That's nice, I was redoing my "gy" bookmark, just for grins and used the search term "idiot" and then tested it with the search term "moron" and most of the results for both pointed to Donald Trump. He's finally succeeded in being the alpha and the omega.
I am generally unimpressed by DDG searches for many things, especially technical stuff. Too much spam gets promoted to the top of the listings. And by default Strict filtering is set and you only get a few results. In fact, when trying to craft a keyword search I couldn't figure out how to deliver 30 results per page, that is a bit of a problem, even startpage allows you to get 20. And since such a high percentage of the DDG results are crap that means a lot of scrolling.
But a keyword search is useful for some sorts of stuff. For instance Google searches are surprisingly crummy for technical stuff because too many old results are promoted to the top. But technical crap evolves quickly, so I just want stuff from the last year or so.
This is my keyword search for Google for the last year, 100 results, safe search off, keyword: gy
It is easy to set up keyword searches (in Firefox, Chrome seems to make it a PITA). Just set up the search any way you want, then bookmark it and then substitute '%s' for your search term 'foo'
Dolphin has its regressions. My current favorite is that when you open the built-in terminal-emulator on some recent distros it doesn't load your ~/.bashrc unless you do a "source ~/.bashrc"; that bug has existed in Ubuntu since 11.10 and KDE since 4.7 and hasn't been fixed yet, AFAIK.
And in konqueror the terminal has not followed the directory of the GUI file manager since version 3.5. Dolphin has a great file filter feature, but it doesn't seem to exist for konqueror. And you can't split dolphin windows up in to more than 2 horizontal panes, unlike konqueror, which you can subdivide in to as many vertical and horizontal panes as you need. And good luck adding a "Edit File Type" button to your dolphin toolbar (though you can do it with konqueror). If KDE could somehow combine the best elements of dolphin and konqueror they would have a better file manager than any other EXCEPT for konqueror in 3.5. Not only did konqueror used to show meta-data if you highlighted a file (even on a removeable drive that isn't indexed by neposuck), a feature that it seems they are just getting around to adding back in, but you could actually edit mp3 tags from the file manager by choosing Properties from the context menu.
KDE3 really was the greatest DE ever. I just wish there was an easy way to just add KDE3 konqueror with all its kioslaves from Trinity KDE without pulling in all the other buggy crap from that little project.
Given Konsole back the new-tab button? (I dont care if this is a config item, I havent found it yet, and why remove it?)
Konsole -> Manage Profiles -> Edit Profile -> Tabs -> Show New Tab and Close Tab buttons in tab bar.
Not hard to find. But I agree it should be the default. What galled me was that KDE went through a rigamarole to migrate KDE3 settings to a new KDE4 profile and none of the ones I cared about seemed to actually migrate from my old.kde folder, including that one.
Nepomuk is enabled by default, Strigi may be as well. Both are optional and can be disabled separately, with no real loss, you just can't use the features they provide if they're turned off. Which is good, because Strigi, in my experience, will drag your system to a crawl if you try to index an expansive filesystem. Nepomuk doesn't seem to incur any noticeable overhead, so while you can disable it it's not as beneficial to do so.
On my current system, at least (Debian testing, KDE 4.6.3) disabling nepomuk disables strigi automatically. I find if I'm using a fast system, say an Intel C2D or an Athlon X2, I can leave them both running without incurring too much of a performance penalty, but they overwhelm a single-core system, even the low-powered dual-core AMD E-350 Fusion system in my living room. Besides which, nepomuk literally filled half of my 10GB home partition on this system (it has a 40GB SSD).
The entire nepomuk model doesn't work for me because it relies on indexing files on each computer. But I have several different computers all over my sprawling Victorian house, netbook, laptops, living room/TV, bedroom TV, office, attic, etc., all accessing data that primarily resides on my low-powered attic Debian Lenny home server. So each machine would have to generate a huge database and comments/tags generated on one system would not be accessible on others. The only way the KDE desktop search stuff would work for me is if I could run nepomuk, etc. on my server and access it from my various clients. It might lug the Atom CPU on the server, but it runs 24/7 and doesn't have much to do anyway, except serve files, web pages, proxy duties, etc.
At least when you open terminal emulator at the bottom of dolphin it stays synced with the directory you switch to with the GUI. In konqueror is stays in the folder you were in when you first opened it, you have to manually 'cd' or re-open the terminal emulator to get it to be in your current directory. I'd use dolphin almost exclusively, but there is no way to split the right file viewing area in to more than two vertical panes, konqueror allows you to create as many horizontal and vertical panes as you need. The result is that I have to use dolphin for any work that requires much use of the terminal and konqueror for heavy file management.
And for me only recently did either dolphin or konqueror begin to read meta-data for SOME files (e.g. some mp3 tags, image file dimensions, camera info, etc.)
Konqueror 3.5x is still far and away the best file manager ever, the terminal emulator worked properly, meta-data worked perfectly, you could even edit music tags from the file manager. In the meantime KDE4 has a new tags/comments functionality that I wonder if ANYONE ever uses, but I wouldn't know if it would come in handy because the first thing I do in a new install is disable the Nepomuck Semantic desktop search shit which completely lugs my machines and NEVER finishes indexing my admittedly largish file system, even when the database begins to fill entire partitions.
I'm not afraid to look, but add me to the always-disappointed club. Yes, KDE is improving every release, but it is still very inferior to KDE 3.5x, at least for me.
For instance, even with Akonadi-Nepomuk-virtuoso-Strigi rat poison enabled KDE4's handling of basic meta-data in dolphin/konqueror is still crummy, especially if a file is not in your home directory (which is the only indexed folder by default). Remember how you could highlight a file in KDE 3 konqueror and get picture's dimensions or mp3's id3 tags? Instead in KDE 4 you get to add a personal tag to a file in the dolphin preview pane (does anyone use this?) I know some KDE developers are not happy about this state of affairs, but the rate of improvement is glacial.
I just hope that by the time Debian Lenny is no longer supported as "old stable" in a year KDE4 will be close to feature-parity with its predecessor 3 years ago.
Actually, the placebo effect has increased markedly in the U.S. over the last decade, so much so, that if the clinical trials for current anti-depressants had taken place today most of them would not have crossed the "threshold of futility" and been approved for market by the FDA. And quite possibly the reason the placebo effect has increased is because people are being subjected to so much Big Pharma advertisement over the last decade or so since the FDA permitted the industry to market its wares directly to the public. Kinda funny, actually, in an effort to increase sales (and incidentally, hypochondria and anxiety in society at large) the drug companies may have made it much harder for themselves to release new compounds as their patents slowly expire. My heart pumps piss...
Ever tried compiz' Enhanced Zoom Desktop plugin? You can zoom in and out on your desktop with your mouse wheel and the Win key, and maneuver around and type in the zoomed desktop. Very handy for using my 32" CRT TV attached to my stereo rack computer by S-video from the couch 5 meters away. Or at least it was until changes to xorg made it impossible for me to install the crummy fglrx proprietary ATI driver on my onboard video adapter (which doesn't have 3D radeonhd support). Now I have to sit close or use VNC from my laptop. Hmmm, KDE4 seems to have a magnifier plugin for Desktop Effects that is similar.
I suspect Windows 7 and OSX must have something similar?
I'm not your mother, Vinterman (AFAIK). Can you give me some hint about what you did to retrieve your install? I didn't use the button but did a vi ":%s/jaunty/karmic/g" on sources.list and a 'apt-get dist-upgrade' after commenting out 3rd party repositories. Maybe I should have commented out contrib, universe, multiverse, upgrades & backports as well, The upgrade choked on some packages, a few rounds of removes and purges of various things wouldn't go through, rebooting stopped at mounting the file system. I'm waiting for a mandriva-linux-free-2010.0-i586 torrent to finish before blowing away Ubuntu altogether.
Linux upgrades are a difficult ho to road. Most Ubuntu upgrades have given me a bit of grief, but this is the first time I've totally broken the system. I have one box that I upgraded every 6 months from 5.04 to 8.04 that is still happily running Hardy LTS a lot more crisply than a heavily used 3.5 year old Windows install. Fedora & Mandriva upgrades are even rougher, Debian is better. My systems tend to be bloated & heavily customized, running multiple DEs and lots of non-standard packages, which doesn't help. I just deleted a couple of GB of games I never play to bring my/usr partition below 80% yesterday on the 2.5 year old Debian sid system on which I'm typing. 25 GB, that is a big-ass Linux install.
If you are using stable. The last time I checked (December) there was no simple apt-get/aptitude repository way to set up the proprietary Nvidia driver in testing. That may have changed now that Lenny is getting close to being released as stable. I didn't read TFA, but I'm guessing there are a lot more sid and testing desktop users than stable, which gets dated very quickly.
I hope one of the reasons Sir-cut City went tits-up was their chicken-shit maneuver a couple of years ago firing 3,400 of its more experienced workers to replace them with new hires willing to work for less. Mind you, the folks they canned weren't getting rich there, making on the order of $11-12 an hour after working at CC for 7 years. In the meantime in 2006 the CEO raked in $10 million and the executive VP pulled down almost VP $7 million. Our corporate masters appreciated CC's flinty-eyed approach, the stock went up.35 cents a share that day (3.5 times its current value). Wall Street hates it when workers are paid enough to sleep indoors, "The Street" has been pissed at CostCo for years because they pay $15 an hour.
CC's prices were higher, their sale items were almost never in stock, and the vast majority of the times I shopped there I walked out empty handed. But the thing that ticked me off most as a customer was their "double" mail-in rebate policy. They might hawk a rodent for $10-$15, but you'd have to send in 2 separate rebates, which meant you had to photocopy the UPC for one of the rebates. Folks would forget to go to Kinko's and the MIR postmark period would toll. I'm sure CC had a lower rebate redemption rate than their competitors (and higher total rebate amounts per item), but it still didn't help because it generated so much ill-will. I stopped even glancing at their circulars a long time ago.
The amphibians are laggards, as usual. Here in the "Land of the Free"® we've had main core tracking perhaps 8 million threats to national security since 1982. Every URL on their computers, every email, all electronic financial transactions, travel arrangements, its all in the database. It is not even controversial here where 9/11 taught us how dangerous Maryknoll nuns and labor activists can be. Main core evolved out of FEMA and you may recognize some of the public servants that set it up, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, David Addington. They is a cute little video about it here. Makes me proud to be Ameri-kine.
On the distribution front, we have had the pleasure of seeing new releases from all major Linux makers. Once again, Mandriva seems to be a winner here, earning high marks from both the reviewers and the users on various forums for its 2008.1 release....SNIP... Still, it seems that Mandriva was the distribution that found the best balance between features and stability. Despite that, the company continues to struggle as its flagship product still lacks the mindshare and popularity of the other three distributions.
Since April I've done fresh installs of the latest versions of Mandriva, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, opensuse11, sidux & Debian testing Lenny (and was scared off from Fedora 9 by the lousy reviews), and I have to say I was most satisfied with the Mandriva process and result.
That said, the Mandriva upgrade process has always been kind of rocky for me, particularly if I try to skip a release or two, and Mandriva only supports its free product with "base" upgrades for about 18 months and "desktop" updates for a paltry year. I hate reinstalling, so I prefer a rolling release like Debian or a release with relatively longer shelf life, like Ubuntu LTS or even opensuse's 2 years of support.
That said, like someone mentioned above, I have been impressed by the efforts made by the Mandriva staff to help me through the bumpy stretches on their forums. I'm secretly convinced that this so-called "Adam Williamson" character is just a code-name for about 50 hard-working guys.
I'd Replace CentOS with Linux Mint. There are only two Deb based distros in this lineup (kick me if I am wrong...) and no Debian? Consider yourself kicked. He reviews Mepis, which is based on Debian Lenny/Etch, though it was derived from Ubuntu for a period. Of course, TFA says that Mepis is Mandriva-based in a couple of places, though it correctly identifies it as a Debian variant in the section on Mepis (actually, he says Debian/Ubuntu, but close enough, I guess some of the Mepis binaries are still based on Ubuntu source code).
As to reviewing Mint, really it has become pretty easy to add all the proprietary stuff to Ubuntu, these days. Enable the mediabuntu repository, install a few packages, done...maybe 10 minutes. Mint is OK, but I wonder how upgradeable it is. It is supposed to be pretty compatible with Ubuntu, I just haven't tried a dist-upgrade with it yet. Mint releases generally trail the Ubuntu disro they are based on by 1-4 months (the KDE version of Mint based on 7.10 didn't materialize until March, 2008). Since Ubuntu only supports regular releases for 18 months anyway, that means you might only have little more than a year of security upgrades before you have to reinstall or upgrade. And the hinckey upgrade path is what convinced Warren Woodford to revert to Debian from Ubuntu.
Or you can shop around a bit and get a Dell with a 1.6 GHz Celeron 420, a 80 GB SATA HD, a gig of DDR2 a CDRW-DVD-ROM, Windows XP AND a 19" TFT monitor for $350 delivered. Perfectly fine for most office tasks and web stuff, plus you can easily slap PCI peripherals and internal drives in the box. Not quite as small or quiet as a Mac Mini, but if you hawk the monitor for $150 you can buy a PC for about a third as much as a low end Mac. Macs never really go on sale, it sticks in my craw.
As to the OS, I'd probably just end up installing Linux on either of them, especially if I were after eye candy. Compiz Fusion runs like a champ on the 855GM Integrated Graphics Device I'm typing this on running Sidux Linux and blows away anything I've seen in that department from MacRosoft.
If it's an Ubuntu fork, then yes, Wine is integrated nicely. Are you sure about that? Probably this box has integrated Via video. Google "wine gutsy unichrome" some time; as soon as you try to use wine on Gutsy with the "via" driver it hard-locks X. I can SSH to the box but can't seem to kill X and have to reboot.
When Linus decides to give up the Linux trademark freely then he can legitimately start complaining about Sun Microsystems. I think Thorvalds' complaints about Sun's efforts to accommodate Linux sound pretty legitimate even if he does trademark the OS name.
Slashdot Mirror
/. mangled my booksmarks, lets see if this works:
"https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s&ia=web"
"https://www.google.com/search?num=100&safe=off&hl=en&biw=1366&bih=573&tbs=qdr%3Ay&ei=NlawW-yqJ8fGjwS9zLdY&q=%s&oq=%s&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l10.154342.155902..156128...0.0..0.145.526.3j2......0....1..gws-wiz.......0i131.rwbf_ZZ_mks"
That's nice, I was redoing my "gy" bookmark, just for grins and used the search term "idiot" and then tested it with the search term "moron" and most of the results for both pointed to Donald Trump. He's finally succeeded in being the alpha and the omega.
The keyword search that worked for me:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s...
I am generally unimpressed by DDG searches for many things, especially technical stuff. Too much spam gets promoted to the top of the listings. And by default Strict filtering is set and you only get a few results. In fact, when trying to craft a keyword search I couldn't figure out how to deliver 30 results per page, that is a bit of a problem, even startpage allows you to get 20. And since such a high percentage of the DDG results are crap that means a lot of scrolling. But a keyword search is useful for some sorts of stuff. For instance Google searches are surprisingly crummy for technical stuff because too many old results are promoted to the top. But technical crap evolves quickly, so I just want stuff from the last year or so.
This is my keyword search for Google for the last year, 100 results, safe search off, keyword: gy
https://www.google.com/search?...
It is easy to set up keyword searches (in Firefox, Chrome seems to make it a PITA). Just set up the search any way you want, then bookmark it and then substitute '%s' for your search term 'foo'
Dolphin has its regressions. My current favorite is that when you open the built-in terminal-emulator on some recent distros it doesn't load your ~/.bashrc unless you do a "source ~/.bashrc"; that bug has existed in Ubuntu since 11.10 and KDE since 4.7 and hasn't been fixed yet, AFAIK.
And in konqueror the terminal has not followed the directory of the GUI file manager since version 3.5. Dolphin has a great file filter feature, but it doesn't seem to exist for konqueror. And you can't split dolphin windows up in to more than 2 horizontal panes, unlike konqueror, which you can subdivide in to as many vertical and horizontal panes as you need. And good luck adding a "Edit File Type" button to your dolphin toolbar (though you can do it with konqueror). If KDE could somehow combine the best elements of dolphin and konqueror they would have a better file manager than any other EXCEPT for konqueror in 3.5. Not only did konqueror used to show meta-data if you highlighted a file (even on a removeable drive that isn't indexed by neposuck), a feature that it seems they are just getting around to adding back in, but you could actually edit mp3 tags from the file manager by choosing Properties from the context menu.
KDE3 really was the greatest DE ever. I just wish there was an easy way to just add KDE3 konqueror with all its kioslaves from Trinity KDE without pulling in all the other buggy crap from that little project.
Given Konsole back the new-tab button? (I dont care if this is a config item, I havent found it yet, and why remove it?)
Konsole -> Manage Profiles -> Edit Profile -> Tabs -> Show New Tab and Close Tab buttons in tab bar.
.kde folder, including that one.
Not hard to find. But I agree it should be the default. What galled me was that KDE went through a rigamarole to migrate KDE3 settings to a new KDE4 profile and none of the ones I cared about seemed to actually migrate from my old
Nepomuk is enabled by default, Strigi may be as well. Both are optional and can be disabled separately, with no real loss, you just can't use the features they provide if they're turned off. Which is good, because Strigi, in my experience, will drag your system to a crawl if you try to index an expansive filesystem. Nepomuk doesn't seem to incur any noticeable overhead, so while you can disable it it's not as beneficial to do so.
On my current system, at least (Debian testing, KDE 4.6.3) disabling nepomuk disables strigi automatically. I find if I'm using a fast system, say an Intel C2D or an Athlon X2, I can leave them both running without incurring too much of a performance penalty, but they overwhelm a single-core system, even the low-powered dual-core AMD E-350 Fusion system in my living room. Besides which, nepomuk literally filled half of my 10GB home partition on this system (it has a 40GB SSD).
The entire nepomuk model doesn't work for me because it relies on indexing files on each computer. But I have several different computers all over my sprawling Victorian house, netbook, laptops, living room/TV, bedroom TV, office, attic, etc., all accessing data that primarily resides on my low-powered attic Debian Lenny home server. So each machine would have to generate a huge database and comments/tags generated on one system would not be accessible on others. The only way the KDE desktop search stuff would work for me is if I could run nepomuk, etc. on my server and access it from my various clients. It might lug the Atom CPU on the server, but it runs 24/7 and doesn't have much to do anyway, except serve files, web pages, proxy duties, etc.
At least when you open terminal emulator at the bottom of dolphin it stays synced with the directory you switch to with the GUI. In konqueror is stays in the folder you were in when you first opened it, you have to manually 'cd' or re-open the terminal emulator to get it to be in your current directory. I'd use dolphin almost exclusively, but there is no way to split the right file viewing area in to more than two vertical panes, konqueror allows you to create as many horizontal and vertical panes as you need. The result is that I have to use dolphin for any work that requires much use of the terminal and konqueror for heavy file management.
And for me only recently did either dolphin or konqueror begin to read meta-data for SOME files (e.g. some mp3 tags, image file dimensions, camera info, etc.)
Konqueror 3.5x is still far and away the best file manager ever, the terminal emulator worked properly, meta-data worked perfectly, you could even edit music tags from the file manager. In the meantime KDE4 has a new tags/comments functionality that I wonder if ANYONE ever uses, but I wouldn't know if it would come in handy because the first thing I do in a new install is disable the Nepomuck Semantic desktop search shit which completely lugs my machines and NEVER finishes indexing my admittedly largish file system, even when the database begins to fill entire partitions.
I'm not afraid to look, but add me to the always-disappointed club. Yes, KDE is improving every release, but it is still very inferior to KDE 3.5x, at least for me.
For instance, even with Akonadi-Nepomuk-virtuoso-Strigi rat poison enabled KDE4's handling of basic meta-data in dolphin/konqueror is still crummy, especially if a file is not in your home directory (which is the only indexed folder by default). Remember how you could highlight a file in KDE 3 konqueror and get picture's dimensions or mp3's id3 tags? Instead in KDE 4 you get to add a personal tag to a file in the dolphin preview pane (does anyone use this?) I know some KDE developers are not happy about this state of affairs, but the rate of improvement is glacial.
I just hope that by the time Debian Lenny is no longer supported as "old stable" in a year KDE4 will be close to feature-parity with its predecessor 3 years ago.
Actually, "the serotonin-deficit theory of depression is built on a foundation of tissue paper" This is one reason why SSRI drugs are basically no more effective than placebos for most depressed people.
Actually, the placebo effect has increased markedly in the U.S. over the last decade, so much so, that if the clinical trials for current anti-depressants had taken place today most of them would not have crossed the "threshold of futility" and been approved for market by the FDA. And quite possibly the reason the placebo effect has increased is because people are being subjected to so much Big Pharma advertisement over the last decade or so since the FDA permitted the industry to market its wares directly to the public. Kinda funny, actually, in an effort to increase sales (and incidentally, hypochondria and anxiety in society at large) the drug companies may have made it much harder for themselves to release new compounds as their patents slowly expire. My heart pumps piss...
Ever tried compiz' Enhanced Zoom Desktop plugin? You can zoom in and out on your desktop with your mouse wheel and the Win key, and maneuver around and type in the zoomed desktop. Very handy for using my 32" CRT TV attached to my stereo rack computer by S-video from the couch 5 meters away. Or at least it was until changes to xorg made it impossible for me to install the crummy fglrx proprietary ATI driver on my onboard video adapter (which doesn't have 3D radeonhd support). Now I have to sit close or use VNC from my laptop. Hmmm, KDE4 seems to have a magnifier plugin for Desktop Effects that is similar.
I suspect Windows 7 and OSX must have something similar?
I'm not your mother, Vinterman (AFAIK). Can you give me some hint about what you did to retrieve your install? I didn't use the button but did a vi ":%s/jaunty/karmic/g" on sources.list and a 'apt-get dist-upgrade' after commenting out 3rd party repositories. Maybe I should have commented out contrib, universe, multiverse, upgrades & backports as well, The upgrade choked on some packages, a few rounds of removes and purges of various things wouldn't go through, rebooting stopped at mounting the file system. I'm waiting for a mandriva-linux-free-2010.0-i586 torrent to finish before blowing away Ubuntu altogether.
/usr partition below 80% yesterday on the 2.5 year old Debian sid system on which I'm typing. 25 GB, that is a big-ass Linux install.
/dev/sda2 ext3 18G 14G 3.5G 79% /usr
/dev/sda3 ext3 20G 9.9G 8.4G 55% /
/dev/sda6 ext3 297G 55G 227G 20% /home
Linux upgrades are a difficult ho to road. Most Ubuntu upgrades have given me a bit of grief, but this is the first time I've totally broken the system. I have one box that I upgraded every 6 months from 5.04 to 8.04 that is still happily running Hardy LTS a lot more crisply than a heavily used 3.5 year old Windows install. Fedora & Mandriva upgrades are even rougher, Debian is better. My systems tend to be bloated & heavily customized, running multiple DEs and lots of non-standard packages, which doesn't help. I just deleted a couple of GB of games I never play to bring my
$ cat /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr
/etc/debian_version
squeeze/sid
4096
$ cat
$ uname -a
Linux sid 2.6.31-0.slh.3-sidux-686 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Sep 16 23:41:49 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux
Seems I live another day even with sWINE & virtualbox-ose installed.
you know if Bill Gates had a penny for every original idea he ever had he'd be flat broke.
If you are using stable. The last time I checked (December) there was no simple apt-get/aptitude repository way to set up the proprietary Nvidia driver in testing. That may have changed now that Lenny is getting close to being released as stable. I didn't read TFA, but I'm guessing there are a lot more sid and testing desktop users than stable, which gets dated very quickly.
I hope one of the reasons Sir-cut City went tits-up was their chicken-shit maneuver a couple of years ago firing 3,400 of its more experienced workers to replace them with new hires willing to work for less. Mind you, the folks they canned weren't getting rich there, making on the order of $11-12 an hour after working at CC for 7 years. In the meantime in 2006 the CEO raked in $10 million and the executive VP pulled down almost VP $7 million. Our corporate masters appreciated CC's flinty-eyed approach, the stock went up .35 cents a share that day (3.5 times its current value). Wall Street hates it when workers are paid enough to sleep indoors, "The Street" has been pissed at CostCo for years because they pay $15 an hour.
CC's prices were higher, their sale items were almost never in stock, and the vast majority of the times I shopped there I walked out empty handed. But the thing that ticked me off most as a customer was their "double" mail-in rebate policy. They might hawk a rodent for $10-$15, but you'd have to send in 2 separate rebates, which meant you had to photocopy the UPC for one of the rebates. Folks would forget to go to Kinko's and the MIR postmark period would toll. I'm sure CC had a lower rebate redemption rate than their competitors (and higher total rebate amounts per item), but it still didn't help because it generated so much ill-will. I stopped even glancing at their circulars a long time ago.
The amphibians are laggards, as usual. Here in the "Land of the Free"® we've had main core tracking perhaps 8 million threats to national security since 1982. Every URL on their computers, every email, all electronic financial transactions, travel arrangements, its all in the database. It is not even controversial here where 9/11 taught us how dangerous Maryknoll nuns and labor activists can be. Main core evolved out of FEMA and you may recognize some of the public servants that set it up, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, David Addington. They is a cute little video about it here. Makes me proud to be Ameri-kine.
I would hope it is not intentional. Using Gnu as a pun in some part of a name is simply greating.
Quick but lousy math. Sure, the 17" may only be about 10% wider than a 15.4" screen, but it has ~23% more screen real estate.
On the distribution front, we have had the pleasure of seeing new releases from all major Linux makers. Once again, Mandriva seems to be a winner here, earning high marks from both the reviewers and the users on various forums for its 2008.1 release. ...SNIP... Still, it seems that Mandriva was the distribution that found the best balance between features and stability. Despite that, the company continues to struggle as its flagship product still lacks the mindshare and popularity of the other three distributions.
Since April I've done fresh installs of the latest versions of Mandriva, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, opensuse11, sidux & Debian testing Lenny (and was scared off from Fedora 9 by the lousy reviews), and I have to say I was most satisfied with the Mandriva process and result.
That said, the Mandriva upgrade process has always been kind of rocky for me, particularly if I try to skip a release or two, and Mandriva only supports its free product with "base" upgrades for about 18 months and "desktop" updates for a paltry year. I hate reinstalling, so I prefer a rolling release like Debian or a release with relatively longer shelf life, like Ubuntu LTS or even opensuse's 2 years of support.
That said, like someone mentioned above, I have been impressed by the efforts made by the Mandriva staff to help me through the bumpy stretches on their forums. I'm secretly convinced that this so-called "Adam Williamson" character is just a code-name for about 50 hard-working guys.
Consider yourself kicked. He reviews Mepis, which is based on Debian Lenny/Etch, though it was derived from Ubuntu for a period. Of course, TFA says that Mepis is Mandriva-based in a couple of places, though it correctly identifies it as a Debian variant in the section on Mepis (actually, he says Debian/Ubuntu, but close enough, I guess some of the Mepis binaries are still based on Ubuntu source code).
As to reviewing Mint, really it has become pretty easy to add all the proprietary stuff to Ubuntu, these days. Enable the mediabuntu repository, install a few packages, done...maybe 10 minutes. Mint is OK, but I wonder how upgradeable it is. It is supposed to be pretty compatible with Ubuntu, I just haven't tried a dist-upgrade with it yet. Mint releases generally trail the Ubuntu disro they are based on by 1-4 months (the KDE version of Mint based on 7.10 didn't materialize until March, 2008). Since Ubuntu only supports regular releases for 18 months anyway, that means you might only have little more than a year of security upgrades before you have to reinstall or upgrade. And the hinckey upgrade path is what convinced Warren Woodford to revert to Debian from Ubuntu.
"Free speech is the right to shout 'Theatre!' in a crowded fire."
-Abbott Howard "Abbie" Hoffman (November 30, 1936 - April 12, 1989)
You just better have a damn good conductor.
Or you can shop around a bit and get a Dell with a 1.6 GHz Celeron 420, a 80 GB SATA HD, a gig of DDR2 a CDRW-DVD-ROM, Windows XP AND a 19" TFT monitor for $350 delivered. Perfectly fine for most office tasks and web stuff, plus you can easily slap PCI peripherals and internal drives in the box. Not quite as small or quiet as a Mac Mini, but if you hawk the monitor for $150 you can buy a PC for about a third as much as a low end Mac. Macs never really go on sale, it sticks in my craw.
As to the OS, I'd probably just end up installing Linux on either of them, especially if I were after eye candy. Compiz Fusion runs like a champ on the 855GM Integrated Graphics Device I'm typing this on running Sidux Linux and blows away anything I've seen in that department from MacRosoft.
Well then I probably shouldn't tell you about the X2 AM2 6000+ retail CPU complete with K8M890-M motherboard at Arbeit Macht Fry's for $230 then?