had a camera covered by Best Buy warranty, one of those point-and-clicks (Canon Powershot SD400 or something). After a while, something mechanical failed --either the lens barrel wouldn't extend/retract, or the lens cover wouldn't close up. Also the slider switch (to select Photo/Video/Playback) was loose. It was covered by the 4-year warranty, so I went to Best Buy and they took it and sent it back for repair.
After a month, repair dept sent it back to my local store, and I picked it up. It was exactly the same: mechanical failure, loose slider switch. I showed the staff at Best Buy, that it was malfunctioning and I hadn't even walked out of the store after picking up the camera. So they sent it back for repairs a second time.
After another month, repair dept sent it back again. Again it was exactly the same, so I told the staff, WTF?? THey said they'd check. After a while, someone called and said, the repair dept could tell that I had damaged the camera, so the repair wasn't covered. What!? I spent almost an hour on the phone with some Best Buy headquarters person, saying, Hey, I just sent it back a 2nd time after having gotten it back from your repair department, and the 1st time there was no mention of damage, so it must have been the repair department that damaged it! (I was confident that it had not been I who damaged it.) The guy said that just because they send it back the first time it doesn't mean that they guarantee that it's in good condition, so it was perfectly valid to say that the 2nd time it was in crappy condition because it was already that way when they sent it back the 1st time.
I said, fine, what about the slider switch that was loose? The guy said, it was already loose, as I had given in my statement the first time I sent it in. That's when it struck me: if I had *NOT* told them about the slider switch, then *THEY* would have been responsible for fixing it since it would seem that they had damaged it during the repair process.
It was maddening, but finally I found a reason to send it back (I remember now: the first time the lens had gotten stuck in the retracted position, and now I could say that it was stuck in the extended position) and it went back. Of course it came back unrepaired, and I ranted and raved at the local Best Buy, saying that I had been missing my camera for 3 months now (in fact, it was a big deal since we had a birth in the family and I had wanted to take pictures). The local staff quietly upgraded to --well, an equivalent camera, but of course the model number had advanced since the 3+ years since buying the malfunctioning camera.
Lesson: if there is more than one thing wrong with the camera, do NOT mention anything else wrong. Gives you more leverage when they try to send it back saying that repair is not covered, and you can say, "What about this here thing wrong? Did you cause this?"
This shows some support on the part of Samsung for open source, although not in the way I had been hoping. I've heard that Samsung is working on a Linux-based phone, apparently with shell. Is this correct? Anyone else confirm/refute this? I heard from what seemed to be a reliable "on the inside" source a year ago, but with the way the economy is going, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very real project that met a very real end.
Any inkling of news would be appreciated, however, since I am hoping I don't have to replace a failing N900 with another N900 bought somewhere over eBay.
"-what do you people do when you travel" Simple - I have an el-cheapo Nokia I use:).
Also - if you know you are going to travel a lot there are CDMA phones that support both CDMA and GSM.
That's what I figured --so the el-cheapo phone you use does have internet connection? Do you use it to sync your files over to the Real Phone or do you end up using the el-cheapo? And what if it doesn't run the software that you're used to on the Real Phone? Or does it not have internet, and then your Real Phone is cut off from the rest of the world? (I mean, I wouldn't have the faintest clue how to rsync an iPhone to home, never mind an el-cheapo Nokia that might not even have bash, let alone rsync.)
I would be interested in CDMA phones which also support GSM --any of them run Linux? (or WebOS or iOS or something decent?)
Agree. Got on TMo to get good service with phones that take a SIM card. (I still don't get phones with no SIM card --what do you people do when you travel? Buy and learn to reconfigure a new phone just because you're in Japan/France/Ecuador for 2 weeks? Keep your non-functioning phone and disappear from civilization?) TMo had no problem with me bringing my unsupported unlocked Treo onto the TMo network, and now I similarly have a N900 which does what I want, as opposed to what the phone's corporate master wants (thank goodness, since Nokia clearly has no idea what N900 owners want).
Here's hoping the deal doesn't go through, or at least that AT&T chokes and crumbles into little customer-oriented pieces.
And, the rest of the phone companies, can you sort of take a look around and realize that global compatibility and SIM card use is a good thing? Thanks.
Just to let people be aware, there has been significant controversy (as far as that is possible in China, and also in overseas communities such as the Chinese community in the USA) in terms of handling of the disaster.
For example, soon after the train crash, the crashed trains were moved off the elevated rail and (literally) buried "to let the other trains run on time"; this was criticized as being too early a move (10 h after the crash), without a thorough enough search for survivors. Reporters were barred from the scene, and pleas from the families of the train crash victims to search through the wreckage were ignored. Indeed, 20h after the crash, one of the uniforms (acting against his orders) was able to locate a 2-yr-old girl still alive; she has been transported to the hospital and is now in good condition, and people are trying to figure out how to tell her that her parents both died in the crash. In general, officials from the train lines have been stonewalling, but have been apparently quite forthcoming with compensation money for the families.
It seems suspicious to me: are they trying to cover up something?
the praising reviews that may have been real, but gave no real information about the product. "CAME in 2 dAYS! Thanks amazon, can't wait to try this out!"
Agree. Also, there are too many reviews by people who have only used their product for less than a week, and YOU CAN'T TELL WHICH ONE THESE ARE (unless they state so). "I've played with this thing for one whole day now! FIVE STARS!!!!"
I would much rather have reviews from people who have used the thing for 3 months, to see if there are any late-showing quirks, batteries that fail after a few weeks, fragile components, customer support issues, etc.
sounds like the best course of action is to say you forgot your passphrase. Problem solved.
There is a similar technique which makes it harder for the attacker.
When asked to decrypt the laptop, explain that you use a keyfile instead of / in addition to a passphrase. The keyfile is stored in a USB thumb drive / SD card. When your laptop was seized, you destroyed the file/card/drive, so now no one will be able to decrypt, not even yourself. (Or, you gave it to someone outside the jurisdiction of the court, who has been instructed not to release it back to you for two years or something similar.) Let them stew.
In reality, everything you have said so far is the absolute truth. What you choose not to mention, however, is that you have already memorized the contents of the keyfile and can reproduce the file from memory. It could be something as banal as a 2-line text file containing #!/bin/sh and the next line PATH="${PATH##*:}:${PATH%:*}" or ls -a "$@" or something similar. So you're not really in danger of losing the encryption key.
This would work great for those airport inspections.
"Why do you have an encrypted volume on your laptop? Decrypt it so I can find an excuse to confiscate it."
"Sorry, that encrypted volume is for work, decrypted only by a keyfile on my USB key, but since I'm here on vacation, I didn't bring my USB key. No keyfile, no decryption."
Nepomuk doesn't search anything. Strigi does. Nepomuk works without Strigi.
Ah, someone who is informed about Nepomuk and Strigi ! Could you please help me take advantage of these two features? How do I, as a semi-geek user, use it on a day-to-day basis? What do these features do? I posted a semi-humourous posting asking for help, and the responses I got were essentially "we're just as clueless as you".
What does Nepomuk do? Can I choose not to install it? What happens if it's not present? If I'm not using Kmail, for example, does that mean I don't need Nepomuk?
Strigi, I hear, is for searching, but I am also not sure how to use it. I tried it once, when I was searching for a file I desperately needed, but it wasn't as intuitive as I hoped. I remembered only 3 things about the file: it was a PDF file, the file contents contained something about my previous job, and I had some idea which directories the file was possibly in. I brought up the Strigi search interface and found nothing, spent a few minutes experimenting with the search using files which I knew about just so I could tell what Strigi did (I didn't succeed), and ended up scripting a grep to look for the file I wanted.
* I can hit the "Windows" key, type a few letters, and instantly be able to launch the application I want, or open the file I'm looking for
* At a glance, I can see which applications are open regardless of which desktop I happen to be in
* I can quickly see an image of, then jump to any of the open instances of a running application
* I can quickly create custom launchers that "bundle" different applications as needed
?? Wtf? You mean you weren't able to do this before? All four of what you describe I was doing since v10.04. Granted, I was using KDE on Kubuntu, but presumably GNOME would have had its equivalent, no? (I really do want to know, since it would make a difference in my migration plans to GNOME.)
Many a time I searched for a replacement for GDM, but none of the alternatives provide the switch-user feature that I need (that is, the ability to have multiple users logged in at once, with an option to switch from one to another; useful for when there are more users than machines at home).
Not sure what you mean. I have been using KDE on Kubuntu (sticking with 10.04 Long-Term Support edition; I don't want to fritter my time on learning to handle a new user interface every 6 months) and they have user switching, either through the main menu, or as I've learned to do it, the KRunner interface (Alt-F2 by default --I redefined mine to be Meta-Space; then type "switch " and hit Enter). It is also an option on the login screen, or, as described in a sibling post, you can just hit Ctrl-Alt-F8, Ctrl-Alt-F9, etc.
In fact, I routinely do this on the "public" guest computer at home so any visitor can use the computer, and yet I can easily switch to a private account for managing finances, etc. to which I don't want our visitors to have access.
Perhaps you find that user switching for the GNOME Display Manager is easier to use, or more intuitive for you, which is fine, but it would be incorrect to say that KDE does not have "the ability to have multiple users logged in at once, with an option to switch from one to another".
Speaking of Nepomuk / Akonadi / Strigi, I'm going to jump in with a not-very-on-topic question about the KDE system that's going to display my ignorance:
What the heck is Nepomuk / Akonadi / Strigi, and how does it affect me as a user? Every explanation I've found has been too abstract to relate to.
As far as I can tell, "Akonadi" = "You must have MySQL installed or else KDE is completely unusable. Oops, sorry if you already had a running MySQL system set up --we're going to take it over now."
"Strigi" = "If you pre-label all your 'family heirloom-related' files as 'family heirloom-related', then KDE will be able to identify them as 'family heirloom-related' even if the file name is a mundane-seeming 'test.txt'. Impressive, huh? Unfortunately, if you don't pre-label your files, then this feature is completely useless. Go use grep instead if you're looking for info within the files."
"Nepomuk" = "No bloody idea. What the heck is this, anyway?"
I'm being facetious, of course, but can someone please explain how these buzzword-loaded features make KDE easier to use for me? Thanks.
While I'd like WINE to be installed by default, I realize that is not always going to be the case. And while I'd like Linux to automatically recognize.exe files and offer to do the right thing (install WINE and run them in response to user command) I recognize it isn't there yet. But at very least I figured I could walk him through opening the package manager GUI, searching for WINE, and installing it. No such luck, as WINE only had a placeholder in the package manager. So on to the Website and click the link for Ubuntu... oops, Mint despite claiming compatibility doesn't know what to do with that. So it's back to apt on the command line which leaves him totally confused and out of his element and afraid to install software on his new machine. So one to the Windows software. Stick the CD in the drive and double click the exe. Nope no luck. it won't run claiming it needs to be executable. So I click properties and try to make it executable. Nope, fails at that too. Back to the command line to find out the non-existent metadata would be stored on the CD so it needs to be copied locally first. Finally it is installed, but no shortcut is in the launch menu and I have to dig through the WINE files to find a shortcut and put it on the desktop. And after all that, WINE can't find the USB ports for some reason. That is when we gave up for the night and started heavily drinking.
My point here... I don't think it is very usable for the home user yet and there are a lot of really obvious areas for improvement.
Sounds like a specific distro, Mint, is not very usable for the home user yet. Your points were: - WINE is not installed by default - WINE is not automatically installed by default - WINE was not listed in the package manager - WINE for a different distro was not installable on your distro - Windows CD was not recognized as executable - installing Windows program failed to install a WINE shortcut
I would like to claim that the majority of these would be solved by Ubuntu, but perhaps someone else can verify my claim. I use Kubuntu; not sure how different that is wrt WINE. I don't recall having to install WINE; certainly it would be installable by package manager. You wouldn't have that distro incompatibility problem --I guess Linux Mint is Ubuntu based, but not sure how compatible that makes it. As for installing Windows software, I am not as familiar, but certainly it automatically added shortcuts to my "Start" menu (not to my desktop, but I seem to recall that was because I asked it not to clutter my desktop with start shortcuts).
My point here is that we should be addressing specific distros. I think Ubuntu probably has the best first-time-user experience, but even they as well as other distros are finding that it takes a lot of work to get things to work smoothly, hence my own preference of sticking to large distros with critical mass rather than smaller distros that may scratch an itch but not have the manpower to address issues that are minor to developers but significant to first time users.
Whatever they do with the April 1 thing today, I'm just grateful that we won't have to suffer through 6 stories of PONIES!!! this year. Crap, that was crummy! <shudders at the memory>
I created a Facdebook page with deliberately misleading and contradictory information, and put on my Facebook page very clearly that this was designed to be misleading, just so Facebook wouldn't rely so much on its info to datamine. I asked a bunch of randomly selected total strangers to friend me on Facebook --and some did.
Do you read every word?... I've read the clauses... but... I found it generally worthless. If you look at nearly every such contract, you'd note that they reserve the right to change the 'agreement' in any fashion at any time, while trying to lock you in like chattel.
On this subject, I wanted to mention my quick script to check for subtle changes in text that you see often, such as Terms & Conditions that pop up every time you use a frequently-used Web service. It will alert you to small changes that you might not otherwise notice because you habitually click on the "I Agree To These Terms And Conditions" button without going through all the text each time. Simply select the text and copy to the clipboard, and then run the script.
Just a note that the script was done quite a while ago and is rather poorly written. It works with KDE 3 (I've since upgraded to KDE 4). Sometime "Real Soon Now" I'll get around to: - replacing the clipboard with "xclip" which seems to work for both the KDE 4 and GNOME clipboards - making variable names not ALLCAPS - rewriting the option detection so it doesn't have to use grep just to detect cmd-line options - replacing backticks with $( ) - etc. etc. etc.
iEYEABECAAYFAk16Li4ACgkQLnc9OVO/yZ5mVQCgnj+JeGJfZKfTMO/0mgm+dctH 8Y0Anj/lxmXnnnGgtJJyRAn7LT+BZLOe =1LN6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- This is the GPG signature of the text with all spaces, tabs, newlines and other non-printable characters removed. To check validity of this signature, put the plain text into PlainTextFile, and the signature (including beginning and end lines) into SignatureFile, and use this command:
tr -cd [:graph:] < PlainTextFile | gpg --verify SignatureFile -
You realize that's a good thing from a business perspective, right? Many companies spend millions of dollars trying to coin phrases like that in the general public... Kinda like how the word Google is synonymous with a general search nowadays - its the de facto standard.
Apropos of this, take a look at this hilarious YouTube parody produced by CollegeHumor, supposedly an ad to promote Microsoft's Bing search engine, which keeps using "google" as a generic search term. "You can google lots of things with Bing!" ROTFLMAO.
iEYEABECAAYFAk1w/uMACgkQLnc9OVO/yZ4itgCbBn4Sko6XFUUiNhHx9d9yi820 JUwAnikURH8Lz1H+IXB8iIrJikC4raCa =NyoU -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- This is the GPG signature of the text with all spaces, tabs, newlines and other non-printable characters removed. To check validity of this signature, put the plain text into PlainTextFile, and the signature (including beginning and end lines) into SignatureFile, and use this command:
tr -cd [:graph:] PlainTextFile | gpg --verify SignatureFile -
You said: "Do they really strip the meta-information? I was under the impression that if you didn't strip it yourself before uploading, everyone could see where you were when you took the photos."
Well, even if they said they did, would you believe them?
iEYEABECAAYFAk1wXzwACgkQLnc9OVO/yZ6HwwCeNMxI+FsxudCxpo0J3tYKyKsl IPQAn2l/SOLLX6FLisvu4od4oxO+z+L/ =AG3j -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- This is the GPG signature of the text with all spaces, tabs, newlines and other non-printable characters removed. To check validity of this signature, put the plain text into PlainTextFile, and the signature (including beginning and end lines) into SignatureFile, and use this command:
tr -cd [:graph:] PlainTextFile | gpg --verify SignatureFile -
Hmm... okay, this GPG signature seems really clumsy...
If Microsoft observe open source licenses and open up their proprietary formats then they've every right to get involved - and let's face it, they've not yet started a patent war with Linux that everyone has been expecting.
No, instead they started an "open format" war by using underhanded practices to ram through a non-open standard under an "open" banner that is not really open due to proprietary intellectual property.
So, I disagree with you and believe that there is reason to be mistrusting.
I note that stances of Slashdotters on Microsoft are either "Microsoft must be up to no good" (if they take into account Microsoft's past) or "Microsoft is not currently doing anything wrong with this" (if they choose not to consider Microsoft's history). No one is saying, "Wow, Microsoft is doing a good thing!"
For what it's worth, in Gianugo Rabellino's shoes, I would have done the same thing --get paid by Microsoft to do something I enjoy anyway (work with Open Source), do my best to affect Microsoft culture for the better, aid my fellow OSS supporters in the community where I can, and expect that I will be leaving Microsoft after a short while because I refuse to bend over for Microsoft. Then they can waste their money on some other Open Source supporter.
You mean by randomly trying every medication they have in the hospital and doing every test procedure they can do he finally stumbles upon it. Which is a little less cool than using a magical cane.
Took the words right out of my mouth.
I hadn't seen the TV show House M.D. till last week. As a physician, I had been seeing patients from time to time comment about this TV show, so finally I got around to watching a few episodes.
I didn't get it at all. This guy is supposed to be some unpersonable irascible doctor who somehow makes up for it by being such a brilliant diagnostician that other doctors are forced to come to him. WTF??? How do you pick up diagnostic clues without having the patient warm up to you so you can understand the details of his/her illness in context? Not to mention that the systematic testing and narrowing in on diagnostic possibilities, that process which on this TV show is supposed to be what makes Dr.House so brilliant, is what all of us doctors do on a daily basis anyway.
If there were a "House, I.T." equivalent, it would feature some supposedly brilliant I.T. tech support guy who refused to touch the computer. His underlings would overcome this deficiency by reading the dmesg logs to him word for word, and then House would come up with some purportedly brilliant insight like "We need to upgrade the video drivers!" at which point all would fall on their knees in fawning worship, chanting "No one else would ever have been able to figure that out!"... I guess to be on-topic, I should talk about this device. Yes, it's nice to have a portable multilingual multimedia medical dictionary around, but this device is hardly newsworthy. Guess what? My Nokia N900 smartphone running Python, Bash and SSHd is also capable of implementing a system to overcome language barriers! It's called... making a phone call to an interpreter service! (Also available on non-Linux smartphones, non-smart cellphones, and non-cell phones.)
Day of disillusionment. Might as well go all the way. Okay, Slashdot, tell me about how new Electronic Medical Record policies will cure my patients.
rolling = fishing, dragging a large net to see what they can catch. Not the internet version of trolling.
What exactly did you think the "internet version of trolling" was? Hint: although people who engage in trolling on Internet forums (ie. casting a dragnet to fish for responses from other forum members) are called trolls and even described as ugly monsters living under bridges, the reference to these bridge-related monsters are just figures of speech and are not related to deliberately provoking a response from a wide range of people to try to catch some prey.
I understand this is a US-centric site but to say something isn't truly international without the US is just dumb.
My thoughts exactly. When it said
With Discovery's presence, the ISS becomes a truly 'international' space station. This is the first time spacecraft from the United States, Russia, Europe and Japan have all docked simultaneously, NASA said.
I thought, "Yeah, when it was just Russia, Europe and Japan, that wasn't international at all. They were just different states within the large country of non-USA. </sarcasm>
This is in contrast to when I visited the USA when I was younger, when I'd hear that some sports team or engineering design team was "truly international" meaning that there was a Canadian or two on the otherwise American team.
Agree with above. Got my N900 almost a year ago. It's a love-hate relationship.
The N900 is unique; there's nothing else like it. I have to have it. [1]
Having said that, the UI is just crap. To be more specific, there are so many ways in which a little effort would have enhanced the user experience so significantly, but this effort was not made. It gives the whole feeling of the software having been rushed to market.
In short, I hate my N900 that I need. The moment someone else comes out with a Linux phone/computer that gives me vim and bash, I'm dumping the N900.
Here are some examples of how the N900 is a failure:
- There is a physical slide-out keyboard; this is good, and many people prefer this. If you object to it, technically you could choose to use the on-screen keyboard (OSK). But the OSK is crap, has a non-standard layout, and takes up all of the screen. Not just 50% or 80%, but ALL of it. You can't use it anywhere where you'd have to edit more than one line of text.[2]
- the Phone app (yes, the one app you must have on the N900 if you want to make a phone call) does not have a digital keypad on the main screen. You have to tap on the "I want to display a keypad" button to bring it up, in which case the "hang up" and "mute" buttons disappear. Whoever thought of putting the keypad on a separate window? It's not like there's no real estate on the main phone screen, which is 50% empty (it just shows the number you're dialing, and four buttons: "hang up", "answer call", "mute", and "switch to the display with the keypad").
- scrollbars. You see the scrollbar; you just can't manipulate it. If you're scrolling through a long list, you can't just slide the scrollbar control to near the end of the bar. You have to flick your finger up the middle of the screen to visibly scroll down the list, watching all the entries fly by at the speed of your fingerflick. It's lots of fun when I have to scroll down to near the bottom of my list of 2500+ contacts. (And, before anyone asks whether I brought this on myself by having a whole bunch of spurious contacts, yes, I know every one of those contacts personally.)
- You have to hold the phone sideways (landscape orientation). Ah, I can already hear indignant N900 owners saying, "But there is a landscape mode, triggered by the accelerometer sensing that you've turned the phone vertically." Well, the landscape mode is crippled. For starters, many of the apps don't recognize landscape mode; of the ones that do, most just try to shoehorn everything into a narrower screen.
For example, the Ovi Maps navigation software always orients the display so that your location is near the centre of the map, while your route is shown as being in front of you. Unfortunately, in standard landscape mode this means that there is only about 2cm between your location and the top edge of the screen to display the next portion of the route you'd have to take, while there's about a 8cm width on the horizontal screen displaying useless information about what's to the left or right. (Why would I want to know about that? I want to know where I need to go, not what's on either side of me.)
The ingenious Slashdotter would think, "I know! I'll just rotate the screen so that it is oriented vertically!" Sadly for you, the geniuses at Nokia have perfected a way to foil your ingenuity. When you rotate the screen, the display reorganizes itself to use only the uppermost 60% of the screen, leaving the lower 40% of the screen completely black. By the way, because the screen is now narrower, there is not enough room to fit in all the menu/screen controls/etc.
- For those of you who would like to blame the app developers for not properly coding for a re-orientable screen configuration (yeah, right, Ovi Maps was coded by this fly-by-night mom's basement developer called, ummmm, *NOKIA*), what about this: the status bar is broken in portrait mode. Th
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up.
had a camera covered by Best Buy warranty, one of those point-and-clicks (Canon Powershot SD400 or something). After a while, something mechanical failed --either the lens barrel wouldn't extend/retract, or the lens cover wouldn't close up. Also the slider switch (to select Photo/Video/Playback) was loose. It was covered by the 4-year warranty, so I went to Best Buy and they took it and sent it back for repair.
After a month, repair dept sent it back to my local store, and I picked it up. It was exactly the same: mechanical failure, loose slider switch. I showed the staff at Best Buy, that it was malfunctioning and I hadn't even walked out of the store after picking up the camera. So they sent it back for repairs a second time.
After another month, repair dept sent it back again. Again it was exactly the same, so I told the staff, WTF?? THey said they'd check. After a while, someone called and said, the repair dept could tell that I had damaged the camera, so the repair wasn't covered. What!? I spent almost an hour on the phone with some Best Buy headquarters person, saying, Hey, I just sent it back a 2nd time after having gotten it back from your repair department, and the 1st time there was no mention of damage, so it must have been the repair department that damaged it! (I was confident that it had not been I who damaged it.) The guy said that just because they send it back the first time it doesn't mean that they guarantee that it's in good condition, so it was perfectly valid to say that the 2nd time it was in crappy condition because it was already that way when they sent it back the 1st time.
I said, fine, what about the slider switch that was loose? The guy said, it was already loose, as I had given in my statement the first time I sent it in. That's when it struck me: if I had *NOT* told them about the slider switch, then *THEY* would have been responsible for fixing it since it would seem that they had damaged it during the repair process.
It was maddening, but finally I found a reason to send it back (I remember now: the first time the lens had gotten stuck in the retracted position, and now I could say that it was stuck in the extended position) and it went back. Of course it came back unrepaired, and I ranted and raved at the local Best Buy, saying that I had been missing my camera for 3 months now (in fact, it was a big deal since we had a birth in the family and I had wanted to take pictures). The local staff quietly upgraded to --well, an equivalent camera, but of course the model number had advanced since the 3+ years since buying the malfunctioning camera.
Lesson: if there is more than one thing wrong with the camera, do NOT mention anything else wrong. Gives you more leverage when they try to send it back saying that repair is not covered, and you can say, "What about this here thing wrong? Did you cause this?"
Maddening.
This shows some support on the part of Samsung for open source, although not in the way I had been hoping. I've heard that Samsung is working on a Linux-based phone, apparently with shell. Is this correct? Anyone else confirm/refute this? I heard from what seemed to be a reliable "on the inside" source a year ago, but with the way the economy is going, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very real project that met a very real end.
Any inkling of news would be appreciated, however, since I am hoping I don't have to replace a failing N900 with another N900 bought somewhere over eBay.
That's what I figured --so the el-cheapo phone you use does have internet connection? Do you use it to sync your files over to the Real Phone or do you end up using the el-cheapo? And what if it doesn't run the software that you're used to on the Real Phone? Or does it not have internet, and then your Real Phone is cut off from the rest of the world? (I mean, I wouldn't have the faintest clue how to rsync an iPhone to home, never mind an el-cheapo Nokia that might not even have bash, let alone rsync.)
I would be interested in CDMA phones which also support GSM --any of them run Linux? (or WebOS or iOS or something decent?)
Agree. Got on TMo to get good service with phones that take a SIM card. (I still don't get phones with no SIM card --what do you people do when you travel? Buy and learn to reconfigure a new phone just because you're in Japan/France/Ecuador for 2 weeks? Keep your non-functioning phone and disappear from civilization?) TMo had no problem with me bringing my unsupported unlocked Treo onto the TMo network, and now I similarly have a N900 which does what I want, as opposed to what the phone's corporate master wants (thank goodness, since Nokia clearly has no idea what N900 owners want).
Here's hoping the deal doesn't go through, or at least that AT&T chokes and crumbles into little customer-oriented pieces.
And, the rest of the phone companies, can you sort of take a look around and realize that global compatibility and SIM card use is a good thing? Thanks.
If you are looking for references, it's all over the news, at least the Chinese news. Here are a handful that I easily pulled off Google News:
http://in.reuters.com/article/2011/07/30/idINIndia-58534820110730
http://www.christianpost.com/news/china-train-crash-social-media-users-allege-cover-up-52793/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/25/us-china-train-censorship-idUSTRE76O1IG20110725
http://mg.co.za/article/2011-07-29-anger-mounts-as-families-mourn-china-train-crash-victims/
http://www.3news.co.nz/Toddler-found-alive-in-China-train-crash/tabid/417/articleID/219948/Default.aspx
Just to let people be aware, there has been significant controversy (as far as that is possible in China, and also in overseas communities such as the Chinese community in the USA) in terms of handling of the disaster.
For example, soon after the train crash, the crashed trains were moved off the elevated rail and (literally) buried "to let the other trains run on time"; this was criticized as being too early a move (10 h after the crash), without a thorough enough search for survivors. Reporters were barred from the scene, and pleas from the families of the train crash victims to search through the wreckage were ignored. Indeed, 20h after the crash, one of the uniforms (acting against his orders) was able to locate a 2-yr-old girl still alive; she has been transported to the hospital and is now in good condition, and people are trying to figure out how to tell her that her parents both died in the crash. In general, officials from the train lines have been stonewalling, but have been apparently quite forthcoming with compensation money for the families.
It seems suspicious to me: are they trying to cover up something?
Agree. Also, there are too many reviews by people who have only used their product for less than a week, and YOU CAN'T TELL WHICH ONE THESE ARE (unless they state so). "I've played with this thing for one whole day now! FIVE STARS!!!!"
I would much rather have reviews from people who have used the thing for 3 months, to see if there are any late-showing quirks, batteries that fail after a few weeks, fragile components, customer support issues, etc.
No one's mentioned this so far, so I'll provide this hilarious youtube link to an ad that's purportedly for Bing but slyly hypes Google everywhere.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYVCk10AzS0
My favourite quote: "So, just google it with Bing. That's 'G-O-O-G-L-E' it with Bing."
There is a similar technique which makes it harder for the attacker.
When asked to decrypt the laptop, explain that you use a keyfile instead of / in addition to a passphrase. The keyfile is stored in a USB thumb drive / SD card. When your laptop was seized, you destroyed the file/card/drive, so now no one will be able to decrypt, not even yourself. (Or, you gave it to someone outside the jurisdiction of the court, who has been instructed not to release it back to you for two years or something similar.) Let them stew.
In reality, everything you have said so far is the absolute truth. What you choose not to mention, however, is that you have already memorized the contents of the keyfile and can reproduce the file from memory. It could be something as banal as a 2-line text file containing #!/bin/sh and the next line PATH="${PATH##*:}:${PATH%:*}" or ls -a "$@" or something similar. So you're not really in danger of losing the encryption key.
This would work great for those airport inspections.
"Why do you have an encrypted volume on your laptop? Decrypt it so I can find an excuse to confiscate it."
"Sorry, that encrypted volume is for work, decrypted only by a keyfile on my USB key, but since I'm here on vacation, I didn't bring my USB key. No keyfile, no decryption."
Ah, someone who is informed about Nepomuk and Strigi ! Could you please help me take advantage of these two features? How do I, as a semi-geek user, use it on a day-to-day basis? What do these features do? I posted a semi-humourous posting asking for help, and the responses I got were essentially "we're just as clueless as you".
What does Nepomuk do? Can I choose not to install it? What happens if it's not present? If I'm not using Kmail, for example, does that mean I don't need Nepomuk?
Strigi, I hear, is for searching, but I am also not sure how to use it. I tried it once, when I was searching for a file I desperately needed, but it wasn't as intuitive as I hoped. I remembered only 3 things about the file: it was a PDF file, the file contents contained something about my previous job, and I had some idea which directories the file was possibly in. I brought up the Strigi search interface and found nothing, spent a few minutes experimenting with the search using files which I knew about just so I could tell what Strigi did (I didn't succeed), and ended up scripting a grep to look for the file I wanted.
So ... what should I be doing? How do I use it?
(I won't even get started on Akonadi.)
?? Wtf? You mean you weren't able to do this before? All four of what you describe I was doing since v10.04. Granted, I was using KDE on Kubuntu, but presumably GNOME would have had its equivalent, no? (I really do want to know, since it would make a difference in my migration plans to GNOME.)
Not sure what you mean. I have been using KDE on Kubuntu (sticking with 10.04 Long-Term Support edition; I don't want to fritter my time on learning to handle a new user interface every 6 months) and they have user switching, either through the main menu, or as I've learned to do it, the KRunner interface (Alt-F2 by default --I redefined mine to be Meta-Space; then type "switch " and hit Enter). It is also an option on the login screen, or, as described in a sibling post, you can just hit Ctrl-Alt-F8, Ctrl-Alt-F9, etc.
In fact, I routinely do this on the "public" guest computer at home so any visitor can use the computer, and yet I can easily switch to a private account for managing finances, etc. to which I don't want our visitors to have access.
Perhaps you find that user switching for the GNOME Display Manager is easier to use, or more intuitive for you, which is fine, but it would be incorrect to say that KDE does not have "the ability to have multiple users logged in at once, with an option to switch from one to another".
Speaking of Nepomuk / Akonadi / Strigi, I'm going to jump in with a not-very-on-topic question about the KDE system that's going to display my ignorance:
What the heck is Nepomuk / Akonadi / Strigi, and how does it affect me as a user? Every explanation I've found has been too abstract to relate to.
As far as I can tell, "Akonadi" = "You must have MySQL installed or else KDE is completely unusable. Oops, sorry if you already had a running MySQL system set up --we're going to take it over now."
"Strigi" = "If you pre-label all your 'family heirloom-related' files as 'family heirloom-related', then KDE will be able to identify them as 'family heirloom-related' even if the file name is a mundane-seeming 'test.txt'. Impressive, huh? Unfortunately, if you don't pre-label your files, then this feature is completely useless. Go use grep instead if you're looking for info within the files."
"Nepomuk" = "No bloody idea. What the heck is this, anyway?"
I'm being facetious, of course, but can someone please explain how these buzzword-loaded features make KDE easier to use for me? Thanks.
Sounds like a specific distro, Mint, is not very usable for the home user yet. Your points were:
- WINE is not installed by default
- WINE is not automatically installed by default
- WINE was not listed in the package manager
- WINE for a different distro was not installable on your distro
- Windows CD was not recognized as executable
- installing Windows program failed to install a WINE shortcut
I would like to claim that the majority of these would be solved by Ubuntu, but perhaps someone else can verify my claim. I use Kubuntu; not sure how different that is wrt WINE. I don't recall having to install WINE; certainly it would be installable by package manager. You wouldn't have that distro incompatibility problem --I guess Linux Mint is Ubuntu based, but not sure how compatible that makes it. As for installing Windows software, I am not as familiar, but certainly it automatically added shortcuts to my "Start" menu (not to my desktop, but I seem to recall that was because I asked it not to clutter my desktop with start shortcuts).
My point here is that we should be addressing specific distros. I think Ubuntu probably has the best first-time-user experience, but even they as well as other distros are finding that it takes a lot of work to get things to work smoothly, hence my own preference of sticking to large distros with critical mass rather than smaller distros that may scratch an itch but not have the manpower to address issues that are minor to developers but significant to first time users.
Whatever they do with the April 1 thing today, I'm just grateful that we won't have to suffer through 6 stories of PONIES!!! this year. Crap, that was crummy! <shudders at the memory>
I created a Facdebook page with deliberately misleading and contradictory information, and put on my Facebook page very clearly that this was designed to be misleading, just so Facebook wouldn't rely so much on its info to datamine. I asked a bunch of randomly selected total strangers to friend me on Facebook --and some did.
On this subject, I wanted to mention my quick script to check for subtle changes in text that you see often, such as Terms & Conditions that pop up every time you use a frequently-used Web service. It will alert you to small changes that you might not otherwise notice because you habitually click on the "I Agree To These Terms And Conditions" button without going through all the text each time. Simply select the text and copy to the clipboard, and then run the script.
It's in my journal entry. I use it several times a month.
Just a note that the script was done quite a while ago and is rather poorly written. It works with KDE 3 (I've since upgraded to KDE 4). Sometime "Real Soon Now" I'll get around to:
- replacing the clipboard with "xclip" which seems to work for both the KDE 4 and GNOME clipboards
- making variable names not ALLCAPS
- rewriting the option detection so it doesn't have to use grep just to detect cmd-line options
- replacing backticks with $( )
- etc. etc. etc.
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEABECAAYFAk16Li4ACgkQLnc9OVO/yZ5mVQCgnj+JeGJfZKfTMO/0mgm+dctH
8Y0Anj/lxmXnnnGgtJJyRAn7LT+BZLOe
=1LN6
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
This is the GPG signature of the text with all spaces, tabs, newlines and other non-printable characters removed.
To check validity of this signature, put the plain text into PlainTextFile, and the signature (including beginning and end lines) into SignatureFile, and use this command:
tr -cd [:graph:] < PlainTextFile | gpg --verify SignatureFile -
Apropos of this, take a look at this hilarious YouTube parody produced by CollegeHumor, supposedly an ad to promote Microsoft's Bing search engine, which keeps using "google" as a generic search term. "You can google lots of things with Bing!" ROTFLMAO.
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEABECAAYFAk1w/uMACgkQLnc9OVO/yZ4itgCbBn4Sko6XFUUiNhHx9d9yi820
JUwAnikURH8Lz1H+IXB8iIrJikC4raCa
=NyoU
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
This is the GPG signature of the text with all spaces, tabs, newlines and other non-printable characters removed.
To check validity of this signature, put the plain text into PlainTextFile, and the signature (including beginning and end lines) into SignatureFile, and use this command:
tr -cd [:graph:] PlainTextFile | gpg --verify SignatureFile -
You said: "Do they really strip the meta-information? I was under the impression that if you didn't strip it yourself before uploading, everyone could see where you were when you took the photos."
Well, even if they said they did, would you believe them?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEABECAAYFAk1wXzwACgkQLnc9OVO/yZ6HwwCeNMxI+FsxudCxpo0J3tYKyKsl
IPQAn2l/SOLLX6FLisvu4od4oxO+z+L/
=AG3j
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
This is the GPG signature of the text with all spaces, tabs, newlines and other non-printable characters removed.
To check validity of this signature, put the plain text into PlainTextFile, and the signature (including beginning and end lines) into SignatureFile, and use this command:
tr -cd [:graph:] PlainTextFile | gpg --verify SignatureFile -
Hmm... okay, this GPG signature seems really clumsy...
No, instead they started an "open format" war by using underhanded practices to ram through a non-open standard under an "open" banner that is not really open due to proprietary intellectual property.
So, I disagree with you and believe that there is reason to be mistrusting.
I note that stances of Slashdotters on Microsoft are either "Microsoft must be up to no good" (if they take into account Microsoft's past) or "Microsoft is not currently doing anything wrong with this" (if they choose not to consider Microsoft's history). No one is saying, "Wow, Microsoft is doing a good thing!"
For what it's worth, in Gianugo Rabellino's shoes, I would have done the same thing --get paid by Microsoft to do something I enjoy anyway (work with Open Source), do my best to affect Microsoft culture for the better, aid my fellow OSS supporters in the community where I can, and expect that I will be leaving Microsoft after a short while because I refuse to bend over for Microsoft. Then they can waste their money on some other Open Source supporter.
Took the words right out of my mouth.
I hadn't seen the TV show House M.D. till last week. As a physician, I had been seeing patients from time to time comment about this TV show, so finally I got around to watching a few episodes.
I didn't get it at all. This guy is supposed to be some unpersonable irascible doctor who somehow makes up for it by being such a brilliant diagnostician that other doctors are forced to come to him. WTF??? How do you pick up diagnostic clues without having the patient warm up to you so you can understand the details of his/her illness in context? Not to mention that the systematic testing and narrowing in on diagnostic possibilities, that process which on this TV show is supposed to be what makes Dr.House so brilliant, is what all of us doctors do on a daily basis anyway.
If there were a "House, I.T." equivalent, it would feature some supposedly brilliant I.T. tech support guy who refused to touch the computer. His underlings would overcome this deficiency by reading the dmesg logs to him word for word, and then House would come up with some purportedly brilliant insight like "We need to upgrade the video drivers!" at which point all would fall on their knees in fawning worship, chanting "No one else would ever have been able to figure that out!" ... I guess to be on-topic, I should talk about this device. Yes, it's nice to have a portable multilingual multimedia medical dictionary around, but this device is hardly newsworthy. Guess what? My Nokia N900 smartphone running Python, Bash and SSHd is also capable of implementing a system to overcome language barriers! It's called ... making a phone call to an interpreter service! (Also available on non-Linux smartphones, non-smart cellphones, and non-cell phones.)
Day of disillusionment. Might as well go all the way. Okay, Slashdot, tell me about how new Electronic Medical Record policies will cure my patients.
What exactly did you think the "internet version of trolling" was? Hint: although people who engage in trolling on Internet forums (ie. casting a dragnet to fish for responses from other forum members) are called trolls and even described as ugly monsters living under bridges, the reference to these bridge-related monsters are just figures of speech and are not related to deliberately provoking a response from a wide range of people to try to catch some prey.
My thoughts exactly. When it said
I thought, "Yeah, when it was just Russia, Europe and Japan, that wasn't international at all. They were just different states within the large country of non-USA. </sarcasm>
This is in contrast to when I visited the USA when I was younger, when I'd hear that some sports team or engineering design team was "truly international" meaning that there was a Canadian or two on the otherwise American team.
Agree with above. Got my N900 almost a year ago. It's a love-hate relationship.
The N900 is unique; there's nothing else like it. I have to have it. [1]
Having said that, the UI is just crap. To be more specific, there are so many ways in which a little effort would have enhanced the user experience so significantly, but this effort was not made. It gives the whole feeling of the software having been rushed to market.
In short, I hate my N900 that I need. The moment someone else comes out with a Linux phone/computer that gives me vim and bash, I'm dumping the N900.
Here are some examples of how the N900 is a failure:
- There is a physical slide-out keyboard; this is good, and many people prefer this. If you object to it, technically you could choose to use the on-screen keyboard (OSK). But the OSK is crap, has a non-standard layout, and takes up all of the screen. Not just 50% or 80%, but ALL of it. You can't use it anywhere where you'd have to edit more than one line of text.[2]
- the Phone app (yes, the one app you must have on the N900 if you want to make a phone call) does not have a digital keypad on the main screen. You have to tap on the "I want to display a keypad" button to bring it up, in which case the "hang up" and "mute" buttons disappear. Whoever thought of putting the keypad on a separate window? It's not like there's no real estate on the main phone screen, which is 50% empty (it just shows the number you're dialing, and four buttons: "hang up", "answer call", "mute", and "switch to the display with the keypad").
- scrollbars. You see the scrollbar; you just can't manipulate it. If you're scrolling through a long list, you can't just slide the scrollbar control to near the end of the bar. You have to flick your finger up the middle of the screen to visibly scroll down the list, watching all the entries fly by at the speed of your fingerflick. It's lots of fun when I have to scroll down to near the bottom of my list of 2500+ contacts. (And, before anyone asks whether I brought this on myself by having a whole bunch of spurious contacts, yes, I know every one of those contacts personally.)
- You have to hold the phone sideways (landscape orientation). Ah, I can already hear indignant N900 owners saying, "But there is a landscape mode, triggered by the accelerometer sensing that you've turned the phone vertically." Well, the landscape mode is crippled. For starters, many of the apps don't recognize landscape mode; of the ones that do, most just try to shoehorn everything into a narrower screen.
For example, the Ovi Maps navigation software always orients the display so that your location is near the centre of the map, while your route is shown as being in front of you. Unfortunately, in standard landscape mode this means that there is only about 2cm between your location and the top edge of the screen to display the next portion of the route you'd have to take, while there's about a 8cm width on the horizontal screen displaying useless information about what's to the left or right. (Why would I want to know about that? I want to know where I need to go, not what's on either side of me.)
The ingenious Slashdotter would think, "I know! I'll just rotate the screen so that it is oriented vertically!" Sadly for you, the geniuses at Nokia have perfected a way to foil your ingenuity. When you rotate the screen, the display reorganizes itself to use only the uppermost 60% of the screen, leaving the lower 40% of the screen completely black. By the way, because the screen is now narrower, there is not enough room to fit in all the menu/screen controls/etc.
- For those of you who would like to blame the app developers for not properly coding for a re-orientable screen configuration (yeah, right, Ovi Maps was coded by this fly-by-night mom's basement developer called, ummmm, *NOKIA*), what about this: the status bar is broken in portrait mode. Th