I'd like to use Blender. It's clearly a great program, probably the best open-source 3D app out there. I want to use it so much that I bought the manual, even though I can reboot into Windows and use Lightwave 3D. I really want to support open source projects like Blender.
But I found the manual to be very poorly edited. The fact that it was not written by native English speakers comes through very clearly. It was so poorly written, in fact, that I got a headache trying to use it and eventually just gave up.
If they come out with a new manual that's edited to a decent level of readability, or even if they just edit the old one better and republish it, I'd probably buy it. Until then, I'll keep rebooting into Windows when I want to do 3D.
Does this BIOS call have anything to do with the soft lock problem encountered by me and many other Ubuntu users? My guess is not, but I don't know enough about these things to guess with much confidence.
One site that seems to have a lot of very good, well-informed answers is Ask MetaFilter. There are certainly snarky, ill-informed and irrelevant answers a-plenty there, but there also seem to be a lot of very good, very useful answers as well.
It seems like a lot of people on this thread are rejoicing that the spammers will be hurt. Well, as others have already said, the true source of spam is not Taiwan.
And instead of "Yay, no spam" you should really be saying "Oh shit, where will we get our graphics cards from?" (Or really, "Wow, I hope no one was injured or killed" -- but is that asking too much?) If Taiwan gets seriously hurt, prices for processors of all sorts, and especially graphics processors, will go through the roof. Open your computer case sometime and check where all those components were designed and built... And hey, why not try to be a little less racist, too?
I've been using Democracy 0.9.1 for a couple weeks now. It works great -- the videos play quite nicely, setting up a channel is relatively painless, the variety of codecs is good, etc.
My one problem is that Democracy allows connections on all kinds of ports that it supposedly doesn't. I have it set (in Preferences) to use only ports 8500 to 8600, but in reality, I get connections all over the place from ports 6000 to 60000. When I shut down Democracy, the connections stay in place. I think it's understandable that I don't want these connections!
Is this a problem with all Torrent programs? Is there anything I can do about it? Thanks to anyone who can help.
One problem is the usage of the word "friends" for what really should be "acquaintances". Someone who reads your $NAME_OF_FORUM_OR_WEBSITE_OR_BLOG page once in a while isn't necessarily a friend. There are people on my "friends" list in a certain blog-forum that aren't actually friends of mine. Some are actually my friends; some, I hope to be friends with in the future; some are friends of friends; others, I just have on my list because I want to hear what they say once in a while, but that doesn't necessarily make them friends.
A lot of the people who post "Ya dude let's go get drunkk!" on Myspace aren't really friends by any reasonable defition. I think Myspace needs a "drinking buddy" button.
Does the final release candidate still not mesh with the system theme? I don't want Firefox to have a completely different theme from the rest of my UI -- I want it to fit nicely into my system theme. Has the system theme issue been fixed in the final version? Is there some sort of workaround for this?
Although the new tab theme looks very attractive, it isn't consistent with the computer's default system theme. Visual integration is one of the factors that contributed to Firefox's initial success over the original Mozilla browser suite.
Opera is looking better and better every day... System themes also don't apply in Opera, but at least I get superior speed.
By "dependency hell", I mean the following things:
URPMI doesn't just always download all the packages needed for a given app. This may mean that Mandriva just hasn't released the packages for the app I want, but regardless, it's a big pain.
As N7DR said, Mandriva doesn't seem to update packages for new and spiffy things, only for security reasons. This can be a big pain; getting Gnome 2.16 running, for example, pretty much requires upgrading the entire Mandriva system, because even things like Garnome don't resolve packages dependencies.
Very often when I try to resolve a dependency issue myself by downloading packages, I find that 1) I have to spend an hour downloading something, then finding out what its dependencies are, then downloading the dependencies of that package, etc. etc., and 2) I usually get to the end and realize that the whole nasty chain is dependent on some package that is simply unfindable.
In general, I've found that URPMI (and its nasty resource-hogging GUI friend RPMdrake) don't resolve dependencies as well as Apt-type things. I don't know if this is a function of the distros behind them not updating their package lists as well, or software problems, or what, but regardless, it's the biggest pain for me in using Mandriva.
It's good to see MenuDrake go. I'm very interested in trying alacarte once it works.
Thank you for the package list. That answered many of my questions.
As for SCIM, there has been a line of very important apps that simply refuse to open due to some kind of conflict with SCIM. I've ended up having to add this stuff to their startup scripts:
That allows the apps to open, but when they do, they drop a nice big core dump on my desktop. Affected apps so far: Firefox, Thunderbird and XaraLX. I don't have the problem when I install Firefox through URPMI, but if I allow Firefox to update itself, the problem always exists.
How close does it get to solving the dependency hell problem? This is probably my biggest single problem with Mandriva.
How's Menudrake? That's one of my other big headaches with Mandriva. How easily can you modify the main menu now?
Where can I find a complete list of packages included? I have some very specific wants that the Mandriva website doesn't discuss.
Are the problems with SCIM resolved? A lot of people just basically unplugged it, but I have to use it because I use Chinese input a lot. Several applications simply wouldn't start because of problems with SCIM, leading to hacks that ended up plopping core dumps on my desktop every time I started them.
How does the new Cedega thing work? Is it just a one-month subscription, or a one-time version of the software or something? It seems like it has to be restricted somehow.
More broadly, there's the idea of von Neumann probes: self-replicating machines designed to cross the vacuum from system to system. But there are reasons why such probes probably aren't used.
A big question for me is, how do you rate qualifications for obscure cultural references? I started the Wikipedia article on gaming conventions, and to be honest I'm worried that someone's going to slap a "This article does not cite its sources" tag on it. (I'm sure that now that I've said this some joker will do just that.) I've been to a bunch of gaming conventions, have helped run cons that include gaming and know quite a bit about the topic in general. On the other hand, most of the articles that have been published about gaming conventions have been extremely inaccurate (usually in the direction of titillation), and there isn't much in the way of other research about them. This means that using citable sources in this case would lower the accuracy of the article. For some articles, expertise is extremely hard to quantify. How Citizendium will work around this?
There are two reasons I still use Gnome (2.10 currently):
Themes are easy to handle. Installing a theme in KDE requires actual installation:./configure, make, make install -- the whole mess. And it frequently doesn't work. In Gnome, it's true drag-and-drop.
To then actually use a theme is also a pain in KDE. There are a million different places to change all the different things, and it's quite difficult to find what I actually want to change.
It's also far, far easier to edit themes myself in Gnome. I just go into the file, find the appropriate image file and change it in GIMP or whatever. In KDE, this is again a huge pain. I don't want to have to recompile a theme in order to change the scroll bar colors!
Non-English fonts are handled far better in Gnome. I run Linux in Traditional Chinese, so this is quite important to me. No matter which font settings I try in KDE, some characters show up as little black circles. This means I can't even read all my menu selections. In Gnome, they all show up quite nicely.
There may be a place to change these fonts in KDE, but I've never seen it, and so I'm stuck with poor Chinese handling. This problem also seems to spill over into the Mandriva menus, where some titles are completely illegible, but at least I don't have to deal with those all the time.
You can, of course, believe who you want to believe. But please don't try to use the Firefly version of "May monkeys fly out of my butt" with any Chinese people. Or at least, don't say anything to me when they run away screaming from the crazy laowai who speaks such bizarre Mandarin...
See, the thing is, Joss asked her to translate what he wrote, not to come up with cool original phrases in Chinese. Those things may have made some sense in English, but Joss' nifty turns of phrase don't make any sense in Mandarin. She may have used some slang, but quite often, she was trying for a literal translation of Joss' cool English, not going for the feel of the words. Firefly's scriptwriting sounds great in English, but when you translate literally, it loses its cultural context and sounds... well, bizarre. If I said to you "You're just cutting the boat where you lost your sword" or "You're as beautiful as Yang Guifei" or "Don't be so motorcycle", you'd probably have very little idea what I was talking about. It's not that those aren't completely appropriate phrases in Mandarin, but in English, they lose context and therefore lose meaning. Joss Whedon is an amazing writer in English, but if you take his words and literally translate them into Mandarin, they frequently make no sense.
Look, I love Firefly. It's one of my favorite series ever. Serenity is also up there. But I recognize that it has faults, as does everything. I'm not trying to say Firefly is crap. It isn't. But their Mandarin was poorly handled. If you can't accept that, I think you have too much invested in your love of Firefly.
I find it unfortunate that so many people have so much emotionally invested in Pluto being a planet. People who can't tell you anything else about Pluto, people who don't care one whit about astronomy, people who couldn't tell you what a neutrino is or why it's important to understand dark matter, people who think evolution is a some kind of humanist conspiracy... It's a sad state of affairs. "Who cares about science? We just want to follow Tradition -- which is to say, to continue wallowing in ignorance."
GenCon is the biggest tabletop/pen-and-pencil RPG and gaming con out there. (Unless you count things like DragonCon, which isn't primarily a gaming con.) But it's not a computer/console/electronic gaming con. Why have performances better related to electronic gaming there?
I know of people who play music in the background of their RPG sessions to add a little mood music, but I don't think I'll be hearing of any orchestras in people's living rooms any time soon. It seems like they didn't think enough about their target audience and target context.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks. I'll check the book out when it hits stores; if the writing is better, I'll buy a copy.
I'd like to use Blender. It's clearly a great program, probably the best open-source 3D app out there. I want to use it so much that I bought the manual, even though I can reboot into Windows and use Lightwave 3D. I really want to support open source projects like Blender.
But I found the manual to be very poorly edited. The fact that it was not written by native English speakers comes through very clearly. It was so poorly written, in fact, that I got a headache trying to use it and eventually just gave up.
If they come out with a new manual that's edited to a decent level of readability, or even if they just edit the old one better and republish it, I'd probably buy it. Until then, I'll keep rebooting into Windows when I want to do 3D.
Does this BIOS call have anything to do with the soft lock problem encountered by me and many other Ubuntu users? My guess is not, but I don't know enough about these things to guess with much confidence.
Would that be the condom or the horse?
One site that seems to have a lot of very good, well-informed answers is Ask MetaFilter. There are certainly snarky, ill-informed and irrelevant answers a-plenty there, but there also seem to be a lot of very good, very useful answers as well.
It seems like a lot of people on this thread are rejoicing that the spammers will be hurt. Well, as others have already said, the true source of spam is not Taiwan.
And instead of "Yay, no spam" you should really be saying "Oh shit, where will we get our graphics cards from?" (Or really, "Wow, I hope no one was injured or killed" -- but is that asking too much?) If Taiwan gets seriously hurt, prices for processors of all sorts, and especially graphics processors, will go through the roof. Open your computer case sometime and check where all those components were designed and built... And hey, why not try to be a little less racist, too?
I've been using Democracy 0.9.1 for a couple weeks now. It works great -- the videos play quite nicely, setting up a channel is relatively painless, the variety of codecs is good, etc.
My one problem is that Democracy allows connections on all kinds of ports that it supposedly doesn't. I have it set (in Preferences) to use only ports 8500 to 8600, but in reality, I get connections all over the place from ports 6000 to 60000. When I shut down Democracy, the connections stay in place. I think it's understandable that I don't want these connections!
Is this a problem with all Torrent programs? Is there anything I can do about it? Thanks to anyone who can help.
One problem is the usage of the word "friends" for what really should be "acquaintances". Someone who reads your $NAME_OF_FORUM_OR_WEBSITE_OR_BLOG page once in a while isn't necessarily a friend. There are people on my "friends" list in a certain blog-forum that aren't actually friends of mine. Some are actually my friends; some, I hope to be friends with in the future; some are friends of friends; others, I just have on my list because I want to hear what they say once in a while, but that doesn't necessarily make them friends.
A lot of the people who post "Ya dude let's go get drunkk!" on Myspace aren't really friends by any reasonable defition. I think Myspace needs a "drinking buddy" button.
Does the final release candidate still not mesh with the system theme? I don't want Firefox to have a completely different theme from the rest of my UI -- I want it to fit nicely into my system theme. Has the system theme issue been fixed in the final version? Is there some sort of workaround for this?
From TFA:
Although the new tab theme looks very attractive, it isn't consistent with the computer's default system theme. Visual integration is one of the factors that contributed to Firefox's initial success over the original Mozilla browser suite.
Opera is looking better and better every day... System themes also don't apply in Opera, but at least I get superior speed.
That's actually not true. It somehow got attributed as Chinese, but in fact it isn't.
Nope, I've used easyurpmi many times and currently have all my sources well set up. I still get problems.
About dependency problems: Well put!
By "dependency hell", I mean the following things:
In general, I've found that URPMI (and its nasty resource-hogging GUI friend RPMdrake) don't resolve dependencies as well as Apt-type things. I don't know if this is a function of the distros behind them not updating their package lists as well, or software problems, or what, but regardless, it's the biggest pain for me in using Mandriva.
It's good to see MenuDrake go. I'm very interested in trying alacarte once it works.
Thank you for the package list. That answered many of my questions.
As for SCIM, there has been a line of very important apps that simply refuse to open due to some kind of conflict with SCIM. I've ended up having to add this stuff to their startup scripts:
That allows the apps to open, but when they do, they drop a nice big core dump on my desktop. Affected apps so far: Firefox, Thunderbird and XaraLX. I don't have the problem when I install Firefox through URPMI, but if I allow Firefox to update itself, the problem always exists.
Anyway, thanks for all the help!
Here's what I'd like to know:
More broadly, there's the idea of von Neumann probes: self-replicating machines designed to cross the vacuum from system to system. But there are reasons why such probes probably aren't used.
Wikipedia on Errai and its companion.
A big question for me is, how do you rate qualifications for obscure cultural references? I started the Wikipedia article on gaming conventions, and to be honest I'm worried that someone's going to slap a "This article does not cite its sources" tag on it. (I'm sure that now that I've said this some joker will do just that.) I've been to a bunch of gaming conventions, have helped run cons that include gaming and know quite a bit about the topic in general. On the other hand, most of the articles that have been published about gaming conventions have been extremely inaccurate (usually in the direction of titillation), and there isn't much in the way of other research about them. This means that using citable sources in this case would lower the accuracy of the article. For some articles, expertise is extremely hard to quantify. How Citizendium will work around this?
There are two reasons I still use Gnome (2.10 currently):
Themes are easy to handle. Installing a theme in KDE requires actual installation: ./configure, make, make install -- the whole mess. And it frequently doesn't work. In Gnome, it's true drag-and-drop.
To then actually use a theme is also a pain in KDE. There are a million different places to change all the different things, and it's quite difficult to find what I actually want to change.
It's also far, far easier to edit themes myself in Gnome. I just go into the file, find the appropriate image file and change it in GIMP or whatever. In KDE, this is again a huge pain. I don't want to have to recompile a theme in order to change the scroll bar colors!
Non-English fonts are handled far better in Gnome. I run Linux in Traditional Chinese, so this is quite important to me. No matter which font settings I try in KDE, some characters show up as little black circles. This means I can't even read all my menu selections. In Gnome, they all show up quite nicely.
There may be a place to change these fonts in KDE, but I've never seen it, and so I'm stuck with poor Chinese handling. This problem also seems to spill over into the Mandriva menus, where some titles are completely illegible, but at least I don't have to deal with those all the time.
There's this thing called modesty, see...
You can, of course, believe who you want to believe. But please don't try to use the Firefly version of "May monkeys fly out of my butt" with any Chinese people. Or at least, don't say anything to me when they run away screaming from the crazy laowai who speaks such bizarre Mandarin...
See, the thing is, Joss asked her to translate what he wrote, not to come up with cool original phrases in Chinese. Those things may have made some sense in English, but Joss' nifty turns of phrase don't make any sense in Mandarin. She may have used some slang, but quite often, she was trying for a literal translation of Joss' cool English, not going for the feel of the words. Firefly's scriptwriting sounds great in English, but when you translate literally, it loses its cultural context and sounds... well, bizarre. If I said to you "You're just cutting the boat where you lost your sword" or "You're as beautiful as Yang Guifei" or "Don't be so motorcycle", you'd probably have very little idea what I was talking about. It's not that those aren't completely appropriate phrases in Mandarin, but in English, they lose context and therefore lose meaning. Joss Whedon is an amazing writer in English, but if you take his words and literally translate them into Mandarin, they frequently make no sense.
Look, I love Firefly. It's one of my favorite series ever. Serenity is also up there. But I recognize that it has faults, as does everything. I'm not trying to say Firefly is crap. It isn't. But their Mandarin was poorly handled. If you can't accept that, I think you have too much invested in your love of Firefly.
I think the only people who understood that Chinese were the scriptwriters... The Chinese in Firefly makes no sense. See my corrections and notes.
I find it unfortunate that so many people have so much emotionally invested in Pluto being a planet. People who can't tell you anything else about Pluto, people who don't care one whit about astronomy, people who couldn't tell you what a neutrino is or why it's important to understand dark matter, people who think evolution is a some kind of humanist conspiracy... It's a sad state of affairs. "Who cares about science? We just want to follow Tradition -- which is to say, to continue wallowing in ignorance."
If science is not a democracy, then why does it matter how many scientists decided on it?
For the Americans in the audience, that would be the length of 1,636,023,620 football fields.
For the non-Americans in the audience, that would be 15 billion kilometers.
GenCon is the biggest tabletop/pen-and-pencil RPG and gaming con out there. (Unless you count things like DragonCon, which isn't primarily a gaming con.) But it's not a computer/console/electronic gaming con. Why have performances better related to electronic gaming there?
I know of people who play music in the background of their RPG sessions to add a little mood music, but I don't think I'll be hearing of any orchestras in people's living rooms any time soon. It seems like they didn't think enough about their target audience and target context.