While I agree in part with your philosophy, I feel it important to point out that if KOffice has substandard MS Office compatibility (which it does), and a company were to switch from MS Office to KOffice, then they would not be able to use any documents they had created, they would not be able to use documents people prepared at home, they would not be able to take work home, they would not be able to recieve documents from others without trouble, they would not be able to send documents to others without trouble...
If you want to replace Microsoft Office in the office, you have to fully replace it. Try telling a corporate manager 'It's entirely free, upgrades are free, we can make our own changes for free to the source code we got for free... Oh, but none of the documents we've made in the last 10 years will work, and anyone using Microsoft Office can't send us files in a format we can read, nor can we send to them.' Then check out www.monster.com.
The Microsoft Office document importing is a standard thing, since I hear more people bitch about getting MS Word documents they can't open than I hear bitch about taxes, and in Canada, people love to bitch about taxes.
The function-name, case-sensitive issue is a major issue for me, having used Excel and ClarisWorks, and knowing that Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro behave the same as Excel does (and I think StarOffice does too), it's annoying to find a case-sensitive spreadsheet. The standard, as far as I've ever seen, is =SUM(A1:D1), since all other spreadsheet programs do that. The fact that this is the exact wrong way to do it in KSpread means that KSpread is broken.
The VBA macros thing is an issue because StarOffice works, MS Office works, and if KOffice wants to be a contender, it will either have to interoperate (which is a good thing), or give people a -damned- good reason to switch over - which it does not have.
As far as I can tell, 'not up to par' in this case means that KOffice lacks features or has bugs that even -I- would run into, and I am hardly an office user. Any office suite that has limitations that I, of all people, would encounter is an office suite with serious limitations.
Ask me if I think those limitations are going to go away, however, and you'll get a much more positive comment. =:>
--Dan
Re:Why MS should be running scared.
on
ZDNet Reviews KOffice
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with things like GnuCash is that, unlike Quicken, I am less likely to find a 'Canadian 2002-updated version' of GnuCash with updated Canadian tax codes and interoperability with the major banks and so on.
A team of Russian, American, Australian, and German programmers are not going to pander to my Canuckian tax laws as well as Quicken will. Perhaps it will end up with (or already has) a plug-in interface or something, so people can do this on their own, but I don't know how many tax-lawyer/programmer/accountant types there are out there in OSS Land.
I hate to say it, but I don't really know if this is open-source area (yet).
Given that RTF is a Microsoft proprietary format...
While I won't debate this point specifically, 99% of the time RTF is the best way out there to switch between word processors - even most word processors for the mac can read/write RTF, as can several OSS editors. Very handy.
English measurements are millimetres. It's only Americans who still use inches.
Technically, while the US is one of two countries in the world that still officially use imperial (the other being some small country no one has heard of), the 'imperial' system of measurements is still also known as 'english' measurements, even though the Brits, as well as everyone else in the world, have changed over long ago. That's just the way it is, I suppose.
I still just call them 'Imperial', saves confusion that way.
try looking for an opengl32.dll or something in the Wolfenstein folder (not elsewhere on the HD, it'll be in the same dir as the executable) and renaming it, then see if that works.
Historically, id software games that support opengl will come with an opengl32.dll for 3DFX cards which will totally break on any other cards - renaming the dll usually works fine, if your drivers are updated.
When I first heard about this, after being woken up to it, I checked CNN's homepage - which was down. I checked several other news sites, and the only working one was CTV News. Then I thought to check slashdot - lo and behold, it was the only other site I could get to. I posted in one of the discussions that ctvnews.ca was working, and by the time I had hit 'submit', it wasn't.
Kudos to the Slashdot team for having the only satisfactorally working news service on the net. Combined with the people that made their own websites and posted their own pictures, and the people that mirrored news reports they COULD get to, it was an amazing triumph of technology. It's just too bad that this great moment in Slashdot history had to come at such a horrid moment in world history.
First of all, it's extremely unlikely that the Palestinians did this. It's not their style, it's not their scale, and it's not their area.
Secondly, they aren't acting like they've defeated the US, they're acting like one of their allies has struck a considerable blow to one of their enemies - which is true (at the very least, under the 'enemy of my enemy (or their allies) is my friend' philosophy).
Thirdly, they don't have a country. This is the entire point of their terrorism: they want their own country, and the Israeli government/people will not agree to this.
Fourth, the US will not attack Palestine, for several reasons. First, it is Israeli-controlled; second, the vast majority of Palestinians live in the West Bank; third, they couldn't leave the country if they wanted to - this is another reason why they strike against the US/Israel when possible.
--Dan
Knowledge is not necessarily a precursor to opinion. -- Me
I sincerely doubt that Palestinians would take on something of this magnitude. Israel will probably not have to worry about international opinion of them, no matter what they do to 'keep down' the Palestinian people, so them doing these attacks (if they even could have) would be giving their persecutors a carte blanche against them.
Also, Canada isn't getting attacked because even though Canada supports the US in almost everything they do, people are too blinded with hatred for the US to notice, and even if they did, Canadians are too nice for anyone to believe that they could help out such an evil empire.
--Dan
Disclaimer: I am a Canadian who spent 3 weeks in Israel this August; do not confuse my comments with bias, for I love both Canada and Israel very much; facts, however, speak mostly for themselves.
All flights to/from Tel Aviv (presumably all of Israel, though Ben Gurion is the major airport in Israel) have several (3-5, apparantly) anti-terrorism agents on board to help in case of emergency. If they suspect you of being a terrorist, you're in big trouble. If you are one, they kill you (if possible).
Not an intentional one, no, just a statement of opinion. I have better ways of starting debates.
Have you not heard of bash, gcc, glibc, fileutils,...?
Bash: not everyone uses it
gcc: got worse between version 2.94.x and 3.x, however I very much liked 2.94.x
glibc: is this the same C library that seems to be getting more and more bloated? I might be thinking of something else.
fileutils: doesn't BSD have these already? I hardly think that fileutils are a GNU invention.
It just seems to me that the GNU project has done a lot of work with very little result. I will easily recognize that these people are better programmers than I, but they don't do a lot (with regard to the GNU project) that I think is really worthwhile.
Finally, if you were to offer in trade a car in exchange for (for example) two cows, then you would be legally obligated to accept the dollar value of two cows.
Not quite - a contract is very definite (at least in Canada). If I say 'I want your two cows, I'll give you $500', can they agree to that, and then give you 'fair market value' for those two cows, even if they're only worth $150 each?
If I sign a contract with someone to buy something, they are going to deliver what I promised, I will sue them, or we will renegotiate our contract (for example, he can pay his way out). There are no other options.
Basically what I'm driving at is this: it is illegal to refuse to accept US dollars within the borders of the US.
Not true. See the above example, but the way I look at it is as one of these two options:
We have not yet signed a contract: In this case, I do not have to sign a contract, and it cannot possibly be legal to force me to do so.
We have signed a contract: In this case, they are required, according to contract law, to do what is specified in the contract, or to try to renegotiate. Otherwise, people would be overcharging for services and then 'buying out' (paying in cash instead of services) and making money for nothing.
Honestly, forcing someone to accept US currency no matter the situation is just plain stupid. What that 'for all debts, public and private' means is that it can be used as legal tender not only between yourself and the government, but between yourself and another private individual - i.e. unlike a gift certificate, which can only be used for debts between yourself and the issuing store, US currency can be legally exchanged between private individuals as well as between private individuals and the US government.
Well, you don't have to give them a $20 or less, but at the same time, they don't have to give you a burger. This is the basis behind things of that sort - you don't have to agree to pay what they want you to pay in, but they don't have to do so either.
Basically, you can tell Burger King 'I refuse to pay in $20 bills, I'm only going to pay in $100 bills', but they can say 'we don't want to sell you anything, please leave'. They don't -have- to take your business; contracts (buying a hamburger is an implied contract) are completely optional for both parties, and they don't have to enter into them if they don't want to.
CLI tools are the opposite. They are hard to learn, but once you know them, they are fast and efficient. Vim is a perfect example of this. The editor is simply amazing. It has a keyboard interface to do nearly anything you want to do. The only problem is, it's very very difficult to learn. You don't know what all your options are. You have to goto:help and start searching for something simliar to what you want to do.
Simple solution to simple problem. Install gvim (apt-get install vim-gtk for debian users, or vim.org for the rest of ye), and use that. It's pretty, it's fast, it's vim with menus. Nothing stops you from treating it like command-line vim, but if you don't know the standard vi commands, you can use the menus - which, incidentally, have the shortcuts on them. That's how I learned that I can use:wq to save and quit,:e to open a file, and so on - and now I use them instead of the menus.
I couldn't possibly have learned vi without gvim, since I'd have spent more time in the help than in my files. Now that I've used it though, I can go into most any copy of vi and get around pretty well (except that the original vi sucked pretty bad compared to vim).
The problem I always have is not so much psychotic GPL advocates, but people who advocate the GPL without reason - that is, they chant 'GPL! GPL! GPL!', but when I debate using the GPL vs. using BSD-style, their arguments are, at best, mediocre.
A lot of the end-users (and even some programmers) that use/are involved with open source nowadays seem to think the GPL is great because everyone else thinks the GPL is great, even though they are not aware of any reasons, and thus cannot defend this position.
The real hardcore GPL advocates are charicterized and led by Richard Stallman, the man who created the GPL and the leader of the (misdirected and nearly useless, IMHO) GNU project. He has said lately, personally or through the GNU project, I forget which, that shared libraries should use the GPL now, instead of the LGPL, because companies that write non-open-source binaries should not be allowed to link against open-source libraries.
This seems to me like a good example. I don't see any practical gain in doing this, except for severely slowing down outside development with Linux (or inside, in the case of Loki, for example). The only thing this would really accomplish that Stallman would want is the elimination of closed-source programs for Linux.
Stallman is a good example of a zealot, in my opinion, and you've to look not too far from him to find others like him. The difference is, he has a cause. Many of those following him spew zealotry without even understanding why.
While I realize that this depends on the cable company, I have a story that might be of interest.
In Canada, there are three major cable companies, Shaw, Rogers, and Cogeco, the latter being irrelevant.
Rogers Communications does cellphones, video stores, cable TV, cable internet, and so on. the Cable division is the only division that actually brings in revenue. The rest are mismanaged sinkholes (the cable is mismanaged, but not a sinkhole). As a result, you pay lots of money for not too great service. Cable internet is done through @home. Customer support is nonexistant. Service is pathetic. The network goes down like a kamikazee
Shaw is the king. They spend as much money as they have to. They also love their customers (and for good reason).
Rogers and Shaw agreed to a deal a while back. Shaw would take BC from Rogers (since Rogers pissed off everyone in BC with a stupid idea to screw them out of more money), and Rogers would get Ontario (since who wants Ontario anyways?).
I woke up one morning, long after figuring that nothing was going to change because of this deal, since nothing had, and my computer was no longer online. Debugged, debugged, traced, couldn't figure out why. Then, finally, I managed to figure it out.
I had the wrong IP, going through the wrong gateway on the wrong subnet of the wrong network. Whee.
After getting pump installed (hard to do in Debian if you have no network access or CD), I almost came. My highest speed of the last two weeks, 80 kbps (average 25) was blown away by my daily dist-upgrade, which went at about 325. This became my average, with peaks at 486 kilobytes/second. Oh yes, this new network was worth it.
The @home network is, at best, pathetic. Being routed from BC to Seattle, California, then out of the @home network into the public networks to make my way back up to Seattle, then BC, then into the telco's network to get to a friend's DSL a half-hour drive away is stupid at best.
Don't expect uninterrupted service, but when my ISP did this, it was a godsend in the truest sense of the word.
Now, if I can only figure out which @home server my @home address is going to (since I have accounts on three different mail servers, only one of which gets the mail sent to the account which should have been deleted two months ago), I'll be happy.
OpenGL was not written for a UNIX environment, it was merely written. Maybe they wrote an implementation in UNIX, but GL is just an API, not designed for any OS.
It works on UNIX, sure, but it also works on Windows (NT4 OpenGL screensavers, not DirectX), and MacOS (OSX is hardware-accelerated via OpenGL).
Saying it 'is written for a UNIX environment' is just silly.
As for your comment about 'OpenGL-boards', there is no such thing. A hardware vendor (like ATI) will make a board, a chip, and so on. They will then write drivers. All manufacturers write DirectX drievrs. Most write OpenGL drivers. This has absolutely nothing to do with the boards themselves, and everything to do with the driver programmers.
Either way, it's entirely possible to extend OpenGL to add features that are not in the spec, and as long as this doesn't 1) break the spec, and 2) force incompatibilities, then it's nto really a problem.
Personally, I play Q3 on 'medium' detail, because while my friends are looking at dynamic lightsourcing and curved arches, I'm smoothly rounding a corner and blasting them all to hell.
1.The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
In plain speech, this means that 'no matter what else is in the Charter, judges can ignore it if necessary.
That being said, and even admitting that most Charter arguments brought before judges are replied to with 'Hmm. No, I disagree. Motion denied,' most charter arguments are things like trying to get out of traffic tickets because the 12 month wait for a trial was an 'unconstititonal breach of the defendant's rights'.
Judges in Canada aren't as verdict-happy as those in the US are. You won't win ten million dollars for spilling coffee in your lap. You will get to court, sure. You can appeal to the Supreme Court, sure. You can even get accepted by the Supreme Court. All that means, however, is that nine judges will laugh at you instead of one or three.
Constitutional Law in Canada is (subjectively) largely irrelevant. The Charter of Rights basically outlines the general ideas of Canadians' rights in Canada, and it is up to the courts to decide if the matter at hand is relevant.
In other words, let's hope the dice come up happy on this one, because that's it's a crap shoot as near as I can tell.
Why should someone who uses CDRs for, say, duplicating software such as Linux, have to pay money into the coffers of the record industry?
For the same reason that you pay EI on your paycheque even if you never collect it, the same reason that you pay for health care even if you only go for a check-up once every year, and the same reason you pay GST and (unless you're Albertan) PST.
Canada is not 'all hail the gods of capitalism', it is a (mostly-)socialist-democracy. We're all in this together, like.
Besides, I look at it as a good thing. If I buy a music CD-R, I pay a hefty price (all things considered) for 'blank media tax', which goes to 'the artists' (just like the $15 I spend on a music CD goes to 'the artists').
Logically then, one can argue that I'm paying the music companies just like I'm paying the health care system. Ergo, just like I can walk into a hospital whenever I want and not worry because I've paid already, I don't have any moral dilemmas downloading soem BNL, Captain Tractor, Shania Twain (for example), and burning a 'dance mix' CD.
I don't buy 100-CD spindles of CDs and burn/sell them, but I don't bat an eye when I want a miscellany CD of songs, even if I haven't purchased them. They're getting my money, and your money, and everyone else's money already. If you want to burn a CD, we've all paid for you already, so go hog-wild. You can even use my share, since I never do.
Implement/ignore at the server level (like on some networks) so that when you ignore someone it doesn't even send you anything anymore. That remove the personal-level DoS attacks. (Well, that and not displaying the user's address.)
I can't help but think of this as totally useless, since flood protection came into effect. Sure, you can load a dozen clonebots and flood someone offline, but you could do that anyway. This would just put more load on the IRC server by making it check every single message that went to one of its clients.
Get rid of ops at the same time. Let people deal with anyone they dislike by simply ignoring them.
And how do you propose that people change the topic? Or should anyone be able to? What about setting +i? +s? What if you want a private channel, a private conversation, or something of the sort? What if you don't want some lamer watching everything you say?
The solution, in my mind, is (in part) services. Let people register nicks/channels, and have them enforced by services, and that'll take away a lot of the reason to flood servers offline temporarily (to get ops status).
Realistically though? I don't think the idiots doing this round of DDoS attacks are trying to get channels, and I don't think they're trying to get around channel bans, and I don't think they're trying to accomplish anything other than to give themselves something to whack off to because their lives are so sad and pathetic that they have nowhere else to turn.
Fact is, they're doign this to be assholes, and if there were services, if there were no ops, and if there was a server-side ignore, these things would still happen, because despite all of these things, flooding someone offline is still being an asshole.
If you spend $1300 on a new iBook it doesn't even come with enough RAM to run the OS installed on the hard drive. Apple has a nifty little icon / badge for OS X on their site. It reminds you 128MB of RAM is required.
Right, and $200 to upgrade to 192 megs of memory comes to $1500, which is still a pretty sweet price. Why make people buy 128 megs of memory if they don't need it? If you do, add it on. It's not too hard, you know.
I suppose if that's too complex, you could just click a more expensive one that already has 128 megs of ram, and you wouldn't have to deal with confusing pop-up menus.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree in part with your philosophy, I feel it important to point out that if KOffice has substandard MS Office compatibility (which it does), and a company were to switch from MS Office to KOffice, then they would not be able to use any documents they had created, they would not be able to use documents people prepared at home, they would not be able to take work home, they would not be able to recieve documents from others without trouble, they would not be able to send documents to others without trouble...
If you want to replace Microsoft Office in the office, you have to fully replace it. Try telling a corporate manager 'It's entirely free, upgrades are free, we can make our own changes for free to the source code we got for free... Oh, but none of the documents we've made in the last 10 years will work, and anyone using Microsoft Office can't send us files in a format we can read, nor can we send to them.' Then check out www.monster.com.
--Dan
The Microsoft Office document importing is a standard thing, since I hear more people bitch about getting MS Word documents they can't open than I hear bitch about taxes, and in Canada, people love to bitch about taxes.
The function-name, case-sensitive issue is a major issue for me, having used Excel and ClarisWorks, and knowing that Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro behave the same as Excel does (and I think StarOffice does too), it's annoying to find a case-sensitive spreadsheet. The standard, as far as I've ever seen, is =SUM(A1:D1), since all other spreadsheet programs do that. The fact that this is the exact wrong way to do it in KSpread means that KSpread is broken.
The VBA macros thing is an issue because StarOffice works, MS Office works, and if KOffice wants to be a contender, it will either have to interoperate (which is a good thing), or give people a -damned- good reason to switch over - which it does not have.
As far as I can tell, 'not up to par' in this case means that KOffice lacks features or has bugs that even -I- would run into, and I am hardly an office user. Any office suite that has limitations that I, of all people, would encounter is an office suite with serious limitations.
Ask me if I think those limitations are going to go away, however, and you'll get a much more positive comment. =:>
--Dan
The problem with things like GnuCash is that, unlike Quicken, I am less likely to find a 'Canadian 2002-updated version' of GnuCash with updated Canadian tax codes and interoperability with the major banks and so on.
A team of Russian, American, Australian, and German programmers are not going to pander to my Canuckian tax laws as well as Quicken will. Perhaps it will end up with (or already has) a plug-in interface or something, so people can do this on their own, but I don't know how many tax-lawyer/programmer/accountant types there are out there in OSS Land.
I hate to say it, but I don't really know if this is open-source area (yet).
--Dan
Given that RTF is a Microsoft proprietary format...
While I won't debate this point specifically, 99% of the time RTF is the best way out there to switch between word processors - even most word processors for the mac can read/write RTF, as can several OSS editors. Very handy.
English measurements are millimetres. It's only Americans who still use inches.
Technically, while the US is one of two countries in the world that still officially use imperial (the other being some small country no one has heard of), the 'imperial' system of measurements is still also known as 'english' measurements, even though the Brits, as well as everyone else in the world, have changed over long ago. That's just the way it is, I suppose.
I still just call them 'Imperial', saves confusion that way.
--Dan
try looking for an opengl32.dll or something in the Wolfenstein folder (not elsewhere on the HD, it'll be in the same dir as the executable) and renaming it, then see if that works.
Historically, id software games that support opengl will come with an opengl32.dll for 3DFX cards which will totally break on any other cards - renaming the dll usually works fine, if your drivers are updated.
Might not work, but try.
--Dan
When I first heard about this, after being woken up to it, I checked CNN's homepage - which was down. I checked several other news sites, and the only working one was CTV News. Then I thought to check slashdot - lo and behold, it was the only other site I could get to. I posted in one of the discussions that ctvnews.ca was working, and by the time I had hit 'submit', it wasn't.
Kudos to the Slashdot team for having the only satisfactorally working news service on the net. Combined with the people that made their own websites and posted their own pictures, and the people that mirrored news reports they COULD get to, it was an amazing triumph of technology. It's just too bad that this great moment in Slashdot history had to come at such a horrid moment in world history.
--Dan
She was using her cellphone on an airplane? No wonder it went down...
--Dan
First of all, it's extremely unlikely that the Palestinians did this. It's not their style, it's not their scale, and it's not their area.
Secondly, they aren't acting like they've defeated the US, they're acting like one of their allies has struck a considerable blow to one of their enemies - which is true (at the very least, under the 'enemy of my enemy (or their allies) is my friend' philosophy).
Thirdly, they don't have a country. This is the entire point of their terrorism: they want their own country, and the Israeli government/people will not agree to this.
Fourth, the US will not attack Palestine, for several reasons. First, it is Israeli-controlled; second, the vast majority of Palestinians live in the West Bank; third, they couldn't leave the country if they wanted to - this is another reason why they strike against the US/Israel when possible.
--Dan
Knowledge is not necessarily a precursor to opinion. -- Me
I sincerely doubt that Palestinians would take on something of this magnitude. Israel will probably not have to worry about international opinion of them, no matter what they do to 'keep down' the Palestinian people, so them doing these attacks (if they even could have) would be giving their persecutors a carte blanche against them.
Also, Canada isn't getting attacked because even though Canada supports the US in almost everything they do, people are too blinded with hatred for the US to notice, and even if they did, Canadians are too nice for anyone to believe that they could help out such an evil empire.
--Dan
Disclaimer: I am a Canadian who spent 3 weeks in Israel this August; do not confuse my comments with bias, for I love both Canada and Israel very much; facts, however, speak mostly for themselves.
The big ones are Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. Secondary are airports like Halifax, and tertiary are ones like Abbotsford.
Realistically though, they are landing planes at any runways they can land planes at, if necessary.
--Dan
All flights to/from Tel Aviv (presumably all of Israel, though Ben Gurion is the major airport in Israel) have several (3-5, apparantly) anti-terrorism agents on board to help in case of emergency. If they suspect you of being a terrorist, you're in big trouble. If you are one, they kill you (if possible).
--Dan
Is this a troll?
...?
Not an intentional one, no, just a statement of opinion. I have better ways of starting debates.
Have you not heard of bash, gcc, glibc, fileutils,
Bash: not everyone uses it
gcc: got worse between version 2.94.x and 3.x, however I very much liked 2.94.x
glibc: is this the same C library that seems to be getting more and more bloated? I might be thinking of something else.
fileutils: doesn't BSD have these already? I hardly think that fileutils are a GNU invention.
It just seems to me that the GNU project has done a lot of work with very little result. I will easily recognize that these people are better programmers than I, but they don't do a lot (with regard to the GNU project) that I think is really worthwhile.
--Dan
Not quite - a contract is very definite (at least in Canada). If I say 'I want your two cows, I'll give you $500', can they agree to that, and then give you 'fair market value' for those two cows, even if they're only worth $150 each?
If I sign a contract with someone to buy something, they are going to deliver what I promised, I will sue them, or we will renegotiate our contract (for example, he can pay his way out). There are no other options.
Basically what I'm driving at is this: it is illegal to refuse to accept US dollars within the borders of the US.
Not true. See the above example, but the way I look at it is as one of these two options:
Honestly, forcing someone to accept US currency no matter the situation is just plain stupid. What that 'for all debts, public and private' means is that it can be used as legal tender not only between yourself and the government, but between yourself and another private individual - i.e. unlike a gift certificate, which can only be used for debts between yourself and the issuing store, US currency can be legally exchanged between private individuals as well as between private individuals and the US government.
--Dan
PS: IANAL (yet)
Well, you don't have to give them a $20 or less, but at the same time, they don't have to give you a burger. This is the basis behind things of that sort - you don't have to agree to pay what they want you to pay in, but they don't have to do so either.
Basically, you can tell Burger King 'I refuse to pay in $20 bills, I'm only going to pay in $100 bills', but they can say 'we don't want to sell you anything, please leave'. They don't -have- to take your business; contracts (buying a hamburger is an implied contract) are completely optional for both parties, and they don't have to enter into them if they don't want to.
--Dan
CLI tools are the opposite. They are hard to learn, but once you know them, they are fast and efficient. Vim is a perfect example of this. The editor is simply amazing. It has a keyboard interface to do nearly anything you want to do. The only problem is, it's very very difficult to learn. You don't know what all your options are. You have to goto :help and start searching for something simliar to what you want to do.
:wq to save and quit, :e to open a file, and so on - and now I use them instead of the menus.
Simple solution to simple problem. Install gvim (apt-get install vim-gtk for debian users, or vim.org for the rest of ye), and use that. It's pretty, it's fast, it's vim with menus. Nothing stops you from treating it like command-line vim, but if you don't know the standard vi commands, you can use the menus - which, incidentally, have the shortcuts on them. That's how I learned that I can use
I couldn't possibly have learned vi without gvim, since I'd have spent more time in the help than in my files. Now that I've used it though, I can go into most any copy of vi and get around pretty well (except that the original vi sucked pretty bad compared to vim).
Very sweet, very nice.
--Dan
The problem I always have is not so much psychotic GPL advocates, but people who advocate the GPL without reason - that is, they chant 'GPL! GPL! GPL!', but when I debate using the GPL vs. using BSD-style, their arguments are, at best, mediocre.
A lot of the end-users (and even some programmers) that use/are involved with open source nowadays seem to think the GPL is great because everyone else thinks the GPL is great, even though they are not aware of any reasons, and thus cannot defend this position.
The real hardcore GPL advocates are charicterized and led by Richard Stallman, the man who created the GPL and the leader of the (misdirected and nearly useless, IMHO) GNU project. He has said lately, personally or through the GNU project, I forget which, that shared libraries should use the GPL now, instead of the LGPL, because companies that write non-open-source binaries should not be allowed to link against open-source libraries.
This seems to me like a good example. I don't see any practical gain in doing this, except for severely slowing down outside development with Linux (or inside, in the case of Loki, for example). The only thing this would really accomplish that Stallman would want is the elimination of closed-source programs for Linux.
Stallman is a good example of a zealot, in my opinion, and you've to look not too far from him to find others like him. The difference is, he has a cause. Many of those following him spew zealotry without even understanding why.
--Dan
While I realize that this depends on the cable company, I have a story that might be of interest.
In Canada, there are three major cable companies, Shaw, Rogers, and Cogeco, the latter being irrelevant.
Rogers Communications does cellphones, video stores, cable TV, cable internet, and so on. the Cable division is the only division that actually brings in revenue. The rest are mismanaged sinkholes (the cable is mismanaged, but not a sinkhole). As a result, you pay lots of money for not too great service. Cable internet is done through @home. Customer support is nonexistant. Service is pathetic. The network goes down like a kamikazee
Shaw is the king. They spend as much money as they have to. They also love their customers (and for good reason).
Rogers and Shaw agreed to a deal a while back. Shaw would take BC from Rogers (since Rogers pissed off everyone in BC with a stupid idea to screw them out of more money), and Rogers would get Ontario (since who wants Ontario anyways?).
I woke up one morning, long after figuring that nothing was going to change because of this deal, since nothing had, and my computer was no longer online. Debugged, debugged, traced, couldn't figure out why. Then, finally, I managed to figure it out.
I had the wrong IP, going through the wrong gateway on the wrong subnet of the wrong network. Whee.
After getting pump installed (hard to do in Debian if you have no network access or CD), I almost came. My highest speed of the last two weeks, 80 kbps (average 25) was blown away by my daily dist-upgrade, which went at about 325. This became my average, with peaks at 486 kilobytes/second. Oh yes, this new network was worth it.
The @home network is, at best, pathetic. Being routed from BC to Seattle, California, then out of the @home network into the public networks to make my way back up to Seattle, then BC, then into the telco's network to get to a friend's DSL a half-hour drive away is stupid at best.
Don't expect uninterrupted service, but when my ISP did this, it was a godsend in the truest sense of the word.
Now, if I can only figure out which @home server my @home address is going to (since I have accounts on three different mail servers, only one of which gets the mail sent to the account which should have been deleted two months ago), I'll be happy.
--Dan
OpenGL was not written for a UNIX environment, it was merely written. Maybe they wrote an implementation in UNIX, but GL is just an API, not designed for any OS.
It works on UNIX, sure, but it also works on Windows (NT4 OpenGL screensavers, not DirectX), and MacOS (OSX is hardware-accelerated via OpenGL).
Saying it 'is written for a UNIX environment' is just silly.
As for your comment about 'OpenGL-boards', there is no such thing. A hardware vendor (like ATI) will make a board, a chip, and so on. They will then write drivers. All manufacturers write DirectX drievrs. Most write OpenGL drivers. This has absolutely nothing to do with the boards themselves, and everything to do with the driver programmers.
Either way, it's entirely possible to extend OpenGL to add features that are not in the spec, and as long as this doesn't 1) break the spec, and 2) force incompatibilities, then it's nto really a problem.
Personally, I play Q3 on 'medium' detail, because while my friends are looking at dynamic lightsourcing and curved arches, I'm smoothly rounding a corner and blasting them all to hell.
This idea (almost) is currently in place in some countries, I believe (maybe France? I don't know).
The form of it that I've heard of goes like this:
1) People go to the polls to vote. They vote for whomever the heck they like. Nader, Gore, Bush, whomever.
2) Votes are tabulated. Bush has 40% of the vote. Gore has 35% of the vote. Nader has 25% of the vote.
3) The top two choices (Bush and Gore) are put into the voting system and everyone votes again for one of these two choices.
4) Gore gets 60% of the vote. Bush gets 40% of the vote.
Personally, I like this idea.
--Dan
I know this...
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
In plain speech, this means that 'no matter what else is in the Charter, judges can ignore it if necessary.
That being said, and even admitting that most Charter arguments brought before judges are replied to with 'Hmm. No, I disagree. Motion denied,' most charter arguments are things like trying to get out of traffic tickets because the 12 month wait for a trial was an 'unconstititonal breach of the defendant's rights'.
Judges in Canada aren't as verdict-happy as those in the US are. You won't win ten million dollars for spilling coffee in your lap. You will get to court, sure. You can appeal to the Supreme Court, sure. You can even get accepted by the Supreme Court. All that means, however, is that nine judges will laugh at you instead of one or three.
Constitutional Law in Canada is (subjectively) largely irrelevant. The Charter of Rights basically outlines the general ideas of Canadians' rights in Canada, and it is up to the courts to decide if the matter at hand is relevant.
In other words, let's hope the dice come up happy on this one, because that's it's a crap shoot as near as I can tell.
--Dan
Why should someone who uses CDRs for, say, duplicating software such as Linux, have to pay money into the coffers of the record industry?
For the same reason that you pay EI on your paycheque even if you never collect it, the same reason that you pay for health care even if you only go for a check-up once every year, and the same reason you pay GST and (unless you're Albertan) PST.
Canada is not 'all hail the gods of capitalism', it is a (mostly-)socialist-democracy. We're all in this together, like.
Besides, I look at it as a good thing. If I buy a music CD-R, I pay a hefty price (all things considered) for 'blank media tax', which goes to 'the artists' (just like the $15 I spend on a music CD goes to 'the artists').
Logically then, one can argue that I'm paying the music companies just like I'm paying the health care system. Ergo, just like I can walk into a hospital whenever I want and not worry because I've paid already, I don't have any moral dilemmas downloading soem BNL, Captain Tractor, Shania Twain (for example), and burning a 'dance mix' CD.
I don't buy 100-CD spindles of CDs and burn/sell them, but I don't bat an eye when I want a miscellany CD of songs, even if I haven't purchased them. They're getting my money, and your money, and everyone else's money already. If you want to burn a CD, we've all paid for you already, so go hog-wild. You can even use my share, since I never do.
--Dan
Implement /ignore at the server level (like on some networks) so that when you ignore someone it doesn't even send you anything anymore. That remove the personal-level DoS attacks. (Well, that and not displaying the user's address.)
I can't help but think of this as totally useless, since flood protection came into effect. Sure, you can load a dozen clonebots and flood someone offline, but you could do that anyway. This would just put more load on the IRC server by making it check every single message that went to one of its clients.
Get rid of ops at the same time. Let people deal with anyone they dislike by simply ignoring them.
And how do you propose that people change the topic? Or should anyone be able to? What about setting +i? +s? What if you want a private channel, a private conversation, or something of the sort? What if you don't want some lamer watching everything you say?
The solution, in my mind, is (in part) services. Let people register nicks/channels, and have them enforced by services, and that'll take away a lot of the reason to flood servers offline temporarily (to get ops status).
Realistically though? I don't think the idiots doing this round of DDoS attacks are trying to get channels, and I don't think they're trying to get around channel bans, and I don't think they're trying to accomplish anything other than to give themselves something to whack off to because their lives are so sad and pathetic that they have nowhere else to turn.
Fact is, they're doign this to be assholes, and if there were services, if there were no ops, and if there was a server-side ignore, these things would still happen, because despite all of these things, flooding someone offline is still being an asshole.
--Dan
If you spend $1300 on a new iBook it doesn't even come with enough RAM to run the OS installed on the hard drive. Apple has a nifty little icon / badge for OS X on their site. It reminds you 128MB of RAM is required.
Right, and $200 to upgrade to 192 megs of memory comes to $1500, which is still a pretty sweet price. Why make people buy 128 megs of memory if they don't need it? If you do, add it on. It's not too hard, you know.
I suppose if that's too complex, you could just click a more expensive one that already has 128 megs of ram, and you wouldn't have to deal with confusing pop-up menus.
--Dan
(BTW is version X 10.0.4 a bit redundant?)
Perhaps, but at least it's not as stupid as "Windows 95 4.00.95" or "Windows 2000 5.00.whatever".
I think the idea is that it's Mac OS version 10.0.0.4, but the 'X' is just to make it sound awesome (and, IMHO, it works).
--Dan
However, their entire front page is a flash applet. Doh!
However, Mozilla works entirely perfectly with flash (insofar as mozilla ever works perfectly), so what's the beef?
Download the Netscape version, throw the libflashplayer.so into Mozilla's plugins directory, and then restart Mozilla. Don't see the problem. =:>