I'm a Suse user, I'm typing this on my Suse 9.1 box right now. I love Suse, but I have to say that from what I've seen, the personal releases are crap.
I remember not too long ago, a friend of mine was wanting to try out a new Linux distrobution. He'd used Mandrake a bit, but still hadn't learned a lot about linux. I suggested that he go buy a copy of Suse 9.1 because the manuals are really nice, and the ftp version wasn't available yet.
He took my advice, but got the personal version to save money (who can blame him). I didn't think there would be too much difference, I've only used pro, but from reading comments here on/. it seemed like only the proprietary software and some advanced server stuff would be missing.
Nope
Suse 9.1 personal is more like a Windows install than a Linux install. It comes with practically nothing you would assume would be in a linux installation. No server software at all, no development tools, it was a very anorexic distrobution in my opinion.
It seems to me it would be much nicer if Suse would have released ISOs of what can be had from the ftp version so people could torrent it.
Wireless is good for a lot of things, but it seems to me that this "solution" will require so much more time and effort that you might as well just use a wired solution. It shouldn't be too hard to have a router in each classroom that can be turned on or off as is appropriate. With a wireless solution you are pretty much relegated to turning off each individual students access based on their schedual, which is going to be much more difficult to impliment effectively.
I am not a physicist, or a physics student, or even an arm chair physicist, but from what I understand, creating a quantum gate requires (at least?) 3 particle entanglement, which is quite a bit more difficult than 2 particle enganglement. Can anyone better versed in the subject confirm or refute this?
I didn't RTFM, but from the headline, it seems like the word CAN is the gotcha, any language that has a purpose for existing can be faster than any other languages in certain situations. This is because computers are (generally) better at optomizing code than people.
But, if this guy is saying that in general Java is faster than C++, I call bullshit. Don't get me wrong, I love Java, and there are a lot of great things about it, but speed ain't one of them.
With the power of modern computers, java is generally fast enough, but if I'm writing an application to run on my 200mz ram hungry and already overloaded server, then Java is not going to be my langauge of choice.
I wish people would just get over this programming language pissing contest that seems to have been going on, and promote each language based on it's own merits, and not try to say that any given language is the end all be all of programming.
In my experience, Java is fast to write, and C++ is fast to run. C++ can be hard to debug, and Java can make it hard to eliminate overhead.
If one day Java is faster than C++, Then I think it will have come at the expence at many of the things that java gets right.
Not that I particularly mind MS shooting itself in it's foot, but I really wonder if Microsoft is doing itself more harm than good by bringing so much attention to Linux. I know a lot of people who completely dismissed Linux prior to Microsoft making such a big deal out of showing it's competitive. I just wonder if microsoft is inadvertently drawing attention to the competition.
Having actually read the Windows XP EULA at one point, IIRC there is a clause which addresses this, so basically when you agree to one EULA you agree to any changes they decide to make to it down the road.
The only difference between the two is that the full version includes the manuals. You can do a fresh install or update from either version. The upgrade version is definitely cheaper, but there were also a lot of nice updates to the manuals in this newer version. Also, IIRC the free installation support may be different between the two versions.
hmm, I wasn't aware of that. Your right though that a lot of N64 games belong on the list. Along with those you listed one of my favorites is Blast Corps.
I don't know many people who played this game, but everyone who did can attest to the fact that this very unique game definitely deserves a spot on the list.
Also let us not forget what I belive might have been the last N64 game to be release, Conquers Bad Fur Day. Now THAT was a fun game.
Mario 64...ok so the Nintendo 64 wasn't 32bit, but is from the same era, and I think it has some of my favorite classics.
Mario 64 is still one of my favorite games of all time, and the graphics are still quite good, if primitive. This was really a revolutionary game, and I can't really even think of a game on any non-nintendo system even today that has quite re-created the formula.
Tekken - I've always prefered the tekken series over the virtua fighter series. These two titles though really brought the fighting game genre into it's own with 3D fighters.
Blood Omen - Legacy of Kain. While I did not care for the sequals, this remains one of my favorite games of all time. With lots of great voice acting this macabre adventure surpasses even a number of the zelda games in my mind.
Resident Evil - this game is like one of those 60's horror flicks, it was scarry at the time, but even now it's a lot of fun because while the graphics "special effects" are dated, it's great fun to go back and laugh at.
Final Fantasy VII -
One of my all time favorite Final Fantasy games, the rich detailed pre-rendered backgrounds still look good today, and the storyline and gameplay still offer plenty of fun. I would love to see a sequal to this game, rather than that dreadful FF:X2.
The fact is, if they want to do this then they can, and you do not have to buy their product if their choice sucks. I have two sony drives, but of course I use Linux so I wouldn't know about their windows policy.
I'm sure the reasoning behind the policy is to prevent people from buying foreign drives cheaper. Have you tried setting windows to english, installing the drivers, then setting it back to japanese? I'm sure if it were that simple though you wouldn't have had to ask slashdot.
true, for a while (maybe still) the gc was outselling the PS2, but I suspect that a lot of that is that because pretty much everyone who really wants a PS2 has one now and had one by 2003, and the price drop was also a big factor. But look at total number of units sold and tell me that the Game Cube, and especially the N64 vs PS One, are not relatively obscure (that is, only selling a fraction of the number of units of their respective competing sony system).
I think the reason that companies can get so much out of pre-fab gaming machines is that people don't understand what hardware does what.
While many hard core gamers and definitely the slashdot crowd knows how to put together a good gaming PC on the cheap, the majority of the people who are going to be buying these machines really don't understand the difference between a hard drive and a video card.
My cousin bought an hp pavillion about a year ago (against my recommendation, but that's irrelevant now) the specs on it were:
1.2gz celeron
128meg PC100 SDRAM
56k v90 modem
20gb hard drive
some sort of non-3d accellerated 8mb video card
yadda yadda yadda
well the other day he went and got Final Fantasy XI and couldn't understand why it wouldn't run. Instead of calling me, they decided that they needed a faster "modem" and "more hard drive" so they went and paid some exorbant amount of money to have a v.92 modem and a 250gb hard drive installed.
When the game still wouldn't install, they finally called me because someone had told them to go buy a new Alienware machine so they could play final fantasy on it, and they wanted to know which one to buy.
I ended up going over and just upgrading the ram to 512meg and trading them the GeForce 4 I had in one of my machines that is now a server for the cheapo video card.
The point is, I suspect that a lot of high end gaming rig sales come from consumers who really have no idea what they need.
Unfortunately, what worked oh-so well for the SNES was one of the major reasons for the ultimate lack of relevancy the N64 had, and now the relative obscurity of the GameCube.
While Nintendo has focused on quality, Sony looked to sheer number of titles for sale, and it would seem Sonys approach worked.
If you walk into a store and were to pick up any random game for the Game Cube, chances are that, assuming it was a genre you liked, it will be a good game. Not so with the PS2. The thing is, while games for nintendo systems, especially games produced by nintendo themselves, tend to be very refined and lots of fun, they are rarely revolutionary.
Don't get me wrong, I love all my nintendo consoles dearly, but if they want to compete with Sony they need to loosen up on what titles they will release (though it looks to me like nintendo is not looking to compete directly with Sony and MS, and is instead seeking a niche market. The relationship between Nintendo and Sony is much like that between Microsoft and Apple I think, with Sony gladling pushing out gobs of mass market games, while nintendo caters to it's own niche of enthusiasts)
depends on the situation. If company A creates software Foo and releases it under the GPL, nothing says they are not free to release that same code under any other license as well (though anyone who got the code under the GPL can still distribute it under the GPL). This also means that the company could release Foo under the GPL while releasing a version with additional features under some other license.
The problem can be in situations where A releases Foo under the GPL, then B submits a patch to Foo wich makes it into the codebase, A can no longer release Foo under any other license than the GPL unless B where to assign the copyright to A.
Fruthermore, if A distributes Foo to company C, then C can do whatever they want with the codebase and keep it in-house without distributing it. If they distribute it, then they must do so under the GPL or buy an alternate license from A (assuming both that A is willing to offer an alternate license and that they own copyright to the entire codebase).
Try MPlayer Here It's mainly intended for video but will work with audio as well. I'm not sure how well the windows version works, but on Linux I've found that it works flawlessly, playing things that all other players will choke on, though it will on rare occasions choke on a wmv file (maybe no support for newer or DRMed windows media files? any other slashdotters out there know).
I know there was a big deal awhile ago about some dvd player manufacturer using mplayer code in their software and not providing the source, and well my thinking is that if it's good enough for a video player manufacturer to steal than it should probably be good enough for the average geek;)
You might think about something like a subscription service. For uses willing to fork over a token amount per month/6-months/year they see no ads and can (if they want) get e-mail updates about the latest versions, maybe other nice things. Of course depending on how your site is set up this might end up costing more to set up than it's worth.
It just seems to me that banner ads today are less about making money through view/clicks and more about making money by driving people to subscribe to an ad-free version of the site.
Hmm, this gives me an idea, though I am not sure if the non-geeks of the world would find this so neat.
If you were going to use dyndns.org (they are great, I use 'em and recommend them to everyone), or a similar service for remote admin anyway, what about enabling apache, and hacking up a simple frontend to gphoto2 or something with a php site, or even just a simple frontend to ftp back to a server you controll, so that visiters can effortlessly create a web blog of their vacation with photos for all their family.
While everyone seems to have their own pet language that they thing would be better than some other language, I belive that once you get into really teaching programming language doesn't really matter, at least for the student. What is important is to pick a language you know well so you can really explain what is going on.
The thing about teaching programming is to teach the concepts and not the semantics of the language. Its much more important for a student to understand the ideas behind sequence, selection and repetition (and objects if you are going to go that route), than it is to know that that you end an if statement with '}' or 'endif' or whatever that languages syntax dictates. Some languages will have more or less memorized code ("public static void main(String[] args)" vs "int main()") but this shouldn't really effect your choice.
One impotant thing to remember is that the only way to learn to program is to write programs, write a lot of programs, and learn to read and work with other peoples programs. Make sure to let her know at the beginning of teaching her that she should be able to take the initative to write out dozens of hello world programs and the like.
Tools are also going to be an important consideration, a fully fledged IDE can be daunting to someone just beginning with programming. If she has a mac running OS X then you already have that battle covered, as both project builder and the gnu tools are excellent. If she is running windows consider giving her a knoppix disk, or installing cygwin (if she's not already on linux you could think about putting a linux parition on her machine, but then you will be having to teach her both programming and Linux in parallel), and teach her to use the gcc, make, and other gnu tools. A text editor like Kate or TextPad would be good to get her started with as they feature syntax highlighting without the learning curve of vi(m) or emacs.
Also remember that to many a true geek things like pseudocode, flowcharts and UML are a pita, they might be usefull teaching aids when concepts and syntax begin to collide.
Most importantly have fun, you (I would assume) enjoy programming, teach her the joy in it, and enjoy the time you and your mother get to spend together doing something that hopefully you both enjoy, and if it turns out that programming is not for her, find another hobby you can both do together.
Explain the USA PATRIOT Act in that context then, please.
Because most americans also belive that ignorance is bliss, and it seems that americans in general also belive that thought is a finite resource, the result is a lot of people who belive they are getting freedom because they are told so and refuse to exert any thought to come up with an alternate conclusion.
Actually, many of the silver apps work wonderfully as well. YMMV, but I have found that the majority of the functionality works perfectly in the silver apps, except for maybe a little quirk here and there . Even the bronze apps work well for the most part if you are not using any of the exotic features of the app, and they will sometimes crash for seemingly no reason (but then again, many apps do that on windows too). Although I have not used Access (ever, windows or under crossover), I would suggest downloading the free trial and giving it a shot, you may be suprised.
I have a 900mz G3 iBook and i've had the same problem. It seems that sometimes when opening the case the sensor doesn't get triggered to wake the machine up (at least that's my best gues), i've found that moving the screen around a bit or closing it and opening it up a couple of times will get it to wake up 99% of the time.
Are you talking about the XP-Theme or the classic theme? The classic windows theme is amazing imho. Very clean and very crisp.
Well, I was refering to the default XP theme. The default XP theme is absolute crap, the classic theme is bland and rather ugly, but no worse than the default KDE theme.
While in terms of absolute best visual quality, I have to say that OS X beats any linux theme i've seen (although a number of the aqua themes are really nice), I think linux wins for customizability.
While others may disagree, I think that Windows XP has perhaps the absolute worst graphical style of any modern OS.
Aqua is really slick, but eventually it gets old, wheras there are dozens of really nice looking themes for KDE.
Even though I have a personal preference for KDE,,Gnome2 is also looking really nice, though in a different way.
I think the biggest advantage Linux has over other OS's is that, while there may not be as many artist using Linux, any artist who wishes has the option of adding artwork or making any other changes to any given program, and the best of those can be incorperated into the program.
You know, for a second I really agreed with you, the problem is, who will define what eithics will be required?
One could even say that someone with "no ethics" merely has an ethical compass that always points to "ok by me", what is more important than requiring people or businesses to have ethics is that people follow their own ethical compass.
I know many people who find Microsoft's business ethics run very contrary to their own ideas of ethical practice, but guess what, most of them run Windows. I know some people who belive the GNU philosophy is the most ethically sound software philosophy, but some of them use windows, others use BSD.
Business ethics should not be a legal requirement, but following ones own ethicall compass should be a social requirement.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a Suse user, I'm typing this on my Suse 9.1 box right now. I love Suse, but I have to say that from what I've seen, the personal releases are crap. /. it seemed like only the proprietary software and some advanced server stuff would be missing.
I remember not too long ago, a friend of mine was wanting to try out a new Linux distrobution. He'd used Mandrake a bit, but still hadn't learned a lot about linux. I suggested that he go buy a copy of Suse 9.1 because the manuals are really nice, and the ftp version wasn't available yet.
He took my advice, but got the personal version to save money (who can blame him). I didn't think there would be too much difference, I've only used pro, but from reading comments here on
Nope
Suse 9.1 personal is more like a Windows install than a Linux install. It comes with practically nothing you would assume would be in a linux installation. No server software at all, no development tools, it was a very anorexic distrobution in my opinion.
It seems to me it would be much nicer if Suse would have released ISOs of what can be had from the ftp version so people could torrent it.
I cannot think of
a very good comment now
do not mod me down
Wireless is good for a lot of things, but it seems to me that this "solution" will require so much more time and effort that you might as well just use a wired solution. It shouldn't be too hard to have a router in each classroom that can be turned on or off as is appropriate. With a wireless solution you are pretty much relegated to turning off each individual students access based on their schedual, which is going to be much more difficult to impliment effectively.
I am not a physicist, or a physics student, or even an arm chair physicist, but from what I understand, creating a quantum gate requires (at least?) 3 particle entanglement, which is quite a bit more difficult than 2 particle enganglement. Can anyone better versed in the subject confirm or refute this?
I didn't RTFM, but from the headline, it seems like the word CAN is the gotcha, any language that has a purpose for existing can be faster than any other languages in certain situations. This is because computers are (generally) better at optomizing code than people.
But, if this guy is saying that in general Java is faster than C++, I call bullshit. Don't get me wrong, I love Java, and there are a lot of great things about it, but speed ain't one of them.
With the power of modern computers, java is generally fast enough, but if I'm writing an application to run on my 200mz ram hungry and already overloaded server, then Java is not going to be my langauge of choice.
I wish people would just get over this programming language pissing contest that seems to have been going on, and promote each language based on it's own merits, and not try to say that any given language is the end all be all of programming.
In my experience, Java is fast to write, and C++ is fast to run. C++ can be hard to debug, and Java can make it hard to eliminate overhead.
If one day Java is faster than C++, Then I think it will have come at the expence at many of the things that java gets right.
Not that I particularly mind MS shooting itself in it's foot, but I really wonder if Microsoft is doing itself more harm than good by bringing so much attention to Linux. I know a lot of people who completely dismissed Linux prior to Microsoft making such a big deal out of showing it's competitive. I just wonder if microsoft is inadvertently drawing attention to the competition.
Having actually read the Windows XP EULA at one point, IIRC there is a clause which addresses this, so basically when you agree to one EULA you agree to any changes they decide to make to it down the road.
The only difference between the two is that the full version includes the manuals. You can do a fresh install or update from either version. The upgrade version is definitely cheaper, but there were also a lot of nice updates to the manuals in this newer version. Also, IIRC the free installation support may be different between the two versions.
hmm, I wasn't aware of that. Your right though that a lot of N64 games belong on the list. Along with those you listed one of my favorites is Blast Corps.
I don't know many people who played this game, but everyone who did can attest to the fact that this very unique game definitely deserves a spot on the list.
Also let us not forget what I belive might have been the last N64 game to be release, Conquers Bad Fur Day. Now THAT was a fun game.
Mario 64...ok so the Nintendo 64 wasn't 32bit, but is from the same era, and I think it has some of my favorite classics.
Mario 64 is still one of my favorite games of all time, and the graphics are still quite good, if primitive. This was really a revolutionary game, and I can't really even think of a game on any non-nintendo system even today that has quite re-created the formula.
Tekken - I've always prefered the tekken series over the virtua fighter series. These two titles though really brought the fighting game genre into it's own with 3D fighters.
Blood Omen - Legacy of Kain. While I did not care for the sequals, this remains one of my favorite games of all time. With lots of great voice acting this macabre adventure surpasses even a number of the zelda games in my mind.
Resident Evil - this game is like one of those 60's horror flicks, it was scarry at the time, but even now it's a lot of fun because while the graphics "special effects" are dated, it's great fun to go back and laugh at.
Final Fantasy VII - One of my all time favorite Final Fantasy games, the rich detailed pre-rendered backgrounds still look good today, and the storyline and gameplay still offer plenty of fun. I would love to see a sequal to this game, rather than that dreadful FF:X2.
The fact is, if they want to do this then they can, and you do not have to buy their product if their choice sucks. I have two sony drives, but of course I use Linux so I wouldn't know about their windows policy.
I'm sure the reasoning behind the policy is to prevent people from buying foreign drives cheaper. Have you tried setting windows to english, installing the drivers, then setting it back to japanese? I'm sure if it were that simple though you wouldn't have had to ask slashdot.
true, for a while (maybe still) the gc was outselling the PS2, but I suspect that a lot of that is that because pretty much everyone who really wants a PS2 has one now and had one by 2003, and the price drop was also a big factor. But look at total number of units sold and tell me that the Game Cube, and especially the N64 vs PS One, are not relatively obscure (that is, only selling a fraction of the number of units of their respective competing sony system).
While many hard core gamers and definitely the slashdot crowd knows how to put together a good gaming PC on the cheap, the majority of the people who are going to be buying these machines really don't understand the difference between a hard drive and a video card.
My cousin bought an hp pavillion about a year ago (against my recommendation, but that's irrelevant now) the specs on it were:
- 1.2gz celeron
- 128meg PC100 SDRAM
- 56k v90 modem
- 20gb hard drive
- some sort of non-3d accellerated 8mb video card
- yadda yadda yadda
well the other day he went and got Final Fantasy XI and couldn't understand why it wouldn't run. Instead of calling me, they decided that they needed a faster "modem" and "more hard drive" so they went and paid some exorbant amount of money to have a v.92 modem and a 250gb hard drive installed.When the game still wouldn't install, they finally called me because someone had told them to go buy a new Alienware machine so they could play final fantasy on it, and they wanted to know which one to buy.
I ended up going over and just upgrading the ram to 512meg and trading them the GeForce 4 I had in one of my machines that is now a server for the cheapo video card.
The point is, I suspect that a lot of high end gaming rig sales come from consumers who really have no idea what they need.
Unfortunately, what worked oh-so well for the SNES was one of the major reasons for the ultimate lack of relevancy the N64 had, and now the relative obscurity of the GameCube.
While Nintendo has focused on quality, Sony looked to sheer number of titles for sale, and it would seem Sonys approach worked.
If you walk into a store and were to pick up any random game for the Game Cube, chances are that, assuming it was a genre you liked, it will be a good game. Not so with the PS2. The thing is, while games for nintendo systems, especially games produced by nintendo themselves, tend to be very refined and lots of fun, they are rarely revolutionary.
Don't get me wrong, I love all my nintendo consoles dearly, but if they want to compete with Sony they need to loosen up on what titles they will release (though it looks to me like nintendo is not looking to compete directly with Sony and MS, and is instead seeking a niche market. The relationship between Nintendo and Sony is much like that between Microsoft and Apple I think, with Sony gladling pushing out gobs of mass market games, while nintendo caters to it's own niche of enthusiasts)
depends on the situation. If company A creates software Foo and releases it under the GPL, nothing says they are not free to release that same code under any other license as well (though anyone who got the code under the GPL can still distribute it under the GPL). This also means that the company could release Foo under the GPL while releasing a version with additional features under some other license.
The problem can be in situations where A releases Foo under the GPL, then B submits a patch to Foo wich makes it into the codebase, A can no longer release Foo under any other license than the GPL unless B where to assign the copyright to A.
Fruthermore, if A distributes Foo to company C, then C can do whatever they want with the codebase and keep it in-house without distributing it. If they distribute it, then they must do so under the GPL or buy an alternate license from A (assuming both that A is willing to offer an alternate license and that they own copyright to the entire codebase).
Try MPlayer Here It's mainly intended for video but will work with audio as well. I'm not sure how well the windows version works, but on Linux I've found that it works flawlessly, playing things that all other players will choke on, though it will on rare occasions choke on a wmv file (maybe no support for newer or DRMed windows media files? any other slashdotters out there know). ;)
I know there was a big deal awhile ago about some dvd player manufacturer using mplayer code in their software and not providing the source, and well my thinking is that if it's good enough for a video player manufacturer to steal than it should probably be good enough for the average geek
You might think about something like a subscription service. For uses willing to fork over a token amount per month/6-months/year they see no ads and can (if they want) get e-mail updates about the latest versions, maybe other nice things. Of course depending on how your site is set up this might end up costing more to set up than it's worth.
It just seems to me that banner ads today are less about making money through view/clicks and more about making money by driving people to subscribe to an ad-free version of the site.
Hmm, this gives me an idea, though I am not sure if the non-geeks of the world would find this so neat.
If you were going to use dyndns.org (they are great, I use 'em and recommend them to everyone), or a similar service for remote admin anyway, what about enabling apache, and hacking up a simple frontend to gphoto2 or something with a php site, or even just a simple frontend to ftp back to a server you controll, so that visiters can effortlessly create a web blog of their vacation with photos for all their family.
While everyone seems to have their own pet language that they thing would be better than some other language, I belive that once you get into really teaching programming language doesn't really matter, at least for the student. What is important is to pick a language you know well so you can really explain what is going on.
The thing about teaching programming is to teach the concepts and not the semantics of the language. Its much more important for a student to understand the ideas behind sequence, selection and repetition (and objects if you are going to go that route), than it is to know that that you end an if statement with '}' or 'endif' or whatever that languages syntax dictates. Some languages will have more or less memorized code ("public static void main(String[] args)" vs "int main()") but this shouldn't really effect your choice.
One impotant thing to remember is that the only way to learn to program is to write programs, write a lot of programs, and learn to read and work with other peoples programs. Make sure to let her know at the beginning of teaching her that she should be able to take the initative to write out dozens of hello world programs and the like.
Tools are also going to be an important consideration, a fully fledged IDE can be daunting to someone just beginning with programming. If she has a mac running OS X then you already have that battle covered, as both project builder and the gnu tools are excellent. If she is running windows consider giving her a knoppix disk, or installing cygwin (if she's not already on linux you could think about putting a linux parition on her machine, but then you will be having to teach her both programming and Linux in parallel), and teach her to use the gcc, make, and other gnu tools. A text editor like Kate or TextPad would be good to get her started with as they feature syntax highlighting without the learning curve of vi(m) or emacs.
Also remember that to many a true geek things like pseudocode, flowcharts and UML are a pita, they might be usefull teaching aids when concepts and syntax begin to collide.
Most importantly have fun, you (I would assume) enjoy programming, teach her the joy in it, and enjoy the time you and your mother get to spend together doing something that hopefully you both enjoy, and if it turns out that programming is not for her, find another hobby you can both do together.
Explain the USA PATRIOT Act in that context then, please.
Because most americans also belive that ignorance is bliss, and it seems that americans in general also belive that thought is a finite resource, the result is a lot of people who belive they are getting freedom because they are told so and refuse to exert any thought to come up with an alternate conclusion.
Actually, many of the silver apps work wonderfully as well. YMMV, but I have found that the majority of the functionality works perfectly in the silver apps, except for maybe a little quirk here and there . Even the bronze apps work well for the most part if you are not using any of the exotic features of the app, and they will sometimes crash for seemingly no reason (but then again, many apps do that on windows too). Although I have not used Access (ever, windows or under crossover), I would suggest downloading the free trial and giving it a shot, you may be suprised.
I have a 900mz G3 iBook and i've had the same problem. It seems that sometimes when opening the case the sensor doesn't get triggered to wake the machine up (at least that's my best gues), i've found that moving the screen around a bit or closing it and opening it up a couple of times will get it to wake up 99% of the time.
Are you talking about the XP-Theme or the classic theme? The classic windows theme is amazing imho. Very clean and very crisp.
Well, I was refering to the default XP theme. The default XP theme is absolute crap, the classic theme is bland and rather ugly, but no worse than the default KDE theme.
While in terms of absolute best visual quality, I have to say that OS X beats any linux theme i've seen (although a number of the aqua themes are really nice), I think linux wins for customizability. ,Gnome2 is also looking really nice, though in a different way.
While others may disagree, I think that Windows XP has perhaps the absolute worst graphical style of any modern OS.
Aqua is really slick, but eventually it gets old, wheras there are dozens of really nice looking themes for KDE.
Even though I have a personal preference for KDE,
I think the biggest advantage Linux has over other OS's is that, while there may not be as many artist using Linux, any artist who wishes has the option of adding artwork or making any other changes to any given program, and the best of those can be incorperated into the program.
You know, for a second I really agreed with you, the problem is, who will define what eithics will be required?
One could even say that someone with "no ethics" merely has an ethical compass that always points to "ok by me", what is more important than requiring people or businesses to have ethics is that people follow their own ethical compass.
I know many people who find Microsoft's business ethics run very contrary to their own ideas of ethical practice, but guess what, most of them run Windows. I know some people who belive the GNU philosophy is the most ethically sound software philosophy, but some of them use windows, others use BSD.
Business ethics should not be a legal requirement, but following ones own ethicall compass should be a social requirement.