I agree with the parent: by showing the hardware vendors that the OSS community is a significant portion of their market, we can gain some clout and be able to take advantage of hardware. Who wouldn't love to be able to tinker with ATI or Nvidia drivers to get them to perform even better? And isn't it great that my newly bought Linksys WRT-54GL router has a OSS firmware replacement that has a SSH daemon and can run shell scripts?
We don't necessarily have to overthrow Microsoft for this, but simply demonstrate that it is advantageous for the hardware vendors to pay attention to us.
On the other hand, I also agree with the grandparent: the achievement of this objective should be done without compromise; otherwise we go down the slippery slope. RMS's philosophy is stringent and painful to follow, but I'm not sure that we can afford not to follow it.
We want clout with the hardware vendors, but we shouldn't compromise our principles to get that clout.
"quantum" leap means "substantially different"
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Tomorrow's Cell Phones
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The article is called "A Quantum Leap for Cell Phones".
It puzzles me that people use a "quantum leap" as a term for a large jump, when in reality it is the smallest jump possible.
I think the idea is that it is the smallest jump possible that makes it different; in other words, there is a substantial change. I guess you can add as small an amount of energy to a radiating body as you want, but if you don't add a quantum of energy, it's not going to produce a photon.
But you're right, too many people seem to take it to mean a large leap rather than a leap that ratchets up to the next notch.
When I first heard about Links (thank you, Steven Darnold, for your BasicLinux project!), I was impressed by how much more functional and user-friendly it was than Lynx. So I tried to find out more about it, install it on my other Linux systems, etc.
I found that I was completely unable to Google for it. Have you any idea how often the word "links" appears on web pages that aren't referring to this particular web browser? Trying the term "links web browser" doesn't work, either --it's still completely obscured by noise.
Finally, I heard about elinks, and a bit of what can be described as rivalry between links and elinks. So I switched over to elinks completely.
I know we complain about dorky-sounding names for OSS projects, but I wish a bit of forethought had been given to the name of the "links" software. On the other hand, the next time I come up with a DRM ubercracking software, I'll name it "the" and let the MAFIAA Google for it.
Note: that was years ago when I was still using Mandrake 8.1. For those of you who are interested, you can now find Links via Wikipedia and you can also Google for "Links2" to find it.
I just got my new Treo 650 last month. (Not the newer 700 because the 650 is the only one that comes unlocked; the others are tied to cell phone providers.) It only seems to crash when I have the program Silkscreen installed; once I turn it off, it seems to be stable.
Unfortunately, Silkscreen provided a number of unique valuable functions. It lets me use Graffiti instead of just the keyboard, thus allowing me to use the "shortcut" key and punctuation marks like the semicolon. (I can't believe that the Treo has no way to define new shortcuts, and even to type "shortcut"-D-T-S for the date/time stamp requires that I type "s"-Alt-down-down-down --hardly a shortcut!)
Also, Silkscreen lets me push the side button to pop up a list of applications and quickly switch, rather than going to the "home" screen, paging through the categories of applications (why do the apps on the SD card have to show up on a separate screen?) and then finding and tapping on the correct icon.
Too bad. But if I'm willing to give that up, apparently the Treo is stable, albeit not as usable.
hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars <Cthon98> ********* see! <AzureDiamond> hunter2 <AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me <Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> ******* <Cthon98> thats what I see <AzureDiamond> oh, really? <Cthon98> Absolutely <AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2 <AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you? <Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as ******* <AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that <Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as ******* <AzureDiamond> awesome! <AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw? <Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw <AzureDiamond> oh, ok.
INGdirect's banking system sets you up with a 4-digit PIN. However, you don't actually enter that number; they have a numeric keypad image that you click on, and a Javascript applet enters letters which correspond to the number on each key. (If Javascript doesn't work for you, you have the option of just manually typing in the letters that correspond to the digits as shown by the image.) These letters change each time that you log in, so unless the keylogger can intercept that image too, it would be useless to know what letters you typed.
Also, INGdirect shows an image and a phrase selected by you when you log in, presumably to foil a man-in-the-middle attack, although I don't know the details.
I'm pretty impressed with INGdirect's cyber security practices: fairly secure yet practical, without needing a USB blood extractor/DNA analyzer dongle. By the same token, when I went to HSBCdirect's site, I was somewhat disappointed by their site. It's not that bad, but you'd expect better from an institution that bills itself as "the world's local bank". Part of this doesn't have to do with cyber security, just stuff like the web site being unclear, the hassle of having to wait for customer numbers in the mail, the delays in signing up for an account only to discover that although I had an "account", I did not yet have an "internet account". HSBC offers a higher interest rate in their savings account, but I'm going to take a very close look at them before I commit a whole lot of money to them.
If memory serves, NiMH cells naturally discharge at approximately 1% per day... so a fully charged NiMH battery should completely discharge in under four months even if you just leave it sitting on a shelf.
NiMH do have a 1% per day natural discharge.. but that is proportional to the current charge.. so 100%-1% 99%-.99% 98.01%-.9801% 97.0299%-.970299%.... it is like the problem of getting half way to a point every day - you never get there..
In other words, there is exponential decay, with a half-life of 68 days (0.99^68 = 0.5). Right?
If you are crying "Unfair!" about how it's not fair to have compensatory "reverse discrimination" or "affirmative action" because men and women should be on an equal footing, you don't get it.
You can debate about whether this is fair in the job search market, but that's a completely different debate, because that's a zero-sum situation: if a company hires a woman due to "affirmative action", then by definition they have rejected a man applicant. That's not what's happening here.
Women's outreach projects like Fedora Women, LinuxChix, etc. are taking advantage of an untapped population. Drawing more women into the FL/OSS community is *not* a loss for men; in fact, it is a gain for everyone. Why the big uproar?
Now, it so happens that the way in which we realized there was an untapped population was because of the low ratio of women to men, but this is merely an indicator. The goal of these projects is *not* to "fix the ratio", which would have implied that we would be equally happy reducing the number of men. Rather, we use the indicator to tell us where we can focus our outreach efforts. We see that there are reasons why women are being systematically and subconsciously being discriminated against (see the FLOSSPOLS report http://www.flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D1 6-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf --it's a PDF file). So we want to fix the problem, partially by increase awareness.
What if we had replaced "women" with some other population with great potential for contribution --say, "non-English-speaking programmers"-- would people complain that the effort to involve all of the international community would be unfair to the English speakers? I can just imagine the outcry:
"There are already some non-English-speaking programmers on one of the Sourceforge projects." "Why are we trying to get them involved in FL/OSS? That means fewer resources to promote FL/OSS to English speakers!" "Who's stopping them from learning English? Face it --they're just not interested." "FL/OSS is doing okay with just English-speakers only. I don't see any problem." "We shouldn't help them, because they're rude --I emailed them about some bugs in their program, but they never even acknowledged my email." "Hey! You English no good! Okay? Me teach you program: HELLO WORLD! Yes?"
Guys, let's pull our collective head out of our ass and stop giving knee-jerk reactions just because the Google keywords "affirmative action" showed up somewhere in this threat.
Add a child panel that doesn't get in the way
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Favorite KDE Tricks?
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· Score: 1
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
I like to have my panel have a large taskbar --I happen to dislike grouping similar applications together, so I need more screen real estate for my 5 instances of Firefox (each with 12 tabs), 7 instances of Kwrite, etc. I also want to have app-launching icons easily reached on the screen. But the panel doesn't have enough room to fit all this and still have a clock, pager, a systray, etc.
So I put all my app-launching icons in another "child" panel, extending down from the upper left corner. I set it so that normally it doesn't get in the way. No, I don't use the hide panel button. Instead, I set it so that other applications are allowed to cover up this child panel; but then when my cursor hits the upper left corner of the screen (without clicking anything), the child panel automatically pops up over any other window. Handy.
Not as needed now that we have Katapult, but I am still trying to get into the habit of using Katapult. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (GNU/Linux)
You don't have to do a lot of pre-formatting; just change the mode from "HTML" to "Plain Old Text", which is actually HTML except that a linebreak is inserted at the end of every line (so you could still insert HTML tags). I've set "Plain Old Text" as my default.
But, yes, I don't regard the Preview button as optional. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (GNU/Linux)
I have a different perspective: I decided to work, keeping in mind that I would later do grad school. My reasons: - - working gives you a new view on the world, so that you have a better idea of what you want to do and where you want your schooling to go - - working gives you an income that gives you a lot more flexibility, such as in being able to afford grad school - - if you just graduated, you're young. You're smart. Go for full-time work and part-time grad school --you can hack it, and now's your chance to achieve. Don't wait till you have two kids and a mortgage - - your company might just pay for grad school, even if only partly
At least, you should look for a job and use grad school as a fall-back plan. I did go through part-time (and later full-time) grad school as above, and I was not impressed by the ivory tower that the academicians lived in. It brought home one saying that I had heard: "Grad school is the snooze button in the alarm clock of life." -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (GNU/Linux)
Agree with you there --I am a KDE fan (Kubuntu 6.06 currently), but from the start, I thought that Konqueror tried to be everything: web browser, file manager, image browser, basically the Swiss Army knife of KDE. Which is great --I think Konqi has its place-- but just as you wouldn't use the Swiss Army knife for your daily screwdriver / can-opener needs, I had no interest in using Konqi for web browsing or file managing. Firefox has enough mindshare that I use it, with its myriad extensions (if I need something fast, I use elinks), and for file managing I use Krusader (like Norton Commander).
One thing Konqi is good for: the kparts. So, if I need to "fish://" something from another computer, or access "media://" or "system://", Konqi is great for that. Don't get me wrong --I'm glad we have Konqi. But I would rather use specialized tools for specific purposes.
By the way, for Krusader, I use v1.7, not the buggy v1.6 that comes with Kubuntu. If you want it: apt-get remove Krusader, download the actual deb package for v1.7 from the Krusader site and force its installation, rename the executable from krusader to something else (like "krusader-1.7"), and then apt-get remove krusader (it won't touch your renamed executable) and then reinstall the buggy v1.6 version, or else apt-get refuses to work while it knows you've got the unsupported v1.7 on your system.
I was pleasantly surprised by Xubuntu installed on an old laptop of ours that had (actually still has) Win98. I had previously tried Kubuntu, since I am a KDE fan, but it was really sluggish. Xubuntu, in contrast, worked well, and I was surprised by how well-polished the interface was. I had expected everything other than KDE or GNOME to be like the old "twm" from the early 90's, but Xubuntu had a graphical file manager (Thunar), had GUI tools for things like setting up networking, and runs Firefox. Maybe I was just ignorant in not keeping up with the advances in Xfce, but I must say I was pleasantly surprised. New life in an old laptop!
(Btw, if you didn't already know, Xfce is the lightweight replacement for GNOME or KDE that Xubuntu runs.)
I don't have the tech specs for the laptop, as I don't know yet how to check how much RAM the laptop has, or the clock speed. It's a Dell Latitude CSx, with a sticker that says "Designed for Win98/NT3.1/Win2k". I suppose there might be some Windows utility to tell me, but I'll be damned if I'm going to boot up Win98 on that thing --I just keep it around at my wife's insistence. Oh, Xubuntu is installed on a 2GB partition.
I have used both; I prefer GnuCash over KMyMoney
on
GnuCash 2.0.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I've been using GnuCash for about a year now, and have also tried out KMyMoney. I have no financial training background and use it for personal finances only.
Although I am a KDE fan and prefer KDE apps on my Kubuntu desktop, I went back to GnuCash because their double-entry accounting system is more rigourous and more powerful. The equivalent in KMyMoney is categories for each transaction, but not only are the categories not well implemented (you have to drill down into the transactions to display the category of each), but it is less flexible. In the same way that Unix treating non-files just like files (e.g. devices, processes, etc.) makes it more powerful, GnuCash's double-entry system lets you treat categories as actual accounts.
However, KMyMoney's interface is quite polished. I think KMyMoney (v0.8) is where GnuCash v0.8 would be, and over time it will catch up to GnuCash. The two convert files between them quite easily, so I plan to easily switch to KMyMoney if/when it overtakes GnuCash.
Note: As someone else has pointed out, "double-entry" does NOT mean you have to type it in twice. It means each transaction answers two questions: 1. where did the money come FROM? 2. where did the money go TO?
I am looking forward to GnuCash v2 appearing in the Ubuntu repositories.
One thing I wish GnuCash had is a redefinable keyboard interface and configurable fonts.
I mentioned some other things in a previous comment of mine about GnuCash, here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189954&cid=156 34117 I talk about how I use GnuCash in a lazy way, and how they have an excellent tutorial that teaches accounting basics as well as specifics of using the program. Never realized accounting could be that interesting. I won't repeat all that, since you can just go back and read my comment.
Speaking of tabs, something that I would absolutely love: I want to be able to indent or unindent the opening statement for a given loop, be it int, sub, function, if, for or else, and have the entire section that it describes, including the braces, indent accordingly. Anyone know of an editor that has this?
I don't know if this fits the bill, but KATE (KDE Advanced Text Editor) will indent blocks. Actually, it's the embedded editor in the KDE suite (for which KATE is the front end); I use the simpler KWrite and it does the same.
You can highlight a group of lines, and then indent or outdent using Tab or Shift-Tab.
If you want to indent an entire programming structure (such as a if-else structure) without having to specify the start and end of the block, you can use KATE's code-folding feature. It recognizes about sixty types of programming/markup languages based on the filename, and maps out the program structure in the margin (if you turn the feature on). For example, it marks the lines starting with "if {" and ending with "}" as a unit. You can collapse the unit into a single line, much like the outline feature of some editors, and you can highlight and indent the line as described above.
If it seems too protracted, you can always assign the operation to some macro key.
Hey I like Google and I do think it is a good company but please throw in a few facts along with the extreme cheering.
Okay, you agree that Google is a good company, but now you are going to tell us some ways in which Google is bad, so that overall Google is not as good as we may think. I'm listening.
1. They make a ton of money. I.E. profits from advertising. I will admit that it is some of the least offensive advertising in the planet but they are ads none the less.
So, they profit a lot from ads. I was expecting something bad. Is there something inherently bad about ads? I find ads in general to be obtrusive and annoying, but Google's ads are not. Is it more an ideological stance against ads? (I'm assuming that the thing that's bad is the ads, not the making a ton of money.)
2. Their search engine is closed source. Yep you got it baby cakes every bit as closed source as Microsoft Office and Windows.
That comparison is so off-base! You're comparing apples to religious denominations. "Closed source" and "open source" would apply if they were distributing the software (as in "Microsoft Office and Windows"), but Google isn't distributing their search engine. You're using the negative connotations of "closed source" to create a misleading impression. You might as well be saying, "John hasn't worked a single day in his life, pays no taxes, and yet lives in daily comfort getting thousands of dollars in government spending." "Really? Who's John?" "My twelve-year-old cousin."
(And don't call me baby cakes.)
3. China.
Wrong. See? I, too, can make one-word dogmatic pronouncements. The morality of Google's actions in China are hotly debated here on Slashdot and elsewhere. Since you don't bother to qualify your one-word non-sentence, I won't qualify mine.
They are not perfect and frankly we are not their customers! We are no more their customers than wheat is a farmers customers. They harvest us and sell us to their advertisers. The people that buy Google ads are Google's customers.
Here again, you imply, without explanation something inherently bad about the situation. So what if we are not their customers?
I think of Google as a broker: they profit by connecting us to what we need. Just as a real estate agent connects you to the sellers of your dream home (hey, you the buyer are not the real estate agent's customer!) or a headhunter connects you to that job you've been looking for, so Google connects us to the information we need. This is one connection, but they don't directly profit from it. The other connection is that they connect their advertisers to us. They do profit from this.
It sounds like you are opposed to them "harvest[ing] us and sell[ing] us to their advertisers", but Google only profits when you follow their offered links. You have a choice about whether to use Google as a search engine, and even when you do, you have a choice about whether to follow their offered links.
It's like you're saying, "Damn, I asked the real estate agent to find me a decent house, and she did! I mean, those agents just harvest us house buyers and sell them en masse to the sellers! Damn those real estate agents for doing what we ask!"
I agree that Google is not perfect, but nowhere in your posting do you say why you think so.
While my stance is more moderate than yours, I think you do have a point. I wouldn't label the users in question "Linux zealots" --perhaps Linux "enthusiasts"? In any case, the point is that if you want people to develop for the Linux platform, the developers need to be assured of some Return On Investment --but "Linux zealots" are not to blame for the lack of this.
I agree that, with the adequate-to-good quality Zero Cost Software (0$S --that first character is a zero) often distributed with Linux, there has come to be an expectation that all software on open-source software operating systems will be zero-cost (or "OSS OS's = 0$S").
In a sense, this is not that different from proprietary operating systems like MS Windows, where presumably Some Guy who buys a computer that comes with MS Windows would expect to pirate MS Word from his neighbour. Commonly used software is 0$S for the home user, too.
The difference is that, in addition to the ubiquitous pirated software, MS Windows also enjoys a legitimate and money-making market in the business world, where corporations really do pay money for MS Office or PhotoShop. Based on this, the software can also be sold in boxed sets at your local computer store: flashy bulky boxes labeled "PhotoShop v99.9!" that contain just a CD-ROM and filler. But the home consumer is not where most of their money is made; it's just a sideline --call it low-cost advertising, if you will.
Competing against this are two types of software from the OSS world: traditional proprietary-license type software written for the OSS platform like Linux, and software that's OSS itself.
OSS-licensed software can't make money from the sale itself, and needs some other sort of income scheme, such as selling the support service, or contracting with Big Corp to write/modify the software. For both of these, you have to work for your money: to earn twice as much, you have to work twice as much --take twice the number of support calls, or write twice the software. If you stop supporting, or writing, your income dries up.
Compare this with proprietary-license software, which makes effortless money once you've made the up-front investment of creating the software. As more people buy the software --a mere click on your webpage or a cheque from some small business-- money automatically comes to you. To earn twice as much, you *don't* need to work twice as much, and if you stop working, money *still* comes to you! You could be earning money while vacationing, or sleeping, or studying to enter law school or something.
Is it any wonder that the starry-eyed developer would much rather sell proprietary software than OSS? But even if we consider proprietary software on OSS platforms, we have another unrelated problem: compared to the MS Windows platform, the market for other platforms is puny. Let's put any Linux bias on hold as we ask: would you rather sell your software to the MS Windows market or the MacOS market?
The smart folk here will answer: "Both!" It turns out that this is one potential answer to getting Linux market share. The sibling post, snarkily disagreeing with the parent post with the sarcastic reference to how Unreal Tournament for Linux has dealt Epic Games a death blow (not!), actually illustrates this point: they aim for the big market (MS Windows) and make low-cost forays into the side markets. Cross-platform programming is something I'm pinning my hopes on for boosting the quality of Linux apps.
One other way I can think of to boost developers' Return On Investment is to have a reliable micropayment system, where people can effortlessly pay $0.75 for OSS. Unfortunately, we don't yet have a good system since PayPal sucks. But micropayments would extend the market reach enough to spur significant software development, especially if you can multiply that market by making the software cross-platform.
That's why I'm heartened to hear that KDE will be coming out for MS Windows as we
OT: Metadata on the file system?
on
EXT4 Is Coming
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· Score: 1
Your comment on filesystem tools led me to think about one particular tool I'd love to have: I would like to know whether metadata --more specifically, my user comments on the file-- would be a component of the proposed ext4.
As an example of when I would like to annotate files: sometimes I download a file --let's say it's a program for my Palm, called "VP2.pdb". Now, that filename could mean just about anything; let's say it was some image viewer named "ViewPicture II", so I would like to rename it "ViewPicture2.pdb".
On the other hand, if someone has some web page pointing to "a cool Palm program that lets you see images", with a link pointing to "VP2.pdb", I want to realize that this is a file that I've already downloaded before. It's not that easy if, say, it was among a bunch of programs you had compared last year, but then put on the back burner until now. I might very well download "VP2.pdb", not realizing that it was the same as "ViewPicture2.pdb".
You can think of other circumstances where you might not want to change the name of a file and yet have some way to store some comments on it.
You could try commenting the file itself, which would easy if it were a text file, but hard if it were some delicate binary format. You could try writing up a "notes" file in that directory, but what if you copy the file itself but not the accompanying "notes" file?
Right now I compromise by appending to the filename: "mv VP.pdb VP-ImageViewer_fromJoeBlowsWebsite.pdb". When I try to download another copy, Firefox won't ask if I want to overwrite, but if I type in Save As: "VP..." it will try to guess: Do you want to type "VP-ImageViewer_fromJoeBlowsWebsite.pdb"? At which point I will realize that I've downloaded it before.
But it would be great to have some sort of all-purpose metadata field, preferably variable length, to tag onto the files. It would be like the EXIF content in digital camera JPEGs that store the date, exposure, etc. without disturbing the image itself.
Is such a system available on any of the current file systems, such as ReiserFS (which I use now) or ext3? If it were, for example, on XFS or JFS, I might be tempted to switch over. Perhaps somewhere someone has written such an addition to the filesystem? I'm thinking EncFS: if someone can make an OTFEncyrption system for individual files, someone ought to be able to make some annotation filesystem.
Anyway, if the Ext4 standard hasn't been solidified yet, I would love to have this added in.
What got me started using GnuCash was the documentation. No kidding. I was absolutely bored on a flight with a Windows laptop, and decided to boot Knoppix just to fiddle around. Discovered GnuCash and started reading what I thought was just a help file or some tutorial on using the software. Wow, it taught me how to use the double-entry accounting system, the difference between Assets, Liabilities and Equity, and organized my thinking in how to think about money. I think whoever wrote the GnuCash docs deserves kudos. Wait, lemme see...
Here we go: Carol Champagne Email: carol@io.com
Chris Lyttle Affiliation: GnuCash Documentation Team Email: chris@wilddev.net
Jon Lapham Affiliation: GnuCash Documentation Team Email: lapham@extracta.com.br
Many thanks, Carol, Chris and Jon.
If you haven't tried tracking your own finances, give it a whirl. I found, to my surprise, that it not only gave me a sense of power to know everything about my money (I learned a few surprising things about my spending), but it actually made it enjoyable to be stingy. The less I splurged, the better I felt because I could see the effect of my money being saved. It sure beats seeing how much disk space I saved by compressing my files.
I did end up having to spend about 20-30 hours writing a Python program to help massage my GnuCash files; thank goodness GnuCash uses a completely transparent XML format. (A true geek would probably have been able to do it in half the time.) This is because, I have to admit, I use GnuCash the lazy way.
What's supposed to happen is that, every day before I climb into bed, I enter all the transactions I made that day: $1.49 for the hamburger, $35.18 for the book I bought, $999.99 for the tank of gasoline, etc. Later that month, I download my bank statement and credit card statement from my bank's web site (QFX/OFX format), and import it into GnuCash. GnuCash checks that the statement matches with what I've entered, and marks each entry as reconciled.
Well, I have better things to do than to enter transactions every day. So, instead, I just let GnuCash do it for me by importing my bank statements and credit card statements. GnuCash says for each transaction: "What's this?? $1.49 from 'MCDONALDS FOODLIKE SUBSTANCE CORP'? I never saw this entry before!" and so on for each entry. My Python program looks at the entry description to figure out where it should be categorized; e.g. if it matches "(?i).*mcdonald'*s.*", then it classifies it under the "fast food, unhealthy" account. And so I can see exactly how much I've spent for groceries, transportation, entertainment, etc.
I did try KMyMoney, since I am a KDE fan (thank you to KStrauser for pointing it out), but I found GnuCash to be a more mature application. Incidentally, my wife bought Microsoft Money, tried it out but found it confusing, couldn't think of a good reason why that program kept wanting to connect to the Internet (blocked by ZoneAlarm), and decided not to trust it.
I agree with my sibling poster that Mandrake is no longer a great distro to use. I used it previously, and have switched to Ubuntu Dapper where I happily compute away, really using the desktop rather than having to tinker with it. So, load up your k/Ubuntu (it's a live CD now, for those of you clinging to Windows) and give GnuCash a whirl.
Wow. Thanks for the reply. I was expecting no replies, or perhaps some snarky replies about "of course it wouldn't be possible". Thanks also to the uncle poster for letting me know about Puppy Linux. Brainstorming in a geek community does have its merits.
In response to your question, no, they won't let me install anything, but that hasn't stopped me from installing Firefox, Servant Salamander, VideoLan Client and IrfanView (software I know from my Win2k days; there's probably better stuff out there now).
I've also installed a bunch of other things that were defeated their firewall, which apparently only lets through packets to Port 80 or Port 443, and even then only HTTP packets --I couldn't ssh into my home server via Port 80. They even tried to bloody filter out my use of webmail. Fortunately, their firewall doesn't detect the webmail system that I happen to use.
But I don't intend to stop trying to push the limits of their firewall caging me --when I get around to it, I'm going to figure out some sort of https passthrough so that I can get into my home server.
If VMware or Qemu don't need admin privileges to run, then I have no problems installing it.
In fact, if they didn't put in a disk encryption system to encrypt the entire hard drive, I'd probably be trying to crack the WinXP admin password. The disk encryption is one thing they did right: on bootup, the encryption system needs the login and password to decrypt the disk so that WinXP becomes detectable. Only then does WinXP boot. This would have solved the problem of the VA laptop being stolen (to bring things back on topic): if my laptop is stolen, it's highly unlikely that anyone would be able to retrieve any data from it. I'm not sure if Puppy Linux would be able to help me because of the disk encryption system.
I, too, am pleased with TrueCrypt; the cross-platform feature allows removable drives to be interchanged between my (k)Ubuntu Dapper systems and my wife's Win2k system (she refuses to use WinXP). Finally we can easily store something on a CF card, pull it out and not worry about data being stolen!
Unfortunately, this does not work on our laptops at work; I am being coerced to use WinXP at work (damn you!) without admin privileges, and TrueCrypt refuses to install without admin privileges.
Does anyone know a workaround for this? I recognize that it's probably unlikely; if it works without admin privileges, it's probably not that secure.
Before anyone suggests that I ask the IT department of our firm: I already asked if it was okay to install certain programs. "Like what?" they asked. "Firefox," I said. "What's Firefox?" they asked. So that pretty much nixes that idea.
I did notice that GPG and WinPT install okay without needing admin privileges, so I am able to have *some* form of encryption, but it is non-ideal for various reasons.
Btw, for those of you using Ubuntu Dapper, here's a web page on how to install it easily. I ended up compiling (pretty much my first time compiling anything), and it was easier than I thought.
I just phoned one of the execs (no answer after 12 rings) and will keep trying. I will post the phone numbers here, but I do encourage people to stand up and be counted by still signing up at the DefectiveByDesign.org website.
We need to take actions like this as a community, because it's our best (and possibly only) tool. We don't have lobbyists cozying up to government officials, and we don't have the money to pay to Learjet the politicians to a nice dinner on a private island. But we do have strength in numbers, and if only we have the backbone to stand up and make our views known, we can make a difference. Because I'm not sure the MAFIAA has backbone; their backs are stiff just because they're so stuffed with money.
By the way, the DefectiveByDesign.org web site only shows ten call reports from people having made phone calls. When I tried to submit my report, I got an error message. So maybe the site isn't working properly. I hope in the end we do get a tally of how many people responded.
Brad Buckles RIAA USA (202) 857-9607 Mitch Bainwol RIAA USA (202) 857-9651 Cary Sherman RIAA USA (202) 857-9632 Mitch Glazier USA RIAA (202) 857-9673 Neil Turkowitz RIAA USA (202) 857-9647 Steve Redmond BPI UK +44 (0)20 7803 1324 Peter Jamieson BPI UK +44 (0) 20 7803 1311 Matt Phillips BPI UK 44 (0) 77 3951 4963 Michael Haentjes IFPI Germany +49 (30) 59 00 38-0 Peter Zombik IFPI Germany +49 (30) 59 00 38-0 Jean never Foitzik IFPI Germany +49 (30) 59 00 38-23 Herve Rony SNEP France +33 (1) 44 13 66 66 Graham Henderson CRIA Canada 1 (416) 967-7272 ext. 102
A tech company willing to have totally gratuitous shots of a chick bouncing her big boobs...well, that's a company for me.
Really- I did move a lot of business there because of the chick with big boobs. I guess that makes me shallow. Or a guy who likes boobs.
In other news today, for some reason there aren't that many women in IT circles. No one's telling them they can't do it, but they just aren't interested. Hmm.
The thing is their prices are so great it's really hard to justify going someplace else. You can pay up to $35 a year at some of the boutique registrars.
Of course you can pay more at another registrar. In fact, you "can" pay me $100 to do it for you. And then I'd go to MyDomain.com and register your domain for $9 per year.
Other posters have listed other places where you can do for much less. You don't even need to stay within this country; the Internet is a global thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with the parent: by showing the hardware vendors that the OSS community is a significant portion of their market, we can gain some clout and be able to take advantage of hardware. Who wouldn't love to be able to tinker with ATI or Nvidia drivers to get them to perform even better? And isn't it great that my newly bought Linksys WRT-54GL router has a OSS firmware replacement that has a SSH daemon and can run shell scripts?
We don't necessarily have to overthrow Microsoft for this, but simply demonstrate that it is advantageous for the hardware vendors to pay attention to us.
On the other hand, I also agree with the grandparent: the achievement of this objective should be done without compromise; otherwise we go down the slippery slope. RMS's philosophy is stringent and painful to follow, but I'm not sure that we can afford not to follow it.
We want clout with the hardware vendors, but we shouldn't compromise our principles to get that clout.
I think the idea is that it is the smallest jump possible that makes it different; in other words, there is a substantial change. I guess you can add as small an amount of energy to a radiating body as you want, but if you don't add a quantum of energy, it's not going to produce a photon.
But you're right, too many people seem to take it to mean a large leap rather than a leap that ratchets up to the next notch.
When I first heard about Links (thank you, Steven Darnold, for your BasicLinux project!), I was impressed by how much more functional and user-friendly it was than Lynx. So I tried to find out more about it, install it on my other Linux systems, etc.
I found that I was completely unable to Google for it. Have you any idea how often the word "links" appears on web pages that aren't referring to this particular web browser? Trying the term "links web browser" doesn't work, either --it's still completely obscured by noise.
Finally, I heard about elinks, and a bit of what can be described as rivalry between links and elinks. So I switched over to elinks completely.
I know we complain about dorky-sounding names for OSS projects, but I wish a bit of forethought had been given to the name of the "links" software. On the other hand, the next time I come up with a DRM ubercracking software, I'll name it "the" and let the MAFIAA Google for it.
Note: that was years ago when I was still using Mandrake 8.1. For those of you who are interested, you can now find Links via Wikipedia and you can also Google for "Links2" to find it.
I just got my new Treo 650 last month. (Not the newer 700 because the 650 is the only one that comes unlocked; the others are tied to cell phone providers.) It only seems to crash when I have the program Silkscreen installed; once I turn it off, it seems to be stable.
Unfortunately, Silkscreen provided a number of unique valuable functions. It lets me use Graffiti instead of just the keyboard, thus allowing me to use the "shortcut" key and punctuation marks like the semicolon. (I can't believe that the Treo has no way to define new shortcuts, and even to type "shortcut"-D-T-S for the date/time stamp requires that I type "s"-Alt-down-down-down --hardly a shortcut!)
Also, Silkscreen lets me push the side button to pop up a list of applications and quickly switch, rather than going to the "home" screen, paging through the categories of applications (why do the apps on the SD card have to show up on a separate screen?) and then finding and tapping on the correct icon.
Too bad. But if I'm willing to give that up, apparently the Treo is stable, albeit not as usable.
hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
<Cthon98> ********* see!
<AzureDiamond> hunter2
<AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me
<Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> *******
<Cthon98> thats what I see
<AzureDiamond> oh, really?
<Cthon98> Absolutely
<AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
<AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you?
<Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that
<Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> awesome!
<AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw?
<Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw
<AzureDiamond> oh, ok.
(taken from <url: http://www.bash.org/?244321> )
INGdirect's banking system sets you up with a 4-digit PIN. However, you don't actually enter that number; they have a numeric keypad image that you click on, and a Javascript applet enters letters which correspond to the number on each key. (If Javascript doesn't work for you, you have the option of just manually typing in the letters that correspond to the digits as shown by the image.) These letters change each time that you log in, so unless the keylogger can intercept that image too, it would be useless to know what letters you typed.
Also, INGdirect shows an image and a phrase selected by you when you log in, presumably to foil a man-in-the-middle attack, although I don't know the details.
I'm pretty impressed with INGdirect's cyber security practices: fairly secure yet practical, without needing a USB blood extractor/DNA analyzer dongle. By the same token, when I went to HSBCdirect's site, I was somewhat disappointed by their site. It's not that bad, but you'd expect better from an institution that bills itself as "the world's local bank". Part of this doesn't have to do with cyber security, just stuff like the web site being unclear, the hassle of having to wait for customer numbers in the mail, the delays in signing up for an account only to discover that although I had an "account", I did not yet have an "internet account". HSBC offers a higher interest rate in their savings account, but I'm going to take a very close look at them before I commit a whole lot of money to them.
In other words, there is exponential decay, with a half-life of 68 days (0.99^68 = 0.5).
Right?
Parent post has a good point.
1 6-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf --it's a PDF file). So we want to fix the problem, partially by increase awareness.
If you are crying "Unfair!" about how it's not fair to have compensatory "reverse discrimination" or "affirmative action" because men and women should be on an equal footing, you don't get it.
You can debate about whether this is fair in the job search market, but that's a completely different debate, because that's a zero-sum situation: if a company hires a woman due to "affirmative action", then by definition they have rejected a man applicant. That's not what's happening here.
Women's outreach projects like Fedora Women, LinuxChix, etc. are taking advantage of an untapped population. Drawing more women into the FL/OSS community is *not* a loss for men; in fact, it is a gain for everyone. Why the big uproar?
Now, it so happens that the way in which we realized there was an untapped population was because of the low ratio of women to men, but this is merely an indicator. The goal of these projects is *not* to "fix the ratio", which would have implied that we would be equally happy reducing the number of men. Rather, we use the indicator to tell us where we can focus our outreach efforts. We see that there are reasons why women are being systematically and subconsciously being discriminated against (see the FLOSSPOLS report http://www.flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D
What if we had replaced "women" with some other population with great potential for contribution --say, "non-English-speaking programmers"-- would people complain that the effort to involve all of the international community would be unfair to the English speakers? I can just imagine the outcry:
"There are already some non-English-speaking programmers on one of the Sourceforge projects."
"Why are we trying to get them involved in FL/OSS? That means fewer resources to promote FL/OSS to English speakers!"
"Who's stopping them from learning English? Face it --they're just not interested."
"FL/OSS is doing okay with just English-speakers only. I don't see any problem."
"We shouldn't help them, because they're rude --I emailed them about some bugs in their program, but they never even acknowledged my email."
"Hey! You English no good! Okay? Me teach you program: HELLO WORLD! Yes?"
Guys, let's pull our collective head out of our ass and stop giving knee-jerk reactions just because the Google keywords "affirmative action" showed up somewhere in this threat.
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I like to have my panel have a large taskbar --I happen to
dislike grouping similar applications together, so I need more
screen real estate for my 5 instances of Firefox (each with 12
tabs), 7 instances of Kwrite, etc. I also want to have
app-launching icons easily reached on the screen. But the panel
doesn't have enough room to fit all this and still have a clock,
pager, a systray, etc.
So I put all my app-launching icons in another "child" panel,
extending down from the upper left corner. I set it so that
normally it doesn't get in the way. No, I don't use the hide
panel button. Instead, I set it so that other applications are
allowed to cover up this child panel; but then when my cursor
hits the upper left corner of the screen (without clicking
anything), the child panel automatically pops up over any other
window. Handy.
Not as needed now that we have Katapult, but I am still trying
to get into the habit of using Katapult.
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You don't have to do a lot of pre-formatting; just change the mode from "HTML" to "Plain Old Text", which is actually HTML except that a linebreak is inserted at the end of every line (so you could still insert HTML tags). I've set "Plain Old Text" as my default.
But, yes, I don't regard the Preview button as optional.
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I have a different perspective: I decided to work, keeping in mind that I would later do grad school. My reasons:
- - working gives you a new view on the world, so that you have a better idea of what you want to do and where you want your schooling to go
- - working gives you an income that gives you a lot more flexibility, such as in being able to afford grad school
- - if you just graduated, you're young. You're smart. Go for full-time work and part-time grad school --you can hack it, and now's your chance to achieve. Don't wait till you have two kids and a mortgage
- - your company might just pay for grad school, even if only partly
At least, you should look for a job and use grad school as a fall-back plan. I did go through part-time (and later full-time) grad school as above, and I was not impressed by the ivory tower that the academicians lived in. It brought home one saying that I had heard: "Grad school is the snooze button in the alarm clock of life."
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Agree with you there --I am a KDE fan (Kubuntu 6.06 currently), but from the start, I thought that Konqueror tried to be everything: web browser, file manager, image browser, basically the Swiss Army knife of KDE. Which is great --I think Konqi has its place-- but just as you wouldn't use the Swiss Army knife for your daily screwdriver / can-opener needs, I had no interest in using Konqi for web browsing or file managing. Firefox has enough mindshare that I use it, with its myriad extensions (if I need something fast, I use elinks), and for file managing I use Krusader (like Norton Commander).
One thing Konqi is good for: the kparts. So, if I need to "fish://" something from another computer, or access "media://" or "system://", Konqi is great for that. Don't get me wrong --I'm glad we have Konqi. But I would rather use specialized tools for specific purposes.
By the way, for Krusader, I use v1.7, not the buggy v1.6 that comes with Kubuntu. If you want it: apt-get remove Krusader, download the actual deb package for v1.7 from the Krusader site and force its installation, rename the executable from krusader to something else (like "krusader-1.7"), and then apt-get remove krusader (it won't touch your renamed executable) and then reinstall the buggy v1.6 version, or else apt-get refuses to work while it knows you've got the unsupported v1.7 on your system.
I was pleasantly surprised by Xubuntu installed on an old laptop of ours that had (actually still has) Win98. I had previously tried Kubuntu, since I am a KDE fan, but it was really sluggish. Xubuntu, in contrast, worked well, and I was surprised by how well-polished the interface was. I had expected everything other than KDE or GNOME to be like the old "twm" from the early 90's, but Xubuntu had a graphical file manager (Thunar), had GUI tools for things like setting up networking, and runs Firefox. Maybe I was just ignorant in not keeping up with the advances in Xfce, but I must say I was pleasantly surprised. New life in an old laptop!
(Btw, if you didn't already know, Xfce is the lightweight replacement for GNOME or KDE that Xubuntu runs.)
I don't have the tech specs for the laptop, as I don't know yet how to check how much RAM the laptop has, or the clock speed. It's a Dell Latitude CSx, with a sticker that says "Designed for Win98/NT3.1/Win2k". I suppose there might be some Windows utility to tell me, but I'll be damned if I'm going to boot up Win98 on that thing --I just keep it around at my wife's insistence. Oh, Xubuntu is installed on a 2GB partition.
I've been using GnuCash for about a year now, and have also tried out KMyMoney. I have no financial training background and use it for personal finances only.
6 34117
Although I am a KDE fan and prefer KDE apps on my Kubuntu desktop, I went back to GnuCash because their double-entry accounting system is more rigourous and more powerful. The equivalent in KMyMoney is categories for each transaction, but not only are the categories not well implemented (you have to drill down into the transactions to display the category of each), but it is less flexible. In the same way that Unix treating non-files just like files (e.g. devices, processes, etc.) makes it more powerful, GnuCash's double-entry system lets you treat categories as actual accounts.
However, KMyMoney's interface is quite polished. I think KMyMoney (v0.8) is where GnuCash v0.8 would be, and over time it will catch up to GnuCash. The two convert files between them quite easily, so I plan to easily switch to KMyMoney if/when it overtakes GnuCash.
Note: As someone else has pointed out, "double-entry" does NOT mean you have to type it in twice. It means each transaction answers two questions: 1. where did the money come FROM? 2. where did the money go TO?
I am looking forward to GnuCash v2 appearing in the Ubuntu repositories.
One thing I wish GnuCash had is a redefinable keyboard interface and configurable fonts.
I mentioned some other things in a previous comment of mine about GnuCash, here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189954&cid=15
I talk about how I use GnuCash in a lazy way, and how they have an excellent tutorial that teaches accounting basics as well as specifics of using the program. Never realized accounting could be that interesting. I won't repeat all that, since you can just go back and read my comment.
I don't know if this fits the bill, but KATE (KDE Advanced Text Editor) will indent blocks. Actually, it's the embedded editor in the KDE suite (for which KATE is the front end); I use the simpler KWrite and it does the same.
You can highlight a group of lines, and then indent or outdent using Tab or Shift-Tab.
If you want to indent an entire programming structure (such as a if-else structure) without having to specify the start and end of the block, you can use KATE's code-folding feature. It recognizes about sixty types of programming/markup languages based on the filename, and maps out the program structure in the margin (if you turn the feature on). For example, it marks the lines starting with "if {" and ending with "}" as a unit. You can collapse the unit into a single line, much like the outline feature of some editors, and you can highlight and indent the line as described above.
If it seems too protracted, you can always assign the operation to some macro key.
Did you miss the point?
:)
The GP's point was that the author's nickname is "Illiad", similar to the product in question, "iLiad".
(Thanks for posting the text of the cartoon, but you forgot to post the text from the ad below the cartoon, too.)
Okay, you agree that Google is a good company, but now you are going to tell us some ways in which Google is bad, so that overall Google is not as good as we may think. I'm listening.
So, they profit a lot from ads. I was expecting something bad. Is there something inherently bad about ads? I find ads in general to be obtrusive and annoying, but Google's ads are not. Is it more an ideological stance against ads? (I'm assuming that the thing that's bad is the ads, not the making a ton of money.)
That comparison is so off-base! You're comparing apples to religious denominations. "Closed source" and "open source" would apply if they were distributing the software (as in "Microsoft Office and Windows"), but Google isn't distributing their search engine. You're using the negative connotations of "closed source" to create a misleading impression.
You might as well be saying, "John hasn't worked a single day in his life, pays no taxes, and yet lives in daily comfort getting thousands of dollars in government spending." "Really? Who's John?" "My twelve-year-old cousin."
(And don't call me baby cakes.)
Wrong.
See? I, too, can make one-word dogmatic pronouncements. The morality of Google's actions in China are hotly debated here on Slashdot and elsewhere. Since you don't bother to qualify your one-word non-sentence, I won't qualify mine.
Here again, you imply, without explanation something inherently bad about the situation. So what if we are not their customers?
I think of Google as a broker: they profit by connecting us to what we need. Just as a real estate agent connects you to the sellers of your dream home (hey, you the buyer are not the real estate agent's customer!) or a headhunter connects you to that job you've been looking for, so Google connects us to the information we need. This is one connection, but they don't directly profit from it. The other connection is that they connect their advertisers to us. They do profit from this.
It sounds like you are opposed to them "harvest[ing] us and sell[ing] us to their advertisers", but Google only profits when you follow their offered links. You have a choice about whether to use Google as a search engine, and even when you do, you have a choice about whether to follow their offered links.
It's like you're saying, "Damn, I asked the real estate agent to find me a decent house, and she did! I mean, those agents just harvest us house buyers and sell them en masse to the sellers! Damn those real estate agents for doing what we ask!"
I agree that Google is not perfect, but nowhere in your posting do you say why you think so.
While my stance is more moderate than yours, I think you do have a point. I wouldn't label the users in question "Linux zealots" --perhaps Linux "enthusiasts"? In any case, the point is that if you want people to develop for the Linux platform, the developers need to be assured of some Return On Investment --but "Linux zealots" are not to blame for the lack of this.
I agree that, with the adequate-to-good quality Zero Cost Software (0$S --that first character is a zero) often distributed with Linux, there has come to be an expectation that all software on open-source software operating systems will be zero-cost (or "OSS OS's = 0$S").
In a sense, this is not that different from proprietary operating systems like MS Windows, where presumably Some Guy who buys a computer that comes with MS Windows would expect to pirate MS Word from his neighbour. Commonly used software is 0$S for the home user, too.
The difference is that, in addition to the ubiquitous pirated software, MS Windows also enjoys a legitimate and money-making market in the business world, where corporations really do pay money for MS Office or PhotoShop. Based on this, the software can also be sold in boxed sets at your local computer store: flashy bulky boxes labeled "PhotoShop v99.9!" that contain just a CD-ROM and filler. But the home consumer is not where most of their money is made; it's just a sideline --call it low-cost advertising, if you will.
Competing against this are two types of software from the OSS world: traditional proprietary-license type software written for the OSS platform like Linux, and software that's OSS itself.
OSS-licensed software can't make money from the sale itself, and needs some other sort of income scheme, such as selling the support service, or contracting with Big Corp to write/modify the software. For both of these, you have to work for your money: to earn twice as much, you have to work twice as much --take twice the number of support calls, or write twice the software. If you stop supporting, or writing, your income dries up.
Compare this with proprietary-license software, which makes effortless money once you've made the up-front investment of creating the software. As more people buy the software --a mere click on your webpage or a cheque from some small business-- money automatically comes to you. To earn twice as much, you *don't* need to work twice as much, and if you stop working, money *still* comes to you! You could be earning money while vacationing, or sleeping, or studying to enter law school or something.
Is it any wonder that the starry-eyed developer would much rather sell proprietary software than OSS? But even if we consider proprietary software on OSS platforms, we have another unrelated problem: compared to the MS Windows platform, the market for other platforms is puny. Let's put any Linux bias on hold as we ask: would you rather sell your software to the MS Windows market or the MacOS market?
The smart folk here will answer: "Both!" It turns out that this is one potential answer to getting Linux market share. The sibling post, snarkily disagreeing with the parent post with the sarcastic reference to how Unreal Tournament for Linux has dealt Epic Games a death blow (not!), actually illustrates this point: they aim for the big market (MS Windows) and make low-cost forays into the side markets. Cross-platform programming is something I'm pinning my hopes on for boosting the quality of Linux apps.
One other way I can think of to boost developers' Return On Investment is to have a reliable micropayment system, where people can effortlessly pay $0.75 for OSS. Unfortunately, we don't yet have a good system since PayPal sucks. But micropayments would extend the market reach enough to spur significant software development, especially if you can multiply that market by making the software cross-platform.
That's why I'm heartened to hear that KDE will be coming out for MS Windows as we
Your comment on filesystem tools led me to think about one particular tool I'd love to have: I would like to know whether metadata --more specifically, my user comments on the file-- would be a component of the proposed ext4.
As an example of when I would like to annotate files: sometimes I download a file --let's say it's a program for my Palm, called "VP2.pdb". Now, that filename could mean just about anything; let's say it was some image viewer named "ViewPicture II", so I would like to rename it "ViewPicture2.pdb".
On the other hand, if someone has some web page pointing to "a cool Palm program that lets you see images", with a link pointing to "VP2.pdb", I want to realize that this is a file that I've already downloaded before. It's not that easy if, say, it was among a bunch of programs you had compared last year, but then put on the back burner until now. I might very well download "VP2.pdb", not realizing that it was the same as "ViewPicture2.pdb".
You can think of other circumstances where you might not want to change the name of a file and yet have some way to store some comments on it.
You could try commenting the file itself, which would easy if it were a text file, but hard if it were some delicate binary format. You could try writing up a "notes" file in that directory, but what if you copy the file itself but not the accompanying "notes" file?
Right now I compromise by appending to the filename: "mv VP.pdb VP-ImageViewer_fromJoeBlowsWebsite.pdb". When I try to download another copy, Firefox won't ask if I want to overwrite, but if I type in Save As: "VP..." it will try to guess: Do you want to type "VP-ImageViewer_fromJoeBlowsWebsite.pdb"? At which point I will realize that I've downloaded it before.
But it would be great to have some sort of all-purpose metadata field, preferably variable length, to tag onto the files. It would be like the EXIF content in digital camera JPEGs that store the date, exposure, etc. without disturbing the image itself.
Is such a system available on any of the current file systems, such as ReiserFS (which I use now) or ext3? If it were, for example, on XFS or JFS, I might be tempted to switch over. Perhaps somewhere someone has written such an addition to the filesystem? I'm thinking EncFS: if someone can make an OTFEncyrption system for individual files, someone ought to be able to make some annotation filesystem.
Anyway, if the Ext4 standard hasn't been solidified yet, I would love to have this added in.
What got me started using GnuCash was the documentation. No kidding. I was absolutely bored on a flight with a Windows laptop, and decided to boot Knoppix just to fiddle around. Discovered GnuCash and started reading what I thought was just a help file or some tutorial on using the software. Wow, it taught me how to use the double-entry accounting system, the difference between Assets, Liabilities and Equity, and organized my thinking in how to think about money. I think whoever wrote the GnuCash docs deserves kudos. Wait, lemme see ...
Here we go:
Carol Champagne
Email: carol@io.com
Chris Lyttle
Affiliation: GnuCash Documentation Team
Email: chris@wilddev.net
Jon Lapham
Affiliation: GnuCash Documentation Team
Email: lapham@extracta.com.br
Many thanks, Carol, Chris and Jon.
If you haven't tried tracking your own finances, give it a whirl. I found, to my surprise, that it not only gave me a sense of power to know everything about my money (I learned a few surprising things about my spending), but it actually made it enjoyable to be stingy. The less I splurged, the better I felt because I could see the effect of my money being saved. It sure beats seeing how much disk space I saved by compressing my files.
I did end up having to spend about 20-30 hours writing a Python program to help massage my GnuCash files; thank goodness GnuCash uses a completely transparent XML format. (A true geek would probably have been able to do it in half the time.) This is because, I have to admit, I use GnuCash the lazy way.
What's supposed to happen is that, every day before I climb into bed, I enter all the transactions I made that day: $1.49 for the hamburger, $35.18 for the book I bought, $999.99 for the tank of gasoline, etc. Later that month, I download my bank statement and credit card statement from my bank's web site (QFX/OFX format), and import it into GnuCash. GnuCash checks that the statement matches with what I've entered, and marks each entry as reconciled.
Well, I have better things to do than to enter transactions every day. So, instead, I just let GnuCash do it for me by importing my bank statements and credit card statements. GnuCash says for each transaction: "What's this?? $1.49 from 'MCDONALDS FOODLIKE SUBSTANCE CORP'? I never saw this entry before!" and so on for each entry. My Python program looks at the entry description to figure out where it should be categorized; e.g. if it matches "(?i).*mcdonald'*s.*", then it classifies it under the "fast food, unhealthy" account. And so I can see exactly how much I've spent for groceries, transportation, entertainment, etc.
I did try KMyMoney, since I am a KDE fan (thank you to KStrauser for pointing it out), but I found GnuCash to be a more mature application. Incidentally, my wife bought Microsoft Money, tried it out but found it confusing, couldn't think of a good reason why that program kept wanting to connect to the Internet (blocked by ZoneAlarm), and decided not to trust it.
I agree with my sibling poster that Mandrake is no longer a great distro to use. I used it previously, and have switched to Ubuntu Dapper where I happily compute away, really using the desktop rather than having to tinker with it. So, load up your k/Ubuntu (it's a live CD now, for those of you clinging to Windows) and give GnuCash a whirl.
Umm... did I go a bit off topic?
Wow. Thanks for the reply. I was expecting no replies, or perhaps some snarky replies about "of course it wouldn't be possible". Thanks also to the uncle poster for letting me know about Puppy Linux. Brainstorming in a geek community does have its merits.
In response to your question, no, they won't let me install anything, but that hasn't stopped me from installing Firefox, Servant Salamander, VideoLan Client and IrfanView (software I know from my Win2k days; there's probably better stuff out there now).
I've also installed a bunch of other things that were defeated their firewall, which apparently only lets through packets to Port 80 or Port 443, and even then only HTTP packets --I couldn't ssh into my home server via Port 80. They even tried to bloody filter out my use of webmail. Fortunately, their firewall doesn't detect the webmail system that I happen to use.
But I don't intend to stop trying to push the limits of their firewall caging me --when I get around to it, I'm going to figure out some sort of https passthrough so that I can get into my home server.
If VMware or Qemu don't need admin privileges to run, then I have no problems installing it.
In fact, if they didn't put in a disk encryption system to encrypt the entire hard drive, I'd probably be trying to crack the WinXP admin password. The disk encryption is one thing they did right: on bootup, the encryption system needs the login and password to decrypt the disk so that WinXP becomes detectable. Only then does WinXP boot. This would have solved the problem of the VA laptop being stolen (to bring things back on topic): if my laptop is stolen, it's highly unlikely that anyone would be able to retrieve any data from it. I'm not sure if Puppy Linux would be able to help me because of the disk encryption system.
I, too, am pleased with TrueCrypt; the cross-platform feature allows removable drives to be interchanged between my (k)Ubuntu Dapper systems and my wife's Win2k system (she refuses to use WinXP). Finally we can easily store something on a CF card, pull it out and not worry about data being stolen!
6 7&highlight=truecrypt
Unfortunately, this does not work on our laptops at work; I am being coerced to use WinXP at work (damn you!) without admin privileges, and TrueCrypt refuses to install without admin privileges.
Does anyone know a workaround for this? I recognize that it's probably unlikely; if it works without admin privileges, it's probably not that secure.
Before anyone suggests that I ask the IT department of our firm: I already asked if it was okay to install certain programs. "Like what?" they asked. "Firefox," I said. "What's Firefox?" they asked. So that pretty much nixes that idea.
I did notice that GPG and WinPT install okay without needing admin privileges, so I am able to have *some* form of encryption, but it is non-ideal for various reasons.
Btw, for those of you using Ubuntu Dapper, here's a web page on how to install it easily. I ended up compiling (pretty much my first time compiling anything), and it was easier than I thought.
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1993
I just phoned one of the execs (no answer after 12 rings) and will keep trying. I will post the phone numbers here, but I do encourage people to stand up and be counted by still signing up at the DefectiveByDesign.org website.
We need to take actions like this as a community, because it's our best (and possibly only) tool. We don't have lobbyists cozying up to government officials, and we don't have the money to pay to Learjet the politicians to a nice dinner on a private island. But we do have strength in numbers, and if only we have the backbone to stand up and make our views known, we can make a difference. Because I'm not sure the MAFIAA has backbone; their backs are stiff just because they're so stuffed with money.
By the way, the DefectiveByDesign.org web site only shows ten call reports from people having made phone calls. When I tried to submit my report, I got an error message. So maybe the site isn't working properly. I hope in the end we do get a tally of how many people responded.
Brad Buckles RIAA USA (202) 857-9607
Mitch Bainwol RIAA USA (202) 857-9651
Cary Sherman RIAA USA (202) 857-9632
Mitch Glazier USA RIAA (202) 857-9673
Neil Turkowitz RIAA USA (202) 857-9647
Steve Redmond BPI UK +44 (0)20 7803 1324
Peter Jamieson BPI UK +44 (0) 20 7803 1311
Matt Phillips BPI UK 44 (0) 77 3951 4963
Michael Haentjes IFPI Germany +49 (30) 59 00 38-0
Peter Zombik IFPI Germany +49 (30) 59 00 38-0
Jean never Foitzik IFPI Germany +49 (30) 59 00 38-23
Herve Rony SNEP France +33 (1) 44 13 66 66
Graham Henderson CRIA Canada 1 (416) 967-7272 ext. 102
In other news today, for some reason there aren't that many women in IT circles. No one's telling them they can't do it, but they just aren't interested. Hmm.
Of course you can pay more at another registrar. In fact, you "can" pay me $100 to do it for you. And then I'd go to MyDomain.com and register your domain for $9 per year.
Other posters have listed other places where you can do for much less. You don't even need to stay within this country; the Internet is a global thing.