There's only a little bit of time left for you Qwest.net subscribers, so act fast. If you haven't gone looking for another ISP, (and don't want MSN) do so quickly. In the letter that I received from Qwest, they will switch your account to MSN automatically, contrary to what they said they were going to do earlier, which was to simply discontinue service.
I was a member of Qwest and just cancelled my account yesterday because I had a semi-popular web page on my account and wanted the redirector to be up as long as possible. Luckily, I found a great little ma 'n pa ISP in the local area who had good rates, the features that I wanted and are even *BSD and Linux friendly.
But trying to find the right phone number to cancel your service can be difficult, of course. After a half-hour of transferred numbers, I finally ended up at a number called Product Services or some name to that effect. Basically, the people you call to buy new services for your phone line, apparently they also handle(d) Qwest.net subscriptions.
(Note: Everything in the post relates to dialup service only.)
I am well aware of the debate on weather or not Slack's packages and associated utilities constitute a "package management system".
I am a die-hard Slackware user, but I don't think a system as rudimentary as Slack's can be considered a package manager. For me, it installs software upon installation and that's it. 99% of the rest of my software gets installed by hand.
I do not consider this a weak point. I consider it one of Slackware's greatest strengths; putting power in the hands of the administrator.
If you're still interested in finding a decent Linux distro, give Slackware a look. No fancy configuration wizards or package management, just good clean Linux.
I'm not trying to be a pissant or anything, but I'm a little tired of the criticism Gnome takes sometime for being "too Win98-like."
Take a look at a fairly recent screenshot of my desktop. Note the panel on the left, which is auto-hidden and contains icons for my most commonly used apps. Now, apart from common UI elements and the taskbar, how can you possibly say that Gnome has a "Windows98 look and feel"? I'm sure you can make it look somewhat like Win98, but you can also make it look vastly different.
I mean, do people who make these remarks fail to realize that you can actually customize the panels for almost every configuration, change the theme, modify the menus, or get a different window manager until you find a configuration that's useful?
And to address what you say about performance, I have Gnome running on a PII266 laptop with 64MB of RAM (which I consider to be "older hardware") and it's quite speedy for everything I want to do. (KDE is another story, however...)
Err, not to start anything here, but I don't see how Gnome copies Windows. (Going beyond the usual common UI elements, that is.) The difference between Gnome and Windows is one of the major reasons I use Gnome over KDE.
Yikes. You bought a PowerBook to test OS X with. Silly me, I was looking into getting one for the 15" display, the DVD + CDRW drive, or perhaps the built-in gigabit ethernet. But you, sir, bought one to test OS X with. Must be an absolutely smashing state of euphoria to have $2300 - $3600 to play around with, merely so you can have something to test OS X with. I mean, the tough decisions you must have to face in your daily life. When you wake up in the morning, yawn, stretch your legs, and then set about wondering, "Today, should I get the driveway repaved, buy some more Amway stock, or test OS X?"
Note: This is not a flame, just a good humourly jab.
I probably don't speak for everyone on this, but if I happen to accidently buy one of these copy-protected CDs and it doesn't play on every single kind of Compact Disc compatible device I have (to include all of my current CD players, portables, computer CD-ROM drives, and video game consoles) then I am marching right back to the store to demand some sort of refund.
I know almost every record store has a policy against refunds for merchandise, but trust me on this, if you bitch enough, you will get one.
No kidding. I read the entire article and didn't see just where their innovation lies... behind all the tech jargon and trademarked methods, it just sounds like fancy compression to me. I don't really understand the math behind this, but from what other people are saying, there doesn't seem to be much that hasn't been thought of before.
Something definitely smells fishy when the CEO is saying that FedEx is more reliable than FTP... I've downloaded more 20+MB Linux kernels than I can even count, and not one of the resulting files has ever had a CRC error. I have, however, known many people to have problems with packages they've shipped or recieved via FedEx.
I think the reason chip designers would FedEx their designs is more for security reasons (certified mail and insurance, etc) than reliability ones.
I agree with this completely. It wouldn't be too difficult to throw a ports.tgz onto the install CDs. I really liked the idea of BSD's ports when I briefly tried FreeBSD. (Unfortunately, they didn't seem to always work as advertised, but that's a gripe for another day.) One of Slackware's stated goals is to be as Unix-like (not "Linux-like") as possible and since BSD is the de-facto Unix these days, I don't see how ports could do any harm.
If someone's actually working on something like this, I would be one of the first to step up and volunteer to help out.
No, "IMHO" goes something more like, the best package management system is the user himself. That's *if* and only if the user is up to the challenge. Sure rpm and apt make things easy, but they're also just as easy to screw up.
I choose slackware because I like the control I have over my system. I used to be a Mandrake fan, but that was until I got fed up with how the user friendly tools got in the way of what I really wanted to do.
When will you a-man-runs-only-slackware idiots get over it ?
Thanks for lumping me into some kind of category that you happen to dislike. I guess you won't be too offended when I refer to you as an rpm weenie who can't stand the thought of actually doing something for yourself vs having some piece of software automate it (sometimes incorrectly) for you?
This is why you use an rpm-based distro (or Debian) if you upgrade frequently. Slackware enthusiasts don't generally do a lot of upgrading. Because once a package is installed and working properly, there is very little reason to install a newer version.
All of the packages that I install from source go in/usr/local/src. That way, if I do ever need to pull something out for removal or upgrade, I just cd to the package directory and do 'make uninstall'. It's then a simple matter to apply a diff or unpack the source of a new version.
This was one of the reasons I moved to slackware. Virtually no package management. You want software? Get the darn tarball and have at it. Configure will tell you if you don't have the right dependencies. It has worked wonderfully for me. Yes, I know of the disadvantages of slackware's lack of package management. They are smaller than the advantages, imho.
On that note, I think since Slackware pretty much starts at nothing in the PM arena, it would be a great candidate for some kind of apt-get-type system. But that would, after all, pretty much collide with slackware's motto of being kept exceedingly simple. (Almost to a fault, some might say.)
Yes, amazing the lack of psychological knowledge in some of these posts. Addiction, well, most of us can relate to addiction. But OSD is a completely different animal. An OSD person *knows* that they have a problem and *want* to stop it, but feel powerless to do so. Most addictions (discounting physilogical ones for now) can be broken merely if the person has enough willpower to do so.
My Psych professor told us of a book that lists all the "official" criteria for various psychological disorders. I'm pretty sure addiction would be in there somewhere. Maybe someone here can cite the entry from the book I'm talking about? (Without pointing to goatse.cx or a penis bird)
I don't think so... people who get addicted to games (though I have no actual experience in the matter) seem to almost always choose one or a few games in preference to all others. Being addicted to games doesn't mean you go out hoarding every 3D shooter, RTS, and flight simulator you can find. It just means you spend too much time playing games.
* Which would you do - wait three weeks for the new hot game, or buy the Windows version immediately and then download the Linux binaries when the become available?
I waited for the Linux version and I've been playing Quake since Quake1. I preordered Quake3 directly from Loki... as soon as they had the discs pressed, they sent them out right away to people who bought the game. They shipped the pretty box and manuals once the contractor had manufactured / printed them all. So Loki kinda went out of their way to make sure us Linux gamers got our version as soon as possible.
* The Linux version only sold in the premium metal tin box, for US$50. The Windows version sold in the cardboard box for US$30. Again, which route are you most likely to take?
1) Until fairly recently, I have never seen the Windows version of Quake3 for $30.
2) The tin box was a sort of collectors edition... after that batch, the rest of the Linux Q3 copies were sold in cardboard. Any tin boxes you saw on the shelf were likely surplus from the original batch.
* Finding a retail store that stocked the Linux version was difficult. If you didn't live in a large city with a computer specialty store, you had no option - you were going to buy the Windows version.
On the contrary, I saw several stores (I'd estimate 50% of the ones I checked out) that carried Q3 Linux. However, not all of these stores stocked them in with the "regular" video games... sometimes you'd have to look for the shelf that displayed Linux distributions and software and you'd see the Q3 among them. I don't mean backwater ma & pa stores, I'm talking about Software Etc, Electronics Boutique, Babbages, et al.
First, if your coolant leaks out, you aren't going to worry much about it since your CPU would overheat and die very quickly without sufficient coolant in the tubes.
Second, 100% distilled water supposedly doesn't conduct electricity, so you're probably fine if a little bit gets out as long as you aren't using tap water. (A bad idea in any event since minerals, et al would eventually form on the CPU cooling element, the pumps, and heat exchanger.)
I live in a dormitory and the noise coming from my computer is far eclipsed by the guy next door watching infomercials and rap music at full blast at 2:30AM.
That pretty much matches up with my (admittedly limited) experience with flight sims. The ones we have here are for the C-130 (I forget which model), MH53-J, and the UH-1 Huey. The Huey, although much simpler and lacking hydraulics was incredibly fun and I got the hang of flying it almost right away, despite never having flown a helicopter before.
I was wondering, though, if you could give any insight as to how a regular geek (or military avionics geek, as I am) would go about eventually securing a job in programming and / or maintaining the program on one of these machines?
I would imagine you have to have a strong background or degree in some aerospace field or two or three first. (Avionics, flight theory, possibly even simulation itself is a degree.) Then, you need to know how to program, probably in a few different languages and quite possibly on several platforms applicable to flight sims.
Then, you need to get in with a company that actually designs, builds, and maintains the flight sims themselves. If memory serves correct, that would be Lockheed/Martin on this base, but it wouldn't surprise me much to hear that Boeing and TRW also get in on it.
Very occasionally, the programmers for the flight sims here stop by our shop to use one of our test benches to have an accurate benchmark of what our avionics test station does vs. what their program is doing. Next time they stop in, (and it's possible they might not) I plan on asking them what I would need to do to be a flight sim programmer. If you give me your email address, I can write it down and give you the scoop.
Come to think it it, there might be some information regarding this on the web. I'll submit this comment and check it out.
Slashdot Mirror
There's only a little bit of time left for you Qwest.net subscribers, so act fast. If you haven't gone looking for another ISP, (and don't want MSN) do so quickly. In the letter that I received from Qwest, they will switch your account to MSN automatically, contrary to what they said they were going to do earlier, which was to simply discontinue service.
I was a member of Qwest and just cancelled my account yesterday because I had a semi-popular web page on my account and wanted the redirector to be up as long as possible. Luckily, I found a great little ma 'n pa ISP in the local area who had good rates, the features that I wanted and are even *BSD and Linux friendly.
But trying to find the right phone number to cancel your service can be difficult, of course. After a half-hour of transferred numbers, I finally ended up at a number called Product Services or some name to that effect. Basically, the people you call to buy new services for your phone line, apparently they also handle(d) Qwest.net subscriptions.
(Note: Everything in the post relates to dialup service only.)
As a consequence, the LCD monitor's biggest drawback, the lasting afterglow, has been significantly reduced.
They just don't make them like they used to.
The emulator might not require protection, but the games have them.
The executables on X-Box games are encrypted and that encryption needs to be broken before they can be emulated.
I am well aware of the debate on weather or not Slack's packages and associated utilities constitute a "package management system".
I am a die-hard Slackware user, but I don't think a system as rudimentary as Slack's can be considered a package manager. For me, it installs software upon installation and that's it. 99% of the rest of my software gets installed by hand.
I do not consider this a weak point. I consider it one of Slackware's greatest strengths; putting power in the hands of the administrator.
If you're still interested in finding a decent Linux distro, give Slackware a look. No fancy configuration wizards or package management, just good clean Linux.
I'm not trying to be a pissant or anything, but I'm a little tired of the criticism Gnome takes sometime for being "too Win98-like."
Take a look at a fairly recent screenshot of my desktop. Note the panel on the left, which is auto-hidden and contains icons for my most commonly used apps. Now, apart from common UI elements and the taskbar, how can you possibly say that Gnome has a "Windows98 look and feel"? I'm sure you can make it look somewhat like Win98, but you can also make it look vastly different.
I mean, do people who make these remarks fail to realize that you can actually customize the panels for almost every configuration, change the theme, modify the menus, or get a different window manager until you find a configuration that's useful?
And to address what you say about performance, I have Gnome running on a PII266 laptop with 64MB of RAM (which I consider to be "older hardware") and it's quite speedy for everything I want to do. (KDE is another story, however...)
Err, not to start anything here, but I don't see how Gnome copies Windows. (Going beyond the usual common UI elements, that is.) The difference between Gnome and Windows is one of the major reasons I use Gnome over KDE.
Yikes. You bought a PowerBook to test OS X with. Silly me, I was looking into getting one for the 15" display, the DVD + CDRW drive, or perhaps the built-in gigabit ethernet. But you, sir, bought one to test OS X with. Must be an absolutely smashing state of euphoria to have $2300 - $3600 to play around with, merely so you can have something to test OS X with. I mean, the tough decisions you must have to face in your daily life. When you wake up in the morning, yawn, stretch your legs, and then set about wondering, "Today, should I get the driveway repaved, buy some more Amway stock, or test OS X?"
Note: This is not a flame, just a good humourly jab.
Just a quick question here... "normal" CD players supposedly correct the intentionally-added noise to play the disc noise-free...
But doesn't cdparanoia do this also?
If not, could this be a "feature" in future releases, being that cdparanoia's goal is to be able to read less-than-perfect discs anyway?
I probably don't speak for everyone on this, but if I happen to accidently buy one of these copy-protected CDs and it doesn't play on every single kind of Compact Disc compatible device I have (to include all of my current CD players, portables, computer CD-ROM drives, and video game consoles) then I am marching right back to the store to demand some sort of refund.
I know almost every record store has a policy against refunds for merchandise, but trust me on this, if you bitch enough, you will get one.
Hey, good point. I should unplug my computer from the wall right now, never know when that "evil current" will just sidle its way into my PC...
NO CARRIER
No kidding. I read the entire article and didn't see just where their innovation lies... behind all the tech jargon and trademarked methods, it just sounds like fancy compression to me. I don't really understand the math behind this, but from what other people are saying, there doesn't seem to be much that hasn't been thought of before.
Something definitely smells fishy when the CEO is saying that FedEx is more reliable than FTP... I've downloaded more 20+MB Linux kernels than I can even count, and not one of the resulting files has ever had a CRC error. I have, however, known many people to have problems with packages they've shipped or recieved via FedEx.
I think the reason chip designers would FedEx their designs is more for security reasons (certified mail and insurance, etc) than reliability ones.
This article just reeked of boneheadedness, IMHO.
I agree with this completely. It wouldn't be too difficult to throw a ports.tgz onto the install CDs. I really liked the idea of BSD's ports when I briefly tried FreeBSD. (Unfortunately, they didn't seem to always work as advertised, but that's a gripe for another day.) One of Slackware's stated goals is to be as Unix-like (not "Linux-like") as possible and since BSD is the de-facto Unix these days, I don't see how ports could do any harm.
If someone's actually working on something like this, I would be one of the first to step up and volunteer to help out.
No, "IMHO" goes something more like, the best package management system is the user himself. That's *if* and only if the user is up to the challenge. Sure rpm and apt make things easy, but they're also just as easy to screw up.
I choose slackware because I like the control I have over my system. I used to be a Mandrake fan, but that was until I got fed up with how the user friendly tools got in the way of what I really wanted to do.
When will you a-man-runs-only-slackware idiots get over it ?
Thanks for lumping me into some kind of category that you happen to dislike. I guess you won't be too offended when I refer to you as an rpm weenie who can't stand the thought of actually doing something for yourself vs having some piece of software automate it (sometimes incorrectly) for you?
This is why you use an rpm-based distro (or Debian) if you upgrade frequently. Slackware enthusiasts don't generally do a lot of upgrading. Because once a package is installed and working properly, there is very little reason to install a newer version.
/usr/local/src. That way, if I do ever need to pull something out for removal or upgrade, I just cd to the package directory and do 'make uninstall'. It's then a simple matter to apply a diff or unpack the source of a new version.
All of the packages that I install from source go in
Not really. Slackware is possible to install. Slackware also has recent software.
This was one of the reasons I moved to slackware. Virtually no package management. You want software? Get the darn tarball and have at it. Configure will tell you if you don't have the right dependencies. It has worked wonderfully for me. Yes, I know of the disadvantages of slackware's lack of package management. They are smaller than the advantages, imho.
On that note, I think since Slackware pretty much starts at nothing in the PM arena, it would be a great candidate for some kind of apt-get-type system. But that would, after all, pretty much collide with slackware's motto of being kept exceedingly simple. (Almost to a fault, some might say.)
Yes, amazing the lack of psychological knowledge in some of these posts. Addiction, well, most of us can relate to addiction. But OSD is a completely different animal. An OSD person *knows* that they have a problem and *want* to stop it, but feel powerless to do so. Most addictions (discounting physilogical ones for now) can be broken merely if the person has enough willpower to do so.
My Psych professor told us of a book that lists all the "official" criteria for various psychological disorders. I'm pretty sure addiction would be in there somewhere. Maybe someone here can cite the entry from the book I'm talking about? (Without pointing to goatse.cx or a penis bird)
I don't think so... people who get addicted to games (though I have no actual experience in the matter) seem to almost always choose one or a few games in preference to all others. Being addicted to games doesn't mean you go out hoarding every 3D shooter, RTS, and flight simulator you can find. It just means you spend too much time playing games.
* Which would you do - wait three weeks for the new hot game, or buy the Windows version immediately and then download the Linux binaries when the become available?
I waited for the Linux version and I've been playing Quake since Quake1. I preordered Quake3 directly from Loki... as soon as they had the discs pressed, they sent them out right away to people who bought the game. They shipped the pretty box and manuals once the contractor had manufactured / printed them all. So Loki kinda went out of their way to make sure us Linux gamers got our version as soon as possible.
* The Linux version only sold in the premium metal tin box, for US$50. The Windows version sold in the cardboard box for US$30. Again, which route are you most likely to take?
1) Until fairly recently, I have never seen the Windows version of Quake3 for $30.
2) The tin box was a sort of collectors edition... after that batch, the rest of the Linux Q3 copies were sold in cardboard. Any tin boxes you saw on the shelf were likely surplus from the original batch.
* Finding a retail store that stocked the Linux version was difficult. If you didn't live in a large city with a computer specialty store, you had no option - you were going to buy the Windows version.
On the contrary, I saw several stores (I'd estimate 50% of the ones I checked out) that carried Q3 Linux. However, not all of these stores stocked them in with the "regular" video games... sometimes you'd have to look for the shelf that displayed Linux distributions and software and you'd see the Q3 among them. I don't mean backwater ma & pa stores, I'm talking about Software Etc, Electronics Boutique, Babbages, et al.
I thought the case itself looked pretty cool as well. Took a look at their website though, and all of the other cases looked ridiculous or cheap.
First, if your coolant leaks out, you aren't going to worry much about it since your CPU would overheat and die very quickly without sufficient coolant in the tubes.
Second, 100% distilled water supposedly doesn't conduct electricity, so you're probably fine if a little bit gets out as long as you aren't using tap water. (A bad idea in any event since minerals, et al would eventually form on the CPU cooling element, the pumps, and heat exchanger.)
I live in a dormitory and the noise coming from my computer is far eclipsed by the guy next door watching infomercials and rap music at full blast at 2:30AM.
That pretty much matches up with my (admittedly limited) experience with flight sims. The ones we have here are for the C-130 (I forget which model), MH53-J, and the UH-1 Huey. The Huey, although much simpler and lacking hydraulics was incredibly fun and I got the hang of flying it almost right away, despite never having flown a helicopter before.
I was wondering, though, if you could give any insight as to how a regular geek (or military avionics geek, as I am) would go about eventually securing a job in programming and / or maintaining the program on one of these machines?
I would imagine you have to have a strong background or degree in some aerospace field or two or three first. (Avionics, flight theory, possibly even simulation itself is a degree.) Then, you need to know how to program, probably in a few different languages and quite possibly on several platforms applicable to flight sims.
Then, you need to get in with a company that actually designs, builds, and maintains the flight sims themselves. If memory serves correct, that would be Lockheed/Martin on this base, but it wouldn't surprise me much to hear that Boeing and TRW also get in on it.
Very occasionally, the programmers for the flight sims here stop by our shop to use one of our test benches to have an accurate benchmark of what our avionics test station does vs. what their program is doing. Next time they stop in, (and it's possible they might not) I plan on asking them what I would need to do to be a flight sim programmer. If you give me your email address, I can write it down and give you the scoop.
Come to think it it, there might be some information regarding this on the web. I'll submit this comment and check it out.