Mmmm, we've got a mix of Windows and Linux servers at work. The Linux ones are all accessed by ssh, so the prompt is enough to tell you which one you're on at a glance, but the Windows ones are both controlled by gooey. They're named after Garfield characters, so Garfield has an orange wallpaper and Odie has a yellowish one, so you can tell at a glance which one you're on.
I guess if we get stuck with any more, Nermal will have a grey wallpaper, Arlene pink and Pookie brown. Then we'll start to struggle.
I sort of agree with you, but I think it depends on the person. A couple of examples, my girlfriend uses my Eee 901 as her main computer, for web browsing, IM, IRC, email etc, but she also uses the media server for watching video and downloading bigger stuff. My mum uses a MSI Wind as her main machine, but she's got a proper monitor, keyboard and mouse plugged into it (but can take it places without the accessories if she wants). The girlfriend especially is basically happy with the Eee as a main computer, and I think a lot of other people use computers in a similar way.
Personally, I wouldn't be happy with just an Eee, but I'm relatively unusual. I'm currently using a normal laptop as my main (almost only machine - there's a server as well), as I got it from work and can't be bothered to spend money on an alternative, but if I didn't have this laptop, I think my ideal would be a powerful desktop for proper computer use and an Eee on the side for travel and lounging around at home.
So, I think it depends how you use a computer. If you're a light user (which I suspect >90% of people are) then a netbook could be sufficient computer for all your home needs.
I have a fairly normal HP laptop, an nx7300, and that supports multi touch, such as 2 fingers for middle click, 3 for right, 2 finger scrolling and so forth. At least, it does under Ubuntu! I've not tried it in Windows 'cos... Well, I don't use Windows.
So, there are other laptops which support it, as long as you have the right software.
Best idea, I think, would be for grub to give two options - fast boot and scan boot. Have a timeout of, say, 2 seconds then it'll fast boot by default. When it fast boots, it assumes all the hardware is the same as last time (most things which change frequently will be USB and therefore hotplug anyway, so this shouldn't matter) and doesn't bother to scan everything.
If it hits any errors during the fast boot, or if anything doesn't appear to be right then it can do a full scanning boot.
Ideally, there'd be a flag you can set before you restart or shut down as well, so if you know you're about to add a hard drive, you click "shut down and scan on next boot" and you don't have to worry about catching grub.
I do something similar - the only SD media I care about is photos from my camera, and those get copied to my laptop as soon as I get the chance (well, usually - sometimes I'm a bit slack about it). If I'm at home then part of the copying process is to then dump them onto my server across the LAN, which means that if either computer dies, I don't lose the photos. If I'm out with the laptop, this can sometimes take a bit longer, which is probably the riskiest part of the system! Every so often (generally when I think of it, which isn't really ideal!) I stick one of two laptop hard drives in my USB-IDE adaptor and copy them off again, and whenever I visit my parents, I swap which drive is left at their house.
So, all my photos older than a month or so have an off site backup, and all the others are at least on two computers.
I used to use CDs (back when my photos would fit on them!), but I've had a lot of CDs rot, so I moved to hard drives and then laptop hard drives, which I believe are more rugged. All my docs and photos will fit easily onto a 40 gig drive, the rest of the stuff on the computers is all replaceable - music, films, OS images etc - so I don't care about it as much, but these days laptop hard drives certainly go up to 250GB, and perhaps 500 (I've not looked recently) so my system is expandable.
Re:Simple shit you didn't know existed
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 1
I've noticed the down side of finding stuff on the forums is that it's frequently several versions of Ubuntu out of date. The required steps to make something work on Edgy are unlikely to be applicable to Intrepid (often the things have been fixed and just work, but other times, people have been trying for a while). However, this can generally be solved by adding the version you're looking for help with in the search ("network manager Intrepid" instead of just "network manager ubuntu"), however sometimes this isn't a perfect solution.
I think the system the forums have now with "thanking" people for posts is a very good idea, however it needs to be taken a lot further, perhaps to the extent Slashdot discussions have... By default, a thread should show the first post and all the thanked posts (or the n most thanked posts if there are a lot of them), and of course, a "show all posts" button.
In an ideal world, the best posts would be copied from the forums to a knowledge bank and there would be links everywhere, and it would be the first hit for searches on Google, but I'm aware that's some way off!
If they're taught to keep the machine on, then you need a dead man's handle, the machine asks for the password every, say, hour (or less, you're really paranoid) that the encrypted partition's open that nukes the data if you don't enter it. Couple that with the 2 partition plausible deniability thing and you're reasonably safe!
But then you've got speed humps, which is even worse. There are figures (from a study done by a town in Colorado, if I remember correctly) which estimated that for every life saved by a speed hump, around 85 deaths are caused, mostly due to emergency vehicles being delayed.
Then there are other reasons like noise (vehicles going over speed humps are louder than vehicles driving on a flat road), environmental impact (due to accelerating and braking between humps), damage to vehicles, damage to the road and surrounding buildings, the added difficulty of judging whether it's safe to cross the road or pull out due to the vehicles' speed changing constantly...
I'm not so sure about the cheap optical drive thing... At one of my previous jobs, I was wandering around the building auditting hardware. I had a cheap, crappy laptop to enter the data on, so to keep myself amused, I had a music CD in it (burned CDR) which I left playing as I walked around. I wasn't remotely gentle with the laptop, picking it up, and turning it from horizontal to vertical pretty quickly.
As you'd expect, the CD picked up lots of neat concentric circle scratches on it, and eventually stopped working, but I was a lot rougher with it than I can imagine being with a fixed games console, and for a lot longer than most people in this thread are describing.
Seconded. I'm getting 15 meg, and I think I've had over 99% uptime in the 2 years I've had it. Very happy! Never seen any sign of throttling or even of it getting slower in the evening.
The point is that once Vista Ultimate has been produced, then it costs the same amount to stamp out an Ultimate CD as it does to stamp out a Basic CD. In fact, it costs more to produce 50,000 Ultimate CDs and 50,000 Basic CDs than it would to produce 100,000 Ultimate CDs because you have to spend time pruning bits out of Ultimate and managing two different stock items.
In, say, cars, once you've developed the car, it costs more to produce one with sat nav, heated seats, air con and a CD changer than it does to produce one without, justifying the higher price.
If only everybody stuck with that! From what I've heard, iPods are notorious for having a weird connection protocol, and lots of cameras "do things their own way".
It needs more pressure from consumers, I guess... I actually returned a camera last year because it didn't support USB mass storage. But I suspect I'm in a minority...
Next thing to push for is standard connectors. If only every camera/phone/MP3 player/etc was mini (or possibly micro, if they must) USB...
Windows XP does everything automagically? In what parallel universe?
Last time I installed Windows, I then spent a day or two installing drivers and software and configuring everything as I wanted it. Last time I installed Ubuntu, I spent an hour installing the OS and all apps (one apt-get command) and no installing of drivers was required.
In that case, wouldn't the best solution be to make a 20 gig RAM drive and use that as swap? Granted, the OS should be smart enough to do that itself, but you could work around it.
My experience is that there's a certain arsehole mentality that leads to buying a BMW, and it also leads to the arrogance that everyone else has been mentioning - the whole "I own the road, get out of my way" thing. It also tends to be management drones, again in my experience, who think they're far too busy to drive, so will drive as fast as they can, cutting up people wherever possible, and probably using their mobile phone or blackberry (for making a call, if you're lucky!).
Softroaders on the other hand are driven by people who don't know how to drive, and women who are scared of driving and think that being surrounded by 3 tonnes of metal is the safest way to do it. These people will fail to give way and drift across lanes not because they're arrogant and think they own the road, but because they're not actually in control of the vehicle.
Don't get me started on BMW 4x4s...
So, yeah. BMWs and 4x4s don't get let out of junctions, partly because they're arseholes and partly because I don't want them in front of me...
I don't know, you're right that HD isn't essential for the cartoony stuff, but it doesn't hurt. I've seen various Pixar stuff in 720p (For The Birds being the first example that comes to mind) and it does look stunning. I've been playing Wii Fit quite a lot recently, and the pixels are quite obvious. I'm running the Wii with the component cables to a 720p capable TV (so, getting 480p) and the images are certainly very sharp... but pixelly.
Metroid did look good, you're right, but I think even the cartoony games would benefit from more rounded edges and less pixels. It's certainly not essential - Wii Fit would be almost exactly the same game, but it would look nicer.
A final thought is that with the simplistic cartoony graphics of games like Wii Fit, the Wii would probably be capable of doing the extra grunt necessary to show it at 720p. It's just a shame it doesn't have that option.
I've just put Ubuntu on my Eee 901 to make it more powerful, and closer to what I'm used to. This has extended the boot time from 20 seconds under Xandros to... significantly more (not timed it yet). Being a laptop, it's on and off a lot more than a desktop or server, so I'd certainly be interested in reducing the boot time as much as possible.
White is almost the same as black? I'd have to disagree... White is lots of radiation at all the frequencies, black is no radiation at any frequency... If you'd said "red is effectively the same thing as blue, given the breadth of the entire spectrum then yes, it makes sense. It would be like saying France is in almost the same place as Germany, given the size of the entire universe, and so roughly correct, but black and white are actual complete opposites.
The nearest I can think of is if you're defining white as lots of radiation across just the visible portion of the EM spectrum, and is therefore just a tiny blip, compared to black, but I think that's a bit of a stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
Mmmm, we've got a mix of Windows and Linux servers at work. The Linux ones are all accessed by ssh, so the prompt is enough to tell you which one you're on at a glance, but the Windows ones are both controlled by gooey. They're named after Garfield characters, so Garfield has an orange wallpaper and Odie has a yellowish one, so you can tell at a glance which one you're on. I guess if we get stuck with any more, Nermal will have a grey wallpaper, Arlene pink and Pookie brown. Then we'll start to struggle.
I sort of agree with you, but I think it depends on the person. A couple of examples, my girlfriend uses my Eee 901 as her main computer, for web browsing, IM, IRC, email etc, but she also uses the media server for watching video and downloading bigger stuff. My mum uses a MSI Wind as her main machine, but she's got a proper monitor, keyboard and mouse plugged into it (but can take it places without the accessories if she wants). The girlfriend especially is basically happy with the Eee as a main computer, and I think a lot of other people use computers in a similar way.
Personally, I wouldn't be happy with just an Eee, but I'm relatively unusual. I'm currently using a normal laptop as my main (almost only machine - there's a server as well), as I got it from work and can't be bothered to spend money on an alternative, but if I didn't have this laptop, I think my ideal would be a powerful desktop for proper computer use and an Eee on the side for travel and lounging around at home.
So, I think it depends how you use a computer. If you're a light user (which I suspect >90% of people are) then a netbook could be sufficient computer for all your home needs.
I have a fairly normal HP laptop, an nx7300, and that supports multi touch, such as 2 fingers for middle click, 3 for right, 2 finger scrolling and so forth. At least, it does under Ubuntu! I've not tried it in Windows 'cos ... Well, I don't use Windows.
So, there are other laptops which support it, as long as you have the right software.
Best idea, I think, would be for grub to give two options - fast boot and scan boot. Have a timeout of, say, 2 seconds then it'll fast boot by default. When it fast boots, it assumes all the hardware is the same as last time (most things which change frequently will be USB and therefore hotplug anyway, so this shouldn't matter) and doesn't bother to scan everything.
If it hits any errors during the fast boot, or if anything doesn't appear to be right then it can do a full scanning boot.
Ideally, there'd be a flag you can set before you restart or shut down as well, so if you know you're about to add a hard drive, you click "shut down and scan on next boot" and you don't have to worry about catching grub.
I always heard that one as about BMW drivers, and from the ones I've seen on the road, that's much more accurate!
I do something similar - the only SD media I care about is photos from my camera, and those get copied to my laptop as soon as I get the chance (well, usually - sometimes I'm a bit slack about it). If I'm at home then part of the copying process is to then dump them onto my server across the LAN, which means that if either computer dies, I don't lose the photos. If I'm out with the laptop, this can sometimes take a bit longer, which is probably the riskiest part of the system! Every so often (generally when I think of it, which isn't really ideal!) I stick one of two laptop hard drives in my USB-IDE adaptor and copy them off again, and whenever I visit my parents, I swap which drive is left at their house.
So, all my photos older than a month or so have an off site backup, and all the others are at least on two computers.
I used to use CDs (back when my photos would fit on them!), but I've had a lot of CDs rot, so I moved to hard drives and then laptop hard drives, which I believe are more rugged. All my docs and photos will fit easily onto a 40 gig drive, the rest of the stuff on the computers is all replaceable - music, films, OS images etc - so I don't care about it as much, but these days laptop hard drives certainly go up to 250GB, and perhaps 500 (I've not looked recently) so my system is expandable.
I've noticed the down side of finding stuff on the forums is that it's frequently several versions of Ubuntu out of date. The required steps to make something work on Edgy are unlikely to be applicable to Intrepid (often the things have been fixed and just work, but other times, people have been trying for a while). However, this can generally be solved by adding the version you're looking for help with in the search ("network manager Intrepid" instead of just "network manager ubuntu"), however sometimes this isn't a perfect solution.
I think the system the forums have now with "thanking" people for posts is a very good idea, however it needs to be taken a lot further, perhaps to the extent Slashdot discussions have... By default, a thread should show the first post and all the thanked posts (or the n most thanked posts if there are a lot of them), and of course, a "show all posts" button.
In an ideal world, the best posts would be copied from the forums to a knowledge bank and there would be links everywhere, and it would be the first hit for searches on Google, but I'm aware that's some way off!
If they're taught to keep the machine on, then you need a dead man's handle, the machine asks for the password every, say, hour (or less, you're really paranoid) that the encrypted partition's open that nukes the data if you don't enter it. Couple that with the 2 partition plausible deniability thing and you're reasonably safe!
But then you've got speed humps, which is even worse. There are figures (from a study done by a town in Colorado, if I remember correctly) which estimated that for every life saved by a speed hump, around 85 deaths are caused, mostly due to emergency vehicles being delayed.
Then there are other reasons like noise (vehicles going over speed humps are louder than vehicles driving on a flat road), environmental impact (due to accelerating and braking between humps), damage to vehicles, damage to the road and surrounding buildings, the added difficulty of judging whether it's safe to cross the road or pull out due to the vehicles' speed changing constantly...
No. Speed humps are almost never the answer.
I'm not so sure about the cheap optical drive thing... At one of my previous jobs, I was wandering around the building auditting hardware. I had a cheap, crappy laptop to enter the data on, so to keep myself amused, I had a music CD in it (burned CDR) which I left playing as I walked around. I wasn't remotely gentle with the laptop, picking it up, and turning it from horizontal to vertical pretty quickly.
As you'd expect, the CD picked up lots of neat concentric circle scratches on it, and eventually stopped working, but I was a lot rougher with it than I can imagine being with a fixed games console, and for a lot longer than most people in this thread are describing.
Golf and Guitar Hero are poor examples (as is running really!) as it's still possible to play against your previous personal best.
Something like Squash (or UT, CoD and many other games), however, does fit as your performance and experience depends a lot more on your opponent.
Ah, OK. To be honest, my IP hasn't changed in the year I've had Be, despite not having asked for static, so I don't think I'm too worried. :-)
I'm with Be, and you get all that except the static IPs for £18/month. A static IP is £1 more. I don't know if they do multiple static IPs though.
Oh, and I'm not sure whether they have a 1 year minimum. I've been with them 2 years, so I'm a little hazy on that side.
Seconded. I'm getting 15 meg, and I think I've had over 99% uptime in the 2 years I've had it. Very happy! Never seen any sign of throttling or even of it getting slower in the evening.
What?
The point is that once Vista Ultimate has been produced, then it costs the same amount to stamp out an Ultimate CD as it does to stamp out a Basic CD. In fact, it costs more to produce 50,000 Ultimate CDs and 50,000 Basic CDs than it would to produce 100,000 Ultimate CDs because you have to spend time pruning bits out of Ultimate and managing two different stock items.
In, say, cars, once you've developed the car, it costs more to produce one with sat nav, heated seats, air con and a CD changer than it does to produce one without, justifying the higher price.
If only everybody stuck with that! From what I've heard, iPods are notorious for having a weird connection protocol, and lots of cameras "do things their own way".
It needs more pressure from consumers, I guess... I actually returned a camera last year because it didn't support USB mass storage. But I suspect I'm in a minority...
Next thing to push for is standard connectors. If only every camera/phone/MP3 player/etc was mini (or possibly micro, if they must) USB...
Bwahahahahahahaaaa...
Windows XP does everything automagically? In what parallel universe?
Last time I installed Windows, I then spent a day or two installing drivers and software and configuring everything as I wanted it. Last time I installed Ubuntu, I spent an hour installing the OS and all apps (one apt-get command) and no installing of drivers was required.
Things are in preferences if they just affect the currently logged in account. They're in admin if they affect the system or all users.
I'm not sure that's 100% accurate, but it's a rough approximation!
In that case, wouldn't the best solution be to make a 20 gig RAM drive and use that as swap? Granted, the OS should be smart enough to do that itself, but you could work around it.
Does this mean that the upgrade from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 is a bigger jump than from 8.04 to 8.10, because it's a whole version number jump?
I read it as him implying that conception before marriage isn't /smart/, not isn't possible.
That said, the comment about blaming the wife for his low sperm count suggests he's a dumbass either way.
My experience is that there's a certain arsehole mentality that leads to buying a BMW, and it also leads to the arrogance that everyone else has been mentioning - the whole "I own the road, get out of my way" thing. It also tends to be management drones, again in my experience, who think they're far too busy to drive, so will drive as fast as they can, cutting up people wherever possible, and probably using their mobile phone or blackberry (for making a call, if you're lucky!).
Softroaders on the other hand are driven by people who don't know how to drive, and women who are scared of driving and think that being surrounded by 3 tonnes of metal is the safest way to do it. These people will fail to give way and drift across lanes not because they're arrogant and think they own the road, but because they're not actually in control of the vehicle.
Don't get me started on BMW 4x4s...
So, yeah. BMWs and 4x4s don't get let out of junctions, partly because they're arseholes and partly because I don't want them in front of me...
I don't know, you're right that HD isn't essential for the cartoony stuff, but it doesn't hurt. I've seen various Pixar stuff in 720p (For The Birds being the first example that comes to mind) and it does look stunning. I've been playing Wii Fit quite a lot recently, and the pixels are quite obvious. I'm running the Wii with the component cables to a 720p capable TV (so, getting 480p) and the images are certainly very sharp ... but pixelly.
Metroid did look good, you're right, but I think even the cartoony games would benefit from more rounded edges and less pixels. It's certainly not essential - Wii Fit would be almost exactly the same game, but it would look nicer.
A final thought is that with the simplistic cartoony graphics of games like Wii Fit, the Wii would probably be capable of doing the extra grunt necessary to show it at 720p. It's just a shame it doesn't have that option.
I've just put Ubuntu on my Eee 901 to make it more powerful, and closer to what I'm used to. This has extended the boot time from 20 seconds under Xandros to ... significantly more (not timed it yet). Being a laptop, it's on and off a lot more than a desktop or server, so I'd certainly be interested in reducing the boot time as much as possible.
White is almost the same as black? I'd have to disagree... White is lots of radiation at all the frequencies, black is no radiation at any frequency... If you'd said "red is effectively the same thing as blue, given the breadth of the entire spectrum then yes, it makes sense. It would be like saying France is in almost the same place as Germany, given the size of the entire universe, and so roughly correct, but black and white are actual complete opposites. The nearest I can think of is if you're defining white as lots of radiation across just the visible portion of the EM spectrum, and is therefore just a tiny blip, compared to black, but I think that's a bit of a stretch.