engineering job... a little scarce at least for my skillset (designing FPGAs).
FPGA=Field Programmable Gate Arrays
A type of chip. Logic gates (AND, XOR, NAND etc.) can be reprogrammed on the fly. (As opposed to PGAs, Programmable Gate Arrays, which you can order from the manufacturer, program the way you want them, but then once you install them in the circuit you can't change it. (As opposed to GAs, Gate Arrays, for which you specify the logic and they come from the manufacturer this way.))
I looked for a store in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I could try a Nokia N900 before buying one. Neither T-Mobile, Best Buy, nor RadioShack had one. I guess the closest thing for a U.S. geek is a Motorola Droid on Verizon Wireless or any of several HTC phones on T-Mobile.
I, too, had resigned myself to the fact that the N900 would be a "Newegg-only" type geek product that would never be available in stores in the USA. When I went to Hong Kong last month, though, Nokia stores everywhere were plastered with ads for the N900, and, yes, I got to try one. (They were selling for about US$600+, so cheaper to get from Amazon.com in USA.) The other day I went to Frys Electronics in the south SF Bay area (not the Palo Alto store), and they were selling for $527 (sells for $515 on Amazon).
I haven't travelled to Indiana lately, so I can't help you there; sorry.
I verified that Acrobat Reader on Linux has this vulnerability, but none of KPDF, eVince, or GhostView have this flaw, probably because they all derive from the Poppler library. (So does Okular but I haven't tested it.)
What kind of dumb PDF keyword is "Launch" anyway? Why would anyone implement such a feature? That's almost as retarded as Microsoft's "Your Email Reader Will Launch Any Software On Command" Outlook feature, way back when we were telling all the non-geeks that there is no such thing as an email virus and "Good Times" is a hoax. Good job, Adobe. What's next in your newest PDF spec, the Format Hard Drive feature?
Now a small request. Can you leave off signing your name at the end of your comment? Your name is clearly spelt out at the top of your comment (as your user name). You and a few other people have this habit and it's quite annoying.
Counterpoint to this: I don't agree. The user name fails to stand out and blends in with the block header for that comment, which does not jump out at me. When Bruce (or whoever) signs a name, it is concise and does not have a string of text (user ID, subscriber options, email address, comment #) after it. If it bugs you, just pretend that the name is part of the sig.
Not that I'm telling Bruce not to make the requested change to the way he signs. But I want to speak out that not everyone finds it annoying.
Simple: you print the key in a blank spot on a random page of War and Peace. Good luck to anybody trying to find it without knowing the page number!
Hey, that's a great idea! But I guess if someone flips through the book, s/he'd be able to find it. Here's an additional idea: print various fake keys in addition, on other pages, and only you know which page contains the real key. Although I guess, unless you use a lot of fake keys, the enemy would be able to just try each key in turn. Defense to that: combine the key with a password, so they have to break the password for each key they try: simple with 1 key, but not so simple if they have multiple keys to try.
Have you any idea what's going on in Kubuntu with Operation Timelord? That's as close as you can get to saying 'We're tired of Ubuntu is fucking us, so we're blowing this popstand and doing it right.'
Wow. Your mention of Operation Timelord tells me that people at Kubuntu are responding and gives me hope. It's more informative than the response given by Asay, who should either have at least mentioned Operation Timelord or should get up to speed on the distro that he's representing.
And for those who respond that Kubuntu is not officially supported by Canonical: I think it *is* supported, but if it's not, that's even more reason to disparage Ubuntu. Geez, I hope not. But it gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, the upcoming first Long Term Support release for Kubuntu in almost four years will actually be worth the pain we went through with KDE4. Long live Kubuntu, and hope Canonical gives you the support you need to renew yourselves.
"Scientists Discover Booze That Won't Give You a Hangover"
I thought it said:
"Scientists Discover That Booze Won't Give You a Hangover"
I thought: gee, what great news! There's no such thing as a hangover! I guess those people with after-party headaches had just happened to come down with some sinusitis!
He managed to dodge some questions, in a very unsatisfying manner. Look at this:
with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?" Matt: I'm new to the Ubuntu party, but I believe we already do this with Kubuntu. No?
Uhh, no. Kubuntu is far from a quality release. The questioner was trying to put this politely, Mr. Asay, and you took advantage of his courtesy to dodge the question. Try answering this one: "Why does Kubuntu suck?" Did you grasp the intent behind that one?
they [Ubuntu] put out unstable, buggy, and sometimes flat-out broken KDE packages. Matt: I remember my first taste of the KDE/Gnome divide when I was involved in the Linux Business Office at Novell. It was fractious then and, judging from your "question," it remains so. I don't want to add to this rancorous debate
Second dodge of this question. This is NOT the "which is better, KDE or GNOME?" question. This is the "why does Kubuntu fall short of KDE?" question.
I have been extremely disappointed with the most recent release of Ubuntu, 9.10, as it has been extremely buggy... Do you have any plans to increase quality control in Ubuntu? Matt: We are not complacent about bugs or quality... As for Ubuntu 9.10, I've heard people call it a buggy release but that has not been my personal experience
Slightly different question that you dodged here, now it's not "Why does Kubuntu suck?" but "Why does Ubuntu suck even when KDE is not involved?" I guess you can't twist it into a KDE/GNOME playoff this time. I notice that you've used the good ol' trick of "What problem? I don't have a problem, therefore you don't either." Unfortunately, Mr. Asay, I suspect that I'm not the only one around here who recognizes your fallacious train of thought. Maybe I can entertain you with a joke:
Q: How many Ubuntu-using Matt Asay's does it take to change a light bulb? A: Why do you want to change the light bulb? I have an exact identical copy of your light bulb here, and it works fine for me.
Okay, next question:
I'm really dismayed by the quality of jaunty and (especially) karmic.
Wow! That's the fifth question about the quality of your software. In a list limited to 12 questions voted to the top by a large number of Slashdotters, we spent five of those questions directly asking about quality. Do you get the sense that your community is trying to tell you something, Mr. Asay? Let's see what your response is...
Matt: See my response above
You know, I was hoping for better. I understand that you're new to Linux, and fielding questions from Slashdotters is probably not one of those essential duties that will determine whether or not you get a bonus at the end of the year. But here's your chance to directly reach out to the people who support you, but who are at the same time telling you that you have problems. You could acknowledge the problems, or at least acknowledge our questions, something like "I see that there is a lot of concern about quality. Here are our processes for improving quality: (insert blurb) I'll find out a bit more and post it on the Ubuntu forum." etc. But to say, "I personally have not had problems with my Ubuntu, so I won't answer your question..." geez, we hashed that out on Slashdot before Canonical even existed.
Disclosure of my personal stance: Linux fan, no Microsoft on my computers since 2004. KDE fan, but Kubuntu has been disappointing. Using KDE3 on Kubuntu 8.04, waiting for Lucid (10.04) to come out so I can learn it and not have to chase after a moving target reinstalling every half a year. I believe KDE4 will be a good experience now, but am not going to find out until Lucid.
I'd like to tap the powers of the Slashdot hivemind in seeing whether I might have been roundhouse-kicked by Chuck Norris; ie. has my router been rooted?
A few years ago I bought a Linksys WRT54GL router, in support of it being explicitly Linux compatible (in fact, I bought two of them --I really wanted to send a message to Linksys). I flashed DD-WRT onto it, and had been using it as a usual router through my DSL line, with DHCP, wireless (at first WEP but later WPA), and port forwarding (a high-numbered port would forward from the Internet into the SSH port 22 on my server).
Lately I have had two problems with it: in the past half to one year, I haven't been able to SSH from outside into my server (I can do it within my home network, so the SSH server is not the problem). More recently, I tried to do something-or-other on the net (I think it was play a BZFlag game?) and it said, "Your IP address, , is known to be an open proxy relay so we're not letting you connect."
If I suspect that the problems I've been having are due to malware/crackers, am I being paranoid?
Possible flaws in my security include: I enabled SSHd on the router, password based SSH (but I changed the default password of course), I was broadcasting my wireless SSID (required because my wife's vaunted MS Vista system didn't know how to handle hidden SSID's!), and I was using an old version of DD-WRT that I hadn't bothered to update. (I think it was Build#4000 or something, and the current build is #16000 or something.) However: I only briefly allowed SSH access from the Internet WAN and otherwise limited to SSH access from LAN, and I did not allow router admin access by wireless: the computer would have to be connected by ethernet.
Does DD-WRT have security flaws? Should I switch to something else like OpenWRT or the Tomato Router (or something like that)?
Not a gamer here, but when I first got my own job after grad school, I bought myself a nice fast computer (for that time) and RealMyst as a treat; it was only $10 at the EB discount bin.
There were bugs in the game. In particular, I had quite obviously solved 2 of the puzzles but the gateway wouldn't open (or whatever magical thing was supposed to happen when I solved the puzzle). I checked some walkthroughs to make sure I wasn't missing something.
But RealMyst was very cool. I haven't seen any other version, but I suspect they were static versions of this . RealMyst was immersive --the entire screen was used for the game; there was no legend or status bars or anything other than the game environment. (There was a mouse cursor that could change shape/status, and there were keyboard commands taht opened menus.)
KDE fan here, still hanging on to Kubuntu 8.04 KDE3 for dear life until they can get a LTS Kubuntu out (coming up with 10.04). I think KDE 4.4 should be par with KDE3 now, although it will still have been too freshly hatched for my taste at the time Kubuntu 10.04 comes out --I'm going to wait a couple of months for the patches to come out first.
Meanwhile, though, I don't think either KDE3 or KDE4 Kubuntu are stable enough for the family bigscreen computer, so I will put GNOME back. The only thing that drove me to switch from Ubuntu GNOME to Kubuntu KDE was the inability to specify a networked computer for a file name. Say I want to play a video on SMplayer, but the video's sitting on my laptop computer. I want to be able to specify that the filename is "fish://MyLaptop.MySOHOnet/videos/myvideo.avi" and then the desktop will reach into the laptop and grab the file.
Right now on Ubuntu, I have to go transfer the file from MyLaptop.MySOHOnet/videos/myvideo.avi, and then play it from the local drive temporary copy. Is there any way for GNOME to do what KDE has been doing for ages?
Any help would be appreciated. I figured with your experience of KDE-to-GNOME, you'd be the one to ask.
I recommend trying Krita aswell [sic]...often forgotten, but quite powerful
I've been meaning to try it, so I have two questions for you:
1. How powerful is Krita compared to GIMP? Assuming I get some time to become familiar with it, is there anything GIMP can do that Krita cannot do, or cannot do as well?
2. How easy is it to learn? There are several books out there on using GIMP, like "Grokking the GIMP", but I don't see any about Krita, so I'd have to rely on the UI to learn. (I'm not going to hope for anything useful from the KDE Krita Online Manual, which, from experience, will probably have useless explanations like: "Boogliboo button - this activates the boogliboo feature.")
Bonus question if you know: any difference between KDE 3 Krita and KDE 4 Krita that people should know about?
"... you did authorize it; it is just in very tiny print somewhere on the form you clicked. Smarmy yes; illegal, maybe not. FTFY.
I do want to mention a shell script that might be of interest. It automates the task of looking for subtle changes in Terms and Conditions for those web agreements that you click on for day-to-day banking, etc. After a while, people get used to clicking "Agree" on long pieces of text in tiny scrolling windows every time they access the bank web site or Internet store. Ridiculous! Do you ever see this in physical bricks-and-mortar stores? Do you have to read through the conditions every time you use a credit card?
What if someone changes the text subtly one day, and you've been clicking through daily for the past few months? My script is designed to catch that. Just highlight and copy the text to clipboard and then run the script (you don't even have to paste the text anywhere).
This shell script compares what's in the clipboard to text files in a certain directory; in this case it's ~/Documents/terms_and_conditions. This is where I would store the T&C text from various web sites. When it finds a similar match, it does a diff to look for minor changes. If there is no exact match, it offers to store the copied text in a new text file so you can compare the current version to future versions.
It's at my journal. Hope it helps. It doesn't obviate the need for having to read the Terms & Conditions at least once, but hopefully it will prevent you from being so bored of reading that you skip over every Terms & Conditions text.
Why are you saying Great Library is useless? Is it because there are too few players for you to automatically steal technology if two or more of them have some technology you don't have?
I generally play as one of about 5 players. Great Library is my number 1 goal. I concentrate on science at the expense of everything else. You start with Alphabet, then research Writing. That lets you build (generic) libraries, which increases your research speed; it also lets you build the cheap Diplomat, which has: increased movement (2 instead of 1), no upkeep costs, and you can even steal the other players' units. After you have discovered Writing, you work on Code of Laws. That's all the requirements you need to start researching Literacy. It's remarkably cheap for a Level 2 technology (where Level 0 are the discoveries that have no prerequisites), since both of the Level 1 technologies on which Literacy is based (ie. Writing and Code of Laws) are based on the same Level 0 tech (Alphabet).
Once you have literacy, you can pretty much stop the science and switch all your cities to maximum production to build the Great Library. And remember all those diplomats you were churning out? You can disband them to contribute to building the Great Library. Once you get the Great Library, you just sit back and wait for all the technology to roll in. So you can increase your taxes at the expense of science (so you have enough $$ for all your diplomats to bribe the other players).
After that, you can work on getting the Lighthouse and having your triremes pound the s**t out of the other triremes.
Admittedly, this does require some time for you to develop in peace before encountering other civilizations. I usually use the map generator where each player gets an island of his/her own and has to cross the water on triremes before finding other civilizations.
This is for FreeCiv. Adjust accordingly for Civ2, Civ3, etc.
I'm surprised that Palm Graffiti came in last place, especially by that big of a margin. I used a Palm Pilot extensively for several years, and I could "write" on my Palm Pilot much faster than I could write on pen and paper.
Agree. Palm Graffiti has a major advantage that is often overlooked: you do not need to be looking at your input. Since all the letters are written one on top of the other, you don't need to shift your hand to the next letter position, or see when you have to start a new line, etc.
When I was talking to a person and taking notes, I'd have my eyes on the other person all the time while I stroked and poked my Palm. Inevitably, after a while the person would say, "Are you taking down all of this without looking at the screen?" If in a meeting taking notes, sometimes I'd have my Palm in my left hand, under the table, entering with my left thumb, and my right hand would be free. (That was slower, though.)
It's a different story for the new Graffiti 2 that's on the new Palms, including my Palm Treo (yes it has a keypad, but I installed "Graffiti Anywhere" to access the Graffiti 2 "shortcut" symbol so I can put "shortcut-D-T-S" for the date/time stamp). The Graffiti 2 strokes are supposedly more "intuitive" (see "user friendly" in the Microsoft dictionary, or "dumbed down" in an ordinary dictionary), but some of them use two strokes. Even worse, it doesn't know which letter you want to enter until you have entered the second stroke! I'm talking about the letter T (downstroke, then a separate horizontal stroke) and the letter i (downstroke, then a dot on top) and the letter L (downstroke, then nothing else). So if I want to enter the letter T, I put a downstroke, and then a letter L appears. Then I put a horizontal stroke, and the letter L is deleted (backspace) followed by the letter T.
However, the shortcut macro system aborts if you enter a non-existent shortcut. No shortcut begins with "shortcut-D-L". So if I want to enter "shortcut-D-T-S", I enter "shortcut-D" and then begin entering the letter T with a downstroke. The letter L appears, the system aborts since I had just entered the non-existent "shortcut-D-L" macro, and even when I do the horizontal stroke and the letter L is replaced by T, it's too late. This was the system on the Tungsten Turd that I bought and then quickly resold (forget the exact Tungsten model, but it had the sliding bottom that covered the Graffiti area --who thought this was a good idea again?). My current Graffiti Anywhere on mt Treo 650 doesn't have that problem, thank goodness. But I wish they could go back to the original Graffiti system again. One stroke per letter, non-intuitive except for geeks --but who cares? Everyone else will use the keyboard.
I'm curious why you chose Teeline. Was it just an opportunity that occurred, or did you find it better than Gregg? My mom learned Pitman and my dad learned Gregg, so I chose Gregg (didn't need different thickness strokes, didn't need to write on lined paper); I wasn't aware of other types of shorthand.
But looking at the Wikipedia entry on Teeline, it still looks like Gregg is better: the strokes are more fluidic in Gregg, and seem more intuitive. For example, "v" is just a big "f" in Gregg, and "b" is a big "p". (The bigger strokes are 3 times the size of the smaller strokes, so there's no confusion.)
I guess one more difference is that Gregg is phonetic ("fonet'k" is how you'd write that in Gregg) just like most shorthand systems, whereas Teeline is alphabetical. That means I can use Gregg for other language systems as well (you couldn't use Teeline for Chinese, for example).
Gregg can reach up to 280wpm. You said Pitman can hit 300wpm, but I don't see how it could possibly be faster than Gregg if Pitman requires different stroke thicknesses (ie. pressing harder or lighter on the paper makes a difference). It's probably just a matter of mastery --Pitman has been around longer and probably has a bigger dictionary of abbreviations.
Not too late to switch, you know! Judging from the stroke shapes, Gregg and Teeline are much different, and you'd probably won't confuse the two. You could mix the two as you transition from Teeline to Teeline/Gregg, or English/Teeline to English/Teeline/Gregg and then English/Gregg and then pure Gregg.
Also remember that, if you're the only one reading your own shorthand, you don't have to stick with the standard shorthand system. I modified my Gregg so that, for example, I could use more stroke combinations for prefixes and suffixes. E.g. Gregg uses a final "sh" for the "-tion" suffix, as in "vision" -> "v-sh", but I changed it to "sh-n" so I could use "sh" with other combinations. Any Gregg teacher would probably slap me.
Yes, shorthand is very useful. I can write shorthand about as quickly as I can type. The advantage of shorthand over typing is that you can do it with low-tech implements (pen and paper). The disadvantage is that, for me at least, it's harder to read. Shorthand speeds up the writing (input) speed at the expense of slowing down the reading (output) speed, where input and output are from the point of view of the piece of paper as a storage medium.
So if someone is speaking and I only have my Treo (which has that tiny keyboard for thumbs), I won't be able to keep up on the Treo, so I write shorthand instead. However, afterward I have to spend time transcribing it.
It took me about a week to learn enough to start using. I started replacing some words in my handwritten notes with shorthand notation, and kept adding more shorthand words to my vocabulary. After a month I was at about 50% shorthand mixed with 50% conventional words, and at 2 months I was basically doing all shorthand. I used Gregg shorthand rather than Pitman because you don't need to write on lined paper and you don't need to tell between thicker and thinner pen strokes (which you can easily do with a pen but not with a pencil).
"""the Slashdot comment interface is very intuitive. I know the reply button starts a reply. The Cancel button cancels it. The option button lets me see various options."""
These kinds of unintuitive pyrotechnics are why I'm sticking with the 1.0 discussion system. In my day young man, we had two buttons--"Reply" and "Parent"; and we were happier for it!
Sorry, what? I see "reply" and "parent". Are you seeing something different?
I agree that using cubic micrometers is nowhere near intuitive.
1 um (replace "u" with the Greek letter "mu" please) is 1e-6 metres. So, 1 cubic um is 1e-18 cubic metres. So, the smallest conventional heat engines are 1e7 of these 1e-18 cubic metres, or 1e-11 cubic metres.
Not that intuitive either. So we'll use cubic mm.
1mm is 1e-3 metres, so 1 cubic mm is 1e-9 cubic metres.
Something that's 1e-11 cubic m (1e7 cubic um) is 1e-2 cubic mm. So, it's 1% of 1 cubic millimetre.
Address? Any long term ticket you might have for your subway or bus system will probably contain that. A student ID card will too. Library card? Of course, a drivers license would be the jackpot.
That's why I set my driver's license address to a PO Box. It was actually my hemi-geek wife who convinced me to do it; she had been doing it for ages.
When people ask, I say, "Why, yes, I do live in a tiny Post Office box."
I suspect, though, that many jurisdictions will not allow you to have a PO Box as the address on the driver's license.
You're ignoring the cap (which is presumably meant to represent reaching terminal velocity)--that's the killer (or rather, the not-killer). 20d6 won't kill a 13th level fighter, and that's the most you can do.
Sorry, I should have been mentioned that part, too.
After falling 200 feet, the last 10' of that 200' would cause 20d6 damage. After that, every additional 10' fall would only cause 20d6 additional damage (instead of 21d6, for example, for the last 10' of a 210' fall). If I recall correctly, there was not supposed to be a cap on the total amount of damage sustained. But when you reach 20d6, it becomes linear damage instead of quadratic.
Slashdot Mirror
FPGA=Field Programmable Gate Arrays
A type of chip. Logic gates (AND, XOR, NAND etc.) can be reprogrammed on the fly. (As opposed to PGAs, Programmable Gate Arrays, which you can order from the manufacturer, program the way you want them, but then once you install them in the circuit you can't change it. (As opposed to GAs, Gate Arrays, for which you specify the logic and they come from the manufacturer this way.))
I, too, had resigned myself to the fact that the N900 would be a "Newegg-only" type geek product that would never be available in stores in the USA. When I went to Hong Kong last month, though, Nokia stores everywhere were plastered with ads for the N900, and, yes, I got to try one. (They were selling for about US$600+, so cheaper to get from Amazon.com in USA.) The other day I went to Frys Electronics in the south SF Bay area (not the Palo Alto store), and they were selling for $527 (sells for $515 on Amazon).
I haven't travelled to Indiana lately, so I can't help you there; sorry.
I verified that Acrobat Reader on Linux has this vulnerability, but none of KPDF, eVince, or GhostView have this flaw, probably because they all derive from the Poppler library. (So does Okular but I haven't tested it.)
What kind of dumb PDF keyword is "Launch" anyway? Why would anyone implement such a feature? That's almost as retarded as Microsoft's "Your Email Reader Will Launch Any Software On Command" Outlook feature, way back when we were telling all the non-geeks that there is no such thing as an email virus and "Good Times" is a hoax. Good job, Adobe. What's next in your newest PDF spec, the Format Hard Drive feature?
Counterpoint to this: I don't agree. The user name fails to stand out and blends in with the block header for that comment, which does not jump out at me. When Bruce (or whoever) signs a name, it is concise and does not have a string of text (user ID, subscriber options, email address, comment #) after it. If it bugs you, just pretend that the name is part of the sig.
Not that I'm telling Bruce not to make the requested change to the way he signs. But I want to speak out that not everyone finds it annoying.
mod parent Insightful. HUGE potential for errors.
Hey, that's a great idea! But I guess if someone flips through the book, s/he'd be able to find it. Here's an additional idea: print various fake keys in addition, on other pages, and only you know which page contains the real key. Although I guess, unless you use a lot of fake keys, the enemy would be able to just try each key in turn. Defense to that: combine the key with a password, so they have to break the password for each key they try: simple with 1 key, but not so simple if they have multiple keys to try.
How do you print the key in a book, anyway?
Wow. Your mention of Operation Timelord tells me that people at Kubuntu are responding and gives me hope. It's more informative than the response given by Asay, who should either have at least mentioned Operation Timelord or should get up to speed on the distro that he's representing.
And for those who respond that Kubuntu is not officially supported by Canonical: I think it *is* supported, but if it's not, that's even more reason to disparage Ubuntu. Geez, I hope not. But it gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, the upcoming first Long Term Support release for Kubuntu in almost four years will actually be worth the pain we went through with KDE4. Long live Kubuntu, and hope Canonical gives you the support you need to renew yourselves.
Instead of
"Scientists Discover Booze That Won't Give You a Hangover"
I thought it said:
"Scientists Discover That Booze Won't Give You a Hangover"
I thought: gee, what great news! There's no such thing as a hangover! I guess those people with after-party headaches had just happened to come down with some sinusitis!
He managed to dodge some questions, in a very unsatisfying manner. Look at this:
Uhh, no. Kubuntu is far from a quality release. The questioner was trying to put this politely, Mr. Asay, and you took advantage of his courtesy to dodge the question. Try answering this one: "Why does Kubuntu suck?" Did you grasp the intent behind that one?
Second dodge of this question. This is NOT the "which is better, KDE or GNOME?" question. This is the "why does Kubuntu fall short of KDE?" question.
Slightly different question that you dodged here, now it's not "Why does Kubuntu suck?" but "Why does Ubuntu suck even when KDE is not involved?" I guess you can't twist it into a KDE/GNOME playoff this time. I notice that you've used the good ol' trick of "What problem? I don't have a problem, therefore you don't either." Unfortunately, Mr. Asay, I suspect that I'm not the only one around here who recognizes your fallacious train of thought. Maybe I can entertain you with a joke:
Q: How many Ubuntu-using Matt Asay's does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Why do you want to change the light bulb? I have an exact identical copy of your light bulb here, and it works fine for me.
Okay, next question:
Wow! That's the fifth question about the quality of your software. In a list limited to 12 questions voted to the top by a large number of Slashdotters, we spent five of those questions directly asking about quality. Do you get the sense that your community is trying to tell you something, Mr. Asay? Let's see what your response is ...
You know, I was hoping for better. I understand that you're new to Linux, and fielding questions from Slashdotters is probably not one of those essential duties that will determine whether or not you get a bonus at the end of the year. But here's your chance to directly reach out to the people who support you, but who are at the same time telling you that you have problems. You could acknowledge the problems, or at least acknowledge our questions, something like "I see that there is a lot of concern about quality. Here are our processes for improving quality: (insert blurb) I'll find out a bit more and post it on the Ubuntu forum." etc. But to say, "I personally have not had problems with my Ubuntu, so I won't answer your question ..." geez, we hashed that out on Slashdot before Canonical even existed.
Disclosure of my personal stance: Linux fan, no Microsoft on my computers since 2004. KDE fan, but Kubuntu has been disappointing. Using KDE3 on Kubuntu 8.04, waiting for Lucid (10.04) to come out so I can learn it and not have to chase after a moving target reinstalling every half a year. I believe KDE4 will be a good experience now, but am not going to find out until Lucid.
I'd like to tap the powers of the Slashdot hivemind in seeing whether I might have been roundhouse-kicked by Chuck Norris; ie. has my router been rooted?
A few years ago I bought a Linksys WRT54GL router, in support of it being explicitly Linux compatible (in fact, I bought two of them --I really wanted to send a message to Linksys). I flashed DD-WRT onto it, and had been using it as a usual router through my DSL line, with DHCP, wireless (at first WEP but later WPA), and port forwarding (a high-numbered port would forward from the Internet into the SSH port 22 on my server).
Lately I have had two problems with it: in the past half to one year, I haven't been able to SSH from outside into my server (I can do it within my home network, so the SSH server is not the problem). More recently, I tried to do something-or-other on the net (I think it was play a BZFlag game?) and it said, "Your IP address, , is known to be an open proxy relay so we're not letting you connect."
If I suspect that the problems I've been having are due to malware/crackers, am I being paranoid?
Possible flaws in my security include: I enabled SSHd on the router, password based SSH (but I changed the default password of course), I was broadcasting my wireless SSID (required because my wife's vaunted MS Vista system didn't know how to handle hidden SSID's!), and I was using an old version of DD-WRT that I hadn't bothered to update. (I think it was Build#4000 or something, and the current build is #16000 or something.) However: I only briefly allowed SSH access from the Internet WAN and otherwise limited to SSH access from LAN, and I did not allow router admin access by wireless: the computer would have to be connected by ethernet.
Does DD-WRT have security flaws? Should I switch to something else like OpenWRT or the Tomato Router (or something like that)?
Not a gamer here, but when I first got my own job after grad school, I bought myself a nice fast computer (for that time) and RealMyst as a treat; it was only $10 at the EB discount bin.
There were bugs in the game. In particular, I had quite obviously solved 2 of the puzzles but the gateway wouldn't open (or whatever magical thing was supposed to happen when I solved the puzzle). I checked some walkthroughs to make sure I wasn't missing something.
But RealMyst was very cool. I haven't seen any other version, but I suspect they were static versions of this . RealMyst was immersive --the entire screen was used for the game; there was no legend or status bars or anything other than the game environment. (There was a mouse cursor that could change shape/status, and there were keyboard commands taht opened menus.)
KDE fan here, still hanging on to Kubuntu 8.04 KDE3 for dear life until they can get a LTS Kubuntu out (coming up with 10.04). I think KDE 4.4 should be par with KDE3 now, although it will still have been too freshly hatched for my taste at the time Kubuntu 10.04 comes out --I'm going to wait a couple of months for the patches to come out first.
Meanwhile, though, I don't think either KDE3 or KDE4 Kubuntu are stable enough for the family bigscreen computer, so I will put GNOME back. The only thing that drove me to switch from Ubuntu GNOME to Kubuntu KDE was the inability to specify a networked computer for a file name. Say I want to play a video on SMplayer, but the video's sitting on my laptop computer. I want to be able to specify that the filename is "fish://MyLaptop.MySOHOnet/videos/myvideo.avi" and then the desktop will reach into the laptop and grab the file.
Right now on Ubuntu, I have to go transfer the file from MyLaptop.MySOHOnet/videos/myvideo.avi, and then play it from the local drive temporary copy. Is there any way for GNOME to do what KDE has been doing for ages?
Any help would be appreciated. I figured with your experience of KDE-to-GNOME, you'd be the one to ask.
I've been meaning to try it, so I have two questions for you:
1. How powerful is Krita compared to GIMP? Assuming I get some time to become familiar with it, is there anything GIMP can do that Krita cannot do, or cannot do as well?
2. How easy is it to learn? There are several books out there on using GIMP, like "Grokking the GIMP", but I don't see any about Krita, so I'd have to rely on the UI to learn. (I'm not going to hope for anything useful from the KDE Krita Online Manual, which, from experience, will probably have useless explanations like: "Boogliboo button - this activates the boogliboo feature.")
Bonus question if you know: any difference between KDE 3 Krita and KDE 4 Krita that people should know about?
"... you did authorize it; it is just in very tiny print somewhere on the form you clicked. Smarmy yes; illegal, maybe not.
FTFY.
I do want to mention a shell script that might be of interest. It automates the task of looking for subtle changes in Terms and Conditions for those web agreements that you click on for day-to-day banking, etc. After a while, people get used to clicking "Agree" on long pieces of text in tiny scrolling windows every time they access the bank web site or Internet store. Ridiculous! Do you ever see this in physical bricks-and-mortar stores? Do you have to read through the conditions every time you use a credit card?
What if someone changes the text subtly one day, and you've been clicking through daily for the past few months? My script is designed to catch that. Just highlight and copy the text to clipboard and then run the script (you don't even have to paste the text anywhere).
This shell script compares what's in the clipboard to text files in a certain directory; in this case it's ~/Documents/terms_and_conditions. This is where I would store the T&C text from various web sites. When it finds a similar match, it does a diff to look for minor changes. If there is no exact match, it offers to store the copied text in a new text file so you can compare the current version to future versions.
It's at my journal. Hope it helps. It doesn't obviate the need for having to read the Terms & Conditions at least once, but hopefully it will prevent you from being so bored of reading that you skip over every Terms & Conditions text.
http://slashdot.org/journal/227249/detecting-subtle-changes-in-Terms-amp-Conditions
Why are you saying Great Library is useless? Is it because there are too few players for you to automatically steal technology if two or more of them have some technology you don't have?
I generally play as one of about 5 players. Great Library is my number 1 goal. I concentrate on science at the expense of everything else. You start with Alphabet, then research Writing. That lets you build (generic) libraries, which increases your research speed; it also lets you build the cheap Diplomat, which has: increased movement (2 instead of 1), no upkeep costs, and you can even steal the other players' units. After you have discovered Writing, you work on Code of Laws. That's all the requirements you need to start researching Literacy. It's remarkably cheap for a Level 2 technology (where Level 0 are the discoveries that have no prerequisites), since both of the Level 1 technologies on which Literacy is based (ie. Writing and Code of Laws) are based on the same Level 0 tech (Alphabet).
Once you have literacy, you can pretty much stop the science and switch all your cities to maximum production to build the Great Library. And remember all those diplomats you were churning out? You can disband them to contribute to building the Great Library. Once you get the Great Library, you just sit back and wait for all the technology to roll in. So you can increase your taxes at the expense of science (so you have enough $$ for all your diplomats to bribe the other players).
After that, you can work on getting the Lighthouse and having your triremes pound the s**t out of the other triremes.
Admittedly, this does require some time for you to develop in peace before encountering other civilizations. I usually use the map generator where each player gets an island of his/her own and has to cross the water on triremes before finding other civilizations.
This is for FreeCiv. Adjust accordingly for Civ2, Civ3, etc.
Does mplayer support Matroska?
Yes, but not accurate.
Just wanted to mention, as a matter of routine, the Big Four behind RIAA: Warner Bros, EMI, Sony, Universal, or "WESU" for short.
I'm trying to give WESU a bit more mindshare so they can't hide behind the mask of the RIAA. Ok, back to your regular programming.
Agree. Palm Graffiti has a major advantage that is often overlooked: you do not need to be looking at your input. Since all the letters are written one on top of the other, you don't need to shift your hand to the next letter position, or see when you have to start a new line, etc.
When I was talking to a person and taking notes, I'd have my eyes on the other person all the time while I stroked and poked my Palm. Inevitably, after a while the person would say, "Are you taking down all of this without looking at the screen?" If in a meeting taking notes, sometimes I'd have my Palm in my left hand, under the table, entering with my left thumb, and my right hand would be free. (That was slower, though.)
It's a different story for the new Graffiti 2 that's on the new Palms, including my Palm Treo (yes it has a keypad, but I installed "Graffiti Anywhere" to access the Graffiti 2 "shortcut" symbol so I can put "shortcut-D-T-S" for the date/time stamp). The Graffiti 2 strokes are supposedly more "intuitive" (see "user friendly" in the Microsoft dictionary, or "dumbed down" in an ordinary dictionary), but some of them use two strokes. Even worse, it doesn't know which letter you want to enter until you have entered the second stroke! I'm talking about the letter T (downstroke, then a separate horizontal stroke) and the letter i (downstroke, then a dot on top) and the letter L (downstroke, then nothing else). So if I want to enter the letter T, I put a downstroke, and then a letter L appears. Then I put a horizontal stroke, and the letter L is deleted (backspace) followed by the letter T.
However, the shortcut macro system aborts if you enter a non-existent shortcut. No shortcut begins with "shortcut-D-L". So if I want to enter "shortcut-D-T-S", I enter "shortcut-D" and then begin entering the letter T with a downstroke. The letter L appears, the system aborts since I had just entered the non-existent "shortcut-D-L" macro, and even when I do the horizontal stroke and the letter L is replaced by T, it's too late. This was the system on the Tungsten Turd that I bought and then quickly resold (forget the exact Tungsten model, but it had the sliding bottom that covered the Graffiti area --who thought this was a good idea again?). My current Graffiti Anywhere on mt Treo 650 doesn't have that problem, thank goodness. But I wish they could go back to the original Graffiti system again. One stroke per letter, non-intuitive except for geeks --but who cares? Everyone else will use the keyboard.
I'm curious why you chose Teeline. Was it just an opportunity that occurred, or did you find it better than Gregg? My mom learned Pitman and my dad learned Gregg, so I chose Gregg (didn't need different thickness strokes, didn't need to write on lined paper); I wasn't aware of other types of shorthand.
But looking at the Wikipedia entry on Teeline, it still looks like Gregg is better: the strokes are more fluidic in Gregg, and seem more intuitive. For example, "v" is just a big "f" in Gregg, and "b" is a big "p". (The bigger strokes are 3 times the size of the smaller strokes, so there's no confusion.)
I guess one more difference is that Gregg is phonetic ("fonet'k" is how you'd write that in Gregg) just like most shorthand systems, whereas Teeline is alphabetical. That means I can use Gregg for other language systems as well (you couldn't use Teeline for Chinese, for example).
Gregg can reach up to 280wpm. You said Pitman can hit 300wpm, but I don't see how it could possibly be faster than Gregg if Pitman requires different stroke thicknesses (ie. pressing harder or lighter on the paper makes a difference). It's probably just a matter of mastery --Pitman has been around longer and probably has a bigger dictionary of abbreviations.
Not too late to switch, you know! Judging from the stroke shapes, Gregg and Teeline are much different, and you'd probably won't confuse the two. You could mix the two as you transition from Teeline to Teeline/Gregg, or English/Teeline to English/Teeline/Gregg and then English/Gregg and then pure Gregg.
Also remember that, if you're the only one reading your own shorthand, you don't have to stick with the standard shorthand system. I modified my Gregg so that, for example, I could use more stroke combinations for prefixes and suffixes. E.g. Gregg uses a final "sh" for the "-tion" suffix, as in "vision" -> "v-sh", but I changed it to "sh-n" so I could use "sh" with other combinations. Any Gregg teacher would probably slap me.
Yes, shorthand is very useful. I can write shorthand about as quickly as I can type. The advantage of shorthand over typing is that you can do it with low-tech implements (pen and paper). The disadvantage is that, for me at least, it's harder to read. Shorthand speeds up the writing (input) speed at the expense of slowing down the reading (output) speed, where input and output are from the point of view of the piece of paper as a storage medium.
So if someone is speaking and I only have my Treo (which has that tiny keyboard for thumbs), I won't be able to keep up on the Treo, so I write shorthand instead. However, afterward I have to spend time transcribing it.
It took me about a week to learn enough to start using. I started replacing some words in my handwritten notes with shorthand notation, and kept adding more shorthand words to my vocabulary. After a month I was at about 50% shorthand mixed with 50% conventional words, and at 2 months I was basically doing all shorthand. I used Gregg shorthand rather than Pitman because you don't need to write on lined paper and you don't need to tell between thicker and thinner pen strokes (which you can easily do with a pen but not with a pencil).
Sorry, what? I see "reply" and "parent". Are you seeing something different?
I agree that using cubic micrometers is nowhere near intuitive.
1 um (replace "u" with the Greek letter "mu" please) is 1e-6 metres.
So, 1 cubic um is 1e-18 cubic metres. So, the smallest conventional heat engines are 1e7 of these 1e-18 cubic metres, or 1e-11 cubic metres.
Not that intuitive either. So we'll use cubic mm.
1mm is 1e-3 metres, so 1 cubic mm is 1e-9 cubic metres.
Something that's 1e-11 cubic m (1e7 cubic um) is 1e-2 cubic mm. So, it's 1% of 1 cubic millimetre.
That's pretty small.
That's why I set my driver's license address to a PO Box. It was actually my hemi-geek wife who convinced me to do it; she had been doing it for ages.
When people ask, I say, "Why, yes, I do live in a tiny Post Office box."
I suspect, though, that many jurisdictions will not allow you to have a PO Box as the address on the driver's license.
Sorry, I should have been mentioned that part, too.
After falling 200 feet, the last 10' of that 200' would cause 20d6 damage. After that, every additional 10' fall would only cause 20d6 additional damage (instead of 21d6, for example, for the last 10' of a 210' fall). If I recall correctly, there was not supposed to be a cap on the total amount of damage sustained. But when you reach 20d6, it becomes linear damage instead of quadratic.