Most live/installer cds have an option to boot an already installed OS. Just use that, possibly have to give it the partition number of the kernel or something, then when booted into the system just sudo grub-install.
I knew somebody would say that!:) Actually, I noticed Ubuntu actually did have better driver support than XP (and that's impressive). What I really meant was the combination of the two: drivers are no good w/o software to access the hardware, as in one, and only one (I'm looking at you, KDE), very simple GUI application associated with the hardware. Perfect example is EVDO/3G connectivity. I have a PC card whose drivers are correctly installed, but the basic PPP setup used by Gnome's Network Manager doesn't work (and there's no indication that you connect to the 3G network via PPP, either, you just sort of have to know that). I eventually got it working with a custom wvdial configuration file and adding a dialer link to my application menu, but that's the sort of hassle ordinary users won't want to go through, nevermind that you can't actually activate the card in Linux. Ugh, that's my pet peeve about Ubuntu specifically and Gnome in general. These days they include all these sorts of utterly useless "simple" configuration dialogs that work for the most simple use case and nothing else. Supposedly to make it easier to use or something. What happens then is that users don't manage to get their setup working and have to go wade through the Ubuntu forums to find whatever config file they need to go edit. If I'm gonna have to edit the config file anyway, just tell me to! To add insult to injury, the bloody things come with the most obvious bugs imaginable.
The one thing that comes up in _every_ review of Ubuntu since at least breezy is X config. They've been shipping with increasingly more useless settings dialogs which would be better of being replaced by a dialog box "Read this (link to docs) and go edit that file as root". It would be faster and, arguably, simpler in many cases. It's what 99% of nvidia/ati users have to go do anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I love Ubuntu, but if you're going to write a GUI for something that used to be a simple text file, either do it right or don't do it at all.
The European Commission is appointed by the EU's participating countries, so in a sense they are elected. Directives usually pass by parliament (which is directly elected), so they're not "law by default". If they were, there would be no point in writing to your MEP now would there?
Only marginally, these are all libraries you could get out of the installers of the respective programs, they've just been collected and put in a nice handy package for you.
I'd just like to add that AI also factors quite heavily in MMORPG's. World of Warcraft for instance is mostly popular because of the cooperative play (and even multiplayer contains some NPC's). The AI is dumb as bricks but they kinda turn that into a plus by making it somewhat of a puzzle on how to best beat an entirely scripted event. A better AI might help with all the bugs that crop up from time to time though.
I don't think you can really compare this with the OLPC initiative at all. The OLPC is designed to work under low power conditions, out in sunlight, by people who can't or can barely read as a learning and social device. The PC's that microsoft's software will be installed on will more likely be common, grey boxes that are put in classrooms/computer rooms, which is an entirely different market. They will more likely be used in richer (parts of) countries and to older students who can read and are probably better off already than the kids using the OLPC.
In short, the OLPC is supposed to be an empowering device, the Microsoft deal is for people who are basically already empowered. Enough so to go to a school with a classroom with always-on electricity at least.
I highly doubt that the OLPC with its array of specialist hardware would be capable of running windows btw.
First you go:
Yes. If only it were. Instead, it's suffering from self-imposed limitations and blaming everyone else for not living in their world. Then:
Nowhere have I suggested anything at all about the viability of open source. Patents are mutually exclusive with open source. You can't really have one together with the other. We are discussing the threat this poses to open source and specifically the way in which Microsoft is apparently using it to gain leverage over linux. Your response to this amounts to "you hippie fools should just shut up and take it like a man". I refrained from trying to point this out to you and went with a sarcastic comment instead, since you obviously just don't get it. At all.
If that makes my post useless, then so be it. But then it's posted in the most useless thread in a useless discussion so excuse me if I don't really care.
Yes. If only it were. Instead, it's suffering from self-imposed limitations and blaming everyone else for not living in their world. I agree, let's ditch this open source thing, it's clearly not working out.
Indeed. I never got that really. I understand Microsoft's total domination in other markets: making a Direct X game is so much easier than open GL. C# and especially VB.NET are an order of magnitude easier to learn than alternatives. SQL Server (not really dominating, but has a subtential market share in OLAP and such) is fully GUI based, and has the easiest OLAP and ETL systems to use that I've ever heard of. Actually as I understand DirectX used to be a lot harder to program for. The modern API is probably pretty good but it is not at all the reason DirectX beat OpenGL for windows games programming.
When the input box/message box loop of death "DDoS" thing that traps you in a page and forces you to manually kill the process was brought up to Mozila they said it wasn't a problem. Why is a similar DDoS/crash situation an issue for a Microsoft product again? In the past IE crashes have also been tagged as vulnerabilities even though they involved no further penetration into the target box or escalation of privileges.
The reason it wasn't a bug in Mozilla (or at the very least a hard to fix one) is that mozilla is executing the script on the page perfectly. The problem is that the script has an infinite loop. In newer versions of mozilla there's a detection thing for scripts that go to 100% CPU but I'm not sure about the kind of scripts that pop up alert boxes. Anyway, it does not make mozilla crash and can't be used to cause a buffer overflow or anything like that. It is a form of DoS but of a completely different variety. In short, it is nowhere near a similar bug to this one where Word crashes on malformed input.
Any software engineer worth his salt should know that you should never just crash on input, but Microsoft is claiming that this is by design. If your app crashes on some form of input by design, you can be sure it's not terribly secure code. And I'm not saying you will not find the same thing in many open source projects, but that doesn't automatically make it right.
Will I be able to have Debian perfectly handle [all] my basic multimedia requirements well by default? I would like to play Yahoo, CNN, ABC, BBC andd FOX video and audio by default. Let a slashdotter inform a soul.
Yahoo probably won't work. They go out of their way to make it hard for you to watch video. Apple movies works fine with the extra codecs and stuff mentioned elsewhere though.
And for just the pre-emptive/non-pre-emptive difference, distros probably ship separate server/non-server kernels.
Yeah Debian doesn't. I brought it up on debian-devel a while ago but didn't get any responses. I guess people just don't feel like supporting both or something.
I am not a Linux expert (although I've been using various flavors of
Unix and Linux for 17 years), but I know there are plenty of versions of
Unix that don't ever require kernel recompiles. Maybe someone who is
an expert with Linux can explain whether a custom kernel really does
provide performance improvements (aside from "I saved 10 kilobytes
of RAM").
And if recompiling really does make a measurable improvement in
performance, it would also be nice to know whether that's an
inherent issue or whether there might be ways to make the stock
kernel build perform just as well as virtually any custom build.
That is, would it be possible to eliminate the difference if it
were a major goal of the Linux development effort to do so?
The only reason why I recompile my kernels these days is because I run them on desktop systems and CONFIG_PREEMPT is disabled in the default debian kernels (which makes sense for a server system, but not a desktop one). This sacrifices some throughput for lower latency, which makes the system far more usable on a desktop system. If you measure your performance in throughput of course, this actually reduces performance. Most other stuff in the kernel I know of is configurable (i.e. the schedulers) or equally niche (optimize kernel for size, interesting for embedded systems).
When looking around for the CONFIG_PREEMPT thing I found some old threads that indicated it used to configurable, but apparently it isn't at the moment, or not as far as I can tell. Ubuntu ships with it enabled by default, which makes sense for a desktop distro.
China invades Tibet. So that makes it ok to invade Iraq? I wouldn't put it past Bush to use such a pretext. There. I turned it away from racism and bigotry and into US bashing and good old political mud slinging.
If you can't make a decent analogy, just don't. To fix this one, I'd suggest it's more like China invading Hawaii, and the US subsequently invading Taiwan (or Tibet).
What is the excitement about graphical installers? i dont get it. Debian has the best installer... period. Its ncurses based and it ALWAYS just works. i can set up a debian machine in 15 minutes including downloads, if using a proxy with the files on it! and thats with software RAID, language and keyboard choice -> danish, timezone set up correctly and so on. It is definately the fastest and most effecient way to install any OS. It's intuituve and it asks the right questions at the right times. Even if you screw up (ofcourse i never do) its easy to correct your mistakes and continue.
Sorry to burst your bubble here, but it doesn't always work. On laptops for instance, it often just doesn't work (black screen, but it's a tough problem to track down). I've run it on all sorts of hardware and I've encountered some strange bugs, sometimes with questions being displayed in the wrong order or stuff going missing, wrong defaults being used. I love debian, but I'm really not a big fan of the installer. (which does work fine in 95% of the cases, but then so does about any other installer, including the windows one)
A lot of parts of france where this train passes were probably just as highly developed. The thing is, the french probably just disowned people along the tracks (forcibly make them sell their land) while I'm not too sure about the possibility of that in the US.
It sounds as if you want to believe the pyramids were built with slave labor. Then go ahead--tell us where the slaves came from, considering the Egyptians were not generally a conquering civilization. And how they performed such meticulous work that a knifeblade could not be inserted between any of the stone blocks. That's the work of craftsmen, not men plucked from another life being whipped.
I don't necessarily disagree with your point, but it seems to me that they could have simply bought the slaves.
How about you go and read your WWII history, and let me know how shipping off their Jews wasn't throwing in the towel? Fuck France.
It was no different in any other occupied country during the war. Some deported more than others and some had more collaborators too, but acting like people in your country wouldn't have done exactly the same thing is arrogant and stupid.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think 24 and Jack Bauer should be a model of modern anti-terrorism policies but the American public is simply getting fed up with authority. In any given episode of 24, Jack breaks anywhere between 5 to 25 laws ranging from speeding to trespassing to murder to torture. And if you pay attention to the sub-plot, Jack is virtually turned into a terrorist by his superiors because of it. Well, if you were the audience watching Jack save the world while the arrogant, bumbling, ineffective authorities try to stop Jack Bauer from saving the world (assuming they're not apart of the conspiracy as well), who would you root for?
What 24 does is set up a huge strawman argument (some insane terrorist plot) and then educate people to agree with torture because it 1) ended the terrorist plot, thus saving the world and 2) it only happens to extremist muslim terrorists anyway. Sure, Jack makes some mistakes now and then, but who cares, he's saving the world right?
When anybody asks me whether they should run Vista I tell them to at least wait till SP1 and preferrably SP2. And that is the only sane advice you can give them. Heck, I personally find XP to be the best windows so far and even that took till SP2 to be halfway usable (and secure). Running Vista now is like running linux 2.6.21. It might be cool, but it will probably just blow up in your face and you get to keep the pieces.
What nobody seems to mention anywhere is that copyright companies are already responsible for protecting their own copyrights and have been pursuing copyright cases offline with great success for years. It's made them rich even. I'm not anti big government or anything, but I see up to a certain degree one should be responsible for protecting his own "property". It's not like Viacom et al. don't have the money to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Most live/installer cds have an option to boot an already installed OS. Just use that, possibly have to give it the partition number of the kernel or something, then when booted into the system just sudo grub-install.
The one thing that comes up in _every_ review of Ubuntu since at least breezy is X config. They've been shipping with increasingly more useless settings dialogs which would be better of being replaced by a dialog box "Read this (link to docs) and go edit that file as root". It would be faster and, arguably, simpler in many cases. It's what 99% of nvidia/ati users have to go do anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I love Ubuntu, but if you're going to write a GUI for something that used to be a simple text file, either do it right or don't do it at all.
The European Commission is appointed by the EU's participating countries, so in a sense they are elected. Directives usually pass by parliament (which is directly elected), so they're not "law by default". If they were, there would be no point in writing to your MEP now would there?
Only marginally, these are all libraries you could get out of the installers of the respective programs, they've just been collected and put in a nice handy package for you.
I'd just like to add that AI also factors quite heavily in MMORPG's. World of Warcraft for instance is mostly popular because of the cooperative play (and even multiplayer contains some NPC's). The AI is dumb as bricks but they kinda turn that into a plus by making it somewhat of a puzzle on how to best beat an entirely scripted event. A better AI might help with all the bugs that crop up from time to time though.
I don't think you can really compare this with the OLPC initiative at all. The OLPC is designed to work under low power conditions, out in sunlight, by people who can't or can barely read as a learning and social device. The PC's that microsoft's software will be installed on will more likely be common, grey boxes that are put in classrooms/computer rooms, which is an entirely different market. They will more likely be used in richer (parts of) countries and to older students who can read and are probably better off already than the kids using the OLPC.
In short, the OLPC is supposed to be an empowering device, the Microsoft deal is for people who are basically already empowered. Enough so to go to a school with a classroom with always-on electricity at least.
I highly doubt that the OLPC with its array of specialist hardware would be capable of running windows btw.
If that makes my post useless, then so be it. But then it's posted in the most useless thread in a useless discussion so excuse me if I don't really care.
The reason it wasn't a bug in Mozilla (or at the very least a hard to fix one) is that mozilla is executing the script on the page perfectly. The problem is that the script has an infinite loop. In newer versions of mozilla there's a detection thing for scripts that go to 100% CPU but I'm not sure about the kind of scripts that pop up alert boxes. Anyway, it does not make mozilla crash and can't be used to cause a buffer overflow or anything like that. It is a form of DoS but of a completely different variety. In short, it is nowhere near a similar bug to this one where Word crashes on malformed input.
Any software engineer worth his salt should know that you should never just crash on input, but Microsoft is claiming that this is by design. If your app crashes on some form of input by design, you can be sure it's not terribly secure code. And I'm not saying you will not find the same thing in many open source projects, but that doesn't automatically make it right.
Just restarting gdm (or xdm or kdm) is probably a better option: /etc/init.d/gdm restart
Yahoo probably won't work. They go out of their way to make it hard for you to watch video. Apple movies works fine with the extra codecs and stuff mentioned elsewhere though.
Yeah Debian doesn't. I brought it up on debian-devel a while ago but didn't get any responses. I guess people just don't feel like supporting both or something.
I am not a Linux expert (although I've been using various flavors of Unix and Linux for 17 years), but I know there are plenty of versions of Unix that don't ever require kernel recompiles. Maybe someone who is an expert with Linux can explain whether a custom kernel really does provide performance improvements (aside from "I saved 10 kilobytes of RAM").
And if recompiling really does make a measurable improvement in performance, it would also be nice to know whether that's an inherent issue or whether there might be ways to make the stock kernel build perform just as well as virtually any custom build. That is, would it be possible to eliminate the difference if it were a major goal of the Linux development effort to do so?
The only reason why I recompile my kernels these days is because I run them on desktop systems and CONFIG_PREEMPT is disabled in the default debian kernels (which makes sense for a server system, but not a desktop one). This sacrifices some throughput for lower latency, which makes the system far more usable on a desktop system. If you measure your performance in throughput of course, this actually reduces performance. Most other stuff in the kernel I know of is configurable (i.e. the schedulers) or equally niche (optimize kernel for size, interesting for embedded systems).
When looking around for the CONFIG_PREEMPT thing I found some old threads that indicated it used to configurable, but apparently it isn't at the moment, or not as far as I can tell. Ubuntu ships with it enabled by default, which makes sense for a desktop distro.
If you can't make a decent analogy, just don't. To fix this one, I'd suggest it's more like China invading Hawaii, and the US subsequently invading Taiwan (or Tibet).
Sorry to burst your bubble here, but it doesn't always work. On laptops for instance, it often just doesn't work (black screen, but it's a tough problem to track down). I've run it on all sorts of hardware and I've encountered some strange bugs, sometimes with questions being displayed in the wrong order or stuff going missing, wrong defaults being used. I love debian, but I'm really not a big fan of the installer. (which does work fine in 95% of the cases, but then so does about any other installer, including the windows one)
A lot of parts of france where this train passes were probably just as highly developed. The thing is, the french probably just disowned people along the tracks (forcibly make them sell their land) while I'm not too sure about the possibility of that in the US.
I don't necessarily disagree with your point, but it seems to me that they could have simply bought the slaves.
Which is the grammar error in this one? (not a native speaker, though I got all the above ones)
There's a Flickr Pool: Public Windows Crashes for anyone looking for more pics.
I hate to point out the obvious, but the GP's point is that this is called an ad hominem(in my bad latin: on the person) remark, not ad homonym.
It was no different in any other occupied country during the war. Some deported more than others and some had more collaborators too, but acting like people in your country wouldn't have done exactly the same thing is arrogant and stupid.
What 24 does is set up a huge strawman argument (some insane terrorist plot) and then educate people to agree with torture because it 1) ended the terrorist plot, thus saving the world and 2) it only happens to extremist muslim terrorists anyway. Sure, Jack makes some mistakes now and then, but who cares, he's saving the world right?
When anybody asks me whether they should run Vista I tell them to at least wait till SP1 and preferrably SP2. And that is the only sane advice you can give them. Heck, I personally find XP to be the best windows so far and even that took till SP2 to be halfway usable (and secure). Running Vista now is like running linux 2.6.21. It might be cool, but it will probably just blow up in your face and you get to keep the pieces.
What nobody seems to mention anywhere is that copyright companies are already responsible for protecting their own copyrights and have been pursuing copyright cases offline with great success for years. It's made them rich even. I'm not anti big government or anything, but I see up to a certain degree one should be responsible for protecting his own "property". It's not like Viacom et al. don't have the money to do so.