I was looking to install a Linux distribution that did things how the package authors intended, not how the distributor thought things should work. Red Hat et. al... tended to modify original packages, file locations, etc. a bit too much for my liking.
Knoppix's hdinstall method got me an up & running Debian install in one easy step. The boot CD lets you test your hardware for compatibility before anything's installed. When everything's tested, a simple hdinstall invocation copies the working system over to disk.
I'd like to think they're the act of some mischievous drone from Iain Banks' Culture universe... using its effectors and fields to insert strangely-capitalized musings into Earth's primitive datasphere...
Are debit cards commonplace in the US? In the UK at least, most current accounts provide a debit card (VISA/Delta) which is usable wherever a credit card would be, except it debits money from the current account, rather than any credit line that has to be paid back with interest.
Almost every student here will have a debit card (and, most likely, a credit card, too).
Brilliant question - I'd love to see a definitive answer. As you say, iTunes on the Mac supports almost every hardware MP3 player under the sun with the same functionality that it affords the iPod.
Naturally it has wizards, but those can't possibly be responsible for the bloat....
Yeah. I've heard the codebase for the Microsoft 'Wizard' Wizard is pretty crufty. The wizard produces really bloated Wizards that not even the Code Optimization Wizard can fix...
Bluetooth seems to be pretty ubiquitous on mobile phones here in the UK. It's trickled down from the high-end into mid-range and even cheap phones.
Because of frequent upgrades and good deals from networks, many many people have pretty advanced phones with features such as Bluetooth.
My old SonyEricsson T68i (and now my new T610) support BT. I've got iSync set up on my Mac to synchronise all contacts and calendar data between the address book, phones and iPod. I never have to consciously perform the synchronisation. Whenever I get to my front door, the devices are already talking to eachother and updating my data.
It's also an excellent way to exchange data between these low-power devices without resorting to transmitting over the serivce-provider's network. I can exchange maps, sounds, contacts or events with speeds and convenience that IR can't match.
I've yet to find a place in the UK where I don't get GPRS coverage, and Bluetooth is the perfect way of using GPRS access on a laptop or PDA. In fact, when it comes to PDA's, it often works out cheaper to couple it with a Bluetooth phone than it does buying the proprietary jackets/expansion kits required to give them direct GPRS/GSM support.
802.11 hot spots are great if you're not actually travelling, and happen to be at a station/coffee shop/library/business where there's a base station or three. The mobile network+bluetooth is handy everywhere.
I've got a box of ye olde ISA cards. Some of the most spectacular that are still in use:
- Soundblaster AWE32. This card's a full-length monster, complete with a bit of warping probably due to the weight of the 4MB SIMMs sitting in the on-board slots.
- Hairy old EtherLink - AUI, BNC and RJ45. RJ45's knackered, but BNC and AUI still work. I've got one other BNC-equipped PC that I can hook it up to.
- Atari Falcon - Still set up, although rarely used. 180MB 2.5" HD.
- Atari Jaguar - Might as well weld Temptest 2000 into the cart. slot. Played regularly.
- Atari Lynx (the original model). Unfortunately something's not right somewhere, and the screen is permanently too bright. Got an absolute shedload of really great games for it. Do I bother picking one up 2nd hand, or do I get a Gameboy Advance SP?
Thanks for that bit of perspective - some things change (markets) some things stay the same (humans).
Wandering OT for a bit, and looking at the bundling issue, it seems to me that there's 'bundling' and then there's bundling.
Bundling an application in order to provide a good 'out of the box' experience is just fine as far as I'm concerned. Hell, even having the MS email app use the MS html rendering engine makes sense (security and general cruddiness notwithstanding).
The crux of the bundling issue is: How easily can a replacement be installed, providing equal functionality and integration with the system?
No, the obtusely named 'Set Program Access And Defaults' control panel is not a decent enough solution. It's not rocket science - just give a list of browsers installed on the system, and let the user choose one. Give it an obvious name, and put it in an obvious place.
Oh, and yeah - NS4.x was nasty. But the Mozilla *birds are undeniably great. It'd be good to see FB bundled up with all the plugins that Joe User loves (yeah, even RealPlayer *shudder*) and provided as an idiot proof installation. Every IE user I've introduced to FB love it once plugins, etc. have been installed. It simply has more end-user friendly features than IE.
Although I can understand the sentiment, the "since when did we have any say?" attitude isn't sound.
Once, I was mid-rant to my housemates, when one of them said, 'yeah, but nothing people say makes a difference'.
I looked around the room. We were all from different backgrounds. One of us came from a more wealthy background than the rest - let's call him Dave. I pointed out that if protest and political engagement had no effect, we'd all probably have been labourers on Dave's land, paid a pittance and obliged to go into battle on his say-so, instead of studying at the same university.
We wouldn't be where we are now without kicking up a fuss, and I don't see any reason to stop now, just because world+dog has equal access to Starbucks.
For the grandparent to make any sense, you've got to define bundling - which is different to MS/Windows' notion of bundling.
The key question is: How easy is it to drop in replacement browser software, and have identical system-level functionality?
As MS have shown with their anti-competitive actions, and the grudging provision of the 'Set Program Access and Defaults" feature - this is not trivial on Windows.
Don't like Safari? Want to use Browser X? Drop new browser into/Applications/ (or ~/Applications/ if that floats your boat), then go to System Preferences -> Internet -> Web, and pick the default browser from a list of every one on your system.
Done.
Apple want to provide a damn fine browsing experience out of the box, and that's what Safari's for. Apple have put nothing in the way of using an alternative. Indeed, their simple prefs system allows any browser to be made default in a few clicks.
It lacks the 4 curved handles found on current units, but sports a single USB and a single FireWire 800 port on the front of the casing,
with additional ports in the rear.
Any readers in the UK with Sky Digital, switch to channel 268.
Overnight, the channel plays a Flash-based word game, where viewers SMS in answers. It's running on a Windows PC, and the screen currently being broadcast to 7 million homes is....
McAfee dialog box: 'bugbear.b High Virus Advisory....'
Hmmm.
(wandering OT - the channel, 'Friendly TV' is apparently being run by students on work experience. A nightly live-broadcast show is 'Girl Talk', where... girls... talk... about... things. Whatever comes into their heads. Oh, and they get progressively more drunk as the evening progresses, which no doubt helps.)
A few experimental clicks in the Internationalization settings of your OS would reveal this... But I'll explain:
(Most) of Continental Europe uses periods as thousand-separators, and commas as decimal separators. It's not uncommon to also find a space used as a grouping symbol.
The US uses the same system as the UK & Republic of Ireland - commas for grouping, full-stop (period) for decimals.
It's largely a non-issue in less, ahem, parochial nations. The RoI uses the Euro, and yet has the Anglicised number format. They seem to have coped just fine without bursting into fits and giggles at those on the Continent.
In fact, I've taken my own advice and looked through the Regional settings on my machine. Looks like only the UK/US/Canada/RoI (and I'm guessing, soon enough, Iraq too) use the Anglicised format.
If you really want to explode your mind with numerical nomenclature, I suggest you google for some info on Indian/sanskrit notation.
Parent makes a lot of sense.
It's funny that geeks should expend so much effort arguing about markets, popularity and economics.
I'm in it for the tech. I can't understand any so-called nerd writing off platform (x) for reasons of market share, dominance, etc. Everyone who thinks of themselves as a geek owes it to themselves to get out and *try* every option available: tinker with every OS, link against every library! Disassemble every case!
Hell, you might find something you like more than what you've got now.
However, this has the (benefit?) that if the share re-appears on the network, it automatically shows up on the Desktop.
This behaviour should probably be configurable, otherwise it's going to pi$$ people off.
re: the Carbon Finder - as the rest of the OS is improving, the Finder's looking weaker by comparison. That being said, it has improved somewhat. Just not enough;)
Still, let's see what Panther brings. I think at this late stage, Apple are well aware of the Finder's technical and usability shortcomings. Panther will no doubt improve on what we have - either through a new Cocoa Finder, or a progression based on a more capable Carbon API.
One big reason I have not made the switch is because of a small but vocal portion of the Mac user base who are blind supporters of Apple no matter what they do.
Sorry, but that strikes me as an odd reason not to buy a computer. You won't switch because of the behaviour of a small portion of the userbase? Because of the reactions of/. moderators?
Slashdot Mirror
Debian's had an excellent installer for a while now...
It's called Knoppix
I was looking to install a Linux distribution that did things how the package authors intended, not how the distributor thought things should work. Red Hat et. al... tended to modify original packages, file locations, etc. a bit too much for my liking.
Knoppix's hdinstall method got me an up & running Debian install in one easy step. The boot CD lets you test your hardware for compatibility before anything's installed. When everything's tested, a simple hdinstall invocation copies the working system over to disk.
Easy as pie.
Then the question is, exactly how did he mix the rock with his labor.
He, um... looked at it. Or something. It takes heaps of effort to see that far, y'know?
In the words of Our Mighty Insectoid Overlord, Bugzilla:
WORKSFORME
Hehe. These AC's posts always make me smile.
I'd like to think they're the act of some mischievous drone from Iain Banks' Culture universe... using its effectors and fields to insert strangely-capitalized musings into Earth's primitive datasphere...
I might be missing something, but...
Just rename your original iMovie to (f'rex) iMovie 2, and you'll be able to use both.
Out of curiosity...
Are debit cards commonplace in the US? In the UK at least, most current accounts provide a debit card (VISA/Delta) which is usable wherever a credit card would be, except it debits money from the current account, rather than any credit line that has to be paid back with interest.
Almost every student here will have a debit card (and, most likely, a credit card, too).
Brilliant question - I'd love to see a definitive answer. As you say, iTunes on the Mac supports almost every hardware MP3 player under the sun with the same functionality that it affords the iPod.
Naturally it has wizards, but those can't possibly be responsible for the bloat....
Yeah. I've heard the codebase for the Microsoft 'Wizard' Wizard is pretty crufty. The wizard produces really bloated Wizards that not even the Code Optimization Wizard can fix...
Bluetooth seems to be pretty ubiquitous on mobile phones here in the UK. It's trickled down from the high-end into mid-range and even cheap phones.
Because of frequent upgrades and good deals from networks, many many people have pretty advanced phones with features such as Bluetooth.
My old SonyEricsson T68i (and now my new T610) support BT. I've got iSync set up on my Mac to synchronise all contacts and calendar data between the address book, phones and iPod. I never have to consciously perform the synchronisation. Whenever I get to my front door, the devices are already talking to eachother and updating my data.
It's also an excellent way to exchange data between these low-power devices without resorting to transmitting over the serivce-provider's network. I can exchange maps, sounds, contacts or events with speeds and convenience that IR can't match.
I've yet to find a place in the UK where I don't get GPRS coverage, and Bluetooth is the perfect way of using GPRS access on a laptop or PDA. In fact, when it comes to PDA's, it often works out cheaper to couple it with a Bluetooth phone than it does buying the proprietary jackets/expansion kits required to give them direct GPRS/GSM support.
802.11 hot spots are great if you're not actually travelling, and happen to be at a station/coffee shop/library/business where there's a base station or three. The mobile network+bluetooth is handy everywhere.
(Disclaimer: Article Not Read Thoroughly)
More to the point, did they bother to apply the AltiVec patch to Quake3?
If not, then did they similarly cripple Q3 on x86 by disabling all SIMD-like support?
I've got a box of ye olde ISA cards. Some of the most spectacular that are still in use:
- Soundblaster AWE32. This card's a full-length monster, complete with a bit of warping probably due to the weight of the 4MB SIMMs sitting in the on-board slots.
- Hairy old EtherLink - AUI, BNC and RJ45. RJ45's knackered, but BNC and AUI still work. I've got one other BNC-equipped PC that I can hook it up to.
- Atari Falcon - Still set up, although rarely used. 180MB 2.5" HD.
- Atari Jaguar - Might as well weld Temptest 2000 into the cart. slot. Played regularly.
- Atari Lynx (the original model). Unfortunately something's not right somewhere, and the screen is permanently too bright. Got an absolute shedload of really great games for it. Do I bother picking one up 2nd hand, or do I get a Gameboy Advance SP?
Paraphrasing Agent Smith to the extreme....
...anyway - read Artifakt's reply too, 'cos there's some good points in it.
"What good is a script, kiddie, if there is no way for the script to run?"
blimey ... someone got hold of some cheap speed, didn't they?
Thanks for that bit of perspective - some things change (markets) some things stay the same (humans).
Wandering OT for a bit, and looking at the bundling issue, it seems to me that there's 'bundling' and then there's bundling.
Bundling an application in order to provide a good 'out of the box' experience is just fine as far as I'm concerned. Hell, even having the MS email app use the MS html rendering engine makes sense (security and general cruddiness notwithstanding).
The crux of the bundling issue is: How easily can a replacement be installed, providing equal functionality and integration with the system?
No, the obtusely named 'Set Program Access And Defaults' control panel is not a decent enough solution. It's not rocket science - just give a list of browsers installed on the system, and let the user choose one. Give it an obvious name, and put it in an obvious place.
Oh, and yeah - NS4.x was nasty. But the Mozilla *birds are undeniably great. It'd be good to see FB bundled up with all the plugins that Joe User loves (yeah, even RealPlayer *shudder*) and provided as an idiot proof installation. Every IE user I've introduced to FB love it once plugins, etc. have been installed. It simply has more end-user friendly features than IE.
Amen.
Although I can understand the sentiment, the "since when did we have any say?" attitude isn't sound.
Once, I was mid-rant to my housemates, when one of them said, 'yeah, but nothing people say makes a difference'.
I looked around the room. We were all from different backgrounds. One of us came from a more wealthy background than the rest - let's call him Dave. I pointed out that if protest and political engagement had no effect, we'd all probably have been labourers on Dave's land, paid a pittance and obliged to go into battle on his say-so, instead of studying at the same university.
We wouldn't be where we are now without kicking up a fuss, and I don't see any reason to stop now, just because world+dog has equal access to Starbucks.
Uhh... spring-loaded folders?
Highlight source file(s). Click & Hold. Drag to Macintosh HD (or a folder alias, toolbar shortcut, folder, whatever) and hover....
Location springs open in a new window. Repeat. Drill down to the final location, and use Cmd/Option modifiers to specify move, copy or alias.
Or, investigate apps like Xshelf, which are also useful.
For the grandparent to make any sense, you've got to define bundling - which is different to MS/Windows' notion of bundling.
The key question is: How easy is it to drop in replacement browser software, and have identical system-level functionality?
As MS have shown with their anti-competitive actions, and the grudging provision of the 'Set Program Access and Defaults" feature - this is not trivial on Windows.
Don't like Safari? Want to use Browser X? Drop new browser into /Applications/ (or ~/Applications/ if that floats your boat), then go to System Preferences -> Internet -> Web, and pick the default browser from a list of every one on your system.
Done.
Apple want to provide a damn fine browsing experience out of the box, and that's what Safari's for. Apple have put nothing in the way of using an alternative. Indeed, their simple prefs system allows any browser to be made default in a few clicks.
Darwin is Mac OS X. Turn off the GUI, and you've got Darwin.
uname -a on my OS X (v10.2.6) machine gives:Darwin endeavour 6.6 Darwin Kernel Version 6.6: Thu May 1 21:48:54 PDT 2003; root:xnu/xnu-344.34.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
Maybe this is why it's branded the iTunes Music Store?
Any readers in the UK with Sky Digital, switch to channel 268.
Overnight, the channel plays a Flash-based word game, where viewers SMS in answers. It's running on a Windows PC, and the screen currently being broadcast to 7 million homes is....
McAfee dialog box: 'bugbear.b High Virus Advisory....'
Hmmm.
(wandering OT - the channel, 'Friendly TV' is apparently being run by students on work experience. A nightly live-broadcast show is 'Girl Talk', where... girls... talk... about... things. Whatever comes into their heads. Oh, and they get progressively more drunk as the evening progresses, which no doubt helps.)
*yawn*
A few experimental clicks in the Internationalization settings of your OS would reveal this... But I'll explain:
(Most) of Continental Europe uses periods as thousand-separators, and commas as decimal separators. It's not uncommon to also find a space used as a grouping symbol.
The US uses the same system as the UK & Republic of Ireland - commas for grouping, full-stop (period) for decimals.
It's largely a non-issue in less, ahem, parochial nations. The RoI uses the Euro, and yet has the Anglicised number format. They seem to have coped just fine without bursting into fits and giggles at those on the Continent.
In fact, I've taken my own advice and looked through the Regional settings on my machine. Looks like only the UK/US/Canada/RoI (and I'm guessing, soon enough, Iraq too) use the Anglicised format.
If you really want to explode your mind with numerical nomenclature, I suggest you google for some info on Indian/sanskrit notation.
Vive la difference!
Parent makes a lot of sense. It's funny that geeks should expend so much effort arguing about markets, popularity and economics. I'm in it for the tech. I can't understand any so-called nerd writing off platform (x) for reasons of market share, dominance, etc. Everyone who thinks of themselves as a geek owes it to themselves to get out and *try* every option available: tinker with every OS, link against every library! Disassemble every case! Hell, you might find something you like more than what you've got now.
Same here.
;)
However, this has the (benefit?) that if the share re-appears on the network, it automatically shows up on the Desktop.
This behaviour should probably be configurable, otherwise it's going to pi$$ people off.
re: the Carbon Finder - as the rest of the OS is improving, the Finder's looking weaker by comparison. That being said, it has improved somewhat. Just not enough
Still, let's see what Panther brings. I think at this late stage, Apple are well aware of the Finder's technical and usability shortcomings. Panther will no doubt improve on what we have - either through a new Cocoa Finder, or a progression based on a more capable Carbon API.
Sorry, but that strikes me as an odd reason not to buy a computer. You won't switch because of the behaviour of a small portion of the userbase? Because of the reactions of
*boggle*