I think you came with a very good point. Althoguh i "use" Linux a bit, mainly in userland thoguh i have created some workgroup type servers, using wizards provided by Mandrake.
My greatest technical achievement in regards to Linux is trying to compile the kernel after stripping crude from using, and sometiems having the whole thing balls up because I have stripped something that was vital.
I am not your average sysadmin who can figure out every script and knows much about process lists, or Kill Signals.
So although I do view Linux as vastly more stable than Windows, if i get frustrated with a problem i usually follow the following steps.
1) CTRL ALT BACKSPACE to kill and restart X which is great for getting rid of dodgy X-Apps 2) init 1 / init 5 sequence to deal with services or errant processes. 3) reboot.. if the above fails
To be honest I dont mind doing the above, and as i learn more about Linux, i am sure i will learn to avoid such drastic measures. However, until then, anything that speeds up the reboot would be great.
Maybe some sort of "snapshot" feature like the Windows Hibernate, so that you can take a snaphot of Linux post boot/ pre X and instead of going through the entire bolava of booting the kernel, and OS, just loading the snapshot?
This is the one thing i NEVER understood about the US FCC, and its "protection" of American invented phone technologies.
the problems you are having is somewhat due to this.
When GSM was envisioned, there were two operating frequencies, 900Mhz, and 1800Mhz. 900Mhz had greater penetration and covered longer distances, whereas 1800Mhz provided slightly higher capacity in built up places (at the expense of range). Many countries use both bands effectively to minimise the requirements on transmitters and yet provide a good balence of range/capacity.
ALL countries, except for the US and canada use a combination of those two frequencies, and a single Dual Band phoen will effectively provide a good service worldwide.
When GSM was introduced in USA, the frequency given was 1900Mhz, which suffered from less distance, in a LARGE country, requiring far tooo many transmitters for the companies introducing the technology to introduce.
Your problems seems to be caused by the choice of a 1900Mhz phone, which is why you are getting the errant signal strngth.
I know that recently the FCC decided to allieviate the problem somewhat by introducing a Lower Frequency band (850Mhz). But again, WHY choose a FOURTH frequency, we already have a 900Mhz that works well throughout the world!
Dont worry, the USA is not the only country with braindead policy in Cellphones, you can add the UK into the mix. Instead of adopting a policy of "900Mhz" in the countryside, and "1800" in built up areas, they allocated the frequencies based on the provider. So you have Vodaphone and O2 using 900Mhz, and T-Mobile and Orange using 1800Mhz.
the problem with this policy is that in the countryside, where 900Mhz is more optimal, you have the 1800Mhz Operators putting up more transmitters to offset their shorter range and provide a good service. On the other hand, in built up areas, where 1800Mhz rules, you have the 900Mhz operators having to add more transmitters to increase their capacity.
add to the mix that nobody "shares" transmitters, and you get a country that has far more transmitters than is needed, and wastage is high.
W-CDMA is 3rd Gen STANDARD GSM technology that is comming in in europe and throughout the world, allowing video calling, and high speed net access.
To say Vodafone uses W-CDMA is misleading as you are implying they are not a GSM (based on TDMA) company. Vodafone IS a GSM company, based in the UK, and also exisiting in, amongst others, Australia, New Zealand, etc, use GSM (specifically GSM 900) and are slowly introducing 3rd Gen GSM using the WCDMA in UK and other countries.
I think in general, people in the US dont understand that GSM is a STANDARD, and not a specific Technology. GSM defines certain rules and services (SMS, MMS, GPRS, WAP, SMIL, Voicemail, ROaming), that is required to support, and a base Technology to support those services.
Currently, GSM 2nd Gen (including 2.5 Gen) uses a form of TDMA on frequencies 900/1800 (everywhere except north america) and 1900 (North America).
We are now moving onto 3rd Gen which uses a form of CDMA (W-CDMA) to provide the same GSM services, plus more, buth with increased bandwidth thanks to the technology change.
So to summarise, we can say that Vodafone IS a GSM company as it follows the standards set by the GSM consortium.
I, like MOST Londonners are VERY amiable to tourists, it keeps the London economy ticking, and many time I have gone to central london during the weekends, where myself and my friends have been very friendly towards tourists, showing them around, and stuff. Although we get nominal "expenses" for this, in reality we do it because we enjoy it, and love to learn about others. I ESPECIALLY am fond of New Yorkers, who I view as coming from London's sister city. I am also Sri Lankan born, just for your information, so i am not a typical "white man, from little england"
EVEN "Loud Mouthed Texans" are GREAT fun to be with. They are VERY noticable, but that doesnt mean they are not appealling.
In reality, I skipped out a couple of details in that description of what happend. The man in concern was ALSO being racist and offensive to Chinese and Black people, saying london is "full of japs with cameras" and "niggers running the show" that the Mayor should take a stand and deal with it.
There WERE a lot of offended people, and a confrontation seemed likely to erupt. I said what i said to introduce humour into the OTHER passengers and to diffuse what could have been a very bad situation. It worked.
As i got off the train, i contacted the underground staff at the station and explained what was happening, and they had a polite word with him, and it was pretty evenly resolved. Afterwards I did see the funny side to the whole thing.
My original post was a reflection of the humour that myself and my fellow passengers felt at the time.
Guys, its friday, lighten up! For gods sakes, humour is sorely needed here.
As for your views about British Drunken Yobs, well I am safe to say, they are not welcome by the majority of the Brits either.
DISCLIAMER: I do like Americans in general, and i have a lot of american frineds, who are friendly, respectful, and people who i would hold dear.
The "worst" American tourist, is the oil rich, no brain texan with the loud hat, louder belly, and even louder mouth.
I had a particularly intresting time a couple of months ago, with a particular specimen of Texan "mouth power". I was on the London underground heading to work, and there was a loud texan onboard, and he was ranting abotu how things were a lot "bigger" back home, to the absolute annoyance of all the other passengers on board (including his poor wife, who seemed a nice lady).
anyway, he comes up to me and asks me: "Son, tell me now, what "tube" do i have to catch to go to Manchester"
now, here is a few facts for those not from UK/London. - the Tube is our nickname for the London Underground, our subway/metro/transit. - It covers ONLY london. nowhere else. -Manchester is another city altogether.. like New York and Los Angeles - there is a big ass advert in the train that he was looking at, which talks about day trips to manchester, and HOW to do it!?!?
most of the people on board were like, WTF? is this guy real...
I simply told him, "Stay on this train for about 4 hours, and it will reach manchester!"
What i didnt tell him, was the train in concern is the "Circle Line" which simply runs around london in a loop!!!!! {EVIL GRIN}
The smiles on the rest of the passengers were certainly a picture.. as was the way he was thanking me for my "advise", and was the last thing i saw... as i got off at the next station!
I am developing a system that handles £2 billion grants, and manages the entire process and maintenance.
Its written in delphi, interfacing to an Oracle database. Delphi IS the ideal langauge for this... the probelm is the previous developers are ex-vb monkeys, who knew NOTHING about oop, and created a mess.. the first few months on the job seems like "polishing turd"
the reason why Borland Turbo Pascal was used a LOT was because of its hacker support amongst geek teens, especially here in Europe. We had the SWAG archives, which were accessible via BBS's.
In Delphi (Object Pascal) it has a new large string lib, which gives up to 2gb (or more i think) strings.
The beauty of its implementation comes in the technical details. it is both a index length, AND a null terminated string. Its space on the heap is dynamically allocated, and garbage collected.
if you do the following:
var
s: String;
you can do:
s:= ' a massive string.......';
but you can also refer to the String as a Null Terminated string too:
var
p : PChar;
p:= pchar(s);
Pointer aritmetic is also supported on Pchars (just like C)
p:= p + 1;
and dereferencing as chars is equally simple:
p^:= 'c';
Allowing things like this:
while (p^ #0)// not null
begin
p^:= '*';
inc(p);
end;
and althoguh the above code looks very highlevel, the compiler properly inlines the code to create a very compact binary for it.
PS, before anyone comments about the C++ style comments, yes Delphi DOES support it.
The reason for Firefox's success (well according to my friends who i converted) is its simplicity. people love it for its straightforward way of working and love the features.
The intresting thing is, I NEVER promoted it by saying that they shoudl switch to firefox for security/CSS or anythign like that. I just said they should "upgrade" their browser to Firefox.... its like counting lemmings!
with CE standing for nothing. Some Microsoft guys just thought it sounded cool.
That was, until people started shortening it to Win CE (Win CE -> WinCE -> Wince) highly appropriate!
also Microsoft's Cellphone OS's codename was renamed from Stinger to Canary, because (especially over here in the UK, with the Orange SPVs) people started refering it as "Stinker".
I have found the +Rs to be more compatible (i am brurning with a 2nd gen Philips DVD+RW Drive).
My Older DVD player is a 5 year old Kenwood 7000 (which is actually a Panasonic 2nd Gen player with Kenwood menus). That always takes AGES to initially read DVD-R media - though it woudl eventually play it. With +R the initial read is as fast as normal pressed disks. It doesnt handle +RW, but my newer (1 year old) Panasonic player handles anything, but still handles +R slightly better.
PNG, and MOST graphic formats use a RGB colour system, which is ideal for screen. Ideally a publisher would prefer to use a CMYK format, as this woudl make print reproduction far more accurate, especially in the screening process, which would already be done, on a CMYK format.
this is really an intresting point, the UK is becomming a lot cheaper than somes places for media.
I buy my stuff from PriceBusters (i dont know the web site, because their warehouse is VERY close to my house, to I just go and buy it direct)
But DL disks are about £4, a stack of 25 +R/-R are usually about £10 (Verbatim brand)
And you can get 50 TDK Cdrs for about £8.
but yeah, some people who came from USA/Canada recently, and were suprised that we get such low prices (at first they though it was the same price, until they realised all UK prices INCLUDE tax)
I already have a Pioneer 108 DVD-Writer, that does 4x dual layer burning, have had it for nearly a month now, and I live in UK (usually a 'little' behind america)
I am talking about the Hotmail Integration here, where when you click on teh mail alert, it automatically goes to either your hotmail inbox, or opens the message. I am NOT talking about embedded links in a IM conversation, these do open up in the default browser (ie firefox).
Somewhere, MSN messenger still launches IE in the hotmail integration. The excuse from MS was that Netscape doesnt handle the "long urls" associated with the autologin process to display a hotmail inbox, or message, and that there is a "security issue". This is pure crap, as earlier versions of MSN Messenger (pre 4.7 i think) DID launch the default browser when clicking the Mail Alert, and worked even on Netscape 4.7
Even Yahoo messenger works fine with loading yahoo mail in firefox, why does MSN Messenger have to be vastly different.
The parent post is not a troll. It is asking when Firefox will support the single logon system for signing in, as currently supported via IE.
If we want to get a lot of offices to transition to FF, this may be very important, and i believe the FF designers ARE working on it, if not already finished it.
I am certainly keen on finding out more about this, and whoever marked the parent as troll will cause this thread to dissapear.
Slashdot Mirror
I was sipping some coffee when i started reading this comment, and it took a few moments to "get it", but it was VERY funny!
;)
I will send you a £20 bill for a replacement keyboard
I think you came with a very good point. Althoguh i "use" Linux a bit, mainly in userland thoguh i have created some workgroup type servers, using wizards provided by Mandrake.
My greatest technical achievement in regards to Linux is trying to compile the kernel after stripping crude from using, and sometiems having the whole thing balls up because I have stripped something that was vital.
I am not your average sysadmin who can figure out every script and knows much about process lists, or Kill Signals.
So although I do view Linux as vastly more stable than Windows, if i get frustrated with a problem i usually follow the following steps.
1) CTRL ALT BACKSPACE to kill and restart X which is great for getting rid of dodgy X-Apps
2) init 1 / init 5 sequence to deal with services or errant processes.
3) reboot.. if the above fails
To be honest I dont mind doing the above, and as i learn more about Linux, i am sure i will learn to avoid such drastic measures. However, until then, anything that speeds up the reboot would be great.
Maybe some sort of "snapshot" feature like the Windows Hibernate, so that you can take a snaphot of Linux post boot/ pre X and instead of going through the entire bolava of booting the kernel, and OS, just loading the snapshot?
This is the one thing i NEVER understood about the US FCC, and its "protection" of American invented phone technologies.
the problems you are having is somewhat due to this.
When GSM was envisioned, there were two operating frequencies, 900Mhz, and 1800Mhz. 900Mhz had greater penetration and covered longer distances, whereas 1800Mhz provided slightly higher capacity in built up places (at the expense of range). Many countries use both bands effectively to minimise the requirements on transmitters and yet provide a good balence of range/capacity.
ALL countries, except for the US and canada use a combination of those two frequencies, and a single Dual Band phoen will effectively provide a good service worldwide.
When GSM was introduced in USA, the frequency given was 1900Mhz, which suffered from less distance, in a LARGE country, requiring far tooo many transmitters for the companies introducing the technology to introduce.
Your problems seems to be caused by the choice of a 1900Mhz phone, which is why you are getting the errant signal strngth.
I know that recently the FCC decided to allieviate the problem somewhat by introducing a Lower Frequency band (850Mhz). But again, WHY choose a FOURTH frequency, we already have a 900Mhz that works well throughout the world!
Dont worry, the USA is not the only country with braindead policy in Cellphones, you can add the UK into the mix. Instead of adopting a policy of "900Mhz" in the countryside, and "1800" in built up areas, they allocated the frequencies based on the provider. So you have Vodaphone and O2 using 900Mhz, and T-Mobile and Orange using 1800Mhz.
the problem with this policy is that in the countryside, where 900Mhz is more optimal, you have the 1800Mhz Operators putting up more transmitters to offset their shorter range and provide a good service. On the other hand, in built up areas, where 1800Mhz rules, you have the 900Mhz operators having to add more transmitters to increase their capacity.
add to the mix that nobody "shares" transmitters, and you get a country that has far more transmitters than is needed, and wastage is high.
W-CDMA is 3rd Gen STANDARD GSM technology that is comming in in europe and throughout the world, allowing video calling, and high speed net access.
To say Vodafone uses W-CDMA is misleading as you are implying they are not a GSM (based on TDMA) company. Vodafone IS a GSM company, based in the UK, and also exisiting in, amongst others, Australia, New Zealand, etc, use GSM (specifically GSM 900) and are slowly introducing 3rd Gen GSM using the WCDMA in UK and other countries.
I think in general, people in the US dont understand that GSM is a STANDARD, and not a specific Technology. GSM defines certain rules and services (SMS, MMS, GPRS, WAP, SMIL, Voicemail, ROaming), that is required to support, and a base Technology to support those services.
Currently, GSM 2nd Gen (including 2.5 Gen) uses a form of TDMA on frequencies 900/1800 (everywhere except north america) and 1900 (North America).
We are now moving onto 3rd Gen which uses a form of CDMA (W-CDMA) to provide the same GSM services, plus more, buth with increased bandwidth thanks to the technology change.
So to summarise, we can say that Vodafone IS a GSM company as it follows the standards set by the GSM consortium.
He didnt have very good intentions.. please read my reply to the first reply someone posted.
Obviously, you have not read the disclaimer.
I, like MOST Londonners are VERY amiable to tourists, it keeps the London economy ticking, and many time I have gone to central london during the weekends, where myself and my friends have been very friendly towards tourists, showing them around, and stuff. Although we get nominal "expenses" for this, in reality we do it because we enjoy it, and love to learn about others. I ESPECIALLY am fond of New Yorkers, who I view as coming from London's sister city. I am also Sri Lankan born, just for your information, so i am not a typical "white man, from little england"
EVEN "Loud Mouthed Texans" are GREAT fun to be with. They are VERY noticable, but that doesnt mean they are not appealling.
In reality, I skipped out a couple of details in that description of what happend. The man in concern was ALSO being racist and offensive to Chinese and Black people, saying london is "full of japs with cameras" and "niggers running the show" that the Mayor should take a stand and deal with it.
There WERE a lot of offended people, and a confrontation seemed likely to erupt. I said what i said to introduce humour into the OTHER passengers and to diffuse what could have been a very bad situation. It worked.
As i got off the train, i contacted the underground staff at the station and explained what was happening, and they had a polite word with him, and it was pretty evenly resolved. Afterwards I did see the funny side to the whole thing.
My original post was a reflection of the humour that myself and my fellow passengers felt at the time.
Guys, its friday, lighten up! For gods sakes, humour is sorely needed here.
As for your views about British Drunken Yobs, well I am safe to say, they are not welcome by the majority of the Brits either.
DISCLIAMER: I do like Americans in general, and i have a lot of american frineds, who are friendly, respectful, and people who i would hold dear.
The "worst" American tourist, is the oil rich, no brain texan with the loud hat, louder belly, and even louder mouth.
I had a particularly intresting time a couple of months ago, with a particular specimen of Texan "mouth power". I was on the London underground heading to work, and there was a loud texan onboard, and he was ranting abotu how things were a lot "bigger" back home, to the absolute annoyance of all the other passengers on board (including his poor wife, who seemed a nice lady).
anyway, he comes up to me and asks me:
"Son, tell me now, what "tube" do i have to catch to go to Manchester"
now, here is a few facts for those not from UK/London.
- the Tube is our nickname for the London Underground, our subway/metro/transit.
- It covers ONLY london. nowhere else.
-Manchester is another city altogether.. like New York and Los Angeles
- there is a big ass advert in the train that he was looking at, which talks about day trips to manchester, and HOW to do it!?!?
most of the people on board were like, WTF? is this guy real...
I simply told him, "Stay on this train for about 4 hours, and it will reach manchester!"
What i didnt tell him, was the train in concern is the "Circle Line" which simply runs around london in a loop!!!!! {EVIL GRIN}
The smiles on the rest of the passengers were certainly a picture.. as was the way he was thanking me for my "advise", and was the last thing i saw... as i got off at the next station!
I am developing a system that handles £2 billion grants, and manages the entire process and maintenance.
Its written in delphi, interfacing to an Oracle database. Delphi IS the ideal langauge for this... the probelm is the previous developers are ex-vb monkeys, who knew NOTHING about oop, and created a mess.. the first few months on the job seems like "polishing turd"
the reason why Borland Turbo Pascal was used a LOT was because of its hacker support amongst geek teens, especially here in Europe. We had the SWAG archives, which were accessible via BBS's.
oops, Slashcode removed the less than / greaterthan in the not equals.
In Delphi (Object Pascal) it has a new large string lib, which gives up to 2gb (or more i think) strings.
:= pchar(s);
:= p + 1;
:= 'c';
// not null := '*';
The beauty of its implementation comes in the technical details. it is both a index length, AND a null terminated string. Its space on the heap is dynamically allocated, and garbage collected.
if you do the following:
var
s: String;
you can do:
s:= ' a massive string.......';
but you can also refer to the String as a Null Terminated string too:
var
p : PChar;
p
Pointer aritmetic is also supported on Pchars (just like C)
p
and dereferencing as chars is equally simple:
p^
Allowing things like this:
while (p^ #0)
begin
p^
inc(p);
end;
and althoguh the above code looks very highlevel, the compiler properly inlines the code to create a very compact binary for it.
PS, before anyone comments about the C++ style comments, yes Delphi DOES support it.
... And I am sure that they will be selling exclusive Sony undies too, comming to a sony store near you!
;)
Actually this is not as much of a joke as intended, the Local Sony stroe here in Harrow, Middx, UK, did sell some sony brand T-Shirts, and hankies!
Ahmen to that.
;)
The reason for Firefox's success (well according to my friends who i converted) is its simplicity. people love it for its straightforward way of working and love the features.
The intresting thing is, I NEVER promoted it by saying that they shoudl switch to firefox for security/CSS or anythign like that. I just said they should "upgrade" their browser to Firefox.... its like counting lemmings!
Amazing that "upgrade" word!
I have managed to get many of my friends to move over, EXCEPT for my fiance.. who still uses AOL. Her sister (a CS Grad) has moved ages ago though!
That was, until people started shortening it to Win CE (Win CE -> WinCE -> Wince) highly appropriate!
also Microsoft's Cellphone OS's codename was renamed from Stinger to Canary, because (especially over here in the UK, with the Orange SPVs) people started refering it as "Stinker".
I have found the +Rs to be more compatible (i am brurning with a 2nd gen Philips DVD+RW Drive).
My Older DVD player is a 5 year old Kenwood 7000 (which is actually a Panasonic 2nd Gen player with Kenwood menus). That always takes AGES to initially read DVD-R media - though it woudl eventually play it. With +R the initial read is as fast as normal pressed disks. It doesnt handle +RW, but my newer (1 year old) Panasonic player handles anything, but still handles +R slightly better.
PNG, and MOST graphic formats use a RGB colour system, which is ideal for screen. Ideally a publisher would prefer to use a CMYK format, as this woudl make print reproduction far more accurate, especially in the screening process, which would already be done, on a CMYK format.
this is really an intresting point, the UK is becomming a lot cheaper than somes places for media.
I buy my stuff from PriceBusters (i dont know the web site, because their warehouse is VERY close to my house, to I just go and buy it direct)
But DL disks are about £4, a stack of 25 +R/-R are usually about £10 (Verbatim brand)
And you can get 50 TDK Cdrs for about £8.
but yeah, some people who came from USA/Canada recently, and were suprised that we get such low prices (at first they though it was the same price, until they realised all UK prices INCLUDE tax)
I already have a Pioneer 108 DVD-Writer, that does 4x dual layer burning, have had it for nearly a month now, and I live in UK (usually a 'little' behind america)
:)
NEC is a bit slow
Yeah i use IMAP too, coz i have my cellphone, COmputer, Laptop, and mail2web accessing the same account, with folders and all.
Nothign beast pure IMAP for speed!
and if u need web access..Try Mail 2 Web (mail2web.com) to treat your POP3 and IMAP as a web account.
I tried that, it did not work.
I am talking about the Hotmail Integration here, where when you click on teh mail alert, it automatically goes to either your hotmail inbox, or opens the message. I am NOT talking about embedded links in a IM conversation, these do open up in the default browser (ie firefox).
Somewhere, MSN messenger still launches IE in the hotmail integration. The excuse from MS was that Netscape doesnt handle the "long urls" associated with the autologin process to display a hotmail inbox, or message, and that there is a "security issue". This is pure crap, as earlier versions of MSN Messenger (pre 4.7 i think) DID launch the default browser when clicking the Mail Alert, and worked even on Netscape 4.7
Even Yahoo messenger works fine with loading yahoo mail in firefox, why does MSN Messenger have to be vastly different.
This is the thing, *you* dont use it, but a lot of us do.
Even i use it to contact my friends, MOST of my freinds are nto geeks like me, who woudl install GAIM etc.
I know there are MSN Messenger clones out there (i use aMSN on Linux). Try and get the average user to install them, no chance.
The parent post is not a troll. It is asking when Firefox will support the single logon system for signing in, as currently supported via IE.
If we want to get a lot of offices to transition to FF, this may be very important, and i believe the FF designers ARE working on it, if not already finished it.
I am certainly keen on finding out more about this, and whoever marked the parent as troll will cause this thread to dissapear.
not if some old program you have decides to "roll back" the library installed......
It was a bug in libPNG (a free implementation library) used for rendering PNGs, and strangely effected IE too (hmmm).
This has definately been patched by Mozilla in all current releases, and in Netscape 7.2