Given that it's made specifically for persistent terminals across login sessions, Screen is definitely worth learning. If your needs are text-based, it's the best way to go.
It sounds like your GUI needs are rare. In those occasions you could probably fire up a VNC or other session when you need it (from the remote screen session) and shut it down again when you're done.
Man, the one time I need mod points and I don't have them. I consider my programming to be artistic expression; sure, it's an expression that fills a need, but the process in creating it is a lot like the creative process other artists use for more traditional media.
Some people give away their music or pictures for free, and others charge for it. People have no problem with either practice (if we ignore technical measures that try to enforce them). It's denigrating our own art form to tell us we can't make the same choice.
Not all that useful? Have you ever tried to write a backup or sync script without it?
I would have assumed mtime (file modification time) would be more useful for this purpose. There's no sense updating the backup of my entire music collection if the only "change" I've made is to listen to it.
Of course, rsync is incredibly useful in this case, since it can transfer only the parts of my collection that have changed (ie, nothing). The man page is thin on technical details, though; specifically, whether it relies on atime or mtime or something else to do its work.
I can't get to the article, but I'd love to know why it, and so many people here, are claiming that NoScript is a hassle. I get a nice little icon in my browser's status bar. That's it. If a site needs javascript, I click on it, and click Allow or Temporarily Allow, and I'm done in two clicks. Where's the hassle?
I found it very ironic that Wal-Mart is worried about people undercutting their prices. How dare someone else steal their business model!
Their entire modus operandi is about finding the absolute cheapest stock they can crank off on a factory line for negligible incremental cost, flooding their shelves with it, and using the massive profits from that to repeat the process. People storm their stores for this substandard schlock because it's so much cheaper than anything anyone else sells (not caring that the quality AND variety are both better elsewhere), and thus the smaller companies that literally can't afford to sell their wares at Wal-Mart prices end up having to close down.
I'd say the chickens are coming home to roost, and I'd love to see Wal-Mart crushed by their own style of underhandedness. Unfortunately, they (unlike any competition they have yet to kill) have enough money and market clout to scare any other company in the world into submission. I predict that the studios being threatened will bend over to Wal-Mart's demands (perhaps encouraged by a frivolous lawsuit), rather than lose their biggest retailer, and that no movies will appear in iTunes as a result.
I know this comment is offtopic, but I wanted to let you know that I'm impressed with your logical arguments, and how well you've been dealing with the slashtrolls and their SirSlud-shaped straw men. You've been rational and, for the most part, a cool cucumber. I respect those traits since they seem to be so rare around here.
Having said that, it's probably not worth feeding the trolls in the first place. They're ugly creatures with read-only minds; any effort to try and get them to see something they don't want to see (such as your ambivalence toward them blocking your ads) is an exercise in futility.
I can't be the only one who gets your point that deleting cookies is the wrong way to go about combating ads. I'm just one of the few who will actually admit it.
Re:Still no word from the pr0n industry
on
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I can guarantee you, and new format player which can't play existing disks is going to utterly tank. People have invested money in their media and will be royally annoyed if their old disks can't play on a new player.
People had lots of money invested in VHS movies too, but one can't (believably) claim that any perceived failure of the DVD is due to people being unwilling to switch.
There are many factors at stake here, and not all are technical. IIRC, lots of movies were released only on DVD, or were out on DVD months earlier than they were on VHS, and that was to encourage people to get DVD players. Despite the fatalistic tone of the article, I think it's safe to say it worked.
Backward compatibility is only one issue at hand. It's an important issue, yes, but it's shortsighted to claim that it will be the one and only deciding factor in this supposed "standards war".
Re:LOL, "familiarize new users"
on
Grokking Knoppix
·
· Score: 1
May I ask why you recommend Debian or Gentoo over Fedora? No flame intended, I'm genuinely curious. I've been using Fedora since it was RH7, because it was recommended to me when I was a newbie, but I'm interested in learning about what I've been missing.
That's a handy idea. It's fairly easy for the end user, and still pretty secure. I've heard of wireless access in coffee shops doing the same sort of thing, only you have to get your username and password from the counter (often at a price).
Come to think of it... Do you happen to know of any open-source implementations of this strategy? (Does it have a fancy name or acronym I could google?)
The 1.0 release usually signifies that all major kinks have been worked out, the main features frozen, and everything should work as expected.
I wish I could believe that were the case with gaim. As someone who uses a fair number of plugins (not to mention trying to write my own), I've been repeatedly frustrated whenever gaim releases a new version. The plugin API changes quite often (but still not as often as Mozilla did in its earlier days). I hope that you're right, and that the main features (particularly the plugin API) are finally frozen, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Granted, the worst offender is the non-FF title (Chrono Trigger), and the loading times may be shorter on the PS2 (does anybody know?)
I have all three collections as well, though I've only been playing FF1, FF2 and CT so far. In FF1 and 2 the load times aren't noticeable to me, but CT's is enough that it's annoying.
I'm playing them on my PS2, if it matters. It probably already has faster seek/load times than a true PlayStation, and it has an option in the PS emulator to further boost the load time, but I haven't noticed that option to have any effect.
Maybe it's my installation, but every time I try to install an extension either it doesn't install or I have to reinstall firefox because it won't start anymore.
That's been a major problem for a while, because extensions are/were essentially becoming part of the main program. You could uninstall them manually, but it was a tricky, fragile practice. Fortunately, Firefox 0.9 introduced a new extension manager that makes the process much easier -- if the extension author supports it. Which leads us to the next point.
I'd say the extensions system needs just a bit more work. And mind you, I've seen a lot of mozilla bugs as I've been with mozilla since version 0.8.x
Not all of the problems are with the extension system itself. An extension can be well or poorly written; it can have bugs, incompatibilities, etc., just like you won't always have a success with every program you see on freshmeat and try out. It's not automatically stable just because it's an extension. If the extension author has written their extension to support the new extension manager, it's easy to uninstall if you determine it's of no use to you, but ideally, a bit of research should be done before you try an extension out. Sites like ExtensionRoom and update.mozilla.org have a place for users to put reviews and comments, so it's a good idea to glance over those, and see if lots of other people have problems, before taking the plunge.
I used to love Tabbrowser Extensions, but it got bigger and slower over time until it finally became unbearable for me. I still think it's a brilliant extension, but I use Firefox instead of Mozilla specifically because I don't want one package that does everything. (:
Piro points to a list of smaller extensions that add features from TBE on an individual basis. I use a few of those and love them. But the one thing I really miss from TBE is the coloured tabgroups. I loved having related tabs all grouped together, and being able to close the group without closing all my other tabs as well.
I have a few years of experience writing/hacking Mozilla-and-family extensions, so I may eventually tackle this myself. But I'm quite busy (lazy) and I keep hoping someone else will miss it enough to write a tabgroup extension for me. (:
There's an extension called MozEX that allows you to use an external program for View Source.
TFA ended up describing the author's personal favourite extensions, so it kind of missed the point that there are extensions for almost everything, like what you need. Some good places to look for extensions:
Like any other kind of software, extensions can vary in quality and stability. You might want to get other opinions of an extension you're considering before you install it. Fortunately, the new Extension Manager in Firefox 0.9 and up makes it easy to uninstall an extension. Before that came along, you had to do it manually which was tricky and easy to screw up.
It's a similar situation with PNG; even though PNG-32 has superior alpha channel support to GIF, you don't see many sites with variable transparency 32-bit PNGs because IE still doesn't support them.
Not to drift too far offtopic, but for what it's worth, there are ways for a webmaster to get proper PNG transparency out of IE5.5+ without too much effort on the part of the web developer. If you don't mind adding some nonstandard CSS (the "behavior" property) to the IMG element, and if you specify a width and height for each image you use, you can use alpha-blended PNGs while still supporting "90% of the users" out there.
I find the gestures to be handy because the nature of using a GUI means I generally need a hand on my mouse much of the time. If I'm already using my mouse to switch between windows, launch programs, etc., then it's easier to gesture to reload the window than it is to move my hand from my mouse to my keyboard to do the same thing. (That's a bit more travel than it may seem at first; I like to keep my keyboard in my lap, though my mouse sits on my desk.)
Of course, there are two counterarguments to that logic. One is that I could/should learn more of the keyboard shortcuts that are available to me. Much of what I do may well be possible using only the keyboard. When it becomes as convenient to discover the shortcut for a given action as it is to do the same action using the mouse (via button, menu or gesture) then I'll probably switch.
The other is that my interface to the computer could use improvement. There's been all sorts of stories here on/. about very neat interface devices that blur the line between keyboard and mouse. My personal favourite is the gesture pad with a keyboard overprinted, that allowed two-handed gesturing and typing. (Now, to win the lottery...)
Of course, the coolest toys aren't directly supported in Linux, but that's a different rant.
The Vortex is my personal favourite too. It's a thrill without being terrifying. I like to have my breath taken away by the fun of the ride, not by the excessive G's or the insane heights. The Vortex succeeds very well at the former.
'Bout the only good thing to come out of Canada's Wonderland once it sold out to Paramount...
That one took me a moment. I remembered it as being something to do with Doom... I finally remembered that it was part of the chain of drivers needed to get modem/network play going.
Ah, the good old days, abusing my position as a network sysadmin in high school. (:
I like it, it seems very well planned out. Putting something in or taking something out looks like it would be much easier than in most tower and (especially -- ugh) desktop cases, where components and riser boards and drive bays are shoved in every which way, making your "upgrade" feel like a game of Tetris. Only I don't remember Tetris giving me scraped and cut knuckles or stripped screws.
It also looks more mobo-friendly. My motherboard, a Tyan S1854 (yes, it's old), theoretically fits in a standard-sized tower case. But the power connector and IDE connectors are on the front edge of the motherboard, where they prevent use of anything deep (like, say, a CD drive) in the 5.25" drive bays. A case like this looks like it would be perfect for my motherboard. It would be more compact than a super-deep tower case, and it doesn't look like I'd need extended IDE cables.
I don't see a price or a link to an order form. Pity. I hope that doesn't mean they won't enter production. I know I'd buy one, as long as they aren't hideously expensive.
Personally, I really wish some open standard would replace AIM/MSN so that we can use any software we like.
Jabber uses an open protocol, and has pushed to try and make it a standard. But as someone who's tried to get people to switch over to Jabber, I can tell you, it's very difficult. They like their current IM software (every Jabber client I give them to try is flaky, if not downright broken), and don't want to lose the friends on their buddy lists (Jabber's cross-protocol transports never seem to work).
Open standards are great, but they aren't as important to J. Random Luser as is what "everyone" uses and what "works". Ask anyone who's tried to get someone to switch from MS Word. (Going OT: the company I work for is driven entirely by the pushing of an Open Source solution on Linux... yet the suits send us company correspondence in MS Word documents that AbiWord chokes on.)
Someone mod parent up. It seems that any SciFi writers drag out time travel when they can't be more creative. And this is just the pilot! It can only go downhill from here.
I'll bet five bucks that there'll be an episode, in the first season, where T'pol and Archer get beamed back into the past, and a logical and moral dilemma ensues over who should or shouldn't kill whom.
People, give blood wherever you live, regardless of whether it's in California or in Rhode Island!
Or even Canada. Canadian Blood Services tells me they're helping out the States. Go to www.bloodservices.ca or phone 1-888-2-DONATE to learn how you can give blood. Innocent people need your help to survive.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that it's made specifically for persistent terminals across login sessions, Screen is definitely worth learning. If your needs are text-based, it's the best way to go.
It sounds like your GUI needs are rare. In those occasions you could probably fire up a VNC or other session when you need it (from the remote screen session) and shut it down again when you're done.
Man, the one time I need mod points and I don't have them. I consider my programming to be artistic expression; sure, it's an expression that fills a need, but the process in creating it is a lot like the creative process other artists use for more traditional media.
Some people give away their music or pictures for free, and others charge for it. People have no problem with either practice (if we ignore technical measures that try to enforce them). It's denigrating our own art form to tell us we can't make the same choice.
I would have assumed mtime (file modification time) would be more useful for this purpose. There's no sense updating the backup of my entire music collection if the only "change" I've made is to listen to it.
Of course, rsync is incredibly useful in this case, since it can transfer only the parts of my collection that have changed (ie, nothing). The man page is thin on technical details, though; specifically, whether it relies on atime or mtime or something else to do its work.
I can't get to the article, but I'd love to know why it, and so many people here, are claiming that NoScript is a hassle. I get a nice little icon in my browser's status bar. That's it. If a site needs javascript, I click on it, and click Allow or Temporarily Allow, and I'm done in two clicks. Where's the hassle?
I found it very ironic that Wal-Mart is worried about people undercutting their prices. How dare someone else steal their business model!
Their entire modus operandi is about finding the absolute cheapest stock they can crank off on a factory line for negligible incremental cost, flooding their shelves with it, and using the massive profits from that to repeat the process. People storm their stores for this substandard schlock because it's so much cheaper than anything anyone else sells (not caring that the quality AND variety are both better elsewhere), and thus the smaller companies that literally can't afford to sell their wares at Wal-Mart prices end up having to close down.
I'd say the chickens are coming home to roost, and I'd love to see Wal-Mart crushed by their own style of underhandedness. Unfortunately, they (unlike any competition they have yet to kill) have enough money and market clout to scare any other company in the world into submission. I predict that the studios being threatened will bend over to Wal-Mart's demands (perhaps encouraged by a frivolous lawsuit), rather than lose their biggest retailer, and that no movies will appear in iTunes as a result.
I know this comment is offtopic, but I wanted to let you know that I'm impressed with your logical arguments, and how well you've been dealing with the slashtrolls and their SirSlud-shaped straw men. You've been rational and, for the most part, a cool cucumber. I respect those traits since they seem to be so rare around here.
Having said that, it's probably not worth feeding the trolls in the first place. They're ugly creatures with read-only minds; any effort to try and get them to see something they don't want to see (such as your ambivalence toward them blocking your ads) is an exercise in futility.
I can't be the only one who gets your point that deleting cookies is the wrong way to go about combating ads. I'm just one of the few who will actually admit it.
I can guarantee you, and new format player which can't play existing disks is going to utterly tank. People have invested money in their media and will be royally annoyed if their old disks can't play on a new player.
People had lots of money invested in VHS movies too, but one can't (believably) claim that any perceived failure of the DVD is due to people being unwilling to switch.
There are many factors at stake here, and not all are technical. IIRC, lots of movies were released only on DVD, or were out on DVD months earlier than they were on VHS, and that was to encourage people to get DVD players. Despite the fatalistic tone of the article, I think it's safe to say it worked.
Backward compatibility is only one issue at hand. It's an important issue, yes, but it's shortsighted to claim that it will be the one and only deciding factor in this supposed "standards war".
May I ask why you recommend Debian or Gentoo over Fedora? No flame intended, I'm genuinely curious. I've been using Fedora since it was RH7, because it was recommended to me when I was a newbie, but I'm interested in learning about what I've been missing.
That's a handy idea. It's fairly easy for the end user, and still pretty secure. I've heard of wireless access in coffee shops doing the same sort of thing, only you have to get your username and password from the counter (often at a price).
Come to think of it... Do you happen to know of any open-source implementations of this strategy? (Does it have a fancy name or acronym I could google?)
The 1.0 release usually signifies that all major kinks have been worked out, the main features frozen, and everything should work as expected.
I wish I could believe that were the case with gaim. As someone who uses a fair number of plugins (not to mention trying to write my own), I've been repeatedly frustrated whenever gaim releases a new version. The plugin API changes quite often (but still not as often as Mozilla did in its earlier days). I hope that you're right, and that the main features (particularly the plugin API) are finally frozen, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Granted, the worst offender is the non-FF title (Chrono Trigger), and the loading times may be shorter on the PS2 (does anybody know?)
I have all three collections as well, though I've only been playing FF1, FF2 and CT so far. In FF1 and 2 the load times aren't noticeable to me, but CT's is enough that it's annoying.
I'm playing them on my PS2, if it matters. It probably already has faster seek/load times than a true PlayStation, and it has an option in the PS emulator to further boost the load time, but I haven't noticed that option to have any effect.
Maybe it's my installation, but every time I try to install an extension either it doesn't install or I have to reinstall firefox because it won't start anymore.
That's been a major problem for a while, because extensions are/were essentially becoming part of the main program. You could uninstall them manually, but it was a tricky, fragile practice. Fortunately, Firefox 0.9 introduced a new extension manager that makes the process much easier -- if the extension author supports it. Which leads us to the next point.
I'd say the extensions system needs just a bit more work. And mind you, I've seen a lot of mozilla bugs as I've been with mozilla since version 0.8.x
Not all of the problems are with the extension system itself. An extension can be well or poorly written; it can have bugs, incompatibilities, etc., just like you won't always have a success with every program you see on freshmeat and try out. It's not automatically stable just because it's an extension. If the extension author has written their extension to support the new extension manager, it's easy to uninstall if you determine it's of no use to you, but ideally, a bit of research should be done before you try an extension out. Sites like ExtensionRoom and update.mozilla.org have a place for users to put reviews and comments, so it's a good idea to glance over those, and see if lots of other people have problems, before taking the plunge.
I used to love Tabbrowser Extensions, but it got bigger and slower over time until it finally became unbearable for me. I still think it's a brilliant extension, but I use Firefox instead of Mozilla specifically because I don't want one package that does everything. (:
Piro points to a list of smaller extensions that add features from TBE on an individual basis. I use a few of those and love them. But the one thing I really miss from TBE is the coloured tabgroups. I loved having related tabs all grouped together, and being able to close the group without closing all my other tabs as well.
I have a few years of experience writing/hacking Mozilla-and-family extensions, so I may eventually tackle this myself. But I'm quite busy (lazy) and I keep hoping someone else will miss it enough to write a tabgroup extension for me. (:
There's an extension called MozEX that allows you to use an external program for View Source.
TFA ended up describing the author's personal favourite extensions, so it kind of missed the point that there are extensions for almost everything, like what you need. Some good places to look for extensions:
Like any other kind of software, extensions can vary in quality and stability. You might want to get other opinions of an extension you're considering before you install it. Fortunately, the new Extension Manager in Firefox 0.9 and up makes it easy to uninstall an extension. Before that came along, you had to do it manually which was tricky and easy to screw up.
Er, possibly... go wrong. Heh, that's the first thing that's ever gone wrong.
The first thing? I seriously doubt that. Nothing is so smiple that it can't be screwed up.
(Yes, that was intentional.)
It's a similar situation with PNG; even though PNG-32 has superior alpha channel support to GIF, you don't see many sites with variable transparency 32-bit PNGs because IE still doesn't support them.
Not to drift too far offtopic, but for what it's worth, there are ways for a webmaster to get proper PNG transparency out of IE5.5+ without too much effort on the part of the web developer. If you don't mind adding some nonstandard CSS (the "behavior" property) to the IMG element, and if you specify a width and height for each image you use, you can use alpha-blended PNGs while still supporting "90% of the users" out there.
I find the gestures to be handy because the nature of using a GUI means I generally need a hand on my mouse much of the time. If I'm already using my mouse to switch between windows, launch programs, etc., then it's easier to gesture to reload the window than it is to move my hand from my mouse to my keyboard to do the same thing. (That's a bit more travel than it may seem at first; I like to keep my keyboard in my lap, though my mouse sits on my desk.)
/. about very neat interface devices that blur the line between keyboard and mouse. My personal favourite is the gesture pad with a keyboard overprinted, that allowed two-handed gesturing and typing. (Now, to win the lottery...)
Of course, there are two counterarguments to that logic. One is that I could/should learn more of the keyboard shortcuts that are available to me. Much of what I do may well be possible using only the keyboard. When it becomes as convenient to discover the shortcut for a given action as it is to do the same action using the mouse (via button, menu or gesture) then I'll probably switch.
The other is that my interface to the computer could use improvement. There's been all sorts of stories here on
Of course, the coolest toys aren't directly supported in Linux, but that's a different rant.
The Vortex is my personal favourite too. It's a thrill without being terrifying. I like to have my breath taken away by the fun of the ride, not by the excessive G's or the insane heights. The Vortex succeeds very well at the former. 'Bout the only good thing to come out of Canada's Wonderland once it sold out to Paramount...
ipxodi
That one took me a moment. I remembered it as being something to do with Doom... I finally remembered that it was part of the chain of drivers needed to get modem/network play going.
Ah, the good old days, abusing my position as a network sysadmin in high school. (:
I like it, it seems very well planned out. Putting something in or taking something out looks like it would be much easier than in most tower and (especially -- ugh) desktop cases, where components and riser boards and drive bays are shoved in every which way, making your "upgrade" feel like a game of Tetris. Only I don't remember Tetris giving me scraped and cut knuckles or stripped screws.
It also looks more mobo-friendly. My motherboard, a Tyan S1854 (yes, it's old), theoretically fits in a standard-sized tower case. But the power connector and IDE connectors are on the front edge of the motherboard, where they prevent use of anything deep (like, say, a CD drive) in the 5.25" drive bays. A case like this looks like it would be perfect for my motherboard. It would be more compact than a super-deep tower case, and it doesn't look like I'd need extended IDE cables.
I don't see a price or a link to an order form. Pity. I hope that doesn't mean they won't enter production. I know I'd buy one, as long as they aren't hideously expensive.
Personally, I really wish some open standard would replace AIM/MSN so that we can use any software we like.
Jabber uses an open protocol, and has pushed to try and make it a standard. But as someone who's tried to get people to switch over to Jabber, I can tell you, it's very difficult. They like their current IM software (every Jabber client I give them to try is flaky, if not downright broken), and don't want to lose the friends on their buddy lists (Jabber's cross-protocol transports never seem to work).
Open standards are great, but they aren't as important to J. Random Luser as is what "everyone" uses and what "works". Ask anyone who's tried to get someone to switch from MS Word. (Going OT: the company I work for is driven entirely by the pushing of an Open Source solution on Linux... yet the suits send us company correspondence in MS Word documents that AbiWord chokes on.)
[...] or is it an example of an evil browser deliberately breaking standards compliance?
How is this breaking standards compliance if there's no standard in place? It's not "breaking" the way anything else is interpreted, is it?
No troll intended. I'm really curious.
Someone mod parent up. It seems that any SciFi writers drag out time travel when they can't be more creative. And this is just the pilot! It can only go downhill from here.
I'll bet five bucks that there'll be an episode, in the first season, where T'pol and Archer get beamed back into the past, and a logical and moral dilemma ensues over who should or shouldn't kill whom.
People, give blood wherever you live, regardless of whether it's in California or in Rhode Island!
Or even Canada. Canadian Blood Services tells me they're helping out the States. Go to www.bloodservices.ca or phone 1-888-2-DONATE to learn how you can give blood. Innocent people need your help to survive.
Canadian Blood Services tells me they're helping out too. Fellow canucks: look at www.bloodservices.ca or call 1-888-2-DONATE and help.