Audacious for me. Handles huge playlists very well, is lightweight, and is fairly cross platform (currently, no OS X support, but they're planning on adding that in a release or two). Even handles classic Winamp skins, a huge bonus if you're someone like me who's used the same skin for years.
Consider, for a moment, why it would be beneficial for the participants to have this program be for girls alone.
Take your time.
I don't see a benefit. What I see is suggesting that they're inferior to men, and need to be separated into their own groups. I can understand if you want to put more girls in a class, to make it less awkward, but then you should be encouraging girls vs excluding boys. Now, I have a question for you: what do you think of making beauty pageants exclusive to boys?
I agree, first thing on my mind too. I understand people want more women in programming, but this? THIS? This is literally the definition of sexism. You're telling me that just because someone is a boy, he can't operate the White House's Christmas Lights? Unbelievable.
Have you compared the average car in Germany with the ones in the USA? Furthermore, in Germany there are mandatory periodic technical inspections, and these are no joke. Half the cars I see in the USA would never pass these inspections. Also, getting a driver license in Germany is HARD, and the average Autobahn driver is very well disciplined compared to his USA counterpart (exceptions exist, I know I know...)
That came across me as well - this senator is making a comparison, but has no idea of how things actually work over here. Having visited the United States frequently, I cannot begin to describe how horrible driving over there is. You have people cutting you off, people who turn without signals, people who will drive so incredibly close behind you that a rear end accident is inevitable. This kind of driving is highly frowned upon over here, and just violating one of these would come with a heavy price. And not only this, but the vehicles themselves are a part of the problem as well - you have rusty old trucks from the 80's that would never pass a safety inspection, you have these large SUVs that think they are invincible, you have these pseudo drag racers which will drive as fast as they can safety be damned.
In short, I think a lot of people over here don't realize they are driving what is essentially a one ton bomb on wheels, and raising the speed limit is really not a good idea.
This is actually a serious question. I'm not overly familiar with BSD but have been thinking about giving it a shot on the desktop. I've been a Gentoo user for many years and am reasonably comfortable diving into stuff, so I don't anticipate user friendliness being a show stopper, more likely something I can currently do on Linux won't be available or will have poor support in BSD.
The main things I'm concerned with are Minecraft/FTB, mplayer, flash, VirtualBox, OpenRA, and jack/rakarrack. I'm open to alternatives as long as they actually work.
Flash I could probably live without, but much as I hate it, browsing the web sans-flash does still pose the occasional problem.
jack/rakarrack I could also probably live without. I currently use my desktop as a quick-n-dirty guitar amp/effects stack.
OpenRA is the thing I anticipate having the most problems with, but I play it somewhat obsessively so very much desired.
At some point I'll probably just try it and see, but I'm curious if any other slashdotter has gone this route and has anything interesting to say about it.
FTB may be a bit of a problem: I use FreeBSD, and I couldn't get it to work correctly. Granted, I expended very little effort into it, so there may be a way and I'm just too lazy. I don't know how well jack or VirtualBox would work, as I don't use either. However, Flash works fine (it'll be an old version, but it's the same old version that's on Linux), mplayer works fine, and OpenRA also works fine. I can't believe I've finally met another player of this game:P
Do you necessarily have to work on your coding skills? What about enjoying the ride and soaking up the scene?
I was going to say the same thing. Concentrate on being a better person, rather than a better programmer. Travel broadens the mind. Let it do so.
I'm the third man in this conga line, but yes, focus on improving yourself and enjoying your trip. You can always learn programming; a trip to the Himalayas is a rare opportunity indeed.
What do you mean by "risk aversion"? I'm genuinely curious.
I can't speak for the grandparent but generally in de facto non-profit monopolies - there's nobody else competing to be the US army for example - there's very little risk in not pushing boundaries. Projects might run over time and over budget but at the end of the day the politicians have to fund the army next year too and you don't get the fat bonuses like when your software makes money for the company. Obvious flops on the other hand might require scapegoats and if you make your superiors look bad, well they're likely to be a step or two up in seniority for the rest of your career in the same "company". That will permeate the entire environment making any kind of change hard, nobody wants to be the one signing off on anything without a drawn out change process.
Here in Norway the craziest example at the moment is the police. In 2005 our politicians made fairly big changes to the penal code, which would go into effect when the police systems were able to handle it. Well, now it's 2014 and it's still not in effect. But what can you do, not fund the police? No matter how much the schedules slip and it goes over budget we have to keep throwing money at them. If they were a commercial company they'd be out of business long ago. Sometimes I wonder if it would be cheaper if we awarded two companies the contract to write the same module with a bonus to the winner, just to get the competition.
That's an interesting idea! I do think that here in the United States, our government's a little bit too business friendly, but using two companies would be a good way to pit competition to (hopefully) produce a better result. Or maybe not, what do I know:P I certainly think it's an idea worth trying, though.
I left the DoD as a software developer largely because they couldn't get their heads out of their asses. The paperwork, mandatory training, and total risk aversion meant I developed code at maybe 25% of the speed that I did before, and after, in the private sector. And the stock options in the DoD were nothing to write home about.
I really don't see how the DoD can win any cyber fight. It would take losing a ground war on U.S. soil for them to give up their worship of bureaucracy.
What do you mean by "risk aversion"? I'm genuinely curious.
I spent $1,200 on my Black MacBook and got eight years of use ($150 per year). Prior to that, I spent $1,200 on a Dell laptop that gave me three years of use ($400 per year). Do the math.
> Apple, and others, stopped using the "truly free" gcc because GPL v3 became quite restrictive.
There's nothing in there that should scare off anyone. If someone is bothered by the GPL3 in a project like C++ compiler, then you should be very suspicious of their motives. They clearly aren't interested in playing nice or being a good citizen.
They clearly want to be free to f*ck you over later.
Go tell that to the BSD guys. No, they don't want to screw you over, their definition of freedom differs. To them, freedom is defined as having as absolutely few restrictions as possible. GCC vs Clang is a perfect example. GCC is intentionally made as opaque as possible to prevent you from working around it, and it's far worse in this respect then many of the proprietary compilers. Clang is more interested in being as useful to the user as it can. If you really want it summed up in one sentence, here it is: GNU projects put the license first, functionality second. THAT's what drove Apple (and pretty much everything other then Linux) away from GCC, not "They clearly want to be free to f*ck you over later".
The author of the summary is not up to date on the recent release of info on Dreadnoughtus schrani, now believed to be the largest creature to ever have walked on land.
See the following:
Damn Whales, walking on land everywhere. Oh what's that, they swim? And they way three times as much as the Dreadnoughtus? The author of this comment is not up to date...
There are comparatively fewer web sites focusing on technology, mathematics, science, and computing. Slashdot was such a site. We'd be able to come here to find articles and dicussion that wouldn't be readily available from other sources or venues.
Next article up: "Ask Slashdot: Will nuclear winter usher in the year of Linux on the desktop?"
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual sense to everythi- oh wait, never mind, that's the nuclear radiation."
Most of the people who are complaining about SystemD are either the BSD guys or those who maintain smaller distros. I'll start with the smaller distroes: they don't like it because it's a lot of maintenance (see Fuduntu), and is pretty bulky for a smaller distro. For something that is designed to be simple, reliable, and well understood by one person, SystemD goes against the principles established by these smaller distroes (Slackware, Gentoo, LFS, etc.). For the BSD guys, they actually don't care about SystemD: it doesn't affect their world, and seeing as SystemD isn't compatible with any of the BSD kernels by design, it would be fine if it were on it's own. The big problem is that SystemD is also converting applications to rely on it, and it exclusively - GNOME 3, anyone? When this happens, it starts to cut off their supply of software, and at the very least adds so much more maintenance and hassle. It's really annoying, especially given SystemD's newness, lack of a track record, and intentionally trying to be as hard to port as possible. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the SystemD proponents, mostly Redhat and Debian guys. They like it because they often maintain massive systems, which are pretty complex. At this point, integrating everything into one init process saves so much work, and makes life much easier. Neither crowd understands the other, understandably because of the vastly different approaches. The real probelm is that the SystemD proponents are pretty pushy, and insist that SystemD be used in places where I don't think it makes sense. If nothing else, maintaining compatibility would be nice, but they intentionally break it. Because of this, the classic init crowd feels threatened because their way of life - computing, same thing to us nerds here;D - is disappearing. When this happens, there is naturally a great deal of resistance, and that's where the tensions lie. My recommendation would be for software to try to avoid being specific to either init system, and instead let the user decide. The two groups can coexist peacefully, although less aggressiveness from the SystemD people would probably go a long way towards helping this. I've tried to provide as much of an unbiased view as possible, and I hope someone finds it helpful. If I get buried at the bottom, never to be seen again, I wish the person reading this in 2034 a good day! Yes, you're probably thinking SystemD is old, crufty, and is probably about to be deprecated, but it was hip and trendy at one time, much as that blows your mind:D
Oh, good god! This post has so many holes in it that it's like a damn piece of Swiss cheese. Where do I start?
Because we're really, really tired of software that uselessly, needlessly, requires the "latest and greatest" operating system for no good reason at all, that's why.
Someone didn't do his research here. Do you know what Macs are famous for? That's right, the upgrade treadmill! If you didn't want to deal with that, why the hell did you buy one?
But, say, if you have something as vanilla as an image processing application, with no real need for anything other than memory allocation and file dialogs, and lets say you add, oh, I don't know, a new RAW file format to the application, then please don't tie that capability to the latest OS
THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF OS X. The "Integration" aspect is a big thing for it, and that's EXACTLY what Apple's target audience wants. Seriously, this is like raging on about how semi trucks are big, slow, and noisy. I don't know which application you're talking about, but I assume it's iPhoto. In which case, you clearly know very little about it. IPhoto doesn't do any image processing, it's ALWAYS relied on OS X's built in libraries to do that. If you've ever programmed on OS X, you should have known that.
Now THERE is a radical fucking idea. With a process like that, maybe my Mini could fucking well print like it's supposed to
That wouldn't change anything. CUPS is not a part of OS X, it's a separate tool. Unless, you want your OS to do integrated printing? Why Image Processing as well? ^^^^
I've written HUNDREDS of them under three different major OS's without EVER having to tie even ONE of them to an OS level.
Let's get this straight: You have coded libraries under every operating system, yet never once used the built in frameworks? You're telling me you've written HUNDREDS of libraries so small and trivial that they never used any kind of system level frameworks? That's quite an achievement. Or, most likely, you DID use this "OS esoterica". I feel for you, I know EXACTLY what you meant to say, but you're statement is just flat out incorrect.
While I'm at it, Apple and Microsoft, stop leaving broken OS's in your wake. When you sell an OS, and it doesn't work the way it was supposed to, you should fix it. Yes, even ten years later. You said it would work, you took the customer's money on that basis, and if it fucking well doesn't work the way you said it would, you need to step up to the plate and make sure it gets fixed.
Okay, this just ridiculous. One, you're talking about something not part of the OS. They promised you a working OS, not any guarantees that your printing would work. You didn't by a full solution, just the package. Have you even contacted their technical support about this? If you have, I'm sorry for you, but they aren't obligated to fix your issue. The best fix is to simply not buy from them next time. Two, how long have you known about this!?!? If this is an old bug, why didn't you put Linux on it? If you don't have the technical knowledge, need compatibility with an application, or found Linux just as bad, why not return it? You could then spend that money on another computer. Seriously, it's inconveniencing, but there are definitely ways around that problem. As a programmer, I would have kinda expected you to have learned by now how to flow around issues like this.
I went through this process of picking my computer operating system, from Windows to OS X to god knows how many Linux distroes. I eventually arrived at nirvana, and it was something completely off the map: FreeBSD. It's rock solid stable, has got a nice long support cycle, is a pleasure to administrate and ticker with, and has a massive library of over 24,000 applications (and no, this isn't Debian where every app is split between 10 different packages). Again, if you need a specific application, FreeBSD is pretty much ruled out (unless it happens to be a Linux app. Then, it M
Ugh, we've heard this before. Remember how to internet was supposed to "revolutionize" our shopping? I don't order very much at all off the internet. Plus, 3D printing machines currently rely upon plastic. YOu can wear solid plastic shoes, but I'm not.
Power pro is a utility that "changes the way you work with Windows". Got you;). Although to be fair, it took a few google searchs to find this thing. Looks like it hasn't had an update in 20 years.
I have a small, but close group of frien..er, applications I stick with. These are:
Audacious for media. Plays many files, while being light on dependencies. Indespensible.
TexMaker for latex. Needed for math and science. Indespensible.
Firefox/Iceweasel. I don't trust Chrome. Indespensible.
vim. Best text editor availible. Indespensible.
cups. My printer does not work without it. Indespensible.
Bitorrent Sync. Comes on Windows, Linux, even FreeBSD! Needed to sync my folder of stuff. Indespensible.
i3. How can anything beat a window manger named, "Window manager improved improved improved!". Indespensible.
And yah, that's pretty much it. (Sorry, Slashdot messed up the list format. Won't let me insert a damn line break.)
Oh, yes! I second that. Civilization IV is a game that you start at 3 in the afternoon, and soon it's 3 in the morning! An amazing game, but very easy to lose time over.
I play the C&C games, such as Generals and Red Alert 3. Unfortunatly, that series is dieing (thanks to EA):(. I've checked out World of Tanks and Warthunder, and they're fun, but they don't involve much planning or strategy and they are not very fair.
Slashdot Mirror
Audacious for me. Handles huge playlists very well, is lightweight, and is fairly cross platform (currently, no OS X support, but they're planning on adding that in a release or two). Even handles classic Winamp skins, a huge bonus if you're someone like me who's used the same skin for years.
Consider, for a moment, why it would be beneficial for the participants to have this program be for girls alone.
Take your time.
I don't see a benefit. What I see is suggesting that they're inferior to men, and need to be separated into their own groups. I can understand if you want to put more girls in a class, to make it less awkward, but then you should be encouraging girls vs excluding boys. Now, I have a question for you: what do you think of making beauty pageants exclusive to boys?
Sexist much?
I agree, first thing on my mind too. I understand people want more women in programming, but this? THIS? This is literally the definition of sexism. You're telling me that just because someone is a boy, he can't operate the White House's Christmas Lights? Unbelievable.
Have you compared the average car in Germany with the ones in the USA? Furthermore, in Germany there are mandatory periodic technical inspections, and these are no joke. Half the cars I see in the USA would never pass these inspections. Also, getting a driver license in Germany is HARD, and the average Autobahn driver is very well disciplined compared to his USA counterpart (exceptions exist, I know I know...)
That came across me as well - this senator is making a comparison, but has no idea of how things actually work over here. Having visited the United States frequently, I cannot begin to describe how horrible driving over there is. You have people cutting you off, people who turn without signals, people who will drive so incredibly close behind you that a rear end accident is inevitable. This kind of driving is highly frowned upon over here, and just violating one of these would come with a heavy price. And not only this, but the vehicles themselves are a part of the problem as well - you have rusty old trucks from the 80's that would never pass a safety inspection, you have these large SUVs that think they are invincible, you have these pseudo drag racers which will drive as fast as they can safety be damned.
In short, I think a lot of people over here don't realize they are driving what is essentially a one ton bomb on wheels, and raising the speed limit is really not a good idea.
How practical is this for the desktop?
This is actually a serious question. I'm not overly familiar with BSD but have been thinking about giving it a shot on the desktop. I've been a Gentoo user for many years and am reasonably comfortable diving into stuff, so I don't anticipate user friendliness being a show stopper, more likely something I can currently do on Linux won't be available or will have poor support in BSD.
The main things I'm concerned with are Minecraft/FTB, mplayer, flash, VirtualBox, OpenRA, and jack/rakarrack. I'm open to alternatives as long as they actually work.
Flash I could probably live without, but much as I hate it, browsing the web sans-flash does still pose the occasional problem. jack/rakarrack I could also probably live without. I currently use my desktop as a quick-n-dirty guitar amp/effects stack. OpenRA is the thing I anticipate having the most problems with, but I play it somewhat obsessively so very much desired.
At some point I'll probably just try it and see, but I'm curious if any other slashdotter has gone this route and has anything interesting to say about it.
FTB may be a bit of a problem: I use FreeBSD, and I couldn't get it to work correctly. Granted, I expended very little effort into it, so there may be a way and I'm just too lazy. I don't know how well jack or VirtualBox would work, as I don't use either. However, Flash works fine (it'll be an old version, but it's the same old version that's on Linux), mplayer works fine, and OpenRA also works fine. I can't believe I've finally met another player of this game :P
Do you necessarily have to work on your coding skills? What about enjoying the ride and soaking up the scene?
I was going to say the same thing. Concentrate on being a better person, rather than a better programmer. Travel broadens the mind. Let it do so.
I'm the third man in this conga line, but yes, focus on improving yourself and enjoying your trip. You can always learn programming; a trip to the Himalayas is a rare opportunity indeed.
What do you mean by "risk aversion"? I'm genuinely curious.
I can't speak for the grandparent but generally in de facto non-profit monopolies - there's nobody else competing to be the US army for example - there's very little risk in not pushing boundaries. Projects might run over time and over budget but at the end of the day the politicians have to fund the army next year too and you don't get the fat bonuses like when your software makes money for the company. Obvious flops on the other hand might require scapegoats and if you make your superiors look bad, well they're likely to be a step or two up in seniority for the rest of your career in the same "company". That will permeate the entire environment making any kind of change hard, nobody wants to be the one signing off on anything without a drawn out change process.
Here in Norway the craziest example at the moment is the police. In 2005 our politicians made fairly big changes to the penal code, which would go into effect when the police systems were able to handle it. Well, now it's 2014 and it's still not in effect. But what can you do, not fund the police? No matter how much the schedules slip and it goes over budget we have to keep throwing money at them. If they were a commercial company they'd be out of business long ago. Sometimes I wonder if it would be cheaper if we awarded two companies the contract to write the same module with a bonus to the winner, just to get the competition.
That's an interesting idea! I do think that here in the United States, our government's a little bit too business friendly, but using two companies would be a good way to pit competition to (hopefully) produce a better result. Or maybe not, what do I know :P I certainly think it's an idea worth trying, though.
I left the DoD as a software developer largely because they couldn't get their heads out of their asses. The paperwork, mandatory training, and total risk aversion meant I developed code at maybe 25% of the speed that I did before, and after, in the private sector. And the stock options in the DoD were nothing to write home about.
I really don't see how the DoD can win any cyber fight. It would take losing a ground war on U.S. soil for them to give up their worship of bureaucracy.
What do you mean by "risk aversion"? I'm genuinely curious.
...three issues: obesity or health problems; lack of a high school education; and criminal histories.
Yes, let's put people with repeated criminal offenses in positions of great power! It's not like they'd ever abuse it, would they?
I spent $1,200 on my Black MacBook and got eight years of use ($150 per year). Prior to that, I spent $1,200 on a Dell laptop that gave me three years of use ($400 per year). Do the math.
What is this, an Atari commercial?
And here I was expecting an Open Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitfall!. How disappointing.
Amen! For a moment, I was really excited too.
> Apple, and others, stopped using the "truly free" gcc because GPL v3 became quite restrictive.
There's nothing in there that should scare off anyone. If someone is bothered by the GPL3 in a project like C++ compiler, then you should be very suspicious of their motives. They clearly aren't interested in playing nice or being a good citizen.
They clearly want to be free to f*ck you over later.
Go tell that to the BSD guys. No, they don't want to screw you over, their definition of freedom differs. To them, freedom is defined as having as absolutely few restrictions as possible. GCC vs Clang is a perfect example. GCC is intentionally made as opaque as possible to prevent you from working around it, and it's far worse in this respect then many of the proprietary compilers. Clang is more interested in being as useful to the user as it can. If you really want it summed up in one sentence, here it is: GNU projects put the license first, functionality second. THAT's what drove Apple (and pretty much everything other then Linux) away from GCC, not "They clearly want to be free to f*ck you over later".
Thats why Windows NT 3.x was the safest OS on the planet!
Windows NT 3.x was NOT a microkernel. They dropped that claim on NT 4, because they knew it was false.
The author of the summary is not up to date on the recent release of info on Dreadnoughtus schrani, now believed to be the largest creature to ever have walked on land. See the following:
http://drexel.edu/now/archive/2014/September/Dreadnoughtus-Dinosaur/
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/04/world/americas/dreadnoughtus-huge-dinosaur/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnoughtus
Damn Whales, walking on land everywhere. Oh what's that, they swim? And they way three times as much as the Dreadnoughtus? The author of this comment is not up to date...
Next article up: "Ask Slashdot: Will nuclear winter usher in the year of Linux on the desktop?"
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual sense to everythi- oh wait, never mind, that's the nuclear radiation."
OH MY GOD, someone else reads the exploits of 419? Epic.
Most of the people who are complaining about SystemD are either the BSD guys or those who maintain smaller distros. I'll start with the smaller distroes: they don't like it because it's a lot of maintenance (see Fuduntu), and is pretty bulky for a smaller distro. For something that is designed to be simple, reliable, and well understood by one person, SystemD goes against the principles established by these smaller distroes (Slackware, Gentoo, LFS, etc.). For the BSD guys, they actually don't care about SystemD: it doesn't affect their world, and seeing as SystemD isn't compatible with any of the BSD kernels by design, it would be fine if it were on it's own. The big problem is that SystemD is also converting applications to rely on it, and it exclusively - GNOME 3, anyone? When this happens, it starts to cut off their supply of software, and at the very least adds so much more maintenance and hassle. It's really annoying, especially given SystemD's newness, lack of a track record, and intentionally trying to be as hard to port as possible. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the SystemD proponents, mostly Redhat and Debian guys. They like it because they often maintain massive systems, which are pretty complex. At this point, integrating everything into one init process saves so much work, and makes life much easier. Neither crowd understands the other, understandably because of the vastly different approaches. The real probelm is that the SystemD proponents are pretty pushy, and insist that SystemD be used in places where I don't think it makes sense. If nothing else, maintaining compatibility would be nice, but they intentionally break it. Because of this, the classic init crowd feels threatened because their way of life - computing, same thing to us nerds here ;D - is disappearing. When this happens, there is naturally a great deal of resistance, and that's where the tensions lie. My recommendation would be for software to try to avoid being specific to either init system, and instead let the user decide. The two groups can coexist peacefully, although less aggressiveness from the SystemD people would probably go a long way towards helping this. I've tried to provide as much of an unbiased view as possible, and I hope someone finds it helpful. If I get buried at the bottom, never to be seen again, I wish the person reading this in 2034 a good day! Yes, you're probably thinking SystemD is old, crufty, and is probably about to be deprecated, but it was hip and trendy at one time, much as that blows your mind :D
Because we're really, really tired of software that uselessly, needlessly, requires the "latest and greatest" operating system for no good reason at all, that's why.
Someone didn't do his research here. Do you know what Macs are famous for? That's right, the upgrade treadmill! If you didn't want to deal with that, why the hell did you buy one?
But, say, if you have something as vanilla as an image processing application, with no real need for anything other than memory allocation and file dialogs, and lets say you add, oh, I don't know, a new RAW file format to the application, then please don't tie that capability to the latest OS
THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF OS X. The "Integration" aspect is a big thing for it, and that's EXACTLY what Apple's target audience wants. Seriously, this is like raging on about how semi trucks are big, slow, and noisy. I don't know which application you're talking about, but I assume it's iPhoto. In which case, you clearly know very little about it. IPhoto doesn't do any image processing, it's ALWAYS relied on OS X's built in libraries to do that. If you've ever programmed on OS X, you should have known that.
Now THERE is a radical fucking idea. With a process like that, maybe my Mini could fucking well print like it's supposed to
That wouldn't change anything. CUPS is not a part of OS X, it's a separate tool. Unless, you want your OS to do integrated printing? Why Image Processing as well? ^^^^
I've written HUNDREDS of them under three different major OS's without EVER having to tie even ONE of them to an OS level.
Let's get this straight: You have coded libraries under every operating system, yet never once used the built in frameworks? You're telling me you've written HUNDREDS of libraries so small and trivial that they never used any kind of system level frameworks? That's quite an achievement. Or, most likely, you DID use this "OS esoterica". I feel for you, I know EXACTLY what you meant to say, but you're statement is just flat out incorrect.
While I'm at it, Apple and Microsoft, stop leaving broken OS's in your wake. When you sell an OS, and it doesn't work the way it was supposed to, you should fix it. Yes, even ten years later. You said it would work, you took the customer's money on that basis, and if it fucking well doesn't work the way you said it would, you need to step up to the plate and make sure it gets fixed.
Okay, this just ridiculous. One, you're talking about something not part of the OS. They promised you a working OS, not any guarantees that your printing would work. You didn't by a full solution, just the package. Have you even contacted their technical support about this? If you have, I'm sorry for you, but they aren't obligated to fix your issue. The best fix is to simply not buy from them next time. Two, how long have you known about this!?!? If this is an old bug, why didn't you put Linux on it? If you don't have the technical knowledge, need compatibility with an application, or found Linux just as bad, why not return it? You could then spend that money on another computer. Seriously, it's inconveniencing, but there are definitely ways around that problem. As a programmer, I would have kinda expected you to have learned by now how to flow around issues like this.
I went through this process of picking my computer operating system, from Windows to OS X to god knows how many Linux distroes. I eventually arrived at nirvana, and it was something completely off the map: FreeBSD. It's rock solid stable, has got a nice long support cycle, is a pleasure to administrate and ticker with, and has a massive library of over 24,000 applications (and no, this isn't Debian where every app is split between 10 different packages). Again, if you need a specific application, FreeBSD is pretty much ruled out (unless it happens to be a Linux app. Then, it M
Ugh, we've heard this before. Remember how to internet was supposed to "revolutionize" our shopping? I don't order very much at all off the internet. Plus, 3D printing machines currently rely upon plastic. YOu can wear solid plastic shoes, but I'm not.
Power pro is a utility that "changes the way you work with Windows". Got you ;). Although to be fair, it took a few google searchs to find this thing. Looks like it hasn't had an update in 20 years.
I have a small, but close group of frien..er, applications I stick with. These are: Audacious for media. Plays many files, while being light on dependencies. Indespensible. TexMaker for latex. Needed for math and science. Indespensible. Firefox/Iceweasel. I don't trust Chrome. Indespensible. vim. Best text editor availible. Indespensible. cups. My printer does not work without it. Indespensible. Bitorrent Sync. Comes on Windows, Linux, even FreeBSD! Needed to sync my folder of stuff. Indespensible. i3. How can anything beat a window manger named, "Window manager improved improved improved!". Indespensible. And yah, that's pretty much it. (Sorry, Slashdot messed up the list format. Won't let me insert a damn line break.)
Oh, yes! I second that. Civilization IV is a game that you start at 3 in the afternoon, and soon it's 3 in the morning! An amazing game, but very easy to lose time over.
I play the C&C games, such as Generals and Red Alert 3. Unfortunatly, that series is dieing (thanks to EA) :(. I've checked out World of Tanks and Warthunder, and they're fun, but they don't involve much planning or strategy and they are not very fair.