I do realize that you are trying to make an honest suggestion, but really, why the apologizing tone? Can't one suggest using Mandrake without being offensive?
Personally, had it not been for Mandrake I'd still be using Windows. But Mandrake made the transition very easy (an essential part was detecting and mounting my NTFS partitions automatically, as my music was on one and working without music is a bore). Now after a year I don't even dual boot anymore.
With this experience I could probably now switch rather easily to a better respected distribution among Slashdot crowd (Debian and Gentoo seem to be the distributions of choice here), but the thing is, I don't want to. While I do enjoy working with my computer, I don't enjoy working on my computer, that is spending too much time configuring things. Granted if I'd use my box as a server I'd want to do it. But I don't, it's a desktop plus a developement platform for small LAMP/JSP work. And for this purpose it excels. (pun not intended;-) If all you need to do is for example get Apache (with mod_perl/mod_php) and MySQL up and running, it's a matter of couple urpmi's (via CLI or GUI) and clicking a few buttons in MDK Control Center to get the services running (and naturally making sure your firewall is properly set). And you're done! Granted, I haven't tried Debian or Gentoo but I have a feeling this isn't quite as simple with them (please do correct me if I'm mistaken).
Another issue at least for me is those mentioned "wrong license" packages. While I do understand that for example mp3 support may be (is, even) a legal issue, it doesn't change the fact that most of my music is in the format. When I tried RH9 it really wasn't difficult at all to get Synaptic running and install mp3 support for xmms - however, in my oh so humble opinion, it's annoying and wastes my time. And PLF repositories for Mandrake are godsend, if you need software that's legal status isn't quite clear (not to say pirated though).
So yes, I at least am very happy with Mandrake. And yes, I'm very glad (and not even a bit offended) that it was reccommended to me (not in Slashdot, though). Diversity (even with distributions) is a good thing, right?
I'd have mod points, but I can't seem to find a "-1, Ignorant" option so I'll just reply, despite the fact that is really getting offtopic. While I'm sure Israel isn't loved in arab countries, it's not just the arab countries that condone actions of Israel. How about the EU for example? If the good-old US of A didn't support Israel so much you really couldn't continue with your current policies.
Please do note that I don't support the actions of radical Palestinians either. But I'd also remind you to check the body count every now and then. If I recall right, during this latest Infitada three times (could have been four even, don't have a reference here) more Palestinians have died compared to jews.
Comment about dynamic range compression: I suppose boosting soft bits of the audio helps to raise the signal-to-noise ratio for weak FM signals--otherwise very soft passages would get lost in static. Even with range compression the local classical station has issues with this.However, wouldn't it be trivial to do the range compression, then broadcast the dynamic shift on a sideband channel?
Radio signals are heavily compressed before they are aired, but multi-band compression is what is being used there. I suppose Radio Botswana might use a single band, but any modern station will have at least three bands (most likely more) which are compressed separately. The reasons for this are simple - when using a single band for example a low, loud sound (say, a kick drum) causes all frequencies to be compressed, thus the music is "pumping" along with the kick (mind you, this is desireable in dance music).
But as far as I know (and this is from a musical perspective, not technical), compression is quite irreversible. Sure you can try to use an expander (which, contrary to a compressor, increases dynamic range), but you won't get the original back.
Well, if you would ever do something like upgrade your memory or change a hard drive, and don't consider it "building one yourself", a Shuttle XPC would be my bet. Yes, it's a barebone PC. Yes, you do have to install the processor, memory and hard drives (plus the obligatory DVD-+RW - who needs floppies anymore). But if as you said you don't do gaming, everything basic you'll need from a PC is already there. NIC (on some models two), sound, USB/Firewire and graphics; some models even feature an in-built GF4 MX with two VGA-outs, very nice for an integrated chip.
On the downside, there's only one free PCI slot and one AGP slot should you wan't to install a better graphics card. But on the upside (and surprisingly related to the discussion), all Shuttle XPC models should be shipping with Mandrake - here
's one review of the combination, there are many others to be found, just google for "shuttle mandrake".
I'm typing this on 10.0 Official (at least that's what it says when I boot), and I updated from Community simply by getting new urpmi sources for Official from Easy Urpmi and running urpmi --auto-select
Now, I can't tell if I've installed just the right packages so they don't conflict or what, but so far I've had no problems with this setup. Actually, it's even better now - when running/etc/init.d/network (re)start it used fail on bringing up eth0 (it still worked though just fine). I've read some other people have had the same problem with MDK as well, and they remedied it by turning off network hotplugging; but this never worked for me. Now it just works.
I have to agree K3B is a great burner, but there's one thing with audio cd's that Nero does in fact do better: most dj mixes/live gigs available (some *gasp* even legally) in the net are longer than a CD. With Nero one can adjust the length of the mp3 to be burned, so you'll be able to fit for instance the beginning of the gig to one cd and the end to another. I've yet to discover this feature in K3B. Having said that I'm not going back to Nero - although that's because I don't have a Windows partition anymore.
I'd reccommend Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel. It spends quite a while teaching the principles of OOP without quite any code, and although C/C++ are more effecient, Java is more suitable for beginners because you can't make elementary mistakes (like, using an array beyond it's capacity). Best of all, you can get older editions for free.
If you read the article at all, the "Official" release of Mandrake will still be available as a free download. However, you can buy a boxed set or "join the club" to support Mandrake.
I'm personally running 9.2 on this computer right now, and despite of hearing many complaints about bugs I can't say they've bothered me too much. Yes, I've had to install a few patches and bugfixes (and the kernel source wasn't included in the downloadable ISO's, which is kinda strange), but as I have a DSL connection this hasn't been an issue. Urpmi is great, the PLF rpm's too.
I haven't paid anything yet - but am concidering buying 10.0 Official boxed. Just to support them.
However, things changed a big bit for me a year ago: I've got a girlfriend. Being a typical person who can uses computer to a level (M$ Word, IE, WinAmp, etc), making her use Linux was difficult. It was just simply too difficult for her. So I had no choice but to installed Windows for her. Even that, I tried to make her use Mozilla or Firebird for web browsing. That failed, too.
I've got a girlfriend too, as a matter of fact I live with her. And really, you could just try a little harder. Not trying to be sexist here, but teaching women (well, at least this particular woman) to use Linux, or computers in general, can be a lenghty and tedious process, and has on occasion caused me to sleep on the couch, or head to the nearest pub for a few (alone, naturally).
But after six months of "training", she's getting there. She uses tabs while browsing, knows how to use Adblock and not to store cookies when they're not needed (this I actually had to simplify a bit, like "Click 'Deny' unless it's your webmail - and if a site doesn't work just call me", but it's at least something).
And the thing is, she really likes it. Well, as much as a non-techie can like using a computer. It doesn't crash, she knows which programs to use for a given purpose, and can chat with her friends with amsn (and she finds the animated penquin logo really cute).
As to the parent post, the programs you mention your girlfriend using are quite elementary; IMHO xmms doesn't differ that much if at all from WinAmp, and (again IMHO) once you get a person into tabbed browsing there's no going back. Office on the other hand is a different issue; while I think OO.org is a viable alternative, it certainly is different from the MS alternative, and will probably require more additional "training". But go ahead, give it another try. Trust me, it will take time.
What they didn't include in the article
on
SCO Offline
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Curiously, this article seems to imply that there was a political agenda behind DDoSing SCO - but to quote Mikko Hypponen of F-secure a bit more:
"It's also possible the attack against SCO is just a smokescreen to misdirect attention away from the backdoor component in the virus - which is most likely included in order to facilitate sending of spam email messages."
Similiar, albeit longer, quote from him asserting that indeed spammers were behind this worm was in the local newspaper on Friday, but it's in Finnish and I'm too lazy to translate it. But the above quote can be found here.
I used to work at Thomann GMBH (one of the largest musical instrument retailers in Europe). They had several "in-house" brands for products, such as "T-Bone" for microphones. One of their products was "T-Box" for speakers - mind you, they were quality speakers - but after a while, the Deutche Telecom (which you Americans might know as T-Mobile) noted that they had used the name before, so we had to change the name.
So the speakers were renamed as The Box. Unfortunately, I've been told (I'm not British myself), "the box" is "cunt" in British slang. It certainly gives a new view into their "Hot Deals";)
Since the mobile market was being played up as the last guaranteed playing ground for Java, maybe it is time to give up my Java skills?:-/
Have you ever tried to develop a J2ME application? Platform independence was indeed a nice idea for mobile applications, but the realities are quite harsh. Screen sizes, the number of colors or buttons, all these (and more) factors can vary from device to device. And the situation isn't improved by the fact that Nokia has included some of their own classes (the "Nokia UI API") to their J2ME implementation. Granted, the MIDP 1.0 spec is quite lacking, especially considering features required by games - still this tactic reminds me of that "other company"... you know, embrace and extend... This is why most J2ME games are made for a specific model.
However, even if getting a bit OT, I think you shouldn't give up on Java, but focus on the server side. There are situations where stability is preferred over slow startup times. IMHO, the mobile market isn't one of those.
I really don't see the authors point about not having a font tag anymore - HTML wasn't intended to describe the look of the page in the first place. Besides, by using CSS significant bandwidth savings can be achieved, not to mention the ability to change the look of several pages by changing a single file.
Re:25meg download for eurotrash propaganda?
on
Star Wreck Trailer
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· Score: 1
I'll have to disagree - at least personally I never (dis)like a person because of his nationatility, and I'm sure "pretty much everyone else" doesn't hate every american there is.
Now, quite a few people disapprove current US foreign policies and personally I find George W. to be as pleasant as herpes - that said, I don't have an issue with Americans per se.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, had it not been for Mandrake I'd still be using Windows. But Mandrake made the transition very easy (an essential part was detecting and mounting my NTFS partitions automatically, as my music was on one and working without music is a bore). Now after a year I don't even dual boot anymore.
With this experience I could probably now switch rather easily to a better respected distribution among Slashdot crowd (Debian and Gentoo seem to be the distributions of choice here), but the thing is, I don't want to. While I do enjoy working with my computer, I don't enjoy working on my computer, that is spending too much time configuring things. Granted if I'd use my box as a server I'd want to do it. But I don't, it's a desktop plus a developement platform for small LAMP/JSP work. And for this purpose it excels. (pun not intended ;-) If all you need to do is for example get Apache (with mod_perl/mod_php) and MySQL up and running, it's a matter of couple urpmi's (via CLI or GUI) and clicking a few buttons in MDK Control Center to get the services running (and naturally making sure your firewall is properly set). And you're done! Granted, I haven't tried Debian or Gentoo but I have a feeling this isn't quite as simple with them (please do correct me if I'm mistaken).
Another issue at least for me is those mentioned "wrong license" packages. While I do understand that for example mp3 support may be (is, even) a legal issue, it doesn't change the fact that most of my music is in the format. When I tried RH9 it really wasn't difficult at all to get Synaptic running and install mp3 support for xmms - however, in my oh so humble opinion, it's annoying and wastes my time. And PLF repositories for Mandrake are godsend, if you need software that's legal status isn't quite clear (not to say pirated though).
So yes, I at least am very happy with Mandrake. And yes, I'm very glad (and not even a bit offended) that it was reccommended to me (not in Slashdot, though). Diversity (even with distributions) is a good thing, right?
Please do note that I don't support the actions of radical Palestinians either. But I'd also remind you to check the body count every now and then. If I recall right, during this latest Infitada three times (could have been four even, don't have a reference here) more Palestinians have died compared to jews.
Radio signals are heavily compressed before they are aired, but multi-band compression is what is being used there. I suppose Radio Botswana might use a single band, but any modern station will have at least three bands (most likely more) which are compressed separately. The reasons for this are simple - when using a single band for example a low, loud sound (say, a kick drum) causes all frequencies to be compressed, thus the music is "pumping" along with the kick (mind you, this is desireable in dance music).
But as far as I know (and this is from a musical perspective, not technical), compression is quite irreversible. Sure you can try to use an expander (which, contrary to a compressor, increases dynamic range), but you won't get the original back.
Well, if you would ever do something like upgrade your memory or change a hard drive, and don't consider it "building one yourself", a Shuttle XPC would be my bet. Yes, it's a barebone PC. Yes, you do have to install the processor, memory and hard drives (plus the obligatory DVD-+RW - who needs floppies anymore). But if as you said you don't do gaming, everything basic you'll need from a PC is already there. NIC (on some models two), sound, USB/Firewire and graphics; some models even feature an in-built GF4 MX with two VGA-outs, very nice for an integrated chip.
On the downside, there's only one free PCI slot and one AGP slot should you wan't to install a better graphics card. But on the upside (and surprisingly related to the discussion), all Shuttle XPC models should be shipping with Mandrake - here 's one review of the combination, there are many others to be found, just google for "shuttle mandrake".
I'm typing this on 10.0 Official (at least that's what it says when I boot), and I updated from Community simply by getting new urpmi sources for Official from Easy Urpmi and running urpmi --auto-select
Now, I can't tell if I've installed just the right packages so they don't conflict or what, but so far I've had no problems with this setup. Actually, it's even better now - when running /etc/init.d/network (re)start it used fail on bringing up eth0 (it still worked though just fine). I've read some other people have had the same problem with MDK as well, and they remedied it by turning off network hotplugging; but this never worked for me. Now it just works.
Installing a theme or an extension? :)
What was I saying?
(see here, for example)
Oddly enough, the site seems to be nonexistent at the moment. 'host www.emailspidereasy.com' returns 127.0.0.2
...that IT Professionals are *happy campers* in general.
I have to agree K3B is a great burner, but there's one thing with audio cd's that Nero does in fact do better: most dj mixes/live gigs available (some *gasp* even legally) in the net are longer than a CD. With Nero one can adjust the length of the mp3 to be burned, so you'll be able to fit for instance the beginning of the gig to one cd and the end to another. I've yet to discover this feature in K3B. Having said that I'm not going back to Nero - although that's because I don't have a Windows partition anymore.
Kazaa!
I'd reccommend Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel. It spends quite a while teaching the principles of OOP without quite any code, and although C/C++ are more effecient, Java is more suitable for beginners because you can't make elementary mistakes (like, using an array beyond it's capacity). Best of all, you can get older editions for free.
Mobster 1: "I thought you said Troy McClure was dead!"
Fat Tony: "No, what I said was he sleeps with the fishes."
Shouldn't there be "PROFIT!!!" somewhere?
I'm personally running 9.2 on this computer right now, and despite of hearing many complaints about bugs I can't say they've bothered me too much. Yes, I've had to install a few patches and bugfixes (and the kernel source wasn't included in the downloadable ISO's, which is kinda strange), but as I have a DSL connection this hasn't been an issue. Urpmi is great, the PLF rpm's too.
I haven't paid anything yet - but am concidering buying 10.0 Official boxed. Just to support them.
I've got a girlfriend too, as a matter of fact I live with her. And really, you could just try a little harder. Not trying to be sexist here, but teaching women (well, at least this particular woman) to use Linux, or computers in general, can be a lenghty and tedious process, and has on occasion caused me to sleep on the couch, or head to the nearest pub for a few (alone, naturally).
But after six months of "training", she's getting there. She uses tabs while browsing, knows how to use Adblock and not to store cookies when they're not needed (this I actually had to simplify a bit, like "Click 'Deny' unless it's your webmail - and if a site doesn't work just call me", but it's at least something).
And the thing is, she really likes it. Well, as much as a non-techie can like using a computer. It doesn't crash, she knows which programs to use for a given purpose, and can chat with her friends with amsn (and she finds the animated penquin logo really cute).
As to the parent post, the programs you mention your girlfriend using are quite elementary; IMHO xmms doesn't differ that much if at all from WinAmp, and (again IMHO) once you get a person into tabbed browsing there's no going back. Office on the other hand is a different issue; while I think OO.org is a viable alternative, it certainly is different from the MS alternative, and will probably require more additional "training". But go ahead, give it another try. Trust me, it will take time.
Curiously, this article seems to imply that there was a political agenda behind DDoSing SCO - but to quote Mikko Hypponen of F-secure a bit more:
"It's also possible the attack against SCO is just a smokescreen to misdirect attention away from the backdoor component in the virus - which is most likely included in order to facilitate sending of spam email messages."
Similiar, albeit longer, quote from him asserting that indeed spammers were behind this worm was in the local newspaper on Friday, but it's in Finnish and I'm too lazy to translate it. But the above quote can be found here.
PING www.sco.com (216.250.128.12) 56(84) bytes of data.
--- www.sco.com ping statistics ---
34 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 33048ms
Getting a bit OT but whattaheck.
I used to work at Thomann GMBH (one of the largest musical instrument retailers in Europe). They had several "in-house" brands for products, such as "T-Bone" for microphones. One of their products was "T-Box" for speakers - mind you, they were quality speakers - but after a while, the Deutche Telecom (which you Americans might know as T-Mobile) noted that they had used the name before, so we had to change the name.
So the speakers were renamed as The Box. Unfortunately, I've been told (I'm not British myself), "the box" is "cunt" in British slang. It certainly gives a new view into their "Hot Deals" ;)
Have you ever tried to develop a J2ME application? Platform independence was indeed a nice idea for mobile applications, but the realities are quite harsh. Screen sizes, the number of colors or buttons, all these (and more) factors can vary from device to device. And the situation isn't improved by the fact that Nokia has included some of their own classes (the "Nokia UI API") to their J2ME implementation. Granted, the MIDP 1.0 spec is quite lacking, especially considering features required by games - still this tactic reminds me of that "other company"... you know, embrace and extend... This is why most J2ME games are made for a specific model.
However, even if getting a bit OT, I think you shouldn't give up on Java, but focus on the server side. There are situations where stability is preferred over slow startup times. IMHO, the mobile market isn't one of those.
I really don't see the authors point about not having a font tag anymore - HTML wasn't intended to describe the look of the page in the first place. Besides, by using CSS significant bandwidth savings can be achieved, not to mention the ability to change the look of several pages by changing a single file.
I'll have to disagree - at least personally I never (dis)like a person because of his nationatility, and I'm sure "pretty much everyone else" doesn't hate every american there is.
Now, quite a few people disapprove current US foreign policies and personally I find George W. to be as pleasant as herpes - that said, I don't have an issue with Americans per se.