Mouse and keyboard cords are good. Until they can come up with a cordless mouse that gets its power wirelessly instead of needing a stupid recharging station or batteries, I'm not going there. There's nothing more annoying than your mouse running out of power. Sure, it may not happen often, but it generally does so at the most annoying times.
Gnome and KDE will always have some different config requirements because, well, they're different systems. There will always be some things they do differently - just like vi and emacs have different configs. However, where I agree with you is that the stuff that is common - dealing with X, with hardware config, font rendering and so on - should be configged in a similar way. Obviously there will have to be different clients (Qt and GTK+), but the backend should be the same (if that is true then the clients will probably evolve similarly anyway).
Fortunately a lot of the work I see going on on freedesktop.org seems to be heading in this direction. It won't happen immediately, but I think in 3-4 years gnome and KDE (as well as other DEs) will be able to play very nicely together with minimal effort.
As for the installation / deinstallation stuff you mention, there's already pretty good standards for this (LSB). Most distributions adhere quite well to it, and the installation / deinstallation is managed very well by apt or rpm or various front-ends (take your pick). Generally, people who need to know how to deal with source tgzs are experienced enough to deal with them fine; certainly, for commercial software a company would be insane not to offer it as a deb or rpm - these are the de facto standards now. You're worrying about a problem that has already been solved.
I suspect they mean this will be a search engine using google-like algorithms, but returning results from your own computer. Though, offhand, the only files I can think of that refer to each other on my computer are local copies of websites and C header files. Perhaps they intend to introduce some kind of autogenerated data to build up some kind of statistical probability of links between other kinds of local files. Alternatively, perhaps I'm talking out of my ass - I didn't read the article any more than most other/.ers will have done...
This is a feature, not a bug. Linux runs on more than x86, you know - but have you ever seen a binary driver for anything other than x86? Making it such a pain in the arse to get binary modules to work is an encouragement for companies to release source (which can be compiled on anything you care to run linux on, probably including your dishwasher...)
I overjoyed when, having bought a Fujifilm camera, I realized I could justify having/mnt/fuji on my system. Oh well, little things please little minds I suppose...;-)
Tips for successful karma-whoring: #63 if you're going to reuse an ancient joke that was dodgy the first time round, at least try not to post it directly in reply to the exact same joke....
I'm inherently skeptical of any paper first heard of via a website. Call me old fashioned, but I'd rather wait for peer review to run its course and read this in something like the Journal of the AAS. Having said that, I read the paper and it's considerably less sensational than the summary suggests. The author considers it possible, if not probable, that the effects can be ascribed to a combination of experimental error and theorists not having taken into account the circumstances of the situation. He suggests that further research would be useful, but I've never read a paper that didn't...
Wasn't it in a bid to protect something-or-other lucrative that the Trade Federation invaded Naboo? Call me harsh, but if some Gungans are going to get wasted I'm right behind the IOC...:-)
> Guess the Games have become about money too now.
Welcome to the 21st century. In other news, there's this marvellous new invention called electricity, and you may be interested in some kind of election campaign going on.
So, what you're saying is: war sucks. Well, duh. Unfortunately it's about as stoppable as the tide. It's been a function of human society ever since prehistory. Sitting in the corner crying Judeo-Christian liberalism won't make it go away. All we can do is to live our lives according to the circumstances we find ourselves in, and hope to stay true on a personal basis to whatever ethical framework we subscribe to.
That's pretty much the idea behind all torpedoes (even the hull-contact ones, which still strike well below the waterline). Even the old Mk22 (designed in 1922, used in anger to sink the Belgrano in 1982!) was so dangerous because of its back-breaking power rather than its hull-penetrating power. An anti-ship missile may damage a ship, and aerial bombardment may not leave much of it left, but to sink a ship a torpedo is still the best bet.
In conventional warfare, the US is certainly unstoppable. However, I'm not sure how much good that will do you. The new battlespace will be both highly asymmetric and extremely dispersed, and I'm not at all convinced it favours you (or us - the UK) at all. 9/11 demonstrated that terrorist activity (a pretty basic form of asymmetric warfare) can have a strategic effect; I suspect people beyond al-Qaeda will have noticed this and allowed it to influence their military doctrine.
You can stop most infernal combustion engines with a bucketload of sand in the air intake. The problem is designing a filter that will guarantee air flow without being prone to sand ingestion problems. (Given the high rate of air intake you can't just put a mesh over the intake as the intake pressure will suck sand onto the mesh and block air intake.) I can think of a few solutions, all of which are complex and therefore liable to break, which is probably not a good thing for a tank...
That's the difference between the cathedral and the bazaar though, isn't it? In a small company certain aspects might get neglected at the expense of others. In an open development model, people can code what they want. I doubt there'll be a sudden shift of rendering engine developers to the game engine; rather, its becoming free just opens it up for extra developers who want to work on game engines to work on it. This sounds like good news (though I wouldn't really know as I'm another of those people who've never been able to get to grips with the UI).
Well ok, not the only real problem, but the real showstopper. I'm not saying GIMP is as good as photoshop, just that for the average amateur photographer there isn't a lot it can't do (with the rather crippling exception of 16bpc support). There is a plugin for loading RAW images (findable via this link), and in GIMP 2 it is possible to decompose an image to CMYK. The adjustment layers would be quite useful, I admit.
is the lack of 16-bit per channel support. Everything else is incidental. It's meant to be an image manipulation program. Text and vector stuff isn't really within its core remit; albeit it makes some effort in that direction there are far better tools for working with text/graphics combinations or with vector graphics. But to be able to cope adequately with scanned images it really really needs 16-bit depth support. I know filmgimp supports it but the interface on that is really clunky (yes, even by GIMP standards!) and I've never managed to get xsane working happily with it. I don't care about ELQ's proposed spiffy scanner interfaces - xsane does everything I'll ever need, though I wish some of the ranges would revert to +/-400% rather than +/-100%. lcms colour management would be nice, but for home users (ie most users) it's not a can't-live-without feature. 16 bits-per-channel support is; I know there are plans to support it in future releases via libGEGL, but progress on this seems achingly slow. There seem to be plans to polish gimp-2.0 and release a 2.2 later in the year; I'd far rather that was shelved and the developers worked on libGEGL as the basis of a new GIMP core.
No, it's because there's only really one power capable of winning such a war. The chances of an individual city being nuked, I would argue, are far higher now than at almost any time during the cold war.
Generally, the purpose is to reduce guns held by criminals. The effect is to reduce guns held by everyone, and often it turns out that criminally-owned guns are reduced marginally less than guns held legally. But still there are many fewer guns in circulation. It reduces the possibility for an unarmed burglar to get his hands on a gun and become an armed burglar; if the police are unarmed (an unlikely de-escalation, but nice in the places where gun crime hasn't yet got out of control) it reduces the likelihood that criminals will feel the need to indulge in an arms race.
It's beautiful. The price pressure on goods leads to outsourcing of jobs, which leads to pressure on wages in order to compete, which leads to... One vicious circle later and the average wage in the US will be no higher than the average wage in urban China. But it won't matter, because everything will be so cheap.
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Mouse and keyboard cords are good. Until they can come up with a cordless mouse that gets its power wirelessly instead of needing a stupid recharging station or batteries, I'm not going there. There's nothing more annoying than your mouse running out of power. Sure, it may not happen often, but it generally does so at the most annoying times.
To hell with music, I want space elevators with Genuine People Personalities! :-)
Gnome and KDE will always have some different config requirements because, well, they're different systems. There will always be some things they do differently - just like vi and emacs have different configs. However, where I agree with you is that the stuff that is common - dealing with X, with hardware config, font rendering and so on - should be configged in a similar way. Obviously there will have to be different clients (Qt and GTK+), but the backend should be the same (if that is true then the clients will probably evolve similarly anyway).
Fortunately a lot of the work I see going on on freedesktop.org seems to be heading in this direction. It won't happen immediately, but I think in 3-4 years gnome and KDE (as well as other DEs) will be able to play very nicely together with minimal effort.
As for the installation / deinstallation stuff you mention, there's already pretty good standards for this (LSB). Most distributions adhere quite well to it, and the installation / deinstallation is managed very well by apt or rpm or various front-ends (take your pick). Generally, people who need to know how to deal with source tgzs are experienced enough to deal with them fine; certainly, for commercial software a company would be insane not to offer it as a deb or rpm - these are the de facto standards now. You're worrying about a problem that has already been solved.
I suspect they mean this will be a search engine using google-like algorithms, but returning results from your own computer. Though, offhand, the only files I can think of that refer to each other on my computer are local copies of websites and C header files. Perhaps they intend to introduce some kind of autogenerated data to build up some kind of statistical probability of links between other kinds of local files. Alternatively, perhaps I'm talking out of my ass - I didn't read the article any more than most other /.ers will have done...
This is a feature, not a bug. Linux runs on more than x86, you know - but have you ever seen a binary driver for anything other than x86? Making it such a pain in the arse to get binary modules to work is an encouragement for companies to release source (which can be compiled on anything you care to run linux on, probably including your dishwasher...)
It sounds like what you're after is an operating system that positively encourages binary drivers and is only readily available on x86. And we all know how well that works...
I overjoyed when, having bought a Fujifilm camera, I realized I could justify having /mnt/fuji on my system. Oh well, little things please little minds I suppose... ;-)
Tips for successful karma-whoring: #63 if you're going to reuse an ancient joke that was dodgy the first time round, at least try not to post it directly in reply to the exact same joke....
I'm inherently skeptical of any paper first heard of via a website. Call me old fashioned, but I'd rather wait for peer review to run its course and read this in something like the Journal of the AAS. Having said that, I read the paper and it's considerably less sensational than the summary suggests. The author considers it possible, if not probable, that the effects can be ascribed to a combination of experimental error and theorists not having taken into account the circumstances of the situation. He suggests that further research would be useful, but I've never read a paper that didn't...
Wasn't it in a bid to protect something-or-other lucrative that the Trade Federation invaded Naboo? Call me harsh, but if some Gungans are going to get wasted I'm right behind the IOC... :-)
> Guess the Games have become about money too now.
Welcome to the 21st century. In other news, there's this marvellous new invention called electricity, and you may be interested in some kind of election campaign going on.
They called it a "lecture theatre".
So, what you're saying is: war sucks. Well, duh. Unfortunately it's about as stoppable as the tide. It's been a function of human society ever since prehistory. Sitting in the corner crying Judeo-Christian liberalism won't make it go away. All we can do is to live our lives according to the circumstances we find ourselves in, and hope to stay true on a personal basis to whatever ethical framework we subscribe to.
That's pretty much the idea behind all torpedoes (even the hull-contact ones, which still strike well below the waterline). Even the old Mk22 (designed in 1922, used in anger to sink the Belgrano in 1982!) was so dangerous because of its back-breaking power rather than its hull-penetrating power.
An anti-ship missile may damage a ship, and aerial bombardment may not leave much of it left, but to sink a ship a torpedo is still the best bet.
In conventional warfare, the US is certainly unstoppable. However, I'm not sure how much good that will do you. The new battlespace will be both highly asymmetric and extremely dispersed, and I'm not at all convinced it favours you (or us - the UK) at all. 9/11 demonstrated that terrorist activity (a pretty basic form of asymmetric warfare) can have a strategic effect; I suspect people beyond al-Qaeda will have noticed this and allowed it to influence their military doctrine.
You can stop most infernal combustion engines with a bucketload of sand in the air intake. The problem is designing a filter that will guarantee air flow without being prone to sand ingestion problems. (Given the high rate of air intake you can't just put a mesh over the intake as the intake pressure will suck sand onto the mesh and block air intake.) I can think of a few solutions, all of which are complex and therefore liable to break, which is probably not a good thing for a tank...
That's the difference between the cathedral and the bazaar though, isn't it? In a small company certain aspects might get neglected at the expense of others. In an open development model, people can code what they want. I doubt there'll be a sudden shift of rendering engine developers to the game engine; rather, its becoming free just opens it up for extra developers who want to work on game engines to work on it. This sounds like good news (though I wouldn't really know as I'm another of those people who've never been able to get to grips with the UI).
Well ok, not the only real problem, but the real showstopper. I'm not saying GIMP is as good as photoshop, just that for the average amateur photographer there isn't a lot it can't do (with the rather crippling exception of 16bpc support). There is a plugin for loading RAW images (findable via this link), and in GIMP 2 it is possible to decompose an image to CMYK. The adjustment layers would be quite useful, I admit.
... and since the tyre profile looks quite rectangular I guess it's "wheely" hard to steer ;-)
is the lack of 16-bit per channel support. Everything else is incidental. It's meant to be an image manipulation program. Text and vector stuff isn't really within its core remit; albeit it makes some effort in that direction there are far better tools for working with text/graphics combinations or with vector graphics.
But to be able to cope adequately with scanned images it really really needs 16-bit depth support. I know filmgimp supports it but the interface on that is really clunky (yes, even by GIMP standards!) and I've never managed to get xsane working happily with it. I don't care about ELQ's proposed spiffy scanner interfaces - xsane does everything I'll ever need, though I wish some of the ranges would revert to +/-400% rather than +/-100%. lcms colour management would be nice, but for home users (ie most users) it's not a can't-live-without feature. 16 bits-per-channel support is; I know there are plans to support it in future releases via libGEGL, but progress on this seems achingly slow. There seem to be plans to polish gimp-2.0 and release a 2.2 later in the year; I'd far rather that was shelved and the developers worked on libGEGL as the basis of a new GIMP core.
No, it's because there's only really one power capable of winning such a war. The chances of an individual city being nuked, I would argue, are far higher now than at almost any time during the cold war.
Generally, the purpose is to reduce guns held by criminals. The effect is to reduce guns held by everyone, and often it turns out that criminally-owned guns are reduced marginally less than guns held legally. But still there are many fewer guns in circulation. It reduces the possibility for an unarmed burglar to get his hands on a gun and become an armed burglar; if the police are unarmed (an unlikely de-escalation, but nice in the places where gun crime hasn't yet got out of control) it reduces the likelihood that criminals will feel the need to indulge in an arms race.
173dB is quiet? Was your previous job in the PR department of a CPU fan manufacturer?
My iPod. Press the play button briefly and it either starts playing or pauses. Press it for longer and the iPod goes into standby.
True - same equalisation effect, though.
It's beautiful. The price pressure on goods leads to outsourcing of jobs, which leads to pressure on wages in order to compete, which leads to... One vicious circle later and the average wage in the US will be no higher than the average wage in urban China. But it won't matter, because everything will be so cheap.