When people stop throwing in red hearings into important discussions Communism stopped being a crime in America a long time ago. What McCarthy did wasn't even legal.
If I'm understanding what you're advocating correctly, then it's a very problematic solution. For one thing, you'd somehow have to make two mouse cursors each controlled by two independant mice, you'd need to keep each cursor within it's own screen (it'd be a bit kooky to see someone elses' mouse keep popping into your side of the screen). Same deal with keyboards - you'd need to make sure anything typed would stay on the screen it was delegated to. There are solutions to this - but they are rare BECAUSE not many people would use this I believe it's supported by X and the Kernel. Under/dev/input, you have a separate mouse device file for each mouse attached to the system./dev/input/event* uniquely identify each HID device, meaning mouse, keyboard or joystick.
In your/etc/X11/xorg.conf file, you can create entries for each DEVICE (mouse) you want attached to the PC, and you can create entries for eachy DISPLAY (screen) you want. All you need are a few $30 PCIe video cards, and you can attach multiple monitors to the PC, each with their own GUI login session.
I'm not sure whether X supports multiple keyboard yet. I seem to recall reading about a patch for XFree86 3.3.6, but that gives you an idea how long its been since I looked into it.
If I were the OP and had a computer powerful enough to even consider this... Are you kidding? X was designed from the get-go with exactly this kind of use in mind. One powerful 66MHz [sic] machine would serve as the application and GUI server, while thin clients were essentially network-attached monitors. It was intended as a GUI analog to the then-extensive use of text-only dumb terminals.
Yes, operating systems and applications have become more resource-intensive over the past 20 years, but do you really believe someone needs even a 3GHz P4 for educational purposes? I've been using Linux on a 1.8 GHz Athlon XP laptop for the past two years for notetaking, programming and web browsing. Until six months ago, I had it underclocked to a mere 1.06GHz, and had no issues with anything that might be considered educational use.
For similar purposes, an Athlon64 X2 4800+ desktop machine with a gig of RAM should be able to support five or six users, as long as you watched out for applications prone to excessive memory usage. And that's a machine you can throw together for only $700. Divide that by six users, and you're talking about a mere $116 per user. That's cheaper than the OLPC. Hell, that's cheaper than I've seen 500MHz desktops sell for at mom-and-pop shops in my area.
Why would a shop with Windows boxes reject a piece of software on the basis that it runs on Windows? Because they may not have a Windows Server license, or because they may not use Active Directory.
The only other option I see is that it's his personal preference and not the company's. In that case, you are correct, he might be making a poor decision. I tend to assume people have a modicum of sense until they've proven otherwise, though. That's the possibility I was cautioning against. This being Slashdot, and considering the way the question was written, it seemed like an appropriate caution.
So, you're saying you think it might be cheaper for an completely non-windows shop to set up a windows server solely to run their dynamic DNS and then hire someone that knows how to keep it running rather than find a solution that runs on their current OS of choice? He didn't say they were a non-Windows shop, though he did say that he wasn't considering MintDNS because it ran on Windows. His original statement read more like a matter of taste, to me.
All I'm saying is that they should compile estimates of actual costs, rather than simply assuming one option would be too expensive.
I'm sorry, but are you discounting MintDNS because it's a Windows application, or because it would cost too much to implement? Only one of those two choices is fiscally responsible...
Compare the total cost of using any software, including Windows-based software, with the cost of rolling your own.
and the PCIx slot won't fit my agp card. Just an observation, but you should be using PCI Express (PCIe), not PCI-X. You can get low-end PCIe cards for $30.
You make a claim that flies in the face of common experience Maybe for others with simple problems. My experience probably mirrors other power users'.
and you don't bother providing a link to back it up when it should be trivial to do so. Finding a specific forum post when one doesn't even remember the exact keywords used to find it is no mean feat, especially for a forum site as large as Ubuntu's. What do you want? Idetic memory?
I still think you're out of line with criticising the Ubuntu forums though. No doubt there are *some* problems they can't fix, but it's certainly not the general case. Quite possibly true. My original post was from the perspective of a power user, but I didn't make that sufficiently clear.
In my experience, the "general case" consists of ten or fifteen problems which are encountered multiple times. Anything else either begets a "file a bug report" response, or gets ignored.
If you don't want the forums in your results use "-ubuntu" in your google search. Not helpful when I'm looking for a solution for my Ubuntu box. Generic searches often yield tutorials for Fedora and Mandriva, not Ubuntu. But point taken.
You know what's really rediculous, from my perspective? I tried to find a link to one particular forum thread where everyone recommended ClarkConnect over Ubuntu when someone asked about setting up a gateway. Instead, I found two posts that were exactly what I was looking for in the first place. I don't know if the pagerank changed or if my search keywords changed. By the datestamps, they're certainly not new posts.
"Contact information"? What are you talking about? A means of sending you a link after this/. article expires.
Since you're having trouble understanding me, let me put it more clearly. I constantly hear these whines about poor support on forums, yet the whiner (in this case, you) never provides a link to the thread illustrating his point. And when I go to the Ubuntu forums what I see is useful advice being given to help people solve their problems. You'd think if there were so many threads where no help was given, you'd manage to link to at least one or two, no? I don't go directly to Ubuntu forums, I google for the problem. For better or for worse, the Ubuntu forums' site's pagerank puts it at or near the top of the search results every time.
I think you just make this crap up, frankly. And you've done it again with your Nvidia error post. Maybe that is a true story, but I seriously doubt it since you can't even get it straight in your own post (how was it that he "refused to understand" something, when he never had any replies?) You seriously need to see someone about your paranoia. In addition, you should pay attention to the context of statements. I mentioned two people in my post: Some poor sap who posted to the forum without receiving a reply, and my roommate for whom I was trying to fix the same problem. My roommate was the guy who "refused to understand" that he didn't need 3D acceleration for what he wanted to use his computer for.
Do you get some weird pleasure from denigrating the work of volunteers, or are you just generally a miserable sod? No, and no. Try doing a Google Groups search for my email address...I've spent a great deal of my time contributing to Linux newsgroups and LUG mailing lists, when I've had time to spare from classes.
Better yet, can't this be used for a clear-room implementation? One that is safe to incorporate on Wine, Cedega, SDL, etc... No. For the same reason that WINE doesn't pave the way for a clean-room implementation of MS Office. It's a glue layer.
Next time I run into a similar issue, I'll send you some.
Wait...not providing contact information? So we can say any old thing online without accountability, right? A four-digit UID is the only thing separating you from Anonymous Cowards. Well, that, and I've seen better comments posted as AC.
As one example, I encountered a bizarre issue with the NVIDIA driver that responded in some sort of object allocation error. A google for the error came back with an Ubuntu forum post complete with a description of the error and some X logs. But not one reply.
None of the other search results gave better answers, and I wound up giving up trying to get the NVidia driver working on that system. (Which didn't bother me. It wasn't my system, and the guy who wanted 3D acceleration refused to understand that it wasn't necessary for the software-rendered Windows game he was already running under WINE.)
With the prevalence of virtualization, it may now be time for a redcode-to-asm compiler. (You'd have to have a thin, very thin kernel for monitoring and scheduling purposes, though.)
Does anybody else get the feeling that biometric features like this are going to make it more difficult to service user's PCs without already having a maintenance account on them?
I'm sorry, but distro forums (Ubuntu's, at least) aren't very useful. Every time I need to Google to resolve an issue, the top link is to an Ubuntu forum. Someone's laid out the question clearly and concisely, and is either ignored, or is told "RTFM".
It bears mentioning again: The questions were worded well, with important details provided.
I don't see how supporting Linux is going to help them at all, and they probably see it the same way. That's because, being both an OS vendor and media format vendor, they're leveraging one product to push another. As a convicted monopolist in the OS area, that's illegal. But I'd like to see someone call them on that.
The real irony is that Firefox is derived from Mozilla, which is derived from the Netscape codebase they fought so hard to shove down. By making this plugin available for Firefox on Windows, they're limiting OS competition at the expense of increasing browser competition. That suggests they don't really care about their browser marketshare anymore.
Last I knew, the Old "turbo" function slowed the system down to the speed of a classic IBM PC, for those programs and games which couldn't handle the speed of an up-to-date processor.
Boy, did that help for those games that timed things in instruction cycles rather than a high-res clock.
If someone wrote a virus that changed everyone's IE home page to something other than MSN, it would fall out of the top 10 easily, and maybe off the charts altogether. There are many such viruses and worms out there already. I've had to clean a few of them off peoples' computers.
I was on my high school's team...for all of one day. The adviser grabbed all the veterans and they did all the design work off in their own little corner, leaving everyone else to stew or, if we tried to participate, be ignored.
I didn't go back. What was the point in coming in with a creative interest, if I couldn't even get my ideas critiqued?
Last week, I ran into someone who participated in FIRST at my HS a couple years later, and that seniority pattern was apparently still present.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe BackOrifice was originally designed for this kind of thing, on Win95/98 machines, no less.
In your
I'm not sure whether X supports multiple keyboard yet. I seem to recall reading about a patch for XFree86 3.3.6, but that gives you an idea how long its been since I looked into it. If I were the OP and had a computer powerful enough to even consider this... Are you kidding? X was designed from the get-go with exactly this kind of use in mind. One powerful 66MHz [sic] machine would serve as the application and GUI server, while thin clients were essentially network-attached monitors. It was intended as a GUI analog to the then-extensive use of text-only dumb terminals.
Yes, operating systems and applications have become more resource-intensive over the past 20 years, but do you really believe someone needs even a 3GHz P4 for educational purposes? I've been using Linux on a 1.8 GHz Athlon XP laptop for the past two years for notetaking, programming and web browsing. Until six months ago, I had it underclocked to a mere 1.06GHz, and had no issues with anything that might be considered educational use.
For similar purposes, an Athlon64 X2 4800+ desktop machine with a gig of RAM should be able to support five or six users, as long as you watched out for applications prone to excessive memory usage. And that's a machine you can throw together for only $700. Divide that by six users, and you're talking about a mere $116 per user. That's cheaper than the OLPC. Hell, that's cheaper than I've seen 500MHz desktops sell for at mom-and-pop shops in my area.
All I'm saying is that they should compile estimates of actual costs, rather than simply assuming one option would be too expensive.
I'm sorry, but are you discounting MintDNS because it's a Windows application, or because it would cost too much to implement? Only one of those two choices is fiscally responsible...
Compare the total cost of using any software, including Windows-based software, with the cost of rolling your own.
When one creates something, one must take responsibility for it. Setting rules for it seems like a logical measure.
In my experience, the "general case" consists of ten or fifteen problems which are encountered multiple times. Anything else either begets a "file a bug report" response, or gets ignored. If you don't want the forums in your results use "-ubuntu" in your google search. Not helpful when I'm looking for a solution for my Ubuntu box. Generic searches often yield tutorials for Fedora and Mandriva, not Ubuntu. But point taken.
You know what's really rediculous, from my perspective? I tried to find a link to one particular forum thread where everyone recommended ClarkConnect over Ubuntu when someone asked about setting up a gateway. Instead, I found two posts that were exactly what I was looking for in the first place. I don't know if the pagerank changed or if my search keywords changed. By the datestamps, they're certainly not new posts.
*sigh*
Next time I run into a similar issue, I'll send you some.
Wait...not providing contact information? So we can say any old thing online without accountability, right? A four-digit UID is the only thing separating you from Anonymous Cowards. Well, that, and I've seen better comments posted as AC.
As one example, I encountered a bizarre issue with the NVIDIA driver that responded in some sort of object allocation error. A google for the error came back with an Ubuntu forum post complete with a description of the error and some X logs. But not one reply.
None of the other search results gave better answers, and I wound up giving up trying to get the NVidia driver working on that system. (Which didn't bother me. It wasn't my system, and the guy who wanted 3D acceleration refused to understand that it wasn't necessary for the software-rendered Windows game he was already running under WINE.)
With the prevalence of virtualization, it may now be time for a redcode-to-asm compiler. (You'd have to have a thin, very thin kernel for monitoring and scheduling purposes, though.)
Sounds like infrastructure for fugitive alerts. Yay.
Does anybody else get the feeling that biometric features like this are going to make it more difficult to service user's PCs without already having a maintenance account on them?
I just wish Ubuntu forums wasn't the top entry in any google search for my issues.
I'm sorry, but distro forums (Ubuntu's, at least) aren't very useful. Every time I need to Google to resolve an issue, the top link is to an Ubuntu forum. Someone's laid out the question clearly and concisely, and is either ignored, or is told "RTFM".
It bears mentioning again: The questions were worded well, with important details provided.
Sounds like it might be a bad burn. Try burning another disc, at a lower burn rate.
The real irony is that Firefox is derived from Mozilla, which is derived from the Netscape codebase they fought so hard to shove down. By making this plugin available for Firefox on Windows, they're limiting OS competition at the expense of increasing browser competition. That suggests they don't really care about their browser marketshare anymore.
Last I knew, the Old "turbo" function slowed the system down to the speed of a classic IBM PC, for those programs and games which couldn't handle the speed of an up-to-date processor.
Boy, did that help for those games that timed things in instruction cycles rather than a high-res clock.
That's why we have things called background checks.
Even the NRA doesn't want to arm everybody.
Cool tool, but I can't do a comparison search for my domain grc4.org. :-/
Start one? :-)
:-)
In the software realm, you can use games like RealTimeBattle and CoreWars. I always wanted to build a table for a physical manifestation of RTB.
I was on my high school's team...for all of one day. The adviser grabbed all the veterans and they did all the design work off in their own little corner, leaving everyone else to stew or, if we tried to participate, be ignored.
I didn't go back. What was the point in coming in with a creative interest, if I couldn't even get my ideas critiqued?
Last week, I ran into someone who participated in FIRST at my HS a couple years later, and that seniority pattern was apparently still present.