Yes, software -can- damage hardware if you don't know what you are doing....
When I first ran X, the monitor made this horrible screeching noise. Yikes! I quickly dropped out of X and found someone else's modelines and put them in, then the monitor worked fine (still does).
So basically, what is the point to this post? You say "software can damage your hardware", then, "look at what happened to me", and then, "but it didn't damage it".
I had an old 48X LG-CDROM that got fried by SuSE 8.0.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the current problem. From the newsthread:
The current news is that it was triggered by
the addition of packet-writing code to the 2.4.22-rc2q5 kernel on Aug.
15, no news on how that determination was made. One must suspect that
querying the drive for the format of the disk or its capabilities
somehow triggers a firmware self-destruct bug in the CRD-84xx models.
This is a recent patch that Mandrake is the first distro to include.
I also heard that my freind had his monitor destroyed by Debian (due to the buggy Xfree86 3.3.7.debian).
Did you just through this in to add some anti-Linux FUD? Remember folks, don't use Linux, your computer might stop working..
What happened here is that the kernel patch sends a standard ATAPI command to the drive to query the format of the disc, and this command triggers a bug in the LG firmware. Nothing to do with Linux, it's just unfortunate that it is the first software to use that feature (and so discovering the bug).
I honestly don't know what problem people have with the Debian installer.
I had only installed distros like Red Hat and Mandrake before but I had no problem using the Debian installer.. I just made sure that I had done all the necessary things and it went fine. (Partition, format, install bootloader, etc. in no particular order)
The only real problem I had was documentation -- it sucks. I wanted to do a net install and had to fight through confusing docs until I discovered that all I had to do was download the right two disk images (the bf2.4 variety) and I was done.
Question: Do CDs have a tendency to fail horribly within 2-3 years like hard drives?
CD media are a lot more reliable than hard drives and computers in general. I have CDs from the late 80's but no surviving hard drives from that time..
There was a Slashdot story months ago about how (with the cheapest carriers) a good percentage of SMS messages never arrive at their destination.. I'd be a bit concerned to use this if there was a chance the parking lot people might suddenly want money for 24 hours worth of parking out of me..
A grounding strap. Have you ever seen anyone use a grounding strap? Last time I went around to a computer store and askedif they had any I was laughed out of the store..
With many companies and government agencies trialling or converting to Linux if Microsoft sabotage Samba etc.. then many such organisations are likely to cut out Windows from their networks than cut out Linux.
I don't know.. many organizations only run Linux on the server. The desktop is still Microsoft's domain.
Say an organization has 300 desktops and 5 servers (disclaimer: I do not know what the needed ratio is and do not care. This is a hypothetical situation). If they all of a sudden discover that, say, Longhorn won't work with Samba, it'll be the Linux servers running Samba that goes. Much easier than switching 300 desktops to Linux.
It's a technical story but it comes down to, that you can use Mount Rainier rewritable (DVD+MRW) disks as 4.3 Gigabyte harddisks. In other words, you don't need a special burning program to put stuff on the +MRWs, you just drag and drop it to your drive icon.
Copying, deleting, everything behaves like with a floppy disk.
So? This is nothing new.. there is a standard for this on CD-RW called UDF. Various programs are avaiable to do this.. DirectCD from Adaptec/Roxio (shudder), InCD from Ahead Software, etc.. (no good support on linux)
In fact, I think you can use UDF on DVD already, but don't take my word for it..
In Canada, our only national broadcaster (CTV has ALMOST national coverage) is the CBC, which is publicly funded. Generally, they are pretty good about commercials.
The National (10pm hour-long newscast) runs for the first half-hour commercial-free, which is nice because if you just want to see the news you can do so without interruption. There is usually a short (3min) break around 10:30 and then a news-documentary for the last half hour with another commercial interruption at ~10:45.
They've also recently been running movies (a lot of good stuff like Gladiator and Saving Private Ryan) uncut and with relatively few commercials (in fact, they have to pad it out with promos at the end because they didn't come to a nice round 3 hours or whatever)
In Ontario (largest province) we also have TVO (TV Ontario) a public broadcaster, like PBS except on a smaller scale and NO DAMN PLEDGE DRIVES. They run commercial-free and sometimes have something interesting on (like a movie marathon of the infamous 70's disaster movies like Airplane and Inferno).
It's actually per year, and it's not that much considering that you get several channels of commercial-free high-quality television, but I strongly disagree with the TV Licensing (warning, crappy site with fake Javascript scrollbars that only work in IE) organization's strong-arm tactics (I've heard more than a few horror stores about people who didn't own TVs being harassed by the TV Licensing people). They even have a section on their website that describes how they will hunt you down and prosecute you.
The new graphical boot is really slick. The previous ones told me that everything is supposed to be [ ok ], but I didn't know what the hell is supposed to be [ ok ]! So thats good too.
I haven't checked it out yet but is it the same as in 8.0? 8.0 had a very pretty graphical init (I can't remember its name.. something with an A) but they either removed it because it was strongly disliked or really buggy.
How is Menudrake (the Mandrake menu editor)? Last time I used it (9.0) it was a painful experience, with moving menu items around nearly impossible (you were supposed to drag and drop, but that seemed to cause the menu items to go somewhere else at random) and made me want to put my fist through the monitor.
First of all, the command line is hidden very well. This means so much for the average user. No xterm's are installed by default, and the run program dialog is disabled.
Why is this necessary? Windows XP does not do this. What if the user wants to run a program not on the Mandrake Menu? Do they give up because they can't find a way to run it?
So stop punishing yourself with the command line, and come into the cozy GUI.
I have to disagree with you. Using the CLI is not punishment. In fact, it is frequently more efficient. Let's say I have a file with 662 files in it. (Say,/etc) I want to copy only the files named blah.conf to my home directory. I do:
cp/etc/*.conf/home/iantri
.. and it's done. How are you going to that easily in a GUI?
Simply put, there are situations where subtitling a Japenese movie in English isn't ideal. You can't even really get the pacing of the sentence.
Well, they've been doing fine so far..
But you aren't really making sense. If the difference in pacing is going to make it hard to subtitle it properly, isn't it going to be an even bigger issue when it comes to dubbing (matching mouth movements to a pacing in which 'the difference is pretty wild')?
A lot of people seem upset about the whole Sitefinder thing, though, which struck me as kind of wierd. IE popped up a helpful page when a domain wasn't found; what's so bad about the actual domain registrar doing it?
Because it completely breaks e-mail and other services that rely on a proper response when a domain doesn't exist. For example, spam-blocking tools. They'll bounce the message if the domain in the From: line doesn't exist. With Sitefinder, it always 'exists', so the spam-blocker is less effective.
(Interesting thing I found out; miniature with British pronounciation actually means 'microscopic or smaller' where with English it's just 'small'.)
Huh? Oh, by "English" you mean American English, beacuse that's the only one which is important, right? (What did you think the British (..and Australians, Canadians, etc.) called their language?
I've noticed that in the review they commented that the volume on your soundcard is set to 0 by default. It's been like this since 9.0. I like Mandrake and all, but find the Linux distribution virtually unusable due to the tons of little bugs and quirks Mandrake has out of the box (for example, in 9.2 VNC dosen't work). Not to mention, I think this would be off-putting for new users.
What's the deal with this lack of attention to detail?
TV Guide is approx CDN$3/issue here, so I highly doubt you pay $12 for 52 issues of TV Guide (the printing costs alone would prohibit that, I'd think they barely make a few cents at that price.
With TiVO (and other EPGs), though, you get all sorts of programming information (descriptions, etc), the ability to have it record shows whenever they happen, and so on. I think its worth it.
The big difference I see is that with the Dialectizer YOU control it, noone forces anyone to see the modified page and above all it is just good clean fun. With corporate censorship, they are modifying the pages and the employees have no way to look at the uncensored versions.
The dialectizer issue was silly. I think this sort of censorship is a problem, though.
The ribbons are still available in most places, believe it or not, as third-party replacements. I'm still able to get ribbons for my Panasonic KX-P2123 and 2124 (great printers).. and at ~CDN$10/ribbon/500-800 pages it is ridiculously cheap.
The levy only applies to hard drive that are in MP3 players, and at the moment it's only in the proposed stage. So the hard drive wouldn't be any more expensive than it's Canadian retail price + 7% GST and x% provincial tax (8% in Ontario).
Slashdot Mirror
This has absolutely nothing to do with the current problem. From the newsthread:
This is a recent patch that Mandrake is the first distro to include. Did you just through this in to add some anti-Linux FUD? Remember folks, don't use Linux, your computer might stop working..What happened here is that the kernel patch sends a standard ATAPI command to the drive to query the format of the disc, and this command triggers a bug in the LG firmware. Nothing to do with Linux, it's just unfortunate that it is the first software to use that feature (and so discovering the bug).
I honestly don't know what problem people have with the Debian installer.
I had only installed distros like Red Hat and Mandrake before but I had no problem using the Debian installer.. I just made sure that I had done all the necessary things and it went fine. (Partition, format, install bootloader, etc. in no particular order)
The only real problem I had was documentation -- it sucks. I wanted to do a net install and had to fight through confusing docs until I discovered that all I had to do was download the right two disk images (the bf2.4 variety) and I was done.
CD media are a lot more reliable than hard drives and computers in general. I have CDs from the late 80's but no surviving hard drives from that time..
There was a Slashdot story months ago about how (with the cheapest carriers) a good percentage of SMS messages never arrive at their destination.. I'd be a bit concerned to use this if there was a chance the parking lot people might suddenly want money for 24 hours worth of parking out of me..
Daltonism? Doesn't that have something to do with eating kittens?
A grounding strap. Have you ever seen anyone use a grounding strap? Last time I went around to a computer store and askedif they had any I was laughed out of the store..
Or even worse, people who zap their components with static electricity because they DIDN'T leave it plugged in and grounded!
I don't know.. many organizations only run Linux on the server. The desktop is still Microsoft's domain.
Say an organization has 300 desktops and 5 servers (disclaimer: I do not know what the needed ratio is and do not care. This is a hypothetical situation). If they all of a sudden discover that, say, Longhorn won't work with Samba, it'll be the Linux servers running Samba that goes. Much easier than switching 300 desktops to Linux.
So? This is nothing new.. there is a standard for this on CD-RW called UDF. Various programs are avaiable to do this.. DirectCD from Adaptec/Roxio (shudder), InCD from Ahead Software, etc.. (no good support on linux)
In fact, I think you can use UDF on DVD already, but don't take my word for it..
As you say, you've been having problems lately. If you'll note in CmdrTaco's Journal, Slashdot is having server issues right now.
The National (10pm hour-long newscast) runs for the first half-hour commercial-free, which is nice because if you just want to see the news you can do so without interruption. There is usually a short (3min) break around 10:30 and then a news-documentary for the last half hour with another commercial interruption at ~10:45.
They've also recently been running movies (a lot of good stuff like Gladiator and Saving Private Ryan) uncut and with relatively few commercials (in fact, they have to pad it out with promos at the end because they didn't come to a nice round 3 hours or whatever)
In Ontario (largest province) we also have TVO (TV Ontario) a public broadcaster, like PBS except on a smaller scale and NO DAMN PLEDGE DRIVES. They run commercial-free and sometimes have something interesting on (like a movie marathon of the infamous 70's disaster movies like Airplane and Inferno).
It's actually per year, and it's not that much considering that you get several channels of commercial-free high-quality television, but I strongly disagree with the TV Licensing (warning, crappy site with fake Javascript scrollbars that only work in IE) organization's strong-arm tactics (I've heard more than a few horror stores about people who didn't own TVs being harassed by the TV Licensing people). They even have a section on their website that describes how they will hunt you down and prosecute you.
How is Menudrake (the Mandrake menu editor)? Last time I used it (9.0) it was a painful experience, with moving menu items around nearly impossible (you were supposed to drag and drop, but that seemed to cause the menu items to go somewhere else at random) and made me want to put my fist through the monitor.
Why is this necessary? Windows XP does not do this. What if the user wants to run a program not on the Mandrake Menu? Do they give up because they can't find a way to run it? I have to disagree with you. Using the CLI is not punishment. In fact, it is frequently more efficient. Let's say I have a file with 662 files in it. (Say,cp /etc/*.conf /home/iantri
But you aren't really making sense. If the difference in pacing is going to make it hard to subtitle it properly, isn't it going to be an even bigger issue when it comes to dubbing (matching mouth movements to a pacing in which 'the difference is pretty wild')?
Because it completely breaks e-mail and other services that rely on a proper response when a domain doesn't exist. For example, spam-blocking tools. They'll bounce the message if the domain in the From: line doesn't exist. With Sitefinder, it always 'exists', so the spam-blocker is less effective.
Huh? Oh, by "English" you mean American English, beacuse that's the only one which is important, right? (What did you think the British (..and Australians, Canadians, etc.) called their language?What's the deal with this lack of attention to detail?
With TiVO (and other EPGs), though, you get all sorts of programming information (descriptions, etc), the ability to have it record shows whenever they happen, and so on. I think its worth it.
The big difference I see is that with the Dialectizer YOU control it, noone forces anyone to see the modified page and above all it is just good clean fun. With corporate censorship, they are modifying the pages and the employees have no way to look at the uncensored versions.
The dialectizer issue was silly. I think this sort of censorship is a problem, though.
The ribbons are still available in most places, believe it or not, as third-party replacements. I'm still able to get ribbons for my Panasonic KX-P2123 and 2124 (great printers).. and at ~CDN$10/ribbon/500-800 pages it is ridiculously cheap.
Interesting.. the poster before you suggests that women ARE the (indirect) cause of mens' early deaths.
Well you're clearly much better than the rest of us. If you think so poorly of us, why the hell are you here?
See for more info.
May I point this out as a good use of Convert LIT.. (the naysayers were saying how useless it was a few stories back)