I have always hated PDFs for one single reason: they don't flow and fill the page width. If you have a tiny screen (or wont to keep your documentation window narrow next to your larger application window) you either have to learn to read with a sub-pixel font or constantly go left/right on every line. That SUCKS. So converting to a _better_ format makes perfect sense.
In short, Ubuntu server is only an install with different default settings. In a few apt-get you can turn one into the other. You cannot do that with Windows and I find this very limiting. And I am NOT taking into account the price, even though I find it normal to pay for good software.
I did test Win2003server for a year and I completely fail to grok the logic behind needing a special OS just to run a bunch of servers. Oh, I understand full well the need of MS to sell you a more expensive OS. But for me a server is an application. Win*server contains several, some more or less well written but that's not the point. The point is that this test convinced me to run Linux, where if I want a web server I just do "aptitude install apache" or "yum install apache", if I want an ssh server, I do "aptitude install openssh-server, likewise for vnc, sql, ftp, etc... And the rest of the OS continues to work the same.
I suggest you don't purchase an HP digital multimeter/signal analyzer... When you later call them to purchase a 1Gb memory upgrade (for about 1000$) they just give you a code to type in on the device... to activate the extra memory that is already installed inside the device. Now I'm only a lowly engineer with no decision/purchase power, but I told them in no uncertain terms to go fuck themselves, and if I had any power the device would be on its way back in the mail with a money-back request. All this because their marketing practices would make a maggot gag.
you SHOULD earn a pittance as a university researcher [...] however, when you DO find something of value, guess what: you cash out and become a millionaire
No. That will lead to people only working in fields where they can 'make it big' and leave all the rest which, as history has taught us again and again, is where the discoveries of tomorrow are to be made. Basically it would push technology and drop fundamental research. You think like a bean counter.
Disclaimer, I work in research. And not everybody who does 'discovers' things. I design instrumentation; as such I'll never 'discover' anything and I'm rarely associated in publications. So for you it means I should earn a pittance with no hope of anything better.
Well, if that's any consolation for you, I do earn a pittance already.
Similarly, if it's parents deciding what kind of baby they want, it's not really eugenics. If it's the state deciding en masse who gets to live and who doesn't (particularly decades after being born), it's not really eugenics either, it's genocide.
It's not like they plan on beating the Oscars in number of viewers when they release the source code. They can survive two hours of slashdotting without need for plenty of mirrors.
What about Ubuntu? Does it have to offer a choice as well?
In default Ubuntu repositories, I see: Firefox, Epiphany, Konqueror, Lynx, Links, Seamonkey, midbrowser, mythbrowser and a couple others I have never heard about.
I've never understood why there isn't a central application installer in Windows, something similar to apt-get & Co of Linux, or the Store of the iPhone. Let 3rd party register and submit apps to it, vetted by MS, possibly payware, and in this antitrust case they can add Firefox at no charge. On first run of the OS, let the user customize the apps they want, charge them if necessary and make money along the way.
Why isn't there a qt/kde/gnome/X/whatever fallback mechanism for when a window/popup is larger than the screen ? Either shrink it, or display it in parts, or move it around slowly... I've faced this problem too and it makes the machine useless unless you know the shortcut keys.
I work next door to the Synchrotron facility of Grenoble, in another lab. That device is so popular that it runs 24/7, with experimenters coming from all over the world to use it for the widest range of uses: crystallography, analysis of paintings, palimpsests, archeology datation, detection of faults in materials... The uses are endless and the people who get a go at it sleep in the bowels of the machine for days or even weeks when they get a time slot.
Ever since it became possible to run CS3 under WINE, the only reason I haven't switched completely to Linux is that I just haven't had the time to shift everything around.
I was like you, just waiting for something to happen. Well, my system disk died early this month. Ubuntu is great ! And I'm surprised at how many critical (for me) apps run perfectly in Wine.
In water you see at most a few meters. How will that help when it takes you at least a km before you can stop anyway ? I'm pretty sure they are using all the options that make sense. Detection of the variation of magnetic field would probably work at proximity (there used to be mines triggered like this, until they started degaussing boats).
There are probably thousands of people who have avoiding wikipedia as editors because their first edits were reverted--even though they might have been productive.
Yup, besides some spelling corrections, one of my only contributions to wikipedia was to start a missing page (several links to it but no content). After a few days it got deleted: "Not enough context to identify article's subject". And deleted pages don't even have a history...
Piers Anthony wrote an excellent book called Macroscope that explores this topic.
I spent 2 14 hour flights with only the 1st 'Bio of a space tyrant'... and the guy next to me was a rabid fan and told me the entire story and how great it was for most of the trip. He was a dwarf so I had to be PC instead of telling him how much it sucked judging the first few hundred pages. Just to say that if you want idiotic plot, stupid fantasy 'science' or kiddy sexual fantasies, go for it, but if you post this because you think one of his books is relevant in a serious technological discussion: Ah! AH! AH!
So what about people who drive with false tags ? Is there some kind of active alert or does it go to/dev/null ? I ask because it's probably a lot more common than you think: my father got in a fender bender; the guy gave him all the necessary info (ID, address, car registration, licence, insurance...), well it turns out everything was false ! Apparently you can purchase the whole package of false documents (including the car tags) if you go to the right places on the 'net.
In the middle age every road or bridge had a toll, and it is considered by many historians the one thing the kept their economy in the gutters. It was just too expensive to ship anything anywhere ! Think that France had extensive forests, but Louis XIV couldn't carry its wood from the center to the shore at affordable prices because of all the tolls. So the wood used in warship construction was purchased in Spain ! Well, the flip side of the coin is that France still has plenty of forest while Spain is mostly a desert since that time.
The main roman advance is the construction of roads. Not the construction of tolls ! It kept the empire in one piece for half a millennium.
In this discourse of tracing back evolution and the cladistic theory, there's one thing I find missing: what about hybrids ? When you have two species that mix to form a new one as an hybrid, like is likely to have happened to many arthropods with larval stages, how do you trace anything back ? An unknown amount of genes got dropped in one single generation. You can't even place the result on a clade... Why is this issue ignored?
I haven't used IE in a couple years, but yesterday I installed XP in a virtual machine and needed to download a few things. No need to install FF I though as I won't use this virtual machine for browsing the web... Well, in 1 minute and 4 web pages of use, it managed to crash twice. Way to go MS ! Guess why I just shifted my main desktop to Ubuntu ?
There's a whole lot we are calculating now without the need for more than 3 significant digits
Yes, this article is hardly news. Good programmers will choose the data type that fit the requirements without needless waste. Float or double ? Well, if you just want to store a pH, you don't need 64 bits. It will use half the memory, half the processing power and be faster (well, no longer as math cores are now optimized only for doubles and compute floats as doubles, but it used to be true). Same thing for long, short and char.
Any OS can look impressive when you find a demo that shows off all the eye candy to its full extent.
Agreed, all the demos are always about that. I want an OS where it takes one minute to install and configure Apache+Php+MySql+Gallery. Then updates them by itself every day without breaking my config files. Instead of monolithic downloads that need lots of work to work together and break when you update any of them a year later.
In the two roles you can recognize Ubuntu apt-get and Windows and what I did yesterday evening. The first one is what impresses me, not eye candy.
Slashdot Mirror
I have always hated PDFs for one single reason: they don't flow and fill the page width. If you have a tiny screen (or wont to keep your documentation window narrow next to your larger application window) you either have to learn to read with a sub-pixel font or constantly go left/right on every line. That SUCKS. So converting to a _better_ format makes perfect sense.
In short, Ubuntu server is only an install with different default settings. In a few apt-get you can turn one into the other. You cannot do that with Windows and I find this very limiting. And I am NOT taking into account the price, even though I find it normal to pay for good software.
I did test Win2003server for a year and I completely fail to grok the logic behind needing a special OS just to run a bunch of servers. Oh, I understand full well the need of MS to sell you a more expensive OS. But for me a server is an application. Win*server contains several, some more or less well written but that's not the point. The point is that this test convinced me to run Linux, where if I want a web server I just do "aptitude install apache" or "yum install apache", if I want an ssh server, I do "aptitude install openssh-server, likewise for vnc, sql, ftp, etc... And the rest of the OS continues to work the same.
I suggest you don't purchase an HP digital multimeter/signal analyzer... When you later call them to purchase a 1Gb memory upgrade (for about 1000$) they just give you a code to type in on the device... to activate the extra memory that is already installed inside the device. Now I'm only a lowly engineer with no decision/purchase power, but I told them in no uncertain terms to go fuck themselves, and if I had any power the device would be on its way back in the mail with a money-back request. All this because their marketing practices would make a maggot gag.
you SHOULD earn a pittance as a university researcher [...] however, when you DO find something of value, guess what: you cash out and become a millionaire
No. That will lead to people only working in fields where they can 'make it big' and leave all the rest which, as history has taught us again and again, is where the discoveries of tomorrow are to be made. Basically it would push technology and drop fundamental research. You think like a bean counter.
Disclaimer, I work in research. And not everybody who does 'discovers' things. I design instrumentation; as such I'll never 'discover' anything and I'm rarely associated in publications. So for you it means I should earn a pittance with no hope of anything better.
Well, if that's any consolation for you, I do earn a pittance already.
Similarly, if it's parents deciding what kind of baby they want, it's not really eugenics. If it's the state deciding en masse who gets to live and who doesn't (particularly decades after being born), it's not really eugenics either, it's genocide.
It's not like they plan on beating the Oscars in number of viewers when they release the source code. They can survive two hours of slashdotting without need for plenty of mirrors.
What about Ubuntu? Does it have to offer a choice as well?
In default Ubuntu repositories, I see: Firefox, Epiphany, Konqueror, Lynx, Links, Seamonkey, midbrowser, mythbrowser and a couple others I have never heard about.
bundles 10-20 really crappy and outdated browsers
I've never understood why there isn't a central application installer in Windows, something similar to apt-get & Co of Linux, or the Store of the iPhone. Let 3rd party register and submit apps to it, vetted by MS, possibly payware, and in this antitrust case they can add Firefox at no charge. On first run of the OS, let the user customize the apps they want, charge them if necessary and make money along the way.
As an ex tcsh user, I just wanted to ask, are csh/tcsh still being developed ?
Why isn't there a qt/kde/gnome/X/whatever fallback mechanism for when a window/popup is larger than the screen ? Either shrink it, or display it in parts, or move it around slowly... I've faced this problem too and it makes the machine useless unless you know the shortcut keys.
I work next door to the Synchrotron facility of Grenoble, in another lab. That device is so popular that it runs 24/7, with experimenters coming from all over the world to use it for the widest range of uses: crystallography, analysis of paintings, palimpsests, archeology datation, detection of faults in materials... The uses are endless and the people who get a go at it sleep in the bowels of the machine for days or even weeks when they get a time slot.
Ever since it became possible to run CS3 under WINE, the only reason I haven't switched completely to Linux is that I just haven't had the time to shift everything around.
I was like you, just waiting for something to happen. Well, my system disk died early this month. Ubuntu is great ! And I'm surprised at how many critical (for me) apps run perfectly in Wine.
In water you see at most a few meters. How will that help when it takes you at least a km before you can stop anyway ? I'm pretty sure they are using all the options that make sense. Detection of the variation of magnetic field would probably work at proximity (there used to be mines triggered like this, until they started degaussing boats).
Maybe it's just because IR doesn't propagate in water ?
There are probably thousands of people who have avoiding wikipedia as editors because their first edits were reverted--even though they might have been productive.
Yup, besides some spelling corrections, one of my only contributions to wikipedia was to start a missing page (several links to it but no content). After a few days it got deleted: "Not enough context to identify article's subject". And deleted pages don't even have a history...
Piers Anthony wrote an excellent book called Macroscope that explores this topic.
I spent 2 14 hour flights with only the 1st 'Bio of a space tyrant'... and the guy next to me was a rabid fan and told me the entire story and how great it was for most of the trip. He was a dwarf so I had to be PC instead of telling him how much it sucked judging the first few hundred pages. Just to say that if you want idiotic plot, stupid fantasy 'science' or kiddy sexual fantasies, go for it, but if you post this because you think one of his books is relevant in a serious technological discussion: Ah! AH! AH!
So what about people who drive with false tags ? Is there some kind of active alert or does it go to /dev/null ? I ask because it's probably a lot more common than you think: my father got in a fender bender; the guy gave him all the necessary info (ID, address, car registration, licence, insurance...), well it turns out everything was false ! Apparently you can purchase the whole package of false documents (including the car tags) if you go to the right places on the 'net.
it makes sense to bill people for their annyal road use
Which is exactly what you do by taxing gas.
In the middle age every road or bridge had a toll, and it is considered by many historians the one thing the kept their economy in the gutters. It was just too expensive to ship anything anywhere ! Think that France had extensive forests, but Louis XIV couldn't carry its wood from the center to the shore at affordable prices because of all the tolls. So the wood used in warship construction was purchased in Spain ! Well, the flip side of the coin is that France still has plenty of forest while Spain is mostly a desert since that time. The main roman advance is the construction of roads. Not the construction of tolls ! It kept the empire in one piece for half a millennium.
officers, are less likely to be out in the open if they knew there are snipers stalking them
Too damn bad. If there's one thing that wars don't kill enough of, it's officers.
In this discourse of tracing back evolution and the cladistic theory, there's one thing I find missing: what about hybrids ? When you have two species that mix to form a new one as an hybrid, like is likely to have happened to many arthropods with larval stages, how do you trace anything back ? An unknown amount of genes got dropped in one single generation. You can't even place the result on a clade... Why is this issue ignored?
IE7 is a steaming pile of crap
I haven't used IE in a couple years, but yesterday I installed XP in a virtual machine and needed to download a few things. No need to install FF I though as I won't use this virtual machine for browsing the web... Well, in 1 minute and 4 web pages of use, it managed to crash twice. Way to go MS ! Guess why I just shifted my main desktop to Ubuntu ?
There's a whole lot we are calculating now without the need for more than 3 significant digits
Yes, this article is hardly news. Good programmers will choose the data type that fit the requirements without needless waste. Float or double ? Well, if you just want to store a pH, you don't need 64 bits. It will use half the memory, half the processing power and be faster (well, no longer as math cores are now optimized only for doubles and compute floats as doubles, but it used to be true). Same thing for long, short and char.
Any OS can look impressive when you find a demo that shows off all the eye candy to its full extent.
Agreed, all the demos are always about that. I want an OS where it takes one minute to install and configure Apache+Php+MySql+Gallery. Then updates them by itself every day without breaking my config files. Instead of monolithic downloads that need lots of work to work together and break when you update any of them a year later.
In the two roles you can recognize Ubuntu apt-get and Windows and what I did yesterday evening. The first one is what impresses me, not eye candy.