Never will you find a more perfect nexus of horrid punnery and sheer nerd-ism.
I wish. But in this case, the poster who said Dunno, It's all Greek to me... in response to the parent was being entirely informative. Except, of course, that Greece as such didn't exist then, it was more or less a collection of generally hellenic city-states.
In any case, what's wrong with nerdism? This kind of thing matters. Believe me.
Are you going to respond to the content in the post, or are you grading English papers?
Nobody else seems to be interested, so I will.
I don't know what the GP was talking about with his flames about the reliability of nVidia's hardware. I've had many of their graphics cards over the years, and I have never, ever had one fail.
In fact, they are almost too damn good. I now have quite a few of them sitting in a crate because whenever I have upgraded motherboards, the slots keep changing, so I've had to change graphics cards when there was nothing wrong with the old one.
Nvidia were pretty much the first to give really good support for Linux, and I couldn't care less if they want to keep their source code secret. I've got better things to do than hack on that kind of code.
In a world where most hardware manufacturers have felt it only necessary to provide drivers for Windows, nVidia's attitude is a refreshing change.
Incidentally, I think I seem to remember an episode of Numb3rs where the plot revolved around characters who had sussed out the sorting algorithm of those shuffling machines. All a bit unlikely, but nevertheless...
I guess that would be easily got around by running the cards through the machine a second time.
Having never had a sense of smell myself, at all, and not knowing that body odour actually even existed until I hit about 20 years of age..
I wouldn't concern myself overmuch about body odour. You can deal with your own easily enough with deodorants, and if you can't smell anyone else's stench then you're on a winning streak.
The only drawback is if you're into your food and drink, since taste and smell are very much the same thing.
Yes, there will likely be some slight injury, but nothing that bad.
Damn right. I still have a nice 40-year-old scar on the middle pinkie of my right hand where I touched my dad's freshly-used masonry drill bit when I was 6 years old. I didn't complain at the time because I knew I had been stupid. No biggie.
I get so tired of this insistence that everybody should wrap up their precious offspring in cotton-wool.
As an aside, it is commonly known as iiBorg, as it has bought out (assimilated) many smaller ISPs.
This is true, and I shunned them for many years. But they were the first kids on the block with ADSL2+ when it first came out (at least where I live in Perth), and I took them up on it. I can't say I've had any complaints - the service has been great. Which, coming from a confirmed cynic, could be taken as an endorsement.
Last I checked, MS Office support in StarOffice was just as good/bad as it is in OpenOffice 2.0.
Mostly I find it's pretty good. But what really made me read this far was to find out if anyone actually still uses StarOffice, since the open form has been made available...
I have a cabinet, in which I keep all my CD's. In the computer, I have the lossy version of every one of them, recorded in variable-bit-rate mp3. Until I can tell the difference between them and the original, even if I have enough disc space, I won't use it for lossless audio.
I'm with you. I can't make any claim to having superhuman hearing (I am over 45 for a start, with the loss of frequency response that the ageing process confers). The MP3s on my iPod are encoded at 192-bit VBR, since that is what I have found works best for my ears, music and headphones. I have only recently acquired a 160GB iPod, so lossless wasn't an option at the outset.
But there is no doubt that even I can distinctly perceive the difference between the compressed signal from my iPod and my CD player through my good headphones or OK Athena Technologies speakers. If I use the tacky little earphones that Apple supplies, everything sounds tinny no matter how it's encoded. Having said that, I wouldn't even consider walking around with my Grado RS-2 headphones on my head (I guess I can find some other way to be a dork), since higher levels of ambient noise make that pointless.
I mean, what kind of research have they been doing to target me perfectly?
I don't know, but if the stats are as the submission suggests, it would seem that the only recourse must be a series of extremely messy object lessons.
I might suggest burning "THOU SHALT NOT SPAM" into their backs with an oxy torch. If anyone can suggest an improvement on this, feel free...
Do Arch Linux binary packages include GNU Info documentation of upstream packages which provide it, yet?
I'm not quite sure what you mean. GNU info seems to be there and, as far as I can tell, it seems complete. I personally tend to hop straight to manpages, so I hadn't had any cause to notice much more about info.
If you're referring to the handling of dependencies, the pacman package system is a bit like Slackware's in adopting a simple tgz format for the binaries. It does pull down dependencies on a loose broad-brush principle, but leaves you to handle details, and that's very much the way I like it. Nice and simple.
In my original post, I was drawing a comparison with Slackware, which is currently built for i486 architectures and beyond. It hasn't, in fact, been very long since Pat dropped i386 builds. My point is that most CPUs these days are i686 for all useful purposes (for which I am conveniently disregarding 64-bit jobs, since I personally don't have any pressing need to address more memory than I can afford), so the distro hits the sweet spot for the majority of reasonably recent machines.
Quite a lot of people in Australia can already get a working ADSL connnection.
Indeed. At my home in Perth, I have an excellent ADSL2+ connection, but where I work, only 160km away, the best available is only 512K. And that is only a recent fixture. A couple of years ago we had to use a satellite connection, which blows goats if you're trying to use any kind of VOIP. The real trouble is, the country is too big and sparsely populated (outside metropolitan areas) to make it attractive for telcos to spend money on infrastructure.
The point that they're playing on the fact that the majority of Australians have no idea how technology works, nor do they have any understanding about the terminology behind it.
You seem to be claiming that Australians are somehow different from other humans. I am not Australian by birth, but I've been living there for a few years, and I've observed that the geek quotient of the population seems to be quite high. What makes an Australian any more likely to get sucked in by a scam than, say, an American?
The simple fact is that we (finally) have a change of government, replacing the morons who had had their heads up their asses for so long they had obviously started to enjoy the view in there. The trouble is, the new government doesn't really want to actually _do_ anything, their preference being to push pieces of paper around and bleat platitudes.
Using the g switch would leave the user permissions alone while setting all of the group permissions...
Yes, I know. And I realise my post was a (perhaps over-)simplification, given that the permissions thing can be quite fine-grained.
But the numbers don't "wipe out" anything. Ignoring suid bits, the owner (the first digit of the triplet) of the file is the owner, which doesn't change. The group = the second digit, and everybody else the third. I don't see how one is more secure than the other.
Audio and video decoding? Is there any decent software available for Linux that does this? What about Photoshop for Ubuntu? All Ubuntu can do is run a server, a web browser, play choppy media with illegal codecs, sport some of the worst font rendering in existence, and consistently fail to recognize my USB 2.0 devices. At least with OS X, I can actually DO something.
Hmmm. Some of your other criticisms might (with some arguments to the contrary) have some foundation, but I am now convinced that font rendering in Linux is at least equal in quality to that on OS X or Windows, if not better. And I strongly suspect that if your USB devices are not being recognised, there is most probably a hardware issue. (I've had recent experience of this.)
I've been using *nix machines for decades, and still use Linux on my desktop and server machines. But since since I inherited a Mac laptop (actually, two now) I have become something of a fanboy for Mac. It is very pleasant to have a (nearly) consistent, intelligently designed interface to a system where everything "just works" with a minimum of effort.
Yes, Linux supports much more hardware, but I can understand why "Joe Sixpack" (or even maybe "the Plumber") would find OS X easier to deal with.
Seriously, "SuSE" is a "grown-up name" and "Ubuntu" isn't? And it "uses nice and simple inittab instead of yet another over complicated replacement called upstart"? I'm laughing, but it's not because you're funny.
I agree that the parent poster is probably a jerk, but when I first played with Ubuntu, I did find that particular choice asinine. Anyone who knows their way around Linux in general knows to look for/etc/inittab. Anyone whose only interaction with the system configuration is through a GUI doesn't need to know what the file is called. So why change it? This isn't a show-stopper by any stretch of the imagination, but it is an irritation for an experienced *nix user unfamiliar with Ubuntu's idiosyncrasies.
Slashdot Mirror
Never will you find a more perfect nexus of horrid punnery and sheer nerd-ism.
I wish. But in this case, the poster who said Dunno, It's all Greek to me... in response to the parent was being entirely informative. Except, of course, that Greece as such didn't exist then, it was more or less a collection of generally hellenic city-states.
In any case, what's wrong with nerdism? This kind of thing matters. Believe me.
Are you going to respond to the content in the post, or are you grading English papers?
Nobody else seems to be interested, so I will.
I don't know what the GP was talking about with his flames about the reliability of nVidia's hardware. I've had many of their graphics cards over the years, and I have never, ever had one fail.
In fact, they are almost too damn good. I now have quite a few of them sitting in a crate because whenever I have upgraded motherboards, the slots keep changing, so I've had to change graphics cards when there was nothing wrong with the old one.
Nvidia were pretty much the first to give really good support for Linux, and I couldn't care less if they want to keep their source code secret. I've got better things to do than hack on that kind of code.
In a world where most hardware manufacturers have felt it only necessary to provide drivers for Windows, nVidia's attitude is a refreshing change.
Incidentally, I think I seem to remember an episode of Numb3rs where the plot revolved around characters who had sussed out the sorting algorithm of those shuffling machines. All a bit unlikely, but nevertheless...
I guess that would be easily got around by running the cards through the machine a second time.
Having never had a sense of smell myself, at all, and not knowing that body odour actually even existed until I hit about 20 years of age..
I wouldn't concern myself overmuch about body odour. You can deal with your own easily enough with deodorants, and if you can't smell anyone else's stench then you're on a winning streak.
The only drawback is if you're into your food and drink, since taste and smell are very much the same thing.
women have a keener sense of smell than men
Hmmm. On anecdotal evidence, I am inclined to politely say "nonsense".
My point is based on the number of women I know who wear enough stinky perfume to knock down a yak at 40 paces.
The one tool that is wonderful in an electronics lab is an oscilloscope
...and another, equally essential (if the kid doesn't already have one) is a multimeter.
Last time I looked, these were fairly affordable.
Yes, there will likely be some slight injury, but nothing that bad.
Damn right. I still have a nice 40-year-old scar on the middle pinkie of my right hand where I touched my dad's freshly-used masonry drill bit when I was 6 years old. I didn't complain at the time because I knew I had been stupid. No biggie.
I get so tired of this insistence that everybody should wrap up their precious offspring in cotton-wool.
I would only add a decent chemistry set; although I hear they are becoming more and more limited in scope these days.
I think the only way to get a decent chemistry set these days would be to make your own.
Obligatory Max Headroom quote, for those of us old enough to remember the early '80s: "Ah, exprosions - very nice..."
You are a professed cynic, not a confirmed one.
I don't think so. This is confirmed by a plurality of independent persons. And (BTW) I stand by the definition of cynic as a "disappointed idealist".
[let the flames start...]
Telstra Small Puddle(TM) might be (partially) government owned, but that doesn't make it the largest ISP. And who uses Optus except for mobile access?
As an aside, it is commonly known as iiBorg, as it has bought out (assimilated) many smaller ISPs.
This is true, and I shunned them for many years. But they were the first kids on the block with ADSL2+ when it first came out (at least where I live in Perth), and I took them up on it. I can't say I've had any complaints - the service has been great. Which, coming from a confirmed cynic, could be taken as an endorsement.
Last I checked, MS Office support in StarOffice was just as good/bad as it is in OpenOffice 2.0.
Mostly I find it's pretty good. But what really made me read this far was to find out if anyone actually still uses StarOffice, since the open form has been made available...
I have a cabinet, in which I keep all my CD's. In the computer, I have the lossy version of every one of them, recorded in variable-bit-rate mp3. Until I can tell the difference between them and the original, even if I have enough disc space, I won't use it for lossless audio.
I'm with you. I can't make any claim to having superhuman hearing (I am over 45 for a start, with the loss of frequency response that the ageing process confers). The MP3s on my iPod are encoded at 192-bit VBR, since that is what I have found works best for my ears, music and headphones. I have only recently acquired a 160GB iPod, so lossless wasn't an option at the outset.
But there is no doubt that even I can distinctly perceive the difference between the compressed signal from my iPod and my CD player through my good headphones or OK Athena Technologies speakers. If I use the tacky little earphones that Apple supplies, everything sounds tinny no matter how it's encoded. Having said that, I wouldn't even consider walking around with my Grado RS-2 headphones on my head (I guess I can find some other way to be a dork), since higher levels of ambient noise make that pointless.
Of course that is after we are disarmed. cant have those pesky pheasants that can defend themselves can we?
Indeed. If all the world's avian inhabitants had access to the courts, the legal system would grind to a halt.
Oh wait, that might be a good thing...
I mean, what kind of research have they been doing to target me perfectly?
I don't know, but if the stats are as the submission suggests, it would seem that the only recourse must be a series of extremely messy object lessons.
I might suggest burning "THOU SHALT NOT SPAM" into their backs with an oxy torch. If anyone can suggest an improvement on this, feel free...
Do Arch Linux binary packages include GNU Info documentation of upstream packages which provide it, yet?
I'm not quite sure what you mean. GNU info seems to be there and, as far as I can tell, it seems complete. I personally tend to hop straight to manpages, so I hadn't had any cause to notice much more about info.
If you're referring to the handling of dependencies, the pacman package system is a bit like Slackware's in adopting a simple tgz format for the binaries. It does pull down dependencies on a loose broad-brush principle, but leaves you to handle details, and that's very much the way I like it. Nice and simple.
Uh, which 686?
In my original post, I was drawing a comparison with Slackware, which is currently built for i486 architectures and beyond. It hasn't, in fact, been very long since Pat dropped i386 builds. My point is that most CPUs these days are i686 for all useful purposes (for which I am conveniently disregarding 64-bit jobs, since I personally don't have any pressing need to address more memory than I can afford), so the distro hits the sweet spot for the majority of reasonably recent machines.
Quite a lot of people in Australia can already get a working ADSL connnection.
Indeed. At my home in Perth, I have an excellent ADSL2+ connection, but where I work, only 160km away, the best available is only 512K. And that is only a recent fixture. A couple of years ago we had to use a satellite connection, which blows goats if you're trying to use any kind of VOIP. The real trouble is, the country is too big and sparsely populated (outside metropolitan areas) to make it attractive for telcos to spend money on infrastructure.
The point that they're playing on the fact that the majority of Australians have no idea how technology works, nor do they have any understanding about the terminology behind it.
You seem to be claiming that Australians are somehow different from other humans. I am not Australian by birth, but I've been living there for a few years, and I've observed that the geek quotient of the population seems to be quite high. What makes an Australian any more likely to get sucked in by a scam than, say, an American?
The simple fact is that we (finally) have a change of government, replacing the morons who had had their heads up their asses for so long they had obviously started to enjoy the view in there. The trouble is, the new government doesn't really want to actually _do_ anything, their preference being to push pieces of paper around and bleat platitudes.
Amarok can sync both iPods and iPhones.
So can Rhythmbox, Or gtkpod. Though I believe the iPod Touch requires a bit of messing around to get it to work...
Cool, thanks, I didn't know that. I learned something new - w00t! :-)
Except...
$ man foo
No manual entry for foo
$
Using the g switch would leave the user permissions alone while setting all of the group permissions...
Yes, I know. And I realise my post was a (perhaps over-)simplification, given that the permissions thing can be quite fine-grained.
But the numbers don't "wipe out" anything. Ignoring suid bits, the owner (the first digit of the triplet) of the file is the owner, which doesn't change. The group = the second digit, and everybody else the third. I don't see how one is more secure than the other.
Audio and video decoding? Is there any decent software available for Linux that does this? What about Photoshop for Ubuntu? All Ubuntu can do is run a server, a web browser, play choppy media with illegal codecs, sport some of the worst font rendering in existence, and consistently fail to recognize my USB 2.0 devices. At least with OS X, I can actually DO something.
Hmmm. Some of your other criticisms might (with some arguments to the contrary) have some foundation, but I am now convinced that font rendering in Linux is at least equal in quality to that on OS X or Windows, if not better. And I strongly suspect that if your USB devices are not being recognised, there is most probably a hardware issue. (I've had recent experience of this.)
I've been using *nix machines for decades, and still use Linux on my desktop and server machines. But since since I inherited a Mac laptop (actually, two now) I have become something of a fanboy for Mac. It is very pleasant to have a (nearly) consistent, intelligently designed interface to a system where everything "just works" with a minimum of effort.
Yes, Linux supports much more hardware, but I can understand why "Joe Sixpack" (or even maybe "the Plumber") would find OS X easier to deal with.
Seriously, "SuSE" is a "grown-up name" and "Ubuntu" isn't? And it "uses nice and simple inittab instead of yet another over complicated replacement called upstart"? I'm laughing, but it's not because you're funny.
/etc/inittab. Anyone whose only interaction with the system configuration is through a GUI doesn't need to know what the file is called. So why change it? This isn't a show-stopper by any stretch of the imagination, but it is an irritation for an experienced *nix user unfamiliar with Ubuntu's idiosyncrasies.
I agree that the parent poster is probably a jerk, but when I first played with Ubuntu, I did find that particular choice asinine. Anyone who knows their way around Linux in general knows to look for