I can't believe how poor this article is - if we're talking about the long-lamented variety of home PCs that cropped up in the 80's, then these are obvious ones in no particular order (look, none of them have Intel processors or run DOS/Windows !):
Commodore Pet
Tandy TRS-80
Sinclair ZX80/ZX81/ZX Spectrum (shoddy, but incredibly popular and brought home computer to the UK masses)
Commodore Vic 20
BBC [Acorn] Model B (the world's finest 8-bit micro and dominated UK education in the 80's)
Commodore Amiga
Atari 520 ST
Acorn Archimedes (arguably the best home PC OS of the 80's anywhere in the world)
Strangely, although RISC OS limped on to this millennium [along with a much-changed AmigaOS], home PC OS'es have commoditised down to Windows vs. UNIX (Linux/*BSD/Mac OS X) with no other OS'es even getting a look in. Ditto with the hardware, which is basically Intel/AMD vs. Power PC.
The UK had a Netscape-branded ISP years ago - its portal is still, surprisingly, available and I even have the Netscape Online ISP CD I picked up from a branch of Woolworth (probably the only ISP CD at that time that came with Netscape [4.X] instead of IE !).
I have no idea if you can still sign up for Netscape Online in the UK - anyone got any ideas (the portal gives no clue)? I reckon you'll just sign up with AOL if you tried that old CD now:-)
The BBC article surprisingly failed to cough up on figures about PC saturation in homes, which surely goes hand-in-hand with Internet access? For instance, I set up a second PC recently at home, but had trouble getting the wireless connection going for a few weeks (a different make of WLAN card fixed that).
During those few weeks, it struck me how utterly useless the PC was without Net access. I couldn't get security fixes or any other software without actually buying it on CD via mail order or at a store. I couldn't check news, sports, music or computer-related sites whenever I liked and I certainly couldn't e-mail anyone with it (and who sends hand-written letters nowadays?).
BTW, if you point out to the average person in the UK that CDs and DVDs cost up to a third less online than they do in UK stores, I'm sure they'd rush to get online:-)
Being the original poster of this thread, I should point out that I did say "be prepared to be staggered at the prices..." - I never pay more than 10 pounds for a CD myself and, yes, I do shop at play.com, CD WOW and even non-UK-targetted online DVD sites like DVD Soon.
Even HMV can actually be reasonable value when it tries - the Josie soundtrack CD was actually in a 3 for 20 pounds offer until about a week ago and so I did actually buy it from HMV at that price (which beats even play.com). Also, if you buy CD singles in the first week, HMV often has them at 2.99 pounds - that's the sort of price no-one can beat online.
Yes, you're right - the HMV Web site is mainly only good for checking their sales listings (e.g. that recent 3 for 20 pounds offer included any mix of CDs or DVDs - there were over 800 DVDs to pick from and I could browse the online list to decide which one(s) I wanted before, yes, going to the bricks'n'mortar store and buying them there).
I'd argue the same is true of amazon.co.uk too - like HMV, it's a great search site for CDs and DVDs because of the massive stock, but the prices are uncompetitive compared to other online stores and I usually wait until another cheaper site has the item before I buy it online.
As for the prices being ironic - the point was that the main article said "you get more [and better] content on the DVD than the CD and it barely costs any more", whereas with Josie, you get less content on the CD, but it costs more and is better...hence it being an ironic twist of the main article's point.
Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack CD:
19.99 pounds ($32)
Same retailer, same movie, two pounds ($3) less for the DVD than the soundtrack CD ! It's ironic really, because the movie is only OK, but the
soundtrack is utterly fantastic - I have it on auto-repeat at the moment...
Funny, I've been paying no more than 10 pounds per CD, DVD disc (obviously more if it's a multi-disc DVD set), book, computer game (I just buy budget ones), movies or concert tickets (I just go to small venues only) for many years now. 15 quid is extortionate!
Can I recommend DVD Price Check and also CD/DVD sites like play.com and CD WOW! to get your music at under 10 quid? Shop on the Net...you'll find it about 1/3rd cheaper than the UK high street...
Yes, not only is the site running IIS on W2K, but
the final (upload) field on the
complaint form is most amusing.
Whilst the prior three fields give you 8K of plain text which to fill in, the final field only lets you upload in one of two proprietary closed-source word processor document formats (one of which is ironically Microsoft's) - nope, you're not allowed to upload SXW format (Open Office), plain text or even PDF files ! Also note that you're allowed a 1000K upload too, thanks to the bloatedness of the two formats they do allow...
I'm surprised the article failed to mention that typos in the.tv domain have been "hijacked" by Verisign almost since it began.
For example, try this non-existent domain and see what I mean. I never liked this, especially since it comes up with a price for the mis-typed domain right away and offers it for sale to you...
Apparently, there are some now-obsoleted RFCs
(RFC1878 and/or RFC1122) which don't allow a
subnet portion of all ones or all zeros (binary).
Rather incredibly, HP-UX 11 actually won't let you use a 10.0.0.X address by default because it blindly (and wrongly) follows these ancient RFC specs ! If you don't believe me, check out this
discussion , which thankfully does indeed have the fixes in the thread (patch PHNE_20633 and a hack to nddconf).
Yep, we use 10.X.X.X addresses and got bitten by this with our HP-UX boxes:-(
You require a Windows machine with Windows Media Player 9. That presumably rules out all Mac and Linux users ?
Compression is used so it won't be as good quality as a CD.
You need a broadband connection really to make regular use of the service.
It sounds like there is some form of DRM (press release is vague about it).
You don't get any artwork/booklet save for a small JPEG screenshot of the front cover.
Albums cost 7.99 pounds to download, whereas I can buy a CD (higher quality, artwork, no DRM) for 8.99 pounds from CD WOW!.
I like solo female singer-songerwriters - good luck on finding Nanci Griffith, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sam Brown or Shawn Colvin on there. And no sign of The Beatles (unless you count a covers band !) on there of course.
Just about the only good thing I could see about the service is the availability of non-album tracks that only previously appeared on now-deleted CD singles (e.g. "Humpty Dumpty" by Aimee Mann came out in January 2003 - I never saw the CD single in the stores I go to - and it has a non-album track on it). Apart from that, you're better every single time buying the CD album or single (the latter can be 1.99 pounds or 2.99 pounds in most cases for 3 tracks).
In the UK, Simpsons and Futurama episodes are aired first on Sky One at 6.30pm and 7.00pm respectively on Sunday nights - we already have a "Groening Hour of Power":-) Plus the DVD box sets of The Simpsons and Futurama are released up to 6 months before the US (although twice the price of the US versions, so I order the US ones instead). Oh, plus the Futurama game came out several months before the US.
Now if only Sky One didn't put "Sky One Brand New" in the top left *and* a red blob in the top right (don't ask - you're supposed to press the red button on your remote, but it doesn't go to a Simpsons/Futurama section of their interactive digital TV stuff, but just to the main menu !).
Luckily, the blob can be removed by a rapid press of the Red button followed by Backup, but you can't get rid of the 2 line logo in the top left:-(
I also hate that they shove in 3 repeats of The Simpsons on consecutive Sundays and then a brand new episode, then 2 repeats, then a new episode, then a repeat, then 3 new episodes and so on - a total guess as to whether the episode will be new or not (so I just record them all and check them out later).
Never mind XINE and XMMS, what about CD/DVD ? :-)
on
More Cheap Linux PCs
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· Score: 1
Interesting about the Xine and XMMS "mix-up", but of more interest is the lack of any mention of a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive to actually play music or movies on !
If it doesn't ship with at least a CD-ROM drive, then this is one cost-cutting exercise taken way too far (after all, how am I supposed to wipe off their distro and put Red Hat on instead ?:-) ).
End of life of RPM update fixes for the consumer Red Hat is probably the biggest "incentive" Red Hat have ever pushed on their customers to move to their (somewhat expensive) Enterprise version.
However, surely the Enterprise version suffers the same security problems (for kernel and core applications) that the consumer version has ? I'm willing to bet that there's been several kernel fixes for the Enterprise version, which of course require a reboot and hence downtime. Does anyone have any figures as to how many "critical" Enterprise fixes there's been in the last year and how that compares to, say, Red Hat 8.0 ?
On the consumer side, I've decided to skip Red Hat 9 - it only gives you 4 months extra life compared to even 7.2 - with barely much difference between say 8.0 and 9 and I am waiting instead for the release after 9 to upgrade existing 7.X and 8.X machines to.
Of course, all this applies to servers - desktops can follow the bleeding edge a bit more (it's cheaper/almost risk-free to try out new releases on a few desktops and then roll them out when you're happy) and I can't honestly ever see the point of running anything other than the consumer Red Hat release on those, even on corporate desktops.
...you have to "billiard ball bounce" around the stages quite a lot for it to affect things significantly. In fact, I've gone full steam into a metal barrier in 6th gear in CMR 2.0 and whilst it breaks a few windows, you can just carry on with the rest of the stage, maybe with a "sticky" gear change, that's all.
Realistic car damage in car racing games is quite important, but at least some car damage (like in CMR 2.0) is better than none at all. I'm quite surprised that such a well-respected brand as the Gran Turismo series has still failed to put this in.
All 4 varieties of RPMs for Opera 7.11 don't work
on Red Hat 8.0 because they've linked dynamically
against an older openmotif library - I'm guessing
possibly because of Netscape 4.X plugin
incompatibilities with the later openmotif library
that comes with Red Hat 8.0 by default. I'd have linked statically against the appropriate library in that case, but the Opera folks decided not to.
To fix this, you have to "rpm -Uvh openmotif21-2.1.30-6.i386.rpm" from one of your Red Hat install CDs (yep, the older openmotif21 RPM is not installed by default on Red Hat 8.0).
Sadly, this crucial dependency problem is not mentioned on either the download page or the FAQ, but is buried in their knowledge base
here. Hope this helps folks struggling out there...
Re:Can you do similar with SRPMs?
on
Gentoo Reviewed
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· Score: 1
This is basically another way of saying "why don't Red Hat ship an entirely i686-targeted distro ?". A while ago, I spec'ed out an automated way to take Red Hat's distro CDs (you'll need all the binary/source CDs) and re-build them to create a new 3-CD i686 binary release that could be installed just like the (mostly) i386 release they currently ship.
Problems that could have fouled things up included:
Red Hat GPG-signs its RPMs - will Anaconda reject unsigned RPMs ?
Some packages may not have a non-interactive config/install - these will have to be exceptions where options are piped through the package installer.
Dependencies ! How does Anaconda cope with this ?
What about a 2 cents coin ?
on
Making Change
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· Score: 2, Insightful
An 18 cent coin just seems silly to me, because the calculations required to use it would be difficult to easily optimise in your head. In the UK, we have
a 2p coin [ironically, one of the largest-diametered in circulation] and wouldn't this cut down the number of coins needed in an easily calculable way ?
It seems to me, that ease of change calculation is as equally important as the average number of coins used for said change, but this is almost glossed over in the article by one sentence.
Unusually for once in the realm of TV, the UK has a clear lead in the widescreen arena:
16:9 sets have been outselling 4:3 sets significantly in the past 3-4 years, so much so that it's virtually impossible to find any set over 20" that's in the old-fashioned 4:3 format.
Almost all UK-made dramas aired on UK TV are now widescreen - in fact, if a new UK drama airs that isn't widescreen, I find it quite shocking:-)
The majority of UK TV adverts are now widescreen.
More and more "cheap and cheerful" UK TV shows are being aired widescreen (home makeovers, quiz shows, gardening etc. etc.). BBC and Channel 4 have been the leaders in this, with ITV begin somewhat behind and the laggards at Sky One bringing up a distant last place.
Sky (the largest UK digital TV platform) has just made all its "Sky Box Office" pay-per-view movies widescreen (what about the normal movie channels too, Sky ?).
I was amused that I had to beg the BBC a couple of years ago to air "Film [insert year here] with Jonathan Ross" in widescreen, because they amazingly shot Ross's studio reviews in 4:3 and then had letterboxed movie clips. The series that followed finally switched to widescreen - amazing that the most obvious BBC show to get widescreen (a movie review show) was one of the last to get it !
One weak point in the UK widescreen TV market, though, is the virtual non-existence of widescreen TV's below the 24" mark. Now, I don't know about you, but I have a small bedroom with limited space to put my VCR, satellite decoder and TV (in fact, the three are stacked on top of each other).
There's no way I can fit a 24" widescreen set in the space available, so how come it's impossible to buy a portable widescreen set in the UK now ? Luckily, I got myself a Sony 16" widescreen set before they got discontinued and I love it to death, but when that needs replacing, I'll have to knock the wall through to the next room to fit a widescreen set in:-)
If you check the man pages for the 3 functions,
you'll see that they just take char * pointers with
no lengths specified, so they'll just copy from
the source data until they hit a zero char or
cause a buffer overflow exception.
To answer your question, it's
not possible to replace the original functions
in libc because there's no maximum length param
in those functions (unlike the safer "n" equivalents like snprintf()).
It's great to see that NVIDIA are getting rid of their huge and confusing list of RPMs and also adding in what sounds like a cute installer, but...and I quote from the README:
"If you already have an XF86Config file working with a different driver
(such as the 'nv' or 'vesa' driver), then all you need to do is find
the relevant Device section and replace the line:..."
Er, silly question here, but why doesn't the NVIDIA installer do all this ? The NVIDIA installer on Windows certainly doesn't expect the end-user to hand-hack a config file afterwards, so why do Linux users have to ?
If you check on the Net, there's only 2 lines you need to add to the wlan-ng.conf file to get the WCF12 card to work. This card is *extremely* popular with the Zaurus (heck, yes, even I bought one for my Zaurus) and really, Sharp should release a ROM update that includes support for it.
If people took your advice, they'd get the inferior WFC11, which blocks the stylus hole I believe. The WCF12 is nice, although like any add-on, it will reduce your battery life (not as much as the backlight though).
I don't know why people use the Red Hat RPMs for Apache (2 !) + PHP etc. - it's quite easy to compile and build them from source. You can choose between Apache 1.3.X (recommended) and Apache 2.X (only recommended for non-PHP/Perl Web serving at the moment).
You can then put your favourite compile options and install paths in, build the thing with dynamic modules and then tweak httpd.conf to remove the modules you don't need. You end up with a "sleek" Apache setup that will probably perform better than the generic RPMs Red Hat ship. This can be important if you need every CPU cycle for your PHP/Perl stuff.
...in theory, you don't even have to pay for just one system (they give you one machine on a "demo" account for free - though they ask you to fill in a survey and validate your e-mail address every 60 days) if you want to be a tight-wad.
The snags with using the "one download and spread it to all the others" are:
You can only handle one OS release that way. Have 7.3 and 8.0 on your network ? You'll need to register 2 machines (yep, time to dig out your
Webmail accounts if you're still a cheapskate) - one for 7.3 and another for 8.0.
You need a way to "override" the Red Hat versions of some packages easily (I figured a way to do that with my script without having to hack around with the up2date config) - e.g. the infamous
xmms without MP3 support RPMs in 8.0 - you want
the MP3-enabled ones from Guru Labs of course.
You need to obsolete superseded RPMs automatically in your download filestore (again, I worked that out myself).
You need a way to distribute "local" RPMs (i.e. stuff that doesn't come with the RH CDs or with the up2date stuff, e.g. Opera, Java and so on) - I worked out how to do that as well:-)
Mind you, even with multiple RHN subs, there's still no easy way to do this (RHN should allow you specify additional "local" RPMs on your filestore that are installed on all registered machines).
If you didn't pay, you'll need a cron job to
download the RHN RPMs at 4.00am or so, otherwise you probably won't get connected during the day.
My solution used an NFS directory to store the
downloaded RPMs (but an rsync to local filestore on each slave machine would be equally good) and there's also some gotchas to work out (like creating soft-links in the master machine's/var/spool/up2date dir to link across each RPM there to your downloaded central copy [to fool up2date into thinking it's downloaded it already],
plus remembering to do "up2date --nox --packages" on your master machine after installing the downloaded RPMs on it, so that RHN know about your updated RPM setup).
The subject says it all - the Windows way of
cutting and pasting usually involves:
Selecting the text you want to copy with the
mouse left button.
Either:
Letting go of the mouse and pressing CTRL-C (some users might be able to hold onto the mouse with one hand and use the other to CTRL-C, but most won't) or
Going to the Edit -> Copy menu item and
choosing that.
[Hint for those who need a clue stick: This is horrible GUI design]
Clicking in the destination window position with the left button to get focus and position the pasting point.
Either:
Letting go of the mouse and pressing CTRL-V or
Going to the Edit -> Paste menu item and choosing that.
[Hint 2 - It's still horrible GUI design]
Now, yes, Windows treats selection of text as simply a highlight function and not a copy, but 99% of the time when you've selected text, you want it copied into the clipboard. X Windows does this automatically and is the correct GUI behaviour - Windows has its default wrong.
Now you've got the text in the clipboard, what do you want to do with it 99% of the time ? Yep, paste it into a window somewhere. Yet again, X does this by default when you press the middle mouse button...Windows ? Sorry, the default is to ignore the middle mouse button and you have to combo a left-click with either a menu selection or a key-press - BZZZT! It's the wrong default again.
Basically, X Windows has its defaults correct and Windows has them wrong - it's twice as fast for a user to cut'n'paste (which is all users do with selections 99.99% of the time) in X Windows than Windows.
Apache is one of those programs that I actually refuse to use a binary distribution of. I just download the latest source, set my preferred options (making sure I build with dynamically loadable modules, which allows me to comment out the ones I don't need in httpd.conf) and away I go.
If Apache is installed, I "rpm -e" it and then
"make install" my source-built version. If I want to upgrade, usually only the httpd binary and modules need updating and then a quick restart of the server and I'm nicely up-to-date (would you trust "rpm -Uvh" on a live production server's Apache ??!).
Slashdot Mirror
Strangely, although RISC OS limped on to this millennium [along with a much-changed AmigaOS], home PC OS'es have commoditised down to Windows vs. UNIX (Linux/*BSD/Mac OS X) with no other OS'es even getting a look in. Ditto with the hardware, which is basically Intel/AMD vs. Power PC.
The UK had a Netscape-branded ISP years ago - its portal is still, surprisingly, available and I even have the Netscape Online ISP CD I picked up from a branch of Woolworth (probably the only ISP CD at that time that came with Netscape [4.X] instead of IE !). I have no idea if you can still sign up for Netscape Online in the UK - anyone got any ideas (the portal gives no clue)? I reckon you'll just sign up with AOL if you tried that old CD now :-)
During those few weeks, it struck me how utterly useless the PC was without Net access. I couldn't get security fixes or any other software without actually buying it on CD via mail order or at a store. I couldn't check news, sports, music or computer-related sites whenever I liked and I certainly couldn't e-mail anyone with it (and who sends hand-written letters nowadays?). BTW, if you point out to the average person in the UK that CDs and DVDs cost up to a third less online than they do in UK stores, I'm sure they'd rush to get online :-)
Even HMV can actually be reasonable value when it tries - the Josie soundtrack CD was actually in a 3 for 20 pounds offer until about a week ago and so I did actually buy it from HMV at that price (which beats even play.com). Also, if you buy CD singles in the first week, HMV often has them at 2.99 pounds - that's the sort of price no-one can beat online.
Yes, you're right - the HMV Web site is mainly only good for checking their sales listings (e.g. that recent 3 for 20 pounds offer included any mix of CDs or DVDs - there were over 800 DVDs to pick from and I could browse the online list to decide which one(s) I wanted before, yes, going to the bricks'n'mortar store and buying them there).
I'd argue the same is true of amazon.co.uk too - like HMV, it's a great search site for CDs and DVDs because of the massive stock, but the prices are uncompetitive compared to other online stores and I usually wait until another cheaper site has the item before I buy it online.
As for the prices being ironic - the point was that the main article said "you get more [and better] content on the DVD than the CD and it barely costs any more", whereas with Josie, you get less content on the CD, but it costs more and is better...hence it being an ironic twist of the main article's point.
Josie and the Pussycats DVD: 17.99 pounds ($29)
Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack CD: 19.99 pounds ($32)
Same retailer, same movie, two pounds ($3) less for the DVD than the soundtrack CD ! It's ironic really, because the movie is only OK, but the soundtrack is utterly fantastic - I have it on auto-repeat at the moment...
Can I recommend DVD Price Check and also CD/DVD sites like play.com and CD WOW! to get your music at under 10 quid? Shop on the Net...you'll find it about 1/3rd cheaper than the UK high street...
Whilst the prior three fields give you 8K of plain text which to fill in, the final field only lets you upload in one of two proprietary closed-source word processor document formats (one of which is ironically Microsoft's) - nope, you're not allowed to upload SXW format (Open Office), plain text or even PDF files ! Also note that you're allowed a 1000K upload too, thanks to the bloatedness of the two formats they do allow...
I'm surprised the article failed to mention that typos in the .tv domain have been "hijacked" by Verisign almost since it began.
For example, try this non-existent domain and see what I mean. I never liked this, especially since it comes up with a price for the mis-typed domain right away and offers it for sale to you...
Rather incredibly, HP-UX 11 actually won't let you use a 10.0.0.X address by default because it blindly (and wrongly) follows these ancient RFC specs ! If you don't believe me, check out this discussion , which thankfully does indeed have the fixes in the thread (patch PHNE_20633 and a hack to nddconf).
Yep, we use 10.X.X.X addresses and got bitten by this with our HP-UX boxes :-(
- You require a Windows machine with Windows Media Player 9. That presumably rules out all Mac and Linux users ?
- Compression is used so it won't be as good quality as a CD.
- You need a broadband connection really to make regular use of the service.
- It sounds like there is some form of DRM (press release is vague about it).
- You don't get any artwork/booklet save for a small JPEG screenshot of the front cover.
- Albums cost 7.99 pounds to download, whereas I can buy a CD (higher quality, artwork, no DRM) for 8.99 pounds from CD WOW!.
- I like solo female singer-songerwriters - good luck on finding Nanci Griffith, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sam Brown or Shawn Colvin on there. And no sign of The Beatles (unless you count a covers band !) on there of course.
Just about the only good thing I could see about the service is the availability of non-album tracks that only previously appeared on now-deleted CD singles (e.g. "Humpty Dumpty" by Aimee Mann came out in January 2003 - I never saw the CD single in the stores I go to - and it has a non-album track on it). Apart from that, you're better every single time buying the CD album or single (the latter can be 1.99 pounds or 2.99 pounds in most cases for 3 tracks).Now if only Sky One didn't put "Sky One Brand New" in the top left *and* a red blob in the top right (don't ask - you're supposed to press the red button on your remote, but it doesn't go to a Simpsons/Futurama section of their interactive digital TV stuff, but just to the main menu !). Luckily, the blob can be removed by a rapid press of the Red button followed by Backup, but you can't get rid of the 2 line logo in the top left :-(
I also hate that they shove in 3 repeats of The Simpsons on consecutive Sundays and then a brand new episode, then 2 repeats, then a new episode, then a repeat, then 3 new episodes and so on - a total guess as to whether the episode will be new or not (so I just record them all and check them out later).
Interesting about the Xine and XMMS "mix-up", but of more interest is the lack of any mention of a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive to actually play music or movies on ! If it doesn't ship with at least a CD-ROM drive, then this is one cost-cutting exercise taken way too far (after all, how am I supposed to wipe off their distro and put Red Hat on instead ? :-) ).
However, surely the Enterprise version suffers the same security problems (for kernel and core applications) that the consumer version has ? I'm willing to bet that there's been several kernel fixes for the Enterprise version, which of course require a reboot and hence downtime. Does anyone have any figures as to how many "critical" Enterprise fixes there's been in the last year and how that compares to, say, Red Hat 8.0 ?
On the consumer side, I've decided to skip Red Hat 9 - it only gives you 4 months extra life compared to even 7.2 - with barely much difference between say 8.0 and 9 and I am waiting instead for the release after 9 to upgrade existing 7.X and 8.X machines to.
Of course, all this applies to servers - desktops can follow the bleeding edge a bit more (it's cheaper/almost risk-free to try out new releases on a few desktops and then roll them out when you're happy) and I can't honestly ever see the point of running anything other than the consumer Red Hat release on those, even on corporate desktops.
Realistic car damage in car racing games is quite important, but at least some car damage (like in CMR 2.0) is better than none at all. I'm quite surprised that such a well-respected brand as the Gran Turismo series has still failed to put this in.
To fix this, you have to "rpm -Uvh openmotif21-2.1.30-6.i386.rpm" from one of your Red Hat install CDs (yep, the older openmotif21 RPM is not installed by default on Red Hat 8.0). Sadly, this crucial dependency problem is not mentioned on either the download page or the FAQ, but is buried in their knowledge base here. Hope this helps folks struggling out there...
Problems that could have fouled things up included:
An 18 cent coin just seems silly to me, because the calculations required to use it would be difficult to easily optimise in your head. In the UK, we have a 2p coin [ironically, one of the largest-diametered in circulation] and wouldn't this cut down the number of coins needed in an easily calculable way ? It seems to me, that ease of change calculation is as equally important as the average number of coins used for said change, but this is almost glossed over in the article by one sentence.
I was amused that I had to beg the BBC a couple of years ago to air "Film [insert year here] with Jonathan Ross" in widescreen, because they amazingly shot Ross's studio reviews in 4:3 and then had letterboxed movie clips. The series that followed finally switched to widescreen - amazing that the most obvious BBC show to get widescreen (a movie review show) was one of the last to get it !
One weak point in the UK widescreen TV market, though, is the virtual non-existence of widescreen TV's below the 24" mark. Now, I don't know about you, but I have a small bedroom with limited space to put my VCR, satellite decoder and TV (in fact, the three are stacked on top of each other).
There's no way I can fit a 24" widescreen set in the space available, so how come it's impossible to buy a portable widescreen set in the UK now ? Luckily, I got myself a Sony 16" widescreen set before they got discontinued and I love it to death, but when that needs replacing, I'll have to knock the wall through to the next room to fit a widescreen set in :-)
To answer your question, it's not possible to replace the original functions in libc because there's no maximum length param in those functions (unlike the safer "n" equivalents like snprintf()).
Er, silly question here, but why doesn't the NVIDIA installer do all this ? The NVIDIA installer on Windows certainly doesn't expect the end-user to hand-hack a config file afterwards, so why do Linux users have to ?
If you check on the Net, there's only 2 lines you need to add to the wlan-ng.conf file to get the WCF12 card to work. This card is *extremely* popular with the Zaurus (heck, yes, even I bought one for my Zaurus) and really, Sharp should release a ROM update that includes support for it.
If people took your advice, they'd get the inferior WFC11, which blocks the stylus hole I believe. The WCF12 is nice, although like any add-on, it will reduce your battery life (not as much as the backlight though).
You can then put your favourite compile options and install paths in, build the thing with dynamic modules and then tweak httpd.conf to remove the modules you don't need. You end up with a "sleek" Apache setup that will probably perform better than the generic RPMs Red Hat ship. This can be important if you need every CPU cycle for your PHP/Perl stuff.
The snags with using the "one download and spread it to all the others" are:
My solution used an NFS directory to store the downloaded RPMs (but an rsync to local filestore on each slave machine would be equally good) and there's also some gotchas to work out (like creating soft-links in the master machine's /var/spool/up2date dir to link across each RPM there to your downloaded central copy [to fool up2date into thinking it's downloaded it already],
plus remembering to do "up2date --nox --packages" on your master machine after installing the downloaded RPMs on it, so that RHN know about your updated RPM setup).
- Selecting the text you want to copy with the
mouse left button.
- Either:
-
Clicking in the destination window position with the left button to get focus and position the pasting point.
- Either:
Now, yes, Windows treats selection of text as simply a highlight function and not a copy, but 99% of the time when you've selected text, you want it copied into the clipboard. X Windows does this automatically and is the correct GUI behaviour - Windows has its default wrong.- Letting go of the mouse and pressing CTRL-C (some users might be able to hold onto the mouse with one hand and use the other to CTRL-C, but most won't) or
- Going to the Edit -> Copy menu item and
choosing that.
[Hint for those who need a clue stick: This is horrible GUI design]- Letting go of the mouse and pressing CTRL-V or
- Going to the Edit -> Paste menu item and choosing that.
[Hint 2 - It's still horrible GUI design]Now you've got the text in the clipboard, what do you want to do with it 99% of the time ? Yep, paste it into a window somewhere. Yet again, X does this by default when you press the middle mouse button...Windows ? Sorry, the default is to ignore the middle mouse button and you have to combo a left-click with either a menu selection or a key-press - BZZZT! It's the wrong default again.
Basically, X Windows has its defaults correct and Windows has them wrong - it's twice as fast for a user to cut'n'paste (which is all users do with selections 99.99% of the time) in X Windows than Windows.
Apache is one of those programs that I actually refuse to use a binary distribution of. I just download the latest source, set my preferred options (making sure I build with dynamically loadable modules, which allows me to comment out the ones I don't need in httpd.conf) and away I go. If Apache is installed, I "rpm -e" it and then "make install" my source-built version. If I want to upgrade, usually only the httpd binary and modules need updating and then a quick restart of the server and I'm nicely up-to-date (would you trust "rpm -Uvh" on a live production server's Apache ??!).