Clearly you've never killed your Window Manager while running X. It flattens all the apps out on the display. If you make the mistake of doing it without a terminal 'on top' to load a new Window Manager you need to log in from another station to kill it or use alt-control-backspace and kill all your active apps. Uh, well first of all, the focus follows the mouse, so if you can mouse into any part of a terminal window you can run another wm by typing blind.
And if you can't, just switch to a vt and run "xterm -display:0" (or whatever your display number is). Switch back to X and you'll have a new xterm on top of the window stack.
But most window managers support the "--replace" flag these days, so you should never have to kill a wm first.
Re:So when do we get its successor?
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X Power Tools
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X may not be fast enough for high performance games or 3d stuff, that may very well be true. As I recall, the last time I was playing 3D games (back in 2000 or so), the linux versions popular 3D games (Quake III Arena, for eg) were maybe 2% slower in FPS scores for the NVIDIA drivers compared to their windows counterparts.
No idea whether things have improved since then or not, but it suggests that the kernel-level 3D rendering was working OK...
Note to mods: Don't bother modding this OT/flamebait/troll/stalker or whatever. I'm just continuing a conversation with parent that we've been having for a while, so don't bother wasting any points. Hmmm.... while we're offtopic, can I put in a request for "-1 Fucking Stupid" and "-1 Uninformative" moderation options? Too many times have I seen someone get modded up writing incorrect drivel, and the only option you can use is "Overrated".
Let's get some angst into our moderation,/.ers! No more Mr. Nice Geek!
You know, I haven't built my own kernel since 'make menuconfig' was the most advanced method around. I got rather tired of picking and choosing what I need, just to get faster boot times. Two points:
1. Don't knock 'make menuconfig' -- it's simple, fast and efficient. 2. You're not going to get (noticeably) faster boot times by compiling a custom kernel. It only takes a couple of seconds for a generic distro kernel to load, after all. (The real time delay in the linux boot process is from the services that get started at boot time, which are started in series by inefficient shell scripts.)
The real reason why most of us compile our own kernels is to enable custom features (swsusp2, for example).
I believe there are a number of Enterprise users that would be quite put out. Oh, I'm sure they'd get over it!
My point is that there are now numerous alternatives -- both for businesses and desktop users -- which have superior stability or superior features to RHEL/Fedora. (And also, that this diversification was a direct result of the abomination that was "gcc-2.96", which still haunts many of us who installed RH 7 back in 2000... *shudders at the memory*)
Huh. Aardvark is actually very good, as it's aa, which is the convention the Linux kernel used after producing 0.99z. We'd still need an 'aa' word at the start, though, if we did that. Would Aambivalent Aardvark be considered cheating, though? Aaronic Aardvark would do the trick. They'll have to start using Welsh dictionaries for the release after that one, though...
I've actually noticed a similar behavior, but not exactly as he described. If i click a download link in my yahoo mail, it behaves as it should, offering to open the document with the appropriate app or let me download it. I've messed up before and canceled and had to click the "download" again. Suddenly Ubuntu has no idea what to open the file with: I have to either search for the appropriate app myself or save the file and click from there. a bit weird, but something I can live with. I've just tried clicking on a link in Gnome Terminal on a generic 7.10 install, and it opens up firefox (and the link location) like a charm... I don't think this is normal behaviour.
Yes, but what do they do after Zoroastrian Zebra? Well, there was never an "A" release, so they can still have the Ambivalent Aardvark... And besides, they've clearly got nothing against re-using letters, since Hearty Heron is using the same letter as Hoary Hedgehog...
(The idea of stepping through the alphabet seems to have started with Edgy, which followed Dapper. Previously it was random: Warty, Hoary, Breezy, Dapper...)
Would anyone care if RedHat disappeared up its own fedora these days?? RedHat stopped being a powerhouse the day they included a broken version of gcc in RedHat 7.0.
Clicking on the link will not help either! You will be prompted to save the file...what I'd like to happen is for GNOME to call the appropriate application and have the application open the link. This does not happen. I suspect your system is fscked -- what you are describing is not normal behaviour. Try using the live CD, and I think you'll find everything works fine. Also, try using a different browser (e.g. Firefox if you're using the GNOME default browser).
I just copied Icky Thump by the White Stripes and Parsifal by Richard Wagner, conducted by James Levine. The Wagner is 4 CDs, so does that mean I owe them a total $7.5mil? Normally, yes. But I'd imagine that listening to four CDs of Wagner would be considered punishment enough...
I remember when Firefox was covered by Slashdot about 7 years ago I think you meant Phoenix, not firefox:) With the dodgy yellow and black buttons.
Funny that the Phoenix project aimed to strip out all the bloat from Mozilla... and now, five years later, Firefox is becoming just as bloated as Mozilla used to be. Somebody needs to re-phoenix Firefox...
Thems was the REAL browser wars. Do you have your Windows 95 Plus Pack yet? Ah, the Windows 95 Plus pack, that gave everyone who bought it smoothed fonts (and themes, too, IIRC). I remember it well! Not as exciting as the gradient titlebars in the early Memphis betas, though...
'course, before the IE vs. Netscape war there was the Netscape vs. NCSA Mosaic war. And before that, there was the Mosaic vs. gopher war. Like fire across the galaxy, the browser wars spread...
Hume says it smarterer than I can Well, Hume certainly says it more verbosely than you! Mr Hume needed the hand of a good editor, I reckon... (My favourite quote in the piece (towards the end, many thousands of needless words already written) was this: "BUT to hasten to a conclusion of this argument, which is already drawn out to too great a length..." Never was a truer word spoken!)
but basically, no. Scientific endeavor is based on faith in the concept of "cause and effect," which we can never have any (non-circular) reason for believing. You can only "prove to yourself" facts about DNA, et cetera if you're already willing to make a boatload of assumptions about the nature of the Universe. Ah, but Science can never prove facts, it can only say that the current evidence points to a hypothesis being correct. Note that this is very different to a proof in the mathematical sense, in which a theorem can be shown to be categorically and universally true and correct. In science, there is always an element of doubt. Likewise, we can't prove the concept of "cause and effect" -- things could happen completely randomly and by chance fit in with our world view. But what we can say is that, on the basis of the current evidence, a "cause and effect" model is the most likely situation for the universe.
I'm pretty sure, from trying to skim that immense Hume article that you linked to, that that's the gist of his own argument anyway (though I gather that Hume's writing was so dense/incomprehensible/random (I'd pick the last one myself) that no two philosophers have been able to agree about what he meant since...). But note that a statement of probability is very, very different to one of faith. Science can at least admit and discuss the probable errors in a prediction, and that very acceptance of fallibility is what gives science its power.
And the Earth is not flat. It's approximately spherical! And it goes around the Sun, not vice versa. I don't care what the Pope says about it: Galileo Galilei was right and the Bible is wrong!
Well, Galileo *was* right in a sense, but at the time the evidence pointed towards the contrary position and he was arguing based on solely on emotion, not logic. The lack of detectable stellar parallax, for example, strongly pointed to a stationary Earth. Likewise, Galileo's proof as espoused in his "Dialogue of the Two Great World Systems" -- the idea of the tides being caused by the Earth's motion -- was astonishingly stupid and insulted the intelligence of any reader. In that same work, Galileo did everything in his power to ridicule the Pope and cause the eventual conflict, until the only way for the Papacy to save face was to bring him before the inquisition.
Was the papacy's subsequent actions sensible? No. But neither were the actions of Galileo, and he only had himself to blame. The papacy had been perfectly willing in the past to change the interpretation of biblical passages from literal to allegorical, but only when there was sufficient proof. Note also that Copernicus was only banned after Galileo forced the issue -- the church had no problem with an alternative theory, provided it didn't constitute a threat. Note also that Kepler was advocating Copernicus at the same time as Galileo, and was neither persecuted by the inquistion nor had his books -- which argued strongly in favour of the Copernican system -- banned. The problem was that Galileo argued in such a was as to make him a direct threat: he didn't have the proof, and instead resorted to thinly disguised ad hominem attacks to win the argument. He forced the papacy into a corner, and suffered the consequences.
(The actual proof of the motion of the earth came via the physical laws of Kepler (which Galileo ignored) and Newton, and then via the first observation of the stellar parallax in 1838. The tides theory was, of course, un-relativistic nonsense. You can hardly blame the papacy for not accepting the fallacious arguments of Galileo!)
All of this is set out in much more detail in Arthur Koestlers' "The Sleepwalkers". Worth a read. His basic thesis is that Galileo forced a schism between science and religion that never needed to have occurred. (After all, the papacy today happily accepts that the Earth revolves around the Sun, as well as other concepts such as evolution -- the catholic church doesn't see itself as in conflict with science, for the most part!)
(Incidentally, for what it's worth, I'm an agnostic scientist working in the field of molecular biology. I don't suffer any fools gladly, and that includes Galileo, who was one of the most pig-headedly stubborn idiots when it came to the Copernican system. Galileo in his Dialogue did what no scientist should ever do: put his own faith above the evidence, and try to hoodwink people by arguments that were clearly incorrect. The entire episode was shameful for all involved, but it seems ironic that Galileo is these days revered as a hero for breaking every single rule of the scientific method... If the current pope wants to argue that Galileo was a fool and base this on decent scholarship, then I'll welcome him to my university and applaud his actions.)
They are reportedly looking for a large number of English to Persian translators willing to work in isolated conditions. Unfortunately for the army, the end result was Farsical...
There are plenty (very easy to use) of alternatives around. Songbird and Yamipod just to name two. Ah... last time I checked the current gen iPods weren't supported -- looks like most of them are now (but still not the touch, apparently).
Songbird looks really interesting, btw -- thanks for the link!
Mac is sort of the "universal platform", IMO, and a year later, I consider it a very worthwhile investment. Give me another two buttons on the track-pad, and I might believe you...:)
Seriously -- how can you have a *nix system without a middle-mouse button?? It's like dating the Prom queen, and finding out she's frigid. All this great potential just going to waste...
Actually, that's exactly what iTunes does, except much faster because... well, let's face it. My computer is probably a lot faster than your phone. Sure, it takes a few seconds to send the database to the iPod, but if you're so busy that you can't afford the time to do that, you probably can't afford the time to listen to music, either. The point is that you can't use a current Apple player without iTunes, which (a) screws me over because I use linux, and (b) stops you from drag'n'dropping your music collection in and out of the player. All my music is organised into folders already, the way *I* like it -- I don't need or want third-party software to move it to and from my player.
The sole reason for iTunes is to prevent music piracy by preventing the user from directly accessing the files on the player.
(Incidentally, I wasn't praising mobile phones as much as condemning mp3 manufacturers. Although the fact that I don't need to carry around an extra bit of hardware by using my phone to play music is certainly a bonus!)
If your mp3 player doesn't load as a "mass storage device" and let you just swap the materials back and forth, then YOU BOUGHT THE WRONG PLAYER. True. I've been idly looking for an mp3 player for some time, that would allow me to transfer music files as a mass storage device, but which would also give me music database management options based on the id3 tag.
The funny thing is that I finally found it all in a bog-standard Nokia phone. Only a 2Gb storage limit, it needs a 2.5mm to 3.5mm headphone adapter, and you have to manually tell it to rebuild the id3 tag database if you change the files. But still -- this is exactly what mp3 players ought to do, and its certainly closer to what I was looking for than the standalone options that I've seen. Why couldn't the big players -- Apple, Microsoft, Sony -- make something that works as well?
For those of you who buy books regularly, do you really read them 3+ times? Or is there some other reason you do it instead of going to the library? Why? Well, it's partly trying to help out artists by supporting their work, and it's partly because for a few dollars I can own a work of art.
I never bought books when I was a student, but always borrowed them from the library. Now that I'm finally earning a decent wage, I've gone back and bought my favourite books so that I own a copy. Not only can I re-read them at my pleasure (and yes -- I do re-read my favourite books), not only can I lend them out to my friends and share the love of good literature, but having a massive library in your house seriously impresses the chicks:)
Wow... !! Because of your low karma I missed your initial reply to my post... but this is just scary!
Seriously, you can't seriously believe what you write, can you? Let's take this gem:
7 days may not be supported now only because many choose to not want to prove the Bible right; there are strong enough biases in the scientific community to have a specific agenda like that. Not to mention that if they decided to support that idea many, if not all, of those people who do not believe in religion would just not accept it. But that is the usual first response to the beginning of a paradigm shift in scientific theories. It takes time for people to let go of the old, incorrect, theories because they still make some sense, if you choose to deny that the newer theory makes even more sense. So... we should all disregard the best scientific evidence that we have in favour of a handful of non-peer-reviewed articles that ignore error measurements in order to push a specific agenda? And we should do this merely because a two-thousand-year-old document says so? This is not a sensible practise, and by suggesting this you're implicitly demonstrating why science and religion cannot mix. Science is based on evidence; religion is based on faith. These are opposing principles!!
Note that I'm not saying you're wrong -- you may indeed be correct (science, after all, can never categorically prove something correct or incorrect -- that luxury lies only with mathematics). But your reasoning is flawed, and your hypothesis goes against the vast majority of accrued evidence so far -- it would have to take some solid evidence (rather than a bit of wishful thinking) to make me (and any other decent scientist) change their minds.
References?? I was only going on what the original poster cited, after all, which doesn't seem to have been cited very much itself. You must also admit that the three observations of c (one of which made in the 1600s, when time-keeping was not exactly top-notch) as described in the post do not provide firm evidence.
If there's a broader body of work out there, please point me towards it as I'd be interested to read it. At first, I must admit, your name calling made me feel a little foolish, so I took some time off to check out your link. As far as I can tell, the "deBray" you refer to is Gheury de Bray, who published a number of Nature papers on the subject between 1927 and 1931. However, the ISI Web of Science only has three articles that cite any of these papers (and Google scholar none at all). Of these three papers, one of these was published in 1929, one on 1940 (and which does not appear to relate at all to the supposed decrease in the speed of light), and the final one in 1981 (which is entitled "THE LORE OF LARGE NUMBERS - SOME HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE" -- unfortunately, I can't get this paper online through my Uni, since it sounds rather amusing!)
Now, this isn't exactly encouraging, is it? First, you got your own reference wrong (the first article by this chap was de Bray (1927), not deBray (1931)), and secondly, this landmark body of work has been cited three times by other authors in peer-reviewed journals, and none in an apparently favourable context.
None of this, of course, means that c is not decreasing. But I retain the right to be sceptical until proven otherwise, and you've done nothing so far to concince me. And I'll leave the final word to Mr. de Bray, who -- in the only article of his I could obtain online (in Isis in 1936: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-1753(193609)25%3A2%3C437%3ATVOL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B), and referring to the observed decrease -- notes:
"To those physicist who attach some significance to the fact, it may be pointed out that the probable errors of the observations are greater than the amplitude of the variation." (p.441)
Excuse me, but any scientist who blatantly disregards sampling error merely because the raw data points fit a trend that he wishes to see, is nothing but a hack.
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And if you can't, just switch to a vt and run "xterm -display
But most window managers support the "--replace" flag these days, so you should never have to kill a wm first.
No idea whether things have improved since then or not, but it suggests that the kernel-level 3D rendering was working OK
Let's get some angst into our moderation,
I got rather tired of picking and choosing what I need, just to get faster boot times. Two points:
1. Don't knock 'make menuconfig' -- it's simple, fast and efficient.
2. You're not going to get (noticeably) faster boot times by compiling a custom kernel. It only takes a couple of seconds for a generic distro kernel to load, after all. (The real time delay in the linux boot process is from the services that get started at boot time, which are started in series by inefficient shell scripts.)
The real reason why most of us compile our own kernels is to enable custom features (swsusp2, for example).
My point is that there are now numerous alternatives -- both for businesses and desktop users -- which have superior stability or superior features to RHEL/Fedora. (And also, that this diversification was a direct result of the abomination that was "gcc-2.96", which still haunts many of us who installed RH 7 back in 2000
(The idea of stepping through the alphabet seems to have started with Edgy, which followed Dapper. Previously it was random: Warty, Hoary, Breezy, Dapper
Would anyone care if RedHat disappeared up its own fedora these days?? RedHat stopped being a powerhouse the day they included a broken version of gcc in RedHat 7.0.
Funny that the Phoenix project aimed to strip out all the bloat from Mozilla
'course, before the IE vs. Netscape war there was the Netscape vs. NCSA Mosaic war. And before that, there was the Mosaic vs. gopher war. Like fire across the galaxy, the browser wars spread
I'm pretty sure, from trying to skim that immense Hume article that you linked to, that that's the gist of his own argument anyway (though I gather that Hume's writing was so dense/incomprehensible/random (I'd pick the last one myself) that no two philosophers have been able to agree about what he meant since
And the Earth is not flat. It's approximately spherical! And it goes around the Sun, not vice versa. I don't care what the Pope says about it: Galileo Galilei was right and the Bible is wrong!
Well, Galileo *was* right in a sense, but at the time the evidence pointed towards the contrary position and he was arguing based on solely on emotion, not logic. The lack of detectable stellar parallax, for example, strongly pointed to a stationary Earth. Likewise, Galileo's proof as espoused in his "Dialogue of the Two Great World Systems" -- the idea of the tides being caused by the Earth's motion -- was astonishingly stupid and insulted the intelligence of any reader. In that same work, Galileo did everything in his power to ridicule the Pope and cause the eventual conflict, until the only way for the Papacy to save face was to bring him before the inquisition.Was the papacy's subsequent actions sensible? No. But neither were the actions of Galileo, and he only had himself to blame. The papacy had been perfectly willing in the past to change the interpretation of biblical passages from literal to allegorical, but only when there was sufficient proof. Note also that Copernicus was only banned after Galileo forced the issue -- the church had no problem with an alternative theory, provided it didn't constitute a threat. Note also that Kepler was advocating Copernicus at the same time as Galileo, and was neither persecuted by the inquistion nor had his books -- which argued strongly in favour of the Copernican system -- banned. The problem was that Galileo argued in such a was as to make him a direct threat: he didn't have the proof, and instead resorted to thinly disguised ad hominem attacks to win the argument. He forced the papacy into a corner, and suffered the consequences.
(The actual proof of the motion of the earth came via the physical laws of Kepler (which Galileo ignored) and Newton, and then via the first observation of the stellar parallax in 1838. The tides theory was, of course, un-relativistic nonsense. You can hardly blame the papacy for not accepting the fallacious arguments of Galileo!)
All of this is set out in much more detail in Arthur Koestlers' "The Sleepwalkers". Worth a read. His basic thesis is that Galileo forced a schism between science and religion that never needed to have occurred. (After all, the papacy today happily accepts that the Earth revolves around the Sun, as well as other concepts such as evolution -- the catholic church doesn't see itself as in conflict with science, for the most part!)
(Incidentally, for what it's worth, I'm an agnostic scientist working in the field of molecular biology. I don't suffer any fools gladly, and that includes Galileo, who was one of the most pig-headedly stubborn idiots when it came to the Copernican system. Galileo in his Dialogue did what no scientist should ever do: put his own faith above the evidence, and try to hoodwink people by arguments that were clearly incorrect. The entire episode was shameful for all involved, but it seems ironic that Galileo is these days revered as a hero for breaking every single rule of the scientific method
Songbird looks really interesting, btw -- thanks for the link!
Seriously -- how can you have a *nix system without a middle-mouse button?? It's like dating the Prom queen, and finding out she's frigid. All this great potential just going to waste
The sole reason for iTunes is to prevent music piracy by preventing the user from directly accessing the files on the player.
(Incidentally, I wasn't praising mobile phones as much as condemning mp3 manufacturers. Although the fact that I don't need to carry around an extra bit of hardware by using my phone to play music is certainly a bonus!)
The funny thing is that I finally found it all in a bog-standard Nokia phone. Only a 2Gb storage limit, it needs a 2.5mm to 3.5mm headphone adapter, and you have to manually tell it to rebuild the id3 tag database if you change the files. But still -- this is exactly what mp3 players ought to do, and its certainly closer to what I was looking for than the standalone options that I've seen. Why couldn't the big players -- Apple, Microsoft, Sony -- make something that works as well?
*laughs* ... I was referring to novels, from the public library! But anyway ...
I never bought books when I was a student, but always borrowed them from the library. Now that I'm finally earning a decent wage, I've gone back and bought my favourite books so that I own a copy. Not only can I re-read them at my pleasure (and yes -- I do re-read my favourite books), not only can I lend them out to my friends and share the love of good literature, but having a massive library in your house seriously impresses the chicks
Seriously, you can't seriously believe what you write, can you? Let's take this gem: 7 days may not be supported now only because many choose to not want to prove the Bible right; there are strong enough biases in the scientific community to have a specific agenda like that. Not to mention that if they decided to support that idea many, if not all, of those people who do not believe in religion would just not accept it. But that is the usual first response to the beginning of a paradigm shift in scientific theories. It takes time for people to let go of the old, incorrect, theories because they still make some sense, if you choose to deny that the newer theory makes even more sense. So
Note that I'm not saying you're wrong -- you may indeed be correct (science, after all, can never categorically prove something correct or incorrect -- that luxury lies only with mathematics). But your reasoning is flawed, and your hypothesis goes against the vast majority of accrued evidence so far -- it would have to take some solid evidence (rather than a bit of wishful thinking) to make me (and any other decent scientist) change their minds.
References?? I was only going on what the original poster cited, after all, which doesn't seem to have been cited very much itself. You must also admit that the three observations of c (one of which made in the 1600s, when time-keeping was not exactly top-notch) as described in the post do not provide firm evidence.
If there's a broader body of work out there, please point me towards it as I'd be interested to read it. At first, I must admit, your name calling made me feel a little foolish, so I took some time off to check out your link. As far as I can tell, the "deBray" you refer to is Gheury de Bray, who published a number of Nature papers on the subject between 1927 and 1931. However, the ISI Web of Science only has three articles that cite any of these papers (and Google scholar none at all). Of these three papers, one of these was published in 1929, one on 1940 (and which does not appear to relate at all to the supposed decrease in the speed of light), and the final one in 1981 (which is entitled "THE LORE OF LARGE NUMBERS - SOME HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE" -- unfortunately, I can't get this paper online through my Uni, since it sounds rather amusing!)
Now, this isn't exactly encouraging, is it? First, you got your own reference wrong (the first article by this chap was de Bray (1927), not deBray (1931)), and secondly, this landmark body of work has been cited three times by other authors in peer-reviewed journals, and none in an apparently favourable context.
None of this, of course, means that c is not decreasing. But I retain the right to be sceptical until proven otherwise, and you've done nothing so far to concince me. And I'll leave the final word to Mr. de Bray, who -- in the only article of his I could obtain online (in Isis in 1936: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-1753(193609)25%3A2%3C437%3ATVOL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B), and referring to the observed decrease -- notes:
"To those physicist who attach some significance to the fact, it may be pointed out that the probable errors of the observations are greater than the amplitude of the variation." (p.441)
Excuse me, but any scientist who blatantly disregards sampling error merely because the raw data points fit a trend that he wishes to see, is nothing but a hack.