> Package management and software installation > still needs to be simplified for the average user
Bah. Although the average user would need help with initial source repository configuration, Mandrake's urpmi and rpmdrake (the gui version with the browsing and the searching et al) do everything effortlessly, with dependency handling and stuff. Heck, you could autoinstall fifty games at once with a single command, and it's not too much harder to do this on the gui. How easy is it to find, download, install and configure fifty apps on MS Windows or Mac OS X?
--
-JC
Novice Game Boy Advance Programmer
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/gbadev/
> Replacing Windows with some Linux-With-Win32 > system wouldn't accomplish anything.
Yeah, maybe, except that you have to install the bulk of cygwin to do even the slightest of useful things on the command line in Win32.
Oh, er, "woot". I finally found a way to cheat to get an MDI command prompt in Win32. I'm running an X11 server in a fixed size window with ion as the internal window manager and a bunch of xterms. So I don't have to have five or six separate command line windows cluttering up my taskbar. Yay!:)
--
-JC
PS: spam filtering would get far easier with Linux-With-Win32, as most spam filters in the POSIX world use stdin/stdout.
> We have some of those un-adaptors. Male on one > end, female on the other, and no cable between, > i.e. just an adaptor. And non of the connections > are crossed either.
> I still haven't figured out what they are > supposed to be used for.
It could be one of those security dongle things. Our big label printer uses that. The label making program runs in limited mode if this device is not between the parallel port and the printer cable.
Additionally, some male to female (or vice-versa, if you will) connectors can limit current to avoid signal overload.
And you can stack them together to make cool pretend space ships.
> Why should you care as long as you get a cheap > burner that can burn both formats and both > formats are supported by DVD-ROM drives and > standalone DVD-players?
> And afaik almost all computers these days come > with a DVD-ROM drive, so that is what happened > to them.
Feh. I just burned a few recorded TV episodes to test out my new DVD burner (for those interested, it worked perfectly with K3b on Mandrake 9.2, and the buffer underrun prevention worked perfectly when my OpenGL screen saver accidentally kicked in). The disc is a DVD+R, and everything reads perfectly on my computer (using this BENQ DVD+RW drive), but my friends DVD-ROM drive can't make heads or tails of it. Not all DVD-ROM drives can read all burned media, not yet.
> Who types in commands in LInux? KDE button | > Configuration | Mandrake Control Center. Then > just click on the big button that says Update. > It really is that simple.
> Now if they'd just put a little check box on > there that says "Keep my computer up to date by > checking and installing updates automatically" > so that the average user could automate the > whole process and never have to worry about it.
If it helps, "Configuration-->Packaging-->Mandrake Update Notifications" gives you the system tray applet that checks for updates once an hour. I don't think it auto installs, but only a psycho would enable that feature. I know that none of my (non-technical) friends would think of allowing such a feature active on their computers. They've learned at least that "letting the computer do stuff on its own" is really, really dangerous (especially since my closest friend is now inundated with secretly installed programs that pop up porn advertisements and now his MSN dialup shortcut no longer points to its associated program).
> Any technology can be used to do irritating > things. Does the fact that I can write a virus > in C++ mean that nobody should ever use C++ again?
I can run C++ apps in a restricted user mode without having to worry about the virus getting out or causing damage. But most browsers cannot run javascript without being able to prevent the craptastic parts of it.
Granted, it's different now. Mozilla and Opera (perhaps others?) allow you to run Javascript while preventing the bad stuff, like unrequested popups or code that causes windows to shake. But two or three years ago, it was just about impossible to run contained Javascript (remember Internet Explorer and Netscape 4.x???)
> Well obviously mouse gestures are going to > become more and more complicated and tedious as > more and more gestures are added. There's only > so many two and three movement gestures you can have.
Yeah, but you don't *need* to use gestures for *everything*. The more complex ones are for people who are *really* into gestures. For the normal joe like me, the simple mouse gestures are wonderful.
The idea is to reduce the amount of work you need to do for common tasks. If I'm holding the phone or hand grips (the squeezy things that you use to strengthen your hand muscles) or my pr0n joystick or whatever, being able to do the most common tasks without having to lift my hand away from my mouse gets rid of a major annoyance. Here are the gestures I use:
Forward Back Reload Close Open Link in Background
Sometimes, I use the "hold right mouse button and scroll the wheel back and forth to cycle between open pages" thing, but for that particular action, hitting ALT+PgUp/PgDn (in Opera) or CTRL+PgUp/PgDn (in Mozilla) or CTRL[+SHIFT]+TAB (in either, also in MyIE2) on my keyboard is usually faster. But if my hand is on my mouse, simply depressing the right mouse button and jerking the mouse rightleftright to close a page is a hell of a lot faster than (1) moving the mouse around until the pointer matches the location of the close page widget, or (2) moving my hands into position to his CTRL+W. Better yet, the gestures don't ever require that I look at either the mouse or the keyboard. To do a keyboard shortcut or to click on a Close button, I have to focus more attention to the keyboard/mouse/screen. I could do simple gestures with my eyes closed. I mean, I don't, because that would be stupid, but I shouldn't have to think about closing a window when I want to close a window. It's practically an instinctive act now: I think to myself "I want this window closed", and my subconscious does all the work without my conscious mind needing to intervene, so while the page is closed by my mindless mouse hand, my concentration on learning to do the OpenGL API with Qt (the toolkit used in KDE) is not interrupted even the slightest bit.
It's all about reducing the time and attention needed by simple acts. This is why I really got into Opera during its 3.x days -- I could do anything on either the keyboard or the mouse (well, except for typing in forms like this), which meant that I didn't have to move my hands to the mouse if I was on the keyboard, and I didn't have to move my hands to the keyborad if I was on the mouse. CTRL-Up/Dn handled navigation within a page, for example. Sometimes, having to reach for a different input device can totally throw you off kilter (especially if you're one of those strange ADD people) and can slow down your productivity and reaction times.
Incidentally, Opera has a "Fast Forward" feature that automatically takes you to the next page or image in a series. And I have an RF gyroscopic mouse. So I could stand across the room and just twitch my mouse in the air to view a slideshow of pictures. The alternative would be to lug around my heavy keyboard and press ALT-Right a lot, which would be far more annoying.
> Not ONE of them has looked properly at the original > question which asked for Server X AND User Y.
Actually, the original answer was basically right, so long as you acceps that "UserX" was a typo and the author meant to write "ServerX".
Granted, his quick command wasn't 100% accurate, but his point was valid. You can do a *crapload* of powerful filtering, searching and administration with simple shell commands.
And Cygwin *is* really useful. I use it regularly to delete all messages in the outgoing mail spool that are bounces being sent specifically by the postmaster on our system (it's an older Novell IMS, and there's a problem when the postmaster has to bounce a large amount of spam). Before learning that I could easily do that with a single-line command, I learned how to make graphical C++ applications from scratch to manage this problem. Retroactive "oh" there.
> Real battle of the titans, that one. > I take it that your main criterion > for a media player is a chunky > interface and processor usage?
Yeah, seriously. I use mplayer (which plays everything I've thrown at it) and xine (for those rare moments when I, a Power Abuser with ADD, mean to type "su -c nice -n -5 mplayer kiddiepr0n.rm" but instead somehow miss some of the keys and accidentally type "su -c rm mplayer") while in Linux or other X11 oriented systems (also those two in Qtopia environments, but I have a partly busted CF Wifi card, so I haven't streamed much media to my handheld), though I always think about moving over to VLC (VideoLAN). When in Win2k, I typically use mplayer (which plays *most* stuff that I throw at it, but the Windows port needs work) or the third party Media Player Classic, though I always think about moving over to VLC. These media players are generally skinnable (not sure about VLC) but work with simple default interfaces that don't take up excess cpu time. They generally play every file type in the universe, and they don't waste time with sending data all over the internet whenever you want to play something.
I never understood why people decide to use these slow, ugly media players that can't even play a decent range of file types. Feh!
--
-JC
PS: No, mplayer is *not* hard to install, not on Win2k (a simple EXE installer, or you can just direct download the mplayer.exe and run it straight), not on Mandrake Linux 9.x (you should have the PLF RPM sources anyway, so you just su to root and type "urpmi --auto --no-verify-rpm mplayer1.0 mplayer1.0-gui".
> As much as I love Linux, I have to agree with the parent post. I tried to > install Opera and it told me there were some dependent files need. It > didn't say where to find them or how to install them at all.
Heh, heh, heh....
The reason why I got hooked into Linux and never use Windows (except perhaps once a week to play Civ III, like right now) is that there are Linux and UNIX operating systems which have intelligent package management. Those systems, which include Mandrake, Debian, FreeBSD and (I'm told) Gentoo, allow you to install an application fully needing *only* the name of the application. You don't even have to necessarily download it, unless it happens to be unavailable on the vendor feeds for that OS.
On my Mandrake 9.1 box, if I wanted to install Mozilla, I just su root then type "urpmi Mozilla" or (if I want to avoid having to type the "y" key twice to confirm stuff) "urpmi --auto --no-verify-rpm Mozilla".
On Debian, if I wanted to install Apache, I would su root and type "apt-get apache".
On FreeBSD, if I wanted to install KDE, I would su root, then "cd/usr/ports/x11/kde && make install".
Gentoo has something called "emerge", but I'm not sure what the syntax is (probably just "emerge OpenOffice" or something simple like that).
In at least the first three of the above (and probably the fourth), you just hit ENTER and make some coffee. The system finds the application's package from the internet (from any of several sources that you can specify, usually set up by the OS vendor), downloads it and installs it, and it makes sure to resolve any dependencies by installing prerequisite libraries and programs. It then puts shortcuts/links in all the right places on your desktop, and it makes sure that the application is in your system path.
And what if the application isn't in the feed? Well, in the case of Opera, you could be pedantically safe by downloading the "static" version of the RPM and doing "urpmi opera-7.20-static.rpm" (or whatever the rpm is named). But urpmi will handle the libraries if you want to install the shared rpm, so you might as well install that one, no?
Automatic dependency resolution is something that turned the computer into a toy again for me. I play very few games, because I don't really enjoy them all that much (and they cost money, which I can't afford on a meager programmer's salary). Being able to try tens of thousands of applications just by typing "urpmi someprogram" at any random root prompt is awesome. I can no longer go back to any OS which lacks this feature.
Frankly, if SuSE doesn't support this feature, it sucks in my book. I know it's really great and all, but... it just sucks. For me, that is. I won't use Red Hat Enterprise. I won't use Fedora until they prove that their package installer is as good as urpmi or apt-get. I won't use Windows NT unless I have to, because I usually have to go all over the place to install a new program. I exaggerate there, yes, but easy installation of stuff is way important to me.:p
--
-JC
PS: The "Opie" branch of the Sharp Zaurus seems to have automatic dependency handling, but it needs some work, and I don't know if it works on the command line.
Re:Minor factual error: no "darkside" of the moon
on
The Case for the Moon
·
· Score: 1
> Why not just cover the entire moon in solar
cells? > Imagine the power that could be collected. > Granted, us Earthlings would have a crappy view, > but eh.. anything in the name of progress, right?
I dunno. I think it'd look pretty, especially since it might make the Moon a partial reflecter for the surrounding starfield and Earth itself. It'd be eerily cool seeing a tiny blue phong at the center of a silvery crescent.
> Irony? Perhaps if the nature and amount of the > settlement was a "minor detail", you'd have made > sense, but um, it's kind of the whole point.
The "irony" in his post was that he was getting riled by a minor detail of a sentence posted by the grandparent poster that specifically noted how slashdot enthusiasts get riled by minor details.
If you missed it, the minor detail was that the sentence used the possessive "slashdotter's" as a plural instead of the infinitely less inaccurate "slashdotters".
> However, if you install Cygwin (and who in their right minds didn't do this years ago?), > you can browse the registry from bash: > $ cd/proc/registry/HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE > $ cat Windows\ NT/CurrentVersion/CurrentVersion > 5.0
Wow. Wowie! That's frigging awesome!
One thing, though... I think you mean: $ cat Microsoft/Windows\ NT/CurrentVersion/CurrentVersion
Nonethelese, you rock. I hate using software for a million years before finding a feature that it had all along that I could have used. It's like the Windows keys in Linux consoles, or the ability of DOS prompts to use CTRL-S and CTRL-Q.
> > PS - every application should have a > > "print preview"! Damn it!
> It's called gv or gsview.
I tend to use KDE's pdf viewer as a print preview. I'm at the beginning of my caffeine/methylphenidate high, so the critical part of my brain that identifies what that program's name is has been momentarily shut off, but that program works pretty well (with the one negative point being that when printed from Konqueror, the KDE print preview program loads the *entire* webpage, even if you told Konq to print only page one (the print preview program knows to only print page one, but it still loads all the extra pages for no reason).
Anyway, my one remaining problem is getting opera to run it. I can't set up a printer object that points to kprintpreview (or whatever), to the best of my knowledge. And I've tried clicking on the "custom program" (something like that) tab in opera's printer setup and putting "| kprintpreview" in the text field, but it loads the program without successfully getting the webpage.
> Oh, just give up on the term "hacker." Most people equate "hacker" with "computer criminal" > and you are not going to change that.
> I don't care how much you want and whine about the term "cracker." The general population has > decided what the word "hacker" means and your definition lost. Pick a new one.
I used to agree with what you are saying here. But then somebody pointed out that the general population has decided that the word "computer" means the CRT or LCD on top or your desk and the terms "hard drive" and "cpu" both mean the large beige or black box that connects you to the internet.
And "internet" is any program that lets you view websites.
> How hard is it for you Star Trek geeks to get this through your heads? There isn't going to be > any manned space exploration because we have no way of getting there.
Alcubierre's metric is by the layman considered to be in the same category as warp drive, and it's a valid metric in General Relativity.
For that matter, you don't need ftl travel to get to nearby stars in your lifetime. All you need are an effectively infinite supply of fuel and something to stop little grains of dust from annihilating your vessel. Special Relativity takes care of the rest: You just constantly accelerate halfway, then constantly decelerate the rest of the way. Yeah, to the people waiting on Earth, it took you five to ten years to get to Proxima Centauri, but to you, it only took a year or two.
> Imagine oceanic exploration without SCUBA,
Um. There was no SCUBA two hundred years ago. Now there is. Good analogy, that.
--
-JC
PS: Yeah, I know that the infinite fuel and magic interstellar dust shielding aren't really easy, if at all possible, but my point was that you don't need some sort of "warp" travel to visit the stars.
> I can open it up and see what's inside. > I don't have to rely on MS for patches to come
Yeah, that's one of the killers. While Microsoft does a generally decent job nowadays of implementing somewhat timely patches, there are occasions when they distribute patches that either (A) break something else or (B) don't really fix whatever bug or hole they're supposed to fix. That happens in Linux, too, but in Linux, if the main program distributor puts out a bad patch like that, you're likely to see some other company, organization or individual releasing an actual working patch. In Windows, this is impossible, because only one vendor has the source code and rights to patch it.
> Windows gets rid of product activation keys > Is affordable
Well, you have to expect them to want to make money, right? I do wish that Microsoft would go the extra mile for the money, though. They don't really make a good effort on the tech support side unless your problem entirely involves their products (if you're running another company's product with their OS, or if you're having a problem with a Microsoft product not quite working right with a non-Microsoft mouse/keyboard/joystick, then the default answer seems to be "it's the other guy's problem" more often than it should be. And they should provide updates to programs for their OSes other than the products they market. The "Free" software companies go this extra mile, especially for their paying customers. So why can't Microsoft? It'd barely put a dent into their massive bank accounts.
> It can run Gnome
http://cygnome.sourceforge.net/
There you go. GNOME on Windows. I haven't tried it, but I have tried KDE on Windows. It's painfully slow on an 800MHz Duron with 512MB PC133 SDRAM and all hoggish KDE features enabled, but I tried quite some time ago, and I could have probably done some process priority tweaking to make it better. One of the neat things about it is that it recognizes some win32 applications (like Civilization III) and automagically makes a link to it in the Application Menu.
Anyway, YMMV, but GNOME is there.
> It eliminates spyware (you wouldn't see spyware on Linux, even IF it traded marketshare with Windows)
I don't have any spyware on my Win2k box. Granted, that's because I'm careful (resulting in an 800MHz machine that outperforms much faster computers that happen to have lots of unwanted stuff running in the background), but a decent power user can live a win32 life free of software espionage.
> It eliminates viruses (same deal).
Fortunately, viruses these days only come into your system if you (A) run an email program apparently made by the shittiest Q&A development team in history or (B) forget to close all open ports (well, TCP135-139 should do for the most part) as well as that stupid Messenger service (not talking about instant messaging, this is an internal windows component thing). I never get infected by viruses. Ever.
> When it gets some form of package management
Crap. Damnit. You got me here. This is why I run Mandrake 9.1 (soon to be 9.2, just after I make sure that I don't have an LG CD-ROM, heh) most of the time. I'm at work, and I just did the following from my Windows 2000 cygwin shell:.................... Administrator@jc ~ $ ssh jc@myipadress [jc@jc jc]$ su Password: [root@jc jc]# urpmi --auto --no-verify-rpm OpenOffice.org....................
That is to say, I remotely connected to my linux box with 'ssh', then I became the root (administrative) user with 'su', then that final 'urpmi' command automatically sought out, downloaded, installed and configured OpenOffice.org, along with any prerequisite libraries and other stuff like fonts and the spell-checking add-in. This required no interaction from me. Heck, it did this while I was writing this message!
> Also, (playing devil's advocate here) the benefits of tabbed browsing are somewhat dubious. > Why would I want to use CTRL+PAGEUP/PAGEDOWN to switch panes when I can use ALT+TAB. ALT+TAB is > consistent across applications and it's closer to the home position on most keyboards.
Oh, that's easy. Right now, between Opera and Mozilla, I have fifty-two web pages open. It's that low because I pruned out a bunch of them a few days ago. Both browsers have session management, so these pages open up when I start my system. Even though I understand that it is not the norm for most users, I am immensely comfortable with this arrangement.
ALT+TAB (and ALT+SHIFT+TAB) is, for me, the hotkey for application switching. Inside applications, CTRL+TAB is the standard hotkey for document switching. In some programs, CTRL+PgUp and CTRL+PgDn control sub-switching from within a document.
For example:
CTRL+TAB switches between web page tabs in Opera, Mozilla, Netscape 4.x (iirc) and MyIE2 (an extension of IE that blocks popups and adds sidebar extras, MDI tabs and gestures). It switches between spreadsheets in Excel. It switches between currently open email folders and messages in Eudora. It switches between open text files in EditPad. It switches between sub-windows in Nero (CD burner).
As you can see, CTRL+TAB is, if not ubiquitous, pretty common and pretty useful. I might have a hundred documents open at any given time, and it would be a serious insane bitch if I had to ALT+TAB through the entire list to get to the one I want. Instead, I can ALT+TAB between the ten open applications (ignore my many Command Prompt windows, as Windows has no MDI option for that, which is a real waste), and then I can CTRL+TAB to the specific document I'm looking for. And then I can use that CTRL+Pg{Up|Dn} for a little finer granularity, like to get to Sheet 2 of my current Workspace.
Everyone has different habits, so I understand if you wouldn't benefit from the same things that I benefit from. But don't take away these features, because there *are* people who need them!
--
-JC
PS: To my surprise, people in my office have really taken a liking to Mozilla's Bayesian filter (the "Junk" button).
> Konqueror to the rescue! The "Browser Identification" feature has helped me more than > once with over-restrictive homepages. BuyMusic.com works fine if you let Konqueror say you're > using IE6.0 on Win XP.
For what it is worth, Opera (F12 key, quick access) and Mozilla (after installing Multizilla, which everybody should be using anyway) do that, as well. You can also edit the prefs.js to get Netscape 4.x to do it (but you should instead just upgrade to Mozilla or Opera). The only problem with spoofing in Mozilla is that it can sometimes confuse the Java VM, which apparently asks for your browser ID before running an applet. Aargh.
> "Found New Hardware -- Would you like to install it?" > "Yes"............ > "Your hardware is now ready to use!"
Hah?
I had a USB HP CD-Writer. There were no Windows 2000 drivers for the first year of its life. During that time, Mandrake (8.x, I think) was able to recognize it, though you had to edit a text file to add a line (something like "load usb2scsi").
Eventually, Windows 2000 drivers came out for the device. Upon installation, the drivers worked. But the next time I did a Windows Update, a plug-in for Windows Media Player was installed that conflicted with the drivers and *wiped out* every CD drive entry from my system. I couldn't access them from explorer.exe or cmd.exe or anywhere else, for that matter. Heck, the conflict effected *both* my USB burner and my regular CD drive.
Around the time that these drivers came out, I installed a newer version of Mandrake, which autodetected everything perfectly, without requiring any clicks from me.
Eventually, I figured the Win2k problem out and got rid of that stupid wmplayer plugin. So *eventually*, Windows 2000 got to the "just works" stage. Of course, the Win2k drivers in *practice* lead to massive overburns unless I closed *every* single other program running. The Mandrake drivers allowed me to burn stuff even while running parchive and rar (both high cpu utilization apps) on large files and downloading large files at high speeds and printing stuff through USB.
"Just works", my ass. The only hardware I've used that worked perfectly in Windows 2000 but required a hassle in Mandrake was my Gyration Cordless Optical Mouse. To get that working, I had to add a line or two somewhere in/etc/* and a few lines in/etc/X11/XF86Config-4.
My Hauppauge WinTV card just worked in Linux. It was a nightmare in Win2k. My 5.1 sound card just worked in Linux, but I had to use Linux to identify the card so that I could find the drivers online for Win2k.
Usually, the hardware installation experience between Windows and Linux are the same. Linux is better with autodetection, but there can be trouble if it doesn't detect it and have built-in drivers. Windows usually doesn't rely on autodetection, but if you know what you're working with, you can download the drivers somewhere.
And I have never, ever needed to recompile a kernel to install something. I don't even know what a "kernel panic" is, though it probably involves the screen turning blue and listing the current cpu registers.
Slashdot Mirror
ITRON, currently the most popular operating system in the world, started in 1984. So the Japanese effort wasn't a complete failure, eh?
"
see "http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2003/10/19.html
--
-JC
Novice Game Boy Advance Coder
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/gbadev/
> Package management and software installation
> still needs to be simplified for the average user
Bah. Although the average user would need help with initial source repository configuration, Mandrake's urpmi and rpmdrake (the gui version with the browsing and the searching et al) do everything effortlessly, with dependency handling and stuff. Heck, you could autoinstall fifty games at once with a single command, and it's not too much harder to do this on the gui. How easy is it to find, download, install and configure fifty apps on MS Windows or Mac OS X?
--
-JC
Novice Game Boy Advance Programmer
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/gbadev/
> Is there anything in the US legal system that is
> preventing US kernel maintainer from suing SCO?
Yeah. You have to be made of money to sue a corporation these days.
--
-JC
> Replacing Windows with some Linux-With-Win32
:)
> system wouldn't accomplish anything.
Yeah, maybe, except that you have to install the bulk of cygwin to do even the slightest of useful things on the command line in Win32.
Oh, er, "woot". I finally found a way to cheat to get an MDI command prompt in Win32. I'm running an X11 server in a fixed size window with ion as the internal window manager and a bunch of xterms. So I don't have to have five or six separate command line windows cluttering up my taskbar. Yay!
--
-JC
PS: spam filtering would get far easier with Linux-With-Win32, as most spam filters in the POSIX world use stdin/stdout.
> We have some of those un-adaptors. Male on one
> end, female on the other, and no cable between,
> i.e. just an adaptor. And non of the connections
> are crossed either.
> I still haven't figured out what they are
> supposed to be used for.
It could be one of those security dongle things. Our big label printer uses that. The label making program runs in limited mode if this device is not between the parallel port and the printer cable.
Additionally, some male to female (or vice-versa, if you will) connectors can limit current to avoid signal overload.
And you can stack them together to make cool pretend space ships.
--
-JC
> Why should you care as long as you get a cheap
> burner that can burn both formats and both
> formats are supported by DVD-ROM drives and
> standalone DVD-players?
> And afaik almost all computers these days come
> with a DVD-ROM drive, so that is what happened
> to them.
Feh. I just burned a few recorded TV episodes to test out my new DVD burner (for those interested, it worked perfectly with K3b on Mandrake 9.2, and the buffer underrun prevention worked perfectly when my OpenGL screen saver accidentally kicked in). The disc is a DVD+R, and everything reads perfectly on my computer (using this BENQ DVD+RW drive), but my friends DVD-ROM drive can't make heads or tails of it. Not all DVD-ROM drives can read all burned media, not yet.
--
-JC
> Who types in commands in LInux? KDE button |
> Configuration | Mandrake Control Center. Then
> just click on the big button that says Update.
> It really is that simple.
> Now if they'd just put a little check box on
> there that says "Keep my computer up to date by
> checking and installing updates automatically"
> so that the average user could automate the
> whole process and never have to worry about it.
If it helps, "Configuration-->Packaging-->Mandrake Update Notifications" gives you the system tray applet that checks for updates once an hour. I don't think it auto installs, but only a psycho would enable that feature. I know that none of my (non-technical) friends would think of allowing such a feature active on their computers. They've learned at least that "letting the computer do stuff on its own" is really, really dangerous (especially since my closest friend is now inundated with secretly installed programs that pop up porn advertisements and now his MSN dialup shortcut no longer points to its associated program).
--
-JC
> Any technology can be used to do irritating
> things. Does the fact that I can write a virus
> in C++ mean that nobody should ever use C++ again?
I can run C++ apps in a restricted user mode without having to worry about the virus getting out or causing damage. But most browsers cannot run javascript without being able to prevent the craptastic parts of it.
Granted, it's different now. Mozilla and Opera (perhaps others?) allow you to run Javascript while preventing the bad stuff, like unrequested popups or code that causes windows to shake. But two or three years ago, it was just about impossible to run contained Javascript (remember Internet Explorer and Netscape 4.x???)
--
-JC
> Well obviously mouse gestures are going to
;P
> become more and more complicated and tedious as
> more and more gestures are added. There's only
> so many two and three movement gestures you can have.
Yeah, but you don't *need* to use gestures for *everything*. The more complex ones are for people who are *really* into gestures. For the normal joe like me, the simple mouse gestures are wonderful.
The idea is to reduce the amount of work you need to do for common tasks. If I'm holding the phone or hand grips (the squeezy things that you use to strengthen your hand muscles) or my pr0n joystick or whatever, being able to do the most common tasks without having to lift my hand away from my mouse gets rid of a major annoyance. Here are the gestures I use:
Forward
Back
Reload
Close
Open Link in Background
Sometimes, I use the "hold right mouse button and scroll the wheel back and forth to cycle between open pages" thing, but for that particular action, hitting ALT+PgUp/PgDn (in Opera) or CTRL+PgUp/PgDn (in Mozilla) or CTRL[+SHIFT]+TAB (in either, also in MyIE2) on my keyboard is usually faster. But if my hand is on my mouse, simply depressing the right mouse button and jerking the mouse rightleftright to close a page is a hell of a lot faster than (1) moving the mouse around until the pointer matches the location of the close page widget, or (2) moving my hands into position to his CTRL+W. Better yet, the gestures don't ever require that I look at either the mouse or the keyboard. To do a keyboard shortcut or to click on a Close button, I have to focus more attention to the keyboard/mouse/screen. I could do simple gestures with my eyes closed. I mean, I don't, because that would be stupid, but I shouldn't have to think about closing a window when I want to close a window. It's practically an instinctive act now: I think to myself "I want this window closed", and my subconscious does all the work without my conscious mind needing to intervene, so while the page is closed by my mindless mouse hand, my concentration on learning to do the OpenGL API with Qt (the toolkit used in KDE) is not interrupted even the slightest bit.
It's all about reducing the time and attention needed by simple acts. This is why I really got into Opera during its 3.x days -- I could do anything on either the keyboard or the mouse (well, except for typing in forms like this), which meant that I didn't have to move my hands to the mouse if I was on the keyboard, and I didn't have to move my hands to the keyborad if I was on the mouse. CTRL-Up/Dn handled navigation within a page, for example. Sometimes, having to reach for a different input device can totally throw you off kilter (especially if you're one of those strange ADD people) and can slow down your productivity and reaction times.
Incidentally, Opera has a "Fast Forward" feature that automatically takes you to the next page or image in a series. And I have an RF gyroscopic mouse. So I could stand across the room and just twitch my mouse in the air to view a slideshow of pictures. The alternative would be to lug around my heavy keyboard and press ALT-Right a lot, which would be far more annoying.
So there!
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-JC
> Not ONE of them has looked properly at the original
> question which asked for Server X AND User Y.
Actually, the original answer was basically right, so long as you acceps that "UserX" was a typo and the author meant to write "ServerX".
Granted, his quick command wasn't 100% accurate, but his point was valid. You can do a *crapload* of powerful filtering, searching and administration with simple shell commands.
And Cygwin *is* really useful. I use it regularly to delete all messages in the outgoing mail spool that are bounces being sent specifically by the postmaster on our system (it's an older Novell IMS, and there's a problem when the postmaster has to bounce a large amount of spam). Before learning that I could easily do that with a single-line command, I learned how to make graphical C++ applications from scratch to manage this problem. Retroactive "oh" there.
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-JC
> Real battle of the titans, that one.
> I take it that your main criterion
> for a media player is a chunky
> interface and processor usage?
Yeah, seriously. I use mplayer (which plays everything I've thrown at it) and xine (for those rare moments when I, a Power Abuser with ADD, mean to type "su -c nice -n -5 mplayer kiddiepr0n.rm" but instead somehow miss some of the keys and accidentally type "su -c rm mplayer") while in Linux or other X11 oriented systems (also those two in Qtopia environments, but I have a partly busted CF Wifi card, so I haven't streamed much media to my handheld), though I always think about moving over to VLC (VideoLAN). When in Win2k, I typically use mplayer (which plays *most* stuff that I throw at it, but the Windows port needs work) or the third party Media Player Classic, though I always think about moving over to VLC. These media players are generally skinnable (not sure about VLC) but work with simple default interfaces that don't take up excess cpu time. They generally play every file type in the universe, and they don't waste time with sending data all over the internet whenever you want to play something.
I never understood why people decide to use these slow, ugly media players that can't even play a decent range of file types. Feh!
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-JC
PS: No, mplayer is *not* hard to install, not on Win2k (a simple EXE installer, or you can just direct download the mplayer.exe and run it straight), not on Mandrake Linux 9.x (you should have the PLF RPM sources anyway, so you just su to root and type "urpmi --auto --no-verify-rpm mplayer1.0 mplayer1.0-gui".
> As much as I love Linux, I have to agree with the parent post. I tried to
/usr/ports/x11/kde && make install".
... it just sucks. For me, that is. I won't use Red Hat Enterprise. I won't use Fedora until they prove that their package installer is as good as urpmi or apt-get. I won't use Windows NT unless I have to, because I usually have to go all over the place to install a new program. I exaggerate there, yes, but easy installation of stuff is way important to me. :p
> install Opera and it told me there were some dependent files need. It
> didn't say where to find them or how to install them at all.
Heh, heh, heh....
The reason why I got hooked into Linux and never use Windows (except perhaps once a week to play Civ III, like right now) is that there are Linux and UNIX operating systems which have intelligent package management. Those systems, which include Mandrake, Debian, FreeBSD and (I'm told) Gentoo, allow you to install an application fully needing *only* the name of the application. You don't even have to necessarily download it, unless it happens to be unavailable on the vendor feeds for that OS.
On my Mandrake 9.1 box, if I wanted to install Mozilla, I just su root then type "urpmi Mozilla" or (if I want to avoid having to type the "y" key twice to confirm stuff) "urpmi --auto --no-verify-rpm Mozilla".
On Debian, if I wanted to install Apache, I would su root and type "apt-get apache".
On FreeBSD, if I wanted to install KDE, I would su root, then "cd
Gentoo has something called "emerge", but I'm not sure what the syntax is (probably just "emerge OpenOffice" or something simple like that).
In at least the first three of the above (and probably the fourth), you just hit ENTER and make some coffee. The system finds the application's package from the internet (from any of several sources that you can specify, usually set up by the OS vendor), downloads it and installs it, and it makes sure to resolve any dependencies by installing prerequisite libraries and programs. It then puts shortcuts/links in all the right places on your desktop, and it makes sure that the application is in your system path.
And what if the application isn't in the feed? Well, in the case of Opera, you could be pedantically safe by downloading the "static" version of the RPM and doing "urpmi opera-7.20-static.rpm" (or whatever the rpm is named). But urpmi will handle the libraries if you want to install the shared rpm, so you might as well install that one, no?
Automatic dependency resolution is something that turned the computer into a toy again for me. I play very few games, because I don't really enjoy them all that much (and they cost money, which I can't afford on a meager programmer's salary). Being able to try tens of thousands of applications just by typing "urpmi someprogram" at any random root prompt is awesome. I can no longer go back to any OS which lacks this feature.
Frankly, if SuSE doesn't support this feature, it sucks in my book. I know it's really great and all, but
--
-JC
PS: The "Opie" branch of the Sharp Zaurus seems to have automatic dependency handling, but it needs some work, and I don't know if it works on the command line.
> Why not just cover the entire moon in solar
cells?
> Imagine the power that could be collected.
> Granted, us Earthlings would have a crappy view,
> but eh.. anything in the name of progress, right?
I dunno. I think it'd look pretty, especially since it might make the Moon a partial reflecter for the surrounding starfield and Earth itself. It'd be eerily cool seeing a tiny blue phong at the center of a silvery crescent.
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-JC
> Squares of the first three primes...
I thought it was squares of all positive integers. After all, is 1 really, really a prime number?
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-JC
> Irony? Perhaps if the nature and amount of the
> settlement was a "minor detail", you'd have made
> sense, but um, it's kind of the whole point.
The "irony" in his post was that he was getting riled by a minor detail of a sentence posted by the grandparent poster that specifically noted how slashdot enthusiasts get riled by minor details.
If you missed it, the minor detail was that the sentence used the possessive "slashdotter's" as a plural instead of the infinitely less inaccurate "slashdotters".
That guy's post earned its "+5, Funny" mark.
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-JC
> No, Voyager's last message is going to
:p
> be "What?! KLINGONS?! OH SHI"
At the risk of seeming anal retentive, I'd like to point out that that was one of the Pioneer space probes.
And it was a crappy movie.
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-JC
> However, if you install Cygwin (and who in their right minds didn't do this years ago?), /proc/registry/HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE
... I think you mean:
> you can browse the registry from bash:
> $ cd
> $ cat Windows\ NT/CurrentVersion/CurrentVersion
> 5.0
Wow. Wowie! That's frigging awesome!
One thing, though
$ cat Microsoft/Windows\ NT/CurrentVersion/CurrentVersion
Nonethelese, you rock. I hate using software for a million years before finding a feature that it had all along that I could have used. It's like the Windows keys in Linux consoles, or the ability of DOS prompts to use CTRL-S and CTRL-Q.
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-JC
> > PS - every application should have a
> > "print preview"! Damn it!
> It's called gv or gsview.
I tend to use KDE's pdf viewer as a print preview. I'm at the beginning of my caffeine/methylphenidate high, so the critical part of my brain that identifies what that program's name is has been momentarily shut off, but that program works pretty well (with the one negative point being that when printed from Konqueror, the KDE print preview program loads the *entire* webpage, even if you told Konq to print only page one (the print preview program knows to only print page one, but it still loads all the extra pages for no reason).
Anyway, my one remaining problem is getting opera to run it. I can't set up a printer object that points to kprintpreview (or whatever), to the best of my knowledge. And I've tried clicking on the "custom program" (something like that) tab in opera's printer setup and putting "| kprintpreview" in the text field, but it loads the program without successfully getting the webpage.
Any suggestions?
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-JC
> Oh, just give up on the term "hacker." Most people equate "hacker" with "computer criminal"
> and you are not going to change that.
> I don't care how much you want and whine about the term "cracker." The general population has
> decided what the word "hacker" means and your definition lost. Pick a new one.
I used to agree with what you are saying here. But then somebody pointed out that the general population has decided that the word "computer" means the CRT or LCD on top or your desk and the terms "hard drive" and "cpu" both mean the large beige or black box that connects you to the internet.
And "internet" is any program that lets you view websites.
To hell with the general population.
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-JC
> There are no warp drives!
> How hard is it for you Star Trek geeks to get this through your heads? There isn't going to be
> any manned space exploration because we have no way of getting there.
Alcubierre's metric is by the layman considered to be in the same category as warp drive, and it's a valid metric in General Relativity.
For that matter, you don't need ftl travel to get to nearby stars in your lifetime. All you need are an effectively infinite supply of fuel and something to stop little grains of dust from annihilating your vessel. Special Relativity takes care of the rest: You just constantly accelerate halfway, then constantly decelerate the rest of the way. Yeah, to the people waiting on Earth, it took you five to ten years to get to Proxima Centauri, but to you, it only took a year or two.
> Imagine oceanic exploration without SCUBA,
Um. There was no SCUBA two hundred years ago. Now there is. Good analogy, that.
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-JC
PS: Yeah, I know that the infinite fuel and magic interstellar dust shielding aren't really easy, if at all possible, but my point was that you don't need some sort of "warp" travel to visit the stars.
> I'll ditch Linux and use Windows when:
.................... ....................
> I can open it up and see what's inside.
> I don't have to rely on MS for patches to come
Yeah, that's one of the killers. While Microsoft does a generally decent job nowadays of implementing somewhat timely patches, there are occasions when they distribute patches that either (A) break something else or (B) don't really fix whatever bug or hole they're supposed to fix. That happens in Linux, too, but in Linux, if the main program distributor puts out a bad patch like that, you're likely to see some other company, organization or individual releasing an actual working patch. In Windows, this is impossible, because only one vendor has the source code and rights to patch it.
> Windows gets rid of product activation keys
> Is affordable
Well, you have to expect them to want to make money, right? I do wish that Microsoft would go the extra mile for the money, though. They don't really make a good effort on the tech support side unless your problem entirely involves their products (if you're running another company's product with their OS, or if you're having a problem with a Microsoft product not quite working right with a non-Microsoft mouse/keyboard/joystick, then the default answer seems to be "it's the other guy's problem" more often than it should be. And they should provide updates to programs for their OSes other than the products they market. The "Free" software companies go this extra mile, especially for their paying customers. So why can't Microsoft? It'd barely put a dent into their massive bank accounts.
> It can run Gnome
http://cygnome.sourceforge.net/
There you go. GNOME on Windows. I haven't tried it, but I have tried KDE on Windows. It's painfully slow on an 800MHz Duron with 512MB PC133 SDRAM and all hoggish KDE features enabled, but I tried quite some time ago, and I could have probably done some process priority tweaking to make it better. One of the neat things about it is that it recognizes some win32 applications (like Civilization III) and automagically makes a link to it in the Application Menu.
Anyway, YMMV, but GNOME is there.
> It eliminates spyware (you wouldn't see spyware on Linux, even IF it traded marketshare with Windows)
I don't have any spyware on my Win2k box. Granted, that's because I'm careful (resulting in an 800MHz machine that outperforms much faster computers that happen to have lots of unwanted stuff running in the background), but a decent power user can live a win32 life free of software espionage.
> It eliminates viruses (same deal).
Fortunately, viruses these days only come into your system if you (A) run an email program apparently made by the shittiest Q&A development team in history or (B) forget to close all open ports (well, TCP135-139 should do for the most part) as well as that stupid Messenger service (not talking about instant messaging, this is an internal windows component thing). I never get infected by viruses. Ever.
> When it gets some form of package management
Crap. Damnit. You got me here. This is why I run Mandrake 9.1 (soon to be 9.2, just after I make sure that I don't have an LG CD-ROM, heh) most of the time. I'm at work, and I just did the following from my Windows 2000 cygwin shell:
Administrator@jc ~
$ ssh jc@myipadress
[jc@jc jc]$ su
Password:
[root@jc jc]# urpmi --auto --no-verify-rpm OpenOffice.org
That is to say, I remotely connected to my linux box with 'ssh', then I became the root (administrative) user with 'su', then that final 'urpmi' command automatically sought out, downloaded, installed and configured OpenOffice.org, along with any prerequisite libraries and other stuff like fonts and the spell-checking add-in. This required no interaction from me. Heck, it did this while I was writing this message!
For equivalent results on
> Also, (playing devil's advocate here) the benefits of tabbed browsing are somewhat dubious.
> Why would I want to use CTRL+PAGEUP/PAGEDOWN to switch panes when I can use ALT+TAB. ALT+TAB is
> consistent across applications and it's closer to the home position on most keyboards.
Oh, that's easy. Right now, between Opera and Mozilla, I have fifty-two web pages open. It's that low because I pruned out a bunch of them a few days ago. Both browsers have session management, so these pages open up when I start my system. Even though I understand that it is not the norm for most users, I am immensely comfortable with this arrangement.
ALT+TAB (and ALT+SHIFT+TAB) is, for me, the hotkey for application switching. Inside applications, CTRL+TAB is the standard hotkey for document switching. In some programs, CTRL+PgUp and CTRL+PgDn control sub-switching from within a document.
For example:
CTRL+TAB switches between web page tabs in Opera, Mozilla, Netscape 4.x (iirc) and MyIE2 (an extension of IE that blocks popups and adds sidebar extras, MDI tabs and gestures). It switches between spreadsheets in Excel. It switches between currently open email folders and messages in Eudora. It switches between open text files in EditPad. It switches between sub-windows in Nero (CD burner).
As you can see, CTRL+TAB is, if not ubiquitous, pretty common and pretty useful. I might have a hundred documents open at any given time, and it would be a serious insane bitch if I had to ALT+TAB through the entire list to get to the one I want. Instead, I can ALT+TAB between the ten open applications (ignore my many Command Prompt windows, as Windows has no MDI option for that, which is a real waste), and then I can CTRL+TAB to the specific document I'm looking for. And then I can use that CTRL+Pg{Up|Dn} for a little finer granularity, like to get to Sheet 2 of my current Workspace.
Everyone has different habits, so I understand if you wouldn't benefit from the same things that I benefit from. But don't take away these features, because there *are* people who need them!
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-JC
PS: To my surprise, people in my office have really taken a liking to Mozilla's Bayesian filter (the "Junk" button).
> Konqueror to the rescue! The "Browser Identification" feature has helped me more than
> once with over-restrictive homepages. BuyMusic.com works fine if you let Konqueror say you're
> using IE6.0 on Win XP.
For what it is worth, Opera (F12 key, quick access) and Mozilla (after installing Multizilla, which everybody should be using anyway) do that, as well. You can also edit the prefs.js to get Netscape 4.x to do it (but you should instead just upgrade to Mozilla or Opera). The only problem with spoofing in Mozilla is that it can sometimes confuse the Java VM, which apparently asks for your browser ID before running an applet. Aargh.
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-JC
> That attitude is what a lot of free software
> suck compared to its commercial counter-part.
Don't you wish that Slashdot had a "grammar undo" function?
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-JC
> "Found New Hardware -- Would you like to install it?" ...... ......
/etc/* and a few lines in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 .
> "Yes"
> "Your hardware is now ready to use!"
Hah?
I had a USB HP CD-Writer. There were no Windows 2000 drivers for the first year of its life. During that time, Mandrake (8.x, I think) was able to recognize it, though you had to edit a text file to add a line (something like "load usb2scsi").
Eventually, Windows 2000 drivers came out for the device. Upon installation, the drivers worked. But the next time I did a Windows Update, a plug-in for Windows Media Player was installed that conflicted with the drivers and *wiped out* every CD drive entry from my system. I couldn't access them from explorer.exe or cmd.exe or anywhere else, for that matter. Heck, the conflict effected *both* my USB burner and my regular CD drive.
Around the time that these drivers came out, I installed a newer version of Mandrake, which autodetected everything perfectly, without requiring any clicks from me.
Eventually, I figured the Win2k problem out and got rid of that stupid wmplayer plugin. So *eventually*, Windows 2000 got to the "just works" stage. Of course, the Win2k drivers in *practice* lead to massive overburns unless I closed *every* single other program running. The Mandrake drivers allowed me to burn stuff even while running parchive and rar (both high cpu utilization apps) on large files and downloading large files at high speeds and printing stuff through USB.
"Just works", my ass. The only hardware I've used that worked perfectly in Windows 2000 but required a hassle in Mandrake was my Gyration Cordless Optical Mouse. To get that working, I had to add a line or two somewhere in
My Hauppauge WinTV card just worked in Linux. It was a nightmare in Win2k. My 5.1 sound card just worked in Linux, but I had to use Linux to identify the card so that I could find the drivers online for Win2k.
Usually, the hardware installation experience between Windows and Linux are the same. Linux is better with autodetection, but there can be trouble if it doesn't detect it and have built-in drivers. Windows usually doesn't rely on autodetection, but if you know what you're working with, you can download the drivers somewhere.
And I have never, ever needed to recompile a kernel to install something. I don't even know what a "kernel panic" is, though it probably involves the screen turning blue and listing the current cpu registers.
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-JC