WhiteWolf666 wrote: Tell me, though. How did you get the stippled menu bar (Session, Edit, View, etc...)This isn't a standard menu applet for the panel, is it?
This is the "Baghira" theme (replacement for Mosfet's Liquid) for KDE 3.2 at work. Go to kde-look.org and search for Baghira. There's a Gentoo ebuild for it and SuSE and Mandrake RPMs. It's a pretty good theme and the one I'm currently using on both my machines that have monitors. IMHO, Plastik is a better window decoration style than Baghira's though.
MooCows wrote: There's a sequel to that one out too, called The Scar
Not quite--The Scar is set after Perdido Street Station, but it's about different characters in a different part of the same world, and it goes into a lot more detail about that world. Perdido was almost entirely about the city it was set in; The Scar talks about other places and explains a bit about why the world is so... weird. One of the characters in Perdido is mentioned in The Scar for about half a page, but that's it. It's certainly not necessary to have read Perdido before reading The Scar. For the record, I liked both books, but thought The Scar was better. HTH,
alexandre wrote: Anyone upgraded and have a joystick working on the es1370 aureal vortex 1 sound card joystick port?
I tried 2.6.0-test9 a couple weeks ago and it wasn't that difficult to get the joystick on my es1371 working. I assume you're using ALSA; if you aren't, go post on comp.os.linux.hardware, since these web-boards suck for doing tech support.
I had to do alsactl -f/etc/asound.state store, then edit the asound.state file with a text editor and change the line under "Joystick Enable" from FALSE to TRUE. Then I had to alsactl -f/etc/asound.state restore. (This feels really clunky, and it isn't really documented anywhere, but that's the price you pay for ALSA.) Then "modprobe joydev grip" made the 15-pin Gravis Gamepad Pro I had plugged in work just fine. YMMV though, since an es1370 is totally different and joystick support has always been a low priority for the ALSA project. HTH,
Bil, Shooter of Bul wrote: diamagnetic materials *Can* be magnetically levitated with a strong enough magnet.
Yes, diamagnetic materials are repelled weakly by a magnetic field. But I thought my comment was getting too long and had too many asides, so I didn't mention that weak effect. I didn't know Livermore levitated a frog, though!
ornil wrote: Admittedly, I know nothing about this [...] Isn't there iron in blood as well? Would that cause problems?
From the article: "Small crystals of magnetite are added to the particles..." . Magnetite (Fe3O4) is magnetic because the 2 Fe+3 ions arranged with the Fe+2 ion in that specific configuration make for "magnetic domains", regions in the magnetite crystals where all the unpaired electrons are spinning the same way[0]. The iron in the hemoglobin in your blood is either Fe+2 or +3, no magnetic domains can exist because the hemoglobin molecules are floating around in solution and don't line up at all--no ferromagnetism. Even if you had a crystal of pure hemoglobin, it'd be paramagnetic (very weakly magnetic, like pure oxygen) or diamagnetic (no magnetic effects at all). You can see this for yourself by trying to pick up a drop of your own blood with a really strong horseshoe magnet.
[0] Well, not really, but the real explanation involves a lot of math and I can't remember it anyway.
One Louder wrote: Anyone out there know why unleaded gasoline cost more than leaded gasoline? Why charge more to *not* put an additive in the gasoline?
(I'm assuming you're serious and not just quoting George Carlin.) Octane ratings. Tetraethyl lead is a cheap, efficient, and toxic way to make gasoline burn slower in a car's engine. It's mostly been phased out, since methyl-t-butyl ether (MTBE) is almost as effective, not a lot more expensive, and much less toxic after it's been burned.
The last time I saw a leaded fuel pump was ~6 years ago, and it was more expensive than mid-octane unleaded.
So... is the nVidia 'drivers' going to work with 2.6?
The evil binary-only nVidia kernel module works OK with 2.6.0-test9 when you apply the patches found at www.minion.de/nvidia.html to an official nVidia tarball and then build the nVidia module. I've been using it for the last 4 days, no problems running OpenGL-intensive stuff like mupen64.
What about the hcf modem 'drivers'?
Good question. I found the minion.de patches by Googling for "nvidia 2.6 linux", so try the same thing, substituting the name of the LoseModem module for "nvidia". There's supposed to be a beta source tarball for Lucent LoseModems for the 2.6 kernel, but it's 404ing at the moment. Quick Googling shows that Lucent will release an updated package when Redhat ships a 2.6 kernel (sigh). Guess my laptop's staying at kernel 2.4 for now.
Good grief. ext2's max partition size has been 2T (2048G) for years and years. The semi-large RAID at my job has 2 ext3 partitions of 248G each for ~2 years, and we've had no problems with them.
I know that if you used a FAT16 partition, you would have to divide it into like
Nobody uses FAT16 for anything except possibly ZIP disks; it's just not worth it. FAT32 is limited to 64G (128G with some fiddling). ext[23] and ReiserFS 3.6 are limited to 2T partitions. ReiserFS 4 will scale up higher. I forget what NTFS's limits are, but ISTR "petabytes" being claimed somewhere. XFS's limits are in the exabyte range. If you have a lot of money to spend on disks, and you need huge partitions with huge data files, XFS is probably the way to go.
Yobgod Ababua wrote: My intention was to use the lowest level access possible to just copy whatever bits happen to be sitting on the CD. I'm not sure if any programs currently exist to do that
Lowest level possible means you don't use the block device layer, which means you don't use dd. "cdrdao copy", or "cdrdao read-cd --read-raw" is probably the lowest level you can get with Linux ATM.
I get the feeling that cdparanoia tries to do error checking
Why do you think I mentioned the -Z option to cdparanoia?
it seems disturbingly non-trivial to merely extract bits from an audio CD. That seems strange to me.
It's trivial to extract bits from an audio CD. It's decidedly nontrivial to extract the right bits from an audio CD, so the.wav or whatever is an exact-as-possible copy of what's on the CD itself. FIrst, CDDA sectors are 2352 bytes, no error correction, and seeking to a specific point is not guaranteed. That's why cdparanoia is paranoid about reading each sector several times and comparing each read result to account for jitter/errors. One element of the FAQ
page on the main cdparanoia website goes into some detail about this.
Yobgod Ababua wrote: Bits is bits. "dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/home/rip-cd" will transfer those bits. Am I missing something?
The fact that dd as applied to a raw CD-ROM device only captures the first track, maybe? I Think You Meant "cd ~/rip-cd && cdparanoia -B". This won't work in all cases either because A) the TOC may be bogus B) they may have salted the audio track with tiny blips of bad data which a D-A converter will average out but a digital ripper like cdparanoia will attempt to reread many times, slowing ripping to a crawl and/or producing staticky results.
The "bad TOC" can be circumvented; I forget exactly how though--probably by specifying a time range instead of letting cdparanoia read the TOC. The bits of bad data might be a little trickier; I didn't see much in the man page other than -Z, but I don't have time to go Googling right now (hint, hint.)
cerberusss wrote: I really would like something like KDesktop. Instant sharing, that's useful when developing with people on other physical locations...
JamesKPolk wrote: KDesktop is the thing in kdebase that puts up your wallpaper [...] but it has nothing to do with networking.
I think what cerberusss meant was "KDE Desktop Sharing". This used to be called "krfb", and it is a pointy-clicky frontend to a VNC server that exports your current X session. You can probably compile krfb and use it with GNOME, so long as you have the KDE libs available. Or you can try the "Xvnc" extension to XFree86, which may actually be faster. Go to groups.google and search comp.os.linux.x for keyword "xvnc" and/or author "Wayne Throop" for further info. HTH,
Is there going to be 'by date' sort anytime soon for Konqueror? There might even be one already for all I know....
Um... since the first version of Konqueror, there's been a "modified" column in the detailed list view when Konqueror is being used as a file manager. Click on the "modified" column heading and the files will be sorted by their last modified date. Click that heading again, and they'll be sorted by the last modified date, in reverse.
Please note that ext[23], ReiserFS, and XFS don't store the creation date for a file. They store atime, the time the file was last accessed in any way, ctime, the time the file last had its status changed, and mtime, the time the file was last modified. atime is usually not useful since doing anything to the file changes atime. HTH,
Linux can "see" those [extra buttons on an Intellimouse Explorer]. Getting Mozilla to do something with them might be a bit harder though.
Use xbindkeys and xmacroplay to bind mouse buttons 6 and 7 (or whatever these extra buttons show up as) to key combinations like Alt-Left and Alt-Right. That'll do "back" and "forward" in Mozilla. Check this groups.google link for more information on precisely how to do it.
It certainly would be cool if a game could unconsciously teach useful things, but in 20 years of gaming it has never been done
Really? I suppose I was just imagining all that junk I learned about Boolean logic from "Rocky's Boots" in 1986. And what about all the Caribbean geography I learned from playing "Pirates!" a lot back in 1992? Granted, learning through commercial games is more the exception than the rule, but it can be done.
Interesting. I'm using RedHat 9 and CDCEther for my cable modem. It works fine except from the need to reboot my cable modem once a day. So what is it with this Zaurus, and what driver does it use instead?
The Zaurus uses the "usbdnet" (2.4.18 and below) or "usbnet" (2.4.19 and up) modules. Apparently, the hotplug daemon thinks the Zaurus implements the CDC standard when it doesn't, hence the "blacklist". Remember that once the module is loaded, you have to do "dhcpcd usb0" to request an IP from the Zaurus's DHCP daemon, otherwise the Zaurus won't talk to your machine. Once that's done, you can use the Zaurus's FTP server on port 4242, or use the Qtopia Desktop program.
Dunno about the cablemodem requiring a reboot once a day. I only have to reboot mine once a week, but then I'm using one with an Ethernet connection.
[MS Natural keyboards] Yes, I agree that the stupid function buttons are useless (especially since I run Debian)
They don't have to be useless. You may not know how to use them, but that Usenet message should get you started. The same commands should work on *BSD and any x86 machine running X as well. The mapping I use most often is one that maps the "Mail" button to "xvidtune -next", so changing resolutions for watching movies or playing games only requires one finger. HTH,
Now, do you possibly know how to get the backspace key to be the back button instead of alt-left..
If it can be done, it's totally not obvious.
Or maybe how to get the fourth or fifth button a mouse to do the same (i have the logitech mx700)?
Huh? Mousewheel up = button 4, mousewheel down = button 5. These buttons are mapped to "window scroll up/down" in Mozilla (and Qt apps, and GTK+ apps). If you have more than 5 buttons on your mouse, and these extra buttons generate X events, it's pretty easy to do this. groups.google has the answer--using extra buttons instead of media keys with xbindkeys is obvious from the comments in the.xbindkeysrc file. HTH,
[binding a key to "suspend to RAM" or "suspend to disk" in Linux]
I haven't tried this, but it seems reasonable that one could use xmodmap and showkey to map any keyboard button to `apm -s` (suspend to ram) or `apm -S` (suspend to disk).
ITYM "use xbindkeys to bind an arbitrary key to any command". xmodmap will not do this; all xmodmap does is map a key to another key. Also note that xbindkeys has a GUI called "gtk-xbindkeys" that may be on your distro CDs. I've posted a complete guide to this junk in the past; use groups.google comp.os.linux.x , keyword "xbindkeys". HTH,
I can't quite remember if they are from lions or tigers, but i believe it was from tigers.
False on both counts. Domestic cats were originally bred from the African wild cat, although some folks think that certain breeds like the Maine Coon Cat arose from people crossing domestic cats with the European wild cat. I read in a biology textbook somewhere that most large cats cannot purr, while most small cats can, and this distinction between "growling cats" and "purring cats" is one reason why most large cats are put in genus Panthera while most small cats are put in genus Felis. Don't know what cladistics has to say about this; my information is a few years out of date.
Humans don't need genetic engineering or even planned breeding programs to produce interesting effects... check out the Singapore Drain Cat for a totally unplanned micro-feline (ranges from 4-9 lbs.) Also Google for "Scottish Fold" and "Cornish Rex", though these were mutants that were encouraged via selective breeding....
one (e2fs) provides defragging under Linux[...]
Will future versions of ReiserFS include additional userland tools for defrag?
"Filesystem fragmentation" is not a problem for ext[23] because the filesystem intelligently allocates block groups. Similar story for ReiserFS. For a reasonably full explanation, check groups.google for author Peter T. Breuer, comp.os.linux.* , keyword "defrag".
I've seen Linus Torvalds post a few times to comp.os.linux.misc , David Hinds (the PCMCIA guru) posts frequently to comp.os.linux.portable, and I could swear I've seen Alan Cox and Theodore T'so post somewhere in comp.os.linux.*.
But heck, the high-powered kernel hackers have important work to do, and even focused, mostly spam- and flame-free venues like comp.os.linux.* (excluding.advocacy) can waste a lot of time. The community on comp.os.linux.{hardware, misc, portable, x} is pretty knowledgable and polite in my experience. (Yeah, I post there
a lot. So sue me.)
And IMHO, Usenet as a discussion forum beats the living shit out of any web-based forum I've seen because A) there are no images B) it's trivial to killfile people or threads C) it's (almost) all archived at groups.google . Web-boards can't seem to get a handle on B (too much server-side processing required).
OK, I'll bite, how do you use a single ethernet port iMac for a firewall?
You buy a USB<->Ethernet adapter. These things are pretty evil and slow (~8 Mbit max, plenty for a cable/DSL connection), but they exist and they apparently work. Kernel modules for MacOS < X might be tough to find, but the standards-compliant ones are supported by Real OSes (check the docs in/usr/src/linux/Documentation/Configure.help for reported working cards, adjust file location for your OS) and you're not going to try to run a firewall/gateway on MacOS 9, are you? Didn't think so. HTH,
Check with University of Michigan's property disposition. They are an all-Mac school
This information is way out of date and wasn't correct even in 1996. U of M has a fair number of MacOS machines, but some labs (the Business School, for one) have no Macs at all and don't want any. Property Dispo has some good stuff, but it's a toss-up as to whether you can get reasonable equipment, since the students all have lots of spare time and they jump on the good deals at 7am.
What kind of capabilities will SuSe 8.2 have for syncing with a Zaurus?
Heck if I know. However, you can install the usbdnet module, as described
here, then grab the Qtopia desktop environment from
trolltech.com/qtopia, then you're set. This should work for any distro, not just SuSE. If you have a Zaurus, I'm really surprised you didn't find this information via Google and try it out months ago.
Books don't get translated from American to British.
I bought a copy of Christine (Stephen King) in Heathrow Airport that disagrees with you. In this copy, the American teenagers in Pennsylvania are constantly referring to "tyres" and calling the hood of a car the "bonnet" and the trunk of a car the "boot". This is only one example, but there must be others.
Dunno about weird translations of/in Niven's work, but Google for "Angry Grapes" for Steinbeck's....
Slashdot Mirror
Tell me, though. How did you get the stippled menu bar (Session, Edit, View, etc...)This isn't a standard menu applet for the panel, is it?
This is the "Baghira" theme (replacement for Mosfet's Liquid) for KDE 3.2 at work. Go to kde-look.org and search for Baghira. There's a Gentoo ebuild for it and SuSE and Mandrake RPMs. It's a pretty good theme and the one I'm currently using on both my machines that have monitors. IMHO, Plastik is a better window decoration style than Baghira's though.
Not quite--The Scar is set after Perdido Street Station, but it's about different characters in a different part of the same world, and it goes into a lot more detail about that world. Perdido was almost entirely about the city it was set in; The Scar talks about other places and explains a bit about why the world is so... weird. One of the characters in Perdido is mentioned in The Scar for about half a page, but that's it. It's certainly not necessary to have read Perdido before reading The Scar. For the record, I liked both books, but thought The Scar was better. HTH,
I tried 2.6.0-test9 a couple weeks ago and it wasn't that difficult to get the joystick on my es1371 working. I assume you're using ALSA; if you aren't, go post on comp.os.linux.hardware, since these web-boards suck for doing tech support.
I had to do alsactl -f /etc/asound.state store, then edit the asound.state file with a text editor and change the line under "Joystick Enable" from FALSE to TRUE. Then I had to alsactl -f /etc/asound.state restore. (This feels really clunky, and it isn't really documented anywhere, but that's the price you pay for ALSA.) Then "modprobe joydev grip" made the 15-pin Gravis Gamepad Pro I had plugged in work just fine. YMMV though, since an es1370 is totally different and joystick support has always been a low priority for the ALSA project. HTH,
Yes, diamagnetic materials are repelled weakly by a magnetic field. But I thought my comment was getting too long and had too many asides, so I didn't mention that weak effect. I didn't know Livermore levitated a frog, though!
From the article: "Small crystals of magnetite are added to the particles..." . Magnetite (Fe3O4) is magnetic because the 2 Fe+3 ions arranged with the Fe+2 ion in that specific configuration make for "magnetic domains", regions in the magnetite crystals where all the unpaired electrons are spinning the same way[0]. The iron in the hemoglobin in your blood is either Fe+2 or +3, no magnetic domains can exist because the hemoglobin molecules are floating around in solution and don't line up at all--no ferromagnetism. Even if you had a crystal of pure hemoglobin, it'd be paramagnetic (very weakly magnetic, like pure oxygen) or diamagnetic (no magnetic effects at all). You can see this for yourself by trying to pick up a drop of your own blood with a really strong horseshoe magnet.
[0] Well, not really, but the real explanation involves a lot of math and I can't remember it anyway.
Anyone out there know why unleaded gasoline cost more than leaded gasoline? Why charge more to *not* put an additive in the gasoline?
(I'm assuming you're serious and not just quoting George Carlin.) Octane ratings. Tetraethyl lead is a cheap, efficient, and toxic way to make gasoline burn slower in a car's engine. It's mostly been phased out, since methyl-t-butyl ether (MTBE) is almost as effective, not a lot more expensive, and much less toxic after it's been burned.
The last time I saw a leaded fuel pump was ~6 years ago, and it was more expensive than mid-octane unleaded.
The evil binary-only nVidia kernel module works OK with 2.6.0-test9 when you apply the patches found at www.minion.de/nvidia.html to an official nVidia tarball and then build the nVidia module. I've been using it for the last 4 days, no problems running OpenGL-intensive stuff like mupen64.
What about the hcf modem 'drivers'?
Good question. I found the minion.de patches by Googling for "nvidia 2.6 linux", so try the same thing, substituting the name of the LoseModem module for "nvidia". There's supposed to be a beta source tarball for Lucent LoseModems for the 2.6 kernel, but it's 404ing at the moment. Quick Googling shows that Lucent will release an updated package when Redhat ships a 2.6 kernel (sigh). Guess my laptop's staying at kernel 2.4 for now.
Good grief. ext2's max partition size has been 2T (2048G) for years and years. The semi-large RAID at my job has 2 ext3 partitions of 248G each for ~2 years, and we've had no problems with them.
I know that if you used a FAT16 partition, you would have to divide it into like
Nobody uses FAT16 for anything except possibly ZIP disks; it's just not worth it. FAT32 is limited to 64G (128G with some fiddling). ext[23] and ReiserFS 3.6 are limited to 2T partitions. ReiserFS 4 will scale up higher. I forget what NTFS's limits are, but ISTR "petabytes" being claimed somewhere. XFS's limits are in the exabyte range. If you have a lot of money to spend on disks, and you need huge partitions with huge data files, XFS is probably the way to go.
My intention was to use the lowest level access possible to just copy whatever bits happen to be sitting on the CD. I'm not sure if any programs currently exist to do that
Lowest level possible means you don't use the block device layer, which means you don't use dd. "cdrdao copy", or "cdrdao read-cd --read-raw" is probably the lowest level you can get with Linux ATM.
I get the feeling that cdparanoia tries to do error checking
Why do you think I mentioned the -Z option to cdparanoia?
it seems disturbingly non-trivial to merely extract bits from an audio CD. That seems strange to me.
It's trivial to extract bits from an audio CD. It's decidedly nontrivial to extract the right bits from an audio CD, so the .wav or whatever is an exact-as-possible copy of what's on the CD itself. FIrst, CDDA sectors are 2352 bytes, no error correction, and seeking to a specific point is not guaranteed. That's why cdparanoia is paranoid about reading each sector several times and comparing each read result to account for jitter/errors. One element of the FAQ
page on the main cdparanoia website goes into some detail about this.
Bits is bits. "dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/home/rip-cd" will transfer those bits. Am I missing something?
The fact that dd as applied to a raw CD-ROM device only captures the first track, maybe? I Think You Meant "cd ~/rip-cd && cdparanoia -B". This won't work in all cases either because A) the TOC may be bogus B) they may have salted the audio track with tiny blips of bad data which a D-A converter will average out but a digital ripper like cdparanoia will attempt to reread many times, slowing ripping to a crawl and/or producing staticky results.
The "bad TOC" can be circumvented; I forget exactly how though--probably by specifying a time range instead of letting cdparanoia read the TOC. The bits of bad data might be a little trickier; I didn't see much in the man page other than -Z, but I don't have time to go Googling right now (hint, hint.)
I really would like something like KDesktop. Instant sharing, that's useful when developing with people on other physical locations...
JamesKPolk wrote:
KDesktop is the thing in kdebase that puts up your wallpaper [...] but it has nothing to do with networking.
I think what cerberusss meant was "KDE Desktop Sharing". This used to be called "krfb", and it is a pointy-clicky frontend to a VNC server that exports your current X session. You can probably compile krfb and use it with GNOME, so long as you have the KDE libs available. Or you can try the "Xvnc" extension to XFree86, which may actually be faster. Go to groups.google and search comp.os.linux.x for keyword "xvnc" and/or author "Wayne Throop" for further info. HTH,
Um... since the first version of Konqueror, there's been a "modified" column in the detailed list view when Konqueror is being used as a file manager. Click on the "modified" column heading and the files will be sorted by their last modified date. Click that heading again, and they'll be sorted by the last modified date, in reverse.
Please note that ext[23], ReiserFS, and XFS don't store the creation date for a file. They store atime, the time the file was last accessed in any way, ctime, the time the file last had its status changed, and mtime, the time the file was last modified. atime is usually not useful since doing anything to the file changes atime. HTH,
Use xbindkeys and xmacroplay to bind mouse buttons 6 and 7 (or whatever these extra buttons show up as) to key combinations like Alt-Left and Alt-Right. That'll do "back" and "forward" in Mozilla. Check this groups.google link for more information on precisely how to do it.
Really? I suppose I was just imagining all that junk I learned about Boolean logic from "Rocky's Boots" in 1986. And what about all the Caribbean geography I learned from playing "Pirates!" a lot back in 1992? Granted, learning through commercial games is more the exception than the rule, but it can be done.
The Zaurus uses the "usbdnet" (2.4.18 and below) or "usbnet" (2.4.19 and up) modules. Apparently, the hotplug daemon thinks the Zaurus implements the CDC standard when it doesn't, hence the "blacklist". Remember that once the module is loaded, you have to do "dhcpcd usb0" to request an IP from the Zaurus's DHCP daemon, otherwise the Zaurus won't talk to your machine. Once that's done, you can use the Zaurus's FTP server on port 4242, or use the Qtopia Desktop program.
Dunno about the cablemodem requiring a reboot once a day. I only have to reboot mine once a week, but then I'm using one with an Ethernet connection.
They don't have to be useless. You may not know how to use them, but that Usenet message should get you started. The same commands should work on *BSD and any x86 machine running X as well. The mapping I use most often is one that maps the "Mail" button to "xvidtune -next", so changing resolutions for watching movies or playing games only requires one finger. HTH,
If it can be done, it's totally not obvious.
Or maybe how to get the fourth or fifth button a mouse to do the same (i have the logitech mx700)?
Huh? Mousewheel up = button 4, mousewheel down = button 5. These buttons are mapped to "window scroll up/down" in Mozilla (and Qt apps, and GTK+ apps). If you have more than 5 buttons on your mouse, and these extra buttons generate X events, it's pretty easy to do this. groups.google has the answer--using extra buttons instead of media keys with xbindkeys is obvious from the comments in the .xbindkeysrc file. HTH,
I haven't tried this, but it seems reasonable that one could use xmodmap and showkey to map any keyboard button to `apm -s` (suspend to ram) or `apm -S` (suspend to disk).
ITYM "use xbindkeys to bind an arbitrary key to any command". xmodmap will not do this; all xmodmap does is map a key to another key. Also note that xbindkeys has a GUI called "gtk-xbindkeys" that may be on your distro CDs. I've posted a complete guide to this junk in the past; use groups.google comp.os.linux.x , keyword "xbindkeys". HTH,
True, though you may want to look here .
I can't quite remember if they are from lions or tigers, but i believe it was from tigers.
False on both counts. Domestic cats were originally bred from the African wild cat, although some folks think that certain breeds like the Maine Coon Cat arose from people crossing domestic cats with the European wild cat. I read in a biology textbook somewhere that most large cats cannot purr, while most small cats can, and this distinction between "growling cats" and "purring cats" is one reason why most large cats are put in genus Panthera while most small cats are put in genus Felis. Don't know what cladistics has to say about this; my information is a few years out of date.
Humans don't need genetic engineering or even planned breeding programs to produce interesting effects... check out the Singapore Drain Cat for a totally unplanned micro-feline (ranges from 4-9 lbs.) Also Google for "Scottish Fold" and "Cornish Rex", though these were mutants that were encouraged via selective breeding....
"Filesystem fragmentation" is not a problem for ext[23] because the filesystem intelligently allocates block groups. Similar story for ReiserFS. For a reasonably full explanation, check groups.google for author Peter T. Breuer, comp.os.linux.* , keyword "defrag".
I've seen quite a number of Carmack postings.
I've seen Linus Torvalds post a few times to comp.os.linux.misc , David Hinds (the PCMCIA guru) posts frequently to comp.os.linux.portable, and I could swear I've seen Alan Cox and Theodore T'so post somewhere in comp.os.linux.* .
But heck, the high-powered kernel hackers have important work to do, and even focused, mostly spam- and flame-free venues like comp.os.linux.* (excluding .advocacy) can waste a lot of time. The community on comp.os.linux.{hardware, misc, portable, x} is pretty knowledgable and polite in my experience. (Yeah, I post there
a lot. So sue me.)
And IMHO, Usenet as a discussion forum beats the living shit out of any web-based forum I've seen because A) there are no images B) it's trivial to killfile people or threads C) it's (almost) all archived at groups.google . Web-boards can't seem to get a handle on B (too much server-side processing required).
You buy a USB<->Ethernet adapter. These things are pretty evil and slow (~8 Mbit max, plenty for a cable/DSL connection), but they exist and they apparently work. Kernel modules for MacOS < X might be tough to find, but the standards-compliant ones are supported by Real OSes (check the docs in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/Configure.help for reported working cards, adjust file location for your OS) and you're not going to try to run a firewall/gateway on MacOS 9, are you? Didn't think so. HTH,
This information is way out of date and wasn't correct even in 1996. U of M has a fair number of MacOS machines, but some labs (the Business School, for one) have no Macs at all and don't want any. Property Dispo has some good stuff, but it's a toss-up as to whether you can get reasonable equipment, since the students all have lots of spare time and they jump on the good deals at 7am.
Heck if I know. However, you can install the usbdnet module, as described here, then grab the Qtopia desktop environment from trolltech.com/qtopia, then you're set. This should work for any distro, not just SuSE. If you have a Zaurus, I'm really surprised you didn't find this information via Google and try it out months ago.
I bought a copy of Christine (Stephen King) in Heathrow Airport that disagrees with you. In this copy, the American teenagers in Pennsylvania are constantly referring to "tyres" and calling the hood of a car the "bonnet" and the trunk of a car the "boot". This is only one example, but there must be others.
Dunno about weird translations of/in Niven's work, but Google for "Angry Grapes" for Steinbeck's....