Something else is wrong if you're rebooting 4 or 5 times a week.
Why does the article's author feel the need to leave his home computers on 24x7? Don't his children ever sleep? Save yourself some power and some hassle, and power them down every night when the machines are not being used. Even Windows XP can stay up a whole day.
I was a Yahoo Personal Address customer (which has a yearly fee), and was enticed by the extra features offered by Yahoo GeoCities Pro (which has a monthly fee plus a signup fee). The upgrade to the GeoCities Pro service did not work, but Yahoo's customer service representatives did not want to refund the signup fee I paid to activate the GeoCities Pro account.
After several more canned responses from their support department, I mailed Yahoo Billing explaining the situation and spelled out the relevant clause or advertisement that stated a full refund would be given if the account was not activated within the stated timeframe. The first few times, my request was refused, but it seems that eventually my message reached the right staff who actually knew my rights, and I was given a refund.
The advice I can give:
contact the billing department rather than the technical support department.
find the relevant section of your contract or terms of agreement that allow you to cancel your service and quote it.
quote your former Yahoo account name in all correspondence.
be persistent.
don't use Yahoo again. their customer service is terrible. if something goes wrong, it will not be quickly resolved.
I would also suggest contacting Yahoo by paper mail and contacting the relevant consumer affairs department/business ombudsman/trade secretary or whoever you would contact in your area if the matter goes unresolved.
You might also like to consider creating a new Yahoo account so that you can easily contact their support staff, as their real addresses are quite hard to come by (it's almost like they're avoiding customers!)
One of my gripes with Yahoo Mail is actually that I can't read my mail from start to finish in an entirely secure session, especially since I've started to see advertisements for software that lets certain groups (such as employers or ISPs) capture information from popular Web mail providers such as Yahoo Mail and MSN Hotmail.
I have been a Yahoo Personal Address customer for about 18 months now. When I first subscribed, I felt it was one of the better Internet mail services provided by a major company, plus I could register a domain name so my mail address was me@mydomain.com rather than an account @yahoo.com, which is often disallowed for registration and disregarded in some serious contexts (such as an employment application).
Unfortunately, the Web hosting portion of this package (provided by Yahoo GeoCities) turned out to be less than desirable (for instance each page has advertising tags added which breaks my pages' W3C XHTML compliance), and basic mail features I found myself increasingly wanting (such as IMAP access) were still not forthcoming.
The short story is: I tried to change to a different provider and redelegate my domain name, but neither Yahoo nor Melbourne IT (the registrar Yahoo registers domain names with) would release my domain name or allow me to redelegate it.
Provided I remain with Yahoo, my domain name will continue to work, and I will receive some sort of mail service, but be warned that your Yahoo Personal Address may not be as permanent as you would like if you want to change provider.
The whole saga also made obvious Yahoo's dreadful customer service. Despite having at one point been entitled to priority customer support, I have found both their regular and their priority support dreadful.
Is anyone aware of a service similar to Yahoo Personal Address provided by another company?
A number of people would say this was a bad thing, however I feel it should be said that The Greens polled about six per cent at the last federal election, yet received no representation in the House of Representatives. Even if Cunningham is thought of as unfair, The Greens still only have one member in the 150 member house, which gives them less than one per cent representation despite attaining six per cent of the vote. The same holds for other "minor" parties.
I'm not necessarily saying that The Greens should have or should not have won the seat, just trying to highlight a flaw in the Australian system where the winner still takes all, as only one representative is elected for each electorate. I understand countries such as Germany and New Zealand have multiple representatives for each electorate and use something similar to the Hare-Clark voting system. This means each party is more closely represented in parliament according to what proportion of the primary vote that party received.
Australia has done without computerized (or even any form of mechanical) vote counting for a long time. I believe in recent elections they have been trialing computers but the hand counted result is still the "official" one. Probably this will eventually change. But the population of the whole of Australia is only about 19(?) million, so it is quite practical to do a hand count.
At a federal level, most of the vote counting is conducted at each polling station and the results sent to the electoral commission head office, so the method used for hand counting would actually scale fairly well.
At the polling booth, ballot papers are grouped according to who was voted for. The ballot papers of the least preferred candidate are removed and added to the group according to the second preference on that paper until a candidate has 50 per cent plus 1 of the vote. It's quite interesting to see.
It could be suggested that a polling station's results could be forged by a corrupt person, however each station has an official from the electoral commission, and candidates are allowed to nominate persons to scrutineer the whole process. The public and the politicians seem to have a confidence in the whole system.
Between exit polls and preliminary results, it is usually possible to tell with some certainty who won the election by the same evening, however it can take up to two weeks for the official results to be announced in any one seat if the result is close. It really does run quite smoothly, and the inconvenience of a few days' wait is balanced by a reliable, trusted voting system.
It was recently revealed that nine per cent of connections (affecting over one million customers) are supplied by using pair-gain technology to provide multiple virtual telephone lines over one physical copper line. These virtual lines can not be used for broadband internet services such as ADSL.
If "third-generation" wireless technology can be used to provide the "last mile" of the connection (instead of relying on copper wires), this means ADSL can possibly be provided to the substantial number of customers whose telephone lines are pair-gain. For most of these customers, the only high speed internet access option previously available to them was satellite internet, which (as you said previously) is well beyond most people's budgets, and offers none of the benefits of ADSL connectivity.
If you take a moment to understand the words you have used, you will realize that "source available" means the same thing as "open source". "Open source" implies nothing more than the source code being published or openly available; it does not imply any right to use the source code or the program unless otherwise specified. (This is why you will hear companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Sun speak of "shared source" or "open source", and why PGP Corporation could rightly call its software "open source" if it makes its source code publically available.)
This is exactly why the Free Software Foundation recommends the term free software. The "free" is what gives you the "freedom" to "take chunks of it and create your own version" as you say.
Re:Is installation getting easier or better doc'ed
on
FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE
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· Score: 2
The FreeBSD handbook is an excellent guide to all aspects of installing, configuring, and using a FreeBSD system. The allocating disk space section contains well written instructions (with pictures) that explain how disk partitions work on FreeBSD, and how to create them.
On my system, I use the GNU GRUB boot loader (used as the default boot loader in many Linux distributions), and it seems quite able to boot partitions over the infamous 1024 (cylinder?) limit. The GRUB manual suggests this configuration for booting FreeBSD. If you use GRUB, select the "Leave the Master Boot Record" option when you install FreeBSD.
Note that on an Intel 386-compatible system, you'll need a spare primary partition to install FreeBSD. Perhaps you don't have one, as there are only four, and each DOS or Windows install will want one, and one will be used to create the extended partition your Linux distribution is likely to install itself in. It might be easier to buy another hard disk drive.
The same problem occurs in relation to bash as/bin/sh. Try making something like ash or ksh the system's/bin/sh (cd/bin; ln -f ksh sh) and watch Red Hat's system scripts break. This is bad because/bin/sh should either be the original Bourne shell or Korn shell (which reportedly comes closest to POSIX shell specifications), but Red Hat relies on many Bash extensions.
We can write software to manage checkbooks, to run space shuttles, to even serve more porn than the world ever needs.
But we can't get a decent browser out the door.
Why? Why is this?
People are willing to pay for each of the three tools you asked about, while (as you point out further below) nobody wants to pay for a browser when they can get one for free. This may affect the amount of organization or time the programmers can spend on developing your browser free of charge.
"rpm --rebuild" didn't work on the source rpms... (--rebuild is no longer an rpm option)
If you had read the release notes, you would know that the rpm package has been broken into two parts, rpm and rpm-build, with rpm-build required to build RPM packages.
Pray tell, how is GNOME listed as DEFAULT anywhere?
Having just installed it twice today: If you choose one of the standard installation types (such as Personal Desktop or Workstation), GNOME is installed, but KDE is not. I expect if you choose a custom install, the GNOME package category will be checked and the KDE one will not be, but I have not yet performed a custom install.
dislikes:
- no direct way to mount a win32 share from the desktop. Yes, I can start Konq and smb://somemachine, but can I right-click and mount it? Nope.
- no 'run' interface like win32. sorry, but I can window-key-R and type \\machine\sharename
On a standard GNOME 2 installation, you can use Actions->Run Program... to type a program name or any valid URI, including local files and web locations. Are you just saying it can't be used to access SMB/CIFS locations in the non-standard Windows manner or does Red Hat 8 perhaps move or rename this menu item?
And have you ever tried to download the ISOs with a 56k.
Yes, and that's what I'm currently doing, as broadband is not available in my area. It takes me on average three days to download one CD image, which makes you wonder whether five CDs (or at least the three install CDs) are really necessary.
Nautilus 2 (which comes with GNOME 2 as used in Red Hat 8) is much faster than Nautilus 1 (which comes with GNOME 1.4 as used in Red Hat 7). In case you didn't know, it's also Nautilus that is used to draw desktop icons by default in GNOME 2, so some of Nautilus and its libraries will probably be preloaded when you go to open Nautilus as a file manager.
According to the Nautilus project page, Nautilus also includes support for NNTP (news), which seems to contradict its performance goals.
In this example, it would in fact simply be GCC, as GCC stands for GNU C compiler (or perhaps GNU Compiler Collection).
Projects owned by GNU (or FSF) are usually called GNU project name, as it is a project that belongs to GNU, so the GNU Hurd kernel project would be called GNU Hurd.
The whole GNU operating system, consisting perhaps of GNU Hurd, GNU compiler collection, GNU C library, GNU Emacs, GNU Grub, and so on is simply called GNU.
One form of the GNU operating system uses Linux as a kernel, which is not owned by GNU, so GNU chooses to call it GNU/Linux (or GNU+Linux) to indicate that it is the GNU system using a Linux kernel. Another form of the GNU operating system uses GNU Hurd as a kernel. This could rightly just be called GNU or the GNU system, but is sometimes called GNU/Hurd (or GNU+Hurd) to distinguish between a GNU system using Linux and a GNU system using Hurd.
To restate that: the kernel on its own is called GNU Hurd; the system is called GNU or GNU/Hurd to show it's using GNU's kernel.
Disclaimer: I know little about GNU Hurd, I'm just stating my understanding of GNU/FSF's perspective.
The entire operating environment devised from GNU tools (glibc, gcc, emacs, and so on) is called the GNU system. The slash notation indicates system/kernel, so when the GNU system is combined with the Linux kernel, it is referred to as GNU/Linux; when the GNU system is combined with the GNU Hurd kernel, it is referred to as GNU/Hurd (it could rightly be called GNU/GNU Hurd, but that would be a little more than most people would want to type, and some would see the presence of GNU twice as redundant).
Anyway, I'm sure we all understand what is meant here.
XFS uses extents rather than blocks, meaning that contiguous data is treated as one logical unit rather than a sequence of separate blocks. This is said to improve performance for sequential access.
As extents are a fundamental component of XFS, the Linux version of XFS also uses extents.
There were some frequently encountered problems when both Flash and Java plugins were installed such as bug 86591. I think this was supposed to be fixed just before Mozilla 1.0. What version are you running? (A problem like this still occurs in the version of Mozilla shipped with Red Hat Linux 7.3.) Perhaps try disabling Java support (click on the Advanced preferences item) to see whether the issue you are experiencing could be related.
There's also an issue with Flash when using a remote display (bug 58937). Perhaps Shockwave has a similar problem.
If neither of these works, I would recommend a Google web search for terms like Mozilla, Flash, Shockwave, and crash, as Bugzilla doesn't seem to have much of use here: most of the bugs that could be related are either marked RESOLVED or WORKSFORME.
You might also like to try to produce debug output, but I think that requires a build of Mozilla that has debugging enabled.
Note that to access Bugzilla links from Slashdot, you will need to copy and paste them into the location bar.
Humour aside, I think it's the marketing department again that thought people wouldn't grok units that look like bits per square micron.
Engineers and scientists wouldn't grok it either; the term micron (meaning one millionth of a meter) was abolished in 1968 in favor of micrometer (BIPM's SI brochure, page 28).
The problem comes when "the general populace" installs a copy of Windows XP and finds Windows Media Player does play their MP3s (also consider it is what is invoked by default when a user clicks/double-clicks on an MP3 audio file). The pundits tell us that in this situation many users will look no further, so Winamp isn't even considered.
Of your friends who use Winamp, are many actually using a version recent enough (>=2.80) to play Ogg Vorbis audio? Again the issue of inertia comes up.
I agree, tho, that beyond the immediate future, things don't look too bad, because players like Winamp do have name recognition.
Slashdot Mirror
Something else is wrong if you're rebooting 4 or 5 times a week.
Why does the article's author feel the need to leave his home computers on 24x7? Don't his children ever sleep? Save yourself some power and some hassle, and power them down every night when the machines are not being used. Even Windows XP can stay up a whole day.
I was a Yahoo Personal Address customer (which has a yearly fee), and was enticed by the extra features offered by Yahoo GeoCities Pro (which has a monthly fee plus a signup fee). The upgrade to the GeoCities Pro service did not work, but Yahoo's customer service representatives did not want to refund the signup fee I paid to activate the GeoCities Pro account.
After several more canned responses from their support department, I mailed Yahoo Billing explaining the situation and spelled out the relevant clause or advertisement that stated a full refund would be given if the account was not activated within the stated timeframe. The first few times, my request was refused, but it seems that eventually my message reached the right staff who actually knew my rights, and I was given a refund.
The advice I can give:
I would also suggest contacting Yahoo by paper mail and contacting the relevant consumer affairs department/business ombudsman/trade secretary or whoever you would contact in your area if the matter goes unresolved.
You might also like to consider creating a new Yahoo account so that you can easily contact their support staff, as their real addresses are quite hard to come by (it's almost like they're avoiding customers!)
One of my gripes with Yahoo Mail is actually that I can't read my mail from start to finish in an entirely secure session, especially since I've started to see advertisements for software that lets certain groups (such as employers or ISPs) capture information from popular Web mail providers such as Yahoo Mail and MSN Hotmail.
I have been a Yahoo Personal Address customer for about 18 months now. When I first subscribed, I felt it was one of the better Internet mail services provided by a major company, plus I could register a domain name so my mail address was me@mydomain.com rather than an account @yahoo.com, which is often disallowed for registration and disregarded in some serious contexts (such as an employment application).
Unfortunately, the Web hosting portion of this package (provided by Yahoo GeoCities) turned out to be less than desirable (for instance each page has advertising tags added which breaks my pages' W3C XHTML compliance), and basic mail features I found myself increasingly wanting (such as IMAP access) were still not forthcoming.
The short story is: I tried to change to a different provider and redelegate my domain name, but neither Yahoo nor Melbourne IT (the registrar Yahoo registers domain names with) would release my domain name or allow me to redelegate it.
Provided I remain with Yahoo, my domain name will continue to work, and I will receive some sort of mail service, but be warned that your Yahoo Personal Address may not be as permanent as you would like if you want to change provider.
The whole saga also made obvious Yahoo's dreadful customer service. Despite having at one point been entitled to priority customer support, I have found both their regular and their priority support dreadful.
Is anyone aware of a service similar to Yahoo Personal Address provided by another company?
A number of people would say this was a bad thing, however I feel it should be said that The Greens polled about six per cent at the last federal election, yet received no representation in the House of Representatives. Even if Cunningham is thought of as unfair, The Greens still only have one member in the 150 member house, which gives them less than one per cent representation despite attaining six per cent of the vote. The same holds for other "minor" parties.
I'm not necessarily saying that The Greens should have or should not have won the seat, just trying to highlight a flaw in the Australian system where the winner still takes all, as only one representative is elected for each electorate. I understand countries such as Germany and New Zealand have multiple representatives for each electorate and use something similar to the Hare-Clark voting system. This means each party is more closely represented in parliament according to what proportion of the primary vote that party received.
At a federal level, most of the vote counting is conducted at each polling station and the results sent to the electoral commission head office, so the method used for hand counting would actually scale fairly well.
At the polling booth, ballot papers are grouped according to who was voted for. The ballot papers of the least preferred candidate are removed and added to the group according to the second preference on that paper until a candidate has 50 per cent plus 1 of the vote. It's quite interesting to see.
It could be suggested that a polling station's results could be forged by a corrupt person, however each station has an official from the electoral commission, and candidates are allowed to nominate persons to scrutineer the whole process. The public and the politicians seem to have a confidence in the whole system.
Between exit polls and preliminary results, it is usually possible to tell with some certainty who won the election by the same evening, however it can take up to two weeks for the official results to be announced in any one seat if the result is close. It really does run quite smoothly, and the inconvenience of a few days' wait is balanced by a reliable, trusted voting system.
Debian does provide official CD images. You can also buy a CD set from any number of vendors, obtain an unofficial network install CD image or create your own CD using Jigdo.
It was recently revealed that nine per cent of connections (affecting over one million customers) are supplied by using pair-gain technology to provide multiple virtual telephone lines over one physical copper line. These virtual lines can not be used for broadband internet services such as ADSL.
If "third-generation" wireless technology can be used to provide the "last mile" of the connection (instead of relying on copper wires), this means ADSL can possibly be provided to the substantial number of customers whose telephone lines are pair-gain. For most of these customers, the only high speed internet access option previously available to them was satellite internet, which (as you said previously) is well beyond most people's budgets, and offers none of the benefits of ADSL connectivity.
If you take a moment to understand the words you have used, you will realize that "source available" means the same thing as "open source". "Open source" implies nothing more than the source code being published or openly available; it does not imply any right to use the source code or the program unless otherwise specified. (This is why you will hear companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Sun speak of "shared source" or "open source", and why PGP Corporation could rightly call its software "open source" if it makes its source code publically available.)
This is exactly why the Free Software Foundation recommends the term free software. The "free" is what gives you the "freedom" to "take chunks of it and create your own version" as you say.
The FreeBSD handbook is an excellent guide to all aspects of installing, configuring, and using a FreeBSD system. The allocating disk space section contains well written instructions (with pictures) that explain how disk partitions work on FreeBSD, and how to create them.
On my system, I use the GNU GRUB boot loader (used as the default boot loader in many Linux distributions), and it seems quite able to boot partitions over the infamous 1024 (cylinder?) limit. The GRUB manual suggests this configuration for booting FreeBSD. If you use GRUB, select the "Leave the Master Boot Record" option when you install FreeBSD.
Note that on an Intel 386-compatible system, you'll need a spare primary partition to install FreeBSD. Perhaps you don't have one, as there are only four, and each DOS or Windows install will want one, and one will be used to create the extended partition your Linux distribution is likely to install itself in. It might be easier to buy another hard disk drive.
The same problem occurs in relation to bash as /bin/sh. Try making something like ash or ksh the system's /bin/sh (cd /bin; ln -f ksh sh) and watch Red Hat's system scripts break. This is bad because /bin/sh should either be the original Bourne shell or Korn shell (which reportedly comes closest to POSIX shell specifications), but Red Hat relies on many Bash extensions.
According to the Australian Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk E-Mail, Australia currently has mild opt-out spamming provisions, most of which are based on a voluntary code of conduct rather than legislation. Perhaps you were thinking of Europe, where there are opt-in rules which could be considered a sufficient deterrent to spammers.
Even so, would Australian laws apply if the spam originated from outside of Australia?
People are willing to pay for each of the three tools you asked about, while (as you point out further below) nobody wants to pay for a browser when they can get one for free. This may affect the amount of organization or time the programmers can spend on developing your browser free of charge.
"rpm --rebuild" didn't work on the source rpms... (--rebuild is no longer an rpm option)
If you had read the release notes, you would know that the rpm package has been broken into two parts, rpm and rpm-build, with rpm-build required to build RPM packages.
Pray tell, how is GNOME listed as DEFAULT anywhere?
Having just installed it twice today: If you choose one of the standard installation types (such as Personal Desktop or Workstation), GNOME is installed, but KDE is not. I expect if you choose a custom install, the GNOME package category will be checked and the KDE one will not be, but I have not yet performed a custom install.
On a standard GNOME 2 installation, you can use Actions->Run Program... to type a program name or any valid URI, including local files and web locations. Are you just saying it can't be used to access SMB/CIFS locations in the non-standard Windows manner or does Red Hat 8 perhaps move or rename this menu item?
And have you ever tried to download the ISOs with a 56k.
Yes, and that's what I'm currently doing, as broadband is not available in my area. It takes me on average three days to download one CD image, which makes you wonder whether five CDs (or at least the three install CDs) are really necessary.
Nautilus 2 (which comes with GNOME 2 as used in Red Hat 8) is much faster than Nautilus 1 (which comes with GNOME 1.4 as used in Red Hat 7). In case you didn't know, it's also Nautilus that is used to draw desktop icons by default in GNOME 2, so some of Nautilus and its libraries will probably be preloaded when you go to open Nautilus as a file manager.
According to the Nautilus project page, Nautilus also includes support for NNTP (news), which seems to contradict its performance goals.
In this example, it would in fact simply be GCC, as GCC stands for GNU C compiler (or perhaps GNU Compiler Collection).
Projects owned by GNU (or FSF) are usually called GNU project name, as it is a project that belongs to GNU, so the GNU Hurd kernel project would be called GNU Hurd.
The whole GNU operating system, consisting perhaps of GNU Hurd, GNU compiler collection, GNU C library, GNU Emacs, GNU Grub, and so on is simply called GNU.
One form of the GNU operating system uses Linux as a kernel, which is not owned by GNU, so GNU chooses to call it GNU/Linux (or GNU+Linux) to indicate that it is the GNU system using a Linux kernel. Another form of the GNU operating system uses GNU Hurd as a kernel. This could rightly just be called GNU or the GNU system, but is sometimes called GNU/Hurd (or GNU+Hurd) to distinguish between a GNU system using Linux and a GNU system using Hurd.
To restate that: the kernel on its own is called GNU Hurd; the system is called GNU or GNU/Hurd to show it's using GNU's kernel.
Disclaimer: I know little about GNU Hurd, I'm just stating my understanding of GNU/FSF's perspective.
The entire operating environment devised from GNU tools (glibc, gcc, emacs, and so on) is called the GNU system. The slash notation indicates system/kernel, so when the GNU system is combined with the Linux kernel, it is referred to as GNU/Linux; when the GNU system is combined with the GNU Hurd kernel, it is referred to as GNU/Hurd (it could rightly be called GNU/GNU Hurd, but that would be a little more than most people would want to type, and some would see the presence of GNU twice as redundant).
Anyway, I'm sure we all understand what is meant here.
For those in the audience using anything more advanced than 7 bit ASCII, the correct spelling is résumé.
XFS uses extents rather than blocks, meaning that contiguous data is treated as one logical unit rather than a sequence of separate blocks. This is said to improve performance for sequential access.
As extents are a fundamental component of XFS, the Linux version of XFS also uses extents.
There were some frequently encountered problems when both Flash and Java plugins were installed such as bug 86591. I think this was supposed to be fixed just before Mozilla 1.0. What version are you running? (A problem like this still occurs in the version of Mozilla shipped with Red Hat Linux 7.3.) Perhaps try disabling Java support (click on the Advanced preferences item) to see whether the issue you are experiencing could be related.
There's also an issue with Flash when using a remote display (bug 58937). Perhaps Shockwave has a similar problem.
If neither of these works, I would recommend a Google web search for terms like Mozilla, Flash, Shockwave, and crash, as Bugzilla doesn't seem to have much of use here: most of the bugs that could be related are either marked RESOLVED or WORKSFORME.
You might also like to try to produce debug output, but I think that requires a build of Mozilla that has debugging enabled.
Note that to access Bugzilla links from Slashdot, you will need to copy and paste them into the location bar.
Humour aside, I think it's the marketing department again that thought people wouldn't grok units that look like bits per square micron.
Engineers and scientists wouldn't grok it either; the term micron (meaning one millionth of a meter) was abolished in 1968 in favor of micrometer (BIPM's SI brochure, page 28).
The problem comes when "the general populace" installs a copy of Windows XP and finds Windows Media Player does play their MP3s (also consider it is what is invoked by default when a user clicks/double-clicks on an MP3 audio file). The pundits tell us that in this situation many users will look no further, so Winamp isn't even considered.
Of your friends who use Winamp, are many actually using a version recent enough (>=2.80) to play Ogg Vorbis audio? Again the issue of inertia comes up.
I agree, tho, that beyond the immediate future, things don't look too bad, because players like Winamp do have name recognition.