They have some of them humonguous monitors at my school's library marked for people with disabilities. I don't get it though, the keyboards have braille dots on them, but the monitors are running at high resolution and very fuzzy at that... I keep wondering if it was somebody's cruel idea to spite blind people!
As an avid internet user and Nigerian patriot, I wish to make a severe protest about this act of wickedness that has been committed by the Slashdot editors. As bad as scam letters can be, I think pulverizing our measly bandwidth and equipment with Slashdot readers is a little extreme as a spam-control measure.
When you go out to buy a copy of this game, you pay money for it. Guess where that money goes? That's right, Blizzard's pocket. You are funding Blizzard. If doing that does not support Blizzard, I don't know what does.
When trolls accuse Linux people of being hypocritical, it's stuff like this that actually gives them proof. It's always a good thing to live by principle. You won't die tomorrow if you don't buy a Blizzard game, will you?
One of the focuses of Mandrake 8.2 is stability and bug-free-ness. They opted not to put KDE 3.0 because, despite all its strong points, it's bound to have a nasty bug or two when it is released -- after all, we're talking about a brand new version of Qt and lots of code porting, plus plenty of new features. They would rather stick with what has gone through a long, thorough bug-weeding process. Of course, that doesn't mean they deny you KDE 3.0 either - IIRC there are KDE 3.0 beta packages already in the release, and if you want to upgrade, you can always do it later through the cooker.
An Anonymous Coward points out an article from Joseph Menn's in the Las Angeles Times which begins...
Dude, were you thinking of Las Vegas? I'll be the first to vote that aspell support be included in Slash immediately to at least remedy some of our editors' chronic error-making!:)
There is a reason why MandrakeSoft chose not to wait for KDE 3 and GNOME 2: stability. One of the primary reasons why Mandrake 8.2 is being released is to provide a more mature, refined and stable distribution than its immediate predecessors. And I'll say it does pretty well at that. Bleeding edge software like KDE 3 and GNOME 2 that will most certainly have a couple of significant bugs at their initial release will wait until the next major version number change, most likely (perhaps you want to wait for Mandrake 9.0 instead).
I wonder how much of the blue screen they can fit unto a cell phone. Perhaps it would be easier if the phone just gave a General Protection Fault and halted whenever you lose signal.
Or better still, "Scandisk has detected that your cellphone was not shut down properly..."
I shoulda seen this one coming...
on
Debian NetBSD
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Finally, it's the GNU/BSD distribution!
Re:Moving away from X
on
Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Check out Evas. It features an excellent, very easy to use/simplified API, hardware acceleration, anti-aliasing and all of those cool things and is designed in such a way that you don't need to be concerned what kind of hardware your app will run on - evas will scale accordingly. Plus, there's rumors that rasterman is building an Evas client-server API that could almost supplant X, while not necessarily supplanting X...I think it's a pity not enough people are looking at this excellent library.
Enlightenment 0.17 is built upon Evas, and from my experience with it, it does run very fast.
I know I risk being modded down for this, but gimme a break. Bacteria living for 300 million years? Under conditions of great heat and pressure? If it is true that living bacteria have been found in coal deposits that were (supposedly) formed over a period of 300 million years, then perhaps we should drop the mind stereotypes and actually consider that perhaps the coal was not actually formed over such a long time. I mean, the odds are astounding.
Looking at these historical posts with great interest, I couldn't help noticing that Usenet used to be primarily a news medium--they were actually news groups where you could find news, but today it hardly fills that role. It would be interesting to see how along the way newsgroups involved more into a forum/discussion group role. Nowadays the last place I'd go to find news would be a newsgroup:)
I also wonder how sites like Slashdot have negatively impacted the level of newsgroup usage. I imagine that with more and more Slashdotlike sites springing about, there must be less people using newsgroups to vent opinions and stuff. Especially since Slashdotlike sites typically perform the task of actually delivering news (don't want to get deep here)
Within 60 days of entry of this Final Judgment, Microsoft shall offer for sale, at an auction administered by an independent third party, licenses to sell Office for use on Operating Systems other than Windows, without further royalty beyond the auction price. In conjunction with these licenses, Microsoft shall supply to the winning bidders all information and tools required to port Office to other Operating Systems... (you'll have to check out the settlement to see the rest)
Exactly what they propose here is for Microsoft to auction 3 licenses for Microsoft office source code, and the bidders get the source code and can then use it to develop a version for any operating system they want. They are not forcing Microsoft to develop for another platform. Which is a good thing, because I'd rather have another company develop MS Office for Linux anyway.
I wonder what companies one would expect to be top bidders here? I'm sure Sun Microsystems wouldn't miss a chance like this for anything.
Is it just me or is everyone missing out on a really major provision in this settlement? Look at this.
12. Internet Browser Open-Source License. Beginning three months after the date of entry of this Final Judgment, Microsoft shall disclose and license all source code for all Browser products and Browser functionality. In addition, during the remaining term of this Final Judgment, Microsoft shall be required to disclose and make available for license, both at the time of and subsequent to the first beta release (and in no event later than one hundred eighty (180) days prior to its commercial distribution of any Browser product or Browser functionality embedded in another product), all source code for Browser products and Browser functionality. As part of this disclosure, Microsoft shall identify, provide reasonable explanation of, and disseminate publicly a complete specification of all APIs, Communications Interfaces and Technical Information relating to the Interoperation of such Browser product(s) and/or functionality and each Microsoft Platform Software product. The aforementioned license shall grant a royalty-free, non-exclusive perpetual right on a non-discriminatory basis to make, use, modify and distribute without limitation products implementing or derived from Microsoft s source code, and a royalty-free, non-exclusive perpetual right on a non-discriminatory basis to use any Microsoft APIs, Communications Interfaces and Technical Information used or called by Microsoft s Browser products or Browser functionality not otherwise covered by this paragraph.
From what I read here, Microsoft would be forced to release IE code as early as its beta stages under a license that bears a strong similarity to the LGPL. They would also be forced to completely explain all underlying APIs and such.
Thinking of it, I wouldn't mind having IE for Linux, if only its security holes would be plugged up first:)
A few months ago I installed Ximian Gnome on one of my Mandrake 8.0 workstations (purely out of curiousity). I liked the interface, but there wasn't really anything I saw to make me justify the installation. Like you, I also gathered in the MonkeyTalk chatroom that there is really no way to uninstall Ximian Gnome (at least that's what the Ximian guy said).
But I went ahead and upgraded to Mandrake 8.1 anyway. The upgrade was smooth, and I was returned to a standard Mandrake Gnome desktop, with all necessary libraries and packages appropriately replaced. I did see a few ximian packages still lying around after that, but for the most part I was able to restore the system.
So I wouldn't conclude that Ximian Gnome ties you down to your current distro version (at least it didn't for me).
"Hassan Barise in Mogadishu told the BBC's Network Africa programme the said more than 80% of Somalis depend on money they receive from relatives outside the country."
"He also pointed out that the United Nations, local and international aid agencies, as well as the government itself all relied heavily on internet access, now denied."
"Somalis living abroad use it to send money to their relatives back home as there are no other banking systems in Somalia since the downfall of the Siad Barre regime in 1991."
It bothers me how many people are ignorant of what poor countries go through. Of course, you've probably never had to depend on a brother living in a foreign country for money to live on. Email isn't just for recreation--perhaps you failed to realize that.
We are also talking about a nation deprived of its number one employer, causing mass unemployment and strangling an already impoverished economy. How selfish and heartless can Americans be?
These pictures are quite intriguing and I will admit they are really cool, but the truth of the matter is that in real life, they cannot serve any practical purpose other than a fanciful display for the purpose of astounding the non-technically minded, or otherwise to serve as another set of cool wallpaper images (send those spatial diagrams to digitalblasphemy.com, will ya?)
What is the primary purpose of a map/atlas? It is to help navigators or travellers find their way around, or to help know where they are and where they should go. Digital tools for this have existed almost since the creation of the internet. They are called portals. Millions and millions of surfers rely on them everyday to navigate the web, to get the information they need, to point them in the right direction.
For me, this looks like a nice little hobby for someone who needs to do something new and creative once in a while. But for practical purposes, whereas a few techno-minded ubergeeks may actually succeed in using these nifty little diagrams for various purposes, they do not serve any major benefits to the generality of internet users. 'nuff said.
"I discovered that HOWTOs and tutorials that detailed changes in initialization and configuration scripts failed me when I tried to apply them to my Mandrake box."
Please cite something specific. So far, I have not run into any situation where manpages and HOWTOs were not helpful. The fact of the matter is that some of the docs (especially the HOWTOs) are a bit outdated, and generally the folks at Mandrake have created better/more efficient/more customized implementations of those configs, so you don't always find things exactly as it is written in the HOWTO. However I have always found HOWTOs to still be helpful in understanding configuration etc.
"In addition, I have tried, and tried, and tried to compile many a program on my Mandrake box in the past year, and only about 25% of the time do I have success."
??? So far I have been able to compile EVERY tarball I've downloaded (with the exception of a certain engineering program which seems to have been designed for a BSD system). For example, I was able to compile Galeon, which requires a ton of gnome libraries. Often the reason why rpm-distro-users get frustrated with tarballs is because they fail to install -devel packages for the libraries needed. I can almost guarantee you'll find every library/devel you need either on the Mandrake CDs or in the cooker. I have a lot of tarball packages in addition to rpm packages installed on my Mandrake system (many of them installed into/usr), and everything works together very well. And there is nothing that stops you from building your own kernel from scratch and installing alongside the original kernel: I have 2.4.9 reconfigured with exactly what I need and it works beautifully...no problems. And you can't possibly tell me it's easier to configure a kernel on Slackware than on Mandrake.
As far as configuration, you still have to give the Mandrake developers a lot of credit. I was completely wowed as I watched the Mandrake installer automatically install my network card, and set up my DSL connection for me without me having to touch a single config file. A lot of people like to rant about graphical configuration tools just because they're insecure about their l337 h4x0r-ness unless they can tinker with config files in VIM. In the real world, people don't need to spend a lot time tinkering with config scripts to get their systems working right. It might be a waste of valuable time that could actually be used to do something productive. And kudos to Mandrake for coming up with a distro that takes a lot of work out of configuration, and yet is not limited in power.
I'm going to register aoltimewarneryahooattibmcompaqhpmicrosoftyahoodell slashdotexxonmobiltexacochevron.com,.net and.org. It will certainly pay off in 2 years.
Hmm..true, but in the past 20 years we have progressed from approximately 4 bits to 32 bits. It would be ridiculous to think that 37 years from now, 32-bit computers would not be living in museums. I think the greatest concern would be die-hard win95 addicts, who would have to be content with the final blue screen of death when this happens.
Slashdot Mirror
They have some of them humonguous monitors at my school's library marked for people with disabilities. I don't get it though, the keyboards have braille dots on them, but the monitors are running at high resolution and very fuzzy at that ... I keep wondering if it was somebody's cruel idea to spite blind people!
As an avid internet user and Nigerian patriot, I wish to make a severe protest about this act of wickedness that has been committed by the Slashdot editors. As bad as scam letters can be, I think pulverizing our measly bandwidth and equipment with Slashdot readers is a little extreme as a spam-control measure.
oga? wetin happen for dis server now?
Hate the messenger but enjoy the message?
When you go out to buy a copy of this game, you pay money for it. Guess where that money goes? That's right, Blizzard's pocket. You are funding Blizzard. If doing that does not support Blizzard, I don't know what does.
When trolls accuse Linux people of being hypocritical, it's stuff like this that actually gives them proof. It's always a good thing to live by principle. You won't die tomorrow if you don't buy a Blizzard game, will you?
--
One of the focuses of Mandrake 8.2 is stability and bug-free-ness. They opted not to put KDE 3.0 because, despite all its strong points, it's bound to have a nasty bug or two when it is released -- after all, we're talking about a brand new version of Qt and lots of code porting, plus plenty of new features. They would rather stick with what has gone through a long, thorough bug-weeding process. Of course, that doesn't mean they deny you KDE 3.0 either - IIRC there are KDE 3.0 beta packages already in the release, and if you want to upgrade, you can always do it later through the cooker.
An Anonymous Coward points out an article from Joseph Menn's in the Las Angeles Times which begins...
:)
Dude, were you thinking of Las Vegas? I'll be the first to vote that aspell support be included in Slash immediately to at least remedy some of our editors' chronic error-making!
There is a reason why MandrakeSoft chose not to wait for KDE 3 and GNOME 2: stability. One of the primary reasons why Mandrake 8.2 is being released is to provide a more mature, refined and stable distribution than its immediate predecessors. And I'll say it does pretty well at that. Bleeding edge software like KDE 3 and GNOME 2 that will most certainly have a couple of significant bugs at their initial release will wait until the next major version number change, most likely (perhaps you want to wait for Mandrake 9.0 instead).
Hmm...I initially read that as "New Series from BS creator".
Or better still, they could have screened for /.ers :)
Troll gene and delivered the rest of us
from yet another lamer.
You had better keep your nuclear mutant insects out of Africa, or we will unleash our deadly Bakassi soldiers on you...
---
Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles...
I've always dreamed of having Clippy around during a phone call!
I wonder how much of the blue screen they can fit unto a cell phone. Perhaps it would be easier if the phone just gave a General Protection Fault and halted whenever you lose signal.
Or better still,
"Scandisk has detected that your cellphone was not shut down properly..."
Finally, it's the GNU/BSD distribution!
Check out Evas. It features an excellent, very easy to use/simplified API, hardware acceleration, anti-aliasing and all of those cool things and is designed in such a way that you don't need to be concerned what kind of hardware your app will run on - evas will scale accordingly. Plus, there's rumors that rasterman is building an Evas client-server API that could almost supplant X, while not necessarily supplanting X...I think it's a pity not enough people are looking at this excellent library.
Enlightenment 0.17 is built upon Evas, and from my experience with it, it does run very fast.
I know I risk being modded down for this, but gimme a break. Bacteria living for 300 million years? Under conditions of great heat and pressure? If it is true that living bacteria have been found in coal deposits that were (supposedly) formed over a period of 300 million years, then perhaps we should drop the mind stereotypes and actually consider that perhaps the coal was not actually formed over such a long time. I mean, the odds are astounding.
Looking at these historical posts with great interest, I couldn't help noticing that Usenet used to be primarily a news medium--they were actually news groups where you could find news, but today it hardly fills that role. It would be interesting to see how along the way newsgroups involved more into a forum/discussion group role. Nowadays the last place I'd go to find news would be a newsgroup :)
I also wonder how sites like Slashdot have negatively impacted the level of newsgroup usage. I imagine that with more and more Slashdotlike sites springing about, there must be less people using newsgroups to vent opinions and stuff. Especially since Slashdotlike sites typically perform the task of actually delivering news (don't want to get deep here)
--
You guys seem to be missing the point here.
According to the settlement,
Within 60 days of entry of this Final Judgment, Microsoft shall offer for sale, at an auction administered by an independent third party, licenses to sell Office for use on Operating Systems other than Windows, without further royalty beyond the auction price. In conjunction with these licenses, Microsoft shall supply to the winning bidders all information and tools required to port Office to other Operating Systems...
(you'll have to check out the settlement to see the rest)
Exactly what they propose here is for Microsoft to auction 3 licenses for Microsoft office source code, and the bidders get the source code and can then use it to develop a version for any operating system they want. They are not forcing Microsoft to develop for another platform. Which is a good thing, because I'd rather have another company develop MS Office for Linux anyway.
I wonder what companies one would expect to be top bidders here? I'm sure Sun Microsystems wouldn't miss a chance like this for anything.
---
Is it just me or is everyone missing out on a really major provision in this settlement? Look at this.
:)
12. Internet Browser Open-Source License. Beginning three months after the date of entry of this Final Judgment, Microsoft shall disclose and license all source code for all Browser products and Browser functionality. In addition, during the remaining term of this Final Judgment, Microsoft shall be required to disclose and make available for license, both at the time of and subsequent to the first beta release (and in no event later than one hundred eighty (180) days prior to its commercial distribution of any Browser product or Browser functionality embedded in another product), all source code for Browser products and Browser functionality. As part of this disclosure, Microsoft shall identify, provide reasonable explanation of, and disseminate publicly a complete specification of all APIs, Communications Interfaces and Technical Information relating to the Interoperation of such Browser product(s) and/or functionality and each Microsoft Platform Software product. The aforementioned license shall grant a royalty-free, non-exclusive perpetual right on a non-discriminatory basis to make, use, modify and distribute without limitation products implementing or derived from Microsoft s source code, and a royalty-free, non-exclusive perpetual right on a non-discriminatory basis to use any Microsoft APIs, Communications Interfaces and Technical Information used or called by Microsoft s Browser products or Browser functionality not otherwise covered by this paragraph.
From what I read here, Microsoft would be forced to release IE code as early as its beta stages under a license that bears a strong similarity to the LGPL. They would also be forced to completely explain all underlying APIs and such.
Thinking of it, I wouldn't mind having IE for Linux, if only its security holes would be plugged up first
---
A few months ago I installed Ximian Gnome on one of my Mandrake 8.0 workstations (purely out of curiousity). I liked the interface, but there wasn't really anything I saw to make me justify the installation. Like you, I also gathered in the MonkeyTalk chatroom that there is really no way to uninstall Ximian Gnome (at least that's what the Ximian guy said).
But I went ahead and upgraded to Mandrake 8.1 anyway. The upgrade was smooth, and I was returned to a standard Mandrake Gnome desktop, with all necessary libraries and packages appropriately replaced. I did see a few ximian packages still lying around after that, but for the most part I was able to restore the system.
So I wouldn't conclude that Ximian Gnome ties you down to your current distro version (at least it didn't for me).
From the article:
"Hassan Barise in Mogadishu told the BBC's Network Africa programme the said more than 80% of Somalis depend on money they receive from relatives outside the country."
"He also pointed out that the United Nations, local and international aid agencies, as well as the government itself all relied heavily on internet access, now denied."
"Somalis living abroad use it to send money to their relatives back home as there are no other banking systems in Somalia since the downfall of the Siad Barre regime in 1991."
It bothers me how many people are ignorant of what poor countries go through. Of course, you've probably never had to depend on a brother living in a foreign country for money to live on. Email isn't just for recreation--perhaps you failed to realize that.
We are also talking about a nation deprived of its number one employer, causing mass unemployment and strangling an already impoverished economy. How selfish and heartless can Americans be?
"As far as certification, it might look good on a resume for a PHB, but in real life don't mean much. Like an MCSE."
MCSE? You mean Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert?
From the article: Lindows hopes a broader software base will help boost the Linux operating system, a 10-year-old clone of Unix.
That's GNU/Lindows to you...
Mod me up, Scotty!
These pictures are quite intriguing and I will admit they are really cool, but the truth of the matter is that in real life, they cannot serve any practical purpose other than a fanciful display for the purpose of astounding the non-technically minded, or otherwise to serve as another set of cool wallpaper images (send those spatial diagrams to digitalblasphemy.com, will ya?)
What is the primary purpose of a map/atlas? It is to help navigators or travellers find their way around, or to help know where they are and where they should go. Digital tools for this have existed almost since the creation of the internet. They are called portals. Millions and millions of surfers rely on them everyday to navigate the web, to get the information they need, to point them in the right direction.
For me, this looks like a nice little hobby for someone who needs to do something new and creative once in a while. But for practical purposes, whereas a few techno-minded ubergeeks may actually succeed in using these nifty little diagrams for various purposes, they do not serve any major benefits to the generality of internet users. 'nuff said.
"I discovered that HOWTOs and tutorials that detailed changes in initialization and configuration scripts failed me when I tried to apply them to my Mandrake box."
/usr), and everything works together very well. And there is nothing that stops you from building your own kernel from scratch and installing alongside the original kernel: I have 2.4.9 reconfigured with exactly what I need and it works beautifully...no problems. And you can't possibly tell me it's easier to configure a kernel on Slackware than on Mandrake.
Please cite something specific. So far, I have not run into any situation where manpages and HOWTOs were not helpful. The fact of the matter is that some of the docs (especially the HOWTOs) are a bit outdated, and generally the folks at Mandrake have created better/more efficient/more customized implementations of those configs, so you don't always find things exactly as it is written in the HOWTO. However I have always found HOWTOs to still be helpful in understanding configuration etc.
"In addition, I have tried, and tried, and tried to compile many a program on my Mandrake box in the past year, and only about 25% of the time do I have success."
??? So far I have been able to compile EVERY tarball I've downloaded (with the exception of a certain engineering program which seems to have been designed for a BSD system). For example, I was able to compile Galeon, which requires a ton of gnome libraries. Often the reason why rpm-distro-users get frustrated with tarballs is because they fail to install -devel packages for the libraries needed. I can almost guarantee you'll find every library/devel you need either on the Mandrake CDs or in the cooker. I have a lot of tarball packages in addition to rpm packages installed on my Mandrake system (many of them installed into
As far as configuration, you still have to give the Mandrake developers a lot of credit. I was completely wowed as I watched the Mandrake installer automatically install my network card, and set up my DSL connection for me without me having to touch a single config file. A lot of people like to rant about graphical configuration tools just because they're insecure about their l337 h4x0r-ness unless they can tinker with config files in VIM. In the real world, people don't need to spend a lot time tinkering with config scripts to get their systems working right. It might be a waste of valuable time that could actually be used to do something productive. And kudos to Mandrake for coming up with a distro that takes a lot of work out of configuration, and yet is not limited in power.
L33T!
l slashdotexxonmobiltexacochevron.com, .net and .org. It will certainly pay off in 2 years.
I'm going to register aoltimewarneryahooattibmcompaqhpmicrosoftyahoodel
America: a history of capitalist communism.
Hmm..true, but in the past 20 years we have progressed from approximately 4 bits to 32 bits. It would be ridiculous to think that 37 years from now, 32-bit computers would not be living in museums. I think the greatest concern would be die-hard win95 addicts, who would have to be content with the final blue screen of death when this happens.