I use a wireless keyboard and my Tungsten E to write with. It works pretty well, and is lighter to carry around and quicker to setup than a laptop. I agree, though, that I wouldn't want to write anything beyond a few lines with grafitti.
Except that even pencil and paper voting seems to be too complex for much of the UK electorate - 500,000 London mayoral election ballot papers were incorrectly filled in.
All you had to do was put two crosses for *different* candidates (first+second preference), and still 500,000 people can't cope with it.
They made a sequel to Traitor's gate? The first one was awful enough - hours of wandering around identical looking sewers in order to find the key to a door so I can go wander around another set of identical looking sewers. All in Myst style graphics. Why bother copy protecting it at all - surely nobody in their right mind would waste a whole CDR on copying something that bad
Advantages of KDE, from a KDE user (GNOME users feel free to chime in too)
- Consistent UI - Excellent built-in apps (Kmail, kdevelop, kate) - UI customisations apply to all apps - e.g. keyboard shortcuts are consistent, can use MacOS like menu bar across all KDE apps - nice integrated features (CD ripping in konqueror, ioslaves)
On a very slow machine, I doubt the speed vs feature tradeoff is worth it,but KDE is getting faster and many people, even ex-WindowMaker users like me, find KDE well worth using.
Why are there so many posts about windowmanagers to use instead of KDE/GNOME here? Take a look at the memory usage of any DE compared to OO.org or mozilla - it's pretty small. Using blackbox will save you maybe 15mb over a bare-bones KDE. Not a large difference when your openoffice window takes ~50mb and mozilla is taking 50Mb to display slashdot.
None of the points raised in the article are actually linux-specific. It's user applications and the graphics system that need optimising.
Huh? How about you learn to read and think before randomly insulting people? Half the problems are non-USB connected.
Even if that were the only problem, why should I throw away my excellent $30 optical mouse (yes, I have an MS mouse) that works perfectly well in Arch, Gentoo and Debian in order to work around a bug in a distro I have no strong reason to want to use. That doesn't make sense.
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but the problems I found were:
Mandrake 10: - Kdevelop crashes on startup (there's a simple workaround, but it's a pretty obvious bug they should have fixed before official) - installer and drakconf lock up with some USB mice connected, so the configuration tools were unusable for me. - Hard freezes on startup and shutdown
SuSE 9.1 - Firefox crashed on me a lot (much more than with other distros) - overly long boot time (five times as long as my current system) - USB keyboard and mouse randomly wouldn't work on boot (about 1 in 15 boots, no problems in other distros apart from Mdk) - random lockups when powering off due to sound card module problem, plus odd static from speakers (again, not seen with any other distro)
The USB and Kdevelop problems are reported in Mdk's anthill bug system for both 9.2 and 10.0 by many people. I don't know about the SuSE bugs, I was too fed up by then to bother, I just wiped it and reinstalled Arch. Of the two, SuSE was better, but neither of the two gave had any killer features that made it worth struggling with the problems, when there are many perfectly good free alternatives. They were both very good-looking distros that I would have liked to have used, but until the bugs are gone I'd rather have something that works.
Yes, the really large, official servers suck big time. The EA 64 player servers are mostly too laggy to play on when full - updating once or twice a second is not exactly good for aiming. That said, on maps with a well defined structure like Tobruk and Battle of the Bulge, I find large games (~40-50 players) can be great fun. The structure of the map encourages some limited team work, so you end up with large-scale gunfights and semi-coordinated attacks. Of course, large servers with stupid maps like Stalingrad and Berlin aren't worth playing on.
I had very similar experience to yours with Mandrake 10.0. I deleted a perfectly stable system (Arch Linux) to try it out, too.
I've tried two of the current major commercial distros now (Mandrake 10.0 and SuSE 9.1). Both had some nice features but had the minor drawback that they didn't work reliably. If the distro companies can't create a stable system with no show-stopper bugs, why bother adding features? I'm back on Arch now, which is faster and more stable than either.
I played a lot of ocarina of time just after finishing windwaker - until my memory card got corrupted and I lost the save. I just didn't have the energy to start again, although it was an excellent game. Maybe I'll start again someday, but I'm currently playing through Link to the Past on my GBA, which is definitely harder than WW.
Zelda:WW was the first Zelda game I played - I only got into console games after I bought a gamecube a few years back - and I absolutely loved it.
I think the only problem with it is the somewhat arbitrary things you sometimes have to do to advance. I had to resort to GameFAQs a few times and I remember thinking "Huh? I was meant to figure that out on my own how?".
I use vi to write code most of the time. Yesterday a colleague asked me to help him with some code, so I sat down and tried to fix it for him using his emacs session. After five minutes filling his code with ^, $ and:w, I let him do the typing.
He means something along the line of what the Zelda games do - the first time you get an item like the grappling hook, you have to use that item in some trivial puzzle in order to get out of the room where you found the item. This reduces the ambiguity - the new item is fresh in the player's memory, so it's easier to figure out that it's needed for the puzzle.
It shows the player what the item is useful for, and where it might come in useful in the future. Basically, it avoids the problem described in the article blurb. Instead of giving an option the first time, you force the player to perform the action (open the window or whatever) by making it the only route forward.
Personally, I found the puzzles in Zelda:WW more interesting than the endless sneaking and lockpicking in Deus Ex.
On my laptop (p3-600), SuSE 9.1 takes over a minute to get to a command prompt. Arch takes 20 seconds. That's with minimum services running. Just what is SuSE spending all that time doing?.
I run Adsense on my project site, and haven't made a whole lot of money, mostly due to the low page impressions I get (3000 unique IPs/month).
I have made a reasonable amount of money (~$500) out of the project through donations from a company to implement specific features in the software for them, about half of which has gone in supporting the project (server and testing hardware costs).
I've idly kicked around a few ideas for making money off the project, including selling plugins for the main, free, product. That said, I didn't expect to make any money of it, so anything I do get is a bonus.
That's the way to get work done - don't install any apps! Who needs LaTeX? There's no point removing features to reduce the mythical "install bloat" if you can't actually do anything with the system. Relying on shared libraries rather than stand alone binaries actually improves performance, by reducing memory usage when lots of processes use the libraries, and allows optimisations of the libraries to speed up all the apps that depend on them. Small does not necessarily imply fast. For example, a project I work on was taking forever to open files (upwards of a minute for large files). So I implemented a custom memory manager that optimised block allocation for the application. The size of the program increased by 15% or so. Agghh! Bloat - must be slow, right? No, time to open files was reduced by a factor of 6.
Slashdot Mirror
I use a wireless keyboard and my Tungsten E to write with. It works pretty well, and is lighter to carry around and quicker to setup than a laptop.
I agree, though, that I wouldn't want to write anything beyond a few lines with grafitti.
Except that even pencil and paper voting seems to be too complex for much of the UK electorate - 500,000 London mayoral election ballot papers were incorrectly filled in.
All you had to do was put two crosses for *different* candidates (first+second preference), and still 500,000 people can't cope with it.
They made a sequel to Traitor's gate? The first one was awful enough - hours of wandering around identical looking sewers in order to find the key to a door so I can go wander around another set of identical looking sewers. All in Myst style graphics.
Why bother copy protecting it at all - surely nobody in their right mind would waste a whole CDR on copying something that bad
StarOffice had(has?) some system of Java extensions, so you could write plugins or something using java. That's why it asked for a JRE.
What effect could Java have on Openoffice? OO is C++.
Advantages of KDE, from a KDE user (GNOME users feel free to chime in too)
- Consistent UI
- Excellent built-in apps (Kmail, kdevelop, kate)
- UI customisations apply to all apps - e.g. keyboard shortcuts are consistent, can use MacOS like menu bar across all KDE apps
- nice integrated features (CD ripping in konqueror, ioslaves)
On a very slow machine, I doubt the speed vs feature tradeoff is worth it,but KDE is getting faster and many people, even ex-WindowMaker users like me, find KDE well worth using.
Why are there so many posts about windowmanagers to use instead of KDE/GNOME here? Take a look at the memory usage of any DE compared to OO.org or mozilla - it's pretty small. Using blackbox will save you maybe 15mb over a bare-bones KDE. Not a large difference when your openoffice window takes ~50mb and mozilla is taking 50Mb to display slashdot.
None of the points raised in the article are actually linux-specific. It's user applications and the graphics system that need optimising.
There are hundreds of non-conductive heat transfer liquids used in industry - I guess it could be any of them.
That's why Dell doesn't sell "laptops" any more, they sell "notebooks".
Huh? How about you learn to read and think before randomly insulting people? Half the problems are non-USB connected.
Even if that were the only problem, why should I throw away my excellent $30 optical mouse (yes, I have an MS mouse) that works perfectly well in Arch, Gentoo and Debian in order to work around a bug in a distro I have no strong reason to want to use. That doesn't make sense.
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but the problems I found were:
Mandrake 10:
- Kdevelop crashes on startup (there's a simple workaround, but it's a pretty obvious bug they should have fixed before official)
- installer and drakconf lock up with some USB mice connected, so the configuration tools were unusable for me.
- Hard freezes on startup and shutdown
SuSE 9.1
- Firefox crashed on me a lot (much more than with other distros)
- overly long boot time (five times as long as my current system)
- USB keyboard and mouse randomly wouldn't work on boot (about 1 in 15 boots, no problems in other distros apart from Mdk)
- random lockups when powering off due to sound card module problem, plus odd static from speakers (again, not seen with any other distro)
The USB and Kdevelop problems are reported in Mdk's anthill bug system for both 9.2 and 10.0 by many people. I don't know about the SuSE bugs, I was too fed up by then to bother, I just wiped it and reinstalled Arch.
Of the two, SuSE was better, but neither of the two gave had any killer features that made it worth struggling with the problems, when there are many perfectly good free alternatives. They were both very good-looking distros that I would have liked to have used, but until the bugs are gone I'd rather have something that works.
Yes, the really large, official servers suck big time. The EA 64 player servers are mostly too laggy to play on when full - updating once or twice a second is not exactly good for aiming.
That said, on maps with a well defined structure like Tobruk and Battle of the Bulge, I find large games (~40-50 players) can be great fun. The structure of the map encourages some limited team work, so you end up with large-scale gunfights and semi-coordinated attacks.
Of course, large servers with stupid maps like Stalingrad and Berlin aren't worth playing on.
Because C blows goats. I have proof.
I had very similar experience to yours with Mandrake 10.0. I deleted a perfectly stable system (Arch Linux) to try it out, too.
I've tried two of the current major commercial distros now (Mandrake 10.0 and SuSE 9.1). Both had some nice features but had the minor drawback that they didn't work reliably. If the distro companies can't create a stable system with no show-stopper bugs, why bother adding features? I'm back on Arch now, which is faster and more stable than either.
pssst.. it's "of" not "off"
Maybe he means "of and only of". You never know.
I played a lot of ocarina of time just after finishing windwaker - until my memory card got corrupted and I lost the save. I just didn't have the energy to start again, although it was an excellent game.
Maybe I'll start again someday, but I'm currently playing through Link to the Past on my GBA, which is definitely harder than WW.
Probably something to do with the large amount of detailed profiling and optimisation that the KDE guys did for the 3.2 release.
Zelda:WW was the first Zelda game I played - I only got into console games after I bought a gamecube a few years back - and I absolutely loved it.
I think the only problem with it is the somewhat arbitrary things you sometimes have to do to advance. I had to resort to GameFAQs a few times and I remember thinking "Huh? I was meant to figure that out on my own how?".
I use vi to write code most of the time. Yesterday a colleague asked me to help him with some code, so I sat down and tried to fix it for him using his emacs session. After five minutes filling his code with ^, $ and :w, I let him do the typing.
He means something along the line of what the Zelda games do - the first time you get an item like the grappling hook, you have to use that item in some trivial puzzle in order to get out of the room where you found the item. This reduces the ambiguity - the new item is fresh in the player's memory, so it's easier to figure out that it's needed for the puzzle.
It shows the player what the item is useful for, and where it might come in useful in the future. Basically, it avoids the problem described in the article blurb. Instead of giving an option the first time, you force the player to perform the action (open the window or whatever) by making it the only route forward.
Personally, I found the puzzles in Zelda:WW more interesting than the endless sneaking and lockpicking in Deus Ex.
wankie.net? Interesting choice of domain name.
Boot time is a little bit slower than 8.2,
On my laptop (p3-600), SuSE 9.1 takes over a minute to get to a command prompt. Arch takes 20 seconds. That's with minimum services running. Just what is SuSE spending all that time doing?.
I run Adsense on my project site, and haven't made a whole lot of money, mostly due to the low page impressions I get (3000 unique IPs/month).
I have made a reasonable amount of money (~$500) out of the project through donations from a company to implement specific features in the software for them, about half of which has gone in supporting the project (server and testing hardware costs).
I've idly kicked around a few ideas for making money off the project, including selling plugins for the main, free, product. That said, I didn't expect to make any money of it, so anything I do get is a bonus.
Someone once said to me "Unix is easy - all you need is apropos, man and a short term memory."
That's the way to get work done - don't install any apps! Who needs LaTeX?
There's no point removing features to reduce the mythical "install bloat" if you can't actually do anything with the system.
Relying on shared libraries rather than stand alone binaries actually improves performance, by reducing memory usage when lots of processes use the libraries, and allows optimisations of the libraries to speed up all the apps that depend on them.
Small does not necessarily imply fast. For example, a project I work on was taking forever to open files (upwards of a minute for large files). So I implemented a custom memory manager that optimised block allocation for the application. The size of the program increased by 15% or so. Agghh! Bloat - must be slow, right? No, time to open files was reduced by a factor of 6.