> The CSM may be one of the most objective news sources in the > US, but that says more about the inadequacy of US journalism > than the stellar achievements of the CSM.
I'll second that.
A lot of people are confused about the purpose of newspapers. The purpose of newspapers has nothing to do with discovering truth, and as a general rule journalists have at best a passing interest in truth or accuracy. The primary concern of journalists is to sell newspapers. In order to do that, they want to be perceived as accurate (or likely accurate) for one day. Whether last week's paper is still perceived as accurate will never matter, as long as people have enough interest to suspend their disbelief long enough to buy _today's_ paper.
A philosphy professor once told me I'm to young to be so cynical...
The Christian Science Monitor is not run by scientists who are Christians, but by Christian Scientists. Christian Science is another shootoff religion; its relationship with Christianity is about the same as that of the JWs or the Mormons; orthodox and fundamental Christians usually consider them a cult.
(But note that Christians mean a different thing by "cult" than the mainstream media do; TV and newspaper reporters say "cult" and are talking about people who stockpile weapons, sacrifice chickens, drink special Kool-Aid, believe aliens are coming on a comet, et cetera; Christians say "cult" and mean a group that claims to be Christian but has altered a major core doctrine, usually the doctrine of the trinity. A cult is like a sect but more extreme. This is an older use of the term. Other examples of such cults include the Unitarians and the Seventh Day Adventists.)
There are of course scientists who are Christians, but they would not be affiliated with the Christian Science Monitor.
There are a small handful of Linux zealots who haven't caught onto it yet, but the arguments for and against NT are different from the arguments for and against Win9x. (When I say NT here, I'm including Win2K and WinXP and WS2003. On the other side, Win9x includes Me.)
If you want to have an uptime contest with a system that can stay up for more than a couple of days, you want to go with BSD, or a cluster. Most single-node Linux kernels have a problem wherein the uptime counter rolls around to zero every five hundred days, making it a poor choice for long-term uptime contests.
Anything[1] can win an uptime contest against Win9x, but NT is a good deal more stable than that. Its weaknesses are more in terms of things like security and network transparency.
Please, no flames; I'm quite aware that other OSes have weaknesses also; I'm only saying that the weaknesses of different OSes are in different areas. I'm not a Linux advocate[2]; I'm a cross-platform advocate.
[1] Except MacOS Classic. But note that both Win9x and MacOS
Classic are deprecated legacy systems, so declared by their
own respective vendors. Because, the industry finally caught
on that while thousand-day uptimes don't matter to users, it
is nice not to have daily crashes. Linux zealots may be
largely responsible for waking them up to this point, or the
industry may have just reached that point; I'm not sure which.
[2] I do currently use Linux, but I do not and will not use
Linux-only apps unless they store their data in open,
application-independent formats. I will not, for example,
use a Linux-only mailreader unless it stores mail in a format
accessible to other mailreaders. So five years from now when
somebody comes out with a new cluster OS written exclusively
in Perl6 with a redundant distributed filesystem (or whatever),
I can make a largely painless transition.
My apologies; I seem to have been mistaken. The language I recall is not present in that ammendment. I probably thought it was because we studied it at the same time we studied the ammendment or something like that.
But I definitely remember learning in US Goverment class that advocating the violent overthrow of the goverment has never been protected speech.
Re:Ahh yes, the classic American Revolution refere
on
Linking Dangerously
·
· Score: 1
They were permitted to vote prior to being convicted of their crimes. This is not remotely the same as having entire unrepresented geographical areas.
Read the ammendment in the Bill of Rights that protects speech. It goes out of its way to clearly and expressly exclude this type of speech from protection. For good reasons.
> but I think everyone has to admit that there is a slippery > slope for freedom of speech
This is nowhere near that slope. It's not even on the same hill. Advocating the violent overthrow of the government has never been protected speech in the US (nor, AFAIK, any nation). You can criticise all the policies you want, criticise all the people you want (in any way that isn't slander or libel[1]), advocate all the nonviolent reform you want, even advocate illegal things (like seccession), and that's all legal. Advocating violent rebellion is something entirely else, and is specifically excluded from protection by the constitution; this exclusion is as old as the clause that protects freedom of speech; it was written in originally, so nobody is taking away any freedoms here that anyone ever had. And if you think you want the government to be overthrown by violent means, go spend a couple of years in central Africa so you can witness such events, and then see what you think. The people who wrote the constitution had just seen that; they didn't want to see it again. War (real war, on your own soil) isn't nearly as much fun as gnawing on rocks, and that goes triple for revolutions. Cities split, people killing their neigbors and friends; families split, people killing their cousins, siblings, parents, children... closest thing on Earth to Hell. Whoever advocates that, jail's too good for him. An assylum is where he belongs.
[1] Factual information you can publish. Opinions, provided they
are clearly subjective, you can publish. What you can't do is
try to pass off speculation or opinion or invented stories or
unsubstantiated rumors as factual anecdotes. So, "Bill Clinton
was investigated for charges of obstruction of justice" is fine.
"Bill Clinton is a Big Loser" is immature but not actionable.
"Bill Clinton is a murderer" could get you in trouble, if he
cares to sue you (unless you've got evidence to back it up
or something). But note that IANALATINLA.
Yeah. Do C-h k:w and notice the name of the function it's bound to. Say for example it's bound to some-command. Then do this in the relevant mode hook: (local-set-key (kbd ":W") 'some-command)
Oh, come on. If you're going to copy my code and just change the string printed, at least have the decency to change the variable names around or something.
> Internet Connection Sharing Linux has had this for a long, LONG time. Some distros even have a GUI setup tool for it.
> NTFS write support Very much agreed. With WinXP basically taking over Win98's OEM market share, this will be absolutely *vital* a year from now. It's already a very noteworthy lack of feature.
It's being worked on, BTW, but it's highly alpha and definitely not ready for real users yet.
> Installation without a CD or a Floppy The biggest thing needed is a major hardware vendor to adopt it solely as their one OEM OS. As yet, none seem eager to do this, but we _have_ seen numerous vendors experimenting with it, dipping their toes in the water, offering certain models with it, and so on.
> Simple folder naming convention like Program Files, Document > and settings, I must disagree here for three reasons. First, most users don't want to know about the filesystem; they want to open the program they used to create the document and pick the document off an MRU list or maybe hit File->Open and pick it from the default folder (on *nix, hopefully that's ~/). Folder names only matter to power users. Secondly, putting spaces in pathnames breaks all sorts of things. If you want to call the directories "Applications" and "Documents", okay, but please, no spaces, and no "My Foo". Incidentally, there's no reason why/Applications can't be a link to/usr with no changes to any current software. Removing the legacy/usr link however would require ten years of heated argument and twenty years of deprecation, by which time it won't matter. Leave it alone; directly accessing the directory heirarchy is a poweruser task anyway. Just make the end user apps so they don't confuse the user with such details.
> give me a version 1, 1.5, 2005 or something that Joe Blow > can understand Most end users don't have any idea what version they're using, even of the OS much less anything else. I have to deal quite a bit with end users, and I find that when a user tells me without equivocating which version of Windows they have at home I right away suspect that they guessed based on a TV commercial and may in fact have an entirely different version; often I later find out that I'm right, and the "Windows XP" that the user believed they had was in fact Windows 98.
Version numbers do matter, but they matter for three reasons:
* For developers to keep straight what's what when they commit
this or that to this branch or that branch.
* For powerusers to make an informed decision about which
version(s) they want to use.
* For advertising. End users don't make decisions about versions; they use whatever the OEM or the poweruser who set up the system for them chose.
> > a common complaint is that there is not enough support for > > specific hardware devices under (gnu/)linux > > This is a myth which is a result of the status quo ten years ago.
More like five years ago. And the world still contains a lot of five-year-old hardware.
> The big deal is you'd end up with a glass 125% full of water.
Ah, but if you take a couple of sips, then you'll have a glass that is three-quarters full and three-quarters empty. Get another glass just like it, drink yet a few _more_ sips out of it, until it's one-quarter full and one-quarter empty, pour them together, and the glass will be full and not full. You know, the full glass that cannot be empty is not the true full glass, and all that zen rot.
> > Yes, but the "your favorite mirror" part isn't supposed to > > be evaluated unless ftp.sunet.se returns undef, because the > > or will short-circuit. HTH.HAND. > > Crap, did I just admit to using VB?
Dunno about you, but my comment indicated Perlish thinking. It's a standard idiom in Perl to do something like this... open FOO, ">somefile" or die "Cannot write somefile: $!"; The program won't die unless the open fails somehow, because or (like its higher-precedence cousin ||) short-circuits. If you couldn't tell I was thinking in Perl, you must not be in the habbit of reading signatures;-)
As far as VB, I haven't used that since college. Version 3 IIRC. I never considered it to be a programming language, so much as a GUI macro toolkit for Windows. (Not that such a toolkit is a bad thing to have around... but I never squeezed it into my budget.)
> Try to keep a known-good video card handy. Good advice. I really should add one of those to my kit.
> It's also a good idea to keep a known-good network card handy > along with driver disks. This is even more important, _especially_ if you have to work with old Compaq models that have lost their OEM install.
> Get a good DOS bootdisk. I keep several of those...
> Try to get one that will let you mount SMB shares from DOS. Is that even possible? Do you have any idea what I would go through to obtain such a disk?
> "L" shaped phillips screw driver for when a longer one won't fit. I've been making do with a regular driver bit and needlenose pliers.
> It might also be a good idea to burn all the service packs and > bug fixes you can find for old versions of windows. Include > the latest version of IE and DirectX.
While you're burning important updates, burn the following: * PowerToys and/or TweakUI for every major Windows version.
As far as I'm concerned, you're not done installing Windows
until you install TweakUI and change certain settings (most
notably, the ones under Stuff That Happens Behind Your Back). * AdAware and some other similar diagnostic/repair tools. * wget for Windows. * If you want to go the whole way, burn a copy of cygwin. * MS Core Fonts. Older Windows versions don't have them.
Always. A slatted screwdriver also comes in handy sometimes. If you have to work with Compaq systems, you'll also want a set of six-pointed-star ("Torx") bits, including a couple of the ones with the hole in the middle ("Security Tee Star" -- you NEED these, because the only _other_ way to get those screws out is with a drill; Compaq is evil) and a spare NIC, because Compaq systems tend to use a NIC that Windows will not recognise on install, and while the OEM system has the drivers you need, if you have to reinstall for any reason it can be painful trying to figure out which drivers you need -- especially for Deskpro models, which don't have the exact model number _anywhere_ on them. A spare NIC, worth $10, can save you hours of pain.
I also keep around a tray with multiple little compartments in it, for screws; very handy. A spare IDE cable might be no bad thing too.
One of the very best things you can have is a complete working system (preferably, a multiboot system). One of my favourite tricks is to pull the HD out of a non-working system, and put it in a working system as slave, so I can mount the drive and look at it. This is similar in principle to the Knoppix idea, but it has the additional benefit of isolating the hard drive from the rest of the system hardware.
Oh, and a pair of needlenose pliers comes in handy for an astonishing variety of things. They fit certain types of screws that no ordinary screwdriver can manage, or can be used on the outside of the screw head in some cases. They're great for retrieving things (jumpers, screws,...) that have fallen into places they shouldn't have. They have other uses as well, and if nothing else you can fidget with them while you think.
Oh, and: you need a set of boot floppies, one for each major version of Windows, containing the following:
* FDISK, SYS, FORMAT, and SCANDISK
* A text editor you can use in an emergency.
* REGEDIT (Know how to use this in command-prompt mode.)
* An ATAPI CD-ROM driver general enough to work with most
ATAPI drives. The Mitsumi one has worked for me.
* MSCDEX
* DEBUG
* A hex editor, if you're not really comfortable with DEBUG.
(You still need DEBUG though, for other things.)
* A third-party boot loader that can install from the
command prompt. BOSS for example.
It's also good to have pkzip (and pkunzip), preferably the Win32 console version, on floppy. These don't have to be on each boot floppy, just have them someplace, and a box of blank floppies. Sometimes you have to get manufacturers' drivers for a NIC or modem before you can get internet connectivity working, which means using another computer to download them, and they can be too big to fit on one floppy. The span-disks feature will get you around this problem. If you don't have it, or some equivalent compression and chunking solution, the other way out involves moving the hard drive over to the system that works (as a slave drive), depositing the files on it, and then putting it back where it goes. PKZip can save you from that sometimes, especially if you're dealing with a SoftPAQ that comes to 2MB or so; PKZip will fit that on two floppies for you.
I also second the Knoppix suggestion. It isn't obvious at first glance, but Knoppix comes with mkdosfs (_very_ handy when the Windows CD has FORMAT embedded in a CAB and you have no filesystem to extract onto) and dosfsck (which with the -v flag gives better information than scandisk). Plus of course the Linux version of fdisk, which is somewhat better than the Windows version, and a decent text editor[1], and other things that can come in handy. And if it recognises your NIC, which in many cases it will, you can use this in lieu of the floppy solution to get NIC/modem drivers downloaded.
[1] By "a decent text editor" I of course mean Emacs.
The really great feature in OO 1.1 for me is that the error message when it reads an invalid.sxw file is _informative_ (i.e., it tells you where the problem is). This won't matter to people just using it as a word processor, but since I generate documents using Perl (pulling data from MySQL) and use OO.o to print them, this feature is really incredibly helpful for debugging my scripts. Using this feature, I was able to track down a problem (involving characters that needed to be encoded as entities) that had me stumped under OO.o 1.0.x.
Yes and no. The default is to _install_ both of them (so that you can use the apps from both), but only to launch one of them for any given session; I believe the default is to launch KDE. Having Gnome also installed only consumes disk space, not memory or other system resources, unless you use it.
And it's quite handy to have both installed. That way you can use the calculator from KDE (which is far superior to the Gnome one) and the gnome-terminal (which is far superior to Konsole), and so on and so forth.
Though, for end users, I would like to see the default be one panel along the bottom with nothing but a task list and clock, and another panel along the left edge with launchers for "Surf the Web" (Moz or possibly Moz FB), "Type a Paper" (OO.o), and so on and so forth, a drawer for Advanced/Setup (containing launchers for the Mandrake Control Center, the Gnome Control Panel, and so on and so forth), and the logout button at the bottom. Oh, and a drawer full of games. I suppose the foot menu should be included as well, but labelled "Extra Stuff" or something. For reasons involving phone tech support, there should also be a terminal launcher, probably in the Advanced/Setup drawer.
Oh, and the _first_ launcher, at the _top_ of the panel, should bring up a help thingy that explains what each of the launchers on the default panel do, and how to use (at a very basic level) the apps that they launch. This should probably be described backwards, as in:
* To Surf the Web:
(Explanation of the Mozilla launcher and how to use Moz,
and link to more info about using Mozilla.)
* To Type a Paper:
(Explanation of the OO.o launcher and how to use OO.o,
including how to turn off all the #@$! AutoCorrect/
AutoReplace/AutoFormat/AutoBullets/AutoNumbering crap,
which is the first thing every newbie asks me about it.
And a link to more info about using OO.o)
(And so on and so forth...)
* To Use Other Software:
(Explanation of foot menu and links to further info about
what programs to use for various tasks and also about
learning to download and install additional stuff, and
finally links to general, more advanced info.)
> GNOME and Nautilus for example will crash/lockup constantly on > both of the Dell test boxes I've used
Nautilus is buggy. I removed it from my Gnome session and the result was improved performance and stability. If you must use a graphical file manager, there's gmc, but I prefer to do my file management from the commandline anyway.
Another option is to use the gnome-panel (and possible a Gnome window manager, such as sawfish) without the whole gnome-session. But I found that just removing Nautilus solved my problems. (This issue is not unique to Gnome; the file manager is a very significant source of instability on Win32 also. That may or may not be a coincidence. Unfortunately, removing the file manager in Win32 is somewhat less practical than in Gnome because then (among other things) where would your panel be? (There is LiteStep, but that's hardly an improvement IMO).)
Yes, but the "your favorite mirror" part isn't supposed to be evaluated unless ftp.sunet.se returns undef, because the or will short-circuit. HTH.HAND.
> Of course they could always include it as a 'try this if you dare' > advanced feature
That's what Mandrake Cooker is all about. The regular Mandrake distro is somewhat less bleeding-edge (though more cutting-edge than some other distros), but Cooker is for testing alpha stuff.
> All in all, it just takes a good day to do, not weeks.
Depends. Depends on your connection, on how much you want to install, and to a lesser extent on your system speed. It took me several days, but I was installing over a shared dialup[1] and had a number of packages I wanted to install (gnome-terminal[2] has a lot of dependencies... so does DBD::mysql...), and I had to work around other activities (such as going to work).
I did wimp out and use stage 3, though. If I'd have gone with stage 1 I'm sure it would have taken somewhat longer.
ObTopic: I use Mandrake on my desktop, both at home and at work, and on the whole I've been quite pleased with it. I'm not chomping at the bit for 9.2, but as much as anything that's because the version I have works. (At home, 9.1. At work, actually, I'm still using 8.1, with upgrades to strategic packages (Mozilla, OO, Emacs, and security updates), and honestly I don't feel compelled to upgrade to 9.1 at work. I am glad I upgraded at home, though, because the games have improved, and sound stuff, and other stuff I don't use at work.)
As far as Linux 2.6, I'm looking forward to it, but at the same time I'm hesitant to jump on it too soon. There are some features in it that I want, but I'm afraid to try a x.x.n kernel where n is a low number. It'd be different if I had a sandbox system to just play with, but currently I don't, because I parted out my old desktop and put half its parts in my new desktop and the other half in a server. Such is the nature of living on a budget.
[1] Note: when doing this, make sure you're the one paying
the internet bill. My family would have rioted otherwise.
At one point, my dad was complaining about how long it was
taking to get his email; I told him I was emerging Emacs on
a PC downstairs, and he said that I should immerse it.
[2] I use gnome-terminal for remote administration, even on
headless systems, because of its terminal classes. This
way I can ssh into the remote system and have scripts that
launch terminals for various purposes which will each have
their own color scheme, their own icon, their own title,
and so forth -- so they're easy to recognise in my window
list. I generally use one of these for MySQL, one for CPAN,
one for tailing logs, and one for a regular shell prompt.
And I configure different appearances for these (especially
the shell prompt one) for each system. Helps me keep things
straight. That's worth some disk space.
Depends what you count as a major distro. Gentoo has the 2.5/2.6pre option I think. I suspect it's not what most people choose yet, though. I didn't choose it. And it's several options down the list of choices, IIRC, after the regular Gentoo sources, the vanilla kernel.org sources, the server-oriented sources, desktop/game-oriented sources, and maybe WOLK and a couple of other options. Incidentally, ISTR that 2.2 was an option also. So, to say "Gentoo uses the 2.6 kernel" without qualification would be an overstatement.
> Now XP mean a version of Windoze and Agile Programming (AP)
Err, I hate to disappoint you, but AP is Associated Press, the source of three quarters of the stories in your local newspaper. (The other quarter are non-news items included as an excuse to get photos of local people's grandkids on the front page so they'll buy twenty copies of the paper for all their friends and relatives. Yes, I'm cynical about newspapers.)
I tend to agree that X has been overused in acronyms during the last few years. Still, that's better than prepending random vowells or possessive personal pronouns to otherwise normal words to create brand names. (Oooh, did I step on the toes of a popular database there? Oopse.)
As far as names being _taken_, the only way to avoid that is to coin an entirely new word, or select one so obscure that nobody would want it as a brand name. I favor the former approach. I like "Fortran" as a name for a language, and "Perl" isn't altogether bad too[1]. Of all the ones that start with X, I like "XUL" best, for two reasons: it's actually pronounceable, and the page served up if you try to access the URL used in the namespace declaration made me ROFL for several moments. (Hint: picture a certain android being possessed by a ghost from his refrigerator... somebody has a seriously weird sense of humor.)
[1] I'm talking about names here; if I were talking about
the languages I'd be much more enthusiastic about Perl.
Slashdot Mirror
"too young", I meant, obviously. Gotta learn to preview...
> The CSM may be one of the most objective news sources in the
> US, but that says more about the inadequacy of US journalism
> than the stellar achievements of the CSM.
I'll second that.
A lot of people are confused about the purpose of newspapers. The
purpose of newspapers has nothing to do with discovering truth, and
as a general rule journalists have at best a passing interest in
truth or accuracy. The primary concern of journalists is to sell
newspapers. In order to do that, they want to be perceived as
accurate (or likely accurate) for one day. Whether last week's
paper is still perceived as accurate will never matter, as long as
people have enough interest to suspend their disbelief long enough
to buy _today's_ paper.
A philosphy professor once told me I'm to young to be so cynical...
The Christian Science Monitor is not run by scientists who are
Christians, but by Christian Scientists. Christian Science is
another shootoff religion; its relationship with Christianity is
about the same as that of the JWs or the Mormons; orthodox and
fundamental Christians usually consider them a cult.
(But note that Christians mean a different thing by "cult" than
the mainstream media do; TV and newspaper reporters say "cult" and
are talking about people who stockpile weapons, sacrifice chickens,
drink special Kool-Aid, believe aliens are coming on a comet,
et cetera; Christians say "cult" and mean a group that claims
to be Christian but has altered a major core doctrine, usually
the doctrine of the trinity. A cult is like a sect but more
extreme. This is an older use of the term. Other examples of
such cults include the Unitarians and the Seventh Day Adventists.)
There are of course scientists who are Christians, but they would
not be affiliated with the Christian Science Monitor.
> We called the contest a draw after two months
You were obviously using an NT kernel, not Win9x.
There are a small handful of Linux zealots who haven't caught onto
it yet, but the arguments for and against NT are different from the
arguments for and against Win9x. (When I say NT here, I'm including
Win2K and WinXP and WS2003. On the other side, Win9x includes Me.)
If you want to have an uptime contest with a system that can stay
up for more than a couple of days, you want to go with BSD, or a
cluster. Most single-node Linux kernels have a problem wherein
the uptime counter rolls around to zero every five hundred days,
making it a poor choice for long-term uptime contests.
Anything[1] can win an uptime contest against Win9x, but NT is a
good deal more stable than that. Its weaknesses are more in terms
of things like security and network transparency.
Please, no flames; I'm quite aware that other OSes have weaknesses
also; I'm only saying that the weaknesses of different OSes are in
different areas. I'm not a Linux advocate[2]; I'm a cross-platform
advocate.
[1] Except MacOS Classic. But note that both Win9x and MacOS
Classic are deprecated legacy systems, so declared by their
own respective vendors. Because, the industry finally caught
on that while thousand-day uptimes don't matter to users, it
is nice not to have daily crashes. Linux zealots may be
largely responsible for waking them up to this point, or the
industry may have just reached that point; I'm not sure which.
[2] I do currently use Linux, but I do not and will not use
Linux-only apps unless they store their data in open,
application-independent formats. I will not, for example,
use a Linux-only mailreader unless it stores mail in a format
accessible to other mailreaders. So five years from now when
somebody comes out with a new cluster OS written exclusively
in Perl6 with a redundant distributed filesystem (or whatever),
I can make a largely painless transition.
My apologies; I seem to have been mistaken. The language I recall
is not present in that ammendment. I probably thought it was
because we studied it at the same time we studied the ammendment
or something like that.
But I definitely remember learning in US Goverment class that
advocating the violent overthrow of the goverment has never been
protected speech.
They were permitted to vote prior to being convicted of their crimes.
This is not remotely the same as having entire unrepresented
geographical areas.
> I don't see how that isn't protected speech.
Read the ammendment in the Bill of Rights that protects speech.
It goes out of its way to clearly and expressly exclude this type
of speech from protection. For good reasons.
> but I think everyone has to admit that there is a slippery
> slope for freedom of speech
This is nowhere near that slope. It's not even on the same hill.
Advocating the violent overthrow of the government has never been
protected speech in the US (nor, AFAIK, any nation). You can
criticise all the policies you want, criticise all the people you
want (in any way that isn't slander or libel[1]), advocate all the
nonviolent reform you want, even advocate illegal things (like
seccession), and that's all legal. Advocating violent rebellion
is something entirely else, and is specifically excluded from
protection by the constitution; this exclusion is as old as the
clause that protects freedom of speech; it was written in
originally, so nobody is taking away any freedoms here that
anyone ever had. And if you think you want the government to be
overthrown by violent means, go spend a couple of years in central
Africa so you can witness such events, and then see what you think.
The people who wrote the constitution had just seen that; they
didn't want to see it again. War (real war, on your own soil)
isn't nearly as much fun as gnawing on rocks, and that goes triple
for revolutions. Cities split, people killing their neigbors and
friends; families split, people killing their cousins, siblings,
parents, children... closest thing on Earth to Hell. Whoever
advocates that, jail's too good for him. An assylum is where he
belongs.
[1] Factual information you can publish. Opinions, provided they
are clearly subjective, you can publish. What you can't do is
try to pass off speculation or opinion or invented stories or
unsubstantiated rumors as factual anecdotes. So, "Bill Clinton
was investigated for charges of obstruction of justice" is fine.
"Bill Clinton is a Big Loser" is immature but not actionable.
"Bill Clinton is a murderer" could get you in trouble, if he
cares to sue you (unless you've got evidence to back it up
or something). But note that IANALATINLA.
Yeah. Do C-h k :w and notice the name of the function it's bound
to. Say for example it's bound to some-command. Then do this in
the relevant mode hook: (local-set-key (kbd ":W") 'some-command)
HTH.HAND.
Oh, come on. If you're going to copy my code and just change
the string printed, at least have the decency to change the
variable names around or something.
> And was your signature perl? I thought the article was corrupted
Yes, a Java guy wouldn't understand my signature, because it
uses closures. A lisp programmer might understand better.
> Internet Connection Sharing
/Applications can't be a link to /usr with no /usr
Linux has had this for a long, LONG time. Some distros even have
a GUI setup tool for it.
> NTFS write support
Very much agreed. With WinXP basically taking over Win98's OEM
market share, this will be absolutely *vital* a year from now.
It's already a very noteworthy lack of feature.
It's being worked on, BTW, but it's highly alpha and definitely
not ready for real users yet.
> Installation without a CD or a Floppy
The biggest thing needed is a major hardware vendor to adopt
it solely as their one OEM OS. As yet, none seem eager to do
this, but we _have_ seen numerous vendors experimenting with
it, dipping their toes in the water, offering certain models
with it, and so on.
> Simple folder naming convention like Program Files, Document
> and settings,
I must disagree here for three reasons. First, most users
don't want to know about the filesystem; they want to open
the program they used to create the document and pick the
document off an MRU list or maybe hit File->Open and pick
it from the default folder (on *nix, hopefully that's ~/).
Folder names only matter to power users. Secondly, putting
spaces in pathnames breaks all sorts of things. If you want
to call the directories "Applications" and "Documents", okay,
but please, no spaces, and no "My Foo". Incidentally, there's
no reason why
changes to any current software. Removing the legacy
link however would require ten years of heated argument and
twenty years of deprecation, by which time it won't matter.
Leave it alone; directly accessing the directory heirarchy
is a poweruser task anyway. Just make the end user apps so
they don't confuse the user with such details.
> give me a version 1, 1.5, 2005 or something that Joe Blow
> can understand
Most end users don't have any idea what version they're using,
even of the OS much less anything else. I have to deal quite a
bit with end users, and I find that when a user tells me without
equivocating which version of Windows they have at home I right
away suspect that they guessed based on a TV commercial and may
in fact have an entirely different version; often I later find
out that I'm right, and the "Windows XP" that the user believed
they had was in fact Windows 98.
Version numbers do matter, but they matter for three reasons:
* For developers to keep straight what's what when they commit
this or that to this branch or that branch.
* For powerusers to make an informed decision about which
version(s) they want to use.
* For advertising.
End users don't make decisions about versions; they use whatever
the OEM or the poweruser who set up the system for them chose.
> > a common complaint is that there is not enough support for
> > specific hardware devices under (gnu/)linux
>
> This is a myth which is a result of the status quo ten years ago.
More like five years ago. And the world still contains a lot of
five-year-old hardware.
> The big deal is you'd end up with a glass 125% full of water.
Ah, but if you take a couple of sips, then you'll have a glass that
is three-quarters full and three-quarters empty. Get another glass
just like it, drink yet a few _more_ sips out of it, until it's
one-quarter full and one-quarter empty, pour them together, and the
glass will be full and not full. You know, the full glass that
cannot be empty is not the true full glass, and all that zen rot.
> > Yes, but the "your favorite mirror" part isn't supposed to
;-)
> > be evaluated unless ftp.sunet.se returns undef, because the
> > or will short-circuit. HTH.HAND.
>
> Crap, did I just admit to using VB?
Dunno about you, but my comment indicated Perlish thinking.
It's a standard idiom in Perl to do something like this...
open FOO, ">somefile" or die "Cannot write somefile: $!";
The program won't die unless the open fails somehow, because
or (like its higher-precedence cousin ||) short-circuits. If
you couldn't tell I was thinking in Perl, you must not be in
the habbit of reading signatures
As far as VB, I haven't used that since college. Version 3 IIRC.
I never considered it to be a programming language, so much as a
GUI macro toolkit for Windows. (Not that such a toolkit is a bad
thing to have around... but I never squeezed it into my budget.)
> Try to keep a known-good video card handy.
Good advice. I really should add one of those to my kit.
> It's also a good idea to keep a known-good network card handy
> along with driver disks.
This is even more important, _especially_ if you have to work
with old Compaq models that have lost their OEM install.
> Get a good DOS bootdisk.
I keep several of those...
> Try to get one that will let you mount SMB shares from DOS.
Is that even possible? Do you have any idea what I would go
through to obtain such a disk?
> "L" shaped phillips screw driver for when a longer one won't fit.
I've been making do with a regular driver bit and needlenose pliers.
> It might also be a good idea to burn all the service packs and
> bug fixes you can find for old versions of windows. Include
> the latest version of IE and DirectX.
While you're burning important updates, burn the following:
* PowerToys and/or TweakUI for every major Windows version.
As far as I'm concerned, you're not done installing Windows
until you install TweakUI and change certain settings (most
notably, the ones under Stuff That Happens Behind Your Back).
* AdAware and some other similar diagnostic/repair tools.
* wget for Windows.
* If you want to go the whole way, burn a copy of cygwin.
* MS Core Fonts. Older Windows versions don't have them.
> A philips screwdriver is always needed.
...) that have fallen into
Always. A slatted screwdriver also comes in handy sometimes. If
you have to work with Compaq systems, you'll also want a set of
six-pointed-star ("Torx") bits, including a couple of the ones with
the hole in the middle ("Security Tee Star" -- you NEED these,
because the only _other_ way to get those screws out is with a
drill; Compaq is evil) and a spare NIC, because Compaq systems tend
to use a NIC that Windows will not recognise on install, and while
the OEM system has the drivers you need, if you have to reinstall
for any reason it can be painful trying to figure out which drivers
you need -- especially for Deskpro models, which don't have the
exact model number _anywhere_ on them. A spare NIC, worth $10,
can save you hours of pain.
I also keep around a tray with multiple little compartments in it,
for screws; very handy. A spare IDE cable might be no bad thing too.
One of the very best things you can have is a complete working
system (preferably, a multiboot system). One of my favourite
tricks is to pull the HD out of a non-working system, and put it
in a working system as slave, so I can mount the drive and look at
it. This is similar in principle to the Knoppix idea, but it has
the additional benefit of isolating the hard drive from the rest
of the system hardware.
Oh, and a pair of needlenose pliers comes in handy for an
astonishing variety of things. They fit certain types of screws
that no ordinary screwdriver can manage, or can be used on the
outside of the screw head in some cases. They're great for
retrieving things (jumpers, screws,
places they shouldn't have. They have other uses as well, and
if nothing else you can fidget with them while you think.
Oh, and: you need a set of boot floppies, one for each major
version of Windows, containing the following:
* FDISK, SYS, FORMAT, and SCANDISK
* A text editor you can use in an emergency.
* REGEDIT (Know how to use this in command-prompt mode.)
* An ATAPI CD-ROM driver general enough to work with most
ATAPI drives. The Mitsumi one has worked for me.
* MSCDEX
* DEBUG
* A hex editor, if you're not really comfortable with DEBUG.
(You still need DEBUG though, for other things.)
* A third-party boot loader that can install from the
command prompt. BOSS for example.
It's also good to have pkzip (and pkunzip), preferably the Win32
console version, on floppy. These don't have to be on each boot
floppy, just have them someplace, and a box of blank floppies.
Sometimes you have to get manufacturers' drivers for a NIC or
modem before you can get internet connectivity working, which
means using another computer to download them, and they can be
too big to fit on one floppy. The span-disks feature will get
you around this problem. If you don't have it, or some equivalent
compression and chunking solution, the other way out involves
moving the hard drive over to the system that works (as a slave
drive), depositing the files on it, and then putting it back where
it goes. PKZip can save you from that sometimes, especially if
you're dealing with a SoftPAQ that comes to 2MB or so; PKZip will
fit that on two floppies for you.
I also second the Knoppix suggestion. It isn't obvious at
first glance, but Knoppix comes with mkdosfs (_very_ handy
when the Windows CD has FORMAT embedded in a CAB and you have
no filesystem to extract onto) and dosfsck (which with the -v
flag gives better information than scandisk). Plus of course
the Linux version of fdisk, which is somewhat better than the
Windows version, and a decent text editor[1], and other things
that can come in handy. And if it recognises your NIC, which
in many cases it will, you can use this in lieu of the floppy
solution to get NIC/modem drivers downloaded.
[1] By "a decent text editor" I of course mean Emacs.
The really great feature in OO 1.1 for me is that the error message .sxw file is _informative_ (i.e., it tells
when it reads an invalid
you where the problem is). This won't matter to people just using
it as a word processor, but since I generate documents using Perl
(pulling data from MySQL) and use OO.o to print them, this feature
is really incredibly helpful for debugging my scripts. Using this
feature, I was able to track down a problem (involving characters
that needed to be encoded as entities) that had me stumped under
OO.o 1.0.x.
> KDE AND Gnome?
Yes and no. The default is to _install_ both of them (so that you
can use the apps from both), but only to launch one of them for
any given session; I believe the default is to launch KDE. Having
Gnome also installed only consumes disk space, not memory or other
system resources, unless you use it.
And it's quite handy to have both installed. That way you can use
the calculator from KDE (which is far superior to the Gnome one) and
the gnome-terminal (which is far superior to Konsole), and so on and
so forth.
Though, for end users, I would like to see the default be one
panel along the bottom with nothing but a task list and clock, and
another panel along the left edge with launchers for "Surf the Web"
(Moz or possibly Moz FB), "Type a Paper" (OO.o), and so on and so
forth, a drawer for Advanced/Setup (containing launchers for the
Mandrake Control Center, the Gnome Control Panel, and so on and
so forth), and the logout button at the bottom. Oh, and a drawer
full of games. I suppose the foot menu should be included as well,
but labelled "Extra Stuff" or something. For reasons involving
phone tech support, there should also be a terminal launcher,
probably in the Advanced/Setup drawer.
Oh, and the _first_ launcher, at the _top_ of the panel, should
bring up a help thingy that explains what each of the launchers
on the default panel do, and how to use (at a very basic level)
the apps that they launch. This should probably be described
backwards, as in:
* To Surf the Web:
(Explanation of the Mozilla launcher and how to use Moz,
and link to more info about using Mozilla.)
* To Type a Paper:
(Explanation of the OO.o launcher and how to use OO.o,
including how to turn off all the #@$! AutoCorrect/
AutoReplace/AutoFormat/AutoBullets/AutoNumbering crap,
which is the first thing every newbie asks me about it.
And a link to more info about using OO.o)
(And so on and so forth...)
* To Use Other Software:
(Explanation of foot menu and links to further info about
what programs to use for various tasks and also about
learning to download and install additional stuff, and
finally links to general, more advanced info.)
> GNOME and Nautilus for example will crash/lockup constantly on
> both of the Dell test boxes I've used
Nautilus is buggy. I removed it from my Gnome session and the
result was improved performance and stability. If you must use
a graphical file manager, there's gmc, but I prefer to do my file
management from the commandline anyway.
Another option is to use the gnome-panel (and possible a Gnome
window manager, such as sawfish) without the whole gnome-session.
But I found that just removing Nautilus solved my problems.
(This issue is not unique to Gnome; the file manager is a very
significant source of instability on Win32 also. That may or
may not be a coincidence. Unfortunately, removing the file
manager in Win32 is somewhat less practical than in Gnome because
then (among other things) where would your panel be? (There is
LiteStep, but that's hardly an improvement IMO).)
> ftp.sunet.se _is_ my favorite mirror
Yes, but the "your favorite mirror" part isn't supposed to be
evaluated unless ftp.sunet.se returns undef, because the or will
short-circuit. HTH.HAND.
> Of course they could always include it as a 'try this if you dare'
> advanced feature
That's what Mandrake Cooker is all about. The regular Mandrake
distro is somewhat less bleeding-edge (though more cutting-edge
than some other distros), but Cooker is for testing alpha stuff.
> All in all, it just takes a good day to do, not weeks.
Depends. Depends on your connection, on how much you want to
install, and to a lesser extent on your system speed. It took
me several days, but I was installing over a shared dialup[1] and
had a number of packages I wanted to install (gnome-terminal[2]
has a lot of dependencies... so does DBD::mysql...), and I had
to work around other activities (such as going to work).
I did wimp out and use stage 3, though. If I'd have gone with
stage 1 I'm sure it would have taken somewhat longer.
ObTopic: I use Mandrake on my desktop, both at home and at work,
and on the whole I've been quite pleased with it. I'm not chomping
at the bit for 9.2, but as much as anything that's because the
version I have works. (At home, 9.1. At work, actually, I'm still
using 8.1, with upgrades to strategic packages (Mozilla, OO, Emacs,
and security updates), and honestly I don't feel compelled to
upgrade to 9.1 at work. I am glad I upgraded at home, though,
because the games have improved, and sound stuff, and other stuff
I don't use at work.)
As far as Linux 2.6, I'm looking forward to it, but at the same
time I'm hesitant to jump on it too soon. There are some features
in it that I want, but I'm afraid to try a x.x.n kernel where n is
a low number. It'd be different if I had a sandbox system to
just play with, but currently I don't, because I parted out my
old desktop and put half its parts in my new desktop and the other
half in a server. Such is the nature of living on a budget.
[1] Note: when doing this, make sure you're the one paying
the internet bill. My family would have rioted otherwise.
At one point, my dad was complaining about how long it was
taking to get his email; I told him I was emerging Emacs on
a PC downstairs, and he said that I should immerse it.
[2] I use gnome-terminal for remote administration, even on
headless systems, because of its terminal classes. This
way I can ssh into the remote system and have scripts that
launch terminals for various purposes which will each have
their own color scheme, their own icon, their own title,
and so forth -- so they're easy to recognise in my window
list. I generally use one of these for MySQL, one for CPAN,
one for tailing logs, and one for a regular shell prompt.
And I configure different appearances for these (especially
the shell prompt one) for each system. Helps me keep things
straight. That's worth some disk space.
Depends what you count as a major distro. Gentoo has the
2.5/2.6pre option I think. I suspect it's not what most people
choose yet, though. I didn't choose it. And it's several options
down the list of choices, IIRC, after the regular Gentoo sources,
the vanilla kernel.org sources, the server-oriented sources,
desktop/game-oriented sources, and maybe WOLK and a couple of
other options. Incidentally, ISTR that 2.2 was an option also. So,
to say "Gentoo uses the 2.6 kernel" without qualification would be
an overstatement.
> Now XP mean a version of Windoze and Agile Programming (AP)
Err, I hate to disappoint you, but AP is Associated Press, the
source of three quarters of the stories in your local newspaper.
(The other quarter are non-news items included as an excuse to
get photos of local people's grandkids on the front page so
they'll buy twenty copies of the paper for all their friends
and relatives. Yes, I'm cynical about newspapers.)
I tend to agree that X has been overused in acronyms during the
last few years. Still, that's better than prepending random
vowells or possessive personal pronouns to otherwise normal words
to create brand names. (Oooh, did I step on the toes of a popular
database there? Oopse.)
As far as names being _taken_, the only way to avoid that is
to coin an entirely new word, or select one so obscure that
nobody would want it as a brand name. I favor the former
approach. I like "Fortran" as a name for a language, and
"Perl" isn't altogether bad too[1]. Of all the ones that start
with X, I like "XUL" best, for two reasons: it's actually
pronounceable, and the page served up if you try to access the
URL used in the namespace declaration made me ROFL for several
moments. (Hint: picture a certain android being possessed by
a ghost from his refrigerator... somebody has a seriously
weird sense of humor.)
[1] I'm talking about names here; if I were talking about
the languages I'd be much more enthusiastic about Perl.