Hey that looks cool. Basically, I didn't know about it at the time. Now, there's no windows partition anymore anyway, but if I'd known about it five years ago, it might have been a nice tool to have.
Actually, for local searches, I've had situations where it was easier to boot into the linux and use "grep" on my windows partition. If that doesn't suggest that something needs fixing, I don't know what does.
For example, I know someone who works in the oil industry out in Alberta and drags a laptop around from site to site to help keep track of stats. I don't know how many issues they have with fumes at the rigs, but I can easily believe that an exploding laptop would cause problems.
My advice, if you really want to be sure, take the time to go through the hardware specs and check the kernel source for drivers for each thing you definitely want to have running (be careful of versions)
Finally, I've noticed that the biggest problems for me in the past have always come in with ACPI support. This is where the most noticable improvements(*) in the kernel have come for me lately. You might want to check out the ACPI4Linux site to see if there's anything special that's been discovered about your system yet.
* It's actually not a problem with Linux, it's a problem with the way some OEMs do ACPI using tools from M$ that the kernel guys have been doing a better and better job of working around. Who needs standards when you think you pwn the world.
Yeah, everybody knows that it's those lewd Sports Illustrated swimsuite calendars and foul language that keep women from becoming automotive mechanics. It has nothing to do with generations of parents/teachers/preachers telling children "boys do these jobs and girls do those."
If you want to carry out advocacy of linux to women, then it will take more than just "clean" screen backgrounds and coming up with new terms for male and female plugs to clean up the industry language. What you should really be worried about is a society that still tries to raise it's children to think that only boys can do certain things and only girls can do certain others. What are you teaching your children to think of their abilities?
If pictures and language are what you think deeper problems are, you should probably petition slashdot to make the pinkified april fools theme the default and then go do some ladies things.
As for profesionalism, different industries/companies have different standards irrespective of gender. At work, I keep a blank background because that is what is acceptable where I work. At home, I put whatever I feel like. It doesn't have to become a gender issue.
I really must learn to leave these offtopic threads alone.
Actually, I'm not gay, I just think this whole line of conversation is silly. Linux isn't about being PC, it's about using your computer the way you want to. If you want to be a puritan and shun all things vile and disgusting (in your eyes) then, well, don't put naked/scantily clad women/men as your wallpaper. Outreach and advocacy are one thing, pandering to oversensative ludites is another.
Keep your hands off my computer and I'll keep my hands off yours.
That's because it's hoax and it's translated from German. Granted, I'm not the most proficient at using whois, but if you do run a whois on the www.openlinux.org ip address, you get a bunch of stuff talking about contact info at "Friedrich Alexander Universitaet Erlangen Nuernberg" So, have yourself a couple of chuckles. One for the hoax, and one for the sad state of computerized translations.
Slack 10.2 was distributed in 2 iso's (4 if you wanted source)... if that's what is called "bare" in linux community today, then we linux users might have to start eating our words when complaining about bloat in other people's software.
As for its use in production environments, I'd say it's one of the few distros I've tried that is serious competition for OpenBSD in terms of stability and security (and securability). Pat doesn't throw in stuff just because he can or because it looks pretty. He also doesn't mess with libraries the way some distros have in the past. The only problem I've ever had with Slackware is that it didn't always do as good a job at recognizing USB devices as some others.
It could just be due to a few local evangelists at the chem. and physics departments at the university where I work, but most of the linux users here seem to use slackware for systems where they need to do serious crunching or where they want to host some web pages. Number crunching in this case is not just a hobby.
My sister's comment on seeing me boot up my laptop was along the lines of "Linux must suck. I saw his laptop turn on and it just had a DOS window come up with a bunch of junk flying past the screen." Gotta love how MS has some people programmed to think information is bad.
On a side note, I had sucked the battery dry on the plane home for Christmas, so it was the first boot in something like 3-months. Funny thing is I could never get standby to work properly when I still had an XP partition on the laptop. Works fine with Slackware 10.2 though (it's an Acer 1690).
I'm not sure what goes on down south of the border, but up here in the great white north, we have police for dealing with criminal activites. We try to keep people working in the educational system busy... well... educating. I guess we're just special that way.
Actually, I don't have an iPod. I had a Rio Karma (got stolen) and now have an iRiver with an unsupported (in North America) bios so I can connect it to my Linux computer like a proper flash drive. I don't subscribe to any service. I buy non-DRM cd's and convert them to ogg. But then, I'm a freak of nature by MS standards.
Careful... the spec sheet says it only supports MTP under windowsXP with mediaplayer 10. So you may have a very exciting time getting it to hook up to your linux box. Then again, you may be one of the XP users out there who use ogg.
Why do they do this? At least Apple had the sense to support their iPod stuff under non-apple OS's.
The POV-Ray scene description language is a better language than VB.
Grain of salt: I haven't touched VB in about 5 years and use a mix of C, Perl, and Python for my programming needs.
Someone above mentioned assembly... there's a good book called "Programming from the Ground Up" by Jonathan Bartlett out there for people who want to go that route. Start with assember (i86) and work your way up through c and perl, all in one book.
Silly Windows users. Having trouble finding the greek letters during lecture? Equation Editor got you down? The solution is simple! Just format the hd, install and modern Linux distro and take your notes in LaTeX format using vi or emacs. Once you've learned the syntax it'll be a snap.
Actually, I bet the campus book-store will still do a brisk market in good, old-fashioned paper notebooks for precisely this reason. Pen and paper is still a good solution for some tasks.
The whole "iRiver only works with MTP" thing seems to be a north american phenomenon. If you google hard enough you can find a bios flash from outside the MS-RIAA zone of control that will allow you to enable the USB mass storage behavior these devices SHOULD come with. I'm sorry, I can't remember where I found it now, but they do exist. Still, if I hadn't gotten mine as a Christmas presant, I think I would have kept the money out of iRiver/Bill's pockets and in mine (or my mom's actually). It does play ogg very nicely now though.
It's just frustrating/silly. Why do they bother with ogg support if they're going to lock out the people most likely to even know what ogg is, let alone use it. Seems like a waste on so many levels.
So do a lot of iRiver products. Problem is, the iRivers like the T30 use a mangled PtP and PlayForSure so you can ONLY get them working with media player 10 under XP (that is the way the north american models operate BY DESIGN). Sure, you can find stuff on the web and flash your player with an unoffical patch to make it work properly, but if you can't make it talk to your Linux computer out of the box, why bother giving them your money? There are plenty of others who are willing to make ogg/vorbis an option without snubbing the Linux community. This thing is going to be P(l)ayForSure, which means Linux will be officially LockedOutForSure. So, don't bother.
Sorry Samsung, but if you buy into this "standard" you will be locking yourself out of a certain portion of the market. You are betting that the RIAA and MS can legally generate not only a monopoly for themselves, but something more like a protection racket. Unfortunately, it looks like a safe bet at the moment.
3) Endnote ported to work for OpenOffice,ODF under Linux
SciFinder can be tortured into working under wine, but it would be nice if it would work natively. Especially since a lot of the people who use it are physicists/physical chemists who do use *nix.
LaTeX or RevTeX (with BibTeX) are pretty sweet and most journals will accept one or the other, until you need to colaborate with someone on a paper and then a plain text file with backslashes and braces everywhere suddenly becomes extreamly confusing, (try to explain that \begin{equation} \exp(x)=e^x \end{equation} will look just fine once it's been processed to someone who doesn't realize that there are alternatives to wysiwyg) so some way to interoperate with the MS addicts and still conveniently insert references would be nice.
Finally, the FOSS offerings for drawing chemical structures are pretty pathetic compared to ChemDraw. Cactvs and XDrawchem are a nice start, but that's all they are... a start. For crying out loud, they have an OSX version... so they're about 75% of the way there already.
So, from my particular niche, that's what I'd like. Another option would be to port a useful free equation editor to MS office, then I might almost be tempted to try windows again.
Big Burley Guard (BBG): What's that sir? Nixie Fan (NF): It's a nixie watch! Cool, huh? BBG: It didn't look like a watch in the scanner. May I take a closer look? NF: Sure... Careful. It's hand crafted. BBG: Did you assemble this "watch" yourself sir? NF: No, it came that way. BBG: What are all these wires? What's that little cylinder? NF: Well, it's a... BBG: What makes it glow? NF: Oh! Well it's really cool. You see there are filaments and they charge up a mixture of argon and mercury... BBG (into head-set): Chief... yeah, sir, we got some nut trying to smuggle a mercury bomb onto the plane...
And smug *nix guys will just smile and keep feeling superior (which, of coarse, we are).
Yes, and by the time this comes out, maybe kexec will have evolved to the point where you can switch out the old kernel for a new one without a reboot or pseudoreboot and without affecting anything that's running. Or so goes my dream. Linux and F/OSS may be constantly playing catchup with MS on the Office file formats, but we're still ahead in technology.
today: The only things you should have to reboot for are a protracted power failure and a kernel upgrade.
tomorrow: The only thing you should have to reboot for is a protracted power failure.
What I don't understand is why he chose to pick on printers for that section of his rant. Every single printer that I've ever tried to hook up to a Linux box has worked without a hitch. If checking to see if your printer is post-script compatible is too complicated for you then you probably need help with more than just your computer.
But then, the guy does work for a Think Tank afterall, so what do you expect?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey that looks cool. Basically, I didn't know about it at the time. Now, there's no windows partition anymore anyway, but if I'd known about it five years ago, it might have been a nice tool to have.
Actually, for local searches, I've had situations where it was easier to boot into the linux and use "grep" on my windows partition. If that doesn't suggest that something needs fixing, I don't know what does.
PS: no, this isn't a joke.
For example, I know someone who works in the oil industry out in Alberta and drags a laptop around from site to site to help keep track of stats. I don't know how many issues they have with fumes at the rigs, but I can easily believe that an exploding laptop would cause problems.
Wow, looks like a sweet machine.
My advice, if you really want to be sure, take the time to go through the hardware specs and check the kernel source for drivers for each thing you definitely want to have running (be careful of versions)
You could also check out the linux on laptops site
Finally, I've noticed that the biggest problems for me in the past have always come in with ACPI support. This is where the most noticable improvements(*) in the kernel have come for me lately. You might want to check out the ACPI4Linux site to see if there's anything special that's been discovered about your system yet.
* It's actually not a problem with Linux, it's a problem with the way some OEMs do ACPI using tools from M$ that the kernel guys have been doing a better and better job of working around. Who needs standards when you think you pwn the world.
Yeah, everybody knows that it's those lewd Sports Illustrated swimsuite calendars and foul language that keep women from becoming automotive mechanics. It has nothing to do with generations of parents/teachers/preachers telling children "boys do these jobs and girls do those."
If you want to carry out advocacy of linux to women, then it will take more than just "clean" screen backgrounds and coming up with new terms for male and female plugs to clean up the industry language. What you should really be worried about is a society that still tries to raise it's children to think that only boys can do certain things and only girls can do certain others. What are you teaching your children to think of their abilities?
If pictures and language are what you think deeper problems are, you should probably petition slashdot to make the pinkified april fools theme the default and then go do some ladies things.
As for profesionalism, different industries/companies have different standards irrespective of gender. At work, I keep a blank background because that is what is acceptable where I work. At home, I put whatever I feel like. It doesn't have to become a gender issue.
I really must learn to leave these offtopic threads alone.
I'm the only gay in the village!
Actually, I'm not gay, I just think this whole line of conversation is silly. Linux isn't about being PC, it's about using your computer the way you want to. If you want to be a puritan and shun all things vile and disgusting (in your eyes) then, well, don't put naked/scantily clad women/men as your wallpaper. Outreach and advocacy are one thing, pandering to oversensative ludites is another.
Keep your hands off my computer and I'll keep my hands off yours.
That's because it's hoax and it's translated from German. Granted, I'm not the most proficient at using whois, but if you do run a whois on the www.openlinux.org ip address, you get a bunch of stuff talking about contact info at "Friedrich Alexander Universitaet Erlangen Nuernberg" So, have yourself a couple of chuckles. One for the hoax, and one for the sad state of computerized translations.
Slack 10.2 was distributed in 2 iso's (4 if you wanted source) ... if that's what is called "bare" in linux community today, then we linux users might have to start eating our words when complaining about bloat in other people's software.
As for its use in production environments, I'd say it's one of the few distros I've tried that is serious competition for OpenBSD in terms of stability and security (and securability). Pat doesn't throw in stuff just because he can or because it looks pretty. He also doesn't mess with libraries the way some distros have in the past. The only problem I've ever had with Slackware is that it didn't always do as good a job at recognizing USB devices as some others.
It could just be due to a few local evangelists at the chem. and physics departments at the university where I work, but most of the linux users here seem to use slackware for systems where they need to do serious crunching or where they want to host some web pages. Number crunching in this case is not just a hobby.
My sister's comment on seeing me boot up my laptop was along the lines of "Linux must suck. I saw his laptop turn on and it just had a DOS window come up with a bunch of junk flying past the screen." Gotta love how MS has some people programmed to think information is bad.
On a side note, I had sucked the battery dry on the plane home for Christmas, so it was the first boot in something like 3-months. Funny thing is I could never get standby to work properly when I still had an XP partition on the laptop. Works fine with Slackware 10.2 though (it's an Acer 1690).
Fav. quote: "It is called the World Wide Web."
... well ... educating. I guess we're just special that way.
I'm not sure what goes on down south of the border, but up here in the great white north, we have police for dealing with criminal activites. We try to keep people working in the educational system busy
Actually, I don't have an iPod. I had a Rio Karma (got stolen) and now have an iRiver with an unsupported (in North America) bios so I can connect it to my Linux computer like a proper flash drive. I don't subscribe to any service. I buy non-DRM cd's and convert them to ogg. But then, I'm a freak of nature by MS standards.
Careful ... the spec sheet says it only supports MTP under windowsXP with mediaplayer 10. So you may have a very exciting time getting it to hook up to your linux box. Then again, you may be one of the XP users out there who use ogg.
Why do they do this? At least Apple had the sense to support their iPod stuff under non-apple OS's.
Grain of salt: I haven't touched VB in about 5 years and use a mix of C, Perl, and Python for my programming needs.
Someone above mentioned assembly ... there's a good book called "Programming from the Ground Up" by Jonathan Bartlett out there for people who want to go that route. Start with assember (i86) and work your way up through c and perl, all in one book.
Trying to deliver a lecture over the sound of 250+ students typing away on their laptops
Silly Windows users. Having trouble finding the greek letters during lecture? Equation Editor got you down? The solution is simple! Just format the hd, install and modern Linux distro and take your notes in LaTeX format using vi or emacs. Once you've learned the syntax it'll be a snap.
Actually, I bet the campus book-store will still do a brisk market in good, old-fashioned paper notebooks for precisely this reason. Pen and paper is still a good solution for some tasks.
The whole "iRiver only works with MTP" thing seems to be a north american phenomenon. If you google hard enough you can find a bios flash from outside the MS-RIAA zone of control that will allow you to enable the USB mass storage behavior these devices SHOULD come with. I'm sorry, I can't remember where I found it now, but they do exist. Still, if I hadn't gotten mine as a Christmas presant, I think I would have kept the money out of iRiver/Bill's pockets and in mine (or my mom's actually). It does play ogg very nicely now though.
Yeah, I know.
It's just frustrating/silly. Why do they bother with ogg support if they're going to lock out the people most likely to even know what ogg is, let alone use it. Seems like a waste on so many levels.
So do a lot of iRiver products. Problem is, the iRivers like the T30 use a mangled PtP and PlayForSure so you can ONLY get them working with media player 10 under XP (that is the way the north american models operate BY DESIGN). Sure, you can find stuff on the web and flash your player with an unoffical patch to make it work properly, but if you can't make it talk to your Linux computer out of the box, why bother giving them your money? There are plenty of others who are willing to make ogg/vorbis an option without snubbing the Linux community. This thing is going to be P(l)ayForSure, which means Linux will be officially LockedOutForSure. So, don't bother.
I ForSureWontBuy
Sorry Samsung, but if you buy into this "standard" you will be locking yourself out of a certain portion of the market. You are betting that the RIAA and MS can legally generate not only a monopoly for themselves, but something more like a protection racket. Unfortunately, it looks like a safe bet at the moment.
1) Chemdraw
2) SciFinder
3) Endnote ported to work for OpenOffice,ODF under Linux
SciFinder can be tortured into working under wine, but it would be nice if it would work natively. Especially since a lot of the people who use it are physicists/physical chemists who do use *nix.
LaTeX or RevTeX (with BibTeX) are pretty sweet and most journals will accept one or the other, until you need to colaborate with someone on a paper and then a plain text file with backslashes and braces everywhere suddenly becomes extreamly confusing, (try to explain that \begin{equation} \exp(x)=e^x \end{equation} will look just fine once it's been processed to someone who doesn't realize that there are alternatives to wysiwyg) so some way to interoperate with the MS addicts and still conveniently insert references would be nice.
Finally, the FOSS offerings for drawing chemical structures are pretty pathetic compared to ChemDraw. Cactvs and XDrawchem are a nice start, but that's all they are ... a start. For crying out loud, they have an OSX version ... so they're about 75% of the way there already.
So, from my particular niche, that's what I'd like. Another option would be to port a useful free equation editor to MS office, then I might almost be tempted to try windows again.
Just as long as there are not griswalds involved apples are fine by me.
Big Burley Guard (BBG): What's that sir? ... Careful. It's hand crafted. ... ... ... yeah, sir, we got some nut trying to smuggle a mercury bomb onto the plane ...
Nixie Fan (NF): It's a nixie watch! Cool, huh?
BBG: It didn't look like a watch in the scanner. May I take a closer look?
NF: Sure
BBG: Did you assemble this "watch" yourself sir?
NF: No, it came that way.
BBG: What are all these wires? What's that little cylinder?
NF: Well, it's a
BBG: What makes it glow?
NF: Oh! Well it's really cool. You see there are filaments and they charge up a mixture of argon and mercury
BBG (into head-set): Chief
Yes, and by the time this comes out, maybe kexec will have evolved to the point where you can switch out the old kernel for a new one without a reboot or pseudoreboot and without affecting anything that's running. Or so goes my dream. Linux and F/OSS may be constantly playing catchup with MS on the Office file formats, but we're still ahead in technology.
today: The only things you should have to reboot for are a protracted power failure and a kernel upgrade.
tomorrow: The only thing you should have to reboot for is a protracted power failure.
But then, the guy does work for a Think Tank afterall, so what do you expect?