I have a friend who studies nutrition, and he said that, in moderate quantities, alcohol it's a good source of calories for the body - since alcohol is distilled from carbohydrates. Very good, in fact; the problem with alcohol it's that, as you said, becomes poisonous in high concentrations (it acts as a powerful dehydrant). Meaning that if you can tame the poisonous effects of alcohol, it actually serves as food.
From Wikipedia: "In colder climates, strong alcoholic beverages are popularly seen as a way to "warm up" the body, possibly because ethanol is a quickly absorbed source of calories and dilates peripheral blood vessels. Their low freezing point may also have helped their popularity."
Anyway, those beer-bellys don't come out of nowhere. Just nitpicking here, but alcohol it's far from "the most damaging food product you can put in your body". Moderation is the key, as in everything.
The only problem I have with Xfce is that, no offense intended to the devs, its file manager is crude and poorly thought out. Xftree 3.x was usable if primitive, but xffm4 is a nightmare. With half a dozen toolbars and obtuse configuration options, it really seems as if it was "tacked on" as an afterthought.
Ahhh, yes, Xfmm. It always seemed to me that they tried to mix the best out of dual-panel file managers and "explorer" ones, but failed to make it intuitve for users of either. To be honest, it's not *that* bad once you get a hang of it, but still, i also think it could be much better.
Like you said, Rox it's an excellent filemanager if you like the "explorer" style. I preffer dual panels myself, and right now i'm using XNC (http://xnc.dubna.su/), which has it's issues but handles virtual directories for archives flawlessly. I'd switch to GnomeCommander in a heartbeat if they implemented those.
Give XFCE4 a go. It's Gnome sans the bloat, and it's getting desktop icons and a session manager in the next version (already available on CVS). I have 512mb and it keeps memory usage well below half of that most of the time.
I like Gnome, but the damn bloat is the same reason that drove me away from KDE in the first place.
"This virus takes advatage of this exploit, but it also takes advantage of this other one; not to forget this other one aswell. Wait, unless it runs on NT, then it specifically targets this one!"
I hope SP2 adresses most of those issues, atleast on XP, but still, Microsoft code feels too much like swiss cheese.
My guess it's they want to deattach themselves from those "markets" and keep a reputation as a serious buisness. Otherwise i don't know; like you said, it's not very different from buying adult items from eBay. And it's not like gambling and prescription drugs don't leave them any money.
Sci-fi it's not meant to be a predictive oracle. It's literature, and good sci-fi it's story driven. The setting and underlying ideas are important, of course, but none of that matters if it's boring to read.
What i see it's that we had very high-quality standarts set in the past for sci-fi, while most modern publications, while not bad, are simply regular (i haven't read everything published, of course - this is just my experience). In that sense, sci-fi might be experiencing a "creativity crisis", but saying the genre is dying is overreacting.
My first thought exactly. "Holy shit, it looks better and loads faster than a Realplayer stream!". This is on my work's terminal (a PIII 800mhz with 512mb) on Opera 7, and the stream is flawless.
Makes you notice how far Java has came peformance-wise lately. Ah, and kudos to the programmers. This is great work.
RealNetworks has always been more Linux-friendly than other streaming media purveyors, and is now moving closer to the open source camp with its Helix Community effort.
Linux-friendly??!?! But we're supossed to HATE RealMedia! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Now seriously, the Linux client has (for a while) been infinitely better than it's Windows counterpart. Reasonably unbloated, and works just as it should. To bad the.rm format still.. (buffering).. sucks ass.
Anyway, my question would be the same as MikeMacK's (please mod it up): what exactly is driving RealMedia to embrace open source with the Helix player?
Heheheh, my exact thoughts! "Ohhh, like this *WON'T* be a flame magnet..."
As for US centric, well, the majority of Slashdot users are from the US. I just hope relevant political stories from the rest of the world are accepted aswell.
At the cybercafe i work we use GoBack (http://www.goback.com/) for instant hard drive restoration. It works fairly well and never gave us an issue; i didn't set up PCs, but i recall the guy who did had some problems with DeepFreeze.
I hate that this kind of software has to exist, but if DF doesn't do it for you, GoBack works just right.
... anytime soon. Given, they are unrelaiable and hold a measly 1,4mb of data, but if you write something on a floppy you're almost guaranteed to be able to read it in 9 out of 10 computers. Need to move files between PCs you know little about? It's your best bet.
Build quality of floppies have been downhill for a while now (i still use floppies from the early '90s, which work better than new, out of the box ones) - but they're dirt cheap. Given, their Price per megabyte relationship sucks compared to, say, a Zip disk. But they're there when you need them to move small files.
Also don't forget the most useful use of floppies nowadays - as boot disks. USB drives narrowed the gap, but if you need a quick, painless way to boot your computer from an alternate OS (to flash your bios f.ex, as it happened to me days ago), it's the easiest, most straighforward way.
Until i can buy an USB keychain for less than 20 bucks, or some other type of cheap, renovable media appears, floppies will still be arround and used. Minidiscs held some promise, but Sony never gave the format a chance in the PC world.
I've noticed a lot of people referring to Direct3D as DirectX; given, it's the most visible part of the API, but DirectX is much broader and cover sound, networking, controllers, and so.
OpenGL is the multiplatform equivalent of Direct3D, and APIs like SDL are the multiplatform equivalent of SDL.
That said, I'll concede that DirectX is better than OpenGL. It must be better than OpenGL to ensure its survival, because no developer wants to lock himself to a single vendor and platform if there is an equally good option.
I humbly disagree. If you refer to the 3D rendering part of DirectX (D3D), OpenGL is much more polished in my humble opinion - not to mention portable. For everything else DirectX, SDL does a fine job, and stays portable aswell.
As a whole, it's a neat solution, but only if you're running Windows. This is my only grief with DirectX; otherwise it's generally good.
I was considering a quality 15 - 17" LCD display for personal use, but the issues with dead pixels make me weary... other than that, i've rarely seen ghosting on 20ms panels, Samsung atleast.
So, i'm considering a quality "flat" CRT - probably LG or Samsung. Their Flatron and DynaFlat tubes, respectively, give a great image for cheap.
Can you recommend any good Priest books? I've only read "Inverted world" - a rather old book of his i brought second hand. The underlying idea was rather nice, but it didn't particularly impressed me.
Being a cynical bastard, I see it not as being too much trust but as being too little thought. People don't want freedom of choice, they want freedom from choice. They don't want to have to think about things, they just want their information spooned out to them so they can accept it without thinking.
This is SO true it's not even funny. Sadly enough, i must say: mod parent up.
Depends heavily on the distro used, but at this very point, X.Org is 100% compatible with XFree, down to the configuration files and drivers. On Gentoo, i uninstalled XFree, installed X.Org and was running with zero issues. Right now the codebase is very similar.
If you were reluctant to try it, do it. The process is as painless as it can be.
Off-topic, but true. I always get a chuckle off the french jokes here in Slashdot, but some people actually take them seriously.
Like you said, no one denies the *huge* impact of the USA in WWII, but the rest of the world also exists, and most of it was involved and did their fair share. Saying the French "didn't fight for their country" is both ignorant and insulting.
Happened to me already, with a friend who saw "Contact" - he didn't care much about the movie and thought the book wasn't worth it. Took me a while to convince him to give it a try, and now he's grateful.
Slightly OT, but check http://maddox.xmission.net/c.cgi?u=i_robot for a rather accurate description of my feelings torwards "I, Robot". The book was only OK, but the movie completely butchered it.
Well, downloading it's nice, but if Half Life 2 comes out being a couple of gigs it would be good to be able to burn it just in case you have to reinstall or something, instead of downloading it over and over again. Having a hard copy is nice.
I was just wondering if this is possible with Steam; AC proposed to copy the game folder from Steam but i dunno if that would work that easily.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a friend who studies nutrition, and he said that, in moderate quantities, alcohol it's a good source of calories for the body - since alcohol is distilled from carbohydrates. Very good, in fact; the problem with alcohol it's that, as you said, becomes poisonous in high concentrations (it acts as a powerful dehydrant). Meaning that if you can tame the poisonous effects of alcohol, it actually serves as food.
From Wikipedia: "In colder climates, strong alcoholic beverages are popularly seen as a way to "warm up" the body, possibly because ethanol is a quickly absorbed source of calories and dilates peripheral blood vessels. Their low freezing point may also have helped their popularity."
Anyway, those beer-bellys don't come out of nowhere. Just nitpicking here, but alcohol it's far from "the most damaging food product you can put in your body". Moderation is the key, as in everything.
Nonononono! Too late! I'm already toasting! (*covers ears with two empty mugs*).
The only problem I have with Xfce is that, no offense intended to the devs, its file manager is crude and poorly thought out. Xftree 3.x was usable if primitive, but xffm4 is a nightmare. With half a dozen toolbars and obtuse configuration options, it really seems as if it was "tacked on" as an afterthought.
Ahhh, yes, Xfmm. It always seemed to me that they tried to mix the best out of dual-panel file managers and "explorer" ones, but failed to make it intuitve for users of either. To be honest, it's not *that* bad once you get a hang of it, but still, i also think it could be much better.
Like you said, Rox it's an excellent filemanager if you like the "explorer" style. I preffer dual panels myself, and right now i'm using XNC (http://xnc.dubna.su/), which has it's issues but handles virtual directories for archives flawlessly. I'd switch to GnomeCommander in a heartbeat if they implemented those.
Give XFCE4 a go. It's Gnome sans the bloat, and it's getting desktop icons and a session manager in the next version (already available on CVS). I have 512mb and it keeps memory usage well below half of that most of the time. I like Gnome, but the damn bloat is the same reason that drove me away from KDE in the first place.
Wow, scary.
"This virus takes advatage of this exploit, but it also takes advantage of this other one; not to forget this other one aswell. Wait, unless it runs on NT, then it specifically targets this one!"
I hope SP2 adresses most of those issues, atleast on XP, but still, Microsoft code feels too much like swiss cheese.
My guess it's they want to deattach themselves from those "markets" and keep a reputation as a serious buisness. Otherwise i don't know; like you said, it's not very different from buying adult items from eBay. And it's not like gambling and prescription drugs don't leave them any money.
Sci-fi it's not meant to be a predictive oracle. It's literature, and good sci-fi it's story driven. The setting and underlying ideas are important, of course, but none of that matters if it's boring to read.
What i see it's that we had very high-quality standarts set in the past for sci-fi, while most modern publications, while not bad, are simply regular (i haven't read everything published, of course - this is just my experience). In that sense, sci-fi might be experiencing a "creativity crisis", but saying the genre is dying is overreacting.
My first thought exactly. "Holy shit, it looks better and loads faster than a Realplayer stream!". This is on my work's terminal (a PIII 800mhz with 512mb) on Opera 7, and the stream is flawless.
Makes you notice how far Java has came peformance-wise lately. Ah, and kudos to the programmers. This is great work.
RealNetworks has always been more Linux-friendly than other streaming media purveyors, and is now moving closer to the open source camp with its Helix Community effort.
.rm format still .. (buffering) .. sucks ass.
Linux-friendly??!?! But we're supossed to HATE RealMedia! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Now seriously, the Linux client has (for a while) been infinitely better than it's Windows counterpart. Reasonably unbloated, and works just as it should. To bad the
Anyway, my question would be the same as MikeMacK's (please mod it up): what exactly is driving RealMedia to embrace open source with the Helix player?
Heheheh, my exact thoughts! "Ohhh, like this *WON'T* be a flame magnet..."
As for US centric, well, the majority of Slashdot users are from the US. I just hope relevant political stories from the rest of the world are accepted aswell.
At the cybercafe i work we use GoBack (http://www.goback.com/) for instant hard drive restoration. It works fairly well and never gave us an issue; i didn't set up PCs, but i recall the guy who did had some problems with DeepFreeze.
I hate that this kind of software has to exist, but if DF doesn't do it for you, GoBack works just right.
Build quality of floppies have been downhill for a while now (i still use floppies from the early '90s, which work better than new, out of the box ones) - but they're dirt cheap. Given, their Price per megabyte relationship sucks compared to, say, a Zip disk. But they're there when you need them to move small files.
Also don't forget the most useful use of floppies nowadays - as boot disks. USB drives narrowed the gap, but if you need a quick, painless way to boot your computer from an alternate OS (to flash your bios f.ex, as it happened to me days ago), it's the easiest, most straighforward way.
Until i can buy an USB keychain for less than 20 bucks, or some other type of cheap, renovable media appears, floppies will still be arround and used. Minidiscs held some promise, but Sony never gave the format a chance in the PC world.
That came bad. I meant equivalent of DirectX as a whole.
I've noticed a lot of people referring to Direct3D as DirectX; given, it's the most visible part of the API, but DirectX is much broader and cover sound, networking, controllers, and so.
;)
OpenGL is the multiplatform equivalent of Direct3D, and APIs like SDL are the multiplatform equivalent of SDL.
Just nitpicking here
That said, I'll concede that DirectX is better than OpenGL. It must be better than OpenGL to ensure its survival, because no developer wants to lock himself to a single vendor and platform if there is an equally good option.
I humbly disagree. If you refer to the 3D rendering part of DirectX (D3D), OpenGL is much more polished in my humble opinion - not to mention portable. For everything else DirectX, SDL does a fine job, and stays portable aswell.
As a whole, it's a neat solution, but only if you're running Windows. This is my only grief with DirectX; otherwise it's generally good.
I was considering a quality 15 - 17" LCD display for personal use, but the issues with dead pixels make me weary... other than that, i've rarely seen ghosting on 20ms panels, Samsung atleast.
So, i'm considering a quality "flat" CRT - probably LG or Samsung. Their Flatron and DynaFlat tubes, respectively, give a great image for cheap.
Best Short Story - "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke
I didn't knew this story ever won an Hugo! One of Clarke's best. But then again, every self-respecting sci-fi fan has readed this one.
Can you recommend any good Priest books? I've only read "Inverted world" - a rather old book of his i brought second hand. The underlying idea was rather nice, but it didn't particularly impressed me.
Being a cynical bastard, I see it not as being too much trust but as being too little thought. People don't want freedom of choice, they want freedom from choice. They don't want to have to think about things, they just want their information spooned out to them so they can accept it without thinking.
This is SO true it's not even funny. Sadly enough, i must say: mod parent up.
Depends heavily on the distro used, but at this very point, X.Org is 100% compatible with XFree, down to the configuration files and drivers. On Gentoo, i uninstalled XFree, installed X.Org and was running with zero issues. Right now the codebase is very similar.
If you were reluctant to try it, do it. The process is as painless as it can be.
Off-topic, but true. I always get a chuckle off the french jokes here in Slashdot, but some people actually take them seriously.
Like you said, no one denies the *huge* impact of the USA in WWII, but the rest of the world also exists, and most of it was involved and did their fair share. Saying the French "didn't fight for their country" is both ignorant and insulting.
Well, to name just one, Minority Report had it right. I wrote no review. I didn't bitch. You're a troll, go away.
Happened to me already, with a friend who saw "Contact" - he didn't care much about the movie and thought the book wasn't worth it. Took me a while to convince him to give it a try, and now he's grateful.
Slightly OT, but check http://maddox.xmission.net/c.cgi?u=i_robot for a rather accurate description of my feelings torwards "I, Robot". The book was only OK, but the movie completely butchered it.
Interesting... do you know if this is available online in some form? A quick search through the usual P2P networks returned nothing.
;)
Perhaps if the copyrights on the tape allow it you would care to encode it...
Well, downloading it's nice, but if Half Life 2 comes out being a couple of gigs it would be good to be able to burn it just in case you have to reinstall or something, instead of downloading it over and over again. Having a hard copy is nice.
I was just wondering if this is possible with Steam; AC proposed to copy the game folder from Steam but i dunno if that would work that easily.