Yeah, it's a bitch to get DVDs to work in Mandrake as well. I mean, you have to configure your urpmi sources (can be done graphically as well if you prefer), type 'urpmi ogle_gui libdvdcss' to a terminal and only then will you be able to watch DVDs from any region with menus and all. Windows sure makes it easier.
not to mention odd little programming tricks like dividing and multiplying the number of votes by 1 (anyone doing a little binary patching should know why this is significant)
I'm not doing "a little binary patching", care to explain why this is significant? n / 1 == n, regardless of the value of n, right?
It's slightly longer, but thinner (only 1.1cm in the thinnest end!) and it has an internal DVD-+RW burner (no integrated Wi-Fi, but a PCMCIA card is included). Certainly it's expensive, but IMHO very, very sexy. El Reg has a review here.
Civilian service is for ideological reasons, period. If a person is mentally or physically unfit for the army, they should not serve at all.
I have to disagree. Although I chose civilian service for ideological reasons, I think cases such as in the article would actually do more good in civilian service. Obviously they can't cope in the army at the moment, and judging by their computer fanatism they aren't in very good physical shape either. Whether their situation will be remedied in a few years I don't know, but I doubt it.
So instead, why not place them in front of a computer (preferably with a limited, monitored net connection;-) and let them do work? Civilian servicemen are free employees, whereas training a solider costs quite a bit. In Germany, where a more significant portion of the population opts for civilian service (not German myself so I don't have the exact figures), servicemen are quite valued because of the work they do.
Besides, civilian service means seven extra months not studying properly, and having to endure the social stigma.
Depends. I've had some friend succesfully study in open university at the same time, and not all service jobs are nine-to-five. It really depends on the job. As for the social stigma, IMHO it doesn't exist anymore. While it is true that some decades ago military service was nearly mandatory for high paying/excecutive jobs, society has changed ever since. Sure, the rednecks still exist, they're a global phenomenon. If you spend time with them I doubt you'd even concider anything else than the army. But most people are quite liberal nowadays.
As a Finnish citizen I cannot understand why these people don't go for "civilian service" (I'm not sure about the correct English term here, but basically it's working for a year for a governmental/communal/nonprofit organisation instead of going to the army), which I personally did. You get the nights off, and you're likely to get a net connection at work as well.
(Mind you, internet addiction was not my reason for not going to the army - my "work computer" during my service was a glorious Schneider 386SX with W3.11 and no net connection. But during my year I got exceedingly good in Solitaire.;-)
No, it doesn't. But I at least have difficulties in remembering what userid/password I've registered with - NYT is certainly not the only site that requires registration. The BugMeNot plugin is IMHO (along with Web Developer) the most useful FireFox plugin out there.
I didn't read TFA (this is slashdot, right?), but at least with previous Shuttle models the floppy drive was an option, as in you could install it, or use the space for an additional hard drive. As for the PS/2 ports, USB peripherals are more expensive - and personally, as I am considering replacing my aging puter with a SN41G2, the ability to use old gear is a plus.
If you still have doubts, try to use your linux desktop for a few days WITHOUT opening up a console window ever. Be sure to see if you can get software installed, updates downloaded, media played and whatever else you do.
Try Mandrake for example, or any desktop-oriented modern distro for that matter (Debian/Gentoo don't fit in this category) and it can be done. I don't use KDE myself, but Konqueror is not the tool that one is supposed to use to install software, for that purpose there are distro-specific tools. You don't use Windows Explorer (or IE even) to install software, do you?
My personal favourite is Kohina - music from various 8-bit devices with emphasis (IMHO rightfully so) on SID-based music. Personally there were two major factors that got me into electronic music: Depeche Mode and Rob Hubbard. Of the two, I'd have to say Hubbard had more influence.
I don't know what percentage of Slashdot's revenue comes from ads versus paying subscribers, but you'd better believe that all this bandwidth we burn up all day long has to be paid for by somebody.
That somebody being OSDN I reckon. While subscriptions and advertisements do naturally bring in some revenue, if bandwidth costs were an issue here one would think they'd do something about it...
but there is one hugely crucial element to "the linux studio" that's missing, and that's support for professional sound cards
FWIW I have Audigy up and running, but that's hardly a card I'd call professional. So lets see... ALSA currently supports several RME cards (with ADAT I/O), several M-Audio cards (most of which are 200$ and up) and some cards from SEK'D and Echo, for example. Granted this is not by any means a complete selection of pro audio cards, but you can get a pro card that'll work with Linux if you shop around a bit (RMEs are held in quite high regard in pro audio circles, right?).
I recall an old discussion over at The GAS Station in which some "professional" audio engineer claimed that copying (digital audio) files from a CD-r to another introduced "digital generational loss". There were even claims that certain hard drives sound better than others! (not as in the physical sound that they create, but as in the quality that you can get when recording to them)
Needless to say those arguments were blown to bits - literally, one person wrote a small program to compare.wav files byte by byte, and first burned a file to a CD, copied it back to a HD and then burned in to another CD, and no differencies were found - which is the result that anyone with half a brain would except, unless there's an error in burning the CD. But it's very amusing how audio is still nearly voodoo to some people, even though in the digital domain it's just zeroes and ones, no magic going on there.
Because when you're working on a corporate project that costs money, it's very difficult to put a business case forward for something which will only be of benefit to a very small number of visitors.
How about the fact that PNGs are (in almost every case) smaller than GIFs? This means direct savings in bandwidth costs. Sounds like something the PHBs might actually get.
'tis strange, as that was a direct cut'n'paste... perhaps someone corrected it? (FWIW I really loved Bratislava, and was quite apalled by the text... oh well)
Thanks for the tip, I wasn't aware of this site. Although it seems it's still a work in progress, out of curiosity I checked the entry for Bratislava (capital of Slovakia) as I visited it recently... and here's the introduction:
Bratislava is the capital and largest city in Slovakia (population 430,000 of the ugliest motherfuckers on the face of th fuckin planet). For almost the entire twentieth century it has been over-run by faggits. Prague, its bigger and better known neighbor to the northwest also suffers from this problem, altough not to the same extent.
...it seems the site still could use some work, at least that entry could use some editing.
Camcorders account for 92 percent of all illegal copies of films that appear for sale over the Internet and are sold on street corners from Burbank to Beijing, according to the MPAA.
Huh? First of all, weren't screeners supposed to be a more severe problem, as they offer significantly better quality (and yes, are occasionally sold as pirate copies)? And who here has seen TS/TC copies being _sold_? I can't recall having to pay anything to suprnova.org...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's a bitch to get DVDs to work in Mandrake as well. I mean, you have to configure your urpmi sources (can be done graphically as well if you prefer), type 'urpmi ogle_gui libdvdcss' to a terminal and only then will you be able to watch DVDs from any region with menus and all. Windows sure makes it easier.
Perhaps the Matrix is just running on old Pentiums?
It's slightly longer, but thinner (only 1.1cm in the thinnest end!) and it has an internal DVD-+RW burner (no integrated Wi-Fi, but a PCMCIA card is included). Certainly it's expensive, but IMHO very, very sexy. El Reg has a review here.
So instead, why not place them in front of a computer (preferably with a limited, monitored net connection ;-) and let them do work? Civilian servicemen are free employees, whereas training a solider costs quite a bit. In Germany, where a more significant portion of the population opts for civilian service (not German myself so I don't have the exact figures), servicemen are quite valued because of the work they do.
Depends. I've had some friend succesfully study in open university at the same time, and not all service jobs are nine-to-five. It really depends on the job. As for the social stigma, IMHO it doesn't exist anymore. While it is true that some decades ago military service was nearly mandatory for high paying/excecutive jobs, society has changed ever since. Sure, the rednecks still exist, they're a global phenomenon. If you spend time with them I doubt you'd even concider anything else than the army. But most people are quite liberal nowadays.(Mind you, internet addiction was not my reason for not going to the army - my "work computer" during my service was a glorious Schneider 386SX with W3.11 and no net connection. But during my year I got exceedingly good in Solitaire. ;-)
No, it doesn't. But I at least have difficulties in remembering what userid/password I've registered with - NYT is certainly not the only site that requires registration. The BugMeNot plugin is IMHO (along with Web Developer) the most useful FireFox plugin out there.
Genuine, as in same as the parent?
I didn't read TFA (this is slashdot, right?), but at least with previous Shuttle models the floppy drive was an option, as in you could install it, or use the space for an additional hard drive. As for the PS/2 ports, USB peripherals are more expensive - and personally, as I am considering replacing my aging puter with a SN41G2, the ability to use old gear is a plus.
And outside the US it'd be "French Software", right?
My personal favourite is Kohina - music from various 8-bit devices with emphasis (IMHO rightfully so) on SID-based music. Personally there were two major factors that got me into electronic music: Depeche Mode and Rob Hubbard. Of the two, I'd have to say Hubbard had more influence.
Shouldn't that be GNU/thuggery?
Needless to say those arguments were blown to bits - literally, one person wrote a small program to compare .wav files byte by byte, and first burned a file to a CD, copied it back to a HD and then burned in to another CD, and no differencies were found - which is the result that anyone with half a brain would except, unless there's an error in burning the CD. But it's very amusing how audio is still nearly voodoo to some people, even though in the digital domain it's just zeroes and ones, no magic going on there.
'tis strange, as that was a direct cut'n'paste... perhaps someone corrected it? (FWIW I really loved Bratislava, and was quite apalled by the text... oh well)
Bratislava is the capital and largest city in Slovakia (population 430,000 of the ugliest motherfuckers on the face of th fuckin planet). For almost the entire twentieth century it has been over-run by faggits. Prague, its bigger and better known neighbor to the northwest also suffers from this problem, altough not to the same extent.
...it seems the site still could use some work, at least that entry could use some editing.
I would agree with you, but I'm not currently wearing my AFDB so they can get to me... nope, you're wrong.