What a timely article! No sooner had I read this on Slashdot than I receive the following email.
The background: I have a somewhat unusual background of an engineering education prior to entering medical school, and I've written on the Web a few articles for engineering students interested in pursuing medicine as a career. In these articles, I encourage readers to contact me with questions, and even though it has been a few years now, requests continue to come in regularly.
This is not the only email I've received that sounds like this:
> i read u r artical in information on medical. > pl let me know in which college/universities is engineering along with medical is avialable like > in university of western ontorio.so that if we dont get admission in medical we can continue in > engineering. > with engineering is good for females both monetary and job satisfation.
[name withheld]
My first thought was: "You gotta be kidding me." My reply:
--(start)--
You will not get into medical school.
Your sloppily written email to me reveals that you have failed to bother with any modicum of care in writing your request.
First, your English is bad. There are parts I still don't understand, such as "with engineering is good for females both monetary and job satisfation". What is that supposed to mean? Women will be attracted to you if you become an engineer?
While you might simply blame it on a lack of skill with English, it is clearly more than this. You make mistakes with something as straightforward as the name of the university. Who do you think you will impress with an essay entitled Why I Should Be Accepted To "university of western ontorio"? Are you not aware that the word "I" is capitalized in English? That "u r" is not a substitute for "you are"? (This in any case is incorrect usage, since it should be "your", not "you're" or "you are", and certainly not "u r".)
You've read my article on entering medicine, an article freely available to you that I posted at my own expense of time and effort. Having presumably benefitted from my free advice, you now seek further free advice from me. Can you not show me some basic respect by putting some thought into compsing your email? Can you not even be bothered to press the "Shift" key when you type the word "I"?
If all this is really due to ignorance, then you lack the basic learning capacity to function in medical school. If this is due to sloth, then all the worse --you may possibly have the potential, but you certainly haven't the attitude.
Please save yourself and others a great deal of effort by turning your endeavours to other fields. Thank you.
Even in answering your question, I've wasted more than you deserve. To compensate, I'm going to post your missive, and my reply, on the Web so that I will not be bothered by others like you.
Could someone please point out where my thinking is flawed? As far as I can tell, this is what they're saying in the Letter to the Linux Community: "The underpinnings of Palm OS will now be Linux. No, you can't have Palm OS for free. No, you can't run without Palm OS. As required by Linux etiquette, we hereby make some general noises about maybe someday perhaps contributing a little bit to the OSS movement."
How does their use of Linux help me, if they've figured out a way to co-opt an open-sourced operating system (OS OS) while still keeping a tight grip on their proprietary software layer? This has no more interest to me as a Linux advocate than if they had said, "We will now use memory chips with the word 'Linux' scratched into the casing."
Someone please tell me I'm wrong. I've been disappointed with Palm too many times.
I've said it before on Slashdot (
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=127781&cid=106 78681)
so I won't rehash it all, but this is a prime example of how "small" problems can turn out to be showstoppers for Linux. Look at how diverse people's experiences are: "I installed Mdk10.1-o, and it's wonderful!" "I did the same, and it was a big waste of time!"
Why is that? Why does a single problem with fetching RPMs across the net cause the installer program to just decide to give up? Why do distributions fail to account for something like SATA? (The least they could have done was put a note: "If installation fails, it might be because SATA is not supported. Here's what to do...") Why does Linux feel like the "Plug'n'Pray" era of Windows? Someone remind me again of the point of releasing the Community edition before the Official edition?
If there's one thing people want more than a chance of a great experience with Linux, it's a dependable lack of a bad experience.
I love ya, Mandrake, but I'm sticking with 10.0-o. If you want my money, you know what to do.
Oh boy, another proprietarily computed number, unknown to me, to rule my life. No wonder I got turned down for a credit card the first time. I had just moved to the USA, applied, and got a letter back saying: "You haven't existed in the USA, for a minimum of 2 years, so you don't exist, and by definition you are bad credit." They mentioned some number that wasn't available due to my non-existence in the previous 2 years. I guess they were referring to the FICO score.
Thank goodness I was living in a small town in the Midwest, where people actually talk to other people. I marched up to my local bank branch and said, "Why can't I get a credit card with a six-figure income??" Of course, everyone knew each other, the loan manager said, "We'll get that fixed," and less than a month later I had my first credit card with a measly $1000 limit. (Well, first US credit card; prior to that I had already held for six years two non-US credit cards with five-figure limits.) That limit rapidly multiplied, and went past $16k before I started tossing out all those notices they mailed to me saying, "Hey, we automatically increased your credit limit AGAIN! By the way, don't you want to see all these nice ads?"
But if I wasn't lucky enough to have a pretty whopping salary, and if I hadn't been in a small town where we knew everyone, my life would have been made pretty nasty by that One Number. No wonder some honest, hardworking folks, IT or otherwise, are having trouble making ends meet.
Curious: did Experian give you the FICO score for free?
Where can we ask technical questions about KDE?
on
Preview of KDE 3.4
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· Score: 1
I, too, hope they've worked out that bug as well as a number of other bugs. In fact, I would love to know where to ask questions about KDE bugs and non-bugs, especially the latter. When I run into a KDE problem, it seems like a bug to me, but it might just simply be poor configuration. But I don't know where to turn. It's not in the KDE FAQ, and when I write to the authors of the various pieces of software, they ask me to check the KDE bugs email list archives --if they reply at all. This is quite understandable, since I'm sure they're busy enough tooling away at the KDE components in their spare time, but --what if it's not a bug? Isn't there some (non-bug) forum or mailing list where KDE-knowledgeable people come together? I've tried linuxquestions.org, but responses are few and scattered.
For example... How do I set it so that KsCD doesn't pop up and try to play my music CD every time I insert one? Why does it now take 5 seconds for any KDE program to launch, instead of instantly like before? Why does my system freeze for 10 seconds every time I try to print, before the KDEprintjob whatchamacallit window finds my printer? When I use cut&paste, why does Klipper paste the previous thing I cut rather than the most recent thing? Why do my settings, for choosing which program opens which type of file, keep getting overwritten?
All these things are driving me nuts and are making this GUI almost unusable (to the point where I am serious considering venturing into GNOME territory). I'm sure that someone out there has the answers, and that I can't be the only one who has these questions, but where do I turn? Help, Slashdot!
(I will certainly appreciate answers to my questions above, but my main question is: where can I find KDE-knowledgeable people? I can't post to Slashdot every time some trivial question about KDE configuration comes up.)
Could someone please design a splashscreen that is:
transparent, and
2 pixels by 2 pixels? Okay, maybe not that big
Every time I start OpenOffice.org, the huge splashscreen just sits there blocking the way of all my other apps. And it sits there for a LOOOooo...ng time! (Later I discovered that I could drag it out of the way by holding down Alt, but why should I have to?)
Even some translucency would be good so that I can at least see what's going on underneath the splash screen. And someone can design a logo for their new slogan: "OpenOffice.org --now only takes 60 seconds to load!"
Okay, okay, I shouldn't be so hard on the OOo team, since it *is* open-source. Please do take a look at some
comments that I and other Slashdotters have made which I hope are being addressed. I recognize that some of these take time to work on, but the first step is to know that the items listed above are a significant incentive to switch to a lesser-developed program like AbiWord despite its inferior MSWord-importing capabilities (for example).
That head official doesn't get it. Of course people will distrust new technology! And well they should. For the first few elections, everyone will demand a recount. Then after a while, when the paper trail always matches the electronic votes, the public will begin to see recount demands as the act of a sore loser and waste of taxpayer money. But in the meanwhile, you might catch a few errors and stop a few cases of wrongdoing.
I agree with the sibling poster who compared it to two bank tellers redundantly counting money. The very fact that there exists a paper trail will prevent certain people (and corporations) from taking advantage of electronic vulnerabilities. Geez, it's almost like the "deterrent factor" excuse that these same people use when questioned about the arms race spending.
I hope people don't just take his word and leave it at that.
Actually, wasn't there an Isaac Asimov short story about futuristic voting? Future scientists determined that basically almost everyone predictably voted against each other, and so the pivotal determining votes were held by a tiny minority who were represented by a single person. It was the job of the superduper computer to analyze and calculate who this One Voter would be. The guy would be officially handed a voting notice by some police officer, like a subpoena, and he would go cast his one vote, and that would determine the outcome of the election.
Seems like an early conception of Asimov's ideas which he later developed into "psychohistory", the mathematical prediction of future world-scale events based on statistical modelling of the human population, which appeared in his Foundation series novels.
Thank god for SCO! Without SCO, the very idea of the Redmond software juggernaut wielding its mighty IP portfolio to crush some upstart software system, written by some "random hacker in China", would send corporate executives scrambling for the protection of O Holy Microsoft.
But guess what? For over a year now, these executives have been hearing about this little SCO company suing IBM, and... and suing IBM, and suing and suing... and not winning (yet)... and not winning, and not winning... Hmm, maybe this intellectual property crap isn't all it's made out to be, after all.
And what's this Linux thing the executives keep hearing about? Oh, it's nothing to worry about, says Microsoft. Ignore it, says Microsoft. Pay no attention, says Microsoft's Steve Ballmer to Munich, skiing across the Atlantic to bring this not very important message to Germany. Don't bother to even think about it, says Microsoft, pulling out all manner of independent reviews to prove its point.
And now, Microsoft roars, if you use Linux, we will SUE YOU!!!! (if you're in China). The Price-Waterhouse executive quakes in his boots as he gazes on the corporate global map--
Hey, waitaminnit, he says. We don't *have* anything in China.
He picks up the phone. "Miss Wynton? Have you renewed our corporate membership in MandrakeClub Gold yet?"
Thank you! That struck a chord with me. It blows my mind how the OpenOffice.org suite (in particular OOo Writer) has painstakingly reproduced the frustration in using MS Word. Spelling "corrections" are automatically made, tables contents are automatically assigned different fonts and line spacing, and that bloody lightbulb keeps popping up like some Web ad.
And that splash screen when it starts up, subbornly staying on top and covering the other windows --is Sun *trying* to advertise how bloody long it takes to start up the program?
But you know what the clincher is? I bought the "OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit", a manual written by Solveig Haugland, and there was this fairly common feature (I forget which one --maybe inserting a static date as text?) that she COULDN'T FIGURE OUT how to do. She basically says, "So far we haven't figured out how to do this yet." This is from someone who's writing a manual for the software.
Good God, Sun, why don't you just get bought out by Microsoft already. Maybe it's time to take another look at AbiWord, see how they're doing on their tables support, and break out the GNOME libraries...
Is there any Linux desktop environment which will allow me to replicate this configuration?
...
When I use Windows, I dock the taskbar on the left of the screen (versus the default bottom), set the width to maximum, and the settings at AlwaysOnTop + AutoHide.
Benefits:
1. The taskbar consumes no screen space. And when I want to see it, I only need to slam the mouse-pointer full left to the screen border to make the taskbar appear, not requiring any precise mouse handling.
2. When I view the taskbar, instead of unlabeled icons or truncated titles (arrayed horizontally), I see amply-sized window titles (stacked vertically, 80+ characters wide).
Of course you can. I'll show you how to do it on KDE. For all the complaining I do about KDE, the number one thing I love is its configurability. Someone more familiar with GNOME can perhaps comment on that desktop.
I use a setting similar to yours on my KDE 3.2 desktop (MandrakeLinux 10). In my case, I have a permanent taskbar at the bottom and a child panel on the left side of the screen full of application quick-launch icons. Under the KDE Control Panel (known as "Configure Your Desktop" in the default Mandrake configuration), set the following:
LookNFeel > Panels > Arrangement > Position : "left" or "left-top" or whatever you prefer
LookNFeel > Panels > Arrangement > Size : "custom" and then set the correct size (in pixels) to make it big enough for your taskbar entries
LookNFeel > Panels > Hiding > Hide Mode : check "Allow Other Windows To Cover Panel" (I find this handier than "Hide Automatically After Cursor Leaves Panel For [user-definable] Seconds"). Furthermore, check "Raise When Pointer Touches The Screen's..." and choose "Left Edge" if you want (I chose "Top Left Corner")
For me, the above settings are for my child panel, since I have a permanent main panel at the bottom with the taskbar. You can set the above for your main panel, which will then be on the left side of the screen. Or, if you wanted some stuff on your screen permanently, like the clock/calendar etc., you could create a child panel as given above, move the taskbar to it, and shrink the main panel to be just big enough for the clock or whatever you want permanently. You can put it in the upper corner or whatever. You can make it semi-transparent to see what's underneath.
Here's an idea: if you're not sure whether it's what you want, boot up Knoppix, which defaults to KDE, and experiment with the settings. I'm pretty sure you can set it to something you like.
Now, I haven't used a MS Windows desktop on my home computer for over a year, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Windows gives you this much flexibility to make multiple bars in different positions, translucency, etc. Right?
I've tried Linux several times, and each time I've suffered greatly
YES! Same here, so let's expand on this more; I think it's important to recognize exactly what it is that turns off people who actually make an effort to switch to Linux but get repelled.
On paper/in writing, Linux is great. People say lots of good things about it, it has ideological advantages, installation and hardware support have improved by leaps and bounds, etc. So what's the problem?
It's not easy for geeks to understand; it still isn't easy for me to understand, even though I was the one going through it. In the end, I did emerge triumphant from the guts of my computer, and said, "See? I did it! What's so hard about that?" Then I thought to myself, "Hey, waitaminnit, I just spent seven $#*$#ing days trying to install something that should only take 30 minutes. How can I say that it was easy?"
In fact, it was so hard for me to answer such a simple question that I started keeping a diary while I was installing. (It's in bits and pieces on various Linux forums; someday I'll post it in one big piece.)
The answer is this:
When installation/use of Linux goes well, it goes very well. When something goes wrong, everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
Example: I install a Linux distro; it autodetects my monitor hardware and sets the resolution. It's wrong. After installation, I boot up and the monitor is wonky --I can't see anything.
What I should have done: press Ctrl-Alt-Plus or Minus to step to the next monitor resolution to get the screen to appear, and then I can use the GUI to permanently set the resolution to the correct value. Or press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to a text screen, and then manually set the XF86config file.
What the newbie would do: nothing. What can a newbie do? Call his friend over and get him to reinstall Windows. What else can you do when the screen is wonky?
But notice what I, as a geek but Linux newcomer, will do. I search the Internet from my other computer, find the solution, and correct it. I realize: "Ah! I clicked the wrong choice when I installed Linux --I thought they meant 'desired resolution' when they really meant 'maximum supported resolution'." If appropriate, I reinstall, this time clicking the correct option, and everything goes well.
And I discount the problem that I just encountered.
"It was my fault," I say to myself. "My mistake caused this installation problem with Linux. See, the second time I chose the correct option, and everything went well! Linux is so easy to install!" And besides, those people at Mandrake/ Fedora/ SuSE/ LibraNet/ MEPIS put so much work into making this a nice-looking distribution. "It would be a pity to just ignore the excellent interface and all that F/OSS on the desktop just because I couldn't install it properly! Let's mark it down: this is a nice distribution."
But you know what? If the newbie encounters a problem, it's a showstopper. If you can't see the monitor, who cares if Firefox has tabbed browsing or OpenOffice.org can export MS Word documents to PDF?
This, I think, accounts for the wide discrepancies between people's experience with Linux. Even in the comments for this very Slashdot article, we have people saying, "I had big problems with Linux!" "What are you talking about? I had zero problems!" It's because, when there *is* a problem everything comes to a grinding halt.
We Linux supporters have to work on this: make sure problems are not showstoppers for newbies. When there is an error message, tell the newbie where to go next. Make it work in degraded mode instead of not working at all. Make it easy to recover. Example: I can't write to my addressbook in KMail. The problem? "Can't write to addressbook" is the message. Like, thanks a lot, KDE! Can you be a little more obvious? Example: in Ogle, it can't identify the sound device
I had an interesting encounter with this sort of scam. I was selling my
folding kayak (yes, a kayak that fits into a backpack!), and advertised in various online classified ads (not eBay, though). About half of the email inquiries that I received involved the buyer having some client (of the buyer) send me money in the form of a "casshier's check in united states of american". But it was too much money, see, so if I could just send him the excess with my kayak that I was selling.
Now, one or maybe two such email messages I can accept as possibly genuine, but not half a dozen of them, all with atrocious grammatical errors. Here's a sample:
I came accros your ad and i am really intreted in geting it.
So i will want you to pls email me if it is still available.
And also tell me its present condition.Also send me the pics if it is available and give me your last price.Also i will want you to know that my mode of payment is with a certified chasiers check which i believe is the best way of payment. If you are ok with that you can get back to me so that we can conclude on payment.
So, I decided to have some fun with a scammer or two.
First, the email mentions "last price" which seems to refer to an auction where the price is always changing, but I had never advertised on eBay or such. So I simply replied, "Well, the price is just as advertised --what price did you see on the ad? Because if it's wrong, I have to change it." Well, none of the three or four scammers (I quit after the fourth one) would state the price. I have no doubt they just got some computer script to cull the web for ads and mass-mail all of them. They probably do it with some MS Word macro or something.
Second, I advertised my folding kayaks on a web site for folding kayaks, so I didn't actually put "folding kayak" in the ad. It was obvious that none of the scammers had any idea what I was actually selling. So I replied in my email that I wanted to make sure they knew how to use the item. How far had they gone in one? Any problems with rolling? ("Rolling" refers to the spectacular technique where, when you're upside-down in the water in a capsized kayak, you can heave yourself out of the water and flip back upright while remaining seated in the canoe at all times.) Of course, I deliberately refrained from revealing what the item was; they had no idea that "the item" was something you travelled in, much less know what I meant by "rolling", and their cluelessness in their responses was laughable.
Every time they would respond asking me for my address and phone, and every time I would insist that they answer my questions about the price and whether they knew how to use "the item". It was great for laughs. After a while, I got bored and stopped. But, boy, lots of potential for mischief there.
As an aside, I was trying to figure out how to ship my kayak to an honest buyer who would send me the money. Some people suggested escrow.com, but I came up with another plan: I would ship the buyer everything except one or two crucial pieces. I would ship the kayak minus the crucial piece, and then wait for payment, and then ship the crucial piece. Before I received payment, the kayak and the crucial piece were equally useless to the buyer and myself, so both of us would be motivated to honestly complete the transaction. As it turned out, I sold to someone who could physically come to my home to pick up the canoe and give me cash, so my scheme was never needed.
Okay, well, Firefox is better than IE already (for starters, I'm using Firefox right now but somehow IE just doesn't work on my Mandrake Linux system), but three hours ago we learn of
Firefox crapping out on bogus HTML code
where MS IE was demonstrably more robust.
I would like to see these errors fixed in Firefox before it is launched (as v1.0) and before the NYTimes ad, and not only because we want Firefox to be ready to make a good first impression. Fixing these errors also shows me that the Mozilla Dev team is willing to take a realistic view of how good their product is, acknowledge problems, and fix it. Until they do that, I'm not prepared to spend money promoting the product.
I recognize that fixing these HTML parsing errors will take an ungodly amount of time. It will probably mean pushing the release date into December or 2005. But if they don't, MozDev (I mean the Mozilla Development Team) would then be acting like a large corporation: plan the budget two years ahead of time, plan the schedule one year ahead of time, and stick to it no matter what happens "or else senior management will have our heads!" Well, one advantage of non-corporate F/OSS is the agility in revising schedules and the large clout of the technical staff rather than marketing.
Please, MozDev, recognize the problem: Firefox crashes, and MS IE doesn't. Fix it. You are the shining example of F/OSS, the #1 application usable on Windows and F/OSS OS's alike. Don't let the hype and the need to "save face" push you into launching Firefox before it's ready. Microsoft pushed back Longhorn; you can push back FF v1.0.
And lest I sound like an ingrate, Firefox has been an absolutely astounding piece of software that is key to refuting Microsoft's claim that "F/OSS doesn't work". It's exactly for this reason that I don't want it all ruined because Mozilla puts out a full-page ad before it robustly parses improper HTML.
Hey, KDE, pay attention to keyboard use!
on
KDE 3.3.1 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
One thing about the KDE desktop I wish would improve: more emphasis on use of the keyboard over using the mouse, so that I don't necessarily need to have a mouse to use the GUI.
When I used Win2k, I could flip open the Start Menu and start a program with a few rapid keypresses: Ctrl-Esc, P, A, P for MS Paint (you have to organize the Start Menu so that each entry starts with a unique letter). You can flip to another window and maximize with Alt-Tab, Alt-Space, X.
With KDE 2.x, you couldn't even select a program with a letter key --either cursor up/down or click with the mouse.
With KDE 3.x, you could now navigate with letter keys --it could tell when you had typed enough of a menu entry to make it uniquely identifiable.
HOWEVER --it wasn't fast enough to catch my keystrokes. For example, setting up my KDE menu to mimic the MS Windows menu, I could type Ctrl-Esc, P, A, P --but I could be finished typing all keystrokes before that danged menu actually popped up on the screen and sluggishly said, "Huhh?? You gonna press a key? I'm waiting for your keybpress you know..." So now I end up having to take my hand off the keyboard to click with the mouse. It's damn annoying.
This is again the case with KDE programs like Krusader, a Norton Commander-like "clone" that is handy enough for me to rely on, but just aggravating enough to be a thorn in my side. It's not officially part of the KDE main package, but it should be --maybe the main KDE developers would pay more attention to the interface part of it.
I have to say that, as GUI-based as MS Windows was, you could do almost everything by keyboard without the mouse. You can't do that with KDE, and I wish I could.
Now for the footnotes: 1. I don't use Windows any more. I've been using Mandrake Linux since v8.1. 2. I don't hate KDE. It has many excellent features such as redefinable keystroke shortcuts. This is the main reason I use KDE; can someone tell me if GNOME has this yet? 3. On using keyboard instead of a mouse: "If you were a *real* geek, you'd use the CLI." Yeah yeah yeah, whatever, I'm sure you get off on ASCII pr0n. There's a place for the GUI, and a place for the mouse, but not necessarily at the same time.
If I could summarize, you are saying that the desktop machine should be configured well and securely so that a firewall is not needed.
To answer your question, a firewall is for damage control when you don't know (or realize too late) that your machine is not perfectly configured. Some program has some vulnerability, or a trojan, or something. You are right --it SHOULD not be this way; but when it just IS, and the trojan starts spamming people or transmitting your private PGP keys onto IRC, the firewall is there to say, "Hey, waitaminnit, something weird is going on here."
A firewall is like a fireman. You hope that it doesn't have to do anything but sit there.
use just 1 site (LQ.org?) to get critical mass
on
Linux Driver Wiki Opened
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This is not to say that one is better than the other, but for the sake of the Linux community, I hope that we minimize duplication of effort. It would be a pity to have information split between two sites with neither one being authoritative (or tending toward such).
Having said this, objectively is there any particular reason why one would choose the wiki at linux-driver.org to list hardware compatibility? (No argument that drivers themselves can be discussed at linux-driver.org since linuxquestions.org doesn't cover that.) Is there an advantage to it being a wiki rather than a database of forum posts (which is essentially what the linuquestions.org list is)? Is it, for example, easier to automate the retrieval of information from a wiki if one were to (say) dynamically generate/update a Linux hardware database? If not, then I'd say support the older site (which came into being earlier). But if for whatever reason linux-driver.org became more massive, then we should all make that site the one with critical mass. Not trying to be biased --just put all your stuff in one place, wherever it is.
In any case, I hope there will be heavy linking between the two so that people who go to one can easily go to the other.
Slightly OT: for the same reason of avoiding duplication of effort and achieving critical mass, I hope Linux knowledge can be funneled into the
forum at linuxquestions.org
as well as
their wiki
(yes, they have a wiki, just not specifically about drivers).
I use a Brompton folding bike http://bromptonbicycle.co.uk/ and don't use a lock. You don't need a lock when the bike can fit under your office chair. The bike comes with me wherever I go, e.g. underneath the shopping cart as I go grocery shopping, etc. I keep it in the trunk of my (compact) car --in fact, it folds small enough that I can fit my wife's Brompton as well as mine in the trunk-- and if I need to go somewhere were parking is a problem, I can park a few blocks away and zip to my destination on the bike.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm interested in Esperanto, but your email address is not listed on Slashdot. Mind if we correspond? I can be reached at kwtm-zrezwtid@tamlylin.net
What a timely article! No sooner had I read this on Slashdot than I receive the following email.
The background: I have a somewhat unusual background of an engineering education prior to entering medical school, and I've written on the Web a few articles for engineering students interested in pursuing medicine as a career. In these articles, I encourage readers to contact me with questions, and even though it has been a few years now, requests continue to come in regularly.
This is not the only email I've received that sounds like this:
> i read u r artical in information on medical.
> pl let me know in which college/universities is engineering along with medical is avialable like
> in university of western ontorio.so that if we dont get admission in medical we can continue in
> engineering.
> with engineering is good for females both monetary and job satisfation.
[name withheld]
My first thought was: "You gotta be kidding me." My reply:
--(start)--
You will not get into medical school.
Your sloppily written email to me reveals that you have failed to bother with any modicum of care in writing your request.
First, your English is bad. There are parts I still don't understand, such as "with engineering is good for females both monetary and job satisfation". What is that supposed to mean? Women will be attracted to you if you become an engineer?
While you might simply blame it on a lack of skill with English, it is clearly more than this. You make mistakes with something as straightforward as the name of the university. Who do you think you will impress with an essay entitled Why I Should Be Accepted To "university of western ontorio"? Are you not aware that the word "I" is capitalized in English? That "u r" is not a substitute for "you are"? (This in any case is incorrect usage, since it should be "your", not "you're" or "you are", and certainly not "u r".)
You've read my article on entering medicine, an article freely available to you that I posted at my own expense of time and effort. Having presumably benefitted from my free advice, you now seek further free advice from me. Can you not show me some basic respect by putting some thought into compsing your email? Can you not even be bothered to press the "Shift" key when you type the word "I"?
If all this is really due to ignorance, then you lack the basic learning capacity to function in medical school. If this is due to sloth, then all the worse --you may possibly have the potential, but you certainly haven't the attitude.
Please save yourself and others a great deal of effort by turning your endeavours to other fields. Thank you.
Even in answering your question, I've wasted more than you deserve. To compensate, I'm going to post your missive, and my reply, on the Web so that I will not be bothered by others like you.
--(end)--
Could someone please point out where my thinking is flawed? As far as I can tell, this is what they're saying in the Letter to the Linux Community: "The underpinnings of Palm OS will now be Linux. No, you can't have Palm OS for free. No, you can't run without Palm OS. As required by Linux etiquette, we hereby make some general noises about maybe someday perhaps contributing a little bit to the OSS movement."
How does their use of Linux help me, if they've figured out a way to co-opt an open-sourced operating system (OS OS) while still keeping a tight grip on their proprietary software layer? This has no more interest to me as a Linux advocate than if they had said, "We will now use memory chips with the word 'Linux' scratched into the casing."
Someone please tell me I'm wrong. I've been disappointed with Palm too many times.
I've said it before on Slashdot ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=127781&cid=106 78681)
so I won't rehash it all, but this is a prime example of how "small" problems can turn out to be showstoppers for Linux. Look at how diverse people's experiences are: "I installed Mdk10.1-o, and it's wonderful!" "I did the same, and it was a big waste of time!"
Why is that? Why does a single problem with fetching RPMs across the net cause the installer program to just decide to give up? Why do distributions fail to account for something like SATA? (The least they could have done was put a note: "If installation fails, it might be because SATA is not supported. Here's what to do...") Why does Linux feel like the "Plug'n'Pray" era of Windows? Someone remind me again of the point of releasing the Community edition before the Official edition?
If there's one thing people want more than a chance of a great experience with Linux, it's a dependable lack of a bad experience.
I love ya, Mandrake, but I'm sticking with 10.0-o. If you want my money, you know what to do.
Oh boy, another proprietarily computed number, unknown to me, to rule my life. No wonder I got turned down for a credit card the first time. I had just moved to the USA, applied, and got a letter back saying: "You haven't existed in the USA, for a minimum of 2 years, so you don't exist, and by definition you are bad credit." They mentioned some number that wasn't available due to my non-existence in the previous 2 years. I guess they were referring to the FICO score.
Thank goodness I was living in a small town in the Midwest, where people actually talk to other people. I marched up to my local bank branch and said, "Why can't I get a credit card with a six-figure income??" Of course, everyone knew each other, the loan manager said, "We'll get that fixed," and less than a month later I had my first credit card with a measly $1000 limit. (Well, first US credit card; prior to that I had already held for six years two non-US credit cards with five-figure limits.) That limit rapidly multiplied, and went past $16k before I started tossing out all those notices they mailed to me saying, "Hey, we automatically increased your credit limit AGAIN! By the way, don't you want to see all these nice ads?"
But if I wasn't lucky enough to have a pretty whopping salary, and if I hadn't been in a small town where we knew everyone, my life would have been made pretty nasty by that One Number. No wonder some honest, hardworking folks, IT or otherwise, are having trouble making ends meet.
Curious: did Experian give you the FICO score for free?
I, too, hope they've worked out that bug as well as a number of other bugs. In fact, I would love to know where to ask questions about KDE bugs and non-bugs, especially the latter. When I run into a KDE problem, it seems like a bug to me, but it might just simply be poor configuration. But I don't know where to turn. It's not in the KDE FAQ, and when I write to the authors of the various pieces of software, they ask me to check the KDE bugs email list archives --if they reply at all. This is quite understandable, since I'm sure they're busy enough tooling away at the KDE components in their spare time, but --what if it's not a bug? Isn't there some (non-bug) forum or mailing list where KDE-knowledgeable people come together? I've tried linuxquestions.org, but responses are few and scattered.
... How do I set it so that KsCD doesn't pop up and try to play my music CD every time I insert one? Why does it now take 5 seconds for any KDE program to launch, instead of instantly like before? Why does my system freeze for 10 seconds every time I try to print, before the KDEprintjob whatchamacallit window finds my printer? When I use cut&paste, why does Klipper paste the previous thing I cut rather than the most recent thing? Why do my settings, for choosing which program opens which type of file, keep getting overwritten?
For example
All these things are driving me nuts and are making this GUI almost unusable (to the point where I am serious considering venturing into GNOME territory). I'm sure that someone out there has the answers, and that I can't be the only one who has these questions, but where do I turn? Help, Slashdot!
(I will certainly appreciate answers to my questions above, but my main question is: where can I find KDE-knowledgeable people? I can't post to Slashdot every time some trivial question about KDE configuration comes up.)
Could someone please design a splashscreen that is:
Every time I start OpenOffice.org, the huge splashscreen just sits there blocking the way of all my other apps. And it sits there for a LOOOooo...ng time! (Later I discovered that I could drag it out of the way by holding down Alt, but why should I have to?)
Even some translucency would be good so that I can at least see what's going on underneath the splash screen. And someone can design a logo for their new slogan: "OpenOffice.org --now only takes 60 seconds to load!"
Okay, okay, I shouldn't be so hard on the OOo team, since it *is* open-source. Please do take a look at some comments that I and other Slashdotters have made which I hope are being addressed. I recognize that some of these take time to work on, but the first step is to know that the items listed above are a significant incentive to switch to a lesser-developed program like AbiWord despite its inferior MSWord-importing capabilities (for example).
That head official doesn't get it. Of course people will distrust new technology! And well they should. For the first few elections, everyone will demand a recount. Then after a while, when the paper trail always matches the electronic votes, the public will begin to see recount demands as the act of a sore loser and waste of taxpayer money. But in the meanwhile, you might catch a few errors and stop a few cases of wrongdoing.
I agree with the sibling poster who compared it to two bank tellers redundantly counting money. The very fact that there exists a paper trail will prevent certain people (and corporations) from taking advantage of electronic vulnerabilities. Geez, it's almost like the "deterrent factor" excuse that these same people use when questioned about the arms race spending.
I hope people don't just take his word and leave it at that.
Actually, wasn't there an Isaac Asimov short story about futuristic voting? Future scientists determined that basically almost everyone predictably voted against each other, and so the pivotal determining votes were held by a tiny minority who were represented by a single person. It was the job of the superduper computer to analyze and calculate who this One Voter would be. The guy would be officially handed a voting notice by some police officer, like a subpoena, and he would go cast his one vote, and that would determine the outcome of the election.
Seems like an early conception of Asimov's ideas which he later developed into "psychohistory", the mathematical prediction of future world-scale events based on statistical modelling of the human population, which appeared in his Foundation series novels.
Thank god for SCO! Without SCO, the very idea of the Redmond software juggernaut wielding its mighty IP portfolio to crush some upstart software system, written by some "random hacker in China", would send corporate executives scrambling for the protection of O Holy Microsoft.
... and suing IBM, and suing and suing ... and not winning (yet) ... and not winning, and not winning ... Hmm, maybe this intellectual property crap isn't all it's made out to be, after all.
But guess what? For over a year now, these executives have been hearing about this little SCO company suing IBM, and
And what's this Linux thing the executives keep hearing about? Oh, it's nothing to worry about, says Microsoft. Ignore it, says Microsoft. Pay no attention, says Microsoft's Steve Ballmer to Munich, skiing across the Atlantic to bring this not very important message to Germany. Don't bother to even think about it, says Microsoft, pulling out all manner of independent reviews to prove its point.
And now, Microsoft roars, if you use Linux, we will SUE YOU!!!! (if you're in China). The Price-Waterhouse executive quakes in his boots as he gazes on the corporate global map--
Hey, waitaminnit, he says. We don't *have* anything in China.
He picks up the phone. "Miss Wynton? Have you renewed our corporate membership in MandrakeClub Gold yet?"
Thank you, SCO.
Thank you! That struck a chord with me. It blows my mind how the OpenOffice.org suite (in particular OOo Writer) has painstakingly reproduced the frustration in using MS Word. Spelling "corrections" are automatically made, tables contents are automatically assigned different fonts and line spacing, and that bloody lightbulb keeps popping up like some Web ad.
And that splash screen when it starts up, subbornly staying on top and covering the other windows --is Sun *trying* to advertise how bloody long it takes to start up the program?
But you know what the clincher is? I bought the "OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit", a manual written by Solveig Haugland, and there was this fairly common feature (I forget which one --maybe inserting a static date as text?) that she COULDN'T FIGURE OUT how to do. She basically says, "So far we haven't figured out how to do this yet." This is from someone who's writing a manual for the software.
Good God, Sun, why don't you just get bought out by Microsoft already. Maybe it's time to take another look at AbiWord, see how they're doing on their tables support, and break out the GNOME libraries...
"Idiotic"? Tell me about it.
1. Wimpy wasp gets beaten up by bully wasps.
2. Wimpy wasp gets painted.
3. Wimpy wasp gets beaten up by bully wasps.
Can we redirect our scientific research to something more practical, like the use of Mexican jumping beans as a method of interstellar travel?
Just in case somebody doesn't get it: http://urbanlegends.about.com/cs/historical/a/jfk_ berliner.htm
and also
http://www.campusprogram.com/reference/en/wikipedi a/i/ic/ich_bin_ein_berliner.html
I use a setting similar to yours on my KDE 3.2 desktop (MandrakeLinux 10). In my case, I have a permanent taskbar at the bottom and a child panel on the left side of the screen full of application quick-launch icons. Under the KDE Control Panel (known as "Configure Your Desktop" in the default Mandrake configuration), set the following:
For me, the above settings are for my child panel, since I have a permanent main panel at the bottom with the taskbar. You can set the above for your main panel, which will then be on the left side of the screen. Or, if you wanted some stuff on your screen permanently, like the clock/calendar etc., you could create a child panel as given above, move the taskbar to it, and shrink the main panel to be just big enough for the clock or whatever you want permanently. You can put it in the upper corner or whatever. You can make it semi-transparent to see what's underneath.
Here's an idea: if you're not sure whether it's what you want, boot up Knoppix, which defaults to KDE, and experiment with the settings. I'm pretty sure you can set it to something you like.
Now, I haven't used a MS Windows desktop on my home computer for over a year, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Windows gives you this much flexibility to make multiple bars in different positions, translucency, etc. Right?
YES! Same here, so let's expand on this more; I think it's important to recognize exactly what it is that turns off people who actually make an effort to switch to Linux but get repelled.
On paper/in writing, Linux is great. People say lots of good things about it, it has ideological advantages, installation and hardware support have improved by leaps and bounds, etc. So what's the problem?
It's not easy for geeks to understand; it still isn't easy for me to understand, even though I was the one going through it. In the end, I did emerge triumphant from the guts of my computer, and said, "See? I did it! What's so hard about that?" Then I thought to myself, "Hey, waitaminnit, I just spent seven $#*$#ing days trying to install something that should only take 30 minutes. How can I say that it was easy?"
In fact, it was so hard for me to answer such a simple question that I started keeping a diary while I was installing. (It's in bits and pieces on various Linux forums; someday I'll post it in one big piece.) The answer is this:
When installation/use of Linux goes well, it goes very well. When something goes wrong, everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
Example: I install a Linux distro; it autodetects my monitor hardware and sets the resolution. It's wrong. After installation, I boot up and the monitor is wonky --I can't see anything.
What I should have done: press Ctrl-Alt-Plus or Minus to step to the next monitor resolution to get the screen to appear, and then I can use the GUI to permanently set the resolution to the correct value. Or press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to a text screen, and then manually set the XF86config file.
What the newbie would do: nothing. What can a newbie do? Call his friend over and get him to reinstall Windows. What else can you do when the screen is wonky?
But notice what I, as a geek but Linux newcomer, will do. I search the Internet from my other computer, find the solution, and correct it. I realize: "Ah! I clicked the wrong choice when I installed Linux --I thought they meant 'desired resolution' when they really meant 'maximum supported resolution'." If appropriate, I reinstall, this time clicking the correct option, and everything goes well.
And I discount the problem that I just encountered.
"It was my fault," I say to myself. "My mistake caused this installation problem with Linux. See, the second time I chose the correct option, and everything went well! Linux is so easy to install!" And besides, those people at Mandrake/ Fedora/ SuSE/ LibraNet/ MEPIS put so much work into making this a nice-looking distribution. "It would be a pity to just ignore the excellent interface and all that F/OSS on the desktop just because I couldn't install it properly! Let's mark it down: this is a nice distribution."
But you know what? If the newbie encounters a problem, it's a showstopper. If you can't see the monitor, who cares if Firefox has tabbed browsing or OpenOffice.org can export MS Word documents to PDF?
This, I think, accounts for the wide discrepancies between people's experience with Linux. Even in the comments for this very Slashdot article, we have people saying, "I had big problems with Linux!" "What are you talking about? I had zero problems!" It's because, when there *is* a problem everything comes to a grinding halt.
We Linux supporters have to work on this: make sure problems are not showstoppers for newbies. When there is an error message, tell the newbie where to go next. Make it work in degraded mode instead of not working at all. Make it easy to recover. Example: I can't write to my addressbook in KMail. The problem? "Can't write to addressbook" is the message. Like, thanks a lot, KDE! Can you be a little more obvious? Example: in Ogle, it can't identify the sound device
I had an interesting encounter with this sort of scam. I was selling my folding kayak (yes, a kayak that fits into a backpack!), and advertised in various online classified ads (not eBay, though). About half of the email inquiries that I received involved the buyer having some client (of the buyer) send me money in the form of a "casshier's check in united states of american". But it was too much money, see, so if I could just send him the excess with my kayak that I was selling.
Now, one or maybe two such email messages I can accept as possibly genuine, but not half a dozen of them, all with atrocious grammatical errors. Here's a sample:
So, I decided to have some fun with a scammer or two.
First, the email mentions "last price" which seems to refer to an auction where the price is always changing, but I had never advertised on eBay or such. So I simply replied, "Well, the price is just as advertised --what price did you see on the ad? Because if it's wrong, I have to change it." Well, none of the three or four scammers (I quit after the fourth one) would state the price. I have no doubt they just got some computer script to cull the web for ads and mass-mail all of them. They probably do it with some MS Word macro or something.
Second, I advertised my folding kayaks on a web site for folding kayaks, so I didn't actually put "folding kayak" in the ad. It was obvious that none of the scammers had any idea what I was actually selling. So I replied in my email that I wanted to make sure they knew how to use the item. How far had they gone in one? Any problems with rolling? ("Rolling" refers to the spectacular technique where, when you're upside-down in the water in a capsized kayak, you can heave yourself out of the water and flip back upright while remaining seated in the canoe at all times.) Of course, I deliberately refrained from revealing what the item was; they had no idea that "the item" was something you travelled in, much less know what I meant by "rolling", and their cluelessness in their responses was laughable.
Every time they would respond asking me for my address and phone, and every time I would insist that they answer my questions about the price and whether they knew how to use "the item". It was great for laughs. After a while, I got bored and stopped. But, boy, lots of potential for mischief there.
As an aside, I was trying to figure out how to ship my kayak to an honest buyer who would send me the money. Some people suggested escrow.com, but I came up with another plan: I would ship the buyer everything except one or two crucial pieces. I would ship the kayak minus the crucial piece, and then wait for payment, and then ship the crucial piece. Before I received payment, the kayak and the crucial piece were equally useless to the buyer and myself, so both of us would be motivated to honestly complete the transaction. As it turned out, I sold to someone who could physically come to my home to pick up the canoe and give me cash, so my scheme was never needed.
The Gibbs free energy equation, G = H - TS, is pronounced "Garlic is Hell without Tartar Sauce"
The link in the parent didn't work. I found the correct link at http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/how1.
Okay, well, Firefox is better than IE already (for starters, I'm using Firefox right now but somehow IE just doesn't work on my Mandrake Linux system), but three hours ago we learn of Firefox crapping out on bogus HTML code where MS IE was demonstrably more robust.
I would like to see these errors fixed in Firefox before it is launched (as v1.0) and before the NYTimes ad, and not only because we want Firefox to be ready to make a good first impression. Fixing these errors also shows me that the Mozilla Dev team is willing to take a realistic view of how good their product is, acknowledge problems, and fix it. Until they do that, I'm not prepared to spend money promoting the product.
I recognize that fixing these HTML parsing errors will take an ungodly amount of time. It will probably mean pushing the release date into December or 2005. But if they don't, MozDev (I mean the Mozilla Development Team) would then be acting like a large corporation: plan the budget two years ahead of time, plan the schedule one year ahead of time, and stick to it no matter what happens "or else senior management will have our heads!" Well, one advantage of non-corporate F/OSS is the agility in revising schedules and the large clout of the technical staff rather than marketing.
Please, MozDev, recognize the problem: Firefox crashes, and MS IE doesn't. Fix it. You are the shining example of F/OSS, the #1 application usable on Windows and F/OSS OS's alike. Don't let the hype and the need to "save face" push you into launching Firefox before it's ready. Microsoft pushed back Longhorn; you can push back FF v1.0.
And lest I sound like an ingrate, Firefox has been an absolutely astounding piece of software that is key to refuting Microsoft's claim that "F/OSS doesn't work". It's exactly for this reason that I don't want it all ruined because Mozilla puts out a full-page ad before it robustly parses improper HTML.
One thing about the KDE desktop I wish would improve: more emphasis on use of the keyboard over using the mouse, so that I don't necessarily need to have a mouse to use the GUI.
When I used Win2k, I could flip open the Start Menu and start a program with a few rapid keypresses: Ctrl-Esc, P, A, P for MS Paint (you have to organize the Start Menu so that each entry starts with a unique letter). You can flip to another window and maximize with Alt-Tab, Alt-Space, X.
With KDE 2.x, you couldn't even select a program with a letter key --either cursor up/down or click with the mouse.
With KDE 3.x, you could now navigate with letter keys --it could tell when you had typed enough of a menu entry to make it uniquely identifiable.
HOWEVER --it wasn't fast enough to catch my keystrokes. For example, setting up my KDE menu to mimic the MS Windows menu, I could type Ctrl-Esc, P, A, P --but I could be finished typing all keystrokes before that danged menu actually popped up on the screen and sluggishly said, "Huhh?? You gonna press a key? I'm waiting for your keybpress you know..." So now I end up having to take my hand off the keyboard to click with the mouse. It's damn annoying.
This is again the case with KDE programs like Krusader, a Norton Commander-like "clone" that is handy enough for me to rely on, but just aggravating enough to be a thorn in my side. It's not officially part of the KDE main package, but it should be --maybe the main KDE developers would pay more attention to the interface part of it.
I have to say that, as GUI-based as MS Windows was, you could do almost everything by keyboard without the mouse. You can't do that with KDE, and I wish I could.
Now for the footnotes:
1. I don't use Windows any more. I've been using Mandrake Linux since v8.1.
2. I don't hate KDE. It has many excellent features such as redefinable keystroke shortcuts. This is the main reason I use KDE; can someone tell me if GNOME has this yet?
3. On using keyboard instead of a mouse: "If you were a *real* geek, you'd use the CLI." Yeah yeah yeah, whatever, I'm sure you get off on ASCII pr0n. There's a place for the GUI, and a place for the mouse, but not necessarily at the same time.
If I could summarize, you are saying that the desktop machine should be configured well and securely so that a firewall is not needed.
To answer your question, a firewall is for damage control when you don't know (or realize too late) that your machine is not perfectly configured. Some program has some vulnerability, or a trojan, or something. You are right --it SHOULD not be this way; but when it just IS, and the trojan starts spamming people or transmitting your private PGP keys onto IRC, the firewall is there to say, "Hey, waitaminnit, something weird is going on here."
A firewall is like a fireman. You hope that it doesn't have to do anything but sit there.
The Linux Hardware Compatibility List at http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php already contains over 1500 products and comments on their compatibility. It's an automated system where people can submit their own entries.
This is not to say that one is better than the other, but for the sake of the Linux community, I hope that we minimize duplication of effort. It would be a pity to have information split between two sites with neither one being authoritative (or tending toward such).
Having said this, objectively is there any particular reason why one would choose the wiki at linux-driver.org to list hardware compatibility? (No argument that drivers themselves can be discussed at linux-driver.org since linuxquestions.org doesn't cover that.) Is there an advantage to it being a wiki rather than a database of forum posts (which is essentially what the linuquestions.org list is)? Is it, for example, easier to automate the retrieval of information from a wiki if one were to (say) dynamically generate/update a Linux hardware database? If not, then I'd say support the older site (which came into being earlier). But if for whatever reason linux-driver.org became more massive, then we should all make that site the one with critical mass. Not trying to be biased --just put all your stuff in one place, wherever it is.
In any case, I hope there will be heavy linking between the two so that people who go to one can easily go to the other.
Slightly OT: for the same reason of avoiding duplication of effort and achieving critical mass, I hope Linux knowledge can be funneled into the forum at linuxquestions.org as well as their wiki (yes, they have a wiki, just not specifically about drivers).
Do these people get paid every time someone happens across the goat.cx page? Geez.
I use a Brompton folding bike http://bromptonbicycle.co.uk/ and don't use a lock. You don't need a lock when the bike can fit under your office chair. The bike comes with me wherever I go, e.g. underneath the shopping cart as I go grocery shopping, etc. I keep it in the trunk of my (compact) car --in fact, it folds small enough that I can fit my wife's Brompton as well as mine in the trunk-- and if I need to go somewhere were parking is a problem, I can park a few blocks away and zip to my destination on the bike.
b ike/
Here's a (coralized) link to my web site showing the bike as it unfolds:
http://dreaming.org.nyud.net:8090/~kwtam/folding/
(as usual, Slashdot has inserted a space into the text...)