" ever had to sit through a 2h40 long lecture? the first 45 minutes aren't too bad, the next 45 are bearable, the remaining 70 are torturous (particularly when the lectures run 7:20-10:00pm.) most profs are kind enough to give a break in the middle, but i've had classes with a few who just forget. if you think the length of the lecture is rough on you, it's doubly so for the prof."
I've had lots of boring lectures. I'd rather get them over with in one sitting. Of course if there were couches or beds, this would be ideal, or else your butt would really start to hurt. I think profs would teach more efficiently. They could probably get what usually takes 3 1 hour lectures done in about 2 hours or 2.5
"secondly, 6 hours of material is approximately two weeks worth of lecture. think about how much missing even one lecture in the wrong class can screw up your understanding of the subject, regardless of how many notes and lecture outlines you get.
Yes, this is a good point, but there are an extra 4 days in the week now to figure it out. A lot of time every week is wasted getting to school, leaving school, lunch break, etc.. If we just compress it into one day, this is efficiency!
And if you don't think it is possible to stay awake 24 hours, try it. Have you ever pulled an all-nighter? It's tough at first but you get used to it. Ask and med school resident what it's like. It's not that bad actually.
This is actually a good idea. When I was in undergrad, I usually had about 7 courses for 3 hours per week spread over 5 days, so about 21 hours, but also a tutorial/lecture here and there, so roughly 24 hours, plus labs.
Wouldn't that be awesome if you could go to lectures for one 24-hour period per week! Then the rest of the week could be used for studying, and doing cool projects and shit. I figure that during the lecturing, you could take some cat naps for like, and hour at a time, and your friend could take notes for you. You could take turns. Ideally all the notes would be available online anyways, so if you took a 6 hour nap, you could get those notes.
Is there a Canadian equivalent of the RIAA as well? Should I stop downloading off Kazaa? Actually I think in Canada I am allowed to download, as long as I don't share. Haha, suckers!
I had to deal with Netgear support which I think was based in India. At least, all the guys on the other end had that stereotypical Indian/Pakistani accent. They seemed really knowledgeable, and they seemed to know the router very well. Their English was a bit difficult to understand at times. It was a bit annoying that every time I called there, they would take me through the same script. Unplug your router, plug it in. Restart your computer, go to 192.168.1.1, go to Wizard, click "next", etc... I had to do this every time I called. It got annoying pretty quick. I can't say whether or not American customer support technician's would be any better. One time I had some questions about my ADSL modem, and it was made by a small Canadian company. When I called customer service, I think I was talking to an engineer. He had intimate knowledge of the modem/router, and it sounded like he might have built part of it. It's too bad there are so many customers out there and there aren't enough of them to go around.
When I said recently, I meant like 4 years ago. The time when schools started buying Macs again coincided with the iMac. Schools are kind of a mix of PCs and Macs nowadays for the most part, from what I have seen.
"Public schools will probably be the very last to "resist" and switch from Microsoft."
This is a very good point. Schools were also the last to switch from Macs... True, Macs are seeing a resurgence, but basically schools used to use only Macs and clung to them until recently when they started switching to PCs.
Er, I'm not sure what your point is. So Debian and Gentoo have bad GNOME packages? Try Red Hat/Fedora, works fine there. How about Garnome on SuSE - worked fine for me. It's possible to screw up KDE packages just as much as anything else.
Redhat has always pushed Gnome and has broken KDE on many occasions. But for the distros that don't TRY to favour either one, Debian and Gentoo are good examples, KDE always works better out of the box compared to GNOME.
I'm going to continue trying GNOME in the coming months. I just needed the hard drive space, and now I have it so I installed it last night. I have to nail down which wm to use, and also whether I want to run xfce with gnome-panel, or something like that. There's a lot of tweaking involved with GNOME compared to KDE I find, but actually I might learn to like this tweakability. Although lack of features like multiple-wallpapers-on-different-virtual-desktops which I take for granted in KDE and many other things might eventually piss me off.
That's the gnome default! I just installed with Gentoo which doesn't do any special configuration, and I have an applications menu at the top and the bottom is just a taskbar. Debian also does this by default as of last year at least (GNOME 2.x).
Yeah, I think you're right, it's because they through in Weather, and all that other Outlook crap, Journal, Calendar, etc.. At one company I worked for we all used Outlook, but I thought it sucked compared to outlook express, so I started using outlook express instead.
I just tried to install GNOME last night on Gentoo. First of all, I did have problems. There was no window manager. Even when I installed metacity, still there was no window manager. There was a lot of advice on the web telling me to do export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/bin/metacity. This didn't work, and it also didn't seem right.
If it weren't for the Gentoo forums I probably wouldn't have found an answer. It turned out the solution was easy, I just needed to add it to "sessions" in the Advanced section of desktop preferences in the GNOME menu. It was also interesting that I could start up a gnome console and type "metacity &" and suddenly my windows were managed.
I had similar window manager problems when using Gnome in Debian as well. Clearly packagers of GNOME haven't been able to make it work as nicely out of the box as KDE. Of course KDE is easier to install, but it is more rigid in the sense that you can't use any window manager you want.
I'm having trouble configuring a lot of things in GNOME right now. Like how to see KDE apps in the menu? How to change icon spacing on the desktop? And it seems that you can't have different desktop wallpapers on different virtual desktops? Nor can you have a randomly changing wallpaper based on a whole bunch of images in a single directory (like in KDE). I don't know, GNOME seems cool, and I've seen a lot of cool screenshots of people running xfce with gnome-panel, gnome with enlightenment, sawfish, metacity, all sorts of combinations. It seems to take much more man hours to get it working that way one wants, compared to KDE.
I think you're way in left field. These were government workers and the licenses were for desktops Linux.
A. They're not runnning any complex scientific software, development environments, or anything else very complex.
B. They're mostly using a browser, email, and Star Office.
C. Java Desktop is not a SERVER!
My point was, this is desktop software. If a user is having trouble doing something in his application, he can contact IT and they can help him fix the problem. IT should be able to find an answer, via his own intuition, or by searching on Google. I've never found a problem in my various workplaces that couldn't be fixed by myself, a colleague or the IT guy (I'm an engineer). The only time we run into trouble is with development tools (IDE, compilers) and CAD software (OrCAD), and in those cases we use the tech support extensively. SUN doesn't provide that. They're just provide a cheap replacement for Windows. So I fail to see the need to pay SUN for support?
With Sun or IBM, you have someone you can call who (eventually) has access to the people who wrote the code causing your problem.
Hmmm, if it's all running Linux, won't the IT department at company X have just as much access to the person who wrote the code as IBM or Sun does? Most of the developers work for free right? so unless Sun or IBM hires them they don't really have any special access to these people who wrote the code.
My main point, which I tried to make long ago was that we don't NEED Sun's support for this. The China deal was for Desktops and it doesn't seem like they would need Sun's support much for that, just like you don't need to call Microsoft for problems with Win98 on the Desktop. What you need support for is the servers, which is a totally different ballgame (but which everyone who replied to my post seems to be referring to).
Their support for KDE was always better. Their rpms worked right out of the box always, but the gnome ones were always substandard compared to Redhat's. I'm not sure why they coded their little GUI utils in GTK, but that's a separate issue.
"What was it? Ohh, right, you are at their mercy for an answer. And god forbid if you don't format it right, or show deference, or put in a monty python reference you will end up flamed and banned from the list."
What's this all about. If you are referring to user moshez on the python irc channel, then I can understand. But I have not heard of most linux support being this way. Check out Gentoo. They have some of the best user communities for support around IMHO.
Asking a mailing list is fine for your typical small-business server running SAMBA, DNS, DHCP, and qmail. For most everything else, its a really, really lame way to get support.
WTF! What other ways of support do you suggest. Let's look in this imcomplete manual. Nope, that doesn't help us in this situation. Alright, let's call SUN technical support. Oh, geez I'm on hold, fuck this shit, I'll type in a few words in Google and find my answer. Or, I'll write to a mailing list, which is basically the same thing, since most Google hits will be from mailing list archives. Jesus what do you think Windows users have been doing for years, even in the "enterprise" environment. They use a search engine or look up a bug on the M$ KB. Same thing in Linux. I have never called M$ in all my years of using Windows. It is much more efficient to find someone else who had the same problem and documented the solution.
What you are saying about non-debian distros is probably true.
Just a tip for Debian, use testing as your default distribution, and just install whatever packages in unstable that you really want. For me testing is usually current enough. It is basically just the packages in unstable which have no more release-critical bugs, which forces them into testing. Running pure unstable is bound to be unstable.
Ok, forget about stupid Mandrake. They suck and I hate them, seriously, I'm so glad I switched from them to Debian and now to Gentoo. But how about Lindows their a good argument against the statement "KDE is effectively dead for business" right?
Slashdot Mirror
I've had lots of boring lectures. I'd rather get them over with in one sitting. Of course if there were couches or beds, this would be ideal, or else your butt would really start to hurt. I think profs would teach more efficiently. They could probably get what usually takes 3 1 hour lectures done in about 2 hours or 2.5
"secondly, 6 hours of material is approximately two weeks worth of lecture. think about how much missing even one lecture in the wrong class can screw up your understanding of the subject, regardless of how many notes and lecture outlines you get.
Yes, this is a good point, but there are an extra 4 days in the week now to figure it out. A lot of time every week is wasted getting to school, leaving school, lunch break, etc.. If we just compress it into one day, this is efficiency!
And if you don't think it is possible to stay awake 24 hours, try it. Have you ever pulled an all-nighter? It's tough at first but you get used to it. Ask and med school resident what it's like. It's not that bad actually.
Wouldn't that be awesome if you could go to lectures for one 24-hour period per week! Then the rest of the week could be used for studying, and doing cool projects and shit. I figure that during the lecturing, you could take some cat naps for like, and hour at a time, and your friend could take notes for you. You could take turns. Ideally all the notes would be available online anyways, so if you took a 6 hour nap, you could get those notes.
Is there a Canadian equivalent of the RIAA as well? Should I stop downloading off Kazaa? Actually I think in Canada I am allowed to download, as long as I don't share. Haha, suckers!
I had to deal with Netgear support which I think was based in India. At least, all the guys on the other end had that stereotypical Indian/Pakistani accent. They seemed really knowledgeable, and they seemed to know the router very well. Their English was a bit difficult to understand at times. It was a bit annoying that every time I called there, they would take me through the same script. Unplug your router, plug it in. Restart your computer, go to 192.168.1.1, go to Wizard, click "next", etc... I had to do this every time I called. It got annoying pretty quick. I can't say whether or not American customer support technician's would be any better. One time I had some questions about my ADSL modem, and it was made by a small Canadian company. When I called customer service, I think I was talking to an engineer. He had intimate knowledge of the modem/router, and it sounded like he might have built part of it. It's too bad there are so many customers out there and there aren't enough of them to go around.
When I said recently, I meant like 4 years ago. The time when schools started buying Macs again coincided with the iMac. Schools are kind of a mix of PCs and Macs nowadays for the most part, from what I have seen.
Forget it, I've got 4.5 MBit/s already.
I'm downloading the torrent. Please download as well, so it will go faster. Thanks.
Why didn't they put ZINF (formerly freeamp) on that CD. It's open source isn't it?
"Public schools will probably be the very last to "resist" and switch from Microsoft." This is a very good point. Schools were also the last to switch from Macs... True, Macs are seeing a resurgence, but basically schools used to use only Macs and clung to them until recently when they started switching to PCs.
It's slashdotted already... mirrors?
Redhat has always pushed Gnome and has broken KDE on many occasions. But for the distros that don't TRY to favour either one, Debian and Gentoo are good examples, KDE always works better out of the box compared to GNOME.
I'm going to continue trying GNOME in the coming months. I just needed the hard drive space, and now I have it so I installed it last night. I have to nail down which wm to use, and also whether I want to run xfce with gnome-panel, or something like that. There's a lot of tweaking involved with GNOME compared to KDE I find, but actually I might learn to like this tweakability. Although lack of features like multiple-wallpapers-on-different-virtual-desktops which I take for granted in KDE and many other things might eventually piss me off.
That's the gnome default! I just installed with Gentoo which doesn't do any special configuration, and I have an applications menu at the top and the bottom is just a taskbar. Debian also does this by default as of last year at least (GNOME 2.x).
Yeah, I think you're right, it's because they through in Weather, and all that other Outlook crap, Journal, Calendar, etc.. At one company I worked for we all used Outlook, but I thought it sucked compared to outlook express, so I started using outlook express instead.
If it weren't for the Gentoo forums I probably wouldn't have found an answer. It turned out the solution was easy, I just needed to add it to "sessions" in the Advanced section of desktop preferences in the GNOME menu. It was also interesting that I could start up a gnome console and type "metacity &" and suddenly my windows were managed.
I had similar window manager problems when using Gnome in Debian as well. Clearly packagers of GNOME haven't been able to make it work as nicely out of the box as KDE. Of course KDE is easier to install, but it is more rigid in the sense that you can't use any window manager you want.
I'm having trouble configuring a lot of things in GNOME right now. Like how to see KDE apps in the menu? How to change icon spacing on the desktop? And it seems that you can't have different desktop wallpapers on different virtual desktops? Nor can you have a randomly changing wallpaper based on a whole bunch of images in a single directory (like in KDE). I don't know, GNOME seems cool, and I've seen a lot of cool screenshots of people running xfce with gnome-panel, gnome with enlightenment, sawfish, metacity, all sorts of combinations. It seems to take much more man hours to get it working that way one wants, compared to KDE.
You mean spam? Or sildenafil citrate?
A. They're not runnning any complex scientific software, development environments, or anything else very complex.
B. They're mostly using a browser, email, and Star Office.
C. Java Desktop is not a SERVER!
My point was, this is desktop software. If a user is having trouble doing something in his application, he can contact IT and they can help him fix the problem. IT should be able to find an answer, via his own intuition, or by searching on Google. I've never found a problem in my various workplaces that couldn't be fixed by myself, a colleague or the IT guy (I'm an engineer). The only time we run into trouble is with development tools (IDE, compilers) and CAD software (OrCAD), and in those cases we use the tech support extensively. SUN doesn't provide that. They're just provide a cheap replacement for Windows. So I fail to see the need to pay SUN for support?
Hmmm, if it's all running Linux, won't the IT department at company X have just as much access to the person who wrote the code as IBM or Sun does? Most of the developers work for free right? so unless Sun or IBM hires them they don't really have any special access to these people who wrote the code.
My main point, which I tried to make long ago was that we don't NEED Sun's support for this. The China deal was for Desktops and it doesn't seem like they would need Sun's support much for that, just like you don't need to call Microsoft for problems with Win98 on the Desktop. What you need support for is the servers, which is a totally different ballgame (but which everyone who replied to my post seems to be referring to).
So is it still $50? or have they negotiated a longer term for more money. details...
Their support for KDE was always better. Their rpms worked right out of the box always, but the gnome ones were always substandard compared to Redhat's. I'm not sure why they coded their little GUI utils in GTK, but that's a separate issue.
What's this all about. If you are referring to user moshez on the python irc channel, then I can understand. But I have not heard of most linux support being this way. Check out Gentoo. They have some of the best user communities for support around IMHO.
Asking a mailing list is fine for your typical small-business server running SAMBA, DNS, DHCP, and qmail. For most everything else, its a really, really lame way to get support.
WTF! What other ways of support do you suggest. Let's look in this imcomplete manual. Nope, that doesn't help us in this situation. Alright, let's call SUN technical support. Oh, geez I'm on hold, fuck this shit, I'll type in a few words in Google and find my answer. Or, I'll write to a mailing list, which is basically the same thing, since most Google hits will be from mailing list archives. Jesus what do you think Windows users have been doing for years, even in the "enterprise" environment. They use a search engine or look up a bug on the M$ KB. Same thing in Linux. I have never called M$ in all my years of using Windows. It is much more efficient to find someone else who had the same problem and documented the solution.
Last I heard they were installed in those Walmart PCs but have no idea about that venture.
Just a tip for Debian, use testing as your default distribution, and just install whatever packages in unstable that you really want. For me testing is usually current enough. It is basically just the packages in unstable which have no more release-critical bugs, which forces them into testing. Running pure unstable is bound to be unstable.
Also, had they used KDE they could have gone with kopete and konqueror which are far better apps than gaim and nautilus respectively IMHO.
Ok, forget about stupid Mandrake. They suck and I hate them, seriously, I'm so glad I switched from them to Debian and now to Gentoo. But how about Lindows their a good argument against the statement "KDE is effectively dead for business" right?