Yeah, whatever. Like America has set its eye on preserving freedom since September 11. If it's all the same to you, I'd rather have Elcomsoft play the sympathy card. It will probably be more effective than any tangible arguments are held by a small minority of people.
Now, if somebody made the claim that al Queda was using protected E-books to transmit orders, we might get them unlocked fairly quickly in the name of the war on terrorism. Then again, maybe the FBI would be the only ones with free access to E-books. Just a thought...
BBC World Service kicks ass, and "Newshour" and "Talking Point" in particular are almost always very good. I don't understand why you prefer CNN to the BBC. Is the CNN international service better than the BBC domestic service? I can't imagine you watching CNN without feeling like you're getting a load of crap rammed down your throat. From my perspective in the USA, the BBC usually fully understands a news story fully two weeks before CNN can get to Square One on the issue, with the issues of Argentina and Guantanamo Bay being prime examples of this syndrome. You can't possibly be watching the same CNN that is offered to us Americans. Maybe the same concept applies to the BBC.
Ye of little faith, I fully expect Intel to release its complier free with source and have it bundled with every Linux distro. I'm so confident, I'll hold my breath until this happens. I'll reply to this thread when it's done.
Recording radio (Ogg Vorbis and SoX, 6620Hz mono, 2500Hz lowpass): oggenc -q0 gives about 115 kB/m of sound (~7MB/h) of audio, and I can still record it on my spare Pentium 75 Linux box. Also, there are no hassles with RealAudio, especially the never-ending upgrade nags from the RealAudio client.
Recording from CD (Ogg Vorbis and cdda2wav or CD-DA X-Tractor): 96 kb/s Ogg files sound as good as 128 kb/s MP3 files, and players and plug-ins are easy to find. Even whiny Windows users can find Ogg Vorbis plug-ins at the Nullsoft site, and installation is a snap. I use FreeAmp on Windows, though.
Audiophile (CD): I used to love my Rio because the battery life was good, and it didn't skip. However, it died because it took too many falls to contrete. My replacement was a $47 Philips CD/CD-R audio player with 45-second skip protection. I take care to not drop this player, but it's amazing how much better the CD sounds than most compressed audio formats. Disk space is zero, no worries about parallel port vs. USB, and most important, no worries about the portable memory format of the day.
Re:What we *really* need is a display config tool
on
Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
·
· Score: 1
Ctrl+Alt+Plus and Ctrl+Alt+Minus (both on the numeric keypad) works great for switching resolution on the fly. It's been around for as long as I've been using X (1996), so I don't know when it got that feature. Color depth seems to be another matter, though, and my knowledge of X utilities isn't what it used to be. For instance, I know that xvidtune is great for pixel-level width and height adjustments on the fly. I just don't know how well it works with XFree86-4.x.
IE6 has the ability to navigate msnbc.com in the way it was meant to be navigated. I don't know why: The menus at foxnews.com work just fine, but msnbc.com displays nothing where menus should be. windowsupdate.microsoft.com? Forget it.
Visit www.voa.gov in Mozilla and wonder why the page looks different in IE6. Simple, the comments on the page are screwy, and vim highlighting will show that. I'm thankful that voanews.com is just fine.
staroffice.com specifically does not support Netscape 6+ and will give you a message to that effect. That said, I haven't noticed any breakage. Expect more such hostility in the future from people who are happy with the one-browser market.
I can't get the RealAudio plugin to work with Mozilla. Maybe I need to install Netscape, deal with the cheesy commercial crap and special offers long enough to install the plugin, copy it to my Mozilla folder, then uninstall Netscape. A minor problem to be sure, but I'm sick of staring at that "you need a plug-in" icon for embedded objects, and I wish the Netscape plug-in finder would recognize my frustration.
I love Mozilla, but it lags behind IE6 on quite a few sites that I visit. These are just some of the sites that I visit, and I stay away from most overdone sites, especially Flash sites. I can't imagine what it's like for people who surf the web for all of its tacky glory. Mozilla has a great foundation. It just isn't there yet for the sites I visit, even less ready than the 0.9.7 moniker would suggest.
Agreed. When I see Netscape bundled with AOL instead of IE, then I'll believe the speculations in the Post article (beyond the Red Hat buyout rumors).
Maybe AOL is waiting for all the pieces to fall into place, when Steve Case can hit The Big Red Button and switch everyone to the AOL/TW computing solution. I doubt it, though. I think it's just people with more money than brains.
I'm glad that my two Slackware systems won't be affected:-)
My favorite glitch was not Windows itself but a Windows program glitch. Imagine rushing on an already-rickety railcar at full speed through the narrow tunnels of Denver International Airport, only to hear the Ding! Ding! Ding! of the Windows default sound as error dialog boxes pop up somewhere unknown to you. The next prerecorded messages over the railcar intercom were "An unknown error has occurred. An unknown error has occurred. An unknown error has occurred" as lights in the car flickered on and off. Fortunately for me, the car acutally stopped at its destination.
Since when did MS test its code so bizarre computational errors won't creep in? I recall seeing something like three different auto-calculation patches for Excel 97, all because some of the millions of Excel users were caught by the bugs. The leap-century bug for date handling is also worth mentioning. Maybe someone can clarify this, but I recall that someone caught the date bug in Lotus 1-2-3, and Microsoft learned from the mistake of Lotus.
Maybe I'm being too harsh on Microsoft. After all, if you don't know that the year 1900 is a non-leap year, how are you going to test your dates? You'll just write a test that works fine to you, and it will succeed. Likewise, some of the auto-calculation bugs could have been caught in testing, if you knew to look for things like problems with a dragged-down formula based on a formula that has itself been dragged down (kind of like chaining pointers, for lack of a better analogy).
Agreed. "Programming Ruby" is fine, but I wish it had the odd humor and compelling programming examples (not OO jukeboxes) that are in the Camel. I also wish it had the Camel's very strong chapter on regular expressions. Hopefully, Matz's book will point out the Ruby pitfalls that are not mentioned in "Programming Ruby."
As this turned to be the "let's bash Ruby" topic on Slashdot, I'll mention that I like Ruby a lot. I just wish that Perl wasn't so automatic to me at this point, else migration would be lots more fun.
There has to be a reasonable line, though. If we were all meant to have a third-grade vocabulary of happy words, then MS should just dump the thesaurus altogether.
I didn't write to argue, though. I want to know what LA is supposed to be in Webdings. If NYC is supposed to be "I love New York," then LA is more like "watch out for the hangman" or "beware the meat hook outside the barn."
Hi! I read the discussions on each kernel release, and I wonder what I'm missing. I'm using 2.4.12 and ReiserFS, but everything is stable. All of my files are intact. I can compile the kernel while listening to 160kb/s mp3 files, and they do not skip, even in KDE. My production machine has yet to swap, let alone swap to death. This is just as boring as the 2.0.36 kernel that powered my production server for a year. The same went for 2.4.5 and 2.4.9.
I somehow feel like less of a Slashdotter because I'm not having troubles. How can I get in on the action?
MySQL is the only midrange database that I've seen that runs just as well on Win32 as on Linux. It's also resonably easy to deploy for its modest capabilities. It runs nicely on slow computers. The full-text search works very well for my purposes. The global/db/table/column security model works as advertised. My experience with MySQL has been fairly painless. YMMV.
As one who made it through college on a donated computer because I was too poor to buy one myself...
I like Open Source because the people are generous, in terms of both time and monetary savings.
When I started learning computers on Windows, I'd find something that I needed, but the author wanted $15 for something that was some VB program barely more than this:
Sub OverpricedSharewareProgram()
MsgBox "Hello World!"
End Sub
I sought alternatives, and Open Source was there to save the day, whether it was gcc or something else.
Granted, I could have been among the "smart" people that were copying Office CD-ROMs and sharing them with their buddies. I didn't feel right doing that, though. [I don't feel so dumb, now that Microsoft is using trial editions and software rental schemes to turn the screws on these people.]
Also, Open Source people are good with their time and knowledge. Most people turn to philosophers like RMS and the high principles of the GPL for inspiration. I identify with hard-working people like Holger Veit, who was in charge of the XFree86-OS/2 project. He had zero time to play and be friendly, but he answered every question that nobody else would answer. His answer was always accurate and a little more thorough than was needed to solve the problem. He taught people about the workings of X11 while solving their problems. Such a work ethic inspired me to be the same way.
Holger was just my example. Others may see the same example in Linus, Perl guru Tom Christiansen, or Ruby author Yukihiro Matsumoto. I'm sure I could continue the list for another half hour.
Several years ago, it became my turn to give back to the community. My efforts at giving code away were done in the process of solving my own narrow problems, so I haven't gotten much feedback. However, I have spent much time in mailing lists and on Usenet, trying to solve problems in my spare time. I reason that it takes more than raw source code to keep the community running smoothly, and that makes me feel good.
Hopefully, I have helped out a poor college student along the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, whatever. Like America has set its eye on preserving freedom since September 11. If it's all the same to you, I'd rather have Elcomsoft play the sympathy card. It will probably be more effective than any tangible arguments are held by a small minority of people.
Now, if somebody made the claim that al Queda was using protected E-books to transmit orders, we might get them unlocked fairly quickly in the name of the war on terrorism. Then again, maybe the FBI would be the only ones with free access to E-books. Just a thought...
BBC World Service kicks ass, and "Newshour" and "Talking Point" in particular are almost always very good. I don't understand why you prefer CNN to the BBC. Is the CNN international service better than the BBC domestic service? I can't imagine you watching CNN without feeling like you're getting a load of crap rammed down your throat. From my perspective in the USA, the BBC usually fully understands a news story fully two weeks before CNN can get to Square One on the issue, with the issues of Argentina and Guantanamo Bay being prime examples of this syndrome. You can't possibly be watching the same CNN that is offered to us Americans. Maybe the same concept applies to the BBC.
Ye of little faith, I fully expect Intel to release its complier free with source and have it bundled with every Linux distro. I'm so confident, I'll hold my breath until this happens. I'll reply to this thread when it's done.
/me holds breath...blush...gasp!...ack!...hrmmmm
No kidding. Finally, a tech toy than nearly everyone can find useful.
Okay, here are my three situations:
Recording radio (Ogg Vorbis and SoX, 6620Hz mono, 2500Hz lowpass): oggenc -q0 gives about 115 kB/m of sound (~7MB/h) of audio, and I can still record it on my spare Pentium 75 Linux box. Also, there are no hassles with RealAudio, especially the never-ending upgrade nags from the RealAudio client.
Recording from CD (Ogg Vorbis and cdda2wav or CD-DA X-Tractor): 96 kb/s Ogg files sound as good as 128 kb/s MP3 files, and players and plug-ins are easy to find. Even whiny Windows users can find Ogg Vorbis plug-ins at the Nullsoft site, and installation is a snap. I use FreeAmp on Windows, though.
Audiophile (CD): I used to love my Rio because the battery life was good, and it didn't skip. However, it died because it took too many falls to contrete. My replacement was a $47 Philips CD/CD-R audio player with 45-second skip protection. I take care to not drop this player, but it's amazing how much better the CD sounds than most compressed audio formats. Disk space is zero, no worries about parallel port vs. USB, and most important, no worries about the portable memory format of the day.
Ctrl+Alt+Plus and Ctrl+Alt+Minus (both on the numeric keypad) works great for switching resolution on the fly. It's been around for as long as I've been using X (1996), so I don't know when it got that feature. Color depth seems to be another matter, though, and my knowledge of X utilities isn't what it used to be. For instance, I know that xvidtune is great for pixel-level width and height adjustments on the fly. I just don't know how well it works with XFree86-4.x.
IE6 has the ability to navigate msnbc.com in the way it was meant to be navigated. I don't know why: The menus at foxnews.com work just fine, but msnbc.com displays nothing where menus should be. windowsupdate.microsoft.com? Forget it.
Visit www.voa.gov in Mozilla and wonder why the page looks different in IE6. Simple, the comments on the page are screwy, and vim highlighting will show that. I'm thankful that voanews.com is just fine.
staroffice.com specifically does not support Netscape 6+ and will give you a message to that effect. That said, I haven't noticed any breakage. Expect more such hostility in the future from people who are happy with the one-browser market.
I can't get the RealAudio plugin to work with Mozilla. Maybe I need to install Netscape, deal with the cheesy commercial crap and special offers long enough to install the plugin, copy it to my Mozilla folder, then uninstall Netscape. A minor problem to be sure, but I'm sick of staring at that "you need a plug-in" icon for embedded objects, and I wish the Netscape plug-in finder would recognize my frustration.
I love Mozilla, but it lags behind IE6 on quite a few sites that I visit. These are just some of the sites that I visit, and I stay away from most overdone sites, especially Flash sites. I can't imagine what it's like for people who surf the web for all of its tacky glory. Mozilla has a great foundation. It just isn't there yet for the sites I visit, even less ready than the 0.9.7 moniker would suggest.
Agreed. When I see Netscape bundled with AOL instead of IE, then I'll believe the speculations in the Post article (beyond the Red Hat buyout rumors).
:-)
Maybe AOL is waiting for all the pieces to fall into place, when Steve Case can hit The Big Red Button and switch everyone to the AOL/TW computing solution. I doubt it, though. I think it's just people with more money than brains.
I'm glad that my two Slackware systems won't be affected
My favorite glitch was not Windows itself but a Windows program glitch. Imagine rushing on an already-rickety railcar at full speed through the narrow tunnels of Denver International Airport, only to hear the Ding! Ding! Ding! of the Windows default sound as error dialog boxes pop up somewhere unknown to you. The next prerecorded messages over the railcar intercom were "An unknown error has occurred. An unknown error has occurred. An unknown error has occurred" as lights in the car flickered on and off. Fortunately for me, the car acutally stopped at its destination.
Since when did MS test its code so bizarre computational errors won't creep in? I recall seeing something like three different auto-calculation patches for Excel 97, all because some of the millions of Excel users were caught by the bugs. The leap-century bug for date handling is also worth mentioning. Maybe someone can clarify this, but I recall that someone caught the date bug in Lotus 1-2-3, and Microsoft learned from the mistake of Lotus.
Maybe I'm being too harsh on Microsoft. After all, if you don't know that the year 1900 is a non-leap year, how are you going to test your dates? You'll just write a test that works fine to you, and it will succeed. Likewise, some of the auto-calculation bugs could have been caught in testing, if you knew to look for things like problems with a dragged-down formula based on a formula that has itself been dragged down (kind of like chaining pointers, for lack of a better analogy).
Agreed. "Programming Ruby" is fine, but I wish it had the odd humor and compelling programming examples (not OO jukeboxes) that are in the Camel. I also wish it had the Camel's very strong chapter on regular expressions. Hopefully, Matz's book will point out the Ruby pitfalls that are not mentioned in "Programming Ruby."
As this turned to be the "let's bash Ruby" topic on Slashdot, I'll mention that I like Ruby a lot. I just wish that Perl wasn't so automatic to me at this point, else migration would be lots more fun.
There has to be a reasonable line, though. If we were all meant to have a third-grade vocabulary of happy words, then MS should just dump the thesaurus altogether.
I didn't write to argue, though. I want to know what LA is supposed to be in Webdings. If NYC is supposed to be "I love New York," then LA is more like "watch out for the hangman" or "beware the meat hook outside the barn."
Hi! I read the discussions on each kernel release, and I wonder what I'm missing. I'm using 2.4.12 and ReiserFS, but everything is stable. All of my files are intact. I can compile the kernel while listening to 160kb/s mp3 files, and they do not skip, even in KDE. My production machine has yet to swap, let alone swap to death. This is just as boring as the 2.0.36 kernel that powered my production server for a year. The same went for 2.4.5 and 2.4.9.
I somehow feel like less of a Slashdotter because I'm not having troubles. How can I get in on the action?
MySQL is the only midrange database that I've seen that runs just as well on Win32 as on Linux. It's also resonably easy to deploy for its modest capabilities. It runs nicely on slow computers. The full-text search works very well for my purposes. The global/db/table/column security model works as advertised. My experience with MySQL has been fairly painless. YMMV.
As one who made it through college on a donated computer because I was too poor to buy one myself...
I like Open Source because the people are generous, in terms of both time and monetary savings.
When I started learning computers on Windows, I'd find something that I needed, but the author wanted $15 for something that was some VB program barely more than this:
Sub OverpricedSharewareProgram()
MsgBox "Hello World!"
End Sub
I sought alternatives, and Open Source was there to save the day, whether it was gcc or something else.
Granted, I could have been among the "smart" people that were copying Office CD-ROMs and sharing them with their buddies. I didn't feel right doing that, though. [I don't feel so dumb, now that Microsoft is using trial editions and software rental schemes to turn the screws on these people.]
Also, Open Source people are good with their time and knowledge. Most people turn to philosophers like RMS and the high principles of the GPL for inspiration. I identify with hard-working people like Holger Veit, who was in charge of the XFree86-OS/2 project. He had zero time to play and be friendly, but he answered every question that nobody else would answer. His answer was always accurate and a little more thorough than was needed to solve the problem. He taught people about the workings of X11 while solving their problems. Such a work ethic inspired me to be the same way.
Holger was just my example. Others may see the same example in Linus, Perl guru Tom Christiansen, or Ruby author Yukihiro Matsumoto. I'm sure I could continue the list for another half hour.
Several years ago, it became my turn to give back to the community. My efforts at giving code away were done in the process of solving my own narrow problems, so I haven't gotten much feedback. However, I have spent much time in mailing lists and on Usenet, trying to solve problems in my spare time. I reason that it takes more than raw source code to keep the community running smoothly, and that makes me feel good.
Hopefully, I have helped out a poor college student along the way.
Michael
I've had trouble finding office stuff born just before business caught wind of the Internet. Examples:
A manual for an IBM WheelWriter 2 typewriter, in PDF (or any other) format.
Jumper settings for an old 25MB hard drive whose maker went out of business. Instructions for the CMOS on the same 286 that had the hard drive.
Drivers and instructions for several old VLB cards on a friend's 486.
Michael