... they abandoned Grafitti. Yes, I know about the lawsuit and why they did it (you suck, Xerox!), but that doesn't really help.
I learned it when I bought my first Palm Pilot and was proficient enough to use it with an outliner to take notes in college. When I bought an m130 with "Grafitti 2" (read: "Not Grafitti"), my handwriting recognition went through the floor. I've tried to adapt to the new style, but I still can't write "E", "S", or "T" on the first try more than 50% of the time. There are workarounds like TealScript, which lets you enter your own strokes (and which ships with a Grafitti clone set), but who knows if that will continue to be supported in future OS versions?
I loved my little IIIxe and used it constantly, but I just can't get the hang of my otherwise completely superior m130. I have a boolean test for whether I'll ever buy another Palm OS unit: will Palmone bring back Grafitti?
It's consistent, and it works. It may seem a bit lame sometimes, but it makes things really easy for me (And others).
Never mind that it destroys the ability to quickly picks apps from a list, such as the KDE menu. You get listings like:
App
CD Player
Editor
GApp
GCD Player
Geditor
... (23 things beginning with G)
GZokoban
JuK
KApp
KCD Player
Keditor
... (147 things beginning with K)
KZokoban
Mozilla
XApp
XCD Player
Xemacs
... (2 things beginning with X)
XZokoban
Zokoban
Basically, it moves all but a handful of apps into two or three "hash buckets", so you have to switch to visually scanning the second letter of application names. I hate it, it's confusing, and I wish it'd never started going that way.
Where on earth did you get that? Noone cares what weird closed driver you load into your kernel, but they do care when you ask for help debugging the resulting mess after a panic. Loading a non-Free module sets a "go pester the vendor" flag and that's pretty much it.
But can it calculate the version numbering scheme?
on
TI-84 Plus Released
·
· Score: 1
How to calculator manufacturers decide to number a new model? I can kind of see that "8x" and "9x" describe two families, but shouldn't "x" have some relationship to order of an entry in that family line?
If I hadn't seen this story, and someone told me that they just bought a TI-84, I'd be amazed that they'd bought something older than my trusty TI-85: "You paid how much for a model a decade old?"
Has anyone managed to figure out this ordering? Doesn't it currently go something like 5 -> 6 -> 9 -> 3 -> 4 for the "8x" line? Sheesh.
The fact that the guy owns a company that makes voting machines does not preclude him from being allowed to vote or to campaign for someone else, as far as I know. Also, I can "promise to deliver Nebraska to Bush!", but if I say it, it means that I'll be donating, advertising, and cheering for him.
If their CEO really meant to "deliver Ohio", then I really doubt that he would've made the announcement in public.
Re:Grudgingly going back to Sendmail.
on
Postfix 2.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Some brain-dead spam broadcasters pick MXes at random to deliver to, and some deliberately target lower-priority exchanges (the idea being that a mailserver may be less picky about mail it receives from one of its backup MXes than other hosts). If a low-priority MX is listed but doesn't really exist, the spammer may attempt to deliver mail to that MX, and then give up when it fails.
It's kludgey, broken, and something I wish I'd thought of earlier.
Re:because it's an ugly, lumbering dinosaur
on
Postfix 2.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
Desktops do that too.
...as evidenced by the fact that whenever I first touch my keyboard or mouse in the morning, every app runs like frozen molasses until the drive quits grinding. I just which Linux wouldn't decide to page out every possible byte when left alone for a while.:)
Still, I agree that this is generally preferable behavior for desktops, too, although perhaps not to the same degree.
Re:because it's an ugly, lumbering dinosaur
on
Postfix 2.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
Sweet! So I can drop-in Postfix without making any changes at all to my virtual hosting configuration, Cyrus IMAP setup (delivers mail internally), or spam/virus filters? Man, it's come a long way since three months ago when it couldn't do any of that automatically. Why, I think I'll skip my coffee break to swap out my mail transfer system!
Yeah, I'm being sarcastic. Do you really believe what you wrote, or have I been trolled?
Re:because it's an ugly, lumbering dinosaur
on
Postfix 2.1 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Proper software doesn't need tuning to do its job.
You may or may not be correct in this particular case, but as a general statement, that's just stupid.
Do you really mean that the exact same settings for a little desktop (high priority to input-related tasks, swap only when needed) would work well for a high-load server (high priority to compute-related tasks, swap agressively to make RAM quickly available)? There are a lot of settings on a modern system that just can't be inferred by the system itself. Stating the opposite like it's an obvious fact is ignorant, misleading, or both.
A real-world example: a Usenet spool and an MP3 repository may be the same size, but benefit hugely from tweaked bytes-per-inode or journal settings. In some cases, once the system is running, it's too late to easily change your mind (like bytes-per-inode). In other cases, you can switch at will, but not without unmounting the filesystem (ext3 journaling options). You, as the administrator, make those decisions. Either way, even if the computer were capable of recognizing that you'd made a bad decision, it's not in a position to correct them.
A real-world example: I tuned Sendmail to use delayed sending so that when a client blasted 20,000 copies of a newsletter (yes, opt-in), then it would wait for several minutes so that it could efficiently aggregate recipients by domain. In there situation, telling Sendmail to leave email in the queue for 10 minutes meant a 50% savings in bandwidth. How on earth would you expect a self-tuned MTA to ever make that discovery on its own?
Computers do some things well. Predicting the future usage patterns of their owners without mounds of previous input is not one of them. That's where manual tuning comes in, and why real system administrators still paid decently.
Re:this SMTP server vs Qmail and Sendmail
on
Postfix 2.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's Free Software (unlike Qmail) without Sendmail's security record (unlike Sendmail).
Personally, I still use Sendmail everywhere, but Postfix is designed to be a fast, secure, easy-to-configure MTA. It would be my migration path of choice if I were ever having problems in any of those three areas.
I've said this before, but it bears repeating: do not filter or otherwise "enhance" the audio files before you store them. Instead, save them losslessly, hisses, pops, and all.
Audio processing technology will get better. Don't ruin your grandkids' heirloom recordings by using today's technology to permanently alter them.
Make working copies and filter those as much as you want, but keep those masters pristine! Maybe somewhere in the background you can hear your grandma yelling at dear ol' grandpa to put that thing away and paint the house, and a clumsy run with an agressive low-pass filter will throw that data away forever. You have something really valuable; please take care of it for the future.
...I want to shake them until they stop. When you come down to it, mainly Debian exists for one purpose: to provide a solid, completely Free operating system. If the license on a piece of software can be interpreted as not giving freedom to the end user, then Debian cannot include that software without violating it's formal constitution.
Q: "But why don't they include the accelerated NVidia driver?!? That would be useful!"
A: Because it's not Free.
Q: "But why don't they include qmail?!? That would be useful!"
A: Because it's not Free.
Q: "But why don't they include pine?!? That would be useful!"
A: Because it's not Free.
Despite that, every time Debian removes (or refuses to add) a piece of non-Free software, the "pragmists" queue up to swear that Debian is irrelevant because they don't care about market share, or that they're a bunch of extremists.
Understand this: Debian has a very explicit social contract with their users. If you continue to be surprised by their strict adherence, then either 1)you need to accept that they will always side with Freedom over pragmatism, or 2)you have a seriously warped worldview that causes you to be mystified by integrity. Either way, find something else to gripe about.
Debian is Free and increasingly popular among those of use who share that value. Every time they make a difficult decision like this, even at the expense of practicality, I respect them even more. Even if you hate Debian, you still benefit from their hard-line observation of their ideals every time you execute a bit of Free code that exists because they otherwise would have rejected it from their distributions.
I just don't why some people are still surprised each and every time. A real news article would be "Debian includes Qmail in 'main'". Now that would be a reason to criticize them. This is not.
the focus of many linux-users has shifted away from trying to improve humanity via things such as more secure and affordable computing
How high is that horse you're up on?
I "discovered" Linux as a free Unix OS, and that was good. Then I read some of RMS's writings and decided that he made a lot of sense, and I began to love Linux for the freedom it gave me. As I grew more proficient and began writing my own GPLed (and BSDed) tools and distributing them, I was happy to share with the community. At no point, ever, have I though "wow, I'm really improving humanity!"
Your motives are your own. Judge yourself by them if you will, but remember that a lot of us are here for entirely different reasons.
Tell me: WHY would I want to use Oracle or even PostgreSQL for a recipe book or web calendar when MySQL requires less mental overhead for me? I wouldn't. That's like using a Mac truck to drive to the grocery store and back.
Answer: don't use every feature that they provide just because they're there. Instead, install and use PostgreSQL and get comfortable with it. Now, you can use it as a flat-text database, or a tera-server with millions of rows, all without having to maintain two systems.
If your time is valuable, why learn two systems when you can learn one that's only slightly more complex than the other and be done with it?
In simple terms, MySQL is the equivalent of a cheetah. It's fast and lean, and accomplishes it's task with agility and grace.
That's a pretty good analogy! Now, put a saddle and a 200-pound rider on that cheetah and see how fast it moves.
MySQL is blazingly fast when doing nothing. PostgreSQL is still blazingly fast when pulling a heavy load, like a Clydesdale on meth. How does that make MySQL better?
In all seriousness, MySQL is fast because it doesn't do anything for you. By the time you shift all of your core logic into the application layer, which is often something terrible like PHP, the end result will probably be much slower than if you built a proper system with PostgreSQL in the first place.
Thank you. I was lost after the first clause ("FreeBSD allows forking pretty easially, Linux doesn't" - huh?), but was thinking maybe I missed something vital so I kept my mouth shut. I have no idea what point he was trying to make.
I know that if I did some work, then it was taken and used by lots of people to make lots of money, and I didn't even get a "thanks", I know I'd be pretty pissed off.
So you're OK with a central company collecting data about every visit you make to otherwise unrelated bars or restaurants? That sounds like a more extremist viewpoint than the one you're replying to.
Well, the idea is to pull out ever bit of audio information possible and archive it. If you want to post-process the data locally to remove that hiss (and any other audio in that frequency band), you can still do so, but the original should be kept pristine. After all, noise filtering is dramatically better now than it was 20 years ago. In another 50 years, I don't want an audiologist complaining about how great those 2004 re-masterings could have been if only they'd known about the Transflugian Transform and hadn't wrecked the archives with ham-fisted turn-of-the-millenium binary methods.
Re:Via's RNG publicity and a conspiracy theory...
on
VIA Pulls PadLockSL
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
VIA's random number generator greatly increases the speed to generate the keys (ie faster than p4 2.6 ghz on VIA's 1Ghz proc).
There are other hardware crypto accelerators. OpenBSD uses them to offload all possible crypto and random functions from the CPU whenever one is present. VIA's is nice, in that it comes with the computer, but $100 will get you the same functionality in a PCI card.
Anybody here thinks that securei easy IM might not facilitate terrorist message interception?
You mean, like Jabber with SSL? That cat's already out of the bag.
In what bizarro way does this seem fair? I cobbled together a little LAN so that my kids can visit playhousedisney.com. How on this God's green Earth can anyone figure that I just created a taxable asset? I already paid sales tax on the wire, the switches, and the NICs, and I'm not re-selling it to anyone. In what possible situation should the State be entitled to money for what I've done?
Remember, the ends don't justify the means. I don't care if the money's going to feed starving, abused puppies - the government doesn't have a right to tax this.
I read his post to imply that I can do whatever I want with a CD I buy, regardless of the terms of that purchase.
You can, within legal limits. If I buy a music CD, I may do whatever I want with it, short of redistributing copies. I didn't certainly didn't mean to imply that you there are no restrictions on what you can do with a purchased CD.
Well, to be fair, why is someone using an address book application to edit the directory for an organization? Should that be the LDAP admin's responsibility?
Ask Ximian why that gave that feature to Evolution. In a large corporation, you'd have a strong point. In a small organization, though, it's convenient for end users to be able to change their own personal information. If Joe works in an office with 10 people, and he gets a new phone number, why should he have to pester the LDAP admin? In a home environment, it's wonderfully convenient to have a centralized directory shared by all household members. If everyone uses Evolution, then they have that capability.
Address Book is there to be an address book. Who cares what the backend happens to be?
Battery-powered cars arn't realistic because of power density issues with modern bateries.
The claim is that the new motor uses 80% less energy (I assume they left out per unit of power). Ergo, an electric car would need 20% of the a current model's energy storage. If that is true, since a modern electric car is almost viable, then one built with this motor will absolutely be practical.
Slashdot Mirror
I learned it when I bought my first Palm Pilot and was proficient enough to use it with an outliner to take notes in college. When I bought an m130 with "Grafitti 2" (read: "Not Grafitti"), my handwriting recognition went through the floor. I've tried to adapt to the new style, but I still can't write "E", "S", or "T" on the first try more than 50% of the time. There are workarounds like TealScript, which lets you enter your own strokes (and which ships with a Grafitti clone set), but who knows if that will continue to be supported in future OS versions?
I loved my little IIIxe and used it constantly, but I just can't get the hang of my otherwise completely superior m130. I have a boolean test for whether I'll ever buy another Palm OS unit: will Palmone bring back Grafitti?
Never mind that it destroys the ability to quickly picks apps from a list, such as the KDE menu. You get listings like:
Basically, it moves all but a handful of apps into two or three "hash buckets", so you have to switch to visually scanning the second letter of application names. I hate it, it's confusing, and I wish it'd never started going that way.
The same amount, but each image will be smart enough to sue you for alimony.
Where on earth did you get that? Noone cares what weird closed driver you load into your kernel, but they do care when you ask for help debugging the resulting mess after a panic. Loading a non-Free module sets a "go pester the vendor" flag and that's pretty much it.
If I hadn't seen this story, and someone told me that they just bought a TI-84, I'd be amazed that they'd bought something older than my trusty TI-85: "You paid how much for a model a decade old?"
Has anyone managed to figure out this ordering? Doesn't it currently go something like 5 -> 6 -> 9 -> 3 -> 4 for the "8x" line? Sheesh.
The fact that the guy owns a company that makes voting machines does not preclude him from being allowed to vote or to campaign for someone else, as far as I know. Also, I can "promise to deliver Nebraska to Bush!", but if I say it, it means that I'll be donating, advertising, and cheering for him.
If their CEO really meant to "deliver Ohio", then I really doubt that he would've made the announcement in public.
It's kludgey, broken, and something I wish I'd thought of earlier.
...as evidenced by the fact that whenever I first touch my keyboard or mouse in the morning, every app runs like frozen molasses until the drive quits grinding. I just which Linux wouldn't decide to page out every possible byte when left alone for a while. :)
Still, I agree that this is generally preferable behavior for desktops, too, although perhaps not to the same degree.
Yeah, I'm being sarcastic. Do you really believe what you wrote, or have I been trolled?
You may or may not be correct in this particular case, but as a general statement, that's just stupid.
Do you really mean that the exact same settings for a little desktop (high priority to input-related tasks, swap only when needed) would work well for a high-load server (high priority to compute-related tasks, swap agressively to make RAM quickly available)? There are a lot of settings on a modern system that just can't be inferred by the system itself. Stating the opposite like it's an obvious fact is ignorant, misleading, or both.
A real-world example: a Usenet spool and an MP3 repository may be the same size, but benefit hugely from tweaked bytes-per-inode or journal settings. In some cases, once the system is running, it's too late to easily change your mind (like bytes-per-inode). In other cases, you can switch at will, but not without unmounting the filesystem (ext3 journaling options). You, as the administrator, make those decisions. Either way, even if the computer were capable of recognizing that you'd made a bad decision, it's not in a position to correct them.
A real-world example: I tuned Sendmail to use delayed sending so that when a client blasted 20,000 copies of a newsletter (yes, opt-in), then it would wait for several minutes so that it could efficiently aggregate recipients by domain. In there situation, telling Sendmail to leave email in the queue for 10 minutes meant a 50% savings in bandwidth. How on earth would you expect a self-tuned MTA to ever make that discovery on its own?
Computers do some things well. Predicting the future usage patterns of their owners without mounds of previous input is not one of them. That's where manual tuning comes in, and why real system administrators still paid decently.
Personally, I still use Sendmail everywhere, but Postfix is designed to be a fast, secure, easy-to-configure MTA. It would be my migration path of choice if I were ever having problems in any of those three areas.
Audio processing technology will get better. Don't ruin your grandkids' heirloom recordings by using today's technology to permanently alter them.
Make working copies and filter those as much as you want, but keep those masters pristine! Maybe somewhere in the background you can hear your grandma yelling at dear ol' grandpa to put that thing away and paint the house, and a clumsy run with an agressive low-pass filter will throw that data away forever. You have something really valuable; please take care of it for the future.
Q: "But why don't they include the accelerated NVidia driver?!? That would be useful!"
A: Because it's not Free.
Q: "But why don't they include qmail?!? That would be useful!"
A: Because it's not Free.
Q: "But why don't they include pine?!? That would be useful!"
A: Because it's not Free.
Despite that, every time Debian removes (or refuses to add) a piece of non-Free software, the "pragmists" queue up to swear that Debian is irrelevant because they don't care about market share, or that they're a bunch of extremists.
Understand this: Debian has a very explicit social contract with their users. If you continue to be surprised by their strict adherence, then either 1)you need to accept that they will always side with Freedom over pragmatism, or 2)you have a seriously warped worldview that causes you to be mystified by integrity. Either way, find something else to gripe about.
Debian is Free and increasingly popular among those of use who share that value. Every time they make a difficult decision like this, even at the expense of practicality, I respect them even more. Even if you hate Debian, you still benefit from their hard-line observation of their ideals every time you execute a bit of Free code that exists because they otherwise would have rejected it from their distributions.
I just don't why some people are still surprised each and every time. A real news article would be "Debian includes Qmail in 'main'". Now that would be a reason to criticize them. This is not.
How high is that horse you're up on?
I "discovered" Linux as a free Unix OS, and that was good. Then I read some of RMS's writings and decided that he made a lot of sense, and I began to love Linux for the freedom it gave me. As I grew more proficient and began writing my own GPLed (and BSDed) tools and distributing them, I was happy to share with the community. At no point, ever, have I though "wow, I'm really improving humanity!"
Your motives are your own. Judge yourself by them if you will, but remember that a lot of us are here for entirely different reasons.
Answer: don't use every feature that they provide just because they're there. Instead, install and use PostgreSQL and get comfortable with it. Now, you can use it as a flat-text database, or a tera-server with millions of rows, all without having to maintain two systems.
If your time is valuable, why learn two systems when you can learn one that's only slightly more complex than the other and be done with it?
That's a pretty good analogy! Now, put a saddle and a 200-pound rider on that cheetah and see how fast it moves.
MySQL is blazingly fast when doing nothing. PostgreSQL is still blazingly fast when pulling a heavy load, like a Clydesdale on meth. How does that make MySQL better?
In all seriousness, MySQL is fast because it doesn't do anything for you. By the time you shift all of your core logic into the application layer, which is often something terrible like PHP, the end result will probably be much slower than if you built a proper system with PostgreSQL in the first place.
Thank you. I was lost after the first clause ("FreeBSD allows forking pretty easially, Linux doesn't" - huh?), but was thinking maybe I missed something vital so I kept my mouth shut. I have no idea what point he was trying to make.
I've already been thanked.
Now I'm saying "you're welcome."
There are other currency systems than "money", you know.
So you're OK with a central company collecting data about every visit you make to otherwise unrelated bars or restaurants? That sounds like a more extremist viewpoint than the one you're replying to.
Well, the idea is to pull out ever bit of audio information possible and archive it. If you want to post-process the data locally to remove that hiss (and any other audio in that frequency band), you can still do so, but the original should be kept pristine. After all, noise filtering is dramatically better now than it was 20 years ago. In another 50 years, I don't want an audiologist complaining about how great those 2004 re-masterings could have been if only they'd known about the Transflugian Transform and hadn't wrecked the archives with ham-fisted turn-of-the-millenium binary methods.
There are other hardware crypto accelerators. OpenBSD uses them to offload all possible crypto and random functions from the CPU whenever one is present. VIA's is nice, in that it comes with the computer, but $100 will get you the same functionality in a PCI card.
Anybody here thinks that securei easy IM might not facilitate terrorist message interception?
You mean, like Jabber with SSL? That cat's already out of the bag.
Remember, the ends don't justify the means. I don't care if the money's going to feed starving, abused puppies - the government doesn't have a right to tax this.
You can, within legal limits. If I buy a music CD, I may do whatever I want with it, short of redistributing copies. I didn't certainly didn't mean to imply that you there are no restrictions on what you can do with a purchased CD.
Ask Ximian why that gave that feature to Evolution. In a large corporation, you'd have a strong point. In a small organization, though, it's convenient for end users to be able to change their own personal information. If Joe works in an office with 10 people, and he gets a new phone number, why should he have to pester the LDAP admin? In a home environment, it's wonderfully convenient to have a centralized directory shared by all household members. If everyone uses Evolution, then they have that capability.
Address Book is there to be an address book. Who cares what the backend happens to be?
The claim is that the new motor uses 80% less energy (I assume they left out per unit of power). Ergo, an electric car would need 20% of the a current model's energy storage. If that is true, since a modern electric car is almost viable, then one built with this motor will absolutely be practical.