Currently, Paris-Marseille, 800 km, is done in 3 hours
And that's probably one of the longest high-speed rail stretches, right?
Well no -- the high speed line will in principle take you from Brussels (and eventually from Amsterdam or Cologne) to Marseille, but I don't think there are regular trains that do this (for profitability reasons): one needs to stop and change in Paris.
Moreover, as I said, lines are being planned from Lyon to Turin in Italy, and from Lyon to Barcelona (via Montpellier and Perpignan). The eurostar track in England is also being upgraded to a high-speed track. So in a few years, a high-speed train all the way from London to Barcelona (except for the channel tunnel itself) should be "possible"... though I expect one would still need to change in Paris.
And even today, the TGV trainset can run on all these routes, but needs to go at a lower speed on some sections.
With a train like the TGV, you could do that in 5 hours. (It's about 1300 km. Currently, Paris-Marseille, 800 km, is done in 3 hours. Paris-Brussels takes 1 hr 15 mins and there are over 20 trains a day. Within the next few years there will be high speed links from Paris to Frankfurt and Barcelona.)
NY to LA is something like 56 hours, IIRC.
For those distances you'd still fly. Not many people need to do NY-LA every week.
The US is the worst country in the world for public transport, and I'm including developing countries in that statement.
But unlike Debian, Ubuntu compromised Free Software principles enough to make it fairly easy to get a working machine.
What are you talking about? To install non-free software you have to manually enable additional repositories -- just as you have to enable "non-free" in Debian. There are third-party tools to do this for you like easyubuntu but they aren't official.
The problem is with evince; due to its bloated nature and attempt to be a viewer for every type of image file imaginable, it does in fact depend on Nautilus
Not on Ubuntu it doesn't. It does depend on libnautilus-extension1, which is a very tiny package. I know because I'm running Ubuntu on AMD64, with a minimal 32bit chroot for mozilla and some helpers, and I have evince installed in the chroot and not nautilus (except for above package). The only other gnome components it needs are gnomecups and gnomeprint.
However, WPA is not native to Ubuntu and apparently the algorithm for WEP my router uses isn't compatible with Ubuntu either.
I'm interested by that statement. As I posted elsewhere, networkmanager worked for me in a WEP network under breezy, but not under dapper, and that's with two different laptops with different drivers -- one native, one NDIS. Perhaps, as you say, the problem is the router.
But the thing is iwconfig works for me. So why doesn't networkmanager work? I think it uses wpasupplicant, not iwconfig, but surely if iwconfig can do it right wpasupplicant can be fixed.
Doesn't work for me. And did with Breezy. Your anecdotal evidence against mine.
Specifically, though, it's not wifi that's broken -- it's networkmanager. Which wasn't a default part of breezy so one can argue that nothing was really broken. I can no longer authenticate to a WEP network that requires a key, and that's with two different laptops, one using NDISwrapper and a Windows driver, one using a native Prism2 driver. On both, manually using iwconfig and dhclient works. I can live with that but it doesn't look good in a desktop OS. And it's not just me -- there are many bug reports (including mine).
The ideal is to remove all the rubbish from the available choices, but failing that,
I don't get it -- why should that fail? Why should a school feed kids rubbish? In an ideal setup there would be no need for moms to monitor what kids eat, because the school wouldn't be feeding them junk. (I live in India and the schools aren't yet MacDonaldised.)
Thanks for the illustration of what Norvig meant. How is "Google Director of Search and AAAI Fellow Peter Norvig" (original article) semantically equivalent to "fellow Google exec" (Slashdot summary)? The latter suggests that Tim Berners-Lee too is a Google exec, which would be news to him.
Theo repeatedly claims that the site wants "approximately 50 personal questions". I looked, and there are only 11 questions with required answers, of which I can only construe two (office phone number, and office address) as invasive of Theo's privacy. (I assume everyone knows Theo's name and email address, from the mailing lists.)
If he objects to providing that information, he can say so, but this sort of easily-refuted hyperbole doesn't help.
Off-topic but what is it with Frank Gehry? Do people actually find his buildings cool-looking? The Bilbao Guggenheim museum was impressive when it was new, but the Disney hall just looks like a tired imitation.
You seem pretty clueless about Indian history. There has never been an empire, before the British, that ruled all of present-day India. (Actually, not even the British did -- Pondicherry was French and Goa was Portuguese.) Before the British, the last significant empire/was the Mughals, up until Aurangzeb. They lasted beyond 1707 -- until 1858 (Bahadur Shah Zafar), in fact -- but their reach did not go much beyond Delhi after Aurangzeb's time. As for the Marathas and others -- they were regional rulers (in present-day Maharashtra), like many others through India's history.
Not that I agree with the ancestor post that the Muslims were to blame for anything. They had a lasting influence on Indian culture, and some (like Akbar) contributed to learning in many respects. The first Mughal (Babar) may have been a foreign invader but his descendants weren't.
The likely reason for slowed growth is that PCs are lasting longer.
According to TFA, the PC market is growing very nicely thank you (13.1% in the last quarter worldwide, 7.4% in the US), and Dell's competitors (particularly HP) are benefiting. But Dell's growth was only 10.2% worldwide, and only 0.2% in the US. TFA goes on to say that for several years Dell has grown substantially faster than the overall market, so this year's change is significant.
I just love it when random slashdotters whine that Mark Shuttleworth, one of the richest South Africans, one of the first space tourists, the man who sold Thawte to Verisign and made enough to basically retire on, doesn't know how to market his products...
If you think Ubuntu is a dumb name, that's your problem. Lots of people seem to like it fine.
Caveat: i was using Kubuntu (another idiotic thing: a fork just for a different window manager?)
Kubuntu is not a fork, it's the same as Ubuntu except for default environment. The base system is identical, and you can just install the KDE packages on ubuntu or the GNOME packages on kubuntu if you want both desktop environments.
Before whining loudly in a public forum, how about getting a clue?
I sholdn't have to file bugs for errors that freaking stupid on a PRODUCTION RELEASE
What errors are you talking about? The last production release was Breezy, and I had no problem compiling anything on that (and believe me I do a lot of compiling). I'm now running a reasonably up-to-date dapper (which is not yet a production release) and I still don't see any problems.
It sounds like your family and friends really don't need that much in the way of software. There are a lot of people that can basically live in a browser. That's fine, but once you need to step out that repository universe, installing software becomes much more difficult than on windows or mac.
What do you need, that is available on linux at all, and is not available in the universe/multiverse?
Seriously. Apart from some scientific software like Matlab and Mathematica, there still isn't very much popular proprietary software for linux, but for the most part there are excellent free alternatives. The only thing I can think of that you can't get so easily is "restricted formats", which is a legal not technological problem, and there's a helpful wiki on ubuntu's site explaining what to do about that.
But if someone came to me and said, "I have a mutually profitable business arrangement I would like to discuss with you" I would at least listen
Somebody called Abacha mails me about that every day. I must have received a few hundred of his mails by now. Maybe I should listen to the guy. Apparently his father was the president of Nigeria.
Perhaps things have changed. I left the US in mid-2004.
This was their "freeup" scheme, in NYC. I got the phone (a Kyocera that was already outdated, but good enough for me) for $50 with $49 of free minutes, which lasted me almost three months. Subsequently I recharged with $15 (the minimum) about every 25-30 days. This was good enough for an average of 2-3 calls a day (generally short calls -- I used the landline for long calls). There was presumably no daily access fee.
Phone unit providers here are Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, etc -- same as anywhere else. Service providers are mostly GSM, and with them you can use any GSM phone. You buy phone separately and service separately. Most people go for prepaid. (I used prepaid even when I was in the US -- more expensive per minute, but cheaper with my usage patterns -- with Verizon I paid less than $20 a month, half what postpaid Verizon customers did. I'm amazed it's so hard to find prepaid service in the US).
Incoming calls are free if you don't roam outside your "circle". And unlike in Europe, dialling *to* a mobile phone is no more expensive than calling a landline. A lot of less-affluent people have picked up mobile phones just for that reason. If my plumber needs to call me, he gives me a "missed call" (calls and cuts off before I answer) and I call him back.
-Almost have driven off the road on various occasions while trying to punch in a message or read a message.
You send text messages while driving? I wish Darwinism worked a bit more efficiently. Unfortunately, people like you don't just kill themselves, they kill other people too.
Reading messages while driving is bad enough. Didn't it occur to you to, like, pull over, or maybe get to the next traffic light? That's a major advantage of SMS vs phone calls -- it waits for you.
I think "moron" was shorthand for "someone who asks inane questions without reading the fine article". When you run into a sufficient number of said species, you start using a more compact way of referring to them.
Conspiracy theories again run rampant as users accuse Slashdot Editors of being in cahoots with scam artists. Sounds like just a normal day at the office for me. Except that I've decided to say a few words on Slashdot article duplication process and users who try to abuse it. Read on for my rant.
It's not hard to figure out what sorts of stories Slashdot likes to duplicate. We have a format, and a subject matter. A persistent user can simply start spamming the bin with a submission about everything he finds on that week's Slashdot that comes even close. If he does it enough, he'll get a few through. Especially if he manages to get a reasonable dupe in at 11pm when there's little else to choose from.
Part of the Slashdot Editor's job is to make a submission "Presentable". Usually this means moving a few URLs around. I'd guess a good half of story dupes use the word 'here' or 'article' or something equally stupid as their anchor text. I prefer relevant words to be linked. You can look up the link at the previous version of the story. There are other minor things tho, like taking off extra intros like "Hi guys I read Slashdot every day and thought you would like this". We want the Slashdot story to be mostly distilled down to the essentials. Just the key 3-4 sentences from the previous day.
Now the real problem with this is what it does to the discussion. Last night a nice dupe was posted. And dozens of comments were posted about the dupe.
The conspiracy theories. The hostility. Now a lot of this is normal Slashdot Forum Faire. Thats fine. But the problem is that often when this occurs, it swamps out the real discussion. The fact that it's a dupe becomes the story.
I think this sucks.
The story is not about Roland or Beatles Beatles or whatever other random user submitted the last version of the story this week. I encourage moderators to use their points to mod these discussions down when they see them. As a moderator, your job ought to be to steer the discussion on-topic. The dupe is almost never the topic!
The catch-22 kills me. I might have a URL in the bin worth sharing. Something a half a million of you might enjoy. But because it is a dupe, I know that posting it will spawn a giant forum cesspool. I could throw away the article and forget it. Or I could post the story and watch as half of the discussion is simply about the previous version and not the dupe that i wanted to share in the first place.
Many users routinely email me to complain about such dupes. I'm usually fairly flexible on these matters. If the dupe is blazingly bad, I will often dupe it again and try to get it right. Of course some users like to email me to tell me how much Slashdot sucks, how fat and lazy I am, and how the most terrible thing in the history of Slashdot is the fact that the 4th story down contains the word 'to' when it ought to contain the word 'too'. That missing 'o' is the greatest travesty on-line today! It's hard to take that seriously. Especially when people are rude.
You are welcome to disagree with me on matters of grammar and spelling. And many of you do, very vocally in the forums. I would hope moderators would see such commentary as offtopic. A dupe of a story about a new motherboard chipset has nothing to do with the proper use of "Its" and "It's".
The moderation system serves many purposes, but perhaps the most important is to provide a user, 24 hours later viewing at Score 2 or 3 an accurate pulse on the dupe at hand. If the comment is not about the new motherboard chipset, or at least about the old story about the same new motherboard chipset, that comment at least should not be modded 'insightful', and in many cases, ought to be modded offtopic of flamebait.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's probably one of the longest high-speed rail stretches, right?
Well no -- the high speed line will in principle take you from Brussels (and eventually from Amsterdam or Cologne) to Marseille, but I don't think there are regular trains that do this (for profitability reasons): one needs to stop and change in Paris.
Moreover, as I said, lines are being planned from Lyon to Turin in Italy, and from Lyon to Barcelona (via Montpellier and Perpignan). The eurostar track in England is also being upgraded to a high-speed track. So in a few years, a high-speed train all the way from London to Barcelona (except for the channel tunnel itself) should be "possible"... though I expect one would still need to change in Paris.
And even today, the TGV trainset can run on all these routes, but needs to go at a lower speed on some sections.
The Wikipedia article is quite informative.
With a train like the TGV, you could do that in 5 hours. (It's about 1300 km. Currently, Paris-Marseille, 800 km, is done in 3 hours. Paris-Brussels takes 1 hr 15 mins and there are over 20 trains a day. Within the next few years there will be high speed links from Paris to Frankfurt and Barcelona.)
NY to LA is something like 56 hours, IIRC.
For those distances you'd still fly. Not many people need to do NY-LA every week.
The US is the worst country in the world for public transport, and I'm including developing countries in that statement.
What are you talking about? To install non-free software you have to manually enable additional repositories -- just as you have to enable "non-free" in Debian. There are third-party tools to do this for you like easyubuntu but they aren't official.
Not on Ubuntu it doesn't. It does depend on libnautilus-extension1, which is a very tiny package. I know because I'm running Ubuntu on AMD64, with a minimal 32bit chroot for mozilla and some helpers, and I have evince installed in the chroot and not nautilus (except for above package). The only other gnome components it needs are gnomecups and gnomeprint.
I'm interested by that statement. As I posted elsewhere, networkmanager worked for me in a WEP network under breezy, but not under dapper, and that's with two different laptops with different drivers -- one native, one NDIS. Perhaps, as you say, the problem is the router.
But the thing is iwconfig works for me. So why doesn't networkmanager work? I think it uses wpasupplicant, not iwconfig, but surely if iwconfig can do it right wpasupplicant can be fixed.
Specifically, though, it's not wifi that's broken -- it's networkmanager. Which wasn't a default part of breezy so one can argue that nothing was really broken. I can no longer authenticate to a WEP network that requires a key, and that's with two different laptops, one using NDISwrapper and a Windows driver, one using a native Prism2 driver. On both, manually using iwconfig and dhclient works. I can live with that but it doesn't look good in a desktop OS. And it's not just me -- there are many bug reports (including mine).
I don't get it -- why should that fail? Why should a school feed kids rubbish? In an ideal setup there would be no need for moms to monitor what kids eat, because the school wouldn't be feeding them junk. (I live in India and the schools aren't yet MacDonaldised.)
Thanks for the illustration of what Norvig meant. How is "Google Director of Search and AAAI Fellow Peter Norvig" (original article) semantically equivalent to "fellow Google exec" (Slashdot summary)? The latter suggests that Tim Berners-Lee too is a Google exec, which would be news to him.
Eh? They are British (even if some of them would rather forget that fact). They aren't English.
If he objects to providing that information, he can say so, but this sort of easily-refuted hyperbole doesn't help.
My favourite comment on Gehry (from the Onion some years ago)
Not that I agree with the ancestor post that the Muslims were to blame for anything. They had a lasting influence on Indian culture, and some (like Akbar) contributed to learning in many respects. The first Mughal (Babar) may have been a foreign invader but his descendants weren't.
According to TFA, the PC market is growing very nicely thank you (13.1% in the last quarter worldwide, 7.4% in the US), and Dell's competitors (particularly HP) are benefiting. But Dell's growth was only 10.2% worldwide, and only 0.2% in the US. TFA goes on to say that for several years Dell has grown substantially faster than the overall market, so this year's change is significant.
If you think Ubuntu is a dumb name, that's your problem. Lots of people seem to like it fine.
Kubuntu is not a fork, it's the same as Ubuntu except for default environment. The base system is identical, and you can just install the KDE packages on ubuntu or the GNOME packages on kubuntu if you want both desktop environments.
Before whining loudly in a public forum, how about getting a clue?
What errors are you talking about? The last production release was Breezy, and I had no problem compiling anything on that (and believe me I do a lot of compiling). I'm now running a reasonably up-to-date dapper (which is not yet a production release) and I still don't see any problems.
What do you need, that is available on linux at all, and is not available in the universe/multiverse?
Seriously. Apart from some scientific software like Matlab and Mathematica, there still isn't very much popular proprietary software for linux, but for the most part there are excellent free alternatives. The only thing I can think of that you can't get so easily is "restricted formats", which is a legal not technological problem, and there's a helpful wiki on ubuntu's site explaining what to do about that.
Somebody called Abacha mails me about that every day. I must have received a few hundred of his mails by now. Maybe I should listen to the guy. Apparently his father was the president of Nigeria.
Perhaps things have changed. I left the US in mid-2004. This was their "freeup" scheme, in NYC. I got the phone (a Kyocera that was already outdated, but good enough for me) for $50 with $49 of free minutes, which lasted me almost three months. Subsequently I recharged with $15 (the minimum) about every 25-30 days. This was good enough for an average of 2-3 calls a day (generally short calls -- I used the landline for long calls). There was presumably no daily access fee.
Phone unit providers here are Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, etc -- same as anywhere else. Service providers are mostly GSM, and with them you can use any GSM phone. You buy phone separately and service separately. Most people go for prepaid. (I used prepaid even when I was in the US -- more expensive per minute, but cheaper with my usage patterns -- with Verizon I paid less than $20 a month, half what postpaid Verizon customers did. I'm amazed it's so hard to find prepaid service in the US). Incoming calls are free if you don't roam outside your "circle". And unlike in Europe, dialling *to* a mobile phone is no more expensive than calling a landline. A lot of less-affluent people have picked up mobile phones just for that reason. If my plumber needs to call me, he gives me a "missed call" (calls and cuts off before I answer) and I call him back.
What do we know today that we didn't know in November 2004?
You send text messages while driving? I wish Darwinism worked a bit more efficiently. Unfortunately, people like you don't just kill themselves, they kill other people too.
Reading messages while driving is bad enough. Didn't it occur to you to, like, pull over, or maybe get to the next traffic light? That's a major advantage of SMS vs phone calls -- it waits for you.
I think "moron" was shorthand for "someone who asks inane questions without reading the fine article". When you run into a sufficient number of said species, you start using a more compact way of referring to them.
No, it's not. It's a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
On the matter of Slashdot story duplication
Conspiracy theories again run rampant as users accuse Slashdot Editors of being in cahoots with scam artists. Sounds like just a normal day at the office for me. Except that I've decided to say a few words on Slashdot article duplication process and users who try to abuse it. Read on for my rant.
It's not hard to figure out what sorts of stories Slashdot likes to duplicate. We have a format, and a subject matter. A persistent user can simply start spamming the bin with a submission about everything he finds on that week's Slashdot that comes even close. If he does it enough, he'll get a few through. Especially if he manages to get a reasonable dupe in at 11pm when there's little else to choose from.
Part of the Slashdot Editor's job is to make a submission "Presentable". Usually this means moving a few URLs around. I'd guess a good half of story dupes use the word 'here' or 'article' or something equally stupid as their anchor text. I prefer relevant words to be linked. You can look up the link at the previous version of the story. There are other minor things tho, like taking off extra intros like "Hi guys I read Slashdot every day and thought you would like this". We want the Slashdot story to be mostly distilled down to the essentials. Just the key 3-4 sentences from the previous day.
Now the real problem with this is what it does to the discussion. Last night a nice dupe was posted. And dozens of comments were posted about the dupe. The conspiracy theories. The hostility. Now a lot of this is normal Slashdot Forum Faire. Thats fine. But the problem is that often when this occurs, it swamps out the real discussion. The fact that it's a dupe becomes the story.
I think this sucks.
The story is not about Roland or Beatles Beatles or whatever other random user submitted the last version of the story this week. I encourage moderators to use their points to mod these discussions down when they see them. As a moderator, your job ought to be to steer the discussion on-topic. The dupe is almost never the topic!
The catch-22 kills me. I might have a URL in the bin worth sharing. Something a half a million of you might enjoy. But because it is a dupe, I know that posting it will spawn a giant forum cesspool. I could throw away the article and forget it. Or I could post the story and watch as half of the discussion is simply about the previous version and not the dupe that i wanted to share in the first place.
Many users routinely email me to complain about such dupes. I'm usually fairly flexible on these matters. If the dupe is blazingly bad, I will often dupe it again and try to get it right. Of course some users like to email me to tell me how much Slashdot sucks, how fat and lazy I am, and how the most terrible thing in the history of Slashdot is the fact that the 4th story down contains the word 'to' when it ought to contain the word 'too'. That missing 'o' is the greatest travesty on-line today! It's hard to take that seriously. Especially when people are rude.
You are welcome to disagree with me on matters of grammar and spelling. And many of you do, very vocally in the forums. I would hope moderators would see such commentary as offtopic. A dupe of a story about a new motherboard chipset has nothing to do with the proper use of "Its" and "It's".
The moderation system serves many purposes, but perhaps the most important is to provide a user, 24 hours later viewing at Score 2 or 3 an accurate pulse on the dupe at hand. If the comment is not about the new motherboard chipset, or at least about the old story about the same new motherboard chipset, that comment at least should not be modded 'insightful', and in many cases, ought to be modded offtopic of flamebait.