Yes, this is off-topic, and you can mod me down if you want, but I just wanted to say: I love your sig; I always thought 'HTTP_REFERER' should have been spelled with a double R.
you've obviously never been to Neopets then.
blasted evil website. Should be set to 127.0.0.1 on every Windows user's HOSTS file in the world. I have removed so much spyware as a result of my little brothers and sisters visiting that website...
This is modded funny, but this is exactly what I do. Here's my advice: If you're using GNOME (KDE might have this setting as well; I don't know) you can find a setting that makes your home dir the desktop dir. (You can't find it on any control panel, but it's under the GConf key/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir). Then I delete the ~/Desktop directory 'cuz I don't need it anymore. (I know this goes against freedesktop.org standards, but hey -- it's my computer; I can do what I want with it.)
Then I create two directories: 'Documents' and 'Downloads'. Inside 'Documents', I create 'audio', 'images', etc, for each of my media types. 'Downloads' takes the place of my home directory; it's where I throw programs I want to compile, compressed files with themes or fonts, etc. This keeps all that junk off my desktop.
And here's where it comes to dot-files: any folder I don't want to see cluttering off my desktop gets a dot at its beginning. I have a ~/.bin for all my little scripts, and stuff like that.
So the way I have it, all my fiddly downloads -- kernel drivers, themes, source code directories for programs -- are kept away in ~/Downloads, and all the other downloads (movies that I don't want to keep, pictures of friends, etc) sit on my desktop, which is ~/, and scream at me to clean them up.
dude, are you serious? Debian is the Choice of a New Generation. There seem to be a plethora of Debian-spawn springing up all over the place. Exciting to see. Starting with Mandrake and moving to Gentoo, I discovered how much better a package manager is when it's tied to a repository (Portage, in Gentoo's case). That's why, when I went looking for a new distro (hard drive crashed, didn't want to spend days compiling X, GNOME, and friends), I went to a Debian-based system. (I coulda gone with Fedora instead, because its maintainers host an online repository, but I thought Ubuntu looked pretty.)
Operating systems like Debian, Fedora, and Gentoo are just simply easier to use... really, it makes Windows look rather silly, with its 'go find your own software' paradigm.
(addendum: I don't know what sort of software tools you could use in order to get the video streams synced. I think that'll be the most difficult question to answer. Perhaps VLC or xine can be run in a daemon mode? that way, you could run three instances, one after the other, and when they've loaded themselves and the videos into memory -- which would cause them to be out of sync -- you could send a command to all three to start playing at the same time. On the other hand, the comment a previous poster made about cobbling together something using Gstreamer abstraction layer might be easier...)
I think that, for the time being, commodity cards, a single computer, and distributed multihead X would be fine. Pro cards that support a perfectly synced video stream might be overkill if this is just a rig used for experimentation: best to start out cheap, get a proof-of-concept, and then go to the big guns later.
Of course, the one problem is that you'll be stuck with rather slow PCI cards if you want three cards in one computer.
I know I'm not answering your question here, but how about Ubuntu? I switched to it from Gentoo the other day because
my hard drive had crashed, and I needed to get my computer back up and running quickly (not a task that Gentoo is suited to)
I was interested in Debian
I'm a GNOME boy
If you want a good, easy-to-use-and-install distro with a well supported security and patching team, that 'just works', you should look into Ubuntu. If you like GNOME.
It comes with a lot of software built in: it has Firefox as its default browser instead of Epiphany, and it includes the GIMP, OpenOffice (which was a real treat for me, coming from Gentoo where I had to compile OO myself ^_^), a buncha extra games (solitaire included), and -- best of all -- the Synaptic package manager, which is a real treat to use.
One caveat: the standard Ubuntu repositories only have open-source software in them, so you'll have to install Gstreamer MP3 support, win32codecs, Java, and Flash yourself from some other Debian repositories. Not that it's hard though; just takes a bit of Googling.
hey, it's lateral thinking, man... No, the (grand)parent didn't directly answer the question, but they did offer an alternate solution, which may cause the story poster (and readers) to go down different paths they never thought of going down. I know it certainly made me stop and think for a moment, because I've been obsessed with finding a trip-planner for Linux too... this guy made me think, "hey, maybe paper maps are good enough; I never thought about that before."
I think your parent was actually talking about me, not you. And, in reply to that parent, naw, I didn't mean anything of the sort; I just said that, with a segfault in GIMP, it shows that these programs could possibly be exploited in the future. And anyway, I was just having fun making wild conjectures, because, after all, this is Slashdot and you're allowed to do that here ^_^
In all seriousness, I downloaded an example of an Evil JPEG to my Linux computer and tried opening it up in various programs.
Eye of Gnome seemed to work okay, but I got all sorts of weird redraw problems when I tried to resize the window.
Gimp (2.1) says the JPEG is unsupported and couldn't be imported by the filter, then segfaults.
Konqueror seems to work okay, but just shows a tall black rectangle, and its spinner is still chugging away, as if it's still busy loading something.
Firefox 0.9.3 has no troubles at all; it just shows a nice white rectangle on a white background
So, after five minutes of extremely unprofessional research and wild conjectures, I'd say it looks like the stories are true: some Linux programs may be vulnerable too. Yikes!
mind you, who would ever write an exploit that would only spread to five percent of the computers in the world?;-)
how dare you?!? "closed source." I spit at the word.
ha, just kidding. I'm developing a project which will most likely be closed-source for a while myself. Okay, in addition to all the source management thingies that other people have suggested, I'd definitely set up a private Jabber server for you chaps to collaborate on in real-time. My two cents' worth.
Computer Christmas is pretty much a two-trick pony, but both of those tricks are extremely exciting and have a lot of potential when it comes to interfacing your computer to the real world. One group of projects deals with multiplexing your 8-line parallel port into a 256- or 1000-line switching machine of wonder (think about being able to turn that many LEDs on and off!). The other group of projects deals with interfacing these boards to the mains in clever ways, using triacs and SSRs and the like.
The focus is on Christmas light displays, but you could conceivably use it for all sorts of things... besides turning a plethora of LEDs on and off, you could make pinwheels spin when you have e-mail, or turn your house lights on and off at certain times, or tie a resistor network to a set of pins and make things fade in and out with the volume of your music. Wheeeee!
well, really, the poster of the article meant the first serious competition for the niche that Gentoo fills: a built-from-source, performance-tuned distro.
I kinda tend to side with you: although distro maintainers do put a lot of work into making sure Freetype is working properly across the board (this involves checking the Big Two toolkits, Qt and GTK+, and their companion desktop environments, KDE, GNOME, and XFCE, as well as OpenOffice and Mozilla, who dance to the beat of their own drums as far as fonts are concerned), every distro provides pretty darn similar software, and as long as you know what you're doing, you can get software from whatever distro working okay.
On that note, I would recommend just going with one desktop environment and one toolkit for the most part; this will make changing font settings for (almost) all programs a one-step task. I believe KDE was the pioneer in bringing things like antialiasing and subpixel decimation (for LCD monitors) to the desktop in an easy-to-control, one-step way, but GNOME is just as easily customiseable now (if not more so -- but I have no idea; I haven't used KDE for a while). From my experience (in Gentoo, at least) the GNOME control panel also changes font default and aliasing settings for Firefox, but OpenOffice is a hit-and-miss affair. Anyway, I stick with GTK+ programs for the most part, so one change in the GNOME control panel and all my programs have a fresh font.
For a really lovely serif font, try Gentium. It has almost every glyph under the sun, in one attractive style. Unfortunately, this comprehensiveness also has a drawback -- they haven't managed to design bold and italic alternates yet. But if you want to show off the international support of Linux to all your Russian, Greek, and Jewish friends, Gentium is the font for you.
Sorry, I get a little starry-eyed about fonts. It's the graphic designer in me.
I second that. It's extremely customisable, and you know what? Drop shadows, although a luxury in some people's minds, really do help you pick out the borders of a window at a glance. I find them incredibly handy for just that reason.
what does K-Y mean? I did a Google search, and the only slippery thing I could find was http://www.lemonjelly.ky/ -- a website that apparently doesn't involve real lemon jelly... I think it's a band or something.
Actually, from what I understand, we're least sensitive to variations in red. Which is very funny, because it's the colour our eyes are most sensitive to -- we just can't pick out subtle variations in that colour.
I hope that makes sense? sensitive to red itself, but not to the differences in various shades of red.
If you've ever had your kid bring home a Where's Waldo book and ask you to find Waldo with them, and if you've ever agreed, you'd understand why people want the book banned. It drives an adult absolutely crazy, because the child either gives up and just flips from page to page, or obsesses over every tiny detail and won't let you leave until everything has been found.
Complaints against Where's Waldo probably all take this form: a poor, harried parent calls up the school and says, "PLEASE don't let my kid bring home any more of those blasted Waldo books! I haven't slept in days; I'm seeing Waldo in the wallpaper; every time I see a guy with glasses and a striped toque I get the urge to yell out, 'I FOUND WALDO!' Please make it stop!!!"
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this is off-topic, and you can mod me down if you want, but I just wanted to say: I love your sig; I always thought 'HTTP_REFERER' should have been spelled with a double R.
you've obviously never been to Neopets then. blasted evil website. Should be set to 127.0.0.1 on every Windows user's HOSTS file in the world. I have removed so much spyware as a result of my little brothers and sisters visiting that website...
This is modded funny, but this is exactly what I do. Here's my advice: If you're using GNOME (KDE might have this setting as well; I don't know) you can find a setting that makes your home dir the desktop dir. (You can't find it on any control panel, but it's under the GConf key /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir). Then I delete the ~/Desktop directory 'cuz I don't need it anymore. (I know this goes against freedesktop.org standards, but hey -- it's my computer; I can do what I want with it.)
Then I create two directories: 'Documents' and 'Downloads'. Inside 'Documents', I create 'audio', 'images', etc, for each of my media types. 'Downloads' takes the place of my home directory; it's where I throw programs I want to compile, compressed files with themes or fonts, etc. This keeps all that junk off my desktop.
And here's where it comes to dot-files: any folder I don't want to see cluttering off my desktop gets a dot at its beginning. I have a ~/.bin for all my little scripts, and stuff like that.
So the way I have it, all my fiddly downloads -- kernel drivers, themes, source code directories for programs -- are kept away in ~/Downloads, and all the other downloads (movies that I don't want to keep, pictures of friends, etc) sit on my desktop, which is ~/, and scream at me to clean them up.
dude, are you serious? Debian is the Choice of a New Generation. There seem to be a plethora of Debian-spawn springing up all over the place. Exciting to see. Starting with Mandrake and moving to Gentoo, I discovered how much better a package manager is when it's tied to a repository (Portage, in Gentoo's case). That's why, when I went looking for a new distro (hard drive crashed, didn't want to spend days compiling X, GNOME, and friends), I went to a Debian-based system. (I coulda gone with Fedora instead, because its maintainers host an online repository, but I thought Ubuntu looked pretty.)
Operating systems like Debian, Fedora, and Gentoo are just simply easier to use... really, it makes Windows look rather silly, with its 'go find your own software' paradigm.
(addendum: I don't know what sort of software tools you could use in order to get the video streams synced. I think that'll be the most difficult question to answer. Perhaps VLC or xine can be run in a daemon mode? that way, you could run three instances, one after the other, and when they've loaded themselves and the videos into memory -- which would cause them to be out of sync -- you could send a command to all three to start playing at the same time. On the other hand, the comment a previous poster made about cobbling together something using Gstreamer abstraction layer might be easier...)
I think that, for the time being, commodity cards, a single computer, and distributed multihead X would be fine. Pro cards that support a perfectly synced video stream might be overkill if this is just a rig used for experimentation: best to start out cheap, get a proof-of-concept, and then go to the big guns later.
Of course, the one problem is that you'll be stuck with rather slow PCI cards if you want three cards in one computer.
I'm guessing that this project is potentially patentable, so the client probably wants to keep the amount of information leaked to a minimum.
I know I'm not answering your question here, but how about Ubuntu? I switched to it from Gentoo the other day because
If you want a good, easy-to-use-and-install distro with a well supported security and patching team, that 'just works', you should look into Ubuntu. If you like GNOME.
It comes with a lot of software built in: it has Firefox as its default browser instead of Epiphany, and it includes the GIMP, OpenOffice (which was a real treat for me, coming from Gentoo where I had to compile OO myself ^_^), a buncha extra games (solitaire included), and -- best of all -- the Synaptic package manager, which is a real treat to use.
One caveat: the standard Ubuntu repositories only have open-source software in them, so you'll have to install Gstreamer MP3 support, win32codecs, Java, and Flash yourself from some other Debian repositories. Not that it's hard though; just takes a bit of Googling.
man, I wish I had mod points. You have the mark of a true comedian.
hey, it's lateral thinking, man... No, the (grand)parent didn't directly answer the question, but they did offer an alternate solution, which may cause the story poster (and readers) to go down different paths they never thought of going down. I know it certainly made me stop and think for a moment, because I've been obsessed with finding a trip-planner for Linux too... this guy made me think, "hey, maybe paper maps are good enough; I never thought about that before."
okay, I think I know what you're implying... but hey, it worked for me, didn't it? ;-)
NO! They do not want any more money. Such actions will be discouraged. HA!
I think your parent was actually talking about me, not you. And, in reply to that parent, naw, I didn't mean anything of the sort; I just said that, with a segfault in GIMP, it shows that these programs could possibly be exploited in the future. And anyway, I was just having fun making wild conjectures, because, after all, this is Slashdot and you're allowed to do that here ^_^
In all seriousness, I downloaded an example of an Evil JPEG to my Linux computer and tried opening it up in various programs.
So, after five minutes of extremely unprofessional research and wild conjectures, I'd say it looks like the stories are true: some Linux programs may be vulnerable too. Yikes!
mind you, who would ever write an exploit that would only spread to five percent of the computers in the world? ;-)
how dare you?!? "closed source." I spit at the word.
ha, just kidding. I'm developing a project which will most likely be closed-source for a while myself. Okay, in addition to all the source management thingies that other people have suggested, I'd definitely set up a private Jabber server for you chaps to collaborate on in real-time. My two cents' worth.
Computer Christmas is pretty much a two-trick pony, but both of those tricks are extremely exciting and have a lot of potential when it comes to interfacing your computer to the real world. One group of projects deals with multiplexing your 8-line parallel port into a 256- or 1000-line switching machine of wonder (think about being able to turn that many LEDs on and off!). The other group of projects deals with interfacing these boards to the mains in clever ways, using triacs and SSRs and the like.
The focus is on Christmas light displays, but you could conceivably use it for all sorts of things... besides turning a plethora of LEDs on and off, you could make pinwheels spin when you have e-mail, or turn your house lights on and off at certain times, or tie a resistor network to a set of pins and make things fade in and out with the volume of your music. Wheeeee!
actually, they do have a programming team or two in Bangalore.
well, really, the poster of the article meant the first serious competition for the niche that Gentoo fills: a built-from-source, performance-tuned distro.
I kinda tend to side with you: although distro maintainers do put a lot of work into making sure Freetype is working properly across the board (this involves checking the Big Two toolkits, Qt and GTK+, and their companion desktop environments, KDE, GNOME, and XFCE, as well as OpenOffice and Mozilla, who dance to the beat of their own drums as far as fonts are concerned), every distro provides pretty darn similar software, and as long as you know what you're doing, you can get software from whatever distro working okay.
On that note, I would recommend just going with one desktop environment and one toolkit for the most part; this will make changing font settings for (almost) all programs a one-step task. I believe KDE was the pioneer in bringing things like antialiasing and subpixel decimation (for LCD monitors) to the desktop in an easy-to-control, one-step way, but GNOME is just as easily customiseable now (if not more so -- but I have no idea; I haven't used KDE for a while). From my experience (in Gentoo, at least) the GNOME control panel also changes font default and aliasing settings for Firefox, but OpenOffice is a hit-and-miss affair. Anyway, I stick with GTK+ programs for the most part, so one change in the GNOME control panel and all my programs have a fresh font.
For a really lovely serif font, try Gentium. It has almost every glyph under the sun, in one attractive style. Unfortunately, this comprehensiveness also has a drawback -- they haven't managed to design bold and italic alternates yet. But if you want to show off the international support of Linux to all your Russian, Greek, and Jewish friends, Gentium is the font for you.
Sorry, I get a little starry-eyed about fonts. It's the graphic designer in me.
I second that. It's extremely customisable, and you know what? Drop shadows, although a luxury in some people's minds, really do help you pick out the borders of a window at a glance. I find them incredibly handy for just that reason.
what does K-Y mean? I did a Google search, and the only slippery thing I could find was http://www.lemonjelly.ky/ -- a website that apparently doesn't involve real lemon jelly... I think it's a band or something.
Actually, from what I understand, we're least sensitive to variations in red. Which is very funny, because it's the colour our eyes are most sensitive to -- we just can't pick out subtle variations in that colour.
I hope that makes sense? sensitive to red itself, but not to the differences in various shades of red.
If you've ever had your kid bring home a Where's Waldo book and ask you to find Waldo with them, and if you've ever agreed, you'd understand why people want the book banned. It drives an adult absolutely crazy, because the child either gives up and just flips from page to page, or obsesses over every tiny detail and won't let you leave until everything has been found.
Complaints against Where's Waldo probably all take this form: a poor, harried parent calls up the school and says, "PLEASE don't let my kid bring home any more of those blasted Waldo books! I haven't slept in days; I'm seeing Waldo in the wallpaper; every time I see a guy with glasses and a striped toque I get the urge to yell out, 'I FOUND WALDO!' Please make it stop!!!"
or somethin' like dat.
that is, if you like teal....... I'm much fonder of tan than I am of teal.
I sure bloody hope you're trying to be funny...