Man I wish I had mod points right now. I couldn't agree with you more.
There seems to be a mentality among linux users that they enjoy upgrading and reinstalling their OS every few months. This may have been acceptable 2-3 years ago when Linux was more of a hobbyist OS, but now I just want to USE THE OS to get my work done. I can't do that if I have to spend a week every year upgrading.
Also, there seems to be a viewpoint that if you want to run the latest apps, you must have the latest version of the OS. Contrast that with the windows world where efforts are made to provide products that work with older operating systems. For instance, Warcraft III, my latest purchase, works with a 5 year old version of Windows.
What I wanted was a new version of GNUCash for an older (9 months or so) distribution. GNUCash was a particular problem since something like 10 other packages needed upgrades too. The problem with Mandrake and with other distros too is that the day a new distribution comes out, users of the older ones are treated like red-headed step children. You get security updates, but that's it. You can try Cooker RPMs, but they have all kinds of false dependencies built into them. (You don't really need version 2.8.6.4 of foo, version 2.8 will do, but cooker says you do.)
So, what I want to see if 12 month release cycles, 3-4 years of support for a distribution, and at least 2 years of that where you have the option of upgrading major packages to the latest and greatest versions. (Just like with Windows.)
One reason I don't want to upgrade everything is that basic things that I am completely happy with get broken from one release to the next.
My point is, I would be willing to pay for this, but I'm not going to shell out $60/year to be part of a "club" that doesn't guarantee me anything.
I've never had a problem downloading their releases, especially if you wait a week or so after its announced. (See my comment about not wanting to update all the time.)
Let me start out by saying that I've used Mandrake for years, I still do. Nothing I've seen comes close in terms of ease of install and automatically detecting and setting up my desktop hardware.
But, unless they fundamentally change the way they do business, I don't think they can survive. Their primary products seem to be a boxed distro that you can download for free and MandrakeClub, which as far as I can tell is paying $60 a year to feel good about yourself. The subscription adds nothing of real value, at least to me. I don't really want the free but commericial software they have there (and if I do, I can download it elsewhere). I don't care to "vote" on which RPMs get packaged up next, etc.
Here's what I want from a linux disto: The ability to use the OS. To not have to tinker with it. To not have to spend a week updating it just because I want to run a more up-to-date version of some program (GNUCash 1.6 comes to mind.) To not have to update the OS every year because the company drops support (and some here bitch at MS for dropping Win-95 support!).
Simply put, I think Mandrake would be better off concentrating on making less versions of their OS, supporting them better, and helping people move forward without updating the whole system. They could easily charge for access to their servers, etc. a. la. the Red Hat Network.
With Red Hat's recent decision to only support their Linux distros for 12 months, I think the market is ripe for something with real support for the end user at a reasonable cost. Move away from the hacker market who DOES like to reinstall every few months chasing the latest and greatest.
It seemed like there was only a short period of time where Alpha was cost effective compared to Intel, the rest of the time up until maybe three years ago, Alpha was often simply a heck of a lot faster and that performance was only needed in niche markets compared to today's desktop market.
For us it was waiting for Linux to reach a certain maturity and then realizing that it had. There was also the issue of g77 versus DEC's f77 which exagerated the performance difference.
Do you know for sure that the demand for PA-RISC is higher than for Alpha (generally)? I'm not arguing, just questioning. In my field (high energy physics) we never went in for PA-RISC. Alphas were the greatest thing ever, until Lintel took over on the $/FLOP pricepoint.
The Alpha is still an amazing CPU line, just not cost effective compared to Intel anymore. But completely different markets, I realize.
The judges claim they banned it because it is "unsafe for city sidewalks",
The ban was by the "supervisors," presumably the city council equivalent. Not judges who don't (or at least aren't supposed to) make policy.
commented that the Segway is "a national threat at least as grave as Iraq" because of laziness. I don't think Iraq is that dangerous, so I don't know exactly what that comment is suppost to mean =) Also they said they didn't want to see a "potential tsunami of lard".
These comments were made by an editorial writer for the SF Times, not any government official.
Without knowing for sure, I would assume that "more than once" means that you can't copy a copy, just like with CDs and audio CD-R, DAT or Mini-Disc. I think for CDs this is called SCMS (serial copy management system).
Nothing stops you (in the CD case) from making unlimited copies of the *original* source CD.
I think I have both (but don't pay for the service, so don't get the mail).
It may depend on how long you've been a customer. I think at some point they introduced the alphabetical names. I've been a subscriber for about 3 years, I guess.
Why aren't the text message preferences deleted when the cancellation notices comes thru?
Just a guess, but probably what is registered is an e-mail address like 3215551212@sprintpcs.com which is how e-mail can find its way to SprintPCS phones. The service you sign up for may have no relation to your cell provider, so cancelling one doesn't cancel the other and then your phone number (and hence e-mail address) can be recycled.
There were a couple of companies that tried this. Process Tree springs to mind. I ran a client for a while t from a different company which was called something like Capacity Calibration. Basically testing connectivity and response time to web sites from a distributed group of computers. I think they paid me $20 or so over 6 months.
If you think about it, that might make more sense than buying CPU time.
I didn't say, or mean to imply, that they forced them out in a classical military fashion. In fact I agree with you and the other posters. By using small arms, they managed to inflict a small amount of damage, but more than the US was willing to bear. And they weren't willing to respond in a way that would ensure victory. But to say that people with small arms are ineffectual clearly doesn't fit the facts. It was a massacre, but they were willing to be massacred. The US wasn't willing to lose any troops, nor was it willing to massacre Somalis on a wider scale.
I've not read Black Hawk Down, but I have seen the movie and seen documentaries on this "incident." No one will ever know the numbers of combatant vs. non-combatant deaths, but as I recall the fire fight lasted for about a day at close range. I'd suspect the number of non-combatants caught in the crossfire after the first 20 minutes or so would be fairly low. That type and number of "collateral damage" is much more tolerable to public opinion than 10's of thousands killed by leveling a city.
As another point, look at the Palestinians or the Irish in the north. Both are fighting or fought asymmetrical wars. Where would they be if they were fighting with knives? Nowhere. (Of course you could also ask where would they be if they embraced non-violent resistance.) While I despise their tactics of targeting civilians, it does work for them at some level. In both cases, the established government will not or cannot do what it takes to win outright on the terms presented to them, so they have to negotiate.
Tell that to the Somalis who forced the U.S. out of their country with (mostly) small arms. Facts: 1) People willing to fight for something they believe in gain an advantage over hired guns. 2) A lot of the advantages of a high tech, heavily armed disappear in urban combat, especially when the high tech army doesn't want to cause incredible numbers of innocent casualties.
Don't assume that every conflict against a poorly armed population will go over like Desert Storm, Kosovo, or Afghanistan.
Good idea. In fact, combine GNUCash as mentioned above with kprinter (the KDE printing panel) and you can directly mail PDF files as a "printer" device.
Beonex communicator is on the CD, which is a rebranded mozilla.
I've never used it, but it looks pretty much the same as stock mozilla 1.0.1, but rebranded and maybe missing the debuggers, and chatzilla. It has mail, news, composer, and of course, the browser parts of mozilla.
The problem is, some of them absolutely require it unless you are paying cash. I too refuse, to the point of having them call over a manager to tell the sales droid how NOT to collect my phone number. If they still refuse, most times I walk out of the store and get what I want somewhere else.
I have noticed that companies that do this often times stop. I guess they reach the same conclusion RS has.
Why they ever think that harrassing their customers is a good thing to do is beyond me. I'd like to see a real comparison of the value of their mailing list (although mostly they ask for phone #'s) vs. the business they loose being nosy.
The only reason email will go away is when mobile (cell) phones become as convenient and cheap a way to communicate as email currently is.
And this will never happen. When I call someone, I know I am interupting them, even if they look at the caller ID and decide not to answer. When I e-mail them, I know they will look at the e-mail when they have time to do it and can take their time to respond if they need to.
More like "Seat belts were banned because in 80% of accidents, the belt seized and wouldn't allow people to escape a burning car."
The problem with these filters isn't what they let through, but what they block. (In addition to them being federally mandated as opposed to the library's own choice.)
Seriously, these filters are really stupid. At my local library, you get the choice when you sit down to use filtered or un-filtered. For kicks, I chose filtered, then tried to find a book I wanted in the library's own catalog. My request was blocked because the book was titled "The First Sex," a book about how women are about to take over the world.
Reading the blurb at the page-a-day site, it says ASCII only where bold is converted to ALL CAPS, the English pound symbol is rendered as "L," etc. No preservation of figures, drawings, or photos.
This seems very short sighted to me. Devices that can only display ASCII are becoming rarer and rarer. Why not, instead, store docs in some sort of SGML format to handle the special markup (which must be rare) and then down convert to ASCII when needed.
I've tried reading these things on my Palm. Very difficult. But if I could get a nice typeset PDF version, that would be a whole different story (no pun intended).
1) Have to switch desktops, hope there is an open place there, find and click on it or 2) Shade a window, hope there is an empty space there, find and click on it.
Seems to me you just added at least 1 click and a mouse movement to the process, making it more difficult. Whenever I've needed to find open desktop on my machine it has been a frustating ordeal.
Just for kicks, I just shaded my mozilla window to try to find the nearest open part of the desktop. Guess what? Lower left corner, just above the "Big K"
The problem is that lots of us don't have root access to our mail servers to install these filters. And sending the mail to a home computer first for filtering is less than satisfactory.
Its a perl script that uses SpamAssassin on runs on any machine as an IMAP client. Spam shows up in your INBOX and disappears shortly there after.
People are working on a Bayesian module for SpamAssassin, which will be promising. The great thing about SA (as many others have said) is that it uses a number of inputs to decide if a mail is spam-like, including auto-whitelists which keep track of the people who send you mail.
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There seems to be a mentality among linux users that they enjoy upgrading and reinstalling their OS every few months. This may have been acceptable 2-3 years ago when Linux was more of a hobbyist OS, but now I just want to USE THE OS to get my work done. I can't do that if I have to spend a week every year upgrading.
Also, there seems to be a viewpoint that if you want to run the latest apps, you must have the latest version of the OS. Contrast that with the windows world where efforts are made to provide products that work with older operating systems. For instance, Warcraft III, my latest purchase, works with a 5 year old version of Windows.
I didn't make my point very clearly.
What I wanted was a new version of GNUCash for an older (9 months or so) distribution. GNUCash was a particular problem since something like 10 other packages needed upgrades too. The problem with Mandrake and with other distros too is that the day a new distribution comes out, users of the older ones are treated like red-headed step children. You get security updates, but that's it. You can try Cooker RPMs, but they have all kinds of false dependencies built into them. (You don't really need version 2.8.6.4 of foo, version 2.8 will do, but cooker says you do.)
So, what I want to see if 12 month release cycles, 3-4 years of support for a distribution, and at least 2 years of that where you have the option of upgrading major packages to the latest and greatest versions. (Just like with Windows.)
One reason I don't want to upgrade everything is that basic things that I am completely happy with get broken from one release to the next.
My point is, I would be willing to pay for this, but I'm not going to shell out $60/year to be part of a "club" that doesn't guarantee me anything.
I've never had a problem downloading their releases, especially if you wait a week or so after its announced. (See my comment about not wanting to update all the time.)
Let me start out by saying that I've used Mandrake for years, I still do. Nothing I've seen comes close in terms of ease of install and automatically detecting and setting up my desktop hardware.
But, unless they fundamentally change the way they do business, I don't think they can survive. Their primary products seem to be a boxed distro that you can download for free and MandrakeClub, which as far as I can tell is paying $60 a year to feel good about yourself. The subscription adds nothing of real value, at least to me. I don't really want the free but commericial software they have there (and if I do, I can download it elsewhere). I don't care to "vote" on which RPMs get packaged up next, etc.
Here's what I want from a linux disto: The ability to use the OS. To not have to tinker with it. To not have to spend a week updating it just because I want to run a more up-to-date version of some program (GNUCash 1.6 comes to mind.) To not have to update the OS every year because the company drops support (and some here bitch at MS for dropping Win-95 support!).
Simply put, I think Mandrake would be better off concentrating on making less versions of their OS, supporting them better, and helping people move forward without updating the whole system. They could easily charge for access to their servers, etc. a. la. the Red Hat Network.
With Red Hat's recent decision to only support their Linux distros for 12 months, I think the market is ripe for something with real support for the end user at a reasonable cost. Move away from the hacker market who DOES like to reinstall every few months chasing the latest and greatest.
Is there something about OS X executables that makes them much larger than Windows or Linux?
Looking at the full mozilla download, I see Windows - 11 MB, Linux - 13.5 MB, OS X 18 MB. (38 MB must be the uncompressed version).
For us it was waiting for Linux to reach a certain maturity and then realizing that it had. There was also the issue of g77 versus DEC's f77 which exagerated the performance difference.
Do you know for sure that the demand for PA-RISC is higher than for Alpha (generally)? I'm not arguing, just questioning. In my field (high energy physics) we never went in for PA-RISC. Alphas were the greatest thing ever, until Lintel took over on the $/FLOP pricepoint.
The Alpha is still an amazing CPU line, just not cost effective compared to Intel anymore. But completely different markets, I realize.
Dispenses 16 bottles of liquor for $235? Even if the hardware was free, I don't think I'd be drinking anything that came out of this "monkey."
The ban was by the "supervisors," presumably the city council equivalent. Not judges who don't (or at least aren't supposed to) make policy.
commented that the Segway is "a national threat at least as grave as Iraq" because of laziness. I don't think Iraq is that dangerous, so I don't know exactly what that comment is suppost to mean =) Also they said they didn't want to see a "potential tsunami of lard".
These comments were made by an editorial writer for the SF Times, not any government official.
Without knowing for sure, I would assume that "more than once" means that you can't copy a copy, just like with CDs and audio CD-R, DAT or Mini-Disc. I think for CDs this is called SCMS (serial copy management system).
Nothing stops you (in the CD case) from making unlimited copies of the *original* source CD.
I think I have both (but don't pay for the service, so don't get the mail).
It may depend on how long you've been a customer. I think at some point they introduced the alphabetical names. I've been a subscriber for about 3 years, I guess.
Try the numeric one and see if it works.
Just a guess, but probably what is registered is an e-mail address like 3215551212@sprintpcs.com which is how e-mail can find its way to SprintPCS phones. The service you sign up for may have no relation to your cell provider, so cancelling one doesn't cancel the other and then your phone number (and hence e-mail address) can be recycled.
I mean, come on. Now spam is "Evil?" Annoying, yes. Illegal, maybe. Evil? Not a chance. This kind of rhetoric cheapens what real "evil" is.
There were a couple of companies that tried this. Process Tree springs to mind. I ran a client for a while t from a different company which was called something like Capacity Calibration. Basically testing connectivity and response time to web sites from a distributed group of computers. I think they paid me $20 or so over 6 months.
If you think about it, that might make more sense than buying CPU time.
I didn't say, or mean to imply, that they forced them out in a classical military fashion. In fact I agree with you and the other posters. By using small arms, they managed to inflict a small amount of damage, but more than the US was willing to bear. And they weren't willing to respond in a way that would ensure victory. But to say that people with small arms are ineffectual clearly doesn't fit the facts. It was a massacre, but they were willing to be massacred. The US wasn't willing to lose any troops, nor was it willing to massacre Somalis on a wider scale.
I've not read Black Hawk Down, but I have seen the movie and seen documentaries on this "incident." No one will ever know the numbers of combatant vs. non-combatant deaths, but as I recall the fire fight lasted for about a day at close range. I'd suspect the number of non-combatants caught in the crossfire after the first 20 minutes or so would be fairly low. That type and number of "collateral damage" is much more tolerable to public opinion than 10's of thousands killed by leveling a city.
As another point, look at the Palestinians or the Irish in the north. Both are fighting or fought asymmetrical wars. Where would they be if they were fighting with knives? Nowhere. (Of course you could also ask where would they be if they embraced non-violent resistance.) While I despise their tactics of targeting civilians, it does work for them at some level. In both cases, the established government will not or cannot do what it takes to win outright on the terms presented to them, so they have to negotiate.
Tell that to the Somalis who forced the U.S. out of their country with (mostly) small arms. Facts: 1) People willing to fight for something they believe in gain an advantage over hired guns. 2) A lot of the advantages of a high tech, heavily armed disappear in urban combat, especially when the high tech army doesn't want to cause incredible numbers of innocent casualties.
Don't assume that every conflict against a poorly armed population will go over like Desert Storm, Kosovo, or Afghanistan.
Good idea. In fact, combine GNUCash as mentioned above with kprinter (the KDE printing panel) and you can directly mail PDF files as a "printer" device.
Beonex communicator is on the CD, which is a rebranded mozilla. I've never used it, but it looks pretty much the same as stock mozilla 1.0.1, but rebranded and maybe missing the debuggers, and chatzilla. It has mail, news, composer, and of course, the browser parts of mozilla.
The problem is, some of them absolutely require it unless you are paying cash. I too refuse, to the point of having them call over a manager to tell the sales droid how NOT to collect my phone number. If they still refuse, most times I walk out of the store and get what I want somewhere else.
I have noticed that companies that do this often times stop. I guess they reach the same conclusion RS has.
Why they ever think that harrassing their customers is a good thing to do is beyond me. I'd like to see a real comparison of the value of their mailing list (although mostly they ask for phone #'s) vs. the business they loose being nosy.
And this will never happen. When I call someone, I know I am interupting them, even if they look at the caller ID and decide not to answer. When I e-mail them, I know they will look at the e-mail when they have time to do it and can take their time to respond if they need to.
Different tools for different purposes.
The problem with these filters isn't what they let through, but what they block. (In addition to them being federally mandated as opposed to the library's own choice.)
Seriously, these filters are really stupid. At my local library, you get the choice when you sit down to use filtered or un-filtered. For kicks, I chose filtered, then tried to find a book I wanted in the library's own catalog. My request was blocked because the book was titled "The First Sex," a book about how women are about to take over the world.
Reading the blurb at the page-a-day site, it says ASCII only where bold is converted to ALL CAPS, the English pound symbol is rendered as "L," etc. No preservation of figures, drawings, or photos.
This seems very short sighted to me. Devices that can only display ASCII are becoming rarer and rarer. Why not, instead, store docs in some sort of SGML format to handle the special markup (which must be rare) and then down convert to ASCII when needed.
I've tried reading these things on my Palm. Very difficult. But if I could get a nice typeset PDF version, that would be a whole different story (no pun intended).
So then you either
1) Have to switch desktops, hope there is an open place there, find and click on it or
2) Shade a window, hope there is an empty space there, find and click on it.
Seems to me you just added at least 1 click and a mouse movement to the process, making it more difficult. Whenever I've needed to find open desktop on my machine it has been a frustating ordeal.
Just for kicks, I just shaded my mozilla window to try to find the nearest open part of the desktop. Guess what? Lower left corner, just above the "Big K"
The problem is that lots of us don't have root access to our mail servers to install these filters. And sending the mail to a home computer first for filtering is less than satisfactory.
Just guessing this is the poster's issue.
Its a perl script that uses SpamAssassin on runs on any machine as an IMAP client. Spam shows up in your INBOX and disappears shortly there after.
People are working on a Bayesian module for SpamAssassin, which will be promising. The great thing about SA (as many others have said) is that it uses a number of inputs to decide if a mail is spam-like, including auto-whitelists which keep track of the people who send you mail.