your ADSL is mostly Telstra no matter who you sign up with
Agreed. Mine is, too, but I buy my service (on a Telstra line) through another provider who gives me a vastly better traffic allowance (not to mention a Linux-hostile response from support), and I haven't had that problem with the poor ping times. (Yet. I hope.)
Dunno about your roachos, but the ones here in Perth (Western Australia, that is, not Scotland) don't swim too well at all. Just about the only way to kill the bastards is to drown them...
I'm pleased to hear that the recession hasn't hit wherever you live.
Well I seem to have touched a raw nerve with my original post in this thread. I don't recall having had so many replies before...
The fact is that when I was young I was inclined to be more accommodating when an employer dealt me a serve of crap.
20-odd years later, I do not admire the person I was then. As for recessions, I got it in the neck in 1990 when I walked off my sysprog job one month into a new mortgage, with interest rates at 17%, and no sign of other employment on the horizon. I think that qualifies, don't you?
Sure, it's hard, but I feel better about myself for taking that step. In my case, I went into blacksmithing for 10 years, and am now back at University again. It's decisions like these that ultimately leave you with a life worth living.
I don't know about you, but I have only tried the generic and Codeweaver's versions of Wine, and have succeeded in getting neither of them to work with anything more challenging than notepad.exe.
I'm not reying to start a flame war here, I am very well aware that others have got MSOffice etc. to work fine. The reason I tried it in the first place was in an attempt to get a Umax parallel-port scanner to work with Linux, since some sites linked to the SANE pages sort of indicated that it could be done.
All my attempts were frustrated, however, and I now have a policy of saying that if I have to take Windows code to use any hardware product, then I don't want that product.
What really freaks me out, though, is the number of teenagers who have probably never tied shoelaces
Not just that, think of the number of kids who can't perform basic arithmetic without a calculator.
I was waiting at a supermarket checkout the other day when a customer had three cartons of cans of soft drink ($13 each). Rather than lifting the things off the trolley, two of the staff tried to work out the cost:
err... $47? No, I think it's $61... Hmmm, better get a calculator...
It took me a moment to realise these guys were serious.
There's NOTHING wrong with being taught something for its own sake
Well said. I had a very classical "old-school" type of education: Latin, Classical Studies, English Language & Literature, French, German, Geography, Music, Maths and a sort of science education I had to make up for later on. Far from resenting "wasted" time, I feel that this breadth of disciplines was very valuable in giving me a real education in the most general and psychologically satisfying sense of the word.
Let's face it, if we need to learn a new "skill" such as typing, programming, carpentry or whatever, there is nothing stopping us from going out and learning it whenever it is appropriate.
My point is that education is more than a set of tools to get a job, it is a framework around which we build perceptions of who we are and how we perceive and interact with our society and environment.
despite the angry words of your colleagues, they may not step up when the crucial moment comes
My experience tells me you are right. Ultimately, since we can no longer expect any loyalty from employers, it follows that we have to look after ourselves since no-one else will. I have seen many situations where solidarity with co-workers has failed to stand the pressure-test, since everybody has their own perceptions of what is important to them.
There are times when it's worth spending a weeks or more without a job (I never say unemployed) if that's what it takes to maintain your self-respect. And yes, I do know what it's like to sleep under bridges in winter, I have done it.
Perhaps you ought to think about how lucky you are to even HAVE a job right now
It's precisely that attitude that perpetuates the perception a lot of bosses (and governments, for that matter) have that it's OK to treat staff as consumables.
If you act like a doormat, don't be too surprised when someone wipes his boots on you.
http://127.0.0.1:631 - You don't need no stinkin' docs!
Like I said: it's only any good if it works out of the box. If it doesn't, then you're stuffed, since the documentation (such as it is) is not helpful.
And yes, I did say that ALSA do make an effort (though their entries don't always work).
I think it's a bit sad that people are losing the skill of penmanship. Sure, scribbling one's message any-old-how may get the basic message across, but there's something missing from the perspective of personal expression.
It brings to mind a (mis-)quote from Robertson Davies who, referring to doctors' abysmal handwriting said something to the effect of "why do we trust these men with a knife if they cannot even control a pen?"
OK, I was at school in the days when we were expected to use fountain-pens, and we either learned a decent fist or we didn't, so I'll admit to a degree of curmudgeonliness. But I still believe that this is an aspect of expression we should not just waste out of laziness.
To be honest, I never found much use for BlueTooth
Nor have I - though I know my mobile phone (Ericsson) supports it. I'm probably being a bit conservative, but I haven't been burned yet by trusting dubious technology. (The corollary to that is that I have been burned by trusting flesh-and-blood people. I think I've lost my money with these guys quite recently.)
Maybe, but LDP by itself doesn't always help. For instance CUPS: How many of us have never managed to get that beast to work? If it works out of the box for you, you're laughing, but if not you're on your own since the CUPS development guys just shrug and say "RTFM you clod" without actually making TFM sufficiently comprehensive to justify the admonition. Same goes for ALSA for those of us who are not running 2.5.x kernels on production boxes, though to their credit, the ALSA team do make more of an effort to provide good documentation.
I agree that OpenOffice is probably the equal of MSOrifice as far as general usability is concerned (I use it every day) but from my point of view, OO needs serious beefing up in statistics and plotting for the spreadsheet to be very useful to me. I've been sort of getting by with Grace, but that seems to have a bit of a long learning curve for me. Now if anybody knows of a good equivalent of SPSS for Linux (instant Score: 5: Informative, anyone?), I'll be a happy man. Dammit, I would even pay for it if it's affordable on a student budget...
You might want to try out Yahoo's webmail service - it's noticeably quicker, and their spam blocking is really very good. I've had Yahoo accounts for at least couple of years and so far I've had absolutely no spam on them at all. Not bad considering my userIDs are based on dictionary words...
I don't understand why they are complaining about the costs of this
Just a big business' resistance to change. They do it because they can, pretty much like Microsoft's antics.
All it means is that the US is going to have to catch up with the rest of the world re number portability. Most civilised countries have had it for years.
GPL'd source guarantees that nothing lives in your kernel that you cannot examine as much as you like for backdoors
Not quite.
(1) It's not just your kernel... (2) Sure, you could spend weeks browsing through the source by yourself (and probably not find any backdoors even if they do exist). (3) Having a source distro in itself doesn't guarantee that said source hasn't been tampered with. I seem to remember there was something like this that came up a few months ago with sendmail where somebody (IIRC) had replaced the source tgz file on some servers. If people do not check MD5sums at the original point of distribution then sooner or later they're going to get their fingers burnt.
Uhh... maybe. but if I were so paranoid about NSA introducing backdoors etc, I would be more inclined to go for Linux From Scratch. I have a reasonable degree of faith in the GNU components and other applications that I use, and if I wanted to be sure that they hadn't been tampered with, I would download the source of each piece of software, check the MD5sums and compile it all myself.
Since I live in the real world (tm) I just use Slackware. I reckon I can trust Pat not to fuck with my system:-).
But back in 1988 - hell, back in 1978, if you wanted content, you didn't look for a computer. Here in 2003, you still have to take a lantern to find content on most websites. There was a brief (halcyon) period before the spammers and banner-ad-mongers came on the scene when there was some useful stuff that was untarnished by commercial imperatives.
Seems we have to work a lot harder to separate the wheat from the chaff now.
These are 33+1/3 RPM records. Yes, I know about the old 78s (bakelite, or something like that?) and these are not those. There's a world of difference between 1950s and 1930s recordings.
Vinyls are in fact made from a more robust plastic than they used to be a few decades ago
When they're made at all. However; I've got quite a few early vinyl calssical recordings (pre-1955) from a variety of labels which have stood up to wear very well indeed, while many recordings from the 1980s are effectively worn out. This is where the contactless forms of sound reproduction, of course, have the edge.
I would be the first to agree that there is an awful lot of fudging and outright wank when it comes to high-fidelity reproduction terminology, and I am also one of the many who are steadily moving their collection to CD (not mp3 or even ogg).
But we should remember that the original sounds are not a digital signal, they are in fact a complex collection of analogue signals.
Ultimately, anyone who really cares about the issue (and who has the requisite financial wherewithal) can check it out by comparison of a top-quality turntable with an equivalent CD player with a good combination of amp and speakers. Nobody will notice much difference with any music produced electronically, but with acoustic instruments and voices, there can be a marked difference in fidelity. I'm not going to get into silly definitions like "warmth", though, since that may in fact be applying different values to the initial signal, which although they might be easy on the ear do not qualify as faithful reproduction.
Re:Just wondering about these desktop screenshots.
on
Ximian's Back
·
· Score: 1
is this because people use it for the screen grab or what?
No. There's a native "start menu" --> Screenshot... utility (or just PrtScn).
Re:The real thing that sets Ximian Desktop 2 apart
on
Ximian's Back
·
· Score: 1
GIMP 1.3 looks very cute with the GTK2 UI, but there are still some issues with scripting (amongst other things) which have caused some distributions of Gnome (e.g. Dropline) to back it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn. I meant to say Linux-friendly response. It's Telstra who give you the hairy eyeball if you don't run Winbloze...
Agreed. Mine is, too, but I buy my service (on a Telstra line) through another provider who gives me a vastly better traffic allowance (not to mention a Linux-hostile response from support), and I haven't had that problem with the poor ping times. (Yet. I hope.)
Dunno about your roachos, but the ones here in Perth (Western Australia, that is, not Scotland) don't swim too well at all. Just about the only way to kill the bastards is to drown them...
Well I seem to have touched a raw nerve with my original post in this thread. I don't recall having had so many replies before...
The fact is that when I was young I was inclined to be more accommodating when an employer dealt me a serve of crap.
20-odd years later, I do not admire the person I was then. As for recessions, I got it in the neck in 1990 when I walked off my sysprog job one month into a new mortgage, with interest rates at 17%, and no sign of other employment on the horizon. I think that qualifies, don't you?
Sure, it's hard, but I feel better about myself for taking that step. In my case, I went into blacksmithing for 10 years, and am now back at University again. It's decisions like these that ultimately leave you with a life worth living.
I'm not reying to start a flame war here, I am very well aware that others have got MSOffice etc. to work fine. The reason I tried it in the first place was in an attempt to get a Umax parallel-port scanner to work with Linux, since some sites linked to the SANE pages sort of indicated that it could be done.
All my attempts were frustrated, however, and I now have a policy of saying that if I have to take Windows code to use any hardware product, then I don't want that product.
Not just that, think of the number of kids who can't perform basic arithmetic without a calculator.
I was waiting at a supermarket checkout the other day when a customer had three cartons of cans of soft drink ($13 each). Rather than lifting the things off the trolley, two of the staff tried to work out the cost:
err... $47?
No, I think it's $61...
Hmmm, better get a calculator...
It took me a moment to realise these guys were serious.
Well said. I had a very classical "old-school" type of education: Latin, Classical Studies, English Language & Literature, French, German, Geography, Music, Maths and a sort of science education I had to make up for later on. Far from resenting "wasted" time, I feel that this breadth of disciplines was very valuable in giving me a real education in the most general and psychologically satisfying sense of the word.
Let's face it, if we need to learn a new "skill" such as typing, programming, carpentry or whatever, there is nothing stopping us from going out and learning it whenever it is appropriate.
My point is that education is more than a set of tools to get a job, it is a framework around which we build perceptions of who we are and how we perceive and interact with our society and environment.
My experience tells me you are right. Ultimately, since we can no longer expect any loyalty from employers, it follows that we have to look after ourselves since no-one else will. I have seen many situations where solidarity with co-workers has failed to stand the pressure-test, since everybody has their own perceptions of what is important to them.
There are times when it's worth spending a weeks or more without a job (I never say unemployed) if that's what it takes to maintain your self-respect. And yes, I do know what it's like to sleep under bridges in winter, I have done it.
It's precisely that attitude that perpetuates the perception a lot of bosses (and governments, for that matter) have that it's OK to treat staff as consumables.
If you act like a doormat, don't be too surprised when someone wipes his boots on you.
Like I said: it's only any good if it works out of the box. If it doesn't, then you're stuffed, since the documentation (such as it is) is not helpful.
And yes, I did say that ALSA do make an effort (though their entries don't always work).
It brings to mind a (mis-)quote from Robertson Davies who, referring to doctors' abysmal handwriting said something to the effect of "why do we trust these men with a knife if they cannot even control a pen?"
OK, I was at school in the days when we were expected to use fountain-pens, and we either learned a decent fist or we didn't, so I'll admit to a degree of curmudgeonliness. But I still believe that this is an aspect of expression we should not just waste out of laziness.
Nor have I - though I know my mobile phone (Ericsson) supports it. I'm probably being a bit conservative, but I haven't been burned yet by trusting dubious technology. (The corollary to that is that I have been burned by trusting flesh-and-blood people. I think I've lost my money with these guys quite recently.)
Maybe, but LDP by itself doesn't always help. For instance CUPS: How many of us have never managed to get that beast to work? If it works out of the box for you, you're laughing, but if not you're on your own since the CUPS development guys just shrug and say "RTFM you clod" without actually making TFM sufficiently comprehensive to justify the admonition. Same goes for ALSA for those of us who are not running 2.5.x kernels on production boxes, though to their credit, the ALSA team do make more of an effort to provide good documentation.
I agree that OpenOffice is probably the equal of MSOrifice as far as general usability is concerned (I use it every day) but from my point of view, OO needs serious beefing up in statistics and plotting for the spreadsheet to be very useful to me. I've been sort of getting by with Grace, but that seems to have a bit of a long learning curve for me. Now if anybody knows of a good equivalent of SPSS for Linux (instant Score: 5: Informative, anyone?), I'll be a happy man. Dammit, I would even pay for it if it's affordable on a student budget...
You might want to try out Yahoo's webmail service - it's noticeably quicker, and their spam blocking is really very good. I've had Yahoo accounts for at least couple of years and so far I've had absolutely no spam on them at all. Not bad considering my userIDs are based on dictionary words...
But I bet you know when your power bill arrives :-)
Just a big business' resistance to change. They do it because they can, pretty much like Microsoft's antics.
All it means is that the US is going to have to catch up with the rest of the world re number portability. Most civilised countries have had it for years.
Not quite.
(1) It's not just your kernel...
(2) Sure, you could spend weeks browsing through the source by yourself (and probably not find any backdoors even if they do exist).
(3) Having a source distro in itself doesn't guarantee that said source hasn't been tampered with. I seem to remember there was something like this that came up a few months ago with sendmail where somebody (IIRC) had replaced the source tgz file on some servers. If people do not check MD5sums at the original point of distribution then sooner or later they're going to get their fingers burnt.
Since I live in the real world (tm) I just use Slackware. I reckon I can trust Pat not to fuck with my system :-).
Seems we have to work a lot harder to separate the wheat from the chaff now.
These are 33+1/3 RPM records. Yes, I know about the old 78s (bakelite, or something like that?) and these are not those. There's a world of difference between 1950s and 1930s recordings.
When they're made at all. However; I've got quite a few early vinyl calssical recordings (pre-1955) from a variety of labels which have stood up to wear very well indeed, while many recordings from the 1980s are effectively worn out. This is where the contactless forms of sound reproduction, of course, have the edge.
But we should remember that the original sounds are not a digital signal, they are in fact a complex collection of analogue signals.
Ultimately, anyone who really cares about the issue (and who has the requisite financial wherewithal) can check it out by comparison of a top-quality turntable with an equivalent CD player with a good combination of amp and speakers. Nobody will notice much difference with any music produced electronically, but with acoustic instruments and voices, there can be a marked difference in fidelity. I'm not going to get into silly definitions like "warmth", though, since that may in fact be applying different values to the initial signal, which although they might be easy on the ear do not qualify as faithful reproduction.
No. There's a native "start menu" --> Screenshot... utility (or just PrtScn).
GIMP 1.3 looks very cute with the GTK2 UI, but there are still some issues with scripting (amongst other things) which have caused some distributions of Gnome (e.g. Dropline) to back it out.