Let's go through your examples: "NASA went to space, so Europe made the ESA.. a weak form of NASA" Ok, the ESA has got nothing on NASA (no surprise since its total funding it sadly only about 1/5th what NASA gets). But the only reason NASA was able to get to the moon so quickly back in the day was that it 'stole' German rocket technology and scientists after the war. Everything NASA's done since then has been based on developments on the rocket technology it got from Germany after the war.
"The US starting building the supercollider (which Reagan cancelled) so they built the LHC -- a weaker supercollider... they only win cause supercollider funding got cut" Nonsense, the LHC is a machine that is literally *the edge* of what current science and technology can do, which is why it's taken so long to get it working. You can't compare that to a collider that was cancelled 20 years ago due to being unrealisticly expensive to build.
"The US has Boeing so Europee made Airbus -- most of their planes are uninspired boeing clones" Airbus pioneered the use technologies like fly-by-wire and composite fuselages long before Boeing dared. They've also introduced new aircraft that change the economics on certain routes such as the A380. Not to mention that the first commercial jetliner in production was the deHavilland Comet from the UK, although it proved unsafe and was eventually overtaken by the American 707.
"The US built the National Ignition Facility to study nuclear fusion, so Europe is building Laser Megajoule" The NIF and ITER are two different approaches to achieving viable nuclear fusion, Europe has commited the majority of its funding to the ITER approach but it'd be stupid not to have some smaller scale experiments which use the approach that NIF uses. Just as I'm sure the US has some experiments that try the ITER torus approach.
Oh and BTW the National Ignition Facility was 5 years behind schedule and almost 4 times more expensive than originally budgeted when completed.
There are areas of scient and technology where the US is ahead and some where Europe is, but it's always annoying in those discussions to have some jingoistic American spread around the myth that all technological development comes from the US and Europe (and everyone else) are just copiers. It's a myth not supported by history, including not by recent history.
I meant the ones that haven't gone independent, i.e. the status of these regions within France is very different to, say, the status of the British Overseas Territories in the UK's political structure
It's not South America's because French Guiana is part of France (and thus the EU), in the same way that Hawaii is part of the US despite being gegraphically separate. I.e. unlike with the UK and a lot of other European countries France has made their former colonies 'regions' with the same status as the regions in European France.
Same here, my last two computers (an 11 inch laptop and a self-assembled desktop) were deliberately bought with AMD graphics cards because the radeon (Open Source AMD card driver) works so well out of the box. HDMI out, multiple monitors all just works.
If I plug in HDMI to my laptop it pops up a dialog asking me to configure the 2nd monitor, which takes me to KDE's standard Display thing in its control panel. This works the same across distros (Opensuse and Kubuntu) and that's the way it should be.
All that said, I leave my gaming for my Windows 7 dual-boot. IMHO configuring WINE isn't worth the effort, you spend more time configuring it than playing games whereas Windows is just a minute or two of reboot time away.
"I honestly thought that was the start of a list of things you could say in favor of a linux desktop, but, by the end of your paragraph, I'm starting to think you actually meant Windows just works right out of the box. Is that what you meant? And, if so, have you setup either Ubuntu or Windows from near scratch recently (near scratch, as in, bought a new pc even)?"
I have, just last week on a PC I assembled myself from decent quality brand-name (D-Link, Asrock, Saphire, AMD) parts. And yes the difference was amazing comparing Windows 7 to Ubuntu - all hardware, including the graphics card, worked out of the box perfectly in 64-bit Ubuntu.
With Windows 7 I had to go through inserting CDs for each bit of hardware to get it working - the motherboard driver CD even went ahead and installed a whole load of crapware that I didn't ask for! Worst of all though the nice D-Link Atheros WLAN card that worked perfectly in Ubuntu failed to work in Win 7 at all, with neither the drivers from the included driver CD nor the latest from D-Link's website. I had to send it back.
Because they don't know that there's free antivirus software out there that does the job just as well, and even if they did they wouldn't trust it - and rightfully so given the amount of malware out there posing as 'anti-virus' and 'anti-spyware' software.
My parents went throuh this painful cycle. First they got duped by some flashing ad on the internet into downloading one of the malware 'anti-virus' programs, then they went to a local big-name store (Australia's infamous Harvey Norman) who were more than happy to sell them an expensive yearly subscription to Symantec's bloated anti-virus to try and fix it up. When I visited them after that I put MS Security Essentials on and everything's fine since.
I wish MS would just have Security Essentials installed and on by default and end this game where both malware authors and big-name 'respectable' firms rip off non-technical computer users?
Australian law says nothing of the sort. Have a look at the full act, it clearly defines the word "harm" as: ""harm" means physical harm or harm to a person's mental health, whether temporary or permanent. However, it does not include being subjected to any force or impact that is within the limits of what is acceptable as incidental to social interaction or to life in the community. " http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/cca1995115/sch1.html
So yes you're perfectly able to insult the Queen, the GG, the PM in Australia with no fear of either civil or criminal penalties.
It definitely doesn't mean harm to their reputation or phsychological harm. otherwise all the tv shows, newspapers and webites run by Aussies which criticise and make fun of politicians, and yes, even queen Liz, would be being chased with sedition and treason laws. it just doesnt happen in Australia.
At the point that you kill Queen, the PM or the Governer General: "Section 80.1 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth) makes it an an offence to cause the death of, or harm to, the Sovereign, the heir apparent, the Governor-General or the Prime Minister." http://www.caslon.com.au/seditionnote2.htm
Why do you need 'impressive security'? The high-speed (up to 300 km/h ~180Mph) trains here in Germany have zero security, you literally just walk in from the street into the train station and get on. The only thing close to 'security' is conductors who come round and check your ticket, and if you don't have one and refuse to pay for one they might call the police and have them meet you at the next stop.
Really, think of high-speed trains more like extensions of the subway or mass-transit systems that operate within cities. They don't have airport-style security checks there because it's simply impractical.
That's simplification to the point of inaccuracy, in Australia's case at least. For a start the illegality is only when race is involved, you can quite freely come to Australia and say that the prime minister, the Queen, the Governor General (the Queen's representative in Oz) or any other politician is a fuckwit or something like that, and you'll find plenty of people who agree with you completely.
Secondly, and more importantly, it only becomes a criminal matter if you threaten violence or physically confront someone and harass them: "To establish racial vilification of a criminal nature, it is usually necessary to establish a high level of harassment or potential threat. While the distribution of offensive material may form one end of the continuum of behaviours prohibited under state criminal law, generally, incitement to violence, threats to person or property, and so on, are required in order for state or federal criminal provisions to apply." http://www.hreoc.gov.au/racial_discrimination/cyberracism/vilification.html
Just posting what GP did would at worst land you in a conciliation process with the above mentioned commission or if that fails a civil court case. And as the link above mentions they handle very few cases about alleged internet discrimination.
I generally would support having US style free-speech laws in Australia, but the current situation is not as repressive as some Americans on/. seem to imagine.
I was scouring the page looking for the scientific debunking of this typically contrived anti-EU 'story' from the Daily Torygraph, and there it is. Mod parent up!
Yes there is, it's in the Education repository. You can find it by going to http://software.opensuse.org/ and searching for 'rosegarden'.
Unfortuantely opensuse still operates a two-tier repository system where packages go into a 'devel' repository with similar packages (the list can be seen here http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/) and only get moved into the main distro repository (called 'oss') if someone promises to maintain them. (Even though of course not all packages in the main repo are well maintained)
And more importantly how does any of this apply to laptops?
Asus making both PC motherboards and laptops really proves nothing. Do they have Linux laptops now or just Windows laptops which might or might not work with Linux, just like everyone else?
What features and what's an example of a motherboard where there's a difference between what you get if you buy it as part of a packaged PC or as a separate part?
Aren't the feature differences just because there's a wider choice of motherboards out on the open market when you buy them yourself, whereas in a brand-name computer you only have one or a small number of m'board and CPU choices? And it still has nothing to do with laptops, you can't (in any practical way) choose or change the motherboard in a laptop or netbook.
"Well the post I responded to seemed to have missed that post given its laptop comment."
Huh? My first post was about laptops and netbooks, you're the one who brought the self-build market into it, even though it has nothing to do with laptops.
"Pardon the repeat but this was debunked previously too. Given that the very small hobbyist build-it-yourself market is viable the consumer Linux market would seem viable too."
You haven't debunked anything - the build-it-yourself market exists only because it's just the same parts sold separately as opposed to together in a brand-name box.
"The "special version" is just different BIOS firmware."
This is the whole problem, it's extra hardware and firmware that someone has to pay to develop, when there's no commercial reason to do so given the less than 1% market share of Linux and other 'alternative' OSes.
I'm not 100% sure of this but I think it's because of the funding process. You have various European organisations or projects (eg. ESA, ESO (astronomy), ITER (test fusion reactor) etc.) which effectively exist as international organisations, some even have diplomatic immunity. Then countries that choose to, and they don't have to be members of the EU, sign up to these organisations in the form of committing to paying 'membership dues' for X Euros for Y number of years.
These organisations then know how much assured funding they'll receive over the next 5 or 10 years and use that to plan big, long term projects. This is better than the piecemeal approach you often get when it's a single government funding projects individually, and cancelling them if they go over budget instead of just pushing them out over a longer time period like the European organisations do.
You're just repeating the exact same thing you said several posts back, so I'll repeat my answer - no vacuum exists because the market for Linux on laptops and netbooks is too small, no one is going to make special versions of any hardware for the Linux consumer market. If laptops and netbooks get locked-down UEFI with no off option by default then it's game over for Linux.
I'm talking about laptops and netbooks and there's no build-your-own market for those. I'm sure it'll always be possible to put together a desktop PC yourself that doesn't have this UEFI stuff locked in, but you can forget about laptops and netbooks.
No, vendors won't. If these locked down UEFI setups (with no off switch or way to import your own keys) become the default it's game over. The void left by the Linux market would be too tiny to make it economically worth producing different hardware designs, especially when margins are already razor thin.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's go through your examples: .. a weak form of NASA"
"NASA went to space, so Europe made the ESA
Ok, the ESA has got nothing on NASA (no surprise since its total funding it sadly only about 1/5th what NASA gets). But the only reason NASA was able to get to the moon so quickly back in the day was that it 'stole' German rocket technology and scientists after the war. Everything NASA's done since then has been based on developments on the rocket technology it got from Germany after the war.
"The US starting building the supercollider (which Reagan cancelled) so they built the LHC -- a weaker supercollider ... they only win cause supercollider funding got cut"
Nonsense, the LHC is a machine that is literally *the edge* of what current science and technology can do, which is why it's taken so long to get it working. You can't compare that to a collider that was cancelled 20 years ago due to being unrealisticly expensive to build.
"The US has Boeing so Europee made Airbus -- most of their planes are uninspired boeing clones"
Airbus pioneered the use technologies like fly-by-wire and composite fuselages long before Boeing dared. They've also introduced new aircraft that change the economics on certain routes such as the A380. Not to mention that the first commercial jetliner in production was the deHavilland Comet from the UK, although it proved unsafe and was eventually overtaken by the American 707.
"The US built the National Ignition Facility to study nuclear fusion, so Europe is building Laser Megajoule"
The NIF and ITER are two different approaches to achieving viable nuclear fusion, Europe has commited the majority of its funding to the ITER approach but it'd be stupid not to have some smaller scale experiments which use the approach that NIF uses. Just as I'm sure the US has some experiments that try the ITER torus approach.
Oh and BTW the National Ignition Facility was 5 years behind schedule and almost 4 times more expensive than originally budgeted when completed.
There are areas of scient and technology where the US is ahead and some where Europe is, but it's always annoying in those discussions to have some jingoistic American spread around the myth that all technological development comes from the US and Europe (and everyone else) are just copiers. It's a myth not supported by history, including not by recent history.
I meant the ones that haven't gone independent, i.e. the status of these regions within France is very different to, say, the status of the British Overseas Territories in the UK's political structure
It's not South America's because French Guiana is part of France (and thus the EU), in the same way that Hawaii is part of the US despite being gegraphically separate. I.e. unlike with the UK and a lot of other European countries France has made their former colonies 'regions' with the same status as the regions in European France.
Same here, my last two computers (an 11 inch laptop and a self-assembled desktop) were deliberately bought with AMD graphics cards because the radeon (Open Source AMD card driver) works so well out of the box. HDMI out, multiple monitors all just works.
If I plug in HDMI to my laptop it pops up a dialog asking me to configure the 2nd monitor, which takes me to KDE's standard Display thing in its control panel. This works the same across distros (Opensuse and Kubuntu) and that's the way it should be.
All that said, I leave my gaming for my Windows 7 dual-boot. IMHO configuring WINE isn't worth the effort, you spend more time configuring it than playing games whereas Windows is just a minute or two of reboot time away.
"I honestly thought that was the start of a list of things you could say in favor of a linux desktop, but, by the end of your paragraph, I'm starting to think you actually meant Windows just works right out of the box. Is that what you meant? And, if so, have you setup either Ubuntu or Windows from near scratch recently (near scratch, as in, bought a new pc even)?"
I have, just last week on a PC I assembled myself from decent quality brand-name (D-Link, Asrock, Saphire, AMD) parts. And yes the difference was amazing comparing Windows 7 to Ubuntu - all hardware, including the graphics card, worked out of the box perfectly in 64-bit Ubuntu.
With Windows 7 I had to go through inserting CDs for each bit of hardware to get it working - the motherboard driver CD even went ahead and installed a whole load of crapware that I didn't ask for! Worst of all though the nice D-Link Atheros WLAN card that worked perfectly in Ubuntu failed to work in Win 7 at all, with neither the drivers from the included driver CD nor the latest from D-Link's website. I had to send it back.
Because they don't know that there's free antivirus software out there that does the job just as well, and even if they did they wouldn't trust it - and rightfully so given the amount of malware out there posing as 'anti-virus' and 'anti-spyware' software.
My parents went throuh this painful cycle. First they got duped by some flashing ad on the internet into downloading one of the malware 'anti-virus' programs, then they went to a local big-name store (Australia's infamous Harvey Norman) who were more than happy to sell them an expensive yearly subscription to Symantec's bloated anti-virus to try and fix it up. When I visited them after that I put MS Security Essentials on and everything's fine since.
I wish MS would just have Security Essentials installed and on by default and end this game where both malware authors and big-name 'respectable' firms rip off non-technical computer users?
Australian law says nothing of the sort. Have a look at the full act, it clearly defines the word "harm" as:
""harm" means physical harm or harm to a person's mental health, whether temporary or permanent. However, it does not include being subjected to any force or impact that is within the limits of what is acceptable as incidental to social interaction or to life in the community. "
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/cca1995115/sch1.html
So yes you're perfectly able to insult the Queen, the GG, the PM in Australia with no fear of either civil or criminal penalties.
That may not be exactly true in the UK since by the sound of it you're still lumbered with un-repealed laws dating back to 1351: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7288516.stm
It definitely doesn't mean harm to their reputation or phsychological harm. otherwise all the tv shows, newspapers and webites run by Aussies which criticise and make fun of politicians, and yes, even queen Liz, would be being chased with sedition and treason laws. it just doesnt happen in Australia.
At the point that you kill Queen, the PM or the Governer General:
"Section 80.1 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth) makes it an an offence to cause the death of, or harm to, the Sovereign, the heir apparent, the Governor-General or the Prime Minister."
http://www.caslon.com.au/seditionnote2.htm
Why do you need 'impressive security'? The high-speed (up to 300 km/h ~180Mph) trains here in Germany have zero security, you literally just walk in from the street into the train station and get on. The only thing close to 'security' is conductors who come round and check your ticket, and if you don't have one and refuse to pay for one they might call the police and have them meet you at the next stop.
Really, think of high-speed trains more like extensions of the subway or mass-transit systems that operate within cities. They don't have airport-style security checks there because it's simply impractical.
That's simplification to the point of inaccuracy, in Australia's case at least. For a start the illegality is only when race is involved, you can quite freely come to Australia and say that the prime minister, the Queen, the Governor General (the Queen's representative in Oz) or any other politician is a fuckwit or something like that, and you'll find plenty of people who agree with you completely.
Secondly, and more importantly, it only becomes a criminal matter if you threaten violence or physically confront someone and harass them:
"To establish racial vilification of a criminal nature, it is usually necessary to establish a high level of harassment or potential threat. While the distribution of offensive material may form one end of the continuum of behaviours prohibited under state criminal law, generally, incitement to violence, threats to person or property, and so on, are required in order for state or federal criminal provisions to apply."
http://www.hreoc.gov.au/racial_discrimination/cyberracism/vilification.html
Just posting what GP did would at worst land you in a conciliation process with the above mentioned commission or if that fails a civil court case. And as the link above mentions they handle very few cases about alleged internet discrimination.
I generally would support having US style free-speech laws in Australia, but the current situation is not as repressive as some Americans on /. seem to imagine.
Super expensive 'gourmet' cup cake bakeries are a fad right now in London, that's how she can get away with 26 quid for a dozen.
I was scouring the page looking for the scientific debunking of this typically contrived anti-EU 'story' from the Daily Torygraph, and there it is. Mod parent up!
It does work, as I said I just tried it. Doesn't mean there's not a bug there but it's something specific to your configuration or what you're doing.
"what do I do if I want to install software but it's not an rpm or whatever it is suse uses. "
In opensuse the 2nd stop for packages is http://software.opensuse.org/ as unfortunately not everything that's packaged is in the default repositories.
"oh, and there's one long lasting bug even since kde3 - ctrl+shift+c to copy from konsole doesn't put the value in klipper :)"
I just tried it right then on an Opensuse 11.4 system (KDE 4.6) and it works.
Yes there is, it's in the Education repository. You can find it by going to http://software.opensuse.org/ and searching for 'rosegarden'.
Unfortuantely opensuse still operates a two-tier repository system where packages go into a 'devel' repository with similar packages (the list can be seen here http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/) and only get moved into the main distro repository (called 'oss') if someone promises to maintain them. (Even though of course not all packages in the main repo are well maintained)
In short if you can't find something go to http://software.opensuse.org/
And more importantly how does any of this apply to laptops?
Asus making both PC motherboards and laptops really proves nothing. Do they have Linux laptops now or just Windows laptops which might or might not work with Linux, just like everyone else?
What features and what's an example of a motherboard where there's a difference between what you get if you buy it as part of a packaged PC or as a separate part?
Aren't the feature differences just because there's a wider choice of motherboards out on the open market when you buy them yourself, whereas in a brand-name computer you only have one or a small number of m'board and CPU choices? And it still has nothing to do with laptops, you can't (in any practical way) choose or change the motherboard in a laptop or netbook.
"Well the post I responded to seemed to have missed that post given its laptop comment."
Huh? My first post was about laptops and netbooks, you're the one who brought the self-build market into it, even though it has nothing to do with laptops.
"Pardon the repeat but this was debunked previously too. Given that the very small hobbyist build-it-yourself market is viable the consumer Linux market would seem viable too."
You haven't debunked anything - the build-it-yourself market exists only because it's just the same parts sold separately as opposed to together in a brand-name box.
"The "special version" is just different BIOS firmware."
This is the whole problem, it's extra hardware and firmware that someone has to pay to develop, when there's no commercial reason to do so given the less than 1% market share of Linux and other 'alternative' OSes.
I'm not 100% sure of this but I think it's because of the funding process. You have various European organisations or projects (eg. ESA, ESO (astronomy), ITER (test fusion reactor) etc.) which effectively exist as international organisations, some even have diplomatic immunity. Then countries that choose to, and they don't have to be members of the EU, sign up to these organisations in the form of committing to paying 'membership dues' for X Euros for Y number of years.
These organisations then know how much assured funding they'll receive over the next 5 or 10 years and use that to plan big, long term projects. This is better than the piecemeal approach you often get when it's a single government funding projects individually, and cancelling them if they go over budget instead of just pushing them out over a longer time period like the European organisations do.
You're just repeating the exact same thing you said several posts back, so I'll repeat my answer - no vacuum exists because the market for Linux on laptops and netbooks is too small, no one is going to make special versions of any hardware for the Linux consumer market. If laptops and netbooks get locked-down UEFI with no off option by default then it's game over for Linux.
I'm talking about laptops and netbooks and there's no build-your-own market for those. I'm sure it'll always be possible to put together a desktop PC yourself that doesn't have this UEFI stuff locked in, but you can forget about laptops and netbooks.
No, vendors won't. If these locked down UEFI setups (with no off switch or way to import your own keys) become the default it's game over. The void left by the Linux market would be too tiny to make it economically worth producing different hardware designs, especially when margins are already razor thin.