You've mentioned it twice here.
So burn to a 700Mb CD-R already! I've seen them as cheap as $0.30 Australian (if you buy 100), but in any case, a CD-R is certainly cheap enough to waste if Knoppix doesn't suit you.
Because it looks better (subjective, yes) and I (and most of the rest of the world) don't run linux.
One feature Gaim has which I haven't seen anywhere else yet (in a MSN client, at least) is the ability to show people's display pictures right in the contact list window. That in itself makes Gaim look much better to me.
I've actually been looking for a MSN replacement for my housemate's computer (the official client requires IE to be installed, and it wastes limited screen space with ads), so I tried Trillian a few weeks ago.
It looked simply awful. It had a horrible unintuitive skinned interface, in contrast to Gaim. Gaim might look just like any other bland Windows app, but its interface is simple, with clearly labelled buttons. Multi-platform support is a bonus, because I can run it here on Linux, and recommend it to people using Windows, knowing that it will work as it should.
Well, don't you give them your money to manage it in first place? You still can store it in your mattress and it won't cost you a penny to access it.
I know that here in Australia at least, if you have a real job (not some shady cash-in-hand arrangement), or even if you're on welfare payments, you need a bank account for the money to be paid into, otherwise you don't get the money.
I think I can safely speak for/., when I say that the suspense in knowing who will be NC's Agriculture Commissioner has me stuck to the edge of my seat with excitement.
If you click the links your browser window will reduce to a smaller size and bounce around the screen, and an audio clip will play saying "I'm looking at gay porno"...
Really?
When I clicked, it said "509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded".
Spammers spam because they think they have the freedom to spam, and the only way to stop this is to take away their freedom, ie some jail time.
Are you sure about that? I'd say they're all aware of the legality of their actions, but the money made from those who do respond is enough to make them not care.
The left-wing/right-wing thing has been argued to death already, but shouldn't this story be posted in the new(ish) politics section of Slashdot?
The Australian federal election is just over a week away (October 9th), and Family First are just making some noise in order to get votes. It's not like it's ever going to happen. I doubt either a Labor or Liberal government would want to alienate small ISPs or be accused of censorship. Even if Family First do get candidates in and propose the bill, if the House of Reps doesn't kill it, the Senate is more than likely to.
I noticed this too - it flies compared to Hotmail or Yahoo, but I'm a little worried that the honeymoon will end when it moves from beta and allows millions of more users.
Then again, if anyone can pull it off, it's Google.
I think Google is already moving in that direction. I've given out heaps of invites in the past couple of weeks, and a few hours later, they keep coming back each time.
And so far, so good. They did move recently to automatically delete messages left in the Spam and Trash folders for more than 30 days, but if they keep dishing out invites, I can only assume storage space isn't an issue for them.
I think it's sad that to stop scammers Ireland has to deliberately stunt its telecommunications infrastructure. This will help stop the scams themselves and their profitability, but scamming will continue to hurt Ireland.
They're not the only ones. Optus in Australia made direct dialing to Sao Tome-Principe, Guinea-Bissau, and Diego Garcia available only on an opt-in basis earlier this year. I don't know if it's the same in Ireland, but everyone I know who makes international calls uses calling cards anyway, since the standard telco rates, even to 'cheap' destinations like NZ, UK, and USA are ridiculously expensive.
Maybe you should all stop complaining about how you don't all have ten megabit connections?
Over here in Australia, we are almost all on 56k. I can count the number of people I know who have broadband on one hand.
In the USA, you recently got to 50% of households with broadband. Care to guess how many people in Australia have access to high-speed internet? One million as of June 2004. Out of more than 20 million. THAT'S FIVE PERCENT!!!
Your statistics are somewhat muddled. The recent news is that the number of broadband connections in Australia has reached one million. One million connections means a lot more than one million people. Most people in Australia DO have access to broadband, but you confuse that with actually taking it up.
Telstra claims that ADSL is available to 75% of the population, and the availability of cable in many Australian cities would increase broadband availability even further.
Most people I know have broadband. Anecdotes don't mean anything.
Just because some countries have faster internet, that doesn't mean you're falling behind.
Um, yeah, it does. Falling behind means you're not keeping pace with others.
I'd kill people to get a 512k ADSL line, but I'm just not able to. Be happy with what you already have.
Some people in remote areas don't even have 56k! Why aren't you happy with what you already have? Or at least, if it's so important to you, why don't you move to where it's available, or pressure Telstra to provide ADSL where you are?
FEAR THE DAMNED ELDER GOD FOR ITS BEIGE OF THE END TIMES CONSUMES YOUR SOUL
Mod me up or down, whatever, but I have to know:
Am I honestly the only person here who likes the new beige colours?
Re:Not ONLY Faster, lighter, but also IE-compatibl
on
Browser Wars 2004
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So, while MS does not respect W3C standards, the only way to compete with IE is being able to render the pages exactly like IE does. What would be better is to provide the user with an option: "show this page as IE would or show it as it should be rendered attending to W3C standars".
Until then, we'll be in a IE driven web (which, btw, is cyclic, designers design for IE 'cos the own the market, and users use IE 'cos the web is designed for IT).
How would this help? Everyone would turn the option on, so that their favourite websites render properly, and web designers would continue to design for IE because that's what everybody's emulating.
A certain site I help run has shown what many other people are seeing: MSN's search robot is absolutely going crazy lately. It purposely retrieves files of all kinds - it's done about 4.5GB of traffic on my site because it's downloading large videos! What's a search engine going to do with all these videos?
If it bothers you so, why don't you use/robots.txt to keep it out? (and if the MSN robot ignores this, there's a story for/. in itself)
If Joe Schmoe wasn't going to buy your software to begin with. It's not a loss whether he uses it illegally or not. These statistics are screwed up beyond all hell.
And if he really did use it illegally, consider it spreading your market share.
I can't take the credit for this example, but if someone chooses to download Photoshop instead of purchasing it for US$649, it's no great loss to Adobe. It is, however, probably a loss to JASC, who could have potentially sold 'Joe Schmoe' the $84 download edition of Paint Shop Pro instead.
"That's a good point why is it that a DVD burner costs (in Australia) $150-$200 while a DVD recorder costs ~$1200?"
Here in the USA, an 8x multiformat DVD burner is around $80-$90 if you shop online.
A DVD recorder is around $200-$300. Prices have fallen signifigantly. Look at this. $229 for a DVD recorder. Not bad at all.
So, it looks like people in Australia are just getting ripped off. DVD recorders have been under $300 for about five months now in the US.
Biogenesis was using Australian Dollars. Currently $1 USD is approximately $1.40 AUD (or if you prefer, $1 AUD is around $0.71 USD).
Prices are actually a bit lower than what he/she has quoted too.
So your $90 (USD) DVD burner is about $126 in Australia (I've seen them for $120 here), and your $200-$300 (USD) DVD recorder is $280-$420 Australian (again, close to what I've seen advertised). Not much of a difference at all.
3. The level of cooperation shared by Windows applications
Are you serious?
The fact that Windows applications tend to not cooperate, but instead steal file associations from each other, is probably my biggest problem with Windows.
For example, I had Photoshop installed on my old Windows partition. I installed Quicktime, and then all of a sudden.PSD files were associated with it. WTF?!
It's even gotten to the point where programs like Winamp employ devices like the Winamp Agent specifically to maintain their own associations.
Yes, I know how to change associations, and I'm sure there was probably an installation option I missed with Quicktime, but as far as newbies go, this is definitely an area where Linux beats Windows.
You say that as if there is something wrong with enjoying 'silly animations and games'. I do. So do many other people.
It may also be inaccessible, but every day people enjoy things that aren't globally accessible, from various forms of media and art to sports and recreation. How do you make animation accessible to those with vision difficulties?
One could write a story instead, but then you have something totally different. Hypertext has been around for decades, and text itself for millennia, and they serve their purpose. Animation serves another.
There will always be people who choose a poor method of presenting their content on the web. Even without Flash, it's still possible to have poorly-navigable sites with too many fonts, and garish colours, et cetera.
The way to solve it is not to discourage the use of Flash, as if it were inherently wrong, but to encourage and show examples of good design and presentation when Flash is not called for.
This may be a niche, but I for one am quite happy that such a niche exists, and is available to Linux users. I'd like to think that one day SVG will be a better alternative and we can all switch to that, but for now there's Flash.
If you don't like it, don't install it. But don't expect others to do the same.
I've managed to get my head around XHTML, but when I try to use CSS, I have trouble doing even the most basic layouts that could easily be achieved with <table>s. I can understand why Slashdot still uses them.
With CSS, nothing seems to 'just work' on every browser. The W3C specs are confusing. And there's no decent HTML/CSS editor (as in the Dreamweaver kind, not the Vim kind) that I know of for Linux, so it has to be done by hand or elsewhere (Wine/Windows, et cetera).
What's the best way for a n00b like myself to learn and use CSS in the real world, where some people use Mozilla, some use Opera and Konqueror, and a lot of people use Internet Explorer?
Slashdot Mirror
my cd-rw are only 650 variety.
You've mentioned it twice here. So burn to a 700Mb CD-R already! I've seen them as cheap as $0.30 Australian (if you buy 100), but in any case, a CD-R is certainly cheap enough to waste if Knoppix doesn't suit you.
Because it looks better (subjective, yes) and I (and most of the rest of the world) don't run linux.
One feature Gaim has which I haven't seen anywhere else yet (in a MSN client, at least) is the ability to show people's display pictures right in the contact list window. That in itself makes Gaim look much better to me.
I've actually been looking for a MSN replacement for my housemate's computer (the official client requires IE to be installed, and it wastes limited screen space with ads), so I tried Trillian a few weeks ago.
It looked simply awful. It had a horrible unintuitive skinned interface, in contrast to Gaim. Gaim might look just like any other bland Windows app, but its interface is simple, with clearly labelled buttons. Multi-platform support is a bonus, because I can run it here on Linux, and recommend it to people using Windows, knowing that it will work as it should.
Well, don't you give them your money to manage it in first place? You still can store it in your mattress and it won't cost you a penny to access it.
I know that here in Australia at least, if you have a real job (not some shady cash-in-hand arrangement), or even if you're on welfare payments, you need a bank account for the money to be paid into, otherwise you don't get the money.The preview is actually from GameSpot and not GameStop, which happens to be a completely different gaming site.
Which is kinda amusing, considering your username (GillBates0).
I think I can safely speak for /., when I say that the suspense in knowing who will be NC's Agriculture Commissioner has me stuck to the edge of my seat with excitement.
My ISP does. They also offer spam-filtering for an extra monthly fee.
I guess there really is one born every minute.
He can concede and the election can still go the other way.
Has this ever happened in US Presidential election history?
If you click the links your browser window will reduce to a smaller size and bounce around the screen, and an audio clip will play saying "I'm looking at gay porno"...
Really?
When I clicked, it said "509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded".
By the way, the coralised link is: http://www-106.ibm.com.nyud.net:8090/developerwork s/linux/library/l-knopx.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01-obg-Sys Recover
Does IBM really require a Coral link?
I don't think I've ever seen them get Slashdotted.
Why did he settle instead of going all the way?
Spammers spam because they think they have the freedom to spam, and the only way to stop this is to take away their freedom, ie some jail time.
Are you sure about that? I'd say they're all aware of the legality of their actions, but the money made from those who do respond is enough to make them not care.
The left-wing/right-wing thing has been argued to death already, but shouldn't this story be posted in the new(ish) politics section of Slashdot?
The Australian federal election is just over a week away (October 9th), and Family First are just making some noise in order to get votes. It's not like it's ever going to happen. I doubt either a Labor or Liberal government would want to alienate small ISPs or be accused of censorship. Even if Family First do get candidates in and propose the bill, if the House of Reps doesn't kill it, the Senate is more than likely to.
I noticed this too - it flies compared to Hotmail or Yahoo, but I'm a little worried that the honeymoon will end when it moves from beta and allows millions of more users.
Then again, if anyone can pull it off, it's Google.
I think Google is already moving in that direction. I've given out heaps of invites in the past couple of weeks, and a few hours later, they keep coming back each time.
And so far, so good. They did move recently to automatically delete messages left in the Spam and Trash folders for more than 30 days, but if they keep dishing out invites, I can only assume storage space isn't an issue for them.
Or, you could register, login once and it will never bug you anymore. If you don't like giving your email address, use mailinator.
I did register for the NYT once. It worked reasonably well until one day the login stopped working. No email from NYT, no explanation, nothing.
If they're gonna treat real registrations like that, I don't see why I should bother as long there are workarounds like Bugmenot and Google News.
I think it's sad that to stop scammers Ireland has to deliberately stunt its telecommunications infrastructure. This will help stop the scams themselves and their profitability, but scamming will continue to hurt Ireland.
They're not the only ones. Optus in Australia made direct dialing to Sao Tome-Principe, Guinea-Bissau, and Diego Garcia available only on an opt-in basis earlier this year. I don't know if it's the same in Ireland, but everyone I know who makes international calls uses calling cards anyway, since the standard telco rates, even to 'cheap' destinations like NZ, UK, and USA are ridiculously expensive.
Maybe you should all stop complaining about how you don't all have ten megabit connections?
Over here in Australia, we are almost all on 56k. I can count the number of people I know who have broadband on one hand.
In the USA, you recently got to 50% of households with broadband. Care to guess how many people in Australia have access to high-speed internet? One million as of June 2004. Out of more than 20 million. THAT'S FIVE PERCENT!!!
Your statistics are somewhat muddled. The recent news is that the number of broadband connections in Australia has reached one million. One million connections means a lot more than one million people. Most people in Australia DO have access to broadband, but you confuse that with actually taking it up.
Telstra claims that ADSL is available to 75% of the population, and the availability of cable in many Australian cities would increase broadband availability even further.
Most people I know have broadband. Anecdotes don't mean anything.
Just because some countries have faster internet, that doesn't mean you're falling behind.
Um, yeah, it does. Falling behind means you're not keeping pace with others.
I'd kill people to get a 512k ADSL line, but I'm just not able to. Be happy with what you already have.
Some people in remote areas don't even have 56k! Why aren't you happy with what you already have? Or at least, if it's so important to you, why don't you move to where it's available, or pressure Telstra to provide ADSL where you are?
FEAR THE DAMNED ELDER GOD FOR ITS BEIGE OF THE END TIMES CONSUMES YOUR SOUL
Mod me up or down, whatever, but I have to know:
Am I honestly the only person here who likes the new beige colours?
So, while MS does not respect W3C standards, the only way to compete with IE is being able to render the pages exactly like IE does. What would be better is to provide the user with an option: "show this page as IE would or show it as it should be rendered attending to W3C standars".
Until then, we'll be in a IE driven web (which, btw, is cyclic, designers design for IE 'cos the own the market, and users use IE 'cos the web is designed for IT).
How would this help? Everyone would turn the option on, so that their favourite websites render properly, and web designers would continue to design for IE because that's what everybody's emulating.
A certain site I help run has shown what many other people are seeing: MSN's search robot is absolutely going crazy lately. It purposely retrieves files of all kinds - it's done about 4.5GB of traffic on my site because it's downloading large videos! What's a search engine going to do with all these videos?
If it bothers you so, why don't you use /robots.txt to keep it out? (and if the MSN robot ignores this, there's a story for /. in itself)
If Joe Schmoe wasn't going to buy your software to begin with. It's not a loss whether he uses it illegally or not. These statistics are screwed up beyond all hell.
And if he really did use it illegally, consider it spreading your market share.
I can't take the credit for this example, but if someone chooses to download Photoshop instead of purchasing it for US$649, it's no great loss to Adobe. It is, however, probably a loss to JASC, who could have potentially sold 'Joe Schmoe' the $84 download edition of Paint Shop Pro instead.
Seems like setting up internet service just for two days seems silly.
RTFA. It's not just for two days, it's for whenever they're in an area with WiFi available.
"That's a good point why is it that a DVD burner costs (in Australia) $150-$200 while a DVD recorder costs ~$1200?"
Here in the USA, an 8x multiformat DVD burner is around $80-$90 if you shop online.
A DVD recorder is around $200-$300. Prices have fallen signifigantly. Look at this. $229 for a DVD recorder. Not bad at all.
So, it looks like people in Australia are just getting ripped off. DVD recorders have been under $300 for about five months now in the US.
Biogenesis was using Australian Dollars. Currently $1 USD is approximately $1.40 AUD (or if you prefer, $1 AUD is around $0.71 USD). Prices are actually a bit lower than what he/she has quoted too.
So your $90 (USD) DVD burner is about $126 in Australia (I've seen them for $120 here), and your $200-$300 (USD) DVD recorder is $280-$420 Australian (again, close to what I've seen advertised). Not much of a difference at all.
3. The level of cooperation shared by Windows applications
Are you serious?
The fact that Windows applications tend to not cooperate, but instead steal file associations from each other, is probably my biggest problem with Windows.
For example, I had Photoshop installed on my old Windows partition. I installed Quicktime, and then all of a sudden .PSD files were associated with it. WTF?!
It's even gotten to the point where programs like Winamp employ devices like the Winamp Agent specifically to maintain their own associations.
Yes, I know how to change associations, and I'm sure there was probably an installation option I missed with Quicktime, but as far as newbies go, this is definitely an area where Linux beats Windows.
Did anyone else feel sick watching the video?
I don't normally get motion sickness at all any more, but that's what I felt when I watched this.
Why would you want it?
Because I happen to enjoy silly animations and games.
You say that as if there is something wrong with enjoying 'silly animations and games'. I do. So do many other people.
It may also be inaccessible, but every day people enjoy things that aren't globally accessible, from various forms of media and art to sports and recreation. How do you make animation accessible to those with vision difficulties?
One could write a story instead, but then you have something totally different. Hypertext has been around for decades, and text itself for millennia, and they serve their purpose. Animation serves another.
There will always be people who choose a poor method of presenting their content on the web. Even without Flash, it's still possible to have poorly-navigable sites with too many fonts, and garish colours, et cetera.
The way to solve it is not to discourage the use of Flash, as if it were inherently wrong, but to encourage and show examples of good design and presentation when Flash is not called for.
This may be a niche, but I for one am quite happy that such a niche exists, and is available to Linux users. I'd like to think that one day SVG will be a better alternative and we can all switch to that, but for now there's Flash.
If you don't like it, don't install it. But don't expect others to do the same.
Sure, but how do people get started?
I've managed to get my head around XHTML, but when I try to use CSS, I have trouble doing even the most basic layouts that could easily be achieved with <table>s. I can understand why Slashdot still uses them.
With CSS, nothing seems to 'just work' on every browser. The W3C specs are confusing. And there's no decent HTML/CSS editor (as in the Dreamweaver kind, not the Vim kind) that I know of for Linux, so it has to be done by hand or elsewhere (Wine/Windows, et cetera).
What's the best way for a n00b like myself to learn and use CSS in the real world, where some people use Mozilla, some use Opera and Konqueror, and a lot of people use Internet Explorer?