Here in Hong Kong it's dirt cheap. You can get a decent connection for less than $25 USD. Any plans above that pricing line is considered to be damned expensive. And if you know where to look there are broadband offers that are under $10, and despite that some of those serivces may suck, some may actually be comparable to those $20 plans. Of course, expect the prices to rise a bit once the intense competition is over.
Basically everybody running broadband is getting at least a 3Mbps connection now, and I'm running off a 10Mbps cable connection (they say it's shared by a bunch of other users, but to date I don't really feel the drag... I constantly pull a few hundred Kbytes/s from local servers)
> could get together to create and maintain a patch for the 2.4 kernel that would back port more then just the critical updates from 2.6
Check out the WOLK project (Working Overloaded Linux Kernel). I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this - it's a patch (quite a large patch) with various interesting features for 2.4.20 (eg. XFS) and as far as I'm using it, it doesn't seem to cause any instability to the 2.4.x kernels.
I can only assume that by "no-no", you mean "a human right, which is viciously punished...
Where in the world would it be safe to speak of things sensitive to the government, and not be hassled in one way or the other? Perhaps pulling the offender into prison without reason seems somewhat "brutal", but how is it different from making up some fancy charges and then still putting the person into prison? What, "terrorism"? ... by the thugs who seized China in a putsch in the late 1940's".
On what basis are you saying that they are "thugs"?
That would be because it's not something to put someone in prison for, even under the "laws" that the commie thugs claim to follow.
And you bet that hasn't happened in places, say, the United States?
Hypocrisy abounds in communist countries.
Hypocrisy is in every political group. Why does it only apply to communist countries? Or does the term "hypocrisy" only apply to those that you dislike, and everything else, no matter how self-contradicting it is, is all correct if the person/group in question is those of your liking?
China does not live under the rule of law, it is under the yoke of the Mao dynasty, which has vastly outdone all previous Chinese dynasties for the brutality it has shown to the Chinese people.
How is it under the rule of the "Mao Dynasty"? The current leaders are apparently quite different from Mao in their attitude and actions. China isn't even strictly a communist country now, though it still claims it is.
Damnit. I'd rather have it that I never met one before. But now that I had, I'm pretty pessimistic that I'm not gonna meet another one anymore... They're pretty damn rare around here. *sigh*
> Forks often rejoin the root tree once they've accomplished their goals, either intentionally or otherwise.
The problem with the current XFree86 development is that they are reluctant to accept new patches/features/changes. So this might not happen after all.
> Wait it out - software development (especially > in larger projects) is a meritocracy -- no one > pays attention to you unless you accomplish > something that makes a difference. Given what > I've read about the reputation of this guy, he's > probably going to bring a lot of good, but lets > just wait for it to happen instead of getting > all reactionary, eh? You're just wasting your > time. Parade or throw tomatoes when something > *really* big happens.
I do believe the new team would make a difference. Actually XFree86 is the only thing I'd call bloated on my system, mozilla and openoffice coming next, but they've been actively trying to fix things up, so I'd expect they'd improve. But what I hear of XFree86 is that they aren't inclined to change. I believe anybody who's reasonably competent will be able to change at least something. Heck, it'd be much better even if they only switched to a better build mechanism, made configuration easier and stripped down obselette / unused code!
Note: If you get a "no search results" message for a search that you'd expect results, this may be because the key has been used up for the day. Sigh. 1000 queries at ten results each isn't a whole lot, is it?
There have been some complaints about gconf acting like the windows-registry system. I might as well address them here. Now I dislike the windows registry as much as you do, but please do not label gconf as "evil" before you check out what it really does and what it really can do. The registry-like system was not neccessarily evil by itself, but MS implemented it such that it was hell to use. Remember why you started hating it?
1. A slight misconfiguration usually leads to unusable systems and needs a reinstallation 2. Too many things (including system level configuration) are integrated with it 3. Stored in a big binary chunk that no other application can read without using the windows API 4. Little to no documentation for most keys 5. Made by M$;-p
Now gconf has none of these flaws:
1. Any misconfiguration that (if even possible) renders the GUI unusable, and you can still use the CLI or a text editor to undo / fix your changes. 2. no system critical processes depend on it 3. stored in XML format 4. most key names are self-explanatory, and there are places where comments about the keys can be written 5. Completely open source;-p
In addition, gconf has the feature that appplications using it are informed of updates to the configuration immediately, so it won't require a restart of the application for things to take effect, while for the windows registry, the application has to poll the registry for changes if it wants to know whether things have been changed.
The "traditional" convention for unix apps was that every app had its own configuration file format, located in anywhere that the developers pleased, and they wrote a config file parser only for their own app. This is a huge waste of time and resources, where developers could have spent their time better in improving their apps instead of worrying about config file formats and writing parsers. Now gconf solves these issues and in addition gives the application a bunch of other features. What more could you ask for?
(disclaimer: I am a "normal" user of GNOME, and not affliated with any GNOME people or developement)
Have you ever given yourself a chance to understand the new system? It sounds as if you came across this new system which has slightly different UI, does things slightly differently and you get totally pissed off.
You think GNOME2 was dumbed down? No, everything that I had configured in GNOME1.4 could be done in GNOME2. When GNOME2 was first released, some features were inevitably missing. But that was NOT because the developers wanted to dumb down the system. They had other priorities, eg. improving the UI, fixing the more fundumental stuff before implementing the features. Now as I update my system (debian sid), the features that I missed are gradually making a come back, most even got better than what I expected. Of course there are some fancy features that were dropped, but they are mostly things that are largely useless to the majority of the user base. If you happen not to be in the minority, then sorry, the developers aren't making the system ONLY for you. However, you still have the option to choose to implement what you want, to choose another desktop, or to not upgrade. And yes, those features might be "fun" or "cool", but as far as productivity is concerned, I have never found myself losing any productivity (in fact, the converse holds) because some feature is dropped in return for other better functionality.
Now for the system hiding away the technical terms... Why not? I mean, if you wanted to look deeper into the system you can always do so, by tweaking your system one way or the other, by RTFM or STFW. But why do you want to force other users who want things to "just work" to go through the same time consuming process as you did? Yes I've been through it too, I know what's a window manager and what not, and those other stuff. But really, I'm not really prepared to learn it through again just to upgrade.
And for your complaints about the terminal not being able to use X style select and paste... I don't get it. Why would you need to right click? You only need to select the text, then focus on another app, then click the middle mouse button. I don't see how this is hard to use or different from the standard X select and paste method.
I always thought that learning Traditional Chinese Characters first, then simplified would be easier.
The simplified characters usually replace more complicated parts of the character with words of same or similar sound, while on the other hand, you need to learn new characters previously unknown to you if you do the reverse. Of course, I may be wrong, as I haven't gone through both processes, and I'm still reading simplified characters with some level of difficulty;-p
Political. KDE relies on a library, QT, that is GPL'ed, which means that all KDE applications must be GPL'd, and by default, is hard to sell directly for cash.
There IS an option not to GPL the application, but that requires paying licence fees to Trolltech, the company that made QT.
Commericial companies get wary of these issues, since they would always like to preserve the option of selling the software, or at least reserving their rights from their code.
Sun, from their evaluation report, seemed to have chosen GNOME as their future desktop mainly because of the licensing issues, but not of technical merits
I don't have a broadband connection, you insensitive clod.
Well, actually I do, but many don't.
Besides, URLs change over time, and if people were so inclined to download the software, a simple google search would do the job, why bother getting it from a CD?
Amen to that. By experience, (though far from a lot) I find that I code better and faster when planning before getting my hands onto typing the real code. However the very existence of a computer next in front of me lures me to type the code first and *then* to check if it's correct. Argh.
I believe it might be of similar case with other people, but then it might be just me without proper training in coding;-p
I know you're joking here, but don't you think it's rather the opposite, that we are always trying to find and disclose the laws of nature/physics, somewhat akin to reverse engineering some closed source product?
If physics was open source, it would have been written in the scriptures...
There are dozens of similar games out there... Maybe not in the U.S. but at least here in Hong Kong, I've seen at least a dozen of these variants. I guess there must be more of these in Japan.
This kind of game is actually not new. About 1-2 years ago I played a game which you have a "carpet" to sence your feet and dance to the music on the beat. It's quite fun, and some people have even used it to attempt to lose weight;-)
it's probably easier to maintain the distro since there's no need for the developers to compile the binaries.
No, it's actually harder. The maintainers still have to compile the binaries, since they have to make sure it compiles and runs as expected before they release it. And unlike binary distros, they have to make sure it compiles with different optimizations and options, resulting in even more work.
Slashdot Mirror
There might not be poetry in COBOL, but there sure is for C:
http://www0.us.ioccc.org/1990/westley.c
I doubt you'd want to spend a life with aliens.
No, they get Googled.
;-p
As if MyDoom weren't enough
Perhaps Yahoo is using Google's backend too?
Assuming your numbers are correct, it's not hard to get the 80% figure by including the Yahoo market share numbers.
Not until you really try it on and look in the mirror.
I guess if it is shown that the software really intends to mislead shoppers, then somebody could be sued or something. (IANAL)
Here in Hong Kong it's dirt cheap. You can get a decent connection for less than $25 USD. Any plans above that pricing line is considered to be damned expensive. And if you know where to look there are broadband offers that are under $10, and despite that some of those serivces may suck, some may actually be comparable to those $20 plans. Of course, expect the prices to rise a bit once the intense competition is over.
Basically everybody running broadband is getting at least a 3Mbps connection now, and I'm running off a 10Mbps cable connection (they say it's shared by a bunch of other users, but to date I don't really feel the drag... I constantly pull a few hundred Kbytes/s from local servers)
> could get together to create and maintain a patch for the 2.4 kernel that would back port more then just the critical updates from 2.6
Check out the WOLK project (Working Overloaded Linux Kernel). I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this - it's a patch (quite a large patch) with various interesting features for 2.4.20 (eg. XFS) and as far as I'm using it, it doesn't seem to cause any instability to the 2.4.x kernels.
Typical Anit-Chinese-without-rationale Troll. Well, I'll bite.
... by the thugs who seized China in a putsch in the late 1940's".
I can only assume that by "no-no", you mean "a human right, which is viciously punished...
Where in the world would it be safe to speak of things sensitive to the government, and not be hassled in one way or the other? Perhaps pulling the offender into prison without reason seems somewhat "brutal", but how is it different from making up some fancy charges and then still putting the person into prison? What, "terrorism"?
On what basis are you saying that they are "thugs"?
That would be because it's not something to put someone in prison for, even under the "laws" that the commie thugs claim to follow.
And you bet that hasn't happened in places, say, the United States?
Hypocrisy abounds in communist countries.
Hypocrisy is in every political group. Why does it only apply to communist countries? Or does the term "hypocrisy" only apply to those that you dislike, and everything else, no matter how self-contradicting it is, is all correct if the person/group in question is those of your liking?
China does not live under the rule of law, it is under the yoke of the Mao dynasty, which has vastly outdone all previous Chinese dynasties for the brutality it has shown to the Chinese people.
How is it under the rule of the "Mao Dynasty"? The current leaders are apparently quite different from Mao in their attitude and actions. China isn't even strictly a communist country now, though it still claims it is.
Who read it as such?
I was thinking... woah, another Slashdot server upgrade??
They do. Many of the best gamers are from Korea.
You mean when "high speed" isn't high anymore?
Damnit. I'd rather have it that I never met one before. But now that I had, I'm pretty pessimistic that I'm not gonna meet another one anymore... They're pretty damn rare around here. *sigh*
> Forks often rejoin the root tree once they've accomplished their goals, either intentionally or otherwise.
The problem with the current XFree86 development is that they are reluctant to accept new patches/features/changes. So this might not happen after all.
> Wait it out - software development (especially
> in larger projects) is a meritocracy -- no one
> pays attention to you unless you accomplish
> something that makes a difference. Given what
> I've read about the reputation of this guy, he's
> probably going to bring a lot of good, but lets
> just wait for it to happen instead of getting
> all reactionary, eh? You're just wasting your
> time. Parade or throw tomatoes when something
> *really* big happens.
I do believe the new team would make a difference. Actually XFree86 is the only thing I'd call bloated on my system, mozilla and openoffice coming next, but they've been actively trying to fix things up, so I'd expect they'd improve. But what I hear of XFree86 is that they aren't inclined to change. I believe anybody who's reasonably competent will be able to change at least something. Heck, it'd be much better even if they only switched to a better build mechanism, made configuration easier and stripped down obselette / unused code!
....... the first try's always free.
Note: If you get a "no search results" message for a search that you'd expect results, this may be because the key has been used up for the day. Sigh. 1000 queries at ten results each isn't a whole lot, is it?
You gotta love slashdot and it's slashdotting....
There have been some complaints about gconf acting like the windows-registry system. I might as well address them here. Now I dislike the windows registry as much as you do, but please do not label gconf as "evil" before you check out what it really does and what it really can do. The registry-like system was not neccessarily evil by itself, but MS implemented it such that it was hell to use. Remember why you started hating it?
;-p
;-p
1. A slight misconfiguration usually leads to unusable systems and needs a reinstallation
2. Too many things (including system level configuration) are integrated with it
3. Stored in a big binary chunk that no other application can read without using the windows API
4. Little to no documentation for most keys
5. Made by M$
Now gconf has none of these flaws:
1. Any misconfiguration that (if even possible) renders the GUI unusable, and you can still use the CLI or a text editor to undo / fix your changes.
2. no system critical processes depend on it
3. stored in XML format
4. most key names are self-explanatory, and there are places where comments about the keys can be written
5. Completely open source
In addition, gconf has the feature that appplications using it are informed of updates to the configuration immediately, so it won't require a restart of the application for things to take effect, while for the windows registry, the application has to poll the registry for changes if it wants to know whether things have been changed.
The "traditional" convention for unix apps was that every app had its own configuration file format, located in anywhere that the developers pleased, and they wrote a config file parser only for their own app. This is a huge waste of time and resources, where developers could have spent their time better in improving their apps instead of worrying about config file formats and writing parsers. Now gconf solves these issues and in addition gives the application a bunch of other features. What more could you ask for?
(disclaimer: I am a "normal" user of GNOME, and not affliated with any GNOME people or developement)
Have you ever given yourself a chance to understand the new system? It sounds as if you came across this new system which has slightly different UI, does things slightly differently and you get totally pissed off.
You think GNOME2 was dumbed down? No, everything that I had configured in GNOME1.4 could be done in GNOME2. When GNOME2 was first released, some features were inevitably missing. But that was NOT because the developers wanted to dumb down the system. They had other priorities, eg. improving the UI, fixing the more fundumental stuff before implementing the features. Now as I update my system (debian sid), the features that I missed are gradually making a come back, most even got better than what I expected. Of course there are some fancy features that were dropped, but they are mostly things that are largely useless to the majority of the user base. If you happen not to be in the minority, then sorry, the developers aren't making the system ONLY for you. However, you still have the option to choose to implement what you want, to choose another desktop, or to not upgrade. And yes, those features might be "fun" or "cool", but as far as productivity is concerned, I have never found myself losing any productivity (in fact, the converse holds) because some feature is dropped in return for other better functionality.
Now for the system hiding away the technical terms... Why not? I mean, if you wanted to look deeper into the system you can always do so, by tweaking your system one way or the other, by RTFM or STFW. But why do you want to force other users who want things to "just work" to go through the same time consuming process as you did? Yes I've been through it too, I know what's a window manager and what not, and those other stuff. But really, I'm not really prepared to learn it through again just to upgrade.
And for your complaints about the terminal not being able to use X style select and paste... I don't get it. Why would you need to right click? You only need to select the text, then focus on another app, then click the middle mouse button. I don't see how this is hard to use or different from the standard X select and paste method.
I always thought that learning Traditional Chinese Characters first, then simplified would be easier.
;-p
The simplified characters usually replace more complicated parts of the character with words of same or similar sound, while on the other hand, you need to learn new characters previously unknown to you if you do the reverse. Of course, I may be wrong, as I haven't gone through both processes, and I'm still reading simplified characters with some level of difficulty
Political. KDE relies on a library, QT, that is GPL'ed, which means that all KDE applications must be GPL'd, and by default, is hard to sell directly for cash.
There IS an option not to GPL the application, but that requires paying licence fees to Trolltech, the company that made QT.
Commericial companies get wary of these issues, since they would always like to preserve the option of selling the software, or at least reserving their rights from their code.
Sun, from their evaluation report, seemed to have chosen GNOME as their future desktop mainly because of the licensing issues, but not of technical merits
I live in HK.
;-)
Most residental apartments (that I've been to) do not exceed the height of 40 stories. I'd say the average is at around 30 stories or so.
Your point still holds though
I don't have a broadband connection, you insensitive clod.
Well, actually I do, but many don't.
Besides, URLs change over time, and if people were so inclined to download the software, a simple google search would do the job, why bother getting it from a CD?
Amen to that. By experience, (though far from a lot) I find that I code better and faster when planning before getting my hands onto typing the real code. However the very existence of a computer next in front of me lures me to type the code first and *then* to check if it's correct. Argh.
;-p
I believe it might be of similar case with other people, but then it might be just me without proper training in coding
It's open source too (just read a physics book)
I know you're joking here, but don't you think it's rather the opposite, that we are always trying to find and disclose the laws of nature/physics, somewhat akin to reverse engineering some closed source product?
If physics was open source, it would have been written in the scriptures...
There are dozens of similar games out there... Maybe not in the U.S. but at least here in Hong Kong, I've seen at least a dozen of these variants. I guess there must be more of these in Japan.
;-)
This kind of game is actually not new. About 1-2 years ago I played a game which you have a "carpet" to sence your feet and dance to the music on the beat. It's quite fun, and some people have even used it to attempt to lose weight
it's probably easier to maintain the distro since there's no need for the developers to compile the binaries.
No, it's actually harder. The maintainers still have to compile the binaries, since they have to make sure it compiles and runs as expected before they release it. And unlike binary distros, they have to make sure it compiles with different optimizations and options, resulting in even more work.