OOo is solid, and it's free. This is good. It's also a great big resource-hungry lump. This is not good. I'd love to see the applications separated, kinda like Firefox and Thunderbird, so there's no need to install the spreadsheet if all you want is the word processor.
If I recall there was an image handling vulnerability in Thunderbird 0.7.3. When that came to light I updated to 0.8. Unfortunately, 0.8 ships with a bug which means that in many cases, a basic POP3 email account can't be validated properly.
So... the current release of one of the flagship Free software projects doesn't work, but you can fix it by downgrading to an older version with a major vulnerability. Excellent!
I submitted a story on this problem to Slashdot but hey, who wants to discuss problems with Free stuff when there's always another cheap crack to make about Microsoft, eh?
I can see why RMS prefers GNU/Linux - after all, it must be pretty galling to see someone else given sole credit for work that many others have had a hand in, particularly if you were the one who set the project in motion.
But... it seems inconsistent to insist on the one hand that all software must be absolutely Free to do with as you please, but also insist very strictly on a specific name for that software.
GNU Linux. No, seriously. If the main branch of the kernel starts being used for development work, what's to stop the FSF creating and maintaining a stable kernel? (Apart from HURD politics, that is.)
It's nice to know I'm not the only one who laments the slow death of anything approaching a decent standard of written English.
*sits back and sweats, praying that he hasn't left a horrendous error in his clever message*
Seriously, I like the English language. I like playing with it. I like writing. It's incredibly annoying, and demoralising, to see what passes for written English nowadays - mostly from people who supposedly have been learning it since birth...
Sounds good to me. If more bands take control of their own output like this, that can only be a good thing. I used to think it might just be me getting older, but modern music really is rubbish: it's pre-chewed baby food and has to be, because there's so much money involved in marketing and packaging and lawyers that it has to be dumbed down for the largest possible audience just to make any kind of profit.
What would work even better is if a band's CD also acts as a passport for added-value services on the website - so if you buy a CD, you can also download MP3s, bonus tracks, wallpapers, ringtones and so on from the website at no additional charge. Real fans buy the CD and get extra goodies. Passing fans just download MP3s cheaply and delete them if they get tired of them. Anyone who just wants to check out the band will pick up some MP3s from their favourite P2P network and either buy more or decide they suck, so it's not like the band loses out.
See? No need for DRM if you DIY. I'm in a band myself... if we ever get round to recording anything, that's the way I want us to go. I'm too old to go selling my soul to a record company.
If they really want to give back, they should use Google to push Firefox and Opera. They have the clout to help break Microsoft's chokehold on the net before Longhorn finally arrives... if they decide to put their closed-source money where their open-source mouth is.
My first experience with Linux was Mandrake 9.2 and all I learned from that was how to bite through my desk when I got locked into another dependency loop. Slack, on the other hand, doesn't attempt to do everything for you and there are lots of clever ways for you to bollock up your system - in other words, you get to learn a lot.
Think of Slackware as the Linux equivalent of the Danger Room in the X-Men. If you survive it, you know you're good enough.
A combination of Slackware, Fluxbox and the Rox Filer COULD own that market... IF someone put together some basic configuration utilities to tie the various pieces together. Hand-hacking config files just won't cut it outside the geek market.
Whether anyone would be prepared to take on such an unglamorous project is another matter entirely. Not enough geek cred attached, I suspect.
Consider ReactOS to be methadone to Microsoft's smack. If this project can provide a free, open source replacement for Microsoft products reaching the end of their supported life, it will provide a natural migration path away from MS. Hey kids, here's your choice - spend $$$ buying Longhorn ( and a monstrous PC to run it on ), or install ReactOS for free and keep running the all the software you know and love, on the same knackered old hardware.
Once that upgrade addiction cycle is broken, can you see users going back to MS products? Or are they likely to move onto another free OS if they feel the need? You tell me.
My only concern would be that, somehow, as soon as the project looks like being a serious threat, Billy Gates and his merry crew of pirates will f*ck it over.
If there ever was anything at Groom Lake, it won't be there now. The SECOND anyone knew that UFO nuts had got wind of it, anything interesting would have been moved somewhere else.
So... here's a scenario for you. When IBM has finished beating up on Microsoft and Longhorn is a dismal failure, what will Billy Gates do? Answer: sell a Windows-branded version of Linux. Probably called Lindows.
If that happens and IBM become the new Evil Empire, will everyone on Slashdot bitch about them and support plucky little Microsoft instead? Or is that just too perverse?
From the Micro$oft school of cosmology. Take something ( a cosmological model ) that barely works, find out there's a yet another problem with it, and patch it ( with blather about dark matter ) in the hope that it works. Then find out that by introducing the patch to fix one problem, you find another ( er... what exactly is dark matter? Anyone? Please? )
Hey, I rubbished Micro$oft and the whole of modern cosmology in one post. Cool.
The purpose of better weapons is to shorten conflicts and save casualties.
Listen to yourself, Cletus. Save casualties, by killing more of the other guys faster... where the hell did you learn to reason like that?
As other posters have said, the US military has an overwhelming superiority in Iraq in terms of cool shiny toys, but they've still completely lost control because they're trying to respond to guerilla warfare, which by design does not provide nice easy targets to aim at, with massed, untargeted firepower. Just like Vietnam all over again, in fact. Sure you have lots of things that go 'BOOOM'. Great. Go have a wargasm. They just aren't the solution.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
This just shows the fundamental problem with the American military mindset: that brute force is the way to solve everything. If the military is overstretched, give 'em bigger guns. That way you need fewer grunts to kill the gooks, ragheads, commies or whatever politically-expedient target the rednecks in the White House have found this week.
Here's a thought. Don't invade every country that looks at you funny. Then maybe the rest of the world won't hate you so much, and you won't have to spend all your cash on finding ways to kill us all real quick.
I use Fruity Loops on Windows XP for writing crushingly heavy industrial metal and, much as I'd like to migrate everything to Linux, I've pretty much given up for now. I've looked up Rosegarden, Hydrogen and Audacity and located RPMs for Mandrake 9.2, which I'm running as a dual boot... all very well, but everytime I try to install a program I get half a dozen obscure dependencies fouling everything up.
This might just be a problem with RPMs in general, which is why I intend to try Slackware in the near future, but the fragmented nature of the underlying sound architecture must make developing worthwhile pro-audio software an absolute nightmare.
Given the size and low cost of hard drive space nowadays Agnula is probably the way to go - have a separate partition with a tuned, low-latency Linux Kernel and a dedicated sound architecture running the show... but having a standardised sound architecture across all distributions would probably help in the development of some decent games for GNU/Linux, which is the other big sticking point for migration away from Windows.
I seem to recall Anton LaVey forecasting (ie guessing) that a huge industry will develop to produce lifelike humanoid robot slaves, so that instead of wasting our time and energy trying to interact with other people who don't share our sensibilities or views, we'll all be able to gain instant gratification from a robot programmed to respond in the manner that pleases us most.
Not that anyone reading Slashdot would want to disengage from human society and take solace with a bunch of anthropomorphic circuits.
Slashdot Mirror
OOo is solid, and it's free. This is good. It's also a great big resource-hungry lump. This is not good. I'd love to see the applications separated, kinda like Firefox and Thunderbird, so there's no need to install the spreadsheet if all you want is the word processor.
That would be nice...
... by the same token, how many machines sold with Windows end up having Linux installed?
Both of mine, for a start.
If I recall there was an image handling vulnerability in Thunderbird 0.7.3. When that came to light I updated to 0.8. Unfortunately, 0.8 ships with a bug which means that in many cases, a basic POP3 email account can't be validated properly.
So... the current release of one of the flagship Free software projects doesn't work, but you can fix it by downgrading to an older version with a major vulnerability. Excellent!
I submitted a story on this problem to Slashdot but hey, who wants to discuss problems with Free stuff when there's always another cheap crack to make about Microsoft, eh?
Copyright Cockroach! Champion of Corporate Liberty, Righter of Wrongs. Fucking insect that eats shit.
Yep. That fits.
I can see why RMS prefers GNU/Linux - after all, it must be pretty galling to see someone else given sole credit for work that many others have had a hand in, particularly if you were the one who set the project in motion.
But... it seems inconsistent to insist on the one hand that all software must be absolutely Free to do with as you please, but also insist very strictly on a specific name for that software.
RMS doesn't read the bit about Linus deciding to write a UNIX-like operating system from scratch.
*listens carefully, hears distant wailing and gnashing of teeth*
Oh dear.
GNU Linux. No, seriously. If the main branch of the kernel starts being used for development work, what's to stop the FSF creating and maintaining a stable kernel? (Apart from HURD politics, that is.)
Just a thought.
It's nice to know I'm not the only one who laments the slow death of anything approaching a decent standard of written English.
*sits back and sweats, praying that he hasn't left a horrendous error in his clever message*
Seriously, I like the English language. I like playing with it. I like writing. It's incredibly annoying, and demoralising, to see what passes for written English nowadays - mostly from people who supposedly have been learning it since birth...
Sounds good to me. If more bands take control of their own output like this, that can only be a good thing. I used to think it might just be me getting older, but modern music really is rubbish: it's pre-chewed baby food and has to be, because there's so much money involved in marketing and packaging and lawyers that it has to be dumbed down for the largest possible audience just to make any kind of profit.
What would work even better is if a band's CD also acts as a passport for added-value services on the website - so if you buy a CD, you can also download MP3s, bonus tracks, wallpapers, ringtones and so on from the website at no additional charge. Real fans buy the CD and get extra goodies. Passing fans just download MP3s cheaply and delete them if they get tired of them. Anyone who just wants to check out the band will pick up some MP3s from their favourite P2P network and either buy more or decide they suck, so it's not like the band loses out.
See? No need for DRM if you DIY. I'm in a band myself... if we ever get round to recording anything, that's the way I want us to go. I'm too old to go selling my soul to a record company.
If they really want to give back, they should use Google to push Firefox and Opera. They have the clout to help break Microsoft's chokehold on the net before Longhorn finally arrives... if they decide to put their closed-source money where their open-source mouth is.
I've only just installed 9.1...
My first experience with Linux was Mandrake 9.2 and all I learned from that was how to bite through my desk when I got locked into another dependency loop. Slack, on the other hand, doesn't attempt to do everything for you and there are lots of clever ways for you to bollock up your system - in other words, you get to learn a lot.
Think of Slackware as the Linux equivalent of the Danger Room in the X-Men. If you survive it, you know you're good enough.
A combination of Slackware, Fluxbox and the Rox Filer COULD own that market... IF someone put together some basic configuration utilities to tie the various pieces together. Hand-hacking config files just won't cut it outside the geek market.
Whether anyone would be prepared to take on such an unglamorous project is another matter entirely. Not enough geek cred attached, I suspect.
I did actually respond to just this question, but it was modded down as being redundant.
*sighs* Who can fathom the mind of the geek?
Consider ReactOS to be methadone to Microsoft's smack. If this project can provide a free, open source replacement for Microsoft products reaching the end of their supported life, it will provide a natural migration path away from MS. Hey kids, here's your choice - spend $$$ buying Longhorn ( and a monstrous PC to run it on ), or install ReactOS for free and keep running the all the software you know and love, on the same knackered old hardware.
Once that upgrade addiction cycle is broken, can you see users going back to MS products? Or are they likely to move onto another free OS if they feel the need? You tell me.
My only concern would be that, somehow, as soon as the project looks like being a serious threat, Billy Gates and his merry crew of pirates will f*ck it over.
"Buy 'em out, boys!"
If there ever was anything at Groom Lake, it won't be there now. The SECOND anyone knew that UFO nuts had got wind of it, anything interesting would have been moved somewhere else.
At a tangent - whatever happened to Bob Lazar?
Or you could buy an SCO licence and have literally minutes of funfunFUN.
So... here's a scenario for you. When IBM has finished beating up on Microsoft and Longhorn is a dismal failure, what will Billy Gates do? Answer: sell a Windows-branded version of Linux. Probably called Lindows.
If that happens and IBM become the new Evil Empire, will everyone on Slashdot bitch about them and support plucky little Microsoft instead? Or is that just too perverse?
From the Micro$oft school of cosmology. Take something ( a cosmological model ) that barely works, find out there's a yet another problem with it, and patch it ( with blather about dark matter ) in the hope that it works. Then find out that by introducing the patch to fix one problem, you find another ( er... what exactly is dark matter? Anyone? Please? )
Hey, I rubbished Micro$oft and the whole of modern cosmology in one post. Cool.
How exactly would a hypervelocity railgun help minimise collateral damage?
How would a Metal Storm help pinpoint targetting of hostiles?
The fact that you believe that the solution lies in 'better' weapons would seem to prove the point that the 'shiny toy' mentality is still prevalent.
We'll have to agree to disagree, since I have neither the time nor the inclination remove the scales from your eyes.
The purpose of better weapons is to shorten conflicts and save casualties.
Listen to yourself, Cletus. Save casualties, by killing more of the other guys faster... where the hell did you learn to reason like that?
As other posters have said, the US military has an overwhelming superiority in Iraq in terms of cool shiny toys, but they've still completely lost control because they're trying to respond to guerilla warfare, which by design does not provide nice easy targets to aim at, with massed, untargeted firepower. Just like Vietnam all over again, in fact. Sure you have lots of things that go 'BOOOM'. Great. Go have a wargasm. They just aren't the solution.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
This just shows the fundamental problem with the American military mindset: that brute force is the way to solve everything. If the military is overstretched, give 'em bigger guns. That way you need fewer grunts to kill the gooks, ragheads, commies or whatever politically-expedient target the rednecks in the White House have found this week.
Here's a thought. Don't invade every country that looks at you funny. Then maybe the rest of the world won't hate you so much, and you won't have to spend all your cash on finding ways to kill us all real quick.
Radio series, in which Adams was involved: great.
Books, in which Adams was involved: variable, from okay to great.
TV series, in which Adams was involved: pretty cool, all things considered.
Film, with no input from Adams but lots from clueless Hollywood types: worse than Vogon poetry, I betcha. Prepare to gnaw your own legs off.
I use Fruity Loops on Windows XP for writing crushingly heavy industrial metal and, much as I'd like to migrate everything to Linux, I've pretty much given up for now. I've looked up Rosegarden, Hydrogen and Audacity and located RPMs for Mandrake 9.2, which I'm running as a dual boot... all very well, but everytime I try to install a program I get half a dozen obscure dependencies fouling everything up.
This might just be a problem with RPMs in general, which is why I intend to try Slackware in the near future, but the fragmented nature of the underlying sound architecture must make developing worthwhile pro-audio software an absolute nightmare.
Given the size and low cost of hard drive space nowadays Agnula is probably the way to go - have a separate partition with a tuned, low-latency Linux Kernel and a dedicated sound architecture running the show... but having a standardised sound architecture across all distributions would probably help in the development of some decent games for GNU/Linux, which is the other big sticking point for migration away from Windows.
Works is no longer a place but an activity.
Unless you read Slashdot, in which case it's just a bemusingly alien concept.
I seem to recall Anton LaVey forecasting (ie guessing) that a huge industry will develop to produce lifelike humanoid robot slaves, so that instead of wasting our time and energy trying to interact with other people who don't share our sensibilities or views, we'll all be able to gain instant gratification from a robot programmed to respond in the manner that pleases us most.
Not that anyone reading Slashdot would want to disengage from human society and take solace with a bunch of anthropomorphic circuits.
*thinks*
Oh dear.