inside my home directory. Assuming that a root is at the bottom, my desktop is on top of my home directory. So all my files are in the folders under my desk, if you like. And my co-workers' desks are in the same office floor (/home) as mine. It all makes perfect sense really.
Windows is for the everyday user... and ...doesn't mind a few crashes...
Are you sure this makes sense? If I needed to use a computer every day I sure as hell would get really annoyed if it crashes. I can understand if I was a "once a month" user - I could handle it crashing each time I used it, but I'd probably still grow to hate it.
I think some people are just too tolerant of products that don't really do what they said they would when they were bought, and I really don't understand how someone that uses a computer every day would prefer one that crashed. I'm not getting at anyone in particular. Perhaps if these people must use Windows, then they could pick one that from experience (of every day use) I've only ever seen crash due to hardware failure or stupid configutation - Windows 2000.
As for being "as user friendly as possible" - I don't think Windows is particularly user friendly. I mostly use KDE and When I use Windows there are usually parts of it's GUI or the way things work that annoy me.
I've used macs (OS 8) and they're quite nice. Best GUI I've seen, until I saw OSX. I've not used it though. The games I play are available on most platforms (Quake, UnrealTournament) so that point isn't much of a problem;-)
They're using in the devices for lighting the gas on gas cookers in domestic kitchens. Either built into the cooker itself or in a hand-held device that, when squeezed, produces a spark at the end which lights the gas.
mmmmm I know I didn't just wanted to get in the top ten
Do the people who get first posts ever use correct grammar and punctuation? the phrase "I didn't just wanted" does not make sense. Perhaps you missed a comma?
And back to the topic on hand...
The laws of quantum mechanics dictate that it provides a way to guarantee that no-one has intercepted that key
Cool. That's half the insecurity problem solved. Or is it? In cryptography are most breaches caused by keys not being kept secure, or by algorithms being cracked? When DES was released, didnt they say it would never be cracked? Well look what happened there.
In fact, it's been done several times now.
Not every ad mailing will be enjoyed by every receipient... I didn't ask for it so they shouldn't send it.
...all you do is hurt the industry's profit margin... An industry that survives on sending me things I didn't ask for seems very unfriendly to me and deserves to loose out.
...it will mean less prepad envelopes...
Not a bad thing, if you ask me:-)
...And then you won't have prepaid envelopes for the stuff you actually want to send for. If it's something I need then I'm happy to pay for it.
...or write to that giant clearinghouse to be taken off the main list. With the majority of spam I receive, I didn't ask to be on the list in the first place, so the company doesn't deserve to receive any decency from me. Neither does the company who gave them my details. Instead of asking to be taken off the list, would it not make better sense to threaten whoever gave them your personal details with the Data Protection Act? (or your country's equivalent)
If you didn't specifically ask to receive correspondance then the company is not allowed to spam you. Simply having a box on forms that says "tick here if you don't want us to send you stuff" is now illegal in the UK - it must say "tick here if you do want to receive stuff from us.
if you are registered with the DMA (Direct Marketing Association), or equivalent service.
I also find that the majority of spam e-mail senders I've seen can be prosecuted under an Advertising standards law (in the UK the ASA / Advertising Standards Authority will deal with anyone using false statements to advertise their product or service).
What you described there was not usability. The majority of PC users work in a corporate environment where "using" a system does not entail installing it. I've never installed Digital UNIX before but using it is simple.
I'm sure if you took a look at the size of the Linux userbase 2 years ago and compared that to what it is today, you'd notice a big change. And all these people in favour of getting the stability right first before adding the pointles crap. Granted, some of the latest distros for workstations do have a lot of not-so-useful things that hinder performance and stability, but I could put up with X crashing a couple of times a year so that I could avoid viruses, non-intuitive software, unreliable applications and OSes that crash when they run an application they don't like (Yes, I know Win2k does that less now, but it still does it sometimes).
As for your laptop, sorry to hear you're not having much luck. Perhaps listing the video card make/model would be more useful than telling us the MHz and RAM size. Does Mandrake's site say they support your card fully? If not, then you can only expect a bit of messing around with it before it works.
Food for thought: out of Linux and Windows, which one is gonna be first to provide support for the iPod MP3 player?
So what about all the Cisco routers? if thay cache anything then they're copying it. And they have no rights management in their OS, do they?
Maybe I'm wrong there, but there are a lot of devices out there running some sort of operating system and very few people will be willing to replace them just because of this new law (if it ever happens).
The OS on my Palm m105 is not upgradable and it can be used to copy things quite easily, totally ignoring any supposed rights. I'm not gonna chuck it away if all OSes not supporting DRM are outlawed.
probably because win9x doesn't have SMP support. You were right about the Linux NVidia drivers up until 11/29/2001 when they brought out new drivers. If you're feeling lucky they're not too hard to find. They support HedHat's SMP kernel. here is a link to the RPM file.
And a bit about SMP in Windows... I've heard that for programs to gain massive performance increases in Windows by using an SMP system, the software has to be written to support this. Windows doesn't automatically decide by itelf that because you've got the OS and WinAmp running on the 1st processor that it will run Paint Shop Pro and office on the other one. Whereas in Linux IIRC, the OS has much better control over what processor it wants to run processes on.
In Linux on my 450 AMD K6/2 i played Unreal Tournament, played MP3s and burned CDs all at the same time, no buffer under-runs, not jumping music, and the game went smoothly:-)
That said, some of the later Linux GUIs tend to use ridiculous amounts of processor power on that old machine. I know people say these MPs are for the server market, but I'd love to have one under my desk just to see the difference:-P
Apart from really fast kernel compiles and stuff like that, what's the benefit of such a machine? Messing around with the usual windows stuff, my AMD K6-450 is about as good as my friend's Intel P4. When it comes to playaing a game at the same time as an MP3, I can see where the MP becomes useful, but as far as I'm aware not many games are written to take advantage of multiprocessor, and although Windows supports it now, it doesn't make best use of it going by reviews I've seen in the past (the one I'm thinking of was mentioned earlies this week, but I can't remember the article title - it showed the MP being 7% faster under an mpeg decode and game playing benchmark test). Lets hope the Althon MP encourages people to write code that is suited to a multiprocessor environment.
I thought it was probably Windows:-) and probably not a particularly up to date version either. As someone stated earlier this week, Win2k is quite stable. I have to agree though that I've not had Linux "crash" like this person was describing. I wasn't going to jump to conclusions and start MS-bashing though... maybe there is another OS producer that doesn't know what they're meant to be doing ?:-)
Maybe you should try it yourself before stating things like that. IE will quite happily run "erasemyharddisk.bat" as long as it's Mime type says it is something that IE doesn't usually ask about. Maybe not so much in IE, but with Outlook if a file is attached with, say, an image/jpeg Mime type and it's called mypic.jpg.exe and the.exe is hidden by Windows, Outlook will think it's an image and pass it onto the OS to process, without asking. The OS then ignores the Mime type and runs the executable. I bet you wish Windows used mime-magic type stuff instead of just assuming a file is what it says it is.
Since you didn't state what OS you're using, this is a fairly unbiased comment:
I've stated something like this before, but... If a program is causing problems like that with your operating system, then you should either:
fix your OS
get a new OS
or complain to your OS distributor
since, if the operating system is crashing, there is clearly a problem with the operating system. Programs run INSIDE (or ON TOP OF) the operating system, and when they misbehave you should be able to use the OS's tools for closing them down. In a well-designed system, applications do not have enough control over the operating system to do damage to it, and even when they do have enough control, it is up to the OS to respond appropriately, instead of crashing. If a KOffice application crashed when you tried to insert an Mpeg video sample into a word processor document (if it can do this) would you blame the person who wrote the MPEG decoder? No. The application that it is running inside is to blame (in this case it would be KOffice, in your case it would be your operating system).
Please not that I have nothing against KOffice - I merely picked a random name to illustrate my point.
The people that you are talking about are probably the portion of the community who do not realize there are any problems involved in using MSIE or Outlook. They probably consist of a lot of people who "catch" e-mail worm/viruses. They do not realize there is anything to be worried about and don't recognize that anything is wrong until it is too late. These are the people who have the most need to switch browsers - although they do not realize it. And when things do go pear-shaped, they will probably just accept it and pay their local computer store to re-install windows (or however people go about fixing these things). They'll probably also spash out on buying the lastest whizz-bang virus detection suite, and then be struck down again the next time terroritst release a new worm, before they update their virus definitions (or even know that virus definitions are for that matter) or when the next MSIE security flaw is realized by the wrong-doers. To say that these people have no reason to switch is simply making matters worse. Not forgetting the evil things that MSIE does that cause web developers to learn lots of non-standard things.
I know this is getting a bit OT, but... I thought it was a kind of UI standard that the middle button on a mouse opens a new window when you use it in a web browser. Konqueror, Mozilla and Netscape all do this. If your pointer is over a hyperlink at the time, then it will open the linked document in a new window. I was under the impression that Opera did this too. At leas on my system, when I want to scroll, I use the scroll wheel on my mouse (which can also click and doubles as the "middle" button).
I'm using a MS Intellimouse Explorer and RedHat 7.2 if that's of any relevance.
You mention that your browser scrolls way too fast. I don't know about browsing in the Windows world, but I've realised there's a lack of ability to control how fast the wheel causes pages to scroll and different apps seem to choose by themselves (ranging from scrolling a couple of lines at a time to scrolling a page at a time). As well as choosing a standard for what the middle button does (i was sure there alrady was one) I think the community (develpers I mean) need to agree on some way of deciding what the wheel does (on mice that have one).
I was referring to the statement about "...other streaming media devices to a network in the home".
This company and this one both sell products that can plug into a home network to supply streaming media. I'm considering getting one of those to stick on the front of my house so I can see what's happening out there from the comfort of my computer chair:-)
Slashdot Mirror
...getting harder to fund.
I looked at Slashdot today and after taking >20seconds to render the page, Konqueror opened a new window, prompting me to install Shockwave Flash. I don't want to use another browser and I don't want to install Flash. If Slashdot is going to stay like this then I think I'll be going somewhere else. I refuse to wait *that* long just because of an advertisment.
And what's worse... it's a doubleclick.net advert.
Anyone else noticed this or found it to be problem?
I know plerty of people who drive cars with manual transmission, but I don't know anyone who uses automatic transmission. I live in the UK, by the way.
Also, I did a presentation at University on Monday. I could have chosen to use Powerpoint, but I chose to use KPresenter, because the only comments I've heard people making about powerpoint were in relation to it being "confusing", not working properly, or crashing. My chosen alternative was intuitive to use and caused no problems.
Having not had much experience of any presentation software up until now, I did give both Powerpoint and KPresenter equal consideration and based my choice purely on efficiency.
Is this a UK thing? Why would you not choose the most efficient way of doing something? Surely any extra learning is not a problem if the result is increased efficiency. And in the case of software, it's something else to add to your resume.
You went where?!
What's it like out there? It looks kinda bright to me. Much brighter than my room. God knows why you'd wanna go there.
Script Kiddie Two: No, It's Daniel Loebl's box. We'll have to desktop it instead.
Doesn't quite have the same effect. Anyway, my desktop is a directory inside my home directory. Assuming that a root is at the bottom, my desktop is on top of my home directory. So all my files are in the folders under my desk, if you like. And my co-workers' desks are in the same office floor (/home) as mine. It all makes perfect sense really.
and
Are you sure this makes sense? If I needed to use a computer every day I sure as hell would get really annoyed if it crashes. I can understand if I was a "once a month" user - I could handle it crashing each time I used it, but I'd probably still grow to hate it.
I think some people are just too tolerant of products that don't really do what they said they would when they were bought, and I really don't understand how someone that uses a computer every day would prefer one that crashed. I'm not getting at anyone in particular. Perhaps if these people must use Windows, then they could pick one that from experience (of every day use) I've only ever seen crash due to hardware failure or stupid configutation - Windows 2000.
As for being "as user friendly as possible" - I don't think Windows is particularly user friendly. I mostly use KDE and When I use Windows there are usually parts of it's GUI or the way things work that annoy me.
I've used macs (OS 8) and they're quite nice. Best GUI I've seen, until I saw OSX. I've not used it though. The games I play are available on most platforms (Quake, UnrealTournament) so that point isn't much of a problem ;-)
WOW! A hub with storage space! mine's only got 8 flashing lights and some ports!
Seriously though, my MP3 collection wouldn't fit on this device so it's not that useful.
Yet another reason to use computers that give higher performance with lower MHz ;-)
It's a P100, not an Athlon ;-)
They're using in the devices for lighting the gas on gas cookers in domestic kitchens. Either built into the cooker itself or in a hand-held device that, when squeezed, produces a spark at the end which lights the gas.
Do the people who get first posts ever use correct grammar and punctuation? the phrase "I didn't just wanted" does not make sense. Perhaps you missed a comma?
And back to the topic on hand...
The laws of quantum mechanics dictate that it provides a way to guarantee that no-one has intercepted that key
Cool. That's half the insecurity problem solved. Or is it? In cryptography are most breaches caused by keys not being kept secure, or by algorithms being cracked?
When DES was released, didnt they say it would never be cracked? Well look what happened there. In fact, it's been done several times now.
Never say Never.
.NET - of course it's name has nothing to do with the amount of holes we're going to find in its security ;-)
Internet Explorer is a particularly good example of this point.
I didn't ask for it so they shouldn't send it.
An industry that survives on sending me things I didn't ask for seems very unfriendly to me and deserves to loose out.
Not a bad thing, if you ask me
If it's something I need then I'm happy to pay for it.
With the majority of spam I receive, I didn't ask to be on the list in the first place, so the company doesn't deserve to receive any decency from me. Neither does the company who gave them my details. Instead of asking to be taken off the list, would it not make better sense to threaten whoever gave them your personal details with the Data Protection Act? (or your country's equivalent)
If you didn't specifically ask to receive correspondance then the company is not allowed to spam you. Simply having a box on forms that says "tick here if you don't want us to send you stuff" is now illegal in the UK - it must say "tick here if you do want to receive stuff from us.
if you are registered with the DMA (Direct Marketing Association), or equivalent service.
I also find that the majority of spam e-mail senders I've seen can be prosecuted under an Advertising standards law (in the UK the ASA / Advertising Standards Authority will deal with anyone using false statements to advertise their product or service).
What you described there was not usability. The majority of PC users work in a corporate environment where "using" a system does not entail installing it. I've never installed Digital UNIX before but using it is simple.
I'm sure if you took a look at the size of the Linux userbase 2 years ago and compared that to what it is today, you'd notice a big change. And all these people in favour of getting the stability right first before adding the pointles crap. Granted, some of the latest distros for workstations do have a lot of not-so-useful things that hinder performance and stability, but I could put up with X crashing a couple of times a year so that I could avoid viruses, non-intuitive software, unreliable applications and OSes that crash when they run an application they don't like (Yes, I know Win2k does that less now, but it still does it sometimes).
As for your laptop, sorry to hear you're not having much luck. Perhaps listing the video card make/model would be more useful than telling us the MHz and RAM size. Does Mandrake's site say they support your card fully? If not, then you can only expect a bit of messing around with it before it works.
Food for thought: out of Linux and Windows, which one is gonna be first to provide support for the iPod MP3 player?
So what about all the Cisco routers? if thay cache anything then they're copying it. And they have no rights management in their OS, do they?
Maybe I'm wrong there, but there are a lot of devices out there running some sort of operating system and very few people will be willing to replace them just because of this new law (if it ever happens).
The OS on my Palm m105 is not upgradable and it can be used to copy things quite easily, totally ignoring any supposed rights. I'm not gonna chuck it away if all OSes not supporting DRM are outlawed.
These geeks think they 0wn the world ;-)
probably because win9x doesn't have SMP support. You were right about the Linux NVidia drivers up until 11/29/2001 when they brought out new drivers. If you're feeling lucky they're not too hard to find. They support HedHat's SMP kernel. here is a link to the RPM file.
And a bit about SMP in Windows... I've heard that for programs to gain massive performance increases in Windows by using an SMP system, the software has to be written to support this. Windows doesn't automatically decide by itelf that because you've got the OS and WinAmp running on the 1st processor that it will run Paint Shop Pro and office on the other one. Whereas in Linux IIRC, the OS has much better control over what processor it wants to run processes on.
In Linux on my 450 AMD K6/2 i played Unreal Tournament, played MP3s and burned CDs all at the same time, no buffer under-runs, not jumping music, and the game went smoothly :-)
:-P
That said, some of the later Linux GUIs tend to use ridiculous amounts of processor power on that old machine. I know people say these MPs are for the server market, but I'd love to have one under my desk just to see the difference
Apart from really fast kernel compiles and stuff like that, what's the benefit of such a machine? Messing around with the usual windows stuff, my AMD K6-450 is about as good as my friend's Intel P4. When it comes to playaing a game at the same time as an MP3, I can see where the MP becomes useful, but as far as I'm aware not many games are written to take advantage of multiprocessor, and although Windows supports it now, it doesn't make best use of it going by reviews I've seen in the past (the one I'm thinking of was mentioned earlies this week, but I can't remember the article title - it showed the MP being 7% faster under an mpeg decode and game playing benchmark test). Lets hope the Althon MP encourages people to write code that is suited to a multiprocessor environment.
I thought it was probably Windows :-) and probably not a particularly up to date version either. As someone stated earlier this week, Win2k is quite stable. I have to agree though that I've not had Linux "crash" like this person was describing. I wasn't going to jump to conclusions and start MS-bashing though... maybe there is another OS producer that doesn't know what they're meant to be doing ?:-)
Maybe you should try it yourself before stating things like that. IE will quite happily run "erasemyharddisk.bat" as long as it's Mime type says it is something that IE doesn't usually ask about. Maybe not so much in IE, but with Outlook if a file is attached with, say, an image/jpeg Mime type and it's called mypic.jpg.exe and the .exe is hidden by Windows, Outlook will think it's an image and pass it onto the OS to process, without asking. The OS then ignores the Mime type and runs the executable. I bet you wish Windows used mime-magic type stuff instead of just assuming a file is what it says it is.
I've stated something like this before, but... If a program is causing problems like that with your operating system, then you should either:
- fix your OS
- get a new OS
- or complain to your OS distributor
since, if the operating system is crashing, there is clearly a problem with the operating system. Programs run INSIDE (or ON TOP OF) the operating system, and when they misbehave you should be able to use the OS's tools for closing them down. In a well-designed system, applications do not have enough control over the operating system to do damage to it, and even when they do have enough control, it is up to the OS to respond appropriately, instead of crashing. If a KOffice application crashed when you tried to insert an Mpeg video sample into a word processor document (if it can do this) would you blame the person who wrote the MPEG decoder? No. The application that it is running inside is to blame (in this case it would be KOffice, in your case it would be your operating system).Please not that I have nothing against KOffice - I merely picked a random name to illustrate my point.
The people that you are talking about are probably the portion of the community who do not realize there are any problems involved in using MSIE or Outlook. They probably consist of a lot of people who "catch" e-mail worm/viruses. They do not realize there is anything to be worried about and don't recognize that anything is wrong until it is too late. These are the people who have the most need to switch browsers - although they do not realize it. And when things do go pear-shaped, they will probably just accept it and pay their local computer store to re-install windows (or however people go about fixing these things). They'll probably also spash out on buying the lastest whizz-bang virus detection suite, and then be struck down again the next time terroritst release a new worm, before they update their virus definitions (or even know that virus definitions are for that matter) or when the next MSIE security flaw is realized by the wrong-doers. To say that these people have no reason to switch is simply making matters worse. Not forgetting the evil things that MSIE does that cause web developers to learn lots of non-standard things.
I thought it was a kind of UI standard that the middle button on a mouse opens a new window when you use it in a web browser. Konqueror, Mozilla and Netscape all do this. If your pointer is over a hyperlink at the time, then it will open the linked document in a new window. I was under the impression that Opera did this too. At leas on my system, when I want to scroll, I use the scroll wheel on my mouse (which can also click and doubles as the "middle" button).
I'm using a MS Intellimouse Explorer and RedHat 7.2 if that's of any relevance.
You mention that your browser scrolls way too fast. I don't know about browsing in the Windows world, but I've realised there's a lack of ability to control how fast the wheel causes pages to scroll and different apps seem to choose by themselves (ranging from scrolling a couple of lines at a time to scrolling a page at a time). As well as choosing a standard for what the middle button does (i was sure there alrady was one) I think the community (develpers I mean) need to agree on some way of deciding what the wheel does (on mice that have one).
This company and this one both sell products that can plug into a home network to supply streaming media. I'm considering getting one of those to stick on the front of my house so I can see what's happening out there from the comfort of my computer chair :-)