That's a good idea... I may decide to switch next year once I'm heading to grad school as well. I've always admired Mac products (my first mac was one of those old ones that you had to have an external harddrive for and looked like a cardboard box, kinda) but it was awesome! I loved asteroids on that thing.
Ahem, anyways, I'll be saving up money furiously for a year. Who knows, by then maybe they will have something even spiffier out?
Right now I'm stuck with x86, but by then I will probably get a ppc.
Oh, and mandrake 10.1 is gonna be released for ppc too... Which rules. I'd love to test it out on a new iMac.
Does the hardware for these phones not have a built in filter to protect the user from this type of thing?
Isn't there hardware in these devices that prevents very loud noises/extremely high pitched noise? I mean, how hard is it to put a volume hardware filter on these devices. There's no reason to have something as loud or as high pitched as was being described, is there?
As a side note, what if an mp3 is corrupted on my mp3 player and the corrupted data causes an extremely high-pitched tone to be emitted for a long duration...? Do mp3 players have hardware (like a volume filter, or a high pass filter) that would prevent me from going deaf?
Isn't this the classic chicken before the egg problem?
Will widespread acceptance of linux occur only when dominant software makers support linux, or will widespread acceptance of linux cause dominant software makers to support linux?
Which will come first?
It's my opinion that widespread usage will occur first. Then software giants will realize the demand, and they will start supporting it.
Linux deserves respect and support from vendors, and I believe it will get it soon.
I've been saying this for a while on slashdot. I've tuned my box so I can make it do what I used to do on my windows box at work (which was a significant amount of applications / work).
linux is ready for prime time. No doubt about it.
People have a choice now; they just need to know about it. I suppose it's our job to let people know about it.
I use XFce, I long ago abandoned KDE. I know KDE is still very popular, so I'm probably a loner in this respect... But I do enjoy the simplicity of XFce much more. I was using kmail a lot and I do remember using my own custom icons for folders.. I also do remember that annoying icon it uses for spam, I think the icon was corrupted (?)
I use firefox and I don't know what you meant by send picture. Also the hardware problems you specify, I do not have issues with... Again it may be kernel 2.6, or unsupported hardware. Who knows.
I'm sorry if I don't really identify with the specific problems you've found, as many of the problems I have never experienced. Sorry to hear you haven't had a good experience, but there are plenty of other distros out there if you don't like mandrake.
BTW I'm sorry if I came off as advertising for mandrake, I didn't mean that at all. That's just the distro I started off with (at 9.0). I'd probably be fine in any distro (red hat, suse, debian even... well ok maybe it'd take some time to get used to debian), because I usually don't use the tools the distro comes with (I compile XFce from CVS).
Anyways, hope you can find a distro that suits your needs:) If you want to work through any of your problems, feel free to stop by #mandrake on irc.freenode.net.
P.S. I use X-chat 2.0.8 and I'm not sure what you meant by x-chat being ugly; it looks normal to me:)
I don't really want linux to be as popular as microsoft windows.
I just want it to get some respect, and get some support from hardware vendors.
I'm not a developer. I'm a user of linux. And I just want it to work.
It works fine for me now, with the hardware I have, so it's not that I have a problem with linux; I have a problem with vendors who think windows and mac is the only game in town.
Luckily things are much better now than they used to be, so perhaps I could just say this:
I just want linux to get some respect. That is all.
I could give a rat's ass about toppling Microsoft, they simply don't matter to me right now.
But linux is already there for me (mandrake 10). The gui is very usable, and I have CXOffice for my windows app needs, as well as the OSS solutions as often as possible. I VPN into work with pptp-client, and I do work with photoshop/dreamweaver mx or bluefish/acrobat.
I find this kind of article mystifying. I find mandrake 10 to be oriented towards the end-user, for I AM an enduser. And I get work done.
I bet all the posts on this page could be found in the previous articles harping on the "linux needs to be friendly to end-users" meme; but people just haven't realized yet that there ARE distros out there which are friendly to the end-users.
IRC is where I go for most of my needs that aren't met by google et. al... On there you can find some real gems, real experts in the fields (also total wannabe-linux-gurus)... But all in all my experience has been great. irc.freenode.net is a great place, with some quality channels.
Happy mandrake 10 user here. It just makes my life easier. Finally without a windows partition!!
I've been using mandrake for 2 years now... before that I was a windows fanboy.
Anyways... linux has been great. I am able to do everything I need to for my job in linux (CXOffice has been wonderful).
If this setup eventually becomes popular and widespread, and we as a nation are playing these videos games...which soldiers play to get trained for fighting in battle...
How does that make you feel? Knowing that you are playing the same games that are used for training for soldier's in the army?
Am I the only one that is scared by that thought?
Is our nation a nation of war and destruction? Are our future young children going to grow up being trained to kill?
I know it's a bit of a stretch to say that playing one of these games makes you suitable to the army. But it's still kind of frightening. Aren't we as civilians supposed to be spending our time actually building our country? Does anyone else think that we should be thinking about this?
I value the future of our country; and I do not want us mentally to be become hardened killers... I honestly hope I am not alone in this.
By the way, did anyone else think of Bradbury's short story "The Veldt" when this article came up?
P.S. Strange that this short story is available on the web... Hmm, google is great, what can I say... Buy one of Bradbury's books if you haven't, he's a great read.
Here's a little hack I made for gkrellm. It works pretty well. I'm currently working on creating a plugin for monitoring multiple gmail accounts. It has some bugs still, but it works pretty well (it's basically a hack of mailwatch, and I've added in the revolving penguin too!).
Unisys has GOT to be better than 30% of the projects on sourceforge.net
Honestly man, when it comes to open source, the more the merrier!
Besides we'll have lots of l33t coders to go through their code and make snide comments. I'm sure the devs at Unisys will die of shame, if they don't revise their coding practices.
Or even better (this way no one dies) someone who's better can fix their code and submit it back to them.
productivity applications will forever be 5+ years behind
I don't know about you, but Microsoft Office 2000 is still more than enough for my desktop productivity needs. I can't imagine why I'd need anything newer.
And yes, it runs on linux, with CrossOver Office ($40).
Also just discovered this great desktop publishing app, scribus. I've been using pagemaker, and after having my pagemaker file mysteriously get corrupted after a period of a year on windows, I discovered that I'm not doing anything in pagemaker that scribus won't do. Sure, there are some things pagemaker does that scribus will never do. I just don't need those features.
Personally I think that the myth that linux isn't able to have productive applications is a myth that needs to be dispelled.
Why do you think patents only exist for "killer features?"
Come on man, companies patent everything, and I mean, EVERYTHING, to protect themselves, so that if someone decides to rip off their cool method for software customization of lighting in a case, they have some way to bring them to court, or at least get some payback.
I don't know if it's really a good thing, but that's just standard practice among companies these days.
But can you legitimately say that hotmail is even comparable with gmail?
Gmail's web interface is second to none. I don't want to see this email service threatened. Actually, I would like it if they gave me @google.com for emails, because @gmail.com just sounds so... dirty.
Also, I don't know why people think slashdot as a whole is biased against MS. Sure the editors are. But I see more posts on MS vs. linux stories defending MS than attacking it.
Personally I think the idea that the community on slashdot is anti-MS is vastly over-exagerated.
Myself, I don't like Microsoft much, but I have to use their products. I'm glad they're starting to get their act together with SP2, and I'll be interested to see what they do with Longhorn.
Ugh, that sounds horrible... I hope you have backups =/
Personally I use backuppc for day to day backups (it works wonders! I love the new version).
Here's the website: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
I actually talked to some people on IRC and it looks like I'm one of the lucky few who never has to do anything special; apparently others have to run firefox first as root, then they can run as normal user from there onwards. Your problem sounds worse however.
BTW when I install firefox, I install to a completely new directory (there are no other files there) and I symlink a folder to the new folder, e.g. I symlink mozilla-firefox to the directory mozilla-firefox-0.9.3. I do have to copy over all my plugins from the old firefox but that's not too hard, and I haven't had a corrupted install yet. Do most people just install over the existing firefox? I'm not willing to test it o_o.
I had no problems either. I got the pango error but that's not really an "error" as such, just a warning. Running firefox 0.9.3 right now after the install and everything works flawlessly.
I really like the firefox installer; I haven't had to restore my backups of my profile or a previous version of firefox... ever.
Guess windows users get the short end of the stick, reading various other posts about windows woes.
Hmm that's interesting, I hadn't thought about actual support of CrossoverOffice. It's on the system, but how do you support it when it's really windows in wine, with proprietary stuff done by Codeweavers to make it work better?
Well, from a support perspective, crossover office isn't really that great, considering if things go wrong with the app, there's not a whole lot you can do, and customers will probably blame you.
That's where I guess you should really try to find Linux/OSS alternatives as much as possible, and if the client absolutely demands software that does run on Crossover Office, you tell them that things may go wrong, and there's not a whole lot you can do about it. But you say you support people who use it, so maybe you know a lot more about it than me =)
That doesn't sound very good, does it. I suppose vmware is really the only solution for corporate environments that need windows software.
Vmware is a great tool, and I'm glad they've lowered their prices.
Comparing the bedroom and the skull to a vehicle which can and does cause bodily harm and death is very unreasonable. Both the bedroom and the skull are personal, private areas.
Driving a car in public, you cannot and should not expect that your behavior will not be monitored. It's PUBLIC. Not private.
They're not going to install cameras inside your car to see what you're doing inside the car. These black boxes are monitoring behavior on the road, which is NOT private, as everyone sees what you're doing, and your actions have a very real effect on the people/things/environment around you.
As TFA talks about, one of the key reasons for implementing this decision is The board concluded investigators could have gained a better scientific understanding of Weller's behavior had his 1992 Buick LeSabre been outfitted with an event data recorder, or "black box."
This is perfectly reasonable and should be done, IMO. I'd like to see more details as to what the black boxes will actually be doing, however.
What uses this data is put to is where abuses can occur. Will they communicate with GPS and keep a record of your movements in the car? That is unreasonable, and I don't think they'll do that. If all they need are to record events that occur, i.e. when you press the gas, when you press the brakes, that won't tell anyone a whole lot about where you've been.
Also I imagine the data from the black box is cleared periodically. Well, I'd like to see more information about it before I decide whether it's a good thing or not. But I feel the grandparent post has a very valid point.
Whenever I see Darl in the news I always think "What if.."
What if, instead of pursuing hopeless litigation against other behemoth companies, you just tried to please the customers you had and try to make your product a better product?
They would have failed, yes. Probably. But, who knows? Maybe they would have been able to garner a reputation for good service, and hold onto their core base for a longer time then they are now. Maybe they could have even segued into providing linux solutions, and made partnerships with other major companies (like IBM) instead of suing.
Would SCO be a more successful company if they had? They might have failed yes, but they would have a good reputation, and they might have even been successful (or bought out), if they had played their cards right. Alas, they threw it all to the wind on a shot-the-moon scenario that will only end in tears for everyone.
It just saddens me that people have such a lack of perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem, anyways, I'll be saving up money furiously for a year. Who knows, by then maybe they will have something even spiffier out?
Right now I'm stuck with x86, but by then I will probably get a ppc.
Oh, and mandrake 10.1 is gonna be released for ppc too... Which rules. I'd love to test it out on a new iMac.
My tutorial on checking gmail status in gkrellm still works flawlessly.
Isn't there hardware in these devices that prevents very loud noises/extremely high pitched noise? I mean, how hard is it to put a volume hardware filter on these devices. There's no reason to have something as loud or as high pitched as was being described, is there?
As a side note, what if an mp3 is corrupted on my mp3 player and the corrupted data causes an extremely high-pitched tone to be emitted for a long duration...? Do mp3 players have hardware (like a volume filter, or a high pass filter) that would prevent me from going deaf?
Will widespread acceptance of linux occur only when dominant software makers support linux, or will widespread acceptance of linux cause dominant software makers to support linux?
Which will come first?
It's my opinion that widespread usage will occur first. Then software giants will realize the demand, and they will start supporting it.
Linux deserves respect and support from vendors, and I believe it will get it soon.
You can still love your country and question it's direction.
Remember, patriotism does not mean you have to wave a flag.
linux is ready for prime time. No doubt about it.
People have a choice now; they just need to know about it. I suppose it's our job to let people know about it.
I use XFce, I long ago abandoned KDE. I know KDE is still very popular, so I'm probably a loner in this respect... But I do enjoy the simplicity of XFce much more. I was using kmail a lot and I do remember using my own custom icons for folders.. I also do remember that annoying icon it uses for spam, I think the icon was corrupted (?)
I use firefox and I don't know what you meant by send picture. Also the hardware problems you specify, I do not have issues with... Again it may be kernel 2.6, or unsupported hardware. Who knows.
I'm sorry if I don't really identify with the specific problems you've found, as many of the problems I have never experienced. Sorry to hear you haven't had a good experience, but there are plenty of other distros out there if you don't like mandrake.
BTW I'm sorry if I came off as advertising for mandrake, I didn't mean that at all. That's just the distro I started off with (at 9.0). I'd probably be fine in any distro (red hat, suse, debian even... well ok maybe it'd take some time to get used to debian), because I usually don't use the tools the distro comes with (I compile XFce from CVS).
Anyways, hope you can find a distro that suits your needs :) If you want to work through any of your problems, feel free to stop by #mandrake on irc.freenode.net.
P.S. I use X-chat 2.0.8 and I'm not sure what you meant by x-chat being ugly; it looks normal to me :)
I don't really want linux to be as popular as microsoft windows.
I just want it to get some respect, and get some support from hardware vendors.
I'm not a developer. I'm a user of linux. And I just want it to work.
It works fine for me now, with the hardware I have, so it's not that I have a problem with linux; I have a problem with vendors who think windows and mac is the only game in town.
Luckily things are much better now than they used to be, so perhaps I could just say this:
I just want linux to get some respect. That is all.
I could give a rat's ass about toppling Microsoft, they simply don't matter to me right now.
I find this kind of article mystifying. I find mandrake 10 to be oriented towards the end-user, for I AM an enduser. And I get work done.
I bet all the posts on this page could be found in the previous articles harping on the "linux needs to be friendly to end-users" meme; but people just haven't realized yet that there ARE distros out there which are friendly to the end-users.
Happy mandrake 10 user here. It just makes my life easier. Finally without a windows partition!!
I've been using mandrake for 2 years now... before that I was a windows fanboy.
Anyways... linux has been great. I am able to do everything I need to for my job in linux (CXOffice has been wonderful).
How does that make you feel? Knowing that you are playing the same games that are used for training for soldier's in the army?
Am I the only one that is scared by that thought?
Is our nation a nation of war and destruction? Are our future young children going to grow up being trained to kill?
I know it's a bit of a stretch to say that playing one of these games makes you suitable to the army. But it's still kind of frightening. Aren't we as civilians supposed to be spending our time actually building our country? Does anyone else think that we should be thinking about this?
I value the future of our country; and I do not want us mentally to be become hardened killers... I honestly hope I am not alone in this.
By the way, did anyone else think of Bradbury's short story "The Veldt" when this article came up?
P.S. Strange that this short story is available on the web... Hmm, google is great, what can I say... Buy one of Bradbury's books if you haven't, he's a great read.
Monitor a Gmail Account with gkrellm
So, you can be stealthy without stealing something. And you don't have to be stealthy to steal something.
Hmm, if I say stealthy enough times, I begin to feel like I have a lithp^H^H^Hsp.
Honestly man, when it comes to open source, the more the merrier!
Besides we'll have lots of l33t coders to go through their code and make snide comments. I'm sure the devs at Unisys will die of shame, if they don't revise their coding practices.
Or even better (this way no one dies) someone who's better can fix their code and submit it back to them.
Wow, I love open source. Can you tell?
This is the story of a DESKTOP USER.
For the slow in the head (or the microsoft furies): Desktop user != Server
So, you cannot compare servers to desktop usage, apples and orange, yadda yadda.
Honestly the best solution to these problems is: Get a fucking router with built in firewall. A linksys costs $40. (less if you find it on sale)
It's worth the price.
I don't know about you, but Microsoft Office 2000 is still more than enough for my desktop productivity needs. I can't imagine why I'd need anything newer.
And yes, it runs on linux, with CrossOver Office ($40).
Also just discovered this great desktop publishing app, scribus. I've been using pagemaker, and after having my pagemaker file mysteriously get corrupted after a period of a year on windows, I discovered that I'm not doing anything in pagemaker that scribus won't do. Sure, there are some things pagemaker does that scribus will never do. I just don't need those features.
Personally I think that the myth that linux isn't able to have productive applications is a myth that needs to be dispelled.
Come on man, companies patent everything, and I mean, EVERYTHING, to protect themselves, so that if someone decides to rip off their cool method for software customization of lighting in a case, they have some way to bring them to court, or at least get some payback.
I don't know if it's really a good thing, but that's just standard practice among companies these days.
Gmail's web interface is second to none. I don't want to see this email service threatened. Actually, I would like it if they gave me @google.com for emails, because @gmail.com just sounds so... dirty.
Also, I don't know why people think slashdot as a whole is biased against MS. Sure the editors are. But I see more posts on MS vs. linux stories defending MS than attacking it.
Personally I think the idea that the community on slashdot is anti-MS is vastly over-exagerated.
Myself, I don't like Microsoft much, but I have to use their products. I'm glad they're starting to get their act together with SP2, and I'll be interested to see what they do with Longhorn.
Personally I use backuppc for day to day backups (it works wonders! I love the new version).
Here's the website: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
I actually talked to some people on IRC and it looks like I'm one of the lucky few who never has to do anything special; apparently others have to run firefox first as root, then they can run as normal user from there onwards. Your problem sounds worse however.
BTW when I install firefox, I install to a completely new directory (there are no other files there) and I symlink a folder to the new folder, e.g. I symlink mozilla-firefox to the directory mozilla-firefox-0.9.3. I do have to copy over all my plugins from the old firefox but that's not too hard, and I haven't had a corrupted install yet. Do most people just install over the existing firefox? I'm not willing to test it o_o.
I really like the firefox installer; I haven't had to restore my backups of my profile or a previous version of firefox ... ever.
Guess windows users get the short end of the stick, reading various other posts about windows woes.
Well, from a support perspective, crossover office isn't really that great, considering if things go wrong with the app, there's not a whole lot you can do, and customers will probably blame you.
That's where I guess you should really try to find Linux/OSS alternatives as much as possible, and if the client absolutely demands software that does run on Crossover Office, you tell them that things may go wrong, and there's not a whole lot you can do about it. But you say you support people who use it, so maybe you know a lot more about it than me =)
That doesn't sound very good, does it. I suppose vmware is really the only solution for corporate environments that need windows software.
Vmware is a great tool, and I'm glad they've lowered their prices.
Yeah, and how many people are switching to linux because they can run iTunes and Microsoft office in linux now?
Driving a car in public, you cannot and should not expect that your behavior will not be monitored. It's PUBLIC. Not private.
They're not going to install cameras inside your car to see what you're doing inside the car. These black boxes are monitoring behavior on the road, which is NOT private, as everyone sees what you're doing, and your actions have a very real effect on the people/things/environment around you.
As TFA talks about, one of the key reasons for implementing this decision is The board concluded investigators could have gained a better scientific understanding of Weller's behavior had his 1992 Buick LeSabre been outfitted with an event data recorder, or "black box."
This is perfectly reasonable and should be done, IMO. I'd like to see more details as to what the black boxes will actually be doing, however.
What uses this data is put to is where abuses can occur. Will they communicate with GPS and keep a record of your movements in the car? That is unreasonable, and I don't think they'll do that. If all they need are to record events that occur, i.e. when you press the gas, when you press the brakes, that won't tell anyone a whole lot about where you've been.
Also I imagine the data from the black box is cleared periodically. Well, I'd like to see more information about it before I decide whether it's a good thing or not. But I feel the grandparent post has a very valid point.
What if, instead of pursuing hopeless litigation against other behemoth companies, you just tried to please the customers you had and try to make your product a better product?
They would have failed, yes. Probably. But, who knows? Maybe they would have been able to garner a reputation for good service, and hold onto their core base for a longer time then they are now. Maybe they could have even segued into providing linux solutions, and made partnerships with other major companies (like IBM) instead of suing.
Would SCO be a more successful company if they had? They might have failed yes, but they would have a good reputation, and they might have even been successful (or bought out), if they had played their cards right. Alas, they threw it all to the wind on a shot-the-moon scenario that will only end in tears for everyone.
It just saddens me that people have such a lack of perspective.
This problem rules. It is very efficient, and changing id3 tags take literally a few mouse clicks. A very well put together program.