No! It was Adam... he was the first man, right? Even though all of the other people couldn't have been created without Eve, Eve was made from Adam's rib, right? So it still goes back to Adam.
But wait a minute... didn't God create Adam? But then where did God come from? A Christian once told me he knew God was real because of the Bible, so God is from the Bible. But who wrote the Bible? This is so bloody confusing.
Switching from one generic binary distro to another is just changing a few details about how certain peices of the OS fit together and what is on or off by default and has nothing to do with speed.
This simply isn't true. If you switch from a binary distro using the hotplug init. scripts for hardware autodetection to another binary distro using udev (or other methods) for that task, you can generally expect the hardware autodetection stage of the boot process to be shortened by something in the region of 10s or so (well that was my value, anyway, certainly significant speedups can be expected).
Maybe you could be developing software that you want to run on Linux as well as OS X. Maybe you have decided that from an ethical standpoint you no longer want to use closed software, but you only know how to use OS X, so you want to ease yourself into Linux by dual-booting for a while. Maybe Linux distributions generally give you more ability to tinker around with the guts of the system, which is something you find enjoyable and educational. Maybe you just think it's a pretty cool thing to do!
No offence, you don't seem like a troll, but this is kind of a silly question that seems to come up every time there is an article on/. about running Linux on a Mac. Even if there was absolutely no sensible reason for doing it whatsoever, plenty of nerdy people would still find it a fun thing to do. If you read Slashdot, then surely you must realise this:-)
I think it's pretty decent of Real to produce versions of their player software for Linux, and open-source software too, but I'm not really sure that it proves that Real matters. The second link you gave provides a lot of information about how important Real is, but then again it's their press section, so I don't really view it as a reliable source.
The only reason Real still seems to be around is the cross-platform playability of their media (see the BBC website as an example). To me, it seems like they want to be like the PDF of audio and video, which is fine. However, due to the current trends in their area of business, they need to embrace DRM in order to survive. The DRM also needs to work across all platforms, so they need DRM support on Linux, which currently does not exist. As others have pointed out before me, it seems like the lack of DRM on Linux hurts Real more than Linux itself. To actually say that Linux is going to die because of a lack of DRM is a fairly ridiculous statement to make, and I think it reflects their frustration at the corner they seem to have backed themselves into. GNU/Linux is under the GPL, so it pretty much can't die. Even if it could, it is viewed by many as a server OS, and it doesn't seem like the ability to play Real Audio is necessary on a server.
I don't dislike Real, but I wouldn't really agree that they are particularly important to very many people. If they dropped off the face of the Earth tomorrow, I probably wouldn't ever notice.
(A pretty unrelated note: When I followed the link to the Real press page, I thought their advert for their music download service was quite funny. "Access over 1 million songs, legally!" Well, I already do. I call it... THE RECORD SHOP!:-)
One day I was using my computer, when I noticed something strange on the screen. It was a little grey mark, moving about on the screen in a seemingly random fashion. It was a little bug of some kind... but it was actually under the screen! I tried to shoo it out of the monitor, but I accidentally squashed it to death, because I forgot the screen of a TFT is flexible. Now there is a little stain on everything I view, thanks to the tiny insect corpse. This would never have happened if I had bought a CRT instead!
People should be able to say what they want, yes, but those cartoons look very much like they were designed to hurt people who believe strongly in the teachings of Islam. Do you believe that hurting people is the right thing to do? If not (and I doubt that you do), then surely you have to concede that is was hurtful and wrong to print the cartoons.
I don't remember either Bush or Blair saying that the comics were a good reason to kill people or burn buildings. Also, a spokesperson for Blair said that the government wasn't in a position to tell the newspapers what to do, and that if they wanted to print the cartoons, the government wouldn't stop them (they'd just be unhappy about it). The newspapers that printed those comics didn't seem to be doing so in support for free speech, I thought it seemed like they were stirring up controversy in order to generate sales. It would have been quite easy to condemn the reactions of the extremists without printing the offensive material, material which must have hurt the feelings of many perfectly peacable Muslims as well as those of the extremists.
I understand that you're not happy with the situation, but who is? Getting angry about problems that stem from anger in the first place does not seem like the sensible thing to do. More incendiary terms like "Islamofascist" are not what the world needs right now.
Well, since KHTML and KJS (I think?) were ported over to Mac OS in the first place in order to create Safari, which then allowed the Apple devs to create the patches that allowed it to pass Acid2, patches which could not then be easily applied back to KHTML and KJS because the code sometimes didn't meet KDE's standards or because the patches were sometimes not supplied in a format that they could easily work with, maybe the KDE devs put in more effort overall:-P
But seriously, who gives a shit who came first, second or whatever; I think the important thing is that browser developers are obviously making an effort to ensure stricter standards compliance. I assume someone must be working on this for Firefox, so does anybody know when we can expect to see Firefox pass Acid2 as well?
As far as I know, Microsoft were found to be in violation of European business law. They were fined for this (not a huge amount IIRC) and were told exactly what they need to do in order to make things right. MS said that they didn't agree with the conditions, but they were rejected. They were told that if they didn't sort things out, then they would face a daily fine.
Microsoft have had plenty of time to show that they are willing to comply with all of Europe's demands, yet they have failed to do so. They were also informed of the consequences they would face if they didn't obey. I don't see how you can honestly say that the European government is trying to extort MS, because they gave them every opportunity to fix the problem (by enabling interoperability) without facing major fines, but MS just tried to weasel their way out of it. If MS want to do business in Europe, then they must play by the same rules as everybody else. If they choose not to do so, then it should come as no surprise when they are punished.
Listen, I don't like the government sticking their nose in my life either, but one of their jobs is to look after the best interests of the populace. It is not in the people's best interest to let companies run amok and do whatever they want, so there must be rules to govern them. If a company breaks the rules, and refuses to stop doing so, then there ought to be consequences, or what would be the point?
For what it's worth, I agree with you, but I still think it's not especially clear who is the bad guy here. The main thing that worries me is that they were able to get rid of those links so easily. I think it's pretty scary that they could just wave a lawsuit in these guys' faces and get them to delete that material. It's like censorship. I believe that people ought to be able to link to whatever the hell they want, and as long as they are not explicitly encouraging illegal activity as they do so, then they shouldn't have to worry about being taken to court simply for showing something to someone else.
I would hesitate to place much blame on Apple though. They are just acting like what they are: a big company. The real blame lies with the people who pass the stupid laws that make Apple able to do this.
For what it's worth, the TI ACX100/111 driver is included in Andrew Morton's patchset. If I remember correctly, many distributions have kernel packages available with this patchset already applied, so give that a go if you can find it.
The driver needs to be able to load a firmware image when the module is loaded. It sounds a bit complicated perhaps, but it should just be a matter of putting a file in the right directory and it will all be handled automatically from there onwards. Information about that and more can be found in this ACX100/111 Wiki.
The problem I had with this driver is finding a firmware image that will work. If the module inserts correctly, the device node (/dev/wlan0 or whatever) appears correctly, but the card just doesn't seem to work when you try to scan for networks and the signal and all other readings are at zero, then maybe it is a firmware problem. Try different combinations of firmware if you run into this problem and you can't figure out any solution.
For me, the driver seems to work very well now. I have a £5 Safecom card, cheapest crap on the market, it's not even listed in the supported devices on the Wiki, but it still works like a charm. Hopefully the driver will make it into the mainline kernel soon.
What? Grey Death is in the original, it's what the whole game is about! For those who don't know, in Deus Ex, there is a plague sweeping America. The plague turns out not to be a naturally ocurring virus, it is actually a man-made nanomachine. The Grey Death is made by a secret group of conspirators, who also make a vaccine/treatment for the virus, called Ambrosia, which they use to control politicians in order to help achieve their dastardly aims.
It's somehow kind of scarily believeable, in a kind of nut-job conspiracy theory way. Although there are some pretty awesome technologies listed in the summary, I'd also be interested to see what evils the experts think could come about due to this new technology.
Yes, OK, sliding menus are actually a pet hate of mine, because they waste my time and don't do anything. It really pisses me off on OSX when things take a second longer to happen than they should because some stupid animation is playing. However, there are some eye-candy effects that I actually quite like.
If you really don't like unnecessary bells and whistles, but you're still dead set on using KDE, then it should still be OK though. When you start up KDE for the first time, it asks you a couple of questions about things. One of the questions is about eye-candy. There is a simple slider, and when you move it all the way to the left, all of the eye-candy that can be disabled is turned off. This means that it still easy to disable everything even when there are 500 fancy features... so more features (like, say, dashboard widgets) does not necessarily mean more work is needed to disable it all.
Well things in the style of the OSX dashboard widgets can be useful too. In this interview, Zack Rusin (the guy mentioned in the summary for this article) talks briefly about OSX-style eye-candy in KDE4, and he says that they want their interface to be useful as well as good-looking. If you still don't want the useful magic eye-candy thingies because you think they're too heavy on resources or annoying or whatever, then you'd probably be better off not using KDE anyway. You could just use XFCE or Fluxbox or something like that instead. You'd still be able to run apps from KDE or GNOME or whatever, but the DE would be more minimal.
According to my dad, there is an interesting explanation behind the difference in rudeness between two English words that mean the same thing. In 1066 the Normans invaded England and took it over. This meant that there were two populations coexisting. There were the Anglo-Saxons, who were the common folk, and you had also the Normans who were the gentry.
These two people spoke different languages. Most of the ruder terms have come from the Anglo-Saxon words, while most of the more acceptable words come from the Norman words. The reason why the Norman words are less rude is, of course, because they were more upper-class and so using the words of the Normans was less vulgar.
I don't know if this is true, but if it is, then it's certainly interesting how class differences from a thousand years ago can still affect the language we speak today! If you look up "crap" in the dictionary, then it tells you that it comes from Old French roots (the Normans came from France), whereas "shit" is apparently from Old English, which seems to lend credence to this theory.
You missed the point. While you say you're doing fine with ATI under Windows, lots of people aren't. I used to use Windows, and I had problems there too. I believe that if they open-source their drivers, then they would greatly improve, and it would have the added benefit of allowing me to use the full power of my graphics card under Linux, too. Opening up the drivers would cost them nothing, but they would see an increase of sales to Linux users. When you're a big company like ATI, even less than 1% is a lot of money. It would be extra profit with a minimum of effort. It would make things better for us, and it would make things better for ATI, but they're not doing it and I don't know why. It's just very frustrating.
Yeah, right. This is why I have trouble understanding why they won't just open-source their driver. I mean if NVidia are ahead on the driver front, then it kind of makes sense that they don't open-source their software, because then they might end up losing the lead because their super-secret formula wouldn't be so super-secret anymore. I still wouldn't agree with them, but I'd understand their argument.
I see so many people complaining about the ATI drivers, people who have a bad experience and decide never to buy their cards again. If ATI can't write drivers to save their life, then fine, maybe there's someone in the community who can. By open-sourcing their drivers, ATI would definitely take the lead in cross-platform compatibility, and they'd probably make up the performance difference too - we all know how full-on some gamers get about performance, if they knew how to tweak the driver code in order to squeeze out a few more FPS, you know they would. It would be a hell of a lot cheaper and easier than installing water cooling or whatever.
It just pisses me off. I can't even use the closed ATI drivers for Linux because they're so shit, they seem to break with every new kernel version, they don't work if I enable framebuffer console, and they're a PITA to install, even though I've done it enough times. It goes without saying that I'll be really surprised if these improvements with the new Windows drivers make it to Linux. Within a week I should be running X.Org 7.0, which comes with support for open-source ATI drivers, but I think that even those won't be too great, due to lack of documentation from ATI.
Yeah, I was considering posting the same thing, because I have suffered from this when I bought a WLAN card with TI's ACX111 (a friend mistakenly told me it has full Linux support). If they just totally ingored Linux altogether, then that's one thing, but it's sad to see them using Linux like this without putting in the tiniest bit of effort to help the project out in return.
Incidentally, the drivers on the site given by the parent poster have stopped working for me recently, but there are updated drivers in the Andrew Morton kernel patchset that work like a charm for me.
Yeah, I thought the same thing when I read it this morning. However, I did actually read it in the newspaper, and it's the Saturday one at that, which I think a lot of people get when they might not get it normally (because it has lots of extra stuff), so hopefully enough people will read it that a few of them will really take exception and Google about it, in which case they will doubtless stumble upon the people fighting this stuff. It may not be perfect, but it's good that the issue is working its way out there. This intellectual property bullshit has gone on long enough; just ask any man on the street if they think you should be able to patent a mouse, website or film plot and they will tell you it's madness.
I think the article makes a very good point when it talks about how the companies who are so vigourously in favour of IP would shy away immediately if it worked both ways. A typical example I often see posted here on/. is: If by purchasing a CD I am only buying the right to listen to that music, then why can't I snap my CD in half, take it back to the shop and ask for a new one for £0.50 or however much the materials and manufacturing actually costs?
The point is that OS X is a unix-based system, shipped with an X implementation AND a load of (closed source) other stuff. All you're doing by not using OS X is removing the 'other stuff'. Look at darwin-ports for the equivalent to apt-get...
Yes, but maybe it is necessary to remove the 'other stuff'. I just read a few posts up that this laptop will only have 1GB of storage space and 128MB of RAM. If you look up the requirements for OSX on Apple's website, it says that you need twice as much RAM and three times as much storage!
I literally just googled "LiveCD 128MB" and on the first result I found Damn Small Linux, and if you take a look then you can see what is possible with a Linux system. If you can figure out a way to make OSX occupy 50MB of disk space and run in 128MB RAM without a GPU to draw the desktop either, then awesome, I support the use of OSX! But I don't think you can. Maybe if the whole of OSX were open then it would be possible to tweak it and make it run on the laptop, but it is not, and that is the problem that makes it unsuitable in this situation.
And nobody should have to pay for health insurance, and refrigerators should grow on trees. It's called utopia... I've never understood the people and culture behind KDE, never liked the KDE desktop. I prefer to use and contribute to GNOME. A lot of other contributors are just like me... They really don't have the time nor care about the way a KDE app looks on GNOME or vice versa. It simply is not that important.
Well, now you're just being silly. Of course refrigerators growing on trees does not appear to be very far within the realms of possibility, but can you seriously not imagine a common colour-scheme configuration shared between the two desktops? It doesn't seem like madness to me, maybe you could just have a directory ~/.xtheme or something with files in there. I guess this wouldn't fit in with this registry-alike thing Gnome has (disclaimer: I know nothing about Gnome and may be wrong), but with a little discussion, I definitely think it would be possible to work something out...
Oh, and without wanting to start a patriotic flamewar, there are many countries where nobody needs to get health insurance... so maybe the things that seem impossible are not as crazy as you think!
In addition to your story and the one in TFA, the Rockbox project recently had a security breach in TWiki too, and the whole thing got deleted. The news item is still there on their website, if you want to read it. I know the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but this little collection of tales of woe still doesn't do much to bolster my confidence in TWiki.
You are mistaken. You can pull off tightly integrated backwards compatibility and still migrate to a new toolkit and language. Apple has demonstrated this.
I'm not quite sure I understand you, if you are switching to using a new language and toolkit, don't you have to rewrite all of your existing codebase in this new language, keeping the old stuff around for backwards compatibility? Or do you suggest that any new program to be developed in the new language/toolkit/whatever, with bindings to integrate it with the older stuff? If you mean the latter, is this really switching, or is it just changing your policy about how new stuff is made? Please clarify further on this interesting point.
KDE4 has specific goals, and one has to ask the question whether Qt and C++ are the best platforms to support those goals. I believe they aren't. But, of course, since most KDE programmers are heavily invested in Qt and C++, they wouldn't agree.
Now I don't want to be nasty here, but this statement seems incredibly vague. What goals in specific are you referring to? I thought that the goal of KDE was to create a good-looking, useable desktop environment. Please explain how C++ and Qt in particular prevent the KDE team from achieving their goals. Are you saying that C++ is too low-level to be used for desktop development, and as Qt is a C++ toolkit, it too is affected by this? Would you suggest a Java-based desktop, or maybe a C#-based one? It's an interesting idea, and I could talk for quite a while about it, but I wouldn't want to waste my time if it's not what you mean.
Yes, that's another problem, and that's exactly the problem the LGPL was intended to address. Putting a GPL license on software that has less restrictive substitutes discourages its use. Most of the software I develop is open source, but I'd still have to pay for Qt if I ever only want to temporarily distribute a single copy in binary form only.
A GPL toolkit is really not a problem for the many open source developers who would be releasing their software under the GPL anyway, and if you want to use the non-GPL Qt license, then you must pay Trolltech for it. Commercial software developers should be able to easily underwrite this cost. You say that a more restrictive license discourages use of that software in favour of less restrictive alternatives, but then by your logic, we would all be using *BSD because the license there is less restrictive that Linux's GPL license, which is obviously not the case.
Although I disagree with you, interesting points! I'm sorry you were modded flamebait.
Because, unless I am very much mistaken, it would require that almost all of the project be re-written or thrown away and started on again. You can still have a radical change without having to throw away all of the code that's already been written. Also, they are porting the whole of the KDE project from the Qt3 toolkit to Qt4, since Qt4 is not backward-compatible with Qt3, so in a sense, they are changing the toolkit - but they are porting to one that is very, very similar to the one they use now.;) What's wrong with Qt anyway that might make you want to port away from it? You might say that it's GPL and not LGPL, which might discourage proprietary developers who don't want to fork out for the alternative license, but that's about it, anything else is really just a matter of preference.
The write-up also seemed rather sparse in details, so while I am writing this post I may as well chuck in a few links:
I don't know, does anybody know if they meant that Qt 3.3.5 was out too early to make it work with just the beta version, or will the 3.5 full release also not support it? Isn't beta just a feature freeze, so then maybe they can get bugfixes in still for the problems making it impossible to build it with 3.3.5? Does anybody have any additional information?
As far as I know, the only other releases in the KDE 3 series will be 3.5.x bugfix releases, and then KDE 4 comes out, which will be on Qt 4. Either they fix it before 3.5 is released, they fix it on a 3.5.x release, or not at all. That's how I see it.
KDE 4 has been underway for a little while now, and all of the software is being ported over to Qt 4. If you read this little article, then maybe it will help you see what they're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
No! It was Adam... he was the first man, right? Even though all of the other people couldn't have been created without Eve, Eve was made from Adam's rib, right? So it still goes back to Adam.
But wait a minute... didn't God create Adam? But then where did God come from? A Christian once told me he knew God was real because of the Bible, so God is from the Bible. But who wrote the Bible? This is so bloody confusing.
Switching from one generic binary distro to another is just changing a few details about how certain peices of the OS fit together and what is on or off by default and has nothing to do with speed.
This simply isn't true. If you switch from a binary distro using the hotplug init. scripts for hardware autodetection to another binary distro using udev (or other methods) for that task, you can generally expect the hardware autodetection stage of the boot process to be shortened by something in the region of 10s or so (well that was my value, anyway, certainly significant speedups can be expected).
That's just one example, I'm sure there are more.
Maybe you could be developing software that you want to run on Linux as well as OS X. Maybe you have decided that from an ethical standpoint you no longer want to use closed software, but you only know how to use OS X, so you want to ease yourself into Linux by dual-booting for a while. Maybe Linux distributions generally give you more ability to tinker around with the guts of the system, which is something you find enjoyable and educational. Maybe you just think it's a pretty cool thing to do!
/. about running Linux on a Mac. Even if there was absolutely no sensible reason for doing it whatsoever, plenty of nerdy people would still find it a fun thing to do. If you read Slashdot, then surely you must realise this :-)
No offence, you don't seem like a troll, but this is kind of a silly question that seems to come up every time there is an article on
I think it's pretty decent of Real to produce versions of their player software for Linux, and open-source software too, but I'm not really sure that it proves that Real matters. The second link you gave provides a lot of information about how important Real is, but then again it's their press section, so I don't really view it as a reliable source.
:-)
The only reason Real still seems to be around is the cross-platform playability of their media (see the BBC website as an example). To me, it seems like they want to be like the PDF of audio and video, which is fine. However, due to the current trends in their area of business, they need to embrace DRM in order to survive. The DRM also needs to work across all platforms, so they need DRM support on Linux, which currently does not exist. As others have pointed out before me, it seems like the lack of DRM on Linux hurts Real more than Linux itself. To actually say that Linux is going to die because of a lack of DRM is a fairly ridiculous statement to make, and I think it reflects their frustration at the corner they seem to have backed themselves into. GNU/Linux is under the GPL, so it pretty much can't die. Even if it could, it is viewed by many as a server OS, and it doesn't seem like the ability to play Real Audio is necessary on a server.
I don't dislike Real, but I wouldn't really agree that they are particularly important to very many people. If they dropped off the face of the Earth tomorrow, I probably wouldn't ever notice.
(A pretty unrelated note: When I followed the link to the Real press page, I thought their advert for their music download service was quite funny. "Access over 1 million songs, legally!" Well, I already do. I call it... THE RECORD SHOP!
One day I was using my computer, when I noticed something strange on the screen. It was a little grey mark, moving about on the screen in a seemingly random fashion. It was a little bug of some kind... but it was actually under the screen! I tried to shoo it out of the monitor, but I accidentally squashed it to death, because I forgot the screen of a TFT is flexible. Now there is a little stain on everything I view, thanks to the tiny insect corpse. This would never have happened if I had bought a CRT instead!
People should be able to say what they want, yes, but those cartoons look very much like they were designed to hurt people who believe strongly in the teachings of Islam. Do you believe that hurting people is the right thing to do? If not (and I doubt that you do), then surely you have to concede that is was hurtful and wrong to print the cartoons.
I don't remember either Bush or Blair saying that the comics were a good reason to kill people or burn buildings. Also, a spokesperson for Blair said that the government wasn't in a position to tell the newspapers what to do, and that if they wanted to print the cartoons, the government wouldn't stop them (they'd just be unhappy about it). The newspapers that printed those comics didn't seem to be doing so in support for free speech, I thought it seemed like they were stirring up controversy in order to generate sales. It would have been quite easy to condemn the reactions of the extremists without printing the offensive material, material which must have hurt the feelings of many perfectly peacable Muslims as well as those of the extremists.
I understand that you're not happy with the situation, but who is? Getting angry about problems that stem from anger in the first place does not seem like the sensible thing to do. More incendiary terms like "Islamofascist" are not what the world needs right now.
Well, since KHTML and KJS (I think?) were ported over to Mac OS in the first place in order to create Safari, which then allowed the Apple devs to create the patches that allowed it to pass Acid2, patches which could not then be easily applied back to KHTML and KJS because the code sometimes didn't meet KDE's standards or because the patches were sometimes not supplied in a format that they could easily work with, maybe the KDE devs put in more effort overall :-P
But seriously, who gives a shit who came first, second or whatever; I think the important thing is that browser developers are obviously making an effort to ensure stricter standards compliance. I assume someone must be working on this for Firefox, so does anybody know when we can expect to see Firefox pass Acid2 as well?
As far as I know, Microsoft were found to be in violation of European business law. They were fined for this (not a huge amount IIRC) and were told exactly what they need to do in order to make things right. MS said that they didn't agree with the conditions, but they were rejected. They were told that if they didn't sort things out, then they would face a daily fine.
Microsoft have had plenty of time to show that they are willing to comply with all of Europe's demands, yet they have failed to do so. They were also informed of the consequences they would face if they didn't obey. I don't see how you can honestly say that the European government is trying to extort MS, because they gave them every opportunity to fix the problem (by enabling interoperability) without facing major fines, but MS just tried to weasel their way out of it. If MS want to do business in Europe, then they must play by the same rules as everybody else. If they choose not to do so, then it should come as no surprise when they are punished.
Listen, I don't like the government sticking their nose in my life either, but one of their jobs is to look after the best interests of the populace. It is not in the people's best interest to let companies run amok and do whatever they want, so there must be rules to govern them. If a company breaks the rules, and refuses to stop doing so, then there ought to be consequences, or what would be the point?
For what it's worth, I agree with you, but I still think it's not especially clear who is the bad guy here. The main thing that worries me is that they were able to get rid of those links so easily. I think it's pretty scary that they could just wave a lawsuit in these guys' faces and get them to delete that material. It's like censorship. I believe that people ought to be able to link to whatever the hell they want, and as long as they are not explicitly encouraging illegal activity as they do so, then they shouldn't have to worry about being taken to court simply for showing something to someone else.
I would hesitate to place much blame on Apple though. They are just acting like what they are: a big company. The real blame lies with the people who pass the stupid laws that make Apple able to do this.
For what it's worth, the TI ACX100/111 driver is included in Andrew Morton's patchset. If I remember correctly, many distributions have kernel packages available with this patchset already applied, so give that a go if you can find it.
The driver needs to be able to load a firmware image when the module is loaded. It sounds a bit complicated perhaps, but it should just be a matter of putting a file in the right directory and it will all be handled automatically from there onwards. Information about that and more can be found in this ACX100/111 Wiki.
The problem I had with this driver is finding a firmware image that will work. If the module inserts correctly, the device node (/dev/wlan0 or whatever) appears correctly, but the card just doesn't seem to work when you try to scan for networks and the signal and all other readings are at zero, then maybe it is a firmware problem. Try different combinations of firmware if you run into this problem and you can't figure out any solution.
For me, the driver seems to work very well now. I have a £5 Safecom card, cheapest crap on the market, it's not even listed in the supported devices on the Wiki, but it still works like a charm. Hopefully the driver will make it into the mainline kernel soon.
What? Grey Death is in the original, it's what the whole game is about! For those who don't know, in Deus Ex, there is a plague sweeping America. The plague turns out not to be a naturally ocurring virus, it is actually a man-made nanomachine. The Grey Death is made by a secret group of conspirators, who also make a vaccine/treatment for the virus, called Ambrosia, which they use to control politicians in order to help achieve their dastardly aims.
It's somehow kind of scarily believeable, in a kind of nut-job conspiracy theory way. Although there are some pretty awesome technologies listed in the summary, I'd also be interested to see what evils the experts think could come about due to this new technology.
Yes, OK, sliding menus are actually a pet hate of mine, because they waste my time and don't do anything. It really pisses me off on OSX when things take a second longer to happen than they should because some stupid animation is playing. However, there are some eye-candy effects that I actually quite like.
If you really don't like unnecessary bells and whistles, but you're still dead set on using KDE, then it should still be OK though. When you start up KDE for the first time, it asks you a couple of questions about things. One of the questions is about eye-candy. There is a simple slider, and when you move it all the way to the left, all of the eye-candy that can be disabled is turned off. This means that it still easy to disable everything even when there are 500 fancy features... so more features (like, say, dashboard widgets) does not necessarily mean more work is needed to disable it all.
Well things in the style of the OSX dashboard widgets can be useful too. In this interview, Zack Rusin (the guy mentioned in the summary for this article) talks briefly about OSX-style eye-candy in KDE4, and he says that they want their interface to be useful as well as good-looking. If you still don't want the useful magic eye-candy thingies because you think they're too heavy on resources or annoying or whatever, then you'd probably be better off not using KDE anyway. You could just use XFCE or Fluxbox or something like that instead. You'd still be able to run apps from KDE or GNOME or whatever, but the DE would be more minimal.
According to my dad, there is an interesting explanation behind the difference in rudeness between two English words that mean the same thing. In 1066 the Normans invaded England and took it over. This meant that there were two populations coexisting. There were the Anglo-Saxons, who were the common folk, and you had also the Normans who were the gentry.
These two people spoke different languages. Most of the ruder terms have come from the Anglo-Saxon words, while most of the more acceptable words come from the Norman words. The reason why the Norman words are less rude is, of course, because they were more upper-class and so using the words of the Normans was less vulgar.
I don't know if this is true, but if it is, then it's certainly interesting how class differences from a thousand years ago can still affect the language we speak today! If you look up "crap" in the dictionary, then it tells you that it comes from Old French roots (the Normans came from France), whereas "shit" is apparently from Old English, which seems to lend credence to this theory.
You missed the point. While you say you're doing fine with ATI under Windows, lots of people aren't. I used to use Windows, and I had problems there too. I believe that if they open-source their drivers, then they would greatly improve, and it would have the added benefit of allowing me to use the full power of my graphics card under Linux, too. Opening up the drivers would cost them nothing, but they would see an increase of sales to Linux users. When you're a big company like ATI, even less than 1% is a lot of money. It would be extra profit with a minimum of effort. It would make things better for us, and it would make things better for ATI, but they're not doing it and I don't know why. It's just very frustrating.
Yeah, right. This is why I have trouble understanding why they won't just open-source their driver. I mean if NVidia are ahead on the driver front, then it kind of makes sense that they don't open-source their software, because then they might end up losing the lead because their super-secret formula wouldn't be so super-secret anymore. I still wouldn't agree with them, but I'd understand their argument.
I see so many people complaining about the ATI drivers, people who have a bad experience and decide never to buy their cards again. If ATI can't write drivers to save their life, then fine, maybe there's someone in the community who can. By open-sourcing their drivers, ATI would definitely take the lead in cross-platform compatibility, and they'd probably make up the performance difference too - we all know how full-on some gamers get about performance, if they knew how to tweak the driver code in order to squeeze out a few more FPS, you know they would. It would be a hell of a lot cheaper and easier than installing water cooling or whatever.
It just pisses me off. I can't even use the closed ATI drivers for Linux because they're so shit, they seem to break with every new kernel version, they don't work if I enable framebuffer console, and they're a PITA to install, even though I've done it enough times. It goes without saying that I'll be really surprised if these improvements with the new Windows drivers make it to Linux. Within a week I should be running X.Org 7.0, which comes with support for open-source ATI drivers, but I think that even those won't be too great, due to lack of documentation from ATI.
Just fucking sort it out, ATI!
Yeah, I was considering posting the same thing, because I have suffered from this when I bought a WLAN card with TI's ACX111 (a friend mistakenly told me it has full Linux support). If they just totally ingored Linux altogether, then that's one thing, but it's sad to see them using Linux like this without putting in the tiniest bit of effort to help the project out in return.
Incidentally, the drivers on the site given by the parent poster have stopped working for me recently, but there are updated drivers in the Andrew Morton kernel patchset that work like a charm for me.
Yeah, I thought the same thing when I read it this morning. However, I did actually read it in the newspaper, and it's the Saturday one at that, which I think a lot of people get when they might not get it normally (because it has lots of extra stuff), so hopefully enough people will read it that a few of them will really take exception and Google about it, in which case they will doubtless stumble upon the people fighting this stuff. It may not be perfect, but it's good that the issue is working its way out there. This intellectual property bullshit has gone on long enough; just ask any man on the street if they think you should be able to patent a mouse, website or film plot and they will tell you it's madness.
/. is: If by purchasing a CD I am only buying the right to listen to that music, then why can't I snap my CD in half, take it back to the shop and ask for a new one for £0.50 or however much the materials and manufacturing actually costs?
I think the article makes a very good point when it talks about how the companies who are so vigourously in favour of IP would shy away immediately if it worked both ways. A typical example I often see posted here on
The point is that OS X is a unix-based system, shipped with an X implementation AND a load of (closed source) other stuff. All you're doing by not using OS X is removing the 'other stuff'. Look at darwin-ports for the equivalent to apt-get...
Yes, but maybe it is necessary to remove the 'other stuff'. I just read a few posts up that this laptop will only have 1GB of storage space and 128MB of RAM. If you look up the requirements for OSX on Apple's website, it says that you need twice as much RAM and three times as much storage!
I literally just googled "LiveCD 128MB" and on the first result I found Damn Small Linux, and if you take a look then you can see what is possible with a Linux system. If you can figure out a way to make OSX occupy 50MB of disk space and run in 128MB RAM without a GPU to draw the desktop either, then awesome, I support the use of OSX! But I don't think you can. Maybe if the whole of OSX were open then it would be possible to tweak it and make it run on the laptop, but it is not, and that is the problem that makes it unsuitable in this situation.
And nobody should have to pay for health insurance, and refrigerators should grow on trees. It's called utopia... I've never understood the people and culture behind KDE, never liked the KDE desktop. I prefer to use and contribute to GNOME. A lot of other contributors are just like me... They really don't have the time nor care about the way a KDE app looks on GNOME or vice versa. It simply is not that important.
Well, now you're just being silly. Of course refrigerators growing on trees does not appear to be very far within the realms of possibility, but can you seriously not imagine a common colour-scheme configuration shared between the two desktops? It doesn't seem like madness to me, maybe you could just have a directory ~/.xtheme or something with files in there. I guess this wouldn't fit in with this registry-alike thing Gnome has (disclaimer: I know nothing about Gnome and may be wrong), but with a little discussion, I definitely think it would be possible to work something out...
Oh, and without wanting to start a patriotic flamewar, there are many countries where nobody needs to get health insurance... so maybe the things that seem impossible are not as crazy as you think!
In addition to your story and the one in TFA, the Rockbox project recently had a security breach in TWiki too, and the whole thing got deleted. The news item is still there on their website, if you want to read it. I know the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but this little collection of tales of woe still doesn't do much to bolster my confidence in TWiki.
You are mistaken. You can pull off tightly integrated backwards compatibility and still migrate to a new toolkit and language. Apple has demonstrated this.
I'm not quite sure I understand you, if you are switching to using a new language and toolkit, don't you have to rewrite all of your existing codebase in this new language, keeping the old stuff around for backwards compatibility? Or do you suggest that any new program to be developed in the new language/toolkit/whatever, with bindings to integrate it with the older stuff? If you mean the latter, is this really switching, or is it just changing your policy about how new stuff is made? Please clarify further on this interesting point.
KDE4 has specific goals, and one has to ask the question whether Qt and C++ are the best platforms to support those goals. I believe they aren't. But, of course, since most KDE programmers are heavily invested in Qt and C++, they wouldn't agree.
Now I don't want to be nasty here, but this statement seems incredibly vague. What goals in specific are you referring to? I thought that the goal of KDE was to create a good-looking, useable desktop environment. Please explain how C++ and Qt in particular prevent the KDE team from achieving their goals. Are you saying that C++ is too low-level to be used for desktop development, and as Qt is a C++ toolkit, it too is affected by this? Would you suggest a Java-based desktop, or maybe a C#-based one? It's an interesting idea, and I could talk for quite a while about it, but I wouldn't want to waste my time if it's not what you mean.
Yes, that's another problem, and that's exactly the problem the LGPL was intended to address. Putting a GPL license on software that has less restrictive substitutes discourages its use. Most of the software I develop is open source, but I'd still have to pay for Qt if I ever only want to temporarily distribute a single copy in binary form only.
A GPL toolkit is really not a problem for the many open source developers who would be releasing their software under the GPL anyway, and if you want to use the non-GPL Qt license, then you must pay Trolltech for it. Commercial software developers should be able to easily underwrite this cost. You say that a more restrictive license discourages use of that software in favour of less restrictive alternatives, but then by your logic, we would all be using *BSD because the license there is less restrictive that Linux's GPL license, which is obviously not the case.
Although I disagree with you, interesting points! I'm sorry you were modded flamebait.
Because, unless I am very much mistaken, it would require that almost all of the project be re-written or thrown away and started on again. You can still have a radical change without having to throw away all of the code that's already been written. Also, they are porting the whole of the KDE project from the Qt3 toolkit to Qt4, since Qt4 is not backward-compatible with Qt3, so in a sense, they are changing the toolkit - but they are porting to one that is very, very similar to the one they use now. ;) What's wrong with Qt anyway that might make you want to port away from it? You might say that it's GPL and not LGPL, which might discourage proprietary developers who don't want to fork out for the alternative license, but that's about it, anything else is really just a matter of preference.
The write-up also seemed rather sparse in details, so while I am writing this post I may as well chuck in a few links:
Interesting interview with Aaron Seigo
Another good interview with Zack Rusin
Official site for KDE Plasma, the KDE4 desktop.
I don't know, does anybody know if they meant that Qt 3.3.5 was out too early to make it work with just the beta version, or will the 3.5 full release also not support it? Isn't beta just a feature freeze, so then maybe they can get bugfixes in still for the problems making it impossible to build it with 3.3.5? Does anybody have any additional information?
As far as I know, the only other releases in the KDE 3 series will be 3.5.x bugfix releases, and then KDE 4 comes out, which will be on Qt 4. Either they fix it before 3.5 is released, they fix it on a 3.5.x release, or not at all. That's how I see it.
KDE 4 has been underway for a little while now, and all of the software is being ported over to Qt 4. If you read this little article, then maybe it will help you see what they're doing.