Really? Sweet! Next time a stupid prof. complains about me doing this I'm going to point them (;-) to the Oxford English Dictionary. Grammarians need to get with the times. It is extremely common in general usage, so who are they to argue?
What I've been saying all along is that the English language needs a gender-neutral singular pronoun for people. I propose "te" (pronounced "tee," but with one 'e' like he, she, we, me).
Example paragraph: "Let's assume that a person would like to visit a website. Te double-clicks the web browser icon. Ter web browser opens. Then the whole internet is ters to explore."
I'm not sure if the posessive should be "ter" or "tis." Maybe "teir" like their. Anyway, maybe we can make it an Internet meme and someday get it into the dictionaries;-)
I wouldn't mind an arrangement like that. It's only fair to pay in proportion to what you use, as long as the fees aren't unfairly high. I only hope ISPs are smart enough to see that this is the way to go.
What are you talking about? You pay for internet access. If the phone companies can't make enough money off of providing Internet access to pay for the access itself, then *that* is the problem. Internet access costs should go up. Specifically charging for VoIP is the Wrong Thing to do.
I fear that in the future the Internet will actually move this way. You want to use Kazaa? Pay a per-hour fee for the privilege. You want to use VoIP? Pay per call. This would kill innovation in Internet services. Would P2P have ever developed if this kind of infrastructure was already in place? No, nobody would have been able to use it because of limits on what they could send over the Internet. The whole point of the Internet is that it is this great 2-way communication medium with nearly infinite possibilities and no limits on what kind of information can travel on it. When you limit what can be transmitted to a few well-known protocols you kill that. Firewalls have already done enough damage to innovation on the Internet. I don't want to be using HTTP to browse HTML webpages served by media conglomerates and POP3 to read the same old e-mail 10 years from now just because ISPs have become complacent and not allowed anything new to develop. I want to be using Freenet and Jabber and other protocols that haven't even been invented yet.
LCDs don't produce their own light either. They need backlights. Since these new screens are *much* more reflective than existing LCD screens, they have a reduced need for illumination anyway.
Why, oh why did they build a FREEWAY on the beach!??!?!? The stupidity here is palpable. Forget seawalls, we should be mad about freeways on the beach!
What a stupid law! So if I put a big giant link on my homepage that says "don't click here, this info is private" and you click on it (causing my webserver to provide you with access to it, even though you know you shouldn't have it) then you have committed a crime. Six months in jail for you!
Please tell me that the law really doesn't work this way.
I never use dselect. I tried for a while, I really did. But it is pointless. Now I just use "apt-cache search" to find the package I want and "apt-get install" to install it. Works like a charm.
I don't know why they even include dselect, it's worse than useless. It encourages you to mess with the dependencies manually, which is a pain and totally unnecessary in 99.9% of cases. If you don't mess with the dependencies yourself, they Just Work (tm). Aptitude doesn't look any better either. Until they get away from the "every software package in the entire world in one giant tree widget" approach they're never going to make any progress with an easy-to-use menu-based package manager.
I think what Debian really needs is a program that streamlines the process of finding the package you want, because apt-get already has the installing part down. Debian needs Google for packages. Not another program that simply lists every debian package ever made.
It seems to me that Helix is somewhat akin to GStreamer. GStreamer is licensed under the GPL, while Helix is licensed under some other license I've never heard of. Furthermore, I have no love for RealNetworks due to their annoying, in-your-face, ad-happy RealPlayer product, and I don't trust them to have my best interests in mind. What are the differences between Helix and GStreamer, and if I was looking for a media framework, why would I choose Helix over GStreamer? How can I be sure that Helix development won't be taken in a direction I don't like (DRM, Palladium, proprietary closed-source codecs, patents, etc)? GStreamer, being developed by volunteers who love open source, is unlikely to ever have these things integrated.
Not time to panic just yet, there are still a few compatibility options ... if you're using an x86 chip. Otherwise, too bad for you!
Relying on software that is only distributed in binary form is BAD, for numerous reasons.
You *can* set debconf to skip some of the prompts. It is actually one of the first prompts you get after the base system is installed. If Debconf skips some prompts later on because you said you wanted to, it sends emails to root explaining what the prompts were and why they were skipped. You can then go at your leisure and read them, file them away, or just delete them. Seems like that satisfies most of your complaints.
Debian's startup isn't optimized. It is easy to make it faster if you fiddle around with the init scripts. Also, compiling your own kernel can make a big difference. Very general kernels must check for lots of hardware, which takes time; a custom kernel can only check for the hardware you have. Since you compiled a kernel for Gentoo, that probably accounts for most of the saved startup time. Debian with a custom kernel can boot fairly fast. Hopefully the Debian Desktop project will do something with the init scripts to make it boot faster.
Here's an idea. Instead of making a UI for each pref in some monster uber-control panel, give each pref its own url (like about:config/prefgroup/prefname). At this url would be a page with a form to modify the pref and save it in your user.js file. Then next time you read about some new whiz-bang mozilla feature, the article will include the URL, and you can turn it on immediately in the GUI. When someone posts a message to a board somewhere asking how to turn on popup blocking, you can reply with and they would simply click on the link and get a page to turn it on with. Wouldn't that be great?
If 20 megs of memory was swapped out to the hard disk in less than half a second, and then back again later, why didn't I hear the hard disk churn and see the light blink? That's not what caused this anomaly. I know how virtual memory works, and my computer was not swapping when I saw this behavior. Besides, shouldn't the total memory usage column of task manager reflect the total amount of virtual memory used by the program, whether or not those actual pages are sitting on the hard disk at the moment?
Try this: Open a few pages, look at memory in task manager, then *minimize all open windows*. On my XP machine, this causes Mozilla and Phoenix's reported memory usage to drop to less than a meg instantly. Bringing up the windows again restores the reported memory usage to the 10-20 meg range, and waving the mouse over the restored windows causes it to go up a few megs more. I would say that the task manager is misleading to say the least.
I think that WinXP kills mozilla performance. Whenever I see someone raving about how fast mozilla is, it's always Windows 95 or 98. On my WinXP computer, Mozilla is still as slow as ever to load, and quicklaunch makes hardly any difference at all. Could something in WinXP's VM system be biased against programs like Mozilla?
It is a hassle to have extra batteries and carry them around. They are too expensive and heavy, and keeping them charged is an annoyance. Since you can't easily tell which ones are charged and which ones aren't, it is constant guesswork. It is yet to be seen how big fuel cells will be; work is proceeding on miniaturized versions that would be quite small. Anyway, why would you carry more than one? All you would need to carry would be the fuel, since they are refillable.
Headline: Apple employees seen putting new IBM chips into new computer cases It is still unclear whether Apple is going to sell these computers, or switch to Intel at the last second for no good reason.
Give it up people! Apple is stuck with PowerPC chips whether they like it or not. What are they going to do, release OS X for Intel and realize suddenly that there are *no* applications or drivers available for it? It would take a while for the application base to build up again, and some older applications would never be recompiled. Then would new applications continue to be released both in Intel and PowerPC versions? If there's something Apple cannot afford, it is to lose market share due to a messy transition.
The problem is that batteries can't be recharged in 10 seconds. Tanks can be filled that fast. My battery dying wouldn't be nearly as big a problem if I could recharge it in 10 seconds. Plus, if fuel cells became popular, the fuel would quickly become available everywhere.
Quickstart has never worked for me. Mozilla is actually *slower* opening when quickstart is on sometimes. WinXP pro, PIII 500 Mhz, 128 MB RAM. The problem is that Mozilla is loaded into memory, and then it gets swapped out to the hard disk while it isn't being used. To bring it back up again, it has to be loaded back from disk, only in a very random and un-optimized fashion. The same thing happens when I minimize a mozilla window and do other tasks for a while. Mozilla gets swapped out and when I click its taskbar icon, it takes freaking forever for it to come back up, and all the while the disk is thrashing making it impossible to do anything else. IE doesn't have this problem since it practically is the desktop shell by itself, and it is always in use. Plus I wouldn't be surprised to see some code like if(isMicrosoftSoftware) dontSwapOut(); down in the bowels of Windows somewhere.
Geez! Doesn't anybody here have a sense of humor? You guys are a tough crowd.
Just to clear up any confusion, that was intended to be a joke. It was also pointing out in a humorous way the lack of coherence in the argument that since the device uses the body's natural conductivity it must be compatible with pacemakers. The fact that it does use the body's natural conductivity in no way indicates that it is safe for people with pacemakers. But the post was mostly intended to be a joke. Which apparently nobody got. At least I didn't waste my +2 bonus on it.
Amazing! An educated, informed, reasonable comment! I congratulate you, sir! And I echo your calls for standardization of config files and documentation (GNU info is an abomination and should be taken out and shot).
KDE has something that makes man pages a little more palatable. If you type a url of the form man:/command into a Konqueror window, you get a rendering of the man page for that command in HTML. Then you get colors, hyperlinks, nice formatting, the ability to dynamically resize the page, a nice search function, a back button, a scroll bar, mousewheel support, and all the other niceties of a modern browser. If the documentation was in a better format to begin with, one that had more ability to specify hyperlinks and graphics, this would be the perfect documentation browser.
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Really? Sweet! Next time a stupid prof. complains about me doing this I'm going to point them ( ;-) to the Oxford English Dictionary. Grammarians need to get with the times. It is extremely common in general usage, so who are they to argue?
What I've been saying all along is that the English language needs a gender-neutral singular pronoun for people. I propose "te" (pronounced "tee," but with one 'e' like he, she, we, me).
Example paragraph: "Let's assume that a person would like to visit a website. Te double-clicks the web browser icon. Ter web browser opens. Then the whole internet is ters to explore."
I'm not sure if the posessive should be "ter" or "tis." Maybe "teir" like their. Anyway, maybe we can make it an Internet meme and someday get it into the dictionaries ;-)
I wouldn't mind an arrangement like that. It's only fair to pay in proportion to what you use, as long as the fees aren't unfairly high. I only hope ISPs are smart enough to see that this is the way to go.
I fear that in the future the Internet will actually move this way. You want to use Kazaa? Pay a per-hour fee for the privilege. You want to use VoIP? Pay per call. This would kill innovation in Internet services. Would P2P have ever developed if this kind of infrastructure was already in place? No, nobody would have been able to use it because of limits on what they could send over the Internet. The whole point of the Internet is that it is this great 2-way communication medium with nearly infinite possibilities and no limits on what kind of information can travel on it. When you limit what can be transmitted to a few well-known protocols you kill that. Firewalls have already done enough damage to innovation on the Internet. I don't want to be using HTTP to browse HTML webpages served by media conglomerates and POP3 to read the same old e-mail 10 years from now just because ISPs have become complacent and not allowed anything new to develop. I want to be using Freenet and Jabber and other protocols that haven't even been invented yet.
LCDs don't produce their own light either. They need backlights. Since these new screens are *much* more reflective than existing LCD screens, they have a reduced need for illumination anyway.
Why, oh why did they build a FREEWAY on the beach!??!?!? The stupidity here is palpable. Forget seawalls, we should be mad about freeways on the beach!
Please tell me that the law really doesn't work this way.
I don't know why they even include dselect, it's worse than useless. It encourages you to mess with the dependencies manually, which is a pain and totally unnecessary in 99.9% of cases. If you don't mess with the dependencies yourself, they Just Work (tm). Aptitude doesn't look any better either. Until they get away from the "every software package in the entire world in one giant tree widget" approach they're never going to make any progress with an easy-to-use menu-based package manager.
I think what Debian really needs is a program that streamlines the process of finding the package you want, because apt-get already has the installing part down. Debian needs Google for packages. Not another program that simply lists every debian package ever made.
It seems to me that Helix is somewhat akin to GStreamer. GStreamer is licensed under the GPL, while Helix is licensed under some other license I've never heard of. Furthermore, I have no love for RealNetworks due to their annoying, in-your-face, ad-happy RealPlayer product, and I don't trust them to have my best interests in mind. What are the differences between Helix and GStreamer, and if I was looking for a media framework, why would I choose Helix over GStreamer? How can I be sure that Helix development won't be taken in a direction I don't like (DRM, Palladium, proprietary closed-source codecs, patents, etc)? GStreamer, being developed by volunteers who love open source, is unlikely to ever have these things integrated.
Not time to panic just yet, there are still a few compatibility options
... if you're using an x86 chip. Otherwise, too bad for you! Relying on software that is only distributed in binary form is BAD, for numerous reasons.
You *can* set debconf to skip some of the prompts. It is actually one of the first prompts you get after the base system is installed. If Debconf skips some prompts later on because you said you wanted to, it sends emails to root explaining what the prompts were and why they were skipped. You can then go at your leisure and read them, file them away, or just delete them. Seems like that satisfies most of your complaints.
Done! Thanks for the pointer into the maze that is Bugzilla, I never would have found that by myself.
Here's an idea. Instead of making a UI for each pref in some monster uber-control panel, give each pref its own url (like about:config/prefgroup/prefname). At this url would be a page with a form to modify the pref and save it in your user.js file. Then next time you read about some new whiz-bang mozilla feature, the article will include the URL, and you can turn it on immediately in the GUI. When someone posts a message to a board somewhere asking how to turn on popup blocking, you can reply with and they would simply click on the link and get a page to turn it on with. Wouldn't that be great?
If 20 megs of memory was swapped out to the hard disk in less than half a second, and then back again later, why didn't I hear the hard disk churn and see the light blink? That's not what caused this anomaly. I know how virtual memory works, and my computer was not swapping when I saw this behavior. Besides, shouldn't the total memory usage column of task manager reflect the total amount of virtual memory used by the program, whether or not those actual pages are sitting on the hard disk at the moment?
Try this: Open a few pages, look at memory in task manager, then *minimize all open windows*. On my XP machine, this causes Mozilla and Phoenix's reported memory usage to drop to less than a meg instantly. Bringing up the windows again restores the reported memory usage to the 10-20 meg range, and waving the mouse over the restored windows causes it to go up a few megs more. I would say that the task manager is misleading to say the least.
I think that WinXP kills mozilla performance. Whenever I see someone raving about how fast mozilla is, it's always Windows 95 or 98. On my WinXP computer, Mozilla is still as slow as ever to load, and quicklaunch makes hardly any difference at all. Could something in WinXP's VM system be biased against programs like Mozilla?
It is a hassle to have extra batteries and carry them around. They are too expensive and heavy, and keeping them charged is an annoyance. Since you can't easily tell which ones are charged and which ones aren't, it is constant guesswork. It is yet to be seen how big fuel cells will be; work is proceeding on miniaturized versions that would be quite small. Anyway, why would you carry more than one? All you would need to carry would be the fuel, since they are refillable.
The situation is different. Just because it was a good idea then doesn't make it a good idea now.
Headline: Apple employees seen putting new IBM chips into new computer cases
It is still unclear whether Apple is going to sell these computers, or switch to Intel at the last second for no good reason.
Give it up people! Apple is stuck with PowerPC chips whether they like it or not. What are they going to do, release OS X for Intel and realize suddenly that there are *no* applications or drivers available for it? It would take a while for the application base to build up again, and some older applications would never be recompiled. Then would new applications continue to be released both in Intel and PowerPC versions? If there's something Apple cannot afford, it is to lose market share due to a messy transition.
The problem is that batteries can't be recharged in 10 seconds. Tanks can be filled that fast. My battery dying wouldn't be nearly as big a problem if I could recharge it in 10 seconds. Plus, if fuel cells became popular, the fuel would quickly become available everywhere.
Quickstart has never worked for me. Mozilla is actually *slower* opening when quickstart is on sometimes. WinXP pro, PIII 500 Mhz, 128 MB RAM. The problem is that Mozilla is loaded into memory, and then it gets swapped out to the hard disk while it isn't being used. To bring it back up again, it has to be loaded back from disk, only in a very random and un-optimized fashion. The same thing happens when I minimize a mozilla window and do other tasks for a while. Mozilla gets swapped out and when I click its taskbar icon, it takes freaking forever for it to come back up, and all the while the disk is thrashing making it impossible to do anything else. IE doesn't have this problem since it practically is the desktop shell by itself, and it is always in use. Plus I wouldn't be surprised to see some code like if(isMicrosoftSoftware) dontSwapOut(); down in the bowels of Windows somewhere.
Just to clear up any confusion, that was intended to be a joke. It was also pointing out in a humorous way the lack of coherence in the argument that since the device uses the body's natural conductivity it must be compatible with pacemakers. The fact that it does use the body's natural conductivity in no way indicates that it is safe for people with pacemakers. But the post was mostly intended to be a joke. Which apparently nobody got. At least I didn't waste my +2 bonus on it.
Lightning bolts also use the body's natural conductivity. Are they compatible with pacemakers as well?
KDE has something that makes man pages a little more palatable. If you type a url of the form man:/command into a Konqueror window, you get a rendering of the man page for that command in HTML. Then you get colors, hyperlinks, nice formatting, the ability to dynamically resize the page, a nice search function, a back button, a scroll bar, mousewheel support, and all the other niceties of a modern browser. If the documentation was in a better format to begin with, one that had more ability to specify hyperlinks and graphics, this would be the perfect documentation browser.