I think the conclusion was that the upper limit is when the speed of the molecules reaches the speed of light.
Explanation by Cecil Adams here mostly agrees, though it says the upper limit is when the particles are traveling so fast they gain so much mass that each particle becomes a singularity. IIRC, it's impossible for any object with a nonzero rest mass to actually reach c.
It's difficult to know what to tell you since you didn't provide any useful details for most of your hardware. There's a Usenet group called comp.os.linux.hardware that many people have found useful; post there.
For example: no Linux support for my printer. I don't have my scanner working yet.
CD burning: well, OK, when I've worked out how to do it in 2.2.18.
Kernel 2.2.18 is positively ancient and you need to upgrade it if you want any "new" devices to work. USB support in particular is much better in kernel 2.4 than it was in 2.2. If you want to get your CD-RW working,
Search comp.os.linux.hardware for keywords "CD-RW howto" since questions involving CD-RWs get asked and answered there all the time.
Wireless hub setup via USB? Nope. USB ADSL modem? Nope.
See above comment about better USB support with new kernels. USB networking is a Goddess-awful kludge, but some devices do work... you know how to use Google, right?
Winmodems? Nope.
The linmodems page has a lot of information on which ones work (many Lucent models, some Conexant, some others) and links/HOWTOs for getting them working.
Digital camera? Who knows...
The people on comp.os.linux.hardware? Most USB digital cameras appear as USB Mass Storage devices, plug in, "mount/dev/sda1/mnt/camera", copy all the pictures to your hard disk. USB Mass Storage support is much better in kernel 2.4 than is was in 2.2, so upgrade!
This is precisely the reason I quit my job as a corporate tool and returned to school to study physics... so that I never again have to give up my job to someone who's better at "looking busy" than I am.
Keep in mind that the businesses which hire physicists act just like other businesses when it comes to hiring and firing people--looking busy is still important, in other words. And if you go into academentia, you'll find that keeping your job depends on how often you publish, and how good you are at playing faculty politics. Six of one, half-a-dozen plus/minus 0.004 of the other.
I find [moving between virtual desktops by just moving the mouse] quite useful, so much so that I went back to Enlightenment specifically for that feature, and why I hate using KDE.
Um. KDE Control Center->Desktop->Window Behavior->Advanced->"Active Desktop Borders". This defaults to "disabled", but if you set it to "always enabled", KDE acts like I think you want it to. This feature has been there since KDE 3.0's first release, and it might have been in KDE 2 (I don't remember.) I don't really care for it, but whatever yanks your crank....
It will still need a hard drive, save files and savestates are still too big to just put on flash,
? "Flash" as in flash-RAM, or "flash" as in CompactFlash media? "du -sh ~/.xmame ~/.snes96_snapshots" returns a total of less than 1M, which should certainly be doable no matter what kind of media you're talking about. (YMMV on this, but I play a fair number of emulated games.) After all, an 8Mbyte SmartMedia card is roughly $10.
if those geeks are able to plug a terminal emulator and nullmodem into a service port on the back
Yes. If any company really tries to make this idea into a real product, this would be a big selling point. Let's just hope they can convince the marketroids and lawyers of this, and that some beancounter decides the $1-2 cost-per-unit of adding this functionality is worth it.
I keep saying that we need to throw out the various CLI shells and replace them with a better CLI, one that takes advantage of the improvements in usability that have come about since the 70's for God's sake,
Interesting idea. Could you expand on it a bit? What, specifically, are the changes you would make to bash/tcsh/zsh in order to take advantage of these improvements? Which specific improvements were you talking about? Links to academic research on the subject of command-line usability, or columns by half-trained experts on the same subject, or crazed rants by experienced curmudgeons would be appreciated. (Yes, the syntax for doing reasonably complex programming in bash feels totally weird, but Perl exists for doing more complex junk.)
If you say anything about "natural language parsing", I'm going to laugh and point you to an interactive fiction guide since those games' parsers show the state of command-line natural language parsing pretty well--and they can't come close to reacting intelligently to everything the user of a (simple) game can do, much less everything the user of a (complex) modern OS can do!
Email. I'm not sure what linux client would work as "nicely" as outlook express does
First, define what you mean by "nicely". No one can help you unless you can explicitly enumerate your requirements. That said, look at Evolution?. It's similar to Outhouse Express. Tools exist to convert.PST files into standard mbox or mdir formats, so you can use any mail client you want.
Synchronization with my palm pilot
JPilot? Dunno, I have a Zaurus and use Qtopia Desktop, which works fine.
USENET. I started out reading usenet on trn, but I'm not sure I can move from Forte Agent & Xnews to TRN.
trn? Where have you been for the last 10 years? There are plenty of other Usenet clients for Unix-like systems available. Pan and Knode for the GUI, slrn and emacs for the console. Pan is similar to Agent.
IRC.
Never been too involved in IRC, so can't offer any suggestions.
Office apps.
OpenOffice has worked fine for me so far, but very little that I do requires "office" functionality. If I want to write text, I use a text editor.
"MultiMedia". From Winamp to Divx to every other codec under the sun used to encode avis, mpgs and the like. Much of that goes away when you abandon windows.
Really? mplayer has played every movie I've thrown at it, except for Sorenson V3-encoded stuff, and they've managed to get that working partially now. Also, a friend of mine gave me a movie that was encoded in something that the default version of 'Doze Media Player that came with Doze2K couldn't play,
but mplayer figured it out immediately (and reported the encoding was MS DirectShow 2.0, of all things! Sigh.)
Yahoo/AIM/ICQ messengers & chat rooms
I hear good things about GAIM, but I don't care much for instant messaging. Chat rooms? Yuck.
Digital camera and CF reader
Difficult to answer without details. Most digital cameras with USB cables act like USB Mass Storage devices; you plug it in and do "mount/dev/sda1/mnt/camera" and that's it. CF readers are similar if they're USB, if they're PCMCIA, you replace/dev/sda1 with/dev/hde1. You want real advice, post the details to comp.os.linux.hardware.
I can deal with using pine for email, but how do I convert 60 megs of emails in OE into something usable in linux?
You don't have to deal with Pine if you prefer something else--I know it's hard for you to believe, but great advances have been made since 1995. Try
LibPST to convert PST into mbox, then you can use any mail client that understands mbox (every sane mail client understands mbox.) HTH, use your Usenet-posting knowledge if you need help since Slashdot sucks as a tech-support forum.
In almost all Linux(...) window managers the application menu can be reached just by clicking on the desktop, which is IMO the easiest and fastest way to do this by far. KDE and Gnome developers what were you thinking?
KDE Control Center->Look and Feel->Desktop-> Clicks on the desktop. By default, left-clicks on the desktop are bound to "no action", right-clicks are bound to "desktop menu", middle-clicks are bound to "window list menu". Sounds like you want to bind left-click to "application menu", so go do that.
The reason it's not done that way by default is because that behavior would confuse Windows users. Also remember that a lot of people maximize every application they work with, 'cause of poor eyesight or tiny monitors or deep-seated fear of "messy desks".
On a more abstract level, clicking on the root window to bring up a menu of applications only works when there's some root window visible, you will have a hard time enforcing that without writing your own WM, and you'll end up with a similar problem: There's a guaranteed bit of root window always visible at the bottom of the screen, but it's just a blank space without the mnemonic features ("start" or "K" button) people have gotten used to.
When I used to work in academia supporting professors and graduate students who were trying to write papers with inordinately complex mathematical models you begin to understand why it is a problem.
This is a bit weird, since AFAIK, most complex papers involving pure math are written in TeX. If you're doing anything really complex or nonstandard with your equation layouts, there's just no substitute. TeX is not completely standardized (there are freely available addons like LaTeX and LAMS-TeX) but still....
Really, the methodology for creating the paper depended sharply on the ultimate destination (or publication). Every publisher has their own requirements for typeset, etc
True. That can get kind of painful in the real world, since style-over-substance rules there and people spend half the day dinking with fonts to get it to look "just perfect". I would expect academic journals to be both exact and sane in their requirements ("use Helvetica 14 Foo for headings, Times New Roman 12 for normal text, Computer Modern 14 for mathematical type, DVI or Quark files.") but that probably doesn't happen since academics are just as stupid as everybody else IME.
The flag is not being held up that I can see, and I would assume that 1/6 gravity would be sufficient to let it hang down, so what gives?
There's no wind on the moon, so obviously the flag can't wave in the wind--it'd just hang down limply, and look ugly. To counter this, they put a stiff wire that sticks out horizontally in the top of the flagpole. The flag hangs down from that wire. Sorry, no direct URL right now, but I believe Cecil Adams talked about the whole thing somewhere on The Straight Dope.
What good is a Linux PDA that doesn't sync with Linux desktops?
This is bloody strange, since I've been syncing my Z with my desktop for a while now. Getting it set up can be a bit of a pain, but when it's set, it Just Works.
How to get the Z syncing under Linux.
My main complaint with the thing so far is that Opera is a bloated sack... really, if I open a 400K HTML document with simple formatting (<p>, <b>, <i>, <h1> through <h3>) Opera on the Z takes 10 to 15 seconds to scroll down one screen. Maybe later I should try Konq-embedded on it, but I've had the device for less than a week...
[Appleworks] always screws up something about formatting when I import [Microsoft Word] documents -- especially if you use the odd tab settings that Word likes to auto-format your documents with. I find that it doesn't do formatting of text around embedded images well, nor does it handle footnotes 100% correctly.
This is not particularly surprising. (experiment done in late 1998:) Take a document written in MS Word 97 on an x86, with a fair number of embedded images. Open this document in MS Word 98 on a MacOS 9 machine. Watch all the pagination and image formatting go to hell. Fix pagination and images, save document as "document-mac.doc". Open "document-mac.doc" on an x86 with MS Word 97... guess what, pagination and images are screwed.
Really, if slightly different versions of MS Word using the same document format can't render things in the same way, you've got to wonder what chance 3rd-party applications have at doing the right thing. Or if MS products do the same thing as Appleworks does, can Appleworks claim it as a feature?
Are you trolling, or just misinformed? The kdegames package (included with every distro that includes KDE) has "KMines", which is a Minesweeper clone. GNOME has "gnomines". Both these are included under the "games" tab in the K menu ("Start menu") in an installation of SuSE 8.0, and
I'd certainly be amazed if Mandrake didn't put them in a similar place.
Diablo?
There's no Diablo for Linux, so it's not on the installation CDs for any distro. You can install Falcons Eye Nethack for something arguably better than Diablo, or Zangband for, again, something arguably better than Diablo.
Falconseye Nethack is on many distro CDs, Zangband is not.
MS Paint? Right. Paint Shop Pro for me. The same goes for default shipments of Linux
GIMP comes with every distro, and is as good or better than PaintShop Pro. Curiously, you haven't mentioned any Linux applications in your half-formed rant, only Windows applications. What, praytell, are some examples of applications you think you need that aren't included in a recent distro CD or aren't available via Sourceforge/freshmeat.net ?
Don't know about the VNC client (if there is any, it would be cool to be able to enter "vnc://password@111.222.111.222" into Konqueror, for sure) but the VNC-server that's in KDE 3.1 was released for KDE2 and KDE 3.0 as "krfb", and it worked pretty well--I'm running it on my laptop right now. Google for "krfb" and you'll find it.
But first, write some decent skins for XMMS. It doesn't even compare to the skins available on WinAmp!
Are you trying to be a troll, or are you just misinformed? xmms uses the same skin format as WinAmp does--a bunch of.BMP files with standardized names, all concatenated into one zip file. Just put any Winamp skin into/usr/share/xmms/Skins/ (system-wide) or ~/.xmms/Skins/ (for one user). This is fully documented in the man page for xmms and has been there for at least 2 years.
Watching thier passwords getting cracked in the span of an hour and a half meeting will get the idea home that if you could do it in that time, what could a real cracker do in the course of a night.
From comp.os.linux.misc , Dec. 2, 2000:
-------
From: "Peter T. Breuer"
Subject: Re: email security
Jose Luis Domingo Lopez wrote:
If you really want to impress your audience on how insecure email is,
consider making a tipical demonstration about reading others email and
getting their POP accounts username/passwords. As simple as download a
sniffer, like sniffit or ethereal (graphical), and start a session where
someone, in another PC in the sme LAN, tries to download his mail.
I've tried precisely this...
When the audience sees the username/password and mail contents appear on
your screen I'm sure they will pay more attention.
... and they weren't impressed. They didn't understand what passwords
were or what they signified.
-------
Against stupidity, the very Gods themselves contend in vain. You can lead people to good resources on password security, but you can't make them think. And ease-of-use trumps security any time you are dealing with large groups of people or people who are not too bright.
OK, I bought the Pro version within a week of release. What the heck, I wanted KDE 3.0. Installation and (basic) configuration were pretty much as the article described--easy. Lots of interesting software to install and use, antialiased fonts look great in KDE apps, YaST2 provides easy interfaces for the newbie to do all kinds of things.
Unfortunately, with 8.0, SuSE has gone to a Redhat-style mess under/etc/sysconfig/ instead of the relatively clean system they had before. The system boot scripts have become about twice as complex as they were in 7.3, with little gain in functionality AFAICT. It works, sure, but aesthetically, it stinks.
Also, the PCMCIA management took a turn for the worse. PCMCIA configuration information isn't stored in the time-honored/etc/pcmcia/ directory, but somewhere under/etc/sysconfig again. This makes it difficult to use the extremely useful PCMCIA scheme support. The apparent solution is to define multiple instances of a PCMCIA NIC through YaST, and the first one corresponds to slot 0 while the second one corresponds to slot 1. Weird, and not documented in the SuSE manuals.
it's too bad all Mr. Simmons writes anymore is thrillers and horror.
Google for "Children of the Helix". Simmons said in some forum a couple of months back (found it via the Open Letters column in Schlock Mercenary) that he's writing a sequel to the Hyperion Cantos. I don't know how he's going to pull that off, since the end of The Rise Of Endymion was... er, pretty final.
Speaking of good science fiction, that link above contains some pretty decent looks at various science fiction topics. Yes, the art isn't as good as it could be, but that's beside the point....
Waiting for new open source drivers to be included in the kernel is a pain in the rear-end, and when they finally arrive the hardware may even be obsolete.
Examples, please? I know of a few things that are not well-supported--Kyro video cards, really cheap software modems, really cheap USB devices, and really cheap printers--but your question is pretty nebulous.
install proprietary drivers suplied by the manufacturer is also annoying, and usually requires a recompilation,
nVidia's evil binary-only X server and kernel module doesn't require this, presuming you're using a distro-supplied kernel (as all the newbies you're referring to will do.) Just install the proper nVidia RPM! Heck, SuSE 8.0 has very recent builds of those, and the installer asks you if you want to use them, should it detect an nVidia card in the system. The Lucent Winmodem drivers also have RPMs available for Redhat and some other distros.
create a standard wrapper for binary drivers that'll allow hardware manufacturers to make the closed source drivers kernel version independent
This is a very nontrivial task. A better solution has been implemented in the nVidia and Lucent modules I mentioned--there's a source wrapper distributed with a big chunk of binary code, you recompile the source wrapper against the kernel headers of the kernel version you want to use, and bingo, you've got a module that works. This approach avoids the kludge of putting together a binary interface, and puts the burden of hardware support directly on the manufacturer, where it really belongs.
make it simple to "joe average" to install new hardware such as a video card and the related drivers ?
Something you may not know is that XFree86 4.N has an abstract binary interface that allows people like nVidia and Kyro to create binary-only X servers. The problem is that, for various reasons, most of the binary-only X servers
currently available also rely on binary-only kernel modules to do some work. (one part of the nVidia module actually emulates part of the Windows Registry... gack.)
Re:Spidey is why I learned to read
on
Review: Spiderman
·
· Score: 2
How to actually kill Wolverine was the topic of many a cafeteria discussion when I was in college.
In the "Wolverine" comic book, somewhere within the first 50 issues, they said basically that Wolverine could starve to death, dehydrate, die from lack of oxygen (~15 minutes without breathing) , and drown. No, I don't have exact issue references. Sorry.
Spider-Man sounds like it could be good, but what i'm really waiting for is a good HBO miniseries adaptation of "Watchmen". That would completely rock, and probably make people think differently about "comic books can't be high art." </wishful_thinking>
As for the teachers, they already get retirement benefits, this was just a scheme to strengthen the seniority system that public schools are based on.
There's definitely truth in this. The seniority system anywhere, whether in public schools or factory floors or Congress, should be abolished and replaced with some sort of meritocracy plan.
And they only had to work half the year every year! It's absurd. If any public school teachers ever did a day of REAL work, they'd die.
Half the year? What? Are you trolling for flames, or just misinformed? Summer vacation in the USA lasts about 3.5 months, add in spring+winter breaks to get about 4 months. That gives a work year of 8 months, 2/3 of a year. And many teachers put in time teaching summer school, as well as going beyond the 8-hour day with extracurricular activities and providing extra tutoring.
As for the "REAL work" comment, you've obviously never tried to teach. Dealing with 25-30 people under 18 who have varying intelligence levels, varying interest levels, and varying degrees of homicidal mania isn't exactly easy. There are plenty of bad teachers, as described
here, but there are also plenty of dedicated professionals who want to help kids learn, and who typically invest plenty of their own time and money doing so. Don't tar all public schoolteachers with the same brush.
I bought their cheapest (stupid move) laser printer a few months back and it doesn't like linux (Only supports PCL not PostScript).
? Printers don't have to speak PostScript. It makes things easier when they do, since everything speaks PostScript under Unix, but there are PostScript->(printer native data format) converters out there. They typically go by the name "print filters", and every distro includes a metric arseload of them.
PCL is pretty standard, so PostScript->PCL print filters are mature and stable. Your distro's setup tool (YaST, "setup", DrakConf, linuxconf, whatever) almost certainly has a "setup printer" option in it. Use this if you can--it's generally pretty easy, and involves letting the parport auto-detection work, or picking your printer from a list of models. If that doesn't work, try going to linuxprinting.org
, entering your printer's model# into the search box, and following the directions.
The day that people willfully allow themselves to confuse a living, breathing, naturally occuring organism with a series of subroutines and man-made polymers, we have truly destroyed the human race.
I think you're going a little over the edge. If people make themselves believe that a robot = a human, that's just another of the (infinite) ways in which people decieve themselves. Protecting people from self- or group-enforced deception would require closing all churches, TV stations, movie theatres, schools, and libraries, as well as shutting down the entire Internet. If some old foozball wants to believe that his {robot,cat,dog,parakeet} is a human and act as if this is the case, who cares?
Conversely, if people don't make themselves believe that an artificial construct is a human, but believe that an artifical construct is a human "accidentally" or "naturally",
it has serious implications.
Slashdot Mirror
Explanation by Cecil Adams here mostly agrees, though it says the upper limit is when the particles are traveling so fast they gain so much mass that each particle becomes a singularity. IIRC, it's impossible for any object with a nonzero rest mass to actually reach c.
For example: no Linux support for my printer. I don't have my scanner working yet.
Printers
Scanners
CD burning: well, OK, when I've worked out how to do it in 2.2.18.
Kernel 2.2.18 is positively ancient and you need to upgrade it if you want any "new" devices to work. USB support in particular is much better in kernel 2.4 than it was in 2.2. If you want to get your CD-RW working, Search comp.os.linux.hardware for keywords "CD-RW howto" since questions involving CD-RWs get asked and answered there all the time.
Wireless hub setup via USB? Nope. USB ADSL modem? Nope.
See above comment about better USB support with new kernels. USB networking is a Goddess-awful kludge, but some devices do work... you know how to use Google, right?
Winmodems? Nope.
The linmodems page has a lot of information on which ones work (many Lucent models, some Conexant, some others) and links/HOWTOs for getting them working.
Digital camera? Who knows...
The people on comp.os.linux.hardware? Most USB digital cameras appear as USB Mass Storage devices, plug in, "mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera", copy all the pictures to your hard disk. USB Mass Storage support is much better in kernel 2.4 than is was in 2.2, so upgrade!
Keep in mind that the businesses which hire physicists act just like other businesses when it comes to hiring and firing people--looking busy is still important, in other words. And if you go into academentia, you'll find that keeping your job depends on how often you publish, and how good you are at playing faculty politics. Six of one, half-a-dozen plus/minus 0.004 of the other.
Um. KDE Control Center->Desktop->Window Behavior->Advanced->"Active Desktop Borders". This defaults to "disabled", but if you set it to "always enabled", KDE acts like I think you want it to. This feature has been there since KDE 3.0's first release, and it might have been in KDE 2 (I don't remember.) I don't really care for it, but whatever yanks your crank....
? "Flash" as in flash-RAM, or "flash" as in CompactFlash media? "du -sh ~/.xmame ~/.snes96_snapshots" returns a total of less than 1M, which should certainly be doable no matter what kind of media you're talking about. (YMMV on this, but I play a fair number of emulated games.) After all, an 8Mbyte SmartMedia card is roughly $10.
if those geeks are able to plug a terminal emulator and nullmodem into a service port on the back
Yes. If any company really tries to make this idea into a real product, this would be a big selling point. Let's just hope they can convince the marketroids and lawyers of this, and that some beancounter decides the $1-2 cost-per-unit of adding this functionality is worth it.
Interesting idea. Could you expand on it a bit? What, specifically, are the changes you would make to bash/tcsh/zsh in order to take advantage of these improvements? Which specific improvements were you talking about? Links to academic research on the subject of command-line usability, or columns by half-trained experts on the same subject, or crazed rants by experienced curmudgeons would be appreciated. (Yes, the syntax for doing reasonably complex programming in bash feels totally weird, but Perl exists for doing more complex junk.)
If you say anything about "natural language parsing", I'm going to laugh and point you to an interactive fiction guide since those games' parsers show the state of command-line natural language parsing pretty well--and they can't come close to reacting intelligently to everything the user of a (simple) game can do, much less everything the user of a (complex) modern OS can do!
First, define what you mean by "nicely". No one can help you unless you can explicitly enumerate your requirements. That said, look at Evolution?. It's similar to Outhouse Express. Tools exist to convert .PST files into standard mbox or mdir formats, so you can use any mail client you want.
Synchronization with my palm pilot
JPilot? Dunno, I have a Zaurus and use Qtopia Desktop, which works fine.
USENET. I started out reading usenet on trn, but I'm not sure I can move from Forte Agent & Xnews to TRN.
trn? Where have you been for the last 10 years? There are plenty of other Usenet clients for Unix-like systems available. Pan and Knode for the GUI, slrn and emacs for the console. Pan is similar to Agent.
IRC.
Never been too involved in IRC, so can't offer any suggestions.
Office apps.
OpenOffice has worked fine for me so far, but very little that I do requires "office" functionality. If I want to write text, I use a text editor.
"MultiMedia". From Winamp to Divx to every other codec under the sun used to encode avis, mpgs and the like. Much of that goes away when you abandon windows.
Really? mplayer has played every movie I've thrown at it, except for Sorenson V3-encoded stuff, and they've managed to get that working partially now. Also, a friend of mine gave me a movie that was encoded in something that the default version of 'Doze Media Player that came with Doze2K couldn't play, but mplayer figured it out immediately (and reported the encoding was MS DirectShow 2.0, of all things! Sigh.)
Yahoo/AIM/ICQ messengers & chat rooms
I hear good things about GAIM, but I don't care much for instant messaging. Chat rooms? Yuck.
Digital camera and CF reader
Difficult to answer without details. Most digital cameras with USB cables act like USB Mass Storage devices; you plug it in and do "mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera" and that's it. CF readers are similar if they're USB, if they're PCMCIA, you replace /dev/sda1 with /dev/hde1. You want real advice, post the details to comp.os.linux.hardware.
I can deal with using pine for email, but how do I convert 60 megs of emails in OE into something usable in linux?
You don't have to deal with Pine if you prefer something else--I know it's hard for you to believe, but great advances have been made since 1995. Try LibPST to convert PST into mbox, then you can use any mail client that understands mbox (every sane mail client understands mbox.) HTH, use your Usenet-posting knowledge if you need help since Slashdot sucks as a tech-support forum.
KDE Control Center->Look and Feel->Desktop-> Clicks on the desktop. By default, left-clicks on the desktop are bound to "no action", right-clicks are bound to "desktop menu", middle-clicks are bound to "window list menu". Sounds like you want to bind left-click to "application menu", so go do that.
The reason it's not done that way by default is because that behavior would confuse Windows users. Also remember that a lot of people maximize every application they work with, 'cause of poor eyesight or tiny monitors or deep-seated fear of "messy desks".
On a more abstract level, clicking on the root window to bring up a menu of applications only works when there's some root window visible, you will have a hard time enforcing that without writing your own WM, and you'll end up with a similar problem: There's a guaranteed bit of root window always visible at the bottom of the screen, but it's just a blank space without the mnemonic features ("start" or "K" button) people have gotten used to.
This is a bit weird, since AFAIK, most complex papers involving pure math are written in TeX. If you're doing anything really complex or nonstandard with your equation layouts, there's just no substitute. TeX is not completely standardized (there are freely available addons like LaTeX and LAMS-TeX) but still....
Really, the methodology for creating the paper depended sharply on the ultimate destination (or publication). Every publisher has their own requirements for typeset, etc
True. That can get kind of painful in the real world, since style-over-substance rules there and people spend half the day dinking with fonts to get it to look "just perfect". I would expect academic journals to be both exact and sane in their requirements ("use Helvetica 14 Foo for headings, Times New Roman 12 for normal text, Computer Modern 14 for mathematical type, DVI or Quark files.") but that probably doesn't happen since academics are just as stupid as everybody else IME.
There's no wind on the moon, so obviously the flag can't wave in the wind--it'd just hang down limply, and look ugly. To counter this, they put a stiff wire that sticks out horizontally in the top of the flagpole. The flag hangs down from that wire. Sorry, no direct URL right now, but I believe Cecil Adams talked about the whole thing somewhere on The Straight Dope.
This is bloody strange, since I've been syncing my Z with my desktop for a while now. Getting it set up can be a bit of a pain, but when it's set, it Just Works. How to get the Z syncing under Linux.
My main complaint with the thing so far is that Opera is a bloated sack... really, if I open a 400K HTML document with simple formatting (<p>, <b>, <i>, <h1> through <h3>) Opera on the Z takes 10 to 15 seconds to scroll down one screen. Maybe later I should try Konq-embedded on it, but I've had the device for less than a week...
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Well, it'd certainly get rid of the vermin which currently infest that general area, but it's overkill when we have regular elections and stuff.
This is not particularly surprising. (experiment done in late 1998:) Take a document written in MS Word 97 on an x86, with a fair number of embedded images. Open this document in MS Word 98 on a MacOS 9 machine. Watch all the pagination and image formatting go to hell. Fix pagination and images, save document as "document-mac.doc". Open "document-mac.doc" on an x86 with MS Word 97... guess what, pagination and images are screwed.
Really, if slightly different versions of MS Word using the same document format can't render things in the same way, you've got to wonder what chance 3rd-party applications have at doing the right thing. Or if MS products do the same thing as Appleworks does, can Appleworks claim it as a feature?
Wrong. Does it have games? Minesweeper? Nope
Are you trolling, or just misinformed? The kdegames package (included with every distro that includes KDE) has "KMines", which is a Minesweeper clone. GNOME has "gnomines". Both these are included under the "games" tab in the K menu ("Start menu") in an installation of SuSE 8.0, and I'd certainly be amazed if Mandrake didn't put them in a similar place.
Diablo?
There's no Diablo for Linux, so it's not on the installation CDs for any distro. You can install Falcons Eye Nethack for something arguably better than Diablo, or Zangband for, again, something arguably better than Diablo.
Falconseye Nethack is on many distro CDs, Zangband is not.
MS Paint? Right. Paint Shop Pro for me. The same goes for default shipments of Linux
GIMP comes with every distro, and is as good or better than PaintShop Pro. Curiously, you haven't mentioned any Linux applications in your half-formed rant, only Windows applications. What, praytell, are some examples of applications you think you need that aren't included in a recent distro CD or aren't available via Sourceforge/freshmeat.net ?
Don't know about the VNC client (if there is any, it would be cool to be able to enter "vnc://password@111.222.111.222" into Konqueror, for sure) but the VNC-server that's in KDE 3.1 was released for KDE2 and KDE 3.0 as "krfb", and it worked pretty well--I'm running it on my laptop right now. Google for "krfb" and you'll find it.
Are you trying to be a troll, or are you just misinformed? xmms uses the same skin format as WinAmp does--a bunch of .BMP files with standardized names, all concatenated into one zip file. Just put any Winamp skin into /usr/share/xmms/Skins/ (system-wide) or ~/.xmms/Skins/ (for one user). This is fully documented in the man page for xmms and has been there for at least 2 years.
From comp.os.linux.misc , Dec. 2, 2000 :
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From: "Peter T. Breuer"
Subject: Re: email security
Jose Luis Domingo Lopez wrote:
If you really want to impress your audience on how insecure email is, consider making a tipical demonstration about reading others email and getting their POP accounts username/passwords. As simple as download a sniffer, like sniffit or ethereal (graphical), and start a session where someone, in another PC in the sme LAN, tries to download his mail.
I've tried precisely this ...
When the audience sees the username/password and mail contents appear on your screen I'm sure they will pay more attention.
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Against stupidity, the very Gods themselves contend in vain. You can lead people to good resources on password security, but you can't make them think. And ease-of-use trumps security any time you are dealing with large groups of people or people who are not too bright.
Unfortunately, with 8.0, SuSE has gone to a Redhat-style mess under /etc/sysconfig/ instead of the relatively clean system they had before. The system boot scripts have become about twice as complex as they were in 7.3, with little gain in functionality AFAICT. It works, sure, but aesthetically, it stinks.
Also, the PCMCIA management took a turn for the worse. PCMCIA configuration information isn't stored in the time-honored /etc/pcmcia/ directory, but somewhere under /etc/sysconfig again. This makes it difficult to use the extremely useful PCMCIA scheme support. The apparent solution is to define multiple instances of a PCMCIA NIC through YaST, and the first one corresponds to slot 0 while the second one corresponds to slot 1. Weird, and not documented in the SuSE manuals.
It is a good distro, just has some warts....
Google for "Children of the Helix". Simmons said in some forum a couple of months back (found it via the Open Letters column in Schlock Mercenary) that he's writing a sequel to the Hyperion Cantos. I don't know how he's going to pull that off, since the end of The Rise Of Endymion was... er, pretty final.
Speaking of good science fiction, that link above contains some pretty decent looks at various science fiction topics. Yes, the art isn't as good as it could be, but that's beside the point....
Examples, please? I know of a few things that are not well-supported--Kyro video cards, really cheap software modems, really cheap USB devices, and really cheap printers--but your question is pretty nebulous.
install proprietary drivers suplied by the manufacturer is also annoying, and usually requires a recompilation,
nVidia's evil binary-only X server and kernel module doesn't require this, presuming you're using a distro-supplied kernel (as all the newbies you're referring to will do.) Just install the proper nVidia RPM! Heck, SuSE 8.0 has very recent builds of those, and the installer asks you if you want to use them, should it detect an nVidia card in the system. The Lucent Winmodem drivers also have RPMs available for Redhat and some other distros.
create a standard wrapper for binary drivers that'll allow hardware manufacturers to make the closed source drivers kernel version independent
This is a very nontrivial task. A better solution has been implemented in the nVidia and Lucent modules I mentioned--there's a source wrapper distributed with a big chunk of binary code, you recompile the source wrapper against the kernel headers of the kernel version you want to use, and bingo, you've got a module that works. This approach avoids the kludge of putting together a binary interface, and puts the burden of hardware support directly on the manufacturer, where it really belongs.
make it simple to "joe average" to install new hardware such as a video card and the related drivers ?
Something you may not know is that XFree86 4.N has an abstract binary interface that allows people like nVidia and Kyro to create binary-only X servers. The problem is that, for various reasons, most of the binary-only X servers currently available also rely on binary-only kernel modules to do some work. (one part of the nVidia module actually emulates part of the Windows Registry... gack.)
In the "Wolverine" comic book, somewhere within the first 50 issues, they said basically that Wolverine could starve to death, dehydrate, die from lack of oxygen (~15 minutes without breathing) , and drown. No, I don't have exact issue references. Sorry.
Spider-Man sounds like it could be good, but what i'm really waiting for is a good HBO miniseries adaptation of "Watchmen". That would completely rock, and probably make people think differently about "comic books can't be high art." </wishful_thinking>
There's definitely truth in this. The seniority system anywhere, whether in public schools or factory floors or Congress, should be abolished and replaced with some sort of meritocracy plan.
And they only had to work half the year every year! It's absurd. If any public school teachers ever did a day of REAL work, they'd die.
Half the year? What? Are you trolling for flames, or just misinformed? Summer vacation in the USA lasts about 3.5 months, add in spring+winter breaks to get about 4 months. That gives a work year of 8 months, 2/3 of a year. And many teachers put in time teaching summer school, as well as going beyond the 8-hour day with extracurricular activities and providing extra tutoring.
As for the "REAL work" comment, you've obviously never tried to teach. Dealing with 25-30 people under 18 who have varying intelligence levels, varying interest levels, and varying degrees of homicidal mania isn't exactly easy. There are plenty of bad teachers, as described here, but there are also plenty of dedicated professionals who want to help kids learn, and who typically invest plenty of their own time and money doing so. Don't tar all public schoolteachers with the same brush.
? Printers don't have to speak PostScript. It makes things easier when they do, since everything speaks PostScript under Unix, but there are PostScript->(printer native data format) converters out there. They typically go by the name "print filters", and every distro includes a metric arseload of them.
PCL is pretty standard, so PostScript->PCL print filters are mature and stable. Your distro's setup tool (YaST, "setup", DrakConf, linuxconf, whatever) almost certainly has a "setup printer" option in it. Use this if you can--it's generally pretty easy, and involves letting the parport auto-detection work, or picking your printer from a list of models. If that doesn't work, try going to linuxprinting.org , entering your printer's model# into the search box, and following the directions.
Say what? Or were you talking about this?
(When over-abbreviating things, be careful you don't change the meaning of what you were trying to say.)
I think you're going a little over the edge. If people make themselves believe that a robot = a human, that's just another of the (infinite) ways in which people decieve themselves. Protecting people from self- or group-enforced deception would require closing all churches, TV stations, movie theatres, schools, and libraries, as well as shutting down the entire Internet. If some old foozball wants to believe that his {robot,cat,dog,parakeet} is a human and act as if this is the case, who cares?
Conversely, if people don't make themselves believe that an artificial construct is a human, but believe that an artifical construct is a human "accidentally" or "naturally", it has serious implications.