Unlike the other replies, I'd like to point you to an ACTUAL twitter-like service.
GNU/Social is a PHP-based microblogging platform that you can install and maintain yourself. It uses OStatus to communicate between instances, and has a small following already.
If you'd like to try it out, you could most definitely find an instance (like Quitter) that you could try.:)
Who mentioned Hurd? I didn't. That's not even a good strawman.
You mentioned Crunchbang used a stock Debian kernel as a seeming downside, so I picked a facetious example of a non-stock kernel. You may commence your giggling.
Why is the comparison point a netinstall? And why, on a system that can be upgraded from version to version, does anyone care very much about configuring it the first time? You only have to install once, not repeatedly. How hard is a netinstall anyway?
Because that's how I've set up my Openbox desktops previously? I tend to distro-hop, so I end up reconfiguring quite a bit. If you're upgrading the same system for years, you're right, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference to you.
As for the website not giving you a bulleted list of features... who cares? There's no Crunchbang copywriters, no marketing department, etc; just the guy who makes the distro. If you're mortally offended by the About page, then by all means, don't download an ISO - or, hop on over to the Crunchbang forums and offer to help them out with their website.
There are plenty of great distros to use out there, including vanilla Debian. If Crunchbang doesn't qualify as an officially blessed, fully-qualified Linux distribution in your eyes... I think we'll find the will to go on living & using it ourselves.;)
Yeah, the bar at the top is the tint2 (https://code.google.com/p/tint2/) panel / taskbar. It's very configurable - the config options are well documented on their project page.
Your right, Crunchbang is essentially Debian with a dark theme - that's one of the reasons I like it so much.
The reason I use it over vanilla Debian is that all of the manual configuration and package selection that I'd do with a Debian netinstall is already done in Crunchbang. A couple config tweaks, and my system's fully-configured. They do add a lot of helper bash scripts and they add some custom packages in their repo, but mostly I use it because it's a Debian + Openbox installation with sensible defaults.
Saying that it's not a distro just because they don't include a custom compiled GNU/Hurd kernel and a fully reimplemented software repository is a little short-sighted. Half the Linux distros in existence are mostly Debian at their core.
Nothing, essentially; Crunchbang just augments the desktop side of Debian, and leaves the rest of it as-is. If you're using it headless, you're just using Debian.
I think the main reason Crunchbang stands out for me as a distro is how well it suits the way I use my computers, and how little tweaking it needs to fit my preferences.
The Crunchbang "dev" - I'm pretty sure it's just Philip - has customized the GTK and Openbox themes, as well as the Openbox menu and the tint2 theme, without inextricably linking them together. If you want another panel, it's easy to swap out tint2 for your favorite. Honestly, I usually leave the defaults because they look awesome.
Philip has also pre-defined keyboard shortcuts so that you can launch your main applications without going through a menu system or leaving the keyboard. There's a cheat sheet built into the desktop via conky that lists the most useful shortcuts there. If you want to tweak the configurations, there's a in-depth right click menu that points you to all of the config options/files.
All of this attention to detail leaves a very minimal system that does exactly what I want, and then gets out of my way. It's like getting the best aspects of a desktop environment with the memory footprint of a barebones window manager.
I'd say it was definitely an isolated occurrence. I use Crunchbang on all of my machines, and have found the community surrounding the distro to be very friendly whenever I've popped into the forums. I was able to meet Phil and Becky Newborough at a barcamp a couple years ago as well, and they're one of the nicest couples you could have at the forefront of your distro.:)
It seems to vary widely by region; in Upstate NY, our basic service is 5mb down, 1mb up and costs $55 monthly after all of the first year deals fall away.
I'd love gigabit service, but at their current pricing model up here, $11,000 a month is a bit steep.
I found myself in the market for a graphics card recently, and after the research and hassle of figuring out what has been released as open source, I decided to delay the decision by sticking with an older NVIDIA card I had kicking around.
Now that I know this series of AMD cards is supported with open source drivers, I'm much more comfortable running it in my Linux desktop than my old NVIDIA card, which requires their proprietary drivers.
I would be curious to see what effect services like PayPal would have on the ability for credit card companies to sell your data to advertisers. Do they still receive the relevant data, or is that retained at PayPal's level?
Granted, there's also nothing to prevent PayPal from doing the same thing with the customer data it collects. Back to gold doubloons handled with gloves, I suppose...
A simple way to donate back would be to buy one of their upgraded accounts for a little while. While RuneScape is a free MMORPG, I think their business model revolves around these upgraded accounts, and that would probably be the easiest way to support them.
Otherwise, their corporate site has a contact page (http://www.jagex.com/corporate/Contact/contact.ws) with a bunch of email addresses. I imagine that any one of them would work, especially if the message was "I have this money I'd like you to have".:)
"In computer science, ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a set of properties that guarantee database transactions are processed reliably. In the context of databases, a single logical operation on the data is called a transaction."
Sure, most games won't run natively just yet - only games based on Valve's source engine.
But when I'm on Steam (and I own dozens and dozens of games, put out by several different publishers), 99% of the time I'll be playing a Valve game. I currently have 300+ hours racked up in Team Fortress 2 alone.
If I can format my Windows gaming partition, and only play Valve games on Linux, I'd say it's a sacrifice I'd be willing to make. I suppose Valve will be the only publisher to get my purchases from now on.
You can also upgrade Ubuntu with an alternate install CD. These can be downloaded via bittorrent, and usually trigger an "automatic update" prompt as soon as they are inserted into an existing Ubuntu system.
I have had nothing but trouble getting Valve's games to run smoothly under Linux, and by reading through the support forums I can see that I'm not the only one.
Mind you, this is on a brand new quad-core 2.3GHz machine with a 384MB NVidia graphics card.
While I don't doubt they'd consider creating a package out of the whole thing, I would like to think that they are interested in opening up to the general Linux market a little as well. I've bought every Valve game so far, so it would be nice to know that my switch to Linux isn't going to prevent me from continuing that trend.
I run VirtualBox on my work machine (XP Host) so that I can test the sites I develop against Linux browsers like Konqueror and Galeon (and so I can use Windows as little as possible;). I tried using QEMU before, but VirtualBox takes away a lot of the complication. Plus, Seamless mode is an excellent way to test web sites.
My only complaint is that it doesn't support a virtualized Windows 2000 system just yet - unless I just haven't figured it out.
I'm a web developer at a medium-sized (county) municipality, and I don't encounter too much downtime.
However, when it does happen, I usually try and brush up on the latest security news (Slashdot counts!), check server logs, clean out unused files from the web directory, etc. to keep me busy. They're all little things, none too terribly important, but it helps to keep things running smoothly.
I try and keep personal stuff to a minimum, since I'm being paid with tax dollars, and will eventually have to pay for any of my 'goofing off' with my own taxes. I'd like to think other civil servants think the same way!
I agree - the problem is in the underlying Flash plugin, and uses the documented functionality of the 'navigateToURL' function and the 'URLRequest' object. This isn't as much a problem with browsers or Flash, though, as much as it is a weakness in UPnP.
Whatever browser you use, if you have one of those home Internet Gateway routers, then make sure UPnP is disabled and you're not using the default password!
Also, keep an eye on your other networked devices (phones, cameras, etc.) - they may also support UPnP and would be vulnerable.
I'd have to agree with Chris - Portal would be my choice for "Best Game of 2007".
I'm not sure who thought of making a first-person puzzle-shooting dark comedy game, but it just so happened to come together wonderfully. Add in the fact that GLADOS was the only real "enemy" of the game (unless you count the turrets), and you have one of the most ingenuitive games I've ever played. It's no wonder that 'The cake is a LIE!' and the 'Companion Cube' are now concepts easily recognized by most gamers and non-gamers alike. If only they had added some kind of multiplayer component!
True, rounded anything is hard to achieve with the current CSS support we have in browsers. However, a lot of that is addressed with CSS3. Check out http://virtuelvis.com/download/218/border-radius.html to see a preview of some of the border-radius properties - most of which don't work in many browsers.
For now, I try to add any non-semantic HTML with Javascript, at least to keep it out of the way. It's a pretty ugly way to do things, but it's what we have to work with currently.
I had the same thought about the 'colspan' attribute, but after some quick Google'd research, I discovered why they made those particular attributes required.
Since CSS is supposed to be strictly presentational, those kinds of details need to be designated in the HTML. Colspan has to deal with the structure of a table, and the number of rows has to deal with the structure of the textarea.
Whether that's appropriate or not for textareas is beyond me, but the colspan thing made sense. Just wanted to shed some light on the thinking behind leaving those attributes in.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike the other replies, I'd like to point you to an ACTUAL twitter-like service.
GNU/Social is a PHP-based microblogging platform that you can install and maintain yourself. It uses OStatus to communicate between instances, and has a small following already.
If you'd like to try it out, you could most definitely find an instance (like Quitter) that you could try. :)
I really like the way that these types of programs are taking us. It's about time that my computer starts listening to me while I'm yelling at it!
I've been using Blather myself, and really enjoy the results.
Who mentioned Hurd? I didn't. That's not even a good strawman.
You mentioned Crunchbang used a stock Debian kernel as a seeming downside, so I picked a facetious example of a non-stock kernel. You may commence your giggling.
Why is the comparison point a netinstall? And why, on a system that can be upgraded from version to version, does anyone care very much about configuring it the first time? You only have to install once, not repeatedly. How hard is a netinstall anyway?
Because that's how I've set up my Openbox desktops previously? I tend to distro-hop, so I end up reconfiguring quite a bit. If you're upgrading the same system for years, you're right, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference to you.
As for the website not giving you a bulleted list of features... who cares? There's no Crunchbang copywriters, no marketing department, etc; just the guy who makes the distro. If you're mortally offended by the About page, then by all means, don't download an ISO - or, hop on over to the Crunchbang forums and offer to help them out with their website.
There are plenty of great distros to use out there, including vanilla Debian. If Crunchbang doesn't qualify as an officially blessed, fully-qualified Linux distribution in your eyes... I think we'll find the will to go on living & using it ourselves. ;)
Yeah, the bar at the top is the tint2 (https://code.google.com/p/tint2/) panel / taskbar. It's very configurable - the config options are well documented on their project page.
Your right, Crunchbang is essentially Debian with a dark theme - that's one of the reasons I like it so much.
The reason I use it over vanilla Debian is that all of the manual configuration and package selection that I'd do with a Debian netinstall is already done in Crunchbang. A couple config tweaks, and my system's fully-configured. They do add a lot of helper bash scripts and they add some custom packages in their repo, but mostly I use it because it's a Debian + Openbox installation with sensible defaults.
Saying that it's not a distro just because they don't include a custom compiled GNU/Hurd kernel and a fully reimplemented software repository is a little short-sighted. Half the Linux distros in existence are mostly Debian at their core.
Nothing, essentially; Crunchbang just augments the desktop side of Debian, and leaves the rest of it as-is. If you're using it headless, you're just using Debian.
I think the main reason Crunchbang stands out for me as a distro is how well it suits the way I use my computers, and how little tweaking it needs to fit my preferences.
The Crunchbang "dev" - I'm pretty sure it's just Philip - has customized the GTK and Openbox themes, as well as the Openbox menu and the tint2 theme, without inextricably linking them together. If you want another panel, it's easy to swap out tint2 for your favorite. Honestly, I usually leave the defaults because they look awesome.
Philip has also pre-defined keyboard shortcuts so that you can launch your main applications without going through a menu system or leaving the keyboard. There's a cheat sheet built into the desktop via conky that lists the most useful shortcuts there. If you want to tweak the configurations, there's a in-depth right click menu that points you to all of the config options/files.
All of this attention to detail leaves a very minimal system that does exactly what I want, and then gets out of my way. It's like getting the best aspects of a desktop environment with the memory footprint of a barebones window manager.
I'd say it was definitely an isolated occurrence. I use Crunchbang on all of my machines, and have found the community surrounding the distro to be very friendly whenever I've popped into the forums. I was able to meet Phil and Becky Newborough at a barcamp a couple years ago as well, and they're one of the nicest couples you could have at the forefront of your distro. :)
It seems to vary widely by region; in Upstate NY, our basic service is 5mb down, 1mb up and costs $55 monthly after all of the first year deals fall away.
I'd love gigabit service, but at their current pricing model up here, $11,000 a month is a bit steep.
I found myself in the market for a graphics card recently, and after the research and hassle of figuring out what has been released as open source, I decided to delay the decision by sticking with an older NVIDIA card I had kicking around.
Now that I know this series of AMD cards is supported with open source drivers, I'm much more comfortable running it in my Linux desktop than my old NVIDIA card, which requires their proprietary drivers.
I would be curious to see what effect services like PayPal would have on the ability for credit card companies to sell your data to advertisers. Do they still receive the relevant data, or is that retained at PayPal's level?
Granted, there's also nothing to prevent PayPal from doing the same thing with the customer data it collects. Back to gold doubloons handled with gloves, I suppose...
"With the one glaring exception of the desktop computer" sounds a lot like "Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
A simple way to donate back would be to buy one of their upgraded accounts for a little while. While RuneScape is a free MMORPG, I think their business model revolves around these upgraded accounts, and that would probably be the easiest way to support them.
Otherwise, their corporate site has a contact page (http://www.jagex.com/corporate/Contact/contact.ws) with a bunch of email addresses. I imagine that any one of them would work, especially if the message was "I have this money I'd like you to have". :)
From the Wikipedia Article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID)
"In computer science, ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a set of properties that guarantee database transactions are processed reliably. In the context of databases, a single logical operation on the data is called a transaction."
Sure, most games won't run natively just yet - only games based on Valve's source engine.
But when I'm on Steam (and I own dozens and dozens of games, put out by several different publishers), 99% of the time I'll be playing a Valve game. I currently have 300+ hours racked up in Team Fortress 2 alone.
If I can format my Windows gaming partition, and only play Valve games on Linux, I'd say it's a sacrifice I'd be willing to make. I suppose Valve will be the only publisher to get my purchases from now on.
You can also upgrade Ubuntu with an alternate install CD. These can be downloaded via bittorrent, and usually trigger an "automatic update" prompt as soon as they are inserted into an existing Ubuntu system.
I have had nothing but trouble getting Valve's games to run smoothly under Linux, and by reading through the support forums I can see that I'm not the only one.
Mind you, this is on a brand new quad-core 2.3GHz machine with a 384MB NVidia graphics card.
While I don't doubt they'd consider creating a package out of the whole thing, I would like to think that they are interested in opening up to the general Linux market a little as well. I've bought every Valve game so far, so it would be nice to know that my switch to Linux isn't going to prevent me from continuing that trend.
As a NewEgg customer and a New Yorker, I'm glad they finally quit playing along with our rogue Attorney General.
This is the same attorney general that convinced major ISPs to block access to newsgroups because they might be used to transmit child pornography.
I can't wait until he's up for election, personally.
I run VirtualBox on my work machine (XP Host) so that I can test the sites I develop against Linux browsers like Konqueror and Galeon (and so I can use Windows as little as possible ;). I tried using QEMU before, but VirtualBox takes away a lot of the complication. Plus, Seamless mode is an excellent way to test web sites.
My only complaint is that it doesn't support a virtualized Windows 2000 system just yet - unless I just haven't figured it out.
I'm a web developer at a medium-sized (county) municipality, and I don't encounter too much downtime. However, when it does happen, I usually try and brush up on the latest security news (Slashdot counts!), check server logs, clean out unused files from the web directory, etc. to keep me busy. They're all little things, none too terribly important, but it helps to keep things running smoothly. I try and keep personal stuff to a minimum, since I'm being paid with tax dollars, and will eventually have to pay for any of my 'goofing off' with my own taxes. I'd like to think other civil servants think the same way!
I agree - the problem is in the underlying Flash plugin, and uses the documented functionality of the 'navigateToURL' function and the 'URLRequest' object. This isn't as much a problem with browsers or Flash, though, as much as it is a weakness in UPnP.
Whatever browser you use, if you have one of those home Internet Gateway routers, then make sure UPnP is disabled and you're not using the default password!
Also, keep an eye on your other networked devices (phones, cameras, etc.) - they may also support UPnP and would be vulnerable.
Here's an update from GNUCITIZENS with further clarifications: http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/flash-upnp-attack-faq
I'd have to agree with Chris - Portal would be my choice for "Best Game of 2007".
I'm not sure who thought of making a first-person puzzle-shooting dark comedy game, but it just so happened to come together wonderfully. Add in the fact that GLADOS was the only real "enemy" of the game (unless you count the turrets), and you have one of the most ingenuitive games I've ever played. It's no wonder that 'The cake is a LIE!' and the 'Companion Cube' are now concepts easily recognized by most gamers and non-gamers alike. If only they had added some kind of multiplayer component!
True, rounded anything is hard to achieve with the current CSS support we have in browsers. However, a lot of that is addressed with CSS3. Check out http://virtuelvis.com/download/218/border-radius.html to see a preview of some of the border-radius properties - most of which don't work in many browsers.
For now, I try to add any non-semantic HTML with Javascript, at least to keep it out of the way. It's a pretty ugly way to do things, but it's what we have to work with currently.
I had the same thought about the 'colspan' attribute, but after some quick Google'd research, I discovered why they made those particular attributes required.
Since CSS is supposed to be strictly presentational, those kinds of details need to be designated in the HTML. Colspan has to deal with the structure of a table, and the number of rows has to deal with the structure of the textarea.
Whether that's appropriate or not for textareas is beyond me, but the colspan thing made sense. Just wanted to shed some light on the thinking behind leaving those attributes in.
One benefit of the Slashdot effect is the ad revenues - maybe they're trying to offset their bandwidth costs?