responsibly doesn't mean the same as in moderation (although it might in some circumstances). I don't see driving and being stoned as being responsible for example same as drink driving. I really meant theres a time and a place to be stoned and being responsible you would keep your use to those times and places.
Will the damage be anywhere near as great as for alcohol?
Cannabis is not a bad drug, but the consequences of its legal status are. Two drunk guys get in a fight and half kill each other, two stoned guys fall asleep. A guy goes out to the pub drinks and goes home to beat his wife. Or maybe just turns up late to work with a stinking hangover.
most lives are pretty mundane and are often spiced with alcohol, it'd probably be better if it was cannabis instead.
while smoking obviously has some negative effects , theres no good reason it couldnt be used as a tea or as a seasoning in various foods.
Cost is obviously a factor in the 'new' stronger strains being produced today, theres always been strong weed its availability has been variable.
There's definitely a level of stonedness which going beyond is no longer pleasant which means you regulate how much you use if you don't want to white out or end up with the world spinning round.
The only thing i would say is negative is that people who smoke it near constantly are as much use as a chocolate teapot , totally unmotivated.
but overall the third choice of cannabis over alcohol and tobacco would be a better choice of recreational drug if it was legal, unfortunately it isn't so a poor substitute alcohol is used instead.
used responsibly cannabis is far less of a problem than alcohol, provided your clear and level headed when you need to be cannabis could be a part of many peoples life styles. A little bit of cannabis makes you think and consider things - maybe thats why its illegal and most of us reach for a beer or similar instead.
Unfortunately for me having a joint is not an option it'd cost me my job, on the other hand a bottle of whiskey a night wouldnt be considered a problem provided i still get my job done. As it happens i do neither but given a legal choice i know which i would prefer.
It's not free health care that people want its health care when its needed, by paying a relatively small amount health care is available for you and your family when its needed.
It's kind of crazy that a first world country has such poor disregard for the needs of the majority of its citizens.
Hi I use a Linux desktop not a VM it's my primary O/S,
Perhaps I should explain why, perhaps no 1 is I don't like using pirated software, and open source provides maybe 99% of what I want and I can live without the 1%. Theres still a few cases where software isn't native to Linux, and I might want to use it, and between wine and a VM it's covered.
I hate the DRM and intrusive nature of windows. WGA was the final straw for me even on a fully paid up Windows Install I would not allow that spyware to run on any of my PC's.
I also hate the closed nature of windows, Linux pretty much gives me access to all area's. I can get to the source when I want and I can have all the tools at my disposal. I enjoy being able to give back to the community, little bits for sure but thats Linux for you everyone can contribute and make the whole experience that little bit better.
Compare that freedom with Microsofts product and it's stand alone o/s with networking bolted on. The Viruses the malware the constant waste of resources expended trying to keep a system clean. Yeah cleaning up windows systems lots of windows systems I sure got fed up with doing that over the years, and the usual have you got a copy of...
Another thing apart from in a VM windows isn't very portable with Linux I can have a set up with what I want set up on a usb drive and I can take it to whatever system I want (admittedly there can be the odd hardware issue usually just wireless and easily fixed).
A lot of people complain about setting up hardware to work with Linux, the surprising thing is how much works straight off with no searching for a download that you hope is genuine and works.
For me windows is a chore an obstacle more often than not to my curiosity. It's part of the rat race and its getting worse, bloated and patched up. Linux and OSX are great modern operating systems and they both out perform windows on a given hardware. If I wasn't using Linux It would be OSX but Apples determined to keep OSX away from generic PC hardware, which is a pity since it gives a secure consistent environment that could be main stream. OSX on a netbook would sell big time, after all if a user doesnt like it windows or Linux is an option.
Linux is an option for people who like computers, but for a large majority they wouldn't want to take time to learn a different way of doing things but for them there is OSX eventually , I hope.
To be fair the Networks have to buy at a price they can afford, six months delay will be at a much better price than when new.
The distributors can ask for more from bigger networks, who wouldn't pay premium prices if smaller networks were getting the same programs at lower prices.
Ok so your TV programs are a bit older but would you swop NZ for living in the USA? When you put it like that bit torrent is an obvious option. The distributors obviously don't want to sell to you since your networks will be less willing to buy in six months and to be honest your just gaining them some advance publicity ensuring the networks will pay as much as possible In order to get the viewers that the advertisers want.
On the other hand is it worth risk playing cat and mouse with the security theatre that goes on now ?
To be frank there should be better things to do in NZ than watch tv.
From what I have read this bug effects Windows, OSX and Linux generally, However it's been largely explored and discussed in Ubuntu.
The practice of substituting Ubuntu for Linux , is justified to some extent. If I was to discover a bug on this laptop i'm using it would initially be an Ubuntu bug (hardy) since that's the Os I am using.
I can't call it a Linux bug since i'm using a subset of Linux, actually a subset of Ubuntu on a particular subset of hardware and I haven't tested for it with any other distro.
It's not unreasonable to identify a bug with a particular version of Linux initially since the extent of a problem is unknown till its been fully identified. Ubuntu is one of the most popular distro's being used as a Desktop/Laptop OS. With it's large user base interacting with it on a daily basis it's almost inevitable that a particular bug will be found on ubuntu first.
until a bug is shown to exist on other distro's it's quite pointless to state that something is a Linux problem rather than an Ubuntu problem until its been shown to be the case.
It makes sense for example to explore say a sound problem within a distro, rather than bothering alsa developers with problems which are not caused by alsa. Thats not being insulting, Its letting the developers get on with developing rather than being tied up with end user problems.
well I've owned one or two of their routers too, the first one failed just after a year I rang belkin and they sent me another after 2 or 3 days. One plus point for belkin a lifetime guarantee.
On the other hand the child safe internet browsing was annoying but it could be turned off. yes it did ship with admin and a blank password but is that really any worse than admin and password being password (another router manufacturer). At least if you messed everything up a hard reset would get you in great if you needed to configure someone elses router and they had forgotten the password. Early versions could be flashed to dd-wrt.
their other networking problems were mostly ok, but as some one mentioned the usb wireless card had at least 4 revisions (3 linux compatible) but they did not change the PID making hard work getting the right driver for the card.
I've seen worse routers and better but the service i've had from belkin has been good and dispite the niggles for a locally cheaply available router made belkin a reasonable choice.
This sales rep thou is way out of line has belkin really fallen that low?
Edimax make good cards with linux drivers, buffalo do some cheap routers ready to be flashed with tomato or dd-wrt (tomato is my preference).
I guess Belkin are not producing hardware I want any more, pity they seem to have lost thier best qualities.
Admittedly the original post was american english, rather than the Queens English, but this is an American board and the lingua franca is American. If the original post had said the sailor's were mad about it. Some Americans might be confused and think a Windows Virus was the cause of madness in the British Navy, the virus is a symptom rather than the root cause.
I am interested in your opinions about reiserfs on sd cards but I really am struggling to find any article that states its bad for sd cards. Can you find a reliable source to back up your negative vibe because so far I haven't found anything to backup your view point.
"After some research I don't think ext2 is a good choice for SD card partition Type. And ext3 is catastrophic. Ext2 tends to wear off the card with great speed, even with SD cards automatic anti-wear off protections. Google on the topic and you will see it for yourself. Also Ext2 isn't very optimized for lots of small files. Neither in speed, nor size.
ReiserFS should be far better choice. It has a big edge over ext in terms of small files handling (the devs behind reiser stress quiet often on that). It is much more self repairing (I got lots of errors when running e2fsck on the SD card from time to time). It handles wearing off much better.
The only bottleneck I can think of now is the 32MB used for metadata. That's it. Even on empty filesystem you have 32MB used with metadata. On the other hand with 2GB cards costing $20 32MB is not that much."
My primary use for SD Cards is data and mostly its reading from a card rather than writing. I'm also prepared for a card to fail, and mostly use the SD Cards as a local copy of data I want on my system at a particular time. In practice so far I've not had an SD Card fail so as to become unusable, Although I have lost partitions under ext2 or 3 reformatting them has always worked.
The life span of cards seems to be unclear but 5 - 10 years seems to be what the manufacturers are saying.
Have you tried Netbook Remix? I have and I just did not get on with it, mainly because its been stripped down too far. Especially annoying was a lack of reiserfs support, which I'd taken to using due to the ability of ext2/3 to lose everything on an sd card under certain circumstances.
But Some people must like it. Surprisingly OSX runs quite well on a netbook, I took a triple booting hdd from a laptop and found the osx and ubuntu installs both booted up fine (Xp didn't but thats MS for you) I soon got wireless working on OSX using an Edimax usb card with a ralink 2500 chipset. It's certainly responsive enough but then again the Macbook Air has a 1.6 dual core CPU so a 1.6 atom isn't that much poorer (the image had been used on a 1.4 Celeron without issues).
Now we find that Android is also a possibility for a netbook, isnt that cool. So much choice, ok there are issues to be resolved for OSX (apart from legal ones) and also for Android and less so for Ubuntu and other Linux versions. XP works quite well, 2000 is good but no webcam driver.
If you really are on first name terms with steve, tell him osx runs well on a netbook, acer aspire one is mostly compatile, needed a usb wificard since the internal one wasn't supported.
There's two possibilities he could consider an osx release which fully supports this limited hardware or getting an apple badged version on the streets.
I understand Apple doesn't want to suffer the Linux issue, 99% compatibility but that 1% causes the quality of Linux into question time and time again. However as a subset of PC hardware which netbooks surely are, Apple really are missing out on a golden opportunity to dramatically increase market share.
An Apple branded netbook would sell and be a gateway to future sales at the higher end too. It would be something of a triumph over Microsoft to be able to supply a netbook with a current mac operating system.
A mother does have a choice what restaurants to frequent. Some of them are willing to help warm milk if you ask. That's one of the nice things about family restaurants your not stuck with following a policy set in a head office somewhere.
Surely rule no 1 is to make your patrons happy in your restaurant, providing a few basic facilities may not make money directly. But a happy customer is far more likely to return again and again.
I've thought a little more on this. First Legal definitions only really matter when your mandating something by law not everything needs to be mandated by law especially with so many versions of the law around the world.
better to avoid useless legislation in the first place.
What I propose would be voluntary if you want kids on your site then you should be prepared to do a little work to enable parents to filter appropriate content for their child. Anything else cannot work you can't modify every website in the world.
ages.txt might be a start to build a safer internet for kids without censoring and filtering at national and international levels. ages.txt is only a guide to your site content that google's bots could read and use to filter results for children.
The next obvious step would be to include an age rating for a particular page this would probably be easiest to add as meta data in the header e.g
or see thats a fine grained level of control for website owners some content may be unsuitable for younger children but ok for older. again absence of this meta tag would be interpreted by the browser as 'adult content'.
Obviously at this point it only works if the website is playing by the rules and even then it is open to a variation in ratings for similar content.
It's not a replacement for parental responsibility but it could be a massive aid. probably in conjunction with parental whitelists and blacklists.
bad categorizing could be flagged to a gray list. which parents could choose to either black or white list or ignore.
not perfect but better than government interference monitoring and censorship.
I must admit i have never heard of pics labels considering its been around since 1996 and seems browser dependent it doesn't seem to be very successful.
The problem is that trying to create a list of the bad stuff doesn't work. Take a recent story in the news about the guy who dressed up in a santa suit and started of by shooting an 8 year old in the face. should your child be exposed to stories like this?
so really you need to be positively identifying child friendly sites because its a lot easier for a webmaster to decide if he really wants kids on his site or not. Thats why I see an opt-in system being a lot easier to implement than a lets force everyone to declare their site to be adult or not. Slashdot is mostly kid friendly till you go through some of the comments for example so perhaps the front page is kid safe but user comments are not. A site based ages.txt can apply for some sites others it may depend on the pages a meta age=18 on a page or Age=8 could be used to give the browser an opportunity to not display a page based on its content.
I guess what needs doing is an rfc proposal
If Kids are your target audience then you should be prepared to jump through a few hoops so that kids can view your pages and you should be prepared to police your pages where users can add content to your site. My site www.phelansguesthouse.com isn't controversial in any way, but I don't really want kids clicking on my google ads for example. That just costs me money since they cant book rooms or restaurants.
So put the kids in a walled garden and let the parents blacklist sites that abuse the tags that would allow kids access. Obviously some oversight would be needed, It'd make no sense for say toys r us to be blacklisted just because some parents don't like it although a hosts list could block it on a particular families pc's
Really there is no way to make all sites comply with any system unless it has positive value for them.
I guess what is needed is a rfc proposal being put to the IEFC but how to submit it to them I don't know.
i've suggested this on another comment but an age.txt similar to robots.txt would solve your problem.
Any site which you host which is kidsafe has an age.txt in its web root folder, it simply states the recommended minimum age eg 12 or 18 or what ever. The browser respects the parental settings set per pc (a simple extension would do it). if there is no age.txt then it assumes its adult content. that way you can host your pornsites on the same server as your flash game sites and the only kids that get to see your porn sites have bad parents.
The problem is this seems to be completely backwards.
What is needed is a way of identifying kid friendly sites, say something like robots.txt but for child friendly sites and a simple extension for the web browser to use it.
when active this would block at the pc level any sites without the child cert. A parental password would turn it on or off.
Thus parents can have a safer internet for the kids and everyone else can have access to the rest.
Simple free and keeps our internet the way we like it.
The key thing its an opt in for kid friendly sites and doesn't require a major change in the way that the rest of us do things.
more than likely there would be a need for some flexibility for parents a site which is supposedly child friendly should be reportable. Allowing an optional greater degree of control for parents. Some creationists might get upset about their children being exposed to evolution for example.
The majority of the internet would probably become off limits to kids , slashdot would but then its not for kids.
Anyone fancy coding something up?
probably the easiest thing would be to add a age.txt to each site that wanted children to be able to access its pages. and a browser extension to check for its presence.
or perhaps an alternative would be a kidsafe button similar to w3c certs on pages click on it if the page isn't kidsafe and the site can be added to a blacklist any parent could download. That might be better since that would give page by page access
with that kind of control slashdots frontpage could be kidsafe but the individual stories not thus saving tender eyes from goatcx and worse.
I don't expect that the governments of this world will let this one go but it might buy a few more years.
The real question for webmasters is do you want kids on your site?
age.txt could be a simple number 18 16 12 3 1 even. All the extension would do is check age allowed by the parent is less than or equal to the age given in age.txt
It probably wouldn't be too difficult for google to read it to filter results for kids.
With something like this in place its no longer the websites that are an issue but parents who ignore the age guidance.
Funny that, but what your saying pretty much happened in the 60's and 70's in the motorcycle industry. The Japanese came along and built bikes that were better than the competition, and in the face of a downturn - cars were becoming affordable.
Sure theres some motorcycles built outside out of the big 4 honda, suzuki, yamaha and kawasaki but the majority of whats left are 750 cc plus being sold to middle aged men who couldn't afford them in their youth.
Running Virtualbox on a netbook isn't exactly difficult.
I've done it on a EEE the 7inch version with the 900mhz celeron with a 2000 guest and it was more responsive than some P4's running XP (admittedly they were bad 512 ram with 600+ in use just on boot up)
With the EEE having 2Gb ram there is more than enough to run 2000 with typically 512 meg which makes it quite speedy not needing to use swap.
On My Aspire One with 1.5gb ram and a faster processor it still runs well (same image 4gb on an 8Gb SD Card) again 512 meg allocated to the VM with 1Gb free for Ubuntu.
As an update there doesn't appear to be a 2000 driver for the aspire one webcam.* I'd prefer not to run XP instead although I may try it out on a USB stick to see if it is usable.
From Microsoft
Before you install the Windows 2000 Professional desktop operating system, make sure that your computer meets the following minimum system requirements:
* 133 MHz or more Pentium microprocessor (or equivalent). Windows 2000 Professional supports up to two processors on a single computer.
* 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended minimum. 32 MB of RAM is the minimum supported. 4 gigabytes (GB) of RAM is the maximum.
* A 2 GB hard disk that has 650 MB of free space. If you are installing over a network, more free hard disk space is required.
* VGA or higher-resolution monitor.
* Keyboard.
* Mouse or compatible pointing device (optional).
As you can see a Netbook is more than adequate for Windows 2000
for XP
The minimum hardware requirements for Windows XP Home Edition are:
* Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended)
* At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)
* At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk
* CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
* Keyboard and a Microsoft Mouse or some other compatible pointing device
* Video adapter and monitor with Super VGA (800 x 600)or higher resolution
* Sound card
* Speakers or headphones
The minimum hardware requirements for Windows XP Professional include:
* Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended)
* At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)
* At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk
* CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
* Keyboard and a Microsoft Mouse or some other compatible pointing device
* Video adapter and monitor with Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher resolution
* Sound card
* Speakers or headphones
XP seems comfortable with 768 Mb ram so shouldn't be too bad in a VM on a Netbook Ubuntu should still be ok with the other half.
* Whilst looking for a 2000 driver, I did find a file which claimed to have a suitable driver but when checked at www.virustotal.com turned out to be a trojan. I'd recommend virustotal.com to anyone they run any file you upload through 38 antivirus and malware programs. in this case only 2 detected the trojan. (The hosting site was only a week old) another site I'd reccommend to take a look at is www.mywot.com they have a firefox extension which gives safety ratings for sites, generally it's quite good and you can find out why a site has been rated dangerous.
I think it was a version of vmmware that needed promiscuous mode to be able to act as two pc's sharing a single lan card and after spending a fair bit of time on it found that wired connections could do it but most wireless couldnt. It was over a year ago and my memory is a little hazy I just remember the disapointment...
I was thinking about the tricky problem of exposure to music. If you haven't heard it just why would you want to buy it? The current solution tends to be download it and listen to it delete it if its really bad or just stick it in your collection.
Paul McCartney kind of gave me an idea, when he decided to host his album in full on his website. (it was also noted that he has copyright on 3000 more songs that he probably could legally do the same with).
I thought about the many times I had been hanging out with friends listening to music, often the first time I would hear a track would be at a friends house and yes sometimes it would get taped.
Maybe Paul McCartney could be your friend so to speak and introduce you to many tracks that he owns rights too, not every track would appeal to you but some you might want to download from him and pay him for them,
Theres a good number of people who could create sites like this jools holland has introduced 100's of artists to a wider audience via his TV Shows why not a web site. Alice Cooper does a breakfast show on digital radio, it would be interesting to see what he rates as good. Of course such sites need to be hosted by copyright holders or authorised by them.
Its simple enough make the music accessible by streaming and people will go to listen and sometimes buy. Obviously this is the opposite of what currently happens RIAA members hoard songs and don't want you to hear them till you have paid and thus the alternative becomes attractive just download them.
I think there would be millions of people who would willingly go to sites to listen to music legally and then later buy what they really like. By the artists developing an online persona, how you view the music changes its not sony's its pauls or who ever.
This situation is interesting, copyright may not be effective for apple since OSX is not being modified in this case or counterfeited. Efi have created some hardware which can be used in conjunction with some main boards that provides appropriate responses to the protocols OSX employs. Samba seems to be comparable, it's not illegal to produce code that speaks the same protocol.
What strength does an Eula have? If I buy a Disk with OSX on it and paid apple for it, can they stop me from using it as a christmas decoration or as sound samples or a random number generator? It's not illegal for me to open a file with a text editor or use the data as raw sound samples is it? Making a computer do interesting things probably should get through.
However I do have some sympathy for Apple since allowing their operating system to run on any old hardware is likely to give them the Linux problem.
The biggest problem with Linux is that some hardware is not fully supported or not at all. Probably the largest percentage of issues with linux are driver related. There are lots of people who fully expect random hardware to work with Linux and some who think it won't work even if it can. There's been a lot of disappointment due to this. Apple obviously do not want this.
The best thing about 2008 for linux has been the Netbook lots of Laptops which are designed to run Linux and systems which should be fully compatible. Unfortunately it's not been quite as good as it should be since there are various gotcha's if you want to run an alternative distro to the one supplied. I'm hoping most major distro's are solving the issues and next year we can pick our favorite distro's and just click and install.
In some ways Linux is becoming closer to Apple in having recognized hardware that will run the relevant OS.
I kind of hope for a draw in this court case, the ideal situation is for psystar to become a licensed distributor of OSX compatible hardware.
More Computers running OSX is a good thing, actually more variation of any os is a good thing less lock in to the computer = windows mindset.
I Selected Host networking and it's showing up on my Lan. Especially cool since its sharing the wireless network card, thats not so easy before wired connections only could share.
USB support is greatly improved one area 2.06 was lacking was in support for the built in Webcam on the aspire one (many others too) That is now detected by the guest. As are other devices which were grayed out under 2.06
There's only a couple of minor things i'm looking to do now. in integrated desktop mode I'd like to make the windows taskbar and windows look more gnome like and scrap the bottom taskbar for gnome. To more fully integrate windows into my desktop. Anyone got any positive suggestions.
Slashdot Mirror
responsibly doesn't mean the same as in moderation (although it might in some circumstances). I don't see driving and being stoned as being responsible for example same as drink driving. I really meant theres a time and a place to be stoned and being responsible you would keep your use to those times and places.
Will the damage be anywhere near as great as for alcohol?
Cannabis is not a bad drug, but the consequences of its legal status are. Two drunk guys get in a fight and half kill each other, two stoned guys fall asleep. A guy goes out to the pub drinks and goes home to beat his wife.
Or maybe just turns up late to work with a stinking hangover.
most lives are pretty mundane and are often spiced with alcohol, it'd probably be better if it was cannabis instead.
while smoking obviously has some negative effects , theres no good reason it couldnt be used as a tea or as a seasoning in various foods.
Cost is obviously a factor in the 'new' stronger strains being produced today, theres always been strong weed its availability has been variable.
There's definitely a level of stonedness which going beyond is no longer pleasant which means you regulate how much you use if you don't want to white out or end up with the world spinning round.
The only thing i would say is negative is that people who smoke it near constantly are as much use as a chocolate teapot , totally unmotivated.
but overall the third choice of cannabis over alcohol and tobacco would be a better choice of recreational drug if it was legal, unfortunately it isn't so a poor substitute alcohol is used instead.
used responsibly cannabis is far less of a problem than alcohol, provided your clear and level headed when you need to be cannabis could be a part of many peoples life styles. A little bit of cannabis makes you think and consider things - maybe thats why its illegal and most of us reach for a beer or similar instead.
Unfortunately for me having a joint is not an option it'd cost me my job, on the other hand a bottle of whiskey a night wouldnt be considered a problem provided i still get my job done. As it happens i do neither but given a legal choice i know which i would prefer.
It's not free health care that people want its health care when its needed, by paying a relatively small amount health care is available for you and your family when its needed.
It's kind of crazy that a first world country has such poor disregard for the needs of the majority of its citizens.
Hi I use a Linux desktop not a VM it's my primary O/S,
Perhaps I should explain why, perhaps no 1 is I don't like using pirated software, and open source provides maybe 99% of what I want and I can live without the 1%. Theres still a few cases where software isn't native to Linux, and I might want to use it, and between wine and a VM it's covered.
I hate the DRM and intrusive nature of windows. WGA was the final straw for me even on a fully paid up Windows Install I would not allow that spyware to run on any of my PC's.
I also hate the closed nature of windows, Linux pretty much gives me access to all area's. I can get to the source when I want and I can have all the tools at my disposal. I enjoy being able to give back to the community, little bits for sure but thats Linux for you everyone can contribute and make the whole experience that little bit better.
Compare that freedom with Microsofts product and it's stand alone o/s with networking bolted on. The Viruses the malware the constant waste of resources expended trying to keep a system clean. Yeah cleaning up windows systems lots of windows systems I sure got fed up with doing that over the years, and the usual have you got a copy of...
Another thing apart from in a VM windows isn't very portable with Linux I can have a set up with what I want set up on a usb drive and I can take it to whatever system I want (admittedly there can be the odd hardware issue usually just wireless and easily fixed).
A lot of people complain about setting up hardware to work with Linux, the surprising thing is how much works straight off with no searching for a download that you hope is genuine and works.
For me windows is a chore an obstacle more often than not to my curiosity. It's part of the rat race and its getting worse, bloated and patched up. Linux and OSX are great modern operating systems and they both out perform windows on a given hardware. If I wasn't using Linux It would be OSX but Apples determined to keep OSX away from generic PC hardware, which is a pity since it gives a secure consistent environment that could be main stream. OSX on a netbook would sell big time, after all if a user doesnt like it windows or Linux is an option.
Linux is an option for people who like computers, but for a large majority they wouldn't want to take time to learn a different way of doing things but for them there is OSX eventually , I hope.
To be fair the Networks have to buy at a price they can afford, six months delay will be at a much better price than when new.
The distributors can ask for more from bigger networks, who wouldn't pay premium prices if smaller networks were getting the same programs at lower prices.
Ok so your TV programs are a bit older but would you swop NZ for living in the USA? When you put it like that bit torrent is an obvious option. The distributors obviously don't want to sell to you since your networks will be less willing to buy in six months and to be honest your just gaining them some advance publicity ensuring the networks will pay as much as possible In order to get the viewers that the advertisers want.
On the other hand is it worth risk playing cat and mouse with the security theatre that goes on now ?
To be frank there should be better things to do in NZ than watch tv.
From what I have read this bug effects Windows, OSX and Linux generally, However it's been largely explored and discussed in Ubuntu.
The practice of substituting Ubuntu for Linux , is justified to some extent. If I was to discover a bug on this laptop i'm using it would initially be an Ubuntu bug (hardy) since that's the Os I am using.
I can't call it a Linux bug since i'm using a subset of Linux, actually a subset of Ubuntu on a particular subset of hardware and I haven't tested for it with any other distro.
It's not unreasonable to identify a bug with a particular version of Linux initially since the extent of a problem is unknown till its been fully identified. Ubuntu is one of the most popular distro's being used as a Desktop/Laptop OS. With it's large user base interacting with it on a daily basis it's almost inevitable that a particular bug will be found on ubuntu first.
until a bug is shown to exist on other distro's it's quite pointless to state that something is a Linux problem rather than an Ubuntu problem until its been shown to be the case.
It makes sense for example to explore say a sound problem within a distro, rather than bothering alsa developers with problems which are not caused by alsa. Thats not being insulting, Its letting the developers get on with developing rather than being tied up with end user problems.
well I've owned one or two of their routers too, the first one failed just after a year I rang belkin and they sent me another after 2 or 3 days. One plus point for belkin a lifetime guarantee.
On the other hand the child safe internet browsing was annoying but it could be turned off.
yes it did ship with admin and a blank password but is that really any worse than admin and password being password (another router manufacturer). At least if you messed everything up a hard reset would get you in great if you needed to configure someone elses router and they had forgotten the password. Early versions could be flashed to dd-wrt.
their other networking problems were mostly ok, but as some one mentioned the usb wireless card had at least 4 revisions (3 linux compatible) but they did not change the PID making hard work getting the right driver for the card.
I've seen worse routers and better but the service i've had from belkin has been good and dispite the niggles for a locally cheaply available router made belkin a reasonable choice.
This sales rep thou is way out of line has belkin really fallen that low?
Edimax make good cards with linux drivers, buffalo do some cheap routers ready to be flashed with tomato or dd-wrt (tomato is my preference).
I guess Belkin are not producing hardware I want any more, pity they seem to have lost thier best qualities.
Admittedly the original post was american english, rather than the Queens English, but this is an American board and the lingua franca is American. If the original post had said the sailor's were mad about it. Some Americans might be confused and think a Windows Virus was the cause of madness in the British Navy, the virus is a symptom rather than the root cause.
I am interested in your opinions about reiserfs on sd cards but I really am struggling to find any article that states its bad for sd cards. Can you find a reliable source to back up your negative vibe because so far I haven't found anything to backup your view point.
http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?p=81635
"After some research I don't think ext2 is a good choice for SD card partition Type. And ext3 is catastrophic. Ext2 tends to wear off the card with great speed, even with SD cards automatic anti-wear off protections.
Google on the topic and you will see it for yourself. Also Ext2 isn't very optimized for lots of small files. Neither in speed, nor size.
ReiserFS should be far better choice. It has a big edge over ext in terms of small files handling (the devs behind reiser stress quiet often on that). It is much more self repairing (I got lots of errors when running e2fsck on the SD card from time to time). It handles wearing off much better.
The only bottleneck I can think of now is the 32MB used for metadata. That's it. Even on empty filesystem you have 32MB used with metadata. On the other hand with 2GB cards costing $20 32MB is not that much."
My primary use for SD Cards is data and mostly its reading from a card rather than writing. I'm also prepared for a card to fail, and mostly use the SD Cards as a local copy of data I want on my system at a particular time. In practice so far I've not had an SD Card fail so as to become unusable, Although I have lost partitions under ext2 or 3 reformatting them has always worked.
The life span of cards seems to be unclear but 5 - 10 years seems to be what the manufacturers are saying.
Have you tried Netbook Remix? I have and I just did not get on with it, mainly because its been stripped down too far. Especially annoying was a lack of reiserfs support, which I'd taken to using due to the ability of ext2/3 to lose everything on an sd card under certain circumstances.
But Some people must like it. Surprisingly OSX runs quite well on a netbook, I took a triple booting hdd from a laptop and found the osx and ubuntu installs both booted up fine (Xp didn't but thats MS for you) I soon got wireless working on OSX using an Edimax usb card with a ralink 2500 chipset. It's certainly responsive enough but then again the Macbook Air has a 1.6 dual core CPU so a 1.6 atom isn't that much poorer (the image had been used on a 1.4 Celeron without issues).
Now we find that Android is also a possibility for a netbook, isnt that cool. So much choice, ok there are issues to be resolved for OSX (apart from legal ones) and also for Android and less so for Ubuntu and other Linux versions. XP works quite well, 2000 is good but no webcam driver.
quick google finds
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2008/12/22/atom-support-now-in-opensolaris/
and http://masafumi-ohta.blogspot.com/ This second link has a picture of a EEE running opensolaris.
How can you not love having lots of options available, I am so tempted to build a collection of images to use with my netbooks.
choice is good very good :)
If you really are on first name terms with steve, tell him osx runs well on a netbook, acer aspire one is mostly compatile, needed a usb wificard since the internal one wasn't supported.
There's two possibilities he could consider an osx release which fully supports this limited hardware or getting an apple badged version on the streets.
I understand Apple doesn't want to suffer the Linux issue, 99% compatibility but that 1% causes the quality of Linux into question time and time again. However as a subset of PC hardware which netbooks surely are, Apple really are missing out on a golden opportunity to dramatically increase market share.
An Apple branded netbook would sell and be a gateway to future sales at the higher end too.
It would be something of a triumph over Microsoft to be able to supply a netbook with a current mac operating system.
A mother does have a choice what restaurants to frequent. Some of them are willing to help warm milk if you ask.
That's one of the nice things about family restaurants your not stuck with following a policy set in a head office somewhere.
Surely rule no 1 is to make your patrons happy in your restaurant, providing a few basic facilities may not make money directly. But a happy customer is far more likely to return again and again.
I've thought a little more on this.
First Legal definitions only really matter when your mandating something by law not everything needs to be mandated by law especially with so many versions of the law around the world.
better to avoid useless legislation in the first place.
What I propose would be voluntary if you want kids on your site then you should be prepared to do a little work to enable parents to filter appropriate content for their child. Anything else cannot work you can't modify every website in the world.
ages.txt might be a start to build a safer internet for kids without censoring and filtering at national and international levels.
ages.txt is only a guide to your site content that google's bots could read and use to filter results for children.
The next obvious step would be to include an age rating for a particular page this would probably be easiest to add as meta data in the header e.g
or see thats a fine grained level of control for website owners some content may be unsuitable for younger children but ok for older. again absence of this meta tag would be interpreted by the browser as 'adult content'.
Obviously at this point it only works if the website is playing by the rules and even then it is open to a variation in ratings for similar content.
It's not a replacement for parental responsibility but it could be a massive aid. probably in conjunction with parental whitelists and blacklists.
bad categorizing could be flagged to a gray list. which parents could choose to either black or white list or ignore.
not perfect but better than government interference monitoring and censorship.
firefox has these
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Parental+controls
I must admit i have never heard of pics labels considering its been around since 1996 and seems browser dependent it doesn't seem to be very successful.
The problem is that trying to create a list of the bad stuff doesn't work. Take a recent story in the news about the guy who dressed up in a santa suit and started of by shooting an 8 year old in the face. should your child be exposed to stories like this?
so really you need to be positively identifying child friendly sites because its a lot easier for a webmaster to decide if he really wants kids on his site or not. Thats why I see an opt-in system being a lot easier to implement than a lets force everyone to declare their site to be adult or not. Slashdot is mostly kid friendly till you go through some of the comments for example so perhaps the front page is kid safe but user comments are not. A site based ages.txt can apply for some sites others it may depend on the pages a meta age=18 on a page or Age=8 could be used to give the browser an opportunity to not display a page based on its content.
I guess what needs doing is an rfc proposal
If Kids are your target audience then you should be prepared to jump through a few hoops so that kids can view your pages and you should be prepared to police your pages where users can add content to your site. My site www.phelansguesthouse.com isn't controversial in any way, but I don't really want kids clicking on my google ads
for example. That just costs me money since they cant book rooms or restaurants.
So put the kids in a walled garden and let the parents blacklist sites that abuse the tags that would allow kids access. Obviously some oversight would be needed, It'd make no sense for say toys r us to be blacklisted just because some parents don't like it although a hosts list could block it on a particular families pc's
Really there is no way to make all sites comply with any system unless it has positive value for them.
I guess what is needed is a rfc proposal being put to the IEFC but how to submit it to them I don't know.
heres a page with a couple of parental controls easy to find and free
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Parental+controls
i've suggested this on another comment but an age.txt similar to robots.txt would solve your problem.
Any site which you host which is kidsafe has an age.txt in its web root folder, it simply states the recommended minimum age eg 12 or 18 or what ever. The browser respects the parental settings set per pc (a simple extension would do it). if there is no age.txt then it assumes its adult content. that way you can host your pornsites on the same server as your flash game sites and the only kids that get to see your porn sites have bad parents.
it's simple easy and cheap
The problem is this seems to be completely backwards.
What is needed is a way of identifying kid friendly sites, say something like robots.txt but for child friendly sites and a simple extension for the web browser to use it.
when active this would block at the pc level any sites without the child cert. A parental password would turn it on or off.
Thus parents can have a safer internet for the kids and everyone else can have access to the rest.
Simple free and keeps our internet the way we like it.
The key thing its an opt in for kid friendly sites and doesn't require a major change in the way that the rest of us do things.
more than likely there would be a need for some flexibility for parents a site which is supposedly child friendly should be reportable. Allowing an optional greater degree of control for parents. Some creationists might get upset about their children being exposed to evolution for example.
The majority of the internet would probably become off limits to kids , slashdot would but then its not for kids.
Anyone fancy coding something up?
probably the easiest thing would be to add a age.txt to each site that wanted children to be able to access its pages. and a browser extension to check for its presence.
or perhaps an alternative would be a kidsafe button similar to w3c certs on pages click on it if the page isn't kidsafe and the site can be added to a blacklist any parent could download.
That might be better since that would give page by page access
with that kind of control slashdots frontpage could be kidsafe but the individual stories not thus saving tender eyes from goatcx and worse.
I don't expect that the governments of this world will let this one go but it might buy a few more years.
The real question for webmasters is do you want kids on your site?
age.txt could be a simple number 18 16 12 3 1 even. All the extension would do is check age allowed by the parent is less than or equal to the age given in age.txt
It probably wouldn't be too difficult for google to read it to filter results for kids.
With something like this in place its no longer the websites that are an issue but parents who ignore the age guidance.
Funny that, but what your saying pretty much happened in the 60's and 70's in the motorcycle industry.
The Japanese came along and built bikes that were better than the competition, and in the face of a downturn - cars were becoming affordable.
Sure theres some motorcycles built outside out of the big 4 honda, suzuki, yamaha and kawasaki but the majority of whats left are 750 cc plus being sold to middle aged men who couldn't afford them in their youth.
Running Virtualbox on a netbook isn't exactly difficult.
I've done it on a EEE the 7inch version with the 900mhz celeron with a 2000 guest and it was more responsive than some P4's running XP (admittedly they were bad 512 ram with 600+ in use just on boot up)
With the EEE having 2Gb ram there is more than enough to run 2000 with typically 512 meg which makes it quite speedy not needing to use swap.
On My Aspire One with 1.5gb ram and a faster processor it still runs well (same image 4gb on an 8Gb SD Card) again 512 meg allocated to the VM with 1Gb free for Ubuntu.
As an update there doesn't appear to be a 2000 driver for the aspire one webcam.* I'd prefer not to run XP instead although I may try it out on a USB stick to see if it is usable.
From Microsoft
Before you install the Windows 2000 Professional desktop operating system, make sure that your computer meets the following minimum system requirements:
* 133 MHz or more Pentium microprocessor (or equivalent). Windows 2000 Professional supports up to two processors on a single computer.
* 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended minimum. 32 MB of RAM is the minimum supported. 4 gigabytes (GB) of RAM is the maximum.
* A 2 GB hard disk that has 650 MB of free space. If you are installing over a network, more free hard disk space is required.
* VGA or higher-resolution monitor.
* Keyboard.
* Mouse or compatible pointing device (optional).
As you can see a Netbook is more than adequate for Windows 2000
for XP
The minimum hardware requirements for Windows XP Home Edition are:
* Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended)
* At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)
* At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk
* CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
* Keyboard and a Microsoft Mouse or some other compatible pointing device
* Video adapter and monitor with Super VGA (800 x 600)or higher resolution
* Sound card
* Speakers or headphones
The minimum hardware requirements for Windows XP Professional include:
* Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended)
* At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)
* At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk
* CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
* Keyboard and a Microsoft Mouse or some other compatible pointing device
* Video adapter and monitor with Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher resolution
* Sound card
* Speakers or headphones
XP seems comfortable with 768 Mb ram so shouldn't be too bad in a VM on a Netbook Ubuntu should still be ok with the other half.
*
Whilst looking for a 2000 driver, I did find a file which claimed to have a suitable driver but when checked at www.virustotal.com turned out to be a trojan. I'd recommend virustotal.com to anyone they run any file you upload through 38 antivirus and malware programs. in this case only 2 detected the trojan. (The hosting site was only a week old) another site I'd reccommend to take a look at is www.mywot.com they have a firefox extension which gives safety ratings for sites, generally it's quite good and you can find out why a site has been rated dangerous.
I think it was a version of vmmware that needed promiscuous mode to be able to act as two pc's sharing a single lan card and after spending a fair bit of time on it found that wired connections could do it but most wireless couldnt. It was over a year ago and my memory is a little hazy I just remember the disapointment...
I was thinking about the tricky problem of exposure to music. If you haven't heard it just why would you want to buy it? The current solution tends to be download it and listen to it delete it if its really bad or just stick it in your collection.
Paul McCartney kind of gave me an idea, when he decided to host his album in full on his website. (it was also noted that he has copyright on 3000 more songs that he probably could legally do the same with).
I thought about the many times I had been hanging out with friends listening to music, often the first time I would hear a track would be at a friends house and yes sometimes it would get taped.
Maybe Paul McCartney could be your friend so to speak and introduce you to many tracks that he owns rights too, not every track would appeal to you but some you might want to download from him and pay him for them,
Theres a good number of people who could create sites like this jools holland has introduced 100's of artists to a wider audience via his TV Shows why not a web site. Alice Cooper does a breakfast show on digital radio, it would be interesting to see what he rates as good. Of course such sites need to be hosted by copyright holders or authorised by them.
Its simple enough make the music accessible by streaming and people will go to listen and sometimes buy.
Obviously this is the opposite of what currently happens RIAA members hoard songs and don't want you to hear them till you have paid and thus the alternative becomes attractive just download them.
I think there would be millions of people who would willingly go to sites to listen to music legally and then later buy what they really like. By the artists developing an online persona, how you view the music changes its not sony's its pauls or who ever.
This situation is interesting, copyright may not be effective for apple since OSX is not being modified in this case or counterfeited. Efi have created some hardware which can be used in conjunction with some main boards that provides appropriate responses to the protocols OSX employs. Samba seems to be comparable, it's not illegal to produce code that speaks the same protocol.
What strength does an Eula have? If I buy a Disk with OSX on it and paid apple for it, can they stop me from using it as a christmas decoration or as sound samples or a random number generator? It's not illegal for me to open a file with a text editor or use the data as raw sound samples is it? Making a computer do interesting things probably should get through.
However I do have some sympathy for Apple since allowing their operating system to run on any old hardware is likely to give them the Linux problem.
The biggest problem with Linux is that some hardware is not fully supported or not at all. Probably the largest percentage of issues with linux are driver related. There are lots of people who fully expect random hardware to work with Linux and some who think it won't work even if it can. There's been a lot of disappointment due to this. Apple obviously do not want this.
The best thing about 2008 for linux has been the Netbook lots of Laptops which are designed to run Linux and systems which should be fully compatible. Unfortunately it's not been quite as good as it should be since there are various gotcha's if you want to run an alternative distro to the one supplied. I'm hoping most major distro's are solving the issues and next year we can pick our favorite distro's and just click and install.
In some ways Linux is becoming closer to Apple in having recognized hardware that will run the relevant OS.
I kind of hope for a draw in this court case, the ideal situation is for psystar to become a licensed distributor of OSX compatible hardware.
More Computers running OSX is a good thing, actually more variation of any os is a good thing less lock in to the computer = windows mindset.
It's looking Good, on ubuntu hardy.
I Selected Host networking and it's showing up on my Lan. Especially cool since its sharing the wireless network card, thats not so easy before wired connections only could share.
USB support is greatly improved one area 2.06 was lacking was in support for the built in Webcam on the aspire one (many others too) That is now detected by the guest. As are other devices which were grayed out under 2.06
There's only a couple of minor things i'm looking to do now. in integrated desktop mode I'd like to make the windows taskbar and windows look more gnome like and scrap the bottom taskbar for gnome. To more fully integrate windows into my desktop. Anyone got any positive suggestions.
The use of vmware images may be useful too :)
That line certainly helps.
you would have thought opening windows would be a bad idea on a submarine.