Last time I rebuilt my computer, I ripped out the floppy drive completely. I hadn't used the thing in years, and 1.4MB of storage isn't useful for very much these days anyway. I filled the space with another hard drive, which is more useful to me.
Getting on-topic for a change, I have personally found the most reliable media for off-line storage to be the TDK 700MB CD-R. I have occasionally had problems with Kodak and Imation media, and I avoid the no-name brands completely. I also use the TDK DVD+R media, but not for anything important. DVD is more convenient, but if I want to keep the data, DVD+R just isn't reliable enough.
I love that we slashdotters spend our Friday night debating on how cool it is to be geeks.
Even worse when it's a sunny Saturday afternoon;-)...
...but in any case:
So if being a geek has really become cool, why has interest in CS as a major dropped among incoming freshmen and women are still a minority in computer and engineering fields...
I suspect the OP is only seeing part of the picture. I know a lot of heavy-duty geeks who pursue other sciences such as molecular biology (such as myself), chemistry, physics and mathematics. And I see no lack of enrolments in those areas at my university.
We just want true cds without any bullshit, plain and simple.
Just a thought:
Perhaps if Sony and all the others had really wanted to prevent copying, they should not have been so quick to abandon black vinyl for recordings. Sure, lots of us had reasonable tape recorders, but NOBODY believed their quality approached that of the original record, so if you could afford it, you would always go out and buy the real thing.
And how will we know Sony isn't trying something *ELSE* with their dissatisfied customers as guinea pigs?
Indeed. I doubt if Sony has accepted the world's judgement as a lesson; it's just a matter of time before they try something else.
What I would do if I had (very hypothetically) bought one of these CDs would be to rip the tracks to a fresh CD via cdparanoia/cdrecord, leaving the rootkit behind, then just throw away the original. Who cares if it's illegal? If you only have the one copy, and you have a receipt for payment for it, you might justifiably feel that you are operating within the spirit of the law, even if not the letter.
Indeed. I had just been trying to remember the last time I actually used usenet, and think it was in ~2000. Let's face it: the forums (fora?) available via stock-standard http have pretty effectively replaced usenet, and I can't say I would really miss it, even though my ISP still has its own news server.
...many cute furry animals die when subjected to Barbara Streisand's music.
I guess it is one of the more ironic (and we could just as easily contract that to "moronic") features of present business proctice that insists that the corporations that sell the crappiest muzack are the same ones that are most vigorous in suing their potential customers.
There should be a lesson there, I suppose, but some folks are slow learners.
This is the problem with the viral nature of the GPL
I get very tired of seeing the word "viral" in association with the GPL, perhaps because it occurs so often in Microsoft propaganda. It is an unnecessary slur on what is, in fact, a very open-ended agreement between developer and user, which is designed principally to confer rights on both parties rather than take them away.
An honest and open agreement (and yes, the BSD licence is another such) is not something to malign, especially in the context of predatory "agreements" (read "ultimata") handed down from Redmond.
Courts in Korea are just as inept as those in this USA. Sad indeed.
Sadder, perhaps, that Microsoft has been slapped for using those practices at home, and presumably (I am being charitable here) might have taken some measures to un-bundle the offending software, but it persists in following the same practices away from home.
If those bozos in the MS boardroom had any of the talent or imagination they are paid for, they should by now have been able to come up with a less obnoxious business model that still pays them good money.
Microsoft has threatened to withdraw its Windows software from South Korea if the country's antitrust agency orders it to unbundle its instant-messaging and media player software from the operating system.
Is that a promise? Please? Can anybody sue Microsoft if they don't follow through?
Might be part of the problem. Sometimes distributions go a bit overboard enabling everything, in an attempt to make everything work out of the box, and sometimes achieve the reverse as a result. You might want to consider stripping unused or unwanted sound drivers out of the kernel config and rebuilding the kernel.
Well, on my FC4 system, Skype works exactly once for a voice call. After that it fails making calls claiming it cannot open the audio device.
Weird. I don't get anything like that on my Slackware box with customised kernel. As a matter of interest, are you using the kernel that came with FC4, or did you roll your own?
I have wondered so far if it supports ALSA at all.
I don't believe it does. I think it only works on my machine because my kernel is configured to enable OSS emulation, and consequently conversations can be a bit choppy as a result. IIRC skype have taken some heat for that in the forums, but I don't know if they're actually doing anything about it.
Sony Classical is one of the biggest classical recording & CD publishing companies. If you will look into classical guitar (for example) you will find that about 90% of artists are published by Sony Classical.
This is true, at least for a number of "big name" musicians who have had lots of media exposure. However, a huge amount is available under other labels: Naxos, for instance, has bought up a heap of good recordings from many of those same artists, and distributes them at very reasonable prices, while a number of very fine musicians such as Jacob Heringman deal exclusively with labels such as Magnatune, which are quite civilised by anybody's standards. Well, mine, at least.
Just boycotting Sony's music products isn't enough to fix this.
Though that's pretty easy to do, given that Sony can hardly be said to be at the forefront when it comes to publishing music of any interest. One might even be tempted to suggest that Sony's rationale might be that if one is inclined towards the lowest common denominator as far as music is concerned, Sony might feel that they are justified in treating that consumer as the lowest common denominator in the marketplace too.
Out of curiosity, I just had a good prowl through some of my music collection on CDs, and found only one on a Sony BMG label. It was one that was given to me a couple of years ago, and has probably only been played twice in that time.
Podcast producers already have a far better idea as to what their listener base is doing than radio broadcasters.
In my case, I only tend to download podcasts from ABC Radio National in any case - a pragmatic feature that allows the listener to pick where and when he or she wants to listen to good quality free-to-air content. And since it's a taxpayer-funded station, there are no adverts, so they fortunately have little to gain from this kind of DRM crud.
This is what you get when you allow large corporations to dictate your laws: they will only be enforced when it suits those corporations. And when you allow nearly all laws to defend only the interests of the very rich at the expense of everyone else, a travesty of justice is the inevitable result.
To be fair, at least Apple have adopted a unix-like operating system that means people like, ummmm, well like me can port useful (and free) software to the OS X platform at will.
That doesn't, of course, do anything to improve the quality of Apple's offerings, some of which are so dumbed-down as to be almost unbearably frustrating.
The distressing fact is that the more contact people have with the police the less they trust them.
Sort of. Here in Australia, where the police system is generally similar to the UK's, confidence in the force is reasonably high, given the usual limitations.
What tends to escape notice, however, is that all the legal provisions enacted ostensibly against terrorist activities appear to have deleterious implications with regard to the rights of normal citizens.
The recent wave of (preemptive, i.e. no crime actually committed) arrests here may have inspired some to breathe a sigh of relief, but given how our present government (and particularly its leader, John Howard) dislikes dissent, it seems to me that it is a small matter to use the new legislation to round up a few prominently outspoken Muslims at the outset, then go on to use the same laws for their real purpose, which is to silence anyone who is critical of the government.
Q: Pardon me, but who exactly were you hanging out with around 1996?
A: Well, it wasn't Linus Torvalds, that's for sure. Not that I don't believe he's a perfectly nice guy, I've just never met him. Fact is, there are plenty of independent-minded people around who are perfectly amenable to different approaches to common goals.
Trouble is, there are some types of environment (e.g. corporate, government, academia) where, as a result of their size and their capacity to dominate social interactions, this kind of independence is, if not actively discouraged, at least harder to maintain unless you're a cantankerous old fart like me.
...back in 2001 when Linux was just a hobby for the blue-haired ponytail set.
I suspect the writer is either very young or has been living in a barrel.
I've never had blue hair either, and haven't sported a ponytail since the '70s, but I've been using Linux exclusively on my desktop machines since ~1996, and nobody considered it radical then.
Like manual menu editing--why can't it just be similar to KDE?
Why should it? The KDE interface doesn't have a monopoly on usability. The SMEG gnome menu editor (which comes by default with a number of distributions) is approachable enough.
What if I install a program that is not technically a gnome prog (like OOo) and want to use it?
Just for your information, there is a build of OOo 2.0 for the Dropline Gnome distribution I mentioned earlier that integrates nicely with it, and sets up the menu entries for you.
make CD #1 mostly a base system with xorg and the basic x apps, similar to Slackware's #1 CD
Slackware's CD#1 in the current 10.2 version doesn't include KDE any more, just xfce, twm and some other more minor desktop environments. And Pat has given up distributing Gnome in anything like a current model: that is well served by Dropline, and there's no point in his reinventing the wheel.
I personally believe Gnome's window manager (metacity) does a little better with two screens than KDe's (kwin)
I'm not sure there's much in it. Although I'm a Gnome user, I prefer KDE's handling of screensavers over the standard xscreensaver implemented with Gnome, in that it treats both screens as one rather than appearing to run two instances of the same screensaver.
That's a very minor niggle, though. I've been a Gnome user pretty much since it came into existence, but I always have the nagging feeling that KDE simply works better. Trouble is, I find I get annoyed by the silly naming theme and the excessively "busy" look and feel of the thing.
That doesn't stop me, however, from trying to get to like KDE every time some of the more asshat Gnome developers decide that it is time to take away yet another feature that I happened to like.
Slashdot Mirror
Getting on-topic for a change, I have personally found the most reliable media for off-line storage to be the TDK 700MB CD-R. I have occasionally had problems with Kodak and Imation media, and I avoid the no-name brands completely. I also use the TDK DVD+R media, but not for anything important. DVD is more convenient, but if I want to keep the data, DVD+R just isn't reliable enough.
Even worse when it's a sunny Saturday afternoon ;-) ...
...but in any case:
So if being a geek has really become cool, why has interest in CS as a major dropped among incoming freshmen and women are still a minority in computer and engineering fields...
I suspect the OP is only seeing part of the picture. I know a lot of heavy-duty geeks who pursue other sciences such as molecular biology (such as myself), chemistry, physics and mathematics. And I see no lack of enrolments in those areas at my university.
In the case of "verbing of nouns", there is long and distinguished precedent for it. After all, it isn't uncommon in Shakespeare's work.
Just a thought:
Perhaps if Sony and all the others had really wanted to prevent copying, they should not have been so quick to abandon black vinyl for recordings. Sure, lots of us had reasonable tape recorders, but NOBODY believed their quality approached that of the original record, so if you could afford it, you would always go out and buy the real thing.
Indeed. I doubt if Sony has accepted the world's judgement as a lesson; it's just a matter of time before they try something else.
What I would do if I had (very hypothetically) bought one of these CDs would be to rip the tracks to a fresh CD via cdparanoia/cdrecord, leaving the rootkit behind, then just throw away the original. Who cares if it's illegal? If you only have the one copy, and you have a receipt for payment for it, you might justifiably feel that you are operating within the spirit of the law, even if not the letter.
Indeed. I had just been trying to remember the last time I actually used usenet, and think it was in ~2000. Let's face it: the forums (fora?) available via stock-standard http have pretty effectively replaced usenet, and I can't say I would really miss it, even though my ISP still has its own news server.
I guess it is one of the more ironic (and we could just as easily contract that to "moronic") features of present business proctice that insists that the corporations that sell the crappiest muzack are the same ones that are most vigorous in suing their potential customers.
There should be a lesson there, I suppose, but some folks are slow learners.
I get very tired of seeing the word "viral" in association with the GPL, perhaps because it occurs so often in Microsoft propaganda. It is an unnecessary slur on what is, in fact, a very open-ended agreement between developer and user, which is designed principally to confer rights on both parties rather than take them away.
An honest and open agreement (and yes, the BSD licence is another such) is not something to malign, especially in the context of predatory "agreements" (read "ultimata") handed down from Redmond.
Sadder, perhaps, that Microsoft has been slapped for using those practices at home, and presumably (I am being charitable here) might have taken some measures to un-bundle the offending software, but it persists in following the same practices away from home.
If those bozos in the MS boardroom had any of the talent or imagination they are paid for, they should by now have been able to come up with a less obnoxious business model that still pays them good money.
Is that a promise? Please? Can anybody sue Microsoft if they don't follow through?
;-)
Might be part of the problem. Sometimes distributions go a bit overboard enabling everything, in an attempt to make everything work out of the box, and sometimes achieve the reverse as a result. You might want to consider stripping unused or unwanted sound drivers out of the kernel config and rebuilding the kernel.
Weird. I don't get anything like that on my Slackware box with customised kernel. As a matter of interest, are you using the kernel that came with FC4, or did you roll your own?
I don't believe it does. I think it only works on my machine because my kernel is configured to enable OSS emulation, and consequently conversations can be a bit choppy as a result. IIRC skype have taken some heat for that in the forums, but I don't know if they're actually doing anything about it.
This is true, at least for a number of "big name" musicians who have had lots of media exposure. However, a huge amount is available under other labels: Naxos, for instance, has bought up a heap of good recordings from many of those same artists, and distributes them at very reasonable prices, while a number of very fine musicians such as Jacob Heringman deal exclusively with labels such as Magnatune, which are quite civilised by anybody's standards. Well, mine, at least.
Though that's pretty easy to do, given that Sony can hardly be said to be at the forefront when it comes to publishing music of any interest. One might even be tempted to suggest that Sony's rationale might be that if one is inclined towards the lowest common denominator as far as music is concerned, Sony might feel that they are justified in treating that consumer as the lowest common denominator in the marketplace too.
Out of curiosity, I just had a good prowl through some of my music collection on CDs, and found only one on a Sony BMG label. It was one that was given to me a couple of years ago, and has probably only been played twice in that time.
In my case, I only tend to download podcasts from ABC Radio National in any case - a pragmatic feature that allows the listener to pick where and when he or she wants to listen to good quality free-to-air content. And since it's a taxpayer-funded station, there are no adverts, so they fortunately have little to gain from this kind of DRM crud.
This is what you get when you allow large corporations to dictate your laws: they will only be enforced when it suits those corporations. And when you allow nearly all laws to defend only the interests of the very rich at the expense of everyone else, a travesty of justice is the inevitable result.
That doesn't, of course, do anything to improve the quality of Apple's offerings, some of which are so dumbed-down as to be almost unbearably frustrating.
Sort of. Here in Australia, where the police system is generally similar to the UK's, confidence in the force is reasonably high, given the usual limitations.
What tends to escape notice, however, is that all the legal provisions enacted ostensibly against terrorist activities appear to have deleterious implications with regard to the rights of normal citizens.
The recent wave of (preemptive, i.e. no crime actually committed) arrests here may have inspired some to breathe a sigh of relief, but given how our present government (and particularly its leader, John Howard) dislikes dissent, it seems to me that it is a small matter to use the new legislation to round up a few prominently outspoken Muslims at the outset, then go on to use the same laws for their real purpose, which is to silence anyone who is critical of the government.
A: Well, it wasn't Linus Torvalds, that's for sure. Not that I don't believe he's a perfectly nice guy, I've just never met him. Fact is, there are plenty of independent-minded people around who are perfectly amenable to different approaches to common goals.
Trouble is, there are some types of environment (e.g. corporate, government, academia) where, as a result of their size and their capacity to dominate social interactions, this kind of independence is, if not actively discouraged, at least harder to maintain unless you're a cantankerous old fart like me.
I suspect the writer is either very young or has been living in a barrel.
I've never had blue hair either, and haven't sported a ponytail since the '70s, but I've been using Linux exclusively on my desktop machines since ~1996, and nobody considered it radical then.
Why should it? The KDE interface doesn't have a monopoly on usability. The SMEG gnome menu editor (which comes by default with a number of distributions) is approachable enough.
What if I install a program that is not technically a gnome prog (like OOo) and want to use it?
Just for your information, there is a build of OOo 2.0 for the Dropline Gnome distribution I mentioned earlier that integrates nicely with it, and sets up the menu entries for you.
Slackware's CD#1 in the current 10.2 version doesn't include KDE any more, just xfce, twm and some other more minor desktop environments. And Pat has given up distributing Gnome in anything like a current model: that is well served by Dropline, and there's no point in his reinventing the wheel.
I'm not sure there's much in it. Although I'm a Gnome user, I prefer KDE's handling of screensavers over the standard xscreensaver implemented with Gnome, in that it treats both screens as one rather than appearing to run two instances of the same screensaver.
That's a very minor niggle, though. I've been a Gnome user pretty much since it came into existence, but I always have the nagging feeling that KDE simply works better. Trouble is, I find I get annoyed by the silly naming theme and the excessively "busy" look and feel of the thing.
That doesn't stop me, however, from trying to get to like KDE every time some of the more asshat Gnome developers decide that it is time to take away yet another feature that I happened to like.
Slackware is certainly the most solid of the KDE-centric distros, and is even better with Dropline Gnome. ;-)