It depends on what your looking for if the Library has what your looking for and no ones taken it out for the next four weeks, Libraries are really good for some things E.g a preschool book or a romantic novel or anything where you can easily substitute one work for another. Once your requirements are outside of what a Library is good at the Idea of being able to get what you need at the drop of a hat is very attractive.
I can imagine that authors who revise their editions on a frequent basis will find Google annoying since if the previous edition is close enough to the new book then there is no need to get the new book. Required reading educational books may suffer. I'm wondering if the publishers are getting cut out of this due to only having a fixed obligation say print 10,000 copies and after that the author is free to republish where they will.
I haven't seen how the price gets fixed if its low then 63% for authors could be peanuts on the plus side it might mean far greater sales than traditional methods and be a positive. Google isn't hoarding public domain it might become the most accessible source for public domain thou.
Thats kind of Apples to Oranges really and not really down to the hardware but the OS. OSX is faster than XP and more responsive on any given hardware that can run it (in my subjective experience) and I bet anyone who runs boot camp on their mac would subjectively at least agree. On my netbook it's probably faster than my ubuntu install (OSX was on a usb hdd and an Aspireone has a very slow SSD).
Hardware wise there does seem to be a tendency for PC hardware to die younger in cheaper Laptops, blown usb ports seem to be a fairly common. If I was looking to buy a new laptop I might consider a Mac due to its reputation for reliability.
I'll argue the opposite view, It is a happy coincidence that keywords are in English but in programing languages they are symbols not words and you need to understand the meaning not the word.
I sometimes have to play around with software in polish and although I might not know the word being used I tend to get what the word means by the context. How many people on Slashdot (since yesterday) know the chinese symbol for download? I do I can't say it and I probably can't write it/ draw it but I can recognize and use it.
There are obvious advantages to knowing English, keywords tend to have some relation to the words use outside of programing and obviously when seeking information theres going to be a lot more English references than any other language and if your in a multinational team the obvious language to communicate with each other is also English. however there is nothing stopping a compiler or IDE being localized. Theres also the assimilation of words into other languages for example the word Google what language is that? Is it an English word or a French word or German. Would two German programmers discuss a software project in German or English I guess the answer would be either.
I wonder perhaps English gets in the way of programing. Assuming you don't know exactly what the keywords are and instead you have to look at the functionality of the code perhaps a non-English speaker would be getting a better mental picture of what the code actually does than an English Speaker. With something low level like assembly there's very little advantage to English and an intimate knowledge of what the symbols will actually do is far more important.
Even when moving into a new programing language the first thing you need to do is get to grips with the terminology in use, its English but not as we know it:) pass a printout of a program listing to a English nonprogrammer and chances are their eyes will glaze and quickly find an excuse to get into something else knowing English doesn't help them.
So really an ability to learn languages would be an advantage but i'm not so arrogant to assume my main language English is essential.
It would be an interesting poll to run on Slashdot to find out how many of us speak 2 or more languages I bet its a pretty high percentage. I wonder if there is a correlation between fluency in two or more languages and programming ability. Does a talent for human languages make for a better programmer?
you are probably 100% right that you can still get security updates through AU but it appears that theres a lot of PC's with automatic updates turned off or there wouldn't be such a large problem.
Joe User, legal or not, doesn't want some automated process going through his details, after all it could get him in trouble.
The reality of the policy doesn't matter since WGA started, it's the perception, thats kept a lot of people away from windows updates.
Even people with genuine licensed windows quite often have genuine not legal copies of office and although windows is legal for them they still won't touch the microsoft website in case they detect the illegal install of office.
Has activation and license verification done anything effective to reduce the number of pirated installs?
WGA if it wasn't for that then perhaps more people would be patched and up to date. It would be remarkably funny if these infected machines turned on microsofts websites and perhaps a lesson learned for microsoft.
Although I understand patching microsofts unpaid user base might not sit well with microsoft, by not doing so they put their paying customers at risk.
To be honest I think the major difference between Linux and Windows is the use of the page file, Ubuntu doesn't use it till it needs it. In an ideal world you will hit 100% CPU usage before you need to use the page file. The key difference is that ubuntu will tend to hit 100% Cpu in less ram than XP for example. (2000 is probably better than ubuntu to be honest its a smaller footprint). So unless you have enough RAM XP slows down massively those paging operations are very slow and bring the PC to a crawl.
Windows7 is looking quite good starting from 300meg ram on boot up should mean its fairly swift.
i've seen memtest find an error and yes the ram was bad.
There is a bit of a difference between ram use on linux and windows desktops, Linux tends to require less ram than a windows system to run, windows is far more likely to use all your ram and page out. In day to day use rarely do my linux systems need to use the swap file. If some of your ram is faulty and never gets used then you will not see crashes. I'm sure most of us have juggled ram about finding swapping slots cures the problem although reseating ram can fix problems anyway. If memtest is showing problems then the ram has problems bare in mind that some tests performed can pass with later tests failing. memtest is to prove ram to be bad, not good. At higher temperatures than the testing was performed at the ram may become unreliable. It might be the case that the ram is ok in some systems but not in others, I've seen that too.
so bring one shred of scientific evidence that supports creationism.
The existence of God or not has no measurable effect in science. (religion effects scientists true but not science)
Take a simple thing like the equation v=i r it says the voltage is proportional to the current and the resistance now you notice there is no God mentioned in that equation thats because it isn't relevant to the relationship between voltage current and resistance.
if there is a god then v=ir and without a god v=ir therefore god isn't relevant to the equation and that's science. Physics is the science of the physical and to be useful irrelevant information has to be eliminated.
you might conduct two experiments with a pink resistor and a blue resistor do you think that the color of the resistors will alter the relationship v=ir? no because it doesnt matter same as if you perform the experiment on a tuesday or a friday in nantucket or sidney the essentials do not change.
it doesn't matter if god exists, ever existed or is just a fairy tale and a way to keep people from rebelling with the promise of a better life in the next life.
If there is a next life, a heaven then maybe all the god believers should welcome leaving this life for the next. Unfortunately some do, expecting the reward of a bunch of virgins as payment for killing a bunch of nonbelievers. Religous belief has some good points too, thou shalt not kill is a good one, admittedly that one only counts when individuals murder and maim and its convenient, when issuing orders for the death of other countrys citizens it becomes excusable.
But you know i don't need god to tell me killing is wrong just like v=ir god is irrelevant.
What really annoys me is all the pain and suffering brought about through religion. God is just an excuse to not behave in a decent and humane manner, so god or not i'll try to be a decent human being, and if i'm wrong and there is a god well it still doesn't matter i will have lived a good life and I really don't care if i'm judged or not. Naturally atheism doesn't mean you have to be a decent human being, its a choice you make for yourself.
It's not the existence of god that is a problem with bringing religion into science it's just one more thing to obscure even a simple relationship like v=ir
what i really believe is Good is inside ourselves.
IE8 doesnt appear to be popular my stats give IE 38% for all versions IE7 has 25% and IE6 11% with 0.7% IE8 and about 1.3% other versions Firefox ranks 48% of my site visits and 3.07 has 32% and 3.06 about 8% most of the other versions rank less than 1% as well Mozilla opera and safari split about 12% between them with close to equal shares. but thats not evidence:)
I think IE8 does cause issues on some popular sites, I seem to remember yahoo mail wouldnt render as expected under IE8 for example. Internet explorer isn't a standard in any incarnation, W3C is and if it passes that I've some javascript which is designed to convert pages for IE
results 67 different browser versions across 4 platforms 60+ near identical renderings and then there is internet explorer... but then we knew that didn't we.
3 minutes is pretty quick but over an hour, well after getting a huge spike in demand (presumably we all submitted something) thats still not bad.
but if you looked at details of the 67 default browsers most will complete in 20 minutes or less. the remaining ones are all on bsd completing in about an hour.
I hate to say this but unless your site is huge or bsd related bsd hits are going to be very rare, and unlikely to get much paid attention.
The alternative product from Microsoft is a windows only product supporting browsers from Microsoft. that's hardly a comparison (although it's where 99% of the issues will be).
If your time is worth money you can get a months priority processing for $29.95 or just post on slashdot while you wait.
XP can be tweaked quite well to run on low memory systems, I've seen XP sp2 Systems use about 600meg of ram by the time they finish booting, which I guess is fairly typical on the other hand there are some "releases" of SP3 that are up and running using less than 256k ram and a much smaller foot print.
I wonder where you stand legally assuming you have a retail or msdn key. perhaps even an oem license might be acceptable provided its used on the oem equipment.
yes intrepid updated firefox earlier today for me, Hardy is downloading the updated version as I type this, my fault for not allowing it to update till now.
Most western people are so squeamish - but they are not vegetarians either. Either you eat crabs or you don't, maybe if they feel pain you might decide not to, but then logically you should become a vegetarian. A crab at least is largely unaware whats about to happen unlike a cow or a pig.
If they do feel pain then a knife in the head isn't going to be pain free, so boiling water is probably no worse. The only limit on pain is how long it goes on for. silencing all the nerve cells in boiling water probably is better than killing some with a knife, while you lobotomize your crab.
Then again most people will never kill or butcher anything, so maybe we should change the menu and call it.. soylent green.
That refresh rate can be a killer, i've a spike in my bandwidth where the refresh was set to once a second, whoops.
I guess the biggest waste is loading images then rescaling them in the browser. Another good one often missed is using a single line instead of a block of color I took a banner that was plain on the left and detailed on the right and set the background color of the div to take the 1 line jpeg and floated the main part of the image right, resizing the column width became easier no loss of impact and a much smaller image file. Another fairly obvious thing is to separate the content from the styling with style sheets, although that is more a time safer than a bandwidth saver when it comes to changing a site.
Changing a remotes functions based on context is not new It's based on tasks rather than here's every button you need for device a and here is every button you might need for device b.
e.g Task 1 -A Cinema Mode Lets say you want to watch a DVD run the Audio through your surround sound Amp and project the video. so the controls would be for the dvd transport volume control on the surround amp projector settings and of course these things all need switching on and the right inputs and outputs selecting (can be via remote controlled switching box).
ok so thats scenario 1, simplified turn on the required devices select correct inputs and outputs (maybe open the dvd drawer too) and give me the controls i'm going to use.
Task 2 The Same as Task 1 but with a Blue RayDisk...
There are three routes to take on these tasks 1)Use the original remotes and juggle half a dozen or more on your sofa - default mode 2)Use a Universal Remote (one for all are the best and can be flashed via jtag on certain models, They also support macro's) 3)Use a PDA or other device with a programable screen.
Why it never works as well as it should. 1)Protocols and frequencies and codes Ir remotes will work on a given frequency with a protocol and a number of codes transmitted via that frequency and protocol but each piece of hardware is different and you usually end up with remotes controlling the wrong device with certain buttons or worse hardware using oddball frequencies and protocols.
2)The Universal Remote approach tends to be assign one device to one mode and another device to another mode, which is ok but you always end up mapping a button to a random spare button and you and only you know what that is and only if you have a memory like an elephant. You can program in macro's and have things like punch through (e.g using dvd mode the volume buttons still work to control the tv volume). This is the cheapest approach
3)There is pda remote software which you can configure to work in a contextual manner, or in the standard universal remote mode biggest advantage is the buttons can be labeled with the actual function, and you can set up screens for tasks. However range may be limited, your hardware clashing, and some devices may be unsupported.
4)Almost everyones home has a different combo of devices which means each case is unique and requires individual programing only geeks with too much spare time are capable of getting at least 95% of the functionality required (theres always something that doesn't quite work right) and worst of all assuming you get to a working system it's only a working system till you replace or add another device.
5)Even using philips harmony IDE which is about the only programing environment for configuring your pda it takes hour's if not days or weeks to learn and develop a functioning configuration for the PDA. so the only people who can get this kind of system are geeks like us or the very rich (who can afford the programming costs).
6)Assuming you succeed there's a very high probability your the only person who can operate the system, which still doesn't please the wife.
Call me pessimistic but I really don't see this situation getting any better and it's probably easiest just to stick with juggling half a dozen remotes on the sofa but for those with the time and inclination...
regarding the names of Applications why does the name of the application have to be the name in the menu? well it doesn't really does it? Not quite sure of the best way to alias these item's maybe a windows locale would be a neat way to customise all the menu's in one go. not so sure about aliasing in the terminal could lead to some weird clashes.
I guess it could be part of user preferences or perhaps added as an applet on the bottom taskbar aka (start) that way you could set up a windows style menu without trashing the standard gnome menu bar.
Your talking like it actually works out that way, you tend to go through a gateway the gateway tends to have most ports blocked by default but assuming they are not then you tend to find it will drop the connection if you even think about loading more than one thing at once. And if the connections only 3g its painfully slow for anything more than light web browsing. Well it seems that way any way.
Poland too your in your first, second, third year... funny really even in English you would be in your first second third year of college only age's get counted on completion of a year I guess no one likes getting old and your two year old car is in reality closer to three years old...
6/32 which is 3/16ths 7/8ths are 14/16ths or 28/32 so it's 5 and 31/32 simple enough really just doubling and halving.
of course number like 2,4,8, 16, 32, 64 are never used except of course in computers. and using base 10 never causes problems unless it's a pentium but then they are obsolete. these figures are in fact pretty easy to juggle without a calculator. Unless your brought up without learning the basics.
I'm not old enough to be able to rattle of all of the simplified fractions of hand but some here will be. it's pretty easy to gauge where half way is between 2 points not so easy to decide where 3/10ths is. with these kind of estimates and a slide rule men got to walk on the moon.
Some of these old measurements are quite cute. the guinea for example was used in horse racing and auction houses for tax and commission, £40 + 40 Shillings = 40 Guinea's no calculator needed.
There is a difference between being used to one system rather than another and the difference isn't usually a case of one being "better" than another.
your last example is strange if you can add 7 and 9/10 to 22 and 1/2 and get 30 and 4/10ths or 30 and 2/5ths whys it so difficult to work out imperial measurements.
http://www.vistahelp.ca/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1981 this might be of interest to you seems Vista has a driver for it and upgrading to windows 7 not only retains a working driver but finds a better one according to one post on this thread, however why windows 7 wouldn't offer a driver on his first go at installing it, well thats just one of those features...
For the guy with the nikon film scanner thats a real bitch but now google will index your comment and hopefully that will help other people before they buy a nikon scanner nothing worse than being bit by something which you would expect to be included in the package.
Slingbox plugin your video source and watch anywhere provided you can watch live! no ability to save the video streams firmware updated and old firmware removed and blocked from working again a third party ap can manage to bring you this functionality and one other thing no streaming to more than one destination.
sometimes bitching on a third party website is the best that you can do manufacturers forums tend to be a bit harsh with users criticizing the products or pointing out how to get round the issues.
The nice thing about a public bug tracker is that many problems have been raised and solved often without changing a single line of code. As a simple example my ethernet card was showing up as eth8 and not eth0 by use of google and finding a bug report i found the reason was due to a udev rule and a particular file which i then edited to get eth0 back. There was no need to go any further.
I found another feature/bug in open office writer today I wanted a block of text in title case and found open office gives the option of lowercase or uppercase and applying a character effect to the selected text all good apart from i just wanted to get title case and paste the text into kompozer however as the title case is just an effect applied to the underlying text so the title case effect is stripped away when you paste as plain text into another application (incidently gedit has a plugin which does title case properly).
komposer in ubuntu intrepid crashes when submenu's are accessed, but there is a repository recently set up with a working version of kompozer that works with hardy intrepid or jaunty (why do I know because of the bug tracker).
3 reasonably simple examples which show that bug tracker does work quite well in the eyes of the public. For devs I can imagine how much it sucks to get the same old questions and incomplete bug reports that are useless. However dev's shouldn't be looking at unconfirmed bugs and there should be an intermediate layer of experienced users and interested parties who can confirm deny and hopefully reproduce the bug on demand and then they can raise the problem with the people coding the project once its shown to be valid.
Which 1 month old printer is it? A make and model would be appreciated, it's the kind of information that is useful to know. I don't run vista, i'm not a fan , but really the lack of a printer driver isn't a vista issue but an issue with your printer manufacturer.
Unless of course what you meant to say was, Vista doesn't come with a printer driver built in, for your 1 month old printer. Thats just unfortunate the hardware was released after Vista got its release and the driver has to be installed from the manufacturers driver disk or downloaded from some website.
Now you could argue in the interests of windows security and ease of use, that Microsoft should maintain a site with installers for latest drivers for all hardware that works with it's operating system. heck it could even have a system where it checked driver versions and informed you an update was available.
but what kind of an organisation would do something like that;)
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on what your looking for if the Library has what your looking for and no ones taken it out for the next four weeks, Libraries are really good for some things E.g a preschool book or a romantic novel or anything where you can easily substitute one work for another. Once your requirements are outside of what a Library is good at the Idea of being able to get what you need at the drop of a hat is very attractive.
I can imagine that authors who revise their editions on a frequent basis will find Google annoying since if the previous edition is close enough to the new book then there is no need to get the new book. Required reading educational books may suffer. I'm wondering if the publishers are getting cut out of this due to only having a fixed obligation say print 10,000 copies and after that the author is free to republish where they will.
I haven't seen how the price gets fixed if its low then 63% for authors could be peanuts on the plus side it might mean far greater sales than traditional methods and be a positive.
Google isn't hoarding public domain it might become the most accessible source for public domain thou.
Thats kind of Apples to Oranges really and not really down to the hardware but the OS.
OSX is faster than XP and more responsive on any given hardware that can run it (in my subjective experience) and I bet anyone who runs boot camp on their mac would subjectively at least agree. On my netbook it's probably faster than my ubuntu install (OSX was on a usb hdd and an Aspireone has a very slow SSD).
Hardware wise there does seem to be a tendency for PC hardware to die younger in cheaper Laptops, blown usb ports seem to be a fairly common. If I was looking to buy a new laptop I might consider a Mac due to its reputation for reliability.
I'll argue the opposite view, It is a happy coincidence that keywords are in English but in programing languages they are symbols not words and you need to understand the meaning not the word.
I sometimes have to play around with software in polish and although I might not know the word being used I tend to get what the word means by the context. How many people on Slashdot (since yesterday) know the chinese symbol for download? I do I can't say it and I probably can't write it/ draw it but I can recognize and use it.
There are obvious advantages to knowing English, keywords tend to have some relation to the words use outside of programing and obviously when seeking information theres going to be a lot more English references than any other language and if your in a multinational team the obvious language to communicate with each other is also English.
however there is nothing stopping a compiler or IDE being localized. Theres also the assimilation of words into other languages for example the word Google what language is that? Is it an English word or a French word or German. Would two German programmers discuss a software project in German or English I guess the answer would be either.
I wonder perhaps English gets in the way of programing. Assuming you don't know exactly what the keywords are and instead you have to look at the functionality of the code perhaps a non-English speaker would be getting a better mental picture of what the code actually does than an English Speaker. With something low level like assembly there's very little advantage to English and an intimate knowledge of what the symbols will actually do is far more important.
Even when moving into a new programing language the first thing you need to do is get to grips with the terminology in use, its English but not as we know it :) pass a printout of a program listing to a English nonprogrammer and chances are their eyes will glaze and quickly find an excuse to get into something else knowing English doesn't help them.
So really an ability to learn languages would be an advantage but i'm not so arrogant to assume my main language English is essential.
It would be an interesting poll to run on Slashdot to find out how many of us speak 2 or more languages I bet its a pretty high percentage. I wonder if there is a correlation between fluency in two or more languages and programming ability. Does a talent for human languages make for a better programmer?
you missed the ubiquity story ?
that plugin will translate the text for you to whatever you like it seems
you are probably 100% right that you can still get security updates through AU but it appears that theres a lot of PC's with automatic updates turned off or there wouldn't be such a large problem.
Joe User, legal or not, doesn't want some automated process going through his details, after all it could get him in trouble.
The reality of the policy doesn't matter since WGA started, it's the perception, thats kept a lot of people away from windows updates.
Even people with genuine licensed windows quite often have genuine not legal copies of office and although windows is legal for them they still won't touch the microsoft website in case they detect the illegal install of office.
Has activation and license verification done anything effective to reduce the number of pirated installs?
WGA if it wasn't for that then perhaps more people would be patched and up to date.
It would be remarkably funny if these infected machines turned on microsofts websites and perhaps a lesson learned for microsoft.
Although I understand patching microsofts unpaid user base might not sit well with microsoft, by not doing so they put their paying customers at risk.
To be honest I think the major difference between Linux and Windows is the use of the page file, Ubuntu doesn't use it till it needs it.
In an ideal world you will hit 100% CPU usage before you need to use the page file. The key difference is that ubuntu will tend to hit 100% Cpu in less ram than XP for example. (2000 is probably better than ubuntu to be honest its a smaller footprint). So unless you have enough RAM XP slows down massively those paging operations are very slow and bring the PC to a crawl.
Windows7 is looking quite good starting from 300meg ram on boot up should mean its fairly swift.
i've seen memtest find an error and yes the ram was bad.
There is a bit of a difference between ram use on linux and windows desktops, Linux tends to require less ram than a windows system to run, windows is far more likely to use all your ram and page out. In day to day use rarely do my linux systems need to use the swap file. If some of your ram is faulty and never gets used then you will not see crashes. I'm sure most of us have juggled ram about finding swapping slots cures the problem although reseating ram can fix problems anyway. If memtest is showing problems then the ram has problems bare in mind that some tests performed can pass with later tests failing.
memtest is to prove ram to be bad, not good. At higher temperatures than the testing was performed at the ram may become unreliable. It might be the case that the ram is ok in some systems but not in others, I've seen that too.
so bring one shred of scientific evidence that supports creationism.
The existence of God or not has no measurable effect in science. (religion effects scientists true but not science)
Take a simple thing like the equation v=i r it says the voltage is proportional to the current and the resistance now you notice there is no God mentioned in that equation thats because it isn't relevant to the relationship between voltage current and resistance.
if there is a god then v=ir and without a god v=ir therefore god isn't relevant to the equation and that's science. Physics is the science of the physical and to be useful irrelevant information has to be eliminated.
you might conduct two experiments with a pink resistor and a blue resistor do you think that the color of the resistors will alter the relationship v=ir? no because it doesnt matter same as if you perform the experiment on a tuesday or a friday in nantucket or sidney the essentials do not change.
it doesn't matter if god exists, ever existed or is just a fairy tale and a way to keep people from rebelling with the promise of a better life in the next life.
If there is a next life, a heaven then maybe all the god believers should welcome leaving this life for the next. Unfortunately some do, expecting the reward of a bunch of virgins as payment for killing a bunch of nonbelievers. Religous belief has some good points too, thou shalt not kill is a good one, admittedly that one only counts when individuals murder and maim and its convenient, when issuing orders for the death of other countrys citizens it becomes excusable.
But you know i don't need god to tell me killing is wrong just like v=ir god is irrelevant.
What really annoys me is all the pain and suffering brought about through religion. God is just an excuse to not behave in a decent and humane manner, so god or not i'll try to be a decent human being, and if i'm wrong and there is a god well it still doesn't matter i will have lived a good life and I really don't care if i'm judged or not. Naturally atheism doesn't mean you have to be a decent human being, its a choice you make for yourself.
It's not the existence of god that is a problem with bringing religion into science it's just one more thing to obscure even a simple relationship like v=ir
what i really believe is Good is inside ourselves.
IE8 doesnt appear to be popular
my stats give IE 38% for all versions IE7 has 25% and IE6 11% with 0.7% IE8 and about 1.3% other versions
Firefox ranks 48% of my site visits and 3.07 has 32% and 3.06 about 8% most of the other versions rank less than 1% as well
Mozilla opera and safari split about 12% between them with close to equal shares. but thats not evidence:)
I think IE8 does cause issues on some popular sites, I seem to remember yahoo mail wouldnt render as expected under IE8 for example.
Internet explorer isn't a standard in any incarnation, W3C is and if it passes that I've some javascript which is designed to convert pages for IE
results
67 different browser versions across 4 platforms 60+ near identical renderings and then there is internet explorer... but then we knew that didn't we.
3 minutes is pretty quick but over an hour, well after getting a huge spike in demand (presumably we all submitted something) thats still not bad.
but if you looked at details of the 67 default browsers most will complete in 20 minutes or less. the remaining ones are all on bsd completing in about an hour.
I hate to say this but unless your site is huge or bsd related bsd hits are going to be very rare, and unlikely to get much paid attention.
The alternative product from Microsoft is a windows only product supporting browsers from Microsoft.
that's hardly a comparison (although it's where 99% of the issues will be).
If your time is worth money you can get a months priority processing for $29.95 or just post on slashdot while you wait.
Why not carry a usb stick instead of a laptop (or maybe a phone which can act as usb mass storage?
portable apps can run most anywhere and qemu can be run without admin access giving you your portable workstation anywhere you want it to be.
cooperative labs might install virtualbox and then let you boot your image file.
maybe this is what the other 10% do already.
XP can be tweaked quite well to run on low memory systems, I've seen XP sp2 Systems use about 600meg of ram by the time they finish booting, which I guess is fairly typical on the other hand there are some "releases" of SP3 that are up and running using less than 256k ram and a much smaller foot print.
I wonder where you stand legally assuming you have a retail or msdn key. perhaps even an oem license might be acceptable provided its used on the oem equipment.
yes intrepid updated firefox earlier today for me, Hardy is downloading the updated version as I type this, my fault for not allowing it to update till now.
Most western people are so squeamish - but they are not vegetarians either.
Either you eat crabs or you don't, maybe if they feel pain you might decide not to, but then logically you should become a vegetarian. A crab at least is largely unaware whats about to happen unlike a cow or a pig.
If they do feel pain then a knife in the head isn't going to be pain free, so boiling water is probably no worse. The only limit on pain is how long it goes on for. silencing all the nerve cells in boiling water probably is better than killing some with a knife, while you lobotomize your crab.
Then again most people will never kill or butcher anything, so maybe we should change the menu and call it .. soylent green.
That refresh rate can be a killer, i've a spike in my bandwidth where the refresh was set to once a second, whoops.
I guess the biggest waste is loading images then rescaling them in the browser. Another good one often missed is using a single line instead of a block of color I took a banner that was plain on the left and detailed on the right and set the background color of the div to take the 1 line jpeg and floated the main part of the image right, resizing the column width became easier no loss of impact and a much smaller image file. Another fairly obvious thing is to separate the content from the styling with style sheets, although that is more a time safer than a bandwidth saver when it comes to changing a site.
Changing a remotes functions based on context is not new It's based on tasks rather than here's every button you need for device a and here is every button you might need for device b.
e.g
Task 1 -A Cinema Mode
Lets say you want to watch a DVD run the Audio through your surround sound Amp and project the video. so the controls would be for the dvd transport volume control on the surround amp projector settings and of course these things all need switching on and the right inputs and outputs selecting (can be via remote controlled switching box).
ok so thats scenario 1, simplified turn on the required devices select correct inputs and outputs (maybe open the dvd drawer too) and give me the controls i'm going to use.
Task 2 The Same as Task 1 but with a Blue RayDisk ...
There are three routes to take on these tasks
1)Use the original remotes and juggle half a dozen or more on your sofa - default mode
2)Use a Universal Remote (one for all are the best and can be flashed via jtag on certain models, They also support macro's)
3)Use a PDA or other device with a programable screen.
Why it never works as well as it should.
1)Protocols and frequencies and codes
Ir remotes will work on a given frequency with a protocol and a number of codes transmitted via that frequency and protocol but each piece of hardware is different and you usually end up with remotes controlling the wrong device with certain buttons or worse hardware using oddball frequencies and protocols.
2)The Universal Remote approach tends to be assign one device to one mode and another device to another mode, which is ok but you always end up mapping a button to a random spare button and you and only you know what that is and only if you have a memory like an elephant. You can program in macro's and have things like punch through (e.g using dvd mode the volume buttons still work to control the tv volume). This is the cheapest approach
3)There is pda remote software which you can configure to work in a contextual manner, or in the standard universal remote mode biggest advantage is the buttons can be labeled with the actual function, and you can set up screens for tasks. However range may be limited, your hardware clashing, and some devices may be unsupported.
4)Almost everyones home has a different combo of devices which means each case is unique and requires individual programing only geeks with too much spare time are capable of getting at least 95% of the functionality required (theres always something that doesn't quite work right) and worst of all assuming you get to a working system it's only a working system till you replace or add another device.
5)Even using philips harmony IDE which is about the only programing environment for configuring your pda it takes hour's if not days or weeks to learn and develop a functioning configuration for the PDA. so the only people who can get this kind of system are geeks like us or the very rich (who can afford the programming costs).
6)Assuming you succeed there's a very high probability your the only person who can operate the system, which still doesn't please the wife.
Call me pessimistic but I really don't see this situation getting any better and it's probably easiest just to stick with juggling half a dozen remotes on the sofa but for those with the time and inclination...
regarding the names of Applications why does the name of the application have to be the name in the menu? well it doesn't really does it? Not quite sure of the best way to alias these item's maybe a windows locale would be a neat way to customise all the menu's in one go. not so sure about aliasing in the terminal could lead to some weird clashes.
I guess it could be part of user preferences or perhaps added as an applet on the bottom taskbar aka (start) that way you could set up a windows style menu without trashing the standard gnome menu bar.
Your talking like it actually works out that way, you tend to go through a gateway the gateway tends to have most ports blocked by default but assuming they are not then you tend to find it will drop the connection if you even think about loading more than one thing at once. And if the connections only 3g its painfully slow for anything more than light web browsing. Well it seems that way any way.
Poland too your in your first, second, third year ... funny really even in English you would be in your first second third year of college only age's get counted on completion of a year I guess no one likes getting old and your two year old car is in reality closer to three years old ...
6/32 which is 3/16ths 7/8ths are 14/16ths or 28/32 so it's 5 and 31/32 simple enough really just doubling and halving.
of course number like 2 ,4 ,8, 16, 32, 64 are never used except of course in computers. and using base 10 never causes problems unless it's a pentium but then they are obsolete. these figures are in fact pretty easy to juggle without a calculator. Unless your brought up without learning the basics.
I'm not old enough to be able to rattle of all of the simplified fractions of hand but some here will be. it's pretty easy to gauge where half way is between 2 points not so easy to decide where 3/10ths is. with these kind of estimates and a slide rule men got to walk on the moon.
Some of these old measurements are quite cute. the guinea for example was used in horse racing and auction houses for tax and commission,
£40 + 40 Shillings = 40 Guinea's no calculator needed.
There is a difference between being used to one system rather than another and the difference isn't usually a case of one being "better" than another.
your last example is strange if you can add 7 and 9/10 to 22 and 1/2 and get 30 and 4/10ths or 30 and 2/5ths whys it so difficult to work out imperial measurements.
http://www.vistahelp.ca/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1981 this might be of interest to you seems Vista has a driver for it and upgrading to windows 7 not only retains a working driver but finds a better one according to one post on this thread, however why windows 7 wouldn't offer a driver on his first go at installing it, well thats just one of those features...
For the guy with the nikon film scanner thats a real bitch but now google will index your comment and hopefully that will help other people before they buy a nikon scanner
nothing worse than being bit by something which you would expect to be included in the package.
Slingbox plugin your video source and watch anywhere provided you can watch live! no ability to save the video streams firmware updated and old firmware removed and blocked from working again a third party ap can manage to bring you this functionality and one other thing no streaming to more than one destination.
sometimes bitching on a third party website is the best that you can do manufacturers forums tend to be a bit harsh with users criticizing the products or pointing out how to get round the issues.
The nice thing about a public bug tracker is that many problems have been raised and solved often without changing a single line of code. As a simple example my ethernet card was showing up as eth8 and not eth0 by use of google and finding a bug report i found the reason was due to a udev rule and a particular file which i then edited to get eth0 back. There was no need to go any further.
I found another feature/bug in open office writer today I wanted a block of text in title case and found open office gives the option of lowercase or uppercase and applying a character effect to the selected text all good apart from i just wanted to get title case and paste the text into kompozer however as the title case is just an effect applied to the underlying text so the title case effect is stripped away when you paste as plain text into another application (incidently gedit has a plugin which does title case properly).
komposer in ubuntu intrepid crashes when submenu's are accessed, but there is a repository recently set up with a working version of kompozer that works with hardy intrepid or jaunty (why do I know because of the bug tracker).
3 reasonably simple examples which show that bug tracker does work quite well in the eyes of the public. For devs I can imagine how much it sucks to get the same old questions and incomplete bug reports that are useless. However dev's shouldn't be looking at unconfirmed bugs and there should be an intermediate layer of experienced users and interested parties who can confirm deny and hopefully reproduce the bug on demand and then they can raise the problem with the people coding the project once its shown to be valid.
Which 1 month old printer is it? A make and model would be appreciated, it's the kind of information that is useful to know. I don't run vista, i'm not a fan , but really the lack of a printer driver isn't a vista issue but an issue with your printer manufacturer.
Unless of course what you meant to say was, Vista doesn't come with a printer driver built in, for your 1 month old printer. Thats just unfortunate the hardware was released after Vista got its release and the driver has to be installed from the manufacturers driver disk or downloaded from some website.
Now you could argue in the interests of windows security and ease of use, that Microsoft should maintain a site with installers for latest drivers for all hardware that works with it's operating system. heck it could even have a system where it checked driver versions and informed you an update was available.
but what kind of an organisation would do something like that ;)