In Montana, I think parts of the state are just left to the "basic speed law", and, yes, I do know someone who has been given a speeding ticket for going too fast there.
Ummm... doing the things you mentioned is illegal, except for "cutting someone off", which is a grey area (it's illegal if it's unsafe). It's the tools who don't want to deal with a four way stop that annoy me: they end up just motioning everyone past, despite having the right-of-way.
Yeah, I agree completely on that one. I can say that, for the most part, gentoo documentation is the most complete that I can find for any distro. The community is usually helpful, but can be slightly hostile if you don't RTFM and ask a stupid question. I've used Debian, and Ubuntu is now my distro of choice for most things (it's just less effort than gentoo, although I still use gentoo on my main box). The Debian community, I've found, is very elitist, and also unbelievably hostile to Debian offshoot distros like Ubuntu and Knoppix. Debian is a good option for other platforms, like PPC, because it is a competent distro in most respects. That being said, use the gentoo documentation.
Well, that's not entirely true. You could say the same thing about the apprentice system, which obviously does work. Sure you don't become a linux 1337 hax0r over night, but, having done a gentoo install, I could see what I had done wrong with other linux systems. As you do the install, you see how things fit together, and getting from the fresh-install to working-desktop stage is better still, in terms of learning. Because X.org wasn't automatically configured, I learned how to do it by the gentoo guide, so when something did screw up with it, I could go back in and fix it. Was this the only way to get this information? No. Would a gentoo install teach you much if you're already a knowledgeable linux/UNIX user? Again, no. For those of us not in that category, the gentoo install proves to be educational, and it ends up with a system that is customized to your liking.
True, but public healthcare (I live in Canada for the record) insures that no one is left without the means to receive medical care. I happen to believe that public and private healthcare can exist in parallel, but it's an idea that's fiercely resisted by many Canadians, thus leading to the fact that no one can get healthcare on a timely basis unless they travel to another country and pay for it anyway. Public healthcare isn't necessarily the answer, but private healthcare isn't either. There is no reason why people should be driven into bankruptcy or sickness just because they need medical care that they can't afford. What's the perfect solution? I'm not sure.
There is some truth to that, it can also be considered a slippery slope, because then the government has the right to control anything that might be unhealthy and cause hospital bills to rise. I think smoking, although not good for you by any stretch of the imagination, is no worse for you than regularly eating potato chips. Studies have shown (no, I don't have a link) that some of tobacco's association with causing cancer is, in fact, caused by the soil it's grown in, which had been shown in some places to be radioactive. Also, I am suspicious of any statistics that say "smoking kills X number of people every year", because I know that they are just taking every possible result of smoking (heart disease, etc.) and saying, if a smoker dies of that, smoking killed him/her. Also, just a note for the future, most cigar smokers have a lower rate of lung cancer, because, unlike cigarette smokers, they tend to not inhale into the lungs.
Indeed... I'm so sick of people who want to control tabacco too much. I'm 16, and if I want to buy cigars, why should I have to get someone else to do it for me? I can see why people want to ban it in indoor settings, but there should be no law against smoking whatever it is you want in the outdoors.
I tried Debian. Then I tried Ubuntu. Ubuntu is like debian, but without the pain. SuSE, though, is still the better option. And right now I'm using gentoo...;)
It's true that those tools do take a while to master. However, I will provide a counterexample: ripping a DVD. I've done this on windows, and to end up with a DivX, you require at least two (possibly three) programs, a guide to show you what options to use, and the patience to find all these tools and carry out the process. On linux, it's as simple as apt-get/emerge dvdrip, and away you go. Sure there are some options, but the defaults are reasonable and it's all in one program: once you hit go, there's nothing more to do. The tools you mentioned do take a while to learn, but so do their windows equivilents. So linux is the same as or better than windows on this front.
Although I can't speak with certainty on the first point, I will correct you on the second. I was referring, at that point, to regular user tasks, not programming. And, yeah, I suppose Visual Studio might be nice if you can afford it.
Who would buy an early XBOX 360 in this case? Assuming you just have to be first, doesn't this also raise problems regarding compatibility? As soon as consoles become anything less than completely standardized (except for addons), their main advantage over computers goes, since it becomes harder and harder to guarantee compatibility. Not to mention that, as far as I've seen, there is no way to upgrade parts (such as a video card) in any console. I really wonder what MS was thinking with this one...
I download a small amount of music (let's say, 10 songs a month) for free, and the occasional movie that isn't out on video (Star Wars: ROTS, only after seeing it once in the theatre), as well as some TV shows I can't get in Canada because of CRTC rules (Real Time With Bill Maher). Sure that may be illegal, but shouldn't it also be considered that the RIAA/MPAA rips me off as I usually by at least one DVD and one CD per month. It's not like I go out of my way to rip people off, in fact, in two of these cases, I only download what I can't even pay for. And now, it seems, I can be arrested for it. What a stupid world we live in...
Well, the truth is that, for 90% of movies, you won't see any difference unless you have a huge TV. DVD-Audio is the same way. There is a certain point where these new formats and qualities become technological elitism more than anything meaningful. The placebo effect tends to work as well. Have you ever noticed that many TV stores use Finding Nemo as a demo, or some other CG movie? It's because, with current filming techniques, other movies look roughly the same on any recent TV.
Is that programmers like to develop for an open source system. It's easier that way, and if they release their code as OSS, it just keeps building. People always ask me, "How do I do X?" where X is a semi-difficult task. I always find myself saying, "Well, I'd do it with this program in Linux, it would take about 5 minutes. The windows equivilent, on the other hand, takes the afternoon to figure out and get right." If there are any moderately useful programs for windows, they are usually cheap payware or annoying shareware. The reason that UNIX/Linux/BSD/OS X will work is that you can do almost anything for free.
That's so true. HL2 was a really complete-feeling game; you weren't left with the idea that they cut corners. It was about as beautiful as any game I've played (well, Far Cry might have had better graphics, but...) and the gameplay was fun and bugfree. If only more games could be more like HL2. Also, although it came out a while ago, Final Fantasy VII was another example of a game that did it right.
OpenBSD is a good server system, but for desktop use it doesn't quite cut it for me. I tried getting everything working for a desktop on OpenBSD, and it was a little bit disappointing. I think, more than anything, it's just the fact that it is a niche player, even moreso than Linux. It's not impossible to use as a desktop, but Linux does have more support from game vendors and other things necessary to have a good desktop offering (is OpenBSD able to run Linux binaries? IIRC, FreeBSD can). Perhaps if someone took the time to write a simple guide to setting up an OpenBSD desktop, it would fare better. It's the small things, like setting up audio, 3D video, and other miscellaneous drivers/hardware that worry me when I think about switching to OpenBSD as a desktop.
The problem with the iPod-sized movie player is that people don't want to watch movies on a small screen. You can already watch DivX movies easily on a PocketPC. Now with CF Cards coming down in price, you can watch them at decent quality. I have been there and done that. Why didn't I like it? Well, it was small, and you can't watch a movie like you can listen to music. With a movie, you have to pay some attention, which pretty much rules it out as an on-the-go activity. What would be interesting is something like the iPod for movies, that plugs into an already existant screen.
I see your point. What I think I failed to put in my last post, was that I see too much competition in mainstream distros that should be consolidated, and not enough choice in distros for special purposes (i.e. old, slower computers). Variety is a good thing, but the choice is too hard to make because there is either too much choice or too little. Also, on the subject of mandrake repositories, I spent about an hour trying to get it set up so I could install firefox. This is not an obscure piece of software, and in the end, it turns out I couldn't. Last time I tried, Fedora couldn't even update itself properly, and I have to admit that installing SuSE has been too much of a hassle for me to bother (the FTP installer hangs). While I agree that there needs to be some variety in distros, I disagree that increasing the number will help. We need a few distros for any given application. The problem is that right now they all seem to be targeting the same area, which doesn't really help me.
I think you underestimate the problem. Sure, he could use any distro, but the point is he shouldn't have to worry about making such a choice. I'm thinking about installing linux on a new box, but I'm not sure which distro to put on it. I'm a fairly seasoned linux user, but it's still a tough choice. Fedora could be interesting, but I'm not sure how it would run with limited resources. Mandrake and Fedora don't have large repositories in the same way that Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, have (they haven't worked for me, at least). Gentoo would be an ideal solution, except the box in question is a 600 MHz celeron with 128MB of RAM. Ubuntu could be good, but once again, I'm not sure how it would handle GNOME or KDE with limited resources. I could install Fluxbox or XFCE, but I'm not sure how Ubuntu will handle them, because it gives me way less hands-on control than my current gentoo box. Debian offers a large deal of customizability, but it also seems to be built on a very old foundation (in terms of still using XFree86, for example). I'm thinking about the BSDs, which are rumored to deal well with limited resources, but I don't want the learning curve to be too steep. Sure, the choice of a distro is easy if you don't mind living with mediocre results for a while, but picking the right distro the first time requires a good bit of knowledge, work, and luck.
No offense, but in what world is 10% not a big difference? Also, as others have said, more layers could be added to Blu-ray to increase capacity, whereas HD-DVD is squeezed as it is.
As others have mentioned, PuTTY is just a single executable. If this still causes a problem (and it might; I know I can't use it at school), you also have the option of a Java based SSH client. Mindterm is the only one I know of, and it works fine provided you don't want advanced features. A quick google search will give you some options, or you can use this one.
Well, assuming they know how to write (which they should by grade 1), it's not really important how often or well they do it. My quick writing isn't good, but if I take a bit of extra time, I can make my writing extremely clear and easy to read. I haven't done a large assignment by hand for several years now, and yet I can write fine.
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In Montana, I think parts of the state are just left to the "basic speed law", and, yes, I do know someone who has been given a speeding ticket for going too fast there.
Ummm... doing the things you mentioned is illegal, except for "cutting someone off", which is a grey area (it's illegal if it's unsafe). It's the tools who don't want to deal with a four way stop that annoy me: they end up just motioning everyone past, despite having the right-of-way.
Yeah, I agree completely on that one. I can say that, for the most part, gentoo documentation is the most complete that I can find for any distro. The community is usually helpful, but can be slightly hostile if you don't RTFM and ask a stupid question. I've used Debian, and Ubuntu is now my distro of choice for most things (it's just less effort than gentoo, although I still use gentoo on my main box). The Debian community, I've found, is very elitist, and also unbelievably hostile to Debian offshoot distros like Ubuntu and Knoppix. Debian is a good option for other platforms, like PPC, because it is a competent distro in most respects. That being said, use the gentoo documentation.
Well, that's not entirely true. You could say the same thing about the apprentice system, which obviously does work. Sure you don't become a linux 1337 hax0r over night, but, having done a gentoo install, I could see what I had done wrong with other linux systems. As you do the install, you see how things fit together, and getting from the fresh-install to working-desktop stage is better still, in terms of learning. Because X.org wasn't automatically configured, I learned how to do it by the gentoo guide, so when something did screw up with it, I could go back in and fix it. Was this the only way to get this information? No. Would a gentoo install teach you much if you're already a knowledgeable linux/UNIX user? Again, no. For those of us not in that category, the gentoo install proves to be educational, and it ends up with a system that is customized to your liking.
I'd go to see that movie, and I haven't seen a new movie since ROTS. Cheetahs are awesome!
True, but public healthcare (I live in Canada for the record) insures that no one is left without the means to receive medical care. I happen to believe that public and private healthcare can exist in parallel, but it's an idea that's fiercely resisted by many Canadians, thus leading to the fact that no one can get healthcare on a timely basis unless they travel to another country and pay for it anyway. Public healthcare isn't necessarily the answer, but private healthcare isn't either. There is no reason why people should be driven into bankruptcy or sickness just because they need medical care that they can't afford. What's the perfect solution? I'm not sure.
There is some truth to that, it can also be considered a slippery slope, because then the government has the right to control anything that might be unhealthy and cause hospital bills to rise. I think smoking, although not good for you by any stretch of the imagination, is no worse for you than regularly eating potato chips. Studies have shown (no, I don't have a link) that some of tobacco's association with causing cancer is, in fact, caused by the soil it's grown in, which had been shown in some places to be radioactive. Also, I am suspicious of any statistics that say "smoking kills X number of people every year", because I know that they are just taking every possible result of smoking (heart disease, etc.) and saying, if a smoker dies of that, smoking killed him/her. Also, just a note for the future, most cigar smokers have a lower rate of lung cancer, because, unlike cigarette smokers, they tend to not inhale into the lungs.
Indeed... I'm so sick of people who want to control tabacco too much. I'm 16, and if I want to buy cigars, why should I have to get someone else to do it for me? I can see why people want to ban it in indoor settings, but there should be no law against smoking whatever it is you want in the outdoors.
I tried Debian. Then I tried Ubuntu. Ubuntu is like debian, but without the pain. SuSE, though, is still the better option. And right now I'm using gentoo... ;)
It's true that those tools do take a while to master. However, I will provide a counterexample: ripping a DVD. I've done this on windows, and to end up with a DivX, you require at least two (possibly three) programs, a guide to show you what options to use, and the patience to find all these tools and carry out the process. On linux, it's as simple as apt-get/emerge dvdrip, and away you go. Sure there are some options, but the defaults are reasonable and it's all in one program: once you hit go, there's nothing more to do. The tools you mentioned do take a while to learn, but so do their windows equivilents. So linux is the same as or better than windows on this front.
Although I can't speak with certainty on the first point, I will correct you on the second. I was referring, at that point, to regular user tasks, not programming. And, yeah, I suppose Visual Studio might be nice if you can afford it.
Who would buy an early XBOX 360 in this case? Assuming you just have to be first, doesn't this also raise problems regarding compatibility? As soon as consoles become anything less than completely standardized (except for addons), their main advantage over computers goes, since it becomes harder and harder to guarantee compatibility. Not to mention that, as far as I've seen, there is no way to upgrade parts (such as a video card) in any console. I really wonder what MS was thinking with this one...
I download a small amount of music (let's say, 10 songs a month) for free, and the occasional movie that isn't out on video (Star Wars: ROTS, only after seeing it once in the theatre), as well as some TV shows I can't get in Canada because of CRTC rules (Real Time With Bill Maher). Sure that may be illegal, but shouldn't it also be considered that the RIAA/MPAA rips me off as I usually by at least one DVD and one CD per month. It's not like I go out of my way to rip people off, in fact, in two of these cases, I only download what I can't even pay for. And now, it seems, I can be arrested for it. What a stupid world we live in...
Well, the truth is that, for 90% of movies, you won't see any difference unless you have a huge TV. DVD-Audio is the same way. There is a certain point where these new formats and qualities become technological elitism more than anything meaningful. The placebo effect tends to work as well. Have you ever noticed that many TV stores use Finding Nemo as a demo, or some other CG movie? It's because, with current filming techniques, other movies look roughly the same on any recent TV.
Is that programmers like to develop for an open source system. It's easier that way, and if they release their code as OSS, it just keeps building. People always ask me, "How do I do X?" where X is a semi-difficult task. I always find myself saying, "Well, I'd do it with this program in Linux, it would take about 5 minutes. The windows equivilent, on the other hand, takes the afternoon to figure out and get right." If there are any moderately useful programs for windows, they are usually cheap payware or annoying shareware. The reason that UNIX/Linux/BSD/OS X will work is that you can do almost anything for free.
That's so true. HL2 was a really complete-feeling game; you weren't left with the idea that they cut corners. It was about as beautiful as any game I've played (well, Far Cry might have had better graphics, but...) and the gameplay was fun and bugfree. If only more games could be more like HL2. Also, although it came out a while ago, Final Fantasy VII was another example of a game that did it right.
OpenBSD is a good server system, but for desktop use it doesn't quite cut it for me. I tried getting everything working for a desktop on OpenBSD, and it was a little bit disappointing. I think, more than anything, it's just the fact that it is a niche player, even moreso than Linux. It's not impossible to use as a desktop, but Linux does have more support from game vendors and other things necessary to have a good desktop offering (is OpenBSD able to run Linux binaries? IIRC, FreeBSD can). Perhaps if someone took the time to write a simple guide to setting up an OpenBSD desktop, it would fare better. It's the small things, like setting up audio, 3D video, and other miscellaneous drivers/hardware that worry me when I think about switching to OpenBSD as a desktop.
The problem with the iPod-sized movie player is that people don't want to watch movies on a small screen. You can already watch DivX movies easily on a PocketPC. Now with CF Cards coming down in price, you can watch them at decent quality. I have been there and done that. Why didn't I like it? Well, it was small, and you can't watch a movie like you can listen to music. With a movie, you have to pay some attention, which pretty much rules it out as an on-the-go activity. What would be interesting is something like the iPod for movies, that plugs into an already existant screen.
I see your point. What I think I failed to put in my last post, was that I see too much competition in mainstream distros that should be consolidated, and not enough choice in distros for special purposes (i.e. old, slower computers). Variety is a good thing, but the choice is too hard to make because there is either too much choice or too little. Also, on the subject of mandrake repositories, I spent about an hour trying to get it set up so I could install firefox. This is not an obscure piece of software, and in the end, it turns out I couldn't. Last time I tried, Fedora couldn't even update itself properly, and I have to admit that installing SuSE has been too much of a hassle for me to bother (the FTP installer hangs). While I agree that there needs to be some variety in distros, I disagree that increasing the number will help. We need a few distros for any given application. The problem is that right now they all seem to be targeting the same area, which doesn't really help me.
And in China, no one will notice if they don't come back. (laugh, I'm not serious...)
I think you underestimate the problem. Sure, he could use any distro, but the point is he shouldn't have to worry about making such a choice. I'm thinking about installing linux on a new box, but I'm not sure which distro to put on it. I'm a fairly seasoned linux user, but it's still a tough choice. Fedora could be interesting, but I'm not sure how it would run with limited resources. Mandrake and Fedora don't have large repositories in the same way that Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, have (they haven't worked for me, at least). Gentoo would be an ideal solution, except the box in question is a 600 MHz celeron with 128MB of RAM. Ubuntu could be good, but once again, I'm not sure how it would handle GNOME or KDE with limited resources. I could install Fluxbox or XFCE, but I'm not sure how Ubuntu will handle them, because it gives me way less hands-on control than my current gentoo box. Debian offers a large deal of customizability, but it also seems to be built on a very old foundation (in terms of still using XFree86, for example). I'm thinking about the BSDs, which are rumored to deal well with limited resources, but I don't want the learning curve to be too steep. Sure, the choice of a distro is easy if you don't mind living with mediocre results for a while, but picking the right distro the first time requires a good bit of knowledge, work, and luck.
No offense, but in what world is 10% not a big difference? Also, as others have said, more layers could be added to Blu-ray to increase capacity, whereas HD-DVD is squeezed as it is.
Umm... probably 80-100%. That's the point of marketing. Whatever speeds its adoption is a good thing, because it is technically superior.
As others have mentioned, PuTTY is just a single executable. If this still causes a problem (and it might; I know I can't use it at school), you also have the option of a Java based SSH client. Mindterm is the only one I know of, and it works fine provided you don't want advanced features. A quick google search will give you some options, or you can use this one.
Well, assuming they know how to write (which they should by grade 1), it's not really important how often or well they do it. My quick writing isn't good, but if I take a bit of extra time, I can make my writing extremely clear and easy to read. I haven't done a large assignment by hand for several years now, and yet I can write fine.