Drivers for the prism54 chipset have finally been merged, which means that the vanilla kernel now has support for 802.11g (54 mbit) wireless lan. The prism54 chipset is used in whole bunch of 802.11g cards.
Well, as others have said, it's not about censorship, but about underreported stories. And when you see how the US press does it's "reporting" these days, it's no wonder why they are underreported. But don't take my word for it, Greg Palast is an american reporter (living in the UK), and he wrote the following in a recent book:
"I freely offered up to CBS this information: The office of the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, brother of the republican presidential candidate, had illegally ordered the removal of the names of felons from voter rolls - real felons who had served time but obtained clemency, with the legal right to vote under Florida law. [...] The next day I received a call from the producer, who said, "I'm sorry, but your story didn't hold up." And how do you think the multibillion-dollar CBS network determined this? Answer: "We called Jeb Bush's office." Oh."
What it boils down to is that reporters generally don't bother to actually investigate and report anything anymore, they mostly just cut and paste from official press releases (there are exceptions, thank god, such as BBC news).
Anyways, what bothers me is that it is true - the neoconservatives want world domination. And they're not even trying to hide it. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and many other friends of Bush are part of a neo-conservative think-tank called the Project for a New American Century. To quote from the PNACs official website: "The Project for the New American Century is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle; and that too few political leaders today are making the case for global leadership."
There is an excellent, well-researched article on GNN by a former british member of parliament, Michael Meacher, on how Afghanistan and Iraq both are part of an PNAC plan on establishing a US presence in the middle-east to secure future oil-supplies. This plan was first described in a document, called Rebuilding America's Defences, which was published by PNAC in september 2000.
I want you to just please read the article (it won't take more than 10 minutes of your time), and then tell me something's not going on here...
Please read these, and then tell me that iraq, or even afghanistan, had anything to do with 9/11 and the war on terror at all (except being used as a smoke-screen).
Well, GNOME has already won awards for its accessibility work, and it has a mature framework for dealing with this (disclaimer: I've never tried it, just heard people praising it).
I have a open source project myself, which I used to host on sourceforge. However, after having used Sourceforge for six months or so, I decided to go looking for hosting somewhere else. The main reason for doing this was because I always thought the Sourceforge systems are a bit "clunky" and inflexible, and I wanted total freedom in which services to provide, and how to configure them.
After a while I stumbled upon a company called John Companies. These guys provide virtual FreeBSD / Linux servers; you get root on your own system, a unique IP address, and full freedom in what to do with your system.
Now, these guys are professionals - you just know that from day one. The systems are really well run, I have had almost no problems at all (except one network outage because of a couple of busted routers at their network providers). And the support is fantastic - you can ask them about any problem you may have, and they'll usually get back to you at once. Their prices are low too, $65 a month for a freebsd system, but if you are an open source developer they'll even give you a $20 discount.
The only snag, really, is that you'll have to set everything up yourself. This was my main reason for switching from sourceforge anyway, so it wasn't a problem for me - but others may not want to go through all the work.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with John Companies in any way, except being a very, very satisfied customer.
I don't know too much about this specific player, but I bought my first DVD player from KiSS about three years ago - a cheap player, around $200, which also played mp3s, vcd and svcd. And it is probably the worst DVD player I have ever used.
The DVD image and audio quality was very, very bad (jerky playback, unclear image, lots of jitter etc), and it wouldn't even play half of the VCDs I tried. It also had a very "plastic" feel to it, and I suspect it used a standard IDE DVD ROM with some very cheap chips for playback.
This new player may be good, but after my experiences with their earlier products I would approach this one with caution.
Audible provides alot of various books on everything from fiction to science to language courses in a downloadable audio format. Unfortunately, they use a proprietary audio format (in order to encrypt the data etc) which are only playable on a handful of MP3 players which are "Audible ready".
You can, however, burn the files to a cd (according to the site), and then you should be able to rip it back to mp3.
Well, I guess the problem is that Sony is selling the colsole very cheap, making almost nothing from hardware sales. Instead I believe most of their ps2 income comes from licencing fees from game developers.
For your analogy to be more accurate you would have to say that when you buy a Ford Ranger the company (Ford) doesn't make very much, if anything. Instead, they get their money from selling gas. So, if you (and about half of Ford's other customers) were to mod your Ford Ranger and install a nuclear reactor in it, I'm sure there would be similar reactions
Well, the IT market crashed just as badly here in Europe as it did in the US. At least here in Norway you better make sure you have a solid education or 4+ years of experience, unless you want to do first-line customer support.
If you don't have a university degree or experience you will need to compete with alot of people who took a one-year crashcourse during the IT-boom to Get Rich Fast, even for the shitty jobs.
I sure had my share of good times on the ol' Amiga, with games like Pinball (Dream|Illusions|Fantasies). Why don't you go get the Unix Amiga Emulator and get hold of any of these games?
Well, I've got a region-free DVD-player (a Samsung DVD-909 or something, for those who want to know) connected to a PAL TV. I buy most my DVDs from the US (region 1) because of a lower price, larger selection, better extras and earlier release date. I don't experience any problems when playing off these NTSC-DVDs, so I guess the player has some sort of built in conversion-system. I think most, if not all, players have this conversion - none of my friends have this problem either, with other DVD-players.
Every, and I do mean EVERY time I've had a problem, it's been easily solved by checking the manual (which usually does the trick), or searching the web - mailing list archives in particular. I honestly don't know why people need techsupport anyways, if they can't get it working by themselves they shouldn't be sysadmins at all.
Go ahead, mod me down, I just had to get it out of my system...
During the last year or so there's been alot of focus on Linux making it as a desktop OS. I use Linux, and nothing but Linux, on all my desktop machines, both at home and at work, and have had no larger problems doing so.
The only big problem with using Linux on the desktop is the inability to handle Microsoft Office files 100% correctly. But what people seem to forget is that this is not a shortcoming of any of the Linux office suites, the problem lies with Microsoft's closed file formats. If Microsoft had released the specs to their file formats we would have Linux support for them in no time.
This, however, is not the issue I'm concerned with. See, I like Linux - in fact, I absolutely love it. And the reason for this is that it's not dumbed-down so that even the most ignorant user can use it. This is because Linux is an OS for computers, not people. Most software is created so that programs can easily exchange data and communicate effortlessly - and to do this the software has to play by computer rules. This is also what makes Linux so powerful and beautiful. Anyone who has set up a linux system from scratch (for example by checking out www.linuxfromscratch.org ;)) knows just what a beautiful ballet of smaller programs Linux actully is. And each of these small programs has a vast range of configuration options, enabling a skilled user to tweak the system into working excactly as he/she wants. This is why I love Linux, and this is also why i hate Windows.
The problem with turning Linux is a desktop OS is that for it to be successful the system has to be dumbed down so even my grandma can use it without any problems. And when doing this I fear that Linux will no longer be Linux - when normal users start migrating to Linux, they will increasingly request features which will make data formats and communication protocols much more complex, and thereby also more messy (see my comment on html for examples of this). This will, in turn, mean that when writing desktop-software for Linux one will need to support these bloated standards, and your software will in turn get bloated. And when the standards get bloated enough, they will mean that only large development teams have the resources to develop new applications - which means that corporations will take over the desktop, further enhancing it's "user-friendliness" with even more complex standards. In the end, the Linux desktop OS will become one huge, monolithic system just as Windows is today, and not leave any room for newcomers.
Long before this has happened I'll probably have left Linux behind, focusing on some other operating system which has the flexibility I seek. Then this will probably happen again, and again, and again.
Why do Linux have to become more user-friendly? Why do we have to have a Linux-box in every office, and even have our moms running it? I like Linux just the way it is; a powerful and flexible OS for users who actually knows what they're doing, and desire more from a computer than a spreadsheet editor and word-processor. I agree fully that we should get more people running Linux, because it is a truly great OS, but I don't think we should transform it into what Windows is today. Instead of bringing Linux to the normal lusers, we should focus our efforts on having fairly computer literate people give Linux a try.
PAN (the Pimp Ass Newsreader) is without a doubt the best newsreader I've used on any platform. Pan seems to be Unix/Linux only, and is based on the gtk+ toolkit.
you've all proven to be the biggest bunch of luddites around ("take your style sheets and stuff'm").
From a few of the replies to my original post, it seems that some have misinterpreted my statements as being anti-aesthetical. I'm not at all against expanding HTMLs capabilities for design, but it has to be done in a correct and standards-compliant way in order to preserve HTMLs original purpose; to provide a flexible way of formatting data, making it possible to render the pages on various devices.
In accordance with this, I think that CSS and related design-extensions are a great idea, because it separates the page design from the data itself, so that these kinds of rules can be stripped by a presentation-layer not capable of displaying advanced graphics. However, when some of the tags are being used in unconvensional ways this often leads to many devices not being able to render the page in a sensible way. This is excactly why standards like WML have been created, when HTML should have been more than sufficient.
Well, let's all just hope that XHTML might fix this by providing a clean way of separating content-structure and design/layout.
Yes, well, I've been working as a web-developer for some years now, and I also use lots and lots of tables for formatting the pages. But my point is that this would have been better solved by adding a designated tag for this kind of control instead of abusing tables.
I'm not going to get into a flamewar on wether or not one should use tables for formatting, in today's reality you'll have a hard time finding a web-developer who doesn't. I'm just trying to make a point about how promising, well-planned universal standards are corrupted, and basically destroyed, when applied incorrectly, mainly by incompetent/ignorant people or by corporations who aren't able to see the long-term consequences of their actions because they're blinded by the aspects of profit.
This also applies to a variety of other standards who'll probably suffer the very same fate, for the very same reasons.
I believe that todays web-pages have become far too complex to fulfill the purpose they were originally intended for; originally HTML was a simplistic markup-language, which focused more on the content-structure of the document instead of the layout, using tags like H1, B, A, P etc. When sticking to these very simple tags, it is up to the user agent to render the page as best it can for its particular medium. A HTML-page should be as easily viewable in a browser on a 16,7m colour modern computer system as on a cellular phone, text-mode browser (lynx etc), news-ticker, blind-terminals or whatever. These different environments requires highly different methods for formatting the data, but the main concern is that it is still easily viewable, and has a logical structure (ie you can distinguish a headline from a footnote).
Today, however, HTML has become very layout-centric, as opposed to content-centric, with emphasis on tables and invisible GIFs for arranging the data. This is most probably a consequence of larger commercial companies moving content onto the web, and using a mindset from magazine and newspaper production in this entirely new medium; and that's where the problems start. When you try to develop a web-page as you would a page in a magazine you have to use alot of tricks to get the desired result, and these tricks corrupt the basic meaning of an html-page. For example, it is not uncommon to have ten nested tables to take care of a basic page layout. However, the purpose of tables is not to take care of layout and design, it is to present data matrixes. And it is this kind of widespread abuse that has messed up the web to the point where it is only properly viewable by a handful of browsers, of which maybe only one or two display it as was intended by the page creator. Luckily we have new standards like XML and XHTML (I have no experience with XHTML whatsoever - so apoligies in advance if this should be wrong) which allows us to separate content-structure from layout and design. But people will most probably abuse these new standards as well... I just think that something's VERY wrong when a browser contains more source code than a complete operating system.
"Microsoft has launched its new Windows XP operation system. The system promises fewer computer crashes and will allow users to delete data from their hard drive."
Oh my, those are some mighty impressive new features. Excuse me for a moment while i format my Linux-box and install XP.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Drivers for the prism54 chipset have finally been merged, which means that the vanilla kernel now has support for 802.11g (54 mbit) wireless lan. The prism54 chipset is used in whole bunch of 802.11g cards.
"When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop."
-- Alan Perils
:)
Well, as others have said, it's not about censorship, but about underreported stories. And when you see how the US press does it's "reporting" these days, it's no wonder why they are underreported. But don't take my word for it, Greg Palast is an american reporter (living in the UK), and he wrote the following in a recent book:
"I freely offered up to CBS this information: The office of the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, brother of the republican presidential candidate, had illegally ordered the removal of the names of felons from voter rolls - real felons who had served time but obtained clemency, with the legal right to vote under Florida law. [...] The next day I received a call from the producer, who said, "I'm sorry, but your story didn't hold up." And how do you think the multibillion-dollar CBS network determined this? Answer: "We called Jeb Bush's office." Oh."
What it boils down to is that reporters generally don't bother to actually investigate and report anything anymore, they mostly just cut and paste from official press releases (there are exceptions, thank god, such as BBC news).
Anyways, what bothers me is that it is true - the neoconservatives want world domination. And they're not even trying to hide it. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and many other friends of Bush are part of a neo-conservative think-tank called the Project for a New American Century. To quote from the PNACs official website: "The Project for the New American Century is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle; and that too few political leaders today are making the case for global leadership."
There is an excellent, well-researched article on GNN by a former british member of parliament, Michael Meacher, on how Afghanistan and Iraq both are part of an PNAC plan on establishing a US presence in the middle-east to secure future oil-supplies. This plan was first described in a document, called Rebuilding America's Defences, which was published by PNAC in september 2000.
I want you to just please read the article (it won't take more than 10 minutes of your time), and then tell me something's not going on here...
I've got a couple of links for you... Perhaps not excactly what you want, but they should help clear up some misunderstandings.
http://www.gnn.tv/war_on_terrorism/doc2869.htmlhttp://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmeri
Please read these, and then tell me that iraq, or even afghanistan, had anything to do with 9/11 and the war on terror at all (except being used as a smoke-screen).
Well, GNOME has already won awards for its accessibility work, and it has a mature framework for dealing with this (disclaimer: I've never tried it, just heard people praising it).
The article itself points this out in two places.
It would install, but it would downgrade to the stable version of GAL, of which I think I use the devel version for something else... :(
Actually, no - if I'm not entirely wrong here, it would install gal 0.24 alongside 1.99.7.
I've been using Evolution as an IMAP/SSL client for a couple of years now, and I haven't had any problems with it at all. Give it a try.
I have a open source project myself, which I used to host on sourceforge. However, after having used Sourceforge for six months or so, I decided to go looking for hosting somewhere else. The main reason for doing this was because I always thought the Sourceforge systems are a bit "clunky" and inflexible, and I wanted total freedom in which services to provide, and how to configure them.
After a while I stumbled upon a company called John Companies. These guys provide virtual FreeBSD / Linux servers; you get root on your own system, a unique IP address, and full freedom in what to do with your system.
Now, these guys are professionals - you just know that from day one. The systems are really well run, I have had almost no problems at all (except one network outage because of a couple of busted routers at their network providers). And the support is fantastic - you can ask them about any problem you may have, and they'll usually get back to you at once. Their prices are low too, $65 a month for a freebsd system, but if you are an open source developer they'll even give you a $20 discount.
The only snag, really, is that you'll have to set everything up yourself. This was my main reason for switching from sourceforge anyway, so it wasn't a problem for me - but others may not want to go through all the work.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with John Companies in any way, except being a very, very satisfied customer.
I don't know too much about this specific player, but I bought my first DVD player from KiSS about three years ago - a cheap player, around $200, which also played mp3s, vcd and svcd. And it is probably the worst DVD player I have ever used.
The DVD image and audio quality was very, very bad (jerky playback, unclear image, lots of jitter etc), and it wouldn't even play half of the VCDs I tried. It also had a very "plastic" feel to it, and I suspect it used a standard IDE DVD ROM with some very cheap chips for playback.
This new player may be good, but after my experiences with their earlier products I would approach this one with caution.
You can, however, burn the files to a cd (according to the site), and then you should be able to rip it back to mp3.
Well, I guess the problem is that Sony is selling the colsole very cheap, making almost nothing from hardware sales. Instead I believe most of their ps2 income comes from licencing fees from game developers.
For your analogy to be more accurate you would have to say that when you buy a Ford Ranger the company (Ford) doesn't make very much, if anything. Instead, they get their money from selling gas. So, if you (and about half of Ford's other customers) were to mod your Ford Ranger and install a nuclear reactor in it, I'm sure there would be similar reactions
Well, the IT market crashed just as badly here in Europe as it did in the US. At least here in Norway you better make sure you have a solid education or 4+ years of experience, unless you want to do first-line customer support.
If you don't have a university degree or experience you will need to compete with alot of people who took a one-year crashcourse during the IT-boom to Get Rich Fast, even for the shitty jobs.
It seems that every few weeks there's some new distro-related story on /., all asking pretty much the same question, in one form on another ;
Which distro is best for what, and why?
A site that answers most questions one might have about pretty much any distro is www.distrowatch.com
I sure had my share of good times on the ol' Amiga, with games like Pinball (Dream|Illusions|Fantasies). Why don't you go get the Unix Amiga Emulator and get hold of any of these games?
Well, I've got a region-free DVD-player (a Samsung DVD-909 or something, for those who want to know) connected to a PAL TV. I buy most my DVDs from the US (region 1) because of a lower price, larger selection, better extras and earlier release date. I don't experience any problems when playing off these NTSC-DVDs, so I guess the player has some sort of built in conversion-system. I think most, if not all, players have this conversion - none of my friends have this problem either, with other DVD-players.
Every, and I do mean EVERY time I've had a problem, it's been easily solved by checking the manual (which usually does the trick), or searching the web - mailing list archives in particular. I honestly don't know why people need techsupport anyways, if they can't get it working by themselves they shouldn't be sysadmins at all.
Go ahead, mod me down, I just had to get it out of my system...
During the last year or so there's been alot of focus on Linux making it as a desktop OS. I use Linux, and nothing but Linux, on all my desktop machines, both at home and at work, and have had no larger problems doing so.
;)) knows just what a beautiful ballet of smaller programs Linux actully is. And each of these small programs has a vast range of configuration options, enabling a skilled user to tweak the system into working excactly as he/she wants. This is why I love Linux, and this is also why i hate Windows.
The only big problem with using Linux on the desktop is the inability to handle Microsoft Office files 100% correctly. But what people seem to forget is that this is not a shortcoming of any of the Linux office suites, the problem lies with Microsoft's closed file formats. If Microsoft had released the specs to their file formats we would have Linux support for them in no time.
This, however, is not the issue I'm concerned with. See, I like Linux - in fact, I absolutely love it. And the reason for this is that it's not dumbed-down so that even the most ignorant user can use it. This is because Linux is an OS for computers, not people. Most software is created so that programs can easily exchange data and communicate effortlessly - and to do this the software has to play by computer rules. This is also what makes Linux so powerful and beautiful. Anyone who has set up a linux system from scratch (for example by checking out www.linuxfromscratch.org
The problem with turning Linux is a desktop OS is that for it to be successful the system has to be dumbed down so even my grandma can use it without any problems. And when doing this I fear that Linux will no longer be Linux - when normal users start migrating to Linux, they will increasingly request features which will make data formats and communication protocols much more complex, and thereby also more messy (see my comment on html for examples of this). This will, in turn, mean that when writing desktop-software for Linux one will need to support these bloated standards, and your software will in turn get bloated. And when the standards get bloated enough, they will mean that only large development teams have the resources to develop new applications - which means that corporations will take over the desktop, further enhancing it's "user-friendliness" with even more complex standards. In the end, the Linux desktop OS will become one huge, monolithic system just as Windows is today, and not leave any room for newcomers.
Long before this has happened I'll probably have left Linux behind, focusing on some other operating system which has the flexibility I seek. Then this will probably happen again, and again, and again.
Why do Linux have to become more user-friendly? Why do we have to have a Linux-box in every office, and even have our moms running it? I like Linux just the way it is; a powerful and flexible OS for users who actually knows what they're doing, and desire more from a computer than a spreadsheet editor and word-processor. I agree fully that we should get more people running Linux, because it is a truly great OS, but I don't think we should transform it into what Windows is today. Instead of bringing Linux to the normal lusers, we should focus our efforts on having fairly computer literate people give Linux a try.
PAN (the Pimp Ass Newsreader) is without a doubt the best newsreader I've used on any platform. Pan seems to be Unix/Linux only, and is based on the gtk+ toolkit.
Check it out at http://pan.rebelbase.com.
you've all proven to be the biggest bunch of luddites around ("take your style sheets and stuff'm").
From a few of the replies to my original post, it seems that some have misinterpreted my statements as being anti-aesthetical. I'm not at all against expanding HTMLs capabilities for design, but it has to be done in a correct and standards-compliant way in order to preserve HTMLs original purpose; to provide a flexible way of formatting data, making it possible to render the pages on various devices.
In accordance with this, I think that CSS and related design-extensions are a great idea, because it separates the page design from the data itself, so that these kinds of rules can be stripped by a presentation-layer not capable of displaying advanced graphics. However, when some of the tags are being used in unconvensional ways this often leads to many devices not being able to render the page in a sensible way. This is excactly why standards like WML have been created, when HTML should have been more than sufficient.
Well, let's all just hope that XHTML might fix this by providing a clean way of separating content-structure and design/layout.
Yes, well, I've been working as a web-developer for some years now, and I also use lots and lots of tables for formatting the pages. But my point is that this would have been better solved by adding a designated tag for this kind of control instead of abusing tables.
I'm not going to get into a flamewar on wether or not one should use tables for formatting, in today's reality you'll have a hard time finding a web-developer who doesn't. I'm just trying to make a point about how promising, well-planned universal standards are corrupted, and basically destroyed, when applied incorrectly, mainly by incompetent/ignorant people or by corporations who aren't able to see the long-term consequences of their actions because they're blinded by the aspects of profit.
This also applies to a variety of other standards who'll probably suffer the very same fate, for the very same reasons.
I believe that todays web-pages have become far too complex to fulfill the purpose they were originally intended for; originally HTML was a simplistic markup-language, which focused more on the content-structure of the document instead of the layout, using tags like H1, B, A, P etc. When sticking to these very simple tags, it is up to the user agent to render the page as best it can for its particular medium. A HTML-page should be as easily viewable in a browser on a 16,7m colour modern computer system as on a cellular phone, text-mode browser (lynx etc), news-ticker, blind-terminals or whatever. These different environments requires highly different methods for formatting the data, but the main concern is that it is still easily viewable, and has a logical structure (ie you can distinguish a headline from a footnote).
Today, however, HTML has become very layout-centric, as opposed to content-centric, with emphasis on tables and invisible GIFs for arranging the data. This is most probably a consequence of larger commercial companies moving content onto the web, and using a mindset from magazine and newspaper production in this entirely new medium; and that's where the problems start. When you try to develop a web-page as you would a page in a magazine you have to use alot of tricks to get the desired result, and these tricks corrupt the basic meaning of an html-page. For example, it is not uncommon to have ten nested tables to take care of a basic page layout. However, the purpose of tables is not to take care of layout and design, it is to present data matrixes. And it is this kind of widespread abuse that has messed up the web to the point where it is only properly viewable by a handful of browsers, of which maybe only one or two display it as was intended by the page creator. Luckily we have new standards like XML and XHTML (I have no experience with XHTML whatsoever - so apoligies in advance if this should be wrong) which allows us to separate content-structure from layout and design. But people will most probably abuse these new standards as well... I just think that something's VERY wrong when a browser contains more source code than a complete operating system.
From the cnn-article :
;)
"Microsoft has launched its new Windows XP operation system. The system promises fewer computer crashes and will allow users to delete data from their hard drive."
Oh my, those are some mighty impressive new features. Excuse me for a moment while i format my Linux-box and install XP.