Let me see how this goes now. You buy a PC with a free trial of Norton SystemWorks, or something like that. You send them money to keep the automatic downloads of virus definitions up to date. Then you decide to get Microsoft's product, having money to burn. Do you uninstall Norton, or keep it, and just let it get out of date. I have one XP computer that has Norton SystemWorks, and also AOL. AOL sometimes pops up with some sort of scan, protecting you from something. I have to push buttons once in a while in Norton, to do full house scans. That takes 45 minutes on the 320 GB that I have. All that is a lot of work, and expense that could probably be saved in an old-fashioned cookiejar, to buy some more cd-r's, instead of going to Norton or Microsoft to pay them to protect my box. But wait. I'm not booted up in XP right now. I'm using my livecd linux, with the built-in Guarddog firewall. I've booted it up with the knoppix cheatcode: boot: knoppix tohd=/dev/hda3 It's running off the hard drive partition hda3 now, and it's very quiet, compared to the noise when running XP. I'm not concerned about viruses. Should I be? If I am, who do I send the $50.00 to? That would be funny, wouldn't it, send Microsoft $50.00 to protect my livecd linux. Bet they would pin that remittance to the bulletin board, with a note asking anyone who will come forward to tell them just what _that_ is for. Anyone with an extra $50.00 might want to save it for the Natural Gas Company, I hear those heating bills will be sky-high.
Last question:
Is there anyone out there who really feels safe putting a Windows computer on the Internet?
The KDE Guarddog firewall does not show up in "top" as a process that takes up memory, unless you boot up the configuration interface to make changes to the firewall rules. I have a preconfigured rc.firewall built in to my livecd linux, that is placed in/etc/init.d ahead of any restoration of personal config that knoppix allows. I have by default http, https, ftp, pop3, pop3s, and dns, so email and web surfing can be done immediately after the linux system boots to the desktop.
I note that Mozilla Firefox has the new version 1.5.0.1 out, I have that up and running in my latest build, and am using it now. Supposed to fix some security bugs. There seems to be an upward spiral of threats vs countermeasures in the Windows world, and as noted in the previous post, perhaps the dual core processors are needed to keep up with that.
Right now, I am using Opera 8.51, with 11 RSS feeds built in. I say "built in", as this is on a knoppix remaster livecd linux. Opera has some real advantages over Firefox in the handling of RSS feeds. When you click on one of the RSS sites, Opera opens it's mail system page, and there is a list of the various stories. Slashdot RSS has 10 all the time. You get 5 lines of preview text on this story, about IE 7, and a link here, to the story on Slashdot. Firefox only gives you the title of the story, and once you click on it, you go right to the story in the main browser window. I note that even on dial up, Opera has all this available within a minute after your dial up connection is ready, longer if you dive right in to a heavy page like "usatoday.com", which will use bandwidth. Once the RSS feeds decide to arrive (about 1 minute), there will be a short pause if you are typing something (like this), and then you will be greeted by the Opera Mail popup notice, at the bottom right of the screen, with the site of each feed, and the number of messages incoming. This will occur later, as more stories are made available, so you stay right on top of the news as it gets published, rather than when you decide to visit a news site, and look around. I just received 2 google news stories right then. The google news RSS summary of a story is quite comprehensive, with several links, in addition to the multi-line summary. I wonder how IE 7 will measure up to Opera. With a livecd linux, unless I decide to save the stories, it starts out new with each bootup, with a fresh batch of stories, if the site has made them. CNET has 22 stories, and interestingly enough, some on Googles new OS, a linux distro! Gotta go read about that!
People Near Me" feature, which searches over a Wi-Fi connection for other Vista users nearby and then sets up a peer-to-peer network with them That's funny. Go to Starbucks, and your OS finds you a date. You better look around the room first, before you turn your laptop on.
I went in Compusa a few years ago, and in the checkout lane the person ahead of me was buying a new Compaq pc. When the clerk asked for $600.00 or whatever the gross price was before rebates, the person cancelled the sale, and walked out. Apparently thinking that the price was $350, as advertised in the bold print in the flyer. The clerk was somewhat upset, and forgot to tear off the register receipt for the cancelled sale, and I wound up with it when I bought my box of floppies. The person was elderly, and perhaps took the advertisement at face value, without reading the tiny (excuse me, small) print. Later, I read the Compusa got in trouble with the FTC for not paying the rebates. Good to hear that Best Buy is working on ending the rebate program sometime in 2007. Why not put that on a fasttrack, and get it done before "Black Friday", 2006? I do like to shop at Office Depot also, and I wish they would get out of the rebate business too. We are just lending them money for the time between when they get our money, and the time the rebate is cashed and hits their bank. Walmart does not use rebates, so their flyers reflect the real price of the item, honest and upfront I say. Everyone knows you get no support at the point of sale at Walmart. When I went to Office Depot to buy a new hard drive, the clerk that opened the display case for me said, "ha ha don't ask me any questions about that, I don't know anything..." I didn't expect them to do something like give me a free floppy with tomrtbt linux on it to aid in partitioning my new drive, or anything like that. I didn't ask any questions, assuming that part of the price was for the brick and mortar impulse-buy convenience, and not for some sort of "value-added support". I do wish that Walmart would use locked display cases on expensive computer parts like graphics cards and hard drives, to keep the boxes in a more or less pristine condition before I take one home. They do have lots of friendly, helpful staff on the floor that would gladly unlock the case for a serious buyer. I do like Walmart, and wish I could spend money there more often.
I wonder if Opera Mini will also have the ability to handle RSS feeds something like the regular Opera 8.51 does.
I'm running it now on my knoppix remaster, and I have several RSS feeds, (including slashdot), and I think it's cool how the little feed download popup in the lower right hand corner of the screen works. Every so often it pops up and shows the download of more stories from the various feeds. Even on dialup, it loads from scratch in less than a minute, sometimes over 180 stories! Then maintains the feed lists with the updates. On a mobile device, do you suppose Opera Mini will have some sort of sound to notify of updated feed lists? Also, the way Opera handles the feeds is superior to Firefox, which only shows the titles of the stories in the bookmarks toolbar folder, in the drop down box. Opera gives you the summary of the story when you click on it, sometimes several lines long, enough for you to decide whether or not you want to click on the main link provided, and go to the actual web page for that item. Opera provides a quick and bandwidth-conserving way of scanning a lot of news items and articles very quickly. Opera Mini might be able to do this also for the mobile devices.
All this has me wondering if Knoppix will automatically detect the wifi cards for laptops supplied by providers like U S Wireless Online (aka Air2Lan). I've seen a bunch of these, and have not been able to get knoppix tested on any of them so far. Surely someone has tried and knows if knoppix linux will work.
The machine I'm using now is a dual processor Pentium Pro, at 200 mhz, each processor having 512 cache, for a total of 1024. RAM is 256 MB. I run my knoppix remaster (see screenshots), and am using "fromhd=/dev/hdd7", which is a 7200 rpm 160 GB drive. The web browser is Opera 8.51. This combination is fast, and makes for an enjoyable online experience. I have Gimp 2.2, and when I run that, I use a gimp temporary file at hdd8, and the system swap is about 5 GB total, spread over several partitions. Right now, it is not using any of that. It would, if I did some Gimp work, however. "top" shows 62573k free right now, because I run a 2.4 kernel, very easy on older boxes compared to the 2.6. My ramdisk useage is only 6% now, so I could download and run a new Firefox build in there, and have ramdisk space left over. I had to work on the remaster to get it down that low. That helps, too, when running on a PII with 128 MB of ram. It's not overly slow there either. (Compare to SLAX 5.05, which is slow, with it's 2.6 kernel) Also tried my OS on a PII with 512K cache, 160 MB RAM, and that combo is reasonable, also. I believe the speed and performance I see on this machine is due to the dual processors, with that 1024 cache, total, together with the OS I am running. This old Pentium pro dual-processor box is still my favorite, and to me, it does not disappoint. I love the idea that the mac's have dual processors, it has to be good. I guess they could not pass up the chance to put Intel processors to work, they ought to sell a lot of those. All they have to do is run the apps a little faster (get more work done, quicker), and that ought to do the trick as far as Apple's bottom line is concerned. I run my remastering work on a P4 HT sometimes, and the difference in time to compress to an iso is considerable, 20 minutes vs two hours. With the latest CD of my OS in hand, I can set up a "master-copy" in about 10 minutes on a P4. Then, the master copy is ready for remastering work. Get into chroot, and apt-get away! It's all about performance, and saving time, getting more done per hour.
It would be nice if they would continue to test until Vista is really ready for release to the general public. Soon, all the computers in the stores will have Vista preinstalled, and lots of people will be buying them, just like they buy the machines now. The public expects all of the security problems and bugs, etc. will be minimal, and that they are getting their money's worth when they buy a new computer. Just like a new car, all of the problems solved before the car/truck, etc. hits the showroom. Sure hope this is the case with Windows Vista.
Maybe they are running out of good luck. Windows, so I have been told, has a lot of code. It has been around a while. Perhaps it is outliving it's developers. Maybe the new coders they have now need more time to go through all that code, and do a lot of testing, etc. to fix things. Some of the flaws are not simple ones anymore, would take anyone a lot of time to fix. I would wonder if they fixed problems in just a few days. Do they have an army of coders up there?
Lead Story on that site:
"Earth is orbiting through a swarm of space debris that may be producing an unusual number of nighttime fireballs."
I need to stay up later. I'm missing something here.
When did corporations get more freedoms than individuals? In the USA they don't. Worldcom and Bernie Ebbers are an example. The USA does not have exclusive rights to toast big business, and their creators. In Russia, we have the YUKOS oil company item, somewhat similar to the Worldcom situation. I know, this is a boring comment, so for you older slashdotters wanting to see a story on a good-looking older woman who found herself in trouble with the law, and the resulting jail term tested the mettle of her Company, here you go. (not that one, this one)
No wonder it won't run on anything less than a 1GHz cpu I had heard that Vista would be scalable, and run on older PC's because of that feature. Kindly enlighten me on that. Is this just a setup similar to KDE where you can enable "less eyecandy" to allow KDE to work better on older PC's, or is it a real scalable setup? Knoppix can scale down to twm if you do not have enough memory, but I would expect Microsoft to do more than that since they have so much development time behind Vista. It may be true that the scalable feature has gone by the wayside, since we see so much high-tech demos of Windows at the Consumer Electronics Show, combining a "media center-like" version with HDTV and complicated Yahoo/TiVo arrangements. Also, since this OS will be preinstalled, the Microsoft/PC makers arrangements will require a 1 GHZ or better processor. Anyway, buying Vista for an older 800 MHZ box would be too expensive, one can just pony up a couple of hundred more and go away with a new PC, Vista and all. I still say that running a LiveCD linux is the cheapest way to run linux and not disturb one's Windows setup.
2) Head moving too much - not enough memory. Back when hard drives made a lot of noise when they were acccessed, I used to enjoy hearing them quieten down when more memory was added. I imagined that the drive would then last a lot longer. On that note, I find that booting Windows 98 causes a lot of noisy drive activity until the desktop is finally reached. Even more activity if something like Norton SystemWorks has to boot. For this test, I leave that out, at my peril, if Win 98 goes on the internet. Comparing that to running Knoppix, with the "fromhd" cheatcode, where a/knoppix folder is present on a hard drive partition, I find that the drive activity is a fraction of what it is when running Windows 98. Of course the CDROM drive spins a little for perhaps 20 seconds or so, until the system finds the/knoppix folder, then it's quiet, and the hard drive takes over. Seems to me to be perhaps only 20 percent, or less of the activity Windows 98 requires to get Mozilla Firefox 1.5 going, and with a site like usatoday.com ready for viewing. Same computer, hardware, etc. It is true that the cheatcode "tohd" has to be used once to get the/knoppix folder placed in the partition, but from then on, that does not have to be repeated, unless one uses a different Knoppix. I usually do not place the/knoppix folder in with Windows 98, there I place the restoration files for Knoppix. Then I can write to them, but could not if the/knoppix folder was there, and I booted up with it. I place the/knoppix folder in a partition of it's own, and do use a generous swap partition. Knoppix only uses what it wants of that, not all of it at once, so the size of the swap partition does not color this test, unless the swap is not present, or is turned off at the boot prompt. Even then, Knoppix still causes a lot less drive drive activity than Win 98. This test is on a box with 128 MB of ram, so the "toram" boot cheatcode is not possible. Naturally, with a GB of ram, the "toram" cheatcode quietens everything down.
Well, I was using it when I came across this story. This isn't new, but I have Firefox with the following RSS feeds:
BBC News
Yahoo News
Slashdot
Google News
ABC News
FoxNews
Linux Today
Rapidweather Blog
I guess you would call me a news junkie, but I don't click on every story. Just looking around with these "speedfeeds" gives me an overview, just from the titles of the stories. If I see something I want to know more about, I'll click on it. All this is much faster than clicking on these sites, and looking them over. I use dialup a lot, so when I have to wait for a page to fully load, I can scan the feeds, it is something to do. Don't get the pictures though in RSS feeds. If that's what you are going to do, look over the news on the internet, then this is a fast method. The other browsers I have in my Knoppix Remaster do not have these feeds at the top, so I do not have to boot up Firefox unless I want to scan the news. For fast browsing, I normally use Opera, and go to the sites I want, directly. I have Flock, but since it takes as long as Firefox to boot up, I don't use it everyday. Do use Konqueror when I have a need for it, glad it has the tabs, good for ftp work.
20. The Queen has never been on a computer, she told Bill Gates as she awarded him an honorary knighthood. I take her word for it, no computer in Buckingham Palace. Grandmotherly types (like the Queen) tend to say things like that. Basically, they want to make you look good. I'll bet Bill Gates felt 10 feet tall after she said that. In this day and age of new discoveries, etc. grandmothers have lots of material. Anyone ever had their grandmother say, "Who would ever have thought of such a thing!" concerning some new technology. Having said that, here is a link to a report that says the Queen apparently knows how to email school children, having set a record for the largest group email the Queen has ever sent. The Queen does not really touch the computer though, she has it done... But, did anyone see that picture of Pope John Paul II on his laptop? They took it down after he died, but he was supposedly answering email when the picture was taken. The top of the laptop had the papal crest, if that is what it is called. Here is a link to a statement from 1989 by John Paul II that has some sections concerning computers. What a great guy he was, we all miss him. Goodbye, 2005!
Goldfish are indeed tough.
I had a goldfish pond, and the cats used to fish them out, but usually walk away. Hours later, I would put the fish back in the pond, and after a while, it would recover. Big rain storms would wash some of them out, same result and cure. Winter brought ice to the pond, I just took a rock and broke the ice every morning, so they could get oxygen from the surface of the water. The cold water did not harm them at all. Kind of like a good car battery that starts the car at 5 degrees below zero. They ate insects that jumped into the pond during the summer, I did not have to feed them except during winter. Put some Water Hyacinths in there, and the goldfish lay their eggs on the roots, and eventually, you have little goldfish swimming around. Those that survived (again, references to battery life), replaced the older fish that died. Goldfish, in their own way, are way tougher than almost any battery. If you decide to raise them, be sure to give them a really big pond, and make it at least 5 feet deep. If you make a concrete pond, let it cure a good long while before adding the fish. Use a half-round concrete drain pipe 12 inch round or so for the bottom, with sloping sides, so you can syphon out the waste material from the resulting trough with a garden hose. Locate the pond out in the open, so they get full sunlight all day long, if possible. You may plant some shrubs on the south and west side if the sun is too strong in the afternoon. Don't put the pond on the north side of a house or fence. If you do all that, you will have some of the goldfish outlive any laptop computer. You don't have to buy goldfish, just wait till a neighborhood kid gets some for free somewhere, and offer to give it a good home. By the way, Goldfish come with their own fishtank screensaver!
Me too. Count all the bugs for apps that don't work right the first time around, also. As far as all of the security bugs goes, I suppose that includes us LiveCD people. Probably doesn't matter how one gets the OS up and running, HD or CD, it will have bugs, etc. I do write C++ apps similar to what is found in Knoppix, and use TCL/TK also. Somehow, though, I feel better running my Knoppix remaster than using XP or (gasp) Windows 98 when going on the internet. I use both Dial Up and Cable Broadband, and sometimes turn the Broadband off if I do not have to connect to the internet at the time. Just to be safe. I do that all the time when using XP. I did have that OS become unbootable once, and spent $240 on a new hard drive and security software to get it running again. Looking at the bright side of that, I do have 320 GB of space now, it's just that 120 GB of it is not bootable anymore. Only problems I have had with Knoppix machines is power supply going out from adding too many cards, etc. That has nothing to do with the OS. I am thinking about doing apt-get install firestarter on my Knoppix remaster, but I hesitate to put something in there that will keep the ordinary user as busy as the XP users updating their security software. Spending time doing that, rather than what they wanted to do in the first place. I have run Firestarter on Debian hard drive installs, and it does a nice job, so I am leaning toward putting it in.
When are you going to have the toolbar redesigned so that the now-obsolete advertisement area, now blank, is filled? All of the home,back,forward, etc. buttons are over on the left, and need to be spread out, like the old Netscape browser did it, or perhaps use a custom setup like Firefox, where the user places the buttons where he wants them. I currently use Opera 8.51 for Linux, and do enjoy it, especially how fast it boots up compared to Mozilla Firefox and Flock. On the older machines it makes a difference as to how fast the browser will boot up.
is RSS really important enough to put into the OS?
Sure it is.
I have the following RSS feeds for Firefox in my Knoppix remaster:
BBC News
Yahoo News
Slashdot
Google News
ABC News
FOXNews
Linux Today
Rapidweather Blog
I have just the one blog, mine. While I view a web page, I can quickly drop down the various stories from these feeds by just waving my mouse cursor across them. If I do see
something I might want to read, I click on it.
I get a lot of news scanned for interesting stories quickly with those seven feeds.
The Rapidweather Blog RSS feed is there for others to check out, I already know what's there;-)
I'd put more RSS feeds there, but I need the browser to fit 800x600 as well as 1024x768.
Oh, wait. Here's an interesting story now: Disneyland Christmas Tree Catches Fire.
It's all a scam to get you to pay to watch ugly people
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What's going on, is that people are constantly looking for that Beauty.
Now that I have answered that, here is a scary thought for all you Slashdotters: When you are old, old ladies will look good to you. You will have to discard that time-worn phrase, "Before 6 Beers, After 6 Beers".
It amusing that the greed of the big media corporations which kickstarted this whole mess to begin with, is the same exact thing that is keeping them from developing effective DRM. No matter what the media, I seem to wind up paying $17.00 for one hit song, and a bunch of songs that don't sound nearly as good. The "big media corporations" have to maintain that $$ momentum, don't they. With Blu-Ray, and 50 GB of storage, they seem to want to be extremely careful, less they give away the store. It is obviously greed on their part, but with a movie, one has to suffer through a popcorn-strewn theater full of sneezing and coughing patrons, to see it. Overpriced theater candy and all. Forbid that we get to see the movie(s) at home on a Blu-Ray device, possibly copied from an unpaid source. Yes, they have to be really careful with Blu-Ray. Imagine, they make one copy, sell it, and all of a sudden, thousands of bootleg copies are produced, being viewed and enjoyed by the non-paying.
Apparently some tennessee lawmaker went into Office Depot and saw the big price tags on some of the software, and decided this might be a source of revenue. If a business running an open-source OS downloads and installs an application for free, how would the state tax that? They are just standing outside of the door of Office Depot, etc. with their tax papers, but have not determined how to tax the downloads. Do they enter the business and look at the software being used? Do they say, that application does the same thing as the one we want to tax, so you pay the tax too? Are forms being mailed as we speak to all businesses, regardless of whether they count on their fingers, or use an expensive spreadsheet application? That's what we have state legislatures for, so the lawmakers can hash over all these questions, and come up with a fair tax, hopefully.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me see how this goes now. You buy a PC with a free trial of Norton SystemWorks, or something like that. You send them money to keep the automatic downloads of virus definitions up to date. Then you decide to get Microsoft's product, having money to burn. Do you uninstall Norton, or keep it, and just let it get out of date. I have one XP computer that has Norton SystemWorks, and also AOL. AOL sometimes pops up with some sort of scan, protecting you from something. I have to push buttons once in a while in Norton, to do full house scans. That takes 45 minutes on the 320 GB that I have.
All that is a lot of work, and expense that could probably be saved in an old-fashioned cookiejar, to buy some more cd-r's, instead of going to Norton or Microsoft to pay them to protect my box.
But wait. I'm not booted up in XP right now. I'm using my livecd linux, with the built-in Guarddog firewall. I've booted it up with the knoppix cheatcode:
boot: knoppix tohd=/dev/hda3
It's running off the hard drive partition hda3 now, and it's very quiet, compared to the noise when running XP.
I'm not concerned about viruses. Should I be? If I am, who do I send the $50.00 to?
That would be funny, wouldn't it, send Microsoft $50.00 to protect my livecd linux. Bet they would pin that remittance to the bulletin board, with a note asking anyone who will come forward to tell them just what _that_ is for.
Anyone with an extra $50.00 might want to save it for the Natural Gas Company, I hear those heating bills will be sky-high.
Last question:
Is there anyone out there who really feels safe putting a Windows computer on the Internet?
The KDE Guarddog firewall does not show up in "top" as a process that takes up memory, unless you boot up the configuration interface to make changes to the firewall rules. I have a preconfigured rc.firewall built in to my livecd linux, that is placed in /etc/init.d ahead of any restoration of personal config that knoppix allows. I have by default http, https, ftp, pop3, pop3s, and dns, so email and web surfing can be done immediately after the linux system boots to the desktop.
I note that Mozilla Firefox has the new version 1.5.0.1 out, I have that up and running in my latest build, and am using it now. Supposed to fix some security bugs.
There seems to be an upward spiral of threats vs countermeasures in the Windows world, and as noted in the previous post, perhaps the dual core processors are needed to keep up with that.
Right now, I am using Opera 8.51, with 11 RSS feeds built in. I say "built in", as this is on a knoppix remaster livecd linux.
Opera has some real advantages over Firefox in the handling of RSS feeds. When you click on one of the RSS sites, Opera opens it's mail system page, and there is a list of the various stories. Slashdot RSS has 10 all the time. You get 5 lines of preview text on this story, about IE 7, and a link here, to the story on Slashdot. Firefox only gives you the title of the story, and once you click on it, you go right to the story in the main browser window. I note that even on dial up, Opera has all this available within a minute after your dial up connection is ready, longer if you dive right in to a heavy page like "usatoday.com", which will use bandwidth. Once the RSS feeds decide to arrive (about 1 minute), there will be a short pause if you are typing something (like this), and then you will be greeted by the Opera Mail popup notice, at the bottom right of the screen, with the site of each feed, and the number of messages incoming. This will occur later, as more stories are made available, so you stay right on top of the news as it gets published, rather than when you decide to visit a news site, and look around. I just received 2 google news stories right then. The google news RSS summary of a story is quite comprehensive, with several links, in addition to the multi-line summary. I wonder how IE 7 will measure up to Opera.
With a livecd linux, unless I decide to save the stories, it starts out new with each bootup, with a fresh batch of stories, if the site has made them. CNET has 22 stories, and interestingly enough, some on Googles new OS, a linux distro!
Gotta go read about that!
People Near Me" feature, which searches over a Wi-Fi connection for other Vista users nearby and then sets up a peer-to-peer network with them
That's funny. Go to Starbucks, and your OS finds you a date.
You better look around the room first, before you turn your laptop on.
I went in Compusa a few years ago, and in the checkout lane the person ahead of me was buying a new Compaq pc. When the clerk asked for $600.00 or whatever the gross price was before rebates, the person cancelled the sale, and walked out. Apparently thinking that the price was $350, as advertised in the bold print in the flyer.
The clerk was somewhat upset, and forgot to tear off the register receipt for the cancelled sale, and I wound up with it when I bought my box of floppies. The person was elderly, and perhaps took the advertisement at face value, without reading the tiny (excuse me, small) print.
Later, I read the Compusa got in trouble with the FTC for not paying the rebates.
Good to hear that Best Buy is working on ending the rebate program sometime in 2007. Why not put that on a fasttrack, and get it done before "Black Friday", 2006?
I do like to shop at Office Depot also, and I wish they would get out of the rebate business too.
We are just lending them money for the time between when they get our money, and the time the rebate is cashed and hits their bank. Walmart does not use rebates, so their flyers reflect the real price of the item, honest and upfront I say. Everyone knows you get no support at the point of sale at Walmart. When I went to Office Depot to buy a new hard drive, the clerk that opened the display case for me said, "ha ha don't ask me any questions about that, I don't know anything..."
I didn't expect them to do something like give me a free floppy with tomrtbt linux on it to aid in partitioning my new drive, or anything like that. I didn't ask any questions, assuming that part of the price was for the brick and mortar impulse-buy convenience, and not for some sort of "value-added support".
I do wish that Walmart would use locked display cases on expensive computer parts like graphics cards and hard drives, to keep the boxes in a more or less pristine condition before I take one home. They do have lots of friendly, helpful staff on the floor that would gladly unlock the case for a serious buyer. I do like Walmart, and wish I could spend money there more often.
I wonder if Opera Mini will also have the ability to handle RSS feeds something like the regular Opera 8.51 does. I'm running it now on my knoppix remaster, and I have several RSS feeds, (including slashdot), and I think it's cool how the little feed download popup in the lower right hand corner of the screen works. Every so often it pops up and shows the download of more stories from the various feeds. Even on dialup, it loads from scratch in less than a minute, sometimes over 180 stories! Then maintains the feed lists with the updates. On a mobile device, do you suppose Opera Mini will have some sort of sound to notify of updated feed lists? Also, the way Opera handles the feeds is superior to Firefox, which only shows the titles of the stories in the bookmarks toolbar folder, in the drop down box. Opera gives you the summary of the story when you click on it, sometimes several lines long, enough for you to decide whether or not you want to click on the main link provided, and go to the actual web page for that item. Opera provides a quick and bandwidth-conserving way of scanning a lot of news items and articles very quickly. Opera Mini might be able to do this also for the mobile devices.
All this has me wondering if Knoppix will automatically detect the wifi cards for laptops supplied by providers like U S Wireless Online (aka Air2Lan). I've seen a bunch of these, and have not been able to get knoppix tested on any of them so far. Surely someone has tried and knows if knoppix linux will work.
The machine I'm using now is a dual processor Pentium Pro, at 200 mhz, each processor having 512 cache, for a total of 1024.
RAM is 256 MB.
I run my knoppix remaster (see screenshots), and am using "fromhd=/dev/hdd7", which is a 7200 rpm 160 GB drive.
The web browser is Opera 8.51.
This combination is fast, and makes for an enjoyable online experience. I have Gimp 2.2, and when I run that, I use a gimp temporary file at hdd8, and the system swap is about 5 GB total, spread over several partitions. Right now, it is not using any of that. It would, if I did some Gimp work, however.
"top" shows 62573k free right now, because I run a 2.4 kernel, very easy on older boxes compared to the 2.6. My ramdisk useage is only 6% now, so I could download and run a new Firefox build in there, and have ramdisk space left over. I had to work on the remaster to get it down that low. That helps, too, when running on a PII with 128 MB of ram. It's not overly slow there either. (Compare to SLAX 5.05, which is slow, with it's 2.6 kernel) Also tried my OS on a PII with 512K cache, 160 MB RAM, and that combo is reasonable, also.
I believe the speed and performance I see on this machine is due to the dual processors, with that 1024 cache, total, together with the OS I am running.
This old Pentium pro dual-processor box is still my favorite, and to me, it does not disappoint. I love the idea that the mac's have dual processors, it has to be good. I guess they could not pass up the chance to put Intel processors to work, they ought to sell a lot of those. All they have to do is run the apps a little faster (get more work done, quicker), and that ought to do the trick as far as Apple's bottom line is concerned. I run my remastering work on a P4 HT sometimes, and the difference in time to compress to an iso is considerable, 20 minutes vs two hours. With the latest CD of my OS in hand, I can set up a "master-copy" in about 10 minutes on a P4. Then, the master copy is ready for remastering work. Get into chroot, and apt-get away!
It's all about performance, and saving time, getting more done per hour.
It would be nice if they would continue to test until Vista is really ready for release to the general public. Soon, all the computers in the stores will have Vista preinstalled, and lots of people will be buying them, just like they buy the machines now. The public expects all of the security problems and bugs, etc. will be minimal, and that they are getting their money's worth when they buy a new computer. Just like a new car, all of the problems solved before the car/truck, etc. hits the showroom. Sure hope this is the case with Windows Vista.
Maybe they are running out of good luck. Windows, so I have been told, has a lot of code. It has been around a while. Perhaps it is outliving it's developers. Maybe the new coders they have now need more time to go through all that code, and do a lot of testing, etc. to fix things. Some of the flaws are not simple ones anymore, would take anyone a lot of time to fix. I would wonder if they fixed problems in just a few days. Do they have an army of coders up there?
Lead Story on that site:
"Earth is orbiting through a swarm of space debris that may be producing an unusual number of nighttime fireballs."
I need to stay up later. I'm missing something here.
Only Useful If Paris Hilton is standing next to you with her Camera Phone....
Sorry, I would not be paying much attention to her Camera Phone.
When did corporations get more freedoms than individuals?
In the USA they don't. Worldcom and Bernie Ebbers are an example.
The USA does not have exclusive rights to toast big business, and their creators.
In Russia, we have the YUKOS oil company item, somewhat similar to the Worldcom situation.
I know, this is a boring comment, so for you older slashdotters wanting to see a story on a good-looking older woman who found herself in trouble with the law, and the resulting jail term tested the mettle of her Company, here you go.
(not that one, this one)
No wonder it won't run on anything less than a 1GHz cpu
I had heard that Vista would be scalable, and run on older PC's because of that feature. Kindly enlighten me on that. Is this just a setup similar to KDE where you can enable "less eyecandy" to allow KDE to work better on older PC's, or is it a real scalable setup? Knoppix can scale down to twm if you do not have enough memory, but I would expect Microsoft to do more than that since they have so much development time behind Vista. It may be true that the scalable feature has gone by the wayside, since we see so much high-tech demos of Windows at the Consumer Electronics Show, combining a "media center-like" version with HDTV and complicated Yahoo/TiVo arrangements. Also, since this OS will be preinstalled, the Microsoft/PC makers arrangements will require a 1 GHZ or better processor. Anyway, buying Vista for an older 800 MHZ box would be too expensive, one can just pony up a couple of hundred more and go away with a new PC, Vista and all. I still say that running a LiveCD linux is the cheapest way to run linux and not disturb one's Windows setup.
2) Head moving too much - not enough memory. /knoppix folder is present on a hard drive partition, I find that the drive activity is a fraction of what it is when running Windows 98. Of course the CDROM drive spins a little for perhaps 20 seconds or so, until the system finds the /knoppix folder, then it's quiet, and the hard drive takes over. Seems to me to be perhaps only 20 percent, or less of the activity Windows 98 requires to get Mozilla Firefox 1.5 going, and with a site like usatoday.com ready for viewing. Same computer, hardware, etc. /knoppix folder placed in the partition, but from then on, that does not have to be repeated, unless one uses a different Knoppix. I usually do not place the /knoppix folder in with Windows 98, there I place the restoration files for Knoppix. Then I can write to them, but could not if the /knoppix folder was there, and I booted up with it. I place the /knoppix folder in a partition of it's own, and do use a generous swap partition. Knoppix only uses what it wants of that, not all of it at once, so the size of the swap partition does not color this test, unless the swap is not present, or is turned off at the boot prompt. Even then, Knoppix still causes a lot less drive drive activity than Win 98. This test is on a box with 128 MB of ram, so the "toram" boot cheatcode is not possible. Naturally, with a GB of ram, the "toram" cheatcode quietens everything down.
Back when hard drives made a lot of noise when they were acccessed, I used to enjoy hearing them quieten down when more memory was added. I imagined that the drive would then last a lot longer.
On that note, I find that booting Windows 98 causes a lot of noisy drive activity until the desktop is finally reached. Even more activity if something like Norton SystemWorks has to boot. For this test, I leave that out, at my peril, if Win 98 goes on the internet. Comparing that to running Knoppix, with the "fromhd" cheatcode, where a
It is true that the cheatcode "tohd" has to be used once to get the
Well, I was using it when I came across this story. This isn't new, but I have Firefox with the following RSS feeds:
BBC News
Yahoo News
Slashdot
Google News
ABC News
FoxNews
Linux Today
Rapidweather Blog
I guess you would call me a news junkie, but I don't click on every story. Just looking around with these "speedfeeds" gives me an overview, just from the titles of the stories. If I see something I want to know more about, I'll click on it. All this is much faster than clicking on these sites, and looking them over. I use dialup a lot, so when I have to wait for a page to fully load, I can scan the feeds, it is something to do. Don't get the pictures though in RSS feeds. If that's what you are going to do, look over the news on the internet, then this is a fast method. The other browsers I have in my Knoppix Remaster do not have these feeds at the top, so I do not have to boot up Firefox unless I want to scan the news. For fast browsing, I normally use Opera, and go to the sites I want, directly. I have Flock, but since it takes as long as Firefox to boot up, I don't use it everyday. Do use Konqueror when I have a need for it, glad it has the tabs, good for ftp work.
20. The Queen has never been on a computer, she told Bill Gates as she awarded him an honorary knighthood.
I take her word for it, no computer in Buckingham Palace.
Grandmotherly types (like the Queen) tend to say things like that. Basically, they want to make you look good. I'll bet Bill Gates felt 10 feet tall after she said that.
In this day and age of new discoveries, etc. grandmothers have lots of material. Anyone ever had their grandmother say, "Who would ever have thought of such a thing!" concerning some new technology.
Having said that, here is a link to a report that says the Queen apparently knows how to email school children, having set a record for the largest group email the Queen has ever sent.
The Queen does not really touch the computer though, she has it done...
But, did anyone see that picture of Pope John Paul II on his laptop?
They took it down after he died, but he was supposedly answering email when the picture was taken. The top of the laptop had the papal crest, if that is what it is called.
Here is a link to a statement from 1989 by John Paul II that has some sections concerning computers. What a great guy he was, we all miss him. Goodbye, 2005!
Goldfish are indeed tough.
I had a goldfish pond, and the cats used to fish them out, but usually walk away. Hours later, I would put the fish back in the pond, and after a while, it would recover. Big rain storms would wash some of them out, same result and cure.
Winter brought ice to the pond, I just took a rock and broke the ice every morning, so they could get oxygen from the surface of the water. The cold water did not harm them at all.
Kind of like a good car battery that starts the car at 5 degrees below zero.
They ate insects that jumped into the pond during the summer, I did not have to feed them except during winter.
Put some Water Hyacinths in there, and the goldfish lay their eggs on the roots, and eventually, you have little goldfish swimming around. Those that survived (again, references to battery life), replaced the older fish that died. Goldfish, in their own way, are way tougher than almost any battery. If you decide to raise them, be sure to give them a really big pond, and make it at least 5 feet deep. If you make a concrete pond, let it cure a good long while before adding the fish. Use a half-round concrete drain pipe 12 inch round or so for the bottom, with sloping sides, so you can syphon out the waste material from the resulting trough with a garden hose. Locate the pond out in the open, so they get full sunlight all day long, if possible. You may plant some shrubs on the south and west side if the sun is too strong in the afternoon. Don't put the pond on the north side of a house or fence. If you do all that, you will have some of the goldfish outlive any laptop computer. You don't have to buy goldfish, just wait till a neighborhood kid gets some for free somewhere, and offer to give it a good home. By the way, Goldfish come with their own fishtank screensaver!
Me too. Count all the bugs for apps that don't work right the first time around, also.
As far as all of the security bugs goes, I suppose that includes us LiveCD people.
Probably doesn't matter how one gets the OS up and running, HD or CD, it will have bugs, etc.
I do write C++ apps similar to what is found in Knoppix, and use TCL/TK also.
Somehow, though, I feel better running my Knoppix remaster than using XP or (gasp) Windows 98 when going on the internet. I use both Dial Up and Cable Broadband, and sometimes turn the Broadband off if I do not have to connect to the internet at the time. Just to be safe.
I do that all the time when using XP. I did have that OS become unbootable once, and spent
$240 on a new hard drive and security software to get it running again. Looking at the bright side of that, I do have 320 GB of space now, it's just that 120 GB of it is not bootable anymore. Only problems I have had with Knoppix machines is power supply going out from adding too many cards, etc. That has nothing to do with the OS.
I am thinking about doing apt-get install firestarter on my Knoppix remaster, but I hesitate to put something in there that will keep the ordinary user as busy as the XP users updating their security software. Spending time doing that, rather than what they wanted to do in the first place. I have run Firestarter on Debian hard drive installs, and it does a nice job, so I am leaning toward putting it in.
When are you going to have the toolbar redesigned so that the now-obsolete advertisement area, now blank, is filled? All of the home,back,forward, etc. buttons are over on the left, and need to be spread out, like the old Netscape browser did it, or perhaps use a custom setup like Firefox, where the user places the buttons where he wants them.
I currently use Opera 8.51 for Linux, and do enjoy it, especially how fast it boots up compared to Mozilla Firefox and Flock. On the older machines it makes a difference as to how fast the browser will boot up.
is RSS really important enough to put into the OS? ;-)
Sure it is.
I have the following RSS feeds for Firefox in my Knoppix remaster:
BBC News
Yahoo News
Slashdot
Google News
ABC News
FOXNews
Linux Today
Rapidweather Blog
I have just the one blog, mine. While I view a web page, I can quickly drop down the various stories from these feeds by just waving my mouse cursor across them. If I do see something I might want to read, I click on it. I get a lot of news scanned for interesting stories quickly with those seven feeds. The Rapidweather Blog RSS feed is there for others to check out, I already know what's there
I'd put more RSS feeds there, but I need the browser to fit 800x600 as well as 1024x768.
Oh, wait. Here's an interesting story now:
Disneyland Christmas Tree Catches Fire.
It's all a scam to get you to pay to watch ugly people
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
What's going on, is that people are constantly looking for that Beauty.
Now that I have answered that, here is a scary thought for all you Slashdotters:
When you are old, old ladies will look good to you.
You will have to discard that time-worn phrase, "Before 6 Beers, After 6 Beers".
Now, do you really want to grow old?
It amusing that the greed of the big media corporations which kickstarted this whole mess to begin with, is the same exact thing that is keeping them from developing effective DRM.
No matter what the media, I seem to wind up paying $17.00 for one hit song, and a bunch of songs that don't sound nearly as good. The "big media corporations" have to maintain that $$ momentum, don't they. With Blu-Ray, and 50 GB of storage, they seem to want to be extremely careful, less they give away the store. It is obviously greed on their part, but with a movie, one has to suffer through a popcorn-strewn theater full of sneezing and coughing patrons, to see it. Overpriced theater candy and all. Forbid that we get to see the movie(s) at home on a Blu-Ray device, possibly copied from an unpaid source.
Yes, they have to be really careful with Blu-Ray. Imagine, they make one copy, sell it, and all of a sudden, thousands of bootleg copies are produced, being viewed and enjoyed by the non-paying.
There is a story on Linux Today that Microsoft has almost completed the purchase of Opera Software. Darn.
Apparently some tennessee lawmaker went into Office Depot and saw the big price tags on some of the software, and decided this might be a source of revenue.
If a business running an open-source OS downloads and installs an application for free, how would the state tax that? They are just standing outside of the door of Office Depot, etc. with their tax papers, but have not determined how to tax the downloads. Do they enter the business and look at the software being used? Do they say, that application does the same thing as the one we want to tax, so you pay the tax too?
Are forms being mailed as we speak to all businesses, regardless of whether they count on their fingers, or use an expensive spreadsheet application?
That's what we have state legislatures for, so the lawmakers can hash over all these questions, and come up with a fair tax, hopefully.