I, and frankly many others of my acquaintance, find a text interface both more functional and more intuitive than menus and buttons.
It amuses me to visit the Uni (of Western Australia) and see stunning young ladies carrying elegantly themed laptops which are leaking trendy tunes into the environment (these represent the core GUI market, one would think) and when you look closer the display is covered in xterms, and some of the crew routinely use screen on those 'coz it's quicker to type ^A-whatever than to find and move the mouse... and of course they all use focus-follows-mouse when they do pay attention to the GUI...
Open source is not about giving things away for free that otherwise would cost a lot of money. That's a recipe for a dead business and a lot of unemployed programmers. Open source is about empowering the user, empowering the third party developers, and leveraging the collaborative efforts of millions of programmers to achieve a common goal.
It feels disorienting to agree with nathanh, but nevertheless... "Hear, hear!" (-:
...post to blogs with an email address which pipes straight into sa-learn, in my case I could use changethiswordtosomethingelse@leon.brooks.fdns.net and feed all mail for "changethiswordtosomethingelse" straight to sa-learn.
What I'd like to see, though, is a dynamic spam analyser that checks messages as they hit the SMTP server, and if they're unquestionably spam have it launch a crack attack on the sender instead of just bouncing it. If the sender's an open relay, they would no longer be. This of course relies on having the vigilante server hosted somewhere "safe" like China, a country which apparently doesn't care very much about hosting spammers.
An alternative to killing the sending machine might be an information-sweeping utility, something like BackOrifice but which grabs as many documents as it can and stuffs them down the wire to you, then opens mike and camera (if any) in an attempt to get pictures of the perpetrators and.or anything else (view out of a window, view of a document) which might place them. Of course, if the box is only being a relay it would be worth chasing the connections until the real perp turns up.
This is just like the Mandrake frying standard PC hardware story. Yes, the LG drives weren't compliant to the de jure standards, but in the real world, standards are de facto, not de jure.
Thank you, Bill Gates. We've heard your story, now you can go home. De facto standards indeed...
In the case of the LG drives, these were also fried by some flavours of Gentoo and at least one of SuSE (although not a variety which would normally be exposed to such crappy hardware, it must be said) and some MS-Windows-based CD writer software. So who's at fault? Mandrake? The Linux kernel developers? They all adhered to the standards, LG didn't. More than that, now that the Liunux crew know some drives suck they have a kernel blacklist for them Just In Case. One of many kernel blacklists for morons who carelessly make everyone else's lives harder for their own convenience.
Some LG technician needs to be dragged out and fired before he does any more damage. He re-used a well-known FLUSH command to implement firmware uploads (I guess because he didn't want to make a jump table bigger). Bad enough, but the firmware upload command does no parameter checking. It wasn't just a weird extension to the ATAPI standard, it broke the standard.
Think along the lines of re-using the extra bolt length on your radiator fan pully wheel as a convenient place to mount a spare tyre and what happens when the driver floors it? Better hope that sucker's well balanced. Or consider updating the design of an automatic rifle including removal of the trigger guard and safety catch - who's at fault when it goes off?
He may be the same bloke who got their drives to spit hot, spinning, damaged CD media at people when they were still called Goldstar some years ago. Either way, the drives are repairable on the spot.
Rotate the master/slave jumper 270 degrees so it crosses the top half of the "SL" and "MA" pin pairs.
Hold in the Eject button
Power up the drive
Upload new firmware without the bug
Meanwhile, back at the standards... your telephone system works because of standards. Your tyres fit your car because of standards. Your CD player fails to shower the inside of your card with burning components because of standards. The vast majority of aeroplanes end their journeys neatly on the apron rather than scattered about the countryside because of standards.
When people violate the standards, things break. I don't know why you should be in favour of things breaking. Perhaps it's time to strip your life down to the bare bones and find out what the personality flaw is that could lead you to favour a standard-breaker over a standard-keeper.
...install The HURD. One year it will be fantastic.
Seriously, it occurs to me that OpenVMS is probably an excellent non-controversial choice. Just have to get used to hitting $ at least twice per symbol typed.
But wait... what happens when all of their customers discover that the IP wasn't SCO's to sell in the first place, and start (1) demanding refunds; and (2) suing for fraud?
Such as the verifiable/falsifiable details about evolution, geology, cosmology?
All manner of fine historical detail. E.g. the Bible referred to one particular pool using the dual form of the name, which was disputed for centuries as an example of its inaccuracy and poor use of language - until the pool was found, dug up and discovered to have been two pools, connected by a channel.
Or do you refer to the complete absence of details about the Trojan War
If I was writing a history of the Plantagenets, I'm not sure why I would see any reason to include material describing the Ti Ping Revolution. (-:
the "accuracy" of the bible will probably differ for us depending on whether or not we accept some of the tenets of the Bible
Only true in a limited sense. There are certain classes of statements that we will each take differently, but there are large amounts of text (and "defused" views of text which would be controversial on strictly philosophical grounds) which are a simple historical record, and a presumption of materialism should not change one's understanding of them noticeably.
You can quickly get mired in philosophical tar here. The statement "everything in the Bible is true" is manifestly false: the Bible accurately records lies. The recording is accurate, the content is a lie. Calling the Bible "the word of God" is also risky, because the words of Satan are also recorded in it in several passages.
However, there are many attributes of the text which are pretty much literally incredible from a materialistic point of view. I'll take a second pass at that. There are many historical, literative, and other attributes of the Bible which are well beyond coincidence, and in other places the recorded information contains details which are beyond the abilities of any of the civilisations we know of which could possibly have written it to have discovered.
I strongly suspect that in the case of male homosexuals this is a consequence of constantly wondering (fearing) how people see them, and possibly also a consequence of being forced by their lifestyle to examine a few basic factors in their lives. WRT that last item, they seem to often react to their circumstances by either becoming extremely observant, or by becoming very unwilling to question anything (presumably in case they get embarrassing answers).
In female homosexuals, trends towards using practical clothing and footwear instead of the hopelessly impractical gear which fashion dictates to femmes might be explicable through similar reasoning.
I know utterly straight examples of both boot-wearing femmes and appearance-conscious BEMs.
In consequence, I occasionally wonder what would happen if we were all taught to regularly sit down and take census of our lives.
Basically, this all says "Pay us money. In exchange, we promise nothing, guarantee nothing, but give you a warm fuzzy feeling that everything will be okay if you die... but we don't guarantee or even really hint that you might feel A) warm or B) fuzzy. It's all in your mind. Give us money now, please.
...but it does need 56MB (ie, 64MB less 8MB for a built-in video card) of RAM to install, because it crams so much stuff into RAMdisks.
AFAICT The installer's written almost entirely in PERL, and has several text modes as well, which would make porting it to those fabulous 11 different architectures much easier. If you could make the initial logic just that tiny bit cleverer and eliminate most of the RAMdisk stuff for most configurations, it'd probably install in 8 or 16MB.
Windows often comes up in a full colour screen after a reboot, as long as the full colour you had in mind was blue. Well... I say "full colour", but it's got some white lettering on it too.
I haven't seen any distro that does CD burning very easily though
I installed Mandrake 9.2 on this laptop. It didn't even mention the CD burner, because the machine doesn't have one (but it didn't on the desktop box underneath it either, which has a Sony CRX220E1 52x24x52 IDE CD burner in it). I effortlessly pulled 503 photos from a Sony DSC-F717 camera onto my laptop during the course of a day. I plugged in a "Genesys" 5.25-inch external USB2 cage containing an IDE DVD burner (a Pioneer DVR-106D) and put a CD blank into it.
K, Applications, Archiving, CD Burners, k3b;
drag folder to "Data1" project;
click Burn.
I waited 3 minutes. My wife is delivering the resulting CD (and two spare children) to her sister as I type. SuSE is similarly easy, but I still prefer Mandrake.
Slashdot Mirror
Posted from my lappie, sitting under a nice shady tree... is that good enough?
Summer over here now. 26degC in the kitchen at 08:56 and rising. I love a sunburnt country. (-:
/ME waves from Region 4.
...ripping existing DVDs, nuking the region coding, and writing them back. Anyone got any favourite words on that topic?
It amuses me to visit the Uni (of Western Australia) and see stunning young ladies carrying elegantly themed laptops which are leaking trendy tunes into the environment (these represent the core GUI market, one would think) and when you look closer the display is covered in xterms, and some of the crew routinely use screen on those 'coz it's quicker to type ^A-whatever than to find and move the mouse... and of course they all use focus-follows-mouse when they do pay attention to the GUI...
It feels disorienting to agree with nathanh, but nevertheless... "Hear, hear!" (-:
...post to blogs with an email address which pipes straight into sa-learn, in my case I could use changethiswordtosomethingelse@leon.brooks.fdns.net and feed all mail for "changethiswordtosomethingelse" straight to sa-learn.
What I'd like to see, though, is a dynamic spam analyser that checks messages as they hit the SMTP server, and if they're unquestionably spam have it launch a crack attack on the sender instead of just bouncing it. If the sender's an open relay, they would no longer be. This of course relies on having the vigilante server hosted somewhere "safe" like China, a country which apparently doesn't care very much about hosting spammers.
An alternative to killing the sending machine might be an information-sweeping utility, something like BackOrifice but which grabs as many documents as it can and stuffs them down the wire to you, then opens mike and camera (if any) in an attempt to get pictures of the perpetrators and.or anything else (view out of a window, view of a document) which might place them. Of course, if the box is only being a relay it would be worth chasing the connections until the real perp turns up.
Remember: he's not a wardriver, he's whoredriver.
In order to make effective use of it you must broadcast onto his.
Sorry, you're asking this question about a human being? How much do you know about human nature?
What it comes down to is that the only safe thing to do is leave it alone until you can find out for sure.
FOR GREAT GOOD.
Thank you, Bill Gates. We've heard your story, now you can go home. De facto standards indeed...
In the case of the LG drives, these were also fried by some flavours of Gentoo and at least one of SuSE (although not a variety which would normally be exposed to such crappy hardware, it must be said) and some MS-Windows-based CD writer software. So who's at fault? Mandrake? The Linux kernel developers? They all adhered to the standards, LG didn't. More than that, now that the Liunux crew know some drives suck they have a kernel blacklist for them Just In Case. One of many kernel blacklists for morons who carelessly make everyone else's lives harder for their own convenience.
Some LG technician needs to be dragged out and fired before he does any more damage. He re-used a well-known FLUSH command to implement firmware uploads (I guess because he didn't want to make a jump table bigger). Bad enough, but the firmware upload command does no parameter checking. It wasn't just a weird extension to the ATAPI standard, it broke the standard.
Think along the lines of re-using the extra bolt length on your radiator fan pully wheel as a convenient place to mount a spare tyre and what happens when the driver floors it? Better hope that sucker's well balanced. Or consider updating the design of an automatic rifle including removal of the trigger guard and safety catch - who's at fault when it goes off?
He may be the same bloke who got their drives to spit hot, spinning, damaged CD media at people when they were still called Goldstar some years ago. Either way, the drives are repairable on the spot.
- Rotate the master/slave jumper 270 degrees so it crosses the top half of the "SL" and "MA" pin pairs.
- Hold in the Eject button
- Power up the drive
- Upload new firmware without the bug
Meanwhile, back at the standards... your telephone system works because of standards. Your tyres fit your car because of standards. Your CD player fails to shower the inside of your card with burning components because of standards. The vast majority of aeroplanes end their journeys neatly on the apron rather than scattered about the countryside because of standards.When people violate the standards, things break. I don't know why you should be in favour of things breaking. Perhaps it's time to strip your life down to the bare bones and find out what the personality flaw is that could lead you to favour a standard-breaker over a standard-keeper.
The one with the sloped plates fitted. Sorry about the ripples.
Seriously, it occurs to me that OpenVMS is probably an excellent non-controversial choice. Just have to get used to hitting $ at least twice per symbol typed.
But wait... what happens when all of their customers discover that the IP wasn't SCO's to sell in the first place, and start (1) demanding refunds; and (2) suing for fraud?
Whereas The SCO Group are merely farted at and expectorated on?
No worries. Mind if I park across your driveway?
Really? You must be new here... <G/D/RVVF>
+1 Informative for the MAR link too, had I the points; but the tagline is outstanding! (-:
I wonder, do you happen to have another tagline kicking around on the topic of man-unmade gods?
All manner of fine historical detail. E.g. the Bible referred to one particular pool using the dual form of the name, which was disputed for centuries as an example of its inaccuracy and poor use of language - until the pool was found, dug up and discovered to have been two pools, connected by a channel.
If I was writing a history of the Plantagenets, I'm not sure why I would see any reason to include material describing the Ti Ping Revolution. (-:
Only true in a limited sense. There are certain classes of statements that we will each take differently, but there are large amounts of text (and "defused" views of text which would be controversial on strictly philosophical grounds) which are a simple historical record, and a presumption of materialism should not change one's understanding of them noticeably.
You can quickly get mired in philosophical tar here. The statement "everything in the Bible is true" is manifestly false: the Bible accurately records lies. The recording is accurate, the content is a lie. Calling the Bible "the word of God" is also risky, because the words of Satan are also recorded in it in several passages.
However, there are many attributes of the text which are pretty much literally incredible from a materialistic point of view. I'll take a second pass at that. There are many historical, literative, and other attributes of the Bible which are well beyond coincidence, and in other places the recorded information contains details which are beyond the abilities of any of the civilisations we know of which could possibly have written it to have discovered.
...in some cases. (-:
I strongly suspect that in the case of male homosexuals this is a consequence of constantly wondering (fearing) how people see them, and possibly also a consequence of being forced by their lifestyle to examine a few basic factors in their lives. WRT that last item, they seem to often react to their circumstances by either becoming extremely observant, or by becoming very unwilling to question anything (presumably in case they get embarrassing answers).
In female homosexuals, trends towards using practical clothing and footwear instead of the hopelessly impractical gear which fashion dictates to femmes might be explicable through similar reasoning.
I know utterly straight examples of both boot-wearing femmes and appearance-conscious BEMs.
In consequence, I occasionally wonder what would happen if we were all taught to regularly sit down and take census of our lives.
...comes within hailing distance of it in the accuracy stakes.
What, like "don't get your dipstick dirty" or "don't bust any blood vessels in your butt"? (-:
Sounds like going to Bill Gates for advice on security.
Is it just me, or is it becoming fashionable to bend every thread to make a political correctness point these days?
Is this by any chance a Microsoft-owned company?
AFAICT The installer's written almost entirely in PERL, and has several text modes as well, which would make porting it to those fabulous 11 different architectures much easier. If you could make the initial logic just that tiny bit cleverer and eliminate most of the RAMdisk stuff for most configurations, it'd probably install in 8 or 16MB.
Windows often comes up in a full colour screen after a reboot, as long as the full colour you had in mind was blue. Well... I say "full colour", but it's got some white lettering on it too.
I installed Mandrake 9.2 on this laptop. It didn't even mention the CD burner, because the machine doesn't have one (but it didn't on the desktop box underneath it either, which has a Sony CRX220E1 52x24x52 IDE CD burner in it). I effortlessly pulled 503 photos from a Sony DSC-F717 camera onto my laptop during the course of a day. I plugged in a "Genesys" 5.25-inch external USB2 cage containing an IDE DVD burner (a Pioneer DVR-106D) and put a CD blank into it.
- K, Applications, Archiving, CD Burners, k3b;
- drag folder to "Data1" project;
- click Burn.
I waited 3 minutes. My wife is delivering the resulting CD (and two spare children) to her sister as I type. SuSE is similarly easy, but I still prefer Mandrake.You should get out and about more often. (-: