Depends on your locale. With a German IP address, my google queries go to google.de, and there the first link is always for gmail.de, whether I search for g-mail or gmail. gmail.de not showing up in searches on google.com would make quite some sense, considering that guy's service Germany only at present (and actually it's in a test phase that's regionally limited to the town of Itzehoe which is just as small as its name suggests
(wikipedia says it's got ~33000 inhabitants, compare that to some 80 million german citizens)).
And, sort of off-topic, did anyone bother to find out what G-mail's "hybrid-mail" service is supposed to be? They want to "combine" hardware/paper mail and digital data transfer: say you want to send a hardware letter from point A to B, and the distance is rather large, say, hundreds of kilometers (for european countries, that's a large distance), and typically mail will be transported in trucks or airplanes. G-mail wants to recieve your letter at some gmail center close to A, digitize it, email it to some center close to B, print it out and deliver it to B. Isn't that great? Can anyone see problems related to (random selection): trust, law, common sense?
I've often wondered if there is a "Unix way" to do spreadsheets--that is, a way to put data in a plain text file and then do analysis on it
There ist root which only requires you to be creative in crude usage of c++. But then you can do more or less any data analysis you like, including good plotting tools.
What other operating systems are named after the tools that built them or the apps that run on them, even if most of thier functionality comes from them?
How about windows 95 which is more like DOS + a better version of windows 3.11 on top of it?
I can't really understand all that outrage about the naming. The kernel's Linux, right? without some/gnu. If you add to this the gnu utils, it sounds like you might have linux/gnu or gnu/linux. Add to this all the benefits of a distribution and you get "distribution gnu/linux". Most distributions offer several desktop environments, web browsers, office applications and so on, but they all have in common the kernel and the core utilities
We could of course invent some kind of code for full acknoledgements, like debian|gnu/linux^xorg^qt^kde^mozilla&&oofice.org&& stuff for a debian based distribution employing the linux kernel and gnu utils powering an xorg server whose qt-based de is kde which offers you menu items for mozilla web products, the openoffice.org productivity suite and stuff. I'd simply call it kubuntu.
Apple got this market because of integration with their on-line store
That argument doesn't make much sense. The iPod is three years older than ITMS. And while I don't know its market share at the time of ITMS' introduction, it surely was well established (and hyped). Apple is strong in the mp3-player market because a) the iPod just works great, b) it looks great, c) people say it's incredibly cool and d) it makes others jealous.
By the way: does anyone know if dapper will ship a kernel that's been compiled with the version of gcc that's included on the distribution CD's? If badger had one fundamental flaw, it would be a kernel compiled with gcc3.4 and gcc 4.? included on the CD. People who need to compile e.g. their wireless driver because it's not included in the standard kernel, are fucked, because they may not have network access with the distribution files and need to download either gcc 3.4 or kernel sources...
I could imagine they would rush the next release, because dapper will be more than just an ordinary half-yearly ubuntu release. They plan to have enterprise-grade releases every other year (or so), with very long (5 years) support. If you want someone to stick with a distribution for 2 years or more, you better deliver something that's as good as it can get (within a reasonable delay from the originally foressen release date, where reasonable obviously still needs to be defined but may be six weeks). For the release following dapper, they can probably simply switch back to ${gnome-release-date}+1month.
And yaa (yet another anecdote): I installed breezy badger on my notebook (asus m2n) and everything but sound worked flawlessly out of the box, with the exception of ACPI (which is due to a bug in the notebooks original bios (which I never updated because I'm just too lazy). More precisely: it's the portion of ACPI for the graphic card and I simply compiled my own kernel disabling that bit. The really bad thing was, that an ACPI-enabled default kernel will crash on this notebook[note again: it's a bug in the notebook's bios, not in the kernel or the distribution] unless I disable acpi in the bootloader. That's not nice if you want to convert someone to linux...). With my new kernel, ACPI is now fine, the sound was fixed (magically) and I could marvel at the really perfect installation which even tied the multimedia and other hotkeys to sensible functions. And not only did my (stupid shared memory intel) graphics card work without any additional work, it even had 3d acceleration enabled.
(The sound thingy is a known problem in ubuntu and there's a workaround documented in the Ubuntu wiki's section on notebook compatibility. I must admit, however, that as much as I do appreciate wikis and such things, it really is a problem of linux distros that many (if not most) users have to search for information and do manual work in order to get _all_ their hardware running well. Still one should also appreciate the difference to windows, where hardware manufacturers provide drivers etc when you buy the stuff. I don't have windows, but I could get a legal copy from my university for free (as in beer). I doubt, however, that windows XP would out of the box support as much of my hardware as an up-to-date linux distribution does. Because this comparison is not quite fair, I also doubt that when it is released windows vista will support all the hardware of my notebook without manual interaction. I probably won't try, though...) The text in this paragraph better shouldn't be in parantheses but it's almost midnight here.
There's a fundamental problem with "filtering" the data. Invariably, the filter is biased towards "what we expect".
That's why we always have a random trigger. I don't know the actual ratio, but it's probably about one event in a thousand (triggered ones) that has not been selected because of a "physics trigger", but randomly.
develop something as quickly as possible, little or no testing before release
wait for bug reports to come in
patch each and every little thing as reports come in (again, symptoms, not causes)
repeat step 2 & 3 ad infinitum
I hate to join in the microsoft bashing here, but you overlooked a very obvious fact:
They don't repeat steps 2&3 ad infinitum, but only for a couple of years at which time you're forced to either live with the remaining bugs and features, upgrade to a new version of windows or to another operating system [where in fact they do the same but in some cases you might get the updates for free which comes pretty close to your step 4.
Of the linux distributions I tried out during the past three months, SuSe, Redhat and mandrake appeared quite apt for "beginners". I didn't toy too much with mandrake, and between redhat and suse I'd choose suse if I didn't want to care about configuration because of yast (suse's install/setup/configuration tool). Also, personally I don't like redhat's default theme too much. Suse's integration of gnome isn't too nice, I think, but might improve now they have been bought by Novel who also have some investment in gnome. If you only want to "try out" this probably won't matter for you.
If you want some "advise" on what desktop to use (and assuming you're only interested in gnome or kde) this is my impression: KDE has more programs with more features, but most gnome programs are much better designed (for what concerns the user interface). Both kde and gnome interoperate more or less nicely, but loading gnome applications under KDE is a lot faster than loading (the first) KDE applications under gnome. I very much prefer gnome, but KDE is neither bad nor evil. For the things you're interested in, I'd suggest using gnome. Apart from CD burning it does all desktop tasks I am interested in pretty well.
If you are not too computer illiterate, and not afraid of text mode installers, you might also consider Debian. I feel that the more you know about linux the more advantages Debian has over suse/mandrake/redhat, but then I've just used it more than the other distros. Don't know much about slackware or gentoo, but sourcemage is most probably nothing for you, although it is nice...
I once tried SuSE Live (I think it was version 7.0, but I don't remember). It didn't work.
You sure do know what you're writing about... Actually, knoppix works more than fine. When my university was hosting the particle physics conference of the national phyisical society, we set up two "internet cafes", one featuring ordinary PCs, the other a bunch of notebooks, all running knoppix with no problems. And that was a year ago. I used knoppix when I bought my notebook, which came without windows preinstalled, but I wanted to see it worked before I took it home, so trusting in God or whoever else is responsible for making things work, I just popped in the knoppix CD and bootet the computer. Actually, I was an idiot and didn't see the pixel failure in the middle of the screen, but I won't blame that on knoppix;-)
If you want to have a gnome desktop from a live CD, try the Morphix
Gnome module. Last time I downloaded it, it worked nicely, definitely better than Gnoppix. This distro's work seems to have been interrupted for a while but they are just reemerging from the sort-of-dead.
They simply count on spammers adopting signatures that flag email messages as "not spam" in spam filters like spam assassin. Assume that in some group of people, eg slashdot readers and their friends, everybody includes the habeas haiku in their email headers to prove the non-spamminess (does this word exist?) of their mail and that popular spam filters include a positive rule (by that I mean a rule flagging a message as "not spam") for this haiku. Spammers need to get through as many anti-spam filters as possible,so they'll include the haiku in their spam messages. This copyright infringement can now be reported and prosecuted.
That's what I think is their idea. Not too convinced it will work, though.
I suppose electricity can be converted to other types;)
Of course it can, can you do it in a split second for a machine that consumes a few mW? You also have different power lines necessitating the use of two sets of current collectors in the Thalys trains. Anyway, I only wanted to point out that train systems are not really standardized yet, and since there are quite sophisticated and evolved systems in use, it will be almost impossible to unify the standards. Hence you'll always need workarounds which fortunately do exist. I very much like travelling by train and I'm hoping for some good progress in railway technology, maybe including maglev, maybe not. Considering that this technology is something like 20 years old now and still not in any serious use, I am a little afraid that it may never adopted on a larger scale...
I don't really understand what your intentions are with that post, but at least it's partly wrong. Maglev trains do need tracks, they simply don't have what you'd normally call rails, hence literally there also can't be derailing. Physically, derailing a maglev train probably requires destroying the track or the train (before derailing) or doing both at the same time by having two trains colliding.
If you want some information on the transrapid project (the one used in Shanghai), you can start
here or here. The third page is the home page of the German test facility for the transrapid trains. It's unfortuantely in german only, but it has some pictures that don't need translation...
And, it's quiet, and doesn't shake. Ever tried ordering coffee from a train kiosk?
Actually, modern trains do offer very comfortable travelling. All you need is modern, well laied rails and good trains. The ICE 3 (the latest German high speed trains) have all axes of all carts powered. Thus you get very smooth acceleration. In a train station, you don't notice the train setting off.
As for standards and international compatibility, there are a few drawbacks in today's railway system, at least in Europe: As far as I know, the width of the rails is standardized by now, but it hasn't always been that way. In most European countries, the US, Canada, China and most of Australia the width is the British standard of 1435mm. But countries such as Spain, Portugal, Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, SA, Japan (apart from their high speed train), Malaisia, Pakistan have different rail systems.
Most, if not all, far distance tracks are electrically powered, but different countries use different systems, mainly 15kV 16 2/3 Hz AC (eg Germany) and 25kV 50Hz AC (eg France). That makes cross border train operation difficult, but there are trains that can operate on both systems, such as the French Thalys, a TGV that commutes between Paris and Cologne.
although the further you take the concept you may as well make a whole program (web based or whatever) and forget using LPD
Well, I startet writing something like that in bash. There are still many things to improve, but it's working quite nicely for me:
http://muff.sourceforge.net
Re:Honest comparison between Gnome and KDE?
on
Gnome 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
The main difference is that KDE's file manager is average, and gnome's is below average. (so people seem to agree)
Well, that is a matter of taste, too. In general, I hate file managers, and konqueror (kde file manager) is a really ugly one (I think). Since gnome 2 has sped up Nautilus (the gnome thingy) by a couple of magnitudes, I have come to sort of like it (although I still don't really use it, because bash is just so much faster).
But anyway, cudos to gnome team. Can't wait to see this nautilus-cd-burning thing in action - could be something for my dad (who seems to hate gtoaster).
That's really really old news
on
Lotus Nanotech
·
· Score: 1
A team of ressearchers has been awarded the Philipp-Morris-Price for work on the lotus effect in 1999 (see here).
Additionally, you noone should hope for lotus-effect-coated cars too soon. The automobile industry has been searching for "anything-repelling" coatings for ages now and one of the counterparts (apart from car washers losing their jobs) is that you simply cannot coat repelling coatings, so if you have to repair the coating after an accident, this simply won't work (or will be very expensive). There will certainly be a use for this technique, but it'll probably not be as obvious as most people think.
Everything I have ever read states the personal taxes (income,sales, gas, etc.) in Europe and Canada are considerably higher than in the US.
That's probably true. It's not only that in the worst case you'll pay very close to 50% taxes on part of your income (so if your salary's raised by one more Euro, the state'll get about 50 cents of this), you still have to add social insurance, health insurance (which is mandatory), some other taxes (not only income tax) and from what is left, you'll typically pay some 16 or so percent VAT. Germany has over eighty different kinds of taxes - one on champagne, for example.
Of course I never was much of a Socialist like most Europeans.
You probably mean that most Europeans are socialists and I'd say that you're wrong. In many European countries, power changes to and fro between slightly left-wing and slightly right-wing parties. At the moment, Germany and the UK have the social democrats (wouldn't actually like to call them socialists, call them overregulating parties who believe that taking from the better off and giving to those who don't create jobs and profit most from social security will break the industries' power while at the same time strengthening it and leading the country to prosperity) in power, France, Italy and the Netherlands have elected right-wing coalitions. In Europe, we have changing majorities, but one really couldn't speak of most Europeans being socialists.
I couldn't find any dirt on Sweden but I still would choose Switzerland.
Switzerland is about the only country to have profited (financially) by each major war during the last century. I'd agree with you that it should be a nice place to live (with all those mountains and about 10% of the world's biggest particle accelerator, not to mention chocolate), but still Norway would be my place of choice. Loads of forests, snow, fjords, fish, mountains, great language to tell lotr-like stories in, oil and long nights in winter for drinking good tea;-)
Slashdot Mirror
If I had any mod points, I'd give them all to you.
Depends on your locale. With a German IP address, my google queries go to google.de, and there the first link is always for gmail.de, whether I search for g-mail or gmail. gmail.de not showing up in searches on google.com would make quite some sense, considering that guy's service Germany only at present (and actually it's in a test phase that's regionally limited to the town of Itzehoe which is just as small as its name suggests (wikipedia says it's got ~33000 inhabitants, compare that to some 80 million german citizens)).
And, sort of off-topic, did anyone bother to find out what G-mail's "hybrid-mail" service is supposed to be? They want to "combine" hardware/paper mail and digital data transfer: say you want to send a hardware letter from point A to B, and the distance is rather large, say, hundreds of kilometers (for european countries, that's a large distance), and typically mail will be transported in trucks or airplanes. G-mail wants to recieve your letter at some gmail center close to A, digitize it, email it to some center close to B, print it out and deliver it to B. Isn't that great? Can anyone see problems related to (random selection): trust, law, common sense?
I can't really understand all that outrage about the naming. The kernel's Linux, right? without some /gnu. If you add to this the gnu utils, it sounds like you might have linux/gnu or gnu/linux. Add to this all the benefits of a distribution and you get "distribution gnu/linux". Most distributions offer several desktop environments, web browsers, office applications and so on, but they all have in common the kernel and the core utilities
We could of course invent some kind of code for full acknoledgements, like debian|gnu/linux^xorg^qt^kde^mozilla&&oofice.org&& stuff for a debian based distribution employing the linux kernel and gnu utils powering an xorg server whose qt-based de is kde which offers you menu items for mozilla web products, the openoffice.org productivity suite and stuff. I'd simply call it kubuntu.
That argument doesn't make much sense. The iPod is three years older than ITMS. And while I don't know its market share at the time of ITMS' introduction, it surely was well established (and hyped). Apple is strong in the mp3-player market because a) the iPod just works great, b) it looks great, c) people say it's incredibly cool and d) it makes others jealous.
By the way: does anyone know if dapper will ship a kernel that's been compiled with the version of gcc that's included on the distribution CD's? If badger had one fundamental flaw, it would be a kernel compiled with gcc3.4 and gcc 4.? included on the CD. People who need to compile e.g. their wireless driver because it's not included in the standard kernel, are fucked, because they may not have network access with the distribution files and need to download either gcc 3.4 or kernel sources...
I could imagine they would rush the next release, because dapper will be more than just an ordinary half-yearly ubuntu release. They plan to have enterprise-grade releases every other year (or so), with very long (5 years) support. If you want someone to stick with a distribution for 2 years or more, you better deliver something that's as good as it can get (within a reasonable delay from the originally foressen release date, where reasonable obviously still needs to be defined but may be six weeks). For the release following dapper, they can probably simply switch back to ${gnome-release-date}+1month.
And yaa (yet another anecdote): I installed breezy badger on my notebook (asus m2n) and everything but sound worked flawlessly out of the box, with the exception of ACPI (which is due to a bug in the notebooks original bios (which I never updated because I'm just too lazy). More precisely: it's the portion of ACPI for the graphic card and I simply compiled my own kernel disabling that bit. The really bad thing was, that an ACPI-enabled default kernel will crash on this notebook[note again: it's a bug in the notebook's bios, not in the kernel or the distribution] unless I disable acpi in the bootloader. That's not nice if you want to convert someone to linux...). With my new kernel, ACPI is now fine, the sound was fixed (magically) and I could marvel at the really perfect installation which even tied the multimedia and other hotkeys to sensible functions. And not only did my (stupid shared memory intel) graphics card work without any additional work, it even had 3d acceleration enabled.
(The sound thingy is a known problem in ubuntu and there's a workaround documented in the Ubuntu wiki's section on notebook compatibility. I must admit, however, that as much as I do appreciate wikis and such things, it really is a problem of linux distros that many (if not most) users have to search for information and do manual work in order to get _all_ their hardware running well. Still one should also appreciate the difference to windows, where hardware manufacturers provide drivers etc when you buy the stuff. I don't have windows, but I could get a legal copy from my university for free (as in beer). I doubt, however, that windows XP would out of the box support as much of my hardware as an up-to-date linux distribution does. Because this comparison is not quite fair, I also doubt that when it is released windows vista will support all the hardware of my notebook without manual interaction. I probably won't try, though...) The text in this paragraph better shouldn't be in parantheses but it's almost midnight here.
There's a fundamental problem with "filtering" the data. Invariably, the filter is biased towards "what we expect".
That's why we always have a random trigger. I don't know the actual ratio, but it's probably about one event in a thousand (triggered ones) that has not been selected because of a "physics trigger", but randomly.
You meant geese, didn't you? And I'm not sure whether they count as white meat.
If you want some "advise" on what desktop to use (and assuming you're only interested in gnome or kde) this is my impression: KDE has more programs with more features, but most gnome programs are much better designed (for what concerns the user interface). Both kde and gnome interoperate more or less nicely, but loading gnome applications under KDE is a lot faster than loading (the first) KDE applications under gnome. I very much prefer gnome, but KDE is neither bad nor evil. For the things you're interested in, I'd suggest using gnome. Apart from CD burning it does all desktop tasks I am interested in pretty well.
If you are not too computer illiterate, and not afraid of text mode installers, you might also consider Debian. I feel that the more you know about linux the more advantages Debian has over suse/mandrake/redhat, but then I've just used it more than the other distros. Don't know much about slackware or gentoo, but sourcemage is most probably nothing for you, although it is nice...
I once tried SuSE Live (I think it was version 7.0, but I don't remember). It didn't work.
You sure do know what you're writing about... Actually, knoppix works more than fine. When my university was hosting the particle physics conference of the national phyisical society, we set up two "internet cafes", one featuring ordinary PCs, the other a bunch of notebooks, all running knoppix with no problems. And that was a year ago. I used knoppix when I bought my notebook, which came without windows preinstalled, but I wanted to see it worked before I took it home, so trusting in God or whoever else is responsible for making things work, I just popped in the knoppix CD and bootet the computer. Actually, I was an idiot and didn't see the pixel failure in the middle of the screen, but I won't blame that on knoppix ;-)
If you want to have a gnome desktop from a live CD, try the Morphix Gnome module. Last time I downloaded it, it worked nicely, definitely better than Gnoppix. This distro's work seems to have been interrupted for a while but they are just reemerging from the sort-of-dead.
They simply count on spammers adopting signatures that flag email messages as "not spam" in spam filters like spam assassin. Assume that in some group of people, eg slashdot readers and their friends, everybody includes the habeas haiku in their email headers to prove the non-spamminess (does this word exist?) of their mail and that popular spam filters include a positive rule (by that I mean a rule flagging a message as "not spam") for this haiku. Spammers need to get through as many anti-spam filters as possible,so they'll include the haiku in their spam messages. This copyright infringement can now be reported and prosecuted.
That's what I think is their idea. Not too convinced it will work, though.
I suppose electricity can be converted to other types ;)
Of course it can, can you do it in a split second for a machine that consumes a few mW? You also have different power lines necessitating the use of two sets of current collectors in the Thalys trains. Anyway, I only wanted to point out that train systems are not really standardized yet, and since there are quite sophisticated and evolved systems in use, it will be almost impossible to unify the standards. Hence you'll always need workarounds which fortunately do exist. I very much like travelling by train and I'm hoping for some good progress in railway technology, maybe including maglev, maybe not. Considering that this technology is something like 20 years old now and still not in any serious use, I am a little afraid that it may never adopted on a larger scale...
that maglev trains do not use wheels and tracks?
I don't really understand what your intentions are with that post, but at least it's partly wrong. Maglev trains do need tracks, they simply don't have what you'd normally call rails, hence literally there also can't be derailing. Physically, derailing a maglev train probably requires destroying the track or the train (before derailing) or doing both at the same time by having two trains colliding.
If you want some information on the transrapid project (the one used in Shanghai), you can start here or here. The third page is the home page of the German test facility for the transrapid trains. It's unfortuantely in german only, but it has some pictures that don't need translation...
And, it's quiet, and doesn't shake. Ever tried ordering coffee from a train kiosk?
Actually, modern trains do offer very comfortable travelling. All you need is modern, well laied rails and good trains. The ICE 3 (the latest German high speed trains) have all axes of all carts powered. Thus you get very smooth acceleration. In a train station, you don't notice the train setting off.
As for standards and international compatibility, there are a few drawbacks in today's railway system, at least in Europe: As far as I know, the width of the rails is standardized by now, but it hasn't always been that way. In most European countries, the US, Canada, China and most of Australia the width is the British standard of 1435mm. But countries such as Spain, Portugal, Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, SA, Japan (apart from their high speed train), Malaisia, Pakistan have different rail systems.
Most, if not all, far distance tracks are electrically powered, but different countries use different systems, mainly 15kV 16 2/3 Hz AC (eg Germany) and 25kV 50Hz AC (eg France). That makes cross border train operation difficult, but there are trains that can operate on both systems, such as the French Thalys, a TGV that commutes between Paris and Cologne.
If you are interested, you might look here
sourcemage
although the further you take the concept you may as well make a whole program (web based or whatever) and forget using LPD
Well, I startet writing something like that in bash. There are still many things to improve, but it's working quite nicely for me: http://muff.sourceforge.net
Well, that is a matter of taste, too. In general, I hate file managers, and konqueror (kde file manager) is a really ugly one (I think). Since gnome 2 has sped up Nautilus (the gnome thingy) by a couple of magnitudes, I have come to sort of like it (although I still don't really use it, because bash is just so much faster).
But anyway, cudos to gnome team. Can't wait to see this nautilus-cd-burning thing in action - could be something for my dad (who seems to hate gtoaster).
Additionally, you noone should hope for lotus-effect-coated cars too soon. The automobile industry has been searching for "anything-repelling" coatings for ages now and one of the counterparts (apart from car washers losing their jobs) is that you simply cannot coat repelling coatings, so if you have to repair the coating after an accident, this simply won't work (or will be very expensive). There will certainly be a use for this technique, but it'll probably not be as obvious as most people think.