if I *had* to get a Win box, it'd be a Gateway, even if they do have a spokescow now.
They seemed to use decent components
They don't. Bought a complete system from them in 1999, basic junk box (Lose98, K6-2 400) and the motherboard (some MSI-55?? micro-ATX thing) and power supply (90W. 90W??! 30% of the time, when I tried to use the LoseModem, the system immediately reset, probably due to too much current being drawn) in the machine were both complete crap.
Since you're an x86 hardware novice, find a local geek and have him/her put together a system for you out of separate components. You won't save money with this approach, but you will get better quality than any of the big OEMs can give you in a "personal" machine. Also, if you build from components, you don't have to pay the Windoze tax unless you want to. HTH,
If Satan had a daughter named Hell, I suspect he would have called the underworld something else.
If you check your Milton, you'll find that Satan had a daughter named Sin, and he banged her, and they had a son called Death. Taking this metaphor a little further, Business had a daughter named Greed, and together, they begat a brood called "Pervasive Idiocy", "Pointy-Haired Boss", "Dot-Com", and "RIAA". Nothing to see here, move along.
Make it clear that unless the case is immediately dismissed, Microsoft will no longer sell or support any product in the USA...
This is over the top and they'd never do it, but very interesting. Main problem is that it would require MS to lose a very large chunk of short-term profits, which would piss off the stockholders, which would lead to top executives getting fired and/or losing a lot of money. That'd never fly.
Also, if they did this, the US Government would get quite upset, possibly upset enough to send Special Ops into Redmond to retrieve the code for all those 'DozeNT systems that are vital to National Security.
(Who moderated this as "troll"? If it is a troll, it's an old-school, interesting troll with almost all the words spelled right, not one of those idiotic crapfloods that passes for a troll nowadays. +3 Interesting, too bad I used up all my mod points yesterday....)
it seems that enough people generate obfuscated code unintentionally that having a contest to encourage this sort of thing is silly and counterproductive to the advancement of programming techniques. I just hope the people who enter this contest are a bit cleaner coders when they have real work to do!
Creating the immense amount of obfuscation seen in these code snippets requires a great deal of skill, and the people who enter this contest definitely don't code like that in the course of their normal work. (Creating code like that takes too much time, and 2 of the main programmer virtues are "laziness" and "impatience".)
Part of the Linux kernel's oddness is caused by the fact that it's a kernel. Parts are in assembly (stuff under arch/ , and possibly some device drivers) and there are more "goto"s than one might like. These are there for efficiency. Speed is much more critical in the kernel than it is in userspace, since functions may be called while another part of the kernel is holding a spinlock, etcetera.
Also, many of the IOCCC entries become much more legible if you run "gcc -E ioccc.c > preprocessed-ioccc.c && indent preprocessed-ioccc.c" . A fair number of them rely on Fancy Preprocessor Tricks to achieve maximum obfuscation. HTH,
Me, i run an open relay on my home server because I never know where i will be when i want to send an email, does that make me a bad person that I help the spammers send you guys spam?
The 1st Amendment doesn't apply to this. You're attempting to raise emotions instead of solving a problem, makes me think you're trolling, but oh well.
Yes, running an open SMTP relay is bad. Best analogy is leaving your house unlocked, and leaving the liquor cabinet unlocked as well. If you did that, and some 16-year-old got into your whiskey and then behind the wheel of a car, you'd be in trouble... but it's totally legal to leave your house and liquor cabinet unlocked.
You personally may not be a bad person, but you are certainly lazy, sloppy, and remiss in your duties, since there are a number of ways you can set your machine up to relay mail from legitimate users without running a wide-open relay:
POP/IMAP-before-SMTP (easy to do, works with all clients)
SMTP Authentication (slightly harder but more secure, some clients may not function properly)
Turn relaying off, SSH to your machine and use a local client (very secure, but inconvenient)
Set up a web-mail client, access your machine from any browser.
An SMTP relay is similar to an "attractive nuisance" like a swimming pool in a residential neighborhood. Best course of action is to put a fence up, so people don't piss in your SMTP server, or fall in and sue you.
One really, really obvious feature that I've never seen is integration of the command line shell and a file manager.
KDE 2.2.1, open a Konqueror window, Window->Show Terminal. Been there for a while, since KDE 2.0.1 I think. (Unless you meant something different by "integration", which you probably did, since that's a really slippery word and you should've defined it better.) Never used it much since I always have a konsole open anyway.
I've never seen the ability to launch a command line shell set to the directory you're currently viewing in the file manager.
Shoot, that's in there too: Open a Konqueror window and choose Tools->Open Terminal (Ctrl-T). Been there since KDE 1.1.2 IIRC, and probably since before then. KDE 1.1.2 came out sometime in 1999.
If you could have a window that was half-command line, half-file manager, such that when you changed directories in one half, it would change directories in the other?
That is the default behavior for the command lines you launch with the "show terminal/Ctrl-T" command in Konqeror, and probably has been there since 2.0.1. You can turn it off by clicking on the "link" icon below the terminal window scrollbar.
Everything you mentioned is available, it either seems so obvious or so "why would anyone want that?" that no one bothers to mention it. Oh yeah, it would also confuse the newbies. HTH anyway.
Maybe I missed it, but religion isn't in this list. To the vast majority of people, this is an important part of their lives, and any changes would be significant to the social structure.
Religion these days is largely about keeping things consistent. Heck, 100 years ago, they were still using Latin routinely in Roman Cathloic services! Lots of people are attracted to religion because it provides a feeling of continuity/oneness with the past. As such, it's a difficult thing for a "futurist" to talk about sanely.
Yet, I think something will surface as a "catch all" religion for people who would simply be Atheists otherwise.
the biggest question is why oh why doesnt the biggest linux company have a program in place to help lug's get the word out for basically free.
Back in December of 1999, the Washtenaw LUG held a "counter-rally" in the U of M Student Union, in the same room where MS was hyping Windows2K and pushing Office. The organizers contacted Redhat, and they sent 500 CDs of Redhat 6.2 for us to give out. Don't know how much it helped in the long run, but Redhat was responsive to this. (So were Caldera, Slackware, Turbo, and SuSE.).
The key is volume and visibility. Redhat is a business; they're here to make a profit. Sure, they want to give back to the community, but for some reason a 2-day event focused on software makes better sense for a mass CD distribution than sending out 3 or 4 guys to hand out CDs on street corners.
It's all about organization. Contact your local LUG and set up an installfest and/or large public meeting for those interested in Linux. Once you've got the details worked out, contact Redhat a week or two in advance. Odds are they'd be glad to help if you can show evidence that enough people will be on hand.
Most of the stuff is probably already in place long ago. it's part of their plan to get @home off real cheap. If they indeed go bankrupt, you can probably buy @home a lot cheaper than what how much it costs now.
I got a physical letter and an E-mail from AT&T @Home in my area (Lansing, MI) saying that AT&T were trying to buy Excite's network but had a backup plan to migrate all their users to an AT&T-owned network in place. They said they would call all the subscribers if they couldn't buy Excite's network. "Service interruptions are possible" was repeated a few times. Business as usual, really.
Obviously, the invisible hand of the market economy needs to go jump in a toxic waste pool so it can see better.
I'm not sure if this helps the terminology issue much, but hopefully it gives some directions.
Mixed metaphors often do. The shortest distance between 2 points is off the wall, I always say.
Re:Linux fetish and mediated slashdot
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Joy of Linux
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· Score: 2
Yet another book for the outsiders. But is it really for the outsiders, are are most of the slashdotters actually outsiders?
Slashdot hereby further encourages the Linux fetish without any depth or discussion..and I am concluding that slashdot is not for Linux
users at all but is meant to humanize them to the outside world. [...] But perhaps we should abandon our pretensions and seriously discuss how many of us
actually are using linux or have any interest in using linux, and how many of us are just trying to be cooler than thou.
Well, if you've been here long enough, you've certainly noticed that this place is probably not the place to go for intelligent discussion with depth. That's what k5 and various mailing lists and/or newsgroups are for. The rapid turnover rate of articles here doesn't encourage the long debates that are possible on other forums. The absence of killfiles and the presence of idiots posting irrelevant crap as ACs can also make it difficult to carry on a real debate.
So: The people who are actually using Linux or have any interest in it often don't trumpet their OS choice to the world at large. They're busy coding, documenting, working, or screwing around, and they're mature enough to realize that there are other OSes out there, and sometimes these are better tools for some users. Anyone who's constantly shouting "Linux R00LZ! W1ND0Z3 DR00L5!" is either 14 years old or a moron and can be safely ignored. "Cooler than thou?" Come on, you are not the OS you run. A Linux-using luser is still a luser, and a Windows-using BOFH is still a BOFH.
If you want to see "discussion without the filtering of marketroids", then you might want to subscribe to a LUG mailing list. Many LUGs have these, and discussion varies quite a bit. "This is why we should boycott Adobe!", "Mac OS X is cool, here's 5 reasons why", "What modules should you put in your Apache?", "Converting from well-defined HTML to XML", and "Call for presentations: Local Chamber of Commerce needs several speakers to talk about Open/Free Software" have all come up in the last week on my local LUG's list.
Seriously, it could correct spelling and grammar mistakes you make on the fly without you having to hit the backspace key simply by
understanding how you use your keyboard. They could also have a completely voluntary profiling system on a website that would allow
you do use "personal profiles" on different systems, so all you have to do is download a program, log in online, and you have an automatic
spelling and grammar checker at your fingertips
And since you have to log in to a remote machine to use this service, you're doing the hard work for them--they already know that user XYZ is sitting down at 111.222.222.111. No company in the world would pass up the opportunity to sell this info once they realized, "Hey, we have a userbase, and we know which IPs they're using 75% of the time." And what happens if you're in the back of the beyond, far from even a 14.4 dialup? "Sorry, I need to access the Net, otherwise I type really slow." No thanks!
What I wish is that hardware manufacturers would just use one standard interface, then only one driver for each device would
be necessary. Impossible you say? Look at current modems, old sound cards (all sound blaster compatible), NE2000 network cards
(I won't buy any other kinds) ATAPI CD-Roms....
Yeah, right. The problem with this approach is that it leads to unnecessarily narrow definitions of functionality, and can prevent hardware manufacturers from doing things cheaper. Not only that, but the examples you chose are kind of screwy. "Current modems" without a qualifier implies the N+1 varieties of WinModems out there, which all do things differently. Many old sound cards did things their own way and had a small DOS TSR that provided SB compatability in software. The floppy, IDE, and ATAPI command sets, as well as the RS232 serial-port standards, are published and standardized, but these are properly communications protocols between devices, not the devices themselves. The PCI and ISA busses are, again, more like protocols to allow devices to communicate rather than devices themselves. I don't see too many non-PCI, non-ISA devices that plug into the insides of an x86.
Non-x86 hardware platforms have it easier; one vendor like Apple/Sun/IBM says, "This is the list of hardware that works on our platform," and you use it. The multitude of hardware vendors for x86 boards and devices has led to a large amount of conflicting standards and weird, proprietary hardware. (If a vendor can save $0.10 per unit on a device by leaving out hardware functions which can be replicated by a kludged binary driver, they will. Think WinModems.) This approach has also made x86 hardware cheaper than the alternatives.
Simply put, things will change and change quickly in hardware. Standards are a good idea, but they quickly become lowest-common-denominator, think "VGA".
Libraries have decades worth of newspapers available for searching - why can't this be put on the web?
People are trying, but AFAIK it's all going to be (sigh) proprietary, pay-per-use access. A large company, UMI, owns the rights to a bunch of microfilm reels of newspapers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor, going back to the 1880s in some cases. The goal over the next few years is to get these pieces of microfilm scanned, do OCR on the readable portions, hand-correct certain bits, and put all the OCRed text+images into a Bloody Huge Database. Preview at http://www.infolearning.com:8090/promo/histNews/sl d001.html in case anyone is really interested. That is only a fraction of what they've got in their 'base; we've been shipping them ~10G of processed data every week.
Of course, they're going to be charging a nominal leg for this service, and marketing it to universities and other large institutions instead of individual subscribers. Public libraries maybe if the libraries have decent funding.
(All the heavy lifting here is being done by several hundred workers in India and Mexico, natch.)
IBM THinkpad 600X, three mouse buttons, works great with SuSE 7.0, sound supported via ALSA or kernel 2.2.18's OSS/Lite. Lucent driver from http://walbran.org/sean/linux/stodolsk/ works with 2.2.x and 2.4.x kernels as long as you read the 1ST.README file and follow the directions. Main problem with the 600X is that the total RAM is not recognized on boot and it's not quite the N meg you think you have, but (N-0.5) M because of the "EZ-BIOS" or whatever.
If you're disappointed that Watterson's gone...
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Web-Based Comics
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· Score: 2
http://ozyandmillie.org/ is a great replacement for those who crave a "Calvin and Hobbes" fix. I'm surprised that the article didn't mention it--despite the author's comments about getting syndication, it's almost as mainstream as "Kevin and Kell" and should appeal to anyone who liked Watterson's stuff. Ah well, they couldn't mention every strip that's worth reading, and that strip just recently moved to Keenspot. The early strips are a bit uneven, but everything from series 5 on is definitely worth your time.
I know I'm not alone in getting more laughs out of 9 or 10 online strips than I get out of an entire page of newspaper strips. Sure, they might be worried that "Sinfest" or "Sluggy Freelance" might offend some people, but as recent MTV/network TV events like "Jackass" and "Survivor" show, the people at Huge Media Coproations know that offensiveness sells. Bah, let them ignore the goose that's laying golden eggs... I'll be viewing webcomics every day and buying merchandise from the ones that are really nifty.
In order to "activate" it, a customer will send data about the installation, such as product ID number and hardware identifier, to a Microsoft-run license clearinghouse.
How? Snail mail? Carrier pigeon? Or will Whistler's initial install boot into a "limited mode" that can access MS.NET with a modem to deliver the ID# and "hardware identifier" (what exactly do they mean by that?) to some remote server, which transmits the required key back?
It seems to me there'd be holes large enough to drive a truck through if they do it over the net, and delivering keys via mail would piss customers off to no end. ("I bought this shiny new MS software and I have to wait 4 to 6 weeks for the key to arrive so I can USE it?") Or maybe they've forsaken the market for ordinary users with WinXX who'd like to buy an upgrade off the store shelves, yet have no Net connection or a really awful 14.4 modem. "Whistler 2001! Only OEMs and large businesses have the resources to get it installed reliably!"
You'd think they'd learn from the N+1 previous copy-protection disasters. It doesn't stop the 31337 KR4CK3RZ one bit, and it irritates normal users. I have a feeling this is just a scary fluff piece, designed to draw hits to ZD/Yahoo/MSNBC and such.
It wouldn't surprise me if your Gateway laptop has something wrong with it. 1.5 years ago, I made the mistake of buying a Gateway, and had horrible problems running Linux on the machine. Win98 also crashed pretty often, but that's "normal behavior".
Needless to say, I got no joy from Gateway's tech support. They said the problems I was experiencing due to the fact I'd installed Linux on the machine, even after I'd wiped the drive and used the "Recovery CD" to completely restore the system. I eventually found out that the problem was due to a motherboard that had been built by the lowest bidder--replacing the board made Linux rock solid and cut '98 crashes in half.
They certainly can't support every OS
s/every/any/ and you're closer to the truth. Oh yes, there used to be these things called "standards" that specified how the pieces of hardware in an IBM-PC compatible system would work. There are even standards for laptops (PCMCIA, Cardbus, APM 1.2, etc.) though nobody seems to follow them. If you check the Linux Configure.help file, you'll see a couple of options in there that are for working around br0ken IBM Thinkpad APM behavior....
Check out his excellent Narnia series sometime
(starting with The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe)
Depends on the kid. The religious allegories present in that series are extremely transparent, and I recall being disgusted with them when I read the books at about age 7 or 8. Kids who were raised Jewish/Muslim/Hindu/Discordian will most likely not be amused, to say nothing of their parents!
Same problem with Madeline L'Engel's stuff, though the religious content is a bit more subtle. Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley, OTOH, is excellent. However, most kids wouldn't be able to plow through it until they're 10 or 11.
Let's face it, media companies have a strong influence on the way
that modern Americans perceive the world; the MPAA/RIAA do control the present and their portrayal of the OS community, accurate or not, will prove the
basis for many people's opinions! We need propaganda of our own if we wish to compete.
Good point. Personally, I've been thinking of using some free tools (POVray and the mpeg_movie suite) to try and create a short (<2 min) video clip that shows Linux and open-source software in a positive light. This clip could be broadcast on Public Access TV, various websites, and possibly major networks if someone fronts the cash. (*cough* RedHat, SuSE) Is anyone working on a project like this, and could they use some help? I'm willing to contribute.
This is probably necessary, because people in general pay more attention to pretty pictures than to well-thought-out arguments. Sad but true; propaganda for the masses is one of the areas where Linux/BSD/Plan 9 have not concentrated their efforts, and it's showing. Let's see if we can change that.
Disclaimer: I'm slightly drunk, but I'll stand by this post, as it's an important issue and one that needs to be addressed.
I think that's one of your standard tripping-out-on-drugs thoughts,
IIRC, there's an urban legend that ingestion of LSD cures color-blindness, so you may not be too far off the mark. Since color perception is something the brain dynamically creates and modifies according to the article, messing around with the brain using hallucinogens can (and does) make you see colors that aren't there. Whether this has any use in treating/studying color-blindness is questionable, but the experiments would be fun...:-}
FWIW, I'm slightly red/green colorblind, and the only effect I've ever noticed from it in the real world is that I can't tell the tan M&Ms from the green ones without examining them really closely. Color vision is not *quite* as important as we think, since most mammals get by with far less color perception than humans. Heck, I might be willing to live with B/W vision if I could see in extremely low light like a cat....
Re:Who is SuSE aimed at? Everyone!
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SuSE 7.0
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· Score: 3
Well, I'm sure glad I didn't pick up that SuSE 6.4 boxed set for half price earlier today...
Anyway, I'd have to agree with with a lot of Jeff's comments. SuSE is excellent if you don't have a fast Net drop. For that reason alone I've been reccommending it to any potential Linux users. Nothing's more frustrating for a newbie than to realize you need $FOO, and it's available for download, but A) the computer you bought has a LoseModem or B) it's 20M in size, and your Real Modem will be busy for 3 hours.
That said, there's at least one improvement they could make: Either borrow, steal, or re-invent RedHat's "sndconfig" program. That thing can save a lot of time and aggravation, especially for a newbie.
Allowing ReiserFS as an option is a good thing, but it might bite people in the arse since very few rescue systems can read ReiserFS. I hope they've addressed this by putting a rescue floppy image that groks ReiserFS somewhere on the CD.
YaST doesn't seem as invasive as Linuxconf, and it's possible (even easy) to munge around manually with things in/sbin/init.d/ without your system getting all confused. Having all the config data in/etc/rc.config may be a bad idea for some things, but I think most people find the idea easier to understand than the royal mess that lies underneath RedHat's/etc/sysconfig/.
Now to wait a few days for the/. effect to wear off so I can actually get a look at what they've done....
Good job, Larry. Focus on the schools. In five to ten years, the business market will be ready too.
...wasn't that Apple's strategy when they had special educational pricing for the Apple ][ and Mac lines? I seem to recall a whole lot of Apple ][s and Macs in educational institutions between... oh, 1983-1993. But once the kids got out into the Real World, guess what they found? PC-compatibles, running DOS or Win3.1. Since Macs and Apple][s were used in schools, they were considered toys, not appropriate for Serious Computing.
And now what do I see in the high schools? Labs full of Pentia, where teachers give classes on how to use MS Word instead of how to do stuff with Applesoft BASIC and/or Pascal. There's a lesson or three here: Business needs drive what happens in schools in subtle ways. And good marketing will overcome superior products any day.
I'll just have to say "M3 T00" to the comments about local storage. LANs can be flaky, as anyone knows, and if there's no {floppy, ZIP, LS-120} drive equivalent on these little NCs, there damn well should be. What if little Johnny needs to take work home, but he lives out in the sticks at the end of a 33.6K pipe? (This will be a problem for the next 2-3 years, if not longer.) Oh well, maybe the time for thin clients has finally come... though I tend to use my P-150 laptop as a thin client these days and I'm always annoyed by how slow it is!
Re:This reminds me of a short story I read.
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Laptops In Education
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· Score: 2
You're thinking of Isaac Asimov's "The Feeling of Power." Not a bad read.
Laptops in school would be a good idea if students knew how to use them or had something relevant ot do with them. 50% of the future-PHBs-of-America who go to school where I work have laptops. As far as I can tell, most of them know how to use M$ Office and I. Exploder. They are completely lost when it comes to doing anything else, and they don't need/can't understand a general-purpose computing tool.
Then again, these students are studying for MBAs, so their brains have mostly ossified. Elementary or junior high students would be more likely to pick up on the possibilities. Especially if {Perl, Python, gcc/Cygwin} were available.
Good point there. I think being a workaholic is fast becoming the norm in the USA, and it will cause nasty problems in the long run. My boss works 55-hour weeks. An irritating cow-orker told me that I'd never get anywhere if I worked "only" 40-hour weeks. The Future Management Types of America I have to deal with all the time are perpetually running, getting nowhere fast and learning things either superficially or not at all in the quest for the Next Big Thing.
Bipolar disorder may actually be a way of coping with this sort of lifestyle. It's certain that biology/evolution has set it up so that humans can work amazingly hard for brief periods of time, then gronk out for roughly the same period; gronk-out happening soon after the mastodon's dead/the sales contract's landed. Bipolar people just have the pendulum swinging a little too far both ways.
As for antidepressants, I was on a whopping does of Zoloft (150mg) for many months. It didn't make me feel any better, but people around me said they noticed an improvement. Ditched it; didn't need the side effects. (Who needs other people's opinions anyway?)
Slashdot Mirror
They don't. Bought a complete system from them in 1999, basic junk box (Lose98, K6-2 400) and the motherboard (some MSI-55?? micro-ATX thing) and power supply (90W. 90W??! 30% of the time, when I tried to use the LoseModem, the system immediately reset, probably due to too much current being drawn) in the machine were both complete crap.
Since you're an x86 hardware novice, find a local geek and have him/her put together a system for you out of separate components. You won't save money with this approach, but you will get better quality than any of the big OEMs can give you in a "personal" machine. Also, if you build from components, you don't have to pay the Windoze tax unless you want to. HTH,
If you check your Milton, you'll find that Satan had a daughter named Sin, and he banged her, and they had a son called Death. Taking this metaphor a little further, Business had a daughter named Greed, and together, they begat a brood called "Pervasive Idiocy", "Pointy-Haired Boss", "Dot-Com", and "RIAA". Nothing to see here, move along.
This is over the top and they'd never do it, but very interesting. Main problem is that it would require MS to lose a very large chunk of short-term profits, which would piss off the stockholders, which would lead to top executives getting fired and/or losing a lot of money. That'd never fly.
Also, if they did this, the US Government would get quite upset, possibly upset enough to send Special Ops into Redmond to retrieve the code for all those 'DozeNT systems that are vital to National Security.
(Who moderated this as "troll"? If it is a troll, it's an old-school, interesting troll with almost all the words spelled right, not one of those idiotic crapfloods that passes for a troll nowadays. +3 Interesting, too bad I used up all my mod points yesterday....)
Creating the immense amount of obfuscation seen in these code snippets requires a great deal of skill, and the people who enter this contest definitely don't code like that in the course of their normal work. (Creating code like that takes too much time, and 2 of the main programmer virtues are "laziness" and "impatience".)
Part of the Linux kernel's oddness is caused by the fact that it's a kernel. Parts are in assembly (stuff under arch/ , and possibly some device drivers) and there are more "goto"s than one might like. These are there for efficiency. Speed is much more critical in the kernel than it is in userspace, since functions may be called while another part of the kernel is holding a spinlock, etcetera.
Also, many of the IOCCC entries become much more legible if you run "gcc -E ioccc.c > preprocessed-ioccc.c && indent preprocessed-ioccc.c" . A fair number of them rely on Fancy Preprocessor Tricks to achieve maximum obfuscation. HTH,
The 1st Amendment doesn't apply to this. You're attempting to raise emotions instead of solving a problem, makes me think you're trolling, but oh well.
Yes, running an open SMTP relay is bad. Best analogy is leaving your house unlocked, and leaving the liquor cabinet unlocked as well. If you did that, and some 16-year-old got into your whiskey and then behind the wheel of a car, you'd be in trouble... but it's totally legal to leave your house and liquor cabinet unlocked.
You personally may not be a bad person, but you are certainly lazy, sloppy, and remiss in your duties, since there are a number of ways you can set your machine up to relay mail from legitimate users without running a wide-open relay:
- POP/IMAP-before-SMTP (easy to do, works with all clients)
- SMTP Authentication (slightly harder but more secure, some clients may not function properly)
- Turn relaying off, SSH to your machine and use a local client (very secure, but inconvenient)
- Set up a web-mail client, access your machine from any browser.
An SMTP relay is similar to an "attractive nuisance" like a swimming pool in a residential neighborhood. Best course of action is to put a fence up, so people don't piss in your SMTP server, or fall in and sue you.KDE 2.2.1, open a Konqueror window, Window->Show Terminal. Been there for a while, since KDE 2.0.1 I think. (Unless you meant something different by "integration", which you probably did, since that's a really slippery word and you should've defined it better.) Never used it much since I always have a konsole open anyway.
I've never seen the ability to launch a command line shell set to the directory you're currently viewing in the file manager.
Shoot, that's in there too: Open a Konqueror window and choose Tools->Open Terminal (Ctrl-T). Been there since KDE 1.1.2 IIRC, and probably since before then. KDE 1.1.2 came out sometime in 1999.
If you could have a window that was half-command line, half-file manager, such that when you changed directories in one half, it would change directories in the other?
That is the default behavior for the command lines you launch with the "show terminal/Ctrl-T" command in Konqeror, and probably has been there since 2.0.1. You can turn it off by clicking on the "link" icon below the terminal window scrollbar.
Everything you mentioned is available, it either seems so obvious or so "why would anyone want that?" that no one bothers to mention it. Oh yeah, it would also confuse the newbies. HTH anyway.
Religion these days is largely about keeping things consistent. Heck, 100 years ago, they were still using Latin routinely in Roman Cathloic services! Lots of people are attracted to religion because it provides a feeling of continuity/oneness with the past. As such, it's a difficult thing for a "futurist" to talk about sanely.
Yet, I think something will surface as a "catch all" religion for people who would simply be Atheists otherwise.
That has already been done a couple of times.
so maybe new "religions" will spring up that focus on maximizing the life we live now
That too.
Back in December of 1999, the Washtenaw LUG held a "counter-rally" in the U of M Student Union, in the same room where MS was hyping Windows2K and pushing Office. The organizers contacted Redhat, and they sent 500 CDs of Redhat 6.2 for us to give out. Don't know how much it helped in the long run, but Redhat was responsive to this. (So were Caldera, Slackware, Turbo, and SuSE.).
The key is volume and visibility. Redhat is a business; they're here to make a profit. Sure, they want to give back to the community, but for some reason a 2-day event focused on software makes better sense for a mass CD distribution than sending out 3 or 4 guys to hand out CDs on street corners.
It's all about organization. Contact your local LUG and set up an installfest and/or large public meeting for those interested in Linux. Once you've got the details worked out, contact Redhat a week or two in advance. Odds are they'd be glad to help if you can show evidence that enough people will be on hand.
I got a physical letter and an E-mail from AT&T @Home in my area (Lansing, MI) saying that AT&T were trying to buy Excite's network but had a backup plan to migrate all their users to an AT&T-owned network in place. They said they would call all the subscribers if they couldn't buy Excite's network. "Service interruptions are possible" was repeated a few times. Business as usual, really.
Obviously, the invisible hand of the market economy needs to go jump in a toxic waste pool so it can see better.
I'm not sure if this helps the terminology issue much, but hopefully it gives some directions.
Mixed metaphors often do. The shortest distance between 2 points is off the wall, I always say.
Well, if you've been here long enough, you've certainly noticed that this place is probably not the place to go for intelligent discussion with depth. That's what k5 and various mailing lists and/or newsgroups are for. The rapid turnover rate of articles here doesn't encourage the long debates that are possible on other forums. The absence of killfiles and the presence of idiots posting irrelevant crap as ACs can also make it difficult to carry on a real debate.
So: The people who are actually using Linux or have any interest in it often don't trumpet their OS choice to the world at large. They're busy coding, documenting, working, or screwing around, and they're mature enough to realize that there are other OSes out there, and sometimes these are better tools for some users. Anyone who's constantly shouting "Linux R00LZ! W1ND0Z3 DR00L5!" is either 14 years old or a moron and can be safely ignored. "Cooler than thou?" Come on, you are not the OS you run. A Linux-using luser is still a luser, and a Windows-using BOFH is still a BOFH.
If you want to see "discussion without the filtering of marketroids", then you might want to subscribe to a LUG mailing list. Many LUGs have these, and discussion varies quite a bit. "This is why we should boycott Adobe!", "Mac OS X is cool, here's 5 reasons why", "What modules should you put in your Apache?", "Converting from well-defined HTML to XML", and "Call for presentations: Local Chamber of Commerce needs several speakers to talk about Open/Free Software" have all come up in the last week on my local LUG's list.
Mmm-hmm. Please check http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/DWIM. html for an example of where this leads.
And since you have to log in to a remote machine to use this service, you're doing the hard work for them--they already know that user XYZ is sitting down at 111.222.222.111. No company in the world would pass up the opportunity to sell this info once they realized, "Hey, we have a userbase, and we know which IPs they're using 75% of the time." And what happens if you're in the back of the beyond, far from even a 14.4 dialup? "Sorry, I need to access the Net, otherwise I type really slow." No thanks!
Yeah, right. The problem with this approach is that it leads to unnecessarily narrow definitions of functionality, and can prevent hardware manufacturers from doing things cheaper. Not only that, but the examples you chose are kind of screwy. "Current modems" without a qualifier implies the N+1 varieties of WinModems out there, which all do things differently. Many old sound cards did things their own way and had a small DOS TSR that provided SB compatability in software. The floppy, IDE, and ATAPI command sets, as well as the RS232 serial-port standards, are published and standardized, but these are properly communications protocols between devices, not the devices themselves. The PCI and ISA busses are, again, more like protocols to allow devices to communicate rather than devices themselves. I don't see too many non-PCI, non-ISA devices that plug into the insides of an x86.
Non-x86 hardware platforms have it easier; one vendor like Apple/Sun/IBM says, "This is the list of hardware that works on our platform," and you use it. The multitude of hardware vendors for x86 boards and devices has led to a large amount of conflicting standards and weird, proprietary hardware. (If a vendor can save $0.10 per unit on a device by leaving out hardware functions which can be replicated by a kludged binary driver, they will. Think WinModems.) This approach has also made x86 hardware cheaper than the alternatives.
Simply put, things will change and change quickly in hardware. Standards are a good idea, but they quickly become lowest-common-denominator, think "VGA".
People are trying, but AFAIK it's all going to be (sigh) proprietary, pay-per-use access. A large company, UMI, owns the rights to a bunch of microfilm reels of newspapers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor, going back to the 1880s in some cases. The goal over the next few years is to get these pieces of microfilm scanned, do OCR on the readable portions, hand-correct certain bits, and put all the OCRed text+images into a Bloody Huge Database. Preview at http://www.infolearning.com:8090/promo/histNews/sl d001.html in case anyone is really interested. That is only a fraction of what they've got in their 'base; we've been shipping them ~10G of processed data every week.
Of course, they're going to be charging a nominal leg for this service, and marketing it to universities and other large institutions instead of individual subscribers. Public libraries maybe if the libraries have decent funding.
(All the heavy lifting here is being done by several hundred workers in India and Mexico, natch.)
IBM THinkpad 600X, three mouse buttons, works great with SuSE 7.0, sound supported via ALSA or kernel 2.2.18's OSS/Lite. Lucent driver from http://walbran.org/sean/linux/stodolsk/ works with 2.2.x and 2.4.x kernels as long as you read the 1ST.README file and follow the directions. Main problem with the 600X is that the total RAM is not recognized on boot and it's not quite the N meg you think you have, but (N-0.5) M because of the "EZ-BIOS" or whatever.
I know I'm not alone in getting more laughs out of 9 or 10 online strips than I get out of an entire page of newspaper strips. Sure, they might be worried that "Sinfest" or "Sluggy Freelance" might offend some people, but as recent MTV/network TV events like "Jackass" and "Survivor" show, the people at Huge Media Coproations know that offensiveness sells. Bah, let them ignore the goose that's laying golden eggs... I'll be viewing webcomics every day and buying merchandise from the ones that are really nifty.
How? Snail mail? Carrier pigeon? Or will Whistler's initial install boot into a "limited mode" that can access MS.NET with a modem to deliver the ID# and "hardware identifier" (what exactly do they mean by that?) to some remote server, which transmits the required key back?
It seems to me there'd be holes large enough to drive a truck through if they do it over the net, and delivering keys via mail would piss customers off to no end. ("I bought this shiny new MS software and I have to wait 4 to 6 weeks for the key to arrive so I can USE it?") Or maybe they've forsaken the market for ordinary users with WinXX who'd like to buy an upgrade off the store shelves, yet have no Net connection or a really awful 14.4 modem. "Whistler 2001! Only OEMs and large businesses have the resources to get it installed reliably!"
You'd think they'd learn from the N+1 previous copy-protection disasters. It doesn't stop the 31337 KR4CK3RZ one bit, and it irritates normal users. I have a feeling this is just a scary fluff piece, designed to draw hits to ZD/Yahoo/MSNBC and such.
Needless to say, I got no joy from Gateway's tech support. They said the problems I was experiencing due to the fact I'd installed Linux on the machine, even after I'd wiped the drive and used the "Recovery CD" to completely restore the system. I eventually found out that the problem was due to a motherboard that had been built by the lowest bidder--replacing the board made Linux rock solid and cut '98 crashes in half.
They certainly can't support every OS
s/every/any/ and you're closer to the truth. Oh yes, there used to be these things called "standards" that specified how the pieces of hardware in an IBM-PC compatible system would work. There are even standards for laptops (PCMCIA, Cardbus, APM 1.2, etc.) though nobody seems to follow them. If you check the Linux Configure.help file, you'll see a couple of options in there that are for working around br0ken IBM Thinkpad APM behavior....
Depends on the kid. The religious allegories present in that series are extremely transparent, and I recall being disgusted with them when I read the books at about age 7 or 8. Kids who were raised Jewish/Muslim/Hindu/Discordian will most likely not be amused, to say nothing of their parents!
Same problem with Madeline L'Engel's stuff, though the religious content is a bit more subtle. Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley, OTOH, is excellent. However, most kids wouldn't be able to plow through it until they're 10 or 11.
Good point. Personally, I've been thinking of using some free tools (POVray and the mpeg_movie suite) to try and create a short (<2 min) video clip that shows Linux and open-source software in a positive light. This clip could be broadcast on Public Access TV, various websites, and possibly major networks if someone fronts the cash. (*cough* RedHat, SuSE) Is anyone working on a project like this, and could they use some help? I'm willing to contribute.
This is probably necessary, because people in general pay more attention to pretty pictures than to well-thought-out arguments. Sad but true; propaganda for the masses is one of the areas where Linux/BSD/Plan 9 have not concentrated their efforts, and it's showing. Let's see if we can change that.
Disclaimer: I'm slightly drunk, but I'll stand by this post, as it's an important issue and one that needs to be addressed.
IIRC, there's an urban legend that ingestion of LSD cures color-blindness, so you may not be too far off the mark. Since color perception is something the brain dynamically creates and modifies according to the article, messing around with the brain using hallucinogens can (and does) make you see colors that aren't there. Whether this has any use in treating/studying color-blindness is questionable, but the experiments would be fun... :-}
FWIW, I'm slightly red/green colorblind, and the only effect I've ever noticed from it in the real world is that I can't tell the tan M&Ms from the green ones without examining them really closely. Color vision is not *quite* as important as we think, since most mammals get by with far less color perception than humans. Heck, I might be willing to live with B/W vision if I could see in extremely low light like a cat....
Anyway, I'd have to agree with with a lot of Jeff's comments. SuSE is excellent if you don't have a fast Net drop. For that reason alone I've been reccommending it to any potential Linux users. Nothing's more frustrating for a newbie than to realize you need $FOO, and it's available for download, but A) the computer you bought has a LoseModem or B) it's 20M in size, and your Real Modem will be busy for 3 hours.
That said, there's at least one improvement they could make: Either borrow, steal, or re-invent RedHat's "sndconfig" program. That thing can save a lot of time and aggravation, especially for a newbie.
Allowing ReiserFS as an option is a good thing, but it might bite people in the arse since very few rescue systems can read ReiserFS. I hope they've addressed this by putting a rescue floppy image that groks ReiserFS somewhere on the CD.
YaST doesn't seem as invasive as Linuxconf, and it's possible (even easy) to munge around manually with things in /sbin/init.d/ without your system getting all confused. Having all the config data in /etc/rc.config may be a bad idea for some things, but I think most people find the idea easier to understand than the royal mess that lies underneath RedHat's /etc/sysconfig/.
Now to wait a few days for the /. effect to wear off so I can actually get a look at what they've done....
(SuSE User since 5/5/1999! Go Geeko!)
And now what do I see in the high schools? Labs full of Pentia, where teachers give classes on how to use MS Word instead of how to do stuff with Applesoft BASIC and/or Pascal. There's a lesson or three here: Business needs drive what happens in schools in subtle ways. And good marketing will overcome superior products any day.
I'll just have to say "M3 T00" to the comments about local storage. LANs can be flaky, as anyone knows, and if there's no {floppy, ZIP, LS-120} drive equivalent on these little NCs, there damn well should be. What if little Johnny needs to take work home, but he lives out in the sticks at the end of a 33.6K pipe? (This will be a problem for the next 2-3 years, if not longer.) Oh well, maybe the time for thin clients has finally come... though I tend to use my P-150 laptop as a thin client these days and I'm always annoyed by how slow it is!
Laptops in school would be a good idea if students knew how to use them or had something relevant ot do with them. 50% of the future-PHBs-of-America who go to school where I work have laptops. As far as I can tell, most of them know how to use M$ Office and I. Exploder. They are completely lost when it comes to doing anything else, and they don't need/can't understand a general-purpose computing tool.
Then again, these students are studying for MBAs, so their brains have mostly ossified. Elementary or junior high students would be more likely to pick up on the possibilities. Especially if {Perl, Python, gcc/Cygwin} were available.
Good point there. I think being a workaholic is fast becoming the norm in the USA, and it will cause nasty problems in the long run. My boss works 55-hour weeks. An irritating cow-orker told me that I'd never get anywhere if I worked "only" 40-hour weeks. The Future Management Types of America I have to deal with all the time are perpetually running, getting nowhere fast and learning things either superficially or not at all in the quest for the Next Big Thing.
Bipolar disorder may actually be a way of coping with this sort of lifestyle. It's certain that biology/evolution has set it up so that humans can work amazingly hard for brief periods of time, then gronk out for roughly the same period; gronk-out happening soon after the mastodon's dead/the sales contract's landed. Bipolar people just have the pendulum swinging a little too far both ways.
As for antidepressants, I was on a whopping does of Zoloft (150mg) for many months. It didn't make me feel any better, but people around me said they noticed an improvement. Ditched it; didn't need the side effects. (Who needs other people's opinions anyway?)